Art as Unlearning: Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy 2018036697, 2018050200, 9780429454387, 9781138318717

Citation preview

Art as Unlearning

Art as Unlearning makes an argument for art’s unlearning as a mannerist pedagogy. Art’s pedagogy facilitates a form of forgetfulness by extending what happens in the practice of the arts in their visual, auditory and performative forms. The concept of learning has become predominantly hijacked by foundational paradigms such as developmental narratives whose positivistic approach has limited the field of education to a narrow practice within the social sciences. This book moves away from these strictures by showing how the arts confirm that unlearning is not contingent on learning, but rather anticipates and avoids it. This book cites the experience and work of artists who, by unlearning the canon, have opened a diversity of possibilities by which we make and live the world. Moving beyond clichés of art’s teachability and what we have to learn through the arts, it advances a scenario where unlearning is uniquely presented to us by the diverse practices that we identify with the arts. The very notion of art as unlearning stems from and represents a fundamental critique of the constructivist pedagogies that have dominated arts education for over half a century. This book will be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, philosophy of education, history of education, pedagogy of art and art education. It will also appeal to educators, art educators, and artists interested in the pedagogy of art. John Baldacchino is Professor of Arts Education and the Director of the Division of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Focusing on art, philosophy and education, his books include Education Beyond Education (2009) Makings of the Sea (2010) Art’s Way Out (2012) and John Dewey (2014).

Theorizing Education

Theorizing Education brings together innovative work from a wide range of contexts and traditions which explicitly focuses on the roles of theory in educational research and educational practice. The series includes contextual and socio-historical analyses of existing traditions of theory and theorizing, exemplary use of theory, and empirical work where theory has been used in innovative ways. The distinctive focus for the series is the engagement with educational questions, articulating what explicitly educational function the work of particular forms of theorizing supports. Series Editors: Gert Biesta, Brunel University, UK Stefano Oliverio, University of Naples “Federico II”, Italy

On the Politics of Educational Theory Rhetoric, theoretical ambiguity and the construction of society Tomasz Szkudlarek Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory Education Michel Alhadeff-Jones Inoperative Learning A Radical Rewriting of Educational Potentialities Tyson E. Lewis Religious Education and the Public Sphere Patricia Hannam Art as Unlearning Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy John Baldacchino For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Theorizing-Education/book-series/THEOED

Art as Unlearning

Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy

John Baldacchino

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 John Baldacchino The right of John Baldacchino to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baldacchino, John, author. Title: Art as unlearning : towards a mannerist pedagogy / John Baldacchino. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Business, [2019] | Series: Theorizing education series Identifiers: LCCN 2018036697 (print) | LCCN 2018050200 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429454387 (E-book) | ISBN 9781138318717 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429454387 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Art--Study and teaching. | Learning--Philosophy. Classification: LCC N87 (ebook) | LCC N87 .B25 2019 (print) | DDC 700.71--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036697 ISBN: 978-1-138-31871-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45438-7 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

The book is dedicated to the memory of my late father Joseph Baldacchino (1931–2013), an artist who encouraged me to unlearn

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Sources and Acknowledgements Introduction

viii ix

1

Undoing Mona Lisa

1

2

Art, doubt and error

20

3

Learning with art

39

4

Art’s deschooled practice

63

5

Willed forgetfulness

79

6

Art’s false ease

97

7

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

118

8

A mannerist pedagogy

131

Index

157

Sources and Acknowledgements

The first and last chapters appear here for the first time. As detailed below, all other chapters have appeared in journals. However, they were extended and partly rewritten to work in a coherent volume. Below I acknowledge their original titles, by way of thanking the respective journal editors for giving me permission to reproduce these essays. In the order that they appear in this book the following are the original titles and contexts within which these papers originally appeared: Chapter 2. A questioned practice: Twenty reflections on art, doubt, and error. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 14 (Interlude 1). www.ijea. org/v14i1/ 2013. Chapter 3. Learning with art, outwith the school: Stumbling upon Adami’s lines, inside Serra’s sequence. In: Theoretical Perspectives on Comprehensive Education: The Way Forward. H. Varenne, E.W. Gordon & L. Lin (Eds.). Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009. Chapter 4. The praxis of art’s deschooled practice. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 27(3), 2008. Chapter 5. Willed forgetfulness: The arts, education and the case for unlearning. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(4), 2013. Chapter 6. Art’s false “ease.” Form, meaning and a problematic pedagogy. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 33(4), 2014. Chapter 7. Art ± education: The paradox of the ventriloquist’s soliloquy. Sisyphus. Journal of Education, 3(1), 2015. John Baldacchino University of Wisconsin-Madison 2018

Introduction

The words “art” and “learning” seem straightforward enough for one to conduct a conversation about them. Though lively and passionate debates invariably arise around controversial works of art, it seems that at the very least we always come to the idea of art with well-defined and strong feelings, even though we also know that we might never agree on a singular definition of what art is or should be. Likewise, learning seems to receive the same treatment. We always claim to know what it means “to learn something,” though we often disagree on “how” or “what” we should be learning. When it comes to “unlearning” the story is altogether different. Disagreement immediately arises with the very word. As a concept, unlearning is enough to stop a conversation in its tracks, especially when it is wrongly premised on the idea of “revising” those forms of learning on which we assume to have general consensus. This is where unlearning is misunderstood. Some would quickly run with the assumption that, in and of itself, unlearning is never enough. They argue that after we unlearn, we have to learn again as we cannot stop with unlearning. This seems to imply that learning is both an imperative and also irreducible. Most would argue that there is no further level that will move beyond learning because we have no other choice than to learn in order to move on in life; indeed, in order to live. Unlearning makes no sense to those who hold onto the need to learn as an incremental form of growth. At the very least, they will argue that unlearning is a form of learning, just as to negate is an act of positing, or else everything is simply suspended and never completed. This volume is premised on the argument that art as unlearning does not necessarily inaugurate a phase of relearning. Unlearning does not warrant a resolution as if we have to resort back to a positively assumed way of doing. In other words, I am arguing that unlearning does not serve as a transition towards some state of rectification that moves beyond what is deemed to have gone “wrong.” Rather, unlearning is here understood to be a continuous way of doing and being. Just as sometimes we make a case for learning of its own autonomous accord without ever implying a phase of unlearning, there are many instances where there is no need to learn or relearn what has been unlearnt.

x Introduction

Without implying any absolutes, and by insisting on the relative context of what we often regard to be as certain as the sun rising in the east, here I make the argument that unlearning is not always a form of learning. Rather, we have to accept that unlearning challenges the assumptions that we have held about learning, and to which somehow, we have been taught to constantly return. To make my case, I am identifying art as one of those human ways of doing and being where to live is to unlearn the constructs through which we are often duped into thinking that we have democratised knowledge and with it, society. While the case I am making is that of art, or to be more precise the arts in their diverse specificities, this book carries a much broader significance in that it aims to address education as a universe of diverse forms. By way of focusing on a tangible moment—or indeed event—of education, I see art as that occasion by which we unlearn what we are forced to grow into, or indeed become. As unlearning, art reveals how we have no choice but to oppose a notion of reality that we have learned to construct as if it were a built edifice. My objection to this edifice is prompted by how it is presumed to have a definitive structure that demands specific processes against which we are forced to measure it. Contrary to the romantic foundation on which we presume to build a meaningful aesthetic education, the arts always reveal why we must reject these edificial pedagogical certainties. In making art, one cannot afford to be trapped in the external expectations of the school’s curricular measure. Even when, for obvious and no less noble reasons, we make a case for aesthetics education, this cannot equate art with an edificial world that is learnt by the processes with which it is built, even when such processes are deemed to be good, true and beautiful. This might not make sense to those who regard and value art from its external outcomes, or what they regard as art’s usefulness. However, the need to unlearn such assumptions is woven into the very reason of doing and making art, where what we mean by art is that which makes it immanent, that is, internal to what we are whenever we make and do it. As we are often expected to engage with art while attempting to learn it, we take the risk of being accused of talking nonsense because we know that art is not simply a matter that could be described. Rather than an action that we talk about, art is a matter of making something by doing, thereby being a making that moves beyond the production of an object. As an array of human actions that remain open-ended, art cannot be simply pronounced ahead of what it may or may not achieve. To define what lies ahead of art as that which will make it an art activity or an art object is to take the said action or object outside the realms of art. It will be something else—equally valuable and useful to human beings, even equally educational—but still something else, and not art. In such a scenario of making something which may or may not be art’s object, we begin to understand how, to start with, we have to unlearn what we have learnt to be art in and of itself as a process of learning. The task sounds difficult to understand, but those who make and do art (whatever that may be

Introduction xi

or mean) know very well that to speak of or describe art’s learning—both as a process and as an acquisition of certain forms of knowledge—is to take the wrong departure. Those who opt to position themselves in an educational context know very well that when they are expected to “teach art,” art’s pedagogy is not what many would describe as being, even when this is cast in all the best possible light in the name of the arts in schools and beyond. To say that one is teaching art, let alone is supposed to be teaching something else through the arts, is not exactly what is meant, and some would flatly refuse to use such words as this would immediately imply something other than art. Upon saying so, I can hear the accusation of elitism from both the right and the left of the argument for the arts within and beyond education. Some would claim that this approach would reinforce the fallacy that art is just for those who see themselves as being “talented,” with skills that are somehow “innate” or “genetically” inherited from others who have the same “gift.” However, I would argue that the accusation of elitism and the perceived risk of “talented” exclusion constitute what is often used as an excuse to conflate art with a developmental paradigm of learning, which not unlike constructivism, is as deleterious to the arts and education as are elitism and exclusivism. Artistic skills are indeed tangible and we do learn them by whatever way happens to suit each and every individual. Yet as soon as we engage with artistic skills, we do realize that here we are not dealing with what is understood to be a learning imperative and less so a kind of taught learning. Rather, what we regard as learning in the arts is a case for unlearning a world that is given to us by dint of a set of expectations. These expectations could even involve the romantic attribution to artists who are somehow deemed to “rebel” against anything that comes their way and whatever is considered sacred. This is not only absurd, but rather childish. Even high schoolers will tell you that for the arts to be radically construed, they must be far more refined and subtle than what they are intent on defying. While I do not want to give the impression that this book is out to challenge every single principle on which the arts in education have been advocated over the years, I want to emphasize that taking on the established reasoning of art’s learning is neither gratuitous nor in any way easy. Yet, given that the arts’ relationship with education remains at the very best difficult and at its worst impossible, we cannot simply assume that the models we have used just need a good tweaking. In certain instances, far from tweaking, established models need to be ditched. Likewise, we have to challenge constantly those assumptions much cherished by a wide range of arts educators, from conservatives to liberals, progressives and even radicals. If anything, the demands that arts students bring to higher education, especially in schools of visual and performing arts (not to mention an increasing number of non-art students who engage with the arts in their respective fields), cannot be ignored, and to do so would be at art’s own peril.

xii Introduction

This book captures unlearning in the example of mannerism, as it holds an underlying promise to which leads, and where I see my own work in the field expanding, perhaps in subsequent books that I intend to publish in the near future. Ultimately, art as unlearning needs to be put within a context and (as a rejection of what has become the canon of learning) the avenue of this mannerist pedagogy takes on new meanings and possibilities. This approach has strong historical antecedents, and to that effect it is neither unfamiliar nor alien to how art has emerged from the stalemate of dogma and oppression. To explain this, I am inviting readers to consider how historically, mannerism, which in 16th- and 17th-century Europe was denounced as a decadent and weak artistic style, has liberated the arts from the predicament of foundationalism. In embracing the very weakness by which they were denounced, mannerists confirmed that by its very demeanour—indeed its manner—art could radically transform human history. By unlearning the canon, mannerists exited into a world of diverse possibilities, and thanks to mannerism the arts continue to challenge, open and change our very sense of being. Because it traps arts educational discourse by an artificial divide between traditional and progressive notions of learning, mainstream educational literature leaves the mannerist challenge of unlearning incompletely drawn. Yet, in their aporetic nature, the arts consistently confirm that unlearning is not contingent on learning. Rather, art anticipates and in turn avoids a univocal and unidirectional notion of learning. To claim that art is equivalent to unlearning is an invitation to forget those taught dispositions by which we have been hoodwinked into the fallacy of certainty, be it expressed through the premises of a foundational tradition or as a sense of continuous progress by which we have developed our habits of making, doing and knowing. Unlearning the certainties by which we were schooled also urges us to exit into a wider world of possibilities. To do so we have to embrace paradox, as we seek to unlearn what we know without presuming to relearn other certainties or find new canons on which we would secure a measurable outcome. When we speak of arts pedagogy, we need to identify an experience that signals radical ways of effectively rethinking arts education. The aim is to do away with the confines of taught learning. This is where a mannerist experience becomes a reference point of what could be possible beyond that which has been deemed to be true, and thereby beautiful and good in their assumed relationship. A mannerist pedagogy would confirm the fallacy of this relationship. Here, any assumption of aesthetics education that is understood as necessarily harmonious and consequential must not be left unchallenged.

Chapter 1

Undoing Mona Lisa

I once asked a group of artist-teachers: “Can we undo the Mona Lisa?” Someone asked back: “What would that look like?” I replied: “I don’t know. But I often think that works of art must go undone. It’s an educational prerogative for art to teach us nothing and for us to unlearn everything.” Beyond any intent to belittle the role of the arts in education (an accusation to which I am no stranger), my objective is twofold: (a) to bring art in some relief in its relationship with education; (b) to distance art and education from the instrumentalist expectations that reify and stultify them respectively. This book was written with one purpose: to invite readers to reassess, recalibrate and reposition art and education beyond the expectations by which they are overinflated and devalued in equal measure. More specifically, I invite readers to assert the autonomy by which we all lay claim to the world through art and education. However, to do so, we must turn the table on education from the perspective of art, where in its versatile and plural meanings, art is read as a collective term which implies the creative arts. By this we mean art as that which brings together the Latin notion of ars with the Ancient Greek τέχνη (téchne). Yet as art has evolved and has increasingly engaged with other than art, its specificity cannot go ignored. By identifying art’s specificity, we afford ourselves the ability to play on the wider and variegated meanings of art as an innovative yet established concept. Likewise, the terms “art education” (where art is understood both as a singular but sometimes stands for a collective noun) and “arts education” (where the arts are read as a field of diverse artistic disciplines) need to be read on this wider horizon of possible meanings, practices and implications. This will help us understand and emphasize what, customarily, education has often been forced to reject: our need to forget and our ability to unlearn. Before going further, I am working on the assumption that there is some agreement on how a designation like arts education is never clear because to discuss it one must keep it open to constant change. The hallmark of a field like arts education is its array of possibilities. Without its plural possibilities, and more so without a distinction between the arts and education, any attempt to

2 Undoing Mona Lisa

discuss this wide field remains trapped in a tautology that leaves it vulnerable to instrumental reason (see Baldacchino 2017). It is worth noting that while the literature on instrumentalism and instrumental reason is substantial and keeps growing, sourcing one’s critique from Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), and more specifically Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumental Reason (2012) and Eclipse of Reason (2013), helps one retain a historical perspective of why this remains central to both art and more so, educational discourse. As we consider art education as a constellation of connections and possibilities, we recognize the nature of its open-endedness. There is significant redundancy in arguing how this relationship remains useful, correct and relevant to whatever we happen to have in mind when we speak of art and education. Yet it is neither superfluous and less so obvious to insist that in a myriad of forms and practices, one cannot simply assume that art is by nature or necessity an instrument or tool of learning. Art educators are mostly force-fed with the belief that learning is art’s given. This does not only distort the relationship between art and education but reinforces the institutionalization of learning where every possibility is already defined and thereby foreclosed. The institutional assault on human knowledge has nothing to do with subsuming art within education. Actually, the vulnerable party in this relationship is not art but education, especially in how education is often reduced to a practicist state of affairs. Whether forced as a means of legitimation within industry by conservative politics or camouflaged under some self-deluded pretext of “radical praxis” by progressivists, practicism is an assault on the autonomy by which humans have always asserted their right to do art and engage in educational and other spheres of living as free and intelligent beings. Practicism takes two forms. The first is an assumption that practice per se is an immediate demonstration of worth and legitimacy, where art is described by what it makes in terms of the value and yield of its objects and action. This objectification of the process and its product is often articulated as a benefit. In the second instance practice is seen through a productivist approach, ascribed to perspectives of industry and education that share a common ground from where versions from both the left and the right of the political spectrum argue that, as productive endeavours, the arts legitimize their role in both progress and the preservation of traditional values. While prima facie this all looks harmless, the implications of practicism are far from straightforward, as it will be discussed in the first, third and sixth chapters of this volume.

No love lost Being an artist and educator who is deeply engaged in philosophy, I remain mindful of the contingency by which art education, as a form of action, provides a degree of protection from the tyranny of the here and now. One way out of this predicament is found in Umberto Eco’s approach to the work of

Undoing Mona Lisa

3

art as an opera aperta, an open work. Eco’s cue is taken from music. He specifically singles out his friend Luciano Berio, whose Sequenza for solo flute was written without any bar lines, thus leaving it open to the performer’s interpretation. This meant that no one performance of the Sequenza was ever intended to be fixed. Less so was there a canonical desire to preserve a work of art for posterity (or at the very least, not in that way). As Eco puts it, in these works of instrumental music there is a common feature: “the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play his work” (Eco 1989, p. 1). Yet before one gets carried away, this was only a parting shot. Eco moves on to develop an elaborate book, where the reader is not afforded the kind of openness that is customarily assumed in common parlance. His take on the open work is underlined by forms of commitment which require a great deal from the performer and the audience. To have autonomy also means that one cannot afford the luxury of relying on goals set by a heteronomous context, even when without such a context there will be no autonomy and less so a possibility of openness (see Baldacchino 2018). Artists and art educators must hold onto the openness that sustains art’s autonomy, even when this appears to move outside the boundaries of legitimacy. Without art’s autonomy any talk of liberty and freedom in their subtle distinctions becomes void. As the notion of what remains empty “outside” any presumed form of walled legitimacy is seen for the fallacy that it represents (as I argue in Chapter 5), an open-ended approach to the binary relationship between art and education must move beyond the subject–object divide. Unlearning these constructs is not easy, particularly when the notion of learning-as-growth remains trapped in the myth of social and developmental inevitability. As we seek to unlearn such constructs we must avoid falling into the traps which customarily describe (let alone dismiss) the arts as being subjective by virtue of their creative character. Nor should we seek legitimation by quickfixes where, as often happens in education, we speak of forcing disciplines into artificial assumptions of integration. This would amount to nothing but a desire to add another shibboleth to policy-making, which in its search of immediate solutions, it demands a structure of legitimation that in the long run, undermines the significance of those forms of autonomy that we claim by doing art. I would beg to differ with those who say that an argument on subjectivity could somehow place the arts in direct opposition with the presumption of scientific objectivism. The strongest denial would not come from the artist but from the natural scientist herself who rightly lays claim to the open-ended nature of her experimental methods of discovery, where the subject–object divide is rendered irrelevant. While faked forms of integration are short-lived, it is equally disingenuous to place disciplines, fields and practices into hierarchies or text-book taxonomies. As needs (must) go, hierarchies and taxonomies are the first to be rejected where experimentation comes in full bloom.

4 Undoing Mona Lisa

Rather than try to make the subject of art objective or indeed on the subjective merits of science, from the very start one must clarify that when one speaks of education, to seek any agreement that would sustain the divisive subject–object construct would foreclose any possibility of new and alternative forms of doing, thinking and finding in any field—be it arts based, scientific, hybrid or distinct. This leaves us with what some would all too quickly dismiss as a cliché: the need to seek dispute and contradiction. Be they participants or passive spectators, readers must allow some space for the fact that in an open work the interpretation of one’s world (in all the different and contrasting ways by which we announce or confess it) is both expected and considered as a good thing to do. In this sense, there can be no love lost between art and education. By this I mean that we have no choice but to remain very singular in our opinions while we come to realize (and admit) that we are all too universal in our nakedness. Throughout our entire life we are never sure how prepared we have to be and somehow the only thing that we have for certain is that we have ourselves and nothing else to cover our bodies. If anything, this is what the articulation of art within an educational and institutional context invariably reveals. Readers should feel reassured that while opinion, informed or otherwise, must not be frowned upon, more importantly there is nothing wrong with dispositions and even our prejudices, as long as these do not hurt anyone in particular. What is here meant by prejudice and disposition is the ability and inclination to come with judgements already made before one even starts a conversation. The openness is not one sided. It comes before the conversation. Otherwise the assumptions brought to the table are already dismissed. The reason that this approach is highly valued in this book has to do with the awareness of what a point of departure, a terminus a quo, must always mean: the decision to risk one’s own reputation by embracing what is deemed erroneous or mistaken by the many. Thus, as one starts from wherever that departure might occur, it helps no one if we try to hide our instincts and responses—without which, by the way, we can neither learn and less so unlearn what we know, feel and mean. After all, this is what really makes us who we are.

The joyous one Nat King Cole sang to her smile, because let’s not forget that Leonardo da Vinci called her La Gioconda, the joyous one. So, what would it really mean to undo Mona Lisa? Wipe off her smile as Mr. Bean does to Whistler’s Mother’s face? Adorn her with red lipstick, as Warhol did in his glamorous prints? Or regale her with a moustache and a wee beard, while making rude allusions to her derrière, as Duchamp suggests? My thought of undoing Mona Lisa was mostly coincidental. I nurture no desire to add anything to Leonardo’s famous pin-up. The “undoing” quip came about from a sense of tiredness and the customary self-doubt which after all is said not done, lectures are lectures and discussions must mean more to

Undoing Mona Lisa

5

those who engage in them than with what is actually said. I suggested an undoing of the revered masterpiece to shift emphasis. Yet instead, I found myself grappling with an idea that sounded too fascinating to forget. What brought this about was a two-hour seminar in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) back in 2013, delivering what I titled Art as Unlearning: Finding a Place (see Baldacchino & McAuliffe 2013). One could feel that the broad expectation fell on me to do most of the talking, as an audience of artistteachers came well-prepared with a couple of long papers which are here included in this volume as Chapters 4 and 5. The expectation was to buy into unlearning as a concept, but for this to have a price—that of how, when and where, even when art teachers are never estranged from the very idea of pushing their students into rejecting what they know, or at the very least, into leaving their baggage outside the art room or studio. As I subsequently reflected on the discussion, I found this quip very revealing in that undoing a work of art required several strategies that would not necessarily guarantee any success, given that there is no one end—indeed no point of arrival, no terminus ad quem—which could with any certainty be used to “measure” anything for anyone. This is another good thing, as the last thing one wants is to flag an objective that should or could be measured and legitimized by some external metric. Having had the opportunity to revisit the undoing of Mona Lisa several times in subsequent lectures where I had to do so formally and with some clarity, I am now more or less clear that to do so, we must at least attempt three related approaches, which, as it happens, will also run across this book. Briefly I would characterize them as follows: that which is found (a) within the outwith; how one could go about (b) undoing art; and how to likewise consider (c) unlearning education. This immediately pairs six words: (a) within and outwith; (b) doing and undoing; and (c) learning and unlearning. In turn, this raises at least three questions: (a) Where is this within and outwith? (b) What are we doing and undoing? (c) How do we learn and unlearn? Curiously whatever raises these questions may be very different (if not conflicting) but all possibilities look similar because they share a common origin and are often urged by the same questions that keep coming to us time and time again. Within and outwith Starting with what is within and outwith, this could be anywhere and nowhere because what we mean by what is intrinsic and extrinsic could be physical, conceptual or a bit of both. We often see ourselves as belonging to a community, city or village and become all too conscious of how we come to be within or outwith such as city or community. We could take a bigger picture and look at how we remain within or outwith a world outlook, a concept, a religion, an ideology or any philosophy or way of life.

6 Undoing Mona Lisa

Without veering off into abstraction, we often think whether anything has a within, an interiority (or immanence, as philosophers would say) or whether what we are and do always lies outwith everything else because the world is made of units, things or individuals that behave according to how they work together as entities, events or beings. Whether these entities remain autonomous or rely on each other by being heteronomous, is something that requires a longer discussion which I hope this book offers. But not to digress, here we are concerned with this business of an outwith or a within, as one takes any context or level one happens to take, whether they do so wilfully or constrained by external circumstances. Doing and undoing In the case of doing and undoing the terms of reference are slightly more specific. This focus is brought by and on behalf of what we call art. As already indicated, this book is written from the perspectives of art, philosophy and education. A major question that fuels all chapters is how they converge but also (and sometimes more importantly) where they do not. In other words, how they are intrinsic to each other but at the same time how they remain separate, distinct and discrete as they stand autonomously outwith each other. Learning and unlearning Another core question that runs across this book is already suggested in its title—Art as unlearning—which suggests that one should expect some treatment of how learning and unlearning play a role in all of this. The assumptions that we often make about art and education are presumed by a desire to be good, true and beautiful, when in effect we never question what we actually mean by this, especially because we value education so much that we have destroyed it because we have stopped ourselves from unlearning. Put another way, we tend to forget that what we learn is mostly best unlearnt as this would allow us to move into an understanding of our concealed nakedness, as it is kept hidden, and of which we are always ashamed. This is what I mean by undoing the Mona Lisa, or any other work of art of your choice.

Columbus, God and pedagogy In this book I am proposing an argument for art as a form of unlearning, and of unlearning as a form of art. Rather than start from an agreed assumption and reject it, readers are invited to imagine (rather than think) how education could happen beyond the assumption of actively producing or passively receiving a destination that has already been reached. This recalls Christopher Columbus’s question: “What’s on the other side of the sea?” He thought the world was indeed round, but he did not know that

Undoing Mona Lisa

7

between Europe and Asia there was another continent. Columbus’s premise was right in terms of a spherical world, but he got the details wrong in that he thought of a smaller sphere. By setting off to reach India by going the “other way round” he bumped into something that was not meant to be there— hence his take on the “West Indies.” His argument for a spherical world was proven right, only that he got more than he bargained for—with all the awful consequences that came with the price the indigenous peoples of what we now call the Americas had to pay for the Genoese’s “discovery.” Likewise, the question that art puts to education goes something like this: How could we think of something that may or may not be there? How could we even move away from thinking that we can find something? Why cannot we just take off without any expectation? Maybe an expectation of not having any expectations is slightly farfetched. However, possibilities do not simply emerge from what is expected. As I hope to show right from the first chapter of this book, risk and error are not happy coincidences, but an integral part of what we do as artists and where knowing how artists work in their various practices, the norm is what we have been taught to call an exception (which is a euphemism for what is not simply unexpected, but which is tolerated as hoping against the rules). Clearly, beyond the excuses we make for what comes unexpectedly, we do have a strong case for revisiting and valuing unlearning, but this time not as some afforded reversal of mistakes, but as a way of valuing and expanding the possibilities by which we have always operated as human beings in whatever we do, be they scientific, artistic, religious, political or anything we care to call a human action. To attempt to reply to the questions posed here, two examples of unlearning come to mind: unlearning the notion of God as a supreme being up there (often seen as “the man in the sky”) and unlearning that which is implied in the futile question: “Can art be taught?” Learnt belief Let us begin with a more basic assumption which we have been taught to make from our infancy. The idea of a moral life, which almost always comes (erroneously, to my mind) by assuming that another entity, something or someone else, takes this into account. (I am aware that this happens to be a generalization taken from what is often assumed as being the “norm,” against which, in the case of religion, atheists and theists have constantly waged their polemics.) Throwing all caution to the air, we might as well start with religious belief and more so what in Catholic parlance is often called religious formation—that is, the catechistic assumption of religious education, understood in both its theological and moral constructs. This question is attested by how difficult it is for many—believers, sceptics and non-believers alike—to unlearn the notion of God as a being “up there,” sometimes even lovingly referred to as “the man upstairs,” or “the guy in the sky.”

8 Undoing Mona Lisa

To give this full respect I would cite Bishop Robinson’s book Honest to God, which when first published in 1963, made considerable waves not only in theological circles, but more so amongst the laity which though mostly Anglican, did not go unnoticed beyond the confines of Anglicanism, given that at the same time Vatican II was in its second year of the five-year earthquake that shook the Roman Catholic Church to the core of its own existence. Bishop Robinson shocked many when he argued that “until the last recesses of the cosmos had been explored … it was still possible to locate God mentally in some terra incognita,” yet now it seems to be impossible. [N]ow it seems that there is no room for him, not merely in the inn, but in the entire universe: for there are no vacant places left. In reality, of course, our new view of the universe has made not the slightest difference. Indeed, the limit set to “space” by the speed of light … is even more severe. And there is nothing to stop us, if we wish to, locating God “beyond” it. And there he would be quite invulnerable—in a “gap” science could never fill. But in fact, the coming of the space-age has destroyed this crude projection of God—and for that we should be grateful. For if God is “beyond”, he is not literally beyond anything. (Robinson 1963, pp. 13–14 emphasis added) In the several arguments that arise between atheists and theists, we learn that both lines of thinking fall in the same direction. It is as if not only do we still reside in a pre-Galilean world, but where the very assumption of relativity is forbidden by both those who assert the notion of a God and those who state the opposite and insist on God’s nonexistence. More so, while theists find life empty without a loving God, atheists cannot see how this same loving God could actually be real given the cruelty and violence that exists in the world. The issue is not that different from the conception of space as being fixed, and likewise how we assume what stays in that space, as if the phenomenological realities of humans inhabiting a space must always remain a point of departure for everything else. “That is how we learn” many would insist. At the risk of generalizing, one could see how often the core issue with belief and non-belief in a supreme being, is how the idea of a divine order has been learnt anthropocentrically, investing everything in the human species which often boils down to us as individuals. It is ironic to come to such a conclusion when in effect faith has always been presented to us as our capacity to transcend our being. Yet when a philosopher like Baruch Spinoza came to terms with this fallacy and argued that on such principles we have fashioned a notion of a universe that God created just for us humans, the man was summarily excommunicated from his Jewish community and deemed a heretic by Church and Synagogue alike.

Undoing Mona Lisa

9

When men became convinced that everything that is created is created on their behalf, they were bound to consider as the most important quality in every individual thing that which was most useful to them, and to regard as of the highest excellence all those things by which they were most benefited. Hence they came to form these abstract notions to explain the natures of things:—Good, Bad, Order, Confusion, Hot, Cold, Beauty, Ugliness; and since they believe that they are free, the following abstract notions came into being:—Praise, Blame, Right, Wrong. (Spinoza 1992, p. 60) The trouble has to do with what I am calling learnt belief, where the assumption of knowing is based on presumed certainties that we learn. These certainties have to add up, not inasmuch as they are mathematically certain— which is what Spinoza used to make his argument—but as facts that are beholden by a lineage of certainties where unlearning is regarded as fatal. Knowledge was meant to reassure us in the myth that the building blocks of learning follow a preordained pattern, as Socrates in Plato’s Meno (2002) claims in his argument for education as anamnesis, a process of recollection. The reassurance of learning is readily provided in all aspects of education, be it scientific, artistic, religious or ideological. It is a reassurance that started its life as a form of pressure, reinforced by a fear from the contingencies of life, only to be accepted as necessary. This remains the case, even when many now state the contrary and claim to sustain a learner-centred notion of education. Learnt art The question “Could art be taught?” traces the same arc of expectations found in “Does God exist?” Strangely these questions are both posed and understood in a pre-Galilean notion of space and time which presumes that there must be one answer, as conflicting answers would analytically result in nonsense. The nonsense is more likely to come from the fact that these are the wrong sort of questions. Whether art could be taught is as belaboured a question as that which expects one to affirm or deny God’s existence—knowing very well that art and God are at best equivocal and at worst misleading terms. To ask “Could art be taught?” betrays a fallacy that there must be a fixed meaning for art and teaching. This renders the question irrelevant by the sheer fact that the teaching of art cannot be positioned outside the historic relativity (to use a Deweyan term) that has shaped art and science, religion and education (see Dewey 1935, pp. 226ff). Those engaged in art’s various pedagogical challenges are continuously caught in debates over skills and creativity, norms and experimentation. Some seek reassurance, unconsciously assuming that there must be a readily available structure within which creativity and experimentation will occur, and where viable emancipatory and inclusive environments are created for learning to take place. Though

10 Undoing Mona Lisa

this structural reassurance comes in reasonable and rational forms and finds a degree of resonance amongst many educational psychologists, sociologists and philosophers, it feeds an expectation that remains foundational and inhabits a preGalilean universe. While creativity and innovation are openly privileged in educational discourse, they are invariably framed and sequenced, following a developmental learning pattern that bears all the hallmarks of social constructivism. The measure of learning remains the same, whichever point of departure it takes because its truth is premised on a tautological structure that seeks to affirm itself. Both in terms of policy and as an educational strategy, this approach is safely assumed to be learner-centred, and for good reason. The argument is that outside the realm of such centredness there is no learning. While it may well have benign and noble intentions, pitted against a didactic hierarchy, learner-centredness does not break the tautology that sustains it. Rather, learner-centredness facilitates this tautology and by implication it reinforces the hierarchy. Pedagogy cannot be critical in and of itself. Neither could one locate teaching outside the realms of what is being taught, not to mention where it takes place and who partakes of it. There is a parallel debate on what should be identified with product and process when speaking of a work of art. In an effort to offset this tedious symmetry, assumptions of making are often, and all too quickly, thrown in. Yet the beatification of artists as makers only seals a distraction by an aesthetic postulation of creativity that in this age of accountability is increasingly bonded with that of the metrics of innovation. Just like learner-centredness the narrative of the artist-as-maker becomes a tautology that does nothing but reinforce the issues which in the first place it was meant to resolve. In all their complexity, these issues often boil down to the fact that no one is inclined to question the very core of the argument, which is simply flawed—that of learnt art. Like learnt belief, learnt art is a distortion of art’s pedagogical questions. This is emblematically compounded by the all too popular non-question: “Can art be taught?” To which I am always tempted to reply: “Yes” while adding: “Because art must not be learnt.”

Mannerism, weak pedagogy and forgetfulness Beyond their apparent provocation, the questions raised by learnt belief and learnt art prompt the need to distinguish learning from education. One cannot emphasize enough the point that the argument of learnt art is a misinterpretation of the notion of art’s unlearning. Unlearning is a concept that comes directly from art-speak, though it is frequently misused in an attempt to disrupt the learning debate over creativity vs skills. Unlearning is not a reversal of learning, but more akin to breaking the cycle of knowing and discovering, a dilemma that Columbus had to confront when he realized that he found a land which he never sought.

Undoing Mona Lisa

11

This alters the whole assumption of education, and more importantly it disallows the artificial distinctions that are drawn between a top-down banking didactic system of instruction and a presumed student-centred constructivist form of learning. Unless we accept that there might be another land which we could well bump into, and unless the relativity of history (not to mention that of space and time) begins to question the very concept of how we learn, hot debates such as those over didactic teaching and student-centred learning remain increasingly irrelevant. Art’s fate in education Education has increasingly become shaped by the politics of measured accountability. This sustains a system of learning that is much closer to instruction and social engineering than to education, and where rather than a convivial form of engagement, it sustains knowledge as a means by which scarcity, as Ivan Illich (1970 and 2001) put it, reinforces the vested establishment of institutional power and financial profit. Recalling most debates on education, even on the rare occasion that the arts are mentioned, is a predominantly functional and dry exercise. When one speaks of the child or learner as a whole person, this ultimately serves the political understanding of individuals who are expected to fulfil social needs and whose happiness is secured by full membership of a preordained system. Art enables us to say things that other subjects do not. Yet not unlike education, not to mention democracy itself, art is relegated to forms of legitimation which require that it forfeits its autonomy. We are told that art is good for us, that its importance is found in how we can learn from it; and in the last few decades we have been reassured that as art must by nature be creative, its use and function are secured. But when art fails to fulfil such criteria, it gets into trouble. It is censored, closed down, denounced as anti-social, as evil, as ugly and untrue. Art is at best perceived as a streak of madness, with the artist as a person of genius whose work will ultimately do us good, if only when its time will come—meaning when it is domesticated. While some would welcome an emphasis on art, this remains invariably formative. Art is deemed to be educational and expected to sustain “the greater good.” This sounds benign enough until we realize that what is good is reserved for the great and powerful. The instrumental argument for art’s legitimacy has become a matter of consensus—to use Gramsci’s term: it becomes “common sense” (Gramsci 1971, pp. 322–327; 1975, pp. 6ff). As common sense, art could only serve the “common good.” It may well come across as occasionally rude, crazy and scandalous, but this allowance is premised on how art’s legitimacy comes framed by the reinforcement of a societal assumption where democracy is not for us but we are for democracy. This is where learning comes back to haunt us. Mona Lisa’s smile might well return a favour to her undoers. To undo Mona Lisa does not amount to do or

12 Undoing Mona Lisa

make something else, but to try to understand art (and with it, education) from a radically different perspective. The big challenge lies in how to break the cycle and how to shift this prevalent paradigm which continues to construct orders that have already been bankrupt a few decades ago. Dewey’s riposte Those who read Dewey’s work from within its immanent character, are not surprised by his desire to see more of us unlearn what we have learnt in school, is a clear rejection of learning as an educational postulate or as some undeniable fact of education. As he remarks in Experience and Education: “He is lucky who does not find that in order to make progress … he does not have to unlearn much of what he learned in school” (Dewey 1997, p. 47). This is liberating. It echoes what was then a new way of looking at the world of growth and experience beyond the accumulation of measured facts or standardized certainty. Dewey highly valued experimentation in his recognition of a world that could never be predicted—neither on the scientific precision of the positivists nor the political inevitabilities of the historicists. Steeped in Hegel’s dialectic, Dewey found in Darwin’s work an avenue for the contingent and the accidental where the creative possibilities captured by men and women come from the ability of our species to survive. Yet survival is not akin to brute force, as neo-fascists have a habit of saying when they all too quickly twist Darwin’s theories. Rather, survival comes from our ability to adapt and seize the opportunity of experimentation. Dewey’s approach to progress was never predetermined. It was open-ended and fully conscious of the contingency by which a particularistic world confronted our constructs of fixed aims and universals. Yet as he fought tooth and nail against those foundationalists who regarded the conservation of universalism as the solution to the world’s problems, Dewey never subscribed to blind empirical progress. Between the interstices of progressive and conservative forms of certainty, Dewey retained the need for a liberal space, where learning could neither be aligned with a set of objectives and standards, nor fixed by a canon of teleological certainty. As he cast his sight on society and its inherence in what we do, he refused to become a slave of the social constructs by which we still witness his own work being manipulated in forms of education which, claiming to be childcentred, still have the same effect on the schooled norm (see Dewey 1963, p. 18). Those who give up on Dewey’s pragmatic horizon are bound to take two routes. They could succumb to neoliberal perversions of democracy and remain deluded into thinking that education could free itself from its tautologies. On the other hand, but not without the same consequences, they could go on to misread the tea-leaves for an advent of a revolution that could never come. To break this cycle, risk and unlearning must become staples of an educational project that, like art, regards itself as an open work. This is why Dewey aligns learning with a plasticity whose malleability and adaptation begins to dialectically break out of its necessitous immaturity (Baldacchino, 2014, p. 51).

Undoing Mona Lisa

13

Mannerism and drawing In an observational drawing class, art teachers urge their students to unlearn their taught dispositions. This suggests a weak approach that challenges their strong habits of seeing. This weak pedagogy begins to suggest a way out of the groundedness that stultifies education with taught learning. It prompts students to exit into a wider and freer world of understanding where art students embrace a paradox: they must unlearn what they know by ways of weakening what is often regarded as an educational strength (see Baldacchino 2005 and 2012). This is a paradox that art embraces, more so in its mannerist turn. For art to be, it must talk its canonical strength out of existence. Or as the modernists plainly put it: art must be anti-artistic. In terms of education, art’s paradox becomes pedagogical, where art’s pedagogy can only articulate itself as a form of unlearning. Unlearning is a paradox borne out to challenge the School’s canon of taught learning. As unlearning, art’s pedagogy facilitates a forgetfulness that is willed in its diverse practice. Consider how as it exited and wilfully forgot the canon of the High Renaissance, mannerism was denounced as a lapsed decadent form by the self-declared cognoscenti and patrons of the art world. Yet mannerists had the last word, as they confirmed how art’s demeanour could radically change human knowing. This book makes an argument for art’s unlearning as a mannerist pedagogy. It follows from the lessons of Michelangelo’s three Pietà’s and from El Greco and Tintoretto’s detractions from the Renaissance. Mannerism paved the way to the 20th century’s avant-garde, which chose the weak, naïve and primitive to counter the Academy (see Hauser 1965). In many ways, art’s pedagogy confirms, time and again, that art has nothing to teach us. To go beyond the customary clichés of art’s teachability, let alone the long history of quibbling over what we have to learn through the arts, this book poses another question: “Is unlearning a reversal of learning, and does it imply a form of relearning?” The answer is a categorical “No!” Mainstream literature on teaching and learning leaves the challenge of unlearning incompletely drawn because it traps it in a binary form of developmental processes. This has plagued both education and more so the arts in education. In their aporetic nature, the arts confirm that unlearning is not contingent on learning, but rather, it anticipates and avoids it.

An outline Even when one has been in the teaching profession or has worked within the wider context of education for many decades, a specific question is never far from one’s mind: What is education and why is it invoked whenever we speak about everything under the sun? When it comes to art education, several art

14 Undoing Mona Lisa

practitioners would ask a similar question: Is art what we assume it to be, what we want it to be or what others tell us it should be? But should not art and education provide spaces of autonomy where women and men could transcend, critique and take ownership of the here and now? Though such questions sound innocuous let alone obvious, they are not. Sometimes they become contentious, especially when we bring art and education together in one sphere. The problem compounds when this sphere is institutionalized, as we find in a schooled context for education or an instrumental approach to the arts. As I have argued in my book Art’s Way Out (Baldacchino 2012), one of the possible approaches to this dilemma is to move out, that is to exit these expected contexts and begin to trace back how art and education found themselves in such a predicament. How this exit “works” is another issue because some would argue that it should happen through practice, while others imply a much more theoretical approach. This complicates the problem by which we started in the first place, especially when theory and practice take different meanings and are often considered as opposed categories. Could this dilemma be undone? Should one forget it? This introductory chapter makes a case of how first, we must unlearn it. In Chapter 2, we go on to revisit the relationship between art, doubt and error, and more specifically it is argued that, far from achieving change or emancipation, the sociology of knowledge has proved to be a perversion of art and education by a continuous act of myth-making posited as an excuse for instrumental practice. This perversion is discussed through a number of reflections on the methodological and practicist fallacies by which art in its educational, sociological, aesthetic and ethical contexts is regarded as a guarantor of critical praxis when it is purportedly “applied” to education. This is done through three considerations: (a) art as a political act, where art is read against the intentionality that is informed by diverse political dynamics such as those of citizenship, belonging and action; (b) art’s philosophies of learning, where a distinction is made between a philosophy of art education and a philosophy of learning that emerges from within art’s “returned” facts; and (c) art’s praxis as an occasion of unlearning, where the concept of learning is taken away from its universalistic certainty and instead assumed on the basis of art’s contingent nature. Exemplified by works from contemporary art and literature this chapter opens the argument by stating that far from guaranteeing any form of functional, pedagogical or sociological pacification, contemporary art moves us to consider practice as a matter of normalcy, thus rejecting the neoliberal rhetoric which neither secures emancipation nor preserves difference. In Chapter 3 the possibility of art and learning begin with a rejection of those assumptions by which art is considered as a closed form of knowledge privileged by institutions within the culture industry. Another fallacy which needs to be countered is that which limits aesthetic education to the School.

Undoing Mona Lisa

15

In rebutting these fallacies, this chapter claims that far from educating us, art educes—and therefore elicits—learning by an act of withdrawal. This withdrawal does not mean or imply a retreat from reality or human knowledge. To the contrary, it asserts that in educing learning art elicits the need to learn for the sake of learning. As we learn how to learn, we continue to learn comprehensively. By doing rather than making art, women and men engage learning within a larger sphere: the polity of everyday life. Rather than learning through art to gain knowledge in competition with others, we learn with art just as we come to know ourselves outwith the exclusivist realms of institutionalized knowledge. Where does the idea of learning with art leave us? Here, readers are invited to consider a number of questions that relate art with learning. Questions like: How do we engage with art as a formative activity with which we learn? Which begs a further question: What do we learn and how does this learning differ from the schooled forms of knowledge that we identify with art education? Does this difference presume other forms of learning that supplement, and even surpass, schooled education? And why should we surpass schooling if not to achieve a comprehensive and immanent form of learning? While the distinction between “learning with” and “learning through” art reveals the need to draw a difference between art as a human act and art as an object, this chapter highlights another fundamental distinction; this time between the things that we learn and the learning by which we do things. As the reader is invited to engage with specific works by Valerio Adami and Richard Serra it becomes evident that rather than how much one knows about art, what we learn with art has to do with one’s own disposition towards the world. As emphasized in Chapter 4, we cannot forget that art’s relationship with education is often characterized by a paradox. Art is often reified within an education system that refuses to see the pedagogical strengths of paradox. Here, art education is approached from three positions. The first is that art is a construct that is neither natural nor necessary. The second is that there are no aesthetic or pedagogical imperatives, but that art education is the recognition of groundlessness where paradox facilitates learning. The third approach is to reposition art with regards to its relationship with learning, education and schooling. In this chapter it is argued that art’s only choice is to deschool learning. The latter is moved by an underlying dilemma as to whether art, considered as an autonomous human act, could ever engage with systems of learning without being turned into a tool or a thing. Unless art education is deschooled, the teaching and learning of art remains trapped between the assumptions of process and product. The idea of art and education as shared practices within schooling remains somewhat dubious unless art’s practices are recognized in parts perceived as wholes and where conclusions are marked by open-endedness. No possibilities for art or learning could ever emerge unless a radically different set of conditions give way to a state of affairs where knowledge is a matter to be discovered but never determined, and where a fixed ground is transformed into a wide horizon.

16 Undoing Mona Lisa

This leads to a central concept in this book: the concept of a willed forgetfulness, which is Chapter 5’s main focus. Established scholarship in art education is invariably related to theories of development founded on notions of multiple intelligence and experiential learning. Yet when contemporary arts practice is retraced on a philosophical horizon, one begins to engage with other cases for learning. This state of affairs reveals art’s inherent paradox where the expectation of learning is substituted by forms of unlearning. This chapter begins to approach unlearning through the tension between art and education, and more specifically through the dialectical relationship between education’s dialogic agonism and art’s negative antagonism. This proposes unlearning as a critique of the moral-pedagogical outlooks that are imposed on art where artworks are expected to tell stories of truth through their propensity towards the beautiful and the good. In re-reading experiential anticipation as a form of anamnesis (recollection) through a process of negation and contradiction, unlearning is also located in forms of mimetic scoping by which art’s assumed pedagogical trajectory turns into the opposite of recollection: as an act of willed forgetfulness. This peculiar “movement” from a state of learning to that of unlearning constitutes the basis for a special kind of pedagogical aesthetics where the challenges of criticality and laterality articulate a special “world” where learning may well work backwards. In foregoing the questions that emerge from the dialectical relationship between form and meaning, an intrinsic fallacy mistakes the relationship between the arts and education for a simplistic mechanism of signification— what I call a false “ease” where empty forms supposedly gain meaning from ethical and aesthetic givens as if the pedagogy of art were analogous to an empty room that was (or still needs to be) inhabited. Chapter 6 invites readers to consider how such a fallacy opens a wider discussion of the tautology by which, more often than not, art education is presented. Art’s false “ease” presents a tautology that presumes the relationship between the arts and learning on assumptions that force a false equivalence between (a) the perception of implicit causes that constitute a number of externalized artistic attributes (such as creative, critical and intuitive forms of thinking and making) by which the arts are instrumentalized, and (b) a number of desired effects that are seen as being equal to the relative value that an arts subject (or discipline) commands in a perceived relationship with the world in terms of its use and function. To counter this distortion, this chapter makes a specific case for a pedagogical aesthetics that would unlearn—and thereby exit—the educationalist tautology of art’s false “ease.” While politically this would mean that the arts are recognized in their ability to think and act outside the traditional notion of schooling as a walled polis, philosophically this represents a challenge to move art education away from the “spatial” concepts by which dialectical narratives, such as those of form and content, have been hitherto assumed as constructivist signifiers.

