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Acknowledging that many art teachers have difficulties with the concept of visual
culture, the author offers some guidelines for considering the playing field of an
art education that embraces the rhizomic nature of visual culture. The guidelines
include distinguishing between Visual Culture Studies as a field and what part of
it legitimately concerns art education. In turn, this involves distinguishing between
different functions of images and artefacts when they concern data and utility and
when they constitute beliefs and values, as well as when they support a status quo
and when they resist and/or offer alternatives. Examples of rhizomic curriculum are
offered that serve for both clarification and as exemplars of practice.
A modernist curriculum that focused exclusively on fine art could be more or
less mapped, because maps are bounded and establish definitive connections
(Wilson 2000a). But a postmodern art curriculum that embraces the concept of
visual culture defies the possibility of mapping because the structure of visual
culture is rhizomic. Like grass or the Internet, both of which have rhizomic
structures, visual culture has no core. It spreads latterly in highly interrelated
ways. Instead of possessing a core from which different elements branch out,
a rhizome is nothing but a network of connections. Whereas maps attempt to
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set down limits and imply stability, rhizomes are non-hierarchical, dynamic
and infinitely extendable. Rhizomes embody constant interaction and change.
Conceived as a field on which to play, they lack boundaries.
With such a rhizomic playing field, visual culture is so extensive, and so
unstable, that teachers often despair of knowing where to begin let alone
how to proceed. In light of this understandable anxiety, this article sets out
some guidelines for considering what is legitimately the playing field of an art
education that embraces visual culture. It is not as though there are no limits
for art education; it is just that the kinds of limits has changed. The limits
I suggest are based not on particular categories of imagery, but rather on how
they function within different discourses. Instead of limiting ourselves to fine
art, and thereby excluding folk and popular media imagery, the limits I suggest
relate to whether imagery concerns beliefs and values or merely data. Finally,
some examples are offered of a visual culture, rhizomic curriculum that serve
as both clarification and as exemplars of practice.
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The problems that teachers have with the idea of visual culture begin with
the all-inclusive definitions of visual culture often proposed by schol-
ars. It seems that nothing is to be excluded. Therefore, prior to exploring
the rhizomic structure of visual culture, it is helpful to consider how others
have described the territory because this helps to understand why teachers
are often resistant.
Elkins defines visual culture as the study of what is seen, and what is seen
depends upon what there is to see and how we look at it (2003: 4). Mirzoeff
(1998) defines visual culture in terms of events in which one seeks informa-
tion, meaning or pleasure in an interface with visual technology. Rogoff insists
that visual culture encompasses a great deal more than the study of images
and goes on to mention a focus on the centrality of vision and the visual
world in producing meanings, establishing and maintaining aesthetic values
(2009: 25). Barnard defines visual culture only a little less narrowly as [A]
nything visual produced, interpreted or created by humans which has, or is
given, functional, communicative and/or aesthetic intent (1998: 18). He goes
on the make a long, highly eclectic list of visual images and artefacts that
exemplify his seemingly all-encompassing definition.
Street and house furniture, street signs, fashion, textiles, pottery and
ceramics, hairdryers, shavers, cars, architecture, garden design, adver-
tising, personal, public, corporate and popular images, film, television,
computer environments, and games, Internet home pages, newspaper
and magazine design, typography, products and packing of all kinds.
(Barnard 1998: 108)
Others such as Mirzoeff (1998), Sturken and Cartwright (2001) and Walker
and Chaplin (1997) offer the same kind of definition; concerned to be inclu-
sive, they appear to leave nothing out.
Barnard (1998) further exemplifies the breath of the field of Visual Culture
Studies by listing the disciplines that contribute to the study of visual culture,
including art history, ethnography, archaeology and cultural geography. Elkins
writes that visual culture draws on nearly two dozen fields, including history
and art history, art criticism, art practice [] feminist and women studies,
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feminism, queer theory, political economy [] film and media studies,
archeology and visual anthropology [] (2003: 25).
