It’s an old-fashioned term, I know, often tossed to the side with the idea of connoisseurship, yet I understand and teach art history as an approach to the aesthetic. Here I am appropriating French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s definition of the aesthetic as the “ability to think contradiction.” Each day I ask my students to look for, and think in, contradiction.
On the first day of class, my students look at an unfamiliar, abstract work of art and describe what they see, first in writing, then in pairs, and finally as a class. Throughout the process, students aren’t shocked to discover that others see the work differently, but they are often surprised that we cannot come to a class consensus.
Immediately, students begin to recognize that active participants in the classroom (and in visual culture at large) can understand art objects differently and oftentimes come to multiple, equally correct interpretations of the same work. I develop lessons that challenge students to accept this important premise and then manage these multiple understandings. These lessons range from simple call and answer strategies during a lecture to jigsaw lessons that ask students to move in groups to assess both primary source readings and art objects, often requiring them to negotiate evolving and shifting interpretations without my guidance or mediation. Often, these group lessons end in students accepting ideas they first perceived as radical or implausible as equally valid and valuable.
Of course, in asking students to make meaning of art objects, I am often asking them to grapple with what they perceive as the ineffable, the essence of a work of art. Students may be uncomfortable with this at first, and many have expressed the belief that they cannot be wrong in their own interpretations. This seeming contradiction, that there may be diverse understandings of problems, questions, and objects and that some may simply be wrong, challenges us to create a classroom environment where students are unafraid to be vulnerable and take risks in making meaning. Together, we wrestle with the nuances and codes of the discipline of art history and discover how we can come to best understand these conventions together. Recently, I have asked students to consider this concept in relation to public art in New York City, completing projects on specific objects near their homes or school. After observing the work on several occasions, students then compile a written response of how people interacted with the work, its history and purpose, ultimately considering the nature of art in our daily lives.
As a specialist in Pre-Columbian art, I have found myself limited by the need to cram thousands of years of distinct and varied histories into a short amount of class time. This is particularly true in art history survey classrooms that tend to focus on the history of western art. It can be frustrating to engage with a canon, and an evolving discipline, which seeks to include what has traditionally been excluded but has not yet learned to do so effectively. In an effort to best serve my students and my own field, I experiment with fitting non-western art into our linear timeline, at times asking students to use primary sources to better understand unfamiliar works of art. While I maintain an attachment to the conventional art historical narrative in my survey classroom, I recognize that art of the non-west requires us to step outside of that construct, and we, as a discipline, are still struggling with the best way to do so.
My students regularly discover new and exciting ways to understand the discipline of art history, play with images that I have seen for many years, and break away from the traditions and conventions that bind us as a field. As they leave my classroom bombarded by the visual culture of everyday life, I hope they take away a skill set that allows them not just to think in contradiction but to see in contradiction as well.
