The Praxis of Art’s 241

Deschooled Practice
John Baldacchino

Abstract

Art’s relationship with education is often charac- ness. No possibilities for art or learning could ever
terised by paradox. Yet art is often reified within emerge unless a radically different set of condi-
an education system that refuses to see the tions give way to a state of affairs where knowl-
pedagogical strengths of paradox. This article edge is a matter to be discovered but never deter-
approaches art education from three positions. mined, and where a fixed ground is transformed
The first is that art is a construct that is neither into a wide horizon.
natural nor necessary. The second is that there
are no aesthetic or pedagogical imperatives, but
that art education is the recognition of ground-
lessness where paradox facilitates learning. The
third approach is to reposition art with regards to
its relationship with learning, education and
schooling. Here it is argued that art’s only choice
is to deschool learning. The latter is moved by an
underlying dilemma as to whether art, consid-
ered as an autonomous human act, could ever
engage with systems of learning without being
turned into a tool or a thing. Unless art education
is deschooled, the teaching and learning of art
remains trapped between the assumptions of
process and product. So the idea of art and educa-
tion as shared practices within schooling remains
somewhat dubious unless art’s practices are
recognised in parts perceived as wholes and
where conclusions are marked by open-ended-

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242 Art education is often characterised by how art
John Baldacchino and education converge at some point only to
part ways again. This relationship sometimes
appears wholesome and steadfast, sometimes
radically opposed and contradictory. It seems
that there are two variables that affect this rela-
tionship: the ever-changing nature of the educa-
tional context, and art’s ambiguous flux in its
practices and definition. A philosophy of art in
education must start from the notion of educa-
tion as a human activity that cannot be pinned
down to a finite concept. Likewise a philosophy
of art cannot afford to be paralysed by a dualism
fixed between product and process.
This article [1] first begins with the assumption
that art and education are historical constructs
that are neither natural nor necessary. Secondly it
will be argued that art does not emerge from
aesthetic or pedagogical imperatives, but that
aesthetics and pedagogy partake of a wider hori-
zon that does include, but is not limited to, the
arts. Thirdly, art education remains dispensable.
There would never be a straightforward case for
the ‘need’ to teach art in primary and secondary
schools, and less so in higher education. If that
were so, then art education is reduced to a case
for art as an intellectual utility, with the result that,
as in the United States, art educators constantly
justify art as a form of intelligence (Hickman 2005,
47), where art education is overwhelmed by
cognitive development.
Art educators must always be mindful that
art’s relationship to schooling remains at best
dubious and at worst impossible. This has noth-
ing to do with how well we teach art or how far
should art serve human development. Beyond
the use of art in schools, the question has to do
with whether art could afford to be further reified
within the fully-fledged industries of schooling
and culture where standardisation, accountability
and merit are deemed as categories of ‘success’
and where human development is invested in an
economy that hardly pays any attention to equal-
ity and social justice.
A case for art education must emerge from
outside the school. In saying this, we should
never shy away from declaring our enthusiasm
for the cause of the arts in education. The notion
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 NSEAD/Blackwell Publishing Ltd
of an outside does not stem from an anti-educa-
tional position. Rather, it comes from the desire
for art to retain its specificity as it exercises its
power to resist reification (Marcuse 1979; 1991;
Lukács 1971; 1974; 1975). The arts could not be
staked on hierarchies of knowledge (Rancière
2006). Even when we argue for art as being
central to the notion of learning and (by political
consequence) the school, this necessitates a
different strategy. This is where the relationship
between art and education gets out of joint. If art
conforms, it has no use to learning. If it becomes
synonymous with learning, then it is not art
anymore. If there is such a thing as art’s peda-
gogical objective, it remains that of expressing,
sustaining and fulfilling such a double bind, such
a paradox.
Ironically, any proscription of paradox in art
neutralises the way by which art is pedagogically
and aesthetically sustained. In her Existential
Encounters for Teachers, Maxine Greene (1967,
29) argues that ‘to be ready to learn is to be ready
for a leap’ and that
a person is most fully himself when he is aware of
the limits of possibility; also, he is overtaken by
guilt when he becomes aware of possibility
unchosen nor unrealized. What is not chosen is a
negation; and a feeling of bad conscience may be
experienced in a learning situation when a learner
refuses to tolerate suspense, to overcome inertia
and to strive.
