Encountering the image of thought in artmaking

Abstract

Drawing from observations by contemporary art critic Jerry Saltz that recent art-school graduates are producing work that imitates the styles of successful and established artists and movements, this article explores how the ways in which artist-students are taught in university art programmes might potentially impact their postgraduate art practices. If art school-educated professional artists do indeed tend to adhere to prescriptive modes of artmaking, what are some ways in which university art educators might disrupt these habits at the outset for art students who are just starting out in a college art programme? To contemplate this question, this article engages Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s philosophical concept of the encounter as one approach that might trigger a new kind of thought in learning and artmaking, which informed a teaching experiment that I undertook with one of my introductory art courses. The implantation and reflection on this teaching experiment illustrates how teachers at all levels of art education might create their own adaptive forms of experimenting with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the encounter to short circuit such emulative modes of thinking in students’ approaches to artmaking.