Studies in Art Education

A Journal of Issues and Research

ISSN: 0039-3541 (Print) 2325-8039 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usae20

Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts:

Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Visual Culture

Kevin M. Tavin

To cite this article: Kevin M. Tavin (2003) Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts:
Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Visual Culture, Studies in Art Education, 44:3, 197-213, DOI:
10.1080/00393541.2003.11651739

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Copyright 2003 by the Studi~s in Art Education
National Art Education Association A Journal of Issues and Research
2003,44(3), 197-213

Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts:

Toward a Critical Pedagogy ofVisual Culture
Kevin M. Tavin
The School oftheArt InstituteofChicago

This article examines critical pedagogy and visual culture as transdisciplinary Correspondence
discourses and practices that focus on the realm of the everyday-populat regarding this article
culture-s-as a site of struggle. Critical pedagogy is explored as a political practice should be addressed
that critiques popular culture in order to promote human agency and democratic to the author at:
public spheres. Visual culture is examined as field of study that analyzes and Department of Art
interprets how visual experiences ate constructed within social systems, practices, Education. The School
and structures. The article investigates how both areas share theoretical allegiances of the Art Institute of
Chicago. 37 South
to the study of popular visual culture in order to understand and challenge the
Wabash Avenue.
way subjectivities are constituted through images and the social imagination. The
Chicago. IL 60603-
article concludes with a synergistic framework that provides support for art
3103. E-mail:
education practice that addresses issues in everyday Iife--outside the classroom ktavin@artic.edu
and beyond the museum realm.

A visionary, vision is scary, could start a revolution ... I'm interesting,

the best thing since wrestling ...A nuisance, who sent, you sent for
me? (Eminem, 2002)
While some K-12 art educators still engage their students in exercises
based on creative self-expression ideologies, many others attempt to help
students gain critical acumen to themselves and their world through the
study of artworks exclusively from the museum realm. Although this prac-
tice is admirable, it nonetheless ignores the way that children and youth
frequently construct their ever-changing identities through popular culture
(Tavin, 2001). Television programs, music videos, movies, CDs, and
fashion merchandise, for example, contribute language, codes, and values
that become the material milieu of everyday discursive formations
(Grossberg, 1992). These formations help shape and regulate students'
understanding of themselves and the world-their social relatedness.
While art educators place art from the museum realm at the center of their
curriculum, their students are piecing together their expectations and
dreams in and through popular culture. By focusing upon certain "art"
objects and authorizing what counts as legitimate culture, art educators
help subjugate students' experiences with everyday life. This form of peda-
gogy "supports the familiar concept of culture as a hierarchy, with the
upper strata as the best and most correct. The art preferences and interpre-
tations of privileged groups reside at the top, and those of students
[popular culture] at the bottom" (Cary, 1998, p.55). By inculcating
students to existing cultural hierarchies, the canon of high art is main-
tained as unproblematic. This position disregards the fact that "canons are
the condition and function of institutions, which presuppose particular
ways of life" (Spivak, 1990, p. 785). By erasing the politics of "culture,"

Studies in Art Education 197

 Kevin M. Tavin

educators reify insider practices and privileged myths and codes of classifi-
cation that, at best, reproduce the status quo.
While much of art education practice remains tethered to so-called high
culture, other more transdisciplinary discourses and fields of study recog-
nize and embrace popular culture as an urgent and necessary object of
study. For example, critical pedagogy problematizes the role of popular
culture in relation to knowledge construction, social desire, and student
agency. In addition to critical pedagogy, a new project called "visual
culture" has emerged that supports the study of popular culture in order to
understand and challenge the way subjectivities are constituted through
images and imagining.
Wrestling with Angels: Critical Pedagogy
and the Politics of (Popular) Culture
Although critical pedagogy cannot be reduced to a homogeneous body
of discourse, it is primarily concerned with challenging individuals to
investigate, understand, and intervene in the matrix of connections
between schooling, ideology, power, and culture (Leisryna & Woodrum,
1999). In this sense, critical pedagogy refers to a variery of practices that
problematize the epistemological and sociopolitical nature of authority and
1Although there ate experience towards the goal of social justice. 1 Critical pedagogy is thus
multiple versions of rooted in a democratic ethos that attends to the practices of teaching and
critical pedagogical
pracrice that operate
learning and focuses on lived experiences with the intention to disrupt,
under various names contest, and transform systems of oppression. Accordingly, critical peda-
(radical, progressive, gogy focuses on classrooms as well as other sites-especially the terrain of
liberation, and engaged
for example) and the
popular culture-as places of production and exchange.
provenance of each is Critical pedagogy recognizes that one of the most common and mean-
complex, most are ingful shared experiences for students is through popular culture. Of
founded upon and course, popular culture is defined in a wide variety of often-conflicting
reworked through a
combination of
ways, depending on the area of inquiry, theoretical analysis, and political
Gramscian counter- project. Each definition is dependent on the ideological position that the
hegemonic practices, author holds in order to make his/her argument for or against popular
Frankfurt School
culture. The dispute usually revolves around the latter part of the term,
critical theory, and
Freirean conscienriza- culture, and its absent or present other-high culture (Storey, 1993). Since
rion (Lather, 1992). the purpose of this section is to address critical pedagogy's relationship to
popular culture, I borrow Grossberg's (1992) definition-"cultural prac-
tices and formations whose primary effects are affective" (p, 398)-and
synthesize it with Browne's (1987) observation on popular culture as
the everyday lifeblood of the experiences and thinking of all of us:
daily, vernacular, common, cultural environment around us all ...
the television we watch, the movies we see, the fast food, or slow
food, we eat, the clothes we wear. (p. 2)
By integrating these definitions, I do not wish to conflare all mass-
produced and distributed materials with popular culture. Images and arti-
facts from popular culture's terrain lie in the everyday and are invested
with meaning and pleasure.

