Autonomy, Discipline, and Integrity: Studio Pedagogy in the Contemporary British and American Art School

• In Event: Education's Autonomy: Perspectives on Locality

Abstract

This presentation will look at three conceptual pillars of studio-based pedagogy as they have emerged in British and American art schools over the last hundred years.

These are (a) autonomy, understood as an immanent and formative sphere of doing; (b) discipline, being a defined area identified in its processes and outcomes of making and knowing; and (c) integrity as that which sustains autonomy and discipline in their unique ways of being. While on their own, these words are easily construed as abstract concepts, the context for their triangulation is the pedagogy of artistic practice as it has emerged in the specific contexts of the contemporary Art School in Britain and the United States in their different contexts yet shared traditions.

Using the Bauhaus as a marker for radical change in art pedagogy in Europe, the US and Britain, one could argue that the case of the integrity of art as an autonomous sphere of understanding and knowing has become the hallmark of studio teaching (Wick, 2000). It is worth noting how art schools in Britain and the United States have been influenced by the modernist turn in European art schools, while at the same time they took different routes to modernism per se. Therefore, the Bauhaus example is not isolated. But it is also thanks to the Bauhaus that in Britain, Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton’s pedagogical revolution gave rise to the Basic Design Movement which developed the Foundations course (Yeomans 1987), while in the US, the pedagogies developed in Black Mountain College radically challenged the American art school (Duberman, 1974; Harris, 1988; Baldacchino 2014). Running in parallel through their shared yet different histories, these two examples reveal how autonomy, discipline, and integrity have come to form the very basis of art pedagogy.

While the history of influences and traditions remains essential to how one understands this common underpinning, here I will use this context to focus on the specific role that autonomy plays both in the definition of artistic disciplines and how these disciplines regard their formal and academic integrity as forms of distinction in their own pedagogical autonomy – both between artistic disciplines themselves, and in terms of the specificity of artistic practice.

This presentation will argue that a triangulation between discipline, autonomy and integrity delineates a concept of autonomy in education that emerges while at the same time accentuates how autonomy itself is a plurality of possible senses. Through Black Mountain and the Basic Design Movement, one identifies situations and meanings which gave rise to the idea of autonomy as a wide horizon on which pedagogical practices are distinctly multidirectional. To do so, some focus will be given to aspects of studio pedagogy which include (de)construction, formativity, emancipation, ignorance, unlearning and indirectness. It will also provide concrete examples of how autonomy, discipline and integrity carry specific meanings which, from the experience of arts pedagogy, one could deduce parallel and other possible forms of reflection on the wider sense of education in its basic processes of teaching and learning.

Author

• John Baldacchino, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author