Conflict and Consensus: Art Dialogues in Rogue Academies

This paper considers the growing use of the collective experience of dialogue and pedagogy in contemporary visual art projects. In order to explore new transformative platforms for education, I examine alternative pedagogical modes of collaborative practice, as a critique of academia.

This research is contiguous with ongoing political and historical debates surrounding the reframing of art education in the 21st Century. A measure of this argument is centered on a renewed energy surrounding socially-engaged and collaborative forms of art practice in recent decades; modes of operation that question the authority of the modernist hegemony in art education in this country. Very little research has been undertaken in the field of dialogical and pedagogical practice where artists, rather than academics and other professionals, are infiltrating the field of epistemology.

The subject of focus will be the alternative art school, Our Day Will Come (ODWC), an event that set up a mutually symbiotic relationship with Tasmanian School of Art during the spring of 2011. The collaborative artwork was by Irish-born artist–curator Paul O’Neill who brought a number of international artists to Tasmania, whose work is within the realm of dialogue and pedagogy. The infiltration into the small arts community by outsiders—along with the generative nature of the work, is conveniently framed within the conference topic—‘creative outposts’. At issue, and the basis of my PhD thesis, are the conversational principles of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and an exploration into conflict and consensus; binaries that fueled creative agency between the local and interloper during the ODWC project.