Research in Visual Arts Education - The National Society for ...

MEDIATED ACTION AND AESTHETIC LEARNING
are inspired by “the methods of art”. “The radical aesthetics” of art – or
rather of contemporary Western art – is described in terms such as open,
questioning and critical:
The strength of art is rather that curiosity and questions, contradictions and uncertainty
may persist. (…) A radical aesthetics should not exclude what is fraught with conflict or
unpredictable. It should challenge conventions and routines by making familiar things
appear unfamiliar, shifting perspectives and turning things upside down. (Thavenius,
2004, p. 120)
Tomas Saar (2005), in an ethnographic study, uses a similar description of
the potential power of art. He makes a distinction between a “strong” aesthetics,
which challenges us to look at things in new perspectives or notice
their ambiguity, and a “weak” aesthetics, which is used to support, illustrate
or embellish a given body of knowledge.
Aesthetic education as mediated action
In En kulturskola för alla [A Culture School for All; Marner & Örtegren,
2003] and Möten & medieringar [Meetings & Mediations; Marner, 2005],
Anders Marner, together with Hans Örtegren, analyse issues in the Swedish
discourse on aesthetic education. They claim, like James Wertsch (1991),
that human action typically employs “mediational means” such as tools
and language, and that the mediation shapes the action in essential ways.
Marner and Örtegren (2003) share the vision by Aulin-Gråhamn, Thavenius
and others of the school as a seedbed for democracy. However, they criticise
their colleagues for
… neglecting the medium-specific competence in favour of a medium-neutral perspective.
In the long run, this will impair efforts to implement aesthetic projects, since students
and teachers who already master the particular medium, will be the only ones to take the
risk of entering into a medium-specific dialogue (s. 78).
Referring to Lev Vygotsky’s theory of creativity (Vygotskij, 1995), they reject
the idea of a sovereign subject who freely expresses herself, relying on the
impulse of the moment, independent of any medium-specific competence
and with no concern about communicative genres. Such an idea of aesthetic
expression, emanating from Romanticism, makes the mistake of looking
upon the medium as being no more than a neutral surface. In the mediumspecific
perspective of Marner and Örtegren, the rhetoric about the child’s
60 NORDIC VISUAL ARTS EDUCATION IN TRANSITION