International Journal of Education Through Art - Volume 14, Issue 1, 2018

This article explores the pedagogical and methodological implications of the arts-based practice of frottage: a process of ‘finding’ images by making, and then erasing, an uneven ground. What could this arts practice mean for both research and classroom teaching? The author offers frottage as a mode of inquiry that resists closure, destabilizes solid understandings and treats matter as dynamic energy. Exploring the educational resonances of this practice, the author rubs against her article’s academic language with both written erasures made from the paper itself and visual erasures created by the author from disparate surfaces, times and spaces.

Two faculty and 35 students in a beginning art theory course at Brigham Young University engage with speculative realism(s), new materialism and object oriented ontology literature as they wash, spin and knit sheep wool in relation to Coffen’s notion of an immanent read.

How do we conceptualize transdisciplinary curriculum development and what might be the curriculum theory that is driving it? In the following I pursue the development of an object-oriented curriculum theory that assembles material agencies that form praxis in curriculum development. I am particularly interested in the potential of a science, technology, engineering, art and math (STEAM) curriculum that allows arts educators and their disciplinary counterparts an opening to think curriculum anew. I focus on various graphics software from a range of STEAM practices by following their material agency as boundary shifters so that we might come to know the accumulations, translations and mediators doing things important to studio and laboratory practice. In building an object-oriented curriculum theory, I offer three theorems: looking for the immutable image, gathering the materiality of data-bodies and per(form)ing three-dimensional thinking.

How might positioning artistic practice as reflective limit the production of knowledge in art education by positioning theory ahead of practice, language over material, who above what? And, what might be done instead? Blueprinting theories with preservice art teachers illuminates such questions and explores ‘what is possible to see and say’ differently in art teacher preparation. Emboldened by contemporary materialisms, this visual essay exposes the poetic tangle where preservice teachers may have already pencilled in and sketched out some tentative ways of knowing/being/doing art education. The vibrant intra-activity of cyanotype photography attempts to eclipse this insistent hold on artmaking as reflective practice – just long enough that something different might be seen, said, felt, imagined in art teacher preparation.

In response to artistic training that is overly technical, the Circle of Artistic Research (C.A.R.) was organized to rearticulate the relationship of theory to art production. Their work helps understand how art education can extend the arguments of new materialism by creating alternative research formats that restore the relevance to the material. This article argues that the strategies in practice as research that the C.A.R. adopts emphasize materiality without neglecting content in a matter-meaning entanglement, with a collective and rhizomatic organization, and producing situated knowledge. The interpretative method is framed by the new materialisms of the school of Rosi Braidotti promoting critique and creativity as a form of resistance.

This project takes up the intersection of medium and content as a place where they can radically reconfigure one another. The entire process is a sort of unlearning; the habitual use of paper is disrupted. Physicality and meaning merge and emerge. Readers’ doings interact and transform both the meaning and background – the content (meaning) that traditionally would be simply re-presented via sheets of paper (background). Troubling just a small, habitual action leads to remarkably different modes of knowing and being. Action, object, meaning, reader and author (re)form tentative self-altering assemblages. These assemblages spiral out in new directions, moving beyond the confines of authorial intent. (Re)new(ed) configurations of self, meaning and object spring forth, opening themselves to different vectors. In order to explore these possibilities, I ask that you print out this article double-sided and cut/fold/etc. as instructed.

Collaboration has become a core aspect of teaching, learning and research in university art departments, especially as contemporary artists have increasingly turned to collective and socially engaged studio practices. Despite this, hylomorphic approaches to arts education continue to position matter as a passive substance to be shaped by the artist(s) in service of linguistic discourse. In this article, we ask how a new materialist approach to collaboration might disrupt humanist ontologies of visual arts education in the university. We first draw on posthumanist writings to re-compose collaboration in ways that are responsive to the specificity of material entanglements as they are enacted within an ecology of studio practices. From there we work diagrammatically across a collaborative ‘data event’ of art in the making, drawing on a year-long participatory study with a cohort of third-year art students. In the final section, we develop propositions for collaboration as a transversal practice of ‘becoming a work of art’.

Between the tensions of Jane Bennett’s human-nonhuman heterogeneous assemblage and Ian Bogost’s alienness of things to each other and humans, the author questions the agency of a prosthesis by speculating on its daily experiences and its thing-power (Bennett) on the user. As a visual essay in the form of shaped prose, the thingness of textual components becomes evident as their proximity and isolation across the surface of the page or at page breaks forces the reader to move back and forth between content and form. Thus, we may also consider how words are both manipulated in the construction of assemblages and have the power to shape ideas and aesthetic ideals that necessitate the existence of some objects, including prostheses.

Developed by Graham Harman, the philosophical approach known as ‘object-oriented ontology’ examines reality on the basis of objects. Harman has referenced an image of burning cotton, which he uses to illustrate the point that, as objects, fire and cotton interact without changing the essential nature of either object. In keeping with Harman’s speculative and poetic approach, I invoke as an example the incidences of cotton being burned during the American Civil War, undertaken first by the Confederacy and later by Union soldiers, including freed slaves; the slaves followed the model of Haitian revolutionaries who famously burned sugarcane fields. Using Harman’s ideas about objects, and drawing on one of his major influences, Bruno Latour, I relate the image of burning cotton to other acts of destruction, including repeated attempts made by African Americans to overcome the legacy of being reduced to the status of objects and repeated attempts by whites to sustain this legacy. I link this history to my decade-long tenure as a full-time art teacher on the southeast side of Chicago, and discuss education in an apartheid school system as a conflicted and asymmetrical transaction mediated by objects with distinct boundaries and roles. In closing, I argue for a consideration of objects by art teachers thinking about their students’ historical context, and an examination of their own role in the community as teachers.

Digital Technologies in Early Childhood Arts: Enabling Playful Experiences, MONA Sakr (2017) London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 198 pp., ISBN: 9781474271882, h/bk, £95.00

Art and Technology: The Practice and Influence of Art and Technology in Education, Luisa Menano and Patricia Fidalgo (eds) (2017) Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 160 pp., ISBN: 9789463008617, p/bk, US$43

Teaching Painting: How can Painting be Taught in Art Schools?, Ian Hartshorne, Donal Moloney and Magnus Quaife (eds) (2016) London: Black Dog Publishing, 424 pp., ISBN: 9781911164104, p/bk, £16.95