In an article in The Canberra Times last week the new head of the ANU School of Art, Denise Ferris, and the retiring director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Howard Morphy, were spruiking the proposal for the abolition of the School of Cultural Inquiry.
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This comprises the disciplines of English, art history and curatorship, classics, film and new media studies, and gender studies, most of which under this proposal would be integrated into the School of Language Studies, possibly with an altered name. Art history and curatorship would be forcibly moved into the Art School.
While this proposed merger would create many pedagogic problems - and we have already witnessed the forced resignation of the head of school, Professor Jill Matthews and several protests by staff and postgraduate students - parts of the administration still seem determined to press forth with the mergers, as witnessed in the interviews with Ferris and Morphy.
So, what is at stake and why all the fuss at a time when academic realignments happen with monotonous frequency? The ANU Art School as an independent entity came into being about 35 years ago, as the Canberra School of Art, at about the same time the ANU introduced the teaching of art history. The primary function of a school of art is to train art practitioners, while the primary function of art history and curatorship is to train art historians, curators and art professionals.
In each instance an undergraduate usually takes three to four years full time to gain competence in the selected field. At present a person at the art school can do additional courses in the rest of the university, including art history, anthropology and classics, while they study their workshop discipline, such as painting, printmaking or studio glass. Trainee art historians and art curators also require all this time to develop their expertise in their chosen area and normally do additional courses in English, classics, history and other humanities disciplines to complement their studies.
In other words, art history is a humanities discipline. This is the area from which it draws its students, the sister disciplines with which it collaborates and the realm in which its graduates seek and find employment. There are literally hundreds of ANU art history and curatorship graduates employed in galleries and museums around the world. Just take a look at Canberra's major cultural institutions, if you require to be convinced.
The universities of Melbourne and Sydney, which have attached to them very distinguished art schools, would take it as an insult to their national and international status if someone suggested that their art history teaching should be transferred from the humanities to their art schools. It simply makes no pedagogic sense to those brought up in the tradition of art history. Art schools do of course teach a form of art history, usually called art theory, but it is especially geared to training practitioners; if it is not, it fails its purpose. It is simply different to the art history taught in the humanities.
Also the qualifications of staff can be quite different: three of the five staff in the art school art theory workshop lack a doctorate, while the seven staff teaching in art history, curatorship, film and new media studies (at present this operates as a teaching unit) require a PhD as a basic starting qualification. This is not intended as a criticism, but as a statement of fact stressing the difference between these enterprises.
At the ANU there are many disciplines that have professional engagement with forms of art history. For example anthropology of art, archaeology of art, classics with Greek and Roman art, Asian studies and Asian art and Islamic studies and Persian art, as well as art history and curatorship. Should they all be moved into the art school because they deal with art?
Such a proposal would be seen as clearly ridiculous. Academic disciplines require the intellectual company of sister disciplines and, while we in art history have enormous respect for art practitioners, we appreciate that what they do is fundamentally different from what art historians and curators do.
Art history and curatorship has been spectacularly successful at the ANU with healthy undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate enrolments and has been trading in the black. It has attracted a very healthy number of students nationally and internationally.
The overwhelming majority of academic staff and postgraduate students in art history strongly oppose the proposed shotgun marriage as we realise that this would weaken our discipline and, within an art school setting, we would no longer be able to offer our students the integrated quality education which they at present enjoy and the exceptional standing that they at present experience in the national and international job market. There is a lot in a name, location and the company we keep - let's not sacrifice these when they have been a proven success.
Sasha Grishin is the Sir William Dobell professor of art history at the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences.