Wrestling with TV “Rasslin”

TV wrestling stretches the envelope of what art educators might consider legitimate content under the emerging art educational paradigm of visual culture. (Duncum & Bracey, 2001) TV wrestling. Or rasslin as it’s known to its audience, is a significant cultural site because it is very popular and, under analysis, has much to say about contemporary cultural experience, especially that of its audience. While it provides pleasures and reference points to its audience, these reference points are often sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, and in terms of familial relationships, dysfunctional. They are also violent and obscene. This paper both acknowledges the lived experience of the audience for TV wrestling and calls into question the structures of feelings and ideas that are embodied in art. For the former it employs the theory of needs and gratifications that holds that cultural sites serve deep instinctive and/or social functions. By contrast, in critiquing TV wrestling, a cultural studies approach is employed that views underlying values of cultural sites in terms of the hierarchic power structures of society

Toward Foundations for a Socially Critical Art Education

Significant recent developments in Australian art education have moved away from a consideration of the aesthetic value of fine art products to a broad sociological conception of the visual arts which includes folk and popular arts. Many art educators assume a socially functionalist approach which celebrates cultural diversity and attempts to describe the function of cultural artifacts, sometimes in terms of lived experience. While acknowledging the importance of these developments, the author adopts the view that cultural production is part of an unjust society in ferment and is a site of ideological struggle. The view advanced is that to be true to its subject, art education must adopt a socially critical position. Drawing upon the culturalist tendency within English Cultural Studies, possible theoretical foundations for a socially critical art education are explored. These include: social structure is as important as lived experience; society is comprised of competing interests and is structured in dominance; cultural production is constitutive of social reality; basic to human action is agency, constraint and struggle; and explicitly engaged judgement is essential to the development of a more democratic society

Seeing Childhood in Art Education

Art education theory and practice sees children as constructivist learners, but postmodern theory teaches us to see children with multiple and fragmented identities. Postmodern theory is used to examine childhood as a site of divergent discourses concerned with persistent adult attempts to control both actual children and the concept of childhood. Many alternative conceptions find pictorial form in the mass media, from abused child to nightmarish threat. This paper focuses on the idea of children as rabid consumers. It examines television advertisements aimed at children, especially by McDonald’s, Mattel and Cap Toys. Implications for the classroom as well as art education as a field of study are outlined

Art Education and Technology: These are the Days of Miracles and Wonder

This paper examines the impact on human consciousness of the exponential proliferation of electronic images, and offers suggestions concerning how educators should respond. A postmodern critique includes the ideas of an inverted Kantian aesthetics which embraces the everyday, a dramatic compression of space and time, and personal disorientation. A further critique grounds these views of consciousness in new economic arrangements and the rapaciousness of capitalism. I argue that the only viable educational response to this new consciousness is a critical examination of mass media imagery. Basic components of media education in schools are signposts of an appropriate response

Behind, the Road is Blocked: Art Education and Nostagia

Proponents of high culture have trusted its power as an antidote to contemporary social ills. However, art educators should be aware that the history of such attempts is a history of failure. It is a history of gradual marginalization, both of the critique and the critics, and of increasingly conservative political reaction. The critique represents, today as it has always done, a nostalgia for an idealized past. But the failure of the critique suggests that there can be no going back. It is argued that the increasing failure of this critique to positively influence social and cultural life is a warning that the future of art education lies elsewhere. As representative of this critique, this paper discusses the English cultural critics Edmund Burke, Matthew Arnold, F.R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot; the Frankfurt School Marxists Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse; and the Postmodern French critic Jean Baudrillard. Finally, guidelines for a future contemporary art education are advanced

The Promiscuity of Aesthetics

I contend that the concept of aesthetics lies at the very heart of the art educational enterprise, albeit significantly reconfigured. I begin by offering a highly potted, historical overview of aesthetics that while it supports Tavin’s view of aesthetics as a confused and confusing concept, demonstrates how important it remains. My intention is not to support aesthetics as part of a progressive socio-political agenda, as many art educators do, but because the word aesthetics is today used extensively beyond our specialized area of art education to conceptualize the sensuousness of contemporary cultural forms. A brief investigation of books and articles on today’s cultural forms indicates that, as Williams (1976) noted 30 years ago, apart from its specialized use in art and literature, “aesthetics is now in common use to refer to questions of visual appearance and effect ” (p. 28). This usage is freed from Modernist associations of formalism and transcendence; rather, it echoes the original Greek origins of aesthetics as aisthesis, which meant sense data in general. For the Greeks, aisthesis was a very general concept meant to distinguish between what could be seen and what could only be imagined (Eagleton, 1990). This very broad meaning of aesthetics as sensation is implied in the opposite idea of anesthetic, the deprivation of sensation

Naughty Pictures: Their Significance to Initial Sexual Identity Formation

This study is about the formation of sexual identity through popular imagery in everyday contexts. Do images with sexual content help inform the development of sexual identity and, if so, in what ways? What is the nature of these images? What values, beliefs, and web of life experiences are revealed through early encounter with such images

Beyond the fine art ghetto : why the visual arts are important in education

The importance of the visual arts lies not in the reasons why some of them ar privileged, but rather in the fact that as a whole they are such an ordinary part of life. They are to be found in all aspects of modern life, and apart from personal experience they structure much of what we know about the world. They take us to the core of social structures with all their contradictions and moral dilemmas. Yet most people have very little conscious knowledge about how to employ the visual arts in their best interests. No greater gifts can be offered by formal education than to facilitate critical minds that ask which images serve one's own interests and which need to be incorporated so that they do so, and also to encourage people with inquiring minds which ask, "What is not shown?" These arguments are advanced by reference to a range of disciplines, including psychology, evolutionary biology, postmodern cultural studies, media studies, semiotics, and the history of science and technology

Arts education in isolated areas of Queensland

"The study examines primary arts education, especially visual arts and drama, as it operates in the area covered by the Longreach School of Distance Education. This includes one quarter of the area of Queensland which is twice the area of Victoria. Data was obtained from School Principals, teachers, and support staff, parents, governesses and children through extensive open ended interviews and a questionnaire."--p. 3