The National Advisory Council on Art Education report of 1961 - the Coldstream Report - contained recommendations to Government as to the constituent parts of the new Diploma in Art and Design which was to replace to a higher standard the existing National Diploma in Design. One recommendation was the inclusion in all Dip.A.D.-awarding programmes of ‘history of art and complementary studies’.
Coldstream recommended that an independent body be established to scrutinise content and structure of those institutions seeking to validate their provision at Dip.A.D. level. Following Coldstream’s guidance, the Ministry of Education set up the National Council for Diplomas in Art and Design, chaired by Sir John Summerson. In 1962, the Summerson Council visited institutions seeking the new accreditation, with the auditing carried out by five designated panels viz: Fine Art, Graphic Design, Three Dimensional Design, Textiles/Fashion, and History of Art and Complementary Studies (HACS).
While it can be said that the recommendations of the Coldstream Report saw traditional academic standards rise in keeping with the ambition of the new Dip.A.D., it is also true to say that the Report contributed in a significant way to a trajectory for history of art and complementary studies which ended up, in many HEIs, with a separation, both operational and psychological, between the disciplines of history & theory and studio.
The Summerson Report of 1964, which reflected on the transition from N.D.D. to Dip.A.D., was particularly critical of institutions’ efforts in respect of History of Art and Complementary Studies. That assessment was perhaps unkind, as academic teams had had little more than a year post-Coldstream to implement new programmes in this area to meet the standards of Summerson’s visiting panels.
Whatever the case, the report was indeed sceptical, not only towards HACS, and many institutions did not at first secure approval for the award of Dip.A.D. At this point, for the purposes of securing Ministry approval, many programmes in HACS were devised expediently by newly recruited staff tasked to develop, and quickly, a discrete discipline area, one amongst five as described by Coldstream.
An unfortunate - although predictable - upshot of the strategic work in the 1960s was the adoption by HACS faculty members of the mantle of protector of academic standards, which served to establish and/or reinforce an ontological distinction between theoretical and conceptual work on the one hand, and practical and technical work on the other.
Counterforces to this authority were the far-reaching conclusions of poststructuralism and postmodernism in the academy of the 1970s and 80s. Not twenty years after Summerson, it became untenable to claim from the vantage point of ‘history of art and complementary studies’ that there was an inviolable form of culture that must be meted out in uniform ways to students of art, design and architecture. While it is beyond doubt, the poststructuralists said, that certain artworks, designed objects and buildings were brought into the world at certain times in our cultural history, what is undoubtedly a matter of doubt is the definitive meaning of those creative phenomena.
So, an omnipresent message in education of the late 20thC, for better or for worse, was (and still is in less militant form) that knowledge is not delivered beyond doubt by the HACS department nor for that matter by the productions of the creative practitioner. Rather, knowledge is a constructive process which involves the reader as much as the author; the artist as much as the theorist; the social as much as the individual; the student as much as the teacher, and so on.
An interesting consequence of this late-century challenge to accepted canons of knowledge was the pragmatist’s association of the working process of the artist and designer with the manner in which knowledge is brought into the world, namely, through a networked process of testing through practice.
Drawing, for example, was cited by commentators as a touchstone of new conceptions of knowledge production: all ‘marks’ or ‘facts’ are subject to erasure, overlay, rubbing out, and all marks are, in part, determined by the structure of the drawing itself as well as by factors external to its own logic. As blogging, wiki-ing and twittering now suggest, all individuals can ‘draw’, all individuals can make their mark in the fluid construction of fields of knowledge.
Acknowledging the epistemological and philosophical pressures outlined above, and taking cognisance of ‘open school’ discourse prevalent today, this paper looks at what shape a contemporary HACS operation might take in the art academy of the 21stC, with reference to contemporary policy priorities in the fields of art, design and architecture education. It looks to contemporary activity in studio and curatorial practice for explanatory models of knowledge production and dissemination, and reflects on the significance of the Coldstream and Summerson reports for art education today.