Undoing Mona Lisa

17

As Chapter 7 will argue, in education art is often played along the lines of a ventriloquist’s soliloquy. When we speak of art education, are we trying to make sense of something by means of something else, just as a ventriloquist speaks with the mouth of a dummy to make us believe that he is having a dialogue with someone else when in effect he is speaking to himself? This chapter discusses how art education could only flourish as an act of approximation as it rejects the incremental and constructivist assumptions that have turned art and education into transactional instruments. Discussing art and education’s immanent relationship, it is here argued that art education is only necessary by force of the accidents that characterize it. Four scenarios, here identified in what I am calling the paradox of the ventriloquist’s soliloquy in art education, illustrate this argument. In discussing how this comes about, this chapter makes reference to Herner Saeverot’s concept of indirect pedagogy and Charles Garoian’s prosthetic pedagogy (2013; Garoian 2013). Art is also an art of forgetting. This confronts us with unlearning as a unique pedagogy: a mannerist pedagogy. By way of concluding this book, this is proposed in Chapter 8. It is nonsense to insist that education is to be read from the construed evidence of its results, and especially those which are supposed to confirm such results from the constructs of learning as a mark of knowledge, and achievement. In the same way, art education cannot be read, let alone conditioned and delivered—indeed redeemed—by some notion of a human action that is based on social and moral precepts. This concluding chapter begins with dispelling the myth that through a series of constructivist procedures the arts could realize an educational model that somehow redeems learners. The reader is invited to consider the role that interpretation plays in revealing the relativity by which art and education are exchanged. In this exchange, a convergence between art and education asserts itself both in their autonomous specificity and in how they come to assert a continuous repositioning. In such a continuity, art and education’s repositioning is prompted by their respective and diverse singularities, and by which they are identified as events of historical contingency. This brings together Dewey and Hans Georg Gadamer, where historical relativity is articulated through art’s hermeneutic potentials. Through a discussion of the intersection between the distinct practices of the arts and pedagogy, it is also argued that for education to nurture and fulfil a democratic disposition it needs to revalue what Dewey calls the immature precondition of growth and thereby recognize its ability to negate rather than posit a body of received or nurtured knowledge. This cannot afford constructivist shortcuts. Rather, it presents art as an approach to unlearning and undoing; an approach that articulates a critique of established constructivist theories of education. Building on the previous chapters, Chapter 8 will also draw from a discussion of works by liberal and critical theorists on aesthetics and education, including Richard Rorty, Jacques Rancière, Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács and Maxine Greene. Bringing together these various strands to focus, it is argued that any discussion of arts pedagogy cannot leave behind the paradoxical relationship

18 Undoing Mona Lisa

between (a) a constructivist argument for art as a form of learning; and (b) the autonomist and non-identitarian conditions and relations borne out by arts practice as forms of unlearning. Ultimately, unlearning does what it states. It does not want to go with assumptions of preconceived patterns by which we are supposed to recollect what we are intrinsically wired to do or achieve. Instead, unlearning proposes a very different approach, which upholds how in our plastic disposition, we recognize contingency in its historical ability to move beyond the expected bounds of history and immediate existence. In the paradoxes that ensue, we reject those redemptive certainties by which immanence was seen as a fixed condition, and instead we realize that survival comes from invention and experiment, and not from strength and might. In this we rediscover the kenotic approach to what we do, and with it we assert unlearning as a weak pedagogy. Here forgetting is recognized in art’s aporetic ways by which we assert an immanence that is never settled, and which is manifested in its diverse nature. Here unlearning is presented through art’s mannerist approach to history. As in mannerism, immanence is approached from what many would see as the “reverse” direction. This is best exemplified in life-drawing classes where a student confronted by a human figure from life is encouraged to unlearn what she knows as a resolved ideal. This helps one find and draw out reality’s diverse and crude existence, as presented in an ordinary human body. Art’s manner is a way out of the grounded paradigm of a strong objectivity by which we are drawn away from contingency. Mannerism deschooled art and moved beyond the confines of the Renaissance’s hegemony. Likewise, the recognition of immanence in art’s manner provides a way for art to assert a form of undoing, begins from a deschooled position—indeed a disestablishment of both art and more so education. We partake of art’s autonomy by dint of art’s weak pedagogy, a mannerist pedagogy that originates from the acknowledgement of a need to unlearn. When all is said and done, what is at stake is our claim to freedom and intelligence as signifiers of a convivial universe of particulars; a universe that rejects the expectancies of a constructed truth, a comfortable beauty and a judgmental goodness, as currently peddled in our schooled societies.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. & Horkheimer, M. 2002. Dialectic of enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baldacchino, J. 2005. Hope in groundlessness: Art’s denial as pedagogy. Journal of Maltese Educational Research, 3(1), 1–13. Baldacchino, J. 2012. Art’s way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Baldacchino, J. 2014. John Dewey: Liberty and the pedagogy of disposition. New York: Springer.

Undoing Mona Lisa

19

Baldacchino, J. 2017. Art’s Ped(ago)gies: Education is not art. Art is not education. In jagodzinsky, j. (Ed.), What is art education? Essays after Deleuze & Guattari. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baldacchino, J. 2018. The right to creative illegitimacy: Art and the fallacy of proprietary legitimation. The Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, 22, Special Issue 1 (forthcoming). Baldacchino, J. & McAuliffe, D., 2013. Art as unlearning: finding a place. John Baldacchino (speaker), Diarmuid McAuliffe (respondent and seminar coordinator). Critical Pedagogies Seminar, Master of Education Artist Teacher Programme, University of West of Scotland. February 2013, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow. Two-part video found on https://vimeo.com/58982833. Dewey, J. 1935. The future of liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy, 32(9), 225–230. Dewey, J. 1963. The child and the curriculum. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. 1997. Experience and education. New York: Touchstone. Eco, U. 1989. The open work. A. Cancogni (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garoian, C. R. 2013. The prosthetic pedagogy of art: Embodied research and practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from prison notebooks. Q. Hoare, & G. Nowell-Smith (trans.). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Gramsci, A. 1975. Il materialismo storico. Turin, IT: Editori Riuniti. Hauser, A. 1965. Mannerism: The crisis of the renaissance and the origin of modern art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Horkheimer, M. 2012. Critique of instrumental reason. London: Verso. Horkheimer, M. 2013. Eclipse of reason. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Illich, I. 1970. Deschooling society. New York: Marion Boyars. Illich, I. 2001. Tools for conviviality. New York: Marion Boyars. Plato. 2002. Meno: Five dialogues. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Classics. Robinson, J.A.T. 1963. Honest to God. London: SCM Press. Saeverot, H. 2013. Indirect pedagogy: Some lessons in existential education. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Spinoza, B. 1992. Ethics, treatise on the emendation of the intellect, and selected letters. S. Shirley (trans.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.

Chapter 2

Art, doubt and error

1 There is nothing to say It seems commonplace to state that when it comes to art one can say and write about everything; except that this is immediately rejected by a counter-argument that clearly states the opposite: art is not everything. Both statement and objection appear valid, where both statements seek legitimacy by pointing at art. To argue that art embraces everything would suggest that art is a way of life; or it is life itself. This might suggest that art is everything and nothing, and that there is nothing to say: I am here

,

and there is nothing to say

. If among you are those who get somewhere , let them leave at any moment . What we re-quire is silence ; but what silence requires is that I go on talking . (Cage 1999, p. 109)

2 Forms of life This prompts a question: is art a form of life—as Richard Wollheim suggests in Art and Its Objects (1980, §45–8, pp. 105ff)? As a form of life, is art definite or indefinite? To speak of art as a form of life is to suggest that art is bound by specific meanings. On the other hand, one could, as Croce (1994) suggests, define art by what art is not. However, this would not diminish the number of boundaries that define art. Bearing Croce’s contextual argument in mind, this approach would not help us here, as it opens art to further tautologies. Unless we are clear where Wollheim’s argument is coming from (i.e. Wittgenstein’s concept of language games as forms of life) there is a risk of misrepresenting the idea of art as a form of life. The phrase [form of life] appears as descriptive or invocatory of the total context within which alone language can exist: the complex of habits,

Art, doubt and error 21

experiences, skills, with which language interlocks in that it could not be operated without them and, equally, they cannot be identified without reference to it. In particular Wittgenstein set himself against two false views of language. According to the first view language consists essentially in names: names are connected unambiguously with objects, which they denote: and it is in virtue of this denoting relation that the words that we utter, whether to ourselves or out loud, are about things, that our speech and thought are “of” the world. According to the second view, language in itself is a set of inert marks: in order to acquire a reference to things, what is needed are certain characteristic experiences on the part of the potential language-users, notably the experiences of meaning, and (to a lesser degree) of understanding: it is in virtue of these experiences that what we utter, aloud and to ourselves, is about the world. (Wollheim 1980, pp. 104–5, emphases added) Wollheim adds that there are considerable differences between the two views. But then he explains that, “the two views also have something in common” in that they both “presuppose that these experiences exist, and can be identified quite separately from language,” adding that “the characterization of language (alternatively, of this or that sublanguage) as a ‘form of life’ is intended to dispute the separation on either level.” (Wollheim 1980, p. 105) Thereby Wollheim’s moral of the story: “The characterization of art too as a form of life has certain parallel implications” (1980, p. 105); and he goes on to show how this comes about and what it would look like (1980, pp. 105ff).

3 A question of possibility Between the interstices of being “of” the world and being about the world one finds how Wittgenstein, like many others before and after him, begins his travels over the horizons of language. So where does this leave art? Wollheim suggests several implications. I would do no justice to Wollheim’s work if I were to presume to describe what he says. It would be far better to read his Art and Its Objects. However, there is one critical remark that cannot go unquoted. Wollheim argues that one of the implications that emerge from stating that art is a form of life would be that: we do wrong to postulate, of each work of art, a particular aesthetic intention or impulse which both accounts for that work and can be identified independently of it. For though there could be such a thing, there need not be. (Wollheim 1980, p. 110, emphasis added) This leads to the question of possibility. Anyone reading Wollheim would have to ask how we could decide whether possible questions on art are necessary or otherwise.

22 Art, doubt and error

4 Art and judgement This calls for the power of judgement, which is not unlike what is discussed in Kant’s third critique (Kant 1974). In other words, it implies that we judge the necessity of possible questions against (that is, in contrast with) their contingent nature. If we go with Kant’s notion of judgement we must assume that human reason can (and indeed must) mediate between particularity and universality, between contingency and necessity. So, to mediate a question is to presume something like an answer that would enjoy a degree of universality. This is a problem for art. No one is sure whether it is necessary to answer art’s questions. It is less clear whether any answer could aspire to a degree of universality, although many artists and many more educators may well argue that without a degree of universality, art risks losing legitimacy. Be that as it may, to identify or try to define art’s questions (let alone art’s answers) is never clear. The problem lies with agency. Who poses the question? The artist or the audience? The educator or the student? Another issue has to do with the object of art, and subsequently the objects of its questions. What are we questioning? Like the dilemma over art being anything and everything, the question itself remains unclear.

5 Resembling a work of art Recall Kundera’s beautiful question in his Immortality: How was it possible that in a single fraction of a second, and for the very first time, she [Agnes] discovered a motion of the arm and body so perfect and polished that it resembled a finished work of art? (Kundera 1992, pp. 39–40) What does it mean to say “resembling a finished work of art”? Should a beautiful gesture resemble a work of art? Does resembling a work of art also mean that this act or object is almost a work of art? Whose motion of the arm and body would qualify as a work of art?

6 The dilemma of practice In case it is not yet clear, this is a discussion of a diversity of unmediated narratives that tend to aggregate and span across the plural horizon of arts practice. In terms of the arts as well as education, these questions are approached within several scenarios and against ever-changing backdrops. They are accordingly captured within a spread of statements that are variously intended and openly formed. These questions share one objective: to identify or suggest, support or contest numerous paradigms and methods that somehow link what is with what is done, and with what we come to know of art’s practices.

Art, doubt and error 23

The flip side of this discussion belongs within the remits of education. This engages us with a discussion of education that would seek to distance itself from academia’s established approach. And yet, this discussion also claims a rightful place in academia. It is within this apparent contradiction that here we take the opportunity to discuss arts research as a practice-based method. A practice-based approach is open enough to adopt different points of departure. This is more likely to locate itself within the interstices that one could take from Wollheim’s discussion of art as a form of life. More specifically, I see art practice as inhabiting the spaces found between the act or state of “being ‘of’ the world” and “being about the world.” Yet this also poses a major challenge, in that departing from the “in-between” is not easy, apart from being almost inconceivable. Similar takes are not uncommon in arts discourse, but not so in education— especially, I dare add, within the general tenor of art educational research, where the question of legitimation often limits art’s argument to the parameters of the social sciences. Because the latter continues to prompt my objection to mainstream art education, I consider any form of research that is embedded in arts practice as a strong and credible form of rebuttal. This also means that arts practice as a method of research must problematize its own practice, lest it becomes normalized and endorsed by the legitimized ark that it is meant to resist.

7 A sociology of knowledge In education, any interstitial discourse is ultimately rejected. Education is mostly understood within a predominantly developmental and social constructivist context. For decades, this “new” approach to education has become the established norm. It is widespread amongst educational researchers who, for reasons that appear more valid than not, presume to understand learning through a methodological combination of pertinent facts, applicable methods and effective practices. The reason for this is explained in Karl Mannheim’s essay “On the Nature of Economic Ambition and its Significance for the Social Education of Man” (2000), where he lays out the reason for the need of what was then a radical change in educational practices and objectives: [O]ur emphasis upon the social factors in education does not mean that we want to minimize or suppress the factors upon which the older type of education was based, such as interpersonal contacts, skills, or traditional cultural values. We rather want to supplement these older factors, to make them more concrete and to add to them the missing third dimension—the social dimension. (Mannheim 2000, p. 233)

24 Art, doubt and error

Mannheim argues that central to a sociological theory of education are “the investigation of social factors [and] the significance of the social environment for education” (2000, p. 233). He cites two reasons for this. The first is that “it is necessary to know as exactly as possible the kind of world in which the new generation is expected to live”, where he articulates social, industrial (technological) and economic change and the readiness of future generations for it. The second reason is perhaps more significant to our discussion. As he puts it, this “already borders on politics.” This has to do with knowledge and making the world manageable and prepared. It relates to social reform and the discussion of “an ‘industrial pedagogy’ as an instrument of social reform.” (2000, p. 233) Mannheim states that “it can be expected that in an era of social transformation such as that in which we find ourselves, men will try turn their attention more and more consciously to the investigation of those influences at work in the everyday life of society which favours the development of a new human type” (2000, pp. 233–4). In a nutshell: The task of education, therefore, is not merely to develop people adjusted to the present situation, but also people who will be in a position to act as agents of social development to a further stage. (Mannheim 2000, p. 234) Though written in the Mannheim’s essays on the sociology of knowledge remain compellingly current. Even when his essays are (thankfully) free from the managerial and policy-ridden jargon used in current educational discourse, his social scientific approach to education retains a strong presence in the educationalist collective unconscious. Fully subscribed to the sociology of knowledge, the educationalist establishment remains true to Mannheim’s call. In terms of the arts, the educationalist argument continues to seek and draw a direct link between the arts, society and the learner’s journey—the contexts of which would range between the school, the museum, the playground, the studio, the home everyday life. So where is the problem? Prima facie there does not seem to be one, until it becomes clear that in its givenness, any method of educational legitimacy that frames the arts within the sociology of knowledge is tightly mortgaged to forms of legitimation that are as foundational as those which Mannheim sets out to rebut (see Mannheim 2000, pp. 230–1). As arts educators would confirm, to argue for art’s place in education is often tied to an expectation where even an arts-based method has to be explained within a social scientific framework (see Gray & Malins 2004; Bresler 2007; Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund 2008; Hickman 2008; Knowles & Cole 2008; Barone & Eisner 2011; Leavy 2018). To ignore this expectation is to remain outside. It is to become a suspect whose modus operandi remains unaccountable.

Art, doubt and error 25

Be that as it may, it has become imperative for the arts and more so for those who lay claim to arts research, to take the risk and leap out—indeed exit— social scientific, developmental and constructivist claims to legitimacy. Failing to do so would simply mean that it has become acceptable to let art’s inherent criticality be transformed into an instrumental form of learning and doing. There is no way around this, even when some would argue that arts research is by nature polyvalent and somehow “immune” from instrumental reason. However, we know well that this kind of reassurance is grossly misleading, because no matter how versatile, multifaceted, inventive, open, or critical an arts method may be, to court or claim legitimation is to frame one’s act within a desirable givenness that is inherently teleological. Arts research only makes sense by dint of its own indescribability. As I have argued elsewhere (Baldacchino 2015), art practice is an experience marked by anticipation where limits are turned into avenues of possibility. If for a second, we bring the imagination within the realm of the possible, this only comes about by looking for what is not known to exist. If we were to know what and where something is likely to be, then there is nothing to find. While no social scientific method would accept this as a legitimate premise for research, art requires it in order to take itself out of the need for legitimacy. Art gives humans their right to illegitimacy. This is because art never seeks but only finds; in that art’s experience is a form of anticipation as creation, and not a reaction that creates (Baldacchino 2018).

8 A sense of everything A meaningful variant of arts-research is found in what is called a/r/tography, which Irwin and Springgay claim to be a “living inquiry,” by which they also mean an opening to descriptions and interpretations that gather a “complexity of experience among researchers, artists and educators, as well as the lives of the individuals within the communities they interact with” (Springgay & Irwin 2008, p. xxv). The a/r/tographic imagination does not simply regard arts practice as a method, but as a way of representing the wider remits of life and living. Although one could rightly object and argue that to articulate a wider remit still represents a method, one also needs to investigate whether the a/r/ tographic “method” is being explicitly anomalous when its approach to being of and about the world remains open. One could argue that, prior to Irwin et al’s (2008) koiné of ars and graphe became commonplace in arts educational research, good examples of such practice are already present in the works of John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Chris Marker, Fernando Pessoa … or indeed my friend’s cooking, my neighbour’s delicate lawn mowing, Agnes’s graceful presence in Kundera’s story or the sheer act of living. However, as argued above (§1) this opens several questions. Neither Beuys nor any of the artists mentioned above would have subscribed to their practice

26 Art, doubt and error

as being a method of research, even when the constraints of academia have forced us to look at their works as such. Unless we keep this in mind, any discussion of art’s “method” or “research” remains within the purview of Mannheim’s sociological intent on knowledge. One must also assume that a/r/tography resists the privileging of one medium or approach over another, whether written, expressed, marked or otherwise; and that this also applies to when the tools of research are evidently carried through a particular or no medium at all. It may seem easy to leave such an argument open to the notion of an anomalous method—or indeed a nonmethod that is open to shortcuts in order to resist definition. Yet this shortcut also poses unwarranted limits on the scope of a notion like a/r/tography where it risks evoking an elusive sense of everything. Describing one of their projects, Irwin et al explain that “a/r/tographical inquiry [is] a methodology of situations” which comes about by “shar[ing] the journey of a collaborative project undertaken by a group of artist educators, researchers working with a number of families in a nearby city” (Irwin et al 2008, p. 205). The pattern that this kind of research takes may be described through Hasebe-Lundt et al’s discussion of another project, which they characterize as a form of métissage or “artful braiding” that in their words, “offers a rapprochement between alternative and mainstream curriculum discourses and seeks a genuine exchange among the writers, and between the writers and their various authors” (2008, p. 58). Even so, this does not constitute a move away from the sociology of knowledge. Rather, it remains a variation on the same theme.

9 An a/r/tographic mishap To “write” art signifies a specific meaning in that it claims to identify the mutual relationship between ars and graphe, art and writing. To move between art and writing (broadly understood) would allow them to unfold together (Springgay & Irwin 2008, p. xxvi) and (one would assume) within each other. This approach is couched within a variety of traditions that hail from philosophy, literature, theory and the arts, ranging from the quasi-canonical Derridean tropes of differance/deferral and slippage to that of relationality, as it has become more commonly expressed in participatory arts practice and more notably in the work of Nicholas Borriaud on relational aesthetics. As a/r/tographers have continuously argued, in its métissage of manners, media, lexica, acts and methods, their approach to arts research and practice is not seeking to claim something new. Neither does it come from nowhere. Rather, a/r/tographers are keen to explain that their interest is to take arts methods into arts practice’s interstitial spaces where art making reclaims its contiguous potential (Springgay & Irwin 2008, p. xxviii). This is quite reassuring. Rather than regard specificity and hybridity as mutually exclusive, a/r/tographers seem to be telling us that arts practice is an inherent form of mutual inclusion. This mutualism is negotiated across

Art, doubt and error 27

divergent sets of activities. Although such acts and activities could be methodologically incompatible, an a/r/tographic approach would effectively bear out their (perhaps hidden) contiguous possibilities. Without wanting to distort this concept of contiguity, I would see the a/r/tographer as engaging in a degree of curatorial practice where a space is opened and commonly shared by artists, educators and participants, and where separate and distinct roles whose performative distinctions have conventionally defined specific art forms, now stand to become irrelevant. Yet while I feel reassured by a/r/togaphers as well as other arts researchers who travel on similar routes, there seems to remain a lingering question over the whole issue of method per se, and more so with regards to the response to the methodological imperatives that the arts research community continues to articulate from the vantage point of practice as this claims its place within the legitimate pantheon of methodology (see MacLeod & Holdridge 2006; Sullivan 2009; and Barone & Eisner 2011; Leavy 2018). Here, the question returns to the same place, where, as it were, the tongue always goes to the same sore tooth: Could a definition of arts research avoid social scientific demands, and instead emerge as distinct from what amounts to “a sociology of knowledge that has been merely brought up from outside” (Adorno 1990, p. 197)?

10 Adding nothing to art The potential rub comes with the implications by which this promised contiguity remains open. Though most artists and educators are likely to buy into the contiguous promise that a/r/tography holds, should not arts research as a method own up to the risks that it carries? This question must not be limited to one variant of arts research (such as a/r/tography and other similar approaches), but all of them put together. To call an artist a researcher adds nothing to his or her arts practice. It is like calling a man or a woman a living human being who recognizes the contingent nature of life’s interstitial faults. Cynically, one could add that apart from being a process that educates us into accepting life’s contingencies, this would ultimately add nothing to the stated description. Likewise, a cynical view of an arts researcher’s promise of a contiguous understanding of the world leaves us in the same quandary by which a sociologically defined arts practice remains prone to become an instrument of the status quo. At the same time this could mean that thanks to this possible quandary, a discussion of arts research confirms the necessity of risk. Variants of arts educational research that want to engage with the world outside the customary limits of the discipline(s) from which they hail come to represent a prompt, a call that urges human beings to engage with arts practice’s risky role. More importantly human beings would realize that this does not afford any comfort because, albeit acknowledged, the risk remains unchanged: like any other practice, arts educational research is never immune from reification.

28 Art, doubt and error

11 Art’s kenotic scandal Far from scandalizing the pious or entertaining the incredulous—as St Paul does when he presents the notion of kenosis to the Jews and the Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:22–3; see also Badiou 2003, pp. 47ff)—I would argue that any case for arts practice (let alone arts research) must be intentionally blurred by dint of its kenotic degrees of intention (see Baldacchino 2012a). The notion of kenosis advances the idea of a thought, and consequently a practice, which retreats and moves against the idea of a fixed ground of identitarian meaning that runs everything by its paradigmatic edicts. As Gianni Vattimo confirms in his argument for weak thought (pensiero debole), kenosis has nothing to do with a weakening of the argument or a practice, but opens up the agency of thought itself—here understood, I would add, as a practice (Vattimo 1985; 1988; 1995; Vattimo & Rovatti 1988). As I have argued elsewhere, this also makes a similar case for weak pedagogy. By stating and proposing a kenotic argument by which the politics of pedagogical aesthetics are articulated on the possibilities opened by art’s groundlessness, we can [also] state that weak pedagogy is characterized by a state of affairs where learning is affirmed in its deschooled, agonistic and multiple properties. (Baldacchino 2012a, p. 191) Through an articulation of weakness in art and education, we would heed to Ernesto Laclau’s eloquent argument for the transformation of grounds into horizons (Laclau 2005, pp. 71ff). This transformation finds a way round the contradiction of making a case qua case, where the idea of making a case warrants its continuous deferral, questioning and changing. In the specific case of arts practice this means that there is no real case to be made; which, strangely enough, becomes another case. This reveals the questionable nature of practice per se, or what Adorno (2000, p. 6) rightly dismisses as an unmediated form of practicism that leads to the production of people who like organizing things and who imagine that once you have organized something, once you have arranged for some rally or other, you have achieved something of importance, without pondering for a moment whether such activities have any chance at all of effectively impinging on reality. To be able to argue for a contiguous approach that enfolds in a way that would preserve the immanent criticality of arts practice, any claim that favours an artsbased method must address the problem of practicism and the quandary of legitimation. Practicism must be tackled head on by declaring that the intention of a practice-based research method must never afford to regard practice as a ground. This gains urgency when such a ground is declared as being open-

Art, doubt and error 29

ended, or where a practice-informed method of research is deemed equivalent to the same ways of life by which we do art and education even when we are not professional artists or educators (see Springgay & Irwin 2008, pp. xxivff). It is not cynical to argue that to escape from the quandary of methodological legitimation (of which practicism is a clear symptom), one must take the risk of the quandary itself. This also applies to the challenge of entering an infinite and ever-returning alternation between “making another case” and “making an other case” without finding oneself stuck in a tautology. As such, the intention behind the need to turn grounds into horizons is not to support a particular method, whether practice-based or otherwise. As I see it, for arts researchers to live up to their own expectations, they must take the opportunity to discuss how practice is an act that intentionally confuses the issue while, at the same time, it can never afford to stop the arts or educational practitioners from discussing and engaging with it.

12 Doubt and error A case for practice that is distanced from practicist distortions must bring about: (i) a persistent form of doubt and (ii) an incessant search for error. Any case that is made on the horizon of sustainable doubt and realizable error is clearly prompted by an expressed refutation of a foundational ground for arts practice (see Chapter 4, in this volume and Baldacchino 2005; 2009; 2012a) This is especially crucial when, more often than not, a strong foundationalist premise is assumed on the basis of critical, progressive or liberal approaches to art, philosophy and education that clearly deceive us into thinking that at the end there is an emancipatory or liberating outcome. This does not occur because of wrong intentions, but because the quandaries of legitimation have not been addressed. The perceived failure of progressive and liberal education touted by many conservatives is in effect a symptom of a situation that preserves the status quo (except that conservatives do not admit it). This scenario is not unrelated to the developmental approach that presents educational criticality as a resolved form of action premised on a supposedly open-ended context where, in effect, a learner-centred pedagogy ends up promoting the very opposite. “It is certainly futile to expect a child to evolve a universe out of his own mere mind as it is for a philosopher to attempt that task,” Dewey argues in The Child and the Curriculum. Dewey goes on to show how, Development does not mean just getting something out of the mind. It is a development of experience and into experience that is really wanted. And this is impossible save as just that educative medium is provided which will enable the powers and interests that have been selected as valuable to function. They must operate, and how they operate will depend almost entirely upon the stimuli which surround them and the material upon which they exercise themselves. (Dewey 1963, p. 18, emphasis added)

30 Art, doubt and error

Rather than at learner-centeredness per se, Dewey’s critique is directed at an unmediated notion of experience. One could likewise translate this within an argument for practice, where a similar critique could be directed at an unmediated notion of practice that fails to perceive the underlying dialectic that defines it.

13 Dewey’s concern Dewey’s concern dwells on the danger of creating a situation that claims that learning takes place developmentally, as if development is a given. This distorts the notion of development, where learning is regarded as a self-sustained ground on which everything and everyone (including the learner) needs to stand and is expected to “grow.” Dewey reveals and tackles the quandary of learning in reverse. While some might read him as if he is imposing on the learner an environment that would ultimately shape her ways of learning, Dewey’s position does the exact opposite by recognising the contradictory nature of learning. Here one begins to appreciate Dewey’s dialectical approach: There is no such thing as sheer self-activity possible—because all activity takes place in a medium, in a situation, and with reference to its conditions. But again, no such thing as imposition of truth from without, as insertion of truth from without, is possible. All depends upon the activity which the mind itself undergoes in responding to what is presented from without. (Dewey 1963, pp. 30–1) To take this further, I would invite the reader to engage in three adjoining “spaces” of argument: the first is marked by the question of practice (see §14, §15 and §16, below); the second inhabits the whereabouts of doubt (see §17 and §19, below); and the third invokes what I would call the poetic scoping of unlearning (see §18 and §19, below).

14 Cage’s interruption The question of practice is marked by its continuous return. Reading Cage with Dewey in mind, I find interesting parallels. Just as Dewey rejects an aprioristic assumption of growth, Cage does the same when he talks about chance. Far from an aprioristic affair, chance is a discipline that is presumed on tangible degrees of choice. Cage states that: [M]ost people who believe that I’m interested in chance don’t realize that I use chance as a discipline. They think I use it—I don’t know—as a way of giving up making choices. But my choices consist in choosing what questions to ask. (Cage 2003, p. 17)

Art, doubt and error 31

The dialectical relationship that characterizes Cage’s comments on chance is not that different from Dewey’s comments on learning. Cage’s approach to the distinction between his modern work and Beethoven reveals another facet of how Cage thinks and does music. Here he draws a relationship between ambient sound and music in parallel with that of fluency and interruption. If the music can accept ambient sounds and not be interrupted thereby, it’s a modern piece of music. If, as with a composition of Beethoven, a baby crying, or someone in the audience coughing, interrupts the music, then we know that it isn’t modern. I think that the present way of deciding whether something is useful as art is to ask whether it is interrupted by the actions of others, or whether it is fluent with the actions of others. (Cage 2003, p. 224, emphasis added) Perhaps the best way of approaching this statement is to read it in reverse. Whereas Beethoven cannot afford interruption, modern music is characterized by an interruption that continuously returns—which means that interruption becomes an intrinsic iteration of Cage’s music. Interruption becomes a practice that must sustain itself as an ever-returning state of affairs where no resolution could sustain itself because it cannot afford to be broken into separate constituencies. So, interruption as a genre is not a problem in and of itself. Rather, it represents formal specificity. Yet to argue for art’s specificity becomes problematic if it were to exclude other artists like Beethoven from the inherent dialect that it portends. On a closer look, one can see that by drawing his distinction, Cage is not putting Beethoven in a very different category. Rather, by excluding interruption from an audience that listens to Beethoven, Cage is re-contextualizing the specificity of Beethoven’s practice within a perspective that has to negotiate and accept the iterative returns that make Beethoven’s work unique. Thus, Cage reads Beethoven after Cage. By transforming interruption into a musical genre that plays a dominant role in his music, he finds himself reconstructing the notion of artistic specificity, and so in drawing a distinction between his work and Beethoven’s he also brings out the common horizon that they share. This looks and sounds odd, especially when one reads how Cage objects to de Kooning, who once told him in a restaurant that if one were to put a frame around breadcrumbs on the table that would not be art. “And what I am saying is that it is,” Cage remarks. “He [de Kooning] was saying that it wasn’t because he connects art with his activity—he connects with himself as an artist whereas I would want art to slip out of us into the world in which we live” (Cage 2003, p. 226). Does this interrupt Cage’s theory of interruption?

32 Art, doubt and error

15 Speaking art out of existence Art’s interruptive return is what makes risk viable and arts practice is marked by perhaps the most tangible risk that it has to take: art’s need to speak itself out of existence. Cage’s intervention on the need for art “to slip out of us into the world” is clearly based on this risk. The risk is not one but multiple. There is a risk that in saying so one appears beautifully naïve. “Modern art has turned life into art,” Cage adds “and now I think it’s time for life (by life I mean such things as government, the social rules and all those things) to turn the environment and everything into art” (Cage 2003, p. 226). This begs the question: Is not this redemption meant to return again and again by means of a genre of interruptions? I would definitely say so. Cage, for sure, does not root for an art left to itself, or its own devices. (We must remember how he regards chance from the agency of choice.) Art might be beautiful, he says, but “it should spill out of just being beautiful and move over to other aspects of life so that when we’re not with art it has nevertheless influenced our actions or our responses to the environment” (Cage 2003, p. 226). In his statements on art’s interruption Cage is not alone. He cannot pretend to claim anything new even when he interrupts the “old” and argues for the “new.” This method is what makes arts practice different from any other form of human activity—which is where I question a/r/tography (see §§8–10, above). Arts practice is synonymous with the risks of the contingency within which it recognizes itself as art. For art practice reveals that art must continuously strive to become non-art. However, art perpetually takes itself out of its state of being art in order to return again, and again, as art. Take three disparate (but never random) examples: Caravaggio’s Deposizione (1602–1604), Louise Bourgeois’s Couple series (late 1990s–early 2000) and Cornelia Parker’s The Maybe (1995). Formally, these works already move beyond the expected, though not particularly carrying any intended shock value. More than shock, these works are marked by a character of futuring, as Maxine Greene would say, citing Sartre. The artist, says Sartre, “must break the already crystallized habits which make us see in the present tense those institutions and customs which are already out of date.” In this respect Greene argues that the artist helps us to do this by force of art’s “problematic nature.” Again, citing Sartre, she states that the artist provides a true image of our time by considering it “from the pinnacle of the future which it is creating, since it is tomorrow which will decide today’s truth” (see Greene 1978, p. 172).

16 Relative ignorance Methodologically speaking, art’s futuring seems more alchemic than scientific. This tends to be the case not because there is some inherent antagonistic relationship between the arts and the natural sciences. Rather there is a difference

Art, doubt and error 33

in terms of their temporal location. Through arts practice, one could argue that contiguity redefines temporality and suspends the conventions of timing as practiced by the natural sciences. To illustrate this, I would cite a philosopher and a political theorist, Michèle Le Doueff and Antonio Gramsci. In The Philosophical Imaginary, Le Doueff takes Galileo as an example: Galileo’s case might lead us to say (…) that a revolutionary scientific idea may, precisely because of its unfamiliarity, be born among metaphors and confusion and attain its “fine abstract pointing” only afterwards, by integration into a scientific system not yet constituted at the time of its initial appearance. (Le Doueff 2002, p. 38) In a similar vein, Gramsci deals with what he calls a relative ignorance of reality by which we continuously anticipate future concepts that are still not historically ripe to be fully understood and contextualized by current knowledge and methods of inquiry. He takes Kant’s noumenon as a model of this kind of concept where “one could make a historical forecast that simply consists of a thought projected in what is to come as a process of development like that which until now has been verified in the past” (Gramsci 1975, p. 48). More specifically he argues that the noumenon represents a recognition of “the concrete sense of a ‘relative ignorance’ of reality [‘relativa ignoranza’ della realtà] as something still ‘unknown’.” One day in the future we would get a full knowledge of this once we have adequate “‘physical’ and intellectual instruments” of inquiry (Gramsci 1975, p. 48, emphasis added). Elsewhere, I have tied Gramsci’s notion of relative ignorance to formative aesthetics (Baldacchino 2012b), but here I want to push formative aesthetics further into the contexts of a practice that inherently represents a form of finding rather than simply searching. This would couch the idea of inquiry into a framework of anticipation. More so it cuts short and even dismisses those methodological processes by which researchers expect to gain legitimation. In Galileo’s case, Le Doeuff (2002) argues that because a revolutionary scientific idea is radically unfamiliar to the conventions of scientific practices and methods of the day, it is “born among metaphors and confusion and attain its ‘fine abstract pointing’ only afterwards” (p. 38). Gramsci is even more radical. The position is that of a relative ignorance that confronts reality by future knowledge. This helps us understand and learn what is yet to be known. The anticipation of ignorance in Gramsci’s discussion of the Kantian noumenon reminds us of arguments on ignorance and learning in the work of Jacques Rancière (1991). It also recalls the 16th century theologian and philosopher Nicolas de Cusa, who in his De Docta Ignorantia (Of Learned Ignorance), he states that, “if the foregoing points are true, then since the desire in us is not in vain, assuredly we desire to know that we do not know.”

34 Art, doubt and error

If we can fully attain unto this [knowledge of our ignorance], we will attain unto learned ignorance. For a man—even one very well versed in learning—will attain unto nothing more perfect than to be found to be most learned in the ignorance which is distinctively his. The more he knows that he is unknowing, the more learned he will be. (De Cusa 1990, I, §1–2, p. 6, emphasis added)

17 A discourse of unlearning Doubt reflects a tension between arts practice and educational practices. Adopting the phenomenological method of epoché while temporarily bracketing arts education away from social scientific methods, would reveal the tension by which art and education relate to each other as antinomic practices. An educational context would invariably presume that arts practice operates as a vehicle of teaching and learning. Here arts practice appears to converge with pedagogical practice. But this is marked by a tension between two forms of practice—that of the arts and that of pedagogy whose conventions by circumstance or necessity are bound to contradict each other. This tension reveals art’s need to return to its originary practice, to its own facticity qua art. However, this return can never replicate or restore the same practice of origin. There is no real return to an origin because origins cannot be replicated. An origin could only return as a transformed iteration. Once this happens, practice needs to be “taught” again … and again … and again … but this time always transformed into other iterations. In this pattern of disjunctive returns, the arts and pedagogical practices, in their separate and common ways, cease to simply become a ground of instruction. Rather, they form a horizon of alterity—or better put, an exchange that sustains a narrative of doubt through which art’s answers become education’s questions, and where in turn, education’s answers form and inform art’s doubt. This is where practice becomes critical, and where one could begin to make a case for art’s pedagogy of practice. While the notion of a returned practice sounds like a tautology, in the case where arts practice refuses to become a pedagogical instrument the tautological cycle is broken. The notion of an originary practice that was once expressive and which some educationalists seem to suggest is now educational, loses its relevance. The method of epoché reveals how an originary point of convergence, which appears to grow or is to be taken as a given in the relationship between the arts and education, is a myth. This myth is no different from that of the self-learning child that Dewey exposes and invalidates. Through the method of epoché, the dialectical relationship between art and education begins to appear more clearly. Just as art practice is an aporia, any relationship between the arts and educational practice remains marked by a necessary contradiction between two diverse conventions of practice: that of art and that of education. This is where a pedagogy of art offers only open-ended—and therefore partial— answers. This also explains how arts education becomes a discourse of unlearning.

Art, doubt and error 35

18 Scoping the indescribable As a form of poetic scoping, unlearning cannot be described. Arts practice constitutes the only viable pedagogical vehicle through which one could make a claim for unlearning without becoming entangled within a web of developmental, cognitive or social determinism. I propose to approach this challenge via three avenues. The first has to do with (i) art as a political act: where it is read against the intentionality that is informed by an array of political conditions, including those of citizenship, belonging and action. This reveals (ii) art’s philosophies of learning: where a distinction is made between a philosophy of art education and a philosophy of learning that emerges from within art’s returned facts; by which we are then engaged with (iii) art’s praxis as a poetic discourse of unlearning: where the concept of learning is removed and distanced from universal certainty and resumed on the basis of art’s contingent nature. It would be difficult to discuss art’s praxis as a form of unlearning unless this is contextualized within the bracketing that was discussed in the previous reflection (§17, above) while bearing in mind that as agreed in §15 and §16, art is moved by a continuous form of exiting which talks itself out of the political spaces of definition and legitimation. Art’s exit strategy—or as I call it, art’s exit pedagogy (Baldacchino 2012a)—is intrinsically tied to the manner of its practice. As a practice that is turned into doubt, art is praxis by default. This is because praxis cannot become a critical act unless it is an act of doubt, as we have seen in Gramsci’s concept of relative ignorance (§16, above). We have also argued that practice, and more so praxis, could not be perverted into mere practicism. This is because for praxis to retain its criticality, it must not be reduced to a practice of certainty that is defined by a ground (see §11, above). By arts praxis one does not simply imply a critical practice of art, but a practice that portends a groundlessness given form by art’s critical doubt (Baldacchino 2005).

19 Finding as in doubting Doubt is the moment of unlearning the certainty of practice. Once we establish that unlearning is central to art’s praxis, we begin to make sense of art’s pedagogical practice as an act of poetic scoping. Scoping is one of the main characteristics of arts practice. It begins to transform research into an act of finding. Artful acts are acts of continuous scoping. As an act of scoping, arts practice (qua finding) exits the social scientist’s ground and travels over the horizon of the arts. Here the datum is generated and the object of the search becomes, like Duchamp’s art, a found object. While we argue for doubt as that which moves arts practice to become a form of research that generates data and finds its objects, we also assert how as praxis, art must doubt itself. As we have seen in the discussion of Cage’s

36 Art, doubt and error

aesthetics, art moves out of itself by slipping “out of us into the world” (see §14 and §15, above). This implies that arts practice rejects all grounds including its own. Put another way, art as praxis rejects the circularity by which groundlessness could become another ground. Likewise, to avoid becoming its own ground, art must reject itself as a making—i.e. as an objectified end—and instead it articulates itself as a doing, and thereby as a poetic act—a horizon—of scoping (see Baldacchino 2005 and 2012a, pp. 62–6; 86ff). This recalls Adorno’s well-known remark in Minima Moralia: “The contradiction between what is and what is made, is the vital element of art and circumscribes its law of development, but it is also art’s shame” (Adorno 2005, p. 226).

20 Art’s rightful contingency As a doing, art’s praxis gains its normalcy. In pedagogical terms, art’s doing emerges from our urge to continuously unlearn the artefacts of making, which constitute art’s uniqueness and its “shame.” While the word “shame” appears too harsh, one must read it in other than the usual context of demeaning embarrassment. Rather, it should be read as an embarrassment that reveals art’s otherness and difference. In claiming its acts of making as a source of pride and embarrassment, art’s practice reveals its contradictory ways of doing. Art’s challenge to the sociology of knowledge lies in reclaiming its normalcy by turning its contingent nature into a choice, in the same way Cage reveals his approach to discipline in chance. In asserting its contingent nature—in turning chance into a choice—art surpasses the walls of the polis and lays claim to its intimacy with the excluded stranger (Greene 1973; Baldacchino 2009; 2012a). In rejecting the artefacts that are made under the guise of ”art”, art rejects those forms of legitimation that expect it to become reified into an instrument of teaching and learning. In this way arts practice asserts itself as a human act—a doing—that constantly needs to unlearn itself. Likewise, art’s poetic scoping is an act of making that is constantly unmade. Art’s poetics of practice—its making—is an act of unmaking. Like the unlearnt, the unmade allows us to reclaim our right to our contingency. Only as contingent beings could we claim the yet unclaimed and the already unlearnt. This is where knowledge begins to unravel, and where it is constantly returned as a way that knows by way of what it seeks to doubt and of which it seeks to retain a viable ignorance.

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. 1990. Negative dialectics. E.B. Ashton (trans.). London: Routledge. Adorno, T.W. 2000. Problems of moral philosophy. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Adorno, T.W. 2005. Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life. London: Verso.

Art, doubt and error 37 Badiou, A. 2003. Saint Paul: The foundation of universalism. R. Brassier (trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Baldacchino, J. 2005. Hope in groundlessness: Art’s denial as pedagogy. Journal of Maltese Educational Research, 3(1). Malta: University of Malta. Online version: www.educ.um. edu.mt/jmer/. Baldacchino, J. 2009. Education beyond education: Self and the imaginary in Maxine Greene’s philosophy. New York: Peter Lang. Baldacchino, J. 2012a. Art’s way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers. Baldacchino, J. 2012b. “Relative ignorance”: Lingua and linguaggio in Gramsci’s concept of a formative aesthetic as a concern for power. In D.R. Cole & L.J. Graham (Eds.), The power in/of language. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Baldacchino, J. 2015. Educing art’s indescribable practice: Four theses on the impossibility of arts research. Derivas: Investigação em Educação Artística, 2, 97–105. Baldacchino, J. 2018. The right to creative illegitimacy: Art and the fallacy of proprietary legitimation. The Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review, 22, Special Issue 1 (forthcoming). Barone, T & Eisner, E. 2011. Arts based research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Bresler, L. (Ed.) 2007. International handbook of research in arts education. Dordrecht, NL: Springer. Cage, J. 1999. Silence: Lectures and writings. London: Marion Boyars. Cage, J. 2003. Conversing with Cage. Edited and compiled by R. Kostelanetz. New York: Routledge. Cahnmann-Taylor, M. & Siegesmund, R. (Eds.) 2008. Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice. New York: Routledge. Croce, B. 1994. Breviario di estetica: Aesthetica in nuce [Handbook of aesthetics: Aesthetics in a nutshell]. Milano, IT: Adelphi. De Cusa, N. 1990. Nicholas of Cusa on learned Ignorance: A translation and an appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia. J. Hopkins (trans.). Minneapolis, MN: The Arthur J. Banning Press. Online version: http://my.pclink.com/~allchin/1814/retrial/cusa2.pdf. Accessed on 12 May 2012. Dewey, J. 1963. The child and the curriculum: The school and society. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Gramsci, A. 1975. Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce. [Historical materialism and Benedetto Croce's philosophy] Torino, IT: Editori Riuniti. Gray, C. & Malins, J. 2004. Visualizing research: A guide to the research process in art And design. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Greene, M. 1973. Teacher as stranger: Educational philosophy for the modern age. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Greene, M. 1978. Landscapes of learning. New York: Teachers College Press Hasebe-Lundt, E., Chambers, C., Oberg, A. & Leggo, C. 2008. Embracing the world, with all our relations: Métissage as an artful braiding. In S. Springgay, R. Irwin, C. Leggo & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.). Being with a/r/tography. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Hickman, R.D. 2008. Research in art & design education: Issues and exemplars. Bristol, UK: Intellect Books. Irwin, R., Beer, R., Springgay, S., Grauer, K., Xiong, G. & Bickel, B. 2008 The rhizomatic relations of a/r/tography. In S. Springgay, R. Irwin, C. Leggo & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.). Being with a/r/tography. Rotterdam, NL: Sense.

