Angels, Ghosts, and Cannibals: Essays on Art Education and Visual Culture

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Notes

¹ Self-cannibalization is the practice of eating oneself. Even though this practice appears to be unhealthy and unethical in the human and natural world, in an academic sense, destroying one’s own established theories and practices is considered a process of critical reconstructive practice. Cannibalization is an emotive word implying rebirth and change, much stronger than self-criticism and constructive criticism that often leads to removing or curing ill functional parts of a system.

² See also a written debate on aesthetics and visual culture in Art Education, Letters to the Editor by Michelle Kamhi, Paul Duncum, and Kevin Tavin (2007).

³ The six acts of miscognition include unknown knowledge, unmeant knowledge, missing metaphors, stupidity, symptoms and sinthomes, and truth untold (Tavin, 2010). He uses these concepts to disturb cognitive theories of art education.

⁴ Lacanian theory in art education has been extensively discussed in the writing of Hetrick (2010), jagodzinski (2004, 2007, 2010), and Tavin (2005a, 2007, 2010). Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective may help art educators explore unconscious world of our daily life. For example, Tavin (2010) challenges us to consider “unmeant knowledge [that] circulates through the unsaid of classroom life and plays a decisive role in structuring the art education pedagogical scene” (p. 59).

⁵ Lacan used object a to describe one’s desire, “the object in desire, or more precisely its spectral or magical effects” (Tavin, 2008, p. 268). In Lacan’s theory, desire is one of the most significant concepts that sustain human life and existence. For further discussion of object a, see Tavin’s 2008 Studies commentary, “The magical quality of aesthetics: Art education’s objet a (and the new math)” (pp. 268–271).