Between Public and Private:Negotiating the Location of Art Education

Jason Wallin
University of Alberta
Citation: Wallin, Jason. (2007). Between public and private: Negotiating
the location of art education. International Journal of Education & the
Arts, 8 (3). Retrieved [date] from http://ijea.asu.edu/v8n3/.
Abstract
This article seeks to articulate developing trends in art education and
practice, locating such movements within the broader cultural contexts of
globalization, neoliberal capitalism, and postmodernity. Against this more
general synopsis, the autobiographical position of the author as a student
and teacher of art will be elucidated as inextricably entwined with such
cultural movements. This entwinement will be understood both in terms of
its capacity to ‘position’ the subject, and yet concomitantly as a site of
disavowal, refusal, and subjective agency. In this manner, the personal
commitment of the author to art education will be developed in a way to
implicate early school and familial experiences with art. Such early
autobiographical experiences arguably form the coordinates of our
identities as art educators, and similarly, constitute the key issues with
which we must necessarily grapple in pedagogical practice. It is in
negotiation with such issues and early enculturation that this article argues
our relationship to art curriculum and practice is located.
Preamble
Revised in 1985, the Alberta Art curriculum emerged in a turbulent time
punctuated by the ultra conservative tone of American Reaganomics and the lingering
ideological, economic and geopolitical anxieties of the Cold War. As the atmosphere of
many schools veered toward competitiveness and standardized achievement as a measure
of ranking ‘cultural capital’ on an international stage, many national art education
programs saw significant cutbacks and public devaluation. Through the emergence of
such new technologies as the video camera, compact discs, and video game consoles, the
proliferation of the image and emergent influence of Generation X motivated the collapse
of art into a commodity of consumerism. As Virilio (2002) contends, “Capitalists no
longer [rush for the] gold, but for the totality of the world’s images” (pp. 58-59). The
seminal postmodern art figure of the age, Andy Warhol, satirizes this collapse through
the development of works mimicking the reproductive mechanisms of factorization.
Warhol’s work is concomitantly invested in the consumption of celebrity and fame, of
which he asserted everyone would have their fifteen minutes. Amidst the exhaustion of
art as a mis-en-scene of the modernist metanarratives of originality and genius, Lyotard
(1979) identifies a strand of postmodernity that deviates from postmodern eclecticism.
While conservative, this counternarrative to modernity and neoliberalism advocates for
an end to experimentation. As a foil against tasteless postmodern architecture and
incomprehensible artworks, this anti-modernist view advocated for grassroots
sensibilities. Lyotard suggests the dissenting voices of this anti-modernist movement
similarly critiqued the conceptual work of artists such as Piero Manzoni, who defines the
conceptual movement in the act of canning and selling his own feces as “100% Pure Art”.
Such ‘art’ is arguably in keeping with the pace of modernity, and is anticipated by
Schwitters’ Dada ‘Merz’ sculptures as early as 1919. Against Warhol’s anesthetics,
Lyotard unravels a conservative anti-modernist advocacy for a return to aesthetics and
‘good sense’. It is at this bifurcated postmodern crossroads that the art curriculum feels
the force of its larger material context. Further, it is along these multiple lines of flight
that current trends in art education are emerging, and must emerge if the discipline is to
remain relevant to its greater social hearing (Deleuze, 1997).
Part One: The Public Realm
The philosophical mandate of the Alberta art education (11-21-31) curriculum
begins with a concern over the organization of visual material. Through this privileged
metaphor of organization, a modernist stance or implicate structure to the
conceptualization of art education is denoted. The systematic organization of the grade(s)
11-21-311 art curricula is evidenced in the philosophical mandate of the program, which
equates ‘systematic instruction’ to ‘artistic proficiency’, again deploying the rhetoric of
causal modeling and transmission models of teaching and learning (Alberta Art
Education Curriculum, 1985). Further, the organ of the eye becomes the privileged
apparatus of artistic ability (Deleuze, 1997). In this ‘sense’, the curriculum specifically
‘focuses’ on the issue of “how we see, interpret and make sense of visual stimuli”
(Alberta Art Education Curriculum, p. 1). The focus of creating personal meaning as
condoned in the curriculum philosophy is organized through the privileged relation of the
1 In the Alberta, Canada provincial program of studies, the grade 10, 11 and 12 art curricula are
referred to through the designations 11, 21, and 31 respectively.