While this kind of kitchen-sink definition is certainly appropriate to the
emerging field of Visual Culture Studies, it is less useful for art educators. For
visual culture to have any cache with teachers it is important to begin to limit
the above definitions in a way that simultaneously acknowledges the breath
of the field, acknowledges the need of teachers for manageable content and
conceptualizes content in keeping with art teachers primary goals. Broadly
speaking, I take the latter to be imparting an awareness of how images consti-
tute our beliefs and values, whether by critique or students own productions.
While visual culture in art education is rhizomic, it should only involve those
images that are specific to art education and not other fields. In what immedi-
ately follows, I begin by limiting myself to considering only two-dimensional
images.
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Even limiting visual culture to two-dimensional images can be overwhelm-
ing, but I will argue that the great majority of images are rarely of interest
to art education. Most images ordinarily belong to quite different discourses.
Mirzoeff (1998) comments that ours is a visual culture primarily because today
we picture phenomenon that in previous times was coded in language or
numbers. Fortunately for art education, we can dismiss most of these images,
at least most of the time. Consider, for example, the ordinary, intended use
of surveillance images. When Foucault (1977) characterized modern life in
terms of surveillance he wrote at a time when surveillance technology was
not nearly as pervasive as today, yet his characterization has proven highly
prescient. On any given day perhaps more than half of all the images created
in the world are concerned with surveillance, and their primary interest is
aiding the prevention and detection of terrorism, crime and unruly behav-
iour. Surveillance cameras, originally employed in Nazi Germany (Walker and
Chaplin 1997), are now a mostly ubiquitous part of everyday life. Every super-
market, supermarket car park, heritage site, bank, ATM machine, government
building and so on is covered by such cameras, and most people who might
otherwise be inclined to anti-social acts in pubic spaces have learnt to inter-
nalize good behaviour as a consequence of never knowing when they are
being observed. Meanwhile, surveillance satellites circle the globe, provid-
ing intelligence to the military and weather forecasters alike. To the extent
that surveillance images are entirely part of discourses on terrorism, crimi-
nality, military intelligence, weather and so on, they are not the province of
art education. When they function exclusively as surveillance images, we can
happily exclude them. As discussed below, it is only when they are used as
part of other discourses concerning beliefs and values that they become the
province of art education.
The same applies to images that ordinarily belong to medical and scientific
discourses. While Elkins (2003) criticizes the field of Visual Culture Studies
for being insufficiently concerned with scientific and medical imagery, such
images do not ordinarily concern art education. X-rays, brain scans, cat scans,
mammograms and so on, belong to discourses of diagnosis and prognosis,
not art education. Similarly, images of scientific enquiry such as those beamed
back from probes about the nature of other planets, the imaging of soil depos-
its, computer simulations of the physical habits of dinosaurs, and all the other
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numerous ways in which scientific data are now pictured are, again, ordinarily
of no concern to art education. Again, it is only when these images enter
discourses about values and beliefs that they become grist to the mill for art
education.
What each of the above images share is that no matter how important
they are to their respective discourses, from the perspective of art education
they ordinarily offer no more than data; they function to provide only useful
information in the pursuit of fields other than our own. In Brooks (1981) view,
they are merely first-order signs. Ordinarily, they function like the normal use
of road signs. A road sign tells us that this is a particular road, from which we
deduce whether we are lost or not. Ordinarily, we are interested in nothing
more; we do not look to a road sign to tell us about the nature of signage or
the nature of roads, let alone what anyone believes or values about roads. We
do not use them as metaphors of roadness; they are not metaphoric.
By contrast, at least three other kinds of imagery are commonly employed
metaphorically. These are vernacular or folk art images, mass media images
and fine art images. Where a modernist curriculum concerned itself exclu-
sively with the latter, a postmodern, visual culture curriculum is concerned
with each.
