Videos
Art's Exiting into the World, All For the Arts, London
Art’s Exiting into the World: Willed Strangers in Pursuit of Inclusion presented at All For the Arts, Goldsmith’s University of London, England in November 2022.
This conversation presents inclusion as a plurality of possibilities that emerge from three instances: belonging, unlearning, and exiting. Outside art making, to pose exiting as a form of inclusion would sound like a play on words. But here I want to take inclusion beyond that closed meaning where “to include” is often confused with “to assimilate.” If, by doing art, we find ways of unlearning a walled sense of inclusion, then exiting provides a way into a wider world. Exiting into the world seeks to surpass the limits of existence. To do art within the purview of education also alerts us to what Maxine Greene calls the teacher’s ability to enter the classroom as a stranger. While I will refer to various examples in art and education, I intend to elaborate on my books Art’s Way Out (2012), Art as Unlearning (2019) and Lessons of belonging (2023).
Art as Unlearning, In Conversation with Professor John Baldacchino
Art as Unlearning, Guest Lecture Series Event: In Conversation with John Baldacchino (Kathrina Farrugia-Kriel, moderator) at the Royal Academy of Dance, London, England in February 2022.
The Guest Lecture Series 2021-22 brought well-respected dance and education practitioners and scholars from world-learning universities to RAD communities. The series of events continued with the theme of arts education. RAD invited speaker Professor John Baldacchino who spoke about arts pedagogy, the legacy of his mentor Sir Ken Robinson (1950-2020), and the value of (un)learning through art education. This event will be of interest to those invested in the arts, education and dance pedagogy.
#sacredconversations - John Baldacchino & Mario Cassar
A conversation about art between Professor John Baldacchino and Gozitan artist Mario Cassar, part of a series of discussions about the identity of art and its autonomy not just from the viewers but also from the artist themselves.
Rubble walls of Contingency: Language, the Self and the Mediterranean Imaginary
Rubble Walls of Contingency: Language, the Self, and the Mediterranean Imaginary at the Institute of Mediterranean Studies, University of Malta, Msida, Malta in November 2021.
Though Professor Baldacchino is not a linguist by trade, writing a book “of” (rather than “about”) literary philosophy in Maltese with the intent of exploring the interrelationship between the experience of the contingent self, displacement, and the pain of beauty, became, in many ways, a linguistic affair. In this lecture, Prof. Baldacchino will explore how doing philosophy in Maltese brings one to engage with disciplines in which one was entirely educated in other languages (in this case, primarily in English and Italian), and how this opens up new opportunities that move inwards as well as outwards. This aspect of directional thinking, as it were, also enters those immanent and external spheres by which phenomenology and aesthetics are put in play. Here, Baldacchino is referring to how the “musk” of one’s language (a term whose linguistic use he first encountered in Seamus Heaney’s take on poetry’s indigeneity) is bound to carry one’s philosophical and literary imaginary onto a wide horizon whose boundaries could only be likened to the porousness of rubble walls. Such walls—these ħitan tas-sejjieħ—tend to mark territories while facilitating a high degree of fluency between them, to the extent that here we could speak of bocage as a contingency of meaning just as bricolage implies an act of an intentional weaving. With this in mind, in this lecture Prof. Baldacchino will reflect on the process of writing in Maltese as a means by which contingency as an approach to living and thinking, remains core to the understanding of how the self is immersed in what we broadly identify with the poetics (and therefore, the making) of the Mediterranean imaginary.
Not a lecture on Gramsci, UW Madison
Not a lecture on Gramsci, a Faculty Colloquium public lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in October 2021.
A conversation about John Baldacchino’s written and studio work, intended to introduce faculty work and research to the UW-Madison community.
vEDUti John Baldacchino, University of Malta
A conversation between Professor John Baldacchino and Professor Camel Borg about art education, part of a series of webinars at the University of Malta, entitled vEDUti, which welcomes prominent authors.
Formative aesthetics and the contradiction of teaching, Aula Magna, Porto
Formative aesthetics and the contradiction of teaching (Estética formativa e a contradição do ensino) presented at Aula Magna, Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto, Portugal in December 2019.
While we often assume that teaching art is inherently to do with a formative aesthetic, this needs to be qualified by the context of teaching itself and more so the inherent paradox that it carries as a pedagogical ‘practice’. Beyond the rather facile question ‘Can art be taught?’, the responsibility and implication of teaching (as such and not limited to art education) carries both a challenge to what we mean by ‘aesthetics’ in a schooled context, and more so what do our pedagogical values consist of. Here I will explore and interrogate with you what we often assume as being ‘givens’ in teaching, and how these are challenged when the issue of a ‘formative aesthetic’ comes in. More so, we need to bear in mind that a ‘formative’ aesthetic is not always or only concerned with ‘teaching art’ but with a wider concern for aspects of formativity which we often identify with learning, unlearning, growth, development, understanding, and all of those assumptions by which we tend to define education as such. A particular focus on the idea of ‘form’ and the ‘formative’, will help us open up this horizon into several possibilities which more often than not come to us as a surprise, and by which we also challenge what (and how) we regard ourselves to be and do as teachers (and artists).
