The perspective of social production to space in visual arts education

Authors

• Heikki Heinonen

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33350/ka.97284

Keywords:

space, social production of space, visual arts education, installation

Abstract

This article deals with the relationship of space and visual arts education. Space is an element of teaching situations in visual arts education and also a central part of the subject's teaching content as well as a way of theorizing teaching. Often, space is dealt with in visual arts education through representations of space, such as perspective drawings. This article seeks to discover the possibilities which could be enabled in visual arts education if  space were approached as socially produced. The question is examined through the concept of “doing things differently” by using viewpoints from the fields of visual arts education, art history, educational sciences and philosophy. The theoretical reflection uses the example of a situation in which an art installation is built collaboratively in a visual arts class by the whole teaching group. The way in which the installation challenges the Cartesian central perspective and, on the other hand, the momentary nature of installations, proves to be an interesting finding. In the process of the whole group making the installation, the central elements include time, togetherness and space. The article suggests that such an installation emerges as a metaphorical agora: a space that is genuinely shared by all participants from the very beginning. The agora is offered as a new metaphor alongside the bridge metaphor used by Marjo Räsänen, when the kind of visual arts education is conceptualized that challenges linearity and features space, time and togetherness in its core.