Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 39, No.

5, 2007

doi: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00246.x

2007 The Author
Journal compilation 2007 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK EPAT Educational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857 2007 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia XXX Original Articles Difference: The creative arts Elizabeth Grierson

Difference: A critical investigation of the
creative arts with attention to art as a site
of knowledge

E

Lizanc1n



G

nicnsoN

School of Art, RMIT University Melbourne

Abstract

This paper brings a critical focus to difference and the creative arts in education with specic
attention to art as a site of knowledge in New Zealand conditions. The 1990s and early
2000s are marked by a paucity of critically engaged literature on the arts in education and
a conspicuous absence of discussions on the politics of difference. Alongside the global return
to empirical research in education where quantiable data-based projects tend to attract
attention ahead of fundamentally crucial questions of philosophical and critical registers,
there has been an apparent reinvention of liberal humanistic concepts of creative practice.
These tendencies are coupled with strategic political alignments of creativity with industry.
The outcome appears to be a withering of attention to the politics of difference on the vine
of educational philosophy, policy and practice in art education. The paper suggests that if
the creative arts are to hold or gain any purchase in the stakes of education in a global
world this vine must be tended and revitalised through a rigorous application of critically
framed questions so that discourses of difference can be recognised as a social and political
responsibility in the art educational encounter.

Keywords: politics of difference, critical engagement, culture, art,
subjectivity

The Research Ground

What are the modes of existence of this discourse? (Foucault, 1977, p. 138)
The focus of this research is art as a site of knowledge with particular attention to
the

politics of difference

in the educational landscape. This work grows out of earlier
projects that engage poststructuralist theories and methodologies through which to
deconstruct dominant discourses of visual arts and art education (see Grierson,
2000).

1

Methodologically the interest of this research is to excavate genealogies of
knowledge in and through art as a particular practice within the category of
creative arts and to put such knowledge to the test in relation to difference. The
overall aim of the research is to clarify and appraise dominant principles at work
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in the discursive practices of art education and to examine art within institutional
changes taking place in tertiary education in the latter 20

th

to early 21

st

centuries.
The research asks questions of pedagogy in terms of meeting the needs of difference
within those changes. In the Foucauldian (1977) sense the modes of existence of
this discourse are thus opened to scrutiny.
Through this research my speaking position is that of artist and art educator, art
historian and theorist, with particular attention to visual arts as a disciplinary
subject in the contemporary institution or academy. Attention is given to the
construction of subjectivity in and through art, and the recognition of art as a site
of knowledge in institutional practices and in the world at large. As both knowing
subject and knowable object the investigator, in this case, is positioned as both
actor and acted upon by the discourses under examination. Thus the subject-object
relations are implicated in the text in terms of a doubling of categoriesas one
who constructs meaning (the artist) and one who interprets meaning (the audience
or viewer), one who reects on questions of meaning (the philosopher) and one
who interprets these reections to make sense for others (the writer). Thus the
artist/writers presence through the text is signied in the marks as much as the
erasures.
Participatory gestures of disclosure and enclosure are thus performed via this
work. Through this process the discourse suggests that true objectivity cannot be
sought, as true subjectivity is also in doubt. Thus the archaeological digs in this
knowledge-eld are undertaken in an attempt to locate, sift and sort the discursive
practices and identify the philosophical assumptions underpinning Western art and
art education. Via this method the contingency of knowledge and ontological
formations might be evidenced in the plethora of visual representations circulating
in popular culture as much as in an art students practice. It should be said that
the representational eld of art and visuality are already embedded in logocentric
metaphysics as a dominant way of knowing and interpreting the world. Thus
visual arts, in the same way as literature or critique, signies a site of knowledge
heavily invested in a liberal, humanist, ideological way of knowing through which
imperialist and colonial enterprises are structured as a dominant epistemological
system.
When encountering art in the globalised eld one might ask: Where does
meaning lie? Evans and Hall (1999, p. 4) suggest that meaning is constituted not
in the visual sign itself as a self-sufcient entity ... but in the articulation between
viewer and viewed, between the power of the image to signify and the viewers
capacity to interpret meaning; and that visual culture always provides a physical
and psychical place for individual spectators to inhabit. Thus we have processes
of signication in operation in visual culture and the subjective capacities of
the subject to take and produce meaning. In those contingent spaces between
signication and interpretation discourses of difference oscillate in the indeterminacy
of meaning.
In spite of Evans and Halls critical engagement with notions of visual culture
there has been, since the early to mid 1990s, a paucity of literature on such issues
from the point of view of the visual arts educator. This is certainly so in the New
Difference: The creative arts

