(Self-)Confrontation

Abstract

This work involves its authors—two art students—striving to conceive of higher art learning as artistic expression both through and beyond the frameworks of arts-based learning and arts-based research. Their own art school studio’s mode of art education already idiosyncratically inclines towards taking the student’s creative process to be the educational content in question; as far as such a predisposition necessarily invites examining the circumstantial relativity of truths about/of art (education), the authors adduce as a means towards discerning whether or not their art making is predicated in nothing but decontextualization the idea of understanding art school today as a pleonasm used both to a fault and in the name of style. The work, which the authors Andrew J. Hauner and Vojtěch Novák have thus entitled ‘(Self-)Confrontation: Making a pleonasm out of art school’, goes on to dialogue with some of the ways in which other art school students—situated within different configurations of how art becomes school and/or vice versa—have the potential to themselves cause their individual pleonastic configurations of art school to be a matter of free will and/or predetermination, all of them (including that of the authors) thereby eventually becoming distinctive only in a correlational fashion. In the end, the authors propose, with evidence, that it is in their second-guessing whether the making of art out of art learning is or even ought to be (un)provable that such work of theirs can be truly creative.

Notes

1 pleonasm: a phrase that is semantically redundant either as a fault of style, or as a figure of speech employed for emphasis or clarity.