© 2019 National Art Education Association

Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research

2019, 60(1), 50–53
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2018.1557444

MEDIA REVIEW
Education After Art: A Review of Letting Art Teach: Art
Education After Joseph Beuys

BETH A. THOMAS

State University of New York at New Paltz

Biesta, G. J. J. (2017). Letting Art Teach: Art Education After Joseph Beuys. Arnhem, Netherlands:
ArtEZ Press. 128 pp. ISBN: 978-94-91444-37-1.

G
ert Biesta’s Letting Art Teach: Art Education After Joseph Beuys is a short
introduction to a number of ideas that have been central in Biesta’s thinking
for a number of years. Biesta offers the book as a response to what he sees as
a double crisis in art education—

“The book’s introduction, conclusion, instrumentalism and expressivism

and seven chapters develop a line of
thinking on art and education that
includes reflection on problems with
instrumentalism and expressivism in art
education… and the need to sustain
students in the face of challenges to
their desires.”
—and his writing is an exploration
of the educational relationships
between teaching, art, and
being-in-the-world.1
Gert Biesta is a professor of
education at Brunel University
London, in England, and NIVOZ
Professor for Education at the
University of Humanistic Studies, the
Netherlands. His titles also include
associate editor of Educational Theory
and coeditor of British Educational
Research Journal. He is an associate
member of the Education Council of
the Netherlands (Onderwijsraad), and
he is a member of the advisory body

Correspondence regarding this review may be sent to the author at thomasb@newpaltz.edu.