In Brooks terms, folk, mass media and fine art have in common the fact
that they are second-order signs; that is, they point beyond themselves to
something else to ideas, values or beliefs. They are more than immediately
useful. In Marxs (1906) terms, surveillance, medical and scientific imagery
are prized predominately because of their use value, whereas with folk, mass
media and fine art images, their use value is their sign value.
Vernacular or folk art is the work of amateurs, formally untrained people
who make pictures because they enjoy doing so. This applies, for example,
to Sunday afternoon painters and scrap bookers as well as the styling of any
number of useful items that bespeak of a desire to make everyday items special.
Although the mass production of both images and utilitarian goods during
the nineteenth century substantially marginalized such vernacular produc-
tion (Storey 2003), it never completely disappeared, and today largely as a
reaction to mass production many handicraft items are making a comeback.
Moreover, electronic technology ensures a wholly unprecedented prolifera-
tion of vernacular imagery. Digital technology sees everyone now taking many
more photographs than ever before, and social networking sites and YouTube
enable many more people to view them than ever before. In various ways,
and using both traditional media as well as the latest technology, the prolif-
eration and dissemination of imagery by untrained people is unprecedented.
Once largely eclipsed by mass production, do-it-yourself imagery has become
a major cultural phenomenon in which people express themselves, share their
dreams, confess their desires, and assert their beliefs and values. This is popu-
lar art in the sense that it bubbles up from below (Williams 1976).
The mass media constitutes a second kind of metaphoric image, a second
example of Brooks (1981) second-order sign. This is popular art in the sense
of being consumed by many people (Williams 1976). Owned largely by corpo-
rations with global reach, mass media offers up the values of corporate capital
as well as mainstream views about a wide range of issues, including race, class,
gender, ablebodiness, mental health and so on. All kinds of moral dilemmas
and social issues are offered to inform and entertain, but the media primarily
act to reinforce existing attitudes and ideas, values and beliefs (Storey 2003).
Governed by what most widely appeals to people, the mass media provide a
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lens on what a society believes and values. By studying mass media we learn
about a society: its priorities and preoccupations, its conflicts, its moral codes
and so on.
Due to the proliferation of such mass market, corporate-produced
imagery, the French philosopher Debord ([1967] 1995) characterized modern
life in terms of visual spectacle. How much more true is this a characterization
of digitally networked societies today than France over 40 years ago? Debord
understood society to be more and more subject to persuasion through the
manipulative lure of visual imagery. And like Foucault, Debord was highly
prescient. Where Foucaults notion of a society of surveillance has grown
ever more important, Debords characterization of a society of spectacle has
become increasingly relevant.
The fine arts of the art world produce a third kind of metaphoric imagery,
a third kind of second-order sign. The fine arts enjoy enormous social pres-
tige, what Bourdieu (1984) calls high cultural capital, but compared to the
onslaught of mass media and the growth of vernacular imagery, especially the
exponential growth of digital forms, the art world produces only a very small
per cent of imagery today. Compared to the past, the fine arts are now a highly
marginalized, minority activity, largely of interest to only a small section of the
middle class and to social elites (Rampley 2005).
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This is not to say that fine art is unimportant; the relatively miniscule produc-
tion level of the art world is, at least in principle, out of all proportion to its
social significance. This is due not only to its cultural capital, but because
the art world stands at a distance from the world of mass media, which is
enabled because the art world operates largely outside market conditions
(Williams 1981). Assisted by government grants, private largesse and benefit-
ing financially from the rhetoric of liberality it offers to capitalist corporations
who help with sponsorship, the art world is able to offer alternatives. The
art world is even able to oppose the values and beliefs propagated by mass
culture. Drawing upon its cultural capital, it operates free from the constraints
imposed by commercial success.
