The Elements of Art and Principles of Design as Governing Tactics of Sight and Self

• In Event: Towards Undisciplining: Temporality, Objects, and Method in Education Research

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
The Elements of Art and Principles of Design (hereafter The Elements and Principles) are a cornerstone curricular document in school-based arts education. However, ideas like “form,” “proportion,” “value,” and “pattern” are not ideologically neutral, objective to the arts, or absent of history; nor is the idea that art can be reduced to an essentialized series of components that produce more valuable or beautiful artwork. These elements and principles, we argue, are also metonyms for making more moral, idealized, and productive kinds of people (Popkewitz, 2018). This paper “undisciplines” art education by examining how these power dynamics still haunt arts education today, suggesting possible ways to resist and reimagine these governing tactics, and offering areas for further consideration for arts educators and scholars of arts education.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Drawing from critical scholarship focused on hauntology (Derrida, 1993/2011; Author , 2023; Yoon & Chen, 2023), we argue that The Elements and Principles are haunted by governing tactics that assume particular dispositions and sensibilities as subjective capacities that must be developed or realized in part through the production of art. By examining works of early arts education policy makers in the U.S., as well as the elements of art and principles of design themselves, we examine the alchemy of these elements and principles (Popkewitz, 2018) to reveal how the production of knowable, sequencable curricula out of art also embodied a conception of an idealized kind of person (aesthetically “pure,” “civilized”).


Modes of inquiry & Sources
Using early arts education documents, particularly a prominent treatise on the necessity of introducing arts education in schools (Perkins, 1871), we problematize the Elements and Principles as representative of the way arts curriculum design seeks to build an “appreciation for the beautiful” as a “road to the practice of the good” (p. 38). Early arts education documents are read to examine the relationship between governing the child and institutionalization of arts education.

Substantiated Conclusions
Historicizing The Elements and Principles reveals how racializing and ableizing discourses are deeply connected with the broader moralizing aims of arts education and therefore part of a civilizing thesis of early arts education. These discourses continue to flit at the surface of art education today in the ways that classrooms, bodies, and arts curricula are ordered and disciplined. These technologies thus constitute a basis for producing differences and exclusion through arts education at the level of sight and self.

Significance
Historicizing the elements and principles of arts education highlights how contemporary appeals to the givenness of The Elements of Art and Principles risk reinscribing the aesthetic sensibility of sight and self meant to tame the “dangers” and “dangerous” populations that were constructed as threatening national unity, economic productivity, and scientific rationality, thus producing differences that exclude. By calling for continued critical examination of the discipline of arts education as historically constructed and concerned with making kinds of people, the paper calls for arts education premised upon transformative love rather than complacent acceptance.

Authors

• Emily Nott, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Christopher M. Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison