Teaching painting in the expanded field: positioning, pedagogy and practice

In 2009 I was invited to design and deliver ‘Painting in the Expanded Field,’ a level 5 undergraduate art theory module that forms part of the BA (Hons) Painting & Drawing degree at the University of Northampton. Following the invitation, I spent a significant length of time attempting to source an appropriate text that whilst not necessarily exhaustive, could nevertheless run alongside the taught programme and that would in effect address and examine the salient debates, themes and issues that have informed painting during the latter half of the twentieth-century and up until the present day. As this proved to be a fruitless endeavor, I sought to write a comparable study myself. After Modernist Painting: The History of a Contemporary Practice, published by I.B.Tauris in 2013, was borne out of a perceived paucity of critical texts that addressed the condition of painting, as a contested medium, as it emerged out of a post 60s artistic milieu. Whilst the study went some way to address the dearth of available literature on this subject, the broader question of what constitutes the contextual studies component of a contemporary painting degree remains a compelling question. The aim of this paper is to examine the possibilities contained therein, and, in addition to evaluating the approach adopted by the author, will also consider to what extent an undergraduate painting contextual studies programme needs to encompass histories, theories and practices that fall outside of the medium’s purview.