THE NEW IMAGE WORLD

As Sontag noted, reality has always been interpreted through images. Painters and sculptors have used art forms to create public manifestations of their understandings of human experience. Traditionally, observers of these works reached their own understanding in a dialogue between felt experience and interpretations of experience represented in the work. In the 20th Century, however, the function of the image has departed from tradition. Images are now ubiquitous: where once one traveled to a gallery to see an image that made a cultural statement, now hundreds of images are stuffed into our mailboxes, and an incessant stream of images are available on television. These contemporary images carry conviction: every photographic or televised image appears real, in the sense that the photograph is a chemical tracing of a real visual array. The completely unreal script, staging, lighting, composition, and editing that help fabricate these images are concealed beneath the surface and are rarely perceived. 

The third departure from tradition is crucial or educational analysis: the content of contemporary images has become bizarre, aggressive, and intellectually reactionary. An observer for THE NEW YORKER (1982) listed three hundred titles of movies, games, records, video, and television she observed in 24 hours; among these were 

Videogames: Communist Mutants from Space, Shopper Command, Megamania, Night Stalker, Laser Blast, Gangster Alley, Suicide Mission, Sub Hunt, Rip Off, Berzerk, Demon Attack, Star Strike...

Toys: Masters of the Universe Battle Ram Mobile Launcher, Masters of the Universe Skeleton Lord of Destruction, Master of the Universe He-Man Most Powerful Man in the Universe...G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Mobile Missile System (MMS) with Removable Missiles You Elevate and Swivel....

Movie Title: "Creepshow,"  "First Blood,"  "Brimstone and Treacle,"  "Dawn of the Dead", Friday the 13th: Part 3," "Funeral Home,"  "The Slumber Party Massacre..." (p. 37)

Cultural content like this, and its associated images, is disturbing for its violence, militarism, xenophobia, nihilism, escapism,  anti-humanism, and other characteristics. When these considerations of image-content are combined with a recognition of image-ubiquity and image-conviction, the reasons for being disturbed increase tremendously.  When content such as this is pervasive and convincing, ¹ the image comes to play a role that is qualitatively different than its role in earlier times. Instead of simply being available to the interested observer, images are a compelling social force, cultural objects that seem like a natural part of social reality.

For educational purposes, the most important aspect of the image world is its effect on observers. There is much reason to suspect that patterns of human understanding have been dramatically altered by the culture of images derived from photographs. Barthes (1981) argues that, in contemporary society, we have come to "consume images rather than beliefs" and Sontag (1977) notes: 

The powers of photography have in effect de-platonized our understanding of reality, making it less and less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. (p. 179)

The hypothesis that both Sontag and Barthes put forth is that contemporary thinking as well as contemporary culture has become dominated by mass-produced images. Implications of this development for human cognition are numerous: there is so much less that the mind can do with a pre-fabricated image than it can do with the "non-sequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity" (Said, 1983, p. 185). An experience stored in memory can be revisited, analyzed, synthesized with other experiences, and abstracted into an infinite array of personal mental images. A photographic or video image, on the other hand, is concrete, fixed, and non-malleable. The thinking subject can evoke from memory this kind of image for contemplation, but in so doing the subject also becomes the prisoner of the image and its fixed set of meanings. When these meanings are of the kind described, a major disservice to educational development has been accomplished.

