This paper considers the complex and multi-layered nature of critical thinking in art school education by examining its relationship to subjectivity and time. In his 2018 book How Art Can Be Thought Allan deSouza insists on the art school studio group critique as ‘a primary mode of art pedagogy.’ Concentrating an embodied, sensory and participatory ‘practice of thinking together,’ deSouza praises the breadth of engagement that it requires of students in their ‘movement between fields’ of art history and critical discourses as well as the ‘flexibility’ necessary in ‘being able to adapt language from different sources.’ Combining reasoning, insight and practicality, criticality in these terms is a highly-prized outcome of art programmes that may be seen as exemplary in creating ‘independent thinkers.’

This paper focuses on the student’s encounter with existing bodies of knowledge, theories, methods, and acquired perspectives, taking what is implicit in critique and considering it as an encounter with what comes to mediate student’s subjective histories. Accepting deSouza’s contention that critique analytically uncovers genealogies of the present in order to release potentialities for social change, this paper argues that this critical manoeuvre requires an affective temporal ‘disjuncture’ between the student and existing knowledge such that its value, significance and purpose is not fully bounded in its immediate reception. As Lisa Baraitser asserts ‘acts of ‘beginning’ are taken up … intergenerationally’ and for this reason it will be argued that an orientation and critical agency only emerges through its resonant repetitions in the subjective present.

The paper asks two basic questions: 1. what is the distribution of the work of critical thinking in art school pedagogy (as it relates to critical studies and studio components of a Fine Art programme)? 2. How do subjective histories affect the ways in which one enters into and takes up critical work (as a project of thinking)?

The paper addresses these questions through examining specific assertions and claims in pedagogic literature and by reflecting on particular student responses to Critical Studies syllabi and learning through an engagement with critical discourses. Specifically, it discusses Allan deSouza’s exemplary account of an art school’s group studio critique in How Art Can Be Thought (2018), which offers a vision of critique as a thinking together that entails many of the aspects and aspirations of Critical Theory as an academic, politically-orientated discipline and field of research. While deSouza offers a compelling account of what critique is, it relegates the study of the critical writing, critical discourses and art theory to the status of ‘tools’ for participatory thinking. This paper challenges this view by considering the implications of student responses to Critical Studies department teaching by highlighting two key points: firstly, that the work of critical thinking is already prefigured in critical writing in various ways, and, secondly, that the way in which one engages with critical histories of art and critical theory is determined in part by subjective histories and a generational questioning. Drawing on psycho-social studies theory (specifically, the writing of Lisa Baraitser), this paper points to ways that teaching and critical engagement is inter-generational and is conditioned in these terms by one’s relationship to the experience of time and the capacity to narrate, both of which are a decisive factors in how one is able and unable to enter into a critical theory as a mode of questioning, formulation, and insight.

The context of this paper is as a contribution to a conference on contemporary pedagogic practices, and in this respect it does not propose a new pedagogic practice as such but instead opens to question how Critical Theory (and critical discourses) works within art school education and bring attention to factors that are often overlooked.