Why New Foundations?

WHY NEW FOUNDATIONS? In less than a decade we will enter the twenty-firstcentury,yet art education is creeping along as though this were still the nineteenth. While our planet is going through a communications revolution, much of art education is geared to the past. If the sole function of art education were the guarding of past knowledge, then at least it would be acting as a living museum; but unfortunately too much of what is being guarded is a mere shadow of the past. Besides, the function of art is not simply to preserve pieces of the past but equally to understand where we are going in light of where we have been. Art shares with science the capacity to explore and to reveal the unknown. From that last great school of art, the Bauhaus, we inherited a social philosophy and a sense of the dynamicsof the creative process in a social context. Yet art educators have ignored the social and educational contributions of the Bauhaus and have simplyfrozen certain aspects of that school-primarily its foundation courses-in time. But the basic Bauhaus art courses-two-dimensional design, three-dimensional design and color-are not anachronisms. They are part of a larger multidimensional structure composed of energies long ignored, energies that are now being reapplied in light of recent scientificdiscoveries. In a new multidimensional universe created by science and technology, art educators still teach shadowsof what used to be. It is about time that we placed the Bauhaus teaching into its proper twenty-first-centurycontext. It is time for new foundations in art education. wood, metal, glass,fabric-by craftspeople in a societywhere fine material goods were the property of the few. Almost a century later, in societiesrich in material goods, we artists are foundering toward the realization that our major economic base is information, which is an immaterial process of structure and communication . Objects remain needed, but the emphasis on mass acquisition of objects of quality has shifted to the need for information of quality. In a factorybuilding, sound barriers are created with white noise rather than with material substances. In advertising,information about the US. Bill of Rights is used to reinforce subliminallya ‘right to smoke’ and thereby to sell cigarettes. Is white noise a reasonable construction ‘material’?Can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? Is industry to make the sole decisions about the new aesthetics of our lives?Does not art education, if it is to have any social impact, need to work in a contemporary world, while grounding itself in the richness of its past? For the most part, art-educational changes are occurring in layered increments. Although new areas of interface between art, science and technology are sprouting up all over the world, the vast majority of institutions are only adding new media to old structures. Every decade in our century, a new medium is tacked onto an existing program. In the 1950s,printmaking was added to painting and sculpture. In the 1960s,photography was added to printmaking, painting and sculpture. In the 1970s,video was added to photography, printmaking, painting and sculpture. In the 1980s,computers were added to make a neat technological stack. In my visits to schoolsin the United States,I learned that new technology generally is placed on the bottom floor. As the base of the stack,it pushes the top-paintingthrough the ceiling. The core of the Bauhaus program involved the exploration of material objects0 1990ISAST PergamonPressplc. Printedin Great Britain. 0024-094)(/90$3.00+0.00 LEONARD0,Vol. 29, No. 2/3, pp, 165-167,1990 165 Painting, of course, is the heart of the art marketplace. Painting as a process is quite different from painting as a product. The basic painting process, with its simple manual tool, is the most direct recording means of our mind, senses and hand. The mechanical camera and the electronic computer are far more complex intermediaries between ourselves and the record, and therefore they are often less direct. The more complex the tool, the more likely that it is the product of many minds and many specialists. The uncomplicated brush, directly connected to our hand, is ideally suited to...