In praise of vagueness: re-visioning the relationship between theory and practice in the teaching of Fine Art from a cross-cultural perspective

ABSTRACT

The emphasis on textual or oral supplements grounded in objective metacognitive analysis, and drawing on theoretical ideas and concepts, is now an acknowledged part of Fine Art pedagogy. But many involved in art education would agree that there is often a problem finding a good ‘fit’ between the theoretical and the practical. I draw on my experience as an artist and a teacher of Fine Art in the Republic of Korea in order to suggest how a positive evaluation of ‘vagueness’ within the cognitive style displayed by Korean students as part-and-parcel of their cultural mindset signals the fact that they are familiar with a analogical cognitive style in which ‘the incoherence associable with images and metaphors are carried over into the more formal elements of thought’ [Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames. 1995. Anticipating China: Thinking Through the Narratives of Chinese and Western Culture. Albany: State University of New York: 124]. I relate this to the research of Barbara Stafford on analogy and suggest that developing a methodology capable of addressing the benefits of this looser, ‘vaguer’, cognitive style can strengthen Fine Art pedagogy by incorporating the analogical language of images.

KEYWORDS:

• Fine Art teaching
• theory and practice
• east-west cultural comparison
• Republic of Korea
• analogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Simon Morley is an artist and writer. He is the author of Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art (2003), editor of The Sublime: Documents in Contemporary Art (2010) and co-author of The Winchester Guide to Keywords and Concepts for International Students in Art, Media and Design (2014). His writings have recently appeared in Third Text, World Art and The Journal of Contemporary Painting. He is currently writing an introduction to modern art, and a study of the global monochrome. He is Assistant Professor at Dankook University, Republic of Korea. His contact address is: [email protected]. His artwork can be viewed at: www.simonmorley.com.

ORCID

Simon Morley http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7516-1373

Notes

1. For more on the ‘agency’ of the artwork, see Gell (1998).

2. Research in the burgeoning field of neuroaesthetics takes broadly two directions, both of which are ‘parallelism’, notes Anjan Chatterjee (Chatterjee 2011). The first, characterised by, for example, V.S. Ramachandran and Semir Zeki, tends to proceed firmly from within a framework that regards the goal of neuroscience to be the production of a more truly ‘scientific’ objective theory of art. A limitation within this aspect of the new field is its unwillingness to approach art as anything other than an affair of visual perception and questions of beauty. In contrast, a second neuroscientific approach is more interested in wedding brain research to contemporary art and theory (for example, Gallagher and Zahavi 2008). For a critique of neuroaesthetics, see Hyman 2010. In relation to the metahistory of the new field of ‘neuroarthistory’, see Onians (2007).