Abstract :
The collection of essays within Spectacle Pedagogy: Art, Politics, and Visual Culture, written following the 9/11 attacks and war in Iraq, make a case for the broadening of art and visual culture education to include critiques and art making related to the mass-mediated spectacle of visual culture. The art making strategies of collage, montage, assemblage, and installation and performance art are promoted as significant curricular and pedagogical approaches through which students and teachers can question and critique the complexity of political and visual cultural codes and ideologies inherent within visual culture, and so involve themselves meaningfully as critical and cultural citizens within a democracy.