Volume 3 Number 3 – 2007 Editorial 169–171 Articles 173–184
Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA Robin M. Chandler
185–193
‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings Vasiliki Labitsi
195–209
Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers Kinichi Fukumoto
211–229
Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society Peeter Linnap
231–241
Mentoring in the creative economy Tiina Rautkorpi
243–247
Book Reviews
248
3.3 International Journal of
Education through Art
Index
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intellect Journals | Art & Design
ISSN 1743-5234
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ISSN 1743-5234
Volume Three Number Three
Education through Art
International Journal of Education through Art | Volume Three Number Three
International Journal of
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International Journal of Education through Art Volume 3 Number 3 A new English-language journal that promotes relationships between the two disciplines. The journal comprises refereed texts in the form of critical essays, articles, exhibition reviews and image-text features. Particular emphasis is placed on articles and visual materials that critically reflect on the relationship between education and art. The editorial content proposes original ways of rethinking the status of education and art education, while addressing the role of teaching and learning in either formal or informal educational contexts – and alongside issues of age, gender and social background. The adoption of an open and inventive interpretation of research-based analysis is also a factor in the selection process, as is a contribution’s capacity to promote and experiment with visual/textual forms of representing art education activities, issues and research. The journal is interdisciplinary in its reflection of teaching and learning contexts and also in its representation of artistic approaches and prac-tices. It provides a platform to question and evaluate the ways in which art is produced, disseminated and interpreted across a diverse range of edu-cational contexts. The contributions consider both formal and informal education contexts: policy and practice, pedagogy, research, comparative education, and transcultural issues are all considered in order to raise debates in these areas.
Editorial Board Anabela Moura – Portugal Analice Dutra Pillar – Brazil Andrea Kárpáti – Hungary Dorothy Bedford – UK Folkert Haanstra – Holland Jeong Ae Park – Korea Mary Stokrocki – USA Li Yan Wang – Taiwan David Andrew – South Africa Toshio Naoe – Japan Yordanka Valkanova – Bulgaria Laura Worsley – UK Harold Pearse – Canada Gladir da Silva Cabral – Brazil Luis Errazuriz – Chile Shei-Chau Wang – USA Vasiliki Labitsi – Greece
Editor Rachel Mason Roehampton University Froebel College, Roehampton Lane, London, SW15 5PJ, UK
[email protected]
Associate Editors Rita Irwin – Canada Debbie Smith-Shank – USA Reviews Editor Nicholas Houghton Wimbeldon College of Art, University of the Arts, Merton Hall Rd., London, SW19 3QA
[email protected]
Editorial Advisory Board Juan Carlos Arañó – Spain Anne Bamford – UK Editorial Assistant Anna Mae Barbosa – Brazil Teresa Eça Elliot Eisner – USA Av. San Pedro 114 Routar Luis Errazuriz – Chile Torredeta 3150 839 Maria Fulkova – Czech Republic Portugal Rita Irwin – Canada Olçay Kirisoglu – Turkey Ann Kuo – Taiwan Diederik Schonau – Netherlands Mary Anne Stankiewicz – USA Nick Stanley – UK Brent Wilson – USA
The views expressed in this journal are those of the authors and do not necessarily coincide with those of the Editor or the members of the Editorial Boards. International Journal of Education through Art is published three times per year by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK. The current subscription rates are £30 (personal) and £210 (institutional). Postage is free within the UK, £5 for the rest of Europe and £10 elsewhere. Advertising enquiries should be addressed to:
[email protected] © 2007 Intellect Ltd. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Intellect Ltd for libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) in the UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service in the USA provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organization.
ISSN 1743-5234 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cambrian Printers Ltd., Wales
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Notes for Contributors Opinion The views expressed in the journal are those of the authors, and do not necessarily coincide with those of the Editor or the Editorial Boards. Referees The International Journal of Education through Art is a refereed journal. Referees are chosen for their expertise within the subject area. They are asked to comment on comprehensibility, originality and scholarly worth of the article submitted. Length Articles should not normally exceed 5,600 words in length. Submitting Articles/visual texts should be original and not under consideration by any other publication. One hard copy must be sent to the editor by post – typewritten/printed on one side only and double-spaced. Also, an electronic version of the article should be emailed to the Editor’s email address: the electronic version should be in Word. (Formats other than Word are not encouraged, but please contact the assistant editor for further details). Language The journal uses standard British English. The editor reserves the right to alter usage to this end. Foreign words and sentences inserted in the text should be italicised. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the readership, jargon should be kept to a minimum. Whereas articles in Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Greek and Japanese may be submitted for review, translation into English will be the responsibility of authors should they be accepted for publication. Hard Copy Hard copy text should be double-spaced and single-sided with at least a 3 cm left margin. Software The journal is set with Apple Macintosh equipment and reset using QuarkXPress; it is therefore best whenever possible to supply text in Word as this crosses easily from PC to Mac systems. Author biography A note on each author is required, and this should include details of their current position, their institution, institutional mail and email address, or an alternative contact
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address if necessary. This should not exceed 80 words. Abstract and keywords Each article should be accompanied by an abstract, which should not exceed 150 words in length and should concentrate on the significant findings. Authors may submit a second abstract in a first language other than English also where appropriate. Each article should also be supplied with 3–5 keywords for searching purposes. Headings The main text should be clearly organized with a hierarchy of heading and subheadings. Main headings should be typed in lower case, bold and increased size; secondary headings should be in lower case, bold italic. Quotations Quotations exceeding 40 words are displayed (indented) in the text. These paragraph quotations must be indented with an additional one-line space above and below and without quotes. Captions All illustrations should be accompanied by a caption, which should include the figure number. and the acknowledgement to the holder of the copyright. Notes Notes will appear at the side of appropriate pages, but the numerical sequence runs throughout the article. These should be kept as short as possible and to a minimum, and be identified by a superscript numeral. References and Bibliography These should be listed alphabetically at the end of paper and must adhere to the following models: Books: author’s full name, title (italics), place of publication, publisher, year, and page reference. Articles: author’s full name, title (within single quotation marks), name of journal (italics), volume and issue numbers, date, and page reference. A bibliography may be included if this is deemed to be a necessary addition to the sidenotes.
sequence and be shown as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. Please do not send original slides, photographs and other artworks. Visuals in proposals should initially be sent as low-res JPEG files on a PC-formatted floppy disk or CD, together with the posted hard copy, and as email attachments together with the emailed electronic version. If articles are selected for publication, contributors will be asked to provide images to the Editor in Tiff format (300 dpi, 145 mm/1740 pixel width). Copyright Before publication, authors are requested to assign copyright to the Journal subject to retaining their right to reuse the material in other publications written or edited by themselves and due to be published at least one year after initial publication in the Journal. A credit to the publisher and the original source should be cited if an article that appears in the Journal is subsequently reprinted elsewhere. Permissions Copyright clearance should be indicated by the contributor and is always the responsibility of the contributor. The source has to be indicated beneath the text. When they are on a separate sheet or file, indication must be given as to where they should be placed in the text. The author has responsibility to ensure that the proper permissions/model for visual image releases are obtained. Reviewing Please contact the Editor if you are interested in reviewing for this journal. Contributions welcome The Editor welcomes contributions. Any matter concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor, Rachel Mason, at: Roehampton University, Froebel College, Roehampton Lane, London SW15 5PJ UK. Email:
[email protected] Tel: 44 (0) 2023923009/4
Visual Materials Illustrations within articles are invited to assist discussion of artworks, learning activities and/or environments. In general, only greyscale reproduction is available. All illustrations, photographs, diagrams, maps, etc. should follow the same numerical
Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor. The guidance on this page is by no means comprehensive: it must be read in conjunction with Intellect Notes for Contributors. These notes can be referred to by contributors to any of Intellect’s journals, and so are, in turn, not sufficient; contributors will also need to refer to the guidance such as this given for each specific journal. Intellect Notes for Contributors is obtainable from www.intellectbooks.com/journals, or on request from the Editor of this journal. For additional guidance on submissions, reviewers guidelines or general information, please contact: Rachel Mason Email:
[email protected]
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International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3. Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.169/2. © Intellect Ltd 2007.
Editorial The papers in this issue address disparate topics. It contains image-texts by Greek and Japanese art educators that report an international curriculum development initiative and a small-scale research. Contributions from the USA and Estonia feature photographic images, paintings and sculpture in a museum collection. They examine their socio-cultural meanings and messages together with the role of image analysis in identity formation. A paper from Finland is a new departure in that it explores recent developments in the ‘creative industries’ and their implications for professional training of artists and designers. Labitsi asked Greek children aged 8 to draw a story they liked very much and used categories of visual narrative structure formulated by Kress.& Leeuwen to analyse the results. Previous research has shown that whereas some young children are elaborate visual storytellers others find it more difficult to represent narrative visually. Many of the drawings Labitsi studied did not represent the unfolding actions the children referred to in their oral explanations of them. She concluded that their ability to communicate narrative visually was constrained by the limited range of schemata they had available for this purpose. The theme of art lunch functioning as a catalyst for a cross-national curriculum experiment involving teacher educators, schoolteachers and children. The project web site, based in Japan, is evidence that children in eight countries have created ‘art lunches’ and exchanged outcomes. The lesson content has been interdisciplinary and combined art expression with learning in geography, history, home economics and religion. The Japanese coordinator’s rationale for the choice of curriculum topic is that food is a fundamental human need and has universal appeal. It is worth noting however that food display is an art form in Japan where it has a lengthy history of inclusion in art lessons. Linnap’s paper examines how and why images engender fear. In the first part he expresses concern about the increased censorship of photography in public places – an anti picture making hysteria – that has gone beyond all reasonable limits of human freedom. He questions what it is that people find so shocking, unsettling and frightening about photographs given the widespread presence of TV and film images deliberately designed to make explicit and characterise horror and fear. The second part features photographs of everyday life from a traumatic period of Estonia’s history that are only just coming to light so as to illustrate his point that ways in which images engender fear depend on the contexts in which they are created and interpreted. It includes images from a photo diary of a flight from Soviet occupation by an Estonian now domiciled in America and pictures of everyday life taken by a family deported to Siberia. Linnap points out that repression or absence of images also engenders fear. The museum pedagogy explicated by Chandler is grounded in critical theory, race awareness and her early childhood visits to the Boston Musuem of Fine Arts. As she points out, museums play a key role in the way young
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Americans view their own cultural life and heritage yet they present identity and heritage from a mono-cultural point of view. The interdisciplinary approach to image analysis she advocates seeks to differentiate the cultural memories of ‘transplanted, subjugated peoples’ from this tradition and examine with students issues of identity, colour and power. The paper includes contextual information about artworks by John Singleton Copley, Jean Léon Gérôme and Cyrus Edward Dallin held in the collection of the Boston Musuem of Fine Arts. This text demonstrates how teachers can use art historical images representing peoples of colour to stimulate research and discussion of their presence in 18th century European society, and to explore topics such as slavery and indented servitude and the oppression of Native American spiritual beliefs According to Rautkopi, Finland is a world leader in ‘futures’ research. Mature postmodern societies operate a new kind of creative economy that is preoccupied with meaning production and in which intangible values are important in generating new areas for consumption. The skill dimensions needed to lead the new creative sector are cultural literacy, craftsmanship, networking, organisation and the co-configuration and dialogue skills that enable producers to respond to the unique features of products and customer needs. Rautkorpi’s investigation into the form of pedagogy best suited to respond to these societal needs leads her to interview successful professionals in the creative and cultural industries who mentor recruits, to reflect on the way mentoring is embedded in traditional forms of artisanal work and in supervision of postgraduate research; and to define it as a cultural encounter centring on a shared dramatic performance. Whereas mentors support independent problem-solving and decision making, share tacit knowledge and cultural experience and tell stories about their work, mentees try to sort out how the mentor works and thinks and participate in a shared journey into the unknown. Reading the last paper led me to re-read and reconsider Brent Wilson’s theory of three pedagogical sites. His first site is the space in which people create their own art and visual culture with little assistance from art educators; his second site is the schools and other formal educational settings where art educators instruct students how to make and interpret art and visual culture; and his third site is a space that operates at the margins of the first one in which new forms of hybrid visual culture and meaning arise through informal contacts between so-called experts and learners. Wilson contrasts the third site favourably with the second one when he describes it as a space that is inclusive not exclusive, ambiguous not clear, abnormal not normal, anti-structural not structural, liminal not sharply defined. The majority of contributors to this issue seem to want to engage with learners self-initiated encounters with art and culture (Wilson’s first pedagogical site). Although they operate within the confines of Wilson’s second site they aspire to many of his third site pedagogical values. For example they understand art education outcomes as unfixed, hold to the possibility of new curriculum content emerging through negotiating their own and their student’s cultural interests and celebrate the emergence of cultural meanings not yet firmly resolved. Although their personal pedagogical philosophies are not always clear, I gained the impression that most of them value art education primarily for its potential to change the way the learners in their care live their own 170
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lives and are seeking out ways to escape the confines of the second site by making their pedagogy more collaborative and less institutional. References Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T.V. (1996). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge Wilson, B (2007) Third Site Bioquiry: Meditations on Biographical Inquiry and Third-site Pedagogy. Paper prepared for InSEA Asia Regional Conference Seoul, Korea, Aug 20–23.
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International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.173/1. © Intellect Ltd 2007.
Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA Robin M. Chandler Northeastern University Boston USA Abstract
Keywords
Museums, especially the larger urban visual arts institutions established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries serve as repositories of global history, Empire and cultural memory, even as they shape identity. When students of colour come to museums, they frequently only see their ancestors depicted in classic portrayals of pre-twentieth century figuration framed by the white imagination and often without any mediated interpretation that confronts racialized visual texts and unpleasant histories. How should scholars and teachers interpret and mediate this space for all students – one that confronts our deepest fears about cultural authenticity, hegemony, self-representation, narratives and story telling, prejudice and the passage of time? This article shares excerpts from an educational game the author has used at secondary and college level for over a decade. In Colorquest© students explore the cultural and intellectual space that museum collections and accessioning practices provide for interpreting how people of colour are represented in their artefacts; and the xenophobic gaze shaping their representation. The pedagogical site for Colorquest© is the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
cultural identity pedagogy race awareness museums visual representation
Background As a child in the 1960s I studied drawing and composition at an urban museum on Saturdays. I travelled the bus line from Cambridge, spent two hours in classes with my instructors, then frequented the galleries following my father’s instructions to ‘find people of colour represented in the museum’. After classes I scoured it for people of colour who looked like me. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) remained a private and professional haunt long after my childhood dream of getting locked up in its caverns after closing hours. In these dreams ended the monumental Pharaoh Mycerinus came alive and spoke to me of things ancient and Egyptian. Contemporary cinematographers, dazzled and romanced by the drama, scale and spectacle of art holdings in museums, have explored ways of bringing them to life in popular films like the Harry Potter series Frida and Night at the Museum, for example. Since then, I have escorted secondary and university students through the Boston MFA on a pedagogical exercise for more than a decade. Colorquest©: Identity and Representation sends them on a search for representations of people of colour. As the desert traveller in the painting
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Nineteenth-century painting, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
2.
Categories or types of ‘new’ museum include heritage-centred, tourism-centred, media-technologyfocused, genocidedocumentary-focused museums, hands-on science exploratoria, and many online virtual museums.
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The Questioner of the Sphinx,1 by Elihu Vedder (1863), it is possible to frame the museum as an African diviner or Delphic oracle availing spectators of the visual possibilities for understanding its artworks, their creators and the times in which they lived. My father’s instructions have stayed with me and informed Colorquest©.
