Abstract Art as Alternative to Multiculturalist Education

Art as Alternative to Multiculturalist Education 218 P H I L O S O P H Y O F E D U C A T I O N 2 0 0 9 unfairly. Multiculturalism resists this trend by promoting an appreciation of how our society may be enhanced by the contributions of increasingly diverse, equal, peacefully coexisting, and communicating cultures. This movement is fundamentally educational, as well as political, and has been changing how we approach the humanities. For those of us who teach in this field, one of our chief aims is to help students cultivate their self-knowledge. Traditionally, we encourage them to reflect on their experiences and views in the light of texts that employ unfamiliar terms of understanding. We hope that by learning the language of such texts, they will broaden, deepen, and refine how they understand themselves. If we are multiculturalists, then, we will want them to develop a clearer and stronger sense of their cultural identities and their relationships to other cultures. The two of course go hand in hand: one’s cultural identity is one’s involvement in the historical interaction between one’s culture or cultures and others’; that interaction in turn can only be interpreted from the perspective of a specific cultural identity. Reflecting on this dimension of their experiences and views should bring home to students the good of participating in constructive intercultural exchanges and the injustice of supporting destructive ones. The best guides to such reflection would accordingly be texts that understand the world in ways that belong to distinct cultures, texts that exemplify cultural understanding, explicitly or implicitly, emphatically or unconsciously. This would seem to cover humanistic work in general, since all of it is rooted in some cultural context — including abstract art. Take Norman Lewis’s Phantasy II. Sure, the painting appears to be simply an arrangement of vertical and diagonal planes sometimes bounding, and sometimes floating free of, blotches of red, yellow, green, and other colors in a shallow, ambiguous space. But is not the fact that Lewis was an African-American man from a proletarian background, trying to prove himself in New York at the end of the nineteen-forties, key for understanding why and how the painting was produced? Fueling the rise of multiculturalism has been the development of historicist analysis like this. Historicism provides the movement with a supporting method of inquiry, criticism, and education. Virtually everyone now accepts that humanistic and artistic works stand to reveal and be revealed by their historical origins in a conjuncture of cultural forces, thus illuminating our own cultural identities. It must be admitted, though, that a painting like Phantasy II is less useful for a multiculturalist teacher than one that pictures the world more recognizably. Because Lewis’s work does not show us much about the Harlem society around him, its cultural understanding has to be reconstructed using sources of information about the painter and his world that are external to the painting. In fact, if we are primarily interested in cultural understanding as such, it makes sense in general to favor the study of other kinds of works. Historical documents and scientific, philosophical, critical, and artistic works that comment directly on cultural history are more valuable for this multiculturalist teacher and her students. True, in order to master the historicist mode of inquiry, it is a good idea for students to practice it on texts