Kevin Tavin
Angels, Ghosts, and Cannibals
Essays on art education and visual culture
100323
Kevin Tavin's book personifies a journey through art education at the beginning of the twentieth-first century. Starting with advancing critical pedagogy and visual studies, the book establishes a path for the movement of visual culture. It then attempts to wrestle with speculative angels and search for liminal apparitions within theory and practice of visual culture. This includes struggling to create a theoretical framework and position specific examples for art education. The essays begin to shift from a critical pedagogy perspective to one informed by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory. The second part of the book embodies an attempt to turn visual culture and art education on its head, so to speak. In total, the book may be read as an assemblage of ideas, provocations, and suggestions for cannibalizing theory and self-cannibalizing practice of art education, as we move toward a post-visual culture era, as well as a personal and professional challenge to know, and remain in doubt.