There has been a continual relationship, for a significant period of time, between art, excess, and education. This entanglement has been dependent upon the specific context, the social and political order, and available discourse at that time. Of course, each of these concepts, ‘art, excess, and education,’ are contested terrains in themselves, and include multiple, complex, and contradictory perspectives that cannot be reduced to a homogeneous body. However, while art and education have their own histories, trajectories, and discourses (and indeed are sutured together as one field—‘art education’), the concept of excess requires an initial, discursive exploration. For example, one of the most conventional ways excess has been defined, comprehended, and deployed is through a particular magnitude or over-abundance of ‘something’ on a predetermined scale. This discursive formation seems to imply that excess is not only the opposite of a lesser amount, or lack of ‘something,’ but also what is considered beyond a particular understanding of moderation or balance.
Excess has also been used to characterize transgressions of particular orders: the social order, cultural order, political order, personal order, and so on. Within them are systems of economics, religion, medicine, science, art, education, philosophy, and so on. This also includes the discourse of the body in general, especially the human body as an orderly body and its relation to the prevailing body politic. The human body is often central for excess when the focus is on substances that the body produces, or surfaces that signify something, along with other matters outside, yet in close proximity to, the body.
Excess is a matter of sense. As mentioned earlier, it is often about transgressing what would be taken as common sense or commonsense standards (political and otherwise). It also has to do with questions around embodied sensations and primary reactions as sense (as in the Sensation exhibition, 1997). The discourse of excess can be about extremity. When sense, common sense, and extremity are discursive constituents applied to the body, excess is tied to ugliness and disgust. The latter might include real or metaphorical ‘disgusting’ body fluids, solids, skin, pigmentation, marking, impurities, defects, disfigurements, and so on that are uncontainable and uncontrollable—‘just too much.’ Excess is also the discourse of the undesirable, abnormal, forbidden, taboo, and wasteful. In this sense, excess is often tied to notions of the abject and monstrosity, especially in art and popular visual culture. Excess needs to be hidden in the dark, for if it comes into the light (so to speak) that which is beyond comprehension might become too dangerous or exciting—too excessive in itself as ‘an experience.’ Excess in Western art, especially filtered through the notion of the disgusting, has been represented (or forbidden from representation) from at least the time of the ancient Greeks, through the so-called Middle Ages, and Modern period. It has been explicitly taken up as a topic in contemporary art, through performance, endurance, shock, and the sensational, for example.
Excess in Art
Classical artworks dealt in part with both beauty and disgust, order and excess. In art from earlier millennia, formal qualities and content dealt with heroes, monsters, creatures, and all sorts of abominable beings, represented within the context of glory and beauty, and other times as its antithesis. Death, in all manners, continued to find its way into the art, through romanticized deterioration of flesh and bone, and severed heads and limbs. Religious art is full with examples of glorified excess, including paintings of Satan and Hell with details of blood, gore, and disfigurement. Of course, there are also endless examples of historical images of Jesus and his crucifixion, and deaths of other Christian martyrs, that show details of lacerations and revolting wounds. As Paco Barragan argues in his chapter in this book, “excess has traditionally been the exclusive monopoly of history painting within the visual arts.” In this sense, one might argue the level of excess was not only within the formal qualities of the images themselves at the time—which were seen as grand, extravagant, beautiful, or sublime—but through the allegories and their corporeal, emotional, and political effects on audiences.
War and politics as a category of art and excess traverse different moments in time. Excessive imagery, such as bloody wounds, mangled body parts, and the suffering and suffocated adorn many of the well-known art examples for centuries as an indicator of conquer and the conquered. These artworks attempt to tell stories of greatness, history, and truth. This work, that was once (and still is to a certain extent) celebrated, has more recently been interpreted in a more critical light as excessive in terms of the extreme harm, brutality, genocide, and violence toward the other. In other words, it was once an attempt to represent the real through these violent works that has turned more recently into a non-representation of the Real.1
For the most part, it is not until the modern era that artworks from the West specifically addressed war not only through the glorious and grand but also through the stark and gruesome. Yet, it could be argued that, in many cases, when artworks were discussed by critics, excess was bracketed out in terms of materiality, while the focus was on an aesthetically valuable work representing excess and horror. For example, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which is discussed throughout this book, represents a bloody massacre by German and Italians during the Spanish Civil War. The stark truth, so to speak, of the horrors of war is there for all to see, but at the same time framed in terms of abstraction, monochrome, and composition. In other words, while the artwork is about excess—human excess in war and its brutality (in terms of the affect)—the painting is not the same excess as discussed in recent discourses of contemporary art. For example, excess in contemporary art might be seen as an over-abundance of ‘something’ material, or some other ‘matter,’ or ‘medium,’ that in turn may cause an excessive embodied reaction. In this way, many contemporary and late modern or postmodern artists challenge the aesthetics of modernism and formalism, and expand their discursive and material relationship to excess outside the work itself.
Modernist Aesthetics and Excess in Art
Strictly understood, modernist theories of formalism in art established that only ‘the work itself’ was of aesthetic interest. In this view, nonformal elements of the artwork, including the social and the political, were artistically and aesthetically superfluous—excessive. Through the configuration of formal qualities, one could attend to the intrinsic value of the work, and mostly through disinterested interest. In other words, everything but the art itself was a certain form of excess (to be discarded). According to this theory, a work of art is ‘autonomous’ and ‘self-sufficient.’ Some of these ideas are often contributed to the critical writings from Emanuel Kant (2007) and more recently Roger Fry (1956), Clive Bell (1961), and Clement Greenberg (1965). Undeniably, there are many other critics who contributed to the appeal of this idea, in both art and art education. Moreover, it is clear that the discourse of excess does not follow the exact path of art’s relationship to modernism’s formalist aesthetics. This is made manifest in the numerous perspectives from the contributors to this book. This brief section is intended, however, to highlight the general principles upon which the aforementioned critics agree and contextualize them within the broader notions of aesthetics, excess, and art in (high) modernism, as opposed to more contemporary artworks.
The writings of Emanuel Kant, however misinterpreted, provided a useful theoretical framework of modern aesthetic formalism that in part have defined a communal habit for viewing art and determining what is moderate, pleasurable, and beautiful, and what is disgusting and excessive. This work, knowingly or not, continues to have profound ramifications in the discursive relationships between art, excess, and especially education. In Kant’s view, good and beautiful art must avoid excess to preserve qualities of artistic integrity and the sublime, and appeal to the disinterested. In Critique of Judgment, Kant (2007) insisted that any response to ‘the beautiful’ precluded the application of determinant concepts. He states, “taste in the beautiful is alone a disinterested and free satisfaction” (p. 32). For Kant, ‘pure disinterested judgment’ was based upon formal properties, not the subject matter. Kant’s notion, that pleasure (as opposed to disgust) was to be found in form, provided a model for modernist versions of formalism that framed the notion of excess in terms of the opposite of the beautiful or perfect, which in most cases is removed from all the excessive ‘muck’ of life. This is exemplified later through the writings of Clive Bell (1961): “to appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions … nothing but a sense of form and color and a knowledge of three-dimensional space” (pp. 36–37).
Bell maintained that the essential qualities of art are permanent and stable, transcending historical, and cultural contexts. This is exemplified when Bell (1961) asks rhetorically, “to those who have and hold a sense of significant form, what does it matter whether the forms that move them were created in Paris the day before yester...