Jan Jagodzinski

Beyond Aesthetics: Returning Force and Truth to Art and Its Education

This essay argues for a fundamental change in the direction of art, its education and research that draws on Alain Badiou’s notion of inaesthetics and negative affirmation as well as Deleuze’s reorientation of aesthetics. I draw on the inspiration of Vincent Lanier’s critical spirit and Irwin Kaufmann’s ideas on art, creativity, and research as they appear in the first issue of Studies in Art Education to argue for such a line of flight. A number of neologisms are introduced that develop this potentiality of the force and truth of art that are ‘beyond aesthetics’ as it is commonly understood.

The Perversity of (Real)ity TV: A Symptom of Our Times

THE COLLAPSE OF REFLECTION: LIVING ON THE “TAIN OF THE MIRROR” One cannot help but be bombarded by the plethora of so-called “reality television” that defines the contemporary American television landscape—America’s Funniest Home Videos, tabloid news, Hard Copy, A Current Affair, American Journal, America’s Most Wanted, The Stories of the Highway Patrol—as well as stunt videos of every conceivable extreme sport you can name—motorcycling, skiing, skateboarding, bungee jumping, parachuting. Then there are the natural and human disaster specials, and so on. More interesting, for my argument, has been the emergence of the new reality game shows like Big Brother, Survivor, Robinson (Britain),The Mole, Love Cruise, The Amazing Race, Temptation Island, and Boot Camp. All rely on the domestication of video technology that allows camcorder shots, vigilante documentation, shock reportage, “real” voyeurism, and the obsession to present for viewers—“live”—the reality of their own streets, neighborhoods, homes, and the lives of “ordinary” people engaged in sometimes extraordinary events. The private has become public and “probic/phobic,” as if social reality has been stood on its head, inverted, its insides pulled out exposing them on the surface like the “guts” of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The success of the low-budget film The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrich and Eduardo Sånchez [II], 1999) would have never been possible if its audience hadn’t already become accustomed to accepting the new televised “look” of “reality” based on odd, “in-your-face” camera angles, jittery tracking shots, and “naturally” recorded sounds with no edits. All this so as to radically dramatize and capture the intensity and panic when “something” foreboding and pent up inside a seemingly contained and safe form (e.g., a house) suddenly erupts. Or, something unexpectedly coming from the outside disturbs the tranquility of equilibrium (e.g., a natural disaster), thereby suddenly intruding into personal space, collapsing all distance with its shock value. Capturing the unexpected accident, or hoping that one will happen while recording is what gives reality TV its particular flavor of “presence,” of the here and now, of the instant. If ethnographic documentary film could be considered a forerunner to this genre, in the sense that it also claimed to capture “reality” as it “truly” was, reality TV”s stylistics are its very antithesis. What is missing is any omniscient authorial voice-over to distance the audience, and the sheer evacuation of monotony where, at times, nothing seemed to happen, a characteristic of documentary films which often gave them the reputation of presenting boring didactic messages. With reality TV something is always happening, the voice-over having been literalized, made carnal into the talk or game show host who appears to be acting impartially, simply making sure the rules are being followed. S/he is a conduit for fairness, in effect representing the “dumb” witness of the jury as Everyman so that the full judgment of the Law can be parceled out; the sentencing of the players and/or guests appears just and impartial. The superegoic judgmental Law remains hidden and absent, displaced away from the scene of the crime. I refer here to the producers who set the rules and the stakes, whose backroom dealings are never revealed in the way the rules change to meet ratings and audience participation. Robert Redford’s production of The Quiz Show (1994) provides a telling example of just how obscene this Law can be; how it can abject the Other in the name of justice and fair play. It is a superego who seemingly, on a whim and at random, gives generously—for gluttonous consumption—and equally without any explanation or warning, takes the prize away without the least bit of remorse. After all,

The Site/Sight/Cite of Jacques Lacan or Forget Slavoj Žižek? Implications for Art and Its Education

This essay attempts to introduce Jacques Lacan in an accessible manner through the explanation of a joke as formulated by Slavoj Žižek in order to develop what is the key to grasping Lacanian psychoanalysis—objet a. It is hoped that difficulties that surround other important terms within the Lacanian lexicon become more accessible through this example. Also, a strong distinction is developed between Lacanian psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, which has become hegemonic in visual cultural studies. I argue that Lacan is not a post-structuralist. Lastly, the essay attempts to question the Žižekian appropriation of Lacan by maintaining that there is another account of the psychic Real as forwarded especially by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Julia Kristeva, that may well have more import for the arts and their education. This remains as an unresolved tension.

