Observation (processual and reflexive)
Imagination
Reflection
Interpretation processes and vision are influenced by experiences of images and life. It becomes clear that the concept of aesthetic thought is closely linked to Goethe’s perception process of productive imagination. When it comes to training aesthetic thought, Welsch states that visual art is particularly able to enable the subject, namely the recipient of the art experience, to have critical and practical awareness experiences that above all increase his/her perception ability. According to Welsch, art experience hones everyday perception skills in terms of aesthetic psychoanalysis. (Welsch, 1996) It is therefore essential for educational processes, explains German art educator Gert Selle (Selle, 2004), also because it is the most educational material that a person can expect of themselves and others.
The capability of contemporary art to produce and criticise awareness is a controversial issue. Umberto Eco calls artwork an “epistemological metaphor” (Lüthi, 2006), in which the creation process and the piece of art generate knowledge with
attributes of self-development and world-development. It may therefore be assumed that, if nothing else, specific forms of knowledge discovery that need to be developed from artistic thought are important for educational processes. In relation to this assumption, German philosopher Anke Haarmann writes the following about the knowledge- generating function of art since Modernism and the shift from the artwork to the aspect of artistic research:
“This shift from the piece of work to artistic research also involves a changed approach to the piece of work itself. It has become a medium of awareness since the Modernism of the 20th century at the latest. The artwork materialises knowledge and uses aesthetic experiences to enable an understanding of the world. In the field of philosophical aesthetics, Adorno, as well as Heidegger, Dewey and Bohrer, highlighted the awareness attributes of the arts. This philosophical appreciation corresponds with one of the expectations raised by art itself. After all, creating art means, initially in a general programmatic sense, using the specific means of art to explore something, to find out something about the world, society or the individual.” (Haarmann, 2011)
Artistic Thought
So how does artistic thought differ from other ways of gaining awareness and/or rationality, namely from scientific thought? This question also concerns the currently dominant style of thought, which has so far been mostly shaped by the sciences, in particular technical sciences, through which it has received social dominance. For education processes, however, it is eminently significant to become acquainted with a plurality of schools of thought and the specific natures of, but also the intersections between, these styles of thought.
In principle, it is essential to state that the artist is, as the subject, constantly extremely closely interwoven in the object of investigation that arouses his or her interest. In this process, mode and substance are inseparably fused together. The artist’s access to the world and to him/herself is therefore subjective, while the methods are inductive and synthesising. The artist thinks and acts in analogies in which his/her thoughtful art creation or artistic thought acts as creative thought in the dialectics of images and concepts, forming a somatic connection between mind and matter and corporality and intellectuality. This involves a combination of clear design, intellectual content and emotional expression in the sense of a holistic arrangement. According to the German art historian Eberhard Roters, this connection between intuition and reason emphasises non- discursive and imaginative rationality, which he also labels “reason incapable of words”. (Roters, 1971/2000)
Science instead follows the cause and effect principle. It verifies, falsifies, develops homologous deductions and uses causal consequences to reach logical answers. Its causal thought is discursive, strives to achieve objectivity and takes a deductive and analytical approach. Eberhard Roters states that the boundaries between art and science may well be sporadically blurred given that artists do indeed work with analogies, parallel reflections, metaphors and paraphrasing.
Artists instead favour the analogical comparison of the manifestations, their similarities and their differences, which they use to develop senses, perception, emotions, imagination and a phenomenologically oriented sensitivity that define their further creative processes. Roters therefore calls this artistic thought a conscious form of a holistic perception of reality, alternatively imaginal thought (Klee) or observative judgement (Goethe), a “different reason” (Roters, 1971) in which artistic thought is a form of epistemology in which creation on one hand and observative, representational thought on the other hand respectively correspond.