To understand the relationships between different cultural categories,
Williams (1977) tripartite model of culture is helpful: dominant, residual and
emergent. Todays mass culture is what Williams calls dominant culture, partly
because there is more of it than any other kind, but principally because it is
most closely tied to dominant economic arrangements. It is not that culture is
directly determined by the economy; it is more that the economy is a highly
significant factor. It is noteworthy that the principle message of television,
arguably still the principle cultural form of our time, perfectly articulates the
primary need of todays consumer capitalism; namely, the virtues of unin-
terrupted consumption. Meanwhile, the rise of the Internet coincides with
its increasing commercialization. Marx (1906), for whom the economy was
everything, would not have been surprised.
Williams two other kinds of culture are markedly different from one
another, one looking backwards, the other looking forwards, yet today
both find their home within the art world. First, the art world archives what
Williams calls the selected tradition of works from the past. This is what he
calls residual culture, a culture that was once dominant, but now consists in
the residue of past ways of life. Produced in former times with former values,
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today it is drawn upon to oppose the values of todays commercial, market-
driven dominant culture. For example, the quiet contemplation of the natural
world so beloved by the French Impressionists and their public, today asserts
a deep human desire that implicitly resists exploitive, commercially driven
development.
At the same time, the art world enables what Williams calls emergent
culture, culture that is in the process of finding a voice, and because it too is
unconstrained by market pressures, it can please itself as to what it offers.
Emergent culture presents alternatives and opposition to dominant cultural
values. For example, contemporary activist art often opposes commercial
exploitation of the environment, and it usually embodies a more demo-
cratic, community-based model of society than corporate-owned mass
media. Thus does the art world, in its dual roles of archivist to the past
and harbinger of possible futures, resist dominant culture and offer alterna-
tives. This is not to suggest that residual, dominant and emergent culture
is always easy to distinguish in practice (Williams 1977). What is emer-
gent is easily appropriated by the dominant in the guise of acceptance.
Mass media continually renews itself; for example, by drawing in subjects
that were once taboo and attitudes that were once scandalous. Thus the
discourses in which images are embedded are not neat, and images often
play multiple roles.
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Relationships between the different discourses are dynamic, not static;
divisions blur and merge, drawing upon, and, in turn, contributing to one
another to produce hybrid categories and functions. Images that are usually
concerned only with data can on occasion crossover to take up the func-
tion of images concerned with beliefs and values. For example, surveil-
lance images sometimes become lightning rods in social controversies.
Images intended only to prevent and detect crime have sometimes become
focal points for broad social issues. Consider the infamous 1993 British
case where mall surveillance cameras captured two 10-year olds abduct-
ing 2-year-old James Bolger, who they later killed; these images not only
helped convict the child perpetrators, the images were caught up in a heated
public debate over the nature of childhood (Jenks 1995). The media fanned
the flames: what was happening to childhood? What was happening to
society? Similarly, images ordinarily concerned with medical and scientific
data can be appropriated for the assertion of beliefs and values. Sturken
and Cartwright (2001) devote a chapter to scientific and medical imagery
in their widely employed textbook on visual culture, and their emphasis is
the metaphoric functions of the imagery. Their examples include imagery
used in controversies over evolution verses creationism and the existence
of God. In short, the normal function of images does not limit the uses to
which they can be put.
The divisions between vernacular, mass and fine arts are also flexible. An
amateur creates an YouTube video that gains so many hits it is picked up by
mainstream media, and moves from one category to another. A fine art block-
buster exhibition is promoted in the mass media on the celebrity of an old
master and so attracts a mass audience. The art world appropriates the vernac-
ular when it showcases Amish quilts, and it appropriates mass culture when a
major public gallery programmes a series of classic Hollywood movies.
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Art educators Bolin and Blandy (2003) point out that people make meaning
from many things other than two-dimensional images. They even cite cuts of
meat and plowed fields. If embracing all images on the basis that they consti-
tute beliefs and values causes anxiety among teachers, Bolin and Blandys
proposal appears prima facie to greatly exasperate the problem of organizing
manageable content.
