Toward a Media History of Art and Design Education

Instructional forms function surreptitiously, as actors that help determine subjectivity. Yet we rarely think about how ordinary classroom tools actually circumscribe the ideas and practices that come across to students, let alone how these tools convey ideologies or inscribe power structures. We invite proposals for papers that scrutinize the educational media of art and design instruction critically and reflect upon their social effects—from the reinforcement of patriarchy to the modeling of democracy—in a global context. Papers might approach the topic in broad strokes; how, for example, did the advent of photo-mechanical reproduction, moving images, and sound recording transform educational practices and philosophies when these media were introduced? How has the architecture of instructional spaces literally and figuratively placed students in relation to their teachers and to concepts of agency? And what of the design of the pedagogical apparatuses—like drafting tables, blackboards, and taborets—that populate the spaces of European and North American classrooms? Papers also might address the history of specific educational forms—like the wax tablet, plaster cast, squared paper, color wheel, nude model, slide presentation, visualization software, or video lecture. What forms once ubiquitous in art and design instruction have become extinct, and why? Additionally, papers could probe the origin, affordances, and ideologies of specific exercises—like copying, model making, the conceptual prompt, the group critique, or the examination in various socio-cultural contexts. We welcome all submissions, seeking as much range as possible across historical period and geographic area.  

Session Conveners: 

Emily Ruth Capper, University of Minnesota (USA) 

Jeffrey Saletnik, Indiana University Bloomington (USA) 

Speakers: 

Barbara Jaffee, Associate Professor Emerita of Art History, Northern Illinois University (USA)  

The Diagram Within 

Marking an image with a few bold lines in order to reveal aspects of its internal structure was once as common to the teaching and practice of art history in the United States as diagramming a sentence was to a grammar school education. The practice has an early antecedent in the comparative method of formal analysis – the juxtaposition of images emphasizing stylistic difference – introduced into the discipline by late-nineteenth century Swiss-German art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. But it reached its apogee in the United States in the years immediately preceding and following World War II, in overtly expressive strategies that immeasurably transformed Wölfflin’s procedure. The extravagantly diagrammed efforts produced by American art historians at mid-century were, like the operations of the artists who were their contemporaries, products of bold and literal gesture performed on the (implied) surface of the object itself. This, as it turns out, is no coincidence. Many American artists were themselves schooled through diagrammatic exemplars used to standardize the production of good design. When the hidden logic of the instructional diagram bursts vividly into view with the art of the abstract expressionists, it lays bare a tangled trajectory of economic imperative, aesthetic virtue, and technological progress – values deeply encoded in the complementary relationship that develops over the first half of the twentieth century in the United States between the production of art and its reception – as artists, art historians, and the public embraced the idea of art as the externalized form of an inner abstract idealism. 

Isabel Bird, Harvard University (USA)  

Life Drawing and the Lay Figure: Adrian Piper’s Pedagogical Models 

This paper traces a material and pedagogical history of the lay figure – that typically wooden and small-scale manikin with movable jointed limbs – and its relationship to life drawing, a bedrock practice of art instruction. How might this relatively modest educational form stand as microcosm for larger structural issues in the life drawing class, such as the power dynamics involved in setting a pose? How do these manikins, in their tireless, articulated limbs and often non-binary anatomies, adhere to or resist assumptions around ideal or normative forms and abilities of the human body? I approach these questions by studying examples of historical and contemporary lay figures alongside a series of drawings that conflate model and manikin: the so-called Barbie Doll Drawings, made in 1967 by an eighteen-year-old Adrian Piper. At the time, Piper, a seasoned student of life drawing, was gaining an introduction to conceptual art practices at the School of Visual Arts. These drawings, I argue, call out the complicated dynamics of agency inscribed within the life drawing class and encapsulated in miniature by the lay figure; they also offer rare insight into a young artist’s processing of one pedagogical practice (figure drawing) in the face of another (conceptualism). In mobilizing Piper’s work as a lens through which to approach a wider media history of life drawing and the lay figure, I make a methodological case, more broadly, for how work resulting from an artist’s own learning processes can guide art historians when thinking critically about instructional forms and practices.  

Rebecca Sprowl, Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien (Austria)  

Comparing the Critical Pedagogies of Michael Asher and Mary Kelly  

Michael Asher and Mary Kelly created innovative approaches to pedagogy that were informed by their investigations as Conceptual artists. Their artwork as well as their teaching incorporated concepts of institutional and social critique. Working parallel to John Baldessari, Asher taught a Post-Studio Art course at CalArts while Kelly later founded the Interdisciplinary Studio program at UCLA. Like many other Conceptual artist-teachers, Asher and Kelly viewed their students as already being artists which was integral to the development of their teaching methods. Extensive group-critique in the classroom became the primary learning device in both of their pedagogies, but they took dramatically different approaches to the practice. Michael Asher conducted highly competitive critiques that focused predominantly on motivation and intention and involved the artist having to rigorously defend their work in a logical manner. Mary Kelly developed a critique method rooted in feminist and psychoanalytic theory in opposition to Asher’s that allowed students to observe external perspectives in a generous environment. Kelly’s “concentric critique” method involved a semiotic analysis, or close reading, of an artwork where the artist does not speak and instead allows the rest of the group to identify the signifiers in the work. Both artists sought to equip students with critical tools and demonstrate how critical thinking operates within artistic practice. Interviews with former students reveal their feelings about these critique methods and the effect they had on their work as artists and teachers. 

Alex Maymind, Assistant Professor, University of Minnesota School of Architecture (USA) 

IAUS: Institutionality and Pedagogy  

Writing to a potential donor in 1968, Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) director Peter Eisenman proposed that his newly formed pedagogical experiment would explore a “diverse number of subjects concerning the environment, with the hope that this experimental institutional model … can grow to become a truly ‘urban university,’ where the process of education, the students and teachers, participates directly in the activities of the city.” This definition of an ‘urban university,’ however vague, harkened back to the historical foundations of the university as a space defined solely by a set of institutional practices, and not a specific spatial context of the university as a group of buildings or a city. This paper looks anew at IAUS through an archival examination of its organizational and administrative documents and media with a vast empirical basis, in order to track the influence of post-1968 pedagogical debates on its formation and para-institutionality. As a nonprofit “nonstock corporation organized and operated exclusively for educational purposes,” pedagogy and anti-institutionality were at the core of its constitution. Documents which describe their organizational protocols, teaching practices, and bureaucratic procedures demonstrate how IAUS operated in a space between an architecture school and a commercial office, producing in effect a language game which delimited a disciplinary space adrift from architecture’s professional or service vocation. The question of pedagogy at an architectural nonprofit operating in/ of/ for the city of New York would underpin the first decade of their research, production, and critical questioning, and would lead to a number of innovative but ultimately problematic efforts in linking together urban problems, institutional legitimation, and pedagogical innovations.