38 Art, doubt and error Kant, I. 1974. Critique of judgement. J. H. Bernard (trans.). New York: Hafner Press, Collier-Macmillan. Knowles, J.G. & Cole, A.L. (Eds.) 2008. Handbook of the arts in qualitative research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kundera, M. 1992. Immortality. P. Kussi (trans.). London: Faber & Faber. Laclau, E. 2005. On populist reason. London: Verso. Leavy, P. 2018. Handbook of arts-based research. New York: The Guilford Press. Le Doueff, M. 2002. The philosophical imaginary. London: Continuum. Macleod, K. & Holdridge, L. (Eds.) 2006. Thinking through art: Reflections on art as research. New York: Routledge. Mannheim, K. 2000. Essays on the sociology of knowledge: Collected works, volume five. London: Routledge. Rancière, J. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Springgay, S. & Irwin, R. 2008. A/r/tography as Practice-Based Research. In S. Springgay, R. Irwin, C. Leggo & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.). Being with a/r/tography. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Sullivan, G. 2009. Art practice as research: Inquiry in the visual arts. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Vattimo, G. 1985. La fine della modernità. Milano: Garzanti. [English trans. Vattimo, G. 1991. The end of modernity. J.R. Snyder (trans.). Baltimore, MA: The Johns Hopkins University Press.] Vattimo, G. 1988. Dialettica, differenza, pensiero debole [Dialectics, difference and weak thought]. In G. Vattimo & P.A. Rovatti (Eds.). Il pensiero debole [Weak thought]. Milano, IT: Feltrinelli, pp. 12–28. Vattimo, G. 1995. Oltre l’interpretazione [Beyond interpretation]. Bari, IT: Laterza. Vattimo, G. & Rovatti, P.A. (Eds.) 1988. Il pensiero debole [Weak thought]. Milano, IT: Feltrinelli. Wollheim, R. 1980. Art and its object: With six supplementary essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 3

Learning with art

To speak of art and learning is to move away from the idea of art as a closed and privileged form of knowledge. Any accusation of elitism levelled against art or education is usually assumed to be a denunciation of what often appears to be an exclusive and arcane artistic meaning over common sense that is privileged and kept away from the artistically uneducated. In fact, before any notion of arcane knowledge, the very question of meaning in art is problematic. This is not because contemporary art is seen as obscure, but because in being perceived as such, contemporary art is either denounced as elitist or exclusively claimed by those who assume to know art more than anyone else. To maintain to know art more than anyone else is not only misleading, but a total fallacy. This fallacy stems from the incorrect supposition that art is a form of knowledge. More so, to assume that art is a form of knowledge is to mistake art for a means of learning and, by implication to assume that art education and the art school somehow embody an institutionalized brand of privilege. In this chapter, it will be argued that rather than educating, art educes—and therefore elicits—what we assume to be learning by an act of withdrawal. Art’s withdrawal should not be confused with a retreat or abdication from reality. Neither should one assume that this somehow distances art from human knowledge. On the contrary, by claiming that art withdraws through acts of educing, we mean that as a human form of action, art elicits learning for the sake of learning, though it never becomes a mere instrument of learning. As we seek to learn how to learn, we learn comprehensively; and therefore, we move beyond anything that is simply identified with art as a tool or an instrument of what we know. In doing (rather than making) art, women and men engage (that is, operate) learning within a larger sphere. This sphere is the polity of everyday life. Rather than learning through art to gain knowledge in competition with others, we learn with art just as we come to know ourselves outwith the exclusivist realms of institutionalized knowledge. The insistence on the word “outwith” as distinct from “outside” or “without” will be explained in terms of the specificity by which the art that makes things (i.e. doing art; arting) is distinguished from the things that art makes (i.e. works of art; art objects). What here appears as an odd insistence on the usage of “outwith” has to do with a delicate balancing

40 Learning with art

between learning and schooling, and more specifically with the distinction between learning, education and schooling. While education formalizes learning, schooling implies the ultimate encasement (not short of entrapment) of human learning. A quibble though this may seem, the relationship between what lies within and outwith (rather than without) the school, is better served if we understand how learning is repositioned outwith the expected areas of schooling, which is neither outside nor without the actual realms of learning. Where does the idea of learning with art leave us? Here, the reader is invited to consider a number of questions that relate art with learning. Questions like: How do we engage with art as a formative activity with which we learn? Which begs a further question: What do we learn and how does this learning differ from the schooled forms of knowledge that we identify with art education? Does this difference presume other forms of learning that supplement, and even surpass, schooled education? And why should we surpass schooling if not to achieve a larger, more comprehensive and immanent form of learning, by which, as this book purports, art begets the need to unlearn? To answer these questions, art is taken to task by matters brought up in its contemporary practices. Particular focus is laid on two artists, Valerio Adami (born, 1935) and Richard Serra (born, 1939), whose works are discussed against the scenarios of (a) contemporary art, where the equivalence between art as an act (as arting) and the work of art (the art object) becomes a source of confusion; and (b) how the question “What is art?” reveals an ironic response where answers could vary between “Art is what it is,” “What arting shows it to be” and “What we, as an audience forced onto art, would know it to be.” Another question, “What is education?” reveals a comparable vein of irony not least because the questions “What is art?” and “What is education?” ultimately confirm that they have nothing to do with art or education. Instead, what really has a bearing on learning and art is the distinction between owning art as an object and beholding it as a human activity, as a form of life. Against these scenarios, the emphasis falls on the need to behold art as art—and not as a commodity or a tool, which in turn constitutes a major pedagogical possibility in terms of a comprehensive notion of education. While the distinction between learning with and learning through art reveals the need to make a distinction between art as a human act and art as an object, we must highlight another fundamental distinction; this time between the things that we learn and the learning by which we do things. As readers engage with Adami and Serra’s works, what matters is not how much one knows about art, but by how one’s own disposition we begin to exchange learning with unlearning. To unlearn an approach by which we have grown to look up to the artistic connoisseur is not easy—especially when we are led to believe that one could attribute identifiable meanings and a span of interpretative canonicity to specific works of art. However, what art’s “knowers” fail to admit is that there is a distinction between works of art and the art that makes them, and that art as a

Learning with art 41

human act denotes something of a form of life with which human beings relate by a way of being that moves beyond art itself. In one’s encounter with art—whether one is making it, appreciating, partaking or simply attending to it—one is ultimately engaging with one’s self and others. Art is just an event of such an encounter and not the essence of one’s being, even in the case of the artist himself. A work of art is distinct from the person who made it. More so, as we learn with art we become aware that art does not and must not teach us anything. While a museum docent, with the best of intentions, tells us a, b and c about an art object, to learn with art is to participate in a comprehensive act where x is learnt for the sake of x and not because one is told that x means a, b and c. To explain art by means of something else would be like “a case of trying to play a conceptual salmon with a cricket-bat or an ace of spades” (Ryle 1973, p. 60). Likewise, art does not add up to anything but itself. If this sounds like a tautology it is because art is never a complete sum made from incomplete parts. Essentialist analogies of this sort are ineffective when it comes to art (as distinct from works of art) because art’s parts are sums in themselves. It is nonsense to state that specific parts have to be in place to make art, drama, dance or music true. What is a true work of art? What is the truth of music if not music, of drama if not drama, of dance, of paintings, of film, etc.?

To educe, retrieve and withdraw The visual artist has long given up the role of a didactic master, a magister who paints churches in order to teach the precepts of the Church. Already in the Early Renaissance—the days of Duccio, Giotto and Fra Angelico—the didacticism of Byzantine and Gothic art had evolved into the notion of teaching as a way of educing the individual’s moral persona. While the stories that Byzantine and Gothic art told the faithful were aimed at the knowledge of Christian salvation, Early Renaissance art was already shifting emphasis on the humanistic idea of being, where the knower must be saved by partaking of the mystery of the faith. Being is educed, drawn out, as it partakes of a larger, comprehensive and immanent moral imagination. It could be argued that the person “drawn out” in Fra Angelico’s Noli Me Tangere [Do Not Touch Me] (1440–1) is still being taught the articles of the faith by which Christ’s resurrection is conveyed and represented. However, as an artist and a Dominican friar, Fra Angelico was more interested in the drawing of the soul; the beautiful soul that returns to the beauty of God and His mystery. This may sound anachronistic now, but the intent then was no less radical than a Scholastic philosopher like John Duns Scotus arguing that logical possibilities would stand even when they are withdrawn from the realm of the actual. As David Luscombe (1997) explains:

42 Learning with art

Duns Scotus (…) developed a notion of logical, as distinct from real possibility. Real possibility means that something that is possible can actually happen, and whatever is actual is really possible. But, since not everything that is possible can actually happen, Scotus withdrew the notion of possibility from the realm of what may become actual to the realm of logic. Not all logical possibilities can be realized in the actual world. For example, if I say of the human free will that a man cannot will something and its opposite at the same time, I would be met by Scotus’ objection that, although a man cannot actually will both simultaneously, it is none the less logically possibly for him to will each of two opposite objects at the same time. (p. 165) As a work of art, Fra Angelico’s Noli Me Tangere is educive of all possibilities, even when such articles (such truths of faith) are impossible to handle within the realm of actuality. This painting depicts the risen Christ who, when seen by Mary Magdalene, tells her not to touch him because he is now risen and his body now belongs to a celestial realm, that of God himself. Here the notion of touching is crucial. How could anyone handle the possibility of a body that was resurrected from the dead? Unless one is prepared to think like Duns Scotus and Fra Angelico, this is impossible, because in the first place, possibility means other than being able to touch a body risen from the dead and which belongs to an order that is not of this world. However, in artistic terms, this possibility becomes easier to understand and handle. Fra Angelico’s work empowers the viewer who is also a person of faith approaching divine mystery with the conviction that would make logically possible the belief in the salvation of humanity by the resurrection represented in the fresco. In art the possibility is widened as a concept and becomes not simply accessible and learnt by the viewer, but more clearly the viewer unlearns the limited notion of possibility as she knows it from her mortal experience. This notion of learning as an act of retrieving possibility by retreating from (and therefore unlearning) the limitations of what appears to be immediately actual, has been located in a similar reading of contemporary art. Writing about the artist Valerio Adami, the philosopher Jean François Lyotard (1989a, p. 220) invites us to “imagine a man withdrawing. When the man who withdraws is a painter, something happens to representation.” Here the withdrawal makes space for other possibilities. This sense of withdrawing is not dissimilar from Fra Angelico’s. Almost as if educing (or retrieving) the living person from within mere existence, Fra Angelico presents the viewer with the resurrected Christ’s withdrawal from Mary Magdalene’s touch, saying: Do not touch me [noli me tangere], for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren, and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God. (John 20:17).

Learning with art 43

Four hundred years after Fra Angelico, artists still present us with the occasion to educe possibility by withdrawing from (and therefore unlearning) the limitations of mere existence: Withdrawal, ritratto, portrait. On 7 September 1983, he [Adami] draws an Autoritratto. On 14 August, he paints it. As we were saying, he combines his withdrawal (se retire) with drawing (tirer) his own portrait. He takes off (tire) or withdraws (retire) his mask, and holds it out to us. A tragedian’s mask (…). (Lyotard 1989a, p. 220) Lyotard’s essay, originally entitled “Anamnèse du visible ou la franchise” (translated as “Anamnesis of the Visible, or Candour”) brings up the question of withdrawal within the realms of anamnesis. Anamnesis is an act of recollection, a remembering, a retrieval of and educing what has been forgotten. Lyotard pays attention to the notion of anamnesis from the Freudian practice of recollection and the retrieval of memory as a way of healing, as therapy. But he also takes this further, as he suggests in another essay similarly entitled “Anamnesis: Of the Visible,” where he moves recollection “from clinic to writing, to painting” where “the stakes are not the same.” To work through language within writing or painting means to produce, in the sense of uncovering what was not exposed, an idiom, a particular language, through the language already spoken by words, made visible already by colours. There too, one can see no end to it (…). The Proustian narrative is exemplary in that respect. The Recherche doubles back on itself, but in order to say at the end: let us begin to write the Recherche. (Lyotard 2004, p. 110) The cycle of recollection is also an act of learning, but this time it is not a process of learning y by means of x in order to get to a stage where one reaches to an end objective z. Anamnesis presumes neither teleological projection nor epistemological anticipation. In this conceptualization of learning one cannot entertain an end-objective, a telos that is reified by a constructivist scaffold that assumes learning by privileging process over product. Neither could one entertain an accumulation of knowns achieved through a process that eliminates the unknowns. On the contrary, one learns x for no sake but x, and it makes no difference where or how are y, z, c, b or a retrieved. In effect, there is no justification for anamnesis but anamnesis, no reason for learning but learning. This would jar with the Platonic notion of anamnesis where, as Socrates explains to Meno, true opinions become knowledge and stable once they are tied down; a process that he identifies as anamnesis, recollection (Meno 97e, in Plato 2005). To Socrates, learning is recalling what the soul knew when it partook of the omniscient world of ideas where, by educing this forgotten

44 Learning with art

knowledge, reason redeems itself from the limits of mortality. In this state of affairs, recollection leaves no recourse but to the presumptions of immortal knowledge as a tethered scaffold that enables one to transcend the limits of mortality. But as Adorno (2005) rightly argues: [E]ven if we were for once to comply with the questionable directive that the exposition should exactly reproduce the process of thought, this process would be no more a discursive progression from stage to stage, than, conversely, knowledge falls from Heaven. (p. 80) And given that no knowledge falls from Heaven, the assumption that anamnesis is simply a process of recollecting the heavenly knowledge that the mind must have forgotten, will undoubtedly hold no sense to us, even if we were to rewrite Socrates’s notion of anamnesis as a learner-centred method of education. In this respect one must recast anamnesis in another light, where, as argued above, a recollection of knowledge that is supposedly suppressed by the limits of mortality must be qualified by a very different description of knowledge: Knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience. (Adorno 2005, p. 80) If this approximates the untethered opinion that Socrates wants to domesticate through a recollection of knowledge, then it is because what is meant by anamnesis is not simply an act of retrieving truth, but as a rejection of the limit in favour of the limitless by means of other than a fixed moral imaginary. To that effect, anamnesis reaffirms itself as an act of educing, where knowledge is not recollected by a soul that partook of omniscience before it was riddled by the mortality of the body, but where knowledge is withdrawn by the activation of the possible (with all the “prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations”) by the representational power that women and men gain from their ability to do art. By doing art, women and men engage in anamnesis not simply as an individualized activity, but within a political sphere—that of the polis—which enhances intelligence with freedom. Elsewhere I have suggested that “liberty emerges from the politics of anamnesis as random recollection, commonplace remembrance and as a return to the everydayness by which art and history gain their keep” (Baldacchino 2002, pp. 42–3). This returns the very concept of knowledge to the recollection of everyday life, where what we forget and what we remember are equally essential to what we learn. By means of their unique

Learning with art 45

positioning within the polis, art and history become catalysts for a more devolved notion of knowledge where curricular hierarchies privileged by schooling become irrelevant. It is also in this context that we speak of a politics of anamnesis where knowledge is never a body to be obtained or gained by competitive processes enacted by schools. This is particularly the case with the arts and their educational manner of doing. Education in art as a form of educing reconfirms that art is not knowledge but a form of life that, as we have argued in the previous chapter, we know amongst other forms of life.

Posing questions In The Arts of the Beautiful, Etienne Gilson rejects the assertion that art is a form of knowledge: “art is not a kind of knowledge … it is not a manner of knowing” (Gilson 2000, p. 9). Instead he calls for a distinction between “the art that makes things” (ars artefaciens) and “the things which art makes” (ars artefacta) (2000, p. 13). This distinction also qualifies his questioning of the way art is taught in formal education, although one must add that the object of his book is not art education. It is noteworthy that even an institution dedicated to communicating sound art appreciation to the public should shy at what is, after all, simply a matter of fact. Our whole teaching of the fine arts, where they are taught, follows the same patterns. We confuse teaching art with teaching art appreciation, as if it were possible to form even the most confused notion of art without having at least attempted to practice one of the arts. In the order of the fine arts, knowing is making. This does not mean that the rest is unimportant—it may even be necessary—but it does mean that what is not directly relevant to the making of a work is about art, not art itself. Such is the justification for stressing a truth so self-evident that it may very well seem meaningless to repeat, but which needs to be restated from time to time because it is continually being forgotten. (Gilson 2000, pp. 11–12) Had Gilson not made the distinction between the art that makes things and the things which art makes, one might argue that his critique of art education would be irrelevant. Current art educators would claim that, to a degree, contemporary art education fulfils Gilson’s distinction, because in schools, students do not simply appreciate art but they also engage in making art. Nevertheless, Gilson’s distinction between the objects that art makes and the art that makes them strikes at the heart of what art is all about. What really matters is not the work of art but art itself. Gilson urges us to focus on art, not on the thing that art makes. This also means that the art that makes things could never be a process as it is mostly argued in contemporary art education.

46 Learning with art

If, like Gilson, one makes an argument for art itself, from the perspective of “the art that makes things,” art as making (as poiesis) would not stand for a process or a production of things, but for an act of being art. It follows that the thing, the work of art, needs to be assessed as being other than a mechanically reflective mirroring of art making. If art is deemed a process, the thing that art makes is deemed to be art’s equivalent, with the consequence that the poetic being of art becomes irrelevant. To argue that the work of art is art’s equivalent is to eliminate Gilson’s distinction. Another consequence will be a removal of the art form from the poetic actuality of art per se, where the thing that art makes becomes a deviation from art to the extent of reducing art to objects that are presented, qualified, sold and appreciated in themselves. This reduction is, in effect, what the art industry has sustained in terms of its vested interests. Under the term “art industry” one must include not only art dealers and collectors, but also museums, galleries and many art and design schools and programmes where a prevalent ideology leads to the conclusion that art stands for the things that it made and not the poetics as that human doing that makes the things. Invariably there are, and will always be, a myriad of assumptions by which one could approach the legitimacy of art as a human activity. By simply assuming that there is such a question would sound odd, especially because no one can doubt the existence of art—art is here to be seen and done. Yet questions over art never abate because the nature of art itself changes from time to time, with the consequence that what is considered as art differs from one work of art to another; which is where the equivalence between art and works of art remains a major source of confusion. It is interesting to note that contrary to those who emphasize works of art over art, artists hardly ask tedious questions like “What is art?” or “Is it art?” This is because artists do not start from the work of art but from art as a form of being art as art, which is a different question from the philosopher’s, the educator’s or the historian’s. Also, when artists approach such questions, they tend to avoid the issue of whether something is or is not art. This is because to consider oneself an artist also means that one is convinced by her art practice, which ultimately renders any questioning of the thing that art makes secondary to the larger, much more complex question of making as the act of being art. Simply put, it is not the artist’s task to answer questions over things. Artists are concerned only with being artists. Somehow, Gilson’s distinction holds strong when it comes to the artist. The artist’s interest is to do art (though as a philosopher, Gilson would insist that artists make art). Apart from what artists see themselves doing and being, philosophers and critics who exercise their own art of questioning and commenting about art, come in two broad camps. There are those who venture in the speculative realms of argument and are taken by a line of thinking which runs parallel to the artist’s insistence on doing and making. On the other hand, there are those who state that ultimately art relies on the institutions that buy, sell, appraise, critique and even teach it. Those who have decided to abandon the parallels

Learning with art 47

between arguing (art’s doing) and making (the art that makes things), choose to identify art with the institution that is seen in turn to “make” of art an identifiable ground with its own established borders. Pragmatically, it could be argued that this approach may not be far from the truth; or at least from a concrete approach by which some kind of truthful definition of art can be established in a context where art, not unlike education, is supposed to represent an accountable human institution. Yet such pragmatic assumptions fall short of taking the question of art further, especially when the dynamic behind the tedious question “What is art?” is in itself, as Croce (1994, p. 15) once told us, a matter of posing the question tongue in cheek: “To the question: ‘What is art?’ one may answer, tongue in cheek [celiando] (although this would not be a silly joke): that art is whatever everyone knows it to be.” One could even think of a number of jokes which could begin with the question: “I say I say I say: When is art not art?” or “I say I say I say: What is art if not art?” Answers would range from the dire reply “When we cannot really understand the question” to “When art is art.” To pose the question is to make an ironic statement that is intended to function beyond its immediate form of questioning. What seems clear in this rather trying line of argument is that the question invariably has nothing to do with art as such (see Baldacchino 2012, pp. 83–6). In the specific case of contemporary art, where the assumptions of form and content are deemed irrelevant, we are not dealing with fixed ends or objectives, but with a state of affairs where the very attempt to define art is proscribed a priori by the artist as well as those who seek to make a philosophical argument for art. This does not exonerate artists, philosophers or critics from the responsibility to define what art does or what the artist makes, but it does impress upon us that beyond what is made and done, art is art and it must be distanced from the act of speaking about or appreciating it. Although such an insistence on distinctions may sound strange, if not futile, it has to be impressed on those who are not familiar or sympathetic with contemporary art that the idea of responsibility which contemporary art has towards the world is underlined by the double bind that makes of art its own ground of meaning. Such a double bind goes something like this: art’s responsibility towards the world does not lie in foreclosing the very notion of possibility by fixing boundaries, but in its refusal to fix any boundaries and therefore in assuming its role as an open notion that regales power to anyone who seeks to behold (rather than own) art. Beholding pertains to a pedagogical act by which we learn with art almost in the same way artists do art. This does not necessarily mean that we have to make works of art. This is a very important distinction. Doing art partakes of art as art, and not as a work of art. Gilson’s distinction between “the art that makes things” and “the things which art makes” is central to this act of beholding. Beholding art as art and not as a work of art constitutes a pedagogical possibility. Perhaps more importantly, this possibility remains outside the boundaries of fixed systems of education such as the school.

48 Learning with art

Like the question “What is art?” the question “What is education?” raises similar dilemmas. Following Croce, I would suggest that it is asked tongue in cheek and that the question is not confined to the joke. It is a bit absurd to ask what does learning mean when in effect what we should be doing in the sphere of education is to unlearn what is learning. Yet the way by which we have to approach the questions of art and learning cannot be simply externalized into realms that would simply instrumentalize, systematize, standardize or rationalize learning.

Art as a learning of the outwith What is taken as evidential in art and learning is radically distanced from what experience tends to show. While experience cannot be ignored in terms of how we understand the world, it would be irrational to argue that by experience one could transcend the limits that it reveals. One cannot reveal a limit of a faculty by means of that same faculty. Human cognition also relies on its own powers of judgement, where other human faculties inform the decisions that we make experientially. Kant (1974, p. 4) argues that in the order of our cognitive faculties, judgement forms a middle term, a mediating agency, between understanding and reason. To reduce learning to the evidential and experiential would imply the predicament of absolute scepticism where reason is neither trusted nor deemed able to reach the understanding. Dewey, that great philosopher of human experience, never argued that experience is by itself the only foundation of learning. As he reminds us in Experience and Education: The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be really equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. (Dewey 1997, p. 25) Experience also comes as inchoate, and it is because of its messy nature, indeed as a “dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium” (Adorno 2005, p. 80), that we can make of experience an opportunity though never an exclusive instrument of learning. But this is not simply done through some accumulation of other experiences. It is easy to regard experience and learning as incremental processes, and this is often the quick assumption made in educational practice. Yet as one begins to understand how learning itself is often reified by this processual and developmental perspective, it becomes clear that more often than not, this developmental habit must be unlearnt. “Again, experiences may be so disconnected from one another that, while each is agreeable or even exciting in itself, they are not linked cumulatively to one

Learning with art 49

another” (Dewey 1997, p. 26). While the pragmatic dimension of experience effectively counters the over-inflated metaphysical aura of cognition, this comes with a major caveat, what we often identify with criticality. Criticality itself needs to come with a caution. In all its uses, criticality is often reduced to a shibboleth that is magically expected to change everything. Obviously, by criticality one does not mean an ability to think critically. But neither is criticality a cue to insist that the root cause of everything must be found in the systemic predispositions of a particular edifice or another. To take such a stance is to do the same mistake by which many a critical pedagogist assumes that somehow, identifying a root cause such as class, gender, race or anything that discriminates will simply bring down the system like a house of cards. Citing anyone from the canonical hagiography of critical theory would confirm that criticality has nothing to do with reducible arguments which so often come wrapped in revolutionary and progressive words. Rather, criticality is primarily an expression of resistance, and more so it is a critique of positivism. As Horkheimer (1974, p. 21) put it “reason has become completely harnessed to the social process.” Criticality does not come from a sociology of knowledge. As argued in the previous chapter, while the sociology of knowledge emerged, like positivism, from a desire to critique and overturn the conservative establishment, it became the best instrument by which the same establishment harnessed and used art and education to its own ends. As I struggle with the ever-expanding literature which claims to represent critical theory within education and the arts, I often wonder how would Horkheimer react to the flourishing constructivist hegemony within the social, humanistic and artistic fields. Bearing the need to refute positivism and with it those constructivist shortcuts that continue to posture as critical strategies in art education, a further refutation must be clarified. To refute the argument that art is a form of knowledge one must also effectively counter the notion that art is a reflexive form of pedagogical experience that must be emancipatory and somehow liberating. In terms of art, the need to learn by drawing out (as suggested above) means to withdraw from and hold back what could be assumed as mere common sense. Common sense is prone to be transformed into a mechanism of inequality and oppression by the same mechanisms that claim to accommodate equity and diversity. This is best expressed by no one less than Antonio Gramsci, considered to be the theorist who dealt with the notion of common sense. Citing Croce, who argues that “Art is educational inasmuch as it is art, but not inasmuch as it is ‘educational art’, because in that case it is nothing, and a nothing cannot educate,” Gramsci argues that this also applies to historical materialism. “Literature does not create literature, etc.; that is ideologies do not create ideologies, superstructures do not create superstructures except as a legacy of inertia and inaction.” There is no place for parthenogenesis. Instead Gramsci sees history as that which partners in this creation; history being that revolutionary activity that creates new social relations (Gramsci 1975, pp. 10–11).

50 Learning with art

While this appears to take a diametrically opposed position to Horkheimer’s, Gramsci is in no way adopting a positivist approach—even though more often than not, there are some who fail to see the distinction between claiming social relations in their immanent dialectic and equating a constructivist assumption of socially determined facts that generate themselves. Gramsci’s point of departure is Croce’s rejection of an art that is instrumentalized in order to educate. This is a critique which he adopts from Croce, who also states that “poetry does not create poetry, there is no place for a parthenogenesis” (cited in Gramsci 1975, p. 10). In this respect, the critical rejection of a self-propelled construction based on the positivistic view of history emerges as one with Horkheimer’s. With this in mind, we could argue that as an autonomous form, art could never be an instrument of social consent or political emancipation; not because it stands on its own detached from history, but because art’s autonomy is what makes it inherently part of history. In exercising their autonomy, human beings make art by dint of their historicity as a dynamic social relation. There cannot be a social relation without autonomous parts that engage with each other dialectically without being reduced to each other’s sameness. This is why when we talk about art and education we are talking about matters that we experience as factually there, in their fullness and not as part of a universe of identical elements. The relationship between experience and criticality is not something that could be simply put down to means of measuring one against the other, while assuming this would come to construct a world of equal parts. The relationship between criticality and experience provides us with a means of understanding the dialectical dynamic between learning as a form of knowing and art as a form of unlearning and thereby resisting that which is simply known, though this does not simply equate to a form of unknowing, as that would take us back to an “educational art” which as Croce rightly puts it, è nulla, is nothing. This reveals a double bind of what is considered to be within and what lies outside; that is, what remains outwith the parameters of the experience that may be art on one hand, and where on the other hand, the presumed evidence that emerges from what is often considered as education. However inasmuch as it appears to be a double bind that some consider as irresolvable, in effect this comes with a disclaimer, in that education cannot be reduced to a matter of evidence-based methods just as art cannot be construed as experience. While the latter could be misconstrued as a critique of Dewey’s Art as Experience, about which one may have reservations, especially in line with his other works, it would necessitate a long study, if not an entirely separate book, to discuss. This begs the question “What do we mean by that which ‘remains outwith’?” This requires us to move sideways into what appears to be a semantic quibble. First, I would like to qualify the word “outwith” and defend it in terms of its usage here. Far from joking or posing questions tongue in cheek about art and learning, this has to do with the efficacy of the concept of the outside as something that is not simply put against the inside but more to do

Learning with art 51

with an enriched notion of the outwith as that which anticipates rather than contest the within. To better explain this, one must resort to definitions. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “outwith” is defined as: A. prep. 1. Outside. a. In a position or place outside of; situated or located outside of; beyond. b. To a position or place outside of; out or away from. 2. Beyond (a specified time or period). B. adv. 1. On the outside; outside; out and about; outwardly. 2. To the outside, out of doors; outwards. C. adj. Outward, external. My justification for the usage of the word “outwith” is an occasion to avoid the negative suggestion of “without” where the inclusive idea that comes from the word “with” seems to disappear. Though “outwith” is not commonly used in the United States, England or most of the Anglophone world, in Scotland “outwith” forms part of common parlance, used in all its nuances, ranging from that of a physical outside to that of a relational notion of concepts, argument or remit. Unlike the word “without,” “outwith” does not imply an absence of something that is supposed to be or has been with something else. There is another, perhaps more important, issue at stake in terms of the discussion of “learning with art.” One hopes that by now it has been clearly argued that art expresses its own intrinsic pedagogy. However, learning does not happen through art, its making or its product (the art form)—even though here it seems that I am pitting my argument directly against that of Herbert Read’s who in Education Through Art claims that “art should be the basis of education” (1958, p. 1), by art meaning that which “is present in everything we make to please our senses” (p. 15). When it comes to art’s intrinsic pedagogy, we must speak of how we learn with art. The distinction I want to make between through and with, may or may not clash with Read’s, whose work I consider as being canonical in the field. I want to clarify what I mean by “learning with art” by saying that to state that we learn through art could easily imply that art is an instrument of learning and therefore an act that could never entertain nor sustain its autonomy. Secondly, to argue that art’s intrinsic pedagogy is equivalent to art education in schools is not only detrimental to our understanding of art as autonomous but also reduces art education to a function of art (rather than a schooled activity that facilitates learning and human development, which is what art education does). In saying so, one could suggest that when it comes to art education, art’s intrinsic pedagogy amounts to “art as a learning of the outwith”; which means that while we learn with art, art’s intrinsic pedagogy remains outwith the work of art per se and more so the school. This raises a major question: If art’s pedagogy must remain outwith works of art and schools, how could the notion of “art as a learning of the outwith” anticipate art as an immanent quality of human learning? First of all, this has to be contextualized in the historical development of art, particularly in the wake

52 Learning with art

of contemporary art, as it abandons the teleological projects that characterized modernism, and as it has slowly taken on the objectless and hybrid aspects which are so often the bane of irritation for those who still seek to engage with what we persist in calling “art.” This also means that as the difficulties with understanding contemporary art remain unabated, a case made for “learning with art” becomes more urgent. To claim that we “learn with art” presumes a great deal of negotiation. In the first place the experience of learning as we know it here becomes contested. This suggests that the wider implications of art as a case for unlearning are considered from a perspective of art and learning that are found outwith the school. Secondly, this resistance presumes that we move between the meanings that lie within as well as outwith (but never without) the works of art themselves.

An audience that art “is made to have” More than any other moment in the history of art, modernism accentuates the three-way relationship between art, the things that art makes and the audience that consumes art by electing the things that it makes as special commodities. With the emergence of the Salon as an identifiable marketplace for the admiration and the selling of works of art, we have come to assume that art and its audience form a natural constituency in mutual existence. But what if one were to suggest, as Stanley Cavell does, that art “is made to have” an audience? This suggestion is found in Cavell’s Foreword to his classic book Must We Mean What We Say?, entitled “An Audience for Philosophy”: It is tautological that art has, is made to have, an audience, however small or special. The ways in which it sometimes hides from its audience, or baffles it, only confirms this. It could be said of science, on the other hand, that it has no audience at all. No one can share its significance who does not produce work of the same kind. The standards of performance are institutionalized; it is not up to the individual listener to decide whether, when the work meets the canons of the institution, he will accept it— unless he undertakes to alter those canons themselves. This suggests why science can be “popularized” and art not (or not in that way), and why there can be people called critics of art but none called critics of science. I might summarize this by saying that academic art is (with notable exceptions) bad art, whereas academic science is—just science. (Cavell 2002, p. xli, emphasis added) As Cavell adds that it is no accident that scientists seem to sit well within universities but creative artists by and large do not, he then poses a question over philosophy’s audience:

Learning with art 53

Now, what is academic philosophy? It seems significant that the questions, “What is the audience of philosophy? Must it have one? If so, what is it to gain from it?”, have no obvious answers. (Cavell 2002, p. xli) But, one might ask, why should an audience for art have an answer when, come to think of it, art is made to have an audience simply because something has to be done with the things that art makes? It seems that the audience is there for its own convenience; or bluntly put, for its consumption of works of art—which is very different from saying that art needs an audience to gain legitimacy. This necessity is indeed tautological, as Cavell suggests. However, it could be tautological not just for the reasons that Cavell gives, but also because of the ambivalence that remains between art and works of art. In other words, it is an ambivalence that is found within the interstitial space created between the work of art’s audience and the artist; an interstice that emerged from the establishment of the gallery and museum as a marketplace and temple for the buying and worshipping of art-objects. We find ourselves in an interesting quandary when Cavell goes on to suggest that art could never be popularized like science, while at the same time this adeptness to popularization is premised by an academic form with which art, unlike science, is deemed to be incompatible. Does one sense in Cavell’s suggestion a paradox where what is standardized by the canon (in this case, art and its chosen audience) cannot be popularized or become adept to academia (as we witness an increase in mergers between art schools and universities)? Without forgetting that the object of Cavell’s argument is philosophy’s presumed “audience,” one cannot help feeling that Cavell’s questions also touch on how the knowledge of art and that of science are radically different in terms of their import. One could remark that the knowledge of art by an audience that is there to be baffled, played with, or lured into consumption, is far from being possibly conformant with (or to) the knowledge partaken by an audience for science (which, de jure, is impossible) and less so with an audience for philosophy (that de facto, remains anathema). When you wish to make serious art popular what you are wishing is to widen the audience for the genuine article. Is this what someone wants who wants to widen the audience for philosophy by writing summaries or descriptions of philosophical works? Or is he, as in the case of popular science, providing simplifications which are more or less useful and faithful substitutes for the original work? Neither of these ideas makes good sense of philosophy. (Cavell 2002, p. xli) Cavell goes on to say that like theology, philosophy cannot be simply explained but has to be understood for what it is really worth. This is why it cannot be popularized, let alone widened in its appeal to an audience or a changed canon:

54 Learning with art

For when philosophy is called for one cannot know beforehand where it will end. That is why Plato (…) at the beginning of the Republic allows the good old man to leave (“to see to the sacrifice”) before Socrates releases his doubts; and why, recalling that moment, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra leaves the old man (“the old saint”) he first encounters on his descent back to man, without relating his sickening tidings. Philosophy must be useful or it is harmful. (Cavell 2002, p. xlii, emphasis added) One might suggest that whereas art, like philosophy, could never know beforehand where it will end, unlike philosophy art cannot be useful, as otherwise it will be harmful. As we recognize the increasingly baffled relationship between contemporary art and an audience that is constantly required to change the rules of the canon by which the arts are expected to be audienced, we also realize that we could never afford for art to be harmful. But to do so, art could not pretend to be useful as it was always expected to do until modernism met its end in its attempt to take this “use” to its extreme logical conclusion.

“Things that we learn” and learning by which we do things With the caveat over the relationship between art and audience expanded enough to leave us baffled (as a proper audience for art must always remain) I propose that we consider two works of art: Valerio Adami’s Lenin’s Vest (1976) and Richard Serra’s monumental Sequence and Band (2007). While Serra’s work is a practice that takes the modernist choice for art to be useful-yet-not-harmful to its logical conclusions, stopping short of declaring art as ultimately useless, I consider Adami’s work as going beyond this threshold. In fact, I regard Adami’s work as suggesting (maybe directly, maybe not) that if we want to keep art from being harmful, the notion of use in art cannot sustain itself further. For art not to be harmful, any notion of use in art (and more so in works of art) must be dismissed, and with that we will have to reject the assumption of a perpetual audience. In not being harmful, art is in no way harmless. This is where the ethical choices that we take in doing art become poignantly pedagogical. Which is also where I would press the point in saying that we learn with art and not through it because otherwise dilemmas in art, such as the possible distinction between art being useful (practically) and art being beneficial (ethically, pedagogically, aesthetically, etc.) could be easily confused with the same distinctions made in learning, where what is “useful” in learning may not be necessarily “beneficial” to the learner. To use an example, as he or she is taught to pass his or her mathematics and art examinations, it could be useful for a student to learn mathematical skills by rote or draughtsman-like techniques in drawing. However, this is not necessarily beneficial for the same student as a human being

Learning with art 55

who is intent on being numerate or artistic. Sheer experience of one’s schooling confirms that whenever one is taught to exam, by rote, mechanistically or otherwise, one may well get good grades but could hardly claim comprehensive or meaningful learning. As one works back from works of art to art, one could rework Gilson’s distinction so that art is talked back into its works of art and where art is seen with the things that it makes. In this way, art is retrieved from the work of art, and as Lyotard suggests, a Proustian route is followed where “[t]he Recherche doubles back on itself, but in order to say at the end: let us begin to write the Recherche” (Lyotard 2004, p. 110). A similar pattern follows with art and learning, where one could argue that a comprehensive education has nothing to do with forms of schooled knowledge that only produces the “things that we learn.” Instead, understood and structured comprehensively, education must find roots in human acts as the “learning by which we do things.” To do things is to do with art what the artist does with the world. It is to engage one’s doing in a search that is begun from a perpetuity that gives the possibility of art a sense of resilience. Suppose there were a feeling, a specifically aesthetic feeling, that existed independently of motive, tendency and fulfilment. And what if it were more than independent? What if it were prior? A susceptibility which was already there, before there was any intrigue. And what if that prior affinity were the object of Adami’s present anamnesis? An affinity which is not the subject of a painting, but which makes painting possible? Its condition of existence. (Lyotard 1989a, p. 228) If Adami does art, would Lyotard make philosophy? What is the affinity that Lyotard speaks of when he, as a philosopher, assumes a quasi-vestigial role by mediating us (a self-elected audience) with Adami (our selected artist)? As we speak of art we realize that we are the only ones that speak. Art does not speak. Nor does art have an audience as such. The audience goes to see art out of an aspiration to become its own audience. Museums are full of art lovers, tourists and other assorted groups such as school children on their occasional educational outing. The interest that brings these groups together is mainly (if not wholly) informed by the objects that artists make. What are the things that we learn when we see and discuss art? And how does the learning by which we do things come about in this relationship as we witness and learn with art to do other things? If we speak about art and express an affinity which, as Lyotard suggests, is not the subject of a painting, it might be true to say that what we learn from this affinity is to do things that may or may not include art. If we claim to be artists and speak of art, we are also doing art. (Just like Proust, we recall in order to begin a recollection.) But in doing so we make other works of art and not the ones of which we elect ourselves as the

56 Learning with art

audience. In recollecting we enable ourselves to start recollecting other recollections. We might recollect what we have lost in our everyday lives and in the histories that we tell each other, but surely art is not simply about telling each other stories or having a dialogue about art. Mountains and terror Lyotard, the philosopher (and certainly not the artist who does art), makes other things. This is where we might want to reconsider his hypothesis where, for argument’s sake there could be “a feeling, a specifically aesthetic feeling, that existed independently of motive, tendency and fulfilment” (Lyotard 1989a, p. 228). What does this mean outside the realms of art? Not much, unless it is attributed to the sight of a beautiful mountain or a terrifying fire engulfing one’s neighbourhood. A terrifying fire would leave us with what Kant (1974) defines as “a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of the magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason” (§27, p. 96). It is a trauma that is felt but not understood. This is where the late Stockhausen got into trouble when he described the falling towers of the World Trade Center on September the 11th as “works of art” (see, for example, Ivry 2008). In a way it was irresponsible to expect people to make sense of this statement, especially when art is customarily expected to be good and beautiful. Many would understand the awe mixed with a sense of overwhelming confusion when witnessing the beauty of a mountain, especially when confronted with its scale and its danger. One could begin to conceptually understand the feelings that overwhelm us with some sense of disinterested harmony. But how could one regard overwhelming terror as having an aesthetic, let alone artistic, value? Unlike Stockhausen’s scandalous characterization of art as terror, the beauty of a mountain is likely to be shared as majestic and maybe benign—unless, of course, we are stranded on it risking death by hypothermia. Leaving this unfortunate possibility aside, the natural beauty that we perceive in the mountain will, as Kant also suggests, “[bring] with it a purposiveness in its form by which the object seems to be, as it were, preadapted to our judgement, and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction” (Kant 1974, §23, p. 83). However, this is not what Lyotard has in mind when engaging with Adami’s work. A specifically aesthetic feeling that existed independently of motive, tendency and fulfilment may not necessarily presume subliminal or beautiful parameters; neither does it question our feelings about art and terror. The parameters that Lyotard suggests for Adami seem to have to do with something else; more specifically with a recollection of a prior affinity. “But an affinity with what in particular?” one might ask. Like Gilson, one must insist on privileging the art that makes things over the things made by art. If there is anything to recollect in Adami’s or any other artist’s work, it is the art that made the work. Seeing, looking or watching over

Learning with art 57

Adami’s Lenin’s Vest would surely leave us ambivalent. This ambivalence is important to acknowledge because if I were to say that we are immediately confronted by meaning, then I will be lying to you. The meaning is neither apparent nor essentially evident. We know he meant something when he painted this work of art, but we also know that he painted the canvas because he wanted to do art and not simply to convey meaning. Any suggestion in the title (Lenin’s Vest) and the dates (his birth and death) is not that helpful, though these appear to be readily available indices if and when the work remains ambivalent. It is debatable whether the title itself has anything to do with our own hypothesis of what the art behind the work of art could be. Maybe one should abandon Gilson’s distinction. But in doing so we still have to go for the art behind the work of art (which is what we are really after) rather than the meaning. One could argue that one must simply remain open to the work of art without any presumptions, as Maxine Greene (2000 and 2001) often suggests. However, we also know that this opening is temporary because what the work of art represents is an excuse and occasion by which we would then have to tap into a further understanding. But that is another matter; indeed, something else. Something else This something else is what Lyotard suggests as that hypothetical aesthetic feeling the existence of which we locate independently of a motive, tendency or fulfilment. Could we retrieve that feeling without actually agreeing on what it is? We all can retrieve an aesthetic feeling, but as we stand in awe of the mountain this feeling is only purposeful in so far as it is a feeling that we have and about which we do not necessarily agree. The latter analogy does not seem to raise any problem with regards to Adami’s art because the audience that is elected for it (whoever decides to view it) is never mandated by anyone but those who decide to go and see (watch or look at) the work. This elected viewing is even more evident when works by Adami are situated in public spaces like a restaurant. For example, in the Lobby Lounge at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York City, a view of Columbus Circle and its dramatic background seen from the huge windows is balanced by two enormous works by Valerio Adami hanging on the walls of the restaurant. Anyone who goes to the restaurant to view these works (in the same way one goes to an art gallery) will find him or herself in a very different (if not awkward) position from the diners whose main intention is not Adami’s art (of which they might be an accidental audience, should they choose to take any interest in the paintings), but to delectate in fine expensive food. If one slips into the restaurant with the intent of viewing the Adamis, the convention of attendance will be challenged and altered. While the occasional visitor could get away with simply viewing the art, it would not be the same if a group of enthusiastic school children armed with an assortment of handouts and crayons are led by their teacher into the restaurant unannounced and only with the intent of viewing the works of art.

58 Learning with art

What does this mean? Are not all works of art intended to be viewed as works? Is the convention of art radically altered? It is evident that any claim for a convention that is set to elicit an expected meaning from works of art is effectively a fallacy. Just as the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Adamis demand no convention but the intent by which the viewer, casually or in a planned manner, engages with them, Adami’s Lenin’s Vest is no different, whether it happens to be in a gallery, in a restaurant or in someone’s bedroom. As in the case of any other work of art, what one does when confronted by Lenin’s Vest, is to speak to oneself or to others about it. Someone might explain that the inverted dates, which Adami writes on the painting, are actually Lenin’s birth and death. But does this information make any actual difference? If we are interested at all in Lenin we might also conclude that the abundance of red must have to do with Lenin’s communist creed. But should this have any effect on the aesthetic qualities of the work? Beyond Lenin (who never appears in the work, except by title, let alone his creed or his birth and death), what the work essentially educes is art. At a minimum we can agree that Lenin’s Vest is art; and even if we do not concede that as an agreement, we could establish that it is a painting and we are looking at it. Lenin, Lyotard, Adami and ourselves, remain outwith the art; which where we learn with, rather than through it as ars artefaciens, as the art that makes things. What is learnt? What do we learn with this or any work of art? What is retrieved? What is Adami’s anamnesis? When it comes to learning, the question cannot just focus on the work. It must focus on the art that we all share in diverse ways and understandings, and which we all recognize as a human act that may be there to educe or aesthetically please. Ultimately what we learn is neither dictated nor assumed by anyone; which is where art remains autonomous from anything that we want to learn or do. Neither critic, teacher, politician nor art historian could establish with certainty for each and every one of us what things we would learn with Lenin’s Vest, or better still with Adami’s art. Nor would anyone but ourselves be able to conclude with certainty how this learning evolved into the ways by which we do things. If this sounds apolitical or indeed carries no particular ethical value or responsibility, it is not because works of art are not contextualized by a polity or signify a moral imagination. As such the political and moral implications are, like art’s pedagogical possibilities, ours and no one else’s; which makes works of art (but not art) a context for anything that we do. This is not a cue for a selfish or self-referential view of art. If we were to state the contrary and thus imbue art with political, pedagogical and ethical ingredients, then we will fail to distinguish between the art and the work of art; and more so we will fail to recognize that it is humans that make and engage with art and not vice versa. Art does not engage with women and men, but

Learning with art 59

men and women do engage with art. Art does not teach us anything, but we do seek to learn with what we perceive as a human activity that interests us because as a human activity it expresses value and because of that value we could then invest art objects with narratives that we want to communicate to others. Political, pedagogical and moral imaginations are located in this communication, which is facilitated by the art object but not the art that gives it form.

Without preconceptions Before someone objects and decries the above as an idealistic split between art and work of art, and before my statement is mistaken for an assumption that art is some mental construction that only pertains to pure thought, I want to clarify a number of issues before we move on to the following chapter. The need to go with Gilson’s distinction is neither semantic nor gratuitous. With some hesitation one could call this distinction methodological, although by method I do not mean some kind of phenomenological suspension of value and context or a Pyrrhonist epoché where the argument is stuck in scepticism. The primary need to distinguish between art and work of art has to do with identifying a clearer notion of (a) art as autonomous form; and by consequence of understanding art’s intrinsic pedagogy as (b) a learning that happens with art. Again, one must reiterate that this does not suggest that art teaches us anything but that we learn with art as opposed to learning from or through works of art. To speak of works of art is to speak of the problematic relationship between the value system that plagued art, particularly contemporary art and its lucrative business on one hand, and an array of performative expectations and assumptions on the other. Given that schooling perfectly aligns itself to performativity (Lyotard 1989b) and remains consumed (not unlike works of art) by a knowledge industry, it is all too easy to mistake art education with a double act that takes place between the performative work and its educational use. This has largely been the case with art education, especially when the art educator is faced with the need to legitimize the discipline and attract funding with a mandate to take art into the community (as if communities are perpetually waiting for art to come their way) or to make sure that art stays in schools (as if that would suffice). To distance one’s argument for learning with art from that of art education, one must distance art from the work of art and learning from schooling. While it is nonsense to banish works of art, education and schools, the distinctions that are made should highlight a contrast between the expectation of the creative and knowledge industries and the pragmatic realities by which art is made. If we were to temporarily set aside the pragmatic complications by which the creative and knowledge industries have been conflated, we might be in a position to better understand how x is learnt for the sake of x and not because of y, z, c, b or a.

60 Learning with art

The best way to get close to a better understanding of these challenges, is to approach and in many ways inhabit installations like Richard Serra’s Sequence (2007) and Band (2006/7), whose immersive experience offers its self-elected audience with other than a learning experience. While Serra’s work never claims to represent (in the sense of presenting once more) the commonplace and less so the challenges of everyday life, his work invites us to identify form across space as we simply move within these works. Yet, what confronts us in being immersed in Serra’s work is common sense and the unremarkable. Not without paradox, this common sense leaves us with more questions than answers. As we seek some magical transformative moment by which we expect to learn something, art eludes us. Serra categorically rejects the notion that his art is there to teach. He is very clear about this. He says that his work Sequence (2007) “isn’t here to teach you anything. It’s your experience and what thoughts it engenders that’s your private participation with this work” (Serra 2007). Sequence and Band, together with another work Torqued Torus Inversion, attracted immense attention from those who visited the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2007. The experiential aspect of these works remains central to Serra’s art. In many ways, his art challenges the notion of a recipient audience which views or engages with the work from a safe distance. Serra’s is not an audience of viewers but of individuals who walk through the work of art. The work is large and creates intricate spaces that give the impression of an endless walk. Yet what is curious is that unlike other works by Serra which inhabit a square or a public space, these works are placed in an art museum. This gives the work a character that moves away from the ordinariness by which one walks through a work of art that is situated in a public space. In Torqued Torus Inversion one walks through the work but cannot just go about his or her business. The work is done in a way that those walking cannot stop, and there is an expectation that far from simply disorient the walker and her commonplace notion of space, the work creates the occasion for a new, or different aesthetic and experiential event. Yet even as this happens according to Serra, these works are meant to refrain from teaching anything. Given the experiential element in the audience’s experience, one could imagine how an educator might object to the notion that art forms are not willing to teach. A constructivist approach to the educational experience of a work of art might argue that while one should not expect a work of art to be didactic, the experience in itself is pedagogical. But is it? Is a pedagogical intentionality attributable to a work of art by implication of the experience? In his interviews on the MoMA website dedicated to this work, Serra (2007) insists that: What one would like to have happen is that after the show is up all the effort disappears, and the weight disappears, and one gets implicated in the space of the pieces, and the speed of the pieces, and one’s body relationship to how one walks and moves through the pieces and the effort isn’t available to anyone, nor ought it to be.

Learning with art 61

While reaffirming Gilson’s distinction between art and work of art, this also rejects the pairing of art as a making (process) with the work of art as an object (product). The distinction is not only a fallacy in the actual aesthetic experiencing of art, but also conflates learning with an instrumental expectation of learning through art. However, as Serra rejects both art as a teaching instrument and the insistence on process, he also sustains the modernist choice by which art becomes useful-yet-not-harmful as an experiential form. This represents the logical conclusion of what the moment of art—as an event of the “modern”—stops short of declaring itself as ultimately useless. Unlike Adami, Serra places the onus of art’s aesthetic moment on the experiential qualities with which he still imbues his works of art. Adami, instead, refuses to give us the handles by which we can either experience or indeed do anything with his work. This distinction is important in the context of how, historically we seek to learn with art in a multiplicity of assumptions. As a human doing that makes things, art could never be described or analysed as a formulaically identifiable act. Once more, art is a form of life that continuously remains elusive in its diverse nature. As is evident in the radical diversity of Serra’s and Adami’s work, the idea of learning with art cannot assume one form of learning. In effect, to state that one learns with art is to confirm that art is not a univocal human act and there is no certainty about it. As a form of life art is as diverse as human individuality. By dint of this diversity art accommodates everyone and behaves as an empty signifier where meaning remains secondary to the anticipations with which individuals approach it. This also implies that to learn with art means that one learns with a form of life. This form of life is expressed as a comprehensive outlook that cannot be limited to the school and could never be formalized by hierarchies of knowledge. As one approximates what such a relationship between learning and art could look like, one must recall what Serra says about his works as he explains how the huge parts that make up Sequence and Band have come to be assembled after they have been delivered from the foundry to the museum. Serra states: “If I can preconceive them, I wouldn’t make them.” Likewise, if one were to preconceive what learning feels and looks like when it is beholden with the arts, there will be no need for it. If this tautology becomes, once more, an irritation, at this stage one cannot afford to apologize to anyone. Refusing to make what could be preconceived is art’s prerogative, and this is what artists do—from which we could possibly learn nothing unless we decide that the school is a preconception that continues to bar us from recognising how we actually learn outwith its parameters.