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Zealand setting, which largely reects the situation of other Western locations such
as Australia and Britain. Somewhere in the 1970s, the territory of art was opened
through critical writing about the art object or the art-world as such. However, art
education as a practice remained out of range. That the art educator might scrutinise
critically the formations of artist or art as subjects or objects of political enquiry
was not entertained, certainly not in the New Zealand context of the art school
or academy in the 1970s to 1990s. Furthermore, engagements with the politics
of disciplinarity or with a Foucauldian equation of power to knowledge were
conditions that escaped capture. Art historical methodology continued to hold sway
in the presentation of art and reference to the politics of art in education tends to
be scant and random with little attention to critical analysis of underlying issues,
policies, premises or practices.
Disciplinary practices are reproduced through consensual appeal to dominant
dening strategies and Enlightenment lineages, while a healthy inscription of
modernity in liberal, humanist accounts of subjectivity ensure the re-inscription of
creativity as a condition beyond theoretical scrutiny. In other words, the creative
category is equated with nature and the natural human condition. Such practices
and values continue to be reproduced if not critically engaged, intervened, and
displaced. Has the situation changed since those decades? Although critical
approaches to postmodern intellectual enquiry may abound in the decade of the
late 1990s and 2000s, how easily in the name of egalitarian and teleological
optimism the obfuscating of political issues occurs, yet again, in the interests of
consensual approval and in the guise of a rationally inscribed instrumentalism in
institutional practice. Poststructuralist accounts can provide the procedures
whereby interventions and displacements can be possible. However in the 1990s,
in New Zealand at least, apart from the writings of Michael Peters and James
Marshall, a lacuna of poststructuralist analysis characterises the eld of education
with a dearth in the actual eld of art education.
What is needed in such conditions is the construction of a discourse, which
could examine discourses; a rigorous questioning of the stabilisation of the vast
unities like periods or centuries to the phenomena of rupture, of discontinuity
(Foucault, 1994, p. 4). This lack of critical purchase in art education is addressed
somewhat in the 2003 publication of

The Arts in Education: Critical perspectives from
Aotearoa New Zealand

(Grierson & Manseld, 2003). With its focus on curriculum
and pedagogical issues in visual arts, dance, drama, and music, the collection
brings attention to the creative arts at a crucial time in New Zealand education
when a new arts curriculum,

The Arts in the New Zealand Curriculum

(Ministry of
Education, 2000) is implemented throughout New Zealand schools, while in the
tertiary sector the arts, broadly conceived, are coupled with industry in new
political formulations of creative industries. The writers (particularly Bracey,
Drummond, Grierson, Lines, Manseld, and Peters) suggest that through political
moves of policy and practice the arts are reinvented too easily via a renewed
form of idealist liberal humanism, as concepts of representation are embedded
more securely in a natural understanding or attitude. By these means creativity
is packaged as a natural condition to serve the instrumentalised interests of
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knowledge transfer in a global knowledge economy, which in itself is naturalised in
the interests of common sense attitudes to rationality and human progress.

Identifying Art in a Knowledge Framework

Within such neo-liberal networks and globalising frameworks of knowledge transfer
how does art situate itself as a legitimate condition of knowledge? Doing
science ... involves its own kind of legitimation, writes Fredric Jameson in his
introduction to Lyotards

The Postmodern Condition

(Lyotard, 1984, p. viii); and so
it is with doing art in the universities and art academies. The methods, systems
and premises of knowledge are determined and reproduced by consensual usage in
the art-world as George Dickie (1984) shows. Concepts of great art, hierarchies
of media, content, genre and style, are authorised repetitively by institutional
practices in the Western academy. This habit results in the canonisation and
conrmation of certain genres of knowledge that are reproduced and reinforced
through historical accounts in the ever-circulating discourses of the art-world.
In this legitimating process

difference

is too easily obfuscated in the determination
and re-inscription of art and its value.
Calling for a critically engaged account of difference we might well ask how the
play of power determines knowledge, and how ofcially approved policies and
practices prescribe how to teach, why to teach, what to teach, and how economi-
cally and efciently it should be done. Where lie the impacts of this arrangement
on art as a subject and how might the why questions be maintained along with
the what and how? These are crucial considerations for the art educator whose
site of study looks to identifying the relations between material practices and
theoretical, cultural or philosophical issues and ideas.
If art is about conditions of, politics of, situations of, considerations of,
signications of, and interpretations of meaning via material practices, and if it is
accepted that each of these modalities with its variables and differences may be a
site of knowledge in and of self and the world, then how may the disciplinary
subject art be identied

