Starting to play with arts education : study of ways to approach experiential and social modes of contemporary art

Abstract

This study discusses and interprets contemporary art that has become a challenge to art education. Both the theory and practices of art education have been based on the notions of the autonomy of art(s), aesthetic experience and metalanguages of arts. Mostly, the concepts used have been raised from the premises of analytic aesthetics and its language-based foundation. The intention of this work is to find means by which to grasp alternative ways to approach and understand contemporary art that is open processes, collage-like and that has lost its autonomy. Instead, it stresses communication, collaboration, participation and an experience – whether aesthetic or not. I examine the influence of the radical avant-garde and the situational aesthetics of the 1960s on contemporary art. On the one hand, in these phenomena the nature of art has gone through a change from studying the form into examining the meanings and tasks of art. On the other hand, these art modes have already had the kind of playful attitude that is seen in contemporary art that I define as 'performative art'. It means any kind of collages of arts which try to create an experience, not just by describing, representing and asserting statements but by offering a space for interaction, participation and dialogue. I argue that there is no necessity for language only (ie, arttalk) when dealing with arts, but other performative modes, such as noises, gestures, walking (flâneur) etc., can be meaningful as well. My hypotheses are that on a practical level arts education would be contextual processes emerging in a current situation at hand. On a theoretical level, ie, when teaching to-be arts educators, the starting point should be providing tools to shape as manifold a concept of art as possible. The theoretical background of this argumentative study is the concept of pragmatist aesthetics. With pragmatic basis I have been able to develop concepts for revising art education so that it could much better to operate in the field where different art modes are blurred, media dissoluted and the oles of artists and audiences are changing.