Connectivity for Showing and Saying Across Differences in Art Education

Abstract

Doubting and non-doubting behaviour. There is the first only if there is the second [1].It is much more important to believe in the possibility of solution than ever to find one in actuality. The gain, or advantage of myth, and its basic function, is to establish that possibility itself [2]. JADE 22.3 ©NSEAD 2003This paper attempts to redress the current preoccupation with the idea of difference for structuring art curricula by reclaiming connectivity for realising value and strategic intelligence in art. In doing so, it makes use of the diverse role narrative plays in culture to establish a rationale for future art curricula, so that myth and mythic artistic methods that reconcile us to the world are given priority over the more recent preference for art to be subversive, like parable. This more complex analysis of the way story informs cultural activity is used to contrast with Efland, Freedman and Stuhr's oversimplified use of narrative that neglects the importance of myth and its equivalent in procedural knowledge for understanding and making durable art. An alternative approach to structuring the art curriculum is mapped out that gives priority to connectivity (myth) over difference (parable) by drawing on meta-narratives over-looked in postmodern thought. AbstractJADE 22.3

The problematic relationship between knowing how and knowing that in secondary art education

“…Both used irony to murder off Abstract Expressionism by sweeping away the idea that art has an essence, which in the case of Abstract Expressionism was located in the authenticity of the regressive, bodily act. However, because irony is difficult to translate into pedagogy and to sustain in a formal way in a secondary art curriculum (Cunliffe, 2003), expressionism was replaced not by Neo-Dada and Pop Art but by the alternative form of essentialism known as basic design education that was a diluted and debased school version of Bauhaus practices.…”