Abstract
Taking as its starting point the doctoral research project PREFAB: Making Political Art Politically, this paper reports on the interim findings of the Know Thyself project currently used as pedagogical line-through within the BA (Hons) Fine Art programme at University of Cumbria. Applying Antonio Gramsci’s ‘inventory of traces’ in which biography serves as structured agency, Know Thyself seeks to provide an inclusive critical framework within which students can draw on their lived experience and the lived history of their communities. This socialist libertarian approach enables students to counter the homogenizing influence of the so-called ‘therapeutic institution’. Whilst challenging its cognitive failure to understand that digital pedagogy is no substitute for the social and sentient experience of acquiring and developing hand skills in an intellectually stimulating studio environment. Taking its lead from dissident exemplars such as Gramsci, Brecht, and the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard, Know Thyself’s theory-in-method nexus applies the political modernist credo of ‘things as they really are’ in order to demythify the ‘things as they are’ of ruling class ways of seeing, knowing and telling. In the context the legitimation crisis facing Western society, Know Thyself’s socially purposive pedagogy supports under-graduate students in their varied and instinctive challenges to the invented traditions of both the formalist avant-garde and the increasingly inauthentic and degenerated institutions of the nation-state. As such, it may offer a humanistic counter to the morbid symptoms of the neoliberal epoch in which ‘human = object = property = commodity’ (Leonard).
Presenters
Martin FowlerHead of Fine Art, Institute of Education, Arts & Society, University of Cumbria, Cumbria, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
DEMYTHIFYING, COUNTER-HEGEMONIC, DISSIDENT, GRAMSCIAN, SOCIALLY-PURPOSIVE, INVENTED TRADITION, NEOLIBERAL