outside

of difference? We might wonder how art could be
construed pedagogically and sustained socially as a meaning-making process

beyond

the conditions of difference that characterise the global world.
It could be argued that in a globalised world of contingent knowledge formations,
where variable social practices exist side-by-side, pedagogical procedures are already
inected with difference by the very framing of institutional conditions whereby
the signifying practices of difference are situated. Thus it is impossible to get outside
of difference. Some crucial questions lie at the forefront of this proposition. In an
over-rationalised world of diminishing resources, how do different contexts, different
genres of meaning and different language-games incubate and grow in institutional
practices? And in respect of art as a site of knowledge how may the art educator
give account of difference in the educational practices of art studio and its study?
There can be no doubt that the dominance of over-rationalised systems of input-
output measures and tick-box mentality take attention away from equally pressing
demands of difference and its politics. The art educator is situated at the edge of
Difference: The creative arts

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pedagogical and institutional challenge, and in this challenge there lies an ethical
demand for difference.
Poststructuralism as both theory and method provides a way to consider this
demand when art as a knowledge practice is put to the test. What becomes
apparent through poststructuralist approaches is that, in the Western world, the
privileging of the visual has arisen through the privileging of representationthat
art is presumed to be intrinsically a visually mimetic practice through which the
world may be captured and re-presented. In this scenario art would be conceived
as a formal process, which depends upon visual perception, and in which difference
cannot be a condition of concern. However, when such capture as a dominating
value of the work of art is reconsidered through an Heideggerian perspective, then art
may be considered as a work that

reveals

the world rather than

represents

the world;
art may be a work that opens to the world and brings the world into its presencing
(see Grierson, 2004a, pp. 2333). In this way the students art works and art
processes would open or reveal a reality or set of conditions, rather than replicating
or

representing

an

a priori

reality that exists prior to the act of material practice.
Engaging such a procedure the art educator might seek to construct in the art
educational studio or classroom a pedagogical situation of contingency and paralogy
(Grierson, 1999). In these pedagogical conditions the art student may

dis

close
rather than

fore

close the possibilities of indeterminacy in art as a meaning-making
strategy or process. This is a far cry from the formulaic prescriptions required of
levels of learning and developmental stages of progression in an arts curriculum that
is designed to meet and measure predictable outcomes via mimetic forms and
renderings. What is being proposed here is that signiers of difference must be
recognised as being at the heart of the textual (visual, artefactual, temporal, sonic,
lmic, material, virtual etc.) explorations of every art student, as the students
experience is already mediated via contingency and difference before the art-making
processes begin. This recognition of difference offers a challenge to the art educator
whose own conditions and lineages of practice will be put to the test. Mapping
the philosophical bases of this challenge will go some way towards clarifying the
potential difculty that an art educator might face in the contemporary art studio
or classroom.

Questions of Legitimation

When

difference

is on the agenda for discussion then

questions of legitimation

must
be addressed (see Lyotard, 1984; Young, 1990; Grierson, 2002). In the art studio
the performing and implementation of a critically informed pedagogical procedure
is crucial if difference is to be accounted for and the politics of difference inscribed.
It can be argued that every instruction, every expectation, every art-example
presented by the educator, and every assessment event and criteria will frame the
outcome for the student and inuence or even determine the values and under-
standings of art in the popular imaginary. The application of rules of judgement
will legitimate (or de-legitimate) a particular subject or object of knowledge,
therefore such rules must be appropriate to the particular genre of discourse under
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examination if difference is to be properly and politically inscribed. Taking art
beyond primarily aesthetic concerns and beyond the judgement of taste, it becomes
clear that different cultural genres are at work in the texts of image, object or artefact
and different rules of judgement apply in the legitimating ground of knowledge,
which is a site of incommensurability as Lyotard (1984) shows.
If culture is inscribed through difference then questions of art as a site of culture
shift from epistemological questions, where art as a static display represents the
existing world of knowledge, to ontological questions where art, which is never
present unto itself nor unto the external referents it suggests, is inscribed through
signs of difference. Here the Derridean concept of