198 Studiesin Art Education

 Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts

Pointing to the primacy of popular culture in everyday life, critical

pedagogy affirms, articulates, and extends one of the main concerns of
cultural studies. According to Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg (1992),
cultural studies explores popular culture as a form of "production in rela-
tion to other cultural practices and to social and historical structures.
Cultural studies is thus committed to the study of the entire range of a
society's arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices" (p. 4).
Cultural studies stresses the importance of interpreting and critiquing
popular culture through the lens of critical social theories. Hall (1992)
suggests a metaphor for this theoretical work: "The metaphor of struggle,
of wrestling with angels" (p. 280). In this sense, Hall is referring to the
difficult work of "interstanding" theory---operating on and through theory
in order to set yourself and the world in question. Through this process of
interstanding, students can critique popular culture in order to (re)construct
meaning and develop agency for promoting social justice.
At its best, this type of interstanding encourages multiple and contradic-
tory interpretations of popular culture that refuse OCR program a static
notion of truth. Critical pedagogy recognizes that popular culture does not
shape consciousness and identity through a process of pure domination or
propaganda.2 In other words, critical pedagogy does not advocate a posi- 2Some early members
tion that popular culture corrupts the masses through passive reception of the Frankfurt
School, including
(Giroux, 1999; Luke, 1998; Mclaren, 1991; Sholle & Denski, 1994). The Adorno, Horkheimer,
particular investments that individuals make are in relation to other discur- and Marcuse, argued
sive and social formations (religious, economic, and familial for example). that popular culture
offers no redeeming
Popular culture can help shape consciousness through complex affective political possibilities
processes that both conform to and resist other forms of identity construc- and is responsible for
tion (Buckingham & Sefton-Green, 1994; Giroux, 1994). In this sense, manipulating
consciousness through
popular culture is not seen as a simple one-way conduit to identity forma-
a totalizing system of
tion-it is a complex terrain that entails struggle and resistance. false propaganda and
Art educators can help students understand the pedagogical power of mass deception.
popular culture through an initial inventory of images that students are Unfortunately, one of
the consequences of
exposed to on a daily basis. By beginning with these images, teachers can this perspective is to
help students articulate their particular investments-naming their plea- preserve the hierarchy
sures, desires, and passions that derive from popular cultural texts. between so-called high
and low culture where
Expanding on this position, Anderson (1990) states that popular culture high culture "becomes
"may in fact, be more important to attend to than traditional arts normally a transcendent sphere,
examined in the art curriculum" (p, 143). Of course, students interpret one of the few arenas
left in which autonomy,
popular culture in multiple and conflicting ways. With this in mind, art
creativity, and opposi-
educators can attempt to position particular forms of popular culture in a tion can be thought and
hermeneutical field of contradictory meanings. Smith (1989) sees this practiced" (Giroux &
process as encouraging and embracing conflict "among students' recep- Simon, 1989, p. 5).

tions of [popular culture] marking it as the site of disagreement, not to say

struggle" (p, 34). In this process, students can begin to see how certain
forms of popular culture may have helped maintain hegemonic beliefs in
ways that seem natural or unproblematic. By embracing differentiated

