VIRTUAL New Schools of Thought

Abstract

This paper considers the complex and multi-layered nature of critical thinking in art school education by examining its relationship to subjectivity and time. In his 2018 book How Art Can Be Thought Allan deSouza insists on the art school studio group critique as ‘a primary mode of art pedagogy.’ Concentrating an embodied, sensory and participatory ‘practice of thinking together,’ deSouza praises the breadth of engagement that it requires of students in their ‘movement between fields’ of art history and critical discourses as well as the ‘flexibility’ necessary in ‘being able to adapt language from different sources.’ Combining reasoning, insight and practicality, criticality in these terms is a highly-prized outcome of art programmes that may be seen as exemplary in creating ‘independent thinkers.’ This paper focuses on the student’s encounter with existing bodies of knowledge, theories, methods, and acquired perspectives, taking what is implicit in critique and considering it as an encounter with what comes to mediate student’s subjective histories. Accepting deSouza’s contention that critique analytically uncovers genealogies of the present in order to release potentialities for social change, this paper argues that this critical manoeuvre requires an affective temporal ‘disjuncture’ between the student and existing knowledge such that its value, significance and purpose is not fully bounded in its immediate reception. As Lisa Baraitser asserts ‘acts of ‘beginning’ are taken up … intergenerationally’ and for this reason it will be argued that an orientation and critical agency only emerges through its resonant repetitions in the subjective present.