The Arts and Education

THE ARTS AND EDUCATION Daryl Chin and Larry Qualls uring the past decade, traditional cultural studies have faced enormous challenges. Post-structuralism, multiculturalism, and the politicization of culture have destabilized notions of the aesthetic, and this has had consequences in the arts in terms of American social policy. At PerformingArts Journa4we have long been concerned with how the performing arts will continue to be passed on as a tradition in our culture. For this reason, we asked a number of critics, artists, and scholars to discuss the issue of pedagogy and performance for presentation in this special double issue of PAJ,which is about to enter its twentieth year. We are concerned with how artists and critics teach the performing arts (this term is extended to include film and video, as well as the traditional performing arts of theatre, dance, and music) and how they thus shape attitudes towards them. Pertinent to this are shifts in the canon, the role of the curriculum in professional training, new forms of performance studies-indeed the very function of history and scholarship in the ongoing process of artistic creation. We also are concerned with how new academic interests in "theory" have had an impact on actual performance, as artists attempt to define theoretical practices in performance. As we approach the next century, it is necessary to remember that it has only been within the last fifty years that the arts became incorporated into standardized education on the scale of at least a minor industry. In the mid-1960s, governmental funding for the arts was formalized in the United States with the establishment of the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities and the numerous state arts councils. In the universities there was a virtual explosion of interest in the arts, this resulting in the creation of new departments, divisions, and institutes of the arts all around the country. Much the same was also occurring in Canada and Great Britain. This era saw the United States on an economic upswing, with a burgeoning middle-class possessed of disposable income and an attendant interest in leisure activities and artistic expression or self-expression. The leisured members of the middle classes graduated with new degrees, such as the now-ubiquitous BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) and MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in such subjects as "studio art," "theatre," "film," to give validation to their desires and interests. 0 1 Also during the 1960s, not just the study of the arts but the arts themselves became professional, in the sense ofbeing licensed by the state. Most of the major American artists from mid-century onward have been products of professional arts training, generally in college or university settings, with the state-approved degree-the artistic license-a mark of approval and would-be passage to success, and a grant from a major public agency or foundation as the next stage, the ennoblement, if you will, of the artist's work. The model for this approach in the visual arts was the shortlived Black Mountain College experience of the forties and fifties. In theatre it was George Pierce Baker's program at Harvard. With this emphasis on the degree program, rather than atelier, studio, or apprenticeship training, the arts became the province of the credentialed. In order to create a justification for the arts-and government funding-in the English-speaking countries, the primary modes of discourse have had to stress either the therapeutic or the educational model. The idea that the arts, in and of themselves, are their own justification (an idea which animated critical discourse on the arts in the period ofmodernism from the 1920s to the 1950s) was superseded by a sociological argument. Even in the precincts of the avant-garde, there has been the pretense of utilitarianism. Thus, a performance of assumed shock value is intended to provide a catharsis, whereby the dysfunction of North American or English life can be analyzed, investigated, indulged. This social context is important to consider, for the supposedly self-evident importance of the arts as a cultural activity is not really that evident within the ideology of capitalism. In a sense, even the hyperconsciousness of modernism was...