Postmodern Dilemmas

Outrageous Essays in Art & art Education

Jan Jagodzinski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781135458010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

In Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education and Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experimental Writings in Art&Art Education, jan jagodzinski presents a series of essays covering a timespan of approximately ten years. These essays chart the theory and practice of art&art education as it relates to issues of postmodernity and poststructuralism concerning representation, identity politics, consumerism, postmodern architecture, ecology, phallocentrism of the artistic canon, pluriculturalism, media and technology, and AIDS. As a former editor of The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and a founding member for the Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education, the author attempts to deconstruct the current art education paradigm, which is largely based on modernist tenets, and to reorient art education practice to social issues as developed in both media education and cultural studies. Part of the intent in these two volumes is to undertake a sustained critique of the 1982 Art in the Mainstream (A.I.M.) statement, which continues to be considered as the core value for art education. The distinct intention of this critique is to put forward a new value base for art&art education in these postmodern times.Many of the essays raise the need to be attentive to sex/gender issues in art&art education and the need to read the artistic discourse "otherwise." There is a sustained critique of the art programs developed by the Getty Center for the Arts, whose arts curriculum presents the paradigm case of late modernist thinking. Some essays are written in a provocative form that tries to accommodate such content. This is particularly the case in Pun(k) Deconstruction, where architectural discourse is deconstructed, and which includes an "artistic performance" given by the author in 1987. This singular set of volumes combines scholarship in the areas of gender studies, aesthetics, art history, art education, poststructuralism, and cultural studies in a unique blend of theory and practice for rethinking the field of art education.

SECTION II
Talking Back

4
a
Para/critical/sitical/sightical
Reading

of
Ralph Smith's
Excellence in Art Education¹
(1987)

¹This performance and text was "staged" and read during Friday, April 23, 1987, at the 27th NAEA meeting, Boston, as part of an invited panel to discuss Ralph Smith's statement on art and excellence as endorsed by the NAEA's Committee on Excellence in Art Education. Those who sponsored the panel were entirely unaware of the contents of this critique and should be absolved of the consequences and its reverberations. Since this is a revised writing, it puts to question what is "original" and what is a "copy" of what took place. During the performance Ralph Smith walked out from the audience. Later, when asked why he had left, he said that he had to go to the bathroom for he couldn't stand "bad theater." This is an entirely appropriate gesture historically made by kings of officialdom, defenders of the code when vulgarity, excessiveness, sensationalism, exaggeration, and parody affect their sensibilities, i believe such strategies become effective rhetorical weapons against any form of elitist culture, which Smith's position represents. Such tactics have historically constituted the "popular" text. Besides, i take comfort in Oscar Wilde's quip that there is no such thing as bad publicity! Smith has since published a second volume on excellence in art education in 1993, also endorsed by the NAEA.

This is the "uncut" version of a tamer essay published under the same title in The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education, No. 11 (June 1991): 90-137, which was greatly toned down, shortened, and scrubbed of its excruciating mocking style. I have decided to let the "uncut" version stand here since it is consistent with "pun(k) deconstruction" as exemplified in the second volume. It first appeared as a performance piece during an invited panel to respond to Ralph Smith's Excellence in Art Education on Friday, April 23, 1987, at the 27th National Art Education Association (NAEA) meeting in Boston. This particular version includes the transcript of this "bad theater," as I call it. It retains its excruciating mocking style and hides under the pretense that it is a work of fiction, a familiar postmodern ruse. Reader be warned!

The idea of a "paracritical," "parasitical," and "parasightical" reading(s) drew on the work of Rosalind Krauss (1985) and David Carroll (1987). Krauss introduces the terms paracritical and paraliterary to identify poststructuralist criticism which "is the space of debate, quotation, partisanship, betrayal, reconciliation; but is not the space of unity, coherence, or resolution..." (292). Carroll uses the term "paraesthetics" to refer to the extra-aesthetic in general. He is interested in the philosophical, historical, and political issues raised by the question of form and the problem of beauty rather than in form and beauty as narrow aesthetic questions. The prefix "para" carries all the disruptive effects of dislodging aesthetics from its complacent moorings. As a preposition the OED gives it the meaning of "to one side, aside, amiss, faulty, irregular, disordered, improper, and wrong." In Carroll's use of paraesthetics, aesthetics is turned against itself; art is not a given but a question without a fixed definition. I have attempted to give flesh to the "para" in my title by "parasitically" latching on to Smith's text in the hopes of dislodging his aesthetics of "excellence."

