Foucault, visual arts, art teaching: a whole other approach

Abstract

Based on some of Michel Foucault's theorizations about visual arts, this article intends to prospect possible contributions to art teaching. When tracing the writings of the French thinker and some of his commentators on the subject, the question of the disjunctive relationship between image, word, and representation is highlighted. It is known that the image is a kind of touchstone for art teaching since at least the creation of the Fine Arts Academies and, in the case of art teaching in Brazil, it figured in a systematized way from the late 1980s, with the so-called Triangular Proposal. More recently, through intercultural, multiculturalist, and visual culture approaches, the plea for expanding the notion of image in visual arts education is attested. Proposing an analytical gaze, from a Foucauldian perspective, on the non-complementary relationship between image and word allows, after all, the temporality of images to emerge, changing the nature of what is seen and who sees it, in an opposite way to the representational assumption of a faithful testimony or even a universal classificatory recognition. Hence, in the company of Didi-Huberman, it is possible to conclude that to see images, in time, is to stand before the archive of the world. In short, it is our own experience that is strengthened there.