Rose, Karel & Kincheloe, Joe L. (2003)
Art, Culture, & Education: Artful Teaching in a Fractured Landscape.
New York: Peter Lang.
In a short space--152 pages--Karel Rose and Joe Kincheloe have a complex set of interconnected stories to tell. The story that inspired Art, Culture, & Education was that of a course the authors taught together to undergraduate honors students at Brooklyn College. "High and Low Art: Good and Bad Taste" occurred in Fall 1999, which coincided with the "Sensation" controversy. This concerned the outcry inspired by this exhibit of edgy and extreme art, particularly Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary,” whose breasts were painted with elephant dung. Controversy returned later, with Renee Cox’s “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” a photograph depicting herself, with bared breasts, as the central Jesus figure. Then-mayor Guiliani publicly criticized these works and pushed for revoking funding for the Brooklyn Museum of Art for showing them.
Rose and Kincheloe are to be credited, first and foremost, for displaying the pedagogical flexibility to take advantage of current events and integrate them into their course. Secondly, they are to be credited with producing a compelling example to follow by writing and presenting this book.
The coincidence of the “sensation” exhibit and Rose and Kincheloe’s class was mirrored by another coincidence: as this book was being prepared in late 2001 the terrorist attacks of September 11 loomed over all attempts to understand and construct political and aesthetic experience. This coincidence provided the most direct referent for their subtitle, Artful teaching in a fractured landscape.
The authors hope to draw a connection between their vision of teaching art and that of artful teaching. These two goals converge in “democratic art education,” which refutes a cultural elite’s “paradigm enforcement” (p. 54) that imposes a canon and expects passive students, as well as that elite’s hypostatization of that canon into something timeless and context-free. Kincheloe describes in contrast “a democratic aesthetic that refuses to surrender artistic judgment to an elite pantheon of arbiters of taste” where “artistic production and aesthetic evaluation become the province of everyone” (p. 55). Such an artistic teaching and learning demands “rigorous scholarship” that leads to an understanding of the power structure, the sociohistorical context, in which a work of art is produced and received.
One recurring effect of an undemocratic establishment and perpetuation of an artistic canon is racial bias. Western artistic elites have historically marginalized the racial and gender other and, accompanied by the likes of Giuliani, continue to do so today. Cox’s and Ofili’s work was berated not primarily for its form or content, but for being the works and perspectives of the Black other, particularly at a time when the mayor was engaged in a racially-charged and devisive "clean-up" of the city. The charge of continued racial bias pertains to the artistic establishment as well. Even where art from other groups has been admitted to the canon, it has had to meet White standards to be deemed worthy of this inclusion. Rose and Kincheloe claim that Guiliani reflects conservative, White-victimization sentiments that seek to turn back what few gains have been made in admitting non-Whites into the artistic establishment and other public spaces.
Another recurring theme is the challenge and possibility of postmodernism. Like multiculturalism, postmodernism works to erase the boundary between what is considered “high” and “low” art. A postmodern artistic education allows students to see the aesthetic possibilities of common experience and view with irony attempts to separate off a high, elite genre of art. Furthermore, embracing what Kincheloe refers to as “cognitive cubism,” (pp. 95 ff.) involves seeing reality as inherently multiplex. We must learn to view the world from multiple perspectives all at once.
Despite their commitments to democratic education the main voices we hear in the book are the authors', particularly Kincheloe's. The voices of the students in Rose and Kincheloe’s class, however, don't appear until over two-thirds of the way through, at which point we hear them for only two pages (pp. 112-114). (Later, Rose also includes commentary from students in a different course, pp. 128-131.) The book closes with a brief commentary by the artist Dread Scott. We get the benefit of his authentic voice without, however, seeing him tie his call for art leading to political action with the authors’ concern for education. Because of these omissions, we are left without guidance concerning the practical question we are likely to face in enacting Rose and Kincheloe’s artful teaching. How do we overcome students’ resistance to pluralistic, postmodern, artful learning? Overcoming this resistance is a daunting challenge. We cannot tell from the text if they successfully met this challenge, let alone how they did so.
In their efforts to promote engagement with the political and social aspect of artistic expression and education Rose and Kincheloe, perhaps unintentionally, marginalize the purely aesthetic. While criticizing an educational functionalism focused on job placement, their emphasis on art for social critique and political change could be accused of its own breed of narrow functionalism. Unfortunately, an appreciation of the aesthetic as such is one more element that has gone missing in contemporary curricula. Kincheloe does not provide us much ammunition in the fight to bring it back; Rose addresses an expanded notion of beauty and the aesthetic briefly, near the end of the book (p.123).
As noted, there are significant omissions to what could have been a well-developed (while not prescriptive) call to engagement in “artful teaching” and “democratic art education.” Nevertheless, this book can serve as a case study and source of inspiration to teachers and instructors, at the college or high school level, who remain committed, despite all the obstacles, to having the aesthetic and the critical hold a prominent place in their curricula.
Pages: 162
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 08204-5745-0
Reviewed by Brian Burtt, a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary interests are the role of education in political theory and the philosophy of educational research.