62 Learning with art

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. 2005. Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life. London: Verso. Baldacchino, J. 2002. Avant-nostalgia: An excuse to pause. J. Diggle (images). Aberdeen, Scotland: Unit for the Study of Philosophy In Art, The Robert Gordon University. Baldacchino, J. 2012. Art’s way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Cavell, S. 2002. Must we mean what we say?: A book of essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Croce, B. 1994. Breviario di estetica: Aesthetica in nuce. [A handbook of aesthetics. Aesthetics in a nutshell] Milano, IT: Adelphi. Dewey, J. 1997. Experience and education. New York: Touchstone. Gilson, E. 2000. The arts of the beautiful. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Gramsci, A. 1975. Letterature e vita nazionale. [Literature and the national life] Torino, IT: Editori Riuniti. Greene, M. 2000. Releasing the imagination: Essays on education, the arts and social change. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Greene, M. 2001. Variations on a blue guitar. The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Horkheimer, M. 1974. Eclipse of reason. New York: Continuum. Ivry, B. 2008. Is it time to forgive Stockhausen? The Guardian, 23 June. www.theguardian. com/music/musicblog/2008/jun/23/isittimetoforgivestockhau. Kant, I. 1974. Critique of judgement. J.H. Bernard (trans.). New York: Hafner Press, Collier-Macmillan. Luscombe, D. 1997. Medieval thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyotard, J.F. 1989a. Anamnesis of the visible, or candour. In A. Benjamin (Ed.). The Lyotard reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Lyotard, J.F. 1989b. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Lyotard, J.F. 2004. Anamnesis: Of the visible. Theory Culture Society, 21(1), 107–119. Plato 2005. Meno. The collected dialogues of Plato: Including the letters (Bollingen Series LXXI). E. Hamilton & H. Cairns (Eds.), L. Cooper (trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Read, H. 1958. Education through art. London: Faber and Faber. Ryle, G. 1973. Dilemmas. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Serra, R. 2007. Richard Serra, sculpture: Forty years. Museum of Modern Art New York. Available at: http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/serra/flash.html. Accessed on 15 December 2007.

Chapter 4

Art’s deschooled practice

Art education is often characterized by how art and education converge at some point, only to part ways again. This relationship sometimes appears wholesome and steadfast, but at times radically opposed and contradictory. It seems that there are two variable conditions that affect this relationship. The first is the ever-changing nature of the educational context. The second has to do with art’s ambiguous fluctuations in both its diverse forms of practice and in how they are understood and defined. If we are to identify a philosophy of art in education, we might want to try to figure out whether (and if so, how) the notion of education, as a human activity that cannot be pinned down to a finite concept, would help us bring to some focus an equally fluctuating human activity such as art. At the same time, if we are to attempt to find a way of relating two fluctuating forms of action, we must always avoid those shortcuts by which a philosophy of art finds itself fashioned on the lines of a dualistic assumption that looks at art and education as a product and process of making and learning. As already argued in the previous two chapters, this approach will immediately neutralize itself as it betrays a formulaic and instrumental intent. In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1986, p. 24), famously states that, “being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap.” This should offer some comfort to those artists and educators who continue to be confronted by the bean-counting culture that has institutionalized the arts into the myth of accountability. Yet while consolation is one thing, action is another; and this cannot simply provide coping-strategies, let alone solutions which result in a worse predicament. To avoid this predicament, we have all too often assumed that art and education are historical constructs that are neither natural nor necessary. This is the classic constructivist argument which has served us well, though it comes with a warning in that, as we have seen, it is prone to frame art education within a sociology of knowledge. One way of keeping a distance from this possibility, is to argue that art does not emerge from aesthetic or pedagogical imperatives, but that aesthetics and pedagogy partake of a wider horizon that does include, but is not limited to, the arts.

64 Art’s deschooled practice

Our approach to art must recognize the historic contingency by which it comes about—that is, by which we do and make art. In an educational context, this means that we must always bear in mind that art education remains dispensable. There would never be a straightforward case for the need to teach art in schools and less so in college. If we were to insist that art education is an indispensable element of schooling, then the constructivist approach by which we started to historicize art and education is more likely to reduce the case for art in education as an intellectual utility, with the result that, as in the United States, art educators constantly justify art as a form of intelligence (Hickman 2005, p. 47), where art education finds itself being overwhelmed by developmental and sociological determinism. While this sounds punitive on those who with all their energy continue to insist that a place must be secured for the arts in schools, their advocacy must be tempered by the fact that art’s relationship to schooling remains at best dubious and at worst impossible. This has nothing to do with how well we teach art or how far should art be at the service of human development—that was never in question. However, beyond the use of art in schools, the question has to do with whether art could afford to be further reified within the fullyfledged industries of schooling and culture where standardization, accountability and merit are deemed as measured categories of success and where human development is invested in an economy that hardly pays any attention to equality and social justice.

A double bind As argued in the previous chapter, a case for art education best emerges from outwith the school. This does not counter the argument for the arts in education. To make a case from outwith the school is not to be anti-educational, but the very opposite. Moving beyond the confines by which a human action becomes reified expresses a desire for art to assert its specificity, thereby resisting reification (Marcuse 1979; 1991; Lukács 1971; 1974; 1975). The arts cannot be staked on hierarchies of knowledge (Rancière 2006) as they are not forms of knowledge, but they are forms of life and action by which we anticipate the limits that are set by a hierarchy of knowledge. Even when we argue for art as being central to the notion of learning and, that by political consequence, they should be at the heart of the school, this would necessitate a different strategy. It implies an act by which we seek a way out of the political and functional confines where the school itself is restricted to specific needs. Here we begin to identify the relationship between art and learning as a double bind. It reads something like this: If art conforms to the school, it has no use to learning. If it becomes synonymous with learning, then it is no longer art. Assuming that we can speak of art’s pedagogical objective (and this remains dubious unless qualified with the paradoxes that it brings up), such an objective cannot be distanced from this double bind, indeed this paradox. To deny this

Art’s deschooled practice

65

paradoxical relationship would neutralize the way by which art is pedagogically and aesthetically sustained; and here one could immediately sense the possibility of yet another iteration of the original double bind with which we began. In her Existential Encounters for Teachers, Maxine Greene argues that “to be ready to learn is to be ready for a leap” and that “a person is most fully himself when he is aware of the limits of possibility.” Greene warns us that anyone who refrains to choose or realize a possibility “is overtaken by guilt” as soon as he becomes aware of what he has missed. “What is not chosen is a negation; and a feeling of bad conscience may be experienced in a learning situation when a learner refuses to tolerate suspense, to overcome inertia and to strive” (Greene 1967, p. 29). This has wider implications. Here we are not simply talking about the presence of the creative arts in the curriculum. Rather, the case is that of art’s legitimation; and in the specific context of education, it relates to art’s recognition by those who have intentionally or unwittingly subsumed the arts within a wider industrial complex of human activity. As we speak of art in schools, so we should keep a distance from the temptation to position art as a paradigm or even a method. This might sound remarkably problematic in view of the fact that art’s methods have become increasingly identified with arts practice. While the recognition of arts- or practice-based research methods could potentially distance art from the clutch of the social sciences, research practitioners in the field must exercise the same caution by which social constructivists must stay away from the sociology of knowledge. The claim that art is a method or a practice must come with a cautionary note which clearly states that no method, even that which is often regarded as art’s method, could afford to resolve art’s paradox let alone the double bind of the arts and education. In Chapter 2, this cautionary note has been amply exemplified by the case of a/r/tography, even when a/r/tographers would argue that this is precisely why they emphasize the interstitial aspects and character of arts practice itself. Yet, just as over the last three decades we have seen a mushrooming of arts-based and practice-based research literature, several blind spots and issues have slowly emerged. What seems to be missing, and what one looks forward to participate in this literature, are tangible debates over the philosophical and political implications of the apparent need to legitimize art as a form of research. More surprisingly, there are precedents in the very social scientific paradigm which all too often and all too quickly, arts-based researchers seem to ascribe to. As we learn from the historical debate between Theodor Adorno and Karl Popper on sociological research in the 1960s (documented in The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology [Adorno et al. 1976]), research cannot be simply methodological. As yet, except for a few dissenting voices (such as jagodzinski & Wallin 2013) there does not seem to be evidence of a similar debate in artsbased and art-educational research, although the literature is being produced at too fast and eager a pace to really assess where and how this debate could emerge. Be that as it may, even when art practice is considered as a method

66 Art’s deschooled practice

(and the jury is still out on that), art remains quintessentially non-methodological and non-identitarian. In other words, it cannot be identified with univocal research models.

Constructs constructing other constructs Let us take some of these assumptions apart and look at them closely, starting with the notion of a construct, and moving on to how art education lives up to the argument that art itself is another construct. If we are to argue that art is a construct, then art must be seen to happen within identifiable contexts. These contexts are identifiable by several tools which must be clearly defined—such as history, or social relations, the economy, race, sexuality, gender, etc. Additionally, for art to be defined as a construct it must belong to specific circumstances that are also considered as constructs. This is because both contexts and circumstances have an important bearing on what artists ultimately do, even though contexts and circumstances are not the ingredients that actually make art because it is the artist who makes art by what she does as an artist (and not as an engineer or a builder, a doctor or a teacher, a police officer, priest or politician). One cannot plot art against an historical grid, pedagogical structure or a sociological inquiry without clearly stating what the parameters of such constructions are, and why they are being brought into a constructivist argument for art. Even when historical, pedagogical and sociological analyses occupy a significant place in the study of art, to presume art as an historical, pedagogical or social construct would be as misleading as assuming that art could be reduced to form and its objects (see Wollheim 1980 and Baxandall 1985). Art and society Any argument that is made for art from outside art itself results in a double bind. As Adorno reminds us: [t]he double character of art—something that severs itself from empirical reality and thereby from society’s functional context and yet is at the same time part of empirical reality and society’s functional context—is directly apparent in the aesthetic phenomena, which are both aesthetic and faits sociaux. (Adorno 1999, p. 252) Keeping this double bind in mind, we begin to understand, or at least observe, how (as we have seen in the previous chapter) art must take different positions by means of a continuous withdrawal (see Lyotard 1988 and 1989). As soon as it gains position, art withdraws and moves on, perhaps sideways or even backwards. In other words, what art is able to construct by way of its specificity,

Art’s deschooled practice

67

immediately moves into the realms of further constructs that are then beholden to other specificities. Regarded as a construct, art is never static, and this is because the condition on which one could begin to argue for art being a construct is countered by an equal weighting given to the argument that art is autonomous. But how could one argue that art is a construct and yet it is autonomous without verging on nonsense? Adorno draws out an interesting musical scenario, which best illustrates this situation. Music, whether it is played in a café or, as is often the case in America, piped into restaurants, can be transformed into something completely different, of which the hum of conversation and the rattle of dishes and whatever else becomes a part. To fulfill its function, this music presupposes distracted listeners no less than in its autonomous state it expects attentiveness. A medley is sometimes made up of parts of artworks, but through this montage the parts are fundamentally transformed. Functions such as warming people up and drowning out silence recasts music as something defined as mood, the commodified negation of the boredom produced by the grey-on-grey commodity world. The sphere of entertainment, which has long been integrated into production, amounts to the domination of this element of art over all the rest of its phenomena. These elements are antagonistic. The subordination of autonomous artworks to the element of social function buried within each work and from which art originated in the course of a protracted struggle, wounds art at its most vulnerable point. Yet someone sitting in a café who is suddenly struck by the music and listens intensely may feel odd to himself and seem foolish to others. In this antagonism the fundamental relation of art and society appears. The continuity of art is destroyed when it is experienced externally, just as medleys willfully destroy it in the material. (Adorno 1999, p. 253, emphasis added) We make sense of art’s historicity only by dint of the autonomy that we invest in it; which is where constructivists cannot relinquish the paradox by which art itself inheres and sustains its own immanence. However, here it seems that as soon as art is given a form of agency it is taken away from that which asserts it as a construct. The only way we could describe this paradox adequately is to say that art is a very special kind of construct, which by dint of its autonomy it constructs other constructs. This also means that art returns onto itself, folds back and forward, and it is never contained by or within a fixed and objectively defined meaning. To say so is to argue that art is never identified let alone could it find itself fixed on (or by) facts or truths. At the same time, because of its immanence (which, as shown in Chapter 7 in this volume, is asserted twice), art does not lend itself to relativism while it avoids being absorbed within a totality. Art simply returns on end.

68 Art’s deschooled practice

This reminds us of Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence (Nietzsche 1980, p. 178) which Deleuze (2013, p. 66) qualifies as a Dionysiac metamorphic affirmation. Perhaps, this is best explained in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Circles,” stating that “every man is not so much a workman in the world, as he is a suggestion of that he should be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age” (Emerson 1941, p. 196). With this proviso, the idea of a construct only makes sense within groundlessness (Baldacchino 2005). As soon as the nature of a ground is recognized as a historically contingent construct itself, one could see how art is bound to refuse to lend itself to either relativism or a closed totality. Let us not lose track of what we are talking about when we say so. Ultimately what matters is to begin to understand what agency art embodies when we cite art as being immanent. The world that we discover and uncover by ways of our artistic explanation demands an engagement with truth in its plurality. In our engagement with truth we try to learn the diverse possibilities that are ahead of us. This appears problematic to those social constructivists who see learner-centredness as being bound to the various experiences that we come by. Here we are talking about a form of learning as something that is not yet experienced, and which we anticipate by our desire to change what comes and goes. This form of learning is dialectical in that it is brought about by the possibility of its own negation. In effect what we learn is bound to be unlearnt immediately after it occurs. When we say that we are trying to learn with art, this happens by acts of entering into realms from which we choose to withdraw from where we depart but also return to, where we arrive at a nexus between learning and what we regard in art as acts of doing. Praxis and the imagination Greene (1978) positions the imagination at the heart of praxis. We do art by engaging with a world of possibilities that is opened by the imagination. But rather than simply equate “praxis” with “critical practice,” Greene’s notion of praxis implies a relationship between the self and a community in continuous expansion. Greene identifies two major avenues for this expanding community—the avenue of education and that of the arts, mostly by way of aesthetics education. Unlike Schiller (1967), in Greene’s work the aesthetic education of women and men comes with no intention to mend the historical and philosophical alienation of the beautiful from the good and the true by attempting to artificially restore some sort of overall consonance between aesthetics, ethics and metaphysics. Greene is not into makeshift bridges, be they philosophical, pedagogical and less so artistic. She regards the aesthetic avenue as upholding its autonomy while urging women and men to consciously engage with the realities by which they have to live an ever-expanding and changing world. In Greene’s work, criticality emerges as a reminder of everydayness. Her point of departure is not that of critical pedagogy, but existentialism, phenomenology

Art’s deschooled practice

69

and more so works of art and literature such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Sula, where the reader encounters the woman, the social self and the artist who learns from her everyday life and her sensible approach to the quotidian. In this engagement, an aesthetic sensibility grows from what we make and do as acts of art and generosity. While we make the world in the image of what we assume to be good, we also strive to act by way of truth, while both the true and what is deemed as good are never premised on each other. Less so is beauty a prerequisite of both. Far from assuming a simplistic notion of transforming the world into a good and true form of living, our aesthetic constructs are doings and deeds of an imagination that never abdicates from the world. The world confirms that fixed grounds hold no hope whatsoever for our engagement with it. In her essay “Aesthetic Literacy in General Education” Greene argues that to “do” philosophy in the domains of the artistic-aesthetic is to think about one’s thinking with regard to the ways in which engagements with the arts contribute to ongoing pursuits of meaning, efforts to make sense of the world. It is to reflect upon perceived realities as well as those that have been conceptualized, and to ponder the phases of remembered experiences with the arts. (Greene 1991, p. 123) As we learn how to do philosophy by pursuing meaning in the aesthetic and artistic sense, we realize that art as doing leads to art’s paradoxical nature, as it reflects the contradictions of existence in its various forms. As we do philosophy while also doing art, we realize art’s aporetic nature—an aporia being a “blank” moment where neither argument nor reason could simply suffice to unravel a paradox or contradiction. As the moment of aporia is also an opportunity of intense learning (as we find in Plato’s [2005] pedagogical dialogues, Meno and Symposium), the act of art as aporia also makes it possible for human knowledge to inhabit that complex space which can be described as going between process and product, beginnings and ends, potentiality and actuality.

Groundless forms of meaning One can describe art’s paradox as the possibility of groundless forms of meaning. Those whom Rorty (2009, p. 12) describes as the edifying philosophers who would unground us from “outworn vocabularies and attitudes,” would regard such groundless forms of meaning as philosophical doings that would never assume an end. These forms are like histories to which we keep returning by seeking Dionysiac potentials. In their Dionysiac nature, these metamorphic forms of meaning sneak up on us beyond their fixed and finite appearance. Discussing Schopenhauer, Nietzsche (1999, p. 17) poetically describes how

70 Art’s deschooled practice

“whenever [the] break-down of the principium individuationis occurs, we catch a glimpse of the essence of the Dionysiac.” Not only is the bond between human beings renewed by the magic of the Dionysiac, but nature, alienated, inimical, or subjugated, celebrates once more her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, humankind. (…) If one were to transform Beethoven’s jubilant “Hymn to Joy” into a painting and place no constraints on one’s imagination as the millions sink into the dust, shivering in awe, then one could begin to approach the Dionysiac. (Nietzsche 1999, p. 18) While some would assume that only contemporary art facilitates the collapse of the principium individuationis—the latter being that principle of individuation on whose Apollonian tranquillity’s all grounded thought is founded—groundlessness is more likely to emerge from what appears to be in such repose, and especially in what appears to have a sense of completeness, such as a work by Caravaggio or Beethoven. In many ways, a Caravaggio or a Beethoven turn out to be open and even less grounded than a Rothko or a Stockhausen. Art’s groundlessness is not limited to a form of art understood as a finalized product, as a painting, a symphony or a play. The more an art form appears to be complete the less it is grounded, thus shattering the reassured comforts of the principium individuationis. At this point in one’s interaction with art, one would recognize what Laclau (2005, p. 71), in his political philosophy, describes as the moment when the ground becomes a horizon. Reading this transformation in terms of art, it could be argued that on this horizon one will not find the openness of our thoughts, but a possibility for “art as doing” understood in terms of Greene’s edifying description of “doing philosophy.” Being a doing itself, theorizing art cannot be distanced from what art does in practice. Inversely, in practicing art we cannot allow ourselves, as artists, to get trapped by theory as an instrumental frame of mind. An argument that simply finds solace in art as a making would limit the notion of art practice by upholding an essentialist view of art. Art is not a product, even when there seems to be an object which we call “art.” Likewise, art cannot be reduced to a process, even when many art educators make an argument for art as a process in order to avoid it becoming a product. To define art from within the paradoxical assumption that it is an in-between would help us understand the art form’s open character (Eco 1989), as discussed in this book’s Introduction. The task becomes more ominous as one engages with the plurality of art’s nature, as when one tries to assume (without ever concluding) what are the objects of art. Richard Wollheim confirms the difficulty of this task when he reveals the shortcomings of a method by which art and its objects could be defined:

Art’s deschooled practice

71

[I]t may anyhow be that a more fruitful, as well as a more realistic, enterprise would be to seek, not a definition, but a general method for identifying works of art (…) For the method might take this form: that we should, first, pick out certain objects as original or primary works of art; and that we should then set up some rules which, successively applied to the original works of art, will give us (within certain rough limits) all subsequent or derivative works of art. (Wollheim 1980, p. 143) Yet, this method leaves us in a quandary: But can we arrive at a formulation of these rules? It is important that at the outset we should be aware of the immensity of the task. It is, in the first place, evident that it would be insufficient to have rules which merely allowed us to derive from one work of art another of the same, or roughly the same, structure. We may regard it as the persistent ambition of Academic theory to limit the domain of art to works that can be regarded as substitution-instances of an original or canonical works: but this ambition has been consistently frustrated. (Wollheim 1980, p. 144, emphasis added) To claim that the assumption of works of art as substitution-instances could be avoided by insisting that art is a process, would open a further problem where the argument gets stuck with that other, related notion, of art as an activity that is beholden to a narrow notion of skills or even knowledge. Pedagogically speaking, this opens tenuous questions like: “Is art to do with skills or concepts?” or “Is it art?” not to mention the classic bore: “Can we teach art?” which invites the pantomime reply: “Oh yes we can!” On the other hand, if one were to insist that the process–product argument is irrelevant to the very definition of art and its objects, it could be claimed that in being a construct that runs within the interstices of process and product, act and object, potential and fulfilment, art could never be reduced to what it makes. This implies that the product–process argument is a tautology. That is why Wollheim opts for neither. Returning to the original question of a context that is neither natural nor necessary for art and learning, I propose that we regard art as a possibility that is neither tied to assumptions of innateness nor to the desperate notion of a need that seems to be God-given or even ordered by a finalized set of rules to which we remain beholden. Rather than art being necessary, we can approach art from an opposite direction, by stating that art is autonomous from any universal necessity. On the other hand, rather than art and education providing us with secure grounds of creativity and growth, we could say that at best we need to seek to continuously re-construct creativity and growth through our doings; and at least we must make do with the circumstances and act accordingly by opening ourselves to possibilities and thereby learn how to live through the same possibilities that are not always ordered by how we fancy them to be.

72 Art’s deschooled practice

Parts as wholes: betwixt learning and education This takes the discussion straight into two issues that arise from any argument about art education. The first has to do with the rift between learning and education. In a schooled context, learning and education fall short of being equivalent or complementary. Yet one could initially argue that it is by means of a desired complementary positioning of learning and education that we could claim a certain amount of autonomy for ourselves as art educators. However, this convenience is short-lived when one considers a second issue that arises from art education: that any argument for art in education must recognize the distinction between learning and education, especially when the latter always places art education in positions of distinct uncertainty. In other words, unless one distinguishes between learning and education, one also stands a good chance of losing any argument for art in education, because education has often foreclosed the plural possibilities by which art must problematize learning critically and aesthetically. As an identitarian form of reasoning—that is, as a form of thinking that assumes that all parts are equal to the whole—education forbids aesthetic criticality. This is because aesthetic criticality is essentially non-identitarian: it questions the assumption of a totality that sums up its assumed parts. As a critical form of reasoning, art denounces the summing of parts into wholes as an instrumental formula that only serves to legitimize the whole by suppressing its parts. However not all is lost. Given the contradictory relationship between learning and education it means that to advocate art education within schools is to argue that art in schools must retain its non-identitarian modus operandi and more critically, it could potentially deschool society, to use Illich’s term (1999). Despite the contradictory ring to such a concept, it is not contradictory to say that because and in spite of education, art educators have no choice but to be advocates of art in education. Here, Laclau’s suggestion that we move from the notion of a ground to that of a horizon in political philosophy begins to gain further relevance to education. By means of its groundlessness, art facilitates knowledge over a horizon that would value the whole (universality) from within its assumed parts (particularities), the parts being that which knowledge achieves from the things with which we engage every day. This recalls Stanley Cavell’s wonderful notion of the “world as things” where he states that his assignment is “not this or that collection (…) but collecting as such; or, as it was also specified to me, the philosophy of collecting” (Cavell 2006, p. 236). If, after Duchamp, we cannot see the point of collecting as an analogy for art and the way we learn with art, then art education is not worth pursuing. Fortunately, we could speak after Duchamp and like him we constantly seek, find and collect a myriad of objects that makes art in their elusive ways; pretty much as we find forms of knowledge that do not have to conform to the schooled knowledge-systems that the state wants us to blindly accept as necessary. This is

Art’s deschooled practice

73

not distant from what Cavell meant by collecting for the sake of it; and more specifically it articulates the act of collecting parts for the sake of collecting parts and never wholes. Like Jacques Rancière’s ignorant schoolmaster, we come to declare that the whole is in the part and that everything lies in each, and not the other way (Rancière 1991, 33–9). Rancière explains in some detail how the self-declared ignorant schoolmaster Jean-Joseph Jacotot adopts a “panecastic method” where an emancipatory education comes from a state of affairs where one could learn from the each that carries everything (pan being everything and hekastos meaning each in Greek). The implication is that emancipation cannot afford to fall between the stools of universality and particularity and less so be subsumed under a hierarchy where parts are summed in one whole, but where in each part there is always everything. Indeed “reciprocity is the heart of the emancipatory method, the principle of a new philosophy that (…) looks for the totality of human intelligence in each intellectual manifestation” (Rancière 1991, p. 39). The panecastic approach leaves no space for the idealization of education, even when education appears to be progressive and learner-centred. If we were to idealize education we have to collect parts that fit the whole, rather than parts that are wholes. An idealized education—whether progressive or traditional—sets goals, or standards, that we could never reach. Art educators know very well that set goals never gain any consensus on what, ultimately, is the aim of education. Dewey, the quintessential philosopher who remained a sceptic over the assumption of wholes, reminds us that an aim in education is rather curious if not outright nonsense. This is because education cannot afford to work towards an external aim. The construction of an absolute and closed whole would distort the fact that education’s goals are more likely to be found in the plural eventualities that keep changing us as human beings. A static aim towards a fictitious end is not just a work of fiction but a fallacy, especially when bestowed on education. Dewey’s position makes no compromise. He argues that: it is well to remind ourselves that education as such has no aims. Only persons, parents, and teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea like education. And consequently, their purposes are indefinitely varied, differing with different children, changing as children grow and with the growth of experience on the part of the one who teaches. (Dewey 1966, p. 100) The notion of an aim that is external to the needs of learners is even more absurd when it comes to schooling, especially when we have to face the polity of the school as a wilful imposition on learning in the name of assumed needs that governments and communities tend to barter between themselves within education systems that are distinctly hegemonic. We know that the question of the school is ultimately contingent on the implied reasons for a systematized notion of education. In the assumed “necessities” that prompt education, the

74 Art’s deschooled practice

school is bounced off as a system of education that is alien to the need of human learning. In Dewey’s words: [T]oo rarely is the individual teacher so free from the dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he can let his mind come to close quarters with the pupil’s mind and the subject matter. This distrust of the teacher’s experience is then reflected in lack of confidence in the responses of pupils. (…) Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic significance of every growing experience is recognized, we shall be intellectually confused by the demand for adaptation to external aims. (Dewey 1966, p. 100)

Deschooling art’s practice Some forty years ago Ivan Illich argued that at points in history we realize that deschooling is as necessary as we thought schooling has always been essential for learning (see Illich 1999). One must not confuse deschooling with a simplistic argument for the closing down of schools. Illich speaks of the disestablishment of the school, which by implication takes learning out of its confessional state; or put another way, deschooling secularizes learning from education, and education from schooling. When he speaks of disestablishment, Illich clearly adopts an ecclesial model—ecclesial here implying the idea of an assembly operated on communitarian and convivial assumptions of society. As he explains many years after writing Deschooling Society, his two sources of inspiration were Gerard Ladner’s The Idea of Reform (1959), and Thomas Luckmann’s The Invisible Religion (1967). In his conversation with David Cayley, Illich gives a context to his understanding of disestablishment, which remains key to his thinking about education even when he does not equate education with faith anymore: You know, people read Deschooling twenty years later. Let them look for Thomas Luckmann’s book The Invisible Religion, and they’ll see where it all began. When he speaks about “church” and “faith”, I simply put in “school” and “education.” At that time, I still identified education with the faith. I wouldn’t at this moment. (Illich & Cayley 1992, p. 242) In Deschooling Society, Illich reclaims a laic position vis-à-vis education. He draws parallels with the disestablishment of the church in the founding of the United States, arguing that Two centuries ago the United States led the world in a movement to disestablish the monopoly of a single church. Now we need the constitutional

Art’s deschooled practice

75

disestablishment of the monopoly of the school, and thereby of a system which legally combines prejudice with discrimination. (Illich 1999, p. 11) The implication is that a society that adopts a confessional form of schooling, which starts from a premise of learning that becomes foundational, leaves no space for one’s own approach to education in its diverse and wide possibilities. By deschooling Illich did not mean the destruction of education, just as the separation of state and church does not mean the destruction of churches and less so a suppression of religious belief and expression. On the contrary, Illich was suggesting a secular state of affairs by which the school is liberated. To that effect in the same way a laic approach to the role of the church in society unlearns established religion, deschooling is a way of unlearning education. To achieve deschooling we have to retrace how education as a system, and schooling as an-institution of learning, came to sustain the fallacy of external aims for education. I do not think this is an impossible task. While a new approach to pedagogical diversity would have been unthinkable and out of question even twenty years ago, more than ever before we must call for a need to change education from the ways that have stifled it, or as Illich put it: “An educational revolution depends on a twofold inversion: a new orientation for research and a new understanding of the educational style of an emerging counterculture” (1999, p. 70). Diverse pedagogies and a widening of subject matter yield a less systematized form of education, where schools will move away from fixed aims. Again, Illich was somewhat sharp in noticing how “[o]ur present educational institutions are at the service of the teacher’s goals.” This reflects a structure that is intrinsically confessional where service is rendered to the priesthood (here embodied in the role of the teacher as the representative of the school) and not the ecclesia, that is the community. “The relational structures we need are those which will enable each man [sic] to define himself by learning and by contributing to the learning of others” (1999, p. 71). Invariably, when we speak of democracy in education we fall foul of the usual platitudes. Yet as we discuss the arts in their relationship with education, the aversion to the paradoxical relationship between art and learning as a form of unlearning is offset by a deschooled understanding of arts education. This opens the possibility to appreciate how a deschooled education could come about. Deschooling art could be far more interesting and perhaps less contentious if we try to understand how the arts operate in the context of the school, and indeed whether they should be there at all. To argue for the deschooling of art is to say that schooling cannot continue to effectively estrange the arts from their intrinsic autonomy and aesthetic specificity. On the contrary, a deschooled art education must come nearer to the particularity by which we do art. In other words, this will approximate Cavell’s philosophy of collecting for collecting’s sake: an exercise that is not hung up with the standards of the

76 Art’s deschooled practice

accountable and the useful but makes way for a real criticality to emerge. Only a deschooled form of art education could get us to understand how art and education can share their specifically different practices. In a brilliant yet not much known little essay entitled “Towards a Polis …”, Greene writes: The ground ought to be laid in the course of teacher education, so that teachers can embark on practice with a consciousness of cultural complexities and quests for meaning. (…) Not only does this mean that teachers-to-be may be empowered to choose themselves as full participants in the changing and ongoing life of what once were disparate disciplines. Acquainted themselves with perspectival viewing, with heterogeneity, with the open universes in which sense must be made, they may discover how to engage their own students in the interpretive process. (Greene 1982, p. 6, emphasis added) Greene argues that the conditions for this to happen are not only the cultivation of a perspectival form of consciousness in teachers, but more so an equality between subjects and a multiple provision. She is proposing a system of education that is not hierarchical and that has no epistemological priorities. This is not simply, then, a question of changing techniques of learning, or a question of student-centredness. Student-centred pedagogies had a good run for a long time, but we have not yet achieved the desired levels of perspectival viewing and heterogeneity in education, let alone in learning. This did not happen because teachers are not good in what they do, but because the system of education on one hand assumes learner-centredness as a dogma that pays lip service to progressive education, while on the other hand the epistemological hierarchies by which education is schooled allow no space for an anti-utilitarian education where learning becomes a matter of autonomy. Autonomy does not come from student-centredness, but from a perspectival notion of education that rejects all epistemological systems. In schools, intrinsically autonomous subjects like the arts find themselves socialized and thereby “made useful,” which means that learning art becomes another way of turning art’s intrinsic specificity into anathema. In a context of heterogeneity, the notions (and practices) of autonomy and paradox are essential in a perspectival view of learning that in and of itself cannot be detached from unlearning. In a perspectival view, art’s context and the way by which it engages with education comes across at variable points. Such points appear sometimes convergent, sometimes radically divergent. If such points are supposed to become epistemologically coherent, then art is socialized by a hierarchy that reduces art to a form of knowledge. The sociology of knowledge has been the most effective way to school art into education, where learning becomes an excuse for socialization—what Adorno calls a “Mannheimian fashion” by which a total ideology is applied to art (Adorno 1999, p. 252).

Art’s deschooled practice

77

Sociologies of knowledge cannot recognize perspectival forms of learning. Instead they seek to avoid paradox by manipulating the epistemological contradictions that emerge from it (see Baldacchino 2002). Where education remains schooled, the sociology of knowledge insists on art (and every other subject) to be considered as a form of knowledge and in turn it deems nonsensical any argument that states that art is never knowledge even when it is a knowable form. I would argue that artists and educators must insist that art may be a knowable form but never a form of knowledge. The reason is that this difference is intrinsic to art’s ever-changing nature. This is why, Gilson (2000, p. 13) argues, “it has seemed useful to recall the very essence of art conceived in its true nature”—which further corroborates the critique of the duality between process and product. The arts portend no fixed skills by which one learns them. Neither do they aspire for a fixed definition by which one would know them, and nor do they emerge as narratives that are always understood by the same forms of human cognition. The changing goal-posts of art come from both sides: from the art form and from the individuals (artists and audience) that engage with the form. Human beings have to adjust their understanding of art all the time, sometimes even with regards to the same work of art. What was art yesterday, today may turn out to be something else. The art of tomorrow is a matter to be discovered; which is where learning comes in as a practice that is always to be discovered, always unlearnt and never determined. Here, the school and with it, education, gain the character of a form of contingency that is threaded, as it were, over a larger ground-turned-horizon.

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. 1999. Aesthetic theory. R. Hullot-Kentor (trans.). London: Athlone Press. Adorno, T.W., Albert, H., Dahrendorf, R., Habemas, J., Pilot, H. & Popper, K.R. 1976. The positivist dispute in German sociology. New York: Harper & Row. Baldacchino, J. 2002. On “a dog chasing its tail”: Gramsci’s challenge to the sociology of knowledge. In C. Borg, J.A. Buttigieg & P. Mayo (Eds.). Gramsci and education. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, pp133–146. Baldacchino, J. 2005. Hope in groundlessness: art’s denial as pedagogy. Journal of Maltese Educational Research, 3(1), 1–13. Baxandall, M. 1985. Patterns of intention: On the historical explanation of pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Cavell, S. 2006. Philosophy the day after tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Deleuze, G. 2013. Nietzsche and philosophy. London: Bloomsbury. Dewey, J. 1966. Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: The Free Press Eco, U. 1989. The open work. A. Cancogni (trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Emerson, R.W. 1941. The works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Four volumes in one. New York: Tudor Publishing Company.

78 Art’s deschooled practice Gilson, E. 2000. The arts of the beautiful. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press Greene, M. 1967. Existential encounters for teachers. New York: Random House. Greene, M. 1978. Landscapes of learning. New York: Teachers College Press Greene, M. 1982. Towards a Polis …. PMI’s Wingspan, (vol. and no. unknown), 6–7. Greene, M. 1991. Aesthetic literacy in general education. 18th yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Hickman, R. 2005. Why we make art and why it is taught. Bristol, UK: Intellect Illich, I. 1999. Deschooling society. London: Marion Boyars Illich, I. & Cayley, D. 1992. Ivan Illich in conversation. Toronto, ON: Anansi Press. jagodzinski, j. & Wallin, J. 2013. Arts-based research: A critique and a proposal. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Laclau, E. 2005. On populist reason. London: Verso Ladner, G.B. 1959. The idea of reform: its impact on Christian thought and action in the age of the Fathers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lukács, G. 1971. History and class consciousness. R. Livingstone (trans.). London: Merlin Press. Lukács, G. 1974. Conversations with Lukács. T. Pinkus (Ed.), D. Fernbach (trans). London: Merlin Press. Lukács, G. 1975. Estetica. F. Fehér (Ed.), A. Solmi (trans.). Torino, IT: Einaudi. Luckmann, T. 1967. The invisible religion: The problem of religion in modern society. New York: Macmillan. Lyotard, J.F. 1988. It’s as if a line …. M. Lydon (trans). Contemporary Literature, 29(3), 457–482. Lyotard, J.F. 1989. Anamnesis of the visible, or candour. In A. Benjamin (Ed.). The Lyotard reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Marcuse, H. 1979. The aesthetic dimension: Toward a critique of Marxist aesthetics. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Marcuse, H. 1991. One-dimensional man: Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Nietzsche, F. 1980. Thus spoke Zarathustra. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. 1999. The birth of tragedy and other writings. R. Spiers (trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Plato 2005. The collected dialogues of Plato: Including the letters (Bollingen Series LXXI). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Rancière, J. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Rancière, J. 2006. The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible. New York: Continuum Rilke, R.M. 1986. Letters to a young poet. New York: Vintage. Rorty, R. 2009. Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. Schiller, F. 1967. On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters. E.M. Wilkinson & L. A. Willoughby (trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wollheim, R. 1980. Art and its object: With six supplementary essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 5

Willed forgetfulness

Established scholarship in arts education has become, over many decades, closely informed by theories of human development founded on notions of multiple intelligence and experiential learning. Partly because of the speciality and the peculiarity of arts practice, and because of the assumption that creativity is regarded as somehow linked to forms of learning that come about “through the arts,” scholars like Jerome Bruner, Victor Lowenfeld and Howard Gardner (to name a notable few) have been instrumental in shifting educational theory away from the idea of received knowledge, while moving closer to experiential learning where intelligence and knowledge are recognized as plural events within a variegated process of creativity, growth and development. A sense of learning that is predicated on growth and experience positions the arts within education as a discipline that is expected to fulfil a distinctly creative engagement with the world. This approach confirms John Dewey’s view that: “[e]ducation as growth or maturity should be an ever-present process” (1997, p. 50). I regard the contribution of educational theories like Bruner’s, Lowenfeld’s and Gardner’s as an iteration of the modernist lineage that ties learning to individual autonomy. This constitutes a radical shift from the idea of learning as an intrinsic quality (that is somehow carved out and educed) to a practice of education that inhabits a multiplicity of environments, facilitating learning through a degree of autonomy by which the notion of a freedom-to-be would avoid the rigidity of preordained ontological assumptions. However, while bearing in mind the contexts which developmental psychologists and educational theorists then regarded as the urgencies of educational practice, it would not be too original (and less so radical) to remind readers that education finds itself at another threshold, especially where it concerns the arts. As this threshold is crossed, teachers, students, arts practitioners and anyone interested in the relationship between the arts and education would be likely to retain that to know, to be and to feel remain an exchangeable affair. This is stated not only from a developmental perspective (as one learns from Bruner et al.), but also from within a political, and thereby aesthetic and pedagogical space of arguing and doing.

80 Willed forgetfulness

Recalling Étienne Balibar’s work one would recognize a similar exchange that operates between autonomy, heteronomy and what he calls a heteronomy of heteronomy (2002, pp. 4ff, 8ff and 21ff). Although Balibar’s context is confined to politics (understood in its comprehensive and immanent operations), his repositioning of autonomy within a dialectic that moves from (a) autonomy as a form of emancipation; to (b) the recognition of a heteronomous condition of transformations that pluralize the condition itself; also urges us to reconsider (perhaps unlike Bruner et al.) that when we speak of art and education, we invariably inhabit a space that is marked by an identifiable tension between education’s sense of dialogic agonism and the arts’ character of negative antagonism. (Note that here, in line with Balibar’s apparent double negative of a heteronomy of heteronomy, my use of a double negative in terms of a negative antagonism is intentional.) More to the point, one would recognize how this tension provides further scope for other ways of engaging with the very concept of learning. Far from an expected synthesis that is often mistaken for a “natural outcome” of creativity, the relationship between the arts and education would have to take a radical turn on learning itself. I would argue that this radical turn may be found in what could be considered as a case for unlearning. Contrary to the constructivist practices of learning with which many arts educators are all too familiar, the process of unlearning neither seeks to resolve and less so eliminate the aporias that emerge from the tension between art and education.

Negation and presence Here I do not want to discuss, improve or somehow reject the various implications of the developmental paradigm of learning. In what, in this book, is a case for unlearning, the intention is to make a case for other than learning. To make such a case is to claim a wider territory for the arts in education. This also means that the approach taken is clearly distanced from the purview of a socio-developmental approach as found in an aspect of the social scientific approach to education. Beyond the strictures of developmental, social scientific or functional matrixes the tension that calls for the case of unlearning must be addressed dialectically. This dialectic is continuously re-constructed as a form of reasoning that prompts and creates the practices of art’s aporias. It therefore seeks unpredictable patterns as these are marked and traced by the interstices found between emancipation (via education) and autonomy (via art). In providing a framework by which the arts and humanities are continuously externalized and made accountable to educational theory, the social scientific methods that prevail in educational theory have, in a Freirean sense, domesticated educational research within the boundaries of methodological dogma and procedural measurement. As a consequence, the occasion for dialectical reasoning has been at worst ruled out of educational discourse and at best absorbed into commercialized programmes for “critical thinkers” and “creative practitioners.”

Willed forgetfulness 81

There are innumerable programmes where creativity and the imagination become buzzwords, distilled and often distorted into training courses meant to instantly transform teachers into “critical practitioners.” A closer look at the immediacy which characterizes the majority of these courses reveals how this state of affairs has drastically limited the methodological horizon of education by eclipsing a myriad of other possible forms of inquiry that have a lot to contribute to the disciplines of the arts and education. As a discipline, education needs to reclaim a wider horizon, not only in terms of the diverse research culture that continues to expand within the arts and humanities (such as, for example, arts-based and practice-informed modes of speculative and generative research) but also because this would re-affirm the wider horizon of education as a space for argument, speculation and unlearning. To begin to engage with such possibilities, education’s terms of reference need to consider (a) the implications that emerge from its role within the polity; and (b) how the arts provide pedagogical and aesthetic spaces for dialectical forms of reasoning that would further problematize and carry education beyond the notion of learning itself. To start with the polity, education pertains to a polis as a disposition within a community that negotiates its own existence. This prompts one to draw from a tradition of dialectical reasoning that recalls the works of thinkers like Étienne Balibar, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser and Jacques Rancière, whose remarks on education are mostly retrieved from their political philosophical treatment of the arts and culture. However, I also want to approach the political situatedness of the arts and education from another angle—by revisiting John Dewey and George Herbert Mead’s work, whose initial engagement with a Hegelian dialectical approach later evolves through a pragmatic shift of emphasis, offering a dynamic that affords other perspectives on pedagogical and aesthetic aspects that are not necessarily limited to the strict parameters of political philosophy. Beyond the assumption of an immediate sense of individual autonomy, what one gets from Dewey’s and Mead’s pragmatic approach is that to state that learning gives the individual a sense of autonomy would mean nothing unless this individuality is articulated by what individuals do with other individuals within a social context. As Mead states: “a man is more than a physical object, and it is this more which constitutes him a social object or self, and it is this self which is related to that peculiar conduct which may be termed social conduct” (Mead 1997, p. 289). In his book Beyond Learning: Democratic Education for a Human Future, Gert Biesta rightly argues that: “we can only come into presence in a world populated by other human beings who are not like us” (2006, p. 32). This is where education has to be assumed within a political space of intersubjectivity. This “is a ‘troubling’ space,” Biesta argues, “but this is a necessary troubling, a troubling that only makes our coming into the world possible” (2006, p. 53).

82 Willed forgetfulness

This takes me to the second point, where the arts provide a space for those dialectical forms of reasoning by which women and men could problematize, critique and better articulate learning. Taking Biesta’s point of a “troubling space” one could argue that education can only be a way for human beings to “come into presence” if as a discipline it enables them to engage, articulate and indeed do what Adorno identifies as “the contradiction between the fixed concept and the concept in motion” (Adorno 1993, p. 70). Contrary to what it has become, both in parody and in its dogmatic petrification, dialectic does not mean readiness to replace the meaning of one concept with another one illicitly obtained. Not that one is supposed to eliminate the law of contradiction, as seems to be expected of Hegelian logic. Rather, contradiction itself—the contradiction between the fixed concept and the concept in motion—becomes the agent of philosophizing. (Adorno 1993, p. 70) Here, art’s challenge must be directed to common expectations of learning. Contrary to such expectations, the arts are not “easy” vehicles for learning even when this impression is often derived from arts educational literature. As discussed in Chapter 3, an example of a clear and unequivocal objection to such didactic expectations could be summarized by Richard Serra’s blunt statement (discussed earlier in this volume) that “this [work of art] isn’t here to teach you anything” (Serra 2007). Before one could elaborate on Serra’s statement, it is necessary to give some context to Adorno’s discussion of the dialectic found in the contradiction between fixed and moving concepts. In his essay “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” which is the second of the three essays that form his book Hegel: Three Studies, Adorno argues that he is not interested in experiential elements within Hegel’s philosophy but in how the experiential gives Hegel’s philosophy the nonidentitarian edge that Adorno perceives in it—which, one needs to add, rejects any argument for a foundational dialectic that some Hegelians (and later many Marxists) sought to assert in the name of a logic that somehow seeks historical repose. After stating that “contradiction itself (…) becomes the agent of philosophizing,” Adorno goes on to elaborate on the concept of contradiction as follows: When the concept is pinned down, that is, when its meaning is confronted with what is encompassed by it, its non-identity—the fact that the concept and the thing itself are not one and the same—becomes evident within the identity of concept and thing that is required by the logical form of definition. Hence the concept that remains true to its own meaning must change; if it is to follow its own conception, a philosophy that holds the concept to be something more than a mere instrument of the intellect must abandon definition, which might hinder it in doing so. (…) Because philosophy will not relinquish that identity, it must accept its difference. (Adorno 1993, pp. 70–1, emphases added)

Willed forgetfulness 83

We must bear in mind that Adorno is discussing a philosophical dynamic (Hegel’s rationalism) that rejects dualism in favour of a notion of oneness that is underpinned by its own negation, and by which Hegel would affirm that “thinking is always the negation of what we have before us” (Hegel 1975, p.17; also cited in Adorno 1993, p. 64). While emphasizing that the primacy of negation in Hegel is not external but “inherent in all moments of knowledge,” Adorno is also keen to clarify that “the universality of negation is not a metaphysical panacea that is supposed to open all doors but merely the consequence of the critique of knowledge, now matured to self-awareness, that demolished panaceas” (1993, p. 77). Adorno also remarks that of all the distortions of the concept of negation, “the most pitiful is the notion that the dialectic has to admit as valid either everything whatsoever or nothing whatsoever” (1993, p. 77). Without this qualification, there would be a risk of creating yet another “method” or “structure.” A dialectical method might sound as a viable way out of foundationalism. However, to resort to a methodological modelling would amount to another form of foundationalism. It would not be dissimilar from the formulaic theories of soviet materialism where “the dialectic” became a byword for “correct” and “scientific” forms of reasoning. Apart from nipping foundationalism in the bud, to make a case for unlearning by way of dialectical reasoning implies a rejection of any methodological apriorism. In fact, to begin to make a case for unlearning is to reject the assumption that somehow, unlearning will become a new model for education. Far from trying to nail one’s colours to one mast or another, what prompts this discussion is an interest in shedding some light on those common educational expectations by which the arts are perceived as immediate and easily accessible forms of learning (see Chapter 6). In the specific field of arts education this distortion prevails when the tension between art and education is dismissed or glossed over. When this tension is recognized, it is at best perceived as a dialectical relationship whose validity is either all or nothing. But we all know this is not enough to take the argument out of the expectations by which the arts in education are reduced to therapeutic or heuristic methods of wellbeing and learning. Such expectations turn arts education into an irenic construct, a panacea that is framed and naturalized by developmental assumptions of creative learning. Because the arts are customarily perceived to be creative and experiential, it seems to follow that they offer an inclusive environment where the usual social constructs are reinforced. In its apparent innocence and openness, doing art is quickly tallied to forms of making that provide effective avenues for teaching and learning. This immediately resorts to the triune attribution of the good, the true and the beautiful within a sublimated view of education laden with aesthetic and moral imperatives that make of the virtuous an artful existence. Whether the skills expected from the arts in education are actually concerned with aesthetics or moral comportment becomes irrelevant, especially when some are too quick to argue that works of art are accessible to everyone and must therefore be useful as an act whose investment in curricular economies

84 Willed forgetfulness

would ultimately yield an identifiable and measured interest. Yet within the same scope of a curricular economy, the arts remain dispensable subjects, and are all too often considered a “luxury” when it comes to cutting on costs or instructional provision.

