Questioning Creativity: Olivia Gude

Chapter 3
Questioning creativity 1
Olivia Gude
Many in the field of arts education today proclaim that cultivating creativity ought to
be central to the field’s goals and outcomes. I am struck by how rarely such proposals
grapple with the aesthetic, cultural, and political implications of emphasising creativ-
ity in the economic and social climates of today. I have encountered bewildered looks
when suggesting to a ‘Creativity Advocate’ that it might be wise to step back from
enthusiastic advocacy for all things new and consider from whence this newly found
emphasis on creativity arises and what questions are not being represented in the cur-
rent creativity discourse.
Could it be said that claiming the centrality of creativity for art education is a pub-
lic relations ploy? In these grim times of economic uncertainty, advocates for arts
education, feeling that the field is threatened with huge cuts in resources, often
respond by attempting to justify the need for arts education with reasons that they
believe will find popular support in today’s cultural climate: higher test scores,
improved school attendance, creative approaches to learning ‘core’ academic sub-
jects. The assumption is that philistines, who do not believe in the importance of
culture and the arts in the lives of students and their communities, will be controlling
education budgets and making cuts (or perceived to be planning to make cuts) to the
arts in education. Thus, whatever their actual beliefs, some art education advocates
deem it expedient to shift debate from the cultural contributions that the arts make to
individual and collective life, to claiming that creativity in itself, in any and all
Copyright © 2012. Routledge. All rights reserved.
domains, is the major aim of art education.

In this public relations discourse, creativity is defined as the ability to freely ‘make
new’ ideas or things on demand. This is a stripped down concept of creativity, a crea-
tive capacity unsullied by the messiness of artistic insight, cultural complexity, human
need, or ethical considerations. To the extent to which this discourse on the necessity
for creativity education originates in the United States, it is important to remember
that in the United States today it is controversial in some cities and states to even use
the word ‘culture’ to a Board of Education because of the perceived potential of ‘cul-
tural’ art investigations to undermine traditional habits of mind and traditional social
organisation. The fear is that art has the potential to reveal and disrupt conservative
ideologies encoded in representations of such things as gender roles, race, sexuality,
patriotism, or what is ‘natural’.
Debates in Art and Design Education, edited by Nicholas Addison, and Lesley Burgess, Routledge, 2012. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?docID=3061019.
Created from kcl on 2020-03-26 05:09:28.
38 Olivia Gude
Is emphasising teaching creative process in art education curriculum a deliberate,

