Picturing the Beautiful Game: A History of Soccer in Visual Culture and Art ed. by Daniel Haxall

The subject of this thesis is a perception that the visual arts is declining in value in Australian culture. The rationale for this perception is drawn in the immediate sense from repeated debate in favour of abolition of the Australia Council (the premier source of grant funding to artistic producers). The method selected to investigate this perception is a comparison of rational and social epistemologies for curriculum, based respectively on the work of Arthur Efland and Theodor Adorno. By making this comparison, the thesis argues that the perceived shrinkage in the value and status of visual art is based on a fundamental conflict between the meanings of “art” and “culture”. The context of the debate is in fact perceptions of curriculum and their function vis-à-vis “cultural production” and is taken here to signal a change in the way Australia regards and values artistic activity. <br> <br> The thesis argues that culture needs to be defined appropriate to the Australian experience of “cultural production”. A lack of appropriate definition has resulted in terms like “creativity” becoming so broad in meaning that they are losing theoretical impact. I am inquiring as to what this loss of meaningfulness indicates about art education: some of the questions I ask in order to conduct the inquiry address whether the switch from visual art to visual culture signals a decline in the value of artistic culture; or does it owe itself to changing conditions between art education and artistic employment or commerce? <br> <br> The study examines visual art in particular as it might fall within the realm of Australian cultural production, providing one instance of artistic employment (i.e., in the visual arts). The focus of the study will be on addressing the stand-off between visual arts and visual culture in the field of curriculum studies: my method entails the application of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory so as to place visual art and visual culture within a framework by which both rational and social epistemologies of art education can be used to define change in the realm of cultural production. <br> <br> Such change will include a re-evaluation of the role of visual art within higher education. At Monash University in Melbourne, the Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture has progressively eroded the value of different studio practices by shutting down programs in disciplines that cannot attract sufficient enrolments. The institution appears to displace artistic practice, and to favour visual culture as a more reliable, rational form of investment, leading to more secure forms of employment, and offering less risk in terms of the returns to public education and the economy more generally. <br> <br> Visual culture, or visual culture studies, purports to be a postmodern approach to the study of art and replaces fine art and visual art studies, which represent a more rational epistemology within the field of art education. Visual culture studies aims to work with the current corporate and technocratic reality rather than deny its existence. It permits interdisciplinarity and the removal of a metanarrative about the artist as hero, offering in its place a semblance of plurality, multiplicity, indeterminacy and fragmentation. <br> <br> Visual culture embraces forms of symbolic analysis to construct meaning or rather, to analyse artworks (Lankshear, 1997); addresses digital and social media more readily, and turns to visual literacy to justify the artfulness of artworks (de Duve, 1994; Brown, 2003). This process may suggest a value-free art is being practised: it erodes the significance of traditional aesthetic skills, making aesthetic judgment less essential to the creation of an artwork. <br> <br> One implication of this change is to free fine art in general from its supposedly elitist origins, and to enable the art world to encompass both “high” and “low” art forms with equal value. This new value, which is implicitly more value-free than the high art it seeks to overturn, destabilizes art to the point that it has so few boundaries its continued existence (in its traditional form) becomes questionable.