Art cannot be identified within a paradigm or a
method, even when very often, art’s ‘methods’
are identified with art practice. Though the recog-
nition of arts- or practice-based research methods
could potentially distance art from the clutch of
the social sciences, research-practitioners in the
field cannot resolve art’s paradox, let alone the
double bind of the arts and education [2]. Even
when art practice is considered as a method (and
the jury is still out on that), art remains quintessen-
tially non-methodological and non-identitarian. In
other words, it cannot be identified with univocal
research models. Another necessary distinction
to be made is that between art and knowledge. As
Gilson (2000) rightly argues, art is not a form of
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knowledge, even though we know art. By the
same logic art does not teach us anything, though
we have a lot to learn with (rather than from or
through) it (Baldacchino 2007; 2008).
Constructs constructing other constructs
Let us take some of these assumptions apart and
look at them closely, starting with the notion of a
construct, and moving on to how art education
lives up to art as a construct.
As a construct, art comes about and happens
in identifiable contexts. It also pertains to specific
circumstances that are equally considered as
constructs. Both contexts and circumstances
have a bearing on what artists ultimately do, even
though contexts and circumstances are not the
ingredients that make art. In this respect one
cannot plot art against a historicist grid or a socio-
logical inquiry. Even when historical and socio-
logical analyses are undeniably essential to study
art, presuming art as an a priori historical and
social construct would be as misleading as
assuming that art is simply a matter of form and
its objects. (Baxandall 1985; Wollheim 1980).
Here, the argument finds itself in a double
bind; that double bind where, Adorno (1999)
reminds us, art as a social construct and as auton-
omous form seems to oscillate dialectically with-
out any need for resolution. Keeping this double
bind in mind, one also realises how art retreats
and takes different positions by means of a
continuous withdrawal (Lyotard 1988; 1989). As
soon as it gains position, it must withdraw and
move on, sideways, and maybe even backwards.
In other words, what art ‘constructs’ by way of its
specificity, immediately moves into the realms of
further constructs that are then beholden to other
specificities. As a construct, art is never static. It
is a construct that in turn constructs other
constructs. It returns onto itself, and refolds back
and forward, and it is never contained by or within
a fixed and objectively defined meaning. In this
way art never identifies or fixes facts or truths. Yet
it does not lend itself to relativism; and neither
does it allow human reason to be absorbed in an
ideal totality. It simply returns on end. This
reminds us of Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recur-
rence (Nietzsche 1980, 178), and more so of
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Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Circles famously stating 243
that ‘every man is not so much a workman in the John Baldacchino
world, as he is a suggestion of that he should be.
Men walk as prophecies of the next age’ (Emer-
son 1941, 196).
With this proviso, we can add that the idea of
a construct also implies groundlessness (Bald-
acchino 2005). The idea of groundlessness
requires continuous engagement with ever-
changing cultural and contextual grounds that are
constantly reconstructed with art and through
learning. As soon as the nature of ground is
recognised as contingent, it becomes clear that
art refuses to lend itself to either relativism or
fixed totalities. The world that we reveal for
ourselves by ways of our artistic explanation
demands of us that we engage with truth. In our
engagement with truth we also learn the possi-
bilities that lie ahead of us – always changing,
coming and going; always departing; always
returning. This is where we arrive at the nexus
between learning and what we often see in art as
acts of doing.
We do art by engaging with a world of possi-
bilities that is opened by the imagination. Greene
(1978) positions the imagination at the heart of
praxis. Rather than equate praxis with a critical
practice, Greene’s notion of praxis implies a rela-
tionship between the self and a community in
continuous expansion. Greene sees two major
avenues for this expanding community: educa-
tion and the arts. Unlike Schiller (1967), in Greene’s
work the aesthetic education of women and men
has no intention to mend the historical and philo-
sophical alienation of the beautiful from the good
and the true by attempting to artificially restore
some sort of overall consonance between
aesthetics, ethics and metaphysics. Greene is
not into makeshift philosophical bridges. She
regards the aesthetic avenue as upholding its
autonomy while urging women and men to
consciously engage with the realities by which
they have to live in the world.
