Visual Inquiry - Volume 2, Issue 2, 2013

YouTube videos produced by school-aged youth in their own time of their own accord are described, and their implications for art education are considered. The videos are conceived as creative conversations, their productions being the consequence of social networks and self-organizing systems rather than individual psychology. The videos primarily emerge from collaborative interaction between two or more contributors. The phenomenal success of YouTube is noted, including how its interface helps to facilitate conversation. Particular examples of videos are described involving Barbie torture, blending machines and aquatic disasters. Educational implications are drawn, partly by considering what art educators have suggested in the past with regard to former kinds of unsolicited creativity by youth. These include pairing students to create collaboratively, teaching appropriate skills, and going beyond the oftentimes-transgressive subject matter to consider the deeper developmental roles played by unsolicited creativity. The adoption of a mix of pedagogies is advocated.

Studio learning and teaching in art and design is still a relatively under-explored zone. While a growing body of literature is beginning to explore what kind of learning and teaching occurs in studio, there is less literature available that explicates why studio learning is important. Three elements highlighting the importance of studio in design learning and teaching are at the centre of this article: the development of artistic/design skills and understanding; the internal and external processes and practices of studio; and how studio models future working environments. This argument has been presented in the context of the authors’ experiences in teaching and supporting a university textile design programme, and has drawn from 2009 student data from a study in the same context. This article has framed such experiences and data in the context of contemporary thinking as expressed in the literature on studio.

In Spring 2012, I brought my undergraduate course ‘Arts and Community Development’ at Columbia College Chicago outside of the classroom and into the community – Albany Park – a neighbourhood on Chicago’s north side, known for its cultural and ethnic diversity. Building upon Chicago’s nineteenth-century activism legacy of noted pioneer settlement worker and founder of the Hull-House, this essay presents the process of my students’ art-based action research and creative workshop projects in an independently artist-run book-bindery, North Branch Projects, as a way of community engagement. The article will conclude with a personal reflection on the success of student-artist collaboration.

In many countries, generalist teachers and not art specialists teach art in primary education. This article examines the range of pre-service primary school teachers’ aesthetic preference and explores what kind of artworks they would most likely choose for organizing learning activities for children, as well as reasons that influence their choices. The kind of artworks they choose will likely have an effect on their pupils’ understandings of art. A mixed methodology research study was carried out with 91 pre-service primary school teachers in Cyprus. The data indicate that the participants had a rather limited understanding of art and reflected a narrow range of ideas and values. Although many participants did not perform non-reflective judgments about artworks, their strong attraction to colours and notions of realism entwine with expression implied that popular culture ideas and modernism ideas about art would be largely reflected in their teaching, thus denying children with encounters with other forms of art.

John Blackburn is a contemporary artist from the original mid-twentieth-century British painters. Once expected to be amongst the top artists of the 1960s, a family crisis caused him to put aside a career as an artist. He continued to paint in his solitary studio, only to be rediscovered in 2005. His repertoire of paintings expand over the last four decades but are only now being fully appreciated. With recent exhibitions in London and a growing list of collectors, Blackburn has caught the attention of modernist connoisseurs who have the rare experience of viewing his works without the tradition of influence or criticism.

Naea 2013 Conference Review, Fort Worth, Texas

Art & Pornography, Philosophical Essays, Hans Maes and Jerrold Levinson (eds) (2012) oxford: Oxford University Press, Isbn 978-0-19-960958-1, Hardback, £35.00, 344 pages.