The artistic experience that is significant in this context in the form of an active process is already a reflection as a sensual and emotional perception and is active, aesthetic, constructive and singular. In terms of research as art or artistic research with the partial moments of items, methods and products, this generates knowledge and experience as sensual and physical “sensed knowledge”. (embodied knowledge). (Klein, 2010, 7)
Project art, which, according to Haarmann, increasingly focuses on the generation process of art in artistic research, emphasises the process character of research and the productive character of the development of awareness and prefers the rejection of the investigation of individual media in favour of “topic-oriented research practice”, which achieves an interweaving of the production and mediation processes, as a significant characteristic of modern aesthetics. Thought is formation and creation that use productive momentum to achieve analysis and positioning in an aesthetic production-related manner and that take a varying, fragmenting, rearranging and decontextualising approach. In reference to the statement that thought is formation and creation, Joseph Beuys informs us that this is particularly relevant to artistic thought, which uses the specific means of art (Haarmann, 2011) to carry out research.
Haarmann’s explanation of project art displays clear parallels to the development of the concept of art education that I am investigating with a number of other colleagues (see Buschkühle and Urlaß) in education and research in terms of its educational potential. We have expanded the model of aesthetic thought, which particularly favours art experience, by adding the individually active components of design as an art experience or artistic activity:
Observation (processual and reflexive)
Imagination
Reflection
Creation (a concept of art education)
In the art project, which, as previously mentioned, comes very close to the intentions of project art, the aforementioned components, namely artistic thought, are trained in terms of the non-linear three-step principle of research, construction and transformation. As I have attempted to show in this presentation, this process encourages the students to explore self-controlled exposure processes that provoke their own questions, own choice of media, own processes and own designs as forms of self-positioning in their artwork. Only on this basis can a form of art education that holds the educational potential for artistic thought using competent artists, who must also be competent educators, in education processes both in and outside of the school environment be legitimised.
Emmanuelle Guth: “Vorhang” (Curtain)
Emmanuelle initially uses drawing to examine the constellation of man and space in a variety of museums in the German city of Karlsruhe over a long period of time. An essential element of this investigation is the rapid recording of principal basic structures of human bodies in exhibition rooms. Formal-aesthetic aspects of presentation related to the section in question and the questions concerning arrangement and composition that arise as a result also constantly play a role in her sketches. The collection of several hundred sketches that has resulted from this work has not, however, prompted her to take the subsequent presentation examination. Instead, she is, relatively suddenly and unexpectedly, starting to search for new motifs that she can gather during her intensive perceptive interaction with a room at the university. Over a period of several months, this room in the Department of Elocution and Speech Training, which also contains a small stage with a corresponding curtain system, will now form the pivotal focus of her self-exposure in a foreign context that she is very gradually exploring, initially by again drawing approaches, then by using photographic examinations and then, at a later point in time, by working with video.
Fig. 1: Emmanuelle Guth: Process sketch from portfolio for the critical course of the project. Karlsruhe 2002.
This process again results in hundreds of observations concerning spatial structure, relationships between light, shadows and colours and objects and materials, which she is documenting in the form of photographs in her research journal. These are joined by critically reflecting texts that accompany the process and clearly depict all the intertextual complexity of the research process, whilst also identifying the line of thought and action, which develops into a rhizomatic network of perceptions, reflections, imaginations, recollections of images stored in the memory, everyday aesthetic experiences, research on historic works of art (Menzel: “Das Balkonzimmer”, 1845) and referring back to and taking a new approach to (scientific) texts that seem essential for the investigation and the individual production of meaning accompanying it.
Fig. 2: (Abb. 2) Adolph Menzel: Das Balkonzimmer. (The balcony room) 1845. Oil on cardboard. 58 x 47 cm. Alte Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.
(Abb. 3-6) Emmanuelle Guth: Vorhangsaum (Curtain hem) in room 006, building III. Videostills. Karlsruhe University 2002.
A consolidation of research takes place with regard to the necessity of establishing a transformation towards self-positioning in an individual’s own piece within the framework of his or her artistic project work (see fig. 1). The sketch of the aesthetic-artistic research process displayed here also depicts the difficulties, crises and interruptions occurring during the process. Emmanuelle Guth does, however, ultimately succeed in developing the essence of her spatial mapping that is important to her. The stage curtain itself and the way it plays with light and shadows and moves with the air is increasingly becoming the focus of her attention. The student ultimately reconstructs her perceptions by artificially creating the curtain movements using a wind generator and adding stage projectors that produce the play of light and shadow. Real perceptions of the moving curtain are artificially constructed in the piece through the use of technical aids. Nevertheless, the artificiality on the video documenting this process does not seem to be an obstacle to the viewer’s perception.