ideologically motivated shift away from teaching artistic process? Is this current
emphasis on teaching creative process a move away from the educational commitment
to fostering core artistic behaviours that are associated with the capacity of the arts to
re-make perceptions and hence, potentially to re-make human subjects and societies?
Individual creativity can be a powerful force of generativity and potential in human
life. In many societies, the artist is seen as someone who shifts the perspectives of
everyday living by calling attention to other ways of perceiving and being. The artist
in modern times extended this role, often functioning as a disruptor, as an iconoclast:
smashing the images and styles of the past, inventing new art to stimulate new ways
of being, often shining light on what was once only seen in fear-inducing shadows.
In our contemporary, postmodern world, the artist often retains this role of chal-
lenger to the status quo, by acting as a bricoleur-leader, not by destroying or disposing
of past styles and making totally new ones but by eclecting, selecting, and remixing
tropes of meaning making to open up and undermine conventional thinking, to find
meaning in the interstices between conventional habits of knowing.
In much current art education the creativity curriculum distances itself from the
disruptive or radically inventive potential of the arts, instead urging its applicability for
any and all aspects of human life and endeavours in everyday life (as it is currently
organised). Such curriculum is often structured to teach steps towards creative work,
methods to approach perceived problems. Curriculum focuses on developing such
capacities as freely and flexibly ideating, playing with concepts and materials, suspend-
ing judgement, brainstorming, working collaboratively, pushing boundaries and other
identified methods to stimulate and develop fresh approaches to any given problem.
Certainly, it makes sense for an art education curriculum to help students develop
the habits of mind and habits of making that will enable them to freely engage with
forms and materials. However, not to focus on understanding the aesthetic method-
ologies through which actual contemporary artists explore many aspects of inner and
outer life greatly truncates the potential for creative endeavours that actually generate
new forms of experiencing, thinking and living. Contemporary creativity curriculum
touts itself as fulfilling the needs of twenty-first century societies, further described
as the needs of twenty-first century economies. It claims that it can foster the creative
class needed to fuel economic growth in capitalist societies in which sustaining pros-
perity must be driven by ever growing consumption.
In a world with rapidly diminishing resources, such creativity curriculum sells itself
as a necessary adjunct to making flexible adjustments within the course prescribed by
dominant economic models for maximum economic development around the globe.
The creative worker of tomorrow is viewed as one who can successfully compete
individually (and as a creative collective) in capitalising opportunities created by
changing technologies. Rather than emphasising openness to divergent experiences of
a satisfying and joyous everyday life – today and in an imagined future – conventional
creativity curriculum teaches our students to solve any problem presented by a teacher
or, in future, by an employer. Creativity is taught as a set of tools to be deployed to
solve problems firmly within boundaries set by conventional social structures.
What are the social and ecological implications of developing in people such a
manic creativity, always privileging the magic of the new and different? What are the
ethical implications of a manic creative capacity, trained to generate ‘creative solu-
tions’ to problems without first considering whether these problems are poorly formu-
lated to address real needs or desirable outcomes? It is, perhaps, too charged to
suggest that in such an unsubtle approach to the human capacity of inventiveness,
build-a-better-mousetrap easily morphs into build-a-better-instrument-for-extracting-
information-from-a-human-being. However, it is not difficult to foresee the potential
harmfulness of promoting the ability to build better ways to entrap people in cycles
of unfulfillable desire by inventing increasingly alluring images and products. An
almost sure indicator that one is dealing with ungrounded manic creative energy is
that, when questioned about the environmental impact of such unrestrained creativity,
the creativity promoter blithely asserts that this is the sort of problem that will be
solved by creatively inventing sustainable technological solutions. It is virtually never
stated that the creative talent will invent new social solutions to the problem of
manufactured desire.
Is the renewed emphasis on creativity an attempt to revert to an earlier stage in the
development of art education curriculum? Is shifting the focus of art teaching to crea-
tivity a reinstatement of traditional art education goals of stimulating creative and
mental growth through children’s free ‘creative’ self-expression? Voices associated
with contemporary, critical approaches to art education, such as those sometimes
grouped together under the heading of Visual Culture Art Education (Duncum 2006;
Tavin 2003), often decry the renewed focus on creativity as such because this is seen
as a regression to a Lowenfeldian, acultural, ahistorical conception of the free child,
freely expressing intrinsic creative capacity before being burdened with the strictures
of a given culture (Lowenfeld 1952). These perceptive scholars correctly question
whether it is possible for humans to make anything (with the exception perhaps of
bodily wastes in the very earliest stages of infancy) that is not shaped by culturally
determined habits of experiencing and perceiving, available materials, codes for mak-
ing meaning, means of distribution, and perceptually and conceptually formed spaces
of reception. As Arthur Efland, so persuasively argued in 1976 in the article ‘The
School Art Style: A Functional Analysis’ (Efland 1976), creative child art endeavours
‘may not be as free as they look’, but instead may in actuality be examples of students
enacting adult fantasies of child art to affirm that schools are places in which students
can freely develop as creative beings. In fact, most schooling has always been designed
to enculturate students to fit into current regimes of knowledge and modes of behaving.
Philosophies such as dialogical education, social reconstructionist education, criti-
cal pedagogy, feminist pedagogy and resistance theory education have over the past
one hundred years articulated many methodologies for re-imagining restrictive edu-
cational practices. These models share the desire to develop forms of education that
do not merely transmit established knowledge, but that engage students in creating
new knowledge. Teaching disciplinary knowledge is thus seen, not as an end in itself,
but as the transmission of the tools needed for conducting creative investigations into
important themes in the lives of students and their communities.
40 Olivia Gude
Can contemporary art educators develop and implement an art education practice
in which students are encouraged to pursue individual and collaborative visual and
cultural research agendas through creative activities?
The Discipline-Based Art Education movement (Eisner 1987) advocated that art
education be based on understanding and emulating professional practices in the arts.
Unfortunately, its conceptions of practices of aesthetics, criticism, art history and art
making were not based on contemporary professional practice, excluding (at any rate,
not incorporating) many of the most important philosophical and artistic ideas devel-
oped in the twentieth century. What understanding of the role of artists as twenty-first
century cultural researchers would need to be taught today so that students could emu-
late the serious, engaged cultural practices of professional artists and cultural workers?
How can we incorporate critical insights drawn from visual culture theory into the art
curriculum while retaining the imaginative and productive potential of arts curriculum?
Can we redefine what it means to ‘exercise creativity’ in art education settings? All
too often, projects taught in K-12 (US) and Key Stage 3 (UK) art education function
as recipes – outlining steps to be taken that will reliably deliver attractive products, or
as directives – requiring students to illustrate with abstracted or realist symbolic rep-
resentations that which is already believed and known, or as exercises – encouraging
students to play with forms such as elements and principles without any deep inten-
tion or belief that something of substance and meaning is at stake. The assumption
seems to be that if students are readied to ‘jump in and make something’ on demand,
they will be able to ‘jump in and make something’ of their lives. Such direction-
following conceptions do not account for the importance of experiencing, studying
and making art that explores significant content that enlarges and deepens students’
understanding of recurring and newly generated problems and opportunities of living.
In ‘Principles of Possibilities: Considerations for a 21st Century Art and Culture
Curriculum’ (Gude 2007), I looked for overlaps in the perspectives of contemporary
students and contemporary artists and educators and then articulated important life
content to be addressed in a quality art education curriculum. This list of Principles of
Possibility is a tentative formulation of some of the important areas of development,
learning, and investigation that ought to be included in a quality art education (the
article, accompanied by images of student work, is posted on the National Art Education
Association website: http://naea.digication.com/omg/Art_Education_Articles.