Studies in Art Education 199

 Kevin M. Tavin

interpretations and linking them to critical social theories students can

understand that popular culture is not simply a terrain of unproblematic
entertainment or static manipulative propaganda. Instead, students' relation-
ship to popular culture is seen as
a layering process in which meanings are altered and always already
contested by the very fact that popular culture is being interpreted or
read ... identities are not only shifting but the meaning of [the] texts
constantly shift also as [students] read them. (Weaver & Daspit,
1999, p. xv)
In art education practice informed by critical pedagogy the analysis and
interpretation of popular culture should engage students in confronting
specific and substantive historical, social, and/or economic issues. This
does not mean, however, that there must be predefined political entail-
ments that offer emancipatory guarantees. It merely suggests that art
educators engage in a democratic project that addresses real life issues
regarding real life struggles. In this project, art teachers can position
popular culture in a dialogic engagement with everyday experiences in
order to understand how certain texts are embedded in and react to
specific historical and political situations. The texts can then be under-
stood as both "performing" in culture and being "performed" on through
active interpretation. Consequently, the art classroom can become a site of
performativity where popular culture is interpreted through "citational
practices drawing upon provided cultural signs [and] resignifYing them to
address the local politics of home" (Morgan, 1998, p. 126). Garoian
(2001) argues that, in art education, this type of performativity "re-posi-
tions viewers as critical participants and enables their creative and political
agency... relevant to their personal identities" (p. 235). In this sense, the
analysis of popular culture challenges students to become politically
engaged in real life issues.
In order to maintain a performative aspect to this analysis it would be
helpful for teachers to engage in the same process as their students by
problematizing their own relationship to popular culture. This would
necessitate an understanding of how they are invested (or not invested) in
3 An educators should particular forms of popular culture. Through this broader understanding,
also avoid using art teachers can gain better access to the experiences of their students.
popular culture as a Teachers could acknowledge students' everyday experiences as valuable
simple lure to introduce
students to "real art."
and at the same time they become learners in the process. Throughout this
See Duncum (1987) for process it is important that educators not appear to be neutral, nor should
a thorough examination they appear to be so removed from culture that they can position them-
of how and why art
educators incorporate
selves as a one-way conduit to administer academic knowledge to their
popular culture as a students) When educators relinquish claims of objectivity they acknowl-
conduit to art from the edge that they are too enmeshed in the culture to be free of it. In other
museum realm within
the general art
words, by refuting the objectivity of their own discourse, art educators can
curriculum. display their own affective investments in popular culture and expose

200 Studies in Art Education

 Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts

themselves to extensive critique and dialogue throughout their pedagogical

project (Mclaughlin, 1996).
Of course, students deal with complex issues and problems when nego-
tiating their identities within the terrain of popular culture. Therefore,
telling students what to think about popular culture is inadequate and irre-
sponsible. It plays into the logic of traditional teacher authority where
educators speak uncontested truths that erase the complicated relationship
students have to popular culture. Instead, educators should address issues
of how to think about popular culture, through multiple perspectives,
performative interpretation, and meaningful production (Turnbull, 1998).
In art education informed by critical pedagogy, this could be seen as a
"contextual practice which is willing to take the risk of making connec-
tions, drawing lines, mapping articulations, between different domains,
discourses and practices, to see what will work, both theoretically and
politically" (Grossberg, 1994, p. 18). With this contextual practice in
mind, I now turn toward the developing field of visual culture, which
shares theoretical allegiances with critical pedagogy.
Visual culture, as a form of critical practice, analyzes and critiques
cultural productions and "makes possible new inventories, new histories,
new sets of relations between areas of experience" (Germano, 1999,
p.329). While critical pedagogy can be seen as "wrestling with angels,"
visual culture might be better understood as "searching for ghosts." As
Mirzoeff (2002) contends, visual culture searches "between the visible and
invisible, the material and immaterial, the palpable and the impalpable, the
voice and the phenomenon" (p. 191).
Searching for Ghosts: Visual Culture and the
Politics of Seeing and Being Seen
The plethora of writing on and around visual culture has not necessarily
helped to form a consensus on what the term signifies. With all the work
that exists on the subject, it is still necessary to ask the same question that
Elkins (2002), who quotes Barnard (2001), who quotes Evans and Hall
(1999), who quotes Mirzoeff (1999), who quotes himself (Mirzoeff, 1998),
who borrows from Barnard (1998), who appropriates from Mitchell
(1995b), asks: "What is visual culture?"
The term visual culture, similar to critical pedagogy, is defined at any
given moment through its construction and context within specific discur-
sive spaces. However, while specific meanings are positioned within
specific discourses, one can find threads of three interrelated concepts
woven through much of the literature that attempt to stake out the
semantic territory of visual culture. These threads appear to position visual
culture as:
• Phenomenological: a description of the present-day condition in which
experience, subjectivities, and consciousness are profoundly affected by
images and the practices of seeing, showing, and imagining.

