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.
A primary function of schooling is to impart moral discipline, and art education distills this role to its core imperative of mandated pleasure, summarised by Jacques Lacan as the ‘will to enjoy’. This manifests in the insistence that, despite producing similar outcomes, students come to recognise themselves as unique and creative. In the twentieth century, art education in the USA has developed methods for extracting supposedly intimate personal expressions from young people, albeit without demanding the technical versatility, historical knowledge and critical reflection required of mature artists – the exception to this, despite its many flaws, being so‐called Discipline‐Based Art Education, or DBAE. In this article, I begin with reflections on the untapped potential of DBAE to relate to contemporary art practices. My ideas on moral instruction are expanded upon in the second section, when I undertake a ‘backwards’ history of British and American art education, in which the ideal of art class as a site of intrinsic and authentic meaning‐making is challenged by the functional requirements of education. My last section takes up a critique of critical pedagogy, in which I use the example of a project my high school students did about Michael Jackson to challenge ways in which trauma and pleasure are seen by critical pedagogues as features of experience that conflict fatally with the educational ends of individualist autonomy.
Race, history and visibility have a great deal to do with how disability operated socially and educationally in the Chicago public high school art classroom where I taught for ten years. I am severely near‐sighted, and I am also white, educated and often, but not consistently, able to pass for non‐disabled. A large number of my students were identified as having learning, emotional and behavioural disabilities, diagnoses which were certainly conditioned by the institution, but diagnoses which perhaps also underrepresented the amount of socially and historically occasioned impairment or debility that existed in the low‐income majority‐Black community served by my school. In this article I reflect on the overlapping social performances that occurred in terms of ‘disability passing’, a state that can characterise both hidden and exaggerated or invented impairments. My reflections examine my own individual experience in contrast to the long‐term experience of the African diaspora in and beyond the USA, in order to think about other ways to parse the complex factors determining how disability plays out in educational environments.
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