visual culturedefinitionsrhizomeintertextcurriculumhybridity

Acknowledging that many art teachers have difficulties with the concept of visual culture, the author offers some guidelines for considering the playing field of an art education that embraces the rhizomic nature of visual culture. The guidelines include distinguishing between Visual Culture Studies as a field and what part of it legitimately concerns art education. In turn, this involves distinguishing between different functions of images and artefacts – when they concern data and utility and when they constitute beliefs and values, as well as when they support a status quo and when they resist and/or offer alternatives. Examples of rhizomic curriculum are offered that serve for both clarification and as exemplars of practice.

A modernist curriculum that focused exclusively on fine art could be more or less mapped, because maps are bounded and establish definitive connections (Wilson 2000a). But a postmodern art curriculum that embraces the concept of visual culture defies the possibility of mapping because the structure of visual culture is rhizomic. Like grass or the Internet, both of which have rhizomic structures, visual culture has no core. It spreads latterly in highly interrelated ways. Instead of possessing a core from which different elements branch out, a rhizome is nothing but a network of connections. Whereas maps attempt to

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set down limits and imply stability, rhizomes are non-hierarchical, dynamic and infinitely extendable. Rhizomes embody constant interaction and change. Conceived as a field on which to play, they lack boundaries.

With such a rhizomic playing field, visual culture is so extensive, and so unstable, that teachers often despair of knowing where to begin let alone how to proceed. In light of this understandable anxiety, this article sets out some guidelines for considering what is legitimately the playing field of an art education that embraces visual culture. It is not as though there are no limits for art education; it is just that the kinds of limits has changed. The limits I suggest are based not on particular categories of imagery, but rather on how they function within different discourses. Instead of limiting ourselves to fine art, and thereby excluding folk and popular media imagery, the limits I suggest relate to whether imagery concerns beliefs and values or merely data. Finally, some examples are offered of a visual culture, rhizomic curriculum that serve as both clarification and as exemplars of practice.

The problems that teachers have with the idea of visual culture begin with the all-inclusive definitions of visual culture often proposed by schol-ars. It seems that nothing is to be excluded. Therefore, prior to exploring the rhizomic structure of visual culture, it is helpful to consider how others have described the territory because this helps to understand why teachers are often resistant.

Elkins defines visual culture as the study of what is seen, and what ‘is seen depends upon what there is to see and how we look at it’ (2003: 4). Mirzoeff (1998) defines visual culture in terms of events in which one seeks informa-tion, meaning or pleasure in an interface with visual technology. Rogoff insists that visual culture ‘encompasses a great deal more than the study of images’ and goes on to mention a ‘focus on the centrality of vision and the visual world in producing meanings, establishing and maintaining aesthetic values’ (2009: 25). Barnard defines visual culture only a little less narrowly as ‘[A]nything visual produced, interpreted or created by humans which has, or is given, functional, communicative and/or aesthetic intent’ (1998: 18). He goes on the make a long, highly eclectic list of visual images and artefacts that exemplify his seemingly all-encompassing definition.

Street and house furniture, street signs, fashion, textiles, pottery and ceramics, hairdryers, shavers, cars, architecture, garden design, adver-tising, personal, public, corporate and popular images, film, television, computer environments, and games, Internet home pages, newspaper and magazine design, typography, products and packing of all kinds.

(Barnard 1998: 108)

Others such as Mirzoeff (1998), Sturken and Cartwright (2001) and Walker and Chaplin (1997) offer the same kind of definition; concerned to be inclu-sive, they appear to leave nothing out.

Barnard (1998) further exemplifies the breath of the field of Visual Culture Studies by listing the disciplines that contribute to the study of visual culture, including art history, ethnography, archaeology and cultural geography. Elkins writes that visual culture draws on nearly two dozen fields, including ‘history and art history, art criticism, art practice […] feminist and women studies,

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feminism, queer theory, political economy […] film and media studies, archeology and visual anthropology […]’ (2003: 25).

While this kind of kitchen-sink definition is certainly appropriate to the emerging field of Visual Culture Studies, it is less useful for art educators. For visual culture to have any cache with teachers it is important to begin to limit the above definitions in a way that simultaneously acknowledges the breath of the field, acknowledges the need of teachers for manageable content and conceptualizes content in keeping with art teachers primary goals. Broadly speaking, I take the latter to be imparting an awareness of how images consti-tute our beliefs and values, whether by critique or students’ own productions. While visual culture in art education is rhizomic, it should only involve those images that are specific to art education and not other fields. In what immedi-ately follows, I begin by limiting myself to considering only two-dimensional images.