Fig. 3: (Abb. 7-9) Emmanuelle Guth: Vorhangsaum (Curtain hem) in room 006, building III. Videostills. Karlsruhe University 2002.
The tension causes this ‘perception model’ to crystallise into what is almost a meditative and contemplative perception experience for the viewer. The aspects of artistic thought that are developed closer to the forefront can be taken from the research process presented here, which is initially based on intensive observations, self-involvements in the surrounding environment that perceive using all of the senses and appearing imaginations that anticipate upcoming situations or reactivate things past and essential biographical aspects as memory pictures. In addition, the self-controlled exploration of reflections is critically considered before initial design ideas that ultimately form the concentration in the piece develop from the process of perception, which is always also an interpreting process in which meaning is constructed.
In reference to the research process that I present here, the art educator Gert Selle writes: “I consider the reflective and intriguing experience of experimenting contemporary art to be a basic lesson in raising awareness and perception of the present and the potential future. It is the most didactic material that I know, the clearest and the most disconcerting, yet also the most brittle, that a person can expect of themselves and others.” (Selle, 2004) The philosopher Wolfgang Welsch notes: “Hidden semantic layers are often brought to light when it comes to aesthetic psychoanalysis. I like to refer to this process as a process of ‘aesthetic psychoanalysis’ that is not only carried out on individuals, but also on artefacts, on crystallised history. The artistic work penetrates into historical layers of the items, into hidden symbolic meanings and into latent emotions of joy or horror. This requires subtle sensitivity on the part of both the artists and the viewers. (…) Such aesthetic psychoanalysis also seems to be one of the most productive approaches of contemporary art. As if they were in possession of sensors and probes, the pieces of art penetrate into both architectural image layers and our mental and psychological pictorial layers that were imprinted on our minds in a family and social setting during our childhood and provided models and patterns that have defined us ever since. One example of this that comes to my mind concerns the basic images of men and woman, sexuality and ideal coexistence that we consider to be a matter of course. Such in-depth images are often effective and compelling, above all in the case of the unconscious. Methods of aesthetic psychoanalysis expose such images and enable them to be edited and amended.
From this point on, we no longer need to bask in their unconscious radiance and dance to their tune for life.” (Welsch, 1996)
Christina Mann: “Madonnenforschung” (Research on Madonna)
The research journal that I have presented in its entirety displays Christina Mann’s intensive visual exploration of the image of a female saint. The journal contains a collection of photographs of Christina Mann’s own sculptures, photographs of depictions of Madonna in architectural contexts that she researched, historical portraitures, newspaper cuttings, images of works of art, texts, sketches, leaflets and experiments with materials. This leads to the creation of an intertext that acts as a “method for handling images” or an “atlas” (Busse, 2009) that attempts, according to Aby Warburg, to visually capture existing
cultural meaning contexts and to create new versions of such contexts. Christina Mann’s detailed research into a motif is, of course, not carried out as a linear process of searching and finding, as is suggested by the use of a research journal, but as a meandering and ramifying process. With its specific arrangement controlled by the student, the journal does, however, almost possess the attributes of an individual work because it requires, based on the individual elements stuck into the book, consistent anticipating and controlling consideration when it comes to the entire context and the reading process of the recipient. Rather than containing what was previously a somewhat ‘wild’ compilation of material, the journal now presents its contents in a spatial sequence and acquires explicit attributes of meaning throughout the creation process.
Fig. 4: Christina Mann: Excerpt from the project portfolio on “Research on the Ma- donna”. Karlsruhe 2002.
Fig. 5: Christina Mann: Excerpt from the project portfolio on “Research on the Ma- donna”. Karlsruhe 2002.
Fig. 6: Christina Mann: Excerpt from the project portfolio on “Research on the Madon- na”. Karlsruhe 2002.
The main focus of the student’s interest seems to be a visual clarification of the terms “original” and “copy”. Where this piece of work is concerned, the methodology of artistic thought is primarily presented in terms of the creation of artistic analogical forms, motif- based shifts in context and processes of estrangement, which the art historian Eberhard Roters describes as “an analogical comparison of the manifestations, their similarity and their discrepancy, which influence our senses, our perception, our emotions, our imagination and our phenomenologically oriented sensitivity and use this to draw their creative consequences”. (Roters, 1971, 116) The aesthetic-artistic penetration into the ‘basic question’, which generates interesting analogical forms and a wealth of variation using intensive motif research and the individual’s own artistic and sculptural experience, becomes clear and the artistic thought process ultimately materialises in the coordination and combination of the texts.
Fig. 7: Christina Mann: Excerpt from the project portfolio on “Research on the Madonna”.
Karlsruhe 2002.
Wanda Sprenger: “Die Braut und das Freiburger Bächle“ (The Bride and the Freiburg Brook)
Wanda Sprenger’s artistic work has been revolving around the question of female identity for quite some time. She completes her work on the shifting of the boundaries of intimacy and publicity in the form of a variety of performances both within the University and in public in the city, for example by walking through the city centre of Karlsruhe in Germany,
with a portable wardrobe and wearing lightweight and elegant summer clothing in wintry weather. She also uses the portable wardrobe as a changing room, which enables her to instantaneously change into different pieces of clothing whilst on the move, regardless of her location, and to create constantly changing female appearances. This activity, which contrasts female identities and role patterns that are precast by the media and personal intrusions into such identities and patterns, may sometimes be reminiscent of the strategies used by Cindy Sherman and Valie Export.
Fig. 8: Wanda Sprenger: “Pregnancy”. Day and night project lasting several weeks during her pregnancy in the painting studio of the Arts Institute Karlsruhe University of Educa- tion 2011.
Nevertheless, it is not deductively deduced from knowledge concerning these female artistic positions, but instead developed inductively from the logic of the student’s own artistic thought. Wanda Sprenger’s performative work searches for personal self- exposure, yet also questions and investigates this concept of the self. This applies to the female role model of the cooking mother who cares for others and caters to their physical well-being or the motherly cook, creating a communication situation around her open fire, that Sprenger presented on the University campus and elsewhere and to her hazarded depiction of the bride whom a priest marries to herself in a celebratory wedding ceremony. It also applies to the performance of “Freiburger Bächle”, which has an effect
on every single viewer. It boasts a title that conjures up a false sense of homeliness and has a content that presents a heavily pregnant woman wearing wedding dresses and high- heeled wedding shoes who is noticeably sinking into a wintry city runnel and successively removes a piece of her soaking wet clothing every time she ‘dives’. By shifting everyday contexts, the intimate sleep process becomes an event that is open to the public, while preparations for the birth of a daughter become a public university art event when Wanda Sprenger moves into the painting studio in the Art Department for 5 weeks, where she sleeps, cooks, takes baths, entertains guests and welcomes visitors. last but not least, during an artistic work trip to Civitella d’Agliano in Italy, a baroque church transforms into the venue for a baptism performance. In Wanda Sprenger’s pieces of artwork, art and life enter into a new alliance and are examined with regard to their mutually beneficial and vexing contents due to “inner necessity” (Sprenger).
In her performances, Sprenger likes to work with cross-fadings of moving and still images, filmed material and actual physicalness and concreteness. This causes linear narrative patterns to be carried over into different tenses and narrative forms, past experiences and times gone by to be retrieved into the current and active present and past, present and future to become scattered.
Fig. 9: Wanda Sprenger: “The Bride and the Freiburg Brook”. Video still of the perfor- mance as a pregnant bride in the Bächle in Freiburg. Freiburg/Breisgau 2012.
The concept of Artistic Education
The concept of Artistic Education is an advanced teaching and learning method developed in more than 20 years in Germany. (Buschkühle, 1996/2001/2007/2009/2017; Kettel, 1997/2001/2004/2009/2016; Regel, 2001/2004/2008).
Current practice in the teaching of art in Germany is predominantly tradition- oriented. All too rarely does it handle the theme of contemporary art, instead it continues to prolong, in isolation, the artistic techniques, procedures and processes in a deductive and imitative fashion. This approach to teaching art is based on still operationalized behaviour of pupils in the input-output process of a linear-causal teaching didactic. Here, teaching continues to be dissected didactically. Complex processes of artistic thought and action are broken down into partial elements, which also establish the relationship of the subject to himself and his respective learning object as analytical-dissociated. This is also often accompanied by a copying aesthetic or image-believing “as-if” didactic which leaves the pupil-subjects inactive, devoid of experience and adopting the “play dead” reflex (picture 2). Despite all the criticism of Pisa and its neglect the investigation of the aesthetic-artistic aspect, moral and emotional intelligence, and its highly normative orientation on the economic concerns of neo-liberal economic ideology by the OECD, this form of teaching of art and its pupils would certainly come off just as badly in an investigation extended to cover this.