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eye to the mental process of meaning making. This conceptual organization is the staging
point for the differentiation of art education from the performing arts, which implicate the
affective body to a greater degree. Akin to the robotic persona of Warhol, the student of
the 1985 art education curriculum is conceived as dis-embodied, that is, as the art
curriculum becomes intellectualized, the affective body is placed at a distance. While the
core curriculum documents assert that the intent of the program is to enable students to
“think and act like artists”, we must understand this invitation in regards to the defining
organization of the curriculum philosophy and broader calculus of institutional mores. In
its objectifying distance, the (11-21-31) curriculum delimits the artistic process as
symbolic and instead treats it is an object of study and reflection, inserting it into the
discourse of rationality. The invitation to “think and act like artists” is thus grounded in
the legitimated terms of the project of Western education, marginalizing the important
contributions of paradox, madness, and arationality to the paradigmatic breaks between
and within various artistic movements (Joselit, 1998).
As with many curriculum documents, the elementary and secondary art programs
might be read in ways that radicalize their conservative connotations. Prefiguring the
emergence of such feminist film researchers as Mulvey (1990), Berger (1972), in his
seminal Ways of Seeing, suggests that the gaze is socially organized and therefore
intimately bound to the function of power. As Berger suggests, “according to usage and
conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome -
men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked
at” (Berger 1972, p. 45- 47). Berger suggests that the assumed neutrality or transparency
of ‘looking’ is bound to the privileged position of patriarchy. In advertising, cinema, and
throughout Renaissance art, the spectator assumes the position of the male gaze as if it
were the ‘objective’ lens of a camera. The organization of looking and its patriarchal
encoding takes on a more ominous tone as Berger (1972) avers:
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it
can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes
before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the
surrounding world; we explain that world within words, but words
can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation
between what we see and what we know is never settled. (1972, p.7)
Particular to Berger’s critical analysis of seeing is an exploration of the
intersection of poststructuralism and the socially constructed gaze. In interrogating this
relationship, the causal correlation of the eye to the rational mind is placed into doubt.
Berger disrupts the transmission model of teaching and learning popularized in
behaviorist methodology, instead focusing on our inability to unequivocally ‘know’ for
certain the meaning of what we see. Berger furthers this position by demonstrating how
the mode of a visual artwork acts to alter interpretation and thus received meaning.
If the Alberta art education curriculum is understood as informed by such radical
reconsiderations as Berger’s (1972) Ways of Seeing, the inherent conservatism of the
document is placed at stake. As Berger’s Canadian media contemporary Marshall
McLuhan suggests (1964), “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System
that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it” (p.
22). With a growing suspicion toward the assumed neutrality of the modernist gaze, the
rise of postmodernism and poststructural theory in art education serve as an antecedent
condition for other ontological and epistemological upheavals. Following McLuhan’s
Early Distant Warning System (1964), the discipline of art education has been influenced
by several major trends in postmodern thought and theory. First, the dilemma of
reproducibility is forecast in Walter Benjamin’s (1936) caveat that the mass production
of art would result in the povertization of the aura or art originals. This fear was never
realized, and counter to Benjamin’s intuition, the mass production of art has had the
obverse effect. The desire to ‘own’ a favored artwork has not diminished in Western
society, proliferating like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers toward a hyperreal cliché. Such kitsch
as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa on a coffee cup has not reduced the original, but has instead
rendered the original more valuable. The second major trend to impact the art world and
the terrain of art education emerges through the rise of consumerist aura. The
consumerist aura refers to the fetishization of items that retain the nostalgia of the relic.
In this manner, the reproduction of ‘originality’ begins to supplant and replace reality as
the hypereal. This movement has been dubbed image consumerism, an area theorized
extensively by Baudrillard (1994), who contends that paradigmatic breaks in art are less
influenced by originality or authenticity than by the novelty of fashion and pastiche
(Baudrillard, 1994). According to Baudrillard, the revolutionary and original possibility
of art has been exhausted, and as a field of inquiry, artistic representation is moribund,
fatally collapsing into the logic of simulation (Baudrillard, 2002).