Even limiting visual culture to two-dimensional images can be overwhelm-ing, but I will argue that the great majority of images are rarely of interest to art education. Most images ordinarily belong to quite different discourses. Mirzoeff (1998) comments that ours is a visual culture primarily because today we picture phenomenon that in previous times was coded in language or numbers. Fortunately for art education, we can dismiss most of these images, at least most of the time. Consider, for example, the ordinary, intended use of surveillance images. When Foucault (1977) characterized modern life in terms of surveillance he wrote at a time when surveillance technology was not nearly as pervasive as today, yet his characterization has proven highly prescient. On any given day perhaps more than half of all the images created in the world are concerned with surveillance, and their primary interest is aiding the prevention and detection of terrorism, crime and unruly behav-iour. Surveillance cameras, originally employed in Nazi Germany (Walker and Chaplin 1997), are now a mostly ubiquitous part of everyday life. Every super-market, supermarket car park, heritage site, bank, ATM machine, government building and so on is covered by such cameras, and most people who might otherwise be inclined to anti-social acts in pubic spaces have learnt to inter-nalize good behaviour as a consequence of never knowing when they are being observed. Meanwhile, surveillance satellites circle the globe, provid-ing intelligence to the military and weather forecasters alike. To the extent that surveillance images are entirely part of discourses on terrorism, crimi-nality, military intelligence, weather and so on, they are not the province of art education. When they function exclusively as surveillance images, we can happily exclude them. As discussed below, it is only when they are used as part of other discourses concerning beliefs and values that they become the province of art education.

The same applies to images that ordinarily belong to medical and scientific discourses. While Elkins (2003) criticizes the field of Visual Culture Studies for being insufficiently concerned with scientific and medical imagery, such images do not ordinarily concern art education. X-rays, brain scans, cat scans, mammograms and so on, belong to discourses of diagnosis and prognosis, not art education. Similarly, images of scientific enquiry such as those beamed back from probes about the nature of other planets, the imaging of soil depos-its, computer simulations of the physical habits of dinosaurs, and all the other

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numerous ways in which scientific data are now pictured are, again, ordinarily of no concern to art education. Again, it is only when these images enter discourses about values and beliefs that they become grist to the mill for art education.

What each of the above images share is that no matter how important they are to their respective discourses, from the perspective of art education they ordinarily offer no more than data; they function to provide only useful information in the pursuit of fields other than our own. In Brook’s (1981) view, they are merely first-order signs. Ordinarily, they function like the normal use of road signs. A road sign tells us that this is a particular road, from which we deduce whether we are lost or not. Ordinarily, we are interested in nothing more; we do not look to a road sign to tell us about the nature of signage or the nature of roads, let alone what anyone believes or values about roads. We do not use them as metaphors of roadness; they are not metaphoric.

By contrast, at least three other kinds of imagery are commonly employed metaphorically. These are vernacular or folk art images, mass media images and fine art images. Where a modernist curriculum concerned itself exclu-sively with the latter, a postmodern, visual culture curriculum is concerned with each.

In Brook’s terms, folk, mass media and fine art have in common the fact that they are second-order signs; that is, they point beyond themselves to something else – to ideas, values or beliefs. They are more than immediately useful. In Marx’s (1906) terms, surveillance, medical and scientific imagery are prized predominately because of their use value, whereas with folk, mass media and fine art images, their use value is their sign value.

Vernacular or folk art is the work of amateurs, formally untrained people who make pictures because they enjoy doing so. This applies, for example, to Sunday afternoon painters and scrap bookers as well as the styling of any number of useful items that bespeak of a desire to make everyday items special. Although the mass production of both images and utilitarian goods during the nineteenth century substantially marginalized such vernacular produc-tion (Storey 2003), it never completely disappeared, and today largely as a reaction to mass production many handicraft items are making a comeback. Moreover, electronic technology ensures a wholly unprecedented prolifera-tion of vernacular imagery. Digital technology sees everyone now taking many more photographs than ever before, and social networking sites and YouTube enable many more people to view them than ever before. In various ways, and using both traditional media as well as the latest technology, the prolif-eration and dissemination of imagery by untrained people is unprecedented. Once largely eclipsed by mass production, do-it-yourself imagery has become a major cultural phenomenon in which people express themselves, share their dreams, confess their desires, and assert their beliefs and values. This is popu-lar art in the sense that it bubbles up from below (Williams 1976).

