Peter Suchin, 'Literacy, Criticism and Fine Art'
Published in 'Round Midnight 2: Words are out, image is in?' directed by Norman Binch. 'The Ambleside Papers: Education' discussion papers which were published and distributed through the magazine Artists Newsletter in 1997.
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At some point the border between theory and practice becomes fuzzy. The way one thinks about art affects the choice of what one makes, as well as exactly how one goes about the latter. And the transmission of technical skills within the art schools is part of a wider framework of beliefs in which something often termed - uncritically - "visual language", holds a central, and I would say pernicious position. The belief in the existence of visual language is a major tenet of contemporary art education. The phrase is something of an oxymoron. It is not a trivial or unimportant task to examine, indeed to criticise this most prevalent myth of a purely visual mode of expression, and it would be irresponsible to leave it unchallenged. The promotion within the art schools of the existence of a means of communication above and beyond words is misleading, not least because it encourages the student to consider him or herself party to an extra-special way of expressing, one which does not, apparently, need to be supported or otherwise aided by language in the ordinary sense of that term. Extending the logic of this "language" takes one into an even muddier mire of presumption and belief. It seems to be assumed by artists and art students alike that there ostensibly extra-linguistic images are legible to all and sundry, that works of art "speak" across all cultural and contextual boundaries. This is nonsense. The practice of making works of art is a highly sophisticated, culturally specific form of behaviour and the decoding of individual works relies not upon some allegedly universal sensitivity but upon a learned familiarity with the conventions of, and the deviations from, established patterns of expression.
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Andrew Brighton's remarks are to the point when he writes:
...the predominant medium of art school teaching is words. It is a discursive practice. The value of the artist as teacher is presumably that they can communicate their grasp of art utterances by discursive example. Tutoring people making art is tutoring people in ways of thinking about art...We now have a situation where many recent graduates of any half-alive art history department have a more literate and imaginative understanding of past and contemporary practice than most art school graduates behind whose thin visual practice stands the common sense of the studios. The underdeveloped discursive culture of art in English art schools culturally disempowers students...
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It should be a function of school-level education that it at least begins to demystify the myths and difficulties that currently surround art and its producers, opening up this area to those who, whilst not occupying the role of the practitioner might, all the same, wish to participate at a relatively informed level. Of course many schools do act to initiate their pupils into the frame of art, but it is arguable that the level at which this is carried out is minimal. Of course many schools do act to initiate their pupils into the frame of art, but is arguable that the level at which this is carried out is minimal. In particular, contemporary practice operates in a way that must leave much of its potential audience out in the cold. A more developed sense of art as being something that essentially belongs to everyone should be fostered in schools, at every level. The teaching of drawing and other skills might help pupils to understand why many artists work the way they do. Much contemporary art has abandoned traditional competencies in favour of other types of practice but these fairly recent developments might be addressed more by discussion than by physical making. In the latter case visual literacy would be a broad ability picked up by students through discussion and argument, and the teaching involved might be closer to what one associates with the philosophy or literature departments of a university rather than conventional school art.
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Within our education system as it now stands art is considered a relatively unimportant component of the curriculum. It's thought to be decorative, or something extra, a kind of playing, positioned at some considerable distance from the serious business of academic work, the learning of useful facts and the passing of exams. Promoting a strong ability to make decisions about visual matters is very low on the list. Is there here implied a fear associated with helping people comprehend how the visual image operates in our increasingly eclectic culture? A fear that if people become astute critics of visual imagery this will aid them in their understanding of the very controlled nature of visual images within the advertising, TV and film industries? For surely this is one thing a developed programme in favour of visual literacy would do. Unpacking the visual image, pulling it apart, has its dangerous side, for such a practice suggests the meanings that reside somewhere between a given image and its reception can be made and unmade, and made again. To be visually literate is to be in possession of perceptions and explanations, to be no longer at the mercy of the all-powerful image [...] there's also a need, if I may make a distinction between consumption and critique, for new ways of distancing oneself from the widely-disseminated image, a space for stepping back in order, paradoxically, to consider the thing more closely. To teach people to be visually literate in this latter sense would be, then, to equip people to think critically about the values in circulation within culture.
Our society is increasingly becoming one in which an obsession with the useful and the profitable is becoming dominant, and this at the expense of other values. Art schools, not so many years ago, were places in which other values at least potentially held sway over more brutally capitalistic concerns. [Brian] Eno, remarking on the ruining of the art education system, gives this view. "The simplistic picture the Conservatives have drawn for education is really my biggest problem with them. It's an anti-curiosity point of view that will in fact kill science as well. And you know that underneath it all there is this terrible puritanism which wants everybody to sit down and do a damn good hard day's work and simply does not trust people following their fancy, doing things they are interested in."
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The more the art schools are battered into a submission to market values, the more tediously narrow the culture as a whole becomes. We are always being told that the days of full employment are numbered and that leisure will be the new order of things. Surely, if such a transformation is on the agenda the art schools need to be defended as sites wherein the ethos of the commodity is not the sole ruling model of exchange.
Andrew Brighton, "Art education and the scrutineers", in Artists in the 1990s, Ed., Paul Hetherington, Wimbledon/Tate, 1994, p. 35. For a critique of the belief in visual language see Terry Atkinson, "Phantoms of the Studio", Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1990. Brian Eno quoted in Kam Patel, "Dr Vibes", The Times Higher Educational Supplement, No. 1121, 29 April, 1994.