The conceptual design of artistic education therefore requires art instructors to be artists. They must see themselves as educators and mediating artists as well as the necessity of developing competences in existential creative processes, i.e. in the context of questions concerning the art of living. (“Philosophie der Lebenskunst”). (Schmid, 1992)
The development of creative competence and imaginative skills are general education objects in the art work of students. Problems arising from a difficult beginning, from continuous motivation and self-motivation in times of creative crisis as well as problems stemming from failure and a new beginning are essential moments in art work which students have to experience in order to stand their ground in their later profession. The ability to let it flow, the creative dealing with shortcomings and difficulties, the courage to cause disturbances and interruptions and stay on course, the ability to assert oneself or to let one’s attention wander, the tenacity to pursue self-imposed and newly defined goals. This list is completed by social competences such as empathy which is more than necessary when it comes to working with other people and dealing with partner organisations, institutions and involved interest groups.
At this point the most important aspects of the concept will be briefly outlined in order to clarify the integration of art project work in the concept of Art Education in the culture of learning and teaching in schools and universities.
The concept is based on the following paradigms:
It appreciates art as art (historical, social, cultural contexts);
It relies on modern art, contemporary art including an extended understanding of art and work as well as historical art;
It promotes Art Education as an advanced learning method which sees itself as art in an extended sense and also as an artistic and art-analogue process including aesthetic education (promotion and development of sensual-vivid perception, thinking and feeling for the beautiful and the authentic);
Production, reception and reflexion as alternating art or art-related activities in the area
of art and creation.
Aim:
acquisition and perfection of artistic, creative and aesthetic competences;
Children and young adults: assistance in value-based orientation and in the exploration of an individual sense of life;
Art classes as a laboratory for the development of competences, intradisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary integration into the entire school culture;
Artistic activities in a broader sense as a productive and receptive basic qualification which can be learnt by everyone with a view to achieving a decent, fulfilled and successful personal life and contributing to the creation of social and cultural conditions within the meaning of the art of living (Schmid, 1992/2000; Marr, 2003);
Art and artistic activities as a form of productive life and world experience, world conquest and modification of reality in their own right which involves senses, emotions and the mind (Regel, 2004).
Characteristics and perspectives of Art Education:
Art Education develops forms and contents of art didactics as art in a theoretical and practical sense;
Art teachers themselves must be trained artists in order to encourage artistic processes in class and also follow the process in an adequate manner;
Art education is based on an art concept where an extended and non-normative notion of art is defined which not only includes art and aesthetisations of every day life and the media, but also phenomena, questions and problems arising from the world students face today.
Societally important education objectives:
Building the capability to position oneself as an individual in art education;
Training mental flexibility and orientation skills of an individual in art work;
Promoting the responsibility of an individual in art work;
Developing the ability to achieve democratic communication as an expression of critical faculties through differentiated perception performance and independent formulation of statements;
Mobilising individual initiatives.
Methods of art education:
Work and process-related creative activity, projects and workshops;
Successive and developing theme-oriented work based on perception and creation;
Immanent interdisciplinary approach with regard to the adequate work form chosen for an art project;
A specific project form embedded in the form of art projects and having an influence on
other subjects;
Interdisciplinary art projects with a narrative and media character where traditional and new media trade in mutual inspiration (Buschkühle, 2001);
Change of paradigm also with regard to dealing with electronic image media and turning again to physical experiences in performative processes.
Educational-methodical implications:
Art classes where aesthetic-artistic research concepts are experimentally tested, invented and further developed and where new perspectives for formal and non-formal art mediation are provided can be considered a continuation of art.
The scope of possibilities offered by schools and classes can be determined in an artistic sense and it may also be extended beyond the school walls in order to enable students to intensely deal with themselves and with the surrounding societal reality.