new school

I'm fond of repeating Lionel Trilling's comment that pedagogy is a depressing subject for all persons of sentiment, so forgive me if I'm about to lower your spirits.  Via the comments at Artblog.net, however, I learned that ArtNews had an article last month on the Janson revision and the subject of art history textbooks more generally.  A quote:

Today, professors say, Art History 101 is a popular class, filled with students, mostly female, who think that newer media, outsider art, and their own cultures are underrepresented in their texts. These students tend to know less about history and classical mythology than the students of Janson’s era, and they are telling their professors that they feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of material they have to memorize.

And one more:

At Penn, the art-history survey class has been reworked to include not only painting and sculpture but prints, maps, photography, and cinema, “to highlight the rise of a public sphere of visual culture, culminating with TV and the Internet,” [University of Pennsylvania professor Larry] Silver says.

Certainly there's some truth to the above, though some of it seems like a bit of projection on the part of the professors concerned might be involved.  The memorization involved in art history is undeniably tedious and time-consuming, and at a moment when many students work and lack the time to devote to the task properly, it can seem like an undue burden.  While there's only so much ground that can be covered, the broadening of a survey to include more non-Western art than was generally done in the past can be worth the price of a somewhat greater level of superficiality; the sacrifice of some amount of clarity and depth can potentially be rewarded with a wider understanding of the interplay between different, often falsely separated, areas.

And yet; while I'm sure some students do clamor for newer media and outsider art, it doesn't seem to me that the typical Art History 101 course is really the place for those concerns.  What is the outsider art of Pharaonic Egypt?  Perhaps the professors should tell them that in the 12th century, Gothic architecture was the new media.  As attractive as a "visual culture" approach might be to some minds, I'm not sure it's always what students are looking for.  In my admittedly receding experience, many more students were coming to class to learn about art they had fallen in love with but never had a chance to study before.  For every cinema enthusiast in Penn's art history survey, I'd be willing to be there's a couple kids who thought they signed up for Vermeer and Chardin and got . . . maps.  I love a good map myself, but I wouldn't blame them for feeling a little cheated.

As for knowing less myth and history than previous generations, perhaps a classroom presents an opportunity to learn, no?  And while I sympathize with the pain of memorizing, it must be said that dates matter.  A lot.  It's not exactly history without them, and developing a sense of how different possibilities exist at different times, the spaces between different cultural moments and what formed them, in short the nurturing of some kind of historical imagination, is pretty much what art history has to offer at a general level, aside from the opportunity to choose between looking at pretty slides or taking a nap in the dark.  Dates and memorization may be dull, but it's with them that it all begins.

Comments

[eva lake]

Yes yes yes!

[Half Brother Clovis]

When I see "outsider art" in that context, I wonder if they're really talking about comic books, or anime. I doubt that most of today's undergraduates are into quilts. Knitting on the other hand...

[JL]

Knitting remains disturbingly popular.

I don't think they're necessarily thinking about comics or anime, but that they are working with an idea of art that is basically contemporary, or at least 20th century. Which, you know, art history intro courses aren't going to be the best place to use to explore.

And, oh - thanks, eva.

[Chris]

I'm not going to second-guess someone else's syllabus, especially in another discipline, but I don't see the point of extensive inclusion of cinema in intro-to-art-history/visual culture classes. Film as an art (or television as a communication form for that matter) really does demand a different vocabulary. There are times when it's totally legitimate to approach film from an art-historical vantage (avant-garde filmmaking by plastic artists, mise-en-scene tied to modernist architecture and applied arts), but sometimes when people who are interested in the plastic arts talk about cinema, the specifics of form (editing, sound, camerawork) get thrown out the window, and you're left with an overemphasis on mise-en-scene, framing and theme.

Am I being unfair?

I realize that this is tangential to your main point, which I agree with. I like your observation about the twentieth-century (at least post modernity) assumptions of "visual culture" studies.

[JL]

I don't think you're being unfair at all. While I'm sure there are some people who can make it work, I think you're absolutely right that dragging film into an art history class brings questions of apples and oranges. Most times, it probably would not be done well, or with a sense of film as a distinct medium.

mise-en-scene tied to modernist architecture

As you probably know, there's someone where you went to grad school who makes a specialty of this topic, and does it quite well.

[Chris]

As you probably know, there's someone where you went to grad school who makes a specialty of this topic, and does it quite well.

Indeed - I really should read Dietrich Neumann's work. I've also noticed that the Film-Architecture bug has caught on Harvard Film Archive, too, probably for Giuliana Bruno's courses.

[sarah]

"And yet; while I'm sure some students do clamor for newer media and outsider art, it doesn't seem to me that the typical Art History 101 course is really the place for those concerns."

I agree and I disagree. By its very nature, Survey is broad reaching, all-encompassing, over-whelming shit. It wouldn't be called survey if it cherry-picked some high points and moved on. With that said I don't think that I'm 100% on board with film being included in Survey courses, at least straight up Intro. to Western Art I & II. Perhaps a mentioning of the media as a form of expression during periods x, y, and z wouldn't be too bad, but actually covering the material might be a bit too much. If students are so interested in film or "outsider art" etc, then they should a) take a contemporary to modern survey course (most institutions offer them at the 2000(200) or 3000(300) level, or b) they should just take a film or modern course. Plain and simple. Art History will appeal to those who are actually interested in a discipline design to facilitate and understanding of the visual image and its contextual home in history. For those that are not intrigued or interested in sucha media...they can find another way to fulfill their arts distribution requirement. It is not the job of an Intro class to pander to students modern cyber/gaming/anime hobbies, it is the job of Intro to cover the widely held canon to art movements and periods from Prehistoric to Contemporary.