Cohort July 2022: Faculty of Arts – Christine D’Onofrio, Anneke Dresselhuis, Roselynn Sadaghiani
Project background
The art critique has long been accepted and practiced as a “consensus” feedback structure in visual art classrooms. Consequently, the process continues to value authority-driven art academy classroom approaches. Existing in a nexus of a mythical understanding of the art world, these methods perpetuate conceptions of objectivity that are fraught with bias, and top-down power structures that create a “knowledgeable” critic and a passive artist.
Project details
Our project asks if this commonly accepted method is still useful to responding to our present condition, or if its presumed ideological framework has expired. (Latour, 2004) Integral to our aims, the partnership allowed us to reconsider, activate and enact forms by which visual art curriculum development could be a more reciprocal, inclusive and collaborative process.
However, our efforts to dismantle hierarchies of value and epistemic totality (Arendt, 1973) also reflect on the continuous work needed to attempt decolonizing the critique experience. Creating community and a sense of belonging can be a way to start, but we also found that in looking at artwork, “the unworking of works” (Nancy, 39) can be a catalyst for the community to emerge.