Aesthetics, Authenticity and the Spectacle of the Real: How Do We Educate the Visual World We Live in Today?
Kirsten Adkins
Abstract:
In his analysis of the twentieth century, the philosopher Alain Badiou defined a ‘passion for the real’ in terms of spectacle, in its extreme violence, disseminated through art or cultural media, that would shake us out of a complacency we might call reality. But how do we teach Badiou's ‘real’ in the technological world we live in today? We now have continual access to the ‘spectacle’ of the real uploaded within moments of it happening. Photography, video and consumer journalism become a dominating force in our visual experi- ence of the world. In the face of this, how might we consider our relationship with the image, its aesthetic and authenticity? What role does art education play in promoting a critical dialogue with representations of today’s real?
Understanding the 'real' in a post-digital world.
['Real'ness is far less relevant I would say than what is 'meaningful'?]
[Math is not real, it does not exist primarily in the world of forms, but the imagined world of concept and thought, it is incredibly meaningful however, to our understanding of the world and has a tremendous influence on how we live our lives.]
Authenticity in a world of reproduction
[Walter Benjamin has some interesting, albeit abstract opinions on authenticity that apply well to this conversation. He discusses the 'aura' of an original artwork, that cannot be reproduced through a screen.]
Research Question:
'What Role does art education play in promoting a critical dialogue with representations of today's real?'
Research framework:
Where & When?
1. Where is the author based and what context is this text written in and about? Is it a context that has relevance to English secondary school art & design education – what makes you think this?
2. When was the text written? and what about the text makes you think it is (still) reliable as a source and relevant to an English context in 2022/23?
Who & Who for?
3. What can you find out about the authors of the text? (Who are they, where are they based, what is their role, what makes them authoritative on the subject of the text?).
4. Who do you think is the presumed audience for the text? What makes you think this and why do you think the author(s) are writing to communicate to that audience particularly? How might this influence how and what they write?
What & Why?
5. What questions does the text tell you it is exploring? (highlight the section that you think tells you this). What do you think the author(s)’ purpose is in asking these questions.
6. What are the key conclusions the text makes?
7. Is there anything in the text that you think is insightful? / helpful / furthers your understanding of the issue? If so, what?
And…?
8. What implications for practice in school do you think arise from the text? (This is the ‘so what?!’ – why do you think we might have chosen this text for your group to read?).
9. What further reading can you identify from the text? – what would you read next?
… prove it!
10. Select one (or two) paragraph(s) from each text that you think are the most important. Be ready to ready to explain the reason for your choices to your group.
11. Summarise the text in no more than 200 words.
12. Are you aware of any other texts that support or contradict this one? If so, what are they (you might not answer this as part of your WES reading group task but it will be a good question to ask when you come to write your WES assignment.
Notes:
Our visual world has changed, it is now ubiquitous and relentless.
Technology, more than ever before, forces us to rethink our notion of authorship, its aesthetic and its authenticity.
This article is concerned with news imagery in the face of rapidly changing global communications. It focusses on violent and disturbing images that are placed in the public domain through news agencies and destablise our view of the world.
These images offer up new realities.
They provoke visceral physical reactions (shudder, catching breath)
The writer identifies a complex relationship between images that we experience of feel and the imagery that is used for teaching practice using this dynamic to problematise the formal elements' tendency to encourage detachment. A detachment of meaning, and affective experience.
Experience seeing a beheading online and having a strong reaction to it, and seeing an image of Caravaggio's Judith behaeading Holofernes. - The dispassionate breaking down of an image through its formal elements: Deconstructing its representational meaning and aesthetic,
without giving context for the artwork or giving it space to ruminate response.
What are the ways in which contemporary images can be discussed?
The article does not offer a solution, but looks to Atkinson, Bolt, Deleuze and Badiou as a way forward in nego- tiating issues of education, representation and a new real.
The Killing of private Lee Rigby -
The assailants had effectively constructed their own spectacle to be staged for a large audience, and given social media today, that is exactly what they got.
The images forced their way into public consciousness. We did not want them, we complained, we were outraged and yet we were drawn to them at the same time - links to the Parisian morgue.
Badiou's 'Passion for the real'.
In his analysis of the twentieth century, Badiou described its key features in terms of visual spectacle. For Badiou, ‘passion’ is that thing which is missing from our understanding of the world. It is something we cannot access and therefore is desired.
Badio distinguishes the Lacanian ‘Real’, which he equates with a sense of horror, from reality as a social order through which we conduct our lives. This ‘real’ is defined as aberrant: a break from, or a threat to the patterns and parameters we view as reality.
[Links to the incogruous, Nietzsche]
Spectacles cause a split in which the gaze of the viewer is both drawn to and confounded by the very un-reality of the imagery.
Slavoj Zizek discusses Badiou’s spectacle as that which embeds into our consciousness and yet with time and repetition becomes disconnected from our reality.
The real in its extreme violence is the price to be paid for the peeling off of the deceptive layers of reality’ (Zizek, 2003)
Atkinson’s descrip- tion of the normative parameters of teacher and learner relationships:
Learning occurs when the learner is challenged by a piece of information that does not conform to the established frameworks of understanding.
The writer recognises that they are most comfortable, when teaching without acknowledging the dimension of affect. This is arguably the most crucial dimension of effective artworks. -
I recognise that I am most comfortable when I teach imagery, with equally violent themes, from a historical context and through the normalising method- ologies of representation and deconstruction, which render the subject inert.
As the horrors of the Woolwich attack were unfolding, I was teaching my students about a 500-year-old aesthetic in which horrors of biblical proportions are hidden in the stillness and shadows of a Caravaggio painting.
