Art, Excess, and Education

Kevin Tavin is Professor and Head of the Department of Art at Aalto University, Finland. He has taught art education since 1990. Recent books include, Angels, Ghosts, and Cannibals: Essays on Art Education and Visual Culture, Experimenting FADS: Finnish Art-Education Doctoral Studies, and Stand(ing) up, for a Change: Voices of Arts Educators.

Mira Kallio-Tavin is Associate Professor of Art-based Research and Pedagogy and the Head of Research in the Department of Art at Aalto University, Finland. Her research area focuses on critical artistic and arts-based practices and research in questions of diversity, disability studies, social justice, and critical animal studies.

Max Ryynänen is Senior Lecturer in Theory of Visual Culture at Aalto University, Finland. He is the Chair of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics and the Editor-in-Chief of Popular Inquiry: The Journal of the Aesthetics of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture. Heis also an ex-gallerist and art writer.

This book concentrates on the deep historical, political, and institutional relationships between art, education, and excess. Going beyond field specific discourses of art history, art criticism, philosophy, and aesthetics, it explores how the concept of excess has been important and enduring from antiquity through contemporary art, and from early film through the newer interactive media. Examples considered throughout the book focus on disgust, grandiosity, sex, violence, horror, disfigurement, endurance, shock, abundance, and emptiness, and frames them all within an educational context. Together they provide theories and classificatory systems, historical and political interpretations of art and excess, examples of popular culture, and suggestions for the future of educational practice.