INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF LIVING TRADITIONS IN ART

A Broken Thread: The Artist-Researcher

(Draft October, 2007)

“From 1941 a number of universities offering the doctorate greatly affected the concepts that have driven our profession.” (1)

“It is especially disturbing that the art department in the School of Education (at NYU) marginalized art education, dropping its undergraduate program, and discontinuing its brilliant doctoral program that was interdisciplinary and phenomenologically oriented in favor of a terminal MFA program.” (2)

An early argument for "Aesthetics in Public School Art Teaching" was made in 1958 in a College Art Journal article with that title by Eugene Kaelin and David W. Ecker. As Ralph Smith points out in the book DBAE which he edited in 1989, (3) their article signaled "a major theme of much of the theoretical writing in art education in the following years." (p. 10) As "another example of work that features the uses of aesthetics," Smith cites Ecker and Kaelin's "The Limits of Aesthetic Inquiry: A Guide to Educational Research" (1972). (4) The authors identify "a peculiarly aesthetic domain of educational research in which their principle concern is with the aesthetic experiences of works of art. They then indicate different kinds and levels of language that bear upon our description and explanation of such experiences. This multilevel scheme identifies discourse that not only attempts to capture the quality of direct aesthetic experience of works of art but also features art criticism, theoretical and philosophical discussions about the nature of art and art criticism, and reflective thought about the place of art in larger philosophical systems." (p. 11)

In an article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education (Fall 1990), (5) Arthur Efland traces the origins of discipline-based art education (DBAE), the national movement sanctioned by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts in 1984 and supported by the Getty since then. Efland sees the "paradigm shift" from art as creative self expression to a "discipline orientation" as occurring in the 'sixties: "Revolutionary ideas by Eisner, Ecker, Chapman, Smith, and Barkan ... Initiated a new period of innovation in art education when they suggested using the disciplined inquiries of artists, critics, and historians as bases for the teaching of art." (p. 69) Efland saw a "ten-year period of revolution" followed by a "twenty-five year period of consolidation," except for the "novel" DBAE addition of aesthetics to art teaching.

Practice quickly followed theory as art teachers were trained in aesthetic inquiry. In Smith' s book, (6) Maurice Sevigny gives the following account of the federally-funded project directed by David W. Ecker, the “Research and Development Team for the Improvement of Teaching Art Appreciation in the Secondary Schools”:

“The first phase of the project took place at Ohio State University from June 28 to August 27, 1965. A team of art educators (Charlotte Buel Johnston, Vincent Lanier, Kenneth Marantz, Robert Saunders, Philip Smith, and G. Stephen Vickers) worked with Ecker to develop a written report (Ecker 1966) that proposed alternative approaches for teaching art history and aesthetics. In its second phase the project supported a summer institute for 20 high school art teachers and art supervisors. Applicants were selected to participate in the 1966 Summer Institute for the Advanced Study of Art Appreciation. Their task was to adapt the newly proposed theories of teaching aesthetics and art history to their home teaching situations. The major thrust of the summer institute studies was to analyze the way professionals write about, talk about, interpret, and evaluate art and to translate such understanding of critical process to public school curricula. In the years that followed, several of the institute fellows became instrumental in the implementation of discipline-based curricula or in the development of DBAE approaches for art teacher education (e.g. Neil Mooney, Nancy MacGregor, Evan Kern, and Richard Loveless).” (p. 101)

When David W. Ecker came to New York University in 1968, he established the first courses in aesthetics, art criticism, and phenomenology for students in the arts professions. The Ecker-Kaelin "levels of aesthetic inquiry" provided a research methodology for graduate students in dance, music, theater, and the humanities as well as for students in the visual arts and arts education. It should also be noted that Jerome Hausman, Irving Sandler, and he (all colleagues at the time) organized the first national Conference on Art Criticism and Art Education at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in 1970.

There was a subsequent drift in the Getty version of DBAE toward the codification of content to be learned in the interest of "national standards," and the academizing of art responses at the expense of art making, the historical focus of public school art education.

David W. Ecker took a different approach, one which was centered on art making. As a graduate student of Francis Villemain at NYU in 1957-58 and then Nathaniel Champlin at Wayne State University in 1959-60, he was able to build upon their Deweyan theory of qualitative intelligence in moving toward an Experimentalist philosophy of art education. His first publication to receive wide critical attention was "The Artistic Process as Qualitative Problem Solving," appearing in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1963. (7) (It was first read at the annual meeting of the A.S.A., held at Wayne State University in October of 1961.) Two issues of the Journal later, Monroe Beardsley wrote at some length on his "Finalistic" theory in his own article, "On the Creation of Art." (8) Ecker’s article and Beardsley's were reprinted together with essays by Heidegger, Stravinsky, Freud, Kafka, Ehrenzweig, and Wollheim in Part Four, "How is Art Made?" of Matthew Lipman's anthology Contemporary Aesthetics, (1973). (9)

