The Arts Institute

Originally published in 1998, Easels of Utopia presents a discussion of art's duration and contingency within the avant garde's aesthetic parameters, which throughout this century have constructed, influenced, and informed our definitions of modernity. In this context the book reads Umberto Boccioni's Futurism as reminiscent of Thomist realism; proposes Caravaggism's historical relevance to the election of individuality in post-war realism; and draws the readers attention to the aesthetic implications in Carlo Carrà's metaphysical art and its reappraisal of the early Renaissance. Following a contextual analysis of the historic avant-garde in Part One, Part Two presents parallel discussions of Italian and British questions, articulated by the works of Marino Marini, Francis Bacon, Renato Guttuso and Stanley Spencer in their return to individuality within art's aesthetic construct. The author argues that this initiates a return to 'lost' beginnings where form seeks knowledge, content regains an ability to anarchize, and art recognizes its contingent condition.

In taking the critique of inclusion and entry as a first step, Art’s Way Out’s discussion of art, politics and learning aims to delineate what an exit pedagogy would look like: where culture is neither seen as a benign form of inclusion nor as a hegemonic veil by which we are all subscribed to the system via popularized forms of artistic and cultural immediacy. An exit pedagogy—as prefigured in what could be called art’s way out through the implements of negative recognition qua impasse—would not only avoid the all too facile symmetrical dualism between conservative and progressive, liberal and critical pedagogies, but also seek the continuous referral of such symmetries by setting them aside and look for a way out of the confined edifices of education and culture per se. An exit pedagogy seeks its way out by reasserting representation in the comedic, the jocular, and more effectively in the arts’ power of pausing, as that most effective way by which aesthetics comes to effect in its autonomist and radical essence.

«In this fluent, limpid, and scholarly work, Baldacchino examines, inter alia, the problem of empathy in relation to art as an event (or series of events), drawing upon a wide and rich range of sources to inform what in effect is his manifesto. With a profound understanding of its philosophical basis, Baldacchino unfolds his argument in an internally consistent and elegantly structured way. This is not a book to be ‘dipped into’, to do so would miss the development of Baldacchino’s philosophical position; like an art work itself, Art’s Way Out has coherent structure, and a complex, interrelation between form and content, reflecting an artist’s concern for getting things right.»
-- Richard Hickman, Cambridge University

«Although art has a limitless capacity to take on myriad responsibilities, according to Baldacchino we also need to consider a ‘way out’ because only then will we understand how art goes beyond the “boundaries of possibility.” As he explains, “our way into reason also comes from an ability to move outside the limits that reasons sets”. This is the ‘exit pedagogy’ that he advocates. And here exit does not mean to leave, but rather to reach beyond, to extend and explore outside the borders we impose on learning, teaching, schooling and most forms of cultural agency. The need to embrace the capacity of art to cycle beyond the contingencies we impose on it also helps to clarify the limits of inclusive arguments for deploying art education for various individual, institutional, and socio-political ends: art as self expression, art as interdisciplinary method, art as culture industry, art as political culture, art as social justice and so on.  This image invokes for me part of the legacy of Maxine Greene that Baldacchino revealed in his earlier text, Education Beyond Education (2009), when he explored her thesis of the social imagination, which is best, achieved when teaching becomes ‘reaching.’ What Art’s Way Out gives us is an exit strategy from the deadening tendency to ignore the enduring capacity of art to give life to learning, teaching and the very culture of our being.»
-- Graeme Sullivan, Penn State University

Like the unlearnt, the unmade 'allows' us to reclaim our right to our contingency. Only as contingent beings could we claim the yet-unclaimed and the already-unlearnt. This is where knowledge begins to unravel, and where it is constantly returned as a way that knows by way of what it seeks to doubt and of which it seeks to retain a viable ignorance.

his article will mostly engage with arts leadership through a discussion that focuses on the arts, leadership and education, and how their convergence might have a direct impact on autonomy. Taking a meta-theoretical approach, the main argument is that arts leadership is an asymptotic state of affairs. Rather than pose art and leadership as antithetical events that necessitate forms of syntheses through identifiable contexts, the context for arts leadership represents a contiguous space where art and leadership continuously seek a mutual way of preserving their integrity in an asymptotic relationship. If this relationship turns into a synthesis, both art’s autonomy and the ability to lead creatively are neutralized. The aim is to question the various implications that bring together the autonomous spheres of the arts, education and leadership, while inviting the reader to draw his or her own conclusions critically and autonomously. To clarify this approach, this article straddles across several horizons, including: arts practice as a sphere of autonomous dispositions and the political implications that follow; education as a horizon that educes – leads out – through the pedagogical exits that are offered by the arts; and art’s anti-systemic pedagogy, where art’s autonomy becomes a possibility of unlearning systems.

