The closing decades of the twentieth century have seen the dynamics of globalisation bring to the fore a conflict between conformity and cultural and social diversity as some products take on a universal appearance, flavour and need (Thwaites 1998: 10). Choice becomes a credo and the desire to 'experience' collapses into consumption as consumers exercise that choice. Consumers of the arts, for example, are differentiated by desires, tastes and styles. The consequent changes in everyday practices and experiences have resulted in changes in the modes of production, consumption and circulation of 'symbolic goods' (Featherstone 1991: 11). Consumption is an "active, creative and productive process, concerned with pleasure, identity and the production of meaning" (Storey 1996: 98).
3.2. Popular Culture
A major concern of postmodernism is that of "popular culture as a serious object of aesthetic and cultural criticism" (Giroux 1988a: 19). In so doing, postmodernism promotes and affirms minority cultures and the diversity of cultural production. Mass culture, the popular media and mediums of mass communication have been anathema in the modernist context. The reality of daily life and the connectedness of education to popular culture, challenges modernist conceptions of high art, elite art or 'serious' taste. This has resulted in the development of new forms of expression including new forms of art, film and writing, and different types of aesthetic and social criticism.
The 'effacement' of the essentially high-modernist 'frontier' between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the modern, is discussed in depth by Jameson (1984). While accepting that such aesthetic 'effacement' may well offend some purists, Jameson reminds us that the shift from 'high modernism', with its emphasis on the 'cultured' and the 'tasteful', is more than a cultural occurrence. It is, he maintains, a political and economic stance based on the nature of multinational capitalism today.
What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes) at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation (Jameson 1984).
According to Giroux (1988a: 19), popular culture has brought into focus the three following issues:
- It has pointed to the ways the electronic media 'mediate' our perceptions and experience of the world;
- It has raised questions about the domain and definition of culture, challenging assumptions that the universal models of civilisation and culture reside in Europe and America;
- It has opened the way for an awareness of 'other' - the acknowledgement and inclusiveness of those vast territories of 'otherness' which include gender, race, culture and socio-economic position.
3.3. Multicultural contexts
One of the major paradigm shifts in arts education has concerned the acknowledgement of multiculturalism as an issue for consideration in education policy, curriculum design and school practice. Issues including pluralism, cultural identity, nationhood and the global community, have during the last two decades impacted in particular on the arts and social sciences in curriculum. Smith (1989) asserts that:
...the art of Western European derivation is culturally specific (and) the art education systems based on such models reflect the same particularity... Recent shifts in art education which have questioned child-centred approaches and favoured sociological and epistemological models have still failed to deal with substantive matters of the interpretation and recognition of cultural differences in form and function in art. (Smith 1989: 14)
Smith discusses the cultural foci of learning in the arts and its associations with the objects, images and events that define and give identity to particular cultures times and individuals. He questions the ways we regard and define 'art', the ways we acknowledge the work of others as art, and questions aspects of context such as the production, materials, function, value(s) and intent of art production.
These questions have become the subject of a range of international and locally based discourse, where defining issues of culture is central to discussions about education. Current curriculum discourse promotes the representation of all cultural groups within societies, their recognition, legitimation and validation through curriculum.
Discourse on the notion of multiculturalism in the arts has rightly located art making within social and cultural contexts and has identified questions such as: "What is art?", "What does it do?", "Who is it for?" and "Who are the art makers?" Dorn (1996: 18-23) states that "thinking about culture actually begins with thinking about thinking itself". Dorn asserts that "what we think is actually shaped by who we are, our experiences with objects and events in the real world and by our state of mind when we experience them". Such assertions are consistent with the view that "knowledge of the self and knowledge of the external world that exists outside our personal knowledge must be considered" (ibid). In this context, knowledge of both objects and events can only be known through "self knowledge", that is, through one's own cultural experiences.
In reflecting postmodern thinking, The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum draft statement promotes the concept of cultural democracy and social equity in education. In practice this democracy encourages pedagogical pluralism and a critical pedagogical approach whereby students are encouraged to take a variety of perspectives on an issue and to ask questions about and analyse art works, art objects and events from a range of cultural perspectives. Education in the arts which prioritises the consideration of the dynamics of race, gender, class and difference, within a cultural context, has the potential to promote critical thinkers who will inform, enrich and contribute to the broad multi-cultural nature of New Zealand society.
3.4. Inclusive Practice and The Arts
Traditional western arts education and practice has a history of marginalising and stereotyping both women and minority groups in the arts. The arts works of marginalised groups have been documented, appraised and categorised within a hierarchy of male art practice.
