Visual culture encompasses a broad range of what we, as a society, see every day. From the moment we wake up and check our cell phones, or turn on our TV and computers, our eyes and minds are bombarded with an endless barrage of imagery that defines who we are, what we like, what we want to buy and who we are buying it from. It encompasses the aesthetics of the every day, and the imagery and items we create that come from those aesthetics. The broad term of visual culture includes fine art, however, the definition of “fine art” is transforming itself. The future seems to be leaning towards a melding of everything we see and all that we create as “art”, in one form or another. Culture is created through a group of people or beings that influence each other, and this can easily be seen throughout our lives in the clothing we wear, the cars we drive, the movies and tv shows and comic books at which we look. With the advent of the Internet, the world has become a smaller place to live, as we can now not only see the culture of own lives, but those of others all over the world. Needless to say, visual culture and art is everywhere. It is not just a part of our lives, it has become life itself.
How can we, as art educators, ignore the visual influence that is constantly with us from the moment we wake up to the moment we sleep at night? To teach about a single timeline, or a single group of people or a single way to make “fine art” is to say that that which makes up our history and has influences our lives to this day should be disregarded, seems to be at odds with living a complete life. Education does not begin and end when a student enters and leaves a classroom, it is constant and unending throughout life. John Dewey said in The School and Society (1956):
“From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in the school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside the school in any complete and free way within the school itself; while on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school. That is the isolation of the school–its isolation from life. When the child gets into the schoolroom he has to put out of his mind a large part of the ideas, interests and activities that predominate in his home and neighborhood.”
To combine those influences and to critically investigate art, visual culture and history is to combine the lives we lead every day with the atmosphere of learning. It takes a once narrow road of education and splits it into a lattice of ideas, images, cross cultures and information that was not previously accessible or attainable. It teaches an ethic of understanding to our children and also teaches them to question everything, to see it from different perspectives, and in that way, they will better know themselves and each other. “In order to effectively teach art today, interdisciplinary and multi-modal connections must be made for students, culturally diverse experiences must be provided, and visual technologies must be understood” (Freedman & Boughton, p.12).
Works Cited
Boughton, D., & Freedman, K. (n.d.). Elementary art education: A practical approach to teaching visual culture. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Dewey, J. 1956. The Child and the Curriculum and The School and Society. Chicago: Phoenix