Flight, Climate Change, and Dangerous Times for Art and Pedagogy

Abstract

In his last book Chaosmosis, Felix Guattari (1995, p. 129) argues that both “intellectuals and artists have got nothing to teach anyone,” and that they produce “toolkits composed of concepts, percepts and affects, which diverse publics will use at their convenience.” In this video presentation and accompanying article, the authors explore Guattari’s claim as a provocation for visual pedagogy and play with the idea that an artist might have nothing to teach anyone in relation to the idea of visual pedagogies. And, then, what happens when an artist and a teacher talk about visual pedagogies? To open up a dialogue, they employ the cliché, ‘I don’t know much about art but I know what I like’. This statement invites thoughts on the tensions between truth-telling, disciplinarity, and affect. Here the authors take the cliché a step further within the context of visual pedagogies and meaning making. They position this dialogue with the cinematic art work, Flight (2018), which aims to give the viewer a different sensation of the world, to render the familiar unfamiliar, and to let things be (Roder & Sturm, 2017), in order to think differently.