Teaching in Spectacular Times: Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture

Teaching in Spectacular Times: Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture CR. Garoian, & Y. Gaudelius (2008). Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN 9780791473863 (paperback).In Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture (2008), Charles Garoian and Yvonne Gaudelius explore and expose, but do not entirely explicate, the complex and nuanced relationships among art, politics, and visual culture through a concept they describe as "spectacle pedagogy" (p. 1). Organized as a non-linear collection of essays, the book reflects the artistic strategies of collage, montage, assemblage, and installation as "spaces" through which "students can learn to create immanent critiques of the spectacle of visual culture through artmaking" (p. 1). I have chosen three essays that articulate what I believe to be foundational concepts for this book: essay one, "The Embodied Pedagogy of War;" essay two, "The Spectacle ofVisual Culture;" and essay six, "Curriculum and Pedagogy as Collage Narrative."Reading the book requires that readers actively contribute to the collaborative text begun by Garoian and Gaudelius - a process approximating one of the text's central themes regarding our experience of a visually pervasive mediated culture, here, termed spectacle. Ubiquitous imagery alone does not suggest the importance of visual culture study. Living and teaching in a visually saturated environment requires pedagogical approaches that correspond to the effects of the spectacle. Accordingly, "spectacle pedagogy" must be "theorized and practiced as collage, a disjunctive, stuttering process where art teachers' personal and academic understandings" (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008, p. 1 18) are considered always in relation to the experiences and cultural histories of their students.Providing us with a working concept of spectacle, Guy Debord's (1 994) text, The Society of the Spectacle, claimed that the spectacle represented a substitute for experience and alienated individuals from lived reality by turning them into consumers of both images and experiences as commodities. The Society of the Spectacle (originally written in 1967) came to prominence in the wake of the student uprisings in Paris universities during May of 1 968 while Garoian and Gaudelius (2008) remark that their book was written in the "shadow of 9/11 "(p. 1). In both cases, the commodification and distribution of information and visual media raised skepticism regarding the origins, purposes, and uses of images. It is this condition of the spectacle that Garoian and Gaudelius explore in the first essay, "The Embodied Pedagogy of War."Presented as a transcription of a performance, the first essay is constructed as a series of fragmented texts alternately spoken by each author. Passages in this essay range from the mundane - "The Sunbeam toaster requires your body to push down a lever after it places the slices in its slots" (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008, p. 12)- to the provocative: "an electrode embedded in a nerve in the neck activates a generator every few seconds, preventing epileptic seizures and alleviating depression (Harper, 2002, p. 54 quoted in Garoian and Gaudelius, p. 15). The juxtaposition and integration of these passages, both literally on the page and in the mind of the reader, replicate one's experience of the spectacle. Through the interchange among ordinary bodily actions, snippets of news reports about the war in Iraq, and biomedical information, this text performs the effect of the spectacle's inscription on the body. The reader experiences information not only as data transmission received through the eyes and ears, but also as a bodily experience conceived by and through the mediated distribution of images and soundsThis essay illustrates two opposing notions of spectacle pedagogy. On the one hand, the spectacle represents an "ever-present form of propaganda in the service of cultural imperialism" (Garoian & Gaudelius, 2008, p. …