Concepts of Art and Interpretation in Interviews with Educators from Tate Britain

Educational practices in art museums are determined, to a great degree, by ideas of art and interpretation put into play, consciously or not, by both museums and educators. This article presents the results of research conducted at Tate Britain in which we have analysed the concepts of art and interpretation that underlie the discourses of the educators interviewed in this gallery. To this end we have designed a methodological device, a model that proposes four ways of understanding and interpreting art commonly found in educational contexts. This model has arranged the various conceptions from more visual or perceptual approaches to the most experientially complex as those summarised below: works of art as a visual representation and interpretation as identification; works of art as a message to be revealed, and interpretation as decodification; works of art as an intellectual, historical and cultural fact, and interpretation as an opportunity for critical reflection; works of art as the materialisation of an experience, and interpretation as an opportunity for self‐development. We conclude that in interviews with educators working in the Tate Britain different narratives about the idea of art and the idea of interpretation coexist, which in many cases are complementary and in some others are contradictory. Examples of the interviews are presented throughout the article.     

Duodji: A New Step for Art Education

In this article, I intend briefly to present some views of how cultural expressions can be used as a basis of artistic education of an indigenous people in a particular area. In the past 30 years, indigenous peoples have demanded that their cultural expressions (and knowledge) be included in higher education; to achieve this, they have applied diverse strategies. This integration is, however, a complex process, as universities or institutions of higher education often have to follow national programmes and regulations concerning higher education. Nevertheless, many indigenous peoples have attempted, in their regions, to create art programmes for higher education, often as part of another art programme, or as an independent programme. The case that I use in the presentation is based on my work at Sámi allaskuvla/the Sámi University College in Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino) in the Sámi area of Norway. The main question here is: How and under what conditions is it possible to launch higher art education that has duodji as its foundation? A key question is what the significance of the overall discourse and praxis that has emerged and developed in indigenous societies is when it is transferred to higher education.     

Of Mice and Manga: Comics and Graphic Novels in Art Education

A justification for the inclusion of graphic comic art in post-14 art education following the development of graphic novels in Europe, Japan and the USA. in recent years. The case is based on the visual dynamics of the medium and the potential for a critical realism which can be exploited in students’ studio practice and research. Particular attention is given to the Holocaust novel Maus and selected Japanese ‘Manga’ comics which have made an impact in the west, such as Barefoot Gen and Adolf. The article analyses the various innovative visual forms that these graphic novels utilise and considers their effectiveness as a vehicle for practice and research in the institutional art curriculum.     

The Project ‘Art for Learning Art’ in Contemporary Art Museums

Projection‐based augmented reality and virtual reality are used in a visual arts‐based educational project in contemporary art museums from an a/r/tographic perspective. The project ‘Art for Learning Art’ (in Spanish, Arte para aprender arte), at the Museo CajaGRANADA in Granada (Spain) has been developed in collaboration with the University of Granada since 2013. We have employed creative, educational and research methodologies inspired by exhibited works in art museums to encourage visual feedback of visitors participating in collaborative installations. Two such experiences also were produced at the Tate Liverpool Gallery and Museum in March 2018; utilising the methodology of mediation through projection‐based augmented reality and virtual reality, which introduces facets of visual and physical experience that alter the whole experience for the museum's public. By putting on virtual reality headsets, and playing with physical movements, we generate images and change the projections in the museum using projection‐based augmented reality to disrupt the way the public typically moves in the museum. The purpose of the developed interrelations with artworks in the Museo CajaGRANADA and the Tate Liverpool Gallery and Museum was to create collaborative digital images by playing with select artworks exhibited in the museums’ collections. We use this kind of mediation in art museums to develop a visual understanding to provoke learning about art through art creation in a contemporary way. The results are extraordinary as images; they are collaborative artworks, which connect visually with the artworks in the exhibition.     

