From Imitation and Invention vs Deconstruction to Unconstructed Practice: Teaching Painting in digitally distracted times

In ‘The End of Ism’s and the Beginning Hegemony of the Impure’Jörg Heiser suggests artists are set adrift on a sea of possibilities in which everything that has gone before is broken in to pieces. They must construct a practice from fragments of arts histories and “it is not the most beautiful raft that counts but the one that takes you the furthest”. But what if those fragments have been reduced to an image encountered without context? What then holds the raft together?

This paper develops Thierry de Duve’s 1994 essay – When Form Has Become Attitude and Beyond in which he outlines the history of antagonistic approaches to art School education from "Talent vs Creativity" to "Imitation and Invention vs Deconstruction". I will suggest that art students are developing a fragmented understanding of the history of painting gleaned through fleeting encounters of images on social media detached from context. This allows a form of andragogy that is leading to Unconstructed Practice rather than something built or deconstructed.

Here the storm of social media has caused shipwrecks which have deterritorialized paintings pluralistic histories. The image without context has led to a form of Unconstructed practice –failing to learn from history and reducing the understanding of painting to a digital equivalent: a form of pure spectacle. As a result the teaching of painting faces new challenges which need to be addressed.