The Life Class: a Linguistic Model of Observation

Arguments for a Collective Teaching Methodology in the Fine Arts

The Life Class, as currently taught in most higher education art programs no longer meets the requirements of today’s art students; it doesn’t reflect the context of artistic education today, the new drawing practices or even the resources that are now generally available to the art student. Because of this, it is increasingly rare to find it in art school curricula and also, it cannot reverse a perceptible decline in the teaching of drawing in art education in general, much less realize the medium’s full potential.

In the past, the Life Class was the cusp of a hierarchical process of learning that, literally, began on the ground floor, by copying plaster models of Greek ideals and continued with the student working his/her way upstairs, copying the teacher’s drawings and collections of old master drawings until reaching the top floor, the Life Class, where all would be revealed. This was a model born in times of philosophical positivism, empiricism, empire and nation building, a time of emerging institutions and also one of codification and regulation of knowledge and laws. [1] This was a time in which where the order of the visible, the written in particular, was of great importance, with the emergence of encyclopaedias and dictionaries, the written and illustrated press, with languages viewed as a form of territory to be defended through the recording of correct usage, in short, a machine de guerre[2].

The hierarchical institution of the Academy was born not only to protect the quality of national fine arts production through teaching and artistic practice but also to establish a reward system whereby a nation’s artists strove to achieve the highest ranking position, that of President of the Royal Academy.

To some extent, the rite of passage dimension of the life class still applies in those increasingly rare college art education programs where life drawing is still being taught, but the decline and almost disappearance of the Academy as an institution should already tell us that things have changed. The fact that the hierarchy of the life class persists some extent until today in art education curricula is due among other factors, to the persistence of certain attitudes in connection with nudity (primarily female) together with narrow views on student age in COED college programs.

But today’s art students bring with them new information, information about a new reality that is invisible, digital, immaterial and yet highly functional, and this information implies or should imply both new resources and new goals as well as the need to teach artists new ways of engaging with this reality, feed from it and represent it. In this sense, the ancient stairs of Academia no longer lead to work or ways of seeing and representing things that are relevant to the students of today. As a result, the new students are finding their own ways, short cuts and provisional goals and aims, guided and assisted by their tutors and teachers in self-directed collaborative research processes.

Colleges have reacted to the new circumstances by developing self-directed art research programs offering dissertation-based research or practice-base research courses combining a written component and studio work. Among other consequences this has led to a devaluation of the MA degree and the emergence of interdisciplinary research in the arts.

Besides looking at the roles of the site, teacher, model and student, an assessment of the life class as a learning environment with a view to the development a more dynamic learning structure must also take into account a dimension that has so far been crucially overlooked: language.
The terminology used in studio discussions and course-related research comprises a form of space, the structural underpinnings and true “walls” of the classroom, for it is inside this space that the learning actually occurs. Words provide the scaffolding to understand the concepts at play and also define the boundaries of one might expect from the life class.

A model of Life Class for these times should be responsive to today’s fluid, changing reality. It should also replicate as far as possible a personal experience of that reality rather than provide the context for a passive observation and imitation in a restricted and regulated context. Today, academic programs that include the life class reflect up to a point the ideology and (past) needs of the educational institution but not necessarily those of the individual student. The strong emphasis on place with its associated ideas of hierarchy and access that have dominated perceptions of the life class so far should be de-emphasized, giving way to more flexible views of the experience of the life class as a personal, fluid space in permanent transition tending to what the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has called invisibility.[3]

Also, a revision of the roles of teacher, model and student as participant observers would serve to reposition the human body in the context of the life class no longer as an a object but as an anti-object and of the life class as a personal experience of a regulated moment in time not necessarily linked to a physical place at all but as part of a broader system (Foucault).
Language, that is the terminology used to discuss the work and the words used between practitioners in their interactions and in an educational context, artistic or otherwise, defines the boundaries of a discipline (Archispeak, Metapolis) and, in this case, the boundaries of the life class as a purpose-built environment for the (socially acceptable) observation of the human body.