Bazon Brock's Visitors’ School on Documenta in Kassel: Training for Reception of Contemporary Art

This article analyses the problem of reception and interpretation of contemporary art exhibition in the context of Besucherschule (Visitors’ School) invented by Bazon Brock: German philosopher, art historian and a follower of Theodor Adorno. He implemented this practice for the first time on documenta 4 in Kassel (1968) and organised such schools of reception until documenta 9 (1992). The aim of the Visitors’ School was to explain works of contemporary art on display to the public. Brock understood this process as ‘mediation’ in aesthetic education, arguing that dependence on theory was no less problematic for contemporary art perception than the lack of traditional art form. The main symbolic task of art – ‘claim for reality’, was demonstrated by Brock in two ideas: ‘new image‐war’ and ‘speaking image’.     

Profiling Primary School Teachers in Relation to Art Teaching

This paper contributes to the on‐going debate about specialisation and teaching art in primary schools. Moreover it provides a starting point for further research and the design of in‐service training that responds to the different needs and attitudes of primary school teachers in relation to teaching art. This is done by investigating several profiles of teachers who teach art in primary schools in Cyprus. It describes five profiles of teachers, which emerged from analysing data from pupils (questionnaire and interview data) and teachers (interview data) and thus brings a fresh insight to the learning‐teaching situation. There are two profiles of art specialist teachers, named as artist‐teacher and specialist‐teacher, and three profiles of non‐art specialist teachers, named as enthusiastic, disappointed, and indifferent non‐specialist. The most effective teacher in the pupils' eyes is the specialist‐teacher, who integrates more successfully than the others their subject matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, knowledge of learners and knowledge of the environmental conditions.     

Making a Difference? An Evaluation of Professional Knowledge and Pedagogy in Art and ICT

The paper presents a research perspective on a Secondary school‐based project,, Art on the Net, which explored the interaction between practising artists, students and teachers using digital technologies in the visual and performance arts in school settings. The study illustrated the role that art education plays not only in providing an authentic context for the use of digital technologies, but also in offering insights into conceptualising the nature of ICT capability. The analysis for this paper highlights key themes arising for participants engaged in such intervention projects and illustrates the interaction between professional knowledge and pedagogy in Art and ICT.     

DNA as a Work of Art: Processes of Semiosis between Contemporary Art and Biology

When A Genomic Portrait – Sir John Sulston by Mark Quinn appeared in the London National Portrait Gallery's exhibition in 2001/2, the ensuing public controversy over its portrayal raised a number of questions about the representation of a publicly known figure. Because the portrait was the Gallery's first contemporary commission using specialised, scientific procedures in its creation, a number of issues arose surrounding its authenticity. How questions of authenticity are answered depends upon how the viewer reads aspects of scientific coding as it functions within the artistic domain. This is a form of visual literacy that depends on the viewer's ability to lift the veil that operates between coding systems and the context of their use. Literacy in this case is built upon the relationship between visual interpretation and ascribed systems of meaning within the context of their recontextualisations. By playing with the intersections between artistic and scientific discourses, the authors investigate how the representation of identity functions as a polysemy across different semiotic domains. Using visual semiotics to examine the intersections between sign systems across these domains, some of the communication aspects of how new modes of art function in present‐day communities are provoked. By illustrating the complexity of this process as a part of transforming expert knowing into pedagogical practice, support is given for improving teacher education in the arts and cultural domain.     

Digital Art Making as a Representational Process

In this article I bring artistic production into the learning sciences conversation by using the production of representations as a bridging concept between art making and the new literacies. Through case studies with 4 youth media arts organizations across the United States I ask how organizations structure the process of producing autobiographical digital art through a focus on representational tasks and how learning can be traced by examining youth artists' representations over time. Using a distributed cognition framework I analyze data on the process of making digital art in terms of the macro and micro tasks performed in order to identify occasions for external representation construction and use across organizations. I then examine how individual youth engage in these macro and micro tasks by producing representations that demonstrate their understanding. These analyses show that youth media arts organization production processes engage young artists in a representational trajectory that begins with developing a story about the self, moves toward a focus on how the tools of the medium afford representation of that story, and culminates in digital representations that reflect an understanding of the relationship between story and tools.     

