I've been reading Susan McKenna and her discussion of theory and practice. ("Theory and Practice: revisiting critical pedagogy in studio art education" Art Journal, spring, 1999). What is interesting is how many of the issues she raises are still current today. However some of the ways to address them are radically different. My problem with her essay is also perhaps the result of nearly 10 yrs more thought. In her text the problematic relation of theory and practice is introduced to a debate surraunding anti-intellectualism. And for me the idea that art is anti-intellectual is the same kind of discussion that photography fell foul of in the 1980s - "but is it art?" It is so redundant, that it misses the point. Perhaps this is because I have come to studio teaching from a history of teaching theory. What I am learning is not that studio (practice) is anti-intellectual) but that theory (theory) is still framed in inappropriate ways. That can force it away from the art. I think (hope) that I work in a very different way. Today I used the spiral to donut film (below) to frame a discussion of entropy. This was the last in a series of studio seminar sessions about systems and networks designed to get the senior electronic arts students thinking about the very materials they work with and some of the politics of these media. The works we discussed were directly drawn form the interests of the students and the projects they are working on, but I drew these out to a bigger picture: To Robert Smithson and his Spiral Jetty, and his positive reading of entropy: To Claude Shannon and his attempts in 1948 to route information down telephone lines that inevitably lead to the SAGE system and to military applications of networked systems: To the very computers that we use that are now reading video footage and printing 3D images ( see gareth Long's Video Solid project ... http://garethlong.net/videoSolid/videoSolid.html). What connected these things was not theory but the very studio projects we are engaged with. Studio WAS the theory, it contributed a framework, presented us with a shared language and enabled us to discuss and analyse the material. Teaching "theory" in studio then is not about one plus the other but about finding aspects of making and practice embedded in the thoughts and ideas we engage. Although McKenna does not go this far in her essay she does head towards a point where studio is understood via the identification of ideological frameworks. After all as she says we are simply teaching students how to look from a particular situated position. It reminds me again of WSST and Donna Haraway's "Situated Knowledge". I need to go back to this essay that I probably haven't read for 15 years....
