Pedagogies of nation: Terra nullius, the Group of Seven and the experience of art

Pedagogies of Nation: Terra Nullius, the Group of Seven and the Experience of Art elaborates a multidisciplinary method for creating image-spaces which challenge and possibly disconnect the experience of art from such practices of identification as nationalism and 'race'. In the first chapter, methods from the fields of Art History, Sociology, Visual Culture and Museum Studies are critiqued. The first chapter concludes by suggesting that the technique of Collage is the most suggestive visual technique for developing critical pedagogies of art. In the second chapter, the theoretical and methodological concerns of Walter Benjamin, Dorothy Smith and Michel Foucault are explored for how those concerns might support Collage as a way of theorizing the experience of art. The chapter concludes by arguing that the experience of images is necessarily complex in its mediation among multiple possibilities of interpretation and social and institutional organization. Both these aspects of visual experience must be understood for a critical pedagogy of art. In the third chapter, the visual methodologies of the critical avant garde are discussed including the work of curators and artists who attempt to Collage art work and social critique. The chapter concludes by recommending that an artistic practice known as Institutional Critique holds possibilities for critical pedagogy of art. The final two chapters of Pedagogies of Nation apply the methodological exploration of the first three chapters to the problem of nation and national identification in the work of the Group of Seven. They look specifically at how the social history of the Group of Seven's work as 'art for a nation' is still the most active and prominent constituent of the installation of the work at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. By exploring the methodological possibilities of the term terra nullius, the final chapters argue that the history of nation the Group of Seven's work is called on to represent is a partial history and one which occludes marginalized or even annihilated histories such as those of aboriginal peoples. In order to question and perhaps break the viewer's identification with the work as national art, Pedagogies of Nation concludes by reinstalling the Group of Seven's work in an image-space of contemporary art work.