Presenting identity ‘The Museum’ was constructed physically and ideologically as a site of power, conquest and intellectual history to preserve artefacts. For the last 200 years as civic institutions museums have constructed memory from a monocultural viewpoint. Yet, as staged for me by my father, they contained objects of material culture that brought the world of far distant lands to my doorstep. I could immerse myself in the national and social identities and ethnic differences among human beings and time-travel to places most people only dream about. Later I travelled on six continents but my personal thirst for global integration and cultural knowledge was first quenched, on a grand scale, within the museum. Today, the consumer-student and patron needs a peripheral vision (Moy, 1993) to comprehend the museum as a stage for representing cultural and racial identity. While the historical ‘other’ may be self-represented in the creation of the objects, museums often staged them imperialistically from a perspective of domination inside an Anglo-American or Euro-American tradition. As a western innovation popularized during an imperial era of global colonialism, the profession of museum collector arose at a time when wealthy amateur collectors and universities were collaborating with anthropologists to conserve and preserve the historical past. This form of institutionalization was a pubic enterprise that made the private collections of the rich accessible to everyday people. In so doing, art museums effectively defined their own identities as gatekeepers, ideologues and arbiters of taste. A cadre of entrepreneurial elites was cultivated to display objects in their collections in ways that would attract and intrigue viewers who knew little or nothing about their cultural contexts. Presenting identity has always been at the centre of the museum mission, therefore. In simpler terms, museums took over the functions of anthropology and private collecting, outwardly for the social good, and functioned as expressions of national and civic identity presided over by European gatekeepers. Furthermore, as Boon (1994, p. 9) has pointed out, they sought to ‘make explicitly exotic populations appear implicitly familiar and explicitly familiar populations appear implicitly exotic’. Museum paradigms are changing in the twenty-first century, mostly due to shifts in audience patronage and applied technologies. Indeed, how long will the public continue to visit, patronize and support museums as public spaces of knowledge production? As they evolve as cultural institutions, the construction of ethnic identity is being reframed by a host of smaller and newer culturally and ethnically specific museums.2 While not the primary subject matter of Colorquest©, this game is underpinned by discussion of race and ethnicity in the current period of ambiguity and artifice. Many museums were set up during or after punitive colonial conquests that demonized ‘exotic other’, while simultaneously appropriating their cultural patrimony in the name of cultural supremacy. These historical memories have contemporary voices constituted by both pride and shame. Ambiguity 174
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and artifice characterize the complex intersubjectivities of the museum industry which is a public, social world administered by entrepreneurial elites.3 Writers contributing to cross-cultural discourse about cultural embeddedness converge at the crossroads of identity and are concerned about how it is influenced by museum acquisition and exhibition policies. This industry is rooted in the interpretation and spectacle of identity and the manner in which successive generations seek to define their civic commitments and social patriotism. More contemporary views of self-representation in the arts and photography have attempted to portray difference from a racialized point of view while explicating the complexities caused by paradigms and practices of racism.4 Who are the new generations of museum consumers?
Neo’s dilemma – the blue or the red pill The clients of arts education in this new century are largely children of The Matrix (1999). Their greater awareness of the global community, reduced to a neighbourhood by the Internet and the World Wide Web, means that they are cosmopolitan, well-educated and graphically signed. They acquire knowledge through glyphs, signs, tags, video and web casts, and computer animation more rapidly than any generation in the past. Handheld devices will soon be integrated into the human body, eventually moving us into the realm of human robotics. Current and future museum patrons are seeking role models in the geopolitical struggles of good versus evil. What cultural models – individual and institutional – are museums promoting in practice-based museum education? In the film The Matrix, the central character Neo is confronted with a dilemma: whether to take a blue pill and remain captive to a bogus, flatlander, materialist, virtual and unreal world in which appearances hide uncomfortable truths or, to take the red pill and confront the real world of contradiction, conflict and chaos – one in which individuals must make choices for themselves. Today’s youth see the world differently from their forbears. For them meaning is increasingly made and remade in virtual reality, popular culture and through transgressing boundaries. Their identities are formed by interacting influences that both complicate and reduce who they are and how they see themselves into the future. Their learning environments can play a key role in shaping their identity and offsetting the data bombarding them at home, in the street and from peers (Wenger, 1998). This generation is producing and reproducing its own multifaceted culture to an extent Bourdieu never dreamed of (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Furthermore, pure transmission of knowledge has been replaced by production of knowledge (Freire, 1988) and by new visual and technological literacies. The subject of inquiry in Colorquest© is the young spectator’s visual, aesthetic and historical literacy. This pedagogical tool is both object and context-centred. Identity formation is more interesting to students than iconological exegesis and Colorquest© offers them the opportunity to reconcile objects in museums with their own histories, education and multiple identities. Theories of how cultural identity is generated have limitations partially due to the monodisciplinary training of most educators and their fear of approaching subjects like genocide, slavery or the crimes against humanity represented in art. Interdisciplinary applied research considers how these findings may be applied to art education. Schools and cultural Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity…
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3.
The term ‘entrepreneurial elites’ refers to museum professionals trained as interpreters of arts and culture objects, the buyers and sellers of museum art, and the mid-strata of mid-level personnel who interface between the public and the museum.
4.
An exemplar, ‘Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self’ Exhibition, Museum of Photographic Arts at San Diego Museum, 2005.
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Visit UNESCO on the web at http://www.unesco. org/culture/ masterpieces.
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institutions (museums et al.) are emerging as sites of reconstruction, debate and knowledge production about the ego and how identity is formed. Educators, therefore, are playing a critical role where their pedagogy is culturally responsive (Gay, 2000). The experience of taking students on innumerable museum field visits led me to formulate a reflexive pedagogy building upon interdisciplinary cross-cultural inquiry. However, there is a strong indigenous compulsion embedded in museum collections and audiences. Recent studies of museum audience development in the United States and elsewhere (e.g. Danylak, 2002) have explored issues of representation, myth and stereotyping and examined the role of specifically ‘ethnic’ museums. Today cultural politics is driving museums to deconstruct identity in their exhibitions and accession policies.
Authenticity and heritage in the ‘floating classroom’ In the Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World, Carlos Fuentes (1999) depicted the world of the Americas as a ‘Utopia, the happy place of the natural man’. He observed that, … the baroque was a shifting art, akin to a mirror in which we see our constantly changing identity. It was an art dominated by the single, imposing fact that we were caught between the destroyed Indian world and a new universe that was both European and American. (Fuentes, 1999, p. 196)
How can educators reconstruct the differentiated cultural memories of transplanted or subjugated peoples brought to the Americas or, of preexisting Native Indian societies; and how are these histories contained in museums? How can they convey an accurate picture of history through visits to local art museums? During the nineteenth century the ideologies of social Darwinism and eugenics and the colonization of arts and artefacts of newly conquered territories were accompanied by the classification of non-Europeans as non- or sub-human. The colonized individual was both a human subject of the conquering nation (albeit without equal citizenship rights) and a material subject of intellectual curiosity. As cultural anthropology, archaeology and pseudo-science emerged as academic disciplines, natural history museums became repositories for both ritual objects and body parts. UNESCO implemented a global Proclamation Programme in 2003 to safeguard ‘intangible heritage’ or ‘living human treasures’ of nations and groups.5 The Programme asserts that, while cultural heritage (both living and traditional) may be constantly shifting or in danger of extinction, it ‘provides a sense of identity and continuity to groups and communities and constitutes a crucible of cultural diversity’. Along with the Proclamation of Masterpieces, countries that support the notion of ‘intangible cultural heritage’ can designate certain individuals as ‘living human treasures’. This position UNESCO has adopted supports the view taken in this article that it is important that individuals and groups reflect on their cultural life and heritage through studying cultural artefacts in museums. The museum enterprise is a part of the cultural sector in cities and towns all around the world.
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Connecting the dots in theory and practice The Colorquest© game enables identification of museum subjects in that portray people of colour in a variety of contexts. The vast scale of the Boston MFA and my familiarity with its more obscure recesses make it an ideal site for exploring issues of identity, culture and power and for searching out how Europeans viewed themselves in contrast to the indigenous peoples they conquered. The focus of the search is on clarifying culturally specific perceptions about difference from a European perspective. The pedagogy was nurtured in several educational contexts. I served as a primary- and secondary-school consultant and worked in higher education for two decades, but not as a conventional art educator. Instead, I undertook sociological-type fieldwork and pursued an active studio career. So I have been steered along several inquiry paths. Whereas the theories mentioned earlier informed the development of Colorquest© the pedagogy sets out to bring these discussions of race and difference into the real world of attitudes, behaviours, feelings, social practices, customs, stereotypes and public opinion. During the 1980s and early 1990s, as director of Caravan, I worked as a human-relations trainer and my search for studies of race and difference led me to sociology. Studying the social nature of systems and individuals helped me understand the way difference and power operate. I became interested in how sociological theorizing about identity formation might apply to the arts. I discovered that scholars like Becker (1982) and Zolberg (1990) had investigated ‘art worlds, but not in ways that address art teachers’ everyday concerns. Art historians, on the other hand, resisted social theories and contextual approaches to studying art. Some art educators who were artists brought an experiential ethos to their teaching and others were more concerned with pedagogy or mediating public arts policy to schools. These are all essential tributaries of a healthy, vibrant art world. However, my understanding of interdisciplinary praxis is rooted in a belief that the arts can effect social change and have a profound impact on teaching and learning, school reform and teacher training. Art education can have a civilizing effect on systems when it leads children to reflect on their own nobility and the contributions they and their racial ancestors have made to humanity. But this cannot happen unless they see themselves represented, or represented positively, in museum collections and exhibitions.
Colorquest©: instructor preparation Step 1:
Identify a large urban museum, with diverse collections and exhibitions.
Step 2:
Study the collections and exhibitions over time, becoming familiar with all the galleries and being careful not to exclude any historical periods, media or special collections you might assume do not contain representations of people of colour. (Most do – from medieval tapestries to seventeenthcentury ceramics and Etruscan vases and to contemporary painting or photography.)
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Step 3
Identify a selection of works that depict a wide range of regions and historical periods. Representations that are figurative and representational rather than abstract offer greater impact. Two kinds of documentation are necessary. First, record all the descriptive data you can about the works, artists, etc. Second, purchase or rent slides of the artworks for review in class after Colorquest©. (If slides are not available at the gift shop or university archives, scan postcards or images from books and make your own slides at institutional media centres. Or download digitized images from the Internet/ online for PowerPoint.)
Step 4
Construct a list of ‘hip clues’ you are sure will resonate with your students of whatever age. Following the museum visit, class discussion can be a fertile debriefing, consciousness-raising, learning event for both teacher and student.
Step 5
Student projects that involve interactive media, comparative study and cross-cultural references can result from Colorquest©. Understanding differences in generational perspectives is a significant learning outcome where instructors are open to whatever new world-view students bring to discussion and projects.
The pedagogy A cross-disciplinary curriculum approach consisting of courses in art history, aesthetics, humanities and social sciences is the ideal context to prepare for this search game/exercise. Begin with a lecture/discussion (Step 4). If the Americas are the primary focus, for example, sessions might begin with discussion of pre-Columbian art, western imperialism, the politics of colonialism and postcolonialism, the meeting of East and West and cultural conflict as well as exchange. Discussion of aboriginal art could include a review of the British occupation of Australia and how these indigenous histories were shaped by power and prestige. This kind of discussion requires interdisciplinary rigour and familiarity with history, economics, art and social policy, religion and political science. Intergenerational dialogue between teachers and students is a rich environment for exchanging ideas about representation, cultural perceptions; and about how communities of colour have been both marginalized and valorized across history by artists, collectors and museums. The twenty-first-century consciousness of today’s students opens up ‘teachable moments’ for sharing views about a range of significant concepts like ‘persons of colour’, enslavement and exploitation, and context-centred approaches to the study of art or symbolism and spirituality. In any case, these preliminary discussions are a rudimentary preparation for Colorquest©. During the museum visit, students work in pairs. A list of clues about selected artworks is distributed and they are charged with finding as many as possible in a limited time period (minimum: one hour). You may need to tell younger students to check their time and location every 30 minutes, make
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sure at least one member in each pair has a watch, and share rules of museum conduct (like not talking to strangers). Finally, plan to wander the museum acting as mentor/teacher. Urban museums can be very busy places, so plan the visit for a low-volume day. Hand out one list of clues per pair and ask one student in each pair to volunteer as a scribe. The list of clues is the key. Clues must be given a humorous, contemporary and youthrelevant ‘spin’ in order to trigger verve, make the search a thought-provoking game and tap into generationally specific lingo and popular culture. In what follows I have selected some site-specific examples of eminently popular works at Boston MFA that could provide a basis for discussion and have provided some examples of clues. IMAGE 1: Work of art: Watson and the Shark. John Singleton Copley (American, 1738–1815), oil on canvas, 72 x 90 (1778). CLUE 1: A local boy telling ‘a fish story’ in an eighteenth-century version of ‘Jaws’. Copley’s painting depicts an unknown person of African descent at the pinnacle of a morbid boating struggle in the harbour. Located in the Evans Wing of the Boston MFA, this painting suggests numerous discussion topics pertaining to the presence of Africans in New World Boston, the occupational lives of these people from mariners to labourers and intellectuals and the presence of free and slave classes in eighteenth-century Boston and its slave-carrying trade. Students can investigate the history of that African presence, the depiction of people of colour in Copley’s works or a host of other topics. The triangulation of the figure at the pinnacle with the boat ends in the foreground makes this monumental painting a powerful visual encounter with tragedy at sea, and the spectator feels a part of the event. Students will take away a fresh understanding of teamwork in action and how ‘colour’ becomes unimportant when people have to work together towards a common goal. Copley treated the African presence in the same way as all the other characters. He did not retreat into caricature or parody.6 Precisely because this portrayal is naturalistic, the work functions as a starting point for discussion about ‘free blacks’, indentured servitude and the prevailing and ‘peculiar institution’ of slavery in the United States that did not end until 1863. During Copley’s time, the slave trade was in full force. Slaves existed in New England circles and prominent New England families benefited from it. Klein (1986) and numerous other scholars cite the 10 to 15 million Africans captured, sold and transported from the Old World (Africa) to the New World (the Americas) as ‘one of the great crimes against humanity in world history, which was made no better by the fact that Africans as well as Europeans participated in its rewards’ (ibid, p. 140) In Art of Exclusion, Boime (1990) writes that the English Abolitionist movement was in its infancy when Copley painted Watson and the Shark, noting that slavery continued in the Massachusetts Commonwealth long past the production of this picture and, indeed, in the very year of its execution. ‘Even the status of
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6. See R. Chandler (1996).
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In R. Gonzalez (1992), Without Discovery: A Native Response to Columbus.
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freedmen and freedwomen proved troublesome for the colonists, in a state whose proposed constitution excluded “negroes, Indians, and mulattoes” from the suffrage, demonstrating that public sentiment was far from unanimous on the question of political rights for emancipated slaves’ (Boime, 1990, p. 30). Given such a history, students are free to imagine a variety of possibilities within the historical frame.
IMAGE 2: Work of art: Appeal to the Great Spirit, Cyrus Edwin Dallin (American 1861–1944). H: 309.9 cm; L: 260.3 cm; W: 111.1 cm. (1909). CLUE 2: Even in a prayerful pose on my trusty steed, it isn’t easy being green (except when they clean up my bronze body) – especially in this unpredictable New England ‘feather’ weather. And my neck… It’s killing me. This outdoor bronze sculpture of a Native American Indian invoking the Creator sits at the Huntington Avenue entrance to the Boston MFA. It grew progressively greener with tarnish until modern conservation methods were developed. It is a welcome acknowledgement of the Indian presence and history in New England. Dallin completed several sculptures of Native people including Massasoit (a seventeenth-century Sachem of the Wampanoag) and Menotomy, an Algonquin word meaning ‘place of running water’. As a friend and colleague of John Singer Sargeant and Augustus St. Gaudens, the sculptor of Boston’s Shaw Memorial standing opposite the State House, Dallin’s portrayal of Native Americans is consonant with the romantic character of paintings and sculpture at the time. A discussion among students about how these artists worked together, passed on commissions, understood and were inspired by the wider historical, archaeological, ethnographic and social paradigms of the fin de siècle era is an engaging forum for career preparation in the arts. Sharing information about early Native American Indian defiance, desperation, loss, decimation and genocide in the face of European annihilation is crucial. This was an important excerpt in American history that students must come to understand and own as part of their national identity and citizenship. Many Indian societies at this time were deeply spiritual and fervently devoted to a cosmological view of the universe rooted in guardianship of the land and environment. In most cases this world-view was dismissed by Europeans as pagan. The Dallin sculpture epitomizes the era of the ‘White Ghost dance’ and other religious movements practised illegally by Native peoples who felt a sense of hopelessness in the face of white barbarity in the late nineteenth century – forced land removal, genocide, massacre, broken treaties, and removal of their children to Indian schools for assimilation in America, north and south. In his essay ‘Reclaiming Ourselves, Reclaiming America’ Francisco Alarcón (1992)7 explains that Native peoples view the ‘discovery’ of America by Columbus as a conquest. He elucidates the ‘scope of the nightmare, holocaust effect the arrival of Europeans had on the Native peoples of this continent: ‘If only we could feel within ourselves the sorrow and despair of a
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Native population of 20 million in Mesoamerica at the time of the coming of the Europeans, reduced to less than two million one hundred years later’ (Gonzales, 1992, p. 32) He punctuates this commentary with the proviso: ‘No account is possible. Words are useless. We are forced to experience this knowledge outside language’ [My italics] (Gonzales, 1992, p. 33).