Since its writing in 1987, the work of Lynda Nead's The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (1992) has a direct bearing on the phallocentrism discussed in this essay. She carefully deconstructs Kenneth Clark's The Nude, and exposes how the nude has been appropriated throughout the Western art tradition as a way of subjugating woman. To pick just two quotes from Ralph Smith's text which would make her scream:

It is precisely such gratification [the experience of art at its best] that Kenneth Clark had in mind when he expressed his belief that even today "the majority of people really long to experience that moment of pure, disinterested, non-material satisfaction which causes them to ejaculate the word 'beautiful,' " an experience, he went on to say, that is "obtained more reliably through works of art than through any other means." (Smith, p. 62; my emphasis)

Consider, for instance, some of the concepts that are brought to bear when we either contemplate, study, admire, criticize, or discuss an outstanding work of art. We may take for example The Rape of the Sabine Women by the seventeenth-century French painter Nicholas Poussin, of which Paul Ziff says that when we approach it we may attend to its sensuous features, to its "look and feel" (Smith, p. 45; my emphasis)

On reflection, a "para" noid Lacanian reading of Excellence in Art would be in order.

What is art? Prostitution.
—Baudelaire

Disclaimer:

Throughout the following text the proper name of Ralph Smith is evoked. Although this appears as an ad hominem attack, the reader should be alerted to Derrida's (1976) disclaimer that a "proper name" does not truly exist but is a general category like any other. "Thus the name, especially the so-called proper name, is always caught in a chain or a system of differences.... The literal [propre] meaning does not exist, its 'appearance' is a necessary function—and must be analyzed as such—in the system of differences and metaphors" (p.89). Ralph Smith speaks a tradition in an enunciated narrative voice as a "grammatical" subject. The words he mouths/writes are the discourse of the Law mouthed/written by others of the same persuasion. In brief, Ralph Smith is Matthew Arnold, is Kramer, is Aldrich, is Kauffmann, is Beardsley, is Adler, is... through a series of continuous displacements. By blurring their differences in the name of Sameness, as Smith does, his Proper Name is dissolved into an itinerary sign of an accompanying "we," devoid of the uniqueness of the person it represents. "Para" doxically Excellence in Art Education becomes an authorless text. It, therefore, does not exist. This is a fictional book review, and its content derives entirely from my imagination. Where i have used "real" names or what seem to be physical descriptions of "real" people, or quoted from "real texts," this is done purely in the interest of fiction. In any serious sense any similarities between this review and the real lives of any persons living or dead is unintended and coincidental.

Pretext

“Bad Theater”

A M(Other) approaches her teenage son sitting at table with knife and fork in hand. On his plate is a picture of the Mona Lisa. His M(Other) asks:

M- Is it good?

S- Oh, —oh, yes indeed! (lost in contemplation over his dish)

M- What are you eating?

S- You mean, right now, at this very moment? (Answering as if he had not heard his mother.)

M- Why Yes—yes of course (somewhat taken aback!)

S- I'm eating the Mona Lisa.

M- Was that a Freudian slip?

S- Slip? Slip? No, Mother! I bought her at Bloomingdale's. As a matter of fact, after my meal I feel much fuller, although she wasn't as fresh as I thought she might be. [He burps.] I've seen her before and it was a fulfilling experience. Still, her elements and components Fit so nicely together that I ate her all up.

