From Modernism to Postmodernism in Arts Education - Essay Example

From Modernism to Postmodernism in Arts Education Modernism art refers to the new traditional experimental art dealing with the formally complex and elliptical elements that contains recreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist's freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster. When we talk about arts education, we see a dramatic shift in the paradigm of arts teaching in British education that occurred between 1920 and 1980, the period in which arts were predominantly taught under the shaping powers of progressivism and modernism. Many modernist artists have mentioned that since 1980 they have been taught, with huge compromising problems and acute tensions, more and more inside a new paradigm based on a different set of premises, practices and expectations, related to but different from the parallel shift into postmodernism. Abbs (2003) has referred this paradigm to the shift that is related to thinking in the Education Institutes of British universities and is not to be identified with the atomistic and politically constructed National Curriculum, though many of the elements dislocated from their original meaning are reflected there (Abbs, 2003, p. 46). Modernist arts provides us reasons to believe that while something of value has been achieved under the shaping energies of the new paradigm, the literal and mechanical way it was instituted betrayed the broad sweep of the philosophy, ignored vital principles of creative pedagogy and maimed the holistic perception which lay at the heart of the thinking (Abbs, 2003, p. 46). Among major modernists names like Theodor Adorno, a major figure in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists, tells us that art and literature, and particularly Modernist art, could function as a kind of negative or contradictory criticism of society, in thought-provoking experimental texts. Adorno argued that difficult texts provoked new, unfamiliar, estranged conceptions of life that the dissonances and fractures of Modernist art expressed the individual's loss of control, centeredness and harmony in the contemporary world. For Walter Benjamin, modernist education has created a world of printing, duplication and photography, where artistic works have lost the 'aura' that their uniqueness once gave (Childs, 2000, p. 34). The rising technologies of artistic reproduction dispensed with the idea of a work's authenticity; for example, the idea of an authentic photographic or film print makes no sense. Benjamin thought this moved art's function from the realm of ritual, where it is magical and revered, into that of politics, where it is mass produced for purposes of marketing and propaganda, with dire consequences for a politically polarised Europe after World War I. To understand the paradigm which defines art in context with postmodernist education, it is first necessary to know what formalist modernism was not. It was not connective, inclusive, transactional, associative, referential, interactive, changeable, discontinuous, multilayered, impure, and ambiguous ignoring the autobiographical data and questions of personality. Postmodernist art, when encompass these qualities, presents a connective paradigm, which in turn demands a connective criticism to which we call "postmodern" recognizes time and periodicity, but, rather than being tied to one-way time series, it can move back and forth in time and can be associated in its reversibility with the new physics (Ascott & Shanken, 2003, p. 178). Walling (2001) while criticising postmodernism suggests that the way postmodernist education have abused and altered art curriculum is absurd. It does not make any sense for the national standards to be imaginative with reference to some particular standard. Postmodernist reforms in education at every level and field of interest has damped the curriculum rather than reform (Walling, 2001). Postmodern art when merged with the capabilities of visual art presents before us natural art, which the resulting group of artistic practices is often positioned at a threshold point in accounts of an emerging postmodernist sensibility. From the vantage point of the present, many ecological, performative, and critical aspects of this artwork have significantly contributed to the greatly expanded field of postmodernist art which best suits the art of 'photography' (Coughlin, 2005). Photography in the light of Modernism and Postmodernism The modernist education, no doubt has reshaped photography to the extent where it has merged with visual arts and education and that has equipped it with modern day tools like adobe Photoshop, choreography etc. The misconception of photography as mentioned by Clarke (2006) has documented the stems from a failure to understand the camera. Clarke (2006) therefore suggests that in such context where modern art has alleviated the boundaries of photography not limited to dance and structuring, it has enabled the camera not to be just a passive tool which records what we see, it senses information about the world differently from the way our eyes and brains do (Clarke, 2006). Modernist art has given us the framework that has decided our fate just like unlike our vision; the camera is monocular rather than binocular which can freeze and hold images in a tiny fraction of a second; our vision cannot (Clarke, 2006). Studying photography as a means to rehabilitating the relation between artistic photograph and photography and between the printed image and the photographic event that today serves as the best example of understanding modernist education still presents before us the gap between the photo and the photographic event (Azoulay, 2005). Apart from the technical issues that suggests possible warnings, photography can be seen in the light of consulting other technical sources that illustrates the results of other aspects of photography like dance, choreography etc (Burchfield et al, 2001). With the generation of computer imagery we have entered a