IMAGE 3: Work of art: Moorish Bath, Jean Léon Gérôme (French 1824 –1904), oil on canvas, 20 x 16 ins CLUE 3: Jerome ‘cleaning up his act’ in a bathroom in the Middle East?? At a time when the Middle East is an ever-present player in geopolitical events, studying a nineteenth-century painting that portrays a Moor is most relevant. Historically the term ‘Moor’ refers to people of mixed Arab and Berber ancestry and of North African lineage who conquered Spain in the eighth century, and also connotes Muslim culture. Used historically, it also can also refer to all dark-skinned or miscegenated people from India to the Americas. This painting provides a jump start for a conversation about why people defined as Moors were in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Near East and for speaking about French nineteenth-century painting at the time of Jerome when the French held colonial power or indirect rule in many regions of the world. The practice of using Moors or blacks as slaves and/or ‘cultural oddities’ in middle and upper European circles and court life is well documented in literature and numerous western paintings. The words of the late Edward Said, who referred to nineteenth-century (western) writers understanding of the Orient as a locale meriting ‘attention, reconstruction, even redemption’ (Said, 1979, p. 167), have contemporary resonance in relation to civil strife and war in the Middle East. He further stated, ‘the professional contributors to Oriental knowledge were anxious to couch their formulations and ideas, their scholarly work, their considered contemporary observations, in language and terminology whose cultural validity derived from other sciences and systems of thought’ (Said, 1979, p. 206). Said addressed the backdrop of political and economic forces that reinforce ‘Orientalizing’, or the Eurocentric requirement to represent the other and, as a Palestinian Arab, he observed the West observing the Orient and in particular, the Muslim Orient. Intersections between the cultural politics of gender and race are a probable discussion topic in response to this work as students explore ways in which racialized identity oppressed women of colour more than any other group historically. Many artists have accessed the politics of colour in their work and critical analysis of the artistic imagination have produced numerous commentaries on the displacement, projection and pathology of theories of white racial superiority.
The seeds of Colorquest©: closing comments about exclusion and art worlds Colorquest© offers entry into cultural worlds through artistic expression and reflection. The pedagogy can inform students’ own processes of identity formation given an inspired teacher.
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I remember my undergraduate and graduate education at university as indoctrination not education. I rejected the well-known textbook History of Art (Janson 1977) because of its western, Christian bias. It included scant representation of or by women or artists of colour. Since then, the United States has witnessed the creation of separatist, discrete art worlds devoted to women’s art, Latin American art, African American art, as well a longer tradition of production and institutionalization in Native American art. Each art world has produced its own infrastructure in parallel to those of institutions and largely in response to unofficial policies of white privilege and male advantage. While this is not a comforting history to revisit, and others may have experienced it differently, I matured in an exclusive art world in which screening and legitimating policies within pubic practice existed but were not written down because this would have violated constitutional values. Since my own career path intersects at art history, cultural difference and sociology and since I am a practising visual artist I, and others like me, have survived with our sense of integrity and nobility intact. This article has not engaged with the most recent museum studies literature, which is extensive and included important works by Karp, Kratz, Szwaja & Ybarra-Frausto (2007), Carbonell (2003) and Lavine (1991) to name but a few. Early art education literature on ‘art games’ including Katter (1986) or Hurwitz & Madeja (1977) were not mentioned because Colorquest© is rooted in critical theory and race awareness. The article does not connect with cultural studies literature and is primarily informed by the anti-racism training that emerged in the 1970s, multicultural education theory and practice and the diversity awareness literature influenced prominently by Banks (2006). Beginning in 1968, this was a decade of revolution, both social and political. Colorquest© does not directly engage with the theoretical exposition of public culture that characterizes a new body of research on museums as cultural institutions. My concern is with the historically conditioned interaction one museum provides and my readings of the artworks as an adult artist who has patronized it for over forty years. Although I trained as an schoolteacher I have taught mainly in higher education. While I am familiar with curriculum trends such as DBAE, municipal teaching and the perennial political struggle in America to maintain arts programmes in schools my work has focused on the global project of visual culture. In my studio work, lecturing and publishing, and from my trans-racial religious perspective, I have found the social sciences the most promising arena for exploration. This article cites a diverse spectrum of scholarship and practice, therefore. Some scholars of museum policy and critics have noticed a shift of attitude towards public outreach. The notion of ‘the museum’ is class-related in that patrons, audiences and administrative personnel have always been drawn from better educated, well-off upper classes. Class production and the reproduction of wealth and status is nothing new. However, museum education departments underwent a period of self-reflection and audience analysis in the 1970s and 1980s in an effort to cross class boundaries. The multicultural education movements of this era produced a new paradigm of ‘representativeness’. Arts departments in historically black and Indian colleges and predominantly white colleges and universities began to churn out artists, art consultants, art collectors and arts experts who challenged the 182
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white racial hegemony that had previously dominated the art world. But my experience was that the predominantly white young and older art museum educators at this time were relatively uninformed and naïve about ethnic and racial difference. Following each museum visit, students’ findings and questions with respect to the history and provenance of works of art should be discussed and processed, but as visceral experiences carrying emotional weight. When I first walked the marble floors of the Boston MFA in the 1960s, there were no African, South Pacific or Nubian collections and no Japanese or Chinese art to speak of; there was little work if any by artists of colour, or women. In closing, it is important to point out that multimedia technology has played a pivotal role in the way Colorquest© is processed afterwards in discussion with students. Online course chat rooms, group media projects that critique museums, interactive web research, and online art historical archives and virtual museums have all altered the pedagogy for the better. Film and Internet resources provide additional cultural insights into museum holdings. Colorquest© continues to function as ‘a safe space’ for dialogues on race and stimulating critical thinking and inquiry on racial difference that goes beyond fear and shame. References Banks, J.( 2006) Race Culture and Education: The selected work of James Banks. New York: Routledge. Becker, H. (1982). Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California. Boime, A. (1990). The Art of Exclusion (Representing Blacks in The Nineteenth Century). Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Boon, J.A. (1994). Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, Texts. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, C. (1977). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Carbonell, B.M. (Ed.) (2003). Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Chandler, R. (1996). Xenophobes, visual terrorism, and the African subject, Third Text 35 (Summer), 15–28. Danylak, K. (2002). Museums Australia – Evaluation and visitor research-topic: Exploding the myths behind multicultural and indigenous audience development: A case study from three new museums. Cultural Perspectives. Paper presented at Museums Australia Conference, Adelaide- Once Upon Our Times. MA2002danylak.pdf. Dominguez, V. (1986). The marketing of heritage. American Ethnologist 13 (3) 546–555. Katter, E. (1988). An approach to art games: Playing and planning. Art Education 41 (3) 46–48 & 50–54. Freire, P. (1988). Pedagogy of Freedom. New York: Seabird Press. Fuentes, C. (1999). The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research and Practice. New York: Teacher’s College Press.
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Gonzalez, R. (Ed.) (1992). Without Discovery: A Native Response to Columbus. Seattle: Broken Moon Press. Hurwitz, A. & Madeja, S. (1977). Joyous View. New York: Prentice Hall. Janson, H. W. & D. J. (1977) History of Art: A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to Present Day. New York: H N Abrams. Karp, I., Kratz, C., Szwaja, L. & Ybarra-Frausto, T. (Eds.) (2007). Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Klein, H.S. (1986). African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Oxford University Press. Lavine, S. (1991). Exhibiting Cultures: The Practice and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute. Moy, J. (1993). Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. ‘Only Skin Deep Symposium: Changing visions of the American self’ (2005). Exhibit- ‘Visualizing Race in American Phorography’, Museum of Photographic Arts at San Diego. 1 October –31 December. For further information, see http://www.sdmart.org/exhibition-skindeep-symposium.html Accessed, November 15, 2007. Said, E. (1979). Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. UNESCO (2001–2005). Third Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. United National Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization. On-line at http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00103. Accessed, November 15, 2007. Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zolberg, V. (1990). Constructing a Sociology of the Arts. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Suggested citation Chandler, R.M. (2007), ‘Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic selfidentity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA’, International Journal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 173–184. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.173/1
Contributor details With a portfolio in the visual arts and sociology, Dr Robin M. Chandler has been a practising artist for more than 25 years and has exhibited in the United States and abroad (http://www.robin-chandler.com). She has conducted field research and community projects taught and lectured in South America, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australia, Asia, and the United States. A widely published author, Chandler is an associate professor, at Northeastern University’s Department of African American Studies. A former Fulbright scholar (South Africa 1996), she has been a consultant to numerous museums and corporations and is a well-known spokesperson and activist for the arts, the advancement of women, and the empowerment of black, Latino, Native Indian and Asian communities. Contact: Dr. Robin M. Chandler Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies And Director of Women’s Studies (2004–2006), Northeastern University, 132 Nightingale Hall, Boston, MA 02115617-373-5681(o) 617-373-2625(f). E-mail:
[email protected] www.robin-chandler.com
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International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.185/1. © Intellect Ltd 2007.
‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings Vasiliki Labitsi Greece Keywords
Abstract Visual narrative construction plays a key role in how children develop their understanding of the world and communicate ideas and meanings. In this visual text I examine how a small sample of 8-year-old children from Greece employed narrative structures to represent unfolding actions and processes of change in narrative drawings. Aided by a set of categories developed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996), I discuss the four main types of narrative structure the children employed and the difficulties they experienced drawing characters in action.
drawing primary children visual narrative narrative structures Greece
Children and visual narrative Visual narrative or telling stories through a picture or sequence of pictures is a means through which children develop and communicate ideas and thoughts about themselves and the world. According to Kellman (1995), spontaneous visual narrative-making enables children to reconstruct their interior, psychological worlds, illustrate the day-to-day details of their lives and come to terms with its demands and situations. A narrative dimension is very common in children’s spontaneous drawings. From approximately the age of 5, drawing seems to become the primary vehicle for their narrative-making (Wilson & Wilson, 1980). This is probably because the visual medium offers particular strengths over other modes of communication. Setting, characters and unfolding actions are three basic elements of any narrative (Porter Abbot, 2002). However, according to Wilson & Wilson (1979), children’s visual narratives tend to exist in a fragmented form and one or more of these basic elements may be missing. For example, some children develop elaborate settings but do not people them with characters. Some concentrate on drawing actions devoid of any setting; others create characters that never go into action. Research by Wilson (2002), Wilson & Wilson (1977; 1980) and Barrs (1988, p. 64) has shown that some children become quite elaborate visual storytellers with practice and the aid of popular visual narrative resources like comics. But in my experience as a teacher many primary-age children find it difficult to represent ‘narrative structures’ visually. Recently I studied a sample of 36 narrative drawings by 8-year-old Greek children collected in two primary-school settings and analysed the kinds of narrative structures they represented and the constraints they faced.
ETA 3 (3) pp. 185–193 © Intellect Ltd 2007.
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Narrative structures: The visual representation of unfolding actions and processes of change.
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Figure 1: Girl and the sunset. Vector: A strong directional thrust, usually diagonal, that connects characters with each other or a character with an object. A vector can be formed by a body or limbs of characters, objects they are holding or their eyeline (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996; Jewitt & Oyama, 2001).
The children were asked to draw a story they liked very much. Once the drawings were completed they were asked to explain orally what they had drawn.
Examining narrative structures in children’s drawings Narrative structures are recognizable by the presence of ‘vectors’. In onefourth of the drawings examined narrative structures were not represented visually, even when the children described unfolding action in their oral explanations of them. For example, one participant child described her drawing as follows (Figure 1): A girl climbs, climbs, climbs, climbs to reach the sunset.
Kress & van Leeuwen (1996) have distinguished a number of different types of narrative structure that can be represented in the visual mode and provide extensive descriptions of each one. When these categories were applied to the drawings in the sample the findings were that the majority of children employed four of them (Figure 2). Type of narrative structure Unidirectional transactional action Non-transactional action Mental/verbal process Bi-directional transactional action
Frequency 10 8 7 4
Figure 2: Most frequent narrative structure types. 186
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Unidirectional transactional action: A vector emanates from a character and is directed towards a passive participant who is usually a non-acting character or some object and is the ‘goal’ of the action (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).
Figure 3: Going shopping at the supermarket. ‘Unidirectional transactional actions’ was the most common narrative structure. Typically the goals of such actions were objects or tools the characters were holding or directing their hands towards (Figures 3–6). ‘Non-transactional action’ was the second most frequent type of narrative structure. In one case, the bodies of the human characters shown in side view in the ‘air gap’, the space formed between the sky and ground lines of the drawing, formed a vector that suggested the direction in which
Figure 4: Mother and child panda eating. ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative…
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Figure 5: Picasso painting.
Figure 6: Robin Hood fights his enemies. 188
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they were heading (Figure 7). In one sequential drawing the presence of vectors was established through viewing the narrative as a sequence of rectangular frames (Figure 8). In this example, the body of a plant shown larger and taller in each subsequent frame suggested a vertical vector emanating from the ground that was directed upwards. The action of growth was non-transactional since it did not point to or was not aimed at anybody. ‘Mental and verbal processes’ were the third most common type of narrative structure evident in the sample. The written texts included in thought Non-transactional action: A vector emanates from a character but does not point at anybody or anything. The action is not done to anybody or anything (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).
Figure 7: Peter Pan and Wendy flying over a rainbow.
Figure 8: A tree growing. ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative…
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Mental and verbal processes: They are formed by the presence of thought and speech bubbles. The oblique protrusions of thought and speech bubbles form a vector connecting speakers or thinkers with their thoughts or words (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).
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or speech bubbles projected the thoughts, feelings and intentions of represented characters and consisted of dialogues, monologues, questions and expletives. The spontaneous inclusion of this written material confirmed the multimodal character of children’s visual practices (Anning & Ring, 2004; Kress 1997; Bearne, 2003). In one case, a group of tin men inspired by Tintown (Tenekedoupoli) a well-known illustrated book for children dealt with the problem of how to cross a river. The dialogue was essential to understanding the narrative. It communicated the problem as it occurred, the characters’ concerns about it and finally the solution (crossing a nearby bridge) (Figure 10).
Figure 9: Tintown characters trying to cross a river.
Figure 10: Bank robbery. 190
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Figure 11: Two giants fighting.
‘Bi-directional transactional action’ was the least frequent type of narrative structure employed to represent characters in conflict. Strong double vectors were evident in the raised hands of characters holding weapons and were enhanced by bullet lines or action lines formed by cannon balls (Figures 10 and 11).
Discussion The children’s visual representations of narrative structures were rather limited. In several cases they did not employ any. Even when their stated intention was to show characters in action. When they did use them the tendency was to show characters holding objects (unidirectional transactional actions), acting alone (non-transactional actions), or thinking and talking with the aid of speech and thought bubbles (mental/verbal processes) that transferred the action from the visual to the written medium. One possible explanation is that their visual narrative-making was constrained by the limited range of schemata or standard ways of representing objects they had at their disposal that were replicated formulaically (Thomas, 1995). The repetition suggests that they may have felt more comfortable using schemata they had mastered well (e.g. frontal upright depictions of human figures) and found it difficult to adapt them according to their communication purposes (for example, to bend parts of the body of a human character or depicting them in profile in order to show them gazing and interacting with other characters or objects). Drawing characters ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative…
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Bi-directional transactional action: Vectors connect two characters interacting. They simultaneously emanate from and are directed at both of them (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).
