English Summary

Searching for Japan

Transcultural Inspiration in Art and Cultural Education

This book was published thanks to grant support from the Ministry of Culture; Call No. 3/2022, Support for Creative Learning Projects (0213) under the National Recovery Plan: Status of the Artist Initiative; Component No. 4.5, Development of the Cultural and Creative Sector; Development of Knowledge and Skills of Trainers and Other Professionals (Reg. No. 0213000094).

The book we present here discusses the possibilities of transculturally oriented art education. Promotion of arts and cultural studies as compulsory segments in the general education system represents one of the current trends that respond to the need to reflect and address social and global issues that are downplayed or remain hidden. Creative processes are an area of human activity that is coming under the spotlight not only in the commercial sphere of the mainstream cultural industry. Observing the variability of unexpected solutions and the ability to think differently, beyond established practices, conventions or stereotypes, is also of high interest to analysts of educational paradigms. Developed countries have already picked up on these tendencies and strongly support cultural art education. It is already evident that it would be worthwhile, at the level of the state sector, to turn attention to updating and revitalizing the post-war concept of ‘education through art’.

However, beyond the official trends of the state cultural and educational policy, we can see a much more important moment. At the level of ‘small’, marginalized social practices to which art and cultural activities belong, organization of dynamic, alternative networks that generate independent and autonomous thinking is taking place. Creative activities that spring from below, figuratively speaking from the emotional undergrowth of social sensibility, should definitely not be prevented, as they are laboratories of new thinking, imagination and sensibility.

This book brings similar topics to a focus. At the beginning, a happy coincidence arranged a meeting that led to a conversation about joint artistic and pedagogical activity. This was characterized not only by the content that was addressed, but also by the search for ways to realize a joint project, and how to simultaneously design it in such a way as to maintain the emphasis on collaboration and communication without neglecting individual uniqueness, respect and consideration for the other person. In the next phase, when the players met face-to-face, the group had to agree on ways of communication. It was apparent that two very different cultures, Czech and Japanese, would meet in a specific situation that would use participatory and cooperative strategies of contemporary art linked to Japanese artistic practices of performance, scene creation and dance performance. This is how the first ENGI-MON project was created, which was the result of collaboration between the Department of Art Education at the Faculty of Education of Charles University, the Institute of Asian Studies at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University and the alternative theatre Scale Laboratory in Shizuoka.

Performance became part of the Prague Quadrennial Festival of Performance Design and Space in 2019. In 2023, after a period of silence caused by the Covid 19 Pandemic, the collaboration and search for languages of understanding continues. The scope of the new project has expanded to include more participants, school children, and has also focused on reflection of the creative process and research mapping of the creative field in which a new cultural artifact and new knowledge crystallize at the border of two cultures.

In summary, this publication introduces the reader to forms of performance, action, and process art, mapping its practices and process against the background of the work of a heterogeneous group of creators and research participants. The authors trace and interpret several months of collaboration between Czech educators and the Japanese art group Scale Laboratory, with teachers and art students from Tamagawa University, with teacher education students, and with primary school teachers, culminating again in a joint performance (scenography, dance, music) held as part of the Prague Quadrennial 2023.

As mentioned, research activities were ongoing throughout the project. A hybrid research model was proposed, based on art-based action research (ABAR). Its main framework belongs to the so-called liquid methodologies, which take into account the turn towards multimodality of data collected from ongoing action (teaching, making), where the diversity of primary research documents characterizes multimodality. This involves collection of cultural artifacts made in different media and fixed by different modes of records, which were analyzed, coded, and organized into interpretative diagrams. These primary research documents included, for example, interviews and their transcripts (many of them conducted online), transcripts of conversations about the process of doing the work, collection of preconceptions about Japanese culture and the visual works (using a variety of traditional and non-traditional media, such as classical ink painting, pen and ink drawing, digital images, and others), lecture recordings and their presentations, shared preconceptions and models for dealing with the topic of RARE, etc. The research team, consisting of all participants, produced multiple types of texts, and their conceptualization was verified (triangulated) in many meetings.