Disinterested education Whenever I hear arguments about the arts’ inclusive character on one hand and those who in the same breath insist that the arts cannot be allowed to be an instrument for the so-called élite, I am reminded of a passage written by Gramsci, which is often an occasion for dispute amongst Gramscian theorists of education. I am referring to the article he wrote as a young socialist, where he advocates the need for the working classes to have “una scuola disinteressata” (Gramsci 1964, p. 227), which in English was mistranslated as “a school open to all” (see Gramsci 1977, p. 26), when in effect what Gramsci meant was “a disinterested school” that operates beyond the bounds of the sociology of knowledge. In fact, Gramsci defines a disinterested school as that “which does not mortgage the child’s future, a school that does not force the child’s will, his intelligence and growing awareness to run along the tracks [that take the child] to a predetermined station” (Gramsci 1977, p. 26). A provision that mortgages the student’s future into measured and accountable skill-sets that are focused on securing employability, would contrast with a situation where epistemological freedom is afforded to “only few versions reduced to the service of a tiny élite of ladies and gentlemen with no worries about a future career” (Gramsci 1975, p. 126). While this seems to suggest that Gramsci is criticizing the disinterested curriculum of the grammar school, he was, in effect advocating it for everyone; which is where one comes across the critique of Gramsci’s so-called “conservative” educational theories. Yet Gramsci’s words have been proven to be rather prescient. British universities are now obliged to produce figures that show statistics for employability attached to each and every award. This statistic is known by the rather curious acronym of KIS (Key Information Sets), which, to cite Warwick University’s KIS website, “enables you [the student] to compare official course data from universities and colleges to help inform your decision about which course is best for you” (see Warwick University 2018). All universities in Britain have to identify measurable means by which their awards are quantified and ultimately ranked by their chosen KIS values—top of which is “employability” as measured by universities in terms of how many of their graduates get into employment within a set period that immediately follows graduation. In terms of the arts, this proves to be quite problematic, especially when arts practitioners tend to be more inclined to work as self-employed artists subsidizing their work through various forms of employment that may or may not be related to their own specialism. It is also well known within the arts community that while arts practitioners who are successful in sustaining their practice

Willed forgetfulness 85

would ultimately remain in their practice-related employment (which they evolve over several years and not immediately after graduating), other professions, such as teachers, may rank high in immediate employability, but low in subsequent retention. Beyond the specific questions that emerge around the attempt to wed a disinterested curriculum with comprehensive schooling (which many would regard as a contradiction in terms), this dilemma offers something even more interesting. This is where the arts are swung from one extreme to the other; being either (a) cited as an emancipatory form of knowledge that would include learners into a world that is otherwise excluded, to (b) being considered as an object of disdain because art is seen as too elitist and therefore suggesting a privilege of disinterest that could only be afforded by exclusive schools that could financially sustain a good arts programme. Unless one enters into a discussion of deschooling (which, as we have seen in the previous chapter cannot be excluded from a wider discussion of learning and unlearning), these arguments lead to the same conclusion. In their disinterestedness the arts are both inclusive and exclusive. As objectified forms of knowledge, the various arts seem to oscillate between being far too expensive for some schools or too cheap (perhaps trivial or even vulgar) for others. However, both arguments confuse the notion of disinterested knowledge with an exotic or rarefied product, when in effect what one means by disinterestedness is the ability to take an autonomous stance from where one can critique the world. We must argue that beyond the immediacy of the here and now, education must provide an environment that enables us all to engage within the circumstantial and contingent conditions of the world. To put it another way, in its claim to autonomy as a disinterested act, art’s autonomous ambitions enters education’s heteronomous condition. Because it is disinterested, this form of education is allowed to sustain the tension between an agonistic heteronomous understanding of education and transgressive autonomous forms of art practice. Disinterested education is a dialectical space where autonomy is confronted by its other. This otherness is found in a conditioned heteronomy that might appear to clash with the idea of a disinterested education. Such a clash is necessary, in that it would bear out the tension that exists between art and education; just as it would bear out the same kind of tension between any experimental form of doing, knowing or being. A disinterested education affords a number of individual claims that would empower myriad forms of subjective reasoning to confront the interested, measurable and accountable world of objective reason. In the scope of such forms of subjective reasoning I would prominently include Dewey’s notion of “experimental knowledge” (Dewey 1981). In practical terms, a disinterested education would provide an environment where women and men learn how to be actors amongst other actors. This is how I read Biesta’s notion of “coming to presence.”

86 Willed forgetfulness

To suggest a disinterested education is to argue that learning is conceptualized, articulated and experienced from a non-identitarian position. While this is not without its aporias, such a concept of education would own up to the world’s contingent nature by recognizing the tensions that this implies. Far from being elitist, a disinterested education would own up to the quotidian. In the recognition of everyday life as a heterogeneous state of affairs, this would also reveal how we learn to objectify and understand the world as subjects. As Dewey argues in Experience and Education: There is no such thing as educational value in the abstract. The notion that some subjects and methods and that acquaintance with certain facts and truths possess educational value in and of themselves is the reason why traditional education reduced the material of education so largely to a diet of pre-digested materials. (Dewey 1997, p. 46) In Everyday Life, Agnes Heller argues that everyday life is objectified in two senses. In the first instance, there is a “continuous process of the externalization of the subject”; and “at the same time, it is the process whereby the person is continually being re-created” (Heller 1984, p. 47). This concept of continuous re-creation tallies with the very Deweyan notion of experimental knowledge. As a closer reading of Dewey’s work on art and experience confirms, what one finds in Heller’s two-pronged concept of everyday life, is how in our continuous externalization of the subject (through experimental forms of knowledge such as the arts) everydayness is neither ignored nor demeaned. One could add that distinctions such as those between the contingent and the necessary, the particular and the general, would here become irrelevant, as the focus will move onto the criticality of the practices that are here implied.

Choosing to unlearn While it is almost natural to seek to understand learning as intrinsic to human development and experience, when we trace (philosophically and artistically) those other kinds of human activity that tend to appear as either special or sometimes strange—perhaps by dint of their continuous re-creation—then we need to extend our horizon beyond what our habits of learning have been trained to expect. Here I want to take the case of arts practice and retrace it on a philosophical horizon, where one begins to engage with a case for other than learning. In this context learning does not present itself in the usually expected rupture or shock of the unfamiliar that, after a period of reflection, is “learnt” and absorbed within the familiar. In fact, as already suggested by the concept of everydayness, I would argue that in art, negation tends to happen less through the unfamiliar and more through the familiar and habitual. However, this “familiarity” must

Willed forgetfulness 87

not be construed as somehow easy or identitarian. Rather than a depiction of reality that appears comfortably mediated by an art form, in artistic practice we are confronted with a spectacle that seems too close to home, and which is often criticized for not being “artistic” enough and therefore lacking “aesthetic value” (although here I would dispute that one necessarily implies the other). This misunderstanding once more goes back to the expectation that art and learning are in and of themselves congruent, and where therefore an art educational project is not expected to imply any sense of paradox or aporia. As an example of this kind of art I will not cite movements like Art Brut or Arte Povera where it is assumed that their “novelty” lies in the shock effect that they may have left in the imaginary of contemporary art practice. Rather, I would direct the reader’s attention to Caravaggio’s sacred work, which caused scandal because the artist dared articulate the divine through the whereabouts of everyday mortality. Here we have no attempt to romanticize the notion of shock—as many would expect from any discourse on artistic autonomy. Caravaggio’s scandal comes from the presentation of the normality by which his figures walk the streets, and which seem to renounce any claim for an irenic state of being. Caravaggio triggers tension by revealing the heterogeneity of everyday life, and by in turn objectifying the otherworldly within it. This immediately allows the subjects of his work (his audience, and not the story he is telling) to become the subjects, and therefore to take charge of their own everydayness by externalizing their subjectivity and continuously re-create themselves. This is where Caravaggio’s heresy is revealed. In its autonomy, his art claims back the real meaning of aìresis (in heresy). It is worth recalling that in its Greek original aìresis means choice. The heretic is he or she who makes a choice without the authority of those who give it. Caravaggio’s art transgressed the boundaries of choice by making a choice and opening its autonomous polity to everyone (see Baldacchino 2010, pp. 97ff). Caravaggio’s choice is in many ways a disinterested one, even when it is charged with a concern for what it portends—i.e. the historical delivery of the world from all its evils through the intervention of a divine figure (the Son of God) who chooses to suffer and die in human form. But beyond the Christian message per se, Caravaggio’s art takes a disinterested route in the same way a disinterested education creates a space for acts of transgression through which forms of experimental knowledge would engage with the heterogeneity of everyday life. This engagement is pedagogical in that it externalizes the tensions that are at the root of such heterogeneity and allows them to re-create themselves as experimental forms of doing, knowing and being. This would apply to all of Caravaggio’s work, and not only his sacred art. One could argue that in Caravaggio’s art the sheer normality of human nature is taken away from those other senses of autonomy by which, later on in Romantic art, would become forms of psychologistic reification or philosophical sublation. Caravaggio’s work is an example of how art’s pedagogical implications are found in the (heretical) choices that art gives and not in the didactic “message” which many would expect art to give through its “beautiful” forms of “goodness.”

88 Willed forgetfulness

This is blatantly evident in forms of artistic practice where the object is not found in a work of art that we can see from a distance (as in a sculpture or a painting), but where the work of art becomes a space that we are invited to inhabit. If we return to Richard Serra’s statement that a work of art is not there to teach anything, we begin to take into account an artistic situatedness where the responsibility for learning is placed on us as active participants with art’s event, rather than with the claim that the arts have some pedagogical duty to teach us something. To better understand this one needs to come to terms with Serra’s actual work. As discussed in Chapter 3, Serra’s Sequence (2006/2007) is based on the idea of the individual spectator’s experiencing of a space in which she may well feel lost, but where at the same time she remains safely embraced by a physically puzzling environment. In Sequence a peculiar environment is created by the use of large sheets of metal that create spaces by means of their arched and bent shapes through which the spectator would walk and negotiate a brief labyrinthine journey. It goes without saying that here the act of spectating is volatile and open because no one is likely to inhabit this labyrinthine space in identical ways. The situation set by Serra vacillates between an occupation of space marked by total autonomy (where one experiences the space alone) and an occupation of space with others. The latter is conditioned by a negotiation with other individuals who are walking within this shared space, and whom the spectator may know or to whom she remains a complete stranger. It is easy to understand how in Serra’s work, the act of being a spectator is as unpredictable as that of regarding and experiencing its spaces as a comprehensive and total work of art. Before one begins to assume that here we have an artist’s intention that simply contradicts his statement (because in stating that art is not there to teach us anything, Serra is making an argument that is intrinsically pedagogical), I would urge caution against the all-too-easy temptation of confusing intentionality with an experience that many would expect to happen within the artistic psyche and which we as an audience are bound to “discover” and respond to. I am equally anxious about the notion that without knowing this intention, we would somehow assume that the work cannot be fully understood, as we are left baffled or indeed made to feel passive in the presence of the work of art. In all forms of creative, visual and performing arts, terms like intent, intention or intentionality are very problematic. Intentionality is neither causal nor teleological. Audiences and spectators do not necessarily approach a work of art with a specific intent. Expectations could be free or manufactured by others, but the actual engagement or encounter with works of art remains unpredictable and fluid. Intentionality spans a vast and widely populated horizon. Like experience, intentionality takes a variegated pattern that is continuously shaped by contradictory acts and thoughts. Such actions could emerge from a dialogue between spectators, a two-way dialogue with the works, a three-way dialogue

Willed forgetfulness 89

between spectators, works of art and other spectators, a chaotic conversation that does not have a fixed direction, … so on and so forth. In other words, intentionality is diverse, but not necessarily evolving towards an end or objective that would capture or explain it in toto. Intentionality is diverse by dint of it being historically contingent, where no resolution is necessary or warranted by any of its agents. Once externalized or objectified, it is not only heterogeneous, but it continuously re-constructs itself. If there is a case for intentionality, it is that which John Searle calls “an intentionality towards the world,” where upon relating “to the environment, and especially to other people [m]y subjective states relate me to the rest of the world.” “These subjective states,” Searle reminds us, “include beliefs and desires, intentions and perceptions, as well as loves and hates, fears and hopes” (Searle 1999, p. 85). Intentionality has no specific direction. It does not travel. It is neither unidirectional—coming from the artist to us via the work of art—nor should it suggest a kind of agency where one is passive and the other is active. There are no senders or addressees. It constitutes a continuous conversation, a dialogue of active individuals, where the artist often disappears and the work of art takes a life of its own. There are “patterns of intention” (as Michael Baxandall [1985, pp. 41-42] would put it), but I do not regard these patterns as being translatable into clear directions. Having said that, one can understand why an installation like Serra’s cannot escape the phenomenological feeling that somehow, we are learning something from or literally through it. This would explain why school children are flocked to galleries and museums in London and New York, or any other big city where arts education programmes claim to include everyone within the artistic experience of the museum’s collection. This is often done at the expense of arts education budgets within schools, where limited funding for the arts prompts arts educational bodies which should be on the same side, to compete for the same money. While any work of art can be seen as “teaching us something” where many teachers would feel compelled to take this into consideration when they deliver the curriculum, this excursion into the would-be pedagogical virtues of the arts is mostly selective and ultimately works against any proper understanding of the relationship between the arts and education. All too quickly such excursions take an identitarian character in the sense that the concept “art” is absorbed into “education” as being its own supposed extension—or vice versa, where art becomes an educational matter. This is why, as amply argued in this book, the arts and education are always at risk of being impaired from their specificity and speciality. However, here we must return to the main thrust of the argument, which is the call for a concept of willed forgetfulness and unlearning. When art is identified with a pedagogical canon that would train the viewer how to spot the good within the true and the beautiful, two things happen. First, art becomes

90 Willed forgetfulness

domesticated and it becomes a form of knowledge bereft of its experimental and autonomous open-endedness. Secondly, the location of the pedagogical “event” in doing art is misplaced. (Here I would include the audience as being integral to doing art because of its intentionality towards the work itself; which also means that art is continuously being produced, re-created again and again as we do when we externalize our subjectivity through everyday life.) Like all of those who sat in on class presentations on art, I am often invited to engage with the virtues of controversial, emotional or morally provocative works like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). Interestingly, whenever one engages with such discussions, these works are soon transformed from objects of controversy into occasions of virtue. Thus, one might ask: “What is wrong with that?” Indeed none is wrong, though this also carries considerable artistic and pedagogical risks. Such risks emerge when in measuring works of art on the construction of values, the dialectic by which we confront an object of scandal and turn it into an object of piety and appreciation is distorted into a false tool of inclusion. The inclusion is false not because it hides some form of elitism behind its apparent erudition or exclusive knowledge of the discipline, but because it inflates art into a false sense of subliminal moral and pedagogical delusion. This is where art is domesticated. In 1999, the then mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani closed down a show in the Brooklyn Museum of Art because it featured Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. This form of censorship does not simply suppress art’s “freedom” as some would have it. More seriously it is a symptom of pedagogical and moral misplacement, where it is expected that art must teach us something “good” by dint of its “beautiful” message. This also presumes art to be a tool to teach and where its message must be somewhat coherent by way of it portending readymade forms of creative or moral truths. Yet Ofili’s sin was to use misplaced cultural referents, such as the use of elephant dung on his painting of the Virgin, which Giuliani and his moralizing mob found offensive, even when it was explained to them that dung is considered to be sacred in African culture. However, as we have argued with regards to Caravaggio and Serra, there is nothing to learn from the “story” or the “message” that art is supposed to “give.” Pedagogically speaking the occasion for a lesson to be found in art’s “stories” is in effect irrelevant to art. What is pedagogical in art is not found in art per se but in the moment of its continuous re-creation through its audience. It is in this continuous re-creation that the same audience is invited to unlearn itself. Here I would draw a strong distinction between unlearning oneself and unlearning what one expects to learn from an object or something (like an work of art or a presumed depository of knowledge). The common pedagogical horizon that the works of Serrano, Ofili, Serra, Caravaggio and many others inhabit is found in how, as works of art, they refuse to emancipate us by means of a process of learning; and where on the contrary, by dint of their disinterestedness in teaching anything (by having no lessons to offer), these works put us as an audience in a situation where we have to unlearn what we came

Willed forgetfulness 91

with before we engaged with these works of art. Just as in Heller’s account (1984, p. 47) of the objectification of everyday life, in the process of unlearning we externalize our subjectivity while at the same time continuously we recreate ourselves.

Scoping, anticipation and disposition This begins to reveal a direct relationship between (a) the contingency borne out of everydayness and (b) the choice of unlearning to which we are invited by art’s refusal to teach. The context for this relationship is found in art’s inherent paradox, its aporia. To say that art is an aporia is not an easy way of presenting it, especially when one is keen to invite others to engage with art in a book on art and education. However, this challenge needs to be had, especially in view of the increasing diversity and hybridity by which arts practice continues to develop in contemporary culture. Art’s antinomic way of being is at the heart of its aporetic nature. An aporia opens an entrance by perplexing whoever tries to “enter.” This is because an aporia is like a shut gate. Art’s aporetic context is an “entrance” only made possible via an exit. To exit an aporia one must enter it looking backwards while taking an uncharted route. In terms of art, an entrance is a mode of exiting, a way out. By doing art, we can only explore or even speculate what we can make of the world and our existence. We do so by a sense of openended experimentation. This helps us look for, find and create situations and possibilities that move beyond the limits posed by our own historical contingencies. In turn this would help us recognize the same limits as being truthful without having to remain beholden by the myth or presumed necessity that works of art have to be true, good or beautiful (Baldacchino 2012, pp. 1–2). In so many ways, what I have identified as an exit, as art’s way out, is the very point of unlearning. What I call an exit pedagogy is a discourse that does not simply transform points of entrance into emergency exits (what in Italian is called un’uscita di sicurezza, a safe exit) (see Baldacchino 2012). Neither would this encourage people to reject what they have learnt. In a maze where one cannot retrace one’s steps, the only way out is to state a paradox: where one must exit by entering. This does not happen because Ariadne’s thread has run out or has been cut off, but because human beings construct the world as a maze whose configuration keeps changing. Far from a reversal of learning, this paradox presents a form of understanding that cannot afford to construct a fictitious ideal world without limits. On the contrary in order to anticipate and therefore transcend the perceived structure of such limits, one must recognize their mutable and contingent nature. The arts have shown that the presumed boundaries that mark these limits are never fixed. Like the invisible boundaries of experience, or like the line that represents the horizon, these boundaries remain contingent on the perspective that one takes. In doing art we also realize—indeed we learn—that even when learning looks like an incremental process that moves from inexperience to

92 Willed forgetfulness

being experienced, this is markedly anticipatory, dispositional and scopic. To begin to explain what I mean by this I suggest that we consider another apparent paradox: that for art to realize itself it must talk itself out of existence (see also Chapter 2, §15). It is often argued that doing art is expected to achieve modes of resolution where particular problems or limits are overcome by answers that ultimately become universal, because they are useful to all. This, however, takes us to the same question which deals with our ability to look and reach beyond the limits of contingency—which, as I just explained, remains dependent on the perspective that one takes. To move beyond the limits, and indeed to solve problems, art cannot seek or claim to have a fixed answer. Art articulates historical contingency not to resolve its limitations, but to bring these conditions within the scope of our own understanding. This is where we can see why art is not in the business of description. Works of art have no lessons to give because their stories are not descriptions but moments of reality that come by in the processes by which subjectivity is externalized and where everyday life is continuously re-invented. If art were to seek its ultimate realization by finding a final logical definition where there will be no more questions to answer, art would have to make way for the contingency that makes it and by which we live our life—which, as it happens will take it back to where it “started” from. In this respect, for women and men to continue to do art—for art to continue to be—art needs to remain aporetic; it has to retain women and men’s ability to do paradox, and therefore to unlearn.

For art to unlearn itself Just as works of art prompt us to unlearn ourselves, art needs to continuously unlearn itself. It may sound odd to say that education is not entirely to do with learning, but if we argue that it also has to do with unlearning, understood as an awareness of contingency, everyday life and the aporia that is triggered by the subject’s externalisation and its continuous re-invention, then we can see how this becomes a matter of disposition. In Democracy and Education Dewey argues that: “Any person who is openminded and sensitive to new perceptions, and who has concentration and responsibility in connecting them has, in so far, a philosophic disposition” (Dewey 1966, p. 325). He also states that, “an underlying disposition represents an attitude not to this and that thing nor even to the aggregate of known things, but to the considerations which govern conduct” (Dewey 1966, p. 324–5). I would add that any notion of “conduct” must be open-ended, and thereby marked by an act of scoping—an exploration which cannot be fixed, presumed or predicated on a set rule, but where by its nature it keeps looking for other ways by which it negotiates the maze that art, in its aporetic experience, reveals.

Willed forgetfulness 93

Some regard the maze of contingency as a hopeless case, a state from which we all need to be redeemed. Yet if we were to view experience as a form of anticipation—or as Alfred Schutz (1970, pp. 137ff) suggests, an experience that is regarded as protentive rather than retentive—then one can see how the ability to anticipate reinforces the disposition by which an aesthetics marked by risk and futuring enables us to scope and navigate the maze of contingency. The relationship between Alfred Schutz and John Dewey’s concepts of experience are not only intriguingly dynamic and actual, but also “liberating” in the sense that in their different ways these theorists are never afraid of crossing boundaries and reaching out to a variety of realities and contexts that reveal a textured and complex landscape (see Baldacchino 2009, pp. 90–126). The case for unlearning is therefore not a case for rejecting what we have been taught. Nor is it a simple act of rejecting bad habits to learn new virtues, which, when turned once more into bad habits, would need to be replaced by something else. That would be a developmental process of learning that amounts to a process of choosing, selecting, evaluating, rejecting and learning anew. In this context, unlearning understood from the position of the arts is an act that is willed, and not simply a case of getting into a place where one cannot move further. To say that art enters by its ways of exiting is to reinforce the notion that a labyrinth never holds any promise of inevitable progress. To exit may well imply the same point by which one entered in the first place. This is why I have argued elsewhere that art does not hide any illusions (Baldacchino 2012, p. 117ff). The artist is not a conjurer who hides her tricks or who fixes everything by the illusion of magic. On the contrary, artists wear their tricks on their sleeve. To externalize art on the stage of learning without showing that in effect art holds no secrets is one of the many reasons why it often scandalizes those who expect it to raise itself above normality. To argue that art should remain above normality is to teach art as if it were a conjurer’s trick—which amounts to the subliminal expectations that we have alluded to when art is expected to provide us with a moral-pedagogical curriculum. In the assumption or expectation of a pedagogical and moral curriculum, art is also expected to provide us with a way of reading the world. Again, this is problematic because for art to “read” the world (albeit visually) it would need to be assumed as a productive and processual mechanism—as many would still consider art, especially when art finds itself co-opted within the so-called creative industry. Within such expectations, works of art like Antoni Tàpies’s Libertat (1988), 500 anys de llibre Català (1974) and Les haricots (1969) might lend themselves to the suggestion of erasure and bracketing, because that is how one’s reading of art is often shaped, where it is assumed that to read a work of art would necessarily end with a resolution of a visual conundrum. But then again this assumed “visual conundrum” is caused by a narrative of readings that remain identitarian: they are what they are—visual readings. This however suggests a limit to what a visual insinuation would or could represent.

94 Willed forgetfulness

In contrast to a processual reading of art’s visual “reading” of the world, Tàpies’s work is an invitation to problematize one’s own visual reading and to stop short of simply assuming what such a reading should amount to. Tàpies presents no illusion. A historical contextualization of his works might help those who want to find in them a story to tell and a lesson to learn. This is soon limited to the extent that the assumption is that one needs to “read” an image, when in effect the image may not be there to be “read,” just as one is not expected to “recite” a chair, or “sing” a tree or “write” a fish. What I am suggesting may sound simple or even dismissive of how we are bound to react to works of art. But there is nothing simple about the way by which art constructs the world aesthetically. Yet this does not mean that Tàpies is hiding something from his audience. There is a point where we have to accept that Tàpies’s art is presenting us with questions that remain inherently scopic. The scopic nature of artistic experience is neither mystical nor esoteric. The best way to explain it is to recall Adorno’s definition of non-identity: “the fact that the concept and the thing itself are not one and the same” (Adorno 1993, p. 70). In addition, as we have already argued in previous chapters, we often ignore Gilson’s distinction between “the art that makes things” (ars artefaciens) and “the things which art makes” (ars artefacta) (Gilson 2000, p. 13).

Forgetting? As a Catholic philosopher who continued to make a case for a philosophia perennis throughout his life, Gilson cannot be accused of twisting logic or playing a deconstructionist game. The distinction that he raises between the art that makes things and the things which art makes stops us from confusing art with a form of knowledge and invites us to consider art as a making. While the deed may be considered as being contextualized within epistemological parameters— just as it happens within ethical, ontological, cognitive, aesthetical, pedagogical, religious or political contexts—to reduce art to a form of knowledge (to an episteme) is to confuse its ways of being. Art is not a form of knowledge not because it refuses to know, but because if it were to accommodate an epistemological structure, it would have to do so in reverse: through unknowing, by being taken to task without necessarily making something or knowing anything. This is how I would see art as an aporia. Here we have a form of “doing” in the world that is different from “being” in the world because it implies an act of constructing the world by unlearning the ways by which we are asked to continuously know the world through a hierarchical set of constructs. Rather than explain, reflect or simply express a form of learning, arts practitioners invite us to critique the developmental notion of learning by directing us (as participants in art’s doing) towards a case where we educe knowledge by other than simply expecting that we carve the perfect statue from a block of marble which, as Neo-Platonists argued, is already a statue dynamei, in potentiality.

Willed forgetfulness 95

I would suggest that we revisit, by resuming and re-suggesting the notion of anamnesis (recollection); but this time as an individualized and therefore an act that is conscious of its political condition by which individuals seek to assert their intelligence with freedom. Thus, rather than suggest anamnesis as Plato did, where we are supposed to remember the ideals by which we normalize and liberate ourselves from our contingent existence, we would wilfully “forget” ideal resolutions, and return the concept of knowledge to a recollection of everyday life. This also means that to educe is no longer a Platonic assumption of recovering an ideal or prescinding mortal existence by conjuring a world of necessary forms from a previously known state of being. To educe would here mean to unlearn the ideality of our own expectations—in other words, to externalize and re-create them over and over again. In this context, art’s unlearning provides us with a way of owning up to historical contingency. As we have argued in previous chapters, rather than a form of knowledge, art is a form of life (Wollheim 1980). This must be regarded as a plurality of forms of life that we come to know and do amongst other forms of life that other humans also know and do. We can thus approach unlearning by: firstly, exploring the anticipatory nature of experience as a dispositional act of scoping; secondly, revisiting the idea of recollection (anamnesis) by exploring how experiencing art’s events opens the ground to a series of negations, paradoxes and contradictions that would highlight the arts as a plurality of forms of life; and thirdly, regarding arts practice as a form of mimetic scoping with unlearning as its pedagogical trajectory. This is what I mean by turning anamnesis into its opposite: where from a passive form of remembering an idealized life, we enter into a form of willed forgetfulness by which other than learning, we also recognize our ability to unlearn. However, this warrants a cautionary remark: this peculiar form of assuming education does not simply happen as a matter of course. Nor could it claim universal validity in terms of how we all engage with the world. Rather, the possibility and risk that unlearning brings up would only make sense if we recognize that this must emerge from a pedagogical aesthetics where the challenges of criticality and laterality are considered as special and therefore belonging to a willed world that is somehow keen to anticipate and take the risk of an act where, to some, learning might appear to work backwards.

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W. 1993. Hegel: Three studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Baldacchino, J. 2009. Education beyond education: Self and the imaginary in Maxine Greene’s philosophy. New York: Peter Lang. Baldacchino, J. 2010. Makings of the sea: Journey, doubt and nostalgia. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias. Baldacchino, J. 2012. Art’s way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Rotterdam, NL: Sense.

96 Willed forgetfulness Balibar, É. 2002. Politics and the other scene. London: Verso. Baxandall, M. 1985. Patterns of intention: On the historical explanation of pictures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Biesta, G.J.J. 2006. Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Dewey, J. 1966. Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press. Dewey, J. 1981. The experimental theory of knowledge. In J. McDermott (Ed.). The philosophy of John Dewey: Two volumes in one. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, pp.175–192. Dewey, J. 1997. Experience and education. New York: Touchstone. Gilson, E. 2000. The arts of the beautiful. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press. Gramsci, A. 1964. Uomini o macchine? In Pagine di Gramsci. Vol. 1. Milano, IT: Il Saggiatore (2000). Gramsci, A. 1975. Gli intellettuali. Torino, IT: Editori Riuniti. Gramsci, A. 1977. Selections from political writings 1910–1920. Q. Hoare (Ed.), J. Mathews (trans.). London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hegel, F. 1975. Logic: Hegel’s logic being part one of the encyclopaedia for the philosophical sciences. (W. Wallace, trans.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heller, A. 1984. Everyday life. G.L. Campbell (trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Mead, G.H. 1997. The mechanism of social consciousness. In L. Menand (Ed.). Pragmatism: A reader. New York: Vintage. Schutz, A. 1970. On phenomenology and social relations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Searle, J. 1999. Mind, language and society. London: Weinfeld & Nicolson. Serra, R. 2007. Richard Serra, sculpture: Forty Years. Museum of Modern Art New York. Available at: http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/serra/flash.html. Accessed 19 February 2012. Warwick University 2018. What is KIS? Available at: www2.warwick.ac.uk/study/ undergraduate/courses/kis. Wollheim, R. 1980. Art and its object: With six supplementary essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 6

Art’s false ease

Generally speaking, the relationship between the arts and education is never forthright. In kindergarten and middle school, the arts tend to be assumed heuristically through a range of creative and developmental expectations. In secondary schools the arts are split along the lines of specialist skill-sets that, still emerging from their previous developmental approach, begin to articulate other curricular hierarchies as dictated by social and political-economic definitions of education. These expectations carry the arts on a binary course where focus is tracked over specific skills that often alienate those who are deemed to lack artistic “talent” or “motivation,” while on a parallel track there runs a discourse that regards the arts as subjects intended to “enable” a core provision of other subjects. In its report on education, First Steps: A New Approach for Our Schools (CBI 2012) the Confederation of British Industries does not have much to say about the arts in education even when it laments over the phenomenon of a “conveyor-belt” approach to schooling (CBI 2012, p. 21). In this report the arts are mentioned once, where they are termed as enabling subjects “that expand and enhance the core subjects.” Enabling subjects include the “humanities, languages, arts, technical and practically-based subjects.” Within the CBI’s epistemological structure these enabling subjects sustain a hierarchy whose core “includ[es] critically maths, English, the sciences and—increasingly—effective use and understanding of computer science” (CBI 2012, p. 31). In tertiary education, the designation of research and teaching universities (a euphemism for academic and vocational schools) reinforces a hierarchy of disciplines by a narrative of “hard” and “soft” subjects, on which advice is readily given by think-tanks (Fazackerley & Chant 2008) and universities (Russell Group 2012) to students who want to gain access to them (BBC 2011). In their report titled, The Hard Truth about “Soft” Subjects: Improving Transparency about the Implications of A-Level Subject Choice, Fazackerley & Chant (2008, p. 4) give this hierarchy a degree of tangibility: At Oxford, more students were accepted in 2007–2008 with Further Mathematics A-level (711) than Accounting, Art & Design, Business Studies, Communication Studies, Design & Technology, Drama/Theatre Studies,

98 Art’s false “ease”

Film Studies, Home Economics, ICT, Law, Media Studies, Music Technology, Psychology, Sociology, Sports Studies/Physical Education and Travel & Tourism A-level combined (overall 494 of these subjects were accepted). Although documents like the Russell Group’s Informed Choices open with statements like, “It’s not about ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ subjects, but the right ones” (2012, p. 1), the assumption of “right” subjects in and of itself does not eliminate the epistemological hierarchy by which tertiary education sets its priorities. While Informed Choices offers students practical guidance on how they should diversify their choice of examination subjects and secure a place in the British equivalent to the American Ivy League, the context that frames this advice invariably turns it into a fallacy that is trapped by its own tautologies. The fallacy is not found in what students are advised to do, but in the justification of the decisions that such universities take; which is where one finds a tautological argument stating that in order to avoid falling foul of such assumptions on knowledge one needs to reinforce the very same assumptions. Based on these assumptions, students are told to choose what is “right” for them, when in effect what is “right” is managed by the rules of the admissions game that they have to play. Furthermore, the designation of “core” subjects as having a higher intrinsic value (implying that other subjects gain their value by supporting the core subjects) legitimates itself on the basis of a knowledge economy that is seen to reinforce this hierarchy. At this stage what is “right” for the student stands for what she can exchange for her degree on the basis of what has already been chosen for her in the first place. Whichever way one looks at it, the hierarchy is inescapable. Be that as it may, transitioning and entering into tertiary education reinforces the distinction between “ease” and “complexity,” where the arts are deemed to belong to the former, whereas subjects like Further Maths belong to the latter category. While one can make a myriad of arguments on why certain disciplines retain a higher positioning in the hierarchy, this state of affairs is not distant from the Platonist slide rule on which mathematical thinking appears to be nearer to a prototypical world of forms (declared to be more conducive to the truth), whereas the arts go further down because of their mimetic (and therefore truth-distorting) nature. This also translates into an all too familiar argument where constructs of the sensible and the rational are pitted against each other. An almost immediate form of rebuttal—which is widespread in arts educational literature—reinforces this distinction by taking two strategies. First, it tries to gain legitimacy by arguing for art’s instrumental creativity, citing the scientific mind of a Leonardo da Vinci or the creative brain of an Albert Einstein. Then it reinforces the same dualism by appealing to constructs of the sensual that distort the critique of rationalism into a number of spiritual, heuristic or emotive attempts of counterlegitimation, often resorting to popularized “right–left” brain and an equally simplified use of neuro-scientific theories (see Pink 2006).

Art’s false “ease” 99

Tautologies, straw men, and “conflicting panaceas” Rather than try to justify the arts by effectively reinforcing some de rigueur epistemological hierarchy or the “latest” fad in the popularization of arts educational advocacy, there is a need to (i) engage with the questions that emerge from the dialectical relationship between form and meaning within the arts; and (ii) begin to discuss how this dialectic is often pacified (and distorted) by an assumed equivalence between the arts and education. A philosophical analysis of this relationship warrants a closer look at the fallacy of art’s “ease” starting from the arts and then moving to the pedagogical practices that ensue. What is here being identified as “art’s false ease” is a tautology that presumes the relationship between the arts and learning on a set of given assumptions which keep folding onto each other and which would likewise insist on an equivalence between implicit causes and desired effects. In this case, implicit causes constitute those externalized artistic attributes (such as creative, critical, intuitive and divergent forms of “thinking” and “making”) by which the arts are legitimized and instrumentalized. The desired effects are expected to amount to the relative value that an arts subject commands in a perceived relationship with the world in terms of use and function. Though this pairing might initially appear generic, one only needs to read through the ever-widening literature and documentation that frames arts education (in elementary and secondary schools) and the education of artists (in the higher education and college sector) within the sphere of the so-called “creative industries” to confirm how instrumentalism has now reached a point, which some would consider irreversible (see Baldacchino 2013). Instrumentalist expectations also tend to snap to an aesthetic and ethical grid that is invariably related to political-economic determinations, psychological stages of development, and sociological and epistemological typologies. As argued in the previous chapter, in the relationship between the arts and education these determinations tend to mistake artistic immanence with an implicit structure of values that are considered to be “essentially” true, good and beautiful. In educational theory this is evidenced by developmental and progressive theories of individual and social learning whose projections assume that through measure, accountability and strategic planning, the arts and education are bound to yield desired results. Inasmuch as these assumptions appear benign and rational, they are conservative because they leave no space except for the same values that are imposed on the arts; an imposition that presumes a set of aesthetic and ethical imperatives that would, in turn, require the arts to provide an experience that must be universally accessible and by implication, acceptable. This is where the arts are expected to interface with learning by a perceived “ease,” where, as a quasi-panacea for social and moral ills, artistic production is mandated to provide a ground for creativity in schools.

100 Art’s false “ease”

Colleagues from the arts and from education may well ask “Why would this state of affairs amount to a problem?” and “Why shouldn’t we simply accept this cycle as being integral to the relationship between the arts and learning, which after all, has secured a place for the arts in the curriculum?” I can hear someone saying that this is just setting up straw men to be burnt down for the sake of polemical delectation. One could understand why questioning these forms of legitimation might appear to create a problem where there seems to be none (hence the “straw man” charge). But to abdicate from questioning the assumptions by which arts education are being legitimized, would reinforce the tautology that avoids the paradoxical relationship between the arts and education. The issue remains wide open, in that there is not one assumption that is inherently right and by implication, another assumption that is somehow wrong by default. Just as one cannot find straw men to burn, here one finds no solace in Manichaeism. What is under discussion is found in the tautological argument on which the relationship between the arts and education is structured, justified, legitimized and ultimately used by those who always see the arts as mere instruments. More concretely, arts educational research finds itself in a situation that is characterized by what Horkheimer would call, “conflicting panaceas.” When Horkheimer speaks of conflicting panaceas he refers to the polemics that emerged between neo-metaphysics and positivism just after the Second World War, where one finds a cyclic argument that is similar to the one we are discussing: Only under ideally harmonious conditions could progressive historical changes be brought about by the authority of science. Positivists may be well aware of this fact, but they do not face the corollary that science has a relative function, determined by philosophical theory. The positivists are just as over-idealistic in their judgment of social practice as they are overrealistic in their contempt of theory. If theory is reduced to a mere instrument, all theoretical means of transcending reality become metaphysical nonsense. (Horkheimer 1974, p. 83, emphasis added) Educational theory is no stranger to positivism. However, I hasten to add that I am not suggesting an alternative set of panaceas. While one cannot dismiss the solid traditions—namely those of developmental psychology, the sociology of knowledge and (the almost forgotten) analytic philosophy of education— which, in the last four to five decades have gradually articulated education as a discipline, it does not follow that reassurance must be found elsewhere, as in some alternative theoretical trinity. There is no more reassurance in what could be deemed as a counter-narrative found in the forms of, say, a Foucauldian analysis that counters developmental psychology, or a critical pedagogy offered in response to the sociology of knowledge, or the reassertion of pragmatism by way of refuting an analytic philosophy of education. Even when Foucault, Freire and Dewey still attract a

Art’s false “ease” 101

considerable following in current educational discourse, to counter one tradition with another would only give the impression that somehow alternative discourses could provide the panacea that teachers and artists have been waiting for. As such, all panaceas must be rejected, just as the tiresome hagiographies invoked in the rituals of the naming and shaming of maladies such as neoliberalism, for which an assortment of cures is interminably recited in the manner of a self-proclaimed “organic intellectual,” a liberation pedagogue, shaman or some misconstrued “ignorant schoolmaster.” Apart from the unwelcome beatification of much-loved heretics like Gramsci, Freire, Foucault, Badiou, Zizek or Rancière (to name a notable few), such rituals only reinforce the conditions that so many ascetic, clench-fisted militants portend to critique—often to the consternation of the “masters” that they proclaim and adopt as their latter-day saints.

The “method” of the empty room Instead of engaging in quixotic battles over one presumed cure or another, I want to begin from the other end—that of art. The arts are already burdened by legions of theorists, practitioners and “praxialists” who have a habit of naming an assortment of maladies and cures which, more often than not, they end up reinforcing, whether intentionally or by accident. This approach is prompted by that longstanding assumption of the dialectical relationship between form and meaning, often articulated as form and content—though the term “content” does not help in this instance, as it reinforces the image of contents that are placed or “poured” into recipient forms analogous to Heidegger’s image of the jugness of the jug in his essay “The Thing” (Heidegger 2001). To approach the question from a discussion of form and meaning, I am suggesting an analogy, what I am calling the method of the empty room. This analogy attempts to explain how in ignoring the dialectical relatedness of form with meaning, the discussion of the arts and education is trapped between (i) a foundationalist nostalgia that presumes arts education from fixed aesthetic and ethical assumptions; and (ii) a constructivist approach whose enthusiasm and passion for the humanization of the world results in the same identitarian impasse that constructivists claim to resolve. The method of the empty room can be described as follows. One comes across an empty room. All there is to say about the room is that (i) it is a room; and (ii) it is empty. Yet the room’s emptiness somehow compels us to presume more than what it shows. Because the room is empty, we assume that beyond this appearance of emptiness there was a prior presence of human beings and objects. In which case one would have to argue that (iii) for this to be a room it has to be inhabited; and (iv) its emptiness is a temporary state, which prompts the notion of a presence that we have to make possible in our imagination.

102 Art’s false “ease”

Prima facie it seems that the emptiness of the room provides us with an opportunity to be “creative”—a bit like having a blank canvas that offers infinite possibilities for one to draw or paint on it. We therefore assume that someone or something must have inhabited the room, as otherwise this is not a room at all but just an empty space. In other words, we feel compelled to humanize the room, fill its emptiness with meaning, and make it ours—thus replicating the simplified assumption that humanization somehow always involves an intervention by which a human must occupy and take control of a state of affairs. What is interesting in this analogy is the method by which we approach emptiness, or to put it philosophically, how we fail to approach the multiple implications of negation. The empty room as a negative seems to imply that we have to make “amends” for it and make it “full” again. We make it “full” by either (i) being nostalgic and attribute the room’s emptiness to memory (as we do in the case of mourning a loved one, or with something that we have lost); or by (ii) adopting a constructivist approach (as we do in education) and change the negative into a positive space by putting human beings and their objects and meanings in it—that is, by imposing a human form of occupation (as we often do with an environment or what we perceive as a “natural” space). Let us look at the two approaches a bit more closely while contextualizing this analogy within the questions that I have raised vis-à-vis the relationship between the arts and education. In the first approach to the empty room, one cannot help recalling the assumption of memory and with it the concept of recollection (anamnesis). Here we would argue that an empty room must presume a prior state of “nonemptiness.” Even if we do not know for certain what this state was or looked like, we have to assume that there must have been people or objects in the room before it became “empty.” Otherwise this emptiness would make no sense for us because we tend to mechanistically assume that “to negate is to negate something.” Beyond the metaphysical aspects of the concept of negation, this brings to mind the notion of ignorance and how this is regarded as a state of handicap where we are supposed to know something but somehow, we remain ignorant of it. We must distinguish this meaning of ignorance from that used by Jacques Rancière (1991) who frames ignorance within a state of equality, meaning that as no one is omniscient, then we are bound to share what we do not know. Rancière’s position of equality also rejects an epistemology that presumes a form to be “empty” (qua “ignorant”) by dint of a former presence, as this would simply grace the state of ignorance with condescending terms such as “naïve,” “innocent” or even using dubious metaphors that liken this to a state of “virginity” and “purity.” The ancient notion of anamnesis poses this state of (“innocent” and “empty”) affairs in terms of the immortal soul being limited by a mortal body. More recent versions of anamnesis are explained through developmental approaches where it is assumed that the capacity for knowledge emerges incrementally

Art’s false “ease” 103

through growth and the activation and realization of inherent abilities, which we would have already mediated by assumed meanings that in effect are not yet present. Still, the basic argument for what I am here calling a nostalgic approach is that in describing a state of emptiness we find ourselves trapped by a foundational approach to knowledge as a state of affairs whose imperative must be somehow realized (indeed: occupied, taken over, owned), as otherwise we would remain ignorant and somehow bereft of such knowledge. This leads to the second approach, where one would constructively handle the notion of an empty room by owning its space and thereby inhabiting and “humanizing” it. A constructivist approach might claim that it would not need to explain absence and ignorance through a prior state of knowing which has been taken away historically, psychologically, politically, aesthetically etc. However, a constructivist approach would argue that the negative needs to be mended and ignorance needs to be rebutted by an acquisition of knowledge that is inclusive of the learner. Constructivism in education is often emphasized through learner-centred pedagogical methods. In this analogy we find that what is questionable is not the pedagogical techniques that are used, but the approach to negation and how notwithstanding its liberal, progressive and critical credentials, this approach remains as identitarian as that of nostalgia and recollection, as explained above. A closer look at these two approaches reveals how the method of the empty room mistakes negation for the first phase in the development of intrinsically redemptive and symmetric forms of thinking. Here the assumption of negation is tied to states of positivity that would necessarily have to precede or follow it. It leaves no real freedom for experimentation, and in terms of education, by claiming to provide a scaffold for learning, it simply assumes that learning takes place by means of a developmental imperative—where, by implication, what is not learnt, becomes an impediment to a presumed form of freedom. In this “learning imperative” one finds echoes of religious and ideological consciousness that describe a current state as being “imperfect,” “sinful” or trapped in “false consciousness.” This crisis presumes a lost state of perfection, grace or consciousness, to which we would need to return or regain through a course of reparation and progress. In both faith and ideology, the whole idea of a progressive history seems to imply that we can only go forward and that history is in itself a redeeming factor. Here learning becomes a mechanized form of accrual, where, though not exactly replicating that infamous “banking system of education” over which so many theories of hegemony have been adopted in educational theory, there is a subtler set of assumptions that privilege learning over education, in a manner where the logic of learning becomes transactionally accountable. (For a critique of this logic of learning see Biesta 2006, especially pp. 19ff.) This transactional-redemptive approach to negation does not allow us to engage with negation as a form of non-identity thinking or doing. Rather it reduces negation to that of a state that needs reparation, which educationally

104 Art’s false “ease”

speaking, needs a quick learning fix. In education this is markedly articulated when the arts are considered as either a form of palliative learning that is expected to make up for those missing parts of a curricular jigsaw puzzle, or as an occasion to counter the jigsaw’s rationale through externalized and measured forms of creativity that are no less transactional and come no less pre-packaged by the same logic of learning. It gets more difficult when one assumes that there must be a method by which one could make some reparation for the empty room—or indeed a state of “ignorance”—by presuming that one could or should be present “in” it. (In effect one is already present once he or she is in the empty room.) In other words, the assertion must be that a past or future presence is both possible and necessary. For this to make sense, it would be necessary to argue that this is possible because one would expect that a certain pattern of behaviour must take place. This would be akin to positing a statement or carving a “fact” out of a perceived need to “have it”—hence the tautological and nostalgic nature by which one simply equates a negative with a positive. While an expectation expresses an imperative or a desire to make a case for possibility, this would have to suggest that the circumstances must favour someone’s presence as a previously posited state of affairs. In other words, one would have to argue that an empty room necessitates someone’s presence or occupation and that any conception that takes place must be necessarily spatial and materially limited to the coordinates of such an assumed space. Put another way, for any argument about the room’s absent occupant to gain some sense or meaning we have to assume that someone must take physical responsibility for presence per se where he or she must vouch for having been, or for intending to be there at some point in time. In terms of a logic of learning, it becomes clear that here what is to be learnt is already preordained by the spatial requisites of the “empty room.” This analogy highlights how the relationship between the arts and education is often simplified and reframed within this kind of imaginary. Furthermore, it is not a new analogy. The idea of a room and the poetics that it represents always bring to mind philosophers like Gaston Bachelard (1992) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1989), whose concepts of space, situatedness and the spectacle are key notions in arts-based research—notions which stand to be distorted by the very same spatial narrative of the empty room and the logic of learning that ensues as a form of transactional reparation. The image of an empty room poses a degree of ambiguity on how we often confuse meaning with an assumed space of phenomena by which we are all too quick to sustain notions of origin or positing in the arts and education. This highlights the predominance of a spatial conceptualization that invariably creates a series of what could be called edificial narratives that are immediately walled in by their own presuppositions. In the logic of learning, the edifice becomes a fixed predisposition for what to teach and what is gained from education.

Art’s false “ease” 105

The presupposition of an edificial narrative and that of the logic of learning have a limiting effect on the notion of the dialectic itself, especially when it comes to the arts and education. Here a dialectical relationship becomes a smokescreen for a mechanism by which opposites are simply synthesized and thereby made “good” by the “truth” of their outcome. If a dialectical relationship is already predisposed to gain something by a measured space, then there is no real conflict and no place for paradox or contradiction. It is like a fixed game where the gambler is cheating by bribing the players to fix the outcome on which he is staking his money. In the case of the arts, this outcome is often expected to be good, true and beautiful. The logic is that whatever the arts may or may not do, even at the cost of scandalizing or disturbing the innocents or the ignorant, at the end of the day art must be an instrument for learning. Like a gambler who fixes the game, this logic of arts educational learning takes no real gamble with creativity because what appears to be innovative is already dealt with, scaffolded and bought through a transactional deal secured by policy makers and curriculum engineers.