Women's Bodies of Performative Excess: Miming, Feigning, Refusing, and Rejecting the Phallus

In one of his late essays before his premature death of AIDS related diseases, the art critic Craig Owen observed that a certain calculated duplicity had come to be increasingly regarded as an indispensable tool for deconstruction. Both contemporary art and contemporary theory were rich in parody, the effects of trompe-l’oeil, dissimulation, and strategies of mimetic rivalry. The appropriated official discourse—the discourse of the Other—was mimed not to praise or vivify its existence, but to wrestle away its power so that its function as the dominant model was cast into doubt. Mimicking was a form of dis-semblance (and not resemblance), a non-reproductive repetition which repeated rather than re-presented. It belonged to the realm of simulacra. As Deleuze once argued, the simulacrum was “an image without resemblance” (49), but then, not quite. The simulacrum “still produce[d] an effect of resemblance,” but it was a “looking like” that took place in a trick mirror where the spectator lacked mastery. The observer could not dominate the simulacrum because it had already incorporated the point of view of the observer. Before the simulacrum, the spectator was mastered. Perhaps because of Western culture’s long standing identification of femininity with masquerade, women make “very good mimics,” wrote Barbara Kruger: “We replicate certain words and pictures [and bodies—as will be argued] and watch them stray from or coincide with your notions of fact and fiction” (qtd. in Owens 201). Mimicry, therefore, has been especially valuable as a feminist strategy. Nowhere has mimicry succeeded so well as in women’s bodybuilding. At first glance, it would appear that women bodybuilders are simply copying men, producing an iconic representation, and therefore desiring to possess the phallic power. Such an impersonation of mimesis, however, takes us away from its more radical performative possibility. As Aoki and Ian have cleverly shown, it is the bodybuilder who is capable of a disorienting mimetic strategy. In what follows, I juxtapose the theories of Jacques Lacan1 and Judith Butler (to show how the woman bodybuilder puts into question the public’s commonsense understanding of the sex/gender couplet. I then show how the bodybuilder relates to other postmodern bodies—namely the mannequin (model), anorexic, and bulimic — within a network of discursive circulation which resist the phallic signifier in yet other ways. Finally, I attempt to show how queer bodies, that of the butch/femme, transvestite, cross-dresser and transsexual, further complicate the already troubled heteronormativity.

The E(thi)co-Political Aesthetics of Designer Water: The Need for a Strategic Visual Pedagogy

This essay attempts to affectively politicize the visual art educator to the global condition of water in the larger context of designer capitalism. The ethical concerns of “designer water” are raised within the broader agenda of ecosophy as inspired by Giles Deleuze and by the last great essay by Félix Guattari. The essay takes an aesthetic line of flight that rests its trajectory on “anti-globalization” forces of protest and on an astonishing multiplicity of artists who are sensitizing us toward “becoming water.” The essay ends with the work of Al Gore, whose pedagogy provides a lesson for art educators in a world of visual designer spin. Hopefully, the argument is compelling enough to initiate an ecological sensibility into the visual curriculum.

Environment and sustainability

This is a call for contributions on the environment and sustainability that target the Anthropocene.

Art and Its Education in the Anthropocene: The Need for an Avant-Garde Without Authority

Bostrom, N. (2005). Transhumanist values. Retrieved from http://www.nickbostrom. com/ethics/values.html Hird, M. J. (2009). The origins of sociable life: Evolution after science studies. New York, NY: Palgrave. Rossini, M. (2006). To the dogs: Companion speciesism and the new feminist materialism. Kritikos, 3. Retrieved from http://intertheory.org/rossini Wolfe, C. (2013). Before the law: Humans and others in a biopolitical frame. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Badiou's Challenge to Art and its Education: Or, ‘art cannot be taught—it can however educate!’

This essay explores Badious writings on art and inaesthetics. It reviews his notion of the artistic event, comments on his 15 theses on contemporary art and examines his notion of inaesthetics. What follows is then applied to art and its education in terms of his search for a ‘third position’ that would challenge the extremes of capitalist design innovation and Romantic idealism that in his summation define the contemporary landscape.

Immanent Spirituality: Art Education in an Era of Digitalization

In this essay I attempt to develop two versions of spirituality that art and its education have drawn on to develop an approach to ecological art. In sum, the first version relies on an organic holism. It is conditioned by an anthropocentric understanding of Nature, and develops an educational orientation that advocates a balance between mind, body, and spirit. It promotes sustainability as its key approach. The second is a more radical posthumanist approach that attempts to decenter subjectivity, and hence deanthropocentricize Nature as a machinic phylum after the work of Deleuze Guattari. The difference between the two can also be summed up as transcendental spirituality versus transcendent spirituality. The essay also attempts to show the historical developments of ecological art, beginning with Land art and then moving to Earth Art is then retheorized within the current anthropological period referred to as the Anthropocene.

Penetrating Images: Paranoia in Media Pedagogy

Using the trope of the reluctant and resistant student who refuses to watch a particular film in my media syllabus, this chapter explores the question of paranoia from the theoretical perspectives of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I bring up the notion of the gaze (Lacan) and the notion of the simulacrum (Deleuze) to worry the psychic penetration that images may have. The ontological status of the image becomes a concern. The essay ends by bringing Jacques Ranciere into the mix by raising his notion of ‘sentence-image’ (le phrase-image).