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Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
Kathryn Grushka
The University of Newcastle
Australia
Kath.Grushka@newcastle.edu.au
Post-compulsory secondary visual art curriculum in NSW, Australia, informed by postmodern and
popular culture perspectives is providing performative sites for the individual to explore their
subjectivities and affirm self. These sites accommodate personal narrative perspectives that are
informed by the way the gaze in visual culture presents ideological, gendered and hegemonic positions.
It demonstrates how the phenomena of youth resistance, as an active agent in subjectivity production
can be explored through discursive and expressive artmaking. Through a longitudinal analysis of
student learning outcomes the paper will examine some of the topics that students chose to explore as
they actively disrupt the perpetuating consumption imperative of visual culture in media practices as
they inform identity. Examples will illustrate how students actively deconstruct and interrogate the very
images and signifiers that seek to represent them. It will present examples of how the students use their
visual literacy skill(s) and material practices in performative ways to disrupt normalising patterns, visually
test their own assumptions about gender relationships through creative destabalisation of hegemonic
images and in so doing explore their own identity possibilities while becoming subjects.
Key Words: Visual Education, Visual culture and visual media, Visual art, Performative material
practice, Subjectivities, visual performative practice
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
Exploring Visual Culture and the Gaze through Discursive and Performative
Visual Art Practices in the Secondary School Context
Introduction
Visual popular culture represents the habitus of youth. It is central to how they
communicate and express themselves and visual imagining is at the core of twenty
first century communicative practice. The multi-media visual activities of popular
culture shape representations and inform identities through the transference of
aesthetic forms, ideas, beliefs and values. Secondary visual art curriculum in
Australia, informed by postmodern and popular visual culture perspectives is
providing performative sites for the individual to reflect on visual culture within the
broader field of fine art practices. The discursive and expressive contemporary
artmaking practices employed in the classroom are presented as offering ways for
youth to resist hegemonic practices, explore their subjectivities and affirm self.
Through a longitudinal analysis of student visual art learning outcomes the paper will
examine some of the topics that students chose to explore as they actively disrupt
the perpetuating consumption imperative of visual culture in media practices through
artmaking to inform identity while becoming subjects.
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
and transmit events with increasing speed and intensity. The creative and fluid
activity of imaging practices now experienced by everyone, significantly impacts on
the perceptions of the experiencing audience. The individual can now record every
life events as a digitised image. They can store and retrieve their own visual
memories and those of others and transport these images with speed across the
world. Similarly media images, both virtual and real come to each of us on a daily
basis and form a strong component of one's lifeworld.
The image is now being presented as a new scientific tool, a cultural signifier and a
form of social discourse and narrative, able to represent knowledge and operate as an
agent to shape identities and behaviours. Meaning as image circulates the globe
shaped and mutated by both cultural activity and cultural contexts. Images transfer to
us messages about our beliefs, desires and feelings. How we see, what we see, and
how the world is represented to us shapes who we are and the visual is playing a more
important role in how we learn about the world and how we are able to understand
ourselves (Freeman, 2003). The skill of visuality or the ability to critically deconstruct
and construct images to make meaning (Stafford, 1996; Meskimmon, 1997) is therefore
fore grounded as an important attribute of all. As visual culture plays a significant role
in presenting images of normalisation as well as actively disrupting and manipulating
within the market place of identities (Mansfield, 2000, p.78) for the purposes of power
and consumption, visuality, as a discursive and performative imaging practice, informs
how we have come to desire the world of produced visual hyper-reality as truth.
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
Artistic activity as cultural production is a framework for society (Guattari, 1995) and
the innovative capacities of the arts must be harnesses in the face of increasing
uniformity of the life of individuals in the urban context (p.152). Given such a
scenario youth will need to develop the critical, reflective and performative skills
embedded in artistic inquiry practices to increase self-consciousness and reflexivity.
These skills will be important if they are to explore the tension between conforming
behaviours, and the active exploration, resistance and performance against social
norms presented as visual representations.
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
Current thinking about art practice could be seen as a discourse around self and an
experience that produces existence (Bolt, 2004). Thought this way, imaging in art
practices could be posited as a productive materiality (Bolt, 2004, p. 168) which
enables truth to be set in process (Grierson, 2006).
Postmodern visual art education practices reject notions of image unity, singular
origins, singular ancestry and bounded nationality, allowing students to explore the
multiplicity of self. The approach draws on the full range of postmodern practices
including appropriation, re-contextualisation of images from history or drawn from
popular cultural contexts to make new meanings. It also includes juxta-positioning
and layering of multiple images to make new meaning in complex ways and the
ability to acquire insights through practice into how to critically investigate and
manipulate current communicative practices. Learning in the visual arts supports
students as self determining learners and personal meaning makers. It nurtures the
performative capacity of visual art inquiry through critical, self reflective and
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
The longitudinal study draws on documented image and text data from exhibitions
spanning a fourteen-year period, 1991-2005. The study involved approximately three
thousand student artist statements and their corresponding artworks. The study aims
to reveal the impact and value, for the adolescent student, of the experience of
engaging with their lifeworld through visual art inquiry. It asked to what extent do the
understandings gained through this learning impact on the student beyond the
classroom and does it inform emancipatory discourses (Denzin, 2005) for the
adolescent students?