diffrance

points to the way
meaning is deferred via a chain of signiers while also incorporating the structuralist
meaning of difference. In this way, art operates as a language (this is not to reduce
art to a system of literacy factorssee Bracey, Grierson, Manseld, Peters, in
Grierson & Manseld, 2003). Different forms of cultural representation circulate
as deferred signs through networks of interpretation, distribution and address.
Through art as a site of textuality, visual or otherwise, culturality is traced
through contingent modalities of time, place and world.
But Foucault asks, What are the modes of existence of this discourse? (1977,
p. 138). At any historical moment, what kinds of conditions come into play in
determining that a particular subject is the legitimate executor of a certain kind
of knowledge? (Foucault, cited in Faubion, 1998, p. xiv). And of the object of
knowledge, Foucault asks, At any historical moment, what conditions come into
play in determining that a particular object is the appropriate object of a particular
kind of knowledge?. Faubion then adds, these are general questions, but Foucault
declared that he was always interested only in specic sectors of the broader eld
of which they might be posed. The conditions that are assumed in the study of
art will determine the kind of knowledge that is available through art. Within
the specic sector of art there are incredible complexities concerning the subject-
object relations in material and textual practices. Beyond the problematics of
representation, artists work in a knowledge zone of the not yet known, a eld of
indeterminacy that characterises creativity.
Foucault directs us to those sectors where the subject, the bearer and executor,
of a certain kind of knowledge is also posited as the object of that very same kind
of knowledge (Faubion, 1998, p. xiv). Art acts as both the subject and object of
enquiry. Both art (site of knowledge) and the artist (human subject), in the broadest
sense of signication, may be considered as knowing subjects and objects of knowledge
at one and the same time. Subject-object relations are effectively problematised
when art is posited as a signifying practice or meaning-making set of conditions
rather than an aesthetic practice, or category of technical practice, or classicatory
style, or mode of representation. Implicit in art as a signifying practice, through
which meanings may be sited or interpreted, are the social, historical, cultural and
political aspects of

difference

, as meaning is constructed or deferred in

diffrance

.
This takes us beyond the idea of culture as a natural set of given traits, conditions
or lineages. Thus it is the

political

aspects of difference that must be sought and
understood via the signifying practices of

diffrance

in art, language and culture.
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These contingencies with their implied presence and absence of meaning are at
play in art as an iterative meaning-making process.

Art and Subjectivity

Implicit in discourses of education are discourses of identity and subjectivity in that
constructions of self are enmeshed in the way art as a knowledge practice is
framed pedagogically and in the way material preferences are valued and funded.
If the condition of difference is to be foregrounded in the art school, studio or
classroom, then questions of subjectivity and agency must be scrutinised and put
to the test. For example, to what extent is the artist to be privileged as the author
or agent of knowledge? From whence has the idea of artistic truth emanated?
Artistic agency is legitimated through the grounding of self-certainty in centuries
of Western ne arts academies, and by such means the ne artist could be
considered (consensually) secure in his (normalised gender) intentionality and
subsequent autonomy of creative action. This privileged process establishes his
universal, or naturally endowed claims to aesthetic and intellectual insight and
value. Seen through this lens, ne arts may represent a mimetic site of signicant
reection of an ideal state of being, which is born of Platonism and achievable
through the stable classication of creative genius via centuries of Enlightenment
practice. Thus through the march of Western progress his creativity was con-
sidered the source of superior insight, gift and genius (see Battersby, 1989).

2

Classical art history construed the artist as creative agent to be a cultural measure
of intellectual achievement and progress, a kind of knowledge-barometer by
which to mark, measure and reect a civilised world-view. Through the disciplinary
organisation of modern knowledge the construction of moral worth was centred on
the autonomous creative action of individual practitioners. Legitimating rules of
judgement assumed artistic genius as a condition of value, which was evidenced
through established criteria such as originality, truth to materials, and intellectual
content, thereby legitimating the myths of creative agency. Thus the modernist
disciplines of ne arts and art history ensured and reected a rationally ordered
world of progressive continuity whereby the naming of heroic practitioners, style
and inuence were fundamental to the demands of rational progress, aesthetic
judgement, categorisation of proper forms and epistemological legitimation.
Coming from such an elevated lineage of philosophical thought and practice, art
in the academy becomes easily accustomed to the privileged idea of the subject of
knowledge (a given) being able to penetrate the eld of knowledge (a given) to nd
the truth (a given). By these means art may be conferred a status beyond its means
as an agent of truth and moral purpose; and the artist, by implication, the status
of truth-seeker or seer. Overlaying this lineage in the 20