Studies in Art Education 201

 Kevin M. Tavin

• Substantial: an inclusive register of images, artifacts, objects,

instrumentaria, and apparatuses.
• Pedagogical: a transdiseiplinary project that attempts to interpret and
analyze the wealth of visual experiences in and through contemporary
culture.
These three concepts can be understood as family resemblances of
similar themes operating across various fields of study (Best & Kellner,
1997). The themes are taken up differently within diverse disciplines and
institutional frameworks. It is within the area of art history, however,
where much of the current discourse around visual culture began and still
resides.
Svetlana Alpers is credited for being one of the first scholars in the area
of art history to use the term visual culture. In The Art of Describing
(1983), Alpers discusses image-making, visual skills, and cultural resources
that directly affected Dutch culture in the 17th century. For Alpers, the
term signified a particular time and culture in which images played a
central role in representing the world. Around the same time as Alpers's
work, so-called "new art historians" were problematizing the discipline of
art history by attempting to expose conservative ideologies that structured
and limited its discourse. In very general terms, the new art historians were
interested in challenging the positivistic practices that subscribed to
notions of trans-historical truths and utilized fixed hermeneutic criteria.
Drawing on theories from cultural studies and elsewhere, the new art
history emphasized the relationship between subject, subjectivities, power,
and interpretation. Arguably, the work of the new art historians helped
visual culture move beyond Alpers's use of the term to now signify a trans-
disciplinary field of study.
In the mid-1990s, visual culture's claim to transdisciplinarity was
growing, but conversations still relied heavily on frameworks from art
history. During that time, Mitchell (1995a) described the relationship of
this newly developing project to art history as "indisciplinary." Mitchell
explains that as indisciplinary, visual culture
looks like an 'outside' to art history, opening out the larger field of
vernacular images, media, and everyday visual practices in which a
'visual art' tradition is situated, and raising the question of the differ-
ence between high and low culture, visual art versus visual culture.
On the other hand, visual culture may look like a deep 'inside' to art
history's traditional focus on the sensuous and semiotic particularity
of the visual. (p. 542)
In this sense, visual culture is understood as within and outside of art
history, specifying an expansive range of images and objects to be studied
through the project by the same name. Similar to Mitchell, Krauss and
Foster (1996) depict visual culture as "both a partial description of a social
world mediated by commodity images and visual technologies, and an
academic rubric for interdisciplinary convergences among art history, film

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 Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts

theory, media analysis, and cultural studies" (p. 3). This description is part
of a larger collection of responses to a questionnaire on the uses and abuses
of visual culture as an academic field in a special issue of the journal
October, in 1996. Responding to the questionnaire, Apter (1996) states
that "new media and the evolving aesthetics of cybervision call for alterna-
tive art-historical formations based on different modes of visual interpreta-
tion" (p. 27). Similarly, Kaufmann (1996) argues that the term visual
culture has "provided a way of talking about visual phenomena that has
proved appealing to art historians interested in relating objects more
broadly to society and culture, and to critics and historians in other fields"
(p. 46). More succinctly, Molesworth (1996) claims that it is "clear that
we live in a visual culture, inundated with an extraordinary array of visual
imagery. How to account for it all is at the heart of the anxiety engendered
by the idea of visual culture as an academic field." (p, 54). These and other
responses to the October questionnaire combine phenomenological and
substantial issues that undergird positions for or against visual culture as a
pedagogical field. In line with the preceding characterizations, Durtmann
(2002) believes visual culture
means that a culture is based on images rather than on concepts, or
that images have become predominant within a particular culture
and have replaced words, or that the impact of quickly moving and
changing images has obfuscated the visual aspect of writing and
reading and has assimilated vision to touch. Visual culture cart also
mean that vision should be cultivated in a given culture, or that the
cultural creation of a framework for vision should itself be made
visible, as should the cultural mediation of the images which appear
by virtue of such a framework. Whilst the first definition amounts to
a series of statements, descriptive or evaluative, factual or critical, the
second definition implies a task, possibly one set by the shifts
acknowledged in the first definition. (p. 10 1)
Dunrnann's comments combine phenomenological issues with a peda-
gogical task that links vision and culture. Unlike Diittmann, Walker and
Chaplin (1997) try hard to separate and distinguish the pedagogical
project they call "visual cultural studies" (p. 1) from the substantial register
of images, artifacts, and objects they call "visual culture" (p. 2). They
demarcate visual cultural studies as "a hybrid, an inter- or multidisciplinary
enterprise formed as a consequence of a convergence of, or borrowings
from, a variety of disciplines and methodologies" (p. 1). In contrast, visual
culture is characterized as "those material artefacts, buildings and images,
plus time-based media and performances, produced by human labour and
imagination, which serves aesthetic, symbolic, ritualistic or ideological-
political ends, and/or practical functions, and which address the sense of
sight to a significant extent" (p. 2). Their attempt to disconnect the project
from its objects of study stems from their belief that the term visual culture
is a potential source of confusion. Similar to Walker and Chaplin's