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holding objects and inserting speech or thought bubbles requires only a minimum deviation from the standard frontal orientation as explained by Golomb (2004) and Thomas & Silk (1990). References Anning, A. & Ring, K. (2004). Making sense of children’s drawings. Maidenhead, Berkshire & New York: Open University Press. Barrs, M. (1988). Drawing a story: Transitions between drawing and writing. In L. Martin & N. Martin (Eds.), The word for teaching is learning: Essays for James Brittan (pp. 51–56). Portsmouth: Heinemann Educational Books. Bearne, E. (2003), Introduction. Ways of knowing, ways of showing: Towards an integrated theory of text. In M. Styles & E. Bearne (Eds.), Art, narrative and childhood. Stoke on Trent, UK & Sterling, USA: Trentham Books. Golomb, C. (2004). The child’s creation of a pictorial world. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Jewitt, C. & Oyama, R. (2001). Visual meaning: A social semiotic approach. In T. van Leeuwen & C. Jewitt (Eds.), Handbook of visual analysis (pp. 134–156). London: Sage Publications. Kellman, J. (1995). Harvey shows the way: Narrative in children’s art, Art Education, 48 (2), 19–22. Kress, G. (1997). Before writing: Rethinking the parts of literacy. London: Routledge. Kress, G. & Leeuwen, T.V. (1996). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge. Labitsi V. (2006). Visual narrative in children’s books and drawings: The Greek case. Ph.D. thesis, Roehampton University. Porter Abbot, H.P. (2002). A Cambridge introduction to narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thomas, G.V. (1995). The role of drawing strategies and skills. In C. Lange-Kuttner & G. Thomas (Eds.), Drawing and looking: Theoretical approaches to pictorial representation in children, New York & London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Thomas, G.V. & Silk, A.M.J. (1990). An introduction to the psychology of children’s drawings. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Wilson, B. (2002). Becoming Japanese: Manga, children’s drawings, and the construction of national character. In L. Bresler & C.M. Thompson (Eds.), The arts in children’s lives (pp. 43–55). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Wilson, B. & Wilson, M. (1977). An iconoclastic view of the imagery sources in the drawings of young people. Art Education, 30 (1), 5–11. —— (1979). Children’s story drawings: Reinventing worlds. School Arts, 79 (8), 6–11. —— (1980). Cultural recycling: The uses of conventional configurations, images and themes in the narrative drawings of American children in arts. In J. Condus, J. Howles & J. Skull (Eds.), Cultural diversity (pp. 227–281). Sydney: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Suggested citation Labitsi, V. (2007), ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings’, International Journal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 185–193. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.185/1
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Contributor details Vasiliki Labitsi is an educational consultant for the Greek Ministry of Education, a children’s book illustrator and teaches art education in the Education Department at Athens University. She has undergraduate degrees in Primary Education and Sociology, Master’s degrees in Art Education and Children’s Literature and has studied illustration at Ornerakis School of Applied Arts. She recently completed a Ph.D. thesis in Art Education at Roehampton University. She has illustrated children’s books for several Greek publishing houses and the Ministry of Education and has exhibited her illustration work in Greece and Europe. She is a member of the board of the Greek Association of Children’s Book Illustrators and has worked as assistant editor of the International Journal of Education Through Art. Contact: Propondithos 16, Oropos, Attiki, 19015, Greece. E-mail:
[email protected]
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International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.195/1. © Intellect Ltd 2007.
Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers Kinichi Fukumoto Hyogo University of Teacher Education Japan (coordinator)
Abstract The Art Lunch Project is a pilot study involving international collaboration of art educators and teachers. The main aim was to compare approaches to teaching the common theme of an art lunch. Lessons organized around this theme took place in both art and interdisciplinary lessons in schools in nine countries. The majority of children recreated traditional food and meals in a range of art media and materials and only a few created ‘fantastic art meals’. This project is still under way and the participant teachers are discussing the issues that arise. They understand this international project as positive in that it functions as advocacy for the subject of art in their school curricula as well as facilitating pupils’ creative skills.
Introduction The Art Lunch Project aims to exchange practical teaching experience. The participants come from nine countries: Portugal, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Turkey, Slovenia, Finland, Denmark and Japan. It is an ongoing project in which art or homeroom teachers in schools interpret the common theme of ‘an art lunch’ in collaboration with universitybased researchers in art education in their classrooms. Work completed by pupils is uploaded to the website listed below1 for mutual viewing by participating teachers and children. In some countries, they are used for teaching art appreciation. The reasons for selecting this theme were that curricula organized around the fundamental human need for food are likely to have universal appeal and the results will reflect national cultural differences. In Japan in particular there is a strong tradition of including food design as a curriculum topic in lower primary-school grades and a custom of displaying sample dishes that goes back to the Taisho period (1912–26).
Content of lessons in each country How did teachers in the participating countries approach the theme? What were the children’s responses? What kinds of art materials were used in classrooms to pursue which expressive aims? The resulting expressive activities will be introduced now, country by country, with accompanying images.
ETA 3 (3) pp. 195–209 © Intellect Ltd 2007.
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Project website http://www.art.hyogo-u. ac.jp/fukumo/ ArtLunchProject/ ArtLunchHome.html
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Portugal
Ms Emilia Lopes’s lessons with seventh-grade pupils were interdisciplinary and combined such diverse subjects as art, English, science (sitology), geography, history and culture, home economics and religion. The main learning objectives were that pupils should gain a thorough understanding of cultural differences in cooking and of art as a mode of expression. Practical work was preceded by discussion of the history and culture of foreign countries designed to facilitate understanding of different world regions and pupils were asked to submit an individual report on a particular region. This was followed by activities designed to get them to think about how to express an art lunch using clay as the main medium and to choose a recipe for a meal. Then they created forks and cups out of waste material for a purposefully designed table setting.
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Slovenia
Ms Marjana Prevodnik targeted third-grade pupils at her primary school and conceived a lesson using waste materials to enhance environmental awareness that highlighted safety. The first practical step was to collect safe materials in collaboration with parents and ensure that none of these contained harmful substances. The next step was to study typical meals in Japan and Slovenia to stimulate artistic ideas. While the teacher proposed they create traditional Slovenian dishes such as zanti (a vegetable soup
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mainly consisting of cabbage), krvavica (blood sausage) and vipara struklji (cheese custard strudel), the pupils chose to create a chocolate cake and handmade cookies, reflecting their own tastes in real life. After this, their work was displayed at a cultural festival in the school called ‘Spring Bazaar’. In addition, they e-mailed electronic messages about the work to participants in other countries. These included: ‘We want to show you some meals from cardboard and clay’, ‘We have prepared fish dishes’, and ‘We have made Slovenian dishes that differ from those in your country – please enjoy them.’ 198
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Turkey
In Turkey, Ms Dilek Acer and Dr Ayse Ilhan worked on the project with fourth-grade pupils in a primary school. While undergoing a brainstorming session, their pupils freely experimented with ideas for an art lunch using coloured drawing paper and created a collage. Then they were asked to research food and cooking and prepare written reports. Through subsequent discussion, they developed a basic understanding of the culture of
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food. A cultural attaché from the Japanese Consulate visited the school and explained Japanese dishes like sushi and bento, which stimulated these pupils’ interest in another culture and world region. He actively collaborated in the project and contributed to international understanding by preparing some attractive display panels that introduced the food culture of Japan. 200
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Finland
Ms Leena Hiillos was the teacher involved in the Finnish project with thirdgrade pupils at a primary school. Her approach was characterized by the use of man-made materials like clay, paper and waste materials as well as leaves and other natural materials. The resulting work had subtle colour tones. Basically, the pupils’ work produced depicted everyday meals in Finland. Art is not taught as an independent subject in this country and classroom teachers are responsible for art lessons.
The Philippines
In the Philippines, Ms Dino Marcelo organized a project around the theme ‘A Filipino Food Fiesta Lunch’ with fifth-grade pupils in a primary school. The artistic aims for her lessons included ‘encouraging children “to use their imagination to create food out of waste material”, “appreciating the potential of paper craft” and learning associated techniques and skills’; and
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they also included the instrumental aims of ‘informing people that art enhances awareness of the environment’ and ‘thinking about the kind of decision-making necessary to protect the global environment’. Ms Marcelo’s approach was characterized by an emphasis on modelmaking and the environmental theme of recycling. After they had participated in some games designed to develop knowledge of recycling, her pupils learned about waste wood, folk art, fine art and some aesthetic concepts. Then they were encouraged to create an art lunch using papiermâché techniques while consulting reference material on recycling, art and typical Philippines dishes. The resulting work featured festival-related food such as roasted pig (Lechon) and grilled squid (inihaw na pusit). 202
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Germany
Dr Petra Weingart organized a project entitled ‘Eating Art’ for fourth-grade pupils. After discussing what kinds of meals children in other countries eat, these pupils were shown some relevant art works to boost ideas. A lot of time was spent in the initial planning stages ensuring that they carefully thought through ways of expressing meals they wanted to create. The teacher offered them a diverse range of materials, including watercolour paint, sawdust, pieces of wood, cloth, tennis balls, styrene foam, chalk and cardboard. The children analysed the presentation of meals prepared to entertain guests so as to gain cultural insights into the design of table settings as part of an art appreciation lesson.
Scotland
Ms Lindsay Brook from Scotland appealed to sixth-grade pupils to ‘create an imaginative lunch for a foreign friend’. The starting point was to research Japanese and Scottish cooking on the Internet and by other means to ‘find meals that foreign friends are likely to enjoy’ and draw them with a view to creating 3D models. Even though the project took place in a school with children from a low socio-economic group and there were discipline problems, it captured their imagination and enthusiasm and she successfully linked development of drawing skills to the theme of creating an art lunch.
Denmark
At Vibenshus School in Denmark, Ms Ingrid Buhl’s approach to the art lunch centred on how to use art-making to achieve new knowledge about a common cultural artefact – the sandwich cake. The sandwich or ‘fancy cake’ is loaded with cultural meanings in Danish everyday life where it is used to celebrate birthdays (as in many other countries) and symbolizes ‘being together, having a good time and cosiness’. These cakes are a part of
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city life and are displayed in bakery windows. There is no need to bake them at home because everyone can go to a shop and buy one or become part of city life by eating one in a cafe. The Danish fancy cake is loaded with associated ‘feel-good’ meanings and has a characteristic shape, material qualities, texture and colours. The decoration has recognizable surface patterns with specific motifs, repetitions and rhythms. The third-grade pupils in this school investigated their cultural heritage through producing fake cakes and learned about their sculptural forms, to 204
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mix colours and sense material surfaces. The starting point was investigating a real cake and its material qualities – what the ingredients felt, smelt and looked like. The next step was to collect pictures of cakes. The students experiments with materials ended up with their using foam rubber for the cake and whipped soap for cream. The pupils achieved in-depth formal knowledge of the food this way. Then the finished cakes became props in three tableaux in which the pupils acted out birthday celebrations, and being confectioners and potential customers outside a bakery shop they had set up in the classroom. These tableaux were photographed. The pupils reflected on every aspect of the lessons and there was a continuous dialectic between art practice and cultural learning; moreover, they learned about a cultural symbol that is taken for granted in everyday life. The project adopted an ethnographic approach that to researching a visual cultural practice and its settings. The pupils, teacher and a researcher shared ideas about common rituals associated with fancy cakes. Viewers experienced few problems understanding the tableaux settings, suggesting that the customs and rituals associated with the cakes are well understood. Whereas this indicates how thoroughly they are integrated into Danish culture, it does not answer the question: ‘Why?’
Japan
Ms Masako Otsu from Amagasaki Municipal Muko-Kita Primary School in Hyogo Prefecture led the project in Japan with fourth-grade pupils. Her lessons had the title ‘Yummy Yummy 100%! Fake It, Copy It, My Special Lunch’ and their main purposes are listed below. • •
To motivate pupils to enjoy art learning and express their food culture through art To expand their imagination through manipulating art materials
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To enable them to apply and develop their past experience and skills To develop awareness of each other’s artistic expression, abilities and ways of manipulating materials To offer opportunities to exchange art works with foreign friends so as to increase awareness and appreciation of the diversity of artistic expression in the world
Emphasis was placed on the effort pupils made to discover skilful ways of ‘creating authentic-looking food even though they are fake’. Because she already knew lower-grade pupils were capable of creating rice balls and other kinds of food in papier-mâché, Ms Otsu wanted these fourth-grade pupils to discover their own way of combining materials to accurately recreate the appearance of tasty food. She emphasized both aesthetic criteria and gaining insights into Japanese culture when she talked about the way they arranged the fake food in their lunch boxes and colour coordination. She anticipated that knowing that children in other parts of the world were making lunch boxes would facilitate her pupils’ awareness of the beauty of everyday artefacts and of some ‘good points’ about Japanese design. To start with, the pupils were encouraged to develop their own ideas for lunch boxes that made the invisible sense of ‘tastiness’ concrete. This was followed by group brainstorming to elaborate ideas and select materials and techniques that would ensure the products would look authentic. As a result, her pupils produced lunch boxes in various shapes, ranging from a star to a tulip, maple leaf, crab and snowball. In developing them, they thought about suitable partitions for arranging dishes such as fried prawns, rice balls, broccoli and seaweed rolls tastefully alongside each other. The materials used to create the food included papier-mâché, egg and fruit containers, shredded waste, aluminium containers, cloth, sand and sawdust. The pupils were satisfied initially with creating shapes out of papier-mâché and colouring them with watercolour. They then began to compete with each other to develop techniques that made their work look more authentic. They were stimulated by each other’s creative ideas leading to a healthy process of trying to outwit each other. When one pupil made a fried prawn using a combination of papiermâché and sawdust, there was an outcry of ‘Wow, that looks tasty!’ This led others to try create the feeling of a wonderful taste in similar ways; including using darker, increasing the amount of sawdust, for example, and colouring sawdust in a vinyl bag to achieve a sprinkled effect and a ‘beautifully browned’ appearance. Meanwhile, a piece of green cloth was transformed into a cabbage, shredded netting used for fruit was transformed forms sprinkled with sand were transformed into octopus balls. Finally, all the products were arranged in the lunch boxes in a colourcoordinated manner and displayed at an ‘exhibition of Japanese lunches’ on the Internet for mutual appreciation. These pupils were excited by the prospect of communicating with counterparts in other countries about their work and exploring the cultural differences in their work via the Internet as indicated by their desire to explain o-temoto (a small complimentary dish) and the soy sauce containers that are unique to Japan. Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers
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Significance of the Art Lunch Project As part of the Art Lunch Project, a questionnaire survey was conducted in each country. Teachers were requested to collect children’s drawings of an evening meal together with information about culturally specific food and get them reflect on this. The intention was to increase awareness and understanding of different styles of table setting and family culture and the potential of the Art Lunch Project for individual artistic expression. Some drawings were not returned for ethical reasons, but those collected featured a diverse range of subject matter including single dishes, table settings and conversation over the dinner table. Many children said that they ate with other family members but a small number did so alone for various reasons. The Art Lunch Project will be successful if these children reflect on their own cultural identity and understand that many countries share similar ways of life. The project is ongoing. Most of the artworks collected so far have represented traditional national foods. The absence of imaginative or visionary work suggests some weaknesses in the lesson instructions. But all the participating teachers have evaluated the exchanges positively in terms of art practice. The children appear to have gained confidence through associating food with national culture. Imagining children of a similar age recreating national dishes elsewhere must have made them think about life in foreign countries. Through creating their own artwork some of them may have learned to take pride in and value their culture more and become more aware of differences in cultures and expressions of others. Working in a global space rather than the closed space of the classroom has brought them into contact with the invisible. Even though the timing of the project has differed slightly from country to country, the almost real-time viewing of their own work on the Internet and that of foreign children has made reflection on art activities and mutual appreciation more real. Additionally, participant children have experienced the joy of sharing ideas in time and space. A recurring comment from the participant teachers was that wrestling with the same theme engendered a sense of competition in them and their pupils and this added to the value of the collaboration and exchange.
Conclusions Education through art implies international understanding through art. Although international exchanges of practical work in classrooms are difficult because of language barriers, artistic expression communicates across national boundaries. This makes it a valuable tool for intercultural communication. These exchanges between Japanese and foreign children constitute a first step in education for peace informed by the shared understanding that we are all human and that the starting point is to recognize heterogeneity. Participant details Kinichi Fukumoto, Associate Dean, Joint Graduate School, Hyogo University of Teacher Education (Japan). E-mail: [email protected] Masako Ohtsu, Art specialist, Amagasaki City Mukokita Elementary School (Japan).
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Teresa Eça, Researcher, Paulo Freire Research Centre, University of Evara (Portugal). Emilia Lopes, Art teacher, Escola ‘A Ribeirinha’ (Portugal). Petra Weingart, Art education researcher, teacher in primary and secondary-modern schools (Germany). Barbara Ebner-Federlein, Teacher of needlework, arts and crafts, Grundund Hauptschule Bergrheinfeld (Germany). Martina Paatela-Nieminen, Postdoctoral researcher, School of Art Education, Academy of Finland, University of Art and Design (Finland). Leena Hiillos, Classroom teacher, Pukinmaki Elementary School (Finland). Ayse Cakir Ilhan, Associate professor, Department of Elementary Education, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Ankara University (Turkey). Dilek Acer, Lecturer, Department of Pre-school Education, Faculty of Educational Sciences, Ankara University (Turkey). Marjan Prevodnik, Senior art education adviser, National Education Institute (Slovenia). Marjana Prevodnik, Classroom teacher, Hinko Smrekar Elementary School (Slovenia). Lourdes K. Samson, Associate professor, Humanities Department, Miriam College (Philippines). Dina Marcelo, Elementary art teacher, Grade School, Art Department, Miriam College (Philippines). Sandra Ewing, Art lecturer, Department of Creative and Aesthetic Studies, University of Strathclyde (Scotland, UK). Lindsay Brock, Art teacher, Windlaw Primary School (Scotland, UK). Mie Buhl, Associate professor, head of Department of Educational Anthropology, the Danish University of Education (Denmark). Ingrid Buhl, Art teacher, Vibenshus School (first to ninth grade) (Denmark). Suggested citation Fukumoto, K. (2007), ‘Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers’, International Journal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 195–209. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.195/1
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International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.211/1. © Intellect Ltd 2007.