The mass media constitutes a second kind of metaphoric image, a second example of Brook’s (1981) second-order sign. This is popular art in the sense of being consumed by many people (Williams 1976). Owned largely by corpo-rations with global reach, mass media offers up the values of corporate capital as well as mainstream views about a wide range of issues, including race, class, gender, ablebodiness, mental health and so on. All kinds of moral dilemmas and social issues are offered to inform and entertain, but the media primarily act to reinforce existing attitudes and ideas, values and beliefs (Storey 2003). Governed by what most widely appeals to people, the mass media provide a

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lens on what a society believes and values. By studying mass media we learn about a society: its priorities and preoccupations, its conflicts, its moral codes and so on.

Due to the proliferation of such mass market, corporate-produced imagery, the French philosopher Debord ([1967] 1995) characterized modern life in terms of visual spectacle. How much more true is this a characterization of digitally networked societies today than France over 40 years ago? Debord understood society to be more and more subject to persuasion through the manipulative lure of visual imagery. And like Foucault, Debord was highly prescient. Where Foucault’s notion of a society of surveillance has grown ever more important, Debord’s characterization of a society of spectacle has become increasingly relevant.

The fine arts of the art world produce a third kind of metaphoric imagery, a third kind of second-order sign. The fine arts enjoy enormous social pres-tige, what Bourdieu (1984) calls high cultural capital, but compared to the onslaught of mass media and the growth of vernacular imagery, especially the exponential growth of digital forms, the art world produces only a very small per cent of imagery today. Compared to the past, the fine arts are now a highly marginalized, minority activity, largely of interest to only a small section of the middle class and to social elites (Rampley 2005).

This is not to say that fine art is unimportant; the relatively miniscule produc-tion level of the art world is, at least in principle, out of all proportion to its social significance. This is due not only to its cultural capital, but because the art world stands at a distance from the world of mass media, which is enabled because the art world operates largely outside market conditions (Williams 1981). Assisted by government grants, private largesse and benefit-ing financially from the rhetoric of liberality it offers to capitalist corporations who help with sponsorship, the art world is able to offer alternatives. The art world is even able to oppose the values and beliefs propagated by mass culture. Drawing upon its cultural capital, it operates free from the constraints imposed by commercial success.

To understand the relationships between different cultural categories, Williams (1977) tripartite model of culture is helpful: dominant, residual and emergent. Today’s mass culture is what Williams calls dominant culture, partly because there is more of it than any other kind, but principally because it is most closely tied to dominant economic arrangements. It is not that culture is directly determined by the economy; it is more that the economy is a highly significant factor. It is noteworthy that the principle message of television, arguably still the principle cultural form of our time, perfectly articulates the primary need of today’s consumer capitalism; namely, the virtues of unin-terrupted consumption. Meanwhile, the rise of the Internet coincides with its increasing commercialization. Marx (1906), for whom the economy was everything, would not have been surprised.

Williams’ two other kinds of culture are markedly different from one another, one looking backwards, the other looking forwards, yet today both find their home within the art world. First, the art world archives what Williams calls the selected tradition of works from the past. This is what he calls residual culture, a culture that was once dominant, but now consists in the residue of past ways of life. Produced in former times with former values,

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today it is drawn upon to oppose the values of today’s commercial, market-driven dominant culture. For example, the quiet contemplation of the natural world so beloved by the French Impressionists and their public, today asserts a deep human desire that implicitly resists exploitive, commercially driven development.

At the same time, the art world enables what Williams calls emergent culture, culture that is in the process of finding a voice, and because it too is unconstrained by market pressures, it can please itself as to what it offers. Emergent culture presents alternatives and opposition to dominant cultural values. For example, contemporary activist art often opposes commercial exploitation of the environment, and it usually embodies a more demo-cratic, community-based model of society than corporate-owned mass media. Thus does the art world, in its dual roles of archivist to the past and harbinger of possible futures, resist dominant culture and offer alterna-tives. This is not to suggest that residual, dominant and emergent culture is always easy to distinguish in practice (Williams 1977). What is emer-gent is easily appropriated by the dominant in the guise of acceptance. Mass media continually renews itself; for example, by drawing in subjects that were once taboo and attitudes that were once scandalous. Thus the discourses in which images are embedded are not neat, and images often play multiple roles.