In Greene’s work, the criticality of praxis
emerges as a reminder of everydayness. She
reads this not only in existentialism and phenom-
enology as her philosophical points of departure,
but more so in works of art and literature, such as
244 Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and To The Light-
John Baldacchino house, and Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Sula where
the reader encounters the woman, the social self,
and the artist who learns from her everyday life,
from her sensible approach to the quotidian. In
this engagement, an aesthetic sensibility grows
from what we make and do as acts of art and
generosity. So while we make the world in the
image of what we assume as good, we also strive
to act by way of truth. But far from assuming a
simplistic notion of making the world into a good
and true form of living, our aesthetic constructs
are also doings of an imagination that never abdi-
cates from the world, even when it makes us
aware of the fact that fixed grounds hold no hope
whatsoever for our engagement with the world.
In an essay entitled ‘Aesthetic literacy in general
education’ Greene (1991, 123) argues that
to ‘do’ philosophy in the domains of the artistic-
aesthetic is to think about one’s thinking with regard
to the ways in which engagements with the arts
contribute to ongoing pursuits of meaning, efforts
to make sense of the world. It is to reflect upon
perceived realities as well as those that have been
conceptualized, and to ponder the phases of
remembered experiences with the arts.
As we learn how to do philosophy by pursuing
meaning in the aesthetic and artistic sense, we
might also realise that art as doing leads to art’s
unavoidably paradoxical nature. As we do philos-
ophy while also doing art, we realize art’s aporetic
nature – an aporia being a ‘blank’ moment where
neither argument nor reason could simply suffice
to unravel a paradox or contradiction. As the
moment of aporia is also an opportunity of
intense learning (as we find in Plato’s pedagogi-
cal dialogues [3]), the act of art as aporia also
makes it possible for human knowledge to inhabit
that complex space which can be described as
the go-between between process and product,
beginnings and ends, potentiality and actuality.
Groundless forms of meaning: beyond
product and process
Just as we do philosophy, we come to do art by
way of surviving its paradoxical nature and its
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 NSEAD/Blackwell Publishing Ltd
aporetic moments. Art’s paradox can be
described as a possibility – the possibility of
groundless forms of meaning. These groundless
forms of meaning come across as philosophical
practices – philosophical doings – that would
never assume an end. They are like histories that
keep returning onto us with vengeance. As forms
of art these groundless forms of meaning sneak
on us beyond their appearance of fixed and finite
forms. It is not only contemporary art that offers
this scenario of groundlessness. One could make
an argument for groundlessness even in what
appears to be ‘complete’ forms – such as a Carav-
aggio, or a Beethoven. In many ways, complete
forms like a Caravaggio or a Beethoven turn out
to be open and even less grounded than a Rothko
or a Stockhausen.
Art’s groundlessness is not limited to ‘form’ –
understood as a finalised product, as a painting, a
symphony or a play. The more a form appears to
be complete, the less it is grounded. At this point
in one’s interaction with art, one would recognise
what Laclau (2005), in his political philosophy,
calls the moment when ground becomes hori-
zon. Reading this transformation in terms of art, it
could be argued that on this horizon, one would
not simply find the openness of our thoughts, but
more so a possibility for art as a doing, under-
stood in terms of Greene’s definition of ‘doing
philosophy’.
The theorising of art cannot be distanced from
what art ‘does in practice’. Inversely, in practising
art we cannot allow ourselves, as artists, to
remain trapped in an instrumental frame of mind.
An argument that simply finds solace in art as a
making, limits both the notion of art practice and
takes an essentialist view of art learning. Art is not
a product, even when there seems to be an
object called art. Likewise art cannot be reduced
to a process, even when many make an argu-
ment for art as a process in order to avoid it
becoming a product. To define art from within the
paradoxical assumption that it is an in-between
would help us understand the art form’s open
character (Eco 1962/1989).
