Conflict and Consensus: Art Dialogues in Rogue Academies

Ms. Fiona Lee
2012 Conference

This paper considers the growing use of the collective experience of dialogue and pedagogy in contemporary visual art projects. In order to explore new transformative platforms for education, I examine alternative pedagogical modes of collaborative practice, as a critique of academia.

This research is contiguous with ongoing political and historical debates surrounding the reframing of art education in the 21st Century. A measure of this argument is centered on a renewed energy surrounding socially-engaged and collaborative forms of art practice in recent decades; modes of operation that question the authority of the modernist hegemony in art education in this country. Very little research has been undertaken in the field of dialogical and pedagogical practice where artists, rather than academics and other professionals, are infiltrating the field of epistemology.

The subject of focus will be the alternative art school, Our Day Will Come (ODWC), an event that set up a mutually symbiotic relationship with Tasmanian School of Art during the spring of 2011. The collaborative artwork was by Irish-born artist–curator Paul O’Neill who brought a number of international artists to Tasmania, whose work is within the realm of dialogue and pedagogy. The infiltration into the small arts community by outsiders—along with the generative nature of the work, is conveniently framed within the conference topic—‘creative outposts’. At issue, and the basis of my PhD thesis, are the conversational principles of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and an exploration into conflict and consensus; binaries that fueled creative agency between the local and interloper during the ODWC project.

Download Full text PDF (469.58 KB)

About the author

Fiona Lee has an MFA and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania. Over the last thirteen years her arts practice has emerged from producing object and material based works into more social forms of practice. Employment within arts administration has fueled an enduring interest in dialogue and pedagogy within art, which have gradually become an integral part of her expanded practice. Her works include 12 Criterion (2008), CAST Board (2009), Kings Committee (2010), Level Directors (2010) and curatorial roles in The Arresting Image (2009) with Pat Brassington and Our Day Will Come (2011). Her collaboration with Scottish poet Liz Niven has resulted in a book; Anything you say… a commonplace book (2012) published by Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum and Art Centre. Lee worked for Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania (CAST) for many years and held a position at the Australian Pavilion during the 2009 Venice Biennale. She has been awarded an Australia Council grants for residencies in England and on Barra, Scotland, and given an Australian Post Graduate Award for her current research. Her current focus is on deconstructing conversation, drawing from the fields of philosophy, cultural and social theory and education, in order to generate new transformative modes of learning within the visual arts.