Redraw lines of art education

Vandana Shukla

Fine art colleges are a gift of colonial rule to India. Today most of them are missed possibilities. Ability for art cannot be easily acquired or controlled under rigid UGC norms. In the course of "making" art, one is expected to break more lines rather than draw them right. "Sometimes breaking the rules is extending the rules", says Mary Oliver, a poet. Right from the curriculum, materials, infrastructure, to the faculty-student relationship — nothing is conducive to the growth of a liberal mind in our art institutions. For, breaking the lines involves conceptual, out-of-the box thinking which is not permitted in majority of India's finest art institutions. 

Last year, students of Delhi College of Art, rated as the third best by reputed rating agencies, went on prolonged strike for alleged lack of transparency, endemic corruption and lack of communication between the faculty and students and restrictions on making contact with other departments within the college. 

In most colleges, the administration maintains a safe distance from practising artists, whose presence might trigger liberal thought among students. 

MP Singh, Professor in sculpture, Banaras Hindu University, while attending a symposium on sculpture in Chandigarh observed, “A few students from Government College of Art, came to see me. They were afraid if their teachers came to know of their visit, they would be reprimanded.” 

The trigger for the strike in Delhi College of Art was a petty refusal by the painting department to give students access to materials, which lay in the cupboards, in front of their eyes, videographed by students. In most colleges, the faculty lives in a time warp, while the art world  outside the college precincts is getting transformed. The smart students  learn new and ingenious forms, due to their exposure to the web world and new technologies, and want to experiment with forms and materials, while most departments in art colleges work in watertight compartments; sculpture, painting, print making — the art forms the world has moved ahead of. Then, there is inter-departmental trivial politics which kills the interest of the students. 

Among the top 500 contemporary artists of the world, none is painting canvas, a reality most art teachers do not wish to confront.  Of the over 12.6 billion auction prices earned by the global art market in 2014, a new entrant China fared ahead, placed third after the USA and France. India does not even get a mention about its share of business. Only Anish Kapoor, a British citizen of Indian origin, features among the top artists. India gets only 1.5 per cent of this pie, much behind China in the contemporary art segment. 

In 2007, 36 Chinese artists featured in the art price index for the top 100 contemporary artists by sales revenues. Most of this has been made possible by a brilliant creation of infrastructure in art; auction houses, galleries, museums and state-of-the-art institutions for teaching art. In most developed countries, practising artists teach in order to support their practice. The MSU, Baroda, and Shantiniketan used to have this practice till a few years back. It provided an organic and symbiotic relationship between practising artists and teachers. 

Barring a few art colleges like Ambedkar University, Shiv Nadar and NID, the knowledge of art students remains limited by the limitation of their faculty. Several art colleges are headed by non-practising art professors. In Delhi College of Art, about 70 per cent faculty positions are vacant and more students are taken than the seats available, despite a faculty crunch. 

Students from top-rated art colleges complain that the curriculum is not in sync with the contemporary art scenario. “We have to remember that an academy of arts is on the one hand a space for promoting discourse and on the other it plays a role in conserving knowledge,” is how the gap is explained by Siva Kumar, art historian, Shantiniketan, who is also in the curriculum-review committee of the UGC. 

Obsolete courses are taught in colleges, with no room for contemporary practices such as video, performance, installation etc., with an oudated pedagogy. Such is the state of art education in UGC-governed colleges, while a majority of colleges still operate under state education boards or technical education directorates. Art education needs a different paradigm. In the absence of a separate policy on art education, norms are largely derived from approaches for technical education. The emphasis on quantitative measures, such as publications in peer-reviewed journals, insistence on text-based PhDs are not the best parameters for grasping the suitability and understanding of an artist or an art educator. Those who acquire these privileges lack any practice-based insights in the arts. The UGC stipulations not only promote mediocrity, they also stifle the creative mind. Instead of a pass-fail oriented system, a more process-oriented system is required for art colleges. 

Moreover in the days of fluid art, there is no logic of specialisation or separate departments on the basis of medium. Increasingly artists are using multiple media in their work.  

Of the 107 colleges that offer a degree course in art, only a few — MSU, Baroda, JJ School of Arts, Jamia Millia Islamia, JNU, etc. are known for the success of their "products". Their hegemony can be judged by the fact that for years the examinations for Indira Kala Sangeet Vishvavidyalaya, Khiaragarh, were conducted by the JJ School of Arts. In recent years, most exciting talent has come from new art colleges and from obscure hinterland art practitioners, reflecting the decay setting in our art institutions. 

“The mainstream art colleges have done great disservice to small-town institutions. There is a funny tendency to rate artists who are unable to speak English, as inferior because of the hegemony of a few urban colleges,” says Johny ML, art scholar, who conducted a privately funded survey of 18 art colleges from Baroda to Chhattisgarh. 

Professor Indrapramit Roy, MSU, Baroda, collected data from 33 art colleges of the five southern states highlighting the roadblocks in art education. In the absence of a comprehensive database on institutes of art, the two studies offer information to understand, analyse, administer and improve art education. Both have not been consulted by any agency to take note of their findings. 

The problem of art education cannot be isolated from the issues afflicting education in general. The new impetus in education is restricted mostly to science, technology and management sectors because of the employment advantage. Therefore, art education requires a major re-think and redefining. Recently, the Foundation for Indian Art Education (FIAE) and the Kochi-Muzeris Biennale Foundation (KMB) came together to jointly address the issue of decay in art education and seek solutions by involving art educators, art administrators, artists and young curators. The suggestions include revamping the selection process for faculty, more tutorials rather than exam-oriented teaching, more stress on liberal thought and awareness of history rather than on the craft. All art is inter-disciplinary, fine arts need to be interlinked with liberal arts. Because of this missing link, we find a vacuum in politically volatile art in India, the kind that triggers creative transgressions and cultural provocations to  explode the accepted parameters of art making. 

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