Reviewed by: Empires of Vision: A Reader ed. by Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy Carla Manfredi Empires of Vision: A Reader. Edited by martin jay and sumathi ramaswamy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. 688 pp. $119.95 (cloth); $32.95 (paper). Empires of Vision contributes to our understanding of the visual cultures of European imperialism and to their afterlives in postcolonial milieus. Thoughtfully edited by cultural historians Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy, the volume includes twenty-one reprinted essays and is divided into two sections: “The Imperial Optic” and “Postcolonial Looking.” The first section introduces five visual media within a trans-historical and global context that spans roughly five hundred years of imperialism. The second section focuses on the decades following decolonization and explores the different ways in which subaltern artists have responded to or “look[ed] back” (p. 3) at Europe. The selections offer a multitude of historical, regional, cultural, and theoretical perspectives, which will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership. Although many of the volume’s selections will undoubtedly be familiar to seasoned scholars, they will provide graduate students with a solid grounding for future historical and theoretical research across the fields of imperialism, postcolonialism, visual and cultural studies, and art history. It is impossible to do justice to any book in a brief review let alone to extracts from twenty-one impressive pieces of scholarship. Thus, this review focuses on the editors’ contributions to Empires of Vision, which are bold reminders of what cross-disciplinary study can achieve: a recasting of conventional, written histories and a questioning of entrenched theoretical paradigms. In “The Work of Vision in the Age of European Empires,” Ramaswamy offers a sophisticated and lucid introduction to current critical approaches to colonialism and visual culture. The stakes of Empires of Vision are clearly defined: “The image is a site where new accounts of empire, the (post)colony, and Europe itself emerge and depart from—even challenge—the more familiar narrative line(s) of nonvisual histories” (p. 3). The volume, explains Ramaswamy, responds to and encourages a gradual academic reorientation. Despite the appearance of several recent visual culture anthologies, the study of art remains largely limited to art history; indeed, histories of colonialism and postcolonialism marginalize the integral role of visual culture in the production of colonial violence. Ramaswamy supports her claim with an anecdote about Edward Said, who confessed that “‘just to think about the visual arts generally sends me into a panic’” (p. 5). Panic becomes a productive metaphor for theorizing how images are often “disorderly” and “unpredictable” and sometimes “incoherent”; thus, Empires of [End Page 927] Vision offers alternative histories to those presented in official textual archives (pp. 5–6). If colonial and postcolonial studies have given short shrift to the visual arts, then visual culture studies also need to catch up. In conventional visual culture accounts, the presence of empire is still obscured, resulting in a European framework of visuality (p. 10). To illustrate this argument, Ramaswamy refers to a compelling 1996 “Visual Culture Questionnaire” published in the journal October: No one who responded to this questionnaire was a specialist in visual arts from regions other than Europe or the United States (pp. 10–11). Needless to say, the questionnaire highlights the importance of this collection, which will militate against parochialism (whether disciplinary or otherwise) and encourage interdisciplinary and interregional approaches to visuality and empire. In their introduction to part 1, “The Imperial Optic,” Ramaswamy and Jay trouble Eurocentric approaches to visual culture by underscoring the dynamic interactions between metropolitan technologies and indigenous traditions and practices. Thus, the “mutually constitutive relationship between empire and image-work” engendered new practices of seeing in and outside Europe (p. 25). Part 1 is divided into four sections, which deal with easel painting, mass-printed illustrations, cartography, and photography/film respectively. Anthropologist Deborah Poole’s influential notion of “visual economy” (1997) serves as an underlying concept for this part. The term “visual economy,” rather than “visual culture” is better suited to consider how images circulate within wide social, cultural, geographical, and imperial networks. In other words, individuals do not have to share a common (visual) culture in order to belong to the...

THE SILK ROUTE AND ITS REFLECTION ON KNOWLEDGE – SYNCRETISM AND IMAGES IN PAINTING AND ARCHITECTONIC FORMS IN MIDDLE-INNER ASIA A PARADIGM BEYOND SPACE AND TIME 13th – 15th CENTURIES AD

Defining over 400 terms and phrases that have recently entered discourse on the visual arts, this is the first reference book specializing in explaining and applying theoretical terminology in contemporary art. Since the early 1970s, the vocabulary used to discuss visual art has expanded radically, leaving many teachers, students, artists, and critics without the accurate definitions necessary for fruitful discourse on contemporary culture. This glossary not only serves as a dictionary but as a guide to current theory and criticism of visual art and culture. Terms can be accessed alphabetically or thematically; the significant cross referencing makes this an easy dictionary to use. Many contemporary art terms have been borrowed from other disciplines or are traditionally employed in the visual arts but have been adapted for use in the contemporary art world and have therefore been assigned specific or specialized applications. These loan terms have increased the likelihood for confusion between old and new definitions, so where possible the authors have applied the terms to works of art or some aspect of visual culture. Most art glossaries and dictionaries concentrate primarily on artistic production in the visual arts―movements, styles, and names. As a complement to these types of works, this glossary of theoretical terms is essential for anyone studying contemporary visual arts and visual culture in general.

