Rethinking the introductory art history survey - Editor's Statement - Editorial

A Practical, Somewhat Theoretical, and Inspirational Guide

This issue of Art Journal is the first of what is hoped will be a number of issues dedicated to the topic of pedagogy. This program is part of a larger agenda of the College Art Association's Board of Directors and its executive director, Susan Ball, to redress the long-standing neglect of education at the expense of scholarship and production. This Art Journal issue and the various sessions on education topics at our recent annual meetings constitute a concerted effort to make the questions surrounding the teaching of art and art history more central to our professions.

The papers and reports included here represent but a fraction of what is actually going on in the area of rethinking the introductory art history survey. When I began this project I knew a number of colleagues were experimenting with new configurations for the survey, but I was surprised to discover how widespread the phenomenon was. Having committed myself to a final list of contributors, I kept discovering others engaged in different and equally interesting reformations. Unfortunately, I could not accommodate them. Art Journal has kindly agreed to publish letters from those who might wish to report briefly on developments in their schools or to respond to the contents herein. I especially urge responses from those who would defend the aims and methods of the old survey approach(es) that my contributors have, to various degrees, repudiated.

On behalf of the old surveys, I will say their ambitions seem modest and manageable compared to those most of us are now enacting or considering. How refreshing in this postmodern age of generally lowered ambitions to observe a crowd of professionals aspiring to transform the survey of Western art into a world survey that will also address issues of gender, race, and sexual preference; methodological assumptions; continental literary theory; sophisticated relations between art, its makers, and its users; besides attempting to provide a diverse range of students with empowering visual and conceptual skills. All this while they are questioning the canon, the traditional hierarchy of the arts, and the distinction between art and ordinary "imagery"!

Originally, I wished simply to provide possible solutions to those looking either for ways to reconfigure the old survey or for the resolve to entirely scrap it for methodological approaches. Therefore, the issue is more practical than theoretical. The emphasis is on reports from instructors at various institutions, sometimes with generic syllabi, about what they are doing. (If you would like more information from a particular instructor, please contact her/him directly.) Also with an aim to practicality, I included, without theoretical argument or explanation, a small sampling of innovative suggestions and assignments for those looking merely to improve their present offerings.

In the final analysis, however, I think the collection raises important questions about the viability of what appears to be our discipline's continuing allegiance to the totalizing approach pioneered by nineteenth-century German art historians and then institutionalized in this country after World War II. The conception of art as a manifestation of large, sweeping historical forces has largely been rejected by so-called new art historians for one that emphasizes its complex embeddedness in the lives of its makers and users. Whether the old survey vehicle can accommodate this new artistic paradigm is the larger question that implicitly stands behind the articles and reports that follow.

BRADFORD R. COLLINS, University of South Carolina, contributed three chapters to Art History, Abrams's new textbook, and edited 12 Views of Manet's "Bar" (Princeton, forthcoming).

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