It is precisely such gratification [the experience of art at its best] that Kenneth Clark had in mind when he expressed his belief that even today "the majority of people really long to experience that moment of pure, disinterested, non-material satisfaction which causes them to ejaculate the word 'beautiful,'" an experience, he went on to say, that is "obtained more reliably through works of art than through any other means." (Smith, p. 62; my emphasis)

Consider, for instance, some of the concepts that are brought to bear when we either contemplate, study, admire, criticize, or discuss an outstanding work of art. We may take for example The Rape of the Sabine Women by the seventeenth-century French painter Nicholas Poussin, of which Paul Ziff says that when we approach it we may attend to its sensuous features, to its "look and feel." (Smith, p. 45; my emphasis)

It is obvious from the above quotations, Smith's text is phallocentrieally free

M- I'm glad to hear that. It is very important that you eat everything on your plate. Maybe tomorrow I'll serve you up an Old Mistress for some variety, if you found the Old Master alright.

S- Thanks, mom. I do need a little feminism in me, even if it belongs to the same old art course.

M- Run along now. I'll clean up your plate. But before you go, can you tell me who painted this? (points to a slide projected on a screen).

S- (glancing at the screen). It's a Van Gogh!

M- No, try again, but slow down this time before you tell me. Describe it for yourself. What is it that you really and truly see and what does it taste like? Can you point out its qualities?

S- OK. It's... (thinking—looking—gazing at length)... it's a Picasso (?)

M- Right! Remember I fed you one of him the other day?

S- Ya, I guess you did. I just forgot.

M- Well, don't worry "it may take years or even half a lifetime really to see and appreciate a great work" (sMyth, p. 46). You have time. We will come back to him later this week. You'll be just like Dad. Remember how well he knows his architecture. As a matter of fact they are adding some Neoclassical pillars to the front of his office building this week to "match" the Art Nouveau entrance. Very postmodern, you know. Remember, "[t]hough the Picasso may appear simple, it achieves intensity of expression and a telling character by virtue of its complex formal relationships. The slightest change in composition could disturb the overall balance" (sMyth, p. 26).... We could visit him at his Bank tomorrow? Would you like that?

S- You mean we're going to visit Picasso in the bank? Mom, he's dead!

M- Only in name son, only in name. You know what I mean.... I meant your father.

They both exist, the narrator continues making a sign of the cross:

IN-THE-NAME-OF-THE-FATHER²: BEARDSLEY, GOODMAN, REID, OSBORNE

²This is in reference to Lacan's Symbolic Order. As a child acquires language he enters in the Name-of-the-Father, meaning s/he is positioned through language as a sign which is phallocentric—male.

HE sat there surrounded by his sheep-lined, kid-leather chair. Shifting his body ever so slightly, it effortlessly swung side to side. "A wonderful bit of tooling," HE thought to himself. Custom made. HE had submitted himself to a casting of his body—just for that—but it had been worth it. HE now felt his back, ass, and legs glide into place. A restful feeling came over his entire body. Carefully HE looked around. The ubiquity of his presence was felt throughout the entire office. HE had real taste. There was that Tiffany lamp in the corner which HE had found in London; beautiful, priceless HE thought. A Daumier lithograph hung on the wall, a fortunate find in a Budapest Antiquariat. HE had bought it relatively cheaply, and successfully smuggled it out of the country. HE still secretly gloated over that. No plundered past here, HE thought. HE had paid good money for it. After all, HE had worked hard and deserved only the best.

In the corner stood his favorite golfing putter. Sometimes in the afternoons HE would practice his putting "style" on the piled rug. HE picked it up. HE could still remember the day that HE "found it," or as they say, it "found him." HE had been golfing at the Royal and Ancient in Scotland, a golf holiday with a business partner and there—there amongst a pile of abandoned clubs HE had spotted it—a wood-shafted putter owned by Hogan himself. HE gazed at the handle which had been meticulously wound with hand tooled leather. Flipping it over, HE slowly turned the putter in his hands, the clubhead gleamed in the light. "You can't find quality like that these days," HE thought to himself.

