Learning the Languages of Art

Abstract

What is one learning when one learns skills of making and responding to art? A provocative answer is that one is gaining facility with the languages of art. It is indeed only a metaphorical answer, because the visual arts do not involve exact analogs of, for instance, syntax and spelling. However, one can both remove the analogy and broaden the scope by speaking not specifically of languages, but of symbol systems, language being the most familiar example. This is the philosopher Nelson Goodman's tactic in his wellknown Languages of Art, the introduction to which confesses that the book could more accurately if less attractively have been entitled Symbol Systems of Art.1 The essence of Goodman's perspective is that the making and perception of art are usefully thought of as symbol producing and perceiving activities, with certain common characteristics and some important differences depending on the symbol system involved-whether configurations of paint, or the words of a poet, for example. Over the past decade, this rubric has proved a fertile one for exploring problems in aesthetic development and arts education. Many of these investigations have been carried out at Project Zero, of the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, a basic research program founded in 1967 by Nelson Goodman and currently directed by Howard Gardner and the present author. It is timely now to consider some results of these and other inquiries, both because of this special issue on curriculum in the visual arts, and because of a recent effort of our own to synthesize our thinking and relate it to the practice of education.2 First, a little more framework. Besides the symbol system perspective, two other features mark the present approach. Artistic activities are seen profoundly cognitive in character, involving knowledge and know-how in some obvious and some subtle senses. This is not to deny the role of affect in artistic activities. However, on the one hand, affective responses are themselves cognitive in many respects, and so subsumed by the cognitive perspective. On the other, an over effulgent emphasis on the affective dimension of art risks misconceiving what the problems are when students have trouble getting into the works of others or getting on with their own. Those problems, we feel, are best understood as problems of knowledge and know-how-problems, in short, of cognition.3,4 Added to this symbolic, cognitive point of view is a third leg-a developmental perspective. Many features of the mature artist or critic or audience member, and many problems of instruction in the arts, seem best understood in the context of human symbolic development. By examining how skill and understanding in such areas as language, picturing, threedimensional modelling, and musical expression, develop from birth to maturity in response to conventional environments and educational practices, one can hope to grasp better the problems students have and appraise more insightfully the educational opportunities at various points along the way.5 6 With these three themes expressed, some attention to curriculum is overdue. The following paragraphs urge the relevance of basic theorizing and basic research to practice by sampling four tentative conclusions from a recent report.7