th

century are the sciences
of human development and the natural premises of Western individualism with
the inalienable right to a self-validated and naturalised self-knowledge. This
plays itself out via the art-as-expression paradigm, which so dominated art
education in the mid-20

th

century, and was an implicit philosophical right of the
Abstract Expressionist painters of the New York School and beyond. This process of
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self-knowledge privileges an already privileged identikit concept of self as an
all-knowing conscious subject evading critical capture. Around such mythologies
both art and artist become cultural capital for the business of fullling societys
civilising dreams of utopia and progress. Today, in the interests of furthering
the agenda of creative industries, art and the artist are folded back into the self-
knowledge model but this time self is one of an enterprise agenda, a creative
innovation model of economic transfer, which now denes the social body and
reinvents humanist ideals of creative agency. A poststructuralist interrogation of this
situation would heighten a critical and political awareness of how these dominant
myths function, how they are constructed and how legitimated. It would be seen
that art practice creates a pedagogical subjectivity as much as it does an artwork.
Thus art as a knowledge eld is a highly political site.

Philosophical Frameworks

In unmasking the privileging of metaphysics in the lineage of aesthetic practice,
Heidegger (1977, 1999) focuses a questioning way of thinking about ontologies
that are fundamental to the work of art and the art education encounter.
Heideggers writings are as applicable today as they were in the mid-20

th

century
and, it could be argued, are crucial if one is to understand the work of art around
which art education is centred. And working from a basis of poststructuralist
encounters, the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida,
and Jean-Franois Lyotard would appear to be crucial reading for the art educator.
Take for example the approach to constructing history in Nietzsches (1874/1997)
On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life where a

critical history

is
positioned and the historical ground is opened to a philosophical sense beyond the
miniscule noting of data or the monumentalising of events, both of which are
familiar approaches in art historical teaching and art-based research. And there are
other more contemporary writers whose works throw light on contemporary and
changing institutional conditions. Stephen Balls (1990, 1992, 1994) application of
poststructuralist analysis to educational politics and policy in Britain, with its focus
on the 1988 Education Reform Act and consequential formations of what he calls
a new economy of power (Ball, 1994, p. 1) in educational organisation, can
inform the questions an educator faces when grappling with the subject art in new
political structures of institutional practice. Ball discloses and examines discursive
practices in the social body of education through application of a Foucauldian
analysis to discourses of reform, thus providing a critical perspective that is trans-
ferable to global conditions of education be they of Britain or New Zealand or
Australia. This has particular resonance in the globalised conditions of a knowledge
economy where art is repositioned essentially as a packagable enterprise. Ball
focuses particularly on the secondary school domain, while Bill Readings (1996,
1997) takes the questions of institutional analysis to the role and structure of the
contemporary university. Readings work on the changing role of the university
raises important questions about the replacement of the idea of culture with the
discourse of excellence in a globalised framework (see Grierson, 2004b).
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Situating Difference Historically

The project of a

politics of difference

is not new. It has grown from postcolonial and
feminist research of the 1970s. In the eld of gender difference and art history, the
work of Griselda Pollock is notable (see for example, 1988, 1996, 1999; with
Orton, 1996; with Parker, 1981). The way Pollock situates art history into a broad
eld of social, cultural and political enquiry is pertinent when a postmodern context
is sought in art as an educational procedure. Opening the disciplinary practices of
art history to intersections with cultural studies, Pollock works through important
concerns of arts production and exchange. It is at these intersections of art with
cultural studies, art history with cultural theories, that the subject art has been
opened to scrutiny in terms of the needs of difference. Edward Said (1993, pp. 310
311) makes clear that there has been a Copernican revolution in all traditional
elds of inquiry ... Eurocentrism has been challenged denitively ... society and
culture have been the heterogeneous product of heterogeneous people in an
enormous variety of cultures, traditions, and situations.
Yet in spite of this social and cultural revelation of the late 20

