Abstract

This post-intentional phenomenological study (Vagle 2018) explores artist-educators’ reflections on their varied arts-interdisciplinary (A-I) pedagogical experiences. Thinking with Mouffe’s (1999, 2001, 2008) agonistic pluralism through a Deleuzoguattarian posthumanist lens, the study conceptualizes artist-educators as co-producing “A-I assemblages.” Generating new understandings of the often-overlooked and always-already political dimensions of arts-interdisciplinary pedagogical practices, this article advances what the author names “Fluxus ontologies” to understand artist-educators’ shared propensity for troubling how “artist,” “educator,” and disciplines are bound within neoliberal and Western humanist ideologies that dominate formal education. A Fluxus ontology, as this article suggests, affords artist-educators two dimensions of political-pedagogical attunement: (1) the uniquely generative potential of disrupting “other people’s spaces” as special guests, intruders and agitators, and (2) critical self-awareness of “becoming-artist-educator” as they co-constitute each new A-I assemblage. These heightened sensitivities spill through an “artist’s lens” to include sensing, navigating, and activating the political potential of materials, spaces, bodies, movement and other components of political A-I assemblages. The study discusses the implications of orienting towards political A-I assemblages for future A-I education initiatives and research, particularly as a form of resisting the myth of apolitical curriculum and pedagogy in a historical moment of extreme political polarization and social volatility.