Object-Oriented Ontology and Art Education: New Contours of Thought

• In Event: 34.061 - Putting Theory to Work: Social Justice, the New Materialisms, and Posthumanism

Abstract

Objectives

New materialist approaches to education are often equated with avant-garde approaches to pedagogical theory or technologically sophisticated research methods that push the boundaries of what can be represented. For this paper, I would like to take a slightly different route. Instead of using new materialism—and in particular object oriented ontology (OOO)—to postulate a new educational practice, avant-garde aesthetic, or research method, I will utilize OOO to re-evaluate the art educational activity of contour line drawing.

Theoretical Framework

OOO is a subset of speculative realisms that have emerged in the last several years as a response to the problem of post-Kantian correlationism. Simply put, correlationism argues that we can only know what the mind intentionally posits in the world, or what language gives us access to. Opposed to this thesis, OOO argues for a return to objects in and for themselves. This is a provocative gesture, especially for art educators who deal with the making of objects on a regular basis. In this paper, I will utilize OOO as a theoretical framework for thinking through contour line drawing in order to see how OOO can reveal something new in this taken-for-granted staple of art education.

Modes of Inquiry

I will focus on paintings by famous artists such as Giorgio Morandi as well as student drawings from studio classes and provide a detailed, philosophical reflection on the relationship between drawing a line and the way objects interact with one another outside of or beyond the correlationist problem.

Scholarly Significance

In essence, what I will argue is that contour lines are not the product of human perceptual schema, nor the result of mere cultural traditions, but rather reveal an ontological truth about objects: that they never truly touch one another. In this sense, the contour illustrates Graham Harman's controversial thesis concerning vicarious causality. For Harman, objects are never fully present to one another. They only come in contact with caricatures of each other. While Harman has run into serious philosophical problems defending this view, I suggest that rather than attempt to “prove” such a thesis through argumentation, OOO would be better served by simply looking toward aesthetic modes of representation, such as contour drawing, as doing a certain amount of ontological work. As such, the most basic, simple, and seemingly humanist approach to art education actually reveals the post human, secret lives of objects, and in turn, this taken-for-granted art educational activity solves a critical philosophical problem. What is called for in art education is not a set of new practices, or a new set of technological innovations, but rather a perspectival shift that dialectically uncovers what is most post human in the human, what is most ‘thingly’ in our taken-for-granted assumptions and activities. This perspectival shift is, as the theme of this year’s conference emphasizes, a special kind of “knowledge to action” that is embodied and situated in a world that exceeds human intentions.

Author

• Tyson E. Lewis, University of North Texas