시각문화교육은 포스트 모더니즘 이후, 미술교육의 새로운 패러다임이라고 볼 수 있다. 시각문화교육은 전통적인 미술교육에서 우리 주변을 둘러싸고 있는 시각 환경으로 그 관심의 폭을 확대하였으며, 전통적인 순수예술에서 대중문화 및 영상예술 등으로 미술교육의 관심을 폭넓게 확장해 왔다. 시각문화교육은 이미지를 둘러싼 사회문화적 맥락에 주목하고, 비주얼 리터러시 능력을 강조하며 구성주의적인 학습을 강조한다는 면에서 문화예술교육의 이슈와 많은 부분을 공유하고 있으며, 실제로 문화예술교육의 주요한 이론적 배경이기도 하다. 이 글에서는 디지털 미디어 시대와 더불어 중요성을 더해가고 있는 애니메이션 교육의 방향성을 제시하기 위해, 시각문화교육의 이론적 배경 및 이슈를 살펴보고, 이와 관련하여 애니메이션 교육의 방향을 제시하였다. 시각문화교육은 1970년대 이후의 진보적인 문화적 배경 아래에서 탄생하였으며, 그 요지는 개인적이고 사회적인 삶의 개선을 위해 시각적 인공물과 그 행위의 의미를 파악하는 것이다. 그러나 시각문화교육은 시각문화 양상의 변화에 따라 지속적으로 발전 중이며, 현재에는 시각문화에서의 미적 체험교육이나, 디지털 스토리텔링을 통한 의미 구성등으로 그 관심을 확장하는 중이다. 디지털 미디어 시대의 시각환경에서 애니메이션은 시각문화의 중심에 자리잡고 있으며, 애니메이션은 하나의 예술장르, 혹은 테크놀러지를 넘어 시각문화 전반에 걸쳐 이미지가 구현되는 형식이기도 하다. 그간 시각적 의사소통 및 비판적 문화 읽기 등을 강조해 온 시각문화교육 또한 미술교육의 체험에서 이해, 감상에 이르기까지 전 영역에 있어서 디지털-애니메이션 시각문화의 새로운 양상을 반영할 필요가 있을 것이다. 이 글에서는 애니메이션 교육 영역의 확장, 범교과적 접근, 사회재건주의적 교육철학, 애니메이션 리터러시 등을 강조하였다. 시각문화교육적 관점에 기초한 애니메이션 교육의 연구는 애니메이션 교육의 정립에 이론적 토대가 될 뿐 아니라 전통적인 비판적으로 텍스트 읽기중심의 시각문화교육을 내용적으로 풍부하고 동시대적이고 미래적인 방향성에 도움을 줄 수 있을 것이다. Visual culture art education (VCAE) seems to be the new paradigm for art education after postmodernism. Getting beyond the traditional art education, VCAE has expanded its scope of interest to include the visual environment that surrounds our life, thus pushing the boundary of art education beyond the traditional fine arts to cover pop culture and visual art. VCAE shares the issues as well as a lot of elements of culture and art education and in fact serves as a major theoretic background for culture and art education, in that it pays attention to the sociocultural context of images and emphasizes visual literacy and constructionist learning. In this paper, I have reviewed the theoretical background and related issues of VCAE with a view to presenting a direction for animation education, which is gaining in importance coming into the Age of Digital Media. VCAE was born in the progressive cultural atmosphere from the 1970s and thereafter, and its gist consists in figuring out visual artifacts and their action in order to improve individual and social life. Yet, VCAE continues with its development according to the changing aspects of visual culture, and currently, it is expanding its scope of interest to cover the esthetic, experiential education in visual culture and construction of meaning through digital story-telling. In the visual environment of the Digital Age, animation is establishing itself as the center of the visual culture, being a form that goes beyond an art genre or technology to realize images throughout the visual culture. Also, VCAE, which has so far emphasized visual communication and critical reading of culture, would need to reflect the new aspects of the visual culture in digital animation across the entire gamut from experiencing to understanding and appreciating art education. In this paper, I emphasize on Cross-Curricula, social reconstruction, the expansion of animation education, interests in animation as a digital media, and animation literacy. A study of animation education from the perspective of VCAE will not only provide a theoretical basis for establishing animation education, but also enrich the content of VCAE, traditionally focused on critical text reading, and promote its contemporary and futuristic orientation.