The art world is a constructed world, and therefore we must remember to view it as contingent and always open to critique. We must regard it as always open to expansion and revision. The canon, once defined by a certain number of men in time past, must always be skeptically conceived and kept open so that we no longer ignore the new and the different as they appear ...Today, we must allow the voices we realise were long silenced to sound: the voices of women, of ethnic minorities, of poets and musicians recognized outside the Western world, and we must make way for the untried and the unexpected (Greene 1995: 136).
This draft curriculum statement seeks to encourage approaches to teaching and learning in the arts which are more inclusive of the art making and arts works of all people. Challenges facing curriculum practitioners include the analysis of how to understand self, gender, knowledge, culture and relationships in ways that do not involve hierarchical, linear or binary ways of thinking.
3.5. Semiotics - Reading Cultural Forms
Early in the twentieth century Wittgentstein, Russell and Heidegger shifted the focus of analysis away from ideas in the mind to the language in which thinking is expressed. The subsequent concentration on language informed postmodern theory.
Postmodernism has...offered powerful modes of criticism in which various cultural objects can be read textually in the manner of a socially constructed language. In effect, by constituting cultural objects as languages, it has become possible to question radically the hegemonic view of representation which argues that knowledge truth and reason are governed by linguistic codes and regulations that are essentially neutral and apolitical. (Giroux 1988a: 24)
The meaning of (arts) language lies in its function as a system and in the subsequent systems of language usages (the synchronic - the conditions for existence of any language, and the diachronic - the changes which take place in a language over time). (Saussure, in Harris 1983). A collection of signs within a given art form might be ordered as, for example, phrases, themes and motifs. The elements involved form in their synthesis, syntagmatic relations with each other, and in turn may be represented and interpreted.
How they are interpreted, and by whom, is crucial in terms of the communication of meaning. The meaning of a dance, drama, music or visual art work is constructed, through signs and symbols, according to the social and cultural context through which the work is interpreted. For example, in particular social or cultural contexts a plagal cadence could communicate religious intent, and a carved container or vessel could evoke concepts of memory, containment, or protection.
To make meaning of the various symbols in the arts we must:
- look for the underlying rules and conventions that enable the language to function within particular arts forms;
- analyse the social, cultural and collective dimensions of arts language rather than specific data;
- explore the infrastructure of arts languages which are constructed according to cultural or social norms. These are the underlying or 'deep' structures which underpin individual meaning making.
3.6. Social and Cultural Text(s)
A text is a combination of signs. It is produced by, and reproduces, cultural attitudes. Treating the arts as a form of social text enables us to better understand the structures, symbols, and the various constituent characteristics that implicate visual, kinesthetic and aural texts with the beliefs and value systems at work within a social context. Signs and codes (for example, music notation, choreography, gesture, iconography) are produced by, and reproduce, cultural meanings and values. By unpacking the formal qualities of arts texts we are led to the discovery of new meanings which have remained hidden under the limited lens of traditional scientific models.
Texts provide a context in which other texts are understood and read, heard or seen. They reveal the processes of negotiation as genres interact and different groups of people understand a text in different ways at different times. Texts may have multiple 'readings' and a multiplicity of interpretations. Texts are rarely as they seem and often contain messages which run counter to their author's intentions. Bracey (1988) discusses the locus of meaning, in terms of the 'art work' as a 'repository of meaning'.
... meaning may be enhanced by reference to data located elsewhere - in other artworks or in the world at large - but, insofar as artworks are required to function as repositories of meaning 'in their own right', data external to them is always contingent.
and:
... meaning is not seen in artworks but assigned to them as part of the conceptual structure within which they are located. Meaning is not in the text, but in the text that attempts to account for the text (Bracey 1988: 82).
Such features, says Bracey, are "common to all contemporary criticism" (p82). Through studying the arts as forms of social text, students bring their own experience and 'reading' (a product of their own cultural attitudes) to the analysis of art works. They become critical thinkers who learn to ask questions. They do not merely accept the obvious as a given, as simply commonsense.
Texts can thus be thought about in terms of:
- textual production (sign choice and combined technical and stylistic features);
- the ways people interpret and use texts;
- relations between texts (contrast and similarity);
- the cultural conditions and contexts in which the texts were produced, used and experienced, and the effects of their use or experience.
(Davis, Mules & Thwaites: 1994)
The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum draft statement seeks to acknowledge the present social, cultural and economic climate and to be responsive to its needs. It also seeks to educate students of the arts in critical thought, in the notion of multiple realities, in how to maintain views on history, the significance of art works, and the use of technologies as a tools for the realisation of ideas. Importantly, the document adopts a postmodern stance which acknowledges pluralism, examines the expansion of cultural significance while critiquing the breaking down of barriers between so-called high and low culture.