However, the above distinctions prove as useful in considering three-
dimensional artefacts, or any other phenomena, as they do in considering
two-dimensional images. The distinction between images concerned only
with data and those that embody beliefs and values, first-order verses second-
order signs, is equally useful in considering all kinds of humanly fashioned
artefacts and phenomena. The distinction continues to be founded on when
an item is regarded solely for its practical utility and when it is employed to
say something beyond itself. A piece of furniture, cutlery, writing pens, build-
ings and cars are all fashioned with a function in mind, yet they all also take
up positions within a network of values and beliefs. Each has a use value,
but each also has a sign value. In Brooks (1981) terms, they too are second-
order signs. As Turkle writes, We think with the objects we love and we love
the objects we think with []. Objects bring together thought and feeling
(2007: 5, 8). And like individual words that have meaning only in relation
to other words, individual consumer goods have no meaning outside their
participation in a system of objects. Consider a humble vacuum cleaner. When
we purchase a vacuum cleaner we consume the social order that they belong
to. We do not just buy a machine that cleans; we buy into assumptions about
gender, households, families and social status. In this way, whenever utilitar-
ian artefacts are considered in terms of their symbolic or metaphoric associa-
tions, they become, potentially, a matter for art education. This applies even
to meat cuts, plowed fields and vacuum cleaners. It is only when they are
viewed solely in terms of their utilitarian function that they hold no interest
for art education.
In summary, art educators are interested in images and artefacts when
they are constitutive of beliefs and values that help both to understand society
as it is, and also to consider opposing views and alternatives. As art educa-
tors we are interested in visual culture that helps understand society and also
visual culture that offers the possibility of social transformation.
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While I have limited the range of images and artefacts of legitimate concern
to art education by virtue of their functions, I have also opened it up well
beyond what art teachers normally consider. To understand how it is possible
to embrace a seemingly infinite amount of material within the confines of a
finite curriculum, it is necessary to make a paradigm shift.
Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Brent Wilson (2000a) describes
visual culture in terms of a rhizome. With rhizomes like grass or the Internet
mapping in any conventional sense is impossible and therefore irrelevant. With
rhizomes there is no hierarchy, and although they must originally start from
somewhere, once they begin to grow they appear to be without a discern-
able centre and to continually expand outwards from all their edges. In the
case of grass one node connects to other nodes, which connect to still others;
with the Internet one hyperlink links to another, and so on. In a continual
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state of depletion and creation, the disappearance of one part holds no real
consequences because a rhizome is constantly rejuvenated by the addition of
other parts. One travels through a rhizome not in a predetermined line but
as a nomad, roaming about from place to place for as long as one chooses.
With visual culture one image could refer to another image, that is inspired
by a novel, that has been translated into a film, that has been adapted from a
childrens story, that has become an Internet meme, that echoes a poem, that
is informed by a philosophical position, that is grasped through a visual meta-
phor, that arises from an image and so on, endlessly. Its all interconnected.
No text is an island unto itself for every text is an intertext. This is true for
the creation of a rhizome and it is equally true when audiences make their
own connections by bringing their own experiences into play in the reading
of a rhizome.
Drawing again on Deleuze and Guattari, Wilson notes that if visual culture
is like grass, modernists approached art curriculum as if art was a tree, with
roots, branches and a trunk. Picture the roots as the various strands of art
history and the branches as all the issues with which art deals: race, patriot-
ism, gender, idealization and so forth. Then consider that in the modernist
curriculum the elements and principles and the particular quality of different
media form the trunk. In the modernist curriculum the core, or the founda-
tion, link the art historical roots and all the issues.
