Bodies of Work and the Practice of Art Making
This article analyses the three most commonly accepted modes of assessing student art, the aesthetic ranking of finished works, the strength and diversity of portfolios, student art diaries and, more recently, assessment based on a student’s body of work.
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Bodies of Work and the Practice of Art Making
A dramatic shift occurred in the evaluation of student art in New South Wales secondary schools during the late nineteen seventies. Previously based on tasks designed specifically for evaluative purposes art assessments began to refer to works made by students outside of invigilated examination conditions. The subsequent use of art diaries and portfolios of artwork, similar to those employed in the Arts PROPEL project in North America, widened the scope of “in school” assessments in NSW. The inclusion of diaries and portfolios moved assessment beyond the compilation of finished art works to include diverse material incidental to the processes involved in their origination (Gardner 1990, p. 44).
12.1
Process as the Incubation of Artistic Ideas
“Process” approaches claim to sample the incubation period of artworks (Bellanoff and Dickson 1991). The claim is based on the assumption that ‘lead-up’ routines to the production of more significant works provide a way of observing the artistic abilities of students more directly. Process assessment is prompted by doubts that aesthetic judgements made about finished works provide a satisfactory basis for inferring the cognitive resources used in their making. The reasons are twofold. Firstly, there is a belief by cognitive theorists that cultural agenda underlying the aesthetic judgements of the assessor are quite likely to overstate or understate the latent artistic motives of young children (Freeman and Sanger 1995). Secondly many educators believe that, when set against a theoretical backdrop of late Brown, N.C.M. (2000). Bodies of work and the practice of art making. In A. Weate and K. Maras (Eds.), Papers: Occasional seminar in art education 9, Bodies of work and the practice of art making papers, pp. 29–42. Paddington, NSW: School of Art Education, UNSW College of Fine Arts. Used with permission of UNSW Art & Design, www.artdesign.unsw.edu.au © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 N.C.M. Brown, Studies in Philosophical Realism in Art, Design and Education, Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education 20, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42906-9_12
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Bodies of Work
modernity, aesthetic judgements provide an overly narrow approach to framing the relationship between the intentional properties of artworks and those of artists. On the face of it, then, assessments of process are believed to enhance the validity of artistic evaluation. This is because they not only model a commonly used practice of annotation in Western art making, the artist’s diary/notebook/portfolio, they open up a more transparent and thus fairer window into artistic ability (Taylor 1960).
12.2
The Nature of Process
Is the role of the artistic process in externalising student’s ability justified? The search for true achievement in art making is coloured by the artifice of the ‘artistic process’. It is further clouded by the historical uncertainty of the “artistic disposition” that these processes are designed to make visible. To begin wi
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