Submission to the work and to its qualities and meanings, writes sMyth, "is undertaken freely and, one wants to add, mainly for the sake of whatever delights and insights the work itself affords. The viewer seldom has any exterior purposes but that of experiencing the work in its fullness." (Smith, p. 22)

HE moved to the office window. It was a beautiful sight, the sun was setting over the city, his city he thought, for HE had helped design many of its buildings. In the distance HE could see the skyscrapers. They offered him a cornucopia of signs. In the distance was Johnson's AT&T tower. How they laughed when it was first built, but no one was laughing now. It had become as famous as the Chrysler Tower. And soon, HE too would have his Art Nouveau entrance. HE particularly liked the sensuousness of the lines. Rossetti and Beardsley reminded him of England, his place of birth. Even Klimt had interested him once. But it was the light, weightless, airborne, floating spirit of art nouveau that truly "disinterested" him.

...but as Strathmann's busy Jugenstil work already indicates, the theme of a woman and her mirror was given considerable boost by the Arts and Crafts vogue of the 1890s, since during this period designers everywhere... were turning out massive numbers of elaborately carved oval band mirrors decorated with wood nymphs, Cupids, Ophelias, Venuses, and so on. Mary G. Houston's design is typical, combining as it does a fascination with art nouveau's organic line, the vulval ovoid shape, and a relief of a Phelia-like woman entwined in her own hair, apparently caught just as she was about to float away among the reeds. Advertising, too, was catching on fast. By 1913, for example, Jungend carried a full-page ad for a food supplement called Biomalz, in which an enticingly uncovered young woman in tip-top physical shape stares intently into her oval hand mirror while a black servant boy enters with her Biomalz. (Dijkstra, 1986, p. 141)

HE turned on the office TVs—huge screens built into the wooden shelved wall. The news was filled with mention of the sale of arms to Iran, the Contra scandal. The President was to appear before the Nation. A car ad flicked on. Lee lacocca's face appeared. "Smart cookie," HE thought to himself—"Chrysler was showing good profits this year, holding their own against the Japanese." Nobody knew that the Dodge Stealth was made in Japan by Mitsubishi.

The point is, as Osborne emphasizes, that the exhilaration of the experience of art is less a function of feeling being directed inwardly than it is of its being directed outwardly towards the object of art. (Smith, p. 22)

In-the-Name-of-the-Mother³ silence_____________

³There is no name of the Mother. Woman is excluded from sMyth's discourse and finds herself already represented through male terms. She is the Other and is defined in HIS terms.

If it is reasonable to hold that human mental powers become animated during our experience of art at its best in the ways just described, if, that is, our perception, reason, and feeling are energized in the manner indicated, and if vision becomes uncommonly synoptic and comprehensive, then it seems acceptable to suppose that our experience of art, unlike perhaps our experiences in most other things, contribute to a sense of personal wholeness or integration, that is, a state of well-being noteworthy for its being unmarred by the discontinuities and frustrations of everyday life. (Smith, p. 24; my emphasis)

At the O(R)FFICE

D- That's a beautiful dress you have on dear.

M- Why thank you dear.

D- That's a beautiful purse and shoes. They match your dress beautifully.

M- Why thank you dear for noticing.

D- Those earrings and necklace are beautiful. They match your dress, your purse, your shoes, your...

M- Why thank you very much dear (turning to her son who is now sitting comfortably in dad's custom-made chair flicking various channels on the TV screens). Just a minute dear. . Get away from that TV! You're sitting too close..... and turn it down.

Works of art may furthermore be assumed capable of not only engaging the aesthetic imagination, but also, ultimately, of stretching imagination generally. (Smith, p. 23)

D- You shouldn't be so harsh on the boy. You know how much he enjoys television,

If our experience of art can be all of this, then surely we are entitled to say of an encounter with an outstanding work of art that is an experience, in Dewey's sense. (Smith, p.23)

M- How many times have I told him... when we come here he should never turn those TVs on without my permission. I'm tired of repeating myself. Every time HE comes here, HE does as HE pleases! And you just stare and look at him, never saying anything. Why is it that I am the o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• SECTION I: ART EDUCATION IN A POSTMODERN AGE
• SECTION II: TALKING BACK!
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index