Interventionist Art Education: Contingent Communities, Social Dialogue, and Public Collaboration

Abstract

Recent nontraditional forms of public art have been described as interventionist, referring to art that establishes its purpose and form through the social exchanges and altered behaviors that arise as a result of its disruption of quotidian patterns of social experience in public spaces. The form of the work is revealed through the contingent communities, spontaneous social dialogues, and incidental social collaborations that occur as a result of its disruption of habitual public experience. This article provides a theoretical and artistic framework for rethinking the function of artmaking within the broader context of art educational practices and for reevaluating the potential that artmaking might have as a means of socially engaging and making meaning in the public environments inhabited by students. An interventionist art curriculum can be understood as a type of art-informed tactical research.