In a 1964 article in Studies in Art Education, (10) Eugene Kaelin found Ecker’s analysis of the process of artistic thought a "clear-cut gain" over the theoretical approaches he had just analyzed, those of Croce and Collingwood, but his "neo-pragmatic description of the artistic process demands completion by a phenomenological account of visibility. It is by virtue of the appearance of structures within a visual field-the description of which is missing in Ecker's account-that the product of art is to be judged: if not by the painter, then by his critics, who may not be so kind."(11)

The role of qualitative thinking in artistic processes was later addressed in three of the sessions of the week-long Seminar in Art Education for Research and Curriculum Development, held at the Pennsylvania State University in 1965. The planning committee (Barkan, Beittel, Ecker, Eisner, Hausman, Mattil) invited Francis Villemain to address the first session in which he proposed "education in the arts as the cultivation of qualitative intelligence." Ecker followed with a methodological analysis of what constitutes a significant problem for research by first considering methodological problems themselves. For example: Can the belief that "We learn by experience" be verified by empirical evidence? Another example: “Is biology or culture the source of aesthetic criteria by which one could distinguish the drawings of Congo (the chimpanzee studied by the biologist Desmond Morris) from the drawings of young children?” (Some critics had already compared Congo's scribblings with drawings of the Abstract Expressionists.) Ecker went on to compare two kinds of problems in the art room: theoretical problems to be resolved by scientific (or humanistic) inquiry and qualitative problems to be resolved by artistic inquiry, a matter of qualitative intelligence. He then gave a qualitative analysis of teaching as acting. At the end of the week, Champlin gave a qualitative analysis of methodological inquiry into aesthetic subject matters. (In between were important papers delivered by the other planners and invited presenters; e.g. Harold Rosenberg, Allan Kaprow, June McFee, Joshua Taylor, Arthur Foshay.) Their inspiration was John Dewey's great essay on "Qualitative Thought" (published in Philosophy and Civilization in 1931. In effect, they were honoring Dewey thirty-four years later by extending his philosophy of art as experience to the domain of art education.

Ecker’s response to Kaelin's criticism of his "neo-pragmatic descnption of the artistic process" was to develop his own phenomenological approach to the arts. He had learned how to do phenomenology, first as Kaelin's graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, 1956-57, and then as his collaborator on several projects over the years. The challenge at New York University was to teach doctoral-students in the arts to validate and build upon their own experience in artistic creation, performance, and criticism. In his course Aesthetic Foundation of the Arts, every session began with an exhibition of artworks, a musical performance, dance, or poetic reading provided by one or more students. They learned how to give that experience their undivided attention by "bracketing" it as “Time One.” Each student then described in writing, prior to discussion, the experience just had, “Time Two.” They then compared respective responses, judgments, descriptions of the "same" artifacts and events, and sought to explain any differences that could not be resolved by seeing and listening alone, “Time Three”. As a result, a very special alternative to reducing art and art education to a rigid set of rules, principles and precepts evolved at New York University.

The understanding of the arts of another culture on its own terms emerged as the central problem. These efforts to teach aesthetic inquiry to culturally diverse students led directly to the formulations presented in Ecker’s Lowenfeld Lecture, "The Possibility of a Multicultural Art Education," at the National Art Education Association's annual conference in New Orleans on April 15, 1986. (12) The students in Ecker’s NYU classes came from the major cultures of the world, many-of them already accomplished artists, musicians, writers, critics, curators, or educators in their own countries. Critiques of Eurocentric assumptions about art and its role in society were frequent. Of necessity, research interests shifted from aesthetics to cultural criticism, from description to interpretation, from perceptual to imaginative experience. Since then, multicutural art education has become a national movement challenging DBAE for the attention of art teachers. Perhaps it was inevitable that complex issues were soon reduced to the political agendas and slogans of "multiculturalism."

From that time until 1997, Dr. Ecker and his colleagues at NYU including Dr. John Gilbert of Music, and Dr. Carl Schmidt of Humanities, assisted scholars to develop research methodology, perform interpretation of foreign texts, acquire interviewing skills, and perform photographic documentation of artistic processes within the study of Living Traditions in Art. The oldest form of art education provided a "new" model for research: apprenticeship to a master of a living art. The initial concern of students was how to earn the privilege of apprenticeship. As artist-researchers these students have gone on to document village blacksmithing of the Tho in Nigeria; the embroidered tanka of monks in Tibet; artist-potters in Japan; the crafts of Afghanistan; Carribbean printmakers; the making of paper from Malaysian fibers; as well as traditional arts of the U.S., e.g. Cynthia Johnson's "The Art of the Windsor Chairmaker: An Aesthetic Inquiry," Ph.D. Dissertation, 1995. (13)

Parallel to these efforts, The International Society for the Advancement of Living Traditions in Art (ISALTA), a NYS 501©3 not-for-profit corporation, was established in 1981 to support worldwide research of traditional arts, especially those at risk. Many graduates of NYU programs remain members of this organization with a commitment to art and art education. Many projects have been completed or are under way. One characteristic example is the question of the status and future of Inuit soap-stone carvers in the context of Canada's multicultural society. Their situation was addressed by leading cultural administrators, economists, artists, and art educators at the First International Symposium: Living Traditions in Art, co-sponsored by ISALTA and McGill University held in Montreal in 1990. ISALTA members have participated in events such as the cross-cultural project, “Art, the Community, and Global Well-Being: Third International Well-Being Symposium,” 1998, Cagliari, Sardinia, the 1985 “Festival of India,” and “Damascus Blade” conferences as well as the early “Navigating Global Cultures” movement. (14) A small voluntary membership organization, however, can be a supplement to, but not a substitute for the commitment and support of a serious academic institution.