The program rationale of the Alberta art education curriculum is deeply
influenced by these cultural influences, and in response, stage the recuperation of skill
development and focused analysis that much conceptual art recklessly abandoned or
admonished. Yet, other aleatory influences place demands on the curriculum as both plan
and existential practice. Post-secondary entrance requirements for art students have
changed dramatically over the rise of postmodernity. In the 1980s, secondary art
education attributed primacy to the development of technical skill in drawing and
painting. As an organizing metaphor for this period, the static and moribund ‘still life’
achieves privileged status as a signifier of artistic competency. This sentiment is reflected
in the post-secondary portfolio requirements of the time, which demanded an
overwhelming focus on the presentation of a student’s technical capacity in fundamental
art principals. As a backlash to the frivolity of conceptual art movements, the art
education institution enacted a return to art fundamentals, orienting the classroom to the
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transmission model of skill development and rage for technical mastery. At heart, it was a
strategic recuperation of modernism.
The orientation toward fundamentals has undergone a significant change over the
past decade, due in part to advances in technological modes of imagistic rendering. In this
manner, the proliferation of technology has enabled the diversification of representational
modes. Further, the contemporary focus on the development of divergent and pliable
thinking has influenced a move away from the overly technical requirements of postsecondary
art programs. As international competitiveness has begun to accentuate the
importance of culture as a growth sector in Canadian development, fundamentals have
been surpassed by an international move toward student dexterity in critical analysis,
multiple perspectives, and in the development of cultural dialogues honoring difference
and uniqueness. Emergent creative industries have been recognized as sustainable sites of
international development, wherein publishing, film, multimedia, and folk crafts bear
direct influence upon a country’s economic viability. In the midst of a world produced by
a “purely scientific vision”, UNESCO insists, “modern progress is no longer able to
provide adequate replies to the questions with which this very progress confronts us”
(UNESCO, 1999, p. 19). Following, the question for sustained artistic inquiry becomes
“can art constitute the horizon whence glows the unique, far-off light of powers which
neither philosophically nor science can give?” (1999, p. 19). In this call for the radical
reconsideration of the unique contribution of art to the development and sustainability of
culture is the suggested break from the domains of technical efficiency and the ‘still life’
of modernism. As Groomer (1999) avers, “There are very, very few countries in the
world where the arts are understood and accepted by governments as education instead of
some luxury activity for those who practice the arts and a diversion for those who choose
to follow the arts” (p. 25). As a call to preserve the social significance of art education,
Groomer continues, “the arts belong in the government budget along with the millions
earmarked for Defense; for the arts are themselves the Defense of a vital kind: of the
human spirit, in all its terrors and marvels of complexity” (p. 25). Influenced by such
international reports as UNESCO’s (1999) Art and Society, the 1980 Recommendation
Concerning the Status of the Artist, and the shifting demands of globalization, postsecondary
art institutions have begun to shift their requirement focus toward a call for
examples of robust conceptual artwork reflecting social consciousness, innovation, and
divergent thinking. This has necessitated the inclusion of postmodern artworks and
contemporary artists into art programs often dominated by the trace of patriarchal and
formalist masters. While portfolio requirements of the 1980s and 1990s placed primacy
upon technical skill and efficiency, the new millennium has seen a shift in the role of the
artist and artwork toward an emphasis upon social commentary and criticism, through
which new relations between art and its cultural referents might be negotiated.
