jeremy blank

Over the last thirty years, art schools or university art departments, have erased or truncated the teaching of basic skills. Traditional perspective or life drawing studies have been perceived as archaic or societally problematic. These studies are from a small lake in the beachside suburb of Abbey in the south west of Western Australia. They were painted from one location, seated in the same position, en plein air. This illustrated paper explores how an image evolves through time, critical self appraisal, acceptance and reflection. It includes reflections on current teaching and learning emphasis, unduly influenced by economic rationalism, non-specialist management and educational streamlining.

The history of media arts stretches beyond the focus of this text. The growth of media arts as an area of study beyond a marginal educational presence from 1990 to 2012, and its subsequent dismantling, is a successful or failed project. It is successful where technology has swept across education, professional exhibition contexts and everyday interactions. It fails where its history is ignored, its contexts viewed as irrelevant and its mode of expression and content reduced to computer and software provision as an educational service area.

Integrating media arts within core visual art curriculum is yet to be fulfilled. Dedicated specialist areas emerging in the early years of the new millennia have been subsumed within generalised undergraduate programs. Technical specialisation has been replaced by research emphasis. Visual art teaching and learning requires revision of emphasis for the digital age.

The replacement of the MA with the PhD as the terminal qualification in visual art has seen a shift in emphasis to research as the basis for higher-level study where technical mastery was privileged in the MA/MFA model. University models of research have now been applied wholesale as the determining factor as how visual art practice is accepted as an academic discipline.