The task becomes more ominous as one
engages with the plurality of art’s nature, when
one tries to assume (without ever concluding)
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what are the objects of art. Richard Wollheim
confirms the difficulty of this task when he reveals
the shortcomings of a method by which art and
its objects could be ‘defined’:
[I]t may anyhow be that a more fruitful, as well as
a more realistic, enterprise would be to seek, not
a definition, but a general method for identifying
works of art … For the method might take this
form: that we should, first, pick out certain objects
as original or primary works of art; and that we
should then set up some rules which, succes-
sively applied to the original works of art, will give
us (within certain rough limits) all subsequent or
derivative works of art. (Wollheim 1980, 143)
Yet, this method leaves us in a quandary:
But can we arrive at a formulation of these rules? It
is important that at the outset we should be aware
of the immensity of the task. It is, in the first place,
evident that it would be insufficient to have rules
which merely allowed us to derive from one work
of art another of the same, or roughly the same,
structure. We may regard it as the persistent ambi-
tion of Academic theory to limit the domain of art
to works that can be regarded as substitution-
instances of an original or canonical work: but this
ambition has been consistently frustrated. (Woll-
heim 1980, 144, emphasis added)
To claim that the assumption of works of art as
substitution-instances could be avoided by insist-
ing that art is a process would open a further
problem where the argument gets stuck with
that other, related notion, of art as an activity that
is beholden to a narrow notion of skills or even
knowledge. Pedagogically speaking, this opens
tenuous questions like: ‘Is art to do with skills or
concepts?’ or ‘Is it art?’ not to mention the classic
bore: ‘Can we teach art?’ which invites the panto-
mime reply: ‘Oh yes we can!’
On the other hand, if one were to insist that the
process-product argument is irrelevant to the very
definition of art and its objects, it could be claimed
that in being a construct that runs within the inter-
stices of process and product, act and object,
potential and fulfilment, art could never be reduced
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to what it makes. This implies that the product- 245
process argument is a tautology. That is why Woll- John Baldacchino
heim opts for neither process nor product.
Returning to the original question of a context
that is neither natural nor necessary for art and
learning, I propose that we regard art as a possi-
bility that is neither tied to assumptions of innate-
ness nor to the desperate notion of a need that
seems to be God-given or even ordered by a final-
ised set of rules by which somehow we are then
beholden. Rather than art being necessary, we
can approach art from an opposite direction, by
stating that art is autonomous from any universal
necessity. On the other hand, rather than art and
education providing us with secure grounds of
creativity and growth, we could say that at best,
we need to seek to continuously reconstruct
creativity and growth through our doings; and at
least, we must make do with the circumstances
and act accordingly by opening ourselves to
possibilities and thereby learn how to live through
these possibilities, which are not always ordered
by how we fancy them to be.
Parts as wholes: betwixt learning and
education
This takes the discussion straight into two issues
that arise from any argument about art education.
The first has to do with the rift between learning
and education. In a schooled context, learning
and education fall short of being equivalent or
complementary. Yet one could initially argue that
it is by means of a desired complementary posi-
tioning of learning and education that we could
claim a certain amount of autonomy for ourselves
as art educators. However this convenience is
short-lived when one considers a second issue
that arises from art education: that any argument
for art in education must recognise the distinc-
tion between learning and education especially
when education always places art education in
positions of distinct uncertainty.
In other words, unless one distinguishes
between learning and education, one also stands
a good chance of losing any argument for art in
education, because education has often fore-
closed the plural possibilities by which art must
problematise learning critically and aesthetically.
246 As an identitarian form of reasoning – as a form of
John Baldacchino thinking that assumes that all parts are equal to
the whole – education forbids aesthetic criticality.
This is because aesthetic criticality is essentially
non-identitarian: it questions the assumption of a
totality that sums up its assumed parts. As a criti-
cal form of reasoning, art denounces the
summing of parts into wholes as an instrumental
formula that only serves to legitimate the whole
by suppressing its parts.