Relationships between the different discourses are dynamic, not static; divisions blur and merge, drawing upon, and, in turn, contributing to one another to produce hybrid categories and functions. Images that are usually concerned only with data can on occasion crossover to take up the func-tion of images concerned with beliefs and values. For example, surveil-lance images sometimes become lightning rods in social controversies. Images intended only to prevent and detect crime have sometimes become focal points for broad social issues. Consider the infamous 1993 British case where mall surveillance cameras captured two 10-year olds abduct-ing 2-year-old James Bolger, who they later killed; these images not only helped convict the child perpetrators, the images were caught up in a heated public debate over the nature of childhood (Jenks 1995). The media fanned the flames: what was happening to childhood? What was happening to society? Similarly, images ordinarily concerned with medical and scientific data can be appropriated for the assertion of beliefs and values. Sturken and Cartwright (2001) devote a chapter to scientific and medical imagery in their widely employed textbook on visual culture, and their emphasis is the metaphoric functions of the imagery. Their examples include imagery used in controversies over evolution verses creationism and the existence of God. In short, the normal function of images does not limit the uses to which they can be put.

The divisions between vernacular, mass and fine arts are also flexible. An amateur creates an YouTube video that gains so many hits it is picked up by mainstream media, and moves from one category to another. A fine art block-buster exhibition is promoted in the mass media on the celebrity of an old master and so attracts a mass audience. The art world appropriates the vernac-ular when it showcases Amish quilts, and it appropriates mass culture when a major public gallery programmes a series of classic Hollywood movies.

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Art educators Bolin and Blandy (2003) point out that people make meaning from many things other than two-dimensional images. They even cite cuts of meat and plowed fields. If embracing all images on the basis that they consti-tute beliefs and values causes anxiety among teachers, Bolin and Blandy’s proposal appears prima facie to greatly exasperate the problem of organizing manageable content.

However, the above distinctions prove as useful in considering three- dimensional artefacts, or any other phenomena, as they do in considering two-dimensional images. The distinction between images concerned only with data and those that embody beliefs and values, first-order verses second-order signs, is equally useful in considering all kinds of humanly fashioned artefacts and phenomena. The distinction continues to be founded on when an item is regarded solely for its practical utility and when it is employed to say something beyond itself. A piece of furniture, cutlery, writing pens, build-ings and cars are all fashioned with a function in mind, yet they all also take up positions within a network of values and beliefs. Each has a use value, but each also has a sign value. In Brook’s (1981) terms, they too are second-order signs. As Turkle writes, ‘We think with the objects we love and we love the objects we think with […]. Objects bring together thought and feeling’ (2007: 5, 8). And like individual words that have meaning only in relation to other words, individual consumer goods have no meaning outside their participation in a system of objects. Consider a humble vacuum cleaner. When we purchase a vacuum cleaner we consume the social order that they belong to. We do not just buy a machine that cleans; we buy into assumptions about gender, households, families and social status. In this way, whenever utilitar-ian artefacts are considered in terms of their symbolic or metaphoric associa-tions, they become, potentially, a matter for art education. This applies even to meat cuts, plowed fields and vacuum cleaners. It is only when they are viewed solely in terms of their utilitarian function that they hold no interest for art education.

In summary, art educators are interested in images and artefacts when they are constitutive of beliefs and values that help both to understand society as it is, and also to consider opposing views and alternatives. As art educa-tors we are interested in visual culture that helps understand society and also visual culture that offers the possibility of social transformation.

While I have limited the range of images and artefacts of legitimate concern to art education by virtue of their functions, I have also opened it up well beyond what art teachers normally consider. To understand how it is possible to embrace a seemingly infinite amount of material within the confines of a finite curriculum, it is necessary to make a paradigm shift.

Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Brent Wilson (2000a) describes visual culture in terms of a rhizome. With rhizomes like grass or the Internet mapping in any conventional sense is impossible and therefore irrelevant. With rhizomes there is no hierarchy, and although they must originally start from somewhere, once they begin to grow they appear to be without a discern-able centre and to continually expand outwards from all their edges. In the case of grass one node connects to other nodes, which connect to still others; with the Internet one hyperlink links to another, and so on. In a continual

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state of depletion and creation, the disappearance of one part holds no real consequences because a rhizome is constantly rejuvenated by the addition of other parts. One travels through a rhizome not in a predetermined line but as a nomad, roaming about from place to place for as long as one chooses. With visual culture one image could refer to another image, that is inspired by a novel, that has been translated into a film, that has been adapted from a children’s story, that has become an Internet meme, that echoes a poem, that is informed by a philosophical position, that is grasped through a visual meta-phor, that arises from an image and so on, endlessly. Its all interconnected. No text is an island unto itself for every text is an intertext. This is true for the creation of a rhizome and it is equally true when audiences make their own connections by bringing their own experiences into play in the reading of a rhizome.

Drawing again on Deleuze and Guattari, Wilson notes that if visual culture is like grass, modernists approached art curriculum as if art was a tree, with roots, branches and a trunk. Picture the roots as the various strands of art history and the branches as all the issues with which art deals: race, patriot-ism, gender, idealization and so forth. Then consider that in the modernist curriculum the elements and principles and the particular quality of different media form the trunk. In the modernist curriculum the core, or the founda-tion, link the art historical roots and all the issues.

With this standard modernist curriculum, so important is the formalist core that art history is often entirely seen through a formalist lens; it is even possible for introductory art historical texts to deal with scenes of rape entirely in terms of colour harmonies and dynamic balance, and to completely ignore subject matter (Gaudelius and Moore 1995/1996). In such cases the issues with which images deal are not even mentioned. The approach is linear and hierarchical, the assumption being that the curriculum should proceed from the simple to the complex, the simple being the core or foundation. However, especially in the lower classes, teachers often never move beyond the basics, and students are condemned to produce line exercises and colour wheels grade after grade never discussing the questions, controversies, power strug-gles and so on, that motivate artists and excite audiences.

The flora model of the modernist curriculum as a tree and a postmodern, visual culture curriculum as a rhizome also highlights their relative resilience: weak in the case of a tree-based curriculum and highly resilient in the case of a rhizome-based curriculum. A tree is easily chopped down. If we once suggest that the elements and principles and the particular quality of materi-als never constituted core knowledge and never should have anchored the curriculum in the first place, the very basis of this curriculum falls apart. On the other hand, it is very difficult to kill off a large section of grass; unless a very large amount of poison is employed, what remains will sprout new growth in another space and/or will in time grow back where the grass had been killed. In the case of the human-made Internet, its rhizomic structure was deliberate. The Internet grew out of the US military’s fear that the Soviet Union could with very few missiles knock out the entire basis of military intelli-gence and caused the US to diversify its centres of intelligence into any number of interconnected sites (Negroponte 1995). Even if a large number of sites were destroyed, enough would likely survive such that the system would not only continue to operate, it would be able to regenerate what had been lost.

The resilience of visual culture should be self-evident from everyone’s everyday experience. The task for art education then is to build curriculum

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that is commensurate with the resilience of visual culture by embracing its rhizomic structure.

Examples of rhizomic curriculum have been developed by Wilson (2000b), Tavin (2002), Taylor (2000), Taylor and Carpenter (2003), Carpenter and Taylor (2006), Herrmann (2006) and myself (Duncum 2006a). Below, I describe just two exercises I undertake with my pre-service art teachers, which are based largely on the work of my colleagues just mentioned.

A few years ago I had students create an electronic rhizomic site using the hyperlink facility on PowerPoint. Creating a rhizome has to start some-where, so I asked students to select an image that interested them and to link it to three or four main issues that it appeared to concern. One student began with a photograph of the cast of Disney’s Broadway play Avenue Q, which she linked to the lyrics of songs used in the show. These included refer-ences to race, sexism, censorship and homophobia. Among the many links she made to race were photographs and texts from white supremacy groups in the United States, Nazi propaganda and anti-semitic woodcuts from the sixteenth century. She broke censorship into various media, including books, movies and art. She dealt with sexism using advertisements from the past as well as the present, and nudity in western art and current popular movies. She explored homophobia with then current controversies over the changing of laws and how images of gays and lesbians are depicted in United States sitcoms. Each of her four issues were introduced with dictionary definitions, and each were also internally linked; for example, she found that the Third Reich’s censorship of books and art was related to race and homophobia, and through the derogatory depiction of black females she linked sexism to racism. When the time came to wrap up the exercise, she said that she felt as though she was only just getting started.

