ABSTRACT
The impetus for this work emerged from my involvement with students in a junior high school on the outskirts of Melbourne as we experienced Picasso’s painting Guernica in a philosophical community of inquiry where students responded in embodied and sensuous ways. At times students used startling metaphors and unusual turns of phrase as they grappled to express meaning. Ultimately these led to rich insights and new thoughts, but at the time, served to create tensions and frustration, while at other times the inquiry proceeded orderly and thoughtfully. My observations of the inquiry with all its uncertainties and frustrations, and its moments of heightened perplexity and curiosity, inspired new questions that shape this chapter: What constitutes an aesthetic experience? Why are aesthetic experiences important and how can we provide for aesthetic experiences in ways that are transformative and enduring? What is it about an encounter with an art work that creates unsettlement, and experiences that are, at times, beyond words? Later in this chapter I present a vignette from an episode of our encounter with Guernica, to show students’ responses to the painting. In my reflection here, and in experimental spirit, I apply Deweyan aesthetic principles in two interrelated ways. First, students’ encounter with the art work, and second taking up Lipman’s proposition that philosophy itself is a ‘form of art’ (Lipman 1988: 173). Throughout the chapter I acknowledge Matthew Lipman’s early and formative thinking on art and aesthetics, which was influenced in part by Dewey (Lipman 1967, 1973, 1988, 2008). In many ways Lipman anticipated what is now being celebrated in the different forms of contemporary scholarship on Dewey’s thinking on art and aesthetics.1
