National Art Education Association

Review: [untitled] Author(s): Frances K. Heussenstamm Reviewed work(s): The Technique of Collage by Helen Hutton Source: Art Education, Vol. 22, No. 7 (Oct., 1969), p. 3 Published by: National Art Education Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3191374 Accessed: 08/01/2009 07:54
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=naea. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

National Art Education Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Education.

http://www.jstor.org

ART AND EDUCATION.Michael Steveni. New York: Atherton Press, 1968. 239 pp. $8.95. The short blurb on the inside cover of Art and Education ends with the phrase, "a remarkably comprehensive text." This remark not only sums up the topography of the book but is also indicative of both its strength and its weaknesses. A comprehensive text must touch upon and describe all of the factors related to the subject and must reveal the relative importance and interrelationships between these factors, in order that the reader can gain some sense of a total framework on which he himself can build and from which he can draw his own conclusions. Steveni's book is successful in the first sense in that he attempts to describe all the factors, beginning with some philosophizing about the nature of education and aesthetics and continuing with an encapsulated history of English art education, theories about child art, and a large section on creativity, and ending with teaching approaches in the art lesson, which includes chapters on design and materials. Indeed somewhere Steveni succeeds in mentioning just about everything; but he does not appear so successful at tying all the threads together. Reading his book is like reading the notes and accompanying research of a lecturer who has faced the awesome task of providing his freshmen students with some idea of what art education is all about. His notes are informative and at times enlightening and insightful, but they have that rather scattered and confused quality that one often associates with notes. In this connection the author is sometimes guilty of rather loose and ambiguous statements that leave the reader hanging in mid air. The first paragraph of Chapter 1 ends with a quote from Suzanne Langer about artistic training being the education of feeling. This is preceded by a discussion about misunderstandings related to the nature of art education. Is the reader to assume that Miss Langer's statement is an example of this misunderstanding? I am sure Steveni would accuse me of being obtuse and that the quote is obviously not meant to be taken in this way; but there are too many occasions when he expects the reader to make similar assumptions without having fully explained his reasons for them. The final paragraph in his concluding chapter is another example of this ambiguity. "The aim of art education is stimulation, not production. The act of living is concerned with production. Would any real teacher wish to tell anyone how they should live?" Are we to assume that art education is not concerned with the act of living, and what has the final question about "real" teachers to do with his former statement? This might prove to be an excellent statement on which to begin an examination of art education but hardly a very satisfactory one for concluding it. However, throughout the text Steveni reiterates and to some extent develops a personal viewpoint towards art education to which I would be sympathetic. Education is seen as a striving for completeness that grows from within the child rather than one of gaining skills and concepts that are imposed from the outside. The value of art education lies in the process that goes on in the act of making, rather than in the end product itself. The author believes strongly that art teachers must be aware of the educational implications of what they are doing and that often this is not the case. Consequently, the activities in the art room become "a series of what often seem to be rather senseless actions." The author continues by pointing out that the teacher should be concerned with providing situations that lead to creative patterns of behavior. His ensueing examination of creativity is a compilation of Dewey, Rugg, Eisner, Guildford, Gordon, and Torrance. It may be of more interest to English readers unfamiliar with American research into creativity, but the concluding chapter to this section entitled "Actions speak louder than words" should not be overlooked. The author describes specific activities he has initiated and which have resulted in some form of creative behavior. These are valuable accounts that vary from an examination of the sensation of wind by a group of low intelligence children to a work card system initiated with a group of adolescents. The final section of the book outlines three areas which affect the teaching situation in the classroom. The social and psychological aspects of classroom teaching are dealt with in a fairly cursory manner, and an example is given of two schools with different orientations towards the method of teaching the same syllabus. This example of comparing two extremes, which

is a method used by the author on a number of occasions, is revealing, but a dangerous over simplification of the actual problem as it exists in the schools. The term "design" is related to the end product of the art and craft lesson, and the process of making and evaluating things as opposed to the process of creative thinking and behavior as an end itself. After a short history of the design object, Steveni sums up: "As a population we are engaged in a process of trying to extract from the world that we live in a meaning that no longer exists, and we seem to exist in a perpetual state of disgruntlement and perplexity because of this fact." He feels that the teaching of design should lean towards a more conceptual and convergent type of thinking related to function and use as opposed to the intuitive and divergent type of thinking required in creative problem solving. In some respects this seems a doubtful distinction since many of his examples of divergent thinking, such as children finding means of constructing bridges out of drinking straws, could surely be classed as a design problem. An experimental approach to materials is advocated, and this is illustrated with the traditional as opposed to the inventive approach of introducing claywork to children. The concluding chapter proposes a gradual growth of understanding gained through a developing art programme of exploratory and design problems. I am inclined to think that Art and Education may have more significance for English art educators, but if you like dipping into a "hodge-podge" of ideas and information, then there is something here for everyone. An author that can compare the conscious and unconscious processes to a "grocer's shop" and in the next moment talk in the familiar jargon of scientific research at least offers variety. This variety is interlaced with a personal philosophy that has much to recommend it, but it is a question of sorting and shuffling through the pieces in order to find it. Ian Thomas Vancouver, B. C.

THE TECHNIQUE OF COLLAGE.Helen Hutton. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, Inc., 1968. 144 pp. $10.95. The author has done scholarly travail to define such diverse terms as assemblage, fumage, bruilage,d6coupage, affices lacer6s, d6chirage, d6collage, froissage, frottage, photograms, photomontage, papier coll6, and, of course, collage. If you have been wondering about these subtly distinctive French referents, this is your book. Eighty percent of the content is an illustrated media mixture which lightly touches the great men and masterpieces we have come to associate with Cubist derivation. First there were Picasso and Braque-then Dadaists Ernst and Schwitters, followed closely by Surrealists Breton, Dali, Miro, and Magritte. The imaginative images of these notables are poorly presented, however. The author has forgotten that looking at a 3" x 4" illustration described thusly ". .. the projection of the various forms is considerable and the work on a larger scale than is usual for Schwitters," simply won't do. We are left without a notion of the original size of the composition-a major oversight. Too many art educators live on their own affective experiences with real art, and expect students to respond to diminutive illustrations as if the substitute were the real. A few of the photographs are excellent, but their quality cannot compensate for the many marvels of color and texture that minute black and white fragments distort, thus negating the artists' original concepts. Surely, if any art deserves large color plates, it is these. This literary production includes a delicate discussion of collage projects at Impington Village College, Cambridge, and the University of Hawaii, but these ten pages (119-129)-plus a glossary and list of suppliers-are not enough to balance an otherwise pedestrian publication. Frances K. Heussenstamm Los Angeles, California 3