With this standard modernist curriculum, so important is the formalist
core that art history is often entirely seen through a formalist lens; it is even
possible for introductory art historical texts to deal with scenes of rape entirely
in terms of colour harmonies and dynamic balance, and to completely ignore
subject matter (Gaudelius and Moore 1995/1996). In such cases the issues
with which images deal are not even mentioned. The approach is linear and
hierarchical, the assumption being that the curriculum should proceed from
the simple to the complex, the simple being the core or foundation. However,
especially in the lower classes, teachers often never move beyond the basics,
and students are condemned to produce line exercises and colour wheels
grade after grade never discussing the questions, controversies, power strug-
gles and so on, that motivate artists and excite audiences.
The flora model of the modernist curriculum as a tree and a postmodern,
visual culture curriculum as a rhizome also highlights their relative resilience:
weak in the case of a tree-based curriculum and highly resilient in the case
of a rhizome-based curriculum. A tree is easily chopped down. If we once
suggest that the elements and principles and the particular quality of materi-
als never constituted core knowledge and never should have anchored the
curriculum in the first place, the very basis of this curriculum falls apart. On
the other hand, it is very difficult to kill off a large section of grass; unless
a very large amount of poison is employed, what remains will sprout new
growth in another space and/or will in time grow back where the grass had
been killed. In the case of the human-made Internet, its rhizomic structure
was deliberate. The Internet grew out of the US militarys fear that the Soviet
Union could with very few missiles knock out the entire basis of military intelli-
gence and caused the US to diversify its centres of intelligence into any number
of interconnected sites (Negroponte 1995). Even if a large number of sites were
destroyed, enough would likely survive such that the system would not only
continue to operate, it would be able to regenerate what had been lost.
The resilience of visual culture should be self-evident from everyones
everyday experience. The task for art education then is to build curriculum
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that is commensurate with the resilience of visual culture by embracing its
rhizomic structure.
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Examples of rhizomic curriculum have been developed by Wilson (2000b),
Tavin (2002), Taylor (2000), Taylor and Carpenter (2003), Carpenter and Taylor
(2006), Herrmann (2006) and myself (Duncum 2006a). Below, I describe just
two exercises I undertake with my pre-service art teachers, which are based
largely on the work of my colleagues just mentioned.
A few years ago I had students create an electronic rhizomic site using
the hyperlink facility on PowerPoint. Creating a rhizome has to start some-
where, so I asked students to select an image that interested them and to
link it to three or four main issues that it appeared to concern. One student
began with a photograph of the cast of Disneys Broadway play Avenue Q,
which she linked to the lyrics of songs used in the show. These included refer-
ences to race, sexism, censorship and homophobia. Among the many links
she made to race were photographs and texts from white supremacy groups
in the United States, Nazi propaganda and anti-semitic woodcuts from the
sixteenth century. She broke censorship into various media, including books,
movies and art. She dealt with sexism using advertisements from the past as
well as the present, and nudity in western art and current popular movies.
She explored homophobia with then current controversies over the changing
of laws and how images of gays and lesbians are depicted in United States
sitcoms. Each of her four issues were introduced with dictionary definitions,
and each were also internally linked; for example, she found that the Third
Reichs censorship of books and art was related to race and homophobia, and
through the derogatory depiction of black females she linked sexism to racism.
When the time came to wrap up the exercise, she said that she felt as though
she was only just getting started.
More recently, I have employed a low-tech approach and involved the
whole class in the production of an intertext using paper, push pins, woolen
yard and a large pin board. In the following example the class started with a
recent picture of Brittany Spears. Spears was selected because the students were
talking about her at the time and because I felt that she epitomized many social
conflicts both contemporary and of long-standing. The class began by brain-
storming what associations she evoked for them. These included celebrity
culture, body image, sexuality, children and child abuse, music videos, mental
illness, families and popular magazine covers. We then created an intertext.
I began by placing in the centre of the pin board a picture of the pop idol taken
from the net, and the students then placed images they had gathered from the
net and elsewhere of each of the issues above. The students also pinned up
dictionary definitions, newspaper articles and statements of their own views.
