Post 2: Survey of Art Ed

            After reading Duncan’s article on 7 Principles for Visual Culture Education, I am happy to agree that as we evolve and develop new technologies and modes of learning and teaching in this 21^st century, so should our terms, our definitions and our general pedagogic tools. Duncan states how we need adequate ways to organize, implement an update currently relevant curriculum that offers better ways to read and interpret our visual, global culture through, “Using contemporary lenses that apply to the extraordinary plethora of images that now form a large part of our daily lives.”

 ( Duncan, Art Educ 63 no1 Ja 2010)

Duncan does not denounce the elements
and principles of art for formal qualities of images, yet he strongly suggests that they are not enough to help push art education into catching up with our image saturated societies. While in concert with Olivia Gude’s progressive working models, he is reconceptualizing principles, such as Gude who has, “specifically designed (pinciples) to help consider today's postmodern fine art that often involves computers, collages, and installations. For example, she

suggests hybridization, layering, and appropriation.

Duncan’s principles are: power, ideology, representation, seduction, gaze, intertextuality, and multimodality.

Duncan says that Power is the key principle since the others will all deal with issues of power. I will never forget when my English teacher in 9^th grade showed us a liqueur add from a magazine. He talked about the hidden image, within the glass, of a naked lady and how advertisers were using persuasive subconscious techniques to sell their product. This was a powerful realization and one no one had ever pointed out to me before. I was a big consumer and relied on images for information at that age. Many students I have encountered in the Columbia schools tell me they don't read, they get their information by looking and watching. Duncan’s 7 principles are Powerful in their own right, since they arm students with discerning skills to size up the armies of images being thrown at them, decide which are useful and which to fend off. Reading images is the only reading many students do and these principles are perfect tools not just for art but for education in general. I have chosen some quotes from Duncan that I want to save to reread and refer to many times.

 “By means of images we engage with widely shared social assumptions about the way of the world: Who are we? What is good versus bad? How should we act and avoid acting? Images offer any number of answers to each of these questions, as well as to many others. Images offer ideologies that can be racist, sexist, xenophobic, ageist, or marginalize people with physical disabilities, but images also offer support for families, inspire ideals, and work to conserve the

environment” ( Duncan, Art Educ 63 no1 Ja 2010)

“Representation is closely aligned with ideology because it refers to how ideology is presented in visual form. It refers to much more than a mere likeness. It involves what images represent, how they represent, and what they fail to represent. What is privileged and what is marginalized? And what rhetorical devices are used to influence our understanding of what is represented?” ( Duncan, Art Educ 63 no1 Ja 2010)

“If we come to images with stereotypes in mind, to see them represented is to experience the pleasure

of feeling justified in our views. Equally, images offer the fulfillment of deep-seated, even unconscious, desires, including socially taboo pleasures (Zizek, 1989)”

( Duncan, Art Educ 63 no1 Ja 2010)

“We are invited by images to see in a particular way, but we also come to them with already existing relationships to what we see.

This means that considering the gaze is a way in which to understand ourselves as individuals and as a society. Are our own gazes sexist, racist, and so on?”

( Duncan, Art Educ 63 no1 Ja 2010)

“With intertexts, images are connected irrespective of historical categories like high and low, past and present, and, importantly, they connect student interest and knowledge with teacher requirements in a way that is limited only by time and imagination.” ( Duncan, Art Educ 63 no1 Ja 2010)

Relating to this here is a link to a photograph taken on 9/11 and the commentary about it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/911-photo-thomas-hoepker-meaning

Ideology:

Representation: