Abstract

The aim of this dissertation is to relate and put in perspective the largely unrecognized scope of existential imagery and temporality in art education. The analysis begins by laying the foundation on three interrelated concepts, language, time and imagery, which are binding in art education. ;In the first part, chapters one through four, examination of the fundamental duality of language, time and aesthetic imagery in art education reveals that while art is deeply grounded on a non-discursive reality, art educators have failed to question the root-assumption of this duality which in intertwined within the notion of the Live-World, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, as an evolving consciousness. In fulfilling this task, I not only take as a point of departure insights within the developing tradition of art but also Heidegger's view of art, language and being, raising the possibility of an aesthetic discourse, not as a linguistic sign but as a revelation of truth and being in the intersubjective communication between teacher-student. ;In the second part, chapters six through seven, I pave the way for Sartre's formulation of the imagining consciousness by examining the phenomenological-existential discourse, its method and presuppositions. In fulfilling this task, I not only take Sartre's concept of the imagination, as a point of departure but the problems of the pre-reflective focussing on Sartre's notion of "negatite." By stressing both levels of being in Sartre's philosophy, I sketch the interdependence of the for-itself-in-itself as indispensable, in the inter-relationship between form-content, in order to account for the objectifying aspect of a work of art. ;The third and latter part of this dissertation, examines the implication of the notion of the other, negatite and the existential project that is at once binding in art education. Ultimately, since aesthetic truth does not arise out of normative or institutional rules but an intentionality of its own, an existential-ontological accountability in art education is examined on the premise that each student is not only engaged in an idiosyncratic time-consciousness but an ontological condition of its own, where the student is an active agent, autonomously and purposively shaping his own undefined existential project