Teaching the method of the empty form The only way to break this tautological approach to education is to deconstruct the spatial imaginary of learning as a transactional occupation and presumed “humanization” of an empty room. By using the analogy of the empty room, I am deliberately presenting a tautology that is not dissimilar to those by which our discussions of art and education almost always become cyclic and seem impossible to resolve. This “almost always” implies the conviction that one can make a case for something by making assumptions of a metaphysical necessity—including the logic of a “learning imperative.” We have already seen how within the tautological coordinates of the method of the empty room—which, like a fixed game, are limited to presumed assumptions over expected outcomes—the concept of negation is fudged and neutered. What is regarded as “negation” is always “mended” by past, present or future acts of positing. Here the dialectical relationship between form and meaning is neutralized. This neutralized relationship often plays another trick, by which it conjures itself as a semiotic game. In semiotic speak, form and meaning tend to operate on an incremental slide rule where, as Barthes argues, what was a sign in which signifier and signified correlate form with meaning, is transformed into an empty signifier (qua form) where the signified (the meaning) takes various possibilities. When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains. There is here a paradoxical permutation in the reading operations, an abnormal regression from meaning to form, from the linguistic sign to the mythical signifier. (Barthes 1973, p. 117)

106 Art’s false “ease”

Yet in the method of the empty room we do not have a semiotic relationship between form and meaning but an approach where meaning “fills” or presumes to “fill” a spatial form. It is also important to bear in mind that the assumption of a “form” as a vehicle is here reinforcing another fallacy by which space becomes preordained by what makes it, or indeed by the assumed perimeters that shape and present it. Within the context of arts pedagogy this opens up a number of possible approaches where teaching as an act of “filling” (or “occupying”) a form with possible meanings, begins to approach an eidetic method. In an eidetic method, presumed essences are produced and presented to accommodate possible outcomes. However, at some point one forgets that this method was not meant to be an exercise in essentialism, but an exercise of speculation that opens up new possibilities. By essentializing our methods, we assume that someone has already fixed the shape by which meaning is formed. By forfeiting the speculative character of our methods, we begin to assume that there is some implicitly given need to fulfil the shape by dint of some developmental, moral, pedagogical or aesthetic imperative. To think that emptiness implies that “form awaits meaning” is to move from a maybe to an ought. This ought would imply that someone has to teach this approach to arts thinking by the same logic of learning that an empty space is presumed. By arts thinking I do not mean thinking about the arts or engaging with art theory as a separate entity from practice. Rather arts thinking emerges from a studio-based environment where doing art implies a degree of practical and critical strategies. Pedagogically speaking, these strategies have to be defended within an environment of peers and audiences. In the arts the concept of theoria goes back to its original notion of thinking qua reflection/contemplation. However, theoria does not stop there, as it becomes a form of practice that within a studio setting becomes both phronesis (as a form of practiced thought) and praxis (as a form of critical practice). One can see how an educational approach based on the imperative of learning, assumed as a form of realizing an empty form or room, goes directly against the experimental and open-ended precepts of arts thinking. Furthermore, there grows an expectation that someone must assume this analogy in order to teach a method which is intended to help us make sense of it. We have to teach the method and the fable of the empty room because it is necessary for us to do so, while forgetting the reason for this assumed necessity. Here arts pedagogy assumes an ethical concern—indeed an ethical imperative—where, as in any moral construct, the fabular begins to take historical postures of truth. We now have two levels of teaching and thinking. The first is to assume that emptiness is only a sign of an absence or negation whose meaning is subservient to the need of a presence or an act of positing that must be learnt. This prompts an analogy of learning where an empty form would indicate a prior or future presence and meaning that must be occupied. Secondly it implies that we must learn to think and do form and meaning in a preordained way (presumed on the

Art’s false “ease” 107

essences that we have eidetically assumed, but then forgot the speculative nature of our own adopted methods). By forfeiting our speculative and experimental intentions we adopt a method of teaching that moves in the opposite direction—where teaching is a fixed construct based on the transactional assumptions of learning. When we come to think about the problem of arts pedagogy there are a number of valid reasons for a scenario that starts as an open-ended experiment and ends as a fixed form of didacticism. Teaching implies a discipline. The discipline is not simply a procedural ritual that moves from a to b—though in effect, many teachers would tell you how the incremental assumption of development is often posed by a formulaic take on scaffolds and sequences that reflect such an assumption. In this case, the main task is to teach the story of meaning by way of an empty form—which basically means that there is an outcome on which one can measure the process of learning. Clearly, in pedagogical terms the method of the empty form relies on a number of givens that could be categorized by terms such as conviction, authority and appearance. We begin with certainty, or rather the assumption that a state of affairs must be necessary by dint of assumed essences or prototypical forms. This has to do with a conviction by which it could be stated that an absent meaning is a fact. This conviction compounds the problem because the fact is often confused between meaning and its absence. (Where, in other words, a negative and a positive become the same thing and lose their dialectical relationship.) This may be clarified if we ask questions like: “What is the ‘fact’ of this situation? The meaning? The form? A presumed essence for art per se? Does this ‘fact’ belong to absence as a state that defines the form as empty? Or is it a matter of the absent meaning in se?” You can translate this in what appear to be “simple” questions posed in the classroom, the museum or an art studio—such as: “What does an art object mean to us?” “Is there an artistic intentionality and if there is such an intentionality where does it come from?” “What value do we give to specific marks, colours, shapes and compositional structures to a work?” “How does one achieve the ‘freedom’ to be creative?” “How do skills feature in the process of learning art?” “Does technique matter?” “Can we teach or learn art? If so, how? If not, why?” While these remain commonplace legitimate questions, the contexts of measuring (i) what students learn, and (ii) finding a discourse of accountability for what is being taught through such questions, often fall straight into the trap of the edificial discourse of learning. Be that as it may, such questions require an authority by which one argues in this manner and states the “facts” to which they are supposed to correspond. Again, this authority comes from teaching why and how one could assume that a meaning is “not present” (as a fact of “having to be present”) by simply deducing this from an empty form—and therefore having the authority and conviction to say so without needing anyone or anything to confirm that there should be meaning although somehow this meaning is not there yet. Thus the “facts” or

108 Art’s false “ease”

“answers” that correspond to the questions posed may take all manners, abstract as well as concrete, firm as well as speculative, dull or indeed creative. They could well take the form of absolute negation where the questions themselves are quickly trivialized by those who claim that they should not be posed. Whatever the questions and however posed, the appearance of an empty form (or better, how we approach the form and consider its spectacle as that which implies the necessity of our conviction and ways of thinking), would always prompt further questions, such as: “Can we judge situations by what they appear to be?” “Is the concept of an empty form enough to give us the authority to state that there is a meaning to it?” “How does one teach such an inference from the sensation of an empty form (or its analogy, the empty room)?” In the arts, those who are charged (or those who charge themselves) with teaching by the method of an empty form are not only obliged to determine the facts of a presence but are also expected to achieve this with a good degree of ease. This is because (we are told) in the arts these absent meanings are open to an infinite number of probabilities. To ask whether art can be taught or learnt in order to know or prescind it, is to affirm that the arts would have to exude their own “creative” imperative. Here the arts are declared as being germane to the intrinsic growth of human “nature.” It is also widely assumed that to refute this would be a retrograde step in the direction of academic didacticism—indeed a rejection of the edificial pedagogies bequeathed to us by modernism itself. In this modernist claim, which has shaped most, if not all current higher education provision for the arts, we have also found a legitimate reason by which art found itself being categorized as an intuitive—and therefore “creative” and “innovative”—act. To complement and complete this intuitive spectacle arts pedagogy had to fulfil the expectations of being “simple” and “easy,” so that art’s intuitive “nature” is fulfilled—and indeed humanized just as one humanizes the ambiguity of an empty room. In the context of arts pedagogy, it is assumed that necessity and authority would “organically” emerge from an immediate form of reasoning that would essentialize everything in intuitive and prototypical forms. On a few theoretical accounts this simplicity appears to have validity. As we know from Henri Bergson (1913), intuition implies a simple method because, as he argues in his Introduction to Metaphysics, through intuition we grasp the essence of the object in one instance. We also know from philosophers like Immanuel Kant (1974) and Benedetto Croce (1965) that intuition provides us with a wider conceptualization of reason and expression. Read in terms of the arts, this gains further meanings that may go beyond their philosophical origins and which cannot be dismissed because otherwise arts thinking would be split between theory and practice. As we cite Kant, Croce and Bergson, we must not forget that their modernist project portends the same rational constructs by which the method of the empty room distorts—because it simplifies—intuition (and subsequently, creativity) by eliminating the dialectical relationship between the arts and education. Based on

Art’s false “ease” 109

the ethical and aesthetic imperatives that characterize this method, the pedagogy that ensues from it invariably conditions art’s intuitive modus operandi even when such imperatives presume to support and construct a learner-centred environment and with it sustain the same logic of learning that we have critiqued earlier. This results in the neutralization of the dynamic relationship between form and meaning, producing instead a formulaic structure that requires the arts to externalize and objectify creativity and intuition into interested mechanisms of knowledge that are easily translated into outcomes and identifiable skill-sets by which the arts gain legitimation within the school and society.

A false “ease” I hope that by now it is clear that the analogy of the empty room is rejected on both an artistic as well as a pedagogical basis. This critique also prompts us to draw a distinction between (a) the spatial imaginary (here articulated as an edificial narrative) as portended by the analogy of an empty room, and (b) the semiological system by which form and meaning are often misread and confused with a dialectical relationship that is figured on spatial coordinates. We have also established that the fallacy of art’s pedagogical ease stands in stark contrast with the pragmatics of art’s speculative, divergent and paradoxical whereabouts. This contrast comes from the same constructivist educational misconception of the arts, which contends that to be creative is “easy” and within an egalitarian reach because ultimately, as an art-form, it comes across as an empty signifier; indeed an empty form which, like an empty room, implies that one could freely assign any meaning to form, as long as the pedagogical method remains learner-centred and fulfils the presumed expectations of a learning imperative. Art’s false ease is therefore a misrepresentation of art, where an art-form is conceptualized as an empty form which like an empty room supposedly provides a space where everything seems to happen at will. This image of a speculative method of thinking and learning quickly dissolves as it becomes clear that its supposed randomness actually conceals a method grounded in a formulaic approach to learning as a form of pre-formed creative growth. One could see how this fallacy is propagated by an externalization of art’s intuitive attributes, as they become effective instruments of moral, aesthetic and educational imperatives. Interestingly, it does not matter whether these imperatives are progressive or conservative because as imperatives they are already given, even when the pedagogies in question are supposedly learnercentred or purportedly “open.” Art’s false ease is thereby confused with statements that art (and by implication, art education) is open-ended, following the modernist categorization of art as being intuitive and thereby accommodating it by means of a dedicatedly safe space within the domains of a rationalized state of affairs. Clearly, within this dedicated intuitive space, art can never be or do everything. It would be

110 Art’s false “ease”

apt to remark that because art is not everything, we must always bear in mind that art is neither equivalent to, nor is it a form of education, even when many seem to be all too willing to perpetuate such confusion. As we have seen in Chapter 2, when Croce (1994) states that art is anything that everyone knows it to be, “l’arte è ciò che tutti sanno che cosa sia,” he then moves to define aesthetic expression as being form and nothing but form. In other words, he states that we have to define art not by going for definite parameters, but by first going through what art is not and then pin down what it could be (see Baldacchino 2012, pp. 81ff). This however does not mean that we positively assume that there is a given definition of art somewhere in the ether, or that we already have a positive concept of art that is foundationally implanted in us—though Croce is often misinterpreted in such ways because he is read from a modernist lens. Not unlike Dewey, Croce looks at art and intuition pragmatically where, like spirit and intelligence, art and intuition are historically understood (see Dewey 1997 and 2005). Here, I would reserve my judgement, because I would argue that notwithstanding their open-ended positions, Dewey and Croce remain beholden to the very modernist parameters by which they locate experimentation and by how they accommodate it within the same framework of a rationalized state of affairs. If anything, this confirms how notwithstanding their philosophical anticipations, just like everyone else, they remained historically positioned. The arguments that sustain art’s false ease in education are familiar. It is often assumed that in art education nothing can go wrong as long as the language, method and the discipline retain a certain kind of epistemological consistency. This consistency is said to be key to the intuitive process, which in terms of schooling finds legitimacy within the curriculum. In this way a moral order is added, reassuring us that nothing can “go wrong” because these facts rest on the ought and the possibility of aesthetic experience. If something or a meaning should and must be possible, then we should have no qualms to teach the arts as creative signifiers of these meanings by any method that is effective, because this remains consistent. This is all aesthetically justified by the assumption that by dint of its received epistemological consistency and because of its moral imperatives, art’s pedagogical horizon can only facilitate a set of skills that would ultimately initiate a process that “looks beautiful” or “has meaning” so that art could “please others” or “do good to others.” It is also commonly assumed that anything in art education can be made “right” by an essentialist process that is mistaken for a form of schooled intuition, and which is justified as a form of learner-centred activity—hence my earlier reference to a forgotten eidetic method that is never resolved because its speculative origin has been forfeited. This is where art’s false ease comes back to haunt us. When we think that art is an empty signifier, an empty form, it turns out that this argument acts like a Trojan horse. When the argument seems to go on to state that art is an empty

Art’s false “ease” 111

signifier, what is really meant is that art’s “previous” state was that of being a sign where form and meaning seemed to be one with all its parts adding up. As is commonly assumed, a sign needs to be fixed by an identity between signified and signifier. In other words, a sign is made up of a meaning and a form that are mutually synchronized. This suggests a totality that presumes an aesthetic ethic that is simple (understood in a Bergsonian way) and therefore free and intelligible. Here we begin to realize that a semiotic explanation is insufficient in terms of elucidating the relationship between art and education as some parallel structure of signifier (art) and signified (learning). Likewise, to claim that within an arts educational context, meaning and form are creative and intuitive would amount to anything and therefore nothing. In the context of a (constructivist) learning imperative, such explanations reveal a degree of manipulation, especially when creation and intuition are considered as ethical and aesthetical oughts. They are taught through methods that claim to be free and intelligent, but which turn out to be as hegemonic and closed as their didactic counterparts. To claim that art signifies an intuitive form of free and intelligent thinking sounds right. However, this does not eliminate the questions that remain over the structuralist framework that is imposed on this supposedly open-ended activity. History reveals how this open-endedness often becomes an expedient instrument of oppression and death—starting with totalist assumptions played on the Inquisition’s Baroque splendour, to the orientalist aesthetic of empire, and ultimately articulating the deadly “genius” of performative power as played out in fascist representation (see Rose 1997; Baldacchino 2012). Form is often misinterpreted as an empty entity or as a state that awaits meaning, just like an empty room expecting fulfilment by dint of a presence that some would tell us it once had. Much of the criticism levelled at Croce’s theory of form comes from a misrepresentation of his use of the word “form,” which some would translate as a signifier in a state of emptiness. When an empty form is represented as a sign, its parts are expected to add up and its meaning is meant to reassure those artist-educators who find themselves seeking certainty in order to define art as something other than itself. Yet this fixedness is deceptive because as Barthes (1973, p. 117) reminds his readers, “[t]he signifier of myth presents itself in an ambiguous way: it is at the same time meaning and form, full on one side and empty on the other.” Attempts to identify form with meaning as a complete sign might seem benign enough in terms of gaining legitimacy within the school and society. This end is often confused with its adopted means. To claim that art is a sign is to present half a story. The other part of the story is that to speak of art—or indeed to “speak art”—implies a “language” located at a further level of signification: that of the language of myth. To explain arts education semiotically would necessitate a non-identitarian approach to negation (which, as we have seen, is not possible within the analogy of the empty room and its learning imperatives). Such an approach to

112 Art’s false “ease”

negation would start from the dialectical relationship between form and meaning revealed by semiotics. But semiotics cannot provide a full picture and at some point, it becomes insufficient. This would confirm the aporetic nature of arts education where production (qua making) and autonomy (qua freedom) continuously contradict each other within art’s language of myth, and by which the paradox that sustains them as artistic categories is retained. To take a semiotic point of departure for the arts in education would also confirm that at this level of signification (where form and meaning do not add up as a sign) ambiguity becomes the hallmark of a pedagogical horizon that remains problematic.

A problematic pedagogy The main objection to the presentation of the arts in education as empty forms—i.e. as enablers of other subjects that are positioned higher up in the school’s epistemological hierarchy—is intended to sustain a radical critique of the school’s externalization of art’s intuitive qualities and the formulaic articulation of creativity as a distributive skill. The feeling that the arts are distributed in forms of division of labour within the creative industries is neither unfounded nor a remnant of some latter-day Marxism. More to the point this is the rational outcome of the modernist assumption that makes use of art’s aporetic qualities by domesticating “the arts” into deliverable outcomes that are labelled intuitive, creative and innovative. This is where art’s multiple disciplines also fulfil their designated role within the distribution of labour, its production of outcomes and the controlled way by which artistic output is then consumed. The sense of a helpless dilemma is felt at the moment when the arts enter the educational realm. Though one cannot ignore the plural specificities that characterize the arts, the development of these ever-growing disciplines cannot be simply discarded and re-written for the sake of discipline-based convenience or a productivist aesthetic that fulfils the need of the market’s forms of cultural consumption—even when these disciplines are taught in the most liberal and learner-centred manner possible. When art is schooled, there is something that does not tally. A major argument against the separation of distinct areas that would house a number of self-referential disciplines emerges from the specificities by which, outside the school, the arts have reinforced their plurality through an emerging hybridity between their practices. While holding onto the hybrid and plural grounds of art’s practices, we come to arts pedagogy per se. Here many arts educators would concur that the arts reveal an inherently problematic pedagogy. This is where agreement stops and a divergence of positions begins. One commonplace position proposes to solve this misplaced “problem” by arguing that art’s educational problem rests with the process by which its linguistic, disciplinary and methodological grounds have to gain the credentials that are dictated by the school and academia.

Art’s false “ease” 113

The logical (and indeed modernist) reply has always been that the arts, in their divergent nature, are linguistically special, methodologically different and thereby integral in terms of their disciplinary uniqueness. This all sounds benign and true. Yet not unlike the assumptions made about art as an empty signifier, this all-too-easy reply remains a non-answer. The consequence of this assumption becomes even more acute when arts practitioners, cultural strategists and arts educators prime the ground for (a) a concurrence with the hegemonic language of the school and academia that propels the arts into a scenario of productivity and consumption; (b) a complete subscription to a functionalist social scientific method that dominates educational research as this is deemed to fulfil professional, practice-based and vocational fields; and (c) a disciplinary reification which attunes to the self-fulfilling prophecy of disciplinary compartmentalization by which the arts are marketed as venues for “specialisation,” “competence,” “accountability,” “efficiency” etc. This begins to indicate where the problem of language, method and discipline is located vis-à-vis the arts in education. As one embarks on teaching the arts it becomes clear that any relationship between the fallacy of art’s ease and an ensuing problematic pedagogy cannot be addressed by means of linguistic, semiotic, methodological or disciplinary assumptions alone. In fact, the problem is essentially political. In other words, it has to do with the location and arrangement of the different elements that position the arts and their pedagogical parameters within a structure that is effective enough to initiate change. As arts educational strategists continue to see no harm in sharing the same languages that fuel epistemological hierarchies on the premise of a calculated sociology of knowledge that is never ideologically neutral or philosophically benign, the impotence of the arts is reinforced from within and outside education. As argued in Chapter 2, this is sustained by the quick assumptions that art educators make over the need for identifiably legitimized methods of research and teaching, revealing an essentialist belief in the identity politics of disciplines.

Beyond edificial narratives To recap the main thrust of this chapter: the analogy (or method) of an empty room (or form) confirms that in arts education, negation is often confused with symmetric mind-sets that proscribe any pedagogical engagement with negation as a form of non-identity thinking or doing. This is because in an educational setup, negation is mistaken for a state of incompletion that awaits fulfilment through the arts as aesthetical and ethical instruments. The main problem with this approach is that negation—and with it, the dialectical relationship between form and meaning—remains spatially articulated. This reduces arts education to a cycle of edificial narratives that are secured by being walled in their own presuppositions and expectations; hence the tautological nature of a cycle that is conditioned by a learning imperative.

114 Art’s false “ease”

This would further reinforce those cyclic dualisms that move between inside and outside, subject and object, mind and body, content and form, which arts educators continuously resist by their liberal and (or) critical pedagogical stances. In addition to the dilemma that emerges between the critical intentions of arts educators and the tautologies by which the arts are instrumentalized, there emerge two levels of teaching and thinking. The first assumes negation as emptiness (qua absence) in need of fulfilment (and positing). The second preordains learning, thinking and doing by aesthetic and ethical givens that are eidetically assumed but which forfeit the speculative origin of their own methods. This eidetic construction claims to go back to the presumed “essence” of this state of affairs, without making any distinction between (a) the methods of exploratory speculation that should be understood as temporary and which gave its origins in the first place; and (b) a formulaic ordering that becomes entrenched in a schooled system. In the school’s eidetic ordering, the arts are constructed on prototypical and essentialist notions of creativity. These are legitimized by assumptions, such as those found in the CBI’s report (2012), that expect the arts to enable other subjects in the curriculum or within the “creative industries.” This takes the form of a simplistic mechanism of signification and subsequently moulds a series of pedagogical constructs that reinforce arts education by the fallacy that here we are calling “art’s false ‘ease’.” This false ease misconstrues art and education in the same way the method of the empty room misrepresents the dialectical relationship between form and meaning as a semiotic construct. This also leaves us with a problem that operates on political, philosophical and pedagogical-aesthetic levels. At a political level any critique of the pedagogical context is neutered by an edificial perception of the arts and learning where they are meant to synthesize inherent antagonisms. This means that communities of students and artists are expected to share the same edificial narrative as the members of a polis that is fashioned by a walled imaginary. At a philosophical level, this plunges arts education into a tautological conundrum, which leaves no real possibility beyond a philosophical model that is limited to a spatial conceptualisation of a resolved sense of art thinking, making and doing. In the walled imaginary of an edificial outlook the arts cannot sustain negation as a perpetual state of doing. Neither could we think (of) art as other than thinking the world as an order of extensions with edifices that keep everything in its place—including the safe places of intuition, creativity and innovation. In this respect, the arts may not be able to poeticise (and thereby make) the world beyond what they are expected to do and be. As we attempt to approach the arts from the vantage point of pedagogical aesthetics, the arts in education are found to be estranged from a possible state of autonomy. In their schooled state, and as “easy” enablers, the arts lose any claim (or ability) to resist, reject, critique or indeed unlearn what learners are presumed to have been taught.

Art’s false “ease” 115

Back to the aporia of exile or death It would be easy to suggest that on all accounts concerning the political, philosophical and pedagogical spheres, one could already tap into the wealth of critical pedagogy as well as progressive and liberal educational theories, which in their different ways, may have come to similar conclusions. If, by a political disposition one nurtures a Gramscian instinct, he or she would quickly sum up a situation where ease is to consent what art is to coercion, and where forms of power would need to be excavated from the terrain of a formative hegemony such as the school. Likewise, from the notion of a walled polis, a pragmatist would discern a state of affairs where education not only loses its ability to democratize knowledge, but where the experiential potential of an aesthetic disposition is clearly proscribed. By the same implication, readers could legitimately ask why here I am not citing and calling to account what these traditions have to offer. The reason for threading between (or even keeping a distance from) critical pedagogy and liberal-progressive theories of education must not be read as a critique of these approaches to education and the arts. Here we have a case that lies beyond any critical, constructivist or pragmatist solution. This is because the idea of a “solution” per se puts arts education in the same aporia that Socrates faced when he had to choose between exile and death. When Socrates was condemned as being a “corrupter of the youth,” he was given two choices: death or exile. We are told that he chose death over exile because for him the polis remained sacrosanct in that it represented a ground for reason. But as we know from the Platonic rendition of the Socratic dialogue, this ground for reason rests on the existence of a foundational system of knowledge that is ideal and therefore eternal, and towards which the death of the mortal body would lead to its union with the immortal soul. Yet here the question has nothing to do with the soul as a way out of the predicament of a closed polis. Rather it asks why we have to think of a polis in terms of the walls that enclose a political community and the grounds on which this community is meant to be together. In the first place, pedagogical aesthetics cannot be limited to the notion of the arts and education as means of inclusion or exclusion. I would suggest that within the political sphere, pedagogical aesthetics (which I would distinguish from arts pedagogy) must provide a way of doing away with the walls by reclaiming the grounds-turned-horizons of the arts. This is because beyond the notion of a community that is walled and included in its space, it is possible to conceive the polis as a community that lies outside the notions of a closed edifice made by the same community. The way to conceive this comes directly from our ways of doing art in terms of the paradoxical nature that the arts could afford us—which also explains why we must sustain, rather than seek to mend, the paradoxical relationship between form and meaning, as well as the arts and education.

116 Art’s false “ease”

This shifts our attention away from a choice between exile and death, to approach education from a pedagogical-aesthetic position where the tautological ways of doing the arts in education are unlearnt, and where ways of exiting the cycle are found in thinking and acting outside the edificial narrative of an empty form that awaits meaning. At this stage we need to bear in mind that unlearning is a form of thinking, doing and making that moves away from the edificial narratives that have trapped art by a pedagogy that is predicated on a false ease. This means that we must think of art and education as autonomous dispositions towards a political and philosophical engagement by which we could exit the conceptualisation of learning as a walled and predictable polis. This begins to shift our notion of art and education away from that of a process or problem of learning, and instead think of it as a continuous horizon of arguing—as an agôn without confines that incites the creation of horizons which undo the limits of predilection, and more so, which do not wager themselves on the fantasy of redemption.

REFERENCES Bachelard, G. 1992. The poetics of space. New York: Beacon Press. Baldacchino, J. 2012. Art’s way out. Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Baldacchino, J. 2013. What creative industries? Instrumentalism, autonomy and the education of artists. International Journal of Education through Art, 9(3), 343–356. Barthes, R. 1973. Mythologies. A. Lavers (trans.). London: Paladin. BBC. 2011. Top universities warn against “soft subjects”. 4 February. Available at: www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12365050. Accessed 1 December 2012. Bergson, H. 1913. An introduction to metaphysics. London: Macmillan. Biesta, G.J.J. 2006. Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. CBI. 2012. First steps: A new approach for our schools. Available at: www.cbi.org.uk/index. cfm/_api/render/file/?method=inline&fileID=2138B72B-84FF-4FD7-9AFFC01 BED033137 Accessed 27 April 2018. Croce, B. 1965. Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. [Aesthetics as a science of expression and general linguistics] Bari, IT: Laterza. Croce, B. 1994. Breviario di estetica: Aesthetica in nuce. [Handbook of aesthetics. Aesthetics in a nutshell] Milano, IT: Adelphi. Dewey, J. 1997. Experience and education. New York: Touchstone. Dewey, J. 2005. Art as experience. New York: Penguin/Perigee. Fazackerley, A. & Chant, A. (2008). The hard truth about ‘soft’ subjects. Improving transparency about the implications of A-level subject choice. Policy Exchange Research Note. Available at: www.policyexchange.org.uk/images/publications/the% 20hard%20truth%20about%20soft%20subjects%20-%20dec%2008. pdf. Accessed 1 December 2012. Heidegger, M. 2001. The thing. In: Poetry, language, thought. A. Hofstadter (trans.). New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, pp. 161–184. Horkheimer, M. 1974. Eclipse of reason. New York: Continuum.

Art’s false “ease” 117 Kant, I. 1974. Critique of judgement. J.H. Bernard (trans.). New York: Hafner Press, Collier-Macmillan Publishers. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1989. Phenomenology of perception. C. Smith (trans). London: Routledge. Pink, D.H. 2006. A whole new mind: Why right-brainers will rule the future. New York: Riverhead Trade. Rancière, J. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in intellectual emancipation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rose, G. 1997. Mourning becomes the law: Philosophy and representation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Russell Group. 2012. Informed choices: A Russell Group Guide to making decisions about post-16 education. Available at: www.russellgroup.ac.uk/media/inform ed-choices/InformedChoices-latest.pdf.

Chapter 7

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

The approaches taken on the whys and wherefores of a convergence between art and education remain contingent on what Nietzsche calls the will to concern oneself with “dangerous perhapses!” as we “await the arrival of a new species of philosopher, one which possesses tastes and inclinations opposite to and different from those of its predecessors—philosophers of the dangerous ‘perhaps’ in every sense” (Nietzsche 2003, §2, p. 34). In its contingency, the perhapses of art and education’s relationship are implicit and explicit in equal measure in that it reflects a sequence of dispositions that are externalized as habits by which we often project a sense of identity and legitimation on how we regard the arts and where we locate them pedagogically (see Dewey 2008). Dispositions and habits could be said to emerge from where we stand, who we are, and how we think and practice the relationship between art and education; a relationship that is not clear and less so predictable. Yet there remains a context by which this relationship is often invested a priori, where more often than not, art and education converge on a transactional horizon where an exchange comes to presume a cultural consensus that is often regarded as intrinsically good, beautiful and somehow true. Here it will be argued that this presumption of consensus often comes at a high price, where both art and education’s separate immanence and the dialectical position they hold in their respective spheres are seriously distorted by the same transactional conditions that schools them.

Two forms of immanence To start with, one needs to locate where and what constitutes the agency of the art educational transaction. The centrist view that customarily appears to be liberal and social democratic gets to the point of art education by asserting this agency within the identification of social and individual needs as measured against what society and the individual could contribute to the ever-changing constructs of the economy and the polity. The critical approach, which is somewhat on the left of the liberal and social democratic centre, would extend

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy 119

this state of affairs to a form of emancipation through the arts where art and education seem to provide forms of critical growth and social empowerment. While both the left and centre appear to articulate the convergence of art with education as a critical–pragmatic opening of possibilities, in and of itself, the identification of a benefit or need does not guarantee that we capture the agency by which art and education are exchanged or even made to work together. As we have to ask why and how we choose to go along with such instances of convergence, we must also find out the real nature of the agency that brings about this relationship. To start with, is this a matter for artists, educators, both, or someone else—such as the democratic right to engage with the arts and to have an education, or indeed the interests, vested or otherwise, by which the market is said to be driven? As argued in this book, these questions continue to challenge our expectations in a variety of ways and circumstances. At the same time, the sense by which we put across the arts and education, together or separately, invariably moves beyond the beliefs held by those who see this relationship as a necessary practice found in institutions such as schools or museums, while somehow claiming that such venues need to retain a place for equality, freedom and democracy. There is a danger that in the haste to assume a democratic and emancipatory horizon for the arts in education, art’s immanence is lost by the fact that education is confronted by a degree of unfreedom when in its claims for emancipation it gets entangled by the conditions therein. One needs to be careful not to close the possibility that in art education the agency of convergence resides in what is immanent within art and education in their distinct and specific dimensions, and not in what they could bring to each other for the sake of what appears to remain true and good. This raises the immediate question as to whether art and education would implicitly inform each other, or whether any possible convergence would need clear mediational mechanisms that could be identified with structures like the school, religion, the state or anything that deems the arts as being pedagogical, institutional, instrumental and therefore political. This prompts at least two takes on immanence as it is played out in the relationship between art and education. The first invests immanence in the relationship itself. This means that its value and measure of function (as a transactional form of convergence) is intrinsic to the relationship between the two, and not from one being the expression of the other. The second instance would locate immanence in the separate dimensions of art and education. This would need to pay attention to both art and education in terms of what they are (their being) and their ways of doing (what they make and therefore make known). While it could be inferred that any separation between art and education remains historical inasmuch as their relationship remains openly instrumental (and therefore inevitably manufactured by the varying consents and interests that lie beyond their respective spheres) a case for mutual immanence—located

120 The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

in the separate dimensions of art and education—stands opposed to an immanence attributed to their manufactured and consented relationship. In the latter case, by externalizing art and education’s function, the polity mandates a relationship that leads to the inevitable reduction of their dimensions into measured values by which they are then assessed. On the other hand, the former context presents a relationship which predicates an identification and empowerment of art and education in their autonomous dimension—meaning that in their relationship, art and education would have to find ways to conform to, as well as oppose, each other dialectically. One hopes that by now, readers would concur with the argument that educators and artists must resist any quick assumption that regards art education as a koiné that comes naturally. If there is anything natural about art education, it is found in the haphazard and thereby self-elective ways by which anything assumed to be artistic or educative is marked by chance, a continuous struggle to find and make, and an unbroken string of contradictions and aporias.

The ventriloquist’s act While the nature of the relationship between art and education (which is what makes art education an identifiable discipline), is of primary concern, this cannot be established unless one locates its agency—i.e. what brings art and education together. It is easy to argue that agency and immanence inform each other. However, this quick conflation fails to recognize the agency that makes of art education a commonplace koiné. This confusion comes from a lack of attention to the performative values by which an agency is expediently confused with immanence. In terms of the performative expectations, by which knowledge is often externalized into a measured outcome (see Lyotard 1989), agency is easily distorted by an external voice whose deception is akin to a ventriloquist’s act. This voice imposes a form of action that appears immanent in form (as it plays the part of art education—the dummy) though it remains entirely extrinsic in its content and intent (as it serves the external needs of those who sponsor the transaction—the ventriloquist). Here I am drawing an analogy from the ventriloquist and the dummy because I would argue that the convergence of art with education often betrays a false hermeneutic which conceals a deliberate strategy of a voice posing as a form of agency. Being neither artistic nor educational, this strategy is political. It fulfils the prerequisites of instrumental reason, which, Horkheimer identifies with “the selfsurrender by reason of its status as a spiritual substance” leading to “the socially conditioned tendency towards neo-Positivism or the instrumentalization of thought, as well as the vain effort to rescue thought from this fate” (2012, viii). When we speak of instrumental reason, we are not simply assuming a hegemonic mechanism that betrays the presumed consent of common sense. Rather, instrumental reason presents itself as commonsensical. Here it appears to pertain to the logic of attainment, which in the process of gaining results, seeks to neuter the dialectic that characterizes the dimensions by which art and

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy 121

education express their singular immanence. This appeal to “common” sense— often backed up by unquestioned assumptions of art’s presence in schools as a tool for growth—clearly demonstrates how instrumental reason seeks legitimation for art education as a means to an end. Back to the ventriloquist analogy, to neuter the dialectic one must first eliminate the other: posing the fallacy of another voice that is effectively the same is one way of doing this. One could conceal the other by convincing him or her that one is being given a voice, while in effect one is exerting power upon the other by putting words in his or her mouth. As a false representation of otherness this is a fabricated hermeneutic that (a) precludes the difference and alterity that are intrinsic to art and education, and (b) creates a false sense of equivalence between such dimensions with the specific intent to eradicate the dialectical nature that sustains the separate specificities from where art and education emerge as autonomous dimensions. Through art education, instrumental reason could assume ventriloquism as a mechanism where the contexts by which we pose or locate art and education’s autonomous identities (as what they are) and functions (as what they do) become compromised by how the ventriloquist’s voice serves as an agent of both. This false appearance of difference (with an appearance of two separate personae—the dummy and the actor—that are effectively the same) results in the effective elimination of the paradox that characterizes how art and education emerge together in their incommensurate and incongruent dimensions. More so this fallacy goes on to proscribe the intrinsic dialectic by which art and education could relate to each other. Instead, here the ventriloquist’s voice presents art education as a koiné of settled convergence, as a coherent state of affairs (where dummy and actor are a mere spectacle) which is singularly and permanently synthesized. However, this is symptomatic of a prosthetic synthesis that proscribes any further dialectical possibilities (see Baldacchino 2015). More so, it leaves us with art education as a unified discipline that causes art and education to self-surrender the original immanence that gives them autonomy.

Who is “speaking”? However, there is a further dimension to this state of affairs, which equally requires recognition and attention, as it is one of the few possibilities by which art education can move out of its instrumental predicament. By suggesting that the ventriloquist’s voice is foisted on art education, it does not simply mean that neither artist nor educator have any more voices left. In fact, the possibility of other voices is infinite. To use Garoian’s (2013) notion of prosthesis, within the dialectic by which we converse about and reinvent art education, further loops emerge. Garoian talks about a fourth loop in the dialectical process, where the chain of contradictions are extended by artistic and pedagogical possibilities that would offer a further paradoxical iteration. This is a mechanism which I regard as remedying the dilemma of a final word, or

122 The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

indeed a halt in the dialectic itself. As I engage with Garoian’s concept (see Baldacchino 2015), I propose that there could be no permanent synthesis of argument that closes the art educational conversation. Rather, like Garoian, I see art education as the embodiment of possibilities; a continuous evolution that emerges from contradictions, conversations, and experimentation. Often the question revolves around whether the artist’s or the educator’s voice would act to the detriment of the dialectical relationship that art education comes to represent at the point of its convergence. This raises at least three scenarios of ventriloquism. In the first place the ventriloquist is external to artists and educators alike. Here, ventriloquism is an attempt to instrumentalize art education for specific means to measured ends. As we have seen in previous chapters, this forms part of the larger instrumental context by which reason and knowledge are being assumed as quantifiable means towards an end. Secondly the artist becomes a ventriloquist where, rather than articulate art’s immanence, he or she seeks to impose art’s ways of doing on the pedagogical sphere. I would argue that this form of ventriloquism not only fails to understand and bear art’s formative possibilities, but it impairs art’s own pedagogical immanence by reducing its gnoseological values into mere epistemological hierarchies. The distinction between gnoseology and epistemology returns to how art relates to truth. Intrinsic to being, knowledge belongs to the truth of art as a gnoseology, as a philosophy of knowledge; while epistemologically speaking, the knowledge of art belongs to an extrinsic discipline, or an epistemological structure by which it seeks validity and value against other disciplines. This distinction implies a further context: when we speak of art’s pedagogical immanence we also touch on how art’s philosophy of knowing (as gnoseology) relates to truth as a claim for freedom. A third form of ventriloquism occurs when educationalists view the arts as instruments of learning in a context where art’s immanence is neither afforded its specificity nor considered in its autonomy, thereby externalising art into an educational means to a political end. Here art’s place is located on an epistemological structure where it is seen as a form of knowledge whose claim for freedom is externally conditioned. As one begins to look closer at what these three forms of ventriloquism could mean and where they would leave art education as a dialectic, two basal questions emerge: As educators, what do we want the arts to say, do, or be? As artists, what do we want education to say, do, or be? Slightly reworded, we can pose these questions as: “Who is ‘speaking’ when education ‘speaks’? Who is ‘speaking’ when art ‘speaks’?” Speech must be regarded as an attempt to converse by dint of a presumed convergence. However, we know that “speaking” in art and education is only one way of conversing. There are many other ways of conversing without ever aiming to reach agreement or settling a dispute. This open-endedness is cue to other forms of engagement by which “speech” is a continuous assertion of

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy 123

positioning; knowing very well that what is sought is not ending the conversation but recognising and valuing difference. In this way the analogy of speaking retains its relevance by means of a shift in its intent and import. By its intent, one continues to speak. By import, we begin to identify the immanent spheres of art and education where speaking does not have an outside. While this might not make much sense beyond the spheres of art and education, when we teach art, the concept and practice of speech have to widen and take on meanings that they never had while unlearning others which are assumed in common parlance. More importantly, speech widens because teaching art implies being thrown into the being of art, where gnoseologically speaking art as knowing is begotten and never made, because neither narration nor explanation would teach us what art is. Being thrown implies an immersion by which we are often led to believe that this resolves the dispute in which a dialectical relationship is sustained. However here the point of being thrown—or indeed thrownness per se—raises a number of questions: In what and with whom are we immersed? Is this an immersion into knowing, meaning, doing, learning, unlearning …? In other words, what does this immersion really imply? Just as a ventriloquist speaks with the mouth of a dummy to make us believe that he is having a dialogue with someone else when in effect he is speaking to himself, could we argue that we are doing something similar with art and education? In view of the three scenarios mentioned above, this could mean that ventriloquism, far from being just a form of manipulation, represents an immersion in meaning through a conversation that remains indirect. This raises a fourth scenario for ventriloquism. In the other three scenarios there is a situation which one could identify with the ossification of synthesis and where the ventriloquist’s act becomes a prosthetic synthesis that has nothing further to offer because it forecloses the dialectic between art and education. However, in a fourth scenario, we have the possibility of what I call a synthetic prosthesis (Baldacchino 2015)—a concept that I develop in response to Garoian’s dynamic notion of art’s prosthetic pedagogy (see Garoian 2013). In this case, the ventriloquist’s voice begins to mediate this synthetic prosthesis as an open-endedness by which art education speaks indirectly, and where the chain of contradictions is re-opened—and in turn left open—to further paradoxical possibilities.

Speaking with whom? While there is a serious issue with how a ventriloquist immersion in art’s relationship with education directly affects the immanence of art and education— whether separately or in conjunction—the indirectness of a ventriloquist’s “conversation” also raises some very interesting questions about agency in this very relationship, especially in terms of practical pedagogical issues.

124 The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

One wonders whether the practices of art and education are actually speaking to each other or to themselves. Likewise, one could ask whether art and education are forced to be each other’s puppets or whether one takes control of the other. This opens the possibility for the analogy of the ventriloquist to be used as a way of critiquing and thereby problematizing the mechanistic approach to art pedagogy. One possibility by which the ventriloquist analogy could be turned on its head and regarded (as well as used) as one which benefits the relationship between art and education, has to do with the intent and agency of speaking per se, and how in terms of art—and more so art teaching— this dialogue could potentially take a character of indirectness by which art education is somehow deconstructed. This pertains to the question of knowledge and to how art as a form of knowing (rather than a form of knowledge) comes closest to a gnoseological approach. This articulation of art education as a possible gnoseology might need some adjustments in terms of how we are used to and expected to perceive art education, both in how it is schooled and how it is taught. The difference is very evident in how an approach to art education from within the immanence of its relationship would intrinsically reject the restrictions of an epistemological structure, such as those found in contexts where knowledge becomes a curriculum. From a gnoseological perspective, when we speak of art education, more than a matter of control we must continuously return to how, as a form of knowing, it pertains to the truth of teaching and that of art. More often than not, as teachers and artists we are challenged by questions over what pushes and controls what: Is the dummy an artistic or an educational performance? It seems to me that such a question falls back on an instrumental assumption that renders ventriloquism to mere manipulation. One could see how a different approach to the question would alter the stance from which we would then regard art’s own pedagogical immanence. This altered position would pose questions like: “Could we really separate art from education or should we even try to separate them once their ventriloquized voice begins to open up the possibility of indirectness and within it the possibilities of an indirect pedagogy?” As Herner Saeverot succinctly put it, an indirect pedagogy is “a form of existential education rather than a locked method.” He goes on to explain that an indirect pedagogy “is opposed to the pedagogic language used by the kind of teacher who likes to explain things, including how to exist as a human” (Saeverot 2013, p. ix). More so, Saeverot goes on to show how this indirectness takes several forms, some of which pertain to spheres and practices that would be deemed as problematic by liberal and social constructivists, such as elements of seduction and deception. While teachers “must not reprimand the students but take them seriously” they must enrich the experience by giving them something that “ensnares the students” into thinking differently. “This seduction therefore has consequently a slight connection to education as it can lead the students into an educational process that questions their present attitude” (Saeverot 2013, p. 21).

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy 125

In refusing to simply explain, art education must take on the indirect mechanisms by which it seduces while it introduces the student to new avenues whose allures would prompt learning to reverse itself and undo what it supposedly constructs. Indeed, art’s immanence is the first cause of any deception that takes place in such an indirect pedagogy, while being thrown remains neither gentle nor didactic. This is not that different from Kant’s (1974) grammar of judgement, by which, he tells us, we have to find ways of bridging reason with the incongruence between beauty and the sublime. By using and adapting the tools of pure and practical reason, the immanence of the relationship between art and education can only hold if, like judgement, it operates on borrowed grammars—that is, borrowed from that which attempts to bridge the disinterestedness of the aesthetic and the meaningful aims of a teleological approach. By adapting tools that are never meant to be used in this way, art and education act as each other’s ventriloquist. The deception here is not intent on manipulation, but to double-cross the same instrumental reason which, under the guise of constructivism, remains alien to both art and education. This means that the only way to approach the “want of accordance” between the imagination and reason (Kant 1974, §27, p. 119) by which art and education could construe an immanent relationship, would imply a form of indirectness that preserves the relationship between art education from becoming externalized. To illustrate how an indirect pedagogy works, one could argue that by dint of our teleological reasoning we come to realize that art’s pedagogical practice cannot be other than a refusal of teleology; a paradox that comes closest to articulate art’s specificity.

How are we speaking? With whom are art and education speaking, and how? The answer could go in every direction, though this often appears as if it is going nowhere. Art and education may well be seen as if they are speaking to no one, as frequently they appear to speak to each other, like a puppet and ventriloquist having a conversation. Yet we know that while this is not a conversation, but a soliloquy, the deception is purely performative, as it is meant to address an audience— hence the ventriloquist’s paradox. At this point we become spectators, just as we become students, we form part of society, we enter the polity, and we consider ourselves as a community of practitioners. In other words, as indirect communicators, we witness art and education as a performing soliloquy that speaks to everyone, and in whose indirect existence we are all thrown. An image that could be seen as being prompted by art’s ability to speak to everyone by speaking to itself is Carlo Carrà’s L’Idolo Ermafrodito (The Hermaphrodite Idol, 1917). The idol’s body remains without features. Yet in its solitary and magisterial pose it claims to represent life, while at the same time we are taught nothing of it.

126 The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

Carrà’s work confronts us with an enigmatic vision that could only attract one’s attention by its sense of deception. As it remains indirect in Carrà’s depiction, the idol’s claim to being—or in what it is immersed—has to be deceptive. The deception is found in the illusion of peace by which the idol’s hermaphrodite form bears no difference of gender, disposition, symbol or any other metaphor or identifier that might cause conflict. Likewise, the space inhabited by the hermaphrodite idol bears no indices. It fails to indicate a specific time or an actual space. At best, the space is ideational because it transcends its formal values in prototypical ways, and yet this space remains neutral, as it does not even suggest a guide of sorts. Even colour remains subdued. What Carrà’s humanoid figure seems to suggest could be everything or nothing at all. Yet for those interested in a pedagogical lineage the magisterial pose is important because a magister is a teacher, and his or her perspective is privileged by what is given in terms of the epistemological space that knowledge is supposed to “fill” or “inhabit.” Being magisterial, the pose is expected to impart and thereby share specific subjects of knowledge with those who want to listen or partake of it. Yet in this assumption of non-speech done in magisterial pose, Carrà’s hermaphrodite gives us nothing of the sort. The magisterial is only suggestive in the sense of alluring one to assume that there is more to its nothingness. It seems to entertain the idea of a pose by which art could not simply suggest but also affirm knowledge by its metaphysical claims of equivalence between the physical and its beyond. More so, this magister entertains the idea of knowledge from its sense of being as a further sense of ambiguity that could only find accommodation within a gnoseological approach, where knowing and being curiously conflate. We know that in the art of Carlo Carrà and Giorgio De Chirico, the metaphysical is radically distanced from surrealism. It gives itself a special space where the equivalence of the now with the beyond suggests the actuality of what is outside. Again, to say nothing by saying it all remains elusive, though not that distanced from the hermeneutic edifices by which the metaphysical is used as a means of explaining the actual. Even when dubbed metaphysical, art is not implied as an otherness beyond the physical but as that which is arrived at— perhaps by “ask(ing) oneself first: what morality does this (does he—) aim at?” (Nietzsche 2003, §6, p. 37).

