Mind in art : cognitive foundations in art education

Mind in Art. Cognitive Foundations in Art Education Dorn, Charles M. (1999). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 275 pages, ISBN 0-8058-3078-2. Reviewed by Ted Bracey, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand A book entitled Mind in Art offers the promise of theory. But the prime motivation for Dorn's investigation of the relationship between mind and art appears to be his belief that those responsible for quality schooling (i.e., curriculum planners and taxpayers) will only be persuaded that art should be in the core curriculum if it can be shown "that the arts do make a difference in the lives of our students" (p. 260), that they involve intelligent activity, and that this intelligent activity in some significant sense supplements the intelligent activity that we normally associate with conventional subjects. If and when we uncover evidence that art indeed does supplement other subjects, we should, Dorn claims, refocus our art programs so that they are consistent with what we understand about that relationship. Clearly, Dorn's interests are divided between an engagement in genuine theory making on the one hand and a determination, on the other, to show that art involves what he calls a form of "higher order thinking" of a kind which will earn it a place alongside traditional subjects in the curriculum. Setting aside, for a moment, Dorn's preoccupation with justifying an art education in instrumental terms and accepting that it makes sense to account for the nature of an art education with some plausible theory of art and mind, the question is, does Dorn provide us with such an account? In this reader's view, he does not. Dorn attempts an account of what he calls "cognition and aesthetics," but he precedes it with an invitation to "skip over" it if we are "familiar with current thinking" in these fields (pp.14-15). This invitation is not surprising when we discover that he has reduced them to a series of short and selective reviews of the literature of experimental psychology (which speaks of human development), of philosophical and psychological theory (which speaks of cognition and learning), of philosophical and psychological theory of art, theory of children's artistic development, the post-1962 literature of developmental research, conceptual formation and conceptual thinking in art, and an account by 10 well known American artists about the way they form concepts. The point of these reviews appears to be to lay a foundation for the hypothesis that "the development of mental/visual concepts in art involves the same cognitive functions of memory, consciousness, reasoning and problem solving: the same perceptual/ conceptual functioning as are used in other domains of inquiry" (p.164). This reader is not persuaded that they do the job. Moreover, they cast very little light on the questions which must lie central to all such enquiry, namely, how art can be known and how knowledge of art can be acquired. The difficulty central to Dorn's selection of support material is that it is founded on a series of largely unquestioned assumptions about the nature of both art and mind, most of which are deeply problematic. Dorn's appears to assume that an artwork, for example, is a self-contained object or event, such as a picture, a sculpture, a piece of music. This notion of "artwork,", however, lost currency following Mark Rothko's insistence that groups of his works which were (to paraphrase Wittgenstein) founded on the same set of "pictorial propositions" amounted to a single work, the parts of which should be kept together if the whole is to make sense (Seldes, 1978). As well as the challenge this view offered to established forms of commodification in the arts, it also raised questions about where one might look for evidence of the thinking that distinguishes art practice. Is it sufficient, as Dorn appears to assume, to take account only of the thinking which is allegedly embodied in a single work (most of the evidence of which is, in any event, concealed from view) as a basis for extrapolating the thinking which characterizes all forms of art making? …