It acknowledges that the student artworks in this inquiry are bound by the limitations
of an educational institution, an external examination process and a curriculum that
presents the field of study and shapes the pedagogical environment. All the empirical
evidence in the form of student artworks must acknowledge the teacher as coconstructor and the role of audience in shaping the final artworks which includes
examiners and the wider community.
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
One of the key findings of the research into student visual art inquiry is that a
postmodern and contemporary oriented Visual Art curriculum supports a discursive
and expressive exploration of identity for the adolescent. The study identified that
approximately 70% of all student works selected for the ARTEXPRESS exhibition
across the study period used the self portrait as a performative narrative tool.
Visibility informing subjectivity production supported a wide range of inquiry positions
broadly identified as Identity as Expressive Self Narrative and Identity as
Expressive Cultural and Social Construct as illustrated in the Table 1 below. The
table illustrates the substantial shift in the recent postmodern curriculum away from
the more abstract objective illustrative inquiry such as landscape and object studies
to discursive and expressive visual narrative forms. Self-reflective, interpretivist
orientations represented connected self to other through intuitive and critical
practices expressed predominantly as the self portrait. The self portrait in
contemporary art practices represented in this research includes traditional forms of
self portraiture but extends to forms such as animation, video and installation
artworks.
50
40
Identity as expressive
cultural & social
construct
30
20
Abstract expressive
analytical & objectiive
studies
10
0
1991
1996
2001
2003
2005
Visualising and reflecting on self through locating self in the events of life, places,
spaces and moments found students working with re-representations of self that
captured all aspects of life. They ranged from friendships to alienation, isolation and
loss to the phenomena of inhabiting ones personal spaces to virtual spaces. Others
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
delved into the cultural and social agencies that shape them to find their sense of
self. They struggle with issues and events that are currently impacting on them in
significant psychological and emotional ways. Just Me; Just Life; Just Different; But
Just Like Everyone Else (Sayarath, 2003, p.99), below is a most eloquent example
of such an approach. In his self portrait he directly faces the audience to confront
them with his questions and his concerns about the cultural constructs of gender
representations.
Students in the study, work with postmodern stylistic markers such as parody, irony,
satire, narrative and appropriation combined with the depth and breadth of visual art
and media technologies. They use the gaze to present them as active rather than
passive participants. The works characteristically demonstrate youths desire to resist
hegemonic practices in the search to validate their own culturally located behaviour.
With this imperative it is little wonder the notion of conformity or cultural identity
preoccupies a significant group of students in the study. Joshua Kerrs Plastic
Majority (2003, p.77) and his statement reflected the perspective of many other
student works, I wanted to make a statement about my own individuality (p.77).
Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
As social and cultural critic student artists chose to explore how media defines
gender and exploits representations. Students choose topics as diverse as gender,
cosmetic surgery, fashion, genetics, history, to domesticity and social role
expectations. Who do you want to be today (Stapleton, 2003, p.46) investigates the
role of gender stereotypes in modern Western society.
So too the works titled Beauty, Marilyn Munroe-A Dime a Dozen, Mesh, You are
What You Wear all approach an understanding of their private inquiry from a
particular angle on media and the gaze. The work Engendered Fantasy
(Bankier,1993, p.2) directly addresses the issues of body politics through the female
nude while the photographic work of Imran Kamal (ARTEXPRESS, 1997,p. 52) takes
a defiant stance and reaction to constant pressure to define self by parents and
relatives during adolescence. The work presents the perception of the successful
young male juxtaposed by the transvestite and the spy disrupting any possibility of a
stereotypical conclusion.
You are What you Wear (Genner, 2001, p.18) is an example of how students
interrogate the devices used by marketing and media to promote specific gender
constructs through fashion statements that facilitate consumerism and define the
female adolescent. The student has photographed themselves in their own product
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Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
You are what you wear T-shirts and has set about the process of merchandising her
concept using mass media techniques of the fashion industry to explore our
desire to use accessories to define ourselves within our consumer driven society.
Student works such as Ballyhoo (Hlavacek, 2002, p.107) and Mesh (Gorgiojski,
2005) are excellent examples of a genre style in ARTEXPRESS that critically
comments on popular media and the loss of individual identity through consumerism.
They work from the orientation of the designer and present their artwork in the format
of the magazine. By becoming the editor and artistic director, Gorgiojski (2005) in her
work Mesh demonstrates how one is able to participate in the process and assess
one of the ways identity formation is shaped. I created a world of famous people,
showing the power of the magazine industry and how easy it is to make an average
person look famous using digital technologies.
Conclusion
Attending to finding a position about self that is somewhere between the absolutes of
objectivism and subjectivism and to work discursively and interpretively within the
fields of feelings and possibilities is the challenge for youth. To find a framework
which will allow a prolonged encounter between self, other and society in ways that
support and work in dynamic relationship with ones emotional and imaginative life is
a necessity. Such a mechanism and its resultant cultural practices will need to be
perceived by adolescents as authentic. It will need to provide each individual with
inquiry practices that allow for reciprocity between self and society grounded in
relevant representational and communicative practices. Contemporary Visual Art
curriculum which nurtures a critical visual, self reflective and expressive capacity
through visual performative and communicative practices is emerging as providing a
legitimate communicative platform for the adolescent to see possibilities. The inquiry
identified that in the area of visual media gender representations, visual performative
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Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
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Kathryn Grushka (2007). Exploring Visual Culture through Discursive Performative Visual Art practices in the
Secondary School Context. Taking a hard look: Gender and visual culture, Pretoria, South Africa
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