However not all is lost. Given the contradictory
relationship between learning and education it
means that to advocate art education within
schools is to argue that art in schools must retain
its non-identitarian modus operandi and more
critically, it could potentially deschool society, to
use Illich’s term (1999). Despite the contradictory
ring to such a concept, it is not contradictory to
say that because and in spite of education, art
educators have no choice but to be advocates of
art in education.
Here, Laclau’s suggestion that we move from
the notion of a ground to that of a horizon in polit-
ical philosophy begins to gain further relevance to
education. By means of its groundlessness art
facilitates knowledge over a horizon that would
value the whole (universality) from within its
assumed parts (particularities), the ‘parts’ being
that which knowledge achieves from the things
with which we engage every day. This recalls
Stanley Cavell’s wonderful notion of the ‘world as
things’ where he states that his assignment is
‘not this or that collection … but collecting as
such; or, as it was also specified to me, the philos-
ophy of collecting’ (Cavell 2006, 236).
If, after Duchamp, we cannot see the point of
collecting as an analogy for art and the way we
learn with art, then art education is not worth
pursuing. Fortunately we could speak after Duch-
amp and like him we constantly seek, find and
collect a myriad objects that make art in their
elusive ways; pretty much as we find forms of
knowledge that do not have to conform to the
schooled knowledge-systems that the State
wants us to blindly accept as necessary. This is
not distant from what Cavell meant by collecting
for the sake of it; and more specifically it articu-
lates the act of collecting parts for the sake of
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 NSEAD/Blackwell Publishing Ltd
collecting parts and never wholes. This is also
where, like Jacques Rancière’s ignorant school-
master we come to declare that the whole is in
the part, that everything lies in each, and not the
other way round (Rancière 1991, 33–9) [4]. This
leaves no space for the idealisation of education,
even when education appears to be progressive
and learner-centred. If we were to idealise educa-
tion we would collect parts that fit the whole,
rather than parts that are wholes. An idealised
education – whether progressive or traditional –
sets goals that we could never reach. Art educa-
tors know very well that set goals never gain any
consensus on what, ultimately, is the aim of
education.
Dewey, that quintessential philosopher who
remained a sceptic over the assumption of
wholes, reminds us that an aim in education is
rather curious if not outright nonsense. This is
because education cannot afford to work towards
an external aim. The construction of an absolute
and closed whole would distort the fact that
education’s goals are more likely to be found in
the plural eventualities that keep changing us as
human beings. A static aim towards a fictitious
end is even more fictitious, especially when
bestowed on education. Dewey’s position makes
no compromise. He argues (1996, 100) that
it is well to remind ourselves that education as
such has no aims. Only persons, parents, and
teachers, etc., have aims, not an abstract idea like
education. And consequently their purposes are
indefinitely varied, differing with different chil-
dren, changing as children grow and with the
growth of experience on the part of the one who
teaches.
The notion of an aim that is external to the needs
of learners is even more absurd when it comes to
schooling, especially when we have to face the
polity of the school as a wilful imposition on learn-
ing in the name of assumed needs that govern-
ments and communities tend to barter between
themselves within education systems that are
distinctly hegemonic. We know that the question
of the school is ultimately contingent on the
implied reasons for a systematised notion of
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education. In the assumed ‘necessities’ that
prompt education, the school is bounced off as a
system of education that is alien to the need of
human learning.
In Dewey’s words (1996, 100):
too rarely is the individual teacher so free from the
dictation of authoritative supervisor, textbook on
methods, prescribed course of study, etc., that he
can let his mind come to close quarters with the
pupil’s mind and the subject matter. This distrust
of the teacher’s experience is then reflected in
lack of confidence in the responses of pupils …
Until the democratic criterion of the intrinsic signif-
icance of every growing experience is recog-
nized, we shall be intellectually confused by the
demand for adaptation to external aims.
Conclusion: art education’s deschooled
perspective
Some forty years ago Ivan Illich (1999) argued that
at points in history we realise that deschooling is
as necessary as we thought schooling has always
been essential for learning. Though we know that
by deschooling Illich did not mean the destruc-
tion of education but he was calling for a radically
different form of learning, we also know why his
notion of deschooling remained prone to it being
dismissed as utopian and impractical. In fact it
would be simplistic to argue that deschooling
simply equates to the abolition of schools per se.