A similar shift in elementary art education has emerged as a result of international
influences. The philosophical rationale of the 1985 elementary art curriculum functions in

accordance to the mandate of the secondary program, and is similarly framed as a
distinct, technical discipline. A lack of professional expertise thus emerges as few
elementary practitioners develop backgrounds in fine arts instruction and practice. In this
scenario, art is often reduced to a common ‘aesthetic’, relegated to the periphery as a
mode of making meaning. As an increasing number of elementary schools advocate for
early textual literacy, art education becomes marginal, and divorced from the rigors of its
own practice. Yet, this understanding of the place of art in the early childhood classroom
is currently under question, most notably as a result of the vivid documentation of student
work in the pre-and primary schools of Reggio Emilia, Italy. Reggio Emilia (Edwards,
Gandini, & Forman, 1993) educators regard the representations of children as vehicles for
professional development, curricular unfoldment and as significant data for the social
construction of knowledge. The work emerging from Reggio Emilia’s primary
‘classrooms’ is less oriented toward the production of a product than its North American
counterparts. The significance of visual literacy lauded by Reggio Emilia educators is not
merely the reversal of the North American text/image binary. It is instead an
understanding wherein visual literacy becomes, alongside (and prior to) textual
articulation, one of “A Thousand” symbolic languages of childhood (Edwards, Gandini,
& Forman, 1993). The visual languages of children are understood as complex and valid
ways to negotiate meaning and articulate knowledge. The Reggio Emilia art exhibition,
Thousand Languages of Children was thus a revelation to many early childhood
educators mired in the treatment of art as singularly the perfunctory task of motor
development. As Reggio Emilia atelier (an artistically trained mentor to teachers) Vea
Vecchi articulates:
It happens very often that some of the children’s products are so
original that one wants to compare them with the work of famous
artists. But that kind of comparison becomes dangerous and fraught
with ambiguity, especially if one tries to make comparisons
consistently. It leads to false conclusions, such as that the behavior of
children unfolds innately, or that the product is more important than
the process. (1998, p. 146)
Akin to shifts in secondary education, an emerging reinvigoration of primary art
education is located in the rigorous research and innovative successes of Reggio Emilia.
It is similarly a turn toward the reinvestment of art as a vehicle of valid meaning making
which does not necessarily culminate in the production of an aesthetic product. Further,
alike the post-secondary art institution's demand for evidence of critical thought, the
Reggio Emilia approach has reframed elementary ‘art’ as a potential force in developing
students’ conceptual understanding.
While shifts within the field of art education have been mobilized by international
circumstances, they have also shifted locally in relation to other subject areas. For
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example, revisions in the new Social Studies program treat visual literacy as an
indispensable mode of curriculum inquiry. In this manner, the updated primary social
studies curriculum understands the important role of artistic representation as a means of
building a dialogue across cultures, geography, and time. Alberta Learning’s document
on teaching and learning entitled Focus on Inquiry (2004) identifies the pivotal role of
visual literacy in assuming a critical stance to teaching and learning. Drawing upon
Gardiner (1993) as a secret point of reference, the Focus on Inquiry documents identifies
the process of ‘drawing’ and ‘painting’ as a strategy to engage kinesthetic learners. In this
is a hint at the affective dimension lost in overly instrumental art education practices. The
Focus on Inquiry document also provides an example of an inquiry into the historical,
cultural, and ideological locations of art, art figures, and movements. Outside of the art
curriculum ‘in itself’, other discipline mandates are acknowledging the implications of
artistic exploration in terms of their ability to help students negotiate, contest, and build
knowledge. This is not to suggest the end of popularized artistic aesthetics in schools, but
is instead an alternate means of understanding the place of art education in reference to
the demands and requirements of globalization.
Part Two: Personal Commitment
My earliest memories of ‘art’ are bound to feelings of frustration and anxiety. For
me, the ‘artistic experience’ was exclusively an engagement with production. More
accurately, it was a highly instrumentalized encounter with art undergirded by an
ideology of production. In this mode, I recall how my ‘artwork’ was defined against its
ideal standard, unremittingly installed by the teacher. In the first Grade, Miss. Kellner
would clip Caroline’s work to the board. “Do you see how neatly it has been done?” the
teacher would rhetorically question. Of course, the answer was implicit. If the teacher
desired the look of Caroline’s picture, it was worthy of thoughtless and direct imitation.
Yet, in implying imitation, I am also suggesting the possible creation of something
singularly different. This is hyperbole. My early art experiences were most often impelled
and organized by precut shapes and models. It was less art than assembly, but in this
endeavor, I struggled to emulate my ideal referent. Nothing seemed to ‘come together’ in
a way that satisfied my own internalized desire to produce the ‘exemplary’ sample. This
unrealizable fantasy was constantly met with its awkward and messy material realization
as a site of lack. The purpose of art only became clear when attached to themes, when it
was superficially imported in production of Christmas cards, glittery Valentine hearts, or
Mother’s Day mobiles. In this vein, art was almost exclusively conceptualized as a public
relations device between the school and home. Art became a stage for the signs of labor,
through which my (in) ability to achieve an a priori standard could be measured.