“The achievements of the past are impressive and serve as a road map for new generations of artist researchers from all disciplines and should now extend beyond text. But attracting this constituency may require more than a website.” (15)

A record of these past achievements in art and art education at NYU is found in ”From Artist-Teacher to Artist-Researcher: First Person Accounts of the Growth of Doctoral Study in Art and Art Education at New York University.” (16), covering the years between 1948 and 1997 from the perspective of Drs. Ecker and Hausman as students and teachers in the department at different as well as overlapping times. A record is also found in the many doctoral dissertations generated during this period. (17) As of Dr. Ecker’s retirement from NYU in 1997, and the reorganization of the University, this thread in the fabric of education has been broken, and the development of this fertile field of ideas arrested in the absence of a significant institutional art and art education research framework. The thread has yet to be taken up, and the challenge to continue weaving the fabric of these explorations remains unanswered.

Notes:

1. In Their Own Words: The Development of Doctoral Study in Art Education

James Hutchens, Editor; NAEA, Reston, VA, {2001} ISBN 1-890160-16-4

2. Wyzard blogger, Tuesday, June 7, 2007; http://navigatingconnections.blogspot.com/

3. Smith, Ralph, DBAE, 1989

4. Ecker, David W., and Eugene Kaelin, "The Limits of Aesthetic Inquiry: A Guide to Educational Research" (1972).

5. Efland, Arthur, Journal of Aesthetic Education (Fall, 1990) p.69

6. Smith

7. Ecker, David W., "The Artistic Process as Qualitative Problem Solving," appearing in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1963.

8. Beardsley, Monroe

9. Lippman

10. Kaelin, Eugene, Studies in Art Education, 1964

11. (His article, "Aesthetics and the Teaching of Art," was reprinted in Readings in Art Education. Eisner and Ecker, eds., in 1966).

12. Ecker, David W., Lowenfield Lecture, "The Possibility of a Multicultural Art Education," at the National Art Education Association's annual conference in New Orleans on April 15, 1986

13. Johnson, Cynthia, "The Art of the Windsor Chairmaker: An Aesthetic Inquiry", 1995.

14. “Navigating Global Cultures emerged as a web presence in the early days of WWW. It was born through the efforts of Sandro Dernini of Plexus, David Ecker of NYU Art, Carl Schmidt of NYU Humanities, and John Gilbert of NYU Music. It emerged from cross cultural and interdisciplinary initiatives in celebration of the 500th year of Christopher Columbus' discovery of America.” From “ISALTA and Navigating Global Cultures,” June 10, 2007. http://navigatingconnections.blogspot.com/

15. Wyzard blogger, Old Wine in New Bottles, June 13, 2007.

16. Hutchens, James, In Their Own Words: The Development of Doctoral Study in Art Education (James Hutchens, ed., NAEA, 2001).

17. A representative sample of NYU dissertationsfrom this period:

Pio, Frank (Ed.D), “The Creation and Development of a Program of Study Derived from Ojibwe Philosophy for a Proposed Center of Learning and Research for the Arts” 1997

Dernini, Sandro (Ph.D.), “A Multicultural Aesthetic Inquiry into "Plexus Black Box," an International Community-Based Art Project” 1997

Chang, Xiao-ai (Ph.D.), "A Cross-Cultural Interpretation of Artistic Terms in Chinese and Western Art Theory and Practice: A Semiotic Analysis" 1994

Nworjih, Chris (Ph.D.),"A Study of the Origins, Characteristics, and Significance of the Traditional Art of Blacksmithing in Southeastern Nigeria" 1993

Huggins, Winston (Ph.D.), "A Critical Study of Six Jamaican Artists in the Context of an Emerging Caribbean Culture in New York: An Aesthetic Inquiry" 1993

Lederman, Arline, 'The Arts of Afghanistan: A Documentation and Aesthetic Analysis" 1989

Fawowe, Moses (Ph.D.),"A Study of the Origins, Development, and Significance of Southern Nigerian Traditional Pottery" 1987

Chew, Teng Beng (Ph.D.), "Papermaking from Selected Malaysian Fibers: An Investigation of its Artistic Potential through Creation of Original Paper Artworks" 1987

Johnson, Cynthia (Ph.D.), "The Art of the Windsor Chairrnaker: An Aesthetic Inquiry" 1985

Nourel-Din, Safwat (Ph.D.), "Ceramics of Failaka: A Question of the Function of Tradition in the Artistic Creation" 1985

Fraih, Insaf (Ph.D.), "Aesthetic Inquiry into Jordanian Embroidery" 1985

Holmes, Ann (D.A.), "The Transition of the Artisan Potter to the Artist-Potter in Mashiko, a FolkloreKiln Site in Japan" 1982