Images and fear: Repressed pictures as tools for analysing society Peeter Linnap Tartu Art College Estonia Abstract
Keywords
This article discusses societal attitudes to images, concentrating on photographs. What may or may not be photographed communicates a lot about a society. As the ability to take photographs increases, with ever more digital devices capable of capturing images, so do various restrictions. These restrictions are connected with the deep fears images can engender. Using examples from Estonia, this article demonstrates that while photographic images continue to have the power to shock, the way and extent to which this happens depends on the particular contexts in which they are created and interpreted.
Image theory Photography Estonia Social values Fear
Introduction In every culture there are certain images that make people feel uncomfortable or fearful. Indeed we could go further and propose that there are whole fields of socio-cultural reality that, according to social norms, should not be recorded via images or, at least, such images should not be shown publicly. Images in general, and more particularly those that are referential or representational, are removed from but also link what is private, restricted and/or illegal to what is in the public sphere. People who make images are often considered dangerous therefore or, at the very least, disturbing. Since they are aware of this, many artists and other sorts of image-makers today are afraid to create certain kinds of images. An otherwise healthy interest in image-making – the will to spontaneously depict scenes, events, subjects and objects – is often visited by unconscious fears and an endless need for reassurance. As recently as 6 September 2007, Breidenbacher (2007) wrote in a US newspaper, Fair boss saw smoke, and put out photo. Even a blue ribbon didn’t exempt a photo from the state fair’s tobacco ban. Her name was Betty and she found herself at a Super Bowl party in Oswego, wearing nothing but a pair of Pittsburgh Steelers boxer shorts. Someone put a cigarette between her lips. The picture won a blue ribbon in the New York State Fair’s 2007 Photography Exhibition.
Here is another example. The new White Plains Building Department Policy of requiring persons asking to see a site plan to fill out a questionnaire asking why they want to examine the plan, and prohibiting photographing of site plans in the Building Department
ETA 3 (3) pp. 211–229 © Intellect Ltd 2007.
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as WPCNR was prevented from doing last week, violates the Freedom of Information Law, according to Robert Freeman, Chair of the New York State Committee on Open Government. (Bailey, 2007)
A recent blog comment in the Sidney Morning Herald raised similar issues but in a more personal way. In January, while on leave, I started photographing people who were climbing up the rocks at Wattamolla Beach, in the Royal National Park, and jumping off. I got four frames away over ten minutes or so, as I was keeping an eye on my son swimming nearby, and then I copped an earful. ‘Take a picture of my daughter and I’ll rip ya f___ing head off.’ Here we go again I thought… I explained that I was just shooting people jumping off the cliff and that my lens included everything from that tree to that rock. ‘Yeah, and if you take a picture of my daughter I’ll I’ll rip ya f___ing head off. (Reid, 2007)
Many similar examples can easily be found. Even though some of the locations differ they confirm that the astonishing multitude of places where taking photographs is disallowed is increasing (compare Jay, 1984; Staples, 2000; Ruby, 2007).
•
•
• •
This article aims: To show that some phenomena within the dichotomy of images and fear are far from explicit; rather they are contextual and have to be dealt with through verbal descriptions, analysis, contextualizing, etc. To exemplify some of these phenomena at greater length using Estonian case studies. Through considering Estonia’s totalitarian past mixed with a neo-liberal present, it should be possible to discover both different and common features of images and fear. To demonstrate that art is no longer a major locus of feared images today. To draw attention to general confusion in the sphere of image ethics.
I have chosen the medium of photography for most of the examples. This is not a chance decision: photography is the field I have studied in greatest detail and it has been interrelated with the questions of fear, and dread, what it is/is not permissible to depict. The timeframe for the examples is rather broad as I am above all trying to trace the complexity of these issues. The examples span almost half a century. As well as domestic or autobiographical photographs, other types of vernacular photography are considered, and there are a few examples from film.
Images in society: restrictions There are a growing number of spaces where photography is forbidden: corporate areas, business parks and even trading centres or restaurants. In addition, there is land that it has long been illegal to enter, such as military
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zones. To make matters worse, a recent American ban on photographing or filming on all public transportation exceeds any reasonable limits to basic human freedom. In most such cases, the reasons for prohibiting pictorial representation are unclear. Typically these regulations are justified through weird notions of safety or privacy, and one can only guess what is behind them. It seems that a new wave of anti-picture-making hysteria reached its height with the tragic events of 9/11 in New York City. But it is also clear that people using it as an excuse to exercise control over civilians distorted this event. This is strange given that recent developments in visual technologies have produced miniature cameras in cellular phones that make it impossible to prevent people taking photos. Moreover, these technological developments render any notion of guaranteeing privacy entirely absurd. People sometimes express concern about why they have been photographed. This anxiety is both psychoanalytical at root and related to social norms and regulations about pictorial representation. It interrelates with concerns about social standing and status, gender, age and many other variables. Most personal restrictions on pictorial representation concern visual aspects of identity. When we ‘take’ a person’s image what we really face is a mixture of both psychological and socially determined factors that cause image-making to be problematic; problematic because social regulations about image-making in public have never been successfully fixed in law and often remain arbitrary. An alarming number of institutional barriers to image-making have been built into every socio-political regime, driven by irrational urges. In his book Everyday Surveillance, Staples (2000: 140) included the vendor’s master database which provides details of websites that have been deemed ‘unacceptable, inappropriate, or undesirable’ to access. The list includes the following categories: ‘abortion advocacy, activist groups, adult entertainment, alcohol/tobacco, alternative journals, cult/New Age, drugs, entertainment, gambling, games, gay/lesbian lifestyles, hacking, illegal, job search, militancy, personals/dating, politics (advocacy of any type), racism/ hate, religion, sex, shopping, sports, tasteless, travel, user defined, vehicles, violence, weapons, web chat’. What else is this surreal list of prohibitions other than an arbitrary enforcement of some new, incomprehensible normality? As mentioned above, the list of places where pictorial representation is prohibited, or not recommended, is very long and this leads to a simple, albeit fundamental question. If certain locations are considered private property, i.e. owned by private or corporate bodies, are images of such entities an extension of such ownership? Or to put it more simply, is a video recording, a photograph or even a drawing of a house automatically the property of the house owner (Tagg, 1988)? Although this kind of question has been posed before (Haggerty & Ericson, 2006), there has never been a simple answer. Since the laws about it, that vary from country to country, have tended to be rather liberal, particular cases have required different solutions. Chaos continues in the formal regulations between ownership and its representation.
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Figure 1: Mari Laanemets. Untitled. (Installation view). 1997
Fear in the field of vision – art as a territory of excuses In parallel, late capitalist societies have demonstrated considerable hostility towards contemporary critical or analytical art. It would be easy to write a history of prohibited artworks from a national and international perspective and compile a history of anti-art from an ethical point of view. Such books already exist (McEvilley, 2005). However, there is a more fundamental problem lurking behind the curtains of the art-fear discussion. Rather than creating a list of what exactly we are afraid of in art, we should pose quite a different question: namely, when are artworks, actions or artists to be feared? Perhaps there is no single answer; though some general statements are possible. The first appears to correlate with a certain default understanding of information perceived to be artistic. Artistic information is rarely produced so as to bring about practical ends. Although in the 1990s the most radical artists did produce a number of works that clearly exceeded this limitation (Hans Haacke, Alfredo Jaar, etc.). These were minor voices, unable to redefine how art is understood. In his groundbreaking piece Shapolsky Real Estate Holdings. For example, Haacke presented statistical data in the form of an artwork. Although he intended to display this work in art(ist) spaces, he failed. As Haacke (1996, p. 72) himself states, (writing about himself in the third person): Thomas Messer, the director of the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, rejected this and two other works, which were all, made for a scheduled oneperson exhibition at the Guggenheim museum. Messer cancelled the exhibition six weeks before the opening, when the artist refused to withdraw the disputed works. Messer called them ‘inappropriate’ for exhibition at the museum and stated that he had to fend off ‘an alien substance that had entered the art museum organism’. Edward F. Fry, the curator of the exhibition, was fired when he defended the works.
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Several other art venues refused to show this piece and it failed to bring about further dialogue between art and other spheres of human activity. In these kinds of examples, what could otherwise be interesting juxtapositions tend to remain in the realm of intra-art communication. Where essentially serious questions are at stake and there are serious goals to achieve it seems the nomenclature ‘art’ devalues and disarms. As soon as (any kind of) painful or fearful image is connected with the notion of art, it is almost guaranteed that its potential to be taken seriously will not be fully achieved. The concept of the artist as a gambler (Homo ludens) might be a factor here. Another obvious reason why art lacks credibility is because popular art forms define and characterize fears and horror through very explicit means. To put it another way, film and television have defined their own ways of representing fear, that do not resort to representations of everyday experience. It seems that art is no longer a major locus for fearful images.
Explicit triviality of trauma photographs: some case studies Of course, this is not to say people are no longer afraid of images. If we focus our attention on more modest small-scale, fearful images that connect with personal experience, it soon becomes clear they generate fear in far more significant ways than the explicit clichés the horror industries produce. I will give some examples now to illustrate this point. A little girl is repeatedly looking at snapshots of uncles and aunts, grandmothers and grandfathers from family albums. She feels that something is strange or not right. The majority of the people depicted in the snapshots have passed on and it is hard for her to understand why pictures of people who have departed this life are preserved. The girl
Figure 2: Mari Laanemets. Untitled. (Scratched album photograph). 1997 Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society
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grabs a pair of scissors and starts to restore the world, to conform to truth: if someone is no longer here, their picture cannot be either, otherwise it would be a lie. The girl scrapes the faces of all deceased persons off the photos (Linnap, 1997, pp. 57–59) (Figure 2). This extraordinary example reveals the compensatory function of photographs in real life: They attempt to hide the absence of someone or something; and they try to replace it with a symbolic, hence surrogate presence of self. Another example is borrowed from Mark Romanek’s 2002 film One Hour Photo, where the lonely Seymour Parrish, nicknamed Sy, who is seemingly locked in another world, is employed in a photo laboratory. For him, the work not only involves developing films, but also caring for valuable moments stored on film. Sy is especially interested in the Yorkins family. Through photos, he grows familiar with their holidays, informal moments and Jake’s childhood. It turns out that Sy’s interest in the Yorkins is pathological: over the past eleven years he has made copies of family photos and followed the progress of their lives while his own life has been utterly ruined.
Images from Estonia’s recent history Let us now consider some more personal examples. As an Estonian, I come from a specific socio-historical background in which the most traumatic and fearful events took place when the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic countries in the 1940s. For a long time this period was excluded from official history and especially image history. It is easy to see why images were hushed up during the Soviet occupation; but harder to understand why they have not been rediscovered and widely shown over the past sixteen years since Estonia became independent. The period itself was extremely rich in all sorts of events and change. In 1940, the Soviets marched across the border with almost no resistance from the local inhabitants. During the following few years: • • • •
Somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people escaped from Estonia by sea, using whatever means of transportation was at hand. Some were enlisted in foreign armies on either the German or Soviet side. Some hid in the forest as partisans for almost ten years and formed a rather non-systematic resistance movement known as the ‘forest brothers’. Some were taken to deportation camps in Siberia.
It shocks people to recall these collective, traumatic events and often renders them speechless, even today. So perhaps it is not so surprising that pictures of this old diaspora slowly started to become public in the late 1990s. Eric Soovere’s published photo-based diary from the 1940s reveals subtle, vibrant records of the places he passed through on his journey of escape (Figure 3). The last stop on Estonian soil was followed by Stettin, Altdamm, Augsburg and other German and Sudeten German places, some without names (Soovere, 1999). He does not criticize or evaluate them: they only have ‘we were here’ meaning for him. They form stages and a background for major and minor characters in his story: the author in the mountains of Sudetenland; sleeping on the top of a railway carriage; Red emissaries calling the refugees back home; barracks; milk queues; cultural and sports events, etc. 216
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Figure 3: Eric Soovere. Registration of Refugees on the board of German military ship “Lappland”. 27.09.1944. These photographs present a fleeting yet kaleidoscopic view of a world where nothing was secure or permanent (Figure 4). By contrast, when Soovere spoke about the traumatic experience the diary recalled, he chose to concentrate on other images. After the war he moved to the United States and has lived there ever since and the locus of trauma for him was embedded in the pictures of his former farmhouse in the Estonian countryside (which was lost forever). As someone who lived in occupied Estonia, there is nothing very special or gripping about this image for me. From my point of view, a different image would be traumatic: for example, a last photograph of the boat that took a part of Estonia’s population away from their homeland forever. Pictures by Donald Koppel are another example. Of Estonian descent, Koppel lived in Miami, Florida until his death in 2005. During the Second World War, he started to take photographs (Carr and Linnap, 2006). His experience was typical of many Estonians: first he was in the Estonian Army, then in a Russian and German camp. Koppel was not an official front correspondent and as a consequence was not restricted by rules about what to photograph and how. His camera recorded Russian war ships in Tallinn and Estonian men in Waffen-SS uniforms. None of these images are exceptional; the war is just disorder and chaos, albeit exceptional enough to be documented. Conspicuous among Koppel’s imagery is the eastern Estonian town Narva (Figure 5). The post-1944 bombed Renaissance town looms in front of the camera as a hideous, inimitable desert. The image of a town that was literally erased and reduced to heaps of rubbish and awful mounds of stone makes a powerful, emotional impression. Although rumours about the total devastation of Narva were quite widespread in Estonia, Koppel’s photographs impinge on us doubly now: the corroboration of hitherto propositional Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society
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Figure 4: Eric Soovere. The former mobilized Estonian soldiers had to sleep on the roofs of the trains. June 1944 on the way to Augsburg refugee camp, Germany. It was the beginning of the further sufferings for these people, because in the following “screenings” in the camps they were separated from their fellow contrymen. information unfolds in front of our eyes. Moreover, there are other interpretations that enhance the emotional force of these photos. In the political/ geographical subconscious of Estonia today, the territory of Narva (like all of eastern Virumaa) is not-entirely-ours. Will it ever be again?
Figure 5: Donald Koppel. Narva after bombing by Russians, March 1944. 218
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Figure 6: Kaljo-Olev Veskimägi. So the deportation of Estonians began. A child´s snapshot from the home window, 1945. Let us next consider a picture shot by a child over a windowsill (Figure 6). It depicts the most traumatic event ever in Estonian history – the forced deportations to Siberia in the 1940s and 1950s. This little, foggy, troubling snapshot depicts what is probably the most painful part of the deportationcamp narrative: arresting people right in their homes. To reconstruct the circumstances, in which that little snapshot was taken, is to confront a deep fear. To be caught photographing under these circumstances was tantamount to facing the death penalty, and it was taken by a child! No wonder, then, that the amateur photographer only dared to publish this image in 2005; the trauma was so troubling, so deep, that the photographer avoided making it public for many decades. A further example comes from a family I know who were deported to Siberia for ten years. Family members always fell silent when people referred to this ‘interlude’ in their lives. It was only when the effects of alcohol made them somewhat more talkative that some of them delved, ever so slightly, into their memories. Although the family took over 1,500 pictures during those ten years they did their best to erase the decade 1949–59 from consciousness and turned over numerous photographs to a relative, a student of photography. The pictures taken were of what, under those circumstances, were ordinary events. People undertaking forced forest labour; a man sleeping on top of an excavator digging bucket, or play-acting the same scene for the purposes of an image. Snapshots of desolate and sparsely developed Soviet remote settlements follow. In some pictures, the snow is melting. Someone is being buried. People are sitting at long tables. Nowhere does the eye catch anything that is fearful or traumatic. But this only provokes additional questions. Do pictures like this really cover the multitude of (partly unpleasant) experiences (Figures 7–10 & 15–16)? What if they were taken to cover up the grim realities that people were going through during this decade? Maybe there were other images that were hidden, lost, confiscated, destroyed? Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society
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Figure 7: Unknown photographer. In this kind of railway cars thousands of Estonians were transported to Siberia. (Photograph from the book: Mart Laar. “Forest Brothers”. Tallinn, 1993). I want to add three more examples from the 1990s, when Estonia was once again an independent state. One is by Jüri Liim who risked his life filming such subjects as the illegal presence of Soviet troops or corpses of murdered liberation fighters (Figure 11). The others are images by the conceptual artist Peeter Tooming, who compared pictures of the same places and objects taken in 1937 and 1987 (Figures 12–13). 220
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Figure 8: Unknown photographer. Thousands of Estonians were transported to Siberia in this kind of railway car. (Photograph from the book: “Estonians: The years of Suffering” Tallinn, 1943).