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 Kevin M. Tavin

attempt at discursive segregation, Herbert tries to unfasten visual culture

from visual studies. Herbert (as cited in Dikovitskaya, 2001) identifies
visual culture as "all human products with a pronounced visual aspect
including those that do not, as a matter of social practice, carry the impri-
matur of art" (p.86). For Herbert, visual studies is a project to engage the
social mechanisms of visual culture.
Mitchell's work is beneficial in rending the veil of uncertainness
enveloping the discursive conflation of visual studies and visual culture.
Mitchell (2002) believes that
there is a certain elegance in allowing "visual culture" to stand for
both the field and its content, and to let the context clarify the
meaning. Visual culture is .. .less neutral than "visual studies," and
commits one at the outset to a set of hypotheses that needs to be
tested-for example, that vision is (as we say) a "cultural construc-
tion," that it is learned and cultivated, not simply given by nature;
that therefore it might have a history related in some yet to be deter-
mined way with the history of arts, technologies, media, and social
practices of display and spectarorship: and (finally) that it is deeply
involved with human societies, and with the ethics and politics,
aesthetics, and epistemology of seeing and being seen. (p, 232)
Mitchell's point is that the term visual culture is best understood as a field
of study not abstracted from its content and historical presence. It therefore
signifies the in-betweens or interstandings of phenomenological, substantial,
and pedagogical issues. I now turn towards these three concepts in an
attempt to draw together various characteristics that relate to art education.
Visual Culture as Phenomenological
As discussed earlier, the term visual culture is often used to describe a
shift or turn in society where the increase in production, proliferation, and
consumption of imagery, in concert with technological, political, and
economic developments, has profoundly changed our world and the
context in which our knowledge and awareness of that world is rooted. In
this sense, visual culture is a phenomenological referent representing a shift
in reality, an epochal transformation, and a present-day condition where
images playa more central role in the construction of consciousness and the
creation of knowledge than in the past. For some this shift is seen as
mirroring the turn from modernism to postmodernism. Various scholars
argue that modernism, among other things, privileged written textual
models and linguistic-based movements to understand culture. In line with
this theory, Mirzoeff (1998) contends that today "human experience is
more visual and visualized... in many ways, people in industrialized and
post-industrialized societies now live in visual cultures to an extent that
seems to divide the present from the past" (p. 4). Poster (2002) disagrees
with Mirzoeff's notion of the visual turn and argues that even in pre-
modern times "certain forms of visual activity were far more developed than
today" (p. 67-68). He explains that the "measure of distance in the Middle

