Potentials of Togetherness: Beyond Individualism and Community in Nordic Art Education

Abstract

Historically, art education has focused mainly on individual learning processes. In Nordic countries,' for example, discourses of training the rational individual through skills of objective representation, developing the authentic individual through child-centered education, or stimulating identity-processes through critical pedagogy have dominated over ideas of collectivity, community, and society (llleris, 2002; Kjosavik, 2001; Lindstrom, 2009; Pedersen, 1998; Pohjakallio, 1998). Today, poststructuralist theories of subjectivity and subjectivation are challenging these modernist discourses by proposing more dynamic models of multiple and instable learning selves, always in the making (e.g., Aure, 2010; Ellsworth, 2005; Gothlund & Lind, 2010; Lind, 2010).In this commentary, I turn my attention away from individual learning processes of becoming self and focus on un(becoming) collective; shared and social as both object and subject for art pedagogy. Through brief critique of the potential cynicism of visual culture pedagogy and the potential romanticism of community-oriented art education in Nordic countries, I use the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy to discuss some thoughts on experimental communitiesas possible path toward an alternative thinking of togetherness as material for art education.Visual Culture PedagogyDuring the last decade, researchers in visual culture pedagogy have focused on developing reflexive and performative approaches in order to provide students with appropriate tools to navigate in contemporary visual realities, both as consumers and producers (e.g., Buhl & Flensborg, 2011; Freedman, 2003; llleris & Arvedsen, 2011). The once contrasting modernist myths of the individual have been reduced to elements in ready-made lifestyle-proposals in the current political situation. Now, many Nordic researchers have adopted critical and constructivist position, where concepts such as strategy and choice are central (e.g. Buhl, 2005; Gothlund & Lind, 2010; llleris, 2009). While on one hand, these researchers (including myself) endorse poststructuralist views of the self as relationally constituted singularity that is always in the making, on the other hand, they acknowledge the usefulness of engaging with students about how to play with visual self-presentations in order to construct identity as strategic visual position. Through the use of concepts such as genre, style, modality, seduction, fascination, and power, the lesson taught by visual culture pedagogy is that identity is a position, not something you are, but role that is relationally constructed within every single event (llleris & Arvedsen, 2011, p. 57). As consequence, working with self-presentations in visual culture pedagogy is to work with focus onhow you wish others to perceive you and to experiment with different possible interpretations of your appearance....This entails that you create distance to how you look and act in certain situation. You are, so to say, conscious that you appear certain way, and that you can experiment with and explore this certain way. (Buhl & Flensborg, 2011, p. 175 [my translation])2From critical point of view, visual culture pedagogy in the Nordic countries follows the tradition of critical art education by teaching students to be reflexive in their use of complex contemporary imagery; however, it runs an unintended risk of sustaining the neo-liberal myth of the emancipated individual as flexible position whose visual form is always open for play. By considering self as social and visual construction, and by using what might be perceived by students as existential choices as strategies of appearance, visual culture pedagogy could be accused of cynically reducing all naive or idealistic discourses of ethics and values to matters of personal choice or style, neglecting the utopian and politically empowering potentials of art education (llleris, 2012a). …