Eric Coombes
The near-destruction in the western world of a centuries-long tradition of visual education could be described – hyperbolically but not misleadingly – as having been accomplished overnight. The inherited gifts of that tradition are now being casually, ungratefully and even malevolently thrown away. In its chronologically long-range survey, What Happened to Art Education? provides the context in which the extraordinary rapidity and grievousness of this loss displays itself.
The enormity of the threat to our culture is evident to those responding to David Lee’s essay in last month’s edition of The Jackdaw. There is broad agreement that art education at the higher level has been wrecked by the jettison and denigration of traditional skills (usually by those incapable of acquiring them), and the imposition of the ‘intellectual’ in their place. This judgement is grounded in a true perception of an appalling state of affairs. But we need, in my view, to take care not to make our observations in misleading terms. James Charnley, for example, suggests that ‘[t]he way forward is to take the intellectualism out of art’. This, however, could be taken to imply that what was displaced by ‘intellectualism’ was itself without an important intellectual dimension. It might also seem to presuppose that the practice of ‘art’ as it is now generally promoted at the ‘higher’ level of ‘education’ is dominated by the exercise of intellect. Who provide the models for this exercise? Such towering intellects as Damien Hirst, ‘Professor’ Tracey Emin or Martin Creed? If intellectualism needs to be ‘taken out’, then ‘intellectualism’ must be understood as something hostile to the cultivation of intellect – as an arrogant imposture, the infantile pantomime of self-important pretence that now constitutes ‘education’ in the visual arts.
Following the recommendations of the Coldstream and Summerson reports more than forty years ago, a formal requirement was introduced for Dip.A.D. and then degree courses in art and design to include a modest element of ‘complementary’ studies, generally art history, theory and sometimes aesthetics. It is worth remembering that the devil’s work of utilitarianism, though already well advanced, had not yet reduced higher education quite to its present state of ruination; and this requirement was intended to enhance the humane benefits of art education, as education – as something of value in itself, rather than a mere preparation of students for their putative future roles as economic units in a world understood entirely in terms of commerce. (It should, in passing, be emphasized that the political context of crass philistinism in which this attitude has triumphed is by no means attributable to one political party rather than another.)
There was no reason why this provision of genuinely intellectual material (wherever the actual provision could properly be so described) would threaten the learning of traditional skills – no more than a course in, say, the philosophy or history of mathematics would hinder a mathematics student from doing mathematics. The bogus intellectualism that now prevails is a very different matter, since it has invaded and subjugated the domain of practice and thoroughly poisoned the soil in which skills were cultivated.
What, exactly, are the skills that have been scrapped? Well, in the case of painting, for example, the correct answer is the tritely obvious one: they are those required to make paintings. In what sense are those skills not intellectual, by contrast with what has displaced them? Clearly, some of the necessary operations involved have, in themselves, no significant intellectual dimension – such things as preparing grounds and so on. But consider what a level of organized complexity can be achieved in painting, even in a simple still-life, let alone in such stupendous achievements as, say, Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf. Such a work embodies an awe-inspiring exercise of intelligence. Does that not count as – among other things – an exercise of intellect? In what sense of ‘intellectual’ is this not intellectual, while gobbledygook posturing as thinking is? The uneducated find what is intellectually demanding indistinguishable from the merely confused, illiterate, pretentious or fraudulent, and may therefore suppose that the more something is incomprehensible to themselves the more they must pretend to understand and value it. And, as a few important but disregarded commentators have pointed out, a major problem of the contemporary world is that education is now largely in the hands of the uneducated.
Before moving on, I want to make one specific point about ‘skills’. Traditionally, the central ‘skill’, for all the visual arts, including architecture, and – partly in a slightly extended sense, sculpture – was that of drawing. I have added scare quotes to the word ‘skill’, not because the word is incorrect in this context, but because it may have inappropriately modest connotations, especially when applied to drawing. If drawing is a skill, it is a skill in much the same sense in which the use of language is a skill, and, like language, it is a medium of thought and not merely the technique for producing artefacts of certain kinds. This is why, before the comprehensive vandalization of art education, drawing was understood to have paramount importance, as something fundamental and indispensible. And unless an understanding of this indispensability is regained, we shall have destroyed our visual tradition, which is as much as to say that we shall have destroyed the visual arts themselves, leaving only a deposit of artefacts as inscrutable items of cultural palaeontology.
Here I merely assert this point, essentially without argument. With the editor’s indulgence, I might return to it in a future article, where I would attempt some elaboration, elucidation and justification. But I now turn to an aspect of the present situation not explicitly dealt with in his essay: the predicament of the young person preparing to enter higher education from school, wanting to pursue an interest in the visual arts, but confronted by the chaotic and hazardous wreckage of the art-school system in which help might once have been found. Deprived of life by the managerialist philistines into whose malign custody they were delivered, the mortal remains of serious and sometimes distinguished schools of art now rest in the huge charnel houses that have ousted and plundered them. Under a regime of licensed fraudulence, these bloated conglomerates often boast such preposterously vainglorious titles as The University for the Creative Arts. (What, may one ask, are the uncreative arts?)