204 Studiesin Art Education

 Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts

Ages was often 'translated' from numbers into visual expression. A standard
of measure in certain villages was how far one could see a red bird in a
forest" (p. 67). Responding directly to MirzoefFs claim, Poster argues that
"it is therefore not the case... that today humans are somehow more visual;
rather we are only in different visual regimes from those of the past" (p. 67).
In another attempt to lay bare the supposed "turn towards the visual" as
unique to postrnodernity, Mitchell (2002) argues that
the visual turn ... is a repeated narrative figure that takes on a very
specific form in our time, but which seems available in its schematic
form in an innumerable variety of circumstances ...The invention of
photography, of oil painting, of artificial perspective, of sculptural
casting, of the Internet, of writing, of mimesis itself are conspicuous
occasions when a new way of making visual images seemed to mark a
historical turning point for better or worse. The mistake is to
construct a grand binary model of history centered on just one of
these turning points, and to declare a single "great divide" between
the "age ofliteracy" (for instance) and the "age of visuality." (p. 241)
Although I agree with Mitchell that the visual has always mediated an
understanding of culture, it is undeniable that contemporary experience in
much of the world is profoundly affected by the rise of technology and the
flood of imagery in a different respect than in the past. Today, images
"convey information, afford pleasure and displeasure, influence style,
determine consumption and mediate power relations" (Rogoff, 1998, p.
15) in ways unimaginable even a few decades ago. This new (or different)
relationship between humans and their experience is engendered by an
endless displacement of meanings through the bombardment of imagery.
The positivist world of cognition has given way to a fluid and indetermi-
nate arena of situated knowledges. For Darley (2000) concepts such as
"repetition, self-referentiality and intertextuality, simulation and pastiche,
and superficiality and spectacle [help describe the condition of] late twen-
tieth-century (visual) culture" (p. 75). Some art educators recognize this
phenomenon as "a glance society" (jagodzinski, 1997), "an image-based
society" (Freedman, 1997), "a visually saturated world" (Gaudelius &
Speirs, 2002), "new times" (Duncum, 1997), "the image blitz of today"
(Sullivan, 2002), and of course, "visual culture" (Chalmers, 2001; Duncum,
2001a, 2001b; Freedman, 2000, 2001; Garoian, 1997; Tavin, 2000a,
2000b, 2001; Wilson, 2000, 2001).
While attempting to avoid any totalizing explanation, the concepts of
visual culture outlined above are striving to explain a present day phenom-
enon. Art educators need to recognize how this cultural condition influences
students' lives in profound ways. Rather than remaining in a cosseted
asylum founded on cultural denial, art educators should engage these
changes by actively exploring students' relationships to them. Hicks
(1989) argues that the educational process should begin with the student's
own phenomenological experience-"the vernacular." Hicks believes art

Studies in Art Education 205

 Kevin M. Tavin

educators should "start out with images that originate within the culture
and everyday experience of students rather than imposing too quickly
academic constraints on what counts as legitimate art" (p. 55). As I have
argued earlier, to begin this process, teachers could take account of the
substance of students' visual culture including specific forms of popular
visual culture that comprise everyday life.
Visual Culture as Substantial
When visual culture is used as a phenomenological referent, it empha-
sizes the cultural aspect of the term. Another use of the phrase refers to the
"visible side" (Barnard, 2001, p. 1) of visual culture. This can be under-
stood as referring to the second of the three concepts, the substantial-the
constituent parts of visual culture. Barnard explains:
It refers to partly the enormous variety of visible two-and three
dimensional things that human beings produce and consume as part
of their cultural and social lives... All kinds of design (graphic, inte-
rior, automotive, and architectural design for example), and things
like facial expressions, fashion and tatooing may be included under
the title of visual culture. (p. 2)
Other scholars who view visual culture as substantial offer examples of
images, objects, sites, instruments, and apparatuses to the inclusive register.
Walker and Chaplin (1997) contribute "advertisements, computer
graphics ... films, graffiti, photography, rock/pop performances, television
and virtual reality" (p. 5). In his first book on visual culture, Barnard
(1998) offers "hairdryers, shavers ... garden design ... personal, public,
corporate and popular images .. .Internet home pages, newspaper and
magazine design, typography, products and packing of all kinds" (p. 108).
To this inventory of component objects of visual culture, Darley (2000)
adds "digital films, simulation rides... music video ... special venue attrac-
tions and simulation rides... and arcade and computer games" (p. 1).
Although some of the "things" mentioned in the attempt to catalog
visual culture's constituent parts include institutionalized art, most of them
come from outside the museum realm. Thus, without discarding institu-
tionalized art, visual culture expands the list of possible sites to include
popular visual culture for theoretical and pedagogical intervention. This
can be seen as a radical departure from traditional art history and offers
immense possibilities for the field of art education. Of course, many art
educators are already engaging students in a "project of possibility"
(Simon, 1992) by focusing on advertisements (Freedman, 1997), comics
(Toku, 2001), fast-food restaurants (Tavin, Lovelace, Stabler, & Maxam in
press), music concerts, memorabilia, and videos (Pistolesi, 2002; Smith-
Shank, 1996; Taylor, 2000), shopping malls, (Srokrocki, 2001), yard art
(Lai & Ball, 2002), and countless other forms of visual culture.
For some advocates of visual culture, however, the content is not simply
images, objects, or sites, it is also the experience of subjects-"subjects
caught in congeries of cultural meanings" (Holly, 1996, p. 40). This is

