On the Impossibility of Life in Art and Education

There is a historical tendency in art education to envision both art and education as integral parts of the development and sustainment of individual human life and a just society. While this conception has enabled art educators to tackle various societal issues in their profession, it reduces the societal presence of art education into a predetermined narrative of completion and conservative politics where everything eventually finds its allegedly right place and function. In this article, I historicize this argument by examining how human life and its development have been tied to the goals of public art education in the United States in the early decades of the 20th century and reflect on what kind of tradition of political thought have they upheld. In order to eventually offer an alternative approach to politics of art education, I end this article by sketching an impossible relation between art, education, and human life that would not consider human agency and its development as given categories but as modalities of being that have radical potentialities beyond predetermined actualizations.