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Exercises to Promote Community in the Visual Art Classroom
Exercises to Promote Community in the Visual Art Classroom
Session summary
Session summary
Led by Christine D’Onofrio, Anneke Dresselhuis, and Roselynn Sadaghiani
The art critique has long been accepted and practiced as a “consensus” feedback structure in visual art classrooms. The process continues to value authority-driven art academy classroom approaches. These methods however, exist in a nexus of a mythical understanding of the art world, conceptions of objectivity that are fraught with bias, and top-down power structures that create a “knowledgeable” critic and a passive artist. Is this commonly accepted method still useful to responding to our present condition? Or has its presumed ideological framework expired? (Latour, 2004) How can we reimagine the pedagogy of critique?
The presenters are a team composed of faculty working with students in course design. The partnership allowed them to reconsider, activate and enact forms by which visual art curriculum development could be a more reciprocal, inclusive and collaborative process.
Their efforts to dismantle hierarchies of value and epistemic totality (Arendt, 1973) will be described in connection to how they reimagined critique. They will share examples of most effective teaching methods, results and insights of critique practices and activities developed and facilitated, intending to decolonize the critique experience. Creating community and a sense of belonging can be a way to start decolonizing the studio critique, but also in artwork, “the unworking of works' (Nancy, 39) a catalyst for community can emerge.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
Barad, Karen. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of how Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, pp. 801-831.
Latour, Bruno. "Why has Critique Run Out of Steam? from Matters of Fact to Matters of
Concern." Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 225-248.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. vol. 76;76.;, University of Minnesota Press,
Minneapolis, MN, 1991.
Bios
Bios
Roselynn Sadaghiani is an artist and 5th-year BFA student completing a double major in visual arts and psychology at the University of British Columbia. Through her practice, she has had a vested interest in tracing the genealogy of mass-produced and invisible objects involved in cycles of dependency and destruction. Ultimately, she is interested in critically engaging with complex meta-narratives entangling art institutions with the military-cultural complex.
Anneke Dresselhuis is a 5th year BFA student who is pursuing a double minor in economics and informatics. Their art practice and research is concerned with negotiating the emerging aesthetic forms of the information state and imagining how embodied experiences of data might create entry points into engaging with the complex social, political and economic dilemmas that the information state presents.
Christine D'Onofrio is an uninvited guest, living and working on Musqueam, Tsleil-Waaututh and Squamish territory that some call Vancouver. In her work, she negotiate the tensions and promises of power found in acts of humour, virtue, narcissism, humiliation, desire, technology and community to exploit intuitive effects and ideologies to reveal characteristics of mediation that tie personal and political agency. Currently an Associate Professor of Teaching at the University of British Columbia, she has exhibited her work across Canada,
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