The class used coloured yarn to link from the original picture to their issues
and then from their issues to other related issues. By the end the students had
made so many connections and the board was so crisscrossed with yarn that
the original starting point was almost buried among the connections.
A lengthy discussion ensued on the way in which each of the above issues
had been represented, including stereotypical representations and how they
connected to one another. How, for example, does the media fall back on
stereotypical representations of mental illness, a subject that is not inherently
visual? As the teacher with more art historical knowledge than the students,
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I made reference to the paintings of Gericault, and as follow-up research two
students began to explore historical representations of the mentally ill in which
Gericaults images were contextualized by his contemporarys understand-
ing of mental illness. Two other students searched online image banks to find
contemporary fine art dealing with mental illness. A similar scenario developed
with the representation of celebrity. I made some historical and cross-cultural
connections to icons, illustrating the very different kinds of notoriety that have
garnered attention in other societies, and several students began investigating
this in some depth. The same thing occurred with families. Introducing the
idea that historically there have been many models of the family motivated
several students to research how families have had themselves represented
in the past. They looked at master paintings and old photographs and made
comparisons with todays informal snapshots. Other students researched the
other topics mentioned above. Finally, students linked up some of the asso-
ciations; for example, childhood imagery with representations of family, celeb-
rity with childhood through famous prodigies, and students found that it was
possible to link celebrity with families through Hello Magazine. In each case we
considered the images and written material to understand how strategies of
visual representation embodied the technology and social preoccupations of
their makers.
By the conclusion of these exercises it becomes apparent to all that there
is no end of further connections that could be made both between the issues
and outwards to other issues. Starting from a single source and moving later-
ally, students were able to make connections with many forms of representa-
tion, past and present, across cultures, in a variety of media, and manifesting
a huge range of issues that provide alternative ways to consider current issues,
issues that excited and motivated them.
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Teachers understandably feel anxiety over proposals to embrace everyday
visual culture, and my strategy to overcome these anxieties has been twofold:
first, to eliminate a great deal of material that is not germane to our enter-
prise. My suggestion is to consider all imagery when it deals with beliefs and
values but to exclude imagery when it is concerned only with data. Thus, I
am defining the field in terms of the function of imagery rather than tradi-
tional categories. My second suggestion is to reconceptualize what it means
to define art education as rhizomic rather than as a map. The latter means
embracing a territory that has no centre, is non-hierarchical, dynamic and
infinitely expandable.
There is much I have not addressed. For example, I have not discussed
at any length reasons for embracing visual culture, which I and others have
done elsewhere (e.g. Duncum 2002), considered appropriate pedagogy (e.g.
Duncum 2009a), described the complexity of introducing a visual culture
curriculum (e.g. Duncum 2006b) or explored the relationship between image
making and critique (Duncum 2003). I have not attempted to outline the many
descriptions by other art educators of their classroom practice (reviewed in
Duncum 2009b), or the problems encountered in limiting ourselves to visual
modes of communication (e.g. Duncum 2004), or the limits imposed by privi-
leging the sense of sight above other senses (Duncum in press). There is much
to consider as one paradigm gives way to another, but having teachers feel
less anxiety about a visual culture curriculum is a beginning.
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Roamn the rhzomc payn .
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Duncum, P. (2012), Roaming the rhizomic playing field of visual culture in
art education, Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art 1: 2, pp. 111122,
doi: 10.1386/vi.1.2.111_1
;GFLJA:MLGJ<=L9ADK
Paul Duncum is Professor of Art Education at the School of Art and Design,
The University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. He gained his doctorate from
The Flinders University of South Australia. He has widely published in art
education journals in the areas of his research and teaching, which include
childrens unsolicited drawings, images of children, critical theory and art
education, and popular culture, all primarily framed in terms of Cultural
Studies. He is a leading advocate of visual culture in art education.
Contact: School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL,
61820, USA.
E-mail: pduncum@illinois.edu
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