206 Studies in Art Education

 Wrestlingwith Angels, Searching for Ghosts

what Mirzoeff (1999) is referring to when he claims "the constituent parts

of visual culture are... not defined by medium so much as by the interac-
tion between the viewer and viewed, which may be termed the visual
event" (p. 13). Mirzoeffs interest in the subjective experience of visual
events as a component object of study overlies the third theme of visual
culture-as a transdisciplinary pedagogical project.
Visual Culture as a Pedagogical Project
So far I have attempted to establish that the term visualculturecan refer
to a present-day phenomenon where values and beliefs are determined, in
part, through visualiry (the social construction of the visual). Ironically,
visualiry is often invisible, as it is part of the social world we interact with
on a daily basis that becomes hegemonically naturalized. Visual culture can
also refer to a range of images, objects, sites, and apparatuses. In this sense,
visual culture signifies an inclusive register of visible materials. A third use
of the term can suggests a pedagogical project that attempts to interpret
the wealth of visual experiences in and on (contemporary) culture-
searching "between the visible and invisible" (Mirzoeff, 2002, p. 191).
Although there are no categorical formations or fixed constitutive compo-
nents of visual culture as a project, two general themes seem to cut across
most discourse around inquiry and methodological processes: (a)
Contextualizing visualiry and the visual subject and (b) transdisciplinariry.
Contextualizing Visualiry and the Visual Subject
Numerous theorists argue that the questions and methodology for the
project of visual culture should be determined around issues that stem
from the cultural conditions of everyday life where, through the visual,
meanings and subjectivities are created, learned, and contested. Rather
than arguing for a single or dominant approach, they advocate for a
protean project where the pedagogical questions and methodologies
remain open and fluid. For example, Mitchell (as cited in Dikovitskaya,
2001) takes the position of "this is my field of inquiry, here is where I will
focus my attention, and these are the questions I will ask" (p. 369).
Although this seems overly vague, the questions can stem from the politics
of seeing and being seen. Mirzoeff (2002) considers these issues and offers
the following questions: "In what ways can a network be thought and how
can a networked subject be understood? How are the politics of visual
identity to be constructed in this latest era of globalization?" (p. 190).
Mirzoeff defines the visual and networked subject as "a person who is both
constituted as an agent of sight (regardless of his or her biological capaciry
to see) and as the effect of a series of categories of visual subjectivity" (p.
189). In line with Mirzoeffs position, Rogoff (1998) sees the politics of
the visual subject as one of the most important issues to be problematized
through the pedagogical project of visual culture:
Visual culture might venture to ask how bodies of thought produced
a notion of vision in the service of particular politics or ideology and

Studies in Art Education 207

 Kevin M. Tavin

populated it with a select set of images, viewed through specific

apparatuses and serving the needs of distinct subjectivities. (p. 21)
Through contextualizing visuality and the visual subject, art education
can pose questions regarding privilege, power, representation, history, and
pleasure within the intertexrual circulation of images. This would require
understanding and producing visual representations as social and political
texts as well as analyzing the ethical and political practices of envisioning
culture.
Art educators can begin to embrace visual culture as a pedagogical
project by asking themselves and their students, What images are we
currently exposed to in visual culture? What investments do we have in
certain images? What are these investments? What do we learn from these
images?What do the images not teach? Do these images provide or signify
a certain lifestyle or feeling for us? Do these images help mobilize desire,
anger, or pleasure in us? Do we believe these images embody sexist, racist,
ablest, and class-specific interests? What are the historical conditions under
which these images are organized and regulated? How is power displayed or
connoted throughout these images? By focusing on everyday experiences,
teachers and students will see the pedagogical power of visual culture-
"what is important to know, how is it to be known and how this produc-
tion of knowledge constructs social identities" (Sholle & Denski, 1994, p.
23)-that might otherwise remain invisible or unproblematic. Art educa-
tion students benefit from this process when their lived experiences are
integrated into classroom pedagogy and cultural production.
Although these questions and issues can be seen as part of a rubric for
the object of inquiry in art education, the methodologies to engage them
should remain fluid. Because our relationship to visual culture is always
situational, art educators need to avoid subscribing to static characteriza-
tions or disembodied theories that neatly form a recipe for methodology.
Like critical pedagogy, "visual culture is a practice of wit, that is, the joy of
invention" (Conley, 1996, p. 32).
Visual Culture as T ransdisciplinary
Visual culture is transdisciplinary by crossing and challenging discipli-
nary boundaries in order to provide a useful set of provisional theoretical
collaborations. In this sense, transdisciplinarity can be seen as a gleaning of
knowledge and practice from a myriad of recognized disciplines while
pushing against and permeating the once-rigid boundaries of those disci-
plines. Visual culture, as a transdisciplinary practice, does not negate or
discount all disciplinary areas of inquiry-it merely refuses to remain
confined to restricted parameters defined by experts in a given field.
Moxey (I996) compares the transdisciplinary character of visual culture to
more traditional modes of art history, which he sees as insulated and
concretized:
Unlike art history, whose disciplinary parameters have been fossilized
by its allegiance to an ahistorical and therefore "natural" notion of