Absent images and imagination Whilst acknowledging that horrifying pictures can induce fear, trauma and pain, it is the case that we become more fearful where images are totally absent or scarce. In such cases, the psyche starts to project far more horrific mental representations of dread. Is it the case that images can liberate us from chimaeras and phantasms that otherwise would torture the personal or collective mind? Parallels can be drawn with phenomena that continuously
Figure 9: Ants Leitmäe. “From family photographs in Siberia” 1949–1959. Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society
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Figure 10: Ants Leitmäe. “From family photographs in Siberia” 1949–1959. occupy and trouble mass consciousness. In most cases, these are events or beings that are not or are poorly covered by images. If ‘perfect’ images of the mass media’s favourite, enigmatic topics existed (UFOs abominable snowmen and various sorts of monsters for example), they would no longer be featured. They remain interesting only as long as something is unresolved, unclear, not seen well enough.
Questions with few answers To summarize, we have yet to confront a number of difficult questions and propositions. Is it ever possible to visually represent fear, or in doing so, do we merely depict scenes that relate to fear in indirect, personal ways? This leads to the understanding that fear or horror is topologically situated and rooted in unfamiliar territory. What if the very act of producing a specific representation is just a way of negating fear? If this is the case, every act of representing fear could be interpreted as a therapy for the traumatic hiatus associated with death. At this point a comparison of language and image is called for. A number of phenomenological studies have noted that, in a state of fear, language stops. In psychoanalytical methodology, language functions as a tool for getting rid of fear. Bur what happens to visual perception and imagination in a state of fear? Do images, like language, cease to exist? Are they blocked, repressed? Would it ever be possible to use images to rid ourselves of fear? In seeking answers to these questions, it becomes clearer how different images and language really are. First, anyone who recalls a frightening experience remembers above all a plenitude of imaginary visions. In these abundant images, people probably try to imagine the source of the fear. Since strategies for survival are at stake here, this kind of image processing 222
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Figure 11: Jüri Liim. Illegal presence of Soviet military troops in Estonia: training centre for submarine crew at Paldiski, 1992. Videostill. takes place almost instantly: fast enough to be inaccessible through language, but ideal for visual representation. If images merely represent aspects of traumatic experience and fear, the question arises how do they stand in relation to these phenomena? Is the relationship entirely arbitrary or personal? Or to turn the whole problem upside down: are images by themselves capable of evoking traumas and generating fear? Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society
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Figure 12: Peeter Tooming and Carl Sarap. From “55 Years Later”. 1937/1992. Kunda, Estonia, 1937.
On factual information and image ethics In order to begin to resolve this problem, we need to find out if images are merely statements, or if some of them can be understood as propositions? In a general sense, images are rarely equal to propositions, and factual information can always be attributed to them using verbal text. But it is the poor state of current knowledge about visual grammar that is the issue isn’t it? Investigations into phenomena known as ‘documentary turns’ (the messages contained in interpretations) have shown they have at least some features in common with visual argument. The perpendicular positioning of a camera in front of subjects and objects asserts we are dealing with factual information, i.e. a statement that at least has the potential to be a proposition. Although the era when a language of images was disputed is over, we cannot entirely avoid drawing certain parallels between the two. One notable feature of traumatic or fearful images is that we try to avoid them. Or, to put it more correctly, we try to escape our own reactions that particular images could provoke. 224
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Figure 13: Peeter Tooming and Carl Sarap. From “55 Years Later”. 1937/1992. Kunda, Estonia, 1992. The discourse generated by these issues is known as ethics; or more precisely, image-ethics (Gross, Katz & Ruby, 1988). The latter has tended to be rather loose and in most cases consists of a set of moral norms or basic regulations applied mainly to public representations. Sex, death, violence and other such matters have been at the heart of these kinds of institutionalized regulations, and not much else. But what counts as image ethics today – and how it has changed with the coming of new media and altered modes of representation – has yet to be determined (Long, 1999). It is important to note, that there is probably greater control over the publication of images than ever before. Again, the issue of public availability of the personal details of ordinary people has been debated with considerable foreboding in the media. The desire to prioritize issues of safety and privacy; however, it is hard not to see arguments for the hyperactive selling of the private realm today as being in the interests of multinational news corporations and entertainment businesses.
Art and fear: some observations So far, I have deliberately avoided much discussion of the domain of art. The grim reality is that art, either in a more restricted, old-fashioned Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society
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Figure 14: Peeter Linnap. From “Concealed Landscapes”(Deserted USSR Rocket-base) 1988 sense – or a newer, all-embracing one– has become a minor field of visual production. The use of the word ‘minor’ is not intended to imply that art is redundant, rather that its impact and influence has decreased and become minimal. Artists ceased to concern themselves with creating beauty and bestowing aesthetic pleasure a long time ago. Instead their art became a form of therapy for psyches disabled by late capitalist ways of living and began to function as a critical tool for researching society (Figure 14). We know these ideas have been widely accepted, but at the same time we cannot deny art is losing its identity. It is no wonder that art education today is confused about its aims. There is no consensus around the concept of the arts anymore, nor is there agreement about what their major functions should be, hence it is really hard to guide art education in any particular direction. But this could also be seen as a positive shift. One of the first things that we thought about when this era that we call postmodernism began to happen, one of the first words that was used to describe it was pluralism. And I’ve always felt personally committed to pluralism. That there should be a variety of approaches and that any one of these variety of approaches should be regarded as OK as long as none of them attains an hegemonic position and represses others because that happened in the modernist Kantian tradition… (Sarapuu, 2003, p. 46)
This is clearly demonstrated in the work of younger artists today (Figure 1): in every sort of new ‘conservative’ painting and occasional, irritating revisits 226
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Figure 15: An instrument found in KGB “interview-office”. (Photograph from the book: “Estonians: The years of Suffering” Tallinn, 1943).
Figure 16: Title: Left: A Forest brotherhood partisan guarding the Peenjärve camp in Virumaa (north-east Estonia); right hidden entrances to the forest brotherhood’s underground caves. Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society
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of modernist classics. I have a feeling that what was once called anti-art (be it dada or postmodern) had an ethical function and that a lot of it was connected to fear. One manifestation of this could simply be the destabilizing impact of art on our consciousness. Unfortunately it appears that this is being lost in the new liberal, risk-averse society. Nevertheless, our fears remain. They are used by governments, media, education and the law and are more real than ever. In other words, fear is genuine, and that is why artworks based on fear are usually genuine as well. It would be nice to think that artists will continue to be able to invent and rediscover new ways of expressing fear out of the exhausted clichés of the mass media. Yet the fact that a number of influential societies have come to prefer art that entertains and support safe art is a telling indication that its power lies dormant. References Bailey, J.F. (2007) City ban of photography of site plans policy illegal. http:// wpcnr.com/jp/index.html. Accessed 9 September 2007. Breidenbach, M. (2007). Fair boss saw smoke and put out photo. http://www. syracuse.com/articles/news/index.ssf ?/base/news-3/1189069226294870. xml&coll=1. Accessed 11 September 2007. Gross, L., Katz, J.S. & Ruby, J. (Eds.) (1988). Image ethics: The moral rights of subjects in photographs, film and television. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. —— (Eds.) (2003). Image ethics in the digital age. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Haacke, H. (1996). Obra social. Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies. Haggerty, K.D. & Ericson, R.V. (Eds.) (2006). The new politics of surveillance and visibility. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jay, B. (1984). Photographer as aggressor. In D. Featherstone (Ed.) Observations. (Untitled series no. 35, pp. 7–25). Carmel, CA: The Friends of Photography. Linnap, P. (1997). On both sides of transparency. In P. Linnap (Ed.), Invasion (Catalogue of the II Saaremaa Biennial, pp. 57–58), Tallinn: Centre for Contemporary Photography. Linnap, P. & Carr, I. (Eds.) (2006). Donald Koppel: I saved them for you: Photographs of Estonians in WW II. Tartu, Estonia: Tartu Art College. Long, J. (1999). Ethics in the age of digital photography. https://www.nppa.org/ professional_development/self-training_resources/eadp_report/. Accessed 7 May 2007. McEvilley, T. (2005). The triumph of anti art: Conceptual and performance art in the formation of post-modernism. New York: McPherson & Co. Reid, J. (2007). Photography is not a crime. http://blogs.smh.com.au /photographers/archives/2007/02/photography_is_not_a_crime.html. Accessed 3 September 2007. Ruby, J. (2007). An ethical image: A post-modern conundrum. Presented at the Images and Fear conference, Tartu Art College, Estonia, 22 June. Sarapuu, H. (2003). Thomas McEvilley: Changes in art education: An international context. Kunst.ee Magazine, 3 , 46. Soovere, E. (1999). Käru ja kaameraga [With camera and pushcart]. Tallinn: Olion.
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Staples, W.G. (2000). Everyday surveillance: Vigilance and visibility in postmodern life. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Tagg, J. (1988). The burden of representation: Essays on photographies and histories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Suggested citation Linnap, P. (2007), ‘Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society’, International Journal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 211–229. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.211/1
Contributor details Peeter Linnap is professor and head of the Photography Department of Tartu Art College. His Ph.D. research ‘Photology’ carried out in the University of Tartu Semiotics and Cultural Theory Department was a systematic analysis of photography, based on Jurji Lotman’s concept of semiosphere. The author of more than 500 essays, research-based and critical writings, his artwork and texts have been published in many journals including Art in America, Art and Design, Neue Bildende Kunst, Aperture and European Photography. Contact: Paasiku 4-128, 13916 Tallinn, Estonia. Email: [email protected]
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International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.231/1. © Intellect Ltd 2007.
Mentoring in the creative economy Tiina Rautkorpi, Helsinki Polytechnic, Finland Abstract
Keywords
Finland is among those countries leading research into the creative economy and co-configuration. A new economy preoccupied with intangible values and cultural meaning-making is being promoted in Finnish business and industry. This article argues that traditions of mentoring in business and education have much to offer in creating the necessary conditions for the new forms of work needed in this context. Mentoring as an area is ripe for development in art education also where attempts are under way to break down existing boundaries between the economy, society and the arts.
mentoring culture meaning creative economy education
Introduction My starting point is the tradition of mentoring in western societies. Historically this has been linked to a master–apprentice relationship; on the other hand, there has always been interest in it in manager training (Juusela, Lillia & Rinne, 2000; Keski-Luopa, 2001.). Mentoring occurs during academic supervision in university studies (particularly in postgraduate research training) where the focus is initiation into a particularly demanding profession – that of researcher or master of research (Aittola, 1995). Widespread public debate about mentoring started in the field of work counselling and supervision during the 1970s and 1980s. There were many publications on mentoring at work in the 1990s. Another starting point is the Finnish context for promoting a creative economy. By a creative economy I refer to a society with an economy that is based on cultural networking and continuous meaning-making. I will begin with existing research. There is a great deal of ‘futures research’ in Finland, which currently has one of the world’s largest academic research units in this field. The multidisciplinary Finland Futures Research Centre was established in 1992 to carry out projects in the areas of foresight, environment, innovation, creativity, culture and the knowledge society. This kind of research focuses strongly on the future characteristics of mature, postmodern societies. Prosperous industrialized societies have long since entered an era in which the basic necessities of life are readily available. In western societies subscribing to the ‘old’ capitalist theory of economics, the exchange value of a commodity was considered more important than its use value. In today’s postmodern societies, what are called intangible values are as (or more) important than tangible values in generating new areas for consumption. In futures research the term ‘intangible values’ refers to values closely connected with things like knowledge, welfare or building and preserving human relationships. Intangible values are very important in the context of postmodern consumption. ETA 3 (3) pp. 231–241 © Intellect Ltd 2007.
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Meaning-making societies Given that an increasingly large share of the value of products is intangible this is necessarily intertwined with culture. The cultural characteristics of products and services have become a central issue in consumption to the extent that they are no longer bought for their practical value but because of associated cultural meanings. Nobody buys a particular brand of cheese, or becomes a slave to fashion, merely in order to survive. According to futures research, mentoring and work counselling are essential within new creative economies in which the work culture is largely based on added intangible value. They require: •
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Skills of co-configuration that enable collaboration between customers and employees in a range of fields. These skills form the starting point for designing user-focused products and services. A meaningful society that capitalises on arenas of interpersonal encounters. When researchers speak of a network society gradually replacing an information society, they stress that such encounters happen globally and are not tied to particular places as in tribal societies. A major share of actual production in a creative economy consists of products that promote encounters or encounter services.
Markku Wilenius, professor of futures studies, has repeatedly stressed that creative economies require three kinds of skill dimension in order to develop cultural know-how: 1. A new type of craftsmanship: the design and realization ability of creative artisans and artists to create interesting, distinctive, aesthetic products; 2. Cultural literacy: the ability to ‘read’ different ethnic, regional and organizational cultures and sub-cultures; 3. A new type of leadership culture suited to guiding creative experts and enabling production and take-up of innovative solutions (Wilenius, 2004, pp. 57–60). The cultural production of meanings is the shared frame of reference for the entire work process. At the same time, the new forms and organizations of labour and coping require that each employee is able to master increasingly broad sections of the work process. An IT professional working in service management or office networking, or someone with a job in educational planning and management for example, must be able to manage the whole work process from start to finish. Traditional superior/subordinate distinctions are no longer relevant for work based in co-configuration requiring a very high degree of self-determination (Huhtala, 2004).
Pragmatist aesthetics According to Richard Shusterman, pragmatist aesthetics encompasses the whole of life (Shusterman, 1992, 2000). Scholars in this field stress that art history is made here and now and all the time. For Shusterman, art exists everywhere, and pragmatist aesthetics plays a central role in creative postmodern economies. As with other important aestheticians, his starting 232
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point is aesthetic experience, the fact that humans are touched and moved by aesthetic qualities. Postmodern, network societies are characterized by cultural diversity and dialogue containing hypertext, discontinuity and new combinations of meaning. According to pragmatist aesthetics such conditions exist in interpersonal encounters, and genius and style are continuously manifested in emergent practices in daily life. In postmodern societies, aesthetics is linked to modes of self-expression and self-branding like dressing up. We all have potential to be performing artists and enjoy the means of producing aesthetic experiences. Shusterman (Ibid) suggests that these increased opportunities for selfexpression protect us from the threat of mechanization. Pragmatist aesthetics understand modern culture as one of encounters. A cultural return to encounters between performers and spectators also implies revisiting the theatrical stage and using ancient drama techniques (Reitala & Heinonen, 2001). According to drama theory, genuine presence is the essential, shared characteristic of self-expression as realized in performance – the present moment, the here and now, that always includes a potential starting-out in some direction. In other words, an individual scene in a drama always contains the seeds of its own future. Many books and articles on mentoring tell the same story of its origins: According to Greek mythology Ulysses, the King of Ithaca, gave his son Telemachus to the care of the goddess Pallas Athene, as he went to wage war in Troy. Athene disguised herself as Mentor, an old friend of Ulysses. Homer says that Mentor’s task was to help and guide young Telemachus and prepare him for the task that he had received at birth. The story describes the Greeks’ belief that the relationship between a young person and his or her senior relies on the fundamental principle of human survival: we learn skills, customs and values directly from a person that we look up to and respect. (Juusela, Lillia & Rinne, 2000, p.14)
From its inception, therefore, mentoring has been closely entwined with drama. From a developmental and educational point of view, the new network society needs arenas for personal encounters in which meanings in formation remain in a state of potential coming-into-being.