th

century, to
mention a critical approach in frameworks of art practice signies a continuing
threat to the idealised notions of truth to practice as a reection of creative
insight and action. Over the past two decades, a resistance to ideas of theory
characterises the art academy when the privileging of practice determines a dominant
agenda. Resistances to art history or theory play out as a desire, sometimes a
devout devotion, to privilege practice over theory through engaging a dialectical
procedure of negating the other, thereby obfuscating the power and politics of
difference. Sites of antagonism are thereby adduced when the hourglass is inverted
to reveal the re-inscription of a self-limiting, hierarchical procedure of identifying
other via the double negation. The epistemic glass still has two distinct ends, and
the binary divide stays rmly in place with battle-lines drawn across the political
terrain. To rescue this situation an identiable demand calls for pedagogical work
in the border crossings between the theory of practice and the practice of theory.
It can be said that in the art academy and art educational setting today the
conditions of marginalising theoretical or critical conversations in the study of art
for the sake of clinging to a privileged notion of practice, are re-scripted in the
political return to disciplinary knowledge in the globalised university or academy.
The demand for research accountability in terms of quantiable outputs attached
to income, increases the urgency to register institutional approval for art practice
as research. However, an evident repetition of the argument appears in the
proposition that the visual does not need the textual to qualify, explain, translate
or perform a legitimating procedure, and that material practice stands on its own
as research. This may well be so, but there is more to this than a mere prioritisation
of practice over theory. Sites of antagonism remain in place when dialectical
reasoning is engaged. It follows therefore that a robust inter-textual relationship
must be set up between theory and practice as a demand of studio based
pedagogy and art history or theory. What is proposed here is an understanding of
art as a signifying practice of indeterminacy through which materiality, philosophy,
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history and contemporary political and cultural conditions of subjectivity are
intertwined in the risky forays of knowledge beyond the propositional logic of
empirical scientic enquiry.
The closure of critical purchase in art education may come from several
directions. Increasing rationalism in educational policies and practices, which
frame market-driven procedures in art and design, tend to close space and time
for critical interrogation. Art then answers to the needs of the marketplace, as
education answers the needs of management technologies, and curriculum answers
the needs of skills acquisition, and value is determined via reductive measures of
useful knowledge. Economic efciency prevails. Furthermore, an emphasis on
vocation as an end point of an education through art increases the demand for
pragmatic responses to educational propositions. In such a scenario there is a
consequent return to view art as the efcient utilisation of skills, a category of
material practice that functions to package and represent the already known, or
an aesthetic exercise that sits on the periphery of societys real problems. Risk
disappears, as indeterminacy, paralogy, intervention and hybridity diminish. This
scenario translates to a reductive and technological solution to the arts as a
curriculum enterprise devoid of critical engagement.

Concluding Comments

Today art graduates are being spawned in increasing numbers into a world of
escalating global complexities marked by a plethora of visual images, signs and
texts that operate to obliterate, translate and transform spaces of nation, ethnicity,
age, gender, class, culture, language, history and meaning. This discussion
contends that it must be the business of education through art to attest to these
changes, to examine critically the assumptions of knowledge in disciplinary his-
tories of art and art education, to educate for an understanding of how discourses
of ofcial or grand narratives of culture function, and how the discursive practices
of ofcial knowledge are normalised and reproduced into legitimate currency in
everyday social life.
This discussion makes a call to educators to be concerned with asking critical
questions of the orders of discourse in which the creative arts and art in particular
are constituted. Closing down of debate coincides with the revival of reductive
technologies in educational discourses through which art and other educational
practices are increasingly framed, as evidenced by new curriculum structures
and the emphasis on means-end accountabilities in globalised knowledge con-
ditions. To construct art as a privileged site of visual representation of the world
out-there is akin to the language of instrumental rationalism and its alignment
with marketplace determinants. The potential of art to be understood and peda-
gogically positioned as a signifying system, through which contingency operates as
a network of vibrations and deferred signs or meanings, will be thus overtaken by
the technological means of production whereby images, objects and artefacts are
delimited and packaged for prescribed and easily transferable ends in a global
market economy.
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A poststructuralist approach to this terrain turns education towards clarication
of the social, cultural, political, and other critically engaged frames (theory) within
which a work of art (practice) might constitute knowledge and might signify
epistemological and ontological formations in and of the world. If

difference

is to
be a workable pedagogical practice then conditions of meaning-making through
image, object, idea, sound, text or artefact must be critically examined in the art
educational encounter. In this sense, foundational and naturalised assumptions of
art and culture as a natural set of conditions call for a deconstructive approach as
an ethical demand.

Notes

1.

The Politics of Knowledge: a Poststructuralist Approach to Visual Arts Education in Tertiary
Sites

(Grierson, 2000) produced a critical history of ne and visual arts education in the
tertiary sector. The project considered visual arts and institutional sites of knowledge
through excavating a genealogy of historical and current practices in art education at
tertiary level, with a focus on New Zealand institutional and cultural conditions.
2. Refer to Christine Battersby (1989)

Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics

for
interrogations of the socially prescribed concept of genius in the histories of Western art,
literature, philosophy.

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