More recently, I have employed a low-tech approach and involved the whole class in the production of an intertext using paper, push pins, woolen yard and a large pin board. In the following example the class started with a recent picture of Brittany Spears. Spears was selected because the students were talking about her at the time and because I felt that she epitomized many social conflicts both contemporary and of long-standing. The class began by brain-storming what associations she evoked for them. These included celebrity culture, body image, sexuality, children and child abuse, music videos, mental illness, families and popular magazine covers. We then created an intertext. I began by placing in the centre of the pin board a picture of the pop idol taken from the net, and the students then placed images they had gathered from the net and elsewhere of each of the issues above. The students also pinned up dictionary definitions, newspaper articles and statements of their own views. The class used coloured yarn to link from the original picture to their issues and then from their issues to other related issues. By the end the students had made so many connections and the board was so crisscrossed with yarn that the original starting point was almost buried among the connections.

A lengthy discussion ensued on the way in which each of the above issues had been represented, including stereotypical representations and how they connected to one another. How, for example, does the media fall back on stereotypical representations of mental illness, a subject that is not inherently visual? As the teacher with more art historical knowledge than the students,

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I made reference to the paintings of Gericault, and as follow-up research two students began to explore historical representations of the mentally ill in which Gericault’s images were contextualized by his contemporary’s understand-ing of mental illness. Two other students searched online image banks to find contemporary fine art dealing with mental illness. A similar scenario developed with the representation of celebrity. I made some historical and cross-cultural connections to icons, illustrating the very different kinds of notoriety that have garnered attention in other societies, and several students began investigating this in some depth. The same thing occurred with families. Introducing the idea that historically there have been many models of the family motivated several students to research how families have had themselves represented in the past. They looked at master paintings and old photographs and made comparisons with today’s informal snapshots. Other students researched the other topics mentioned above. Finally, students linked up some of the asso-ciations; for example, childhood imagery with representations of family, celeb-rity with childhood through famous prodigies, and students found that it was possible to link celebrity with families through Hello Magazine. In each case we considered the images and written material to understand how strategies of visual representation embodied the technology and social preoccupations of their makers.

By the conclusion of these exercises it becomes apparent to all that there is no end of further connections that could be made both between the issues and outwards to other issues. Starting from a single source and moving later-ally, students were able to make connections with many forms of representa-tion, past and present, across cultures, in a variety of media, and manifesting a huge range of issues that provide alternative ways to consider current issues, issues that excited and motivated them.

Teachers understandably feel anxiety over proposals to embrace everyday visual culture, and my strategy to overcome these anxieties has been twofold: first, to eliminate a great deal of material that is not germane to our enter-prise. My suggestion is to consider all imagery when it deals with beliefs and values but to exclude imagery when it is concerned only with data. Thus, I am defining the field in terms of the function of imagery rather than tradi-tional categories. My second suggestion is to reconceptualize what it means to define art education as rhizomic rather than as a map. The latter means embracing a territory that has no centre, is non-hierarchical, dynamic and infinitely expandable.

There is much I have not addressed. For example, I have not discussed at any length reasons for embracing visual culture, which I and others have done elsewhere (e.g. Duncum 2002), considered appropriate pedagogy (e.g. Duncum 2009a), described the complexity of introducing a visual culture curriculum (e.g. Duncum 2006b) or explored the relationship between image making and critique (Duncum 2003). I have not attempted to outline the many descriptions by other art educators of their classroom practice (reviewed in Duncum 2009b), or the problems encountered in limiting ourselves to visual modes of communication (e.g. Duncum 2004), or the limits imposed by privi-leging the sense of sight above other senses (Duncum in press). There is much to consider as one paradigm gives way to another, but having teachers feel less anxiety about a visual culture curriculum is a beginning.

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Duncum, P. (2012), ‘Roaming the rhizomic playing field of visual culture in art education’, Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art 1: 2, pp. 111–122, doi: 10.1386/vi.1.2.111_1

Paul Duncum is Professor of Art Education at the School of Art and Design, The University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana. He gained his doctorate from The Flinders University of South Australia. He has widely published in art education journals in the areas of his research and teaching, which include children’s unsolicited drawings, images of children, critical theory and art education, and popular culture, all primarily framed in terms of Cultural Studies. He is a leading advocate of visual culture in art education.

Contact: School of Art and Design, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL, 61820, USA. E-mail: pduncum@illinois.edu

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