Reviewed by: Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives ed. by Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg Denise Amy Baxter Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg, eds., Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives (New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020). Pp. 286; 16 color and 106 b/w illus. $150.00 cloth; $35.95 paper. Despite a wonderful collection of essays on the subject by scholars such as Margaret C. Jacob, Janet M. Burke, and Robert Beachy published in the Winter 2000 issue of this journal, Freemasonry does still mystify, if not historians, then art historians, or, at least many of them, or maybe just me.1 Yet, I contend that this is not surprising. Freemasonry is chronologically, geographically, and organizationally diffuse, with individual orders and rites and lodges, and it is, explicitly, secretive. Nonetheless, Freemasonry surrounds us on a daily basis. Even if with our increasingly cashless society I less frequently encounter the all-seeing eye of the national seal on the one-dollar bill, I pass both a Masonic Lodge and a billboard for Scottish Rite for Children Orthopedic Hospital on my daily commute. And it is exactly these historical though contemporary, completely encompassing visual and material aspects of Freemasonry that is the topic of Freemasonry and the Visual Arts from the Eighteenth Century Forward: Historical and Global Perspectives. The scope of this fascinating volume, ably brought together by art historians Reva Wolf and Alisa Luxenberg, is simply the "centrality of the arts to the history of Freemasonry, and conversely, Freemasonry's significance for the history of art from the 1720s forward" (1). After reading the volume's essays you may well also experience the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency bias, and see Masonic imagery and influence everywhere you look. But, in this case, it really was already there. The introductory chapter, co-authored by Wolf and Luxenberg, points to the volume's overarching goal of the "Mystery of Masonry Brought to Light," whetting the reader's suspicions that indeed we are, and have been, surrounded by Masonic imagery in media ranging from architecture to porcelain, city planning to paintings, and in sites starting in the early eighteenth century, such as the Grand Lodge of England, to contemporary Haitian Vodou visual and material culture. In addition to the case studies, the editors have generously provided the reader with an extended bibliography of the kind so frequently missing in anthologies. The [End Page 327] volume's essays were sourced from a College Art Association session chaired by Reva Wolf in 2016 and a set of three sessions on Freemasonry and the Visual Arts at the Second World Conference on Fraternalism, Freemasonry, and History in 2017 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. It would appear that the combination of sources contributed to the disciplinary and geographic range of the authors. The scope of the volume is ambitious, especially its additional claim of not only a historical but a global perspective. That said, it is important to note that the contributions are explicitly the particular interests of the authors; they are selected case studies. The volume does not comprise chapters commissioned to cover the entire scope of the relationship between Freemasonry and the visual arts, nor, as these selections indicate, could any single volume contain that totality. Organized chronologically, five of the eleven case studies are situated in the long (and broad) eighteenth century, and it is these on which I focus. In the first of these, art historian David Martín López asks the question of what would change if we were to posit that noted Portuguese Enlightenment politician, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, Marquis of Pombal and Count of Oeiras, was a Freemason? How would this alter our interpretations of the Marquis of Pombal and, more discretely, how would his architectural projects in Lisbon following the devastation of the 1755 earthquake be alternatively understood through this lens, and, conversely, how might an analysis of the architecture and urban planning spearheaded by the Marquis of Pombal provide evidence for his affiliation with Freemasonry? Biographical evidence, including the Marquis of Pombal's friendship with known...