Arts Agön, October Arts Research Forum, UW Madison
Arts Agön, February Arts Research Forum, UW Madison
Arts researchers shared their work with each other and with campus colleagues, creating connections and encouraging dialogue at the first event in a new series, titled “Arts Agôn: A Forum Where Arts Researchers Connect.”
Beatified Lying: Make-belief and truthfulness in the democratic imaginary, Annual Philosophy Sharing Lecture, Valletta
Beatified Lying: Make-belief and truthfulness in the democratic imaginary at the Annual Philosophy Sharing Lecture in Valletta, Malta in March 2018.
In this lecture John Baldacchino argues that the act of lying has been gradually beatified as a political-aesthetic event. The beatification of lying inaugurated the substitution of democracy with what Baldacchino identifies with the society of myth. This is possible because in the language of myth the process by which lying is structured as a polity of representation is mostly taken in its state of immediacy. As such, the practice of lying now deceives itself in that its validation comes from a procedure that lost its mediating virtue. This is to say that, in their beatified state, lies and acts of lying are no longer virtuous, and less so effective in their pursuit of fairness and democracy. Philosophically speaking, lies have become meaningless to the polity because no one believes a lie anymore. The lie is now misconstrued by mechanisms of deception and lost its ability to become truthful. To understand this apparent paradox one needs to recognise how the polity of representation has been reduced to a positivist structure where facts are artefacts and deception suffers the same fate as knowledge, which is reduced to an epistemology that lacks any gnoseological value. Here Baldacchino argues that: Firstly, just like truth, the lie is no longer dialectical, but has become relational. Secondly, forms of instrumentalised forms of relationality have become commonplace in the structure of representation. Thirdly, relational representation is acting as a surrogate form of relativism where the vacuum left by the retreat of the virtuous lie has weakened democracy and any other form of societal living to the extent that, what Gillian Rose aptly calls “the fascism of representation”, has become a way of life with all the consequences thereof.
Painting Workshop with The Studio Seminar, UW Madison
John Baldacchino joined The Studio Seminar class for a collaborative Painting Workshop in December 2017 in The Studio’s Blackbox space in Sellery Hall. The students were directed to break into groups and create collaborative drawings and further work them into collaboratively made paintings. At the end of the class, each group presented their work.
What Does Arts Research Look Like at UW-Madison?
A talk given in September 2017 at the launch of a new symposium about arts research at University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin.
The arts are key to the creation of new knowledge through research, whether it takes the form of arts practice as method of inquiry; historical research through curation; arts in science research; arts educational research; or arts impact studies. This exploratory conversation by invited arts research practitioners and leaders about the scope and variety of arts research at UW-Madison in the context of national and international conversations took place on Monday, September 25 in the Discovery Building. The goal of this multidisciplinary panel was to develop strategies to enhance and grow arts research on campus.
(Un)doing arts pedagogy, Visiting Arts Colloquium, UW Madison
(Un)doing arts pedagogy at the Visiting Artist Colloquium, University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin in September 2017.
Arts Institute Director John Baldacchino participated in the Art Department Visiting Artist Colloquium. The program plays a vital role in the department by exposing young artists to the latest developments in fine art, craft and design.
UW-Madison Arts on Campus
Explore the arts at the University of Wisconsin – Madison with Arts Institute Director John Baldacchino.
Art±education: as a method of the more or less, University of Porto
Art±education: as a method of the more or less at the 2nd Encounter on Practices of Research in Arts Education, University of Porto, Portugal.
Within the Outwith: Undoing Art, Unlearning Education, University of Dundee
Within the Outwith: Undoing Art, Unlearning Education, Professorial Talk at the University of Dundee.
Art as unlearning: finding a place, University of the West of Scotland
Art as Unlearning: finding a place, University of the West of Scotland Artist Teacher Programme at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Scotland in February 2013.
“As I have argued in my recent paper Willed Forgetfulness, to make a case for unlearning is to reject the assumption that somehow, unlearning will become a new model for education. Unlearning is neither a new pedagogy, nor a new way of doing art. There is nothing new in unlearning. Unlearning is implied in what we are by dint of what we do…and vice-versa. The focus of unlearning is found in the paradox that seems to happen between being and doing and which we always find much much later. So where does art come into this? Art is, amongst other, unlearning per se. It is such a space, such a place, such a moment… such an afterthought that we realize much much later. Though as I say this…I begin to doubt!”
Lecture on influence and the canonical in Peter Sant’s film I Yam what I Yam … L’invenzione, Valletta
Lecture on influence and the canonical in Peter Sant’s film I Yam what I Yam … L’invenzione at a Private Screening & Seminar, St James Cavalier, Valletta, Malta in October 2012.