Divination at art school: A speculative methodology for an expanded reading practice

Divination at Art School addresses challenges from the neurodiversity paradigm to artists’ reading and study practices. I expand the concept of reading to include the history and practice of divination, as encoded, and enacted through the Tarot. By recognising divination as a precursor to mass literacy in this way I engage reading to address underacknowledged issues of epistemological injustice, access, and disability at art school.

To demonstrate the conditions necessitating expanded reading I interrogate Simon Baron Cohen’s mindblindness, working with Damian Milton’s double empathy problem, danah boyd and Alice Marwick’s writing on context collapse, the work of Fernand Deligny, and the field of art writing. As a neurodivergent student, teacher, artist, and researcher implicated and complicit in the systemic effects of art pedagogy’s disregard for reading, I trace associated difficulties and dynamics in the context of Sheffield Hallam’s Art and Design department and the history of British art education. In response, I appropriate both self- and medical diagnoses for reparatory neuroqueer purposes with reference to work by Nick Walker, M. Remi Yergeau, and other neurodivergent scholars, artists, and activists.

The study’s practice element employs autoethnography, drawing, writing, and digital collage, linking art writing and autofiction via calligraphy and textile production to Fluxus influenced traditions of digital mixed media and image synthesis. In thesis and practice I use divinatory strategies as neuroqueer method and analysis, abstracting and recombining their gestural and structural elements. These experiments with making reading tangible alongside trials of new teaching methods culminate in the development of a speculative programme of teaching.

The meta-methodological structure of the spinning process shapes my thinking throughout, emphasising attention and receptivity over creativity. I conclude that expanded reading, as historically exemplified by the Tarot, offers valuable ways to trace and therefore examine itself. Thus, it reveals the receptive capacity of art practice.