Revista DIÁLOGOS com a arte

I am very grateful for the invitation given to me to write a preface to this excellent issue of Dialogues with Art - Magazine of art, culture, and education.

I know that good academic custom dictates that when we preface a book or magazine we comment on each text and introduce the authors. I received a summary of the texts and the rich/excellent CVs of the professors/researchers who authored the articles in this issue.

I was so enthusiastic about the set of texts that I decided to just comment on the importance of the lines of thought that guide the texts included here, since their CVs and summaries already give us the dimension of the great importance that each of the writers has in their institutions and in their areas of knowledge. What initially impacted me was the variety of themes revealing the Arts' commitment to the struggles of contemporary life, the organization of the different knowledge necessary for today's life, the social wounds that sicken our communities and the possibilities of individual and community development through the arts. An excellent example of social and personal development through crafts is the article of Rachel Mason, pioneer in multicultural studies that greatly influenced Brazil and Portugal. The fact that the Journal counts on Mason's collaboration is proof of its high academic quality. The article has the collaboration of a Portuguese researcher, Raquel Moreira.

The wide spectrum of subjects that Dialogues with Art covers ranges from the analysis and enjoyment of an artist like Hilma af Klint by Margarete Soares to the digital experiences that we need to master in order to be contemporary with ourselves and become more useful to society without becoming mechanized, as the authors Ana Camargo, Irineu Camargo and Anabela Moura argue in the text Interface between Communication and Technologies in Distance Education: Undiscipline ways of promoting critical thinking – What would be the relationship between ‘undiscipline” and transdisciplinarity? For my country, transdisciplinarity is still a utopia. Probably 'undiscipline' will be the future of universities, but we are going through interdisciplinarity, perhaps less radical than the reunification between art and aesthetics proposed by Wolfgang Weinlich in his work entitled Visual Primordial Language: Decoupling of
Aesthetics and Art and their Reunification? in which he defines universal aesthetics and natural aesthetics. I saw the Hilma af Klint exhibition described and appreciated here, and I was amazed. This artist was a precursor of abstractionism and was so aware of her historical moment that she asked that her work only be exhibited years after her death. She knew that it would not be well evaluated and understood in her time because she was a woman, because of the
immanence of the subjectivity she revealed, because of the absence of norms in its forms and its cultural hybridity interrelating Eastern and Western cultures.

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We live in the inter era. We are living in a time in which attention is focused on the internet, interculturality, interactivity, inter-territoriality, interaction, interrelationship, integration and interdisciplinarity of arts and media, as challenging modes of production and meaning of limits,
borders, and territories.

Interdisciplinarity is the value that weaves together the texts in this issue of Dialogues with the Art. Interdisciplinarity goes beyond dialogue to configure itself as epistemology. Two texts use the word interdisciplinarity in the title: Art and Fashion in Times of Crisis: an Interdisciplinary Analysis by Maria Antonieta Vaz de Morais and Reading “My Last Death”: an Interdisciplinary Approach, by Suparna Banerjee-India. This last essay interrelates Poetry and Dance as well as The Soundscape in the Understanding of the Literary Text by Cíntia Rocha, Adalgisa Pontes, and Ana Raquel Aguiar, which interrelates Poetry and Sound.

Some articles are not necessarily interdisciplinary but trace a plot between complementary and/or opposing knowledge, such as Light and Shadow: the exploration of sustainable design in the Fiat Lux! by Patrícia Vieira who integrates sustainability, a subject in need of first aid across the globe, with Lighting Artifacts and the text by Raquel Moreira and Assunção Pestana, Artistic Installation and Performance; Resonances in Socio-Artistic-Educational Environments, opposing rupture and interaction in the relational context of education and art in the action that we call in Brazil: Art/Education, as we expose its interdisciplinary character in the very naming of the discipline or interdiscipline.

Interdisciplinarity occurs in several ways. The definition of interdisciplinarity is easier through the process of exclusion, that is, saying what it is not. It is not, for example, a ready-made restaurant, with a little meat, rice, and vegetables, prepared by teachers for students to swallow. It is the teacher's responsibility to plan, but not deliver, the relationships between the arts and other knowledge, already defined. Interdisciplinarity is the work of several heads creating possibilities for the student to establish different connections. Contemporary technologies have facilitated and sharpened the need to establish relationships between different fields of knowledge to solve problems and enhance, through exercise, our ability to establish “links”, interrelations between concepts, images, ideas, etc.

The term interdisciplinarity itself suggests the existence of separate, autonomous school subjects, which are intended to interrelate, extending borders, overlapping contexts, exploring intermediate ranges.