50 Thomas / Review: Education After Art

of the Dutch government and parliament.
A prolific writer and educational theorist, for
several years Biesta has raised critical questions
about democracy, responsibility, subjectivity,
and emancipation in relation to education in
numerous published scholarly books, chapters,
and articles. In Letting Art Teach, Biesta brings
many previously developed ideas together and
explores them using a 1965 performance by the
artist Joseph Beuys as an explanatory example.
As the subtitle suggests, Biesta starts with Beuys
to articulate “an approach to art education that
‘follows’ from Beuys’s action” (p. 38). The book’s
introduction, conclusion, and seven chapters
develop a line of thinking on art and education
that includes reflection on problems with instru-
mentalism and expressivism in art education,
being subject in and with the world, education
beyond cognition, the educational significance
of interruption, and the need to sustain stu-
dents in the face of challenges to their desires.
To do this, Biesta pays particular attention to
the interactive character of subjectivity, drawing
on Hannah Arendt’s writing on being a subject
in the world and subjectivity’s dependence on
particular modes of interaction with others;
Phillipe Meireu’s conception of subjectness as
existing in the world without being the center
of the world; and Emmanuel Levinas’s practice
of connecting subjectness with an address from
outside the individual. Within each chapter,
Biesta comes back to Beuys’s performance to
relate philosophical or theoretical concepts
under consideration in analyzing Beuys’s perfor-
mance as an educational archetype and real-
world example.
To orient the reader to Beuys’s performance
as an example for the ideas under considera-
tion, Beista opens Letting Art Teach with 28
pages that consist of grainy black and white
documentary photographs showing Beuys’s
November 1965 performance of How to
Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare at Schmela
Gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany. These pages,
which are devoid of text with the exception of
the timestamps denoting the point of action
within the 6-hour performance, show Beuys
carrying, cradling, and talking into the ear of
a dead hare in front of pictures placed within
the gallery, and the invited audience observing
Beuys through the front glass of the locked
gallery. By beginning the book with this set
of images, and therefore suspending discus-
sion, Biesta directs attention toward the inti-
macy and materiality of Beuys’s performance,
highlighting the significance of the perfor-
mance to and providing a visual reference for
the discussion that follows. Identified as “first
and foremost, an image of teaching and the
teacher… which is at the very same time
teaching-as-showing and a showing of this
showing” (p. 48), Beuys’s action, his double-
showing, teaches something important about
education concerned with the student-as-
subject.
The central project of the book lies in
explaining how teaching matters to existing
as subject in the world, in what Biesta calls
a grown-up way: being in dialogue with the
world in such a way that we walk a middle
ground between asserting ourselves on the
world with “too little consideration for the
integrity of what we encounter” (p. 64) and
becoming frustrated with the resistance of
the world to our initiatives and withdrawing
from our existence as subject in the world. Art
is an important part of the project because for
Biesta, being in dialogue with the world, which
he asserts is a central question of education, is
also a central question of art. This question
challenges expressivist approaches to art edu-
cation where the primary educational value of
art lies in the opportunity for students to
express their unique identities; Biesta points
out that such approaches ignore the ways
that the realities of the world exist beyond
individual desires and challenge the logic of
the ego. He acknowledges that the opportu-
nities to express individual voice afforded by
the arts have an important role to play in
educational contexts where instrumental
objectives focus on measurable learning
Studies in Art Education / Volume 60, No. 1 51
 outcomes and tend to turn children into man-
ageable objects. However, for Biesta, in order
to be educational, expressive opportunity must
be followed by attention to “the existential
quality of what is expressed, a quality that
has to do with how children and young people
can exist well, individually and collectively, in
the world and with the world” (p. 57). This is
especially important on a planet that has lim-
ited capacity to fulfill individual desires, in
a social world where individual actions may
oppress or damage others, and in consumer
culture where much effort goes into multiply-
ing and satisfying individual desires regardless
of the “desirability of our desires” (p. 72) or for
the well-being of others and the planet. Biesta
asserts that the educational, ethical, and poli-
tical responsibility of teachers is to help stu-
dents turn their attention toward the world,
open themselves to being taught by the
world, and consider the desirability of their
desires in relation to the world and what it
asks of each of us. The doing of teaching
involves moving students toward reconciling
themselves to the radical otherness of the
world and developing the capacity to be “in
the world without occupying the centre of the
world” (p. 37) and to exist in the world in
a grown-up way.
The doing of teaching that is outlined in
Letting Art Teach begins with a showing that
interrupts desires and creates opportunities for
children and young people to encounter, and
remain with, resistances in the world that chal-
lenge their desires. Biesta points to the resistance
of materials in the production of visual art forms
and the body in the production of movement art
forms as examples of opportunities to examine,
question, rearrange, and transform our ways of
understanding and responding to the world in
addition to walking a middle ground between
giving way to the world, identified as self-
destruction, and giving way to desires, identified
as world destruction. In other words, experien-
cing the resistance of materials is a way to
explore being-in-the-world in a grown-up way.
52 Thomas / Review: Education After Art
Although he refers to Beuys’s performance
as a pedagogical showing from which an
account of teaching might be developed,
Biesta avoids making the claim that art and
education are inherently immanent to or
synonymous with one another. One problem
is that Letting Art Teach is framed as being
about art education without identifying what
“art education” means for Biesta within the
context of the book. The book opens with
a critique of instrumentalism and expressi-
vism in art education but from there discusses
education more generally throughout, gloss-
ing over any question of particularities speci-
fic to what might be referred to as art
education.
One potential critique of Biesta’s framing the
book as responding to a crisis in art education
could be that the book does not adequately
explore or acknowledge contemporary
approaches to art education concerned with
emancipation, transformation, or being-in-the-
world (see, e.g., Atkinson, 2011, 2012; Bootwala
& Desai, 2009; Clements, 2004; Graham, 2007;
Jackson, 2012; Jagodzinski, 2008; Jeong, 2017;
Kalin, 2014). A related critique is that while
Biesta’s observations are certainly relevant and
meaningful for art education, it is precisely
because they are relevant and meaningful for
education in general and so should be framed
as such. Framing the discussion in terms of art
education seems to unnecessarily limit the edu-
cational significance of How to Explain Pictures
to a Dead Hare to the practice and theory of art
education. If, however, art, as manifested in
Beuys’s performance, is seen as existing as an
image of teaching and teaching something
about education, the meaning sense of the
term “art education” can be seen to shift from
“education about or for art” to “art as educative
for education.” In this sense, art education after
Joseph Beuys’s performance supports teach-
ing’s educational potentialities in support of
students as subjects, and their existing in
a grown-up way can emerge from the doing of
teaching as well as the doing of art.
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Bootwala, M., & Desai, D. (2009). Memoryscapes: Witnessing the crisis of internal refugees through visual
practice. Journal of Cultural Research in Art Education, 27, 94–106.
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ENDNOTE
1
“Being-in-the-world” as used here refers to ways human existence is intimately tied up in the everyday
materiality of the world and the ways we move within the world based on our distinctive potentials as
unique beings (Warnock, 1970).

Studies in Art Education / Volume 60, No. 1 53

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