| How can a pedagogical and creative practice coexist? Where are the interstices of these two practices that highlight both of their potentialities? How do pedagogy and contemporary art practices challenge and reflect each other to generate new ways of working? Is there a moment when pedagogy and art practice are the same thing? What type of agency can this pedagogy-art confluence create for a learner? This dissertation was conceptualized as a written artwork to make proposals around these topics. The author, coming from a studio art background and having taught at both the high school and college level proposes strategies for examining conceptual art in order to discover "ways of being", which can merge the efforts of pedagogues and artists more readily.;Examining how conceptual art affronts the entrenched labor-equals-rigor models of Western art, the author points to how these subversive modes of operation expand curricular practice. Conceptual art modes such as durational art, relational aesthetics, bricolage, and civic engagement art are placed alongside the non-linear concept of currere (Pinar and Grumet, 1976), or "living curriculum" in order to reconfigure pedagogy as contemporary art practice. Latin American conceptualism is examined as a mode that demarcates a local, hybridized pedagogy as conceptualist practice. Among others, the 1920's work of Los Estridentistas and the contemporary conceptualism of Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer is examined. The dissertation also catalogues the author's personal practice through pedagogy as contemporary art practice. Classroom and gallery projects are examined. The author's collaboration with the Chicago performance group Goat Island, his research into the pedagogy of experimental composer John Cage, and one of the author's own autoethnographic performance texts (Denzin, 2003) are included in this dissertation. An analysis of these modes of working is proposed, offering that a pedagogical practice imbricated with a conceptual art practice permits for a more emancipatory pedagogical and creative enterprise. The dissertation ends with evidence of the author's critical discoveries as a first generation Mexican-American navigating the complexities of class, privilege, and race in American schooling---through art education---attaining agency and a more sentient presence in the world. |