Reduced to a diagnostic apparatus, art became a process alienated from the conditions of
its production. Its connotations always emerged elsewhere, in evaluation of participation,
neatness, ability to follow directions, and fine motor development. The experience of
‘producing art’ was therefore in service of a broader apparatus of evaluation and
measurement absented from the radical force of art itself.
Years of ambivalence toward instrumental art would pass before it would be
recuperated in my personal life through an interest in popular comic book art. While the
source of this interest evades conscious memory, I am almost certain it emerged from
outside of my direct familial influence. As a child of the late 1970s and early 1980s - a
Gen X’er- I grew up in midst of an accelerating media bred from a neoliberal attitude
toward its proliferation. Obverse to the overdetermination of art as an institutional
practice, I found in comic book art the opening of imaginative possibility and
concomitantly, a fantasy space into which I could be projected. My experience of art at
school largely denied this affective investment by distancing my labor from the object of
its production - that is, creating superficial and inauthentic links between a student’s work
and the product of the work. Such vacuous ‘demands’ served only to enact the signs of
labor, denying complication, struggle, and affective investment. Yet, in an age of
rampant commodification, of Max Headroom, IntelliVision, and Madonna’s “Material
Girl”, such surface treatments were ubiquitous, and consumer society was caught in
mimesis. However, growing up in Revelstoke, British Columbia, then a sleepy railroad
and mill town, my experience was very much anachronistic with the surface glitz of
MTV and repetitive servomechanism of video games (which my parents refused).
While teachers continued to define the image ideal of artistic production, my
vitalized interest in comic art became a private escape, something particular to my own
desire, carrying a trace of my agency in ways that possibilized new ways of
understanding agency. Much to the consternation of my teachers, I voraciously doodled,
the forms and bodies of pulp fiction constituting an escape from the institutional objet a
(ideal object) from which I became increasingly divested in achieving. Yet, this is only
partially accurate. I remained a high achiever while using art as a way to negotiate a
passage between institutional recognizability and becoming-other than the often closed
circuit of institutional existence. Though only to my vague awareness at the time,
drawing became a vehicle to psychically stage subconscious feelings and drives, anxieties
and fears. It was thus early on that I appreciated the role of drawing as a means of
storying experience, articulating and dispersing affect.
Images are not neutral (a moot point). The current tensions between the Danish
government and numerous Muslim communities as a result of the Jyllands-Posten
publication of ‘Muhammad’s Face’ attests to the affective force carried by an image. This
applies also to the selfsame artwork created in classrooms today. While such work is
often of an outstanding technical quality, surpassing the ability of many adults, it
demonstrates the absence of interpretation and creative application. In this vein, I am
drawn to the similarity of my own early childhood ‘art education’, and am reminded why
I theorize about emergence and potential in everyday classroom practice. My teaching
was oriented toward the arts, or more accurately, to alternate modes of representation in
Wallin: Between Public & Private 9
supplementation to the Foucauldian ‘regimes of writing’ (cited in Aoki, 2000). My work
with students also drew heavily upon innovative uses of technology such as the use of
green screens, animation, photography, hypertext, and web page development. Growing
up amidst the rapid evolution of personal computers, my teaching by extension drew
upon technology as a potentially fecund vehicle for teaching and learning; And as art had
pervaded all areas of my life, my understanding of the subject areas were conceptualized
along visual topographies. Over the first years of my teaching, I taught fractions
exclusively through the work of Warhol, nets and tessellations through Escher, and
probability through Duchamp. In this way, I began to think the disciplines as already
having an ‘art’ at work in their (dis)organization. Yet, this was not the readymade and
alien art of my own early education. This ‘art’ was instead a potential to create new
knowledge in an affective encounter with the lived disciplines. While this is difficult to
‘orchestrate’ and maintain through external measures, it is not uncommon when the
alienating apparatus separating the process of production from its product is disorganized.