Artists ± educators We know that the claim to morality in Nietzsche becomes a claim to move beyond it, “where a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone beyond good and evil.” This comes from the manner by which a philosophy recognizes “untruth as a condition of life” and resists “customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion” (Nietzsche 2003, §4, p. 36). Those familiar with the layers of interpretation by which Nietzsche sustains his non-

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy 127

identitarian narrative would also recognize how just like Carrà’s idol, he or she who seeks to privilege the interrogation of one’s morality is in effect doing nothing by assuming that he or she is doing everything. In this structure we have to ask how art turns us into a community of learners and doers, while at the same time it invites us to reject these kinds of definitions. Quick answers to what artists are, or do, effectively reinforce those constructivist assumptions that couch artists and educators into the role of earnest builders. Given that education has been assumed in primis as a building project, the constructivist assumptions that come with it in liberal and progressive pedagogies seem to retain a loyalty to the Bildung of which, more often than not, a concept of criticality is expected to be a natural attribute. As I have suggested earlier in this chapter, the danger lies in how hasty assumptions often mistake a democratic and emancipatory horizon for the arts in education as a passage into the morals which art, in its deceptive and indirect pedagogy, must seek to avoid in order to exit the polity’s instrumental rationale. This is why notwithstanding the critical argument for emancipation, art education often signals a loss of immanence where art finds itself constructed on the unfree grids of an epistemological teleology; a teleology assumed on the Mannheimian patterns by which a sociology of knowledge was meant to task education “not merely to develop people adjusted to the present situation, but also people who will be in a position to act as agents of social development to a further stage” (Mannheim 2000, p. 234). If we build learning (as constructivists sometimes argue in their unquestioned acceptance of student-centred processes) there is a risk that rather than speak to everyone and no one, we create formulas on how we speak to each other; thereby reducing speech into a moral imperative by transforming art’s maybe into an ought, into an aesthetic imperative. In this respect, the sociologist of knowledge sustains a kind of Bildung that does not seek to negate the immediate to imagine possibilities from where one could, dialectically speaking, grasp the accident in order to save oneself from the assumption of necessity. On the contrary, the sociology of knowledge regards education as a means to avoid the accident. Hence, to a social constructivist like Mannheim, “the social relations governing everyday life are an important subject for research if it is desired to rescue more and more factors in the social education of men from the realm of ‘accident’” (Mannheim 2000, 234). As argued earlier in this book, because Mannheim’s progressive credentials invariably offer a kind of succour by which this kind of social constructivism seems to retain a hope for a rational outcome, it is not easy to simply dismiss such an approach as instrumentalist. Likewise, Mannheim’s take on how the so-called milieu of social constellations creates a firm ground on which one could build a possible plan for action is equally attractive (See Mannheim 2000, pp. 234ff). However, albeit progressive, Mannheim’s approach remains open to the transformation of critical practice into a measured end. Here, the critical Bildung which Hegel assumed as a simultaneous “process of self-transformation

128 The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

and an acquisition of the power to grasp and articulate reasons for what one believes or knows” (Wood 1998, p. 302) is transformed into a progressive and incremental rejection of that “immediacy of substantial life” from where Bildung laboriously emerges (Hegel 1977, p. 3). Hegel regarded Bildung as that which gives one the power “to support and refute the general conception [or universal thought] with reason” (Hegel 1977, p. 3). If this approach to Bildung is transformed into an ability to be “rescued from the realm of accident” (Mannheim 2000, p. 234) then all that this progressive approach would achieve, is an elaborate grid of skillsets that proscribes the individual’s creative refusal; thereby neutering the critical immanence of Bildung by reducing it to a form of incremental building. A neutering of Bildung comes with the suppression of its dialectical nature. Dialectically speaking the accident retains its necessity as that which negates necessity per se. This might seem too abstract, unless one revisits Dewey’s own approach to growth, which he sees as essentially rooted in immaturity. Here, Dewey’s Hegelian foundations become pragmatic. As he succinctly put it, for a child growth is not something done to her, but something that she does herself (Dewey 1966, p. 41). Likewise for Bildung—understood as a formative critical event that we often translate as culture or education—the accident cannot be rejected. In the case of art education, to approach and indeed critique the sociological neutering of Bildung, one cannot simply critique the assumptions of teaching as a choice between instrumental skillsets and a creative construction of self-referential critical individuals, as we normally do when confronting traditional-conservative with progressive-liberal forms of education. Rather, we need to take a detour, and approach art’s pedagogical question from a disposition where art education implies that artists and educators are more or less equivalent—as artists ± educators; while at the same time this approximation provides both a mean as well as an addition that is signified by its subtraction (and vice versa). Rather than equivalence between a creative artistic activity and a progressive form of education, here we have an approximation by which art education continuously signals a perpetual negotiation between that which it adds and that which it subtracts from the same life forms that we call art and education (see Chapter 2, and Wollheim 1980). One caveat is that this sense of approximation could only come into effect through an indirect pedagogical approach, which means that we might also have to indulge in a degree of ventriloquism.

Approximated soliloquys The claim for approximation draws our attention to the averaging that signals art ± education in terms of what it might imply as a method—or poetics—of the more or less. We know from basic mathematics that 1 ± 1 = either 2 or 0. Yet 1 ± 1 is also 1 in that 1 is the mean, or average, of 1 and 1. In trying to assume that there is some equivalence between art and education in art education as a koiné,

The ventriloquist’s soliloquy 129

we have argued that this could imply a variety of possibilities. Often such possibilities reveal a paradox and refuse to affirm that one could progressively assume a solid definition for art education—which directly contradicts any constructivist approach to art education. Instead of a secured accrual of definition or function, we are left with a state of approximation by which we could affirm that art’s method is marked by what might be, more or less. Any presumed convergence between art and education does not add up. Rather, it remains disjointed by the paradoxical nature that brings it together. This is evidenced by the historical contexts by which art and education have been conflated in their own dialectical ways. More so, we experience this in terms of how, as forms of life, art and education have asserted a sense of autonomy in our ways of being by dint of the interiority that we attribute to them. Far from some metaphysical assumption, how we come to relate art with education pertains to the same sense of being by which many individuals or communities figure out how to think and do the impossible. The fact that artistic practice is often deemed to be either a form of genius or madness has nothing to do with some romanticized view of the errant artist who disdains the world. On the contrary it is the artists’ love of the world that has turned them into outcasts of society. After all, what artists do is never deemed to be certain, let alone measurable. And when this happened, as art became an institution, art had to gain value (be it as a form of learning or earning), by which the aesthetic was reinvented to sustain what could be deemed as true or beautiful. While many would prefer to go with this institutionalized assumption of art education as the very avenue by which creativity prompts growth and meaning, the same argument cannot be sustained by the certainties by which those who want to claim legitimacy for art education go on to measure and instrumentalize such legitimacy. This is why current claims for the creative and culture industries as integral to the wealth and wellbeing of society convince only those who seek art as a form of certainty, indeed as a currency by which an economy or a state of being is assumed. As one returns to the aporia of art, the question is rather simple: Is art education a necessity or a matter of contingent situations? Devotees of order and progress alike, whether traditional or liberal, would be disinclined to leave this question unanswered and tell us how art is there for us to learn and even earn, as indeed we have a wealth of literature to show. Yet in their earnestness to legitimize art education through learning and earning, these colleagues fail to explain why we must insist that both art and education are only necessary by force of their accident, and when forced into a structure, they fail. More so, to insist that art education is some kind of milieu that settles the question on firm ground—be it that of learning, earning or anything else—is to abort the state of immaturity in which growth retains its possibilities. Far from a romantic argument for a state of innocence, this is a call for an approach by which art and education would always provide ways of keeping an ace up our sleeves in order to win the perpetual game of contingency. This is what we learn from the paradox of the ventriloquist’s soliloquy.

130 The ventriloquist’s soliloquy

REFERENCES Baldacchino, J. 2015. The métier of living: Art, genocide, and education. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(6), 494–503. Dewey, J. 1966. Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press. Dewey, J. 2008. Human nature and conduct. New York: Barnes & Noble. Garoian, C.R. 2013. The prosthetic pedagogy of art: Embodied research and practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of spirit. A.V. Miller (trans.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, M. 2012. Critique of instrumental reason. M.J. O’Connell et al. (trans.). London: Verso. Kant, I. 1974. Critique of judgement. J.H. Bernard (trans.). New York: Hafner Press. Lyotard, J.-F. 1989. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. G. Bennington & B. Massumi (trans.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. Mannheim, K. 2000. Essays on the sociology of knowledge. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, F. 2003. Beyond good and evil. R.J. Hollingdale (trans.). London: Penguin. Saeverot, H. 2013. Indirect pedagogy: Some lessons in existential education. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Wollheim, R. 1980. Art and its object: With six supplementary essays. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Wood, A.W. 1998. Hegel on education. In A.O. Rorty (Ed.). Philosophers on education. London: Routledge, pp. 300–317.

Chapter 8

A mannerist pedagogy

Art’s art of forgetting confronts us with a unique pedagogy—that of unlearning. This makes no sense if we approach education as an objective set of results that are manifest in the constructs of learning, knowledge and achievement. Neither would unlearning make sense if we construe education, especially art education, as a human activity founded on social and moral precepts. Benign and positive as these may appear, especially in the light of progressive and liberal approaches to education, the moral–social nexus of learning has proved to be the most susceptible assumption by which education was quickly schooled and instrumentalized by governments of all hues, be they liberal, social democratic or conservative. In view of the constant failure of education to move beyond such parameters, another case for education must be made. In this book I have made a case for unlearning, which would in turn call for another case—that of sustaining concepts of reality that reject the idea of a strong foundational objectivity. Here, the argument for unlearning is suggested from how art poses the subject from a position of weakness, where education unfolds over an inter-subjective horizon, as it becomes an art of unlearning, and thereby forgetting, on the understanding that no end is teleologically asserted by assumptions of ground or origin. In Art’s Way Out, I make a case for weak pedagogy from art’s kenotic appearance on the horizons of a groundless, open and hopeful reality. Weak pedagogy inhabits a fluid horizon on which reason creatively engages with the multiplicity of particularities that characterize the equally multiple senses of truth (Baldacchino 2012, p. 191). In other words, we can only engage with reality in its fluid diversity, through a concept of groundlessness (Baldacchino 2005). In affirming groundlessness, a weak pedagogy comes to signify two major shifts in arts educational thinking. The first is that of rejecting the redemptive notion of education and learning, to which we are invariably held hostage. The second is that art’s kenotic approach to the world has no value to those prevalent educational practices that, to use Nietzsche’s description, are nothing but “artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles”:

132 A mannerist pedagogy

Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you that the true, original meaning and basic stuff of your nature is something completely incapable of being educated or formed and is in any case something difficult of access, bound and paralysed; your educators can be only your liberators. And that is the secret of all culture: it does not provide artificial limbs, wax noses or spectacles—that which can provide these things is, rather, only sham education. (Nietzsche 1997, pp. 129–30, emphasis added) As subjects—and therefore as actors of what we regard as an objective world— we claim the right to a weak pedagogy by a willed forgetfulness that yields a different notion of understanding where discovery is a generative act that confirms the artistic ability to look for what is not known. Not dissimilar from Meno’s paradox (Plato 2005), except that the aim is not recollection but forgetting, this aporia makes the case for unlearning as one for immanence, which this concluding chapter presents through art’s mannerist approach to history. As in mannerism, immanence is negatively approached by the same way that someone drawing a human figure from life must unlearn what she knows as an ideal, in order to begin to see and understand what she will find and draw out in its crude existence—in this case, an ordinary human body. Far from being an instrument of learning, art’s manner is a way out of the grounded (and strong) objectivity by which we are drawn away from the crudeness of what we are. Just as how mannerism deschooled art and moved beyond the confines of the Renaissance’s hegemony, the recognition of immanence through the manner of art’s undoing is conditioned on how education is deschooled from those moral and social assumptions by which it has become instrumentalized. This is premised by how we exercise art’s autonomy and how we partake of art’s weak pedagogy.

Exiting and forgetting The image of an “historical confinement,” beyond which Gadamer seeks art by travelling with it outside history’s boundaries, is not a metaphor but a tangible and concrete historical experience. The creator of a work of art may intend the public of his own time, but the real being of his work is what it is able to say, and this being reaches fundamentally beyond any historical confinement. (Gadamer 1976, p. 96) This is confirmed by Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. While Gadamer invites us to move out of boundaries, Godot leaves us waiting because Beckett presents us with no boundaries to escape from; unlike the boundaries of history from which we need to exit as we partake of what we make with art.

A mannerist pedagogy 133

BOY: (in a rush). Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow. Silence. (Beckett 2006, p. 43) Beckett achieves what historical boundaries do not allow: the ability to make forgetting possible. What is in turn forgotten is the obsession with a necessary redemption. We wait for what we cannot forget, but as we wait, we wilfully forget what we were waiting for in the first place. VLADIMIR: No no, it’s impossible. ESTRAGON: That’s the idea, let’s contradict each another. (Beckett 2006, p. 56) Inasmuch as Gadamer speaks of art’s hermeneutics, his reference to an historical confinement directs us to a notion of art that is as concrete as it could get. There is no ease to this, as with art, living becomes and never is. Its present is a moment that will be, as if it is constantly heading to history’s way of exiting. This is how forgetfulness is willed, in that it is not an irresponsible state of denial, but an active form of unlearning what we receive as undeniably true. ESTRAGON: I’ve forgotten. (Chews.) That’s what annoys me. (He looks at the carrot appreciatively, dangles it between finger and thumb.) I’ll never forget this carrot. (He sucks the end of it meditatively.) Ah yes, now I remember. (Beckett 2006, p. 14) A willed forgetfulness is probabilistic in that it recognizes the possibilities that come about by art as deed and object. In Chapter 5 I likened art’s exit to an uscita di sicurezza, an emergency way out. Just as forgetfulness is not a form of denial, art’s exit is not a form of escape. What art forgets and exists are the confines which insist on defining it, just as the same boundaries are used by humans to insist on defining other humans. Undeniably, forgetfulness, unlearning and exiting present a number of paradoxes. To start with, by making art, our understanding of history moves beyond its confinement; yet we are able to do so because art is historical. This does not make sense outside the dialectical definition of art, which like history is posited through self-negation. Far from an idealist trope, this is how humans make, partake of, experience and hypostasize their poetic doing as art. Marcuse explains this succinctly in his Aesthetic Dimension: Art’s unique truth breaks with both everyday and holiday reality, which block a whole dimension of society and nature. Art is transcendence into this dimension where its autonomy constitutes itself as autonomy in contradiction. When art abandons

134 A mannerist pedagogy

this autonomy and with it the aesthetic form in which the autonomy is expressed, art succumbs to that reality which it seeks to grasp and indict. (Marcuse 1978, p. 49, emphasis added) As artists and audiences alike, humans collect art where other humans leave it. They find it again just as they seek to forget and recall art as they also make history. Art makes history as they move away from the myth of some prototype that originates in making. Nothing is sacred and nothing is permanent because the aesthetic and historical dimensions come about by our ability to transcend and thereby move beyond permanence. Quoting Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Marcuse argues that all forgetting is reification (1978, p. 73). Here I am proposing a different approach to forgetting and anamnesis, where, as I argue in Chapter 5, recollection must be turned into its opposite, taking it away from a passive form of remembering an idealized life to a form of willed forgetfulness by which other than learning, we also recognize our ability to unlearn. I do not find this alien to Marcuse’s argument that concludes Aesthetic Dimension. Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance. Forgetting past suffering and past joy alleviates life under a repressive reality principle. In contrast, remembrance spurs the drive for the conquest of suffering and the permanence of joy. But the force of remembrance is frustrated: joy itself is overshadowed by pain. Inexorably so? The horizon of history is still open. If the remembrance of things past would become a motive power in the struggle for changing the world, the struggle would be waged for a revolution hitherto suppressed in the previous historical revolutions. (1978, p. 73) In classic dialectical fashion, Marcuse presents a double bind. Just as remembering could unleash the power to fight back what was forgotten, it is frustrated by a pain which, I would argue, is used to make of recollection a reification of the same hegemonic powers that suppressed the past. When I speak of a willed forgetfulness I am not advocating a form of historical repression—as the deniers of the Shoah and the Armenian genocide actively do. A willed forgetfulness is not an act of denial. Rather it presents the very opposite. Far from a form of denial, forgetfulness is a conscious choice to unlearn what has led to historical denial. As unlearning, willed forgetfulness is a rejection of what has effectively instrumentalized forgetting into a form of reification. As presented to us in the process of Platonic learning, anamnesis turns out to be a form of manipulation, a forced act of remembering which does not allow any reversal. As attested by the Meno (Plato 2005), Socrates (or perhaps Plato’s rendition of Socratic teaching) makes of autonomy a tool by which the learner is coerced into a preordained hierarchical structure of knowledge, just as is

A mannerist pedagogy 135

currently done when a curricular hierarchy is delivered by a learner-centred pedagogy. In After Deschooling, What? Illich identifies this danger in what he calls an uncritical disestablishment of schooling: The uncritical disestablishment of school could also lead to new performance criteria for preferential employment and promotion and, most importantly, for privileged access to tools. Our present scale of “general” ability, competence, and trustworthiness for role assignment is calibrated by tolerance to high doses of schooling. It is established by teachers and accepted by many as rational and benevolent. New devices could be developed, and new rationales found, both more insidious than school grading and equally effective in justifying social stratification and the accumulation of privilege and power. (1974, p. 46, emphasis added) The Socratic approach is often regarded as rational and benevolent, and yet the insidious ways by which a learner is manipulated is most evident in the Meno. The myth of a paideia assumed to best lead to the “good life” is no less insidious in Aristotle’s moral-didactic mechanisms of the tragedy, which provide the most effective forms of coercion—as Augusto Boal (2008, pp. 33–4) rightly argues in Theatre of the Oppressed. Just as contemporary iterations of the paideia found themselves funnelled in would-be progressive and liberal iterations, so does the culture industry today give the impression of a free participatory choice in social media, where increasingly the media arts tend to function as moral-didactic mechanisms of a hyperreality by which the lie has long lost its liberal honesty (see Adorno 2005, p. 30). As we try to figure out art’s collecting, rejecting and recollecting, forgetting, remembering and forgetting again, learning and unlearning, discovering and losing, retaking and relaying … we find ways of philosophizing art, as Gadamer suggests. However, in his introduction to Truth and Method, Gadamer also warns that this presents a challenge, which I would regard as being part of art’s historical paradox and which is philosophical inasmuch as it must be kept separate from art’s own approach by dint of itself: That truth is experienced through a work of art that we cannot attain in any other way constitutes the philosophic importance of art, which asserts itself against all reasoning. Hence together with the experience of philosophy, the experience of art issues the most pressing challenge to the scientific consciousness to acknowledge its own limits. (Gadamer 1979, pp. xxii–xxiii) Note that the experience of philosophy and that of art are not the same, and Gadamer puts them side by side but does not conflate them. The philosophic moment comes from the realization that we cannot attain truth experience

136 A mannerist pedagogy

through a work of art in any other way. Any other way, even a philosophical one, defies the philosophical moment itself. Just as exiting the confines of history comes from art’s historic nature, so would exiting from the confines of philosophy constitute art’s philosophical importance. One hopes that by now, art’s educational position is fully understood in terms of art’s rejection of its educational confines. The same goes with art and learning. Art’s positioning vis-à-vis any concept of learning as a practice within the educational confines, can only articulate itself as a form of unlearning.

Relativity and interpretation From Dewey’s own preoccupation with the degeneration of liberalism in the 1930s and from the work that he developed in Chicago, we know that he had already foreseen how even open-ended and pragmatic forms of thinking could become formulaic and oppressive where the need to escape from emerging confines becomes a must in the experiential aspect of what we do. This might explain why Dewey’s Art as Experience (2005) feels rather metaphysical in both its tenor and ambition. While I am puzzled by this abstract turn in his work, I tend to rejoice in the fact that Dewey’s attention to art also signals a deep preoccupation with the degeneration of ideological practices in education. In the constellation that marked his vast work, Dewey constantly keeps his attentive readers alert to history’s temporal relativity. In his essay “The Future of Liberalism”, he explains how liberalism degenerated into pseudo-liberalism (which, in today’s terminology, we would call neoliberalism). As he puts it, this degeneration shows symptoms of a “denial of temporal relativity.” He captures this with characteristic clarity: Even when words remain the same, they mean something very different when they are uttered by a minority struggling against repressive measures and when expressed by a group that, having attained power, then uses ideas that were once weapons of emancipation as instruments for keeping the power and wealth it has obtained. (Dewey 1935, p. 226) The reality of temporal relativity and how we can only ignore it at our own risk, is illustrated by Illich when he states that: The hidden curriculum unconsciously accepted by the liberal pedagogue, frustrates his conscious liberal aims, because it is inherently inconsistent with them. But, on the other hand, it also prevents the take-over of education by the programmed instruction of behavioural technologists. (Illich 1974, pp. 38–9)

A mannerist pedagogy 137

By a “hidden curriculum” Illich means “the structure of schooling as opposed to what happens in schools” (1974, p. 38). I read this as Illich’s resistance to the neutering of the paradox that is revealed once one looks closely at the dilemma that emerges from learning, especially as knowledge finds itself schooled together with society. Illich further qualifies this dilemma by drawing our attention to a state of affairs which remains very relevant to any assessment of the liberal and progressive desire to free schools from their structures. As he puts it: “Free schools, which lead to further free schools in an unbroken chain of attendance, produce the mirage of freedom” (1974, p. 43). As we read accounts such as Dewey and Illich’s we begin to realize how the current disregard towards history’s relativity has become widespread and is in turn normalized. This also begins to qualify what I mean by the tenuous state in which current constructivist arguments for education are constantly finding themselves. In this book I approached this issue from an engagement with the arts and their uncomfortable and difficult relationship with education. In current educational debates one comes across an astounding disregard for the aesthetic dimension by which Dewey sought to liberate education and society from functionalist sterilization. Often distorting Dewey’s notion of instrumentalism, and most of the time turning pragmatism into an excuse to reject the role of critical discourses and practices, more than ever before, education is packaged by forms of policy making that mistake economistic equity for equality and instrumentalism for democracy. One way of approaching this is to offer a critique from the perspective of the arts—especially in their performative, participatory and critical practices. This would also involve an inquiry on how this impacts on our engagement with education in all its wider contexts. In this book, especially in Chapter 4, I have amply argued that the arts continuously reveal a degeneration of constructivism into a functionalist and institutionalized practice of education. Constructivism in education confirms the same symptoms of a disregard to history’s temporal relativity. This also means that in hermeneutic terms, constructivist approaches are forfeiting art’s educational, historical and aesthetic roles. More often than not, the scaffolded structures that have been used as tools for a pedagogical liberation of students’ interests and needs become a major impediment to art’s role in education, thereby impeding art from mediating what we can call society’s democratic right to interpret the world. From an artistic perspective it would seem odd to reassert the primacy of our right to interpret the world, when a constructivist argument invariably starts with the right to construct and indeed make the world—which, as many would argue, coincides with art’s specific and special ability to change the world by making it. However, here I am not dismissing constructivism per se. Neither am I trying to privilege interpretation over making. The hermeneutic implications of constructivist approaches in both art and education cannot be dismissed—although

138 A mannerist pedagogy

I would hasten to add that any critique of the current ossification of constructivism must begin with an examination of how its hermeneutic potentials have been squandered and extinguished by instrumental reason with the result of turning making into a function of the so called “knowledge industry.” This prompts us to revisit Gadamer’s question about aesthetic formation: Is the aesthetic quality of formation only the condition for the fact that the work bears its meaning within itself and has something to say to us? This question gives us access to the real problematic dimension of the theme “aesthetics and hermeneutics.” (1976, p. 97) The ownership of the poetics of making remains central to both art and education. It is because of art’s ability to know by making that human beings claim for themselves (perhaps above every other species on Earth) the special sensibility— what Georg Lukács (1975) identifies with the “peculiarity of the aesthetic”—by which we can see beyond a mechanistic assumption of ownership and construction of art’s “special ‘world’” (Lukács 1971). In this two-pronged approach we find how art’s speciality (which lends us with the need to engage with it hermeneutically) cannot make sense without art’s aesthetic dimension, by which we perceive art’s ability to transcend and therefore express the paradoxes by which Marcuse has positioned art’s autonomy. This also begins to explain why the convergence between art and education, indeed aesthetics and formation (understood hermeneutically), in their respective autonomous specificity are asserted by their continuous repositioning according to the diverse singularities that mark them as events of historical contingency. This state of affairs could never be settled. Rather, we need to embrace its contradictory nature. As Gadamer (1976, p. 96) put it, “The creator of a work of art may intend the public of his own time, but the real being of his work is what it is able to say, and this being reaches fundamentally beyond any historical confinement.” If we are to follow up a concept of peculiarity as related to (or indeed articulated by) art, we must first begin to understand the aesthetic dimension within a formative-hermeneutic context that brings together our ability to interpret the world as exercised by our right to construct and change it and by asserting it in its relativity. Key to this dual role of construction and interpretation is the autonomous ability by which we do art. To reiterate a central theme that runs across this book, the concept of autonomy gains central stage in any practice by which we relate art to education; the reason being that art and education must be distinct and therefore autonomous in terms of what they stand for and what they do, if, in the sense given to us by Gadamer (1976, p. 96), “the work of art occupies a timeless present.” But this is not enough. We also need to bear in mind—and Gadamer here refers to Kant— that “universal validity is required of the judgement of taste.” As judgement,

A mannerist pedagogy 139

understood in Kant’s critique, is that faculty by which we mediate universality with singularity, then I take this to be intrinsic to a pedagogical critique from where singularity and universality can neither be hierarchized nor assumed separately. In this concept of judgement, one begins to contextualize what is meant by autonomy and heteronomy, as well as the heteronomy of heteronomy which, in Chapter 5, I borrow from Balibar’s political philosophy. Without this dialectical corollary the relationship between particularity and universality cannot work because one begets the other. Any talk about universal ownership or historical construction must be qualified by the way that diverse and singular meanings and practices begin to transpire from the relationship between art and education. More than anything, this should give us the freedom by which we own the world intelligently without relying on preordained structures (developmental or otherwise), even when these would claim to be scaffolding our ways of knowing with those of doing. This also reveals a dilemma of approach, or better put, a question over how one tends to approach the issue of aesthetics, which Gadamer captures in his questions: “‘To say something,’ ‘to have something to say’— are these simply metaphors grounded in an undetermined aesthetic formative value that is the real truth? Or is the reverse the case?” (Gadamer 1976, p. 97).

From redemption to unlearning Here we are speaking of a horizon on which we seek to assert groundlessness as an occasion, ability and opportunity by which we practice and articulate education and art. In their groundless nature arts educational practices would avoid being determined by developmental assumptions, ideological projections, or pedagogical economies (see Baldacchino 2005). With art and education, we present each other with a relationship that is practiced rather than simply applied or professed on a horizon of autonomy. As amply argued above, the paradoxical relationship that art and education enjoy in their singular and diverse forms of existence does not warrant any resolution. Neither are we beseeched to universalize this relationship through function or means—even when in their autonomy we make several universal claims—such as those expressed by our desire for equality, freedom, democracy, inclusion and social justice. For the umpteenth time, here I would affirm the paradox, indeed the aporia, of art and education. While we articulate aesthetic judgements as formative events of an education that some would insist on professing through art, this judgement is always marked by constant negotiation and, to use Dewey and Bentley’s term, a transactional state of affairs (Dewey & Bentley 2008). However attractive a concept, a transactional context for education is too prone to misinterpretation. A transactional relationship could be mistaken for an assumed commerce between functions of artistic creation and those of learning. This reveals a sense of irony where an exchange that many would regard as a basis

140 A mannerist pedagogy

for a knowledge economy, finds itself conflated with the so-called cultural and creative industries. Art education finds itself caught between reductionist arguments of knowledge exchange and artistic production. While this seems obtuse enough to be summarily dismissed, it has become a commonplace extension of a Bauhausian productivist aesthetic by which art schools and the education of artists and arts practitioners seek a form of legitimation for their disciplines. There is some attraction in translating art education into a narrative of usefulness. But art is also denounced as being somewhat elitist, if not a luxury when compared to other disciplines. The inclusion of the arts in the commercial milieu by which higher education finds wider legitimacy is somehow presented and perceived as a form of redemption. Here, redemption takes a functional role in the implementation of both social policy and economic strategy. It becomes an excuse that claims, on art’s behalf, full political kudos where its creative and innovative potentials are seen for their “miraculous” power to effect change. At face value, these forms of academic and political-economic legitimation, as tied to the spiritual qualities attributed to art, begin to construct a narrative of inclusion, freedom and emancipation. However, it soon transpires that these forms of legitimation result in a gradual redundancy of the arts. This state of affairs suits well those who seek a redemptive element in the perspective of a normalising factor where the pacifying and therapeutic “miraculous qualities” that the arts are claimed to have—such as transferring of skills into making better mathematicians, or less boring scientists, or indeed effective workers— begins to gain consensus while effectively incapacitating art’s universal validity by dint of alienating it from its contingent nature. As art’s redemption becomes functionalized, art education finds itself popularized by narratives that trivialize the profound need to engage across disciplines. As the fever of the latest fad in arts education becomes more pronounced, new contradictions emerge, leaving us in a situation where the arts become increasingly implicated in a new wave of misunderstanding, simplification and functionalization. This is quickly seized by those who have sought to undermine the creative arts’ place in tertiary education, especially when the arts are seen as ancillary to other disciplines. We reach full circle when the tautological assumptions made about the value of the knowledge and creative industries begin to feed into each other until the usual novelties and fuss over art’s newly found use begin to lose momentum. To give another example of the tautological assumptions by which we are caught, I cite Illich once more, when he reminds his readers that, Learning by doing is not worth much if doing has to be defined, by professional educators or by law, as socially valuable learning. The global village will be a global schoolhouse if teachers hold all the strings. It would be distinguishable in name only from a global madhouse run by social therapists or a global prison run by corporation wardens. (Illich 1974, p. 43, emphasis added)

A mannerist pedagogy 141

To reassert that only an autonomous and paradoxical relationship would make sense for art to be engaged in an educational context, comes with a caveat. There is no certainty in assertions which ultimately find themselves manipulated into doing the opposite—as social constructivism has been pushed to do in schooling, even when in essence it was moved by a benevolent, if not noble, ideal that came from the assumptions of a learning by doing with the expectation to liberate learners. The problem came from how learning remained premised on the recollection—or rather the aspiration—towards knowledge as a developmental form of a holistic myth that was presumed to need completion. It seems that this assumption also chose to ignore Dewey’s qualifying argument for democratic education, which to be nurtured in its plastic disposition, should have been valued by what he calls the immature precondition of growth (see Dewey 1966, pp. 42–4). Dewey brings this qualifying definition of growth into the philosophy of education through the idea of plasticity. Our adeptness to growth as conditioned by immaturity reveals the plasticity by which we are predisposed to engage and embrace the paradox of practice and experience. This was first revealed by Darwin’s engagement with the dispositional aspect of human evolution, where the nurturing of one’s survival does not come from might but from our ability to experiment and to seek those opportunities that emerge from chance. In Experience and Nature, Dewey explains this beautifully: The conjunction of problematic and determinate characters in nature renders every existence, as well as every idea and human act, an experiment in fact, even though not in design. To be intelligently experimental is but to be conscious of this intersection of natural conditions so as to profit by it instead of being at its mercy. (Dewey 1958, p. 70, emphases added) This should bring to some focus the need to negate rather than posit a body of received knowledge. Growth is posited on ignorance, which means that there is a dialectical and often violent contradiction by which growth is predicated, and where, as we see in art, the experience of learning becomes a form of unlearning which neither presumes forms of reversal, nor would it mean that order is somehow restored within the fantasyland of redemption and magic. Somehow because we value education so much, we have tended to undermine and ultimately destroy it. In the constructivist desire to own making we have stopped ourselves from unlearning mainly because of a fear of the incomplete. It is a fear which Dewey captures as follows: Since thinkers claim to be concerned with knowledge of existence, rather than with imagination, they have to make good the pretention to knowledge. Hence they transmute the imaginative perception of the stably good object into a definition and description of true reality in contrast with

142 A mannerist pedagogy

lower and specious existence, which, being precarious and incomplete, alone involves us in the necessity of choice and active struggle. (Dewey 1958, p. 53) Art confirms time and again that what we learn is often best unlearnt in order to move into an understanding of those forms of “lower and specious existence” by which we need to embrace the error as an event of experimentation. Dewey warns against the metaphysical approach which avoids finitude and error. He says that this would result in nothing but dogma and cult. It becomes a wisdom that “consists in administration of the temporal, finite and human in its relation to the eternal and infinite, by means of dogma and cult, rather than in regulation of the events of life by understanding of actual conditions” (Dewey 1958, p. 55). So, what does unlearning mean in the specific context of art education? Is it an undoing? Is it an act of willed forgetting? Does it revert anamnesis to amnesia? Is unlearning restricted to education and undoing to art-making? This recalls the question that opened this book: Can one undo a work of art? In hermeneutic terms this also prompts a similar question: Could we uninterpret a work of art? Or better put: Can we alter the way a work of art has grown within history—that is, our histories and the work’s own? To undo a work of art does not amount to do or make something else, but to try to understand art (and education) from a radically different perspective. It also implies that the agency of unlearning and undoing cannot be confused with the object. As unlearning, art is often the agency and not the object. To argue that art is unlearning, one must also bear in mind the dual meaning of art—that which makes the object and the object that is made. Both deed and result are called art, and in confusing them we have sustained a notion of art education that remains instrumental. To figure out what art as unlearning really implies helps us approach how we interpret or know art by making it. The big challenge lies in how to break the redemptive cycle and shift the paradigm by which we seem to continue to construct and order our world, and where we often invoke as “common sense” models that vacillate between art as a form of learning and of learning as a form of art. A closer consideration of unlearning is primarily meant to alter the whole assumption of education. It should shift education from its pre-Galilean space that it still inhabits to a space re-defined by Galileo’s and later Einstein’s approach to relativity. Unlearning should disallow the artificial distinctions that are too quickly drawn between a top-down banking didactic system of instruction and a presumed student-centred constructivist form of learning. In a post-Galilean concept of space and time, the conflict between didactic and constructivist notions of education becomes irrelevant as it is regarded as a symptom of a much more fundamental problem with education. This problem comes as evidenced by how we have avoided the disestablishment of learning, and with it, the school and education. Unlearning is prompted by the need to

A mannerist pedagogy 143

recognize, through a closer analysis of the paradoxical relationship between art and education, that we have to do away with a redemptive assumption of history. Hopeful though it may seem, redemptive outlooks—whether they happen to be religious, philosophical, political, moral, artistic or didactic—have nurtured a foundationalist view of the world that was more than just ugly.

Nietzsche’s teacher To best understand unlearning without falling into the usual traps of identitarian thinking, one must break the same redemptive cycle that has trapped educational discourse. This requires a radical shift, where art education’s conversation seeks another place. To illustrate this, I would seek this place in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which I want to put at the centre of my discussion. Placing Nietzsche at the centre of a discussion of education must begin with the rejection of those assumptions that make things look convincingly good. In education, goodness is assumed on the expectation of rectifying what was once harmed or rejected by some moral or social “mistake.” As we have seen, this becomes an excuse to sustain a redemptive model for education, which ultimately rests on the idea that educational aims reside elsewhere and away from education and its “human subjects.” In the moral sphere, the rejection of goodness begins to condition any starting point that we might value in education. On a socio-economic level, an “original sin” is often attributed to power and hegemonic structures that are deemed to be intrinsically “evil.” This leads to a moral epistemology which sustains the fallacy of an educational teleology—indeed a whole construct of moral and political salvation—that becomes a virtue by dint of its praxis. Nietzsche presents us with a notion of education that, from the outset, is neither comfortable nor comforting. It affords no escape into the delectation of knowledge and emancipation. It does not offer a direct link to an expected liberation unless there is a point by which liberation is implicitly directed against the benign assumptions of which it is customarily made. Any idea of education as a form of liberation which implies expectations of charity and altruism is greeted by Nietzsche with severe scepticism. In itself, education must not be expected to give us a conscience—social or otherwise. If it were to do so, education will immediately trap the person into a supposition of a strong foundational reality. Likewise, if we are to make education a tool for liberation, we must find a way of turning education onto itself in order to negate its own moral and social precepts. No form of freedom or knowledge could afford to be idealized as virtue. Neither should freedom be aligned on the binary tracks of good and evil. On both counts—that of a social conscience and that of freedom—to articulate what and who gives an education to whom is highly problematic. Those who offer a wider view of education by keeping away from social developmental and constructivist views, remind us that the question of education could never be essentialized or identified with any form of teleological

144 A mannerist pedagogy

assumption (see Greene 1973 and 1988, Rancière 1991, Biesta 2006 and 2014). As arts practitioners who dwell on education have amply shown, education is seriously compromised and ultimately becomes a non-question when it is aprioristically posed on assumptions that frame the educational act as either moral or social (see amongst others Greene 2001, Atkinson 2011; Garoian 2013; jagodzinski 2017). As one goes with the flow of the Nietzschean hermeneutic, it feels as if all of this rupture with the socio-moral expectancy of education has to be obvious. Yet even here, Nietzsche’s approach affords no comfort, not even a nihilistic one. The expectation of what seems obvious—be it functionalist, moral, elective or even nihilist—is, in Nietzsche’s search for a teacher, precluded by dint of its own possibilities; by which I mean, those possibilities that Nietzsche wants to open, but of which he rejects a straight definition. To ask, “Who is the true educator and formative teacher?” is to ask the wrong question. To search for the reality that he or she is supposed to reveal is to miss the very point of what a non-question is all about. As we have seen, education poses non-questions, and this is what we should avoid in the first place, in order to reach a modicum of possibility that begins to help us articulate what Nietzsche and others often seek in what they, prima facie, seem to approach by ways of rejection. Nietzsche finds it almost impossible to engage with education not because he is pedantic, nor because he rejects education per se, but because the questions in themselves are caught in the tautological posing of the question of learning that is often allied to Plato’s assumption of anamnesis. In primis this is dependent on the Real in all its strength. In secundis it assumes (short of commanding by a degree of moral authority) that forgetting must be left behind. This is desired even when it is in wilful forgetting that the aporia of learning (which is radically different from that of remembering qua anamnesis) will take place in the relationship between teacher and pupil. This impossibility is confirmed by the paradox in which Socrates finds himself caught in the Meno (Plato 2005), where his questions mislead the slave-child into making a mistake, only to assume that the learner would instinctually discern the mistake in the first place without any particular will from his part (because this is substituted by the teacher’s prompting of a memory suppressed by the limits of mortality). In this respect Nietzsche is wilfully forgetting the rules of the normative educational assumptions by which, Plato tells us, we ought to articulate and realize the potentials which make up our pedagogical disposition, as if these are imprinted in us in a certain way. Before we discard Platonic pedagogy as a thing of the past, we should remember that developmental psychologists and social constructivists alike still insist on a pattern by which we remain predisposed to behave and respond to common social-developmental habits. Thus, whether processual or teleological, the ultimate notion of a strong reality remains, even when the Eleatic distinction between the real and the existent is supposedly discarded (see Stace 1955, pp. 6ff).

A mannerist pedagogy 145

As already shown, a pedagogical disposition that is pragmatically found and mostly constructed against all odds is bound by the immature condition which, as Dewey (1966, p. 41) has shown, becomes a corner stone of our (un)learning. This is what I would regard as a weak reality, which in its effacement and unremarkable assumptions, prompts one to dismiss the non-questions posed by the certainty of a strong reality, and where instead, the particularization of truth gives way to the hermeneutic power of finding, as against that of searching (see the discussion of weak thought in Vattimo & Rovatti 1988). The fact that Nietzsche finds in Schopenhauer what he was “looking for” (only that he was looking for what he did not want to find because that was already there to be found), goes to show how he made it difficult for himself to identify what he could not presume to find: what I was trying to say is that the philosopher in Germany has more and more to unlearn how to be “pure science”: and it is to precisely that end that Schopenhauer as a human being can serve as an example. (Nietzsche 1997, p. 137, emphasis added) From the start Nietzsche rejected the possibility that any pedagogical predisposition must be traced back to some foundational assumption of the real by which Socrates could dismiss the weak nature of the immature mortal. As he put it in Twilight of the Idols, when discussing Socrates: Is it necessary to go on to demonstrate the error in his faith in “rationality at any price”? It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from decadence by waging war against it. (Nietzsche 1990, §11, pp. 33–4) Nietzsche’s argument is to reverse the direction. Give in to the instincts, because to refuse to do so, is to become decadent and seek a reality that is not there. “Socrates was a misunderstanding,” Nietzsche states, qualifying this misunderstanding to be any morality of improvement. Rationality at any price is a kind of disease “and by no means a return to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ to happiness. To have to fight the instincts—that is the definition of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct” (Nietzsche 1990, §11, p. 34). Nietzsche worked backwards to find what he “wanted”—which almost makes one wonder whether he was already anticipating the pragmatic turn by which Dewey cultivated and transformed his Hegelian formation (see Bernstein 1966, pp. 12ff). What he wanted to find did not exist, or at the very least he was not aware of it. Nietzsche set out to find something of which he was not aware. Yet here he thinks and finds like an artist. As he put it in his essay on Schopenhauer:

146 A mannerist pedagogy

Even the much-admired way in which our German men of learning set about their scientific pursuits reveals above all that they are thinking more of science than they are of mankind, that they have been trained to sacrifice themselves to it like a legion of the lost, so as in turn to draw new generations on to the same sacrifice. (Nietzsche 1997, pp. 131–2) In the roster of what was listed as being a good educator (or indeed a liberating one), to be liberated from what Nietzsche negated was equally difficult to identify because what he was rejecting was not posited but already came to him from a will to unlearn and forget what was supposed to be a liberating teacher. Thus, he asks: “where are we, scholars and unscholarly, high placed and low, to find the moral exemplars and models among our contemporaries, the visible epitome of morality for our time?” (Nietzsche 1997, p. 132).

Nietzsche’s forgetting In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche elevates forgetfulness to a beatitude: “Blessed are the forgetful: for they will ‘have done’ with their stupidities too” (Nietzsche 2003, §217, p. 148). Forgetting is also at the centre of his critique of education. The question he asks of “the English psychologists” in The Genealogy of Morality is the same question which we need to ask of educationalists, policy makers and an assortment of teachers and parents who regard education as that which sustains the myth of an immense causal chain by which the school has hitherto sustained its legitimacy. These English psychologists–just what do they want? You always find them at the same task, whether they want to or not, pushing the partie honteuse [the private parts, of which one is ashamed] of our inner world to the foreground, and looking for what is really effective, guiding and decisive for our development where man’s intellectual pride would least wish to find it (for example, in the vis inertiae [inertness] of habit, or in forgetfulness, or in a blind and random coupling and mechanism of ideas, or in something purely passive, automatic, reflexive, molecular and thoroughly stupid)–what is it that actually drives these psychologists in precisely this direction all the time? (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 10) The relevance here is remarkable. The “English psychologists,” to whom Nietzsche makes reference, were empiricists who proposed a genealogy of morality that exploits an experiential claim that fails to move beyond itself. In this they begin to construct a moral structure that only values contingency as a scapegoat of a greater moral order. In this moral order, within this genealogy, good and evil come into play, generating a mechanism of guilt that weakens the power of one’s will.

A mannerist pedagogy 147

Against these psychologists, Nietzsche is arguing for the opposite scenario. He argues that to forget also means to master one’s will. One’s will must break the cycle that is tied to mere experience; where in the eyes of the empiricist, experience is reduced to a limited measure of what we would call “learning.” The usefulness of unegoistic behaviour is supposed to be the origin of the esteem in which it is held, and this origin is supposed to have been forgotten:—but how was such forgetting possible? Did the usefulness of such behaviour suddenly cease at some point? The opposite is the case: it is that this usefulness has been a permanent part of our everyday experience, something, then, that has been constantly stressed anew; consequently, instead of fading from consciousness, instead of becoming forgettable, it must have impressed itself on consciousness with ever greater clarity. (Nietzsche 2006, I §3, p. 12) In a formula of human development that prohibits forgetting, unlearning is only accepted as a moment of re-learning, just as forgetting is reduced to a moment of recollection. In suppressing forgetfulness, both learning and recollecting remain taught and thereby dependent on educational and psychological schema that have no real recognition of contingency. In this omission of contingency, one finds that neither autonomy nor heteronomy have a real role in freedom. Here it would not be farfetched to state that without the autonomous will to forget and unlearn, freedom is a mere distraction. When learning lacks the autonomous ability and will to forget and unlearn, humans are unable to make autonomous choices, let alone actualize their creative potential. This goes some way to explain why the need to unlearn is often addressed after one’s schooling is completed. This is because those claims to creativity are immersed in assumptions by which, genealogically, they remain tied to experiential expectations that may or may not be valuable to them. In mainstream psychological or sociological accounts of learning, the claim to a creative and learner-centred process is ultimately tied to a series of methodological presuppositions. To that effect even when it claims to be openended, an empirical analysis of experience retains its claim to a structure of correspondence on which it conforms to an agreed structure of legitimation. Discussing Nietzsche’s approach to forgetting, Deleuze (2013) characterizes forgetting as “a specific active force” whose job is that of “supporting consciousness and renewing its freshness, fluidity and mobile, agile chemistry at every moment.” He argues that “psychology’s mistake was to treat forgetting as a negative determination, not to discover its active and positive character” (p. 106). Nietzsche (2006) couples the faculty of forgetting with that of memory and the will. Unlike the “dyspeptic” person who cannot forget anything, the person who has the ability to forget and “in whom forgetting is a strength” has a better and far more healthy approach to memory. In fact, he sees the skills of

148 A mannerist pedagogy

forgetfulness as that which breed “a counter-device, memory, with the help of which forgetfulness can be suspended in certain cases, –namely in those cases where a promise is to be made” (p. 36). While this appears to have veered away from those familiar contexts by which we assert the educational—just as we assert the political, the social or even the moral—Nietzsche’s argument becomes a critique of the myth of those causal chains by which predictability becomes an educational concern. This “is precisely what constitutes the long history of the origins of responsibility,” says Nietzsche. Human beings have been bred into the inability to forget on the promise of “making man to a certain degree necessary, uniform, a peer amongst peers, orderly and consequently predictable” (Nietzsche, 2006, p. 36). This is not that far removed from how learning often conforms to a sociology of knowledge that lays promise on all manners of progressive policies. On such a premise, one finds the same liberal promise; a promise that was easily hollowed out to accommodate the pretexts of neoliberalism.

Paradox as a mannerist pedagogy Forgetting comes across as an attitudinal approach to the world, a way of carrying one’s own embodied experience—as demeanour which, as a word, might sound inappropriate to education, especially when this becomes an institutional matter. However, just as Dewey gives us plasticity and disposition, and as Nietzsche, Freud and Deleuze give us forgetfulness, while Plato and Socrates seek to substitute learning with recollection, and Rancière gives us equal ignorance, a picture begins to take shape where unlearning takes the form of a manner—indeed, a demeanour in itself. If there is such a thing as reassurance, this must be offered as a manner. As both a way of doing but also a demeanour, a manner may well suggest a modus operandi that could appear to be teleological. Yet one could turn this on its head and argue that as a demeanour, manner is just an excuse to move away from what is expected to be made and characterized by what is acceptably expected. Taking a sideways view of the expected, the manner could be a vehicle of rejecting the central assumptions over which education is regarded as something equivalent to learning. To put it bluntly, the manner is here suggesting the rejection of anything that was learnt to be expected. Those who believe that learning is premised on progress and growth, would indeed consider both mannerism and unlearning pejoratively. In many ways, that begins to help me make the very case for unlearning as a mannerist pedagogy. Thus I want to borrow the notion of maniera as it was attributed to a phase in Western art that historically lies somewhere between the end of the Renaissance and the emergence of Baroque, but where conceptually it recurs throughout the history of art, as found both in the late Hellenistic age as well as the origin of modernism as prefigured in symbolism and surrealism, as Arnold Hauser rightly argues.

A mannerist pedagogy 149

What is one to make of the temper of an age whose creations were for the most part born under the sign of this uncommonly fascinating but coquettish and complacent way of thinking? Irrationalism, which in philosophy and science leads to the “destruction of reason” and intellectual bankruptcy, does not of course prevent the creation of significant works of art, a fact which is often overlooked by those critics who acutely point out its dangers in the field of theory. (Hauser 1965, pp. 15–16) For those who may be rusty on their art history, the best way to place mannerism is to compare Michelangelo’s three Pietà’s: the well-known Pietà Vaticana (1497–1499), (which is a canonical work of the Renaissance), the Pietà Bandini (also known as the Deposition or the Florence Pietà) which was done between 1547 and 1555 and the last, unfinished but radically different Pietà Rondanini which was started in the 1550s and on which Michelangelo continued to work until his death in 1564. Starting with the last Pietà, one would notice not simply a shift in style, but also in the whole understanding of how Michelangelo’s engagement with this central episode in the Christian story becomes an engagement with humanity, as it intensifies and comes to terms with the very paradox of existence. Likewise, one could approach mannerism by putting alongside each other works like Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper (1495–98) and that by Tintoretto (1592–94), or Raphael’s Visitation (1517) and that by El Greco (1604–14). Far from just a change in style, in Tintoretto and El Greco we find a radical rejection of the certainty by which art was supposed to reach its non plus ultra in the Renaissance. I would argue that if one were to capture the idea of art as unlearning (as that which rejects any attempt to revert to re-learning), then one should begin to approach the fallacy of progression through mannerism, where artists refused to accept an evolutionary paradigm by the same way it was constructed by science, and where rather than being a construct that builds one discovery onto another, artists seek to actively unlearn what precedes them. While (erroneously) some regard the Renaissance as a resurgence of the scientific precision of ancient Greece and Rome which was somewhat “lost” in the Middle Ages (an argument that Eco [1997] and others copiously refuse), in effect what we find in mannerism is a rejection of this notion of direction. What is often seen as a decadence of reason in periods like mannerism, is actually a recognition of the other senses by which we understand our own existence as humans. Hauser captures this beautifully in a couple of sentences: The artists and writers of the mannerist period were not only aware of the insoluble contradictions of life, they actually emphasised and intensified them; they preferred reiterating and drawing attention to them to screening or concealing them. The fascination that the paradoxical nature and

150 A mannerist pedagogy

ambiguity of everything exercised over their minds was so strong that they singled out the contradictory quality of things, cultivated it as artists, and tried to perpetuate it and make it the basic formula of their art. (Hauser 1965, p. 15) In mannerism, art appears to decline vis-à-vis what was regarded as canonical in the Renaissance. Yet in this apparent decline one finds a perpetual sense of ascendancy. While the historical attribution to a manner, a maniera, is considered to be disparaging, this term reverts its fortunes in that it becomes a signature of a sense of liberation which I do not find that different from the sense that Nietzsche attributes to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. One finds that mannerism enhances the approach to this same turn in art making with the rise of artists like El Greco and Tintoretto who basically deschooled what they inherited from their masters. Likewise, mannerism claims the latter aspects of Michelangelo’s art as engaging with the never foreseen bounds of art’s ability to anticipate the depths of the human condition. In the Hellenistic period, one could argue that mannerism is already anticipated by how art takes turns with its human origin, looks at the human condition straight in its disfigured reality, and reveals the weakened reality that the limits of humanity would confirm. Contrary to the strength of the ideal prototype found in the Classical period or the High Renaissance, during Hellenism and likewise in the period of mannerism all ideal assumptions of beauty and form are engaged in a wilful break between form and content, thus pushing art’s paradox to its very limits.

