“People Should Come to Work”: Un-becoming Cartesian Subjects and Objects in Art Education

摘要

When asked about how he wants viewers to engage with his often confrontational and difficult work, performance artist William Pope. L responded, u22people should come to worku22 (personal communication, February 3, 2003). Preparedness to engage, to work, is at the core of considering the connection of art education and democracy. All too often that connection is reduced to the idea of beauty being in the u22eye of the beholderu22 and you can do whatever you want-flitu27s a free country!u22 Re-imagining the work of art education, I want to talk of rhizomes and cyborgs, perhaps at the risk of alienating readers with raised eyebrows and being accused of hiding behind nouveau metaphors du27jour. But I want to argue for these metaphors because as Nietzsche (1979) suggested, metaphors have life spans: once a metaphor dies, it is time for a new metaphor. The rhizome and the cyborg do what metaphors help us do; think creatively and imaginatively about a previously known idea-in this case the Cartesian seeing subject and seen object. Too frequently art education and democracy get linked at the most superficial level. I argue for new complex metaphors, which require work, to help us understand the relationship of these ideas on a more profound level.