Artistic thinking is the cornerstone of the artist-researcher's activities when considering pedagogical issues. Thinking takes place through artistic activity, in the form of paths that tend in different directions. They criss-cross, alternate and occasionally form a meeting place for an insight, a point from which a thought breaks out into something new. In teaching art, there is no use in theories that are not based on experiential knowledge, the artist's ability to think visibly and invisibly, in sounds and silences, through movement and bodily experiences. It's easier to describe the artistic thinking process as pieces moving about in a three-dimensional space, which may sometimes form tendrils, chains, accumulations, which suddenly break out and start flying in different directions, to nowhere. Juha Varto (2017, 38) defines artistic thinking as using one's own skill, evaluating it, positioning it and developing it conceptually. The theory of artist pedagogy consists of practices, artists' efforts to tell new generations that this kind of activity is possible: the pursuit of the immaterial through matter, sound, bodily experiences, sensuality.
My ideas about artist pedagogy have been formed as if unnoticed over the years, after working as a teacher at a children's and young people’s art school and as a teacher and later as principal at the Nordic Art School, followed by a career as a researcher and university professor in higher education. My main question about art education has been since 1990’s whether art education has anything to do with art and art world, or is it mainly a way of emphasizing the current understanding of societal norms and conventions, whichever they are? Where and how does the actual art teaching by practicing artists take place? Why and how do artists teach? How does artistic thinking reveal itself in pedagogy?
In the 2020s, the idea of a safe space that popped up in the everyday life of art schools was far from the everyday life of any art academy or university of previous decades (or even centuries). The actions of all the teachers who have taught at art schools since the first academies in the 1560’s would not stand up to ethical scrutiny according to today's pedagogical concepts. The feedback given to the students could have been cruel and belittling. Some were lifted and others were trampled or just simply disowned, which was very common and totally accepted as a code of conduct. Some kind of unspoken principle has been that if you can get through art education mostly with your wits about you, you are presumably good enough to be an artist. I don't defend that kind of pedagogy, but on the other hand, art is never a safe space, and an art student cannot be spared from a deep personal crisis regarding his own artistry. Admitting your own incompetence hurts. Moving into an area where there are no definite answers is scary and uncertain.
Despite many wrong doings and unacceptable un-pedagogic behavior throughout history I still strongly defend pedagogy based on artists' authorship, even without formal pedagogical qualification. I argue that pedagogical theories and training can never replace artistic thinking that comes through serious art practice. Juha Varto (2017, 58) writes about author’s knowledge and how important it is for authors to write about their own field. Varto considers that the artist's reflection can be considered a theory, if theory is thought of in the sense of the Greek language "to look further".
Varto emphasizes the importance of the artist's voice because the author writes, defines, sets the boundaries of his own field through the first person, relying on experiential knowledge. According to him, most of these artists' texts can be called "theoretical", because the artists have stopped in the middle of their artistic activity to collect their thoughts, which artistic activity generates all the time. He writes about poets who have written more about artistic thinking and exploration through art than they have written poems. These ideas may well answer the questions of other art fields as well. Varto continues that this kind of cross-fertilization of art might be more successful than searching for wisdom in philosophy or economics, sociology or cognitive science (Varto 2017, 58–59). Along this path, I too have searched for answers in literature, performing arts and music, when my questions have arisen from the field of visual arts. I rely on artists’ way of looking at the world and its various phenomena, the artist’s capacity to take another point of view and question the normative thinking of their days.
I have thought about the processes of making art, when the goal has been to understand teaching art, what it really means. When I teach, I think about how I think through making art, and I try to guide students through their own process to the sources of their own thinking.
I have been trained as a visual artist and I see myself as a teaching artist, not so much as an art teacher. I consider that I have the right to speak with the author's voice in the areas of making art as well as teaching and researching it. For years, I have strived to work dialogically with my students and thought that I would encounter a foreign culture in them, the individuals, which I approach with curiosity. My approach is to create a joint polyphony of images with my students. The polyphonic structure of the images is based on the idea of the dialogic nature of human thinking, which Bakhtin (1991, 162) describes as the opposite of unanimity that seeks the truth. Bakhtin refers to the Socratic notion of the co-creation of truth between truth-seeking people in their dialogic interactions. When this kind of dialogic way of working is used in connection with art education, I have found that the less I try to influence my students and the more I let them influence me, the more interesting the teaching work and its research develop. The focus shifts from teaching the student to the teacher's learning and the realization of the artist's work in the teaching process. Such an approach is only possible when both the teacher and the student are involved in artistic creation, in a free dialogue, in an equal dialogue.
The American artist Agnes Martin (1990, 97) has said that she did not even try to do her own artistic work during the times when she was teaching. According to Martin, both painting and teaching are jobs that require so much concentration that they cannot be done side by side. Many artists feel that way, but you can also experience teaching as part of your own artistic work process, and I'm not talking about participatory art in the form that it has been presented in connection with various community projects. Just as there is always a reason to ask what art is, it is good for someone working in art education to ask over and over again what teaching art is. And not to be afraid if the answer is different time after time.
Literature:
Bahtin, Mihail 1991. Dostojevskin poetiikan ongelmia. Helsinki: Kustannus Oy Orient Express.
Erkkilä, Jaana 2008. Viittaustaidetta – eli kuka on tämän kuvan tekijä? Teoksessa Haverinen, Lahdelma, Vainikkala (toim.) Tekijyyden ulottuvuuksia. Nykykulttuurin tutkimuskeskuksen julkaisuja 93. Jyväskylän yliopisto, 148 – 160.
Erkkilä, Jaana 2012. Tekijä on toinen – kuinka kuvallinen dialogi syntyy. Aaltoyliopiston julkaisusarja Doctoral Dissertations 10 / 2012.
Martin Agnes, 1990. Hiljaisuus taloni lattialla/The Silence on the floor of my house. Helsinki: Vapaa Taidekoulu.
Varto, Juha 2017. Taiteellinen tutkimus. Mitä se on? Kuka sitä tekee? Miksi? Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books.