Michelangelo’s uneducable possibilities Outwith the limits of art’s paradox, the power of an ideal and exacting reality moves sideways and lets in the notion of weakening as that which would get us closer to the immanent values of what and who we are as human beings. As in the intensity of Michelangelo’s last Pietà, one could see how even in its incomplete state, his inversion of priorities shows a radically different way of understanding the mystery of human existence. Instead of a young Mary, almost imperially presenting her dead Son, as the royal redeemer of humanity in all its enthroned glory as found in the Pietà Vaticana, in the Pietà Rondanini we have Mary as a bereaved woman, almost destroyed with pain and suffering, barely holding her thirty-three-year-old murdered son, who is falling off her weak arms. In the Pietà Rondanini there is no presentation of the heroic and princely Son of God who redeems us, as found in the Pietà Vaticana. Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini presents redemption from an understanding of the misery of life and death in a reality that expresses itself as weak—indeed kenotic—where with his own death approaching, Michelangelo realizes that to live is to let go and embrace the human condition. This is a radically different approach to redemption; one which makes the

A mannerist pedagogy 151

heretical choices of human despair, but not as a surrender to life itself. In the Pietà Rondanini redemption folds onto itself. The strength is kenotic in that it comes from the recognition of what is within. This weakness does not give up but exits the world of strong expectations. It rejects the ferrous certainties of a teleology that somehow fixes life in a preordained and predestined assumption of one’s own existence. In the Pietà Rondanini Michelangelo’s catholic sense of immanence emerges in its kenotic strength; indeed, a paradox that could never be didactic, let alone learnt by the militant assumptions that would come from a propaganda machine that would suppress mannerism by the assertion and strong certainties of a Jesuitical Baroque. The Pietà Rondanini’s kenotic possibilities of what is uneducable, represent an artistic articulation of unlearning. Artistically speaking this work of art acts in defiance of the certainties that would emerge in the Baroque period. Michelangelo goes beyond the magisterium that his early work might have sustained. If anything, he has radically changed the sense of art’s magisterium by an approach to what is found beyond the realms of what is theologically or philosophically possible. His is an art that refuses to teach in the sense of what it has been doing before. Art reclaims itself by dint of the weakness that it embodied and not by the strength of the perfection and grandeur that the high classical models of the Renaissance were supposed to purport. The implications beyond art itself are huge. What is really at stake is how we could reclaim the freedom and intelligence by which we could recognize and begin to build a sense of conviviality. To borrow Illich’s definition of conviviality, here we are not talking about a simplistic way of coming together, but of a way of owning and using the tools by which individual freedom is realized “in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value” (Illich 2001). It is important to add that interdependence is not only vertical, but also horizontal, in that what was a ground now has become a horizon. Such an approach is removed from those instrumentalized assumptions of schooling— whether found in established forms of religious, moral, artistic, or political formation. Instead, the way we go about being in the world is rearticulated by what Nietzsche identifies as “something completely incapable of being educated” (Nietzsche 1997, p. 130). This captures what we mean by a mannerist pedagogy. We are not talking about a method or a system of educing or forming, nor are we assuming any points of origin and less so a journey with a redemptive destination waiting for us. This is no pilgrimage, nor is it a planned salvific way of being. Through art’s art of forgetting, understood in the mannerist way of making possible that which is uneducable, we begin to understand how such a possibility could ever make sense, let alone be. This could sound too abstract, although it begins to make more sense when mannerism is contextualized within a distinction that needs to be made between style and value. Hauser dwells on this when he discusses Michelangelo and what would mean to regard him as a mannerist in terms of art history in

152 A mannerist pedagogy

one instance, but beyond that, what does it mean to articulate mannerism as a concept within art that would move beyond the sixteenth century. Expanding the concept of mannerism to include practically the whole of the sixteenth century and the subsumption under it of practically all the representative artists of the age never meets with greater resistance than in the case of Michelangelo, who seems much too powerful, unique, and independent to be called a mannerist, a term always associated with extravagance and affectation. (Hauser 1965, p. 164) Hauser explains that in the first place it is not easy “to reach general consent on the significance and definition of the style” of mannerism. Mannerism got a bad name in that maniera meant a demeanour inasmuch as it was meant to imply those who simply imitated other artists’ styles—artists who some considered as the masters beyond whom one could not get. To cite Michelangelo as a mannerist would imply a paradox as he was one such great master and anything that would position him in the light of imitating his own greatness would demean his same greatness. To use Hauser’s words, mannerism’s “unlucky name” would be a way of “distracting attention to characteristics which are by no means the most essential, let alone the most permanent.” Critics are reluctant to describe Michelangelo or Shakespeare as mannerists, feeling that this involves drawing excessive attention to forced and arbitrary features which are certainly not lacking in their art. If some other phrase, such as the “crisis of the Renaissance”, were used in connection with the masters of the age, nobody would have the slightest objection. Here we are really faced with a misconception. (Hauser 1965, p. 164) This misconception must be dealt with if we are to speak of a mannerist pedagogy, as I am using it here. In the first place, mannerism is a refusal to continue to have art’s value predicated by another—which is the very opposite of what mannerism was accused. The contradiction can only hold if we sustain a simplistic sense of art history that moves and progresses from one expectation to a higher one. In other words, this only makes sense if the Platonic space of a good life that stands to be ameliorated retains its hold on art through a set of formative-didactic expectations. Hauser resolves this in two ways. First he makes a distinction between stylistic principles and judgement of value: Those who refuse to see the stylistic principles of mannerism in the art of Michelangelo are generally unable to dissociate a judgment of value from the concept of style, and seem to forget what theoretically they would hardly deny, namely that style is a concept independent of value or

A mannerist pedagogy 153

aesthetic quality. The personal merit of an artist and the value of his work is not a stylistic question. In talking about style it must always be borne in mind that every artist, great or small, conformist or nonconformist, traditionalist or rebel, is an individual case, an “exception”. (Hauser 1965, p. 164) Second, Hauser understands the inherent dialectic by which art, in being historical, refuses to simply remain within confines which would reduce it to a reductionist notion of style or characteristic. Though every artist in certain respects is a special case, nevertheless he inevitably bears the stamp of his age. Every stylistic classification necessarily neglects and does violence to the individual artistic phenomenon, but even the most unique phenomenon has its historical place, and is more or less closely connected with other contemporary historical phenomena. The coincidence of certain characteristics of an artist’s work with those of the predominant stylistic trend can always be described as accidental, as has been specifically done in the case of Michelangelo; but it is precisely from the accumulation of such “accidents” that the notion of style arises. A style is not established deliberately or consciously, and its principles are not invariably and consistently followed. The artist generally finds himself in harmony with them unknowingly and unsuspectingly, and just as often he diverges from them equally unknowingly and unsuspectingly. But that does not destroy the stylistic nature of his art. (Hauser 1965, p. 164) Mannerism is a special moment in the history of art, which appears in between those grand narratives that take over with their temporary certainties. As in the specific example of Michelangelo’s Pietà Rondanini, the manner, indeed the demeanour, by which an artist makes his art, refuses to give into the temptation of restoring the total, and instead insists on what is a moment that some might consider to be a state of incompleteness, and therefore a state that cannot and should not be taught. If indeed incompleteness is considered as a mancanza or a handicap to those who seek in art a state of completeness, then it is this expectation that we should to seize upon, as artists and educators, to press home the argument against instrumentalism—indeed against learning through art. The refusal to teach is not art’s but ours. We make the art work and it is in this deed that we seek to unlearn the expectation of completion and conclusion.

Without a beginning or end By way of concluding, I would remind readers that unlearning reasserts a willed forgetfulness that is twice removed from the Platonic or developmental-constructivist assumption of recollection, even when the latter is often conflated

154 A mannerist pedagogy

with learner-centredness. We do not simply unlearn in order to relearn. Rather, unlearning signals the absolute rejection of a strong grounded truth that is supposed to be critically discovered, socially learnt or systematically accepted by the school. In this combination of a weakening of reality and unlearning, the understanding is that we should not come closer to existence, and thereby mortality, but to move away from the idea of learning as a form of anticipated forgetting that assumes something to be recalled as a strong form of knowledge attested to the real. Inversely, in the weakening of the real, unlearning suggests an approach that is not based on the presumption of knowing but on a process by which in unknowing what is presumed to be true and foundational we get to shift our expectations into a wilful unmaking and forgetting by investing in what we are yet to know. Four well-known examples of what was presumed to be true and foundational are: the image of a geocentric universe which condemned Galileo to home imprisonment; the notion of a flat world which confronted Columbus with an outdated doctrine; the creationist fallacies which despised Darwin and what he stood for; and a straight notion of time that initially discounted Einstein’s genius. These foundational truths were presumed as iterations of a strong reality that was constructed by a magisterium which science and religion considered as dogma—that is, a structured set of principles on which truth is predicated. However, more than the assumption of truth itself, what must be questioned is the principle of predication as a form of attributional assertion that is inclined to teach and thereby presume to form and shape the process of learning. In the case for education, a method of rejection or a process of elimination is often prompted by the interests of a political state of affairs. This offers no reassurance for those who want to assume a position that rejects both the idea of learning and that of growth as a priori assumptions for education. Less reassuring is that commonly used method by which an educationalist seeks his or her guarantee in a set of results, as found in the positivist assumptions taken up by the social scientist. To move beyond what appears as a self-fulfilling cycle within which educational expectations have trapped anything that they seek to school, we must find a way out of those redemptive models of learning by which we remain tied to assumed origins. This brings together all those elements by which this book makes the case for unlearning and how art’s autonomy consistently prompts us to wilfully forget a world view that is pegged on preordained expectations. Just as redemptive models in religion and ideology have beholden us to a state of sin or imperfection for which our entire existence has to atone, myths like those of a state of emptiness (as in the analogy of the empty room), or a presumption of ignorance or not knowing continue to couch learning in preordained structures. Yet as art confirms, there is no beginning that could serve as a form of reassurance for a change in matters of conduct, personhood, citizenship or anything that has been used to justify the schooling of everything we do. Less so could one make a case for education on the presumed targets

A mannerist pedagogy 155

that leaders and policy-makers tend to set for society, whether such claims are made from a progressive, liberal, conservative or reactionary stance. To claim that one only needs to leave such expectations open-ended would make no sense, because open-endedness does not make teleological assumptions go away. Rather, they are in and of themselves teleologically construed. If there is a sense of departure, far from being a terminus a quo, it has to begin without ever presuming a telos let alone a terminus ad quem. The one exception— that of a desired end—is deceptive enough to be accorded some consideration, only to highlight the paradox that assumes an end that is only desired. A desired end is not even open-ended because without any clear beginning, it discards any criteria of rejection. Unless we do away with an educational system that operates on predication, any pedagogical structure—be it critical or didactic, open or closed—remains problematic. This is where I would cite Nietzsche to break the cycle of predication and to make a case for a mannerist pedagogy. Finding Schopenhauer as the teacher which he never expected to find—because he had no preordained notion of what this educator would look like—Nietzsche’s route was one of unlearning what an educator should be. This was not a method of rejection assumed over a strong ground. If that was the case it would have simply presumed an unequivocal reality—the ideal type (typos, as model) of teacher—to be discovered. Rather, what Nietzsche asserts as the reality of his pedagogical desires, was a weakened horizon; weakened by the fact that his search was premised on the negation of any presumed typology. Just like Nietzsche himself, Schopenhauer could never be a model, if only a model that rejects all models. As Nietzsche put it, “Schopenhauer never wants to cut a figure: for he writes for himself and no one wants to be deceived, least of all a philosopher who has made it a rule for himself: deceive no one, not even yourself!” (1997, p. 134). It is in such a denied deception, that we begin to understand, not without a degree of paradox, how art is an act of unlearning.

REFERENCES Adorno, T. 2005. Minima moralia: Reflections from damaged life. London: Verso. Atkinson, D. 2011. Art, equality and learning: Pedagogies against the state. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Baldacchino, J. 2005. Hope in groundlessness: Art’s denial as pedagogy. Journal of Maltese Educational Research, 3(1), 1–13. Baldacchino, J. 2012. Art’s way out: Exit pedagogy and the cultural condition. Rotterdam, NL: Sense. Beckett, S. 2006. Waiting for Godot. The Grove Centenary Edition. Volume III. Dramatic Works. New York: Grove Press. Bernstein, R.J. 1966. John Dewey. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview. Biesta, G.J.J. 2006. Beyond learning: Democratic education for a human future. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Biesta, G.J.J. 2014. The beautiful risk of education. London: Routledge

156 A mannerist pedagogy Boal, A. 2008. Theatre of the oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Deleuze, G. 2013. Nietzsche and philosophy. London: Bloomsbury. Dewey, J. & Bentley, A.F.K. 2008. Knowing and the known. In J.A. Boydston (Ed.). The later works of John Dewey 1925–1953: Volume 16 1949–1952. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 1–294. Dewey, J. 1935. The future of liberalism. The Journal of Philosophy, 32(9), 225–230. Dewey, J. 1958. Experience and nature. Mineola, NY: Dover Dewey, J. 1966. Democracy and education. New York: The Free Press. Dewey, J. 2005. Art as experience. New York: Perigree. Eco, U. 1997. Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale [Art and beauty in the middle ages]. Milano, IT: Bompiani Gadamer, H.G. 1976. Philosophical hermeneutics. S.E. Linge (Ed. & trans.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gadamer, H.G. 1979. Truth and method. London: Sheed and Ward. Garoian, C.R. 2013. The prosthetic pedagogy of art: Embodied research and practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Greene, M. 1973. Teacher as stranger: Educational philosophy for the modern age. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing. Greene, M. 1988. The dialectic of freedom. New York: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. 2001. Variations on a blue guitar. The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education. New York: Teachers College Press. Hauser, A. 1965. Mannerism: The crisis of the Renaissance and the origin of Modern Art. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Illich, I. 1974. After deschooling, what? London: Writers and Readers Cooperative. Illich, I. 2001. Tools for conviviality. New York: Marion Boyars. jagodzinski, j. (Ed.) 2017. What is art education? After Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave Macmillan Lukács, G. 1971. Prolegomeni a un’ estetica Marxista, sulla categoria della particolarità. Roma, IT: Editori Riuniti Lukács, G. 1975. Estetica. F. Fehér (Ed.), A. Solmi (trans.). Turin, IT: Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi. Marcuse, H. 1978. The aesthetic dimension: Toward a critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Nietzsche, F. 1990. The twilight of the idols. In The twilight of the idols and the AntiChrist: or how to philosophize with a hammer. RJ. Hollingdale (trans.). London: Penguin, pp. 29–122. Nietzsche, F. 1997. Schopenhauer as educator. In Untimely meditations. D. Breazeale (Ed.), R. J. Hollingdale (trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. 2003. Beyond good and evil. R.J. Hollingdale (trans.). London: Penguin. Nietzsche, F. 2006. On the genealogy of morality and other writings. K. Ansell Pearson (Ed.), C. Diethe (trans.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Plato 2005. Meno. The collected dialogues of Plato: Including the letters (Bollingen Series LXXI). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Rancière, J. 1991. The ignorant schoolmaster: Five lessons in emancipation. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Stace, W.T. 1955. The philosophy of Hegel: A systematic exposition. New York: Dover. Vattimo, G., Rovatti, P.A. (Eds.). 1988. Il pensiero debole [Weak thought]. Milano, IT: Feltrinelli.

Index

a/r/tography 25–27, 32, 37–38, 65 about the world 21, 25 accountability 10–11, 63–64, 99, 107, 113; myth of 63 Adami, V. 15, 40–43, 54–58, 61 Adorno, T.W. 2, 17–18, 27–28, 36, 44, 48, 62, 65–67, 76–77, 82–83, 94–95, 134–135, 155 aesthetic imperative 106, 121, 127 aesthetics: education x, xii, 68 agency 22, 28, 32, 48, 67–68, 89, 118–120, 123–124, 142 agôn 116 agonism 16, 80 Althusser, L. 81 anamnesis 9, 16, 43–45, 55, 58, 62, 78, 95, 102, 134, 142, 144 antagonism 16, 67, 80, 114 anti-art 13 anticipation 16, 25, 33, 43, 61, 91, 93, 110 Apollonian 70 aporia 34, 69, 80, 86–87, 91–92, 94, 115, 120, 129, 132, 139, 144 aporia of exile 115 approximation 17, 128–129 Aristotle 135 Armenian genocide 134 ars 1, 25, 26 ars artefaciens 45, 58, 94 ars artefacta 45, 94 Art Brut 87 art education 1–2, 13–19, 23, 35, 39–40, 45, 49, 51, 59, 63–66, 72, 75, 109–110, 118–129, 131, 140, 142–143, 156; action 39; arts in education 1, 13, 80, 83, 97, 112–119, 127; arts education xii, 1, 34, 79, 83, 89,

99–115, 140; open-endedness 2, 3, 12, 15, 29, 34, 90–92, 106–111, 122–123, 136, 155; “returned” facts 14, 35 art: ± education 126–129; antinomic way of being 34, 91; aporetic ways xii, 13, 18, 69, 91–92, 112; autonomy 1–3; 11, 18, 50–51, 67–68, 72–76, 79–88, 112–116, 121–122, 129, 132–139, 147, 154; contingent nature 2, 12, 17–18, 22, 32, 36, 64, 77, 91–95, 118, 129, 138; exit pedagogy 35, 91, 116, 132–133, 136; false ‘ease’ 16, 97–110, 112, 114, 116; fate in education 11, 120; finished work 22; groundlessness 15, 18, 28, 35, 37, 69–72, 77, 131, 139, 155; manner xii, 18, 35, 45, 132, 148, 150, 153; maybe 32, 106, 127; need to speak itself out of existence 13, 32, 92; objectless 52; of forgetting 17, 18, 94, 131–135, 142–154; paradox xii, 13. 15–17, 53, 60,64, 65–69, 76–77, 87, 91–92, 112, 121, 125, 129, 132, 135–139, 141, 144, 149–152, 155; pedagogy i-xii, 6, 10, 13, 16–19, 24, 28–29, 34–37, 51, 59, 106–116, 123–156; philosophies of learning 14, 35; practices 1–7; 13–19; 22–48; 54, 63–88, 91, 95, 99–139, 141; praxis as a poetic discourse of unlearning 35; praxis as an occasion of unlearning 14; reified 15, 36, 43, 48, 64; teachability 1, 13; teaching xi, 9–15, 34, 36, 41, 45, 60–61, 83, 89–90, 97, 105–114, 123–128, 134; that makes things 45–47, 56, 58, 94; undoing 4–6, 18, 132, 142; uninterpreting 142; ways of being 94, 129 Arte Povera 87

158 Index arting 39–40 artist-as-maker 10 artists ± educators 126–128 arts practice: practices 1–7; 13–19; 22–48; 54, 63–88, 91, 95, 99–139, 141; as a method of research 23, 25–29, 33, 65; plural horizon of 1, 22, 70, 72, 112 arts research 23, 25, 27–28, 37; practice-based 23, 28, 37; arts-based methods 24, 65, 81, 104 Atkinson, D. 144, 155 audience 3, 5, 22, 31, 40, 52–57, 60, 77, 87–88, 90, 94, 106, 125, 134; audienced 54 autonomy 1–3, 6, 11, 14–18, 50–51, 58–59, 67–68, 71–76, 79–81, 85–88, 90, 112, 114, 116, 120–122, 129, 132–134, 138–139, 141, 147, 154 avant-garde, 20thc. 13 Bachelard, G. 104, 116 Badiou, A. 28, 37, 101 Baldacchino, J. Balibar, É. 80–81, 96, 139 banking: didactic system of instruction 11, 142 Barone, T. 24, 27, 37 Barthes, R. 105, 111, 116 Baxandall, M. 66, 77, 89, 96 BBC 97, 116 beautiful: 22, 32, 41, 45, 110, and sublime 56, 83, 125; true and good x, xii, 6, 16, 68, 87, 89–91, 99, 105, 118, 129, beauty 9, 18, 56, 69, 125, 150; beauty: of God 41 Beckett, S. 132–133 , 155 Beethoven, L. 31, 70 being xi–xii, 6, 85, 87, 94–95, 119, 122, 126, 132, 151; an artist 2, 46, 63; and doing ix; antinomic 91; as art 32, 46; as tool or thing 15; contingent 36; God as 7, 8; heteronomous 6; intelligently experimental 41; interstices of 21; thrownness of 123–125; ways of 41, 94, 129 Bentley, A. 139, 156 Bergson, H, 108, 111, 116 Berio, L. 3 Beuys, J 25 Biesta, G. 81, 82, 85, 96, 103, 116, 144, 155 Bildung 127–128; building learning 127

Boal, A. 135, 156 Borriaud, N. 26 Bourgeois, L. 25, 32 Bresler, L. 24, 37 Bruner, J 79–80 Byzantine art, 41 Cage, J. 20, 25, 30–32, 35–37 Cahnmann-Taylor, M. 24, 37 can art be taught? 7, 10 canon 52, 53; artistic 13, 40, 54, 71, 149, 150; canonical desire 3; critical theory 49; of learning 13, 51, 89; teleological certainty 12; unlearning the i, xii Caravaggio, M.M. 32, 70, 87, 90 Carrà, C. 125–127 Cavell, S. 52–54, 62, 72–75, 77 Cayley, D. 74, 78 Chant, A. 97, 116 child-centred education (see learnercentredness and distinction) Cole, A.L. 24, 38 Columbus Circle, NYC Columbus, C. 57 common good 11 common sense 11, 39, 49, 60, 120, 142 complexity 25, 98 Confederation of British Industries (CBI) 97, 114, 116 conflicting panaceas, 99–100 consciousness 76, 102, 135, 147; false: 103 conservative xi, 99, 155; forms of certainty 12, 109; education 29, 84, 128; politics: 2, 131 constructivism xi, 17, 67, 101–103, 115, 127, 141; argument for art 66, 129; education & learning xi, 11, 18, 60, 64, 109, 111, 125, 137, 141–144; hegemony 49; legitimacy 25; scaffold 43; shortcuts 17; signifiers: 16; social: 10, 50, 63, 65, 68, 124, 141 constructs 66, 67, 118, 125; aesthetic 69, 97–98; historical 63; moral and theological 7; of learning 17, 114, 131; rational 108; social 12, 83; unlearning x, 3, 12 contiguity 27–28, 33 contingency 2, 22, 85–86, 93, 105, 140, 146–147; art 14, 32, 35–36, 118, 129; and accidental 12; education 77, 118, 129; everydayness 91–92; historical

Index 159 17–18, 64, 68, 89, 92, 95, 138; of life 9, 27, 95 could art be taught? 9 creative industry 93, 99, 112, 114, 116, 140 creativity 9–10, 71, 79, 81, 98–99, 104–105, 10–109, 112, 114, 129, 147 criticality 14, 16, 35, 49–50, 60, 75, 86, 95, 127; aesthetic 72; arts practice 28, 34–35; critical pedagogy 10, 35, 49, 68, 100, 106, 114–115, 155; critical practice 68, 81, 106, 118, 137; critical pragmatism 119; critical theorists 17; critical thinkers 80, 99; educational 29, 127, 155; immanence 128 Croce, B. 20, 37, 47–50, 62, 108, 110–111, 116 curriculum 124, 104; arts 65, 89, 100, 114; discourses 26; disinterested 84–85; economy 83–84; hidden 36–37; hierarchies 45, 97, 135; moralpedagogical 93; policy 105, 110 dangerous perhapses 118 Darwin, C. 12, 141, 154 de Cusa, N. 33, 34, 37 de Kooning, W. 31 Deleuze, G. 19, 68, 77, 147–148, 156 demeanour, art’s xii, 13, 148, 152–153 democracy 11, 137, 139; arts 119, 127; knowledge, democratised x, 115; neoliberal perversions of 12; disposition 17, 74, 92; in education 74–75, 81, 92, 141 deschooling 135; practice, art’s 18, 63–78, 132, 150; learning: 15; pedagogical aesthetics 28; society 72 desired effects 16, 99 Dewey, J. 9, 12, 17, 29–31, 34, 37, 48–50, 62, 73–74, 77, 79, 81, 85–86, 92–93, 96, 100, 110, 116, 118, 128, 130, 136–139, 141–142, 145, 148, 155–156 dialectal 31 dialectics 12, 50, 80; Adorno and Hegel, 82–83; and Bildung 127–128; art 90, 133, 153; art and education 34, 108–109, 120–123, 129; autonomy and heteronomy 80–81, 139; Dewey’s 30, 141; disinterested education 85; double bind 47, 50, 64–66, 134; Cage’s 31; fourth loop 121; form and meaning 16,

99–101, 112–114; relationship 16, 83, 105, 107; knowledge and unlearning 50; learning 68 dialogic agonism 16, 80 didactic teaching 10, 11, 41, 60, 107–108 Dionysiac 68–70 discovery 68, 149 methods of 3, 7, 10, 132; in art 77, 88, 135; in art and education 15 disestablishment 18, of the school 74, 135; of learning 142 disinterestedness: education (disinterested school) 84–87; aesthetic 125 disposition 40, 91–95, 118, 126; aesthetic 115; democratic 17; education (pedagogical) 81, 128, 114, 145; in evolution 141; fixed predisposition 49, 104; taught xii, 13; and prejudice 4; towards the world 15; plastic 18, 141, 148; political 115–116 distinction: aesthetics and ethics 54; ars artefaciens and ars artefacta (Gilson’s) 39, 45–47, 57, 59, 61, 94; art and education 1, 14, 115; autonomous and constructive 50; autonomy and liberty 3; contingency and necessity 86; didactic and learner-centred 11, 142; ease and complexity 98; education and learning 10, 35, 72; Eleatic 144; learning with and through 15, 40, 51; exploratory and eidetic 114; gnoseology and epistemology 122; in unlearning 80; modern and non-modern 31; performative 27; space and edifice 109; style and value 151–152 diversity 17, 49, 61, 131; artistic disciplines 1, 61, 91; education 81; forms x; immanence 18; intentionality 89; narratives 22; political 14; possibilities xii, 68, 75; practices 13, 34, 63; singularities 138–139; specificities x does God exist? 9 doing ix, 25, 69, 79, 94; art as 36, 39, 44–48, 54–57, 61, 68–71, 83, 90–93, 106, 115–116, 122, 127, 133; art x; as unlearning 17; knowing and being xii, 85, 87, 123, 139; learning by 140–142; making x, xii, 15; philosophy (and thinking) 70, 103, 113, 114; undoing ix, 1, 4–6, 17, 18, 132–133, 142; ways of x, 119, 148

160 Index double bind: art and learning 64–66 (see also dialectics) doubt: and error 14, 20, 29–30; and finding 35–36; self-doubt 4; through art 34–35 (see also error) draw out 18–19, 41, 132 (see also educe and withdraw) drawing 13, 18, 54, 132 Duccio, di Buoninsegna 41 Duchamp, M. 4, 35, 72 Duns Scotus, J. 41–42 dynamei 94 ease: fallacy 16, 97–100, 109–110, 113–116 ecclesia 74–75 Eco, U. 2–3, 19, 70, 77, 149, 156 edifice x; edificial narratives 104–107, 113–116; pedagogical certainties. 107–108 educe 15, 39, 41–45, 58, 94–95, 151 (see also draw out, retrieve and withdraw) method: eidetic 106–107, 110, 114 Einstein, A. 98, 142, 154 Eisner, E. 24, 27, 37 El Greco 13, 149–150 emancipation 14, 50, 73, 80, 119, 127, 136, 140, 143; emancipatory 29, 49, 73, 85, 119, 127 Emerson, R.W. 68, 77 empire 111 empty: room, method of 16, 101–109, 111–114, 154; space 102, 106; form, teaching method of 105–111, 116 English Psychologists, the (see also Nietzsche) 146 epistemology 94, 97, 102, 110, 124, 126; anticipation 43; freedom 84; hierarchy 76–77, 98–99, 112–113, 122; moral 143; teleology 127; typology 99 epoché 34; Pyrrhonist 59 equality 64, 102, 119, 137, 139, 155 (see also emancipation); inequality 49 error (see also doubt) 7, 142, 145; and doubt 14, 20; 29 everydayness 68, 87, 91, 147; everyday life 15, 24, 39, 44, 56, 60, 86–87, 90–92, 95, 127, 133 existentialism 68 exit 127, 132–133, 136, 151; as unlearning 16; exit pedagogy 35, 91; exiting and forgetting; exiting into the

world xii, 13; exiting: art’s 14, 25, 35, 93; way out (uscita di sicurezza) 91 experience: aesthetic 110, 115, 133, 135–136; anticipation 16, 93–94; art 25, 50, 60–61, 67, 69, 88–89, 95, 99, 129; education 12; 29–30, 55, 74, 86, 124, 129; empiricist 146–148; language 21; learning 16, 44, 48–50, 52, 68–69, 73, 79, 91–92; mannerist; philosophy 82–83, 132, 141 experiment: discovery 3; doing 85; knowledge 85–87, 90; arts thinking 106–107; experimentation 9, 12, 18, 91, 103, 110, 122, 141–142 faits sociaux 66 false “ease”: art’s (see ease, fallacy) false consciousness (see consciousness, false) Fazackerley, A. 97, 116 finding 4, 33, 35, 145 fluency 31; and interruption 31–32 forgetfulness: and weak pedagogy 10–18; art as, 131–132; art’s way, 18, 44; as unlearning 1, 13, 89, 134–135; forgetting taught dispositions xii; forgetting, art of 17, 94–95; Nietzschean concept, 146–154; willed 16, 79–95, 132–135, 142, 144 form: and content 16, 150; and meaning 16, 99, 101; art 13, 50, 56, 60, 66, 87, 102; autonomous 47, 59; empty, 105–109; groundlessness given 35; qua form 110–116 forms of: action 63; doing 4, 87, 104; knowledge xi, 15, 40, 55, 60, 64, 72, 85–87; learning ix, 12, 40, 77, 79; legitimation 11, 24, 36, 100, 140; life 40–41 art as 20–23, 45, 60 61, 64, 95, 129; making 83, 99; meaning 69; mimetic scoping 16; practice 34, 60, 85, 88; reasoning 81–83, 85, 99, 103, 136; unlearning 16, 18 Formative: aesthetics 33, 138; art as 15, 40, 122; context 138–139; event 128; formative-didactic expectations 152; hegemony 115; teacher 144 Foucault, M. 100–101 foundationalism xii, 10, 12, 24, 29, 75, 82–83, 83, 103, 115, 131, 143, 145; nostalgia 101 Fra Angelico 41–43

Index 161 freedom 9, 140, 143; and democracy 119; and intelligence 2, 18, 44, 95, 111, 151; and liberty 3; art’s 3, 90, 139; autonomy 3 112, 147 (see also autonomy); epistemological 84, 122, 143; experimentation 103; schools 137; to be 79; to be creative 107; unfreedom 119, 127; will 42 Freud, S. 43, 148 futuring 32, 93 Gadamer, H.G. 17, 132–133, 135, 138–139, 156 Galileo Galilei 33, 142, 154; Galilean pre-Galilean 8, 9, 142; pre-Galilean world; post-Galilean: space; time 142 Gardner, H. 79 Garoian, C. 17, 19, 121–123, 130, 144, 156 gender 49, 60, 66, 126 Gilson, É. 45–47, 55–59, 61–62, 77–78, 94, 96 Giotto 41 Giuliani, R. 90 gnoseology 122–126 Godot 132–133, 155 good, the 9, 18, 69, 83; art as 11, 110 and evil 126, 156; life 135, 152; true and beautiful (see beautiful: true and good) Gothic art 41 grace 102–103 Gramsci, A. 11, 19, 33, 35, 37, 49, 50, 62, 77, 81, 84, 96, 101, 115 graphe 25–26 Gray, C. 24, 37 Greene, M. 17, 32, 36–37, 57, 62, 65–66, 68–70, 76, 78, 95, 144, 156 ground 28, 30, 35–36, 68–69, 72; turned horizon 28–29, 77, 115, 151; art’s 47; plural 112; methodological 112; groundedness 13, 18, 132, 154–155 groundlessness 15, 28, 35–36, 68–72, 131, 139 growth, ix, 3, 12, 17, 30, 48, 71, 73, 79, 103, 108–109, 119, 121, 128–129, 141, 148, 154 guy in the sky Hasebe-Lundt, et al. 26, 37 Hauser, A. 13, 19, 148–153, 156 Hegel, G.F. 12, 81–83, 95–96, 127–128, 130, 145, 156

Heidegger, M. 101, 116 Heller, A. 86, 91, 96 heresy: as choice 87 hermeneutics 17, 120–121, 126, 133, 137–138, 144–145, 156 heteronomy 3, 6, 80, 85, 139, 147; heteronomy of heteronomy 80, 139 Hickman, R. 24, 37, 64, 78 historical confinement 32–133, 138 Holdridge, L. 27, 38 horizon: of autonomy 139; intersubjective 131 (see ground: turned horizon) Horkheimer, M. 2, 18–19, 49–50, 62, 100, 116, 120, 130, 134 hybridity 4, 26, 52, 91, 112 ignorance 103–104, 105, 154; as growth 141; ignorant schoolmaster 73, 101–103; Nicola of Cusa’s notion 33; Rancièrian notion of, 36, 102, 148; relative ignorance, Gramscian notion of 32–34, 35 Illich, I. 11, 19, 72, 74–75, 78, 135–137, 140, 151, 156 imagination 25, 56, 81, 101, 141 and praxis 68–72 imaginary: art 87; Greene’s 37; moral 44; philosophical 33; spatial 104–105, 109; walled 114 immanence 6, 18, 67, 99, 118–128, 132, 151; immanence: two forms 118–120 immaturity 12, 17, 128–129, 141, 145 Immediacy 81, 85, 128 implicit causes 16, 99 Indirectness 126; pedagogy 17, 19, 124, 127–130; ventriloquist 123–124 inevitability: myth of 3 Innovation 10, 105, 108, 112, 114, 140 Inquisition 111 instrumental reason 2, 19, 25, 120–121, 125, 130, 138 instrumentalism 1–2, 16, 48, 50, 99, 114,116, 122, 127, 129–134, 137, 151, 153 intentionality 14, 28, 35, 60, 65, 88–90, 107 Interpretation 3, 4, 17, 25, 38, 126, 142; and relativity 136–139; interpretation: canonicity 40; interpretive process 40, 76 interruption (see fluency) Interstices 12, 21, 23, 53, 71, 80 Irwin, R. 25, 26, 29, 37–38

162 Index Jacotot, J.J. 73 jagodzinski, j. 65, 78, 144, 156 joyous one: La gioconda judgement 48, 56, 62, 125, 138–139; and art 22 Kant, I. 22, 33, 38, 48, 56, 62, 108, 116, 125, 130, 138–139 Kenosis 18, 28, 131, 150–151 King Cole, N. 4 Key Information Sets (KIS) 84, 96 knowledge 2, 9, 11, 15, 17–18, 23–27, 33–36, 38–45, 53–59, 61–65, 69–72, 76–79, 83–87, 90, 94–100, 115, 120–126, 130–138, 140–143, 148, 154; (see also forms: of knowledge); epistemology 102, 122, 143; gnoseology 122–124, 126; industry 138; sociology of (see sociology of knowledge) Knowles, J.G. 24, 38 Kundera, M. 22, 25, 38 Laclau, E. 28, 38, 70, 72, 78 Ladner, G. 74, 78 laicity 74–75 Language 43, 110–113, 124; language games: as forms of life 20–21 Le Doueff, M. 33, 38 learner-centredness 9–10, 29, 44, 68, 73, 76, 103, 109, 110, 112, 135, 147, 154 learning: of the outwith, art as 48–52; by which we do things 40, 54–55, 58; as growth ix, 3, 17, 30, 71, 79, 109, 119, 128, 129, 141, 148, 154; through art 15, 23, 39–40, 61, 79, 153; with art 12, 15, 39, 40–62, 80–148 learnt art 9–10 learnt belief 7–10 Leavy, P. 24, 27, 38 legitimation 2–3, 11, 23–29, 33, 36–37, 65, 98, 100, 109, 118, 140, 147 Lenin, V.I. 54, 57–58 Leonardo da Vinci 4, 98, 149 liberalism, liberals 17, 29, 102, 112, 114–118, 124, 127–129, 131, 135–137, 148, 155 life-drawing 18 Lowenfeld, V. 79 Luckmann, T. 74, 78 Lukács, G. 17, 64, 78, 138, 156

Luscombe, D. 41, 62 Lyotard, J.F. 42–43, 55–59, 62, 66, 78, 120, 130 magnitude 56 making x, xii, 10, 15–16, 24, 26, 28–30, 28, 36, 39, 41, 45–47, 51, 61, 63, 70, 83, 94, 99, 112, 114–117, 133–134, 137–138, 140–142, 150; unmaking 36, 154 Malins, J. 24, 37 man in the sky 7 man upstairs 7 mancanza 153 Manichaeism 100 maniera 148, 150, 152 (see also demeanour and manner) manner xii, 18, 35, 45, 132, 148, 150, 153 Mannheim, K. 23, 24, 38, 128, 130; Mannheimian 76, 127 Marcuse, H. 64, 78, 133–134, 138, 156 Marker, C. 25 Marxism 82, 112 Merleau-Ponty, M. 104, 117 McAuliffe, D. 5, 19 MacLeod, K. 27, 38 Mead, G.H 81, 96 measure: curricular mediation Meno 9, 43, 62, 69, 134–135, 144; Meno’s paradox 132 metaphysical métissage 26 Michelangelo, di Buonarroti 13, 149–153; Pietà Bandini 140; Pietà Rondanini 149–151, 153; Pietà Vaticana 149–150 mimetic scoping 16, 95, 98 Mona Lisa 1, 4–6, 11 moral life 7 more or less, the (see art: ± education and approximation) Morrison, T. 69 mountain (see also magnitude) 56–57 multiple intelligence 16 myth-making 14 necessary redemption 133 necessity 71, 73, 91, 108, 127–129, 142 negation 16–17, 67–68; and presence 80–84, 86, 95, 102–105, 108, 111–114, 133, 155

Index 163 neo-Positivism 120 neoliberalism 12, 14, 135, 148 Nietzsche, F. 54, 68–70, 77–78, 118, 126, 130–132, 143–151, 155–156 non-identitarian thinking 18, 66, 72, 82, 86, 94, 103, 111–113 nostalgia 101–104, avant-nostalgia 62 noumenon 33 objects: 2 art’s x, 15, 21–25, 35–36, 38–42, 46, 52–53, 55–56, 59–67, 70–72, 81–91, 101–109, 114, 131–133, 141–142; objectless 52; (see also subject-object) observational drawing 13 Ofili, C. 90 open work (opera aperta) 3–4, 12, 19 originary practice 34 otherness 36, 85, 121, 126 outwith, the 5–6, 37, 40, 48–52 paideia 135 pain 56, 134, 150 panecastic 73 paradox xii, 13, 15–18, 53, 60, 64–65, 67, 69, 70, 75–77, 87, 91–92, 95, 105, 109, 112, 115, 121, 125, 129, 132, 135, 137–144, 148–152, 155 Parker, C. 32 parthenogenesis 49–50 particularity 22, 73, 75, 139 pedagogy: art xi-xii, 1, 10, 13, 16, 17–19, 34,106–108, 112, 115, 130, 156; canon 89; indirect (see indirectness); mannerist xii, 13, 17, 131–156; pedagogical aesthetics 16, 28, 95, 114–115; prosthetic 17, 19, 123, 130, 156; weak 10, 13, 18, 28, 131–132 pensiero debole (see also weak thought) 28, 38, 156 perception of implicit causes 16 performativity 59, 111, 120, 125, 137 Pessoa, F. 25 phenomenology 68, 89, 96, 117, 130; phenomenological suspension (method) 34, 59 philosophy 2, 5, 6, 52–56, 65, 68–70, 72–73, 75, 81–83, 92, 99–100, 110, 116, 136, 139, 145, 150–155; art and education 6, 29, 46–48, 86–87, 113–114, 135–136, 141, 143; imaginary (see also imaginary:

philosophical) 33; knowing 122–126; perennial (philosophia perennis) 94; philosophers, edifying 69, 118; philosophy: doing 70; philosophy: of art education 14, 35, 63; philosophy: of learning 14, 35 phronesis 106 Pietà, Michelangelo’s (see Michelangelo) Pink, D. H. 98, 117 plasticity 12, 141, 148; disposition 12, 141 Plato 9, 19, 43, 54, 62, 69, 78, 94–95, 98, 115, 132, 134, 144, 148, 152–153, 156 plurality 1, 22, 68, 70, 72–73, 79–80, 95, 112, grounds 112 poetic scoping, 30, 35–36 poiesis 46 polis 16, 36, 44–45, 76, 78, 81, 114–116; walled 16, 115 Popper, K. 65, 77 positivism 12, 49–50, 65, 77, 100, 120, 154 possibility xii, 1–7, 12, 14–15, 21, 25, 27–28, 40–43, 47, 55–58, 63, 65, 68–72, 75, 81, 91, 95, 104–106, 110, 114, 119, 124, 127, 129, 133, 144–145, 150 potentiality 17, 69, 71, 94, 115, 138, 145 practice-informed method, 29, 81 practicism 2, 14, 28–29, 35 pragmatism 12, 47, 49, 81, 100, 110, 120, 136–137, 145 praxis: 2, 14, 35, 36, 68, 106, 143 praxialists 101 (see also critical practice) predisposition (see disposition) principium individuationis 70 process 114; art, process: and product 2, 10, 15, 43, 46, 63, 69–71, 77; art x-xi, 46, 61, 93–94; learning (and unlearning) 43, 48, 90, 91–94, 107, 110, 112, 116, 121, 127, 134, 147, 154; processual 48, 93, 94, 144; social 49 product: (see process: and product) productivist aesthetic 2, 112, 140; Bauhaus 140 progress, progressives xi, xii, 2, 12, 29, 44, 73, 76, 99–100, 103, 109, 115, 127–131, 135, 137, 148–149, 155 prosthesis 121, 123 (see also pedagogy: prosthetic); prosthetic synthesis 121–123 protentive 93 (see also experience) Proust, M. 55

164 Index race 49, 66 Rancière, J. 17, 33, 38, 64, 73, 78, 81, 101–102, 117, 144, 148, 156 Raphael, Raffaello Sanzio 149 Read, H. 51, 62 recollection: process of (see anamnesis) redemption, redemptive 18, 32, 103, 116, 131, 133, 139–143, 150–154 reification 1, 15, 27, 36, 43, 48, 64, 87, 113, 134 relationality 26, 51, 75 relativity, relative 137, 138, 142; and interpretation (see interpretation: and relativity); ignorance 32–33, 35, 37 (see also ignorance); relativity: historic 9, 11, 17 Renaissance 13, 19, 41, 132, 148–152, 156 resemblance 22 retrieval iv, 41–44, 55, 57, 58, 81 (see also withdrawal, drawing out and educing) reversal 7, 10. 13, 91, 134, 141 Rilke, R.M. 63, 78 risk 4, 7, 12, 25–27, 32, 83, 90, 93, 95, 155; and error (see error) Robinson, J.A.T. 8, 19 Rorty, R. 17, 69, 78 Rose, M.A. 111, 117 Rothko, M. 70 Rovatti, P.A. 28, 38, 145, 156 Russell Group 97, 98, 117 Ryle, G. 41, 62 Saeverot, H. 17, 19, 124, 130 Sartre, J.P. 32 school, the x, 13–14, 24, 37, 40, 47, 51–52, 61, 64, 73–75, 77, 109, 111–115, 119, 142, 146, 154 schooling 15–16, 40, 45, 55, 59, 64, 73–75, 85, 97, 110, 135, 137, 141, 147, 151, 154, 156; comprehensive: 15, 40, 55, 85 schooled society (se e also deschooling) Schopenhauer, A. 69, 145, 150, 155–156 Schutz, A. 93, 96 scopic 92, 94 scuola disinteressata see disinterestedness Searle, J. 89, 96 semiotics: semiological system; semiotic relationship

Serra, R. 15, 40, 54, 60–62, 82, 88–90, 96 Serrano, A. 90 sexuality 66 Shakespeare, W. 52 Shoah 134 Siegesmund, R. 24, 37 silence 20, 37, 67, 133 sin 90, 143, 154 singularities 17, 138–139 social constructivism (see constructivism) social sciences 23–27, 34–35, 65, 80, 113, 154 sociology of knowledge 14, 23, 26–27, 36, 38, 40, 63, 65, 77, 84, 100, 113, 127, 130, 148 Socrates 9, 43–44, 54, 115, 134–135, 144–145, 148 soft subjects (see also ease, fallacy of) 97–98, 116 soliloquy: 17, 125, 118, 128–129 (see also approximation) something else x, xi, 12, 17, 41, 51, 57–58, 77, 93, 142 Son of God 87, 150 Spinoza, B. 8–9, 19 Springgay, S. 25–26, 29, 37–38 Stace, W.T. 144, 156 Stockhausen, K. 56, 62, 70 student-centred learning, studentcentredness (see learner-centred) subject-object (see object) substitution-instances 71 Sullivan, G. 27, 38 Surrealism 126, 148 symbol 126, 148 synthesis 80. 105, 114, 121–123; synthetic prosthesis 123 Tàpies, A. 93–94 taught dispositions xii, 13, 93 (see also disposition) tautology, tautological 2, 10, 12, 16, 20, 29, 34, 41, 52–53, 61, 71, 98–100, 104–105, 113–116, 140, 144 taxonomies 3 teachability (see art: teachability) teaching (see art: teaching) téchne 1 teleology 12, 25, 43, 52, 125, 127, 131, 143–144, 148, 151, 155

Index 165 temporal relativity (see relativity: historical ) Terror 56–57; terror: and art (see also sublime and beauty) Theoria 106 thing, the 45–46, 82, 94, 101; that art makes 45–46: that we learn 40, 51–55 Tintoretto, J. 13, 149–150 transaction 17, 103–105, 118–120, 139 transgression 85, 87 troubling space 81–82 true: good and beautiful, see beautiful: true and good truth 10, 16, 18, 30, 32, 41, 44–47, 68–69, 98, 105–106, 131, 139, 145, 154 undoing (see doing) uneducable possibilities 150–151 universality 22, 72–73, 83, 139 unmediated 22, 28, 30 use, art’s: uselessness 54, 61; usefulness x, 31, 53–54, 61, 75–77, 92, 140, 147

Vatican II 8 Vattimo, G. 28, 38, 145, 156 ventriloquism 17, 118, 120–130; (see also indirectness: ventriloquist) Wallin, J. 65, 78 Warhol, A. 4 weak: pedagogy 10, 13, 18, 28, 131–132; weak thought 28, 38, 145, 156; weakness xii, 28, 131, 151 (see also kenosis) wellbeing 83, 129 Whistler, J.A.M. 4 willed forgetfulness (see forgetfulness: willed) withdrawal, 15, 39, 41–44, 49, 66, 68 within (see outwith) Wittgenstein, L. 21 Wollheim, R. 20–21, 23, 38, 66, 70–71, 78, 95–96, 128, 130 Wood, A. W, 128, 130 Woolf, V. 69 World Trade Center, NYC 56 Zizek, S. 101