Educating Art in a Globalizing World. The University of Ideas: A Sociological Case‐study

In 1999, the Italian Arte Povera artist Michelangelo Pistoletto and other artists laid the foundations of The University of Ideas (UNIDEE), an exceptional international artist‐in‐residence programme with a strong ideological foundation. As a sociologist of culture I had the opportunity to do research in the huge organization for a month by doing participant observation, in‐depth interviews and discourse analysis. In this article the educational programme of UNIDEE is interpreted in sociological terms. First of all it will be contextualized in the artistic work of Michelangelo Pistoletto through his concept of the mirror and his a‐modern idea of ‘The Minus Artist’. In the second part Pistoletto's artistic, political and economic movement Cittadellarte, in which UNIDEE is based, will be described. Finally UNIDEE will be analysed as a model for art education on the border of modernity attempting to redefine the position of art and of the artist in a globalizing world.     

NGO Art Education

How is art education being put to use today? To explore this provocation, I read between the lines of teaching for civic literacy through visual arts education in the United States as mandated by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills. I consider an art education of social practice's utility within this mandate. In order to accomplish this, I describe artist Rick Lowe's Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow social sculpture project and then analyse this through a service aesthetics’ lens and neoliberal motives. In the process of overlaying social practice within the Partnership for 21st Century Skills as a model for visual arts and citizenship education toward globally competent graduates, I articulate the possible limitations of such micro‐utopian ventures for art education that amount to NGO‐esque art, making the case that these efforts, while facilitating a feeling of civic engagement, only further intensify the depoliticisation of art education acting as a form of Rancière's better police in reasserting the neoliberal status quo. I sound a cautionary note about such a pragmatic turn risking the exacerbation of our collective interpassivity through aligning art education too closely to our apparent use value for late capitalism.     

Contemporary Art and the Role of Interpretation: Reflections from Tate Modern's Summer Institute for Teachers

Recent research indicates that the taught curriculum in art and design secondary school education pays scant attention to meaning‐making in visual art. This article explores possibilities for teaching interpretation through a report on an action‐research project based on Tate Modern's Summer Institute for Teachers. In doing so it argues for the value and necessity of interpretation as a taught skill.     

The Creation of the ‘Hong Kong Visual Arts Education Web’ and the Use of the Inquiry‐Based Teaching Approach

This article describes a collaborative action research conducted by a lecturer and several primary school art teachers, who between 2001 and 2006 created the Visual Arts Education Web (‘iii web’) in Hong Kong. The creation of the ‘iii web’ was accomplished through research that employed questionnaires, focus group discussions and individual interviews. Teachers' perceptions of using websites in teaching were examined, art education websites from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China and the USA were compared, in order to create a website that could meet the needs of Hong Kong primary school art teachers. Inquiry‐based learning is one of the important teaching approaches that were introduced during the Hong Kong Education Reform in 2003. An example of using the ‘iii web’ to teach public art is described to illustrate how the teacher and students used inquiry‐based learning in art education.     

Building Bridges: Experiential Art Understanding

When building the bridge of experiential art understanding, the focus is set on the key stone of self in the centre of the arch. Art interpretation as a means of understanding and constructing self is based on the view of self as an unilinear collage of the accumulated life experiences each of us possesses. It is a whole consisting of different roles and relations, cultural identity being a crucial part of it. Self-identity is the experience of distinctness, agency, and continuity that is formed through one’s personal life history. In the model of experiential art interpretation, the process of art interpretation is understood as a series of events where the viewer’s past and present experiences are the basis for constructing new knowledge. The dialectics between personal and social knowledge happens through the different, coequal forms of grasping and transformation. Experiential art interpretation combines strategies from the disciplines of art history, aesthetics, and criticism, and connects them to the experientially-based processes of reflective observation, conceptualization, and production. A central concept in experiential art exploration is transfer, which means the ability to apply knowledge and skills learned in one context to other situations. Transfer leads to increased self-consciousness and metacognitive skills. For transfer to happen, learners have to be able to apply processes of artistic inquiry both in understanding other artworks and in making their own artworks. The second level of transfer has to do with the ability to apply the new ideas and attitudes adopted in the interpretation process in real-life situations.     

