Implications of Gregory Bateson's Ideas for a Semiotic of Art Education

Abstract

This article examines how a classroom art lesson can reproduce a Cartesian pattern of thinking where creativity is represented as an autonomous act and the aesthetic is seen as a property of an art object - which also is considered to have an autonomous existence. The ideas of Gregory Bateson, as well as insights from the field of semiotics, are used to illuminate how the individual (as artist) is part of a larger ecology of relationships and how these relationships serve as the information pathways essential to the survival of the larger system. The recent work of Ellen Dissanayake is used to clarify how art, as making special, can involve giving everyday relationships (sign systems that communicate) an aesthetic dimension-which is a view of art that corresponds more closely to the ideas of Bateson and to an understanding of the aesthetic dimensions of the sign systems that we use to communicate about relationships. The conceptual categories that underlie the epistemology of the dominant culture influence the most taken for granted and seemingly straightforward patterns of thought and expression. Witness, for example, the explanations in the teacher's manual forArt Works (1989), which is part of a discipline-based art education instructional materials series: As students create their crayon etchings, comments such as the following may be helpful: You (the student) are pressing down hard onyour crayons, which will help you as you etch. Your sense of humor is being reflected in your art. (p. 47, italics added) This representation of the person as an autonomous source of agency and of art as an entity with an independent existence, which, if good enough, may be displayed for the purpose of viewing by others, carries over to the explanations that are to guide how the student thinks about the art of traditional cultures. The students are to be told that Kenojuak Ashevak is a contemporary Canadian Eskimo artist whose artwork reflects the traditions of her cultural heritage, the hunting and gathering Inuit, or real people, of Northern Canada. Her stonecut print, Enchanted Owl, was included in a collection of Eskimo art in 1960, and in 1970, it was selected for use on a postage stamp. (p. 31) The cultural epistemology that frames the student's artistic expression as autonomous and art as an entity also reframes the wide range of aesthetic expression that characterizes traditional cultures into a reductionist and modern point of view where art is an object- this time to be displayed on a postage