HEA Annual Conference 2017 Manchester, 4th July

Diffraction in art and art education:

a paradigm shift away from reflection

Alberto Condotta

Kolb’s Learning Cycle

It is rather a melting pot

Isaac Newton ^

Karen Barad >

< Niels Bohr

Donna Haraway >

< Reflexion

Diffraction >

origin

copy

Medical Student Fine Art student

• Consolidated set of skills and notions to be learned

• Knowledge can be represented well enough by marking

• Final results have a clear and direct impact on employability

• Developing an autonomous self-critical methodology

• No clear/univocal/official knowledge to be acquired

• (hence) Marking represents the value of one’s practice much more arbitrarily

• Final results do not mean professional success

Creative/critical responsibility:

The ability to renegotiate one’s goals as to accommodate in real time the present and its

sensuous charge any time the emergence of an unexpected way of making sense strikes

Marking can infantilise

When individualism hinders success

Diffraction: wave pattern superposition

G. Bellini, Madonna of the Meadow, About 1500, 67x86cm, oil and egg painting on board. © Copyright The National Gallery, London 2016

Reverse of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna of the Meadow

Of course this scene is to be found nowhere in the holy texts of Catholicism

Disjoining creativity from originality

Creativity:

the performing of a kind of care that is both critical and reckless

Homage art:

fascinating by carefully-critically-recklessly translating that which has fascinated oneself

Picasso after Velázquez…

… and Picasso after Velázquez + after Picasso himself + after Picasso-after-Velázquez

Bacon after Velázquez

All music is diffracted, rather than invented

…some genres more explicitly than others

creative-critical phenomenological analyses and homage artworks

are non-objectivising research, they are methods for critical engagement within

proximity and creative and means of analysis

In conclusion…

where the key is developing autonomous methodologies of research:

the centrality of marking can be challenged while great attention should be paid to the

class as an environment

within favourable environmental conditions knowledge is trusted to emerge as an horizontal-cross breeding of practices

Alberto Condotta

Diffraction in art and art education: a paradigm shift away from reflection

HEA Annual Conference 2017 Manchester, 4th July