The space of the classroom—the life class or any other— is in fact primarily a linguistic space, where concepts are shared and learnt. The role of language in the theoretical discussion and teaching of drawing has never been properly assessed for unlike classical dance, for example, where movements of the body have names that serve to explain in words the choreography, in drawing, bodily movements makes no sense, only the outcome. The study of drawing has been based mostly on the outcome of such movements: the drawing as an object. Because of its potential importance however, terminology should probably be examined as a tool for the creation of linguistic and metaphorical spaces, a new semantic “life room” where this dynamic experience of the life class might develop and (over)flow into new and emerging fields and disciplines through the porosity of language, through the borrowing, incorporation and metaphorical use of language.

Existing web resources allow today’s student to gain the experience of the pose (albeit a mediated one) via specialist websites and drawing software, challenging the historical role of the life class as sole and exclusive source for the observation and artistic representation of the human body. Supported by countless “how to” books and sources, these and other similar web resources challenge not only the accepted timeframe of the class but also, and unfortunately in my opinion, the mystery, the sense of gathering around in a joint journey of discovery and knowledge under the guidance and leadership of the teacher-shaman. In a sense, the new reality tends to destroy the sense of class community and diminishes the importance of the role of the individual teacher with respect to the introduction of the students into the mysteries of the (mostly female) human body. This may come across as paradoxical, given that many people view crowded classrooms as one of the causes of the poor performance of some students and therefore such people might consider the one-on-one relationship that is possible today as positive. Even accepting that there is a certain merit in that view, I believe that the role of a horizontal dialogue between students should not be underestimated and also, it is not the authority of the teacher that is currently challenged but his capacity as a human being to provide or guide the students to all the information that is available.

On the up side, the new reality affords the opportunity and also the means to extend the experience of the life class way beyond a pedagogical timeframe and place. This new flexibility allows for the introduction of new possible elements and variables into the experience of the life class allowing for the student’s insertion into his or her social context through part-time employment or personal research in connection with their academic project, adding yet another layer or dimension of information to the work.

It would be particularly interesting, for example, to examine the role of the model as active collaborator with his or her own agenda, rather than a passive, malleable biological (and overtly sexual) object under the direction of the teacher; a teacher who, in turn, is guided by the exploration of accepted formal poses drawn from Greek and Roman antiquity and their more recent expression through the classicist teaching programs of the Academy.

A model-performer would introduce a new direction into the group’s exploration of the human form through drawing, new roles, new forms. Also, it could possibly lead to a new exploration of performance that would feed back to and broaden the context of the life class. Visual and choreographic grammars such as the Laban Notation System would provide the linguistic means to write down and discuss and even propose the pose in different terms, examining it s potentialities and limitations. Laban’s notion of Kinesphere, for instance, would allow for a dynamic and focused observation of the negative space surrounding the human figure in a new understanding of the pose and its development in time and space. It would also allow for the choreographing of instances of expression through the human body that are not necessarily linked to Greek and Roman ideals (although Vitruvius is an inescapable reference).

Instead, the new options afforded by the possibility of naming and describing in specific terms a dynamic space in flux give rise to new perceptions of the historical dimension of the pose (e.g. the recent history of the pose) and also of the experience of the life class as the meeting and interaction of personal spaces in an academic context and for a specific purpose, whilst at the same time learning how to translate the three-dimensional living human form into a two-dimensional visual narrative as part of a broader narrative and expressive reality.

A pedagogical structure that depends on a single source of information for a class with many students who passively absorb this information will inevitably limit the experience of the exploration of the human body that the life class should provide limiting, also, the flow of information towards the students. Therefore, it is necessary to examine closely all aspects of this model of drawing tutoring in the fine arts to identify those areas in which research might lead to new forms, new models of observation, new exercises and activities that can push the life class beyond the constraints of its current form and boundaries.

[1] School of Genius A History of the Royal Academy of Arts, James Fenton; Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, Albert Boime; French Academy, Vincent LeonH, The King's Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture 1760-1840 (Oxford Historical Monographs), Holger Hoock.
[2] Hitchings, Henry R.Johnson’s Dictionary. The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World, John Murray, London, 2005, p.2 Other major works included the massive Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert.
[3] Kuma, Kengo Anti-Object, Architectural Association, London 2009.