But, it might be objected, they have no difficulty in recruiting students – do they? Well, perhaps not – no more than do any of the other entities now allowed to boast the once meaningful title of ‘university’. What is the significance of this fact, if it is a fact – in a situation where, in consequence of government policies, a university place – no longer perceived, as it once was, as a privilege contingent on achievement – has become, for nearly half of each cohort of school leavers, something like a right which it is almost compulsory to claim? It might be worth reflecting on the hugely varying levels of ability or attainment needed to gain places at these institutions, and – connectedly of course – the unprecedented magnitude of variations in the levels of well-informed esteem, or disesteem, which they enjoy within the informal hierarchy of institutions now labelled ‘university’.
Let us consider the likely path to art school taken by able young people in the past. Many children, probably most, will, if encouraged, enjoy using art materials, and often fall happily into the habit of drawing – a habit that can be cultivated, unhampered by cumbersome paraphernalia, using very modest, easily portable materials. As we grow up, those of us who develop a strong interest in the visual arts are usually, I imagine, encouraged by teachers or parents, or, best of all, both. At least, that was, I think, true for many of my generation: I feel less confident that it is still the case. Our interest in making art or, more accurately perhaps, what is not yet art – proto-art – grows along with our discovery (helped by those mentors) through reproductions and visits to galleries, of what is possible – which turns out to be even more revelatory than we had, to begin with, realized. The masters show us what is possible, but this is disclosed gradually, since the ability fully to experience what they reveal itself depends upon the development of perceptual capacities which are cultivated only through acquaintance with their works.
The particular kind of satisfaction we take in making images becomes inseparable from our sense of participating in an activity defined by the practice of the masters, not simply through knowledge of the fact that it is of the masters, but through finding that our experience of their work leads us towards an intuitive grasp of what – in our tradition – drawing is. This involves the dawning understanding – not necessarily verbally or self-consciously articulated – that when we enjoy a drawing by, say, Rembrandt, we are following the articulation of a thought of Rembrandt’s, inseparable from that particular drawing, and not merely recognizing the subject-matter. We could almost say that we follow that articulation by imagining ourselves making that drawing, and perhaps wanting to do something not the same, but in some sense equivalent, or in the same spirit. The joy that comes from any modest little successes in this endeavour engenders an aspiration, an inner voice which will not be silenced, which may ultimately deflect the young person from the path of prudence. Sensible suggestions to enter the law or accountancy are rejected, and the seduction of art triumphs over the cogently argued merits of social and economic caution.
It is still possible, though less likely than it was, for sixth formers to be in something like that state when contemplating where to go after school. But the seduction of art no longer leads them to art school (or ‘University of Blah Blah’), or, if it does, they have made a big mistake (I know of one such mistake); for they will almost certainly find themselves required to devote time and energy to what bears no discernible relationship to the difficult but rewarding activity that brought them there, but prevented from trying to do better what they actually want to do. Why would an intelligent young person animated by the joy to be found in drawing, painting and sculpture – which is still what usually leads the young to art – gladly submit to a peremptory requirement to make videos, discover a hitherto undisclosed enthusiasm for ‘installations’, or rejoice in solemn but idiotic projects under the rubric of ‘conceptual art’. What have these things got to do with the visual arts? Not only will students not be taught to draw, they will probably be virtually forbidden to engage in what can properly be called drawing – although they may well be told that photography, videos, installations and, for all I know, pastry-making, yo-yos, pub-crawls, ping pong or bouncy castles are forms of drawing.
The consequence is that, the ‘lad or lass’, to borrow some words of Augustus John’s, whose ‘soul is alight with that flame which in the young only art and love can kindle’ will, if both intelligent and well-informed, decline to enter an institution purporting to provide higher education in the practice of the visual arts. Any unfortunate enough to be misled are destined to probable early withdrawal, or to the endurance of shamelessly pretentious diseducation, to frustrated hopes and huge debts, acquired entirely wastefully. I leave it to the reader to judge whether these institutions are filled with lads and lasses whose souls are alight with that flame which, in the young, can be kindled only by videos, installations and ‘conceptual art’. For myself, I have to admit that I regard that hypothesis with scepticism.
Degree courses in art, therefore, especially in ‘Fine Art’, may enrol unprecedentedly large numbers – criminally large numbers – of students. Whether they have many young people actually studying the visual arts is another matter entirely. Indeed, one may doubt that successful art students – successful by the criteria (or whims) of the system