UNDERSTANDING SIGNIFICANCE OF VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF REALITY AS MAIN STEP IN LEARNING THROUGH MAKING USE OF MIMETIC

THEORY OF ART

~LALIT KISHORE

Some negative positions

Art is essentially mimesis and mimicry of reality or nature. ~Plato

Art is useless and potentially dangerous. ~Plato

Art is an imitation of an imitation, thus barely real at all. Art is mainly concerned with sensual pleasure. ~ Common metaphysical notions

“Either all works of visual art have some common quality, or when we speak of 'works of art' we gibber." ~Clive Bell: 20th Century Formalist

Emergent positions on art as mimesisAristotle said that though art was essentially mimesis, however,

he maintained that (good) art was neither useless nor dangerous, but rather natural and beneficial

Any human society which is healthy will be a society where there is imitative art. ~Plato

Human have the ability to use reason and to create. ~Humanism school of thought

Nothing is more natural than for children to pretend.Human child learns from imitation coupled with analysis.

~Developmental psychologySenses are gateways to knowledge construction. Constructed

multisensory experiences with analysis and visual codification lead to learning. ~Constructivism

Acceptance that ..Mimesis ≠ Mirroring Nature

Mimetic theory of art as applied to constructed learning experience or teaching

(Good) visual art, related to representation of reality, is institutionally tied to learning and its first level codification and communication.

Visual symbols, graphics, stick drawings, line drawings, diagrams as visual codes draw strength from the emergent mimetic theory of art to make learning process based through semi-real experience making it pedagogically sound.

The link

Represent--ation of reality

Visual symbol /Support

Mimesis

Visual symbols

The are two-dimensional simple line drawings to represent reality

They are not real and use some features of the reality to make it recognizable and useful for culture-free communication

They are the basic codes of visual literacy They are drawn in single colour Because of being imitative they are learnt best

through modeling

Redrawn as mimetic exercise and practice

Some Christmas related visual symbols for practice

Pedagogically sound learning experience two stages supported by mimetic theory of art

Abstract codification of the generated knowledge

Practice , internalization and application of abstraction

A desk-study survey of elementary school textbooks of 3 private publishers

90% colourful pictures and 50% of them three-dimensional with details as sensual pleasure (distraction from learning, highly artistic, difficult to draw for chidren)

Convenient use of printing technology, readymade artistic pictures as marketing strategy (publishers’ plea)

High cost glamorous textbooks inducing schools to take commissions and discounts (all three contacted school head-teachers of private schools admitted)

Post-survey discussion and implications Visual art (media), textbook industry (market) and

mimesis ( pedagogically unsound imitation and copying) have turned textbooks into glamorous and glossy products

It was found that an elementary school teacher needs to be proficient in drawing at least three hundred visual symbols of the pictures used in the textbooks

A training course of 20 hours in visual symbol drawing for teachers for learning and practicing 15 visual symbols per hour