The interviews In the following section I will discuss ideas about mentoring that emerged from interviews with three people with lengthy careers in creative fields who have been mentors/supervisors. Two of them worked in mass-media companies and were thoroughly familiar with the master-apprentice tradition that has been embedded in art education for a long time. They believe this tradition will be useful in the future, provided it is modified and extended in certain ways. My first interviewee was Ms Ria Karhila, editor for the Finnish Broadcasting Company and other independent production companies and a freelance director. From time to time she has prepared visual-arts and media-arts students for careers in radio and television. She told me she views them as novice colleagues in art. She is convinced that they need to work closely Mentoring in the creative economy
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with adults already working in the field and understands the mentor-actor relationship as two-sided. The mentor who shares in the youthful energy of the student is privileged to be in the frontline of development and hears the student’s dreams and visions. My second interviewee, Mr Mikko Bruun, directs a corporate strategy office at the Finnish Broadcasting Company. His work as development manager of radio operations since the mid-1990s has included division management, producer training and voluntary-work counselling groups. Mr Bruun has been a journalist and lecturer in Finland and Sweden and worked for UNESCO. He explained that new forms of leadership training and work counselling were being initiated at the Finnish Broadcasting Company because of fundamental changes in the social environment. He pointed out that modernity, a time of continuity, has given way to an era of discontinuity and mobile, multi-personal audiences. The disruption of the entire cultural paradigm is affecting the nature of the work and personal skills required of every employee. My third interviewee, Mr Eero Holstila, is in charge of municipal policy for business and industry and his job is to attract businesses to the capital region. Finnish businesses have pioneered the use of mentoring to meet the needs of creative economies. Nowadays public policy supporting business is increasingly conducted by federations of municipalities and is linked to adult education to ensure that the workforce develops appropriate skills. Until the beginning of 2006, Eero Holstila was managing director of Culminatum, a centre of expertise for the Helsinki region. The centre, which encourages contact between universities and the world of work, effects new combinations of expertise by linking the best know-how in public administration, business and higher education. The expressed focus of its innovation strategy for 2005 was promoting the creative economy by supporting inclusion of cultural meanings in planning the operating environment of residents. Culminatum and its associates, such as the Forum Virium Helsinki that supports digital services in the region, understand the creative economy as a means to increasing well-being. Culminatum has developed and implemented partnership programmes for small and medium-sized enterprises and uses mentoring to exchange and support expertise. Eero Holstila told me he has studied clusters of new, knowledge-intensive fields in several countries. He pointed out that representatives of creative fields often speak of knowledge clusters and creative campuses and explained that he does not think creativity is independent of time and space. It requires long-term personal interaction in order to flourish.
Creativity and diversity According to futures research a newer fragmented production process is developing side by side with the creative economy. Because traditional industrial value chains are being dismantled and broken down into sections, the production of a given product or service requires a much smaller ownership in the entire value chain. In an economy of this kind, the quality of even the smallest sub-processes is defined by cultural meanings. If we think of an everyday kitchen appliance like a pasta machine, it is no longer enough for it just to make pasta. We need a machine suited to ‘a tall 234
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sporty man’, designed in colours that young couples living in cities favour that are compatible with other postmodern kitchen appliances. The list is endless, because so many technical, design and practical requirements and cultural connotations and values have to be adapted to and met. Research into the creative economy increasingly focuses on the plurality of society and culture. Some research and development activity in business, for example, concentrates on winnowing out appropriate meanings from the flood of meanings, and on distinctions based on meanings and the creation of individual brand concepts. Given these new conditions, we need much more research in art education. It is a fact that the creative economy has often tried to pluck out creativity, as it were, from art and design fields and bring it closer to business, but this has been energetically resisted. As theory of cultural criticism suggests (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2005), the more culture becomes a market commodity, the more it threatens the autonomy and inherent value of creative work with extinction. However, much more is going on than the separation of creativity from traditional fields of art and design. Creative work based on the production of intangible values and the principle of autonomy is an in-built necessity in a creative economy for conserving culture and the economy, so their mutual positions are reversed. If we really believe that free competition automatically guarantees the quality of new art forms, there is no need to introduce new methods of teaching and learning even at this time of radical social change. Researchers who study work development, such as Bart Victor and Andrew Boynton (1998) speak of ‘craft work’ rather than ‘production of meaning’. They argue that craftwork is embedded in more recent work patterns in many ways. In industrial societies with mechanical and automated forms of work it is still needed, for example, whenever products are modified to meet the needs of new customer groups. In Finland we often use the concept ‘craft design’. Writing about ‘generations of work’, Victor & Boynton (1998) note that, as production methods change, new gaps are continuously created in consumer needs and desires; they point out that it is the characteristics of artisanal work that serve to bridge these gaps by helping to create new styles, innovations and unique features of products.
Developing co-configuration skills Leaders in the creative sector are often represented as having a visionary, charismatic leadership style (Aaltonen & Heikkilä, 2003). However, the network society requires other types of organizational skills. For example, skills in building are keys to managing experts from different fields who must be persuaded to work together towards common goals. We need new combinations of artistic/artisanal work and business skills. Management probably still requires charisma and a shared vision, but the ability to subtly understand and support people from widely divergent operating cultures is probably more important. According to Yrjö Engeström (2005), a professor of cultural-historical activity theory and developmental work at the University of Helsinki, coconfiguration closely resembles co-production and co-creation activities, all Mentoring in the creative economy
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of which are linked to the production process. The concept of co-configuration refers to continuous activity or ‘chipping away around shared targets’; consequently, it is linked to products or services with long life cycles. According to Engeström, co-configured products or services never seem complete in a traditional sense, because they must be adaptable and capable of modification to suit users. They contain ‘customer intelligence’ created by means of information technology. Work development requires training in a new type of articulated knowledge, for achieving continuous re-configuration of dialogues between users, producers and products. The production process is turned upside down when the ultimate goal is to respond to customer needs and situations and teamwork focuses primarily on inter-professional discussion of such needs. A creative economy based on intangible products and services requires coconfiguration skills because product development cannot move forward unless existing products are enriched by continuously linking them to new services and experiences (Wilenius, 2004). Yrjö Engeström has suggested that coconfiguration work requires multiple perspectives. The concept of perspective dependency is central to Adrian Cussin’s theory of cognitive pathways (1992) that proposes that actors gain independence from their own perspectives by establishing a network of paths through a given terrain. When operational changes begin to occur within this terrain, an established network obstructs navigation. To regain independence of perspective, the network must be destabilized, which means that the system is in continuous movement. Complicated thinking of this kind is needed to understand how coconfiguration works and learning how it operates takes time. Co-configuration skills cannot be acquired rapidly, and must be assimilated over successive generations. To be able to articulate meaning-making in the work process in such a way that everyone can configure meanings is a demanding skill. It requires not only that all parties share a broad-based overall understanding of a particular sort of work or production, but also a climate of trust. The professionals I interviewed had extensive experience of meaning production of various kinds. Mikko Bruun agreed that neither creative work in the content business nor the methods of supporting it will ever be perfected. He uses many counselling methods, such as gestalt therapy, teamwork methods, psychodrama, sociodrama and psychotherapy in his work and believes that no single method can respond to all that is expected.
Supervision as a journey When we think about new methods of art education, it is important to remember the mentoring embedded in supervision of postgraduate research. In this case the developmental process of an actor from youth to adulthood becomes even clearer. Mentoring is intertwined with stories of shared journeys towards the unknown. Dante’s Divine Comedy is a tale about mentoring, in which Virgil (a classic supervisor character) leads his protégé from Hell to Heaven. Helena Aittola (1995) reviewed literature on supervision and human development. Both the growing comprehension of possible destinations and the process itself enable supervisees to broaden their perspectives, set far-reaching goals and objectives and extend their ideas of what is humanly possible. 236
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In academic supervision, instead of attempting to change, help or understand supervisees, supervisors support independent problem-solving and decision-making (Aittola, 1995). The postgraduate students in Aittola’s study (1995) found supervision very beneficial and wanted it to be both professional and personalized. Not surprisingly therefore, Ria Karhila told me that her head swims when she thinks about teaching novice colleagues. Her instruction takes the form of sharing experiences, telling stories about her own work, mistakes, uncertainties and successes. She is not sure whether she is a teacher. Instead she wants to share in the lives of others, understand them and speak her mind. Nobel laureates, and famous researchers who study at Harvard or Cambridge University (Aittola, 1995) typically enter an apprentice system at the start of their research careers. In a mentoring relationship of this kind, the acquisition of information is less important than observing how a ‘master’ works, thinks and does research at close range. The greatest advantage of this supervision system is that the supervisee acquires a broad research orientation, including the ability to evaluate the quality of research. The mentor’s tasks also include strengthening the values, norms and self-image of supervisees. Where academic mentoring is understood as leading supervisees through a rite of passage, even more colourful metaphors are used. Periods during the journey are characterized by intellectual crises, unexpected competition and encounters with enemies, emotional conflict, failure and the possibility of self-deception. According to this literature, postgraduate research students are serious and gloomy, even though cognitive development and creative research requires a rich imagination and playfulness. At best, mentoring nurtures these capacities in the study process (Juusela, Lillia & Rinne, 2000; Keski-Luopa, 2001). The notion of a shared journey into the unknown, that involves leading others and being led, is a frequent theme in fiction. In the journey metaphor, the word ‘dia-logos’ (that which is in-between) is emphasized (Sava, 1998; Räsänen, 2003; Greimas, 1987; Propp, 1928/1977). Thus, mentoring is an intermediate stage in growth that is inevitably linked to partnership and choice. Mentoring is also associated with crossing social boundaries in the sense of breaking down borders between disciplines in research and/or art (Wilenius, 2004). Today, management is increasingly understood to consist of promoting creativity and co-configuration. Stories seem to be the most effective means of transferring modes of work and organizational culture between persons. According to Aaltonen & Heikkilä (2003), they are used in management to clarify links between actions and as means of attaining goals.
Tacit knowledge and dialogue During the mentoring process two people from different communities, work cultures and professions enter a dramatic stage to participate in a shared performance during which they learn about each other’s work modes. This process closely resembles the work patterns based on coconfiguration that Engeström described. Mentoring, work counselling, academic supervision and teaching all deal with and process tacit knowledge that cannot (yet) be articulated or Mentoring in the creative economy
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transmitted to others. This knowledge is personal, contextual and difficult to externalize as abstract concepts or numerical data. Other forms of knowledge are easier to verbalize or express through metaphor and analogy. However, tacit knowledge exists at a deeper level and cannot be directly transferred or copied from one particular process and/or organization to the next (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). The tacit knowledge that is typical of artisanal work is closely bound up with experience, techniques and tools. It forms the basis of all handcraft and related value production. In artisanal work makers continuously accumulate tacit knowledge when they strive to create new, unique solutions visà-vis customers, products, processes, tools and materials. When Pirkko Anttila (2004) contrasted practical and personal knowledge she noted that the former was associated with a skilled maker’s personal style. So attempts to transfer this to a new situation do not necessarily lead to positive results. My interview with Ria Karhila confirmed this. As a professional who enjoys working with students, she told me that she understands herself as a person who unties knots, an unruffled solver of difficult situations. Where a student lacks courage, she considers avoidance of risk is unproductive and told me it simply leads to mediocre work. The notion that dialogue enables transmission of tacit knowledge is central to mentoring. When Shusterman writes about pragmatist aesthetics, he argues that dialogue provides a stage for action and makes moments of self-expression possible. Dialogue offers a safe, equal relationship within which to formulate meanings. The language of encounter is shared and understandable (at least at some level), and this facilitates exchanges of tacit knowledge between two people. I want to suggest a connection between mentoring and a theory of dialogue and polyphony (multi-voicedness) formulated in the nineteenth century. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1984; see also Buber, 1993) constructed a theory of dialogue around the notion of story structures and the dramatic stage. He understood Socratic dialogue and the Menippean satires as precursors to the modern dialogic novel. According to him, Socratic dialogue embodies means of narration such as syncrisis, or the comparison of different viewpoints, and anacrisis, or provocation to elicit speech. In Socratic dialogue protagonists had different perspectives on the world. The nature of truth and human thinking was presented as dialogic and ideas were tested dialogically. According to Bakhtin, Socrates used questions to reveal tacit knowledge or ideas not yet properly articulated. He constructed action stages on which persons with two world-views could speak of themselves in their own language as equals and simultaneously test each other. According to Bakhtin, Dostoyevsky’s novels are good examples of multi-voicedness. Their heroes conduct dialogues with themselves and each other that continuously modify their identities. Dialogue pervades every word in his novels giving them two voices (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 68).
Conclusion Thus, it is possible to argue that the actors in Bakhtin’s multi-voiced world are continuously on stage, living in dramatic time and in a state of their own becoming. It is the act of opening one’s mouth and replying to 238
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another’s speech that opens up directions for individual actors. The activities of actors participating in a dialogue on a stage unfold one sentence at a time, and each response has the potential to turn it in a new direction. As mentioned previously, creative economies are flooded with meanings. However, the main interest of pragmatist aesthetics and drama theory is in how humans act in and manage society. The creative economy with work patterns based on co-configuration requires actors who are subjects of their own lives. Those within reach of the opportunities offered by the creative economy and co-configuration feel hopeful, because they have many options (Juuti, 2005). The aesthetics of dialogue is not totally fragmented, and the key point is to find the right direction in life. My interviewee Eero Holstila did not view the mentoring process as a locus for creating innovation per se. Whereas the latter is characterized by unpredictability, mentoring is primarily a support structure. He thinks that individuals need to experience basic security so as to encourage them to take bigger professional risks. At any one time, dialogue may include a performance by one person in response to the voice of another. Each new reply contains hope. Hope resides in the fact that life has direction and evolves. Art education institutions need to think carefully about how to respond to the requirements of new creative economies. Together with my interviewees, I propose mentoring as an appropriate means of breaking down boundaries between disciplines and connecting cultural meaning-making and economics. Notes 1. In Finland, work counselling first started among healthcare and social-work professionals. The British and American tradition in this field often focuses on understanding the meaning of inter-organizational relationships and communication; see the research interests of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. The term ‘supervision’ appears infrequently and originates in both manager training and therapy. The tutorial meaning of the term ‘supervision’ was first used at Cambridge University. 2. Details of interviewees: Mikko Bruun is Head of Development at the Corporate Strategy Office of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (face-to face interview, 20 April 2005). Eero Holstila currently works as Director of Economic Development at the City of Helsinki Economic and Planning Centre. At the time of the interview he was Managing Director of Culminatum (face-to-face interview, 7 April 2005). Ria Karhila is a freelance TV journalist (e-mail interview, 20 April 2005). References Aaltonen, M. & Heikkilä, T. (2003). Tarinoiden voima: Miten yritykset hyödyntävät tarinoita? [The power of stories: How do companies make use of stories?]. Jyväskylä: Gummerus. Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. (2005). Kulttuuriteollisuus: Valistus joukkohuijauksena [Culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception]. Tiedotustutkimus, 27 (4–5), 9–37. Aittola, H. (1995). Tutkimustyön ohjaus ja ohjaussuhteet tieteellisessä jatkokoulutuksessa [Supervision of research work and supervisory relationships in scientific further
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education]. Jyväskylä Studies in Education, Psychology and Social Research, 111. Jyväskylä: Jyväskylän yliopisto. Anttila, P. (2004). Tiedonhankinnan kanavat ammatillisen asiantuntijuuden edistäjinä [Channels of information acquisition in the promotion of professional expertise]. In H. Kotila & A. Mutanen (Eds.). Tutkiva ja kehittävä ammattikorkeakoulu [Polytechnics in research and development] (pp. 128–160). Helsinki: Edita. Bakhtin M. (1984). Problems of Dostoyevsky’s poetics. (Ed. and Trans. C. Emerson). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Buber, M. (1993). Minä ja Sinä [I and Thou]. Juva: WSOY. Cussins, A. (1992). Content, embodiment and objectivity: The theory of cognitive trails. Mind, 101, 651–688. Engeström, Y. (1995). Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental work research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit. Engeström, Y. (2005). Developmental work research: Expanding activity theory in practice. Berlin: Lehmanns Media. Greimas, A. (1987). On meaning: Selected writings in semiotic theory. (Trans. P.J. Perron & F.H. Collins). London: Frances Pinter. Huhtala, H. (2004). The emancipated worker? A Foucauldian study of power, subjectivity and organising in the information age. Commentationes Scientiarum Socialium, 64. Saarijärvi: Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters. Juusela T., Lillia, T. & Rinne, J. (2000). Mentoroinnin monet kasvot [The many faces of mentoring]. Jyväskylä: Yrityskirjat Oy. Juuti, P. (2005). Toivon johtaminen [Management by hope]. Aavaranta-sarja. Keuruu: Otava. Keski-Luopa, L. (2001). Työnohjaus vai superviisaus: Työnohjausprosessin filosofisten ja kehityspsykologisten perusteiden tarkastelua [Work supervision or super-wisdom: On the philosophy and developmental psychology of the work supervision process]. Oulu: Metanoia-instituutti. Nonaka, I. & Takeuchi, H. (1995). The knowledge-creating company: How Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Propp, V. (1928/1977). Morphology of the folktale. Austin & London: University of Texas Press. Räsänen, M. (2003). Kirjeitä sinisestä hatusta [Letters from the blue hat]. In J. Varto, M. Saarnivaara & H. Tervahattu H. (Eds). Kohtaamisia taiteen ja tutkimisen maastoissa [Encounters in the terrains of art and research] (pp. 174–183). Artefakta, 13. Hamina: Akatiimi Oy. Reitala H. & Heinonen T. (2001). Dramatisoitua todellisuutta [Dramatized reality]. In H. Reitala & T. Heinonen, Dramaturgioita: Näkökulmia draamateorian, dramaturgian ja draama-analyysin ongelmiin [Dramaturgies: Viewpoints on the problems of theory of drama, dramaturgy and analysis of drama] (pp. 9–74). Saarijärvi: Palmenia-kustannus. Sava, I. (1998). Taiteen ja tieteen kietoutuminen tutkimuksessa [The intertwining of art and science in research]. In M. Bardy (Ed.). Taide tiedon lähteenä [Art as a source of knowledge] (pp. 103–121). Stakes julkaisut. Jyväskylä: Atena Kustannus Oy. Shusterman, R. (1992). Pragmatist aesthetics: Living beauty, rethinking art. Oxford: Blackwell. (2000). Performing live: Aesthetic alternatives for the ends of art. Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press.