论公共场所艺术作品合理使用标准

关于公共场所艺术作品的合理使用,我国著作权法及其司法解释仅详细规定了对公共场所艺术作品进行平面复制被认定属合理使用的行为,但对于平面复制品的再利用问题却语焉不详。在我国经济飞速发展,人民精神文明要求逐步提高的今天,这样薄弱的保护不能适应现实需求。因此,我国著作权法对于认定公共场所艺术作品合理使用,应当从新作品的创作意图、原作品在新作品中的比例、原作品的知名度等因素来确定。这样才能保证在公共场所艺术作品实现公共价值的同时,其著作权人的合法利益也受到合理的保护。     

Art‐Based Action Research for Art Education in the North

This article introduces the art‐based action research (ABAR) methodology as part of the international discussion of art‐based educational research (ABER). The participatory and dialogical approach of ABAR was inspired by a consideration of the pressure for change in art education stemming from the practices of relational and dialogical contemporary art. The need for ABAR as a tool of culturally decolonising, sustainable art education research was identified in multidisciplinary collaboration with the University of Lapland's (UoL) northern and circumpolar network. The methodology was developed collaboratively by a group of art educators and researchers at UoL to support the artist/teacher/researcher with professional skills for seeking solutions to recognised problems and to promote future actions and aspirations in the changing North and Arctic. This article describes how ABAR has been used in school projects, in doctoral theses and finally in a development project with an impact on regional development in the North. These examples show how art education developed through the ABAR method has supported decolonisation, revitalisation and cultural sustainability in schools, communities and businesses.     

论怀特海的教育艺术思想

怀特海出身于教育世家,一生致力于教育教学.他根据自己的亲身体验,以数学家和哲学家敏锐的直觉和深刻的思考,提出了一系列的教育艺术思想:教育绝不是往行李箱里装物品的过程,教育只有一个主体,那就是五彩缤纷的生活;教育是引导个体去领悟生活的艺术;教育是教人们掌握如何运用知识的艺术;一般概念和普遍原理的学习要通过接触、由树见林;成功教育必有某种创新.     

Art,ordinary work and conceptuality: sculpting the social relations of the art world

ABSTRACT

This research reveals the social relations of the art world through an investigation of visual artists’ ordinary art-making practices. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, the article attends to art and ordinary work, clarifying how visual artists’ work, is not only shaped socially and historically, but also reveals tensions about what counts as art and who counts as an artist. The article clarifies how today’s art world valorises conceptual approaches – centred on mobilising concepts and ideas, while devaluing expressivist approaches – centred on accessing intuition or inspiration. The article makes visible an increasingly conceptual, academic art world in which an expressivist practice is harder to sustain. By tracing shifting forms of work and shifting social relations, the study contributes to educational research on art, while calling attention to organisational processes that deeply shape artists’ lives.     

On Art and Knowledge

I comment upon the recent blossoming of writing on art, knowledge and research and connect this to its material roots in the changing nature of higher education. I find much of this writing wanting in that it implies a division of art into ‘knowledge‐producing’ and ‘non knowledge‐producing’ art. I examine how art objects might be said to generate knowledge, particularly the kind of propositional knowledge which sits at the centre of both traditional epistemology and ‘knowledge transfer’ in the contemporary academy. Although there are many ways in which artworks might variously generate such knowledge, I conclude that there is none that is common to all. I go on to examine other kinds of knowledge, particularly Gilbert Ryle's ‘knowledge‐how’ and use this as a staging post to suggest that there is yet another kind of knowledge, produced by all works of art. Finally I borrow some ideas from recent work in the philosophy of science to suggest a concrete mechanism by which this knowledge is made available to us.     

Teaching and Learning How to Create in Schools of Art and Design

This article describes the studio model—a cultural model of teaching and learning found in U.S. professional schools of art and design. The studio model includes the pedagogical beliefs held by professors and the pedagogical practices they use to guide students in learning how to create. This cultural model emerged from an ethnographic study of two professional schools of art and design. A total of 38 professors from a total of 15 art disciplines and design disciplines were interviewed and their studio classes were observed. A grounded theory analysis was used to allow the studio model to emerge from audio recordings of interviews and video recordings of studio classes. The model was then validated by 16 different professors at six additional art and design schools. The studio model was found to be general across art and design disciplines and at all eight institutions. The central concept of the studio model is the creative process, with three clusters of emergent themes: learning outcomes associated with the creative process, project assignments that scaffold mastery of the creative process, and classroom practices that guide students through the creative process.