It is at this point that I am also invested as an arts-based researcher. One line of
flight in my own research is an exploration of alternate modes of theorizing, collecting,
writing and disclosing research. This work is not in any way an admonition of textual
expression. Rather, it is an exploration and deconstruction of the limits of text, its
organization, suppositions, and limits (Fidyk & Wallin, 2005). The ‘artistic’ process not
only plays with the limits of representation, it creates new inter/intratextual relations,
opening spaces for (unsettling) conversations. The radical potential of the ‘arts’ have
therefore continued to be pertinent to my reading of the curriculum field and the
negotiation of meaning as a student, theorist and practitioner. Yet, I have never conducted
arts-based research as a sole researcher. My work in this area has been collaborative and
has endeavored to grapple with the tensions, misunderstandings, and sudden inspirations
of critical dialogue. Along these lines, I fear for the reduction of ‘art education’ as solely
the practice of individuals who only encounter the voice of their peers in summative ‘art
critiques’. How can arts-based research, as a collaborative and scholarly practice,
articulate the becoming or imminent quality of working or being-with-others?
In my last two years as a curriculum consultant to early childhood educators, I
worked closely with a number of schools and individual teachers examining the
ramifications of the Reggio Emilia ‘approach’ to classroom practice. Distinct from
considering the role of art as integrable into other disciplines, my own professional
development pivoted on the use of visual literacies in building knowledge and
formatively assessing student understanding. Obverse to my own art experience as a
student, wherein visual literacies were largely trivialized and framed as non-rigorous
leisure activities, I began to actively plan for the practice of visual literacy as a sometimes
primary mode of articulating understanding, enabling the social construction of
knowledge, and making decisions regarding lesson planning and curricular direction. I

also drew heavily upon contemporary visual culture in my work, making the case that
students are more than ever immersed in a world constituted in and by images. It is
therefore imperative that they not only become savvy critics of visual culture, but also
creators and re-creators of the visual technoscape (Postman, 1993). This need not carry a
negative connotation and might rather be understood as a revision of the scriptocentrism
rampant in many early childhood classrooms. My approach is critical of the mantra ‘art
for art’s sake’, and is concerned that such an understanding casts ‘art education’ as a
closed, solipsistic loop. Instead, I strongly believe that as a practice of signification, art
points both to itself (the lived discipline and process) as well as away from itself, toward
its greater assemblage and tendency to overlap in rich ways with other disciplines. My
understanding of ‘art’ in the classroom thereby attempts to evade its reduction to a
separate discipline or field of knowledge. Following the work of Reggio Emilia, visual
literacy might otherwise be practiced as a language through which one might conceive
‘worldly’ experience in creative, innovative, and expressive ways. In a sense, visual
language offers a strategic and subtle means to elude the constraints of textual language
and its institutionally organized forms of enunciation.
Autobiographical Statement
As a child, I grew up in a household that unconsciously attested to a Protestant
work ethic. In particular, my father met the practice or appreciation of art with
ambivalence. He would often downplay his own passion for photography, an interest he
unconsciously inherited from his own father. Defined in accordance to the male
stereotypes of ruggedness, strength, and control, my father would sometimes decry ‘art’
as flighty, effeminate, and impractical. At an early age, my gender identity was thus
constructed in disavowal of ‘art’ as a ‘masculine’ practice. This coding of art as a
signification of ‘femininity’ precipitated my reluctance to make my own ‘artwork’ public.
In possible preservation of the surface appearance of gender identity informed by my
father and broader socius, my encounter with art was largely private and solipsistic. The
desire in my family oriented itself toward the ‘masculine’ activities of playing sports,
fishing, and logging. In approaching gender and its discursive practices through the
purview of poststructuralism, I have begun to unravel the signifying chain linking ‘art’ to
‘femininity’. Moreover, through this approach to meaning and the knowledge/power
relationship, I have begun to consciously understand ‘art’ as a means of recoding gender
identity asymmetrically to the modernist sexual binary man/woman. In this vein, I have
begun to challenge my overtly sexist and misogynist upbringing through participation in
counter normative ‘artistic’ practices, thereby waging a pointed critique against
patriarchy.
