Expressing the Not-Said: Art and Design and the Formation of Sexual Identities

Abstract

Abstract:Central to this paper is an analysis of the work produced by a year 10 student in response to the "Expressive Study" of the art and design GCSE (AQA 2001). I begin by examining expressivism within art education and turn to the student"s work partly to understand whether the semiconfessional mode she chose to deploy is encouraged within this tradition. The tenets of expressivism presuppose the possibility that through the practice of art young people might develop the expressive means to give "voice" to their feelings and come to some understanding of self. I therefore look at the way she took ownership of the "expressive" imperative of the title by choosing to explore her emerging lesbian identity and its position within the normative, binary discourses on sex and sexual identity that predominate in secondary schools. Within schooling there is an absence of formal discussion around sex, sexual identity and sexuality other than in the context of health and moral education and, to some extent, English. This is surprising given the emphasis on self-exploration that an art and design expressive study would seem to invite. In order to consider the student"s actions as a situated practice I examine the social and cultural contexts in which she was studying. With reference to visual semiotics and the theoretical work of Judith Butler, I interpret the way she uses visual resources not only to represent her emerging sexual identity but to counter dominant discourses around homosexuality in schools. I claim that through her art practice she enacts the "name of the law" to refute the binary oppositions that underpin sex education in schools. This act questions the assumptions about the purpose of expressive activities in art education with its psychologically inflected rhetoric of growth and selfhood and offers a mode of expressive practice that is more socially engaged and communicative. ExpressivismWhen people express something they are said to take from within themselves some phenomenon, a sensation, perception, thought or feeling and put it outside; they take what was once inside and, through a process of transformation, represent it as a material act or thing. Such a process makes it clear that the inner something and the expression are not one and the same. However, this way of explaining the process presupposes that the inner something is prior to its expression, a common sense attitude that pervades teaching in schools. And yet, as Hal Foster argues, quoting from Nietzsche"s The Will to Power III: "The whole notion of an "inner experience" enters our consciousness only after it has found a language that the individual understands -i.e., a translation of a situation into a familiar situation …". This "translation" precedes, indeed constitutes any formed expression so that between it and the self a rhetorical figure intervenes.

What is Art in Education? New Narratives of Learning

“…This central phrase, ‘pupils use colour, form, texture, pattern and different materials and processes to communicate what they see, feel and think,’ subscribes quite clearly to a view of artist, art object and spectator that presupposes a humanist or expressivist (Addison, 2005) aesthetic. Here unitary subjects are viewed as expressing their ideas, feelings and thoughts through art media for others to interpret.…”

“…Whilst contemporary art questions the frameworks and boundaries within which art practices and objects are conceived, much school art education appears to be caught in a time‐warp, and a failure to mourn past/traditional practices and understandings of practice. For school art practice the expressive subject is still a pervasive and dominant discourse (Addison, 2005). This might constitute a melancholic attitude towards both subjectivity and object (Butler, 1996).…”

Identity Politics and the Queering of Art Education: Inclusion and the Confessional Route to Salvation

“…Increasingly it is being argued that sexuality should appear alongside those categories of difference such as class, disability, ethnicity, gender, that have proved prejudicial to equality of opportunity for young learners [2]. It was in relation to these concerns that I wrote an article (published in this journal, 2005) examining the way a fifteen-year-old student explored her emerging lesbian identity through the opportunity provided by the GCSE 'expressive module' [3]. My argument critiqued those prevailing understandings of the expressive that revolve around the notion of an indivisible self whose essence unfolds through a process of selfrevelation.…”

School Art Education: Mourning the Past and Opening a Future

“…Though there are some schools in which innovative and exciting work is being achieved they appear to be part of a small minority. Addison [4] and Addison and Burgess [5] claim that the school art curriculum has evolved an insular approach to art practice and understanding art practice. A recent research project written by Downing and Watson, School Art: What's in it?…”