Creative Grammar and Art Education
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Introduction
Grammar is a word associated with the rules that govern language and its related pedagogy for articulating types of declarative knowledge. It can also refer to the organizational structure of practices and their related forms of knowledge, as described here by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Essence is expressed in grammar. . . . Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”1 Wittgenstein’s remark about theology can be generalized to visual art, and, by extension, to the grammatical structure of art education.
The grammar of creative practices is described by George Steiner as the “articulate organisation of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when it communicates with itself and with others.”2 Steiner’s description of creative grammar is consistent with Lev Vygotsky’s comment that “art is the social within us, and even if its action is performed by a single individual, it does not mean that its essence is individual,”3 a remark which echoes Wittgenstein’s that “essence is expressed in grammar.”
If artistic essence is expressed by creative grammar, this would suggest that art education needs to account for appropriating and articulating such grammar in its practices. This article argues for such an approach. It will [End Page 1] be supported by recent generic research into the grammatical structure of creative development and expert performance;4 sustained by an analysis of the performative value of creative grammar as condensed by Steiner5 as forms of accretion, omission and nihilism; and justified by extending the analogies that Gary Hagberg6 makes between persons and works of art to the capacity of different creative grammars to act as an analogy for art education as a process of becoming, in which the present stock of skills and knowledge is evaluated in relationship to its potential to sustain future flourishing. Although the focus of this article is on higher art education, the same principles apply to earlier phases. Before developing the argument in some detail, it will be necessary to discuss the role assigned to voluntary and involuntary processes in recent fine art higher education, which will then be compared to the way such processes are accounted for in research in creativity and expert performance.
Voluntary and Involuntary Processes in Art Education
Both late-modern and postmodern forms of art education play down the role of complex voluntary processes for acquiring and using a range of creative grammar. In late-modern forms of art education, this can be linked to the legacy of what Robert Weisberg7 describes as the “tension view” paradigm of creativity that identified involuntary processes or traits as the way to release latent forms of aboriginal creative grammar. Postmodern art education distances itself from this emphasis on involuntary processes in preference for promoting a narrow range of voluntary activities as forms of pastiche, irony, and critique. This is a focus on voluntary processes as an afterthought, the post in postmodernism.
The disregard for voluntarily acquired but complex forms of knowledge and skills shared by late-modern and postmodern art education can be traced back to positive nihilism and aesthetic modernism’s attempt to realize meaningful differences in order to overcome the disenchantment of modernity.8 Nietzsche thought that meaningful differences could be best realized by adopting the attitude of a superman who acts as a free, creative spirit. Early modern artists interpreted this as a form of primitive authenticity thought to reside in the involuntary processes of the unconscious mind. However, the achievements of aesthetic modernism did not flow from such aboriginal essence but emerged from “the social within us,” as recorded in the quotation from Vygotsky in the introduction. In the case of early modernism, the social within us involved an impressive synthesis of two existing visual grammars: Western creative grammar as deliberately acquired in forms of art education that developed sophisticated autographic skills as exemplified, say, in the training of Matisse; and the appropriation of non-European artistic grammar as detached from its [End Page 2] original cultural setting and meaning, and so misunderstood as a form of primitive, authentic sensibility.
The early-modernist critique of modernity that was served up as...
