The assumption that art is a closed form of knowledge, privileged by institutions within the culture industry is as false as that other assumption which limits aesthetic education to the School. While retaining a militant advocacy for the presence of the arts in schools, one must be equally clear about the fact that artistic formation spans far wider than schooling. While making the case for the above, this essay will focus on form and ‘formation’ beyond art education. It will be argued that while we learn with art —rather than from or through art—we do this outwith the School and beyond the cultural institutions that assume a univocal definition of what art and aesthetic education should be. Here form indicates the common ground by which we define ‘art’ in its variegated—and ever-changing—definition. On the premise, art holds a deeper ‘responsibility’ to set the sources of our aesthetic education and daily engagement through visual, aural, tactile, spatial (…) forms.
So the question is: Could aesthetic education take place outside—without and outwith—the school? As here we will be focusing on what we call ‘fine art’ (which is not entirely visual, but involves convergent forms of aesthetic sensibility), another question will be: How do we engage with art as a formative activity by which we learn? Which begs a further question: What do we learn and how does this learning differ from the schooled forms of knowledge that we identify with art education?
While we seek to identify the notion of form across the commonplace and within the contexts of the commonsensical, this essay will also argue that this search is neither implied in the expectancy of an ‘urge to learn’, nor in a schematic set of behaviours by which we are somehow programmed to react. Rather, contemporary art itself has reached a point where the illusion of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art is rendered irrelevant by the fact that art has to emerge from what is often considered as non-art. Likewise what is often deemed to be non-educational is itself a far more formative activity than any assumed forms of knowledge ‘gained’ or indeed inculcated by the School or its curricular engineers. It is between art and non-art, education and non-education that this essay would develop.
Outline
Paper (January 2008 final draft)