Bringing Students into the Picture: Teaching with Tableaux Vivants

Boucher, Mélanie, « Le tableau vivant de l’art contemporain et son immobilité », Stay Still, Translate : Performance, Présentation, Conservation du tableau vivant au Canada (organisé par Mélanie Boucher), Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 17 février 2017. Many contemporary artists describe their performances as being tableaux vivants. However, they do not necessarily reproduce speci c works and the performers that carry them out do not always remain immobile, which raises the question of what one understands by the tableau vivant in contemporary art is. The de nition of the historical tableau vivant is not appropriate, no more than it is in general for contemporary production that goes under the term of “tableau vivant.” While the question of its re-emergence and reiteration have recently been investigated in re-enactment studies, the notion of immobility has remained largely unexplored. After an overview of what the tableau vivant is in contemporary art, through re- ferences to Canadian works created from 1970 to today this presentation focuses on the main modes in which immobility is used in performance.

Journal of Art & Design Education, 1987

The recent wholesale retreat from child-centred methods in art education is bringing about-or has been brought about by-a new interest in art as a teachable, learnable, examinable subject. Practitioners of the 'cognitive-developmental' approach are now engaged upon a considerable programme of research aimed at finding out what can be taught about art and the practice of art at different levels of the school curriculum, and, correspondingly, how much of the previous paradigm of art-as-expression can be jettisoned as worthless baggage. As readers of this journal will know, the results are varied, challenging, sometimes inconsistent, but always heavy with the implication that art and art practice are there to be learnt, possibly as a core subject in general education or possibly as a major fourth addition to the still-predominant three Rs. This is neither the time nor the place to launch an assessment of the 'cognitive-developmental' approach and all its various findings and prescriptions. Art historians, however, are bound to be intrigued by recent investigations into two proximate but actually distinguishable questions. The first is simply what types of art images are to be used in the classroom?-and here I remind you of the fact that the choice is potentially vast; that selectivity is unavoidable. And the second question concerns how these images are to be used-for what purpose, and by what methods? It is excellent that some debate on these important questions should now be under way once more. But our discussion must inevitably have some reference to a newer type of understanding that is being developed within art history itself, an understanding which for some time now has insisted on the historical rootedness of works of art (and all other constructed images) not merely in the emotional system of the artist, but in the social, economic and ideological interchange of the society as a whole. This understanding is not fixed or immutable, thankfully. But art historians are not going to remain happy for long, I suspect, if visual images continue to be used indiscriminately in the classroom merely in the service of an unstructured notion of 'appreciation'; nor, what is worse but no less likely, given the present attack on teachers' resources by government, if art-works are paraded merely out of convenience, or for reasons stemming primarily from the taste of the teacher. This may be a useful moment therefore to voice some fears about the dangers of unreflective art-history in schools, as yet too little thought out, and in some cases provided at too early an age for the children concerned. I argue that we need to abandon the practice of studying received 'masterpieces' alone, such as can be

Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research in Art Education, 2009

This essay argues for a fundamental change in the direction of art, its education and research that draws on Alain Badiou's notion of inaesthetics and negative affirmation as well as Deleuze's reorientation of aesthetics. I draw on the inspiration of Vincent Lanier's critical spirit and Irwin Kaufmann's ideas on art, creativity, and research as they appear in the first issue of Studies in Art Education to argue for such a line of flight. A number of neologisms are introduced that develop this potentiality of the force and truth of art that are 'beyond aesthetics' as it is commonly understood. Vincent Lanier, one of the first generation of post-World War II art educators, had an influence on the field of art education that still remains with us to this day. He was a provocateur who would challenge the field from the margins and hold court in hotel lobbies and foyer armchairs during NAEA conferences. Fact or fiction, that's how the legend goes. Vincent was certainly part of the ground floor that helped to establish NAEA and its journal, Studies in Art Education, in those formative years. He published "Implications of the Concept of Action Research" in the very first fall issue of 1959, where he questioned the division between pure and applied research, defending the necessity of scientific research for the field, a position he was to renege on later in his career. I was fortunate enough to attend several summer school courses Vincent taught at the University of Oregon in the late '70s. He was also my external dissertation examiner in 1980. I have held a long-standing affection toward him that is unlikely to go away. For this 50th anniversary Studies special, I offer this article as a tribute to Vincent's audacity of spirit, especially in the vein of two influential essays that were written around the time I was finishing my Masters and Doctorate degrees: "A Plague on Your Houses: The Tragedy of Art Education" (Lanier, 1974) and especially, "The Misdirected Eye" (Lanier, 1978) that raised the social import of art and questioned the field's moral and social compass. There is approximately a 15-year gap between the thrust of Vincent's first essay in Studies on research and these two key essays that articulate his challenge to the field. The first essay ("Plague") is a historical review of the field that questions its overemphasis on creativity and studio practices, calling for an "aesthetic education" that addresses social transformation and expands art education to include the popular culture of film and television; the second essay ("Misdirected Eye") comes closest to my own project. Lanier admonishes aesthetic and environmental education for failing to address social and moral issues. However, "Some art," he says, "speak[s] to the human condition" (p.14, added emphasis). My orientation is similar but

This article investigates how high school students master and appropriate concepts in aesthetics and modern art in art history classes and in art museums. It is argued that distinctions between schools and museums as places of formal and informal learning, respectively, are not useful analytical categories for understanding complex meaning making processes.