The Educational Response

Through the power of Elfland's (1976) description of "the school art style," has been clear that typical school art programs create a cultural world of their own. This cultural world typically includes an excessive preoccupation with materials, holiday art, and an aesthetic view restricted to Nineteenth Century European painting and expressionism. Products of this culture are typically materialistic, conventional, and derivative of reductionistic artistic thinking (for example, an overly dependent emphasis upon the design elements). Rather than conduct a rigorous critique of traditional art curricula, what is important to note is simply that the traditional art curriculum is not the kind of curriculum that helps learners deal with contemporary visual culture. Neither a survey of traditional fine arts media nor a sensitivity to line and shape will help a learner make sense of, say, the rock video phenomenon. Perhaps the traditional fine arts curriculum offers a noble alternative by offering chances to create expressive images as alternatives to the image world? This is an attractive argument because it implies that traditional art education helps set free an unspoiled sensibility. But is this true? Some of the most perceptive critics of this century have argued that self-expression is not an intrinsically valuable activity; it may simply be re-presentation of unanalyzed cultural material taken in by artists (Benjamin, 1979; Adorno, 1982).  A fourth-grader, for example, may draw "G.I. Joe" in action after he/she has played with the toy and seen the commercial. This activity of creating the drawing is an expression of what is on the child's mind, but it is not self-expression in any meaningful sense of the term. It is an expression designed by an advertising agency. Activities that purport to be self-expressive may only add to reification (i.e., making the illusory seem real) of the image world, and thus, preclude greater contact with the world of lived experience.

What might art education look like if it were responsive to the contemporary image world? It is clear that this art education would need to produce alternative images rather than reproduce existing ones. It is also clear that this art education would need to discuss morality, social conditions, and ways of knowing as much as it would discuss forms and colors and techniques. Because of the overwhelmingly violent nature of popular culture, there is a danger that this critical/moral approach would degenerate into preaching and censorship, as occurred in the early days of motion pictures. In the last twenty years, however, there has been substantial progress in critical methodology (consider, for example, the sophistication and rigor of semiotic film criticism), and this progress gives ample reason to believe in the feasibility of critical/moral dialogue in art education. 

Three Proposals for the Curriculum  

There are three kinds of images to which art education could productively turn its attention: the pervasive, the invisible, and the possible. By pervasive, I mean the image-world of contemporary North American culture as discussed above. The invisible images are those that this image-world intentionally or unintentionally leaves out, such as images of the third world as seen by third world artists. The possible are those images that students can create once they have understood processes of representation and are freed from conventions and stereotypes.

There is a kind of development that needs to take place in the art curriculum for each of these kinds of images. The first is development of critical programs. Criticism can help learners understand the means by which images convey their message as well as the kind of cultural consciousness that must exist for images to remain influential. Critical methods that attend to both the image and the observer, as they interact in the cultural context, are historical and semiotic. Historical criticism (Jagodinski, 1983b) attends especially to the "world view" of the observer at a specific moment in history and under specific social conditions. Semiotic criticism attends to the "cultural codes" used by observers to understand signs in a visual work (Andrew, 1976). Formalist criticism, commonly used in art classes, is less adequate; it restricts itself to formal relations in the work and de-emphasizes the content of the work and its socially-constructed meaning.

As an example of how these methods might be applied to popular images, consider the varnished photograph, or decoupage. This was a very popular art form in the lower-class district high school where I taught, and I recently saw several booths of them at a state fair. The technique is to singe a piece of wood so as to make it look rustic, glue on a photograph, and then varnish or shellac the entire piece. The content of the photograph is often sentimental; a ship at sea, a misty landscape, two lovers on a beach. There are, as well, the bizarre scenes of science fiction heroes dragging maidens off into red sunsets. What do these images mean? Historical criticism might raise questions about the significance of the technique. Why is singed wood attractive? Why is a plastic-like surface perceived to be enhancing? Is there a contradiction between these two effects? The historical critic might come to see the decoupage as a meeting ground of cultural contradictions: the simplicity of the old and the compulsion of the new. Experience is idealized in the form of a sentimental image framed in a mythical past, and this aesthetic object is then covered over with a plastic gloss to give it contemporary credibility. The resulting object is a symbol of yearning for other worlds without demonstrating any critique of the existing world. In the view of aesthetician A.S. Vazquez, mass involvement with art like this constitutes a kind of false-consciousness, a condition in which people "share the spiritual poverty and mystification of human relations and values" (1973, p. 258). Vazquez's cultural pessimism is redeemed somewhat by sociologist's Dick Hebdige's (1979) view that subcultures of mass society (e.g., Teddy Boys, punk, reggae, etc.) have the capacity to dramatize social issues and challenge the social status quo. From these two positions, we may derive the concepts of reactionary and progressive trends in popular culture, where the decoupage is reactionary and reggae music is progressive. These analyses are of course meaningless without confirmation at the level of individual human experience, which is precisely what historical criticism seeks to accomplish.

Historical criticism asks questions about the viewer's experience as well as about the object. It asks us to explore why we respond in the way we do. Do we want to watch violent police shows, or are we merely conditioned to accept their images of masculinity and heroism? Do we really need to cover a piece of wood with plastic, or are we simply intimidated by the pervasiveness of plastic in advertising culture? Criticism, then, begins with an analysis of the object but ends with an understanding of personal experiences, values, and social attitudes; what Jagodzinski (1983a) calls making the unconscious conscious.

A second new task for art education is to make the invisible visible: the present students with images of contemporary life not found in the mass media. Images from other cultures (as opposed to images of other cultures, as in National Geographic) can provoke a shock similar to the culture shock of travel. For the learner who is open to new ideas, this shock can be rewarding. There is something refreshing about discovering that advertising is not as prevalent in all societies as it is in ours or that friendship or other positive values are especially prized in certain places. By placing images from outside the western mass media in the curriculum, we restore the image to its original role as mediator and stimulator of thought rather than as definitive controlling force. I have found it useful to contrast mass media and alternative images for students, such as a Western-produced tourism film on Somalia produced with Somali participation, images of women as portrayed in the mass media and images of women produced by feminist video artists, or network "white papers" on schools and documentaries on schools as seem from the student's point of view. In each case, the obvious differences in interpretation between the two presentations highlight the selective and value-laden nature of any media presentation. This removal of absolute authority from the image encourages students to re-investigate experiences that images purport to interpret. The third task of new art curricula is to encourage students to carry their dialogue between experience and representation into their art work. After critiques of the image world and exposure to less visible images, it should be clear to students that authentic interpretation of experience through art is problematic. The problematic nature of art is challenging though also exciting. Students can investigate  the contemporary artist's search for means of effective representation. How effectively do different artists convey new information, rather than add to the stockpile of redundant images, and how well do they involve viewers actively, rather than confine their cognition? Students will come to realize as the contemporary artist does, that personal experience must be continually re-examined as a source of authentic images. How do I see my community? What are my feelings about friendship, love, family, or conflicts I read about in the newspaper? For each category of experience, it is possible for art teachers to present a range of images that deal with that category in different ways, and it is possible for students to produce alternative images in their work. The dialogue between image and reality thus achieved makes possible and educationally productive kind of thought rather than a stultifying one.

In asking art education to look critically at pervasive, invisible, and possible images, I am essentially building on a cognitivist approach to curriculum reform. To see the world as well as we can, we need to open the windows all the way and draw the blinds of the image world. The view outside makes this effort worthwhile.

 ¹ It may be rightfully objected that toy and video games are not derived from photographs and therefore do not carry the photograph's quality of conviction. It is quite obvious, however, that best-selling toys do build their popularity on dramatizations provided by television (G.I. Joe) and movies (Star Wars). Similarly, television commercials for video games typically portray the space invaders, or whatever the content, and three-dimensional representations, even though the games themselves consist of small dashes, crosses, etc. Thus, it is evident that a background layer of photographic images does add conviction to media such as toys and games.  

Dan Nadaner is an instructor in the Department of Art and Design at California State University at Fresno, California. He has an M.F.A. from U.C. Berkeley and B.A. from Harvard University , He is a Professor of Art, teaching courses in drawing, painting, and art education at . He has exhibited widely in California and has been Artist-In-Residence in Yosemite . In addition to being a practicing artist he has published numerous articles on painting and art theory.

References for Dan Nadaner's article

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  Hebdige, D. (1979). Subculture: The meaning of style. London: Methuer
  Jagodzinski, J. (1983). A critque of Elliot Eisner's Educating artistic vision. Bulletin of the Caucus on Social Theory and Art Education, No. 3.
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  Sontag, S. (1977). On Photography. New York: Delta.
  Vazquez, S. (1973). Art and society. New York: Monthly Review Press.