Rather we should be arguing that it is possible to
have education (i.e. as a construct, rather than a
system, of learning) that is deschooled with phys-
ical schools still standing. I suggest that to
achieve deschooling we have to retrace where
education as a system, and schooling as an insti-
tution of learning, came to sustain the fallacy of
external aims for education.
I do not think this is an impossible task, espe-
cially when we have also developed a more
robust pedagogical argument for wider (and
other) subjects within the school – branching
from art, drama and music. Furthermore, with
new forms of pedagogies which would have
been unthinkable and out of question even
twenty years ago, we must call for a need to
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change education from the ways that have stifled 247
it. The latter has mainly emerged from a total John Baldacchino
misunderstanding of learning from the part of
those who believe that schooling could improve
if you throw more money at it, or by simply reduc-
ing class sizes.
Diverse pedagogies and a widening of subject
matter yield a less systematised form of educa-
tion, where schools will move away from fixed
aims and instead start to approximate the aims of
human learning. This is not easy, given that
democracy in education sadly amounts to mere
platitudes. However as we come to recognise
(and as we become less scared of) the paradoxi-
cal relationship between art and learning, we will
also begin to understand what this offers in terms
of new pedagogies and a less systematised
education, which potentially could be deschooled.
This recognition offers us a possibility to under-
stand, at least conceptually for the time being,
how a deschooled education could come about.
One cannot promise that this will be bereft of
contradictions; neither would I be inclined to go
about avoiding any paradox, especially when, as
I have just argued, art cannot be sustained with-
out paradox – more so when art’s paradoxical
nature emerges from the aesthetic criticality of
the imagination by which we come to open up
the realms of possibility.
So rather than leaving the notion of deschool-
ing unexamined, I suggest that we give it context
in terms of art. The whole question of deschooling
art could be far more interesting and perhaps less
contentious if we try to understand how a subject
like art in the context of the school operates. This is
also a way of saying that to argue for the deschool-
ing of art is to argue that art will not be effectively
denatured and estranged from its aesthetic specif-
icity. A deschooled art education will come nearer
to the particularity by which we do and indeed
learn art. In other words, this will approximate
Cavell’s philosophy of collecting for collecting’s
sake: an exercise that is not hung up with the
‘useful standards of the accountable’, but makes
way for a real criticality to emerge. I believe that
only a deschooled form of art education could get
us to understand how art and education can share
their specifically different practices.
248 In a brilliant yet not much known little essay enti-
John Baldacchino tled ‘Towards a Polis …’ Greene writes:
The ground ought to be laid in the course of
teacher education, so that teachers can embark
on practice with a consciousness of cultural
complexities and quests for meaning. … Not only
does this mean that teachers-to-be may be
empowered to choose themselves as full partici-
pants in the changing and ongoing life of what
once were disparate disciplines. Acquainted
themselves with perspectival viewing, with
heterogeneity, with the open universes in which
sense must be made, they may discover how to
engage their own students in the interpretive
process. (Greene 1982, 6, emphasis added)
Greene argues that the condition for this to
happen is not only the cultivation of a perspecti-
val form of consciousness in teachers but more
so an equality between subjects and a multiple
provision. In other words she is proposing a
system of education that is not hierarchical and
that has no epistemological priorities. This is not
simply, then, a question of changing techniques
of learning, or simply a question of student-
centredness. Student-centred pedagogies had a
good run for a long time now, but we have not yet
achieved the desired levels of perspectival view-
ing and heterogeneity in education, let alone in
learning.
This did not happen because teachers weren’t
good in what they do, but because the system of
education on one hand assumes learner-centred-
ness as a dogma that pays lip service to progres-
sive education, while on the other hand the epis-
temological hierarchies by which education is
schooled allow no space for a anti-utilitarian
education where learning could become open
enough to give learners their due autonomy. In
effect autonomy does not come from student-
centredness, but from a perspectival notion of
education that rejects epistemological systems.
In schools, intrinsically autonomous subjects like
the arts find themselves socialised and thereby
‘made useful’, which means that learning art
becomes another way of making art’s intrinsic
specificity anathema.
