Contemporary Art and Art in Education: The New, Emancipation and Truth

Abstract

This article assembles some ideas on equality and learning in relation to the notions of truth and emancipation. It considers learning as a political act, as defined by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, rather than, for example, an incremental process of psychological or sociological development. Practical exemplifications will be taken from contexts of art practices and art in education, but the general argument is directed at learning and equality across all human endeavours. The article discusses the idea of the truth of learning as something which ruptures existing frameworks of practice and knowledge and ponders the kind of pedagogies we require to inform effective pedagogic action. To this end it proposes what might be termed pedagogies against the state, or pedagogies of the event, in order to respond to acts of learning that involve leaps of becoming into a new or reconfigured world.