Community Art, Culture and Education projects carried out and theorized in this issue, such as the Jorge Gumbe's article Art Education for the Promotion of Intangible Heritage - Luvale Traditional Festival, demonstrates a high degree of social awareness, but also objectives of expanding historical knowledge essential to political awareness as in SPA_LOW_SKY-of Rolf Laven (Interconnecting Artistic Participation and Cultural History) and The People and the Sea: Cine-Concert “Heróis do Mar” - a Community Project by Helena Maria da Silva Santana and Maria do Rosário da Silva Santana.

Community work is almost always interdisciplinary, such as Immigrants in Viana do Castelo. Welcoming and Social Integration by António Cardoso and Margarida Torres because, there cannot be social integration in the absence of place consciousness and place consciousness in the absence of social sciences and cultural anthropology, environmental history, and the history of the community itself.

Also raising awareness is the work War, Trauma and Consequences by Maria Celeste Henriques de Carvalho de Almeida Cantante, who, through the analysis of war films from various times, discusses the contemporary war in Ukraine.

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We can affirm that the function of interdisciplinarity is not to communicate to the individual an integrated vision of all knowledge, but to develop in him a thought process that makes him able of, when faced with new objects of knowledge, seeking a new synthesis. In this sense, the integration of knowledge will always be tentative, never terminal, and the analytical-synthetic method, therefore, the axis around which interdisciplinarity takes place.

Technological education dichotomized the analytical-synthetic method of investigation, privileging analysis, as it was the appropriate way to vertically explore knowledge and turned this type of exploration into a pedagogical axiom. If it is true that only with this verticality the necessary fundamental competence can be achieved, it is also true that teaching that focuses exclusively on verticality atomizes the cognitive universe.

Rasheed Olowoselu in his article Use of Augmented Reality Technology in Learning Satisfaction of Arts Students proves that students, according to themselves, are more satisfied when they understand that Augmented Reality Technology has improved their learning abilities.

 

However, contradictorily, but appropriately, the technology that reinforced the model of fragmented studies, by resulting in in-depth study, contributed in such a way to social complexity that, necessarily, it requires interdisciplinary solutions. Just remember the problem of energy production and conservation, the solution of which requires the co-participation of engineers, physicists, economists, sociologists, architects, social psychologists, and so on.

Therefore, interdisciplinarity, has the function of integrating the patchwork of highly developed skills and diverse and often antagonistic interests. This integration is an organization that takes place in the student's mind, caused by the way knowledge is presented to him.

The interdisciplinary art teacher has a similar role to the curator at an exhibition: leading the observer to search for memories of experiences and information that go beyond the images and objects presented.

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• From the epistemological factors of interdisciplinarity, Hugh Petrie highlights, as the most comprehensive, the need for each participant to have interpretative knowledge of the other school subjects. This means, therefore, that each participant in the interdisciplinary adventure must have tacit knowledge of all areas of study involved in the project, in addition to the focal knowledge of the school subject within their specific competence.
• The distinction between focal knowledge and tacit knowledge that is done by Michael Polanyi, in the book Personal Knowledge. The difference between focal knowledge and tacit knowledge can be exemplified in a simplifying way, through an analogical reduction to figure and ground relationships in the act of perception.
• Observing a drawing, the figure perceived is equivalent to focal knowledge, and the background to tacit knowledge. This contributes to the configuration of focal knowledge. However, it is a kind of subsidiary perception of a situation not observed in itself but used as an instrument or clue in the active understanding of an object. This tacit knowledge, in the case of interdisciplinarity, is aimed at knowing the cognitive maps of the school subjects
involved in the project. By cognitive map we mean the global paradigm and perceptual apparatus used by a school subject. The cognitive map includes, among other elements, the basic concepts of the school subject, research methods, observable categories, technical representations the meaning of the terms used, and so on.