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 NSEAD/Blackwell Publishing Ltd
In a context of heterogeneity, the notions (and
practices) of autonomy and paradox are essential
ingredients for learning. In a perspectival view,
art’s context and the way by which it engages
with education comes across at variable points.
Such points appear sometimes convergent,
sometimes radically divergent. If such points are
to cohere with an assumed form of knowledge,
then art is socialised by a hierarchy of forms of
knowledge, which in turn would reduce art itself
to a form of knowledge. This sociology of knowl-
edge has been the most effective way to school
art into education, where learning becomes an
excuse for socialisation.
Sociologies of knowledge cannot recognise
perspectival forms of learning. Instead they seek
to avoid paradox by manipulating the epistemo-
logical contradictions that emerge from it (Bald-
acchino 2002). This also means that such a soci-
ology of knowledge will have no place for paradox
in the way it sees the development of human
learning and understanding. Indeed the sociol-
ogy of knowledge insists on art (and every other
subject matter) as a form of knowledge and in
turn it deems nonsensical any argument that
states that art is never knowledge even when it is
a knowable form. However I suggest that artists
and educators must insist that art may be a know-
able form but never a form of knowledge. The
reason is that this difference is intrinsic, indeed
essential, to art’s ever-changing nature. This is
why, Gilson (2000, 13) argues, ‘it has seemed
useful to recall the very essence of art conceived
in its true nature, that is to say, the art that makes
things (ars artefaciens) rather than the things
which art makes (ars artefacta)’ – which further
corroborates the critique of the duality between
process and product.
The arts portend neither fixed skills by which
one learns them, nor a fixed definition by which
one knows them. Neither do they emerge as
narratives that are always and at all times under-
stood by the same forms of human cognition.
The changing goal-posts of art come from both
sides: from the art form and from the individual
that engages with the form. Human beings have
to adjust their understanding of art all the time,
sometimes even with regards to the same work
JADE 27.3 (2008)
of art. What was ‘art’ yesterday is not ‘art’ today.
What art will be tomorrow is a matter to be
discovered … which is where learning comes in
as a practice that is always to be discovered but
never determined where the school and to some
extent education become contingent to a larger
ground-turned-horizon.
Notes
1. This article was originally presented (in
shorter form) as a paper on ‘Art And Education
Parallel Philosophies, Shared Practices’ at the
School of Education, The University of the West
of Scotland, on 13 February 2007.
2. Recently, arts-based research has produced a
fast growing line of publications. Just to
mention four books that came out in the last
four years, one gets Sullivan (2005), McLeod &
Holdridge (2006), Bresler (2007) and Cahnmann-
Taylor & Siegesmund (2008). Indeed this is just a
small sample. There are many others.
Undoubtedly this growing literature in the field is
laudable and one looks forward to a greater
understanding of art-based research. However
what seems to be missing – and what one looks
forward to participate in – is a tangible debate
over the philosophical and political implications
of the apparent need to ‘legitimize’ art as a form
of research. As evident from the great debate
between Adorno and Popper on sociological
research in the 1960s, now documented in
Adorno et al. (1976), the issue of research
cannot be simply methodological. As yet, I don’t
see evidence of a similar debate in arts-based
and art-educational research, although the
literature is being produced at too fast and eager
a pace to really assess where this debate could
emerge.
3. I refer more specifically to Plato’s The Meno
and Symposium and the apocryphal yet not less
interesting Alcibiades I (see Plato 2005).
4. Here I refer to Jacotot’s ‘panecastic method’
in Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, where
it is argued that an emancipatory education will
emerge from a state of affairs where one
JADE 27.3 (2008)
© 2008 The Author. Journal compilation © 2008 NSEAD/Blackwell Publishing Ltd
could learn from the each that carries everything 249
(pan being everything, and hekastos meaning John Baldacchino
each in Greek). The implication is that
emancipation cannot afford to fall between the
stools of universality and particularity, or a
hierarchy where parts are summed in one
whole, but where in each part there is always
everything (see Rancière 1991).
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