Reviewed by: Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry ed. by Avi Lifschitz, Michael Squire C. Richard Booher Avi Lifschitz and Michael Squire (eds.). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xxxiii, 411. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-19-880222-8. Lifschitz and Squire have assembled a set of essays on Lessing’s Laocoon, in honor of the 250th anniversary of its publication. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines including archaeology, art history, classics, literature, and philosophy. This volume serves as a useful resource for those interested in Lessing’s work and its contributions to aesthetics. This volume’s strengths are many. For anyone approaching Laocoon for the first time, it offers an excellent entryway into the central issues in Lessing’s text and the debates that have arisen between scholars over the past 250 years. The book’s organization makes it easy to read selectively, according to the interests of the reader. Yet this strength is also one of the book’s weaknesses. It is better read piecemeal than as a whole. When it is read as a whole, there tends to be an excess of repetition. Lessing’s text is framed and placed in context over and over again. This can be tiresome when encountered in nearly every chapter. Lessing’s Laocoon is itself a strange work, whose peculiarities are often overlooked due to its status as a canonical work of aesthetics. Lessing himself describes it as “more of a disordered collectanea for a book, than a book.” The work’s title is derived from Lessing’s discussion of the difference between the [End Page 240] representation of the Laocoon myth in the famous sculpture held in the Vatican and in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lessing’s central question concerns what each of these forms of representation can do most effectively. What can sculpture, or the visual arts more generally, do that cannot be done as effectively in poetry, or the literary arts? That is, as the subtitle of Lessing’s book asks, what are the proper Grenzen (limits or borders) of poetry and sculpture? One lesson that runs through many of the essays (such as those of Luca Giuliani and David Wellbery) is that Lessing’s account of the boundaries of the arts can only be made compelling if we generalize from sculpture and poetry to a broader set of categories. Some contributors (Frederick Beiser, Avi Lifschitz, and W. J. T. Mitchell) keep their focus on the fine arts, and work out accounts of the accuracy and usefulness of Lessing’s conception of the difference between the visual and literary arts. Jürgen Trabant goes even further, using Lessing as an occasion to reflect on the difference between linguistic and imagistic cognition as such. For those interested in these issues, the volume offers much of value. There are a few issues that could have been more fully addressed in the volume. The first is the adequacy of Lessing’s own theory for forms of art that combine the literary and the visual that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as film and Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstwerk. The second is an oddity of Lessing’s own work: he never actually beheld the sculpture that is given pride of place in his essay. This matter is mentioned a few times, but its potential significance is not explored in much detail. The arc of Lessing’s argument, as several contributors note, tends to defend the superiority of the literary over the visual arts. One wonders if his lack of interest in seeing the Laocoon statue evidences a merely personal proclivity for language over and against the visual arts, rather than his ranking of them being the product of careful reflection on each medium. One final concern is this volume’s inclusion in Oxford University Press’ Classical Presences series. The justification for it seems to be that Lessing’s text discusses the Laocoon statue, as well as works of Greek and Latin literature. However, Lessing’s work seems to be at its weakest when read...

Book Review| January 01 2022 Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow K. Mitchell Snow, A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2020. 346 pages. Hardcover $90.00. Lesley A. Wolff Lesley A. Wolff Texas Tech University, Lubbock Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (2022) 4 (1): 152–154. https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.1.152 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lesley A. Wolff; Review: A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico, by K. Mitchell Snow. Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 January 2022; 4 (1): 152–154. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2022.4.1.152 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentLatin American and Latinx Visual Culture Search There is a timeliness to the release of K. Mitchell Snow’s A Revolution in Movement: Dancers, Painters, and the Image of Modern Mexico in September 2020, a moment when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the world to a standstill. We were suddenly confronted with empty roadways, empty classrooms, and the constant hum of the computer fan running in overdrive to keep us virtually connected through a litany of corporate collaborative platforms: Zoom, Skype, Yammer, Slack, Canvas, Blackboard. At the same time, protestors and activists took to the streets across the hemisphere, from Chile to Mexico to the United States, disrupting the stillness to demand civic, social, and racial justice. Against this backdrop of capitalism and modernity stressed to their very limit and a collective longing for connection, Snow’s book brings the vitality of movement and the promise of collaboration into relief, not only in the context of Mexico, but also as... You do not currently have access to this content.