The artistic and research activities result in a case study that forms something of a content center, but at the same time, its elements spill out as evidence throughout the space of this book. Therefore, the reader will find a large number of diverse texts inter-textually and inter-visually connected, interacting with each other and forming a network of references. It is an aggregate, parts of which do not form a unified whole. On the contrary, we believe that its heterogeneity supports the spatial idea of the intermingling of the two cultures, in which the motivational and inspirational starting points for new creation and new knowledge are activated in different constellations. For a better overview, we also publish three simplified plans or diagrams of conceptual reasoning around the meanings that participants agreed are important on p. 111, 126, 127. Importance grounded inspiration for art making and preparation. Many of the artifacts reproduced here carry elements of Japonisme, whereby the creators (artists — teachers, student teachers, and children, whom we consider equal authors) do not imitate or copy, but develop and apply understood principles of Japanese art and culture. Indeed, the tradition of searching for a new expression of Czech artistic modernism, heavily inspired by Japanese art, demonstrates similar creative borrowings which function as a formative principle of artistic experimentation since the 1890s. For contemporary art pedagogy, the discovery of this generative principle is particularly beneficial.

The book, a heterogeneous case study, contains individual chapters which differ in the genre of explanation, reflexive description, interpretation, and the use of media that interact with each other in the generation of meaning, typically between word and image, word and word, image, and image. The main chapters are as follows:

1. Preface

2. The Progress of the Project

3. Nevšední, Rare, Mare

4. Interviews with Czech and Japanese Artists

5. Searching for Japanese Culture

6. Performance and Action Trends in Art Pedagogy

7. Open-Form Art Education

8. Teaching Culture

9. Research Probe

10. Methodology

11. Results

12. Transcultural Inspiration

13. Conclusion

The chapters do not follow each other, but together with the graphic planes of the book’s graphic design, they create a flexible field of meanings.

The chapter with the trilingual title Nevšední, Rare, Mare (in English The Unusual, Rare, Mare ), shows how Japanese inspirations were imprinted in the work and thinking of the participants. It points to the fact that transcultural collaboration is a continuous translation from language to language that continuously shifts linguistically and culturally established understanding of meanings. The content of the section is framed by thinking of the participating artists, captured in a series of guided interviews. The cultural context is then illuminated by the text Searching for Japanese Culture

Parts 6 and 7 present links to action and collaborative art forms and the principles inspiring open-form art education. Teaching scaled in this way uses processes of action and reaction, improvisation, and visual dialogic action. It develops the actors’ ability to perceive the personal creative process as well as the ability to engage in the process of collective creation. The aim of such education is for actors to learn to perceive social bonds and group dynamics and to be able to use them in the creative process. People can communicate and shape their personal and cultural identity through art. Participatory actions can help strengthen social cohesion. They should be based on an awareness of the values of the community and, in a broader context, of the values of cultural heritage, which do not lie in the motionless petrification of thought and imi- tation of forms, but in their contextualization and updating, respecting their craft and material traditions, understanding the moments of their creation and transformations of their previous use. Art, its forms, shapes, social functions, and their manifestations develop life skills, foster creative potential and give people a chance to change their approach to dealing with problems.

The chapter entitled Teaching Culture is significant for the didactics of art education. It defines the key concepts related to our field of research: transcultural education and cultural competence. In the professional discourse, these are newly established concepts, burdened, moreover, with many educational policy statements.

The last chapters of the book are presented in the genre of interpretation. This research report analyses the creative and pedagogical approach of the three artists, in which children play a pivotal role as co-authors. It examines this process in terms of the possibilities of collaboration and the openness of the creative process. It also describes different forms of communicative space in art education. All explanatory texts are accompanied by carefully selected visual evidence, serving as examples of certain conclusions or statements.

We conclude with information that tends to be at the beginning. It is a justification and definition of the objective. This is because cultural education and artistic production are very complex social fields with many players and many functions. The basic questions that art education has long asked itself are: Is it possible to teach art? Is it possible to teach culture? We are convinced that the answer is “yes”, if we realize that both are open-ended concepts. Culture and art denote space rather than a set of instructions and guidelines. Instructions for art and instructions for culture do not exist, and as a phrase, it even sounds like a Dada joke. However, once we accept the spatial notion of cultural communication, and understand creation as a cultural practice of symbolic exchanges, then we arrive at the ground of meaning-making and cognition, of diverse variants of languages and their function in the processes of cognition. The best variants for active learning are artifact creation, namely collaborative, and shared creation. This publication aims to fill the gap in contemporary art education in the field of open creative processes and transmedia forms of contemporary art, and at the same time to fill the lack of teaching materials for art education in the changing conditions of cultural education. Transcultural exchanges and encounters in ‘making art’ are workshops of humanity. And we truly believe that teaching values of being human is possible.