Page 24 - Studio International - May 1973

as an alternative to the official akademie (the unfair in relation to the other schools, and the can hardly be expected to coincide with the
usual designation for art schools in this country) State Academy's failure to produce anything of historical divisions between subjects and the
of The Hague, but its origins date back to the sufficient quality to justify its privileges only earth's annual revolution around the sun. Over
late thirties. The Psychopolis label, aggravated the discrepancy. After the riots of the past decade, the need for a structure
attached to it about four years ago, indicates a 1968, the two ministries concerned appointed adaptable to a great variety of individual
change in purpose. `Psychopolis', the slogan a committee to advise on a reform of the entire dispositions has become generally recognized.
runs, 'is the answer to Technopolis'. The system of art education. One of the few results This cannot be fully realized before the present
institute's ideologists are no longer interested in was a recommendation to put all the institutions legislation has been modified, but in the
training professional artists, but in mobilizing on the same level and under a single authority — meantime traditional boundaries can be in some
all creative forces against the dehumanizing which implies dropping the ludicrous epithet measure broken down. The ministerial
tendencies in our industrialized society. The `superior'. committee, mentioned above, has proposed a
school has accordingly become a conglomerate In fairness to the State Academy, it has had a structure so devoid of any form as to leave
of workshops available to anyone, 'artist' and few good teachers, and there were many places practically everything to the spontaneous
`amateur' alike, who feels the need to develop where the idea that Natura is not the sole desires and interests of (groups of) students.
his creative potentialities. Association with Artis Magistra would not take root. At a time However positive the recognition of individual
political action groups is warmly encouraged. not ten years past, even elementary Bauhaus variation may be in its liberating effects, we have
The only art schools authorized to offer ideas would have met with suspicion in the to guard against the danger of students engaging
`superior' instruction are the two State majority of Dutch art schools; the crisis was only in that which suits their disposition at the
Academies. The one at Maastricht is a fairly universal. The notion of 'superior' art moment and so missing the opportunity to
recent creation, but the Amsterdam State education becomes ludicrous only in the discover unsuspected possibilities — art, after all,
Academy has a long and mostly controversial context of a universal uncertainty about the is concerned with the unlikely. Besides, it should
history. Both were conceived as institutes for nature and significance of art. Indeed, without be clear to them that personal integrity does not
the final training of promising students picked a definite doctrine to which teacher and student necessarily imply originality — one may well
from the other art schools. Their 'superior' alike can refer, the idea of art education itself put other people's inventions to respectable use.
status — on university level — transpires in the becomes problematical. If personal integrity is the ultimate criterion,
freedom accorded their inmates and in the Artistic dogma in the 19th and early loth does not the individual become the sole judge of
amount of money spent on their equipment, on century was concerned primarily with the his own creations ? Many artists implicitly
salaries and on stipends. During a change of moral effects to be expected from art — with think so. By a less orderly train of thought —
government in 1965 it even landed them under beauty, edification, the hierarchy of subjects, uncertainty about art in general and their own in
the authority of a different cabinet minister from and so on. With few exceptions, it kept the more particular — many teachers arrive at the identical
the rest. The Ministry of Education, Arts and objective, elementary aspects of the visual conclusion that Art cannot be taught — the
Sciences was split up for purely political reasons medium at the level of studio recipes and rules Mysterious Something is an innate quality. All
and the State Academies were assigned to the of thumb. Consequently, art education relied one can do is teach the sorry little tricks of the
newly created Ministry of Culture, whereas all heavily on doctrines whose validity depended trade to the mediocre — genius will find its way
the others remained under the supervision of the upon the general approval of the art community. unassisted. The records of the Dutch academies
Ministry of Education. This absurd situation When it became evident that 'truth', 'beauty', of art certainly do not console them in their
was undone in 1971, though in practice nothing and other 'moral' aspects of art, far from despair : among the twenty or thirty most
much has changed — the status of the two expressing eternal laws, are very much a prominent artists in the country only a handful
`superior' institutes is still under debate. matter of particular social and individual completed their studies in any art school. This
Ever since Theo van Doesburg attacked it in aspirations, academic art education found itself does not prove that art schools are congenitally
De Stijl in 1919, the Amsterdam State Academy unable to find a new support in a scientific incapable of offering anything by which a young
has been accused of inveterate conservatism. investigation of the medium which the old artist might profit. He might be put in touch
These attacks culminated in internal dissensions doctrines had never encouraged. Moreover, for with what is going on in the art of his day; learn
and riotous interventions from outside in 1968. all its dependence upon fixed rules, and despite about his own position and the possible role of
The party in power within the institution its habit of failing to recognize it in practice, his medium in society; learn to consciously
countered by initiating a department of visual traditional art education valued individual handle a complex and immensely varied
communication and of plastic art connected creativity. The authority of 'genius' has been medium. These are legitimate requirements in
with architecture; the presence of these two an accepted notion at least since Mannerism, any profession, and nowhere else is one
`modernisms' (safely tucked away in a separate and art theories of the 17th and 18th century supposed to be such a fabulous monster as to
building) made little sense, however, in a school abound with assertions that nobody will attain acquire such a body of knowledge all by oneself.
where abstraction versus realism was still a point perfection without an innate 'Something' of They are also the requirements which art
of hot debate as late as 1971. The annual mysterious description — one is born, not made, education has been traditionally blamed for
exhibitions of students' work continued to an artist. Consequently, as belief in the old failing to satisfy.
offer the sorry sight of mutually universal doctrines declined, a cult of Instead of engaging in unbiased visual
indistinguishable portraits and landscapes in individual creativity, not a 'science of visual research, students have been required to adopt a
oils and watercolour, lacking even the slightest media', took its place. This change proceeded at particular teacher's methods, which in the worst
evidence that the possibility of investigating a vastly different pace from one artistic milieu cases amounted to learning tricks. Paradoxically,
any but the most superficial aspects of the to the next. De Stijl and the Bauhaus were it is the advocates of pure visual research who
medium had ever been pointed out to the already attempting to check the course of are, even today, sometimes suspected of
painters. Of course, the Academy might have unbridled individualism when the majority of encouraging 'insincerity' and formalism and
been left to die a natural death if it had not been their contemporaries had only begun to break pointing the way to 'easy success'. The attempt
for the prerogatives attached to its official loose. in the Arnhem 'department of monumental art'
status. For one thing, these assured it a steady The shift to personal initiative was bound to to base environmental design on exact
supply of students for whom, apparently, affect the structure of art education. If personal knowledge of visual structures has not met
financial and spatial facilities and elaborate integrity is valued above all else, room must be with universal approval. The idea that insight
equipment well outweighed a little artistic made for the student to follow his own path into the physical properties and perception
backwardness. The situation was felt to be very according to his own rhythm of growth, which of art may be used in its making still seems a bit
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