208 Studiesin Art Education

 Wrestling with Angels, Searching for Ghosts

cultural values, visual [culture] can engage in an endless dialogue

with the social forces which would seek to privilege one conception
of the valuable above another. (p, 59)
Cartwright (as cited in Dikovitskaya, 2001) agrees with Moxey that
visual culture "cannot be adequately considered within the limits of a
single discipline '" looking and imaging practices change with history in
relation to other social practices and cannot be considered distinct from
those practices" (p. 154).
What disciplines and theories may be relevant to the project of visual
culture? Walker and Chaplin (1997) argue that visual culture, as an
emerging body of transdisciplinary endeavors, is informed by
Aesthetics, Anthropology, Archaeology, Architectural History/
Theory, Art Criticism, Art History, Black Studies, Critical Theory,
Cultural Studies, Deconstruction, Design History, Feminism, Film
Studies/Theory, Heritage Studies, Linguistics, Literary Criticism,
Marxism, Media Studies, Phenomenology, Philosophy,
Photographic Studies, Political Economy, Post-Colonial Studies,
Post-Structuralism, Proxemics, Psychoanalysis, Psychology of
Perception, Queer Theory, Reception Theory, Russian Formalism,
Semiotics, Social History, Sociology, (and) Structuralism. (p. 3)
Visual culture can be understood as a matrix that cuts across multiple
disciplines and branches of knowledge included in, but not limited to,
Walker and Chaplin's extensive list. In this sense, visual culture is a site of
convergence and contention across disciplinary lines that helps break down
artificial barriers and undermines confidence in canonized knowledge. Art
education could benefit from this type of transdisciplinarity by moving
beyond fossilized "art disciplines" designed to preserve high culture.
Through this project, disciplinary hegemony that has tainted the tastes and
values of many art educators can be challenged and disrupted.
Interstandings: Critical Pedagogy and Visual Culture
as Dialogic Partners
Both critical pedagogy and visual culture are reactions to and counter
movements against conservative formations, positivistic theories, and
undemocratic institutional structures. Critical pedagogy challenges techno-
cratic models of education that rely on depoliticized curricula. Visual
culture problematizes traditional formations of art history that subscribe to
notions of universal truths and employ fossilized hermeneutic criteria.
Thus, both critical pedagogy and visual culture challenge dominant para-
digms that sustain inequalities and maintain hegemonic relations.
Both visual culture and critical pedagogy recognize, analyze, and
critique how social, political, and economic realities help name and shape
our experience of the world. Visual culture attempts to interpret how
visual experience and the visualized subject are constructed within social
systems, practices, and structures. Critical pedagogy embraces this notion
of critical consciousness and challenges students to analyze how values,

Studies in Art Education 209

 Kevin M. Tavin

beliefs, and knowledge are interconnected with issues of agency, politics,

and power. Together, critical pedagogy and visual culture challenge art
education practices that consciously or unconsciously subscribe the separa-
tion of "art" inquiry from a critique of power relations.
Mutually, critical pedagogy and visual culture are informed by a panoply
of theories and practices from a variety of disciplines. As a result, both crit-
ical pedagogy and visual culture subscribe to transdisciplinarity by gleaning
knowledge and practice from recognized domains while crossing and chal-
lenging disciplinary borders. The transdisciplinary character of visual
culture and critical pedagogy can help dismantle art education practices that
rely on concretized disciplines and pre-determined codes of classification.
Together, critical pedagogy and visual culture focus on the realm of the
everyday-popular culture-as a site of struggle. Through critical peda-
gogy, students are encouraged to critique popular culture in order to
promote democratic public spheres and ethical imperatives. Visual culture
embraces the study of popular culture in order to understand and chal-
lenge the way subjectivities are constituted through images and imagining.
Art education practice informed by critical pedagogy and visual culture
should engage students in the interpretation of popular culture through
social theories and critique the haunting effects of visuality-wrestling
with angels and searching for ghosts.

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