When a district, school, department or individual teacher designs an art curriculum,
it makes sense that planning begins with how content and activities will contribute to
the students’ capacities to experience, examine and shape various aspects of living.
I identify these principles as:
• Playing – as pleasurable investigation and as a means to connect to deeply

personal, unarticulated, idiosyncratic aspects of one’s being;
• Forming Self – using art to understand the self as a constructed, complex and
evolving entity;
• Investigating Community Themes – identifying and inquiring into the problems
and potentials of particular times and places;
• Encountering Others – understanding and being ourselves re-shaped and trans-

formed through encounters with other ways of conceiving of the world;
• Attentive Living – in the natural and human-constructed environment;
• Empowered Experiencing and Empowered Making – understanding and enacting
the many meaning-making strategies of artists and other cultural workers;
• Deconstructing Culture – using an array of artistic and theoretical tools to
perceive and analyse the cultural construction of meanings;
• Reconstructing Social Spaces – forming and participating in physical, virtual,
and discursive spaces for social interaction;
• Not Knowing – accepting the open-endedness of complex thinking, not enforcing
premature closure because of anxiety when experiencing the uncertainty, liminal-
ity, and fluidity of contemporary life.
The core goal of the pedagogical practices of art education ought to be enabling
our students’ empowered making and empowered experiencing by introducing them
to the many practices of making meaning that have been developed by artists through-
out the world and throughout the ages. We owe it to our students to teach them about
great traditions of art and culture, but even more so to introduce them to the latest
contemporary art practices and to contemporary theorising about images, objects, and
events so that they will be able to participate in contemporary cultural conversations.
In making a curriculum plan, the focus ought not to be on comprehensive coverage,
on surveys of ‘important’ art or on ‘fundamental’ techniques for making. Rather the
principles of selection should be based on such questions as: What aesthetic practices
do our students need to know about in order to engage the cultural wealth of our (and
other) societies? What knowledge of particular aesthetic practices will enable them to
expand their frameworks of experiencing, perceiving and understanding? What aes-
thetic practices will give them the means to conduct investigations of phenomena and
issues of contemporary life?
A quality art education teaches students ‘aesthetic codes’ that they can adopt and
adapt to make their own meanings – as interpreters and as artist makers. Understanding
these aesthetic codes gives students the capacity to ‘read’ and make meaning in styles
of brushwork or in the editing choices of a film. Like any language systems, these
ways of communicating are unintelligible unless one has been introduced through
formal or informal education to the ways in which aesthetic choices generate a series
of meaning-laden associations, through contrasts and similarities with other tropes of
meaning making.
However, it is important to understand that the experience of making meaning
through art as an interpreter/experiencer or as a maker is more than an intellectual
exercise in deciphering codes or playing with signifiers. Awareness of a range of
aesthetic practices also expands the affective and perceptive range. One literally
becomes a different sort of person, experiencing the world differently by virtue of
internalised, cultivated ways of being in and with the world.
Imagine a twenty-first century art education in which we teach students that it is
through internalising established and evolving artistic-aesthetic practices – that are then
42 Olivia Gude
appropriated, deconstructed, hybridised, remixed, reassembled, and utilised for one’s

own ends – that we each have the capacity to function as makers and shapers of culture.
Can we together imagine art education practices in which we develop in our students
the willingness and capacity to ‘enter into’ aesthetic practices and the ability to select
and shape these practices for use as experience-generating, information-generating,
pleasure-generating and purpose-generating vehicles of aesthetic investigation?
Note
1 This is a version of Olivia Gude’s paper ‘Creativity, for whom? Together
Reconceptualising the Possibilities of Art Education’ given at the KOSEA 2011
conference.
References
Duncum, P. (2006) Visual Culture in the Art Class, Reston, VA: National Art Education
Association.
Efland, A. (1976) ‘The School Art Style: A Functional Analysis’, Art Education, 17 (2):
37–44.
Eisner, E. (1987) The Role of Discipline-Based Art Education in America’s Schools, Santa
Monica; CA: Getty Foundation.
Gude, O. (2007) ‘Principles of Possibility: Considerations for a 21st Century Art and
Culture Curriculum’, Art Education, 60 (1): 6–17.
Lowenfeld, V. (1952) Creative and Mental Growth, 2nd edn, New York: Macmillan.
Tavin, K. (2003) ‘Wrestling With Angels, Searching for Ghosts: Towards a Critical
Pedagogy of Visual Culture’, Studies in Art Education, 44 (3): 197–213.

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Chapter 3

domains, is the major aim of art education.

Is emphasising teaching creative process in art education curriculum a deliberate,

Association website: http://naea.digication.com/omg/Art_Education_Articles.

• Playing – as pleasurable investigation and as a means to connect to deeply

• Encountering Others – understanding and being ourselves re-shaped and trans-

appropriated, deconstructed, hybridised, remixed, reassembled, and utilised for one’s

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