Pedagogical Sights/Sites: Producing Colonialism and Practicing Art in the Pacific

Abstract

Producing “Blank/Whiteness”Students in art are routinely educated to associate the beginning of their creative efforts with blankness—the white sheet of drawing paper, the gessoed canvas, the blue screen of the video monitor. But what if this surface and space, identified as empty, were already filled with something that our artistic sensibilities and aesthetic schema are unable to detect? According to Henri Lefebvre, the primary misconception about space in Western society is that it is empty. For Lefebvre, space is always filled with the unseen social relations of people; it is produced by social relations and embodies them. We fail to see the historical and contemporary relations of people because we are taught to use particular conceptual strategies and categories in Western culture that ignore these interactions and therefore allow space to appear empty to us. The social, political, economic, and historical relations that actively produce the world and shape the way we live in it are not immediately visible. Ideology and power thus remain largely unseen in daily life.