A Practical Study of Visual Culture Conveyance

Editorial Introduction

In a visual culture where the dividing line between the theatrical and visual art forms is becoming increasingly blurred, it is important to reconsider the ways in which the spatial is conceived. Space is another non-linguistic medium of communication-it does not convey ideas through language, but through an array of visual and spatial components augmented by aural or linguistic threads. Robert Wilson, Maria Irene Fames, John Byme, David Storey and John Arden were trained as fine artists before becoming playwrights. Their works are used to describe stage space as a visible medium of expression. These playwrights make use of principles from painting, sculpture and installation to create spatio-temporal images that work with a text to form a theatrical performance. They have constructed their pieces with an implicit visual structure that is essential to their staging. Each manipulates aesthetic concepts gleaned from the fine arts as mechanisms to create three dimensional theatrical compositions, which can be categorised as 'scopic building blocks'. By analysing these mechanisms with a methodology and vocabulary drawn from the visual arts, a theatrical conception of spatial analysis will become apparent. These playwrights will be placed in the context of the theatre as a seeing place, into which artists often have crossed over and made use of as an expressive form. Then a summary of the playwrights' fine art training will introduce their aesthetic technique, thereby connecting their visual art and theatrical work. Their working methods will be examined so that their 'playwriting' or 'visual scripting' can be defined. Once the evidence is presented, there will be an exploration of the ways in which these techniques can be applied to physical theatre, theatres of images or other visually influenced texts.

Conversations about Art This article describes a disruptive model of interpretation, which explores positioning in discursive practices embedded in visual culture as a means of understanding self and difference. The model understands interpretation as a Foucauldian (Martin, Gutman, & Hutton, 1988) technique of the self, and its use may give art teachers and students strategies for understanding the social construction of interpretation, self, and difference through discursive positioning. In understanding this construction, students may be able to disrupt or resist 'where they are coming from'-their assumed discursive positions with, and interpretations of, the artwork-and explore self and difference. The term 'visual culture' acknowledges the inclusive and boundarycrossing aspects of postmodernism where the traditional high art canon of museum art-painting and sculpture-is de-fused. The `new canon,' if one still wants to name this reconfigured body of knowledge, becomes 're-fused' with the inclusion of all visual cultural images, that is, the visual arts and crafts including performance and installation, the popular mass media of television, film, advertising, music, and architecture. Disruption in Educational Practice To understand the term disruption in the sphere of postmodern, poststructuralist theory is to understand it as a critical dismantling of the concept of structures coming out of the writings of early 20th-century theorists, particularly Husserl and Heidegger. It evolves out of concern with the adequacy of the concepts of structuralism, that is with the analytic methodology concerned with structures and with the general rules by which structures work. At the heart of structuralism is a desire to uncover the rules, the linguistic systems which form the basis of human social and cultural practice. Structuralism is intimately concerned with the cultural phenomena of modernism under whose umbrella it sits and from where it assumes that the same underlying structures determine the language of social and cultural practices. Michael Lane (in Cherryholmes, 1988) states succinctly that: (Structuralism) is presented as a method whose scope includes all human social phenomena... social sciences... humanities... and the fine arts. This is made possible by the belief that all manifestations of social activity, whether it be the clothes that are worn, the books that are written or the system of kinship and marriage that are practices in any society, constitute languages, in a formal sense. Hence their regularities may be reduced to the same set of abstract rules that define and govern what we normally think of as language (p. 18) Therefore, the language of clothes or myths or the practices of education, can be analyzed for meaning in terms of their structures only. Structuralist ways of thought have dominated educational practices and made knowledge claims which, although questioned and critiqued (Cherryholmes, 1988; Geahigan, 1998; Wolcott, 1996) have remained intact in contemporary education. A major premise of structuralism in analyzing the structure of texts, works and practices is that the underlying structure is defined by the relationships between their constitutive parts. Objects can never be related outside their structure to their social and historical contexts. How an object has come into existence and continues to exist are not issues for meaning. It means that the human subject, the self, is excluded or decentered, the new centered subject being the structure itself. Eagleton (1983) emphasizes the anti-humanist position of structuralists, stating "that they reject the myth that meaning begins and ends in the individual's experience" (p. 113). Modernist metanarratives as structures appear to give us centers of authority or transcendental signifieds around which we can fix standards and goals. In educational structuralism such centers are concepts like 'excellence in education ' or 'equity in education ' or 'equity in education' or 'multiculturalism. …