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Victor, B. & Boynton, A. (1998). Invented here: Maximizing your organization’s growth and profitability: A practical guide to transforming work. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Wilenius, M. (2004). Luovaan talouteen: Kulttuuriosaaminen tulevaisuuden voimavarana [Towards a creative economy: Cultural expertise as a resource for the future]. Helsinki: Edita.
Suggested citation Rautkorpi, T. (2007), ‘Mentoring in the creative economy’, International Journal of Education through Art 3: 3, pp. 231–241. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.231/1
Contributor details Tiina Rautkorpi is Senior Lecturer of Media at Helsinki Polytechnic, Finland. She worked as a radio and TV journalist and documentary director for ten years. Since then she has been employed as Lecturer in Education Planning and Management in the Department of Visual and Media Arts. She is interested in combining industry and business-oriented research and development with art pedagogy in adult education; and her main research topic is the use of art pedagogy, developmental work and research methods in journalistic production. Contact: Research and Development, Helsinki Polytechnic, PO Box 4032, FIN-00099 City of Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: [email protected]
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BOOK REVIEWS International Journal of Education through Art, Volume 3 Number 3. Book Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/eta.3.3.243/5. © Intellect Ltd 2007.
Artes Visuais: Da Exposição à Sala de Aula (Visual Arts: From Exhibition To Classroom), Ana Mae Barbosa, Rejane Galvão Coutinho and Heloísa Margarida Sales, (2005) São Paulo: Edusp-principlesEditora da Universidade de São Paulo, 216 pp. ISBN 85-314-0935-7 (pbk), Real(Bzl)62.00 Reviewed by Anabela Moura, Escola Superior de Educação de Viana do Castelo, Portugal This book provides an account of research on an important topic. The authors investigated the key areas of professional development of art teachers and the role of educational resources in this development. The original project was funded by the Cultural Centre of the Brazilian Bank – CCBB and developed by Arteducação Produções and La Fabbrica do Brazil. The aim was to reflect on and evaluate what impact the educational materials called Diálogos e Reflexões (Dialogues and Reflections – D & R) had on teachers’ attitudes and behaviours. Ana Mae Barbosa, one of the three researchers and authors, briefly summarizes this research project. It was set in 70 primary (elementary) schools in the city of São Paulo, Brazil and was mostly about art teachers; the sample comprised four groups of specialist teachers with higher education training (80 per cent of whom specialized in the arts). The researchers critically evaluated the various approaches of participant teachers to the materials. Of the 64 teachers in the sample, 32 of them (5 men and 27 women) sent their students’ works to be evaluated at the end of the academic year. Only four of them were artist practitioners, but all those who completed the questionnaire reported that they went to exhibitions and used the Internet regularly as a research tool. The teachers’ average age was 43 and they had an average of sixteen years teaching experience. There is a lack of clarity about the methods used by the four groups. The roles of the different members of the research team were not well specified, although it is clear that all the groups had a field agent who visited the teachers, as well as monitors who accompanied those visits and a researcher who contacted all the teachers by e-mail. Moreover, students’ responses served as the basis of reflection by the La Fabbrica do Brasil’s team on the involvement and professional development of the participants. However, the researchers did not address all the four groups in equal depth. This was perhaps inevitable given the number of case studies, the lack of reflection and evaluation of many of the participant teachers, and also their difficulty with the reporting of their own case studies. Barbosa considered the strategies and resources fundamental to the success of this project. The CCBB was in charge of distributing the D & R material to the four groups, all of which, in their conversations with the field agent or in their answers to the questionnaire, praised it (p. 209) and considered it an adequate strategy. According to the researchers, there was a feeling that the ETA 3 (3) pp. 243–247 © Intellect Ltd 2007.
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materials and the meetings with the groups were interrelated (p. 210) since, the teachers were given guidelines at those meetings, on how to use the materials. The conceptual basis and defined methodology allowed the teachers to use the materials in an individual way, which was verified through practice (p. 212). The teachers reported that the D & R material gave them greater freedom to speak about art, and themselves. They considered that the materials alone made their teaching richer in quality and that the meetings enabled them to get the best out of them and that D & R contained both information and orientation, whose guiding principles should be brought together in combination with the teachers’ own principles. It was also confirmed that, throughout the one-year study, the teachers were able to integrate and/or add new content to their curricula, with a wider variety of materials and classroom repertoire, through proposing themes that were more inclusive and applicable to their students’ realities, and through addressing aesthetic and philosophical questions about contemporary art. Interdisciplinary approaches between art and history were also thought to be essential. By using the evaluative criteria employed by Group 1 together with the sequence of the students’ artworks it was possible to provide comparative analysis throughout. The conclusion was that there was progress in all the classes that sent in materials. This idea of progress was emphasized in the teachers’ conversations with the field agents and in their answers to the questionnaire, with the exception of Group 1, which did not mention this aspect explicitly. The final evaluation was positive with the researchers noting that ‘the quantitative results and qualitative analyses show that the contents of the CCBB exhibitions in 2004 became a part of the programmes of the teachers who took part in the research’ (p. 210). This conclusion was drawn from the teachers’ analyses, taking the following factors into consideration: their academic training, their repertoire, the characteristics of their teaching practice and their commitment to teaching. A final recommendation is for agreements to be drawn up between cultural institutions and state education to enable educational specialists to visit schools and provide guidance for teachers for evaluating their teaching resources, proposing ideas for projects and making better use of the resources that local communities have to offer. This book is well written and it is clear that the researchers have put a great deal of effort into it and that this study will make a contribution to research in this field. It contains an interesting discussion about projectbased art criticism. However, the references it presents are poor in terms of background reading and the description of the methods used is not clear enough. The reader is given some explanation of whom the participants in each case study are and becomes better acquainted with them as the description progresses. Nevertheless, it would be better if more details were provided in order to explain the differences and behaviours in each specific situation. The sequence of ideas throughout the paper and its overall structure are clear. On the other hand it would have helped those international readers who know little or nothing about this country or education system had the researchers contextualized it within the Brazilian art education scene, including the images of the four exhibitions mentioned in the project, and 244
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information about the educational materials (Diálogos e Reflexões – D & R) would help readers to understand the teachers’ responses better. Moreover, the book discusses concepts that readers may not understand. Therefore, further explanation, clarification and definitions would help, for example, Abordagem Triangular or Triangular Approach (which has nothing at all to do with ‘triangulation’ as used in many research designs) and Pedagogia Questionadora or Questioning Pedagogy, folder interactivo or interactive folder, re-leitura or re-reading. The final verdict is that this research is not reflective enough and the discussion remains far too generalized. It is rare to read about research without finding fault with aspects of method, but in this case it is apparent that changes to the overall research design were required, as was a clearer explanation of the authors’ own understanding of aesthetic practice.
Histories of Art and Design Education: Collected Essays, Mervyn Romans (ed), (2005) Bristol, UK and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, for the National Society for Education in Art and Design. 243 pp. ISBN 1- 84150-131-X (hbk), £24.95 Reviewed by Harold Pearse University of Alberta, Canada Although this book is a collection of essays by diverse authors, all but two of which appeared over a span of sixteen years in the International Journal of Art and Design Education, when taken together they read as a complex yet relatively seamless history of art and design education in the United Kingdom. It is no coincidence that most of the essays are from that fertile decade for art education history research and writing – roughly from 1983 to 1993. What links the chapters together is the organization – six sections of from two to four chapters each, dealing with drawing manuals and books; motives and rationales; institutional approaches; the professionalization of the field; pivotal historical figures; and British influences abroad. While in themselves the section headings do not imply a particular chronology, within each section a historical evolution is revealed. This structure, devised by the editor, Mervyn Romans, firmly situates the field’s history in a social/political/economic and cultural context and is a vivid indicator of how research and writing on the history of art and design education has matured. After a helpful contextualizing introduction by the editor, the book opens with two chapters that focus on drawing instruction publications in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Rafael Cardoso’s chapter, ‘A Preliminary Survey of Drawing Manuals in Britain c. 1825–1875’, describes vividly the impact of the advent of cheap engraving and printing methods in the mid-1820s that made drawing and design instruction books available to a broad public and helped to prepare the ground for the establishment of institutions like the Department of Science and Art and a system of schools of design a decade or so later. Diana Korzenik’s chapter, ‘“How to Draw” Books as Sources to Understanding Art Education of the Nineteenth Century’ shows how in America drawing instruction served practical purposes Book Reviews
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while in Britain, as Cardoso explains, the aim was to uplift moral values. Cardoso’s article is relatively recent (1996) while Korzenik’s (1985) is a classic. Both help us to gain insights into the relationship between popular selfhelp publications and school system-generated curriculum materials. The second section of the book, Chapters 3 and 4, both by Romans, is headed ‘Motives and Rationales for Public Art and Design Education’. The only new chapters, they revisit the taken for granted and generally acknowledged genesis of a system of art and design education in Britain, the 1835–36 Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures. Earlier historians tended to regard the Committee’s deliberations and recommendations as motivated primarily by economic considerations. In the spirit of the new revisionist historians, Romans argues in one chapter that concerns with the economy were by far overshadowed by the question of ‘taste’. Through a careful reading of the Committee’s minutes he reveals the complex layers of meaning underlying taste as a social construct, its link with fashion and consumerism and as the moral justification for the implementation of public art and design education. In the other chapter he re-examines this period and the Select Committee’s hearings through the lens of the language of class. Again he introduces a new complexity and subtlety to the discussion noting that social class was in a state of flux at that time and that our understanding can best be served by considering the interactions between the changing working, artisan and middle classes. While Roman’s contention that art and design education historians can learn from ‘the wider community of social historians’ is well founded, when it comes to carefully and critically presenting socially contextualized historical material, the authors in this volume are no slouches. John Swift’s two chapters (5 and 6) elaborate in exquisite detail the growth of Birmingham’s Art School from its first incarnation in 1800 to the 1920s, chronicling the pressures of local influences and the struggle against central control. In spite of the dominance of London in governing the national system of art and design schools, the one in Birmingham developed a relatively autonomous approach and innovative educational philosophies, including the notion of executed design wherein students could bring their own ideas to fruition. Swift describes how this innovation benefited female students, at least to the extent that gender stereotyping would allow. The two chapters that make up Section 4, ‘Towards Art Education as a Profession’, by David Thistlewood and John Steers respectively, trace the hundred-year history of the National Society for Education in Art and Design (originally the Society of Art Masters) and the fifty-year history of the International Society for Education through Art (INSEA). Full of fascinating characters, both are rich in detail and effectively situate people and events in social, cultural and political contexts. Probably the most accessible section is the one on ‘Pivitol Figures in Art and Design Education History’. Every field of endeavour needs heroes and four of almost mythic stature are presented here, each with their own chapter: John Ruskin, Marion Richardson, Herbert Read and Richard Hamilton. Given their pervasive influence it is not surprising that their careers link to other chapters. John Ruskin and his book, Elements of Drawing are featured in the chapter on drawing manuals and Herbert Read and Education through Art are key players in the chapter on INSEA. Marion 246
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Richardson, a graduate of the teacher-training course at the previously profiled Birmingham School of Art, is respectfully portrayed as an exemplar of the inspired practising teacher whose work and ideas can propel an entire education movement. Her insistence that the expressive work of children was to be nurtured and valued profoundly influenced the New Art Teaching of the 1930s and 1940s and as the author, Bruce Holdsworth, observes, still reverberates today. Similarly, the legacy of Richard Hamilton, post-secondary educator and artist and a key player in the Basic Design movement of the 1950s and 1960s, still persists in the widely held conviction that there are fundamental visual principles that should be the foundation of art and design education at any level. The final section is comprised of two chapters dealing with the influence of British art and design education overseas, specifically Canada and Japan. Graeme Chalmers’ essay examines the ways that the South Kensington system translated to Ontario and draws insightful parallels between the strategies and circumstances of a little-known bureaucrat, Samuel Passmore May in Canada and the celebrated Sir Henry Cole in England. Akio Okazaki looks at the impact of the introduction of nineteenth-century drawing manuals and the South Kensington system in early twentieth-century Japan and the backlash in the 1920s of a short-lived ‘free drawing movement’. Curiously, just as Japanese art had influenced European art via Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, European modernism and the ideas of Read and Richardson influenced art and art education in twentieth-century Japan. An anthology is an appropriate format to portray the history of art and design education as it is so multifaceted that its scope and range can best be reflected through multiple voices. Moreover, the task is likely to be beyond the endurance, if not the knowledge and resources, of a single author. This book is an important contribution to stimulating a muchneeded dialogue between historians of art and design education as well as among the wider community of historians. At the same time it is an accessible vehicle for practitioners and students to gain an awareness and understanding of the roots and evolution of their field. It serves effectively one of the most important tasks of history – revealing and scrutinizing the sources of our current theories and practices.
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ETA Volume 3 INDEX Barreto, C., and Coutinho, R., Art education and professional training: The São Paulo Professional School for Women, pp. 69–76. Cepeda, C., Art in science education: Creative visions of DNA by engineering students, pp. 37–42. Chanda, J., Learning from images: a source of interdisciplinary knowledge, pp. 7–18. Chandler, R., Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA, pp. 173–184. Chung, S.K., An exploration of media violence in a junior-high school art classroom, pp. 57–68. Flood, A., and Bamford, A., Manipulation, simulation, stimulation: the role of art education in the digital age, pp. 91–103. Fukumoto, K., Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers, pp. 195–209. Gombe, C., Indigenous plaited patterns on Ugandan mats, pp. 125–134. Gumbe, J., Researching ritual as content for Angolan art education, pp. 19–35. Labitsi, V., ‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings, pp. 185–193. Linnap, P., Images and fear : Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society, pp. 211–229. Navarro, S., Alzheimer’s: Researching the disease through sculpture, pp. 135–141. Piazza, G., On the wave of creativity: Children, expressive languages and technology, pp. 105–123. Rautkorpi, T., Mentoring in the creative economy, pp. 231–241. Steers, J., The ever-expanding art curriculum – is it teachable or sustainable? pp. 143–155. Ulkuniemi, S., Exposed lives: dialogues between viewers and installations about family photography, pp. 43–55.
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JVAP 6 (3) Index © Intellect Ltd 2007. ISSN 1743-5234.
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Volume 3 Number 3 – 2007 Editorial 169–171 Articles 173–184
Colorquest©: A museum pedagogy on ethnic self-identity, representation and cultural histories at the Boston MFA Robin M. Chandler
185–193
‘Climbing to reach the sunset’: an inquiry into the representation of narrative structures in Greek children’s drawings Vasiliki Labitsi
195–209
Art Lunch Project: an international collaboration among art teachers Kinichi Fukumoto
211–229
Images and fear: Repressed pictures as a tool for analysing society Peeter Linnap
231–241
Mentoring in the creative economy Tiina Rautkorpi
243–247
Book Reviews
248
3.3 International Journal of
Education through Art
Index
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