ABSTRACT
Art’s art of forgetting confronts people with a unique pedagogy—that of unlearning. The image of an “historical confinement,” beyond which Gadamer seeks art by travelling with it outside history’s boundaries, is not a metaphor but a tangible and concrete historical experience. The creator of a work of art may intend the public of his own time, but the real being of his work is what it is able to say, and this being reaches fundamentally beyond any historical confinement. A willed forgetfulness is probabilistic in that it recognizes the possibilities that come about by art as deed and object. Art fights reification by making the petrified world speak, sing, perhaps dance. Art’s positioning vis-a-vis any concept of learning as a practice within the educational confines, can only articulate itself as a form of unlearning. As art’s redemption becomes functionalized, art education finds itself popularized by narratives that trivialize the profound need to engage across disciplines.
