Month: February 2023

Kenneth M. Lansing, 1925–2022: A Voice in the Wilderness of Art Education

I first heard of Ken Lansing in 2002 at the annual convention of the National Art Education Association. In the Q&A of a session entitled “Educating the Museum Educator,” I suggested that not everything displayed in art museums nowadays truly qualifies as art. Following the session, I was approached by a colleague who introduced himself as Herman du Toit, then head of Museum Research at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Art. In response to my comment, he kindly informed me that the question of nonart being treated as art had been raised as far back as the 1970s by Kenneth Lansing in his textbook Art, Artists, and Art Education.

In that book, as I later learned, Lansing had insisted that art teachers needed to adopt a definition of art in order to “operate efficiently and avoid the production of nonart in [the] classroom.”

Though I had only recently begun to delve into the field, it was clear to me that the Lansing caveat had fallen on deaf ears. It was therefore to my considerable surprise and no small delight that just a year later an essay by him entitled “A Definition of Art” was published as an NAEA Advisory (Summer 2003). In it, he renewed his conviction that “art can and must be defined if we are to make any sense out of what we do in the classroom.” He also noted that he had presented a more detailed argument supporting that view in an article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education.¹ Rather poignantly, he added: “I have received no reaction to [that] piece since it was published.” Deaf ears indeed!

The JAE article astutely identified basic flaws in the reigning philosophical claim that art could not be defined. Most important, Ken recognized that at the root of both a highly influential 1956 essay by philosopher Morris Weitz and the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein that it drew upon was the mistaken assumption that “usage can never be incorrect.” They accepted as art any avant-garde invention put forward as such, and were therefore constrained to formulate a definition that would include it—an increasingly impossible task.

In his NAEA Advisory, Ken recommended “entertain[ing] the idea that we may have assigned the words ‘work of art’ unjustifiably to certain things in the past.” He therefore advocated adopting an “honorific” definition, based on long-accepted referents. That essentially traditionalist view effectively excluded the problematic inventions of the avant-garde.

Having argued along similar lines in What Art Is, Lou Torres and I welcomed Ken as an ally, and wrote to seek his permission to reprint his Advisory article in Aristos, the online review of the arts we co-edit. Our letter to him noted that we “were struck by how closely [his] concerns regarding the subject correspond to our own.” He readily agreed, responding that learning of our work was a “breath of fresh air,” but warning: “The forces that oppose you are enormous. Art educators at all levels resist attempts at logic and clarity. I think it threatens them.”²

To borrow the memorable last line from the film Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

We soon published Ken’s Advisory article in Aristos (December 2004), in slightly revised form, under the new title “Why We Need a Definition of Art”—with some supplementary material, including an open letter to colleagues. In that letter, Ken roundly castigated fellow educators for scholarly pretensions that increasingly misled them to “venture into speculations more appropriate for psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, mathematicians, psychiatrists, and politicians” while they ignored the fundamentals of art education. Though we wanted to reprint his JAE article as well, we were regrettably unable to obtain the journal’s permission.

To afford Ken a more complete sense of our viewpoint, we sent him a copy of What Art Is, and were delighted when he informed us that, having read through it twice, he agreed with virtually everything we had written.³ His one “friendly disagreement,” as he put it after reading other work by us, pertained to the place of studio art courses in the upper grades.

Most prominently, in a chapter on art education in Who Says That’s Art? (a copy of which I sent him in December 2014), I argued that past 8th grade studio art courses should be offered only as an elective. He, however, firmly believed in their value for general education. That difference notwithstanding, he lauded the book as “absolutely wonderful . . . both scholarly and readable,” and noted that my definition of art had set a “higher standard” than his own.⁴ A later message advised that the book was one that “every art educator should read, and read carefully.”⁵

In August 2021, Ken sent us a summary outline of his own thoughts about art and art education. In it, he noted the significant difference between meaningful works of representational art and essentially “decorative” abstract work, stressing that the former should be the primary focus of art education. He also cautioned against “endless boundary breaking,” as well as the moral and ethical relativism he had observed in a student of his decades ago who went on to become prominent in the field. Teachers, he held, have an obligation to promote work embodying beneficial values. Finally, he appended this kind note to Lou and me: “Even if we disagree here and there, I want you to know that I think you have made the most important contributions to art education in my lifetime.”⁶

Last June, I had the pleasure of sending Ken a copy of the published version of “The Lamentable Consequences of Blurring the Boundaries” (Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 10:2, February 2021), previously sent him in draft form. In it, I credited him for his prescient insistence on the need for teachers to define their subject. He didn’t respond, but some weeks later I was surprised by a message on my answering machine from his daughter Laura. When I phoned back, she explained that she was helping her dad make phone calls to people whose friendship he valued.

The unspoken subtext was that in his 97th year, Ken sensed that the end was near, and that this would be our last conversation. He once again expressed his keen appreciation for our work and thanked us for our friendship. I, in turn, took the opportunity to repeat our gratitude for the interest and support he had given us over the years. Rarely does one have the chance for such closure, and it is a testimony to the calibre of Ken’s character that he had made it possible.

A week before Thanksgiving last year, Laura Lansing wrote to let me know that Ken had died on September 21st. I told her of my intention to post this tribute to him and asked if there were any information she would especially like me to include. In addition to noting that Ken had been a devoted husband and father, she reported that he was especially proud of having received the NAEA’s Manuel Barkan Memorial Award.

Conceived in honor of Manuel Barkan, the award is presented to an individual who, through published work in either Art Education or Studies in Art Education, has contributed a “product of scholarly merit to the field.” Ken’s winning article was “The Effect of Drawing on the Development of Mental Representations” (Studies in Art Education, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1981]). Reporting on a series of drawing exercises done with kindergarten classes, it dealt with an important cognitive aspect of a foundational skill in art education, and presents a marked contrast to the latest Barkan Award article: “Art Education Beyond Anthropocentricism: The Question of Nonhuman Animals in Contemporary Art and Its Education,” by Mira Kallio-Tavin in the same NAEA journal.

According to the University of Georgia, where Kallio-Tavin is a “Distinguished Professor of Art,” her award-winning article

recognizes current problems in human co-existence with nonhuman lives and speaks to the urgent needs of environmental, ecological, ethical, and social justice concerns of current times. The publication develops and decenters humanist-centered philosophy in art education through posthumanist lenses, introducing critical animal studies to the field of art education.

Attempting to unpack that turgid account would go far beyond my scope here,⁷ but it surely calls to mind Ken’s observations quoted above about scholarly pretensions that increasingly lure art educators into arcane speculations while they ignore the fundamentals of art education.

More telling evidence of that point is the sort of work Kallio-Tavin regards as art. Here is one example:

Joseph Beuys explored the human separation from other species and made a point on human-centeredness in his 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me, in which he spent 3 days in the René Block Gallery in New York with a wild coyote.

Whether one regards that bizarre example of “performance” as a sincere expression of some sort or rather as the product of either an artworld charlatan or a deranged mind, it is not a work of art, properly speaking. It is instead an example of postmodernist anti-art.⁸

An award-winning “distinguished professor of art” should surely recognize the difference. Her failure to do so is a clear indication of the extent to which nonart is now the subject of art education, fully realizing the fear Ken Lansing so presciently sounded decades ago.