When we speak of art education, are we trying to make sense of somethingby means of something else, just as a ventriloquist speaks with the mouth ofa dummy to make us believe that he is having a dialogue with someone elsewhen in effect he is speaking to himself? This paper discusses how art educationcould only flourish as an act of approximation as it rejects the incrementaland constructivist assumptions that have turned art and educationinto transactional instruments. Discussing art and education’s immanentrelationship, this paper argues that art education is only necessary by forceof the accidents that characterise it. Four scenarios, here identified in whatthe author calls the paradox of the ventriloquist’s soliloquy in art education,illustrate this argument. In discussing how this comes about, this papermakes reference to Herner Saeverot’s concept of indirect pedagogy andCharles Garoian’s prosthetic pedagogy.

This is a catalogue essay in response to the exhibition 'After Illusion' held in Penwith Gallery, St Ives, Cornwall, April 29, 2017. The artists featured were Niamh Collins, Jeremy Diggle, Tony Plant, Iain Robertson, Clare Wardman, and Simon Williams. Full paper found on line (see link).

Art as Unlearning makes an argument for art’s unlearning as a mannerist pedagogy. Art’s pedagogy facilitates a form of forgetfulness by extending what happens in the practice of the arts in their visual, auditory and performative forms. The concept of learning has become predominantly hijacked by foundational paradigms such as developmental narratives whose positivistic approach has limited the field of education to a narrow practice within the social sciences. This book moves away from these strictures by showing how the arts confirm that unlearning is not contingent on learning, but rather anticipates and avoids it.

When we speak of the arts, and more so when one engages with the arts as a practitioner in their various contexts, the questions of legitimacy and legitimation take a very different turn. This spans across a wide horizon, whether it is that of art-making in the studio; of showing in the gallery; of performing in the hall; or of teaching, learning and unlearning in schools, colleges or universities.

To start with, one needs to understand and find a way of differentiating between legitimacy and legitimation. Legitimacy implies a degree of conformity, whether it is with the law, agreed rules, or a grammar of speech, practice, and procedure. Legitimation is the action by which legitimacy is or could be claimed. In terms of images, by which we mostly make art, the process of being justified and verified, and more so, in terms of a manner by which a process of legitimation comes forth, emerges from that which is shown in terms of what it represents to groups and individuals who, in being recognized as sources of legitimacy, are then ready to give it.

This raises an immediate question: is legitimacy a gift that is expected from others? In turn, this could imply that as recipients of this gift, human actions only gain the validity of what they represent so as to have a value that is identifiable with forms of legitimation established outside them. Values that immediately come to mind, when the arts are presented within this realm of legitimacy, would include those aesthetic, pedagogical, social, and moral categories from which one could always glean a political set of assumptions. These are often sustained and justified by socio-economic metrics that are now linked to the so-called culture and creative industries. The latter seems to have completed the circle of legitimacy, where the arts are not simply seen, but expected to justify their existence from perspectives that are tangible, and to which the institutional voice of the arts is increasingly and often actively, giving assent.

Dewey's argument for education is predicated on how, as free and intelligent beings, we have the power to develop dispositions. However, in a context where democracy is neutered by anti-politics, reading Dewey now comes with an urgent need to revisit his argument for an experiential and experimental approach towards the world. Revisiting Horkheimer's critique of Dewey, which reveals two opposed notions of instrumentalism, this article argues that unless Dewey is reassessed from the non-identitarian character of his pragmatism, his philosophy of education risks being lost to an alignment with social constructivism. This exposes the Deweyan approach to what Maxine Greene calls a disjunction in the culture between everydayness and reason, where the "integrations" that Dewey achieved with his concentration on experience vanish. Historically framed, this paper draws on Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin's discussion of a democracy that is more akin to a "burning house" than an associated form of living. K E Y W O R D S disposition; instrumentalism; anti-politics; democracy; education; race; the arts. SISYPHUS J O U RN A L O F E DU CA T IO N