world of cyberspace which is radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography, and television; the representation of 'real optically perceived space' has vanished into'aesthetics of disappearance' (Virilio, 1991). So at the point where art education find itself amongst such daunting propositions, we live in a world where our current education seems to be anachronistic to today's realities. Therefore art education to meet this challenge of postmodernist has given the changed realities in technology, in consumerism, in our outlook to youth culture, and in the diasporic identities of post-colonialism that question the very hegemony of some totalized solution. For an art educator to undertake a trajectory of change it is important to have a grasp of how vision has been historically shaped so that we can better comprehend how it is, once again, undergoing change during this postmodern transition. With this in mind, there are purposeful repetitions and redundancies of thought throughout these layerings; concerns and concepts are repeated and restated in different ways but from different perspectives. Such a historical narrative cannot be related in any chronological or linear way, one can hope that the effect of the visual arts just like writing will leave the audience with a number of instances of what kind of 'object' postmodern might be, and the place of vision in it. Many historical accounts posit the origins of modernist visual art and culture in the 1870s and 1880s with impressionism instead of modernism, and postimpressionism instead of postmodernism for the reason that photography emerged as a new model of visual representation and perception that constituted a radical break with the paradigm of Renaissance perspective. Photography and cinema, on the other hand, are simply understood as the continuance of classical perspective space and perception to which one argues that the events of the 1820s and 1830s produced a new kind of observer. These decades set the preconditions for the ongoing abstraction of vision that underwrote both of these later developments (Jagodzinski, 1997, p. 11). The quantification and homogenization of vision enabled a never-seen-before commodity fetishism to emerge to which whether it was photography along with later moving image, window displays, or the act of perception itself, specularity was part and parcel of capitalism, mass entertainment, and modernity. Modernists like Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin equated this 'kaleidoscopic' consciousness with modernity itself. Walter Benjamin documented how modernity subverted the possibility of a contemplative observer with the spreading of new urban spaces, artificial lighting, shopping arcades, fashion, jostling crowds, and new glass-and-steel architecture. Modernism where on one hand elucidated the phenomena of photography, retinal afterimages, peripheral vision, thresholds of attention, and binocular vision that contributed to the physiology of sight, on the other hand postmodernism invited all the critics of the optical devices of the stereoscope which Cary identifies as having the most radical impact in this change to autonomous vision. Critics in the answer to photography raised the issue of 'stereoscope' which simulated the actual presence of a physical object or scene. Postmodernism explained the audience that the desired effect was not simply likeness, but the absolute tangibility of an object or scene, a tangibility which was purely a visual experience conflating the 'real' with the optical (Jagodzinski, 1997, p. 11). While studying photography, students in order to control light handling in a limited environment make use of coloured filters, grids and lenses, moving screens, and prefabricated items. When last year's festival concentrated on the more obvious levels of identity politics, other artistic works from the European countries like Norway and Denmark addressed issues of assimilation in society and youth culture in the countryside in the form of a music festival (Kouwenhoven, 2007). Though the festival focussed on music, it was photography that enabled the installation art and sound bites to match up with photography or other video fleshed out aspects of assimilation and integration (Postmodern Photography, 2008). Often in photography practical, the postmodern art criticises the situation which creates a theatre-play, in the course of which students rehearse a variety of social and archetypal roles and explore the relationship of illusion to identity in terms of colour and light which reacts in terms of registering environmental changes on light-sensitive paper, thereby introducing photography. The Photographic Transition The perception of our own times is more inclusive and panoptic with the simultaneity of events and their endless changeability which calls for a depth of field that zooms from the microscopic to the macroscopic. It is a perception as much tactile as visual indeed, it engages all the senses in a way young photographer students can best describe as behavioural. The transition from the old sensibility to the new reflects the impact of indeterminism on science, of the analytic method on psychology and of phenomenology on philosophy, and is seen to evolve slowly from the middle of the nineteenth century, becoming more apparent in the early years of the twentieth. Art students present a comprehensive documentation of the seeds of modern photography that goes to call for the breakdown of an intricate mosaic field of events. However the photography when realised from the eye of history lacked the capability to realise emergence of the new sensibility as signalled by an awakening of the sense of time and of the event, which are measured visually in terms of movement. But physical movement, especially in the mechanistic ways that visual philosophers 'Degas' or 'Seurat' chose to depict it, is simply the superficial expression of change to which the never-ending movement of life becomes reality (Ascott & Shanken, 2003, p. 114). It is the intuitive