Of Diagrams and Rhizomes: Visual Culture, Contemporary Art, and the Impossibility of Mapping the Content of Art Education

Abstract

What are the boundaries of art education? Discipline-Based Art Education expanded the content of art education, and now, proposals to move art education toward visual culture promise to further complicate our field. The difficulty encountered in attempting to add the content of emerging contemporary artworks and popular visual culture to a map of an education provides an analogy for the problems faced by proponents of visual cultural-based curricula. In this article, the dojinshi phenomenon, pertaining to the fanzine-like comic books that Japanese teenagers create, is used to illustrate the futility of diagramming within art education content which is rhizomatic—more like the tangle of a patch of grass than the orderly structure of a tree. Three strategies are presented for dealing with contemporary art and rhizomatic popular visual culture within art education curricula: (1) opting for the status quo which precludes the addition of contemporary art and popular visual culture, (2) supplementing existing curricula, and (3) fully submitting to the new and popular. One tactic is also presented—that of moving pedagogy to a space situated between conventional artworld-based school curricular content and content from contemporary art and popular visual culture. This tactic is proposed as a means for teachers and students to collaboratively embrace dynamic changes and expansions of content in a site alongside traditional art education.