• It is common that different school subjects use the same linguistic term to mean different things. For example, in genetic epistemology the term accommodation has an active meaning of “procedure” while in social sciences it carries a passive meaning of “agreement” or “acceptance”. It is common for different disciplines, looking at the same fact or object, to see different things. This can be exemplified again through visual perception, using a figure widely publicized by Gestalt, that of the young/old woman.
• Some looking at this figure, initially perceive a young woman in profile others, an old woman with a pointy chin. The young woman's necklace is the old woman's mouth.
• Taking this figure as an object of observation, the specialist in one discipline will be able to refer to the woman and the specialist in another discipline, guided by the observation categories in his area, will understand that he is referring to the girl, but the first specialist, for different categories of observation, you may be mentioning the old one. My discipline, through the perceptual apparatus employed, may allow me to see the girl in the figure, while
another discipline interprets the same figure as an old woman. Two scholars from different fields can be talking about women for a long time without realizing that they are talking about different things. As Hugh Petrie says, only when you see what I see does interdisciplinary
work have a chance of being successful.
• A translation of principles from one area to another would be a mere associative use of knowledge, but not interdisciplinarity. We must understand at least the key terms and ways of observing each discipline in its own context so that we can work interdisciplinary.
• Milton Yinger compares the development of interdisciplinary projects to learning a foreign language. He says that for many scholars, not long ago, the work of other disciplines was ‘non-language’. Other scholars recognized the existence of related disciplines, even without understanding them or considering them particularly interesting. It was ‘Greek’ to them, but it was a language. Recently the number of those who can speak and read one or more foreign
languages has grown, although with a strong accent and with the tendency to translate words into their own language for understanding.
• Only now we are finding people who can honestly think in interdisciplinary terms, therefore without the need for translation.

 

The most appropriate vehicle for developing interdisciplinary thinking would be a kind of weaving together of different disciplinary fields through the search for synthesis.
There are four different methodological senses of synthesis:
1. reconstructive sense: an analysis is followed by a synthesis to restore the whole.
2. judgmental sense: analysis conducting the synthesis of which is a value judgment.
3. transformative sense: an analysis followed by a synthesis which represents a qualitative advance.
4. cultural sense: analysis and synthesis embedded in the context – an analysis/synthesis that, to produce meaning, considers the cultural context.

 

I confess that when teaching Art through the Triangular Approach, I prioritize the cultural sense by valuing the contextualization of what is produced and what is seen. The Triangular Approach proposes the articulation of perceptual, cognitive, analytical, and creative processes around the actions of:

1. Make Art
2. See, read, analyze the image and work or field of meaning of Art [1]
3. Contextualize - what is expressed and the images and objects that are read in historical,
social, experiential, subjective, interdisciplinary terms, etc.

 

The goal is:
1. Develop perception and imagination to capture the surrounding reality (through imagination we discover what does not exist in reality). Recent technologies, including augmented reality, have been helping to expand perception. In this magazine I was surprised by Rasheed Olowoselu's article on Augmented Reality Technology Usage on Arts Students Learning Satisfaction. The two subjects Augmented reality and perception; and learning satisfaction in both senses by answering the questions Was I satisfactorily taught? and “Did I enjoy learning?” They will be especially important in teaching the Art you want.
2. Develop the critical ability to analyze images, objects, and perceived reality.
3. Stimulate the creative capacity not only to materialize what is imagined, but also to respond appropriately to the perceived and analyzed reality by modifying or transforming it.

 

If Image Reading is the construction of knowledge, whatever the instrument of analysis (Semiotics, Gestalt, Empirical Aesthetics, Iconology, etc.), Contextualization illuminates reading, leading Art to function not only as a delight, but mainly as a basis for cultural and social criticism.

Context is the fiber optics of reading. Contextualization is the open door to interdisciplinarity, an idea that permeates this well-constructed number of Dialogues with Art. Contextualization is the synthesis of the learning process.

 

Contextualization as a phenomenological and epistemological instrument of the Triangular Approach was constructed in direct relationship with Paulo Freire's idea of “awareness”.

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With Freire our process of educational decolonization began.

Brazil was colonized by Portugal but in terms of Art teaching, Portugal outsourced, hiring French people to create higher education in Arts in 1816. It later chose as a model the teaching of American drawing presented by Walter Smith at the Exhibition of the Centenary of the Liberation of the United States in Philadelphia in 1876. Since the 20th century we have been fighting for education to be based on our context and reflect on our plural identity and our consciousness as citizens.

Enough of copying the world to which we do not belong, but with which we want to dialogue.

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Bibliography
Barbosa, Ana Mae e Cunha, Fernanda Pereira (2005). Abordagem Triangular no Ensino das Artes e das Culturas Visuais. Editora Cortez.
Fazenda, Ivani (org.; 2002). Dicionário em construção: interdiscplinaridade. Cortez.
Petrie, Hugh (1976). Do you see what I see? The Epistemology of Interdisciplinary Inquiry. Educational Researcher, feb. 1976.
Japiassu, Hilton (2012). Interdisciplinaridade e patologia do saber. Imago.
Parsons, Michael (2005). Curriculum, Arte e cognição integrados in Ana Mae Barbosa (2005). Arte/Educação Contemporânea. Cortez.
Polany, M.(2015). Personal knowledge. Towards a post-critical philosophy. The University of Chicago Press.

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ANA MAE BARBOSA

Professor Emeritus at the University of São Paulo, Brazil

anamaebarbosa@gmail.com