Page 48 - Studio International - October 1972

for tenure within the college and terrified of manufacture. The mobile studio, the itinerant in Canadian universities should be Canadian.
being found incompetent and irrelevant. Such recording truck and other schemes came out of There is, from time to time, loose talk about a
people exist everywhere, and certainly in this. Equally outside the ivory tower, a good purge of American professors. The appointment
Canadian art departments, and it is possible that deal of work with visual creativity was set up of a non-Canadian as chief curator of the Art
until their time runs out, or the institutions are with underprivileged groups in the city, both Gallery of Ontario, to replace Mario Amaya,
reformed, very little will be or can be socially and physically handicapped. was met with quite virulent criticism. Canada
accomplished. There are a great many artists We were frequently approached by, and is certainly now more confident that it has a
and teachers in Canada with ideas and ability sought out, a good many small groups in stock of talent building up which makes it less
who simply have no opportunity or power to Ontario who had no affiliation with any formal necessary to search far afield to fill academic
create the necessary structural changes in visual educational unit but were concerned to positions. In any case the more vicious
education. develop new art forms and systems. These nationalists are by and large fifth-rate artists and
It is instructive briefly to examine the OCA groups are all over Canada, as they are in the journalists more embittered by their own lack of
experiment. Instead of departments with their States and Europe — Image Bank in Vancouver, success than concerned with the impact of the
territorial rights and exclusive physical resources General Idea and A Space, for example, in States.
we designed a learning landscape, a richly varied Toronto. There is much energy of this kind in In art the impact is certainly felt. Most of the
environment through which, after an initial rite Montreal also. best young artists in Canada live part of the time
of passage — a groundcourse, a student could These various developments both within in New York (in London, Ontario, there is a
plot his route, a kind of learning path or creative OCA and further afield brought about an group of notable exceptions), and they see
track. The polarities of this landscape were attitude of mind, for many of us, which pointed showing there as being of major importance.
Concept (generating of ideas), Structure to the ultimate dissolution of the art teaching While, fortunately, they are available to teach in
(shaping and relating material elements) and institution as such, a splitting and reforming Canada they undoubtedly have problems of
Information (messages, communication, in many modules or cores of creativity — which identity. As far as I can discover New York
identity). The intellectual, spiritual and physical would be both service centres (skill banks) and styles and Art Forum attitudes provide the
support systems were provided by the Cultural creative pressure points (transactional areas). fillip to flagging art courses which are jaundiced
Probe, the Technological Probe and, never to be Some kind of organic whole, linking the with the eternal tedium of life drawing and
realized, the Interior Probe (the mystical and various agencies and units together, is likely to Bauhaus exercises.
occult, the psychological and behavioural surface in the next few years. An entirely new Another, although minor, faction in the art
fields). As for skills and techniques, we kind of 'art college' will appear, without walls in department and colleges has to be recognized.
recognized at once that to base a curriculum on a certain sense, and quite unlike the monumental This is represented by a return to the loom and
these is inhibiting when our principal concern is edifices designed in the Victorian manner which wheel. It is a sort of folksy yearning for old
with awareness and the development of mind. exist today. We can anticipate more continuity Canada, pottery, weaving, macrome and a rather
When skills and techniques are finite and can of thought on the part of the artist as teacher — spiritless Group of Seven romanticism. It is a
be systematically presented and systematically where the college and his studio need not be kind of boutique and cottage industry ethos —
acquired they can be made available in a skill alien separate worlds. We can anticipate an easy essentially middle class and mindless. However,
bank (necessarily automated to use the time of co-existence of mysticism and technology. it keeps a good many faculties in work and
creative teachers more effectively). The skill It can happen eventually in Canada, if it can feeling wanted, when they would undoubtedly
bank should be operational 24 hours a day so happen at all, because the existing institutions in any really critical situation simply be fired.
that the student can reach out and use it as the have no real roots; they are merely transplants Criticism is the last point I shall touch on. Art
need arises in his own personal development. from England and the States. There is no criticism hardly exists in Canada. Although Arts
The skill bank is, of course, a threat to many entrenched art establishment to obstruct this Canada is a superb journal and the editor, Ann
dyed-in-the-wool art teachers whose raison progression. In theory, at any rate, there is a Brodsky, does a fine job of focussing-in on the
d'être is the one-way transmission of technical very special hope for Canada in terms of visual best of Canadian art, apart from John Chandler
information or stylistic attitude; the seal training education that the present meaningless charade and Garry Dault it is difficult to think of many
routine. could be reformed, and the existing learning critics who bring tough informed criticism of
During the course of the year a long-range structures dissolved. What is likely in practice ? high quality to bear on the art scene.
planning study showed that many of us felt we I know that many people in Canada are ready This in turn affects the art colleges and fine-
should move out of the building we occupied in and eager for this change in some good sense. art departments. Their level of criticism is on
downtown Toronto and consider our full William Irwin Thomson at York University in the whole low, it is spongy and trivial, often little
potential as an interactive system, a creative Toronto is an eloquent and persuasive more than the personal stylistic prejudice of the
organism, and spread out through the whole spokesman for alternatives in education. professors. Many students at first are afraid of
community of Ontario. We envisaged a Marshall McLuhan's contributions need no tough criticism. A more total commitment to art
highly-developed communication network to emphasis. At the same time it would be wrong and much higher levels of criticism are
link groups of minds throughout the province not to indicate the intense nationalism that is prerequisites of a viable art education, and they
and to encourage mobility amongst the faculty. being expressed by many people in Canada at are elements too often lacking in the schools.
Related to this pattern was the actual this time. It is a symptom of the need for a Clearly my interest in Canadian art education
development through the year of a number of separate cultural identity free from the States is not primarily in what it is within the existing
non-institutional projects — involving real-life and Europe. It has caused hysteria and a good structures, despite the fact that at many places
design for survival groups both in Canada (in deal of cultural aggression at times. The exciting things are being done, but what it could
deep winter) and on Andros Island in the Canadian Artists Representation, which become. Canada presents a real potential for
Bahamas. These projects called for social incidentally includes many fine and talented change and is edging toward an important new
relationships to be designed and tested as well as young artists, has demanded that well over era in creative art education.
shelters, clothing, tools and methods of three-quarters of the faculty of art departments ROY ASCOTT
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