and forceful expression of change that marks many as the decisive influence in the course of modern photography. Analysing the facets of the history of photography from the twenty-first century promontory, the photographer's work can be considered as an attempt to give us clues, and show us paths, to understand the multi-facetted surface of what we now consider as fine-art photography (Chalifour, 2005). According to Palermo (2007), nothing in the postmodernist art could be more controversial than to believe the notion that theory and practice in photography are distinguished on the basis of modernist from postmodernist photography. Today, when postmodern philosophers and photographers like Walter Benn Michaels explains the error of both sides of postmodernist photography's and that even in theoretical stance, how could a student be able to criticise what photography upholds. Postmodernist photographers like Michaels claim that if a student take the photograph to be art just because of his interest in the thing it pictures if his join Levine in admiring the Edward Weston photograph solely for Neil's beautiful torso, or if he admires an untitled 'film still' by Cindy Sherman solely for her skill in staging tableaux vivants one is not admiring the photograph, but the things of it. Thus, postmodern photography enables us to differentiate between what is meaningful and what is meaningless pertinent to the photograph (Palermo, 2007). On the other hand, the notion of treating a photograph matters in a sense that if one treats the photograph as if it were in quotation marks to be an element in an endless citational chain, and claim that it is therefore unable to express the photographer's intention, one is treating it as a mark rather than as a sign. That means the student or an individual amounts to treating the photograph as an object like any natural object, even. Not only will the photograph be marked open to all plausible resonances, any aspect of the beholder's experience irrespective of how tenuous or arbitrary its relation to the photograph or the photographer's intention, it might equally well be brought to bear on it (Palermo, 2007). That condition arises because of the intention of the beholder that once has determined to treat the photograph as an object; there is no way to declare the irrelevance of any aspect of the beholder's situation to the beholder's experience of it. That clearly explains the 'meaninglessness' of the photograph to the beholder. Students while focussing on postmodernism are expected to propose, perhaps naively and without caution in the light of society's relentless determination, the ways to institutionalise and contain creativity by any means, that telematic discourse can exist outside such closed systems, or that a much more inclusive, indeed, planetary. Fellowship of discourse can be created, lying outside and circumnavigating the institutional management of discourse as it now exists in book production, conventional telecommunications, and entertainment media structures. Supporting fine art photographers in context with postmodernism provides an opportunity to the students to criticise the work while differentiating between copy and image that provides that moral rights shall not extend coverage to authors when the work at issue is a reproduction, depiction, or portrayal of the original visual work of art. Teachers and students must be at the consciousness level of realising that a fine art photographer may create an image, and then have the image published in a magazine, but altered by the magazine editors (Carver, 2004). Photography is characterised in a visual discourse of art, embodied in painting, sculpture, film, and photography, which has its own closed fellowship. For all the apparent freedom from constraint cherished in the mythology of the avant-garde, the ways of addressing artwork constitute a set of rules, the learning of which permit entry into the permitted discourse. The control, selection, organization, and redistribution of art must be understood as part of the large ordering processes in society, where art is the subset of a wider discourse, subject to the institutional management of desire and power. References Abbs Peter, (2003) Against the Flow: Education, the Arts and Postmodern Culture: RoutledgeFalmer: London. Ascott Roy & Shanken A. Edward, (2003) Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness: University of California Press: Berkeley, CA. Azoulay Ariella, (2005) "The Ethic of the Spectator: The Citizenry of Photography" In: Afterimage. Volume: 33. Issue: 2. Burchfield, J., Jacobs, M., & Kokrda, K. (2001). Photography in focus (5th ed.). New York: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill. Carver J. Katherine, (2004) "The Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 Is Too Narrowly Applied to Photographic Works of Art" In: Afterimage. Volume: 31. Issue: 4. Chalifour Bruno, (2005) "Photography Speaks / 150 Photographers on Their Art" In: Afterimage. Volume: 32. Issue: 4. Childs Peter, (2000) Modernism: Routledge: London. Clarke Steve, (2006) "Moving and Seeing: Photographing Dance; Far More Than Passive Documentation, Dance Photography Can Collaboratively Aid Dancers and Choreographers in the Development of Their Art" In: JOPERD - The Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance. Volume: 77. Issue: 2. Coughlin Maura, (2005) "Landed" In: Art Journal. Volume: 64. Issue: 2. Jagodzinski Jan, (1997) Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art & Art Education: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. Kouwenhoven Bill, (2007) "A Baltic Round Up" In: Afterimage. Volume: 35. Issue: 1. Palermo Charles, (2007) "The World in the Ground Glass: Transformations in P. H. Emerson's Photography" In: The Art Bulletin. Volume: 89. Issue: 1. Postmodern Photography, 2008, Accessed from < http://www.kiasma.fi/index.phpid=94&FL=1&L=1> Walling R. Donovan, (2001) "Rethinking Visual Arts Education: A Convergence of Influences" In: Phi Delta Kappan. Volume: 82. Issue: 8. Read More