FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM IN ARTS EDUCATION Essay

FROM MODERNISM TO POSTMODERNISM IN ARTS EDUCATION - Essay Example Many modernist artists have mentioned that since 1980 they have been taught, with huge compromising problems and acute tensions, more and more inside a new paradigm based on a different set of premises, practices and expectations, related to but different from the parallel shift into postmodernism. Abbs (2003) has referred this paradigm to the shift that is related to thinking in the Education Institutes of British universities and is not to be identified with the atomistic and politically constructed National Curriculum, though many of the elements dislocated from their original meaning are reflected there (Abbs, 2003, p. 46). Modernist arts provides us reasons to believe that while something of value has been achieved under the shaping energies of the new paradigm, the literal and mechanical way it was instituted betrayed the broad sweep of the philosophy, ignored vital principles of creative pedagogy and maimed the holistic perception which lay at the heart of the thinking (Abbs, 2003, p. 46). Among major modernists names like Theodor Adorno, a major figure in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theorists, tells us that art and literature, and particularly Modernist art, could function as a kind of negative or contradictory criticism of society, in thought-provoking experimental texts. Adorno argued that difficult texts provoked new, unfamiliar, estranged conceptions of life that the dissonances and fractures of Modernist art expressed the individual's loss of control, centeredness and harmony in the contemporary world. For Walter Benjamin, modernist education has created a world of printing, duplication and photography, where artistic works have lost the 'aura' that their uniqueness once gave (Childs, 2000, p. 34). The rising technologies of artistic reproduction dispensed with the idea of a work's authenticity; for example, the idea of an authentic photographic or film print makes no sense. Benjamin thought this moved art's function from the realm of ritual, where it is magical and revered, into that of politics, where it is mass produced for purposes of marketing and propaganda, with dire consequences for a politically polarised Europe after World War I. To understand the paradigm which defines art in context with postmodernist education, it is first necessary to know what formalist modernism was not. It was not connective, inclusive, transactional, associative, referential, interactive, changeable, discontinuous, multilayered, impure, and ambiguous ignoring the autobiographical data and questions of personality. Postmodernist art, when encompass these qualities, presents a connective paradigm, which in turn demands a connective criticism to which we call "postmodern" recognizes time and periodicity, but, rather than being tied to one-way time series, it can move back and forth in time and can be associated in its reversibility with the new physics (Ascott & Shanken, 2003, p. 178). Walling (2001) while criticising postmodernism suggests that the way postmodernist education have abused and altered art curriculum is absurd. It does not make any sense for the national standards to be imaginative with reference to some particular standard. Postmodernist reforms in education at every level and field of interest has damped the curriculum rather than reform (Walling, 2001). Postmodern art when merged with the capabilities of visual art presents before us natural art, which