Reading Between the Obliques

A/r/tography, a research methodology featured in a special issue of Visual Arts Research (Irwin & Sinner, 2012), is said to be a critical response to normative approaches to qualitative research in arts education. A/r/tography critiques research that privileges one identity, that of researcher, over other identities, including artist and teacher. It assumes emotional and political engagement on the part of the artist/researcher/teacher. A/r/tography views the desire for coherence and certainty in research as quixotic because lived experiences neither cohere nor are they certain. It critiques representations of complex social worlds and their actors when reduced to unreal composites, caricatures, and typologies. A/r/tographers instead embrace contiguous identities and represent multiple meanings using multiple modes. Constructed and interpreted meanings are carried forward through a/r/tographers’ bodies as lived experiences (i.e., “embodiment”), and these constructed meanings remain open to new interpretations.

The diversity of contributions in the VAR special issue (Irwin & Sinner, 2012) shows that there is no single approach to a/r/tographic representation. Yet, its preferred style leans toward the postmodern, a self-conscious and opaque approach that is less concerned with making sense than saying something about the making of sense itself. A/r/tographers use stylized language, maintain ambiguity, and seek irony. They do not refer to some fixed or final understanding of reality, but locate their representations in time and place and refer to the time and place through which their representations have arisen. This ironic self-referentiality is evident in Leggo’s (2012) observation that a/r/tography’s obliques (i.e., “/”) can be considered by some as “pretentious postmodern posturing like gaudy tattoos for scholars who eschew clarity, coherence, and convention” (p. 2). Through his ode to the pretentiousness and gaudiness of the oblique, Leggo’s witty self-referentiality neutralizes the critique of a/r/tography’s “postmodern posturing” by reclaiming it.

Postmodern representation in arts education typified by a/r/tography comes at a curious time. In the 1990s, it became clear that postmodernism was no longer the radical counter-discourse of earlier times; it had become the dominant one. But postmodernist discourse in arts education has neither gained the same dominance nor arisen at the same time as other disciplines. Both its relative lag and non-normative status are evident in arts education’s push for Discipline Based Arts Education (DBAE) as other disciplines took up postmodernist discourse. Indeed DBAE can be interpreted as a reaction to pressure to defend the epistemic legitimacy of arts education whereas postmodernism in arts education undermines that very notion. Then and now, taking the postmodern path in arts education is double trouble for a field whose legitimacy is doubted already in many quarters.

A/r/tography’s ascension in arts education today occurs when postmodern discourse has outlived its strong intellectual contributions, particularly its attention to politics of difference and injustice. A/r/tography’s vital contribution to arts education is that it obscures the false, trichotomous separation of artist, teacher, and researcher. But in the current climate, with massive information flows and the push for open, accessible scholarship, does getting to the point in a clearly articulated manner gain new dominance? And does getting to the point clearly become one approach to scholarly “tidbits” (Lucero, 2014), which are prefigured by popular culture’s 140-character treatises and 15-second video memes?

By taking Clark/Keefe’s (2012) a/r/tographic representation and emphasizing essential words through found poetry analysis (cf. Prendergast, 2012; Wiggins, 2011), we interrogated these questions. This repurposed representation can be read as written and reread as emphasized to contest two contrasting tidbits.

The image titled A/R/Tographic Back Tracks enfolds my attempts to approach analysis of and to work generously across two intellectual and subjective spaces that I occupy. The first space approached through production of the painted image centers the often-antagonistic methodological disciplinary discourses of interpretivism, poststructuralism, and material feminism. Painting, I mine the Deleuzian-induced force and rhythm of becoming-a/r/tographical, working in the middle of these disciplinary discourses as a creative, embodied, and...