One student in particular recreated her own response to the painting, creating a photograph of her sister. She said she was intrigued by the benign and beautiful expression of Judith. She wrote about how the expression contradicted the act in which the subject was engaged
Aesthetic of contradictive Separation from the real.
It is the aesthetic of contrast shown in this image that emphasises and reflects our own indifference to meaninful experience, reducing it instead to the performative and curated.
Inertia of meaning
In British schools we work to a subtractive model, which places the acquisition of formal elements at its heart.
Through deconstruction we make sense of the image. We dissect the image to gain an understanding of the way it operates. It is laid out before us, as a rat in a laboratory, inert.
Peterson contrasts Badiou’s ‘ethic of truths’, with a socially constructed ‘ethics of necessity’
in Badiou’s terms reduces education to the dissemination of knowledge, but which negates learning and negates truth.
My students are taught, by me, to use customary methods of deconstruction, to
remove Judith from her context and therefore assign to her image an altered narrative. She becomes a fragment, displaced from her event.
The fascination with the real is related to the ambition to produce presence, the irrefutable immediacy of powerful affect, brought about by the focus on the agonising body, but also for the desire to capture the opposite, that is, a presence that is never fully realized, present only by way of its absence, in the mode of withdrawal, palpable precisely by remaining inaccessible, ineffable. (Buch 2010, 17)
To ascribe the normative values of representation and deconstruction to the contemporary image would feel like a violent act.
Applications to the classroom:
The image is alive, an intensive presence that insinuates itself into our world, so that we ‘ live it’.
Activation of images
Sound works as reactivated into new contexts whenever they are played, as they have a dialogue a discussion a discourse with their surroundings. We live in a world of separation from the visual images that swarm around us. Therefore we do not acknowledge it, but this is and should be equally true of any visual artwork.
The contemporary image however is not constructed by form and shadow as produced by a paintbrush, there is a new literacy that must be produced to encounter digital imagery that acknowldeges its reproduction as intergral to our understanding of its meaning, just as the application of paint to canvas is understod as the reproduction of the idea of an artist.
Barbara Bolt challenges us to consider the image not in terms of representation, but in terms of its performativity.
Through 'imaging', Bolt offers an alternative to the limiting process of representational education, which ‘orders the world, and predetermines what can be taught’ (Bolt 2013).
Imaging: considering its ‘real material effects in the world.
Perhaps we should be discussing with students the fluidity through which our understanding and knowledge of the image changes with time
how our own context might affect our relationship with the image; ‘What’s my context? What’s my story and how might this image change my story?’
Perhaps the only truth to be read in the image is the way in which it has performed and continues to perform.
This text appears to be written by a teacher who is frustrated wioth themselves for felling unable to (or more comfortable not to) produce affective encournters with the imagery and art in his educational practice.
Bolt cites Deleuze & Guattari, asking us to consider the image in terms of its
materiality. We are asked not simply to expe- rience the image, but to live the image, perhaps to be the image: ‘The plane of mate- rial ascends irresistibly and invades the plane of composition of the sensations themselves, to the point of being part of them or indiscern- ible from them’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1991). The image attacks, trembles and quietly breathes.
In British schools we work to a model which places the acquisition of formal elements at its heart. Students engage in the analysis and production of art: line, tone, form. By working in this way we make sense of the image. We gain an understanding of one way in which it operates. The image is dissected, decon- structed, laid out before us, inert. As an art teacher I am comfortable when I teach to a deconstructed aesthetic, in which I make sense of a world which cannot be explained or contained. I am confident when I draw on the past, but need to work harder to keep step with the images which shake my reality today. This is an aesthetic through which I am in danger of learning to skilfully ignore the real. I teach my students the art of fragmentation. I teach my students to conceal the passion – that which cannot be revealed – lest it should harm us in some way. I enable my students to disconnect themselves. Experience becomes dulled and diluted.
Is it more than a coincidence that as our ‘passion for the real’ becomes increasingly triggered by an ever-growing digital specta- cle, our education system asks us to revert to the safe practices of technical representa- tion?
In education, we hang on to the historical and by default we deny the visual world of the present. ‘Our preservation is a critical quagmire, a stutter that never stops’ (Applebaum 2013, 80).
Ours is a technologically driven visual world, which is infinite, messy, beautiful and violent. Images are not ‘safe’. We consume visual technology and the arts to make sense of our identities, our histories, our cultures. If we, as educators, continue to offer a reading of imagery through the parameters of representation, dissection and decapitation, we deliver a potential for mismatch, misrecognition and alienation. The problem is that the authenticity of represen- ation is becoming increasingly implausible
decapitation as spearation from head and heart, as metaphor for the issue of the text.
The detachment and decapitation of deconstruction through formal elements.
Frustrating the detachment and inertia of formal elements.
Disembodiment and detachment.
We are failing to recognise that visual culture has changed and with the language of formal elements, we are unable to talk about how young people experience images.
Formal Elements:
The elements of design are those structural values that can be objectively identified as line,
shape, space, color, texture, and pattern. The principles of design are those identifiable qualities and relationships by which design elements are processed and composed. They are often described in terms of complements or opposites.
Visual thinking strategies may be a good way we can reconstruct learning to draw out more menaingful responses. Formal elements may come into the reception of the artwork, however it does not limit the responses. ( https://vtshome.org/).
About the Writer
Kirsten Adkins has been an art teacher in the West Midlands for ten years. She has recently completed her MA in Arts Practice and Education at Birmingham City University. She is a regular contributor to the Centre For Fine Art Research, having delivered an academic paper at the 2013 conference On the Verge of Photography at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design. Kirsten works with news-based photography and film as part of her own art practice. Before teaching, Kirsten worked as a television news journalist and director. This background informs much of her current research
Further Reading identified:
Roland Barthes: Image - Music - Text. (1377)
Walter Benjamin: The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. (1935)
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