Le Burkina Faso organise tous les deux ans à Bobo Dioulasso, la Semaine Nationale de la Culture dont les objectifs essentiels demeurent la valorisation de la culture et la promotion des artistes burkinabè. Cette manifestation biennale, si elle concerne nombre de domaines des arts, reste un cadre de valorisation et de promotion très perceptible pour les arts du spectacle surtout. Les arts plastiques ne semblent pas y avoir trouvé une voie d’expression et de promotion pour leur plein épanouissement. Les facteurs militant contre cette catégorie d’art sont la confusion entre art traditionnel et art contemporain, l’anonymat de l’artiste plasticien, l’absence d’un thème autour duquel organiser la compétition, le sort non enviable réservé aux œuvres primées et aux artistes lauréats. Des propositions de solutions sont faites, espérant qu’elles produisent l’envol des arts plastiques à partir de la Semaine Nationale de la Cul.&nbsp;&nbsp;

There was dearth of students for the BA programme of the Department of Visual Arts and Technology, Cross RiverUniversity of Technology, Calabar, because a credit pass in fine arts at the secondary school level was requisite for admissions. Thisresearch sort to find out if doing fine arts at the secondary school level was an inevitable requisite for studying visual arts in the university.Admissions data was recorded for 6 years before, and 5 years after credit pass in fine arts was delisted as admission requisite. Researchinstruments were designed and applied to students and staff to find out if not having done fine arts in secondary school affected the abilityof BA students to learn and execute creative skills, or whether there was any significant difference in performance between them and thosethat did fine arts in secondary school. Data indicates a dramatic rise in the number of students that applied and were admitted after finearts was delisted. Further, 91.2% of the students were satisfied with doing visual arts without having done fine arts in secondary school,while 78.4% of the students and 100% of lecturers perceived no significant difference in performance between students that did fine arts insecondary school and those that did not. The study then concluded that fine arts is not an inevitable requisite for Bachelors Degree inVisual Arts and students that did not do the subject in secondary school can do as well if the curriculum and training conditions areright.

The present research investigates the experiences of pre-service visual arts teachers in the planning and application phase of a course focusing on visual culture in the special teaching methods course. This course in Turkey provides information about how and with what type of methodologies arts-related topics should be taught in visual arts education. During the first semester, the course was conducted theoretically, and in the second semester the researcher focused on the application of these theories. In this research, visual culture is discussed as one of the special teaching methods of visual arts education. A total of five visual arts pre-service teachers were selected as participants using criterion sampling. The research used practitioner inquiry as a method and conducted during the 2017–2018 spring and 2018–2019 fall semesters, lasting 8 weeks in total. During the application process, the pre-service teachers taught their samples of course plans on visual culture that they created during their pre-service practice to the primary and secondary school students in 2 weeks of classes. The research data were obtained through semi-structured interviews, document review, and reflective notes and analyzed with descriptive methods. As a result of this research, the visual arts pre-service teachers saw the students gain a critical perspective, become more aware of issues in their daily lives, express themselves in a better way, and improve their inquiring skills with the application of a visual culture course plan. With the visual culture course plan, the pre-service teachers also gained several professional experiences and skills.