I learned very early from my father that the ‘art’ profession was an untenable
future option, fraught with hardship and lack of viable work. This sentiment was
conjoined to the geographical location in which I grew up. In the early 1980s,
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Revelstoke, British Columbia, was predominantly driven by industry, a stark difference
to its current status as an eco-tourist and cultural center. As a disruptive or challenging
force, ‘art’ was largely absent in the broader social space in which I lived. The art to
which I was exposed largely catered to a common denominator of aesthetic taste,
unabashedly mired in realism and direct representation. This had the effect of structuring
my aesthetic tastes toward conservatism, and the equation of artistic competence to
mechanical replication. Much later, when I would encounter abstract and conceptual art
movements, my first reaction would be disavowal, denying its legitimacy as art proper.
This backlash mirrored the conservative tone of both my familial, social and political
location. As the child of a blue collar, working class family, abstract and conceptual art
seemed wasteful, senseless, and ‘gay’ - fatally removed from ‘reality’. Yet, my personal
location also intersects with the radical interrogation of ‘popular taste’ waged by
postmodernism. After all, the 1980s saw culture reduced to a lowest common
denominator of anti-intellectualism and candid self-consumption. It was here that such
early influences as the satire of MAD magazine and publications of EC Comics (Tales
from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and adaptations of Bradbury in Weird Science)
began to change both my active relation to popular culture, and the sanctity of a
legitimated popular aesthetic taste. It is in this vein that I continue to work in the modes
of deconstruction and poststructuralism to reveal the discursive strategies that maintain
‘popular taste’. Further, I have continued to draw upon the futurism of science fiction and
the force of horror as two ways into theorizing the radical potential of art education and
representation.
As addressed earlier, my language acquisition was overwhelmingly oriented
toward the visual. This is of course not without its complications, one of which
exemplified in the dangerous correlation of the eye organ to brain function. As a student
who was slow to acquire proficiency in reading, I relied more heavily upon visual cues in
illustrations, signs, and gestures; and while my brother was verbose, I am characterized as
a quiet child in the anecdotes of my parents. As the youngest child, I grew up surrounded
by others already proficient in textual literacy. As such, a proclivity toward visual
representation might have been an attempt to assert agency and create a personalized
voice. Narrated as a ‘quiet’ child, I might have been predisposed to being wistful,
assuming the quietudes of ‘art’ as my native, or ‘natural’ language. This is perhaps
another illusion I am currently attempting to work through as a researcher and
practitioner. This illusion is explored through an analysis of an assumed ‘naturalness’ or
‘neutrality’ in visual literacy. Through this work, I might better understand my own
encounter with the visual not as a ‘natural’ dispensation, but as a motivated engagement
installed by both my upbringing and the binary division of textual literacy/visual literacy.
Along this vector, I continue to research the limits of representation, demonstrating
potential places of overlap and fertile spaces of “original difficulty” (Caputo, 1987).
Concluding Statement
In navigating the passage between public discourse and private knowledge, I have
endeavored to articulate the complex, contested, and difficult character of art education.
Yet, this essay similarly traces the complex location of subjectivity in the art education
classroom. In this vein, my exploration suggests the importance of carefully considering
how the subject is neither the transparent projection of curriculum policy nor the selfenclosed
terminus of prior experiences. More aptly, our location as art educators exists at
the limin of these horizons in ways which inform, permeate, and provoke one another. In
negotiating this intricate horizon of public and private knowledge, I invite the reader into
my own life as a vehicle for understanding how private identifications, repressions, and
desire play a significant role in approaching and understanding art education. Likewise, I
attempt to detail how curriculum policy positions the subject in ways that both accord and
conflict with identity and experience. In exploring and working through these sites of
tension, our habits and presumptions of art education might be traversed in ways that
open us to new opportunities for perceiving the pedagogical potential of art. In this vein, I
offer my exploration not as a solipsistic endeavor, but as a screen upon which the reader
might project the significance of their experiences and fantasies as they inform their own
understanding of art and art education.
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About the Author
Jason Wallin is a Killam Scholar, art educator, and Ph.D. Provisional Candidate studying
at the University of Alberta, Canada, in the Department of Secondary Education. His
current research interests include visual arts research, the social construction of
childhood, and the implications of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian philosophy to
pedagogy.

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