 |
Education, communication and platforms for dialogue |
|
What place does education have in the programmes of museums and art centres and, in a broader sense, for all of us involved in contemporary art? If we all agree on the need to bridge the gulf between art and society (as the Montse Badia’s Mind the Gap consultative survey documented), then education must have a central role.
In this and in forthcoming issues of the bulletin David Armengol will develop his article in the April issue and —now with Martí Manen— analyse the role that education plays —and can and should play— in contemporary art.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Invisible Academy |
|
|
|
|
DAVID ARMENGOL / MARTÍ MANEN
Education, and not only art education, is in a state of crisis. The proposal to cut the number of university courses by half, to do away with the Humanities altogether or to absorb Art History into the History syllabus are just some of the symptoms of the need to revise and redefine the specific processes of higher education in art practices.
Given the lack of faith in the dominant academic models, there is a growing impetus within the art system in favour of creating a diversity of platforms offering alternative models of learning, apparently situated outside of the official circuits. With their smaller scope, but from a non-hierarchical position, these proposals are starting to be more habitual —and necessary— than ever in the sphere of production cultural, and emerging as mechanisms capable of maintaining discursive nexi with reality, a far from frequent occurrence in the structures of conventional education.
Education as a discipline, as a strategy that imposes certain kinds of knowledge, is called into question by systems of relationship that are largely based on proximity and interchange between the positions involved; in other words, by platforms where the transfer of knowledge operates on many levels and in many directions, and alters the structure of power defined by the schema transmitter-receiver or, to express this in terms of formal education, of teacher-student.
The attempt to construct other educational models, whether it be from the revision of existing academic structures or directly from contra-institutional positions, entails an effort to define education with new parameters. The education, no longer as a process in which the receiver absorbs new knowledge in a linear fashion but as a practice in which this receiver assumes an active and committed position and in which the process itself intersects with the reality around it, with its context and its interests.
The direction taken by much of contemporary art during the 1990s made it possible to think of art as a place of relation, a context capable of revealing a high degree of intimacy and of becoming a new, personalised and accessible educational tool. In the contact she established with the spectator, the artist offered part of her life as a basic material basic and favoured the integration of the experience into the processes of
access to the artistic phenomenon. The next step has been the creation of platforms for dialogue, in which the role of the spectator is blurred and transformed into a more defining and discursive element. This new situation calls for a redrawing of the internal barriers, and an acceptance of a necessary redefinition of the models and structures (the institution, the exhibition, the framework, the artwork or the actual public), in which the idea of community serves to favour the construction of a network of spaces of actuation.
|
|
|
|
|
| Copenhagen Free University |
|
|
|
In the attempt to rethink the notion of education and to distance ourselves from the non-discursive position that it evidently had in the realm of art, the first aspect that calls for revision is the hierarchical structure that defines educational systems. As is often the case in other realms of cultural production, new platforms with freer and more independent structures are appearing. As a result, the art context —no longer the institution, but the series of elements that have a place in it— has the capacity to generate trial structures in the fields of communication and accessibility. Alternative approaches to the university, spaces for creation run by artists and curators, centres with smaller infrastructures that envisage education as a tool of critical discourse and spaces for encounter in which the roles of transmitter and receiver merge or blur… are among the proposals this text aims to put forward. |
|
Other ways of thinking of education
We could cite many cases of artists who have decided to convert their work into a space of freedom designed to facilitate interchange. Rirkrit Tiravanija is one very evident example of this, but perhaps in the same Thai context we should also note the contribution made by Surasi Kusolwong’s Invisible Academy, which sees art as a possible substitute, in view of the lack of effective structures offering access to the art phenomenon. This ‘Academy’ constitutes a concept from which work in common can be created on the basis of dialogue and interchange, in which the presentation —from the realm of art rather than from that of education— helps to promote closer and more horizontal positions.
The Copenhagen Free University is also a space created by artists –Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise— which engages with the connection between a society based on the consumer product and the need to make education a space in which this can be questioned. The characteristic structures of education would thus be integrated into the mechanisms of production and generate another opportunity to seek new systems of non-productive contact in the art context.
|
|
It is not only the artists who are exploring the current forms of education. The curators are also changing their role, becoming generators of spaces and trying to define different models. At the start of the new century Charles Esche launched an educational project at Edinburgh College of Art known as Proto-academy. Conceived as a virtual parasite of the parent institution, the Proto-academy posited a less hierarchical model in which the students had far more capacity for decision-making and it was accepted that the ‘results’ should not be confined to the field of research but that could make the leap to the real world.
The curator Annie Fletcher in conjunction with the artist Sarah Pierce launched the so-called Paraeducation Department in Rotterdam, a space of encounter on the fringes of pre-defined positions, as a platform under the joint auspices of Witte de With and TENT, two of the city’s front-running art institutions. In this case the idea was to go beyond the value traditionally accorded to the educational factor by art institutions and engage with education as a multidirectional dialogue that requires the participation of diverse sectors of society in order collectively to construct possible models of education more closely connected to everyday reality.
|
Pursuing the same line of decentralizing educational processes, Yvane Chapuis, François Piron and Loïc Touzé jointly run Les Laboratoires in Aubervilliers, a multidisciplinary centre that offers tools of production, diffusion and training in the expanded realm of contemporary creation. On the fringe of the conventional educational premisses, Les Laboratoires promote other formulas for the construction of knowledge, with regular courses run by artists that provide spaces for a more direct encounter between artists and public.
Turning now to our own local context, the last few years have seen a proliferation
of similar mechanisms that, faced with the lack of a clear critical position
within the university system, have opened up more independent lines of specific
training — peripheral approaches that have advanced toward discursive positions
that formal education does little to reflect. The specializations of the QUAM, Panorama in
|
|
|
|
 |
|
| Copenhagen Free University |
|
|
|
Olot, the Sant
Andreu Free University (SAFU), the Education
Workshops organized by institutions such as the Fundació “la
Caixa” or the Centre Cívic de Sant Andreu
sketch out a framework defined on the basis of non-hierarchical
systems of knowledge in which the art space presents
itself as something closer to a laboratory and space
of interchange.
|
Education and institution
At the same time, given the level of demand and the existence of counter-academic models capable of changing the habitual systems of art education, we also need to ask ourselves about the position of the art institution. In terms of rhythm, the museum comes perilously close to the educational models characteristic of the university structure. In many cases its attempt to define itself as a space of actuation in time present is frustrated by a unidirectional functional system that inhibits from trying out other educational practices.
Having said that, the commitment to redefining the limits and the capacities of the art institution is leading some museums and art centres to take responsibility for the processes of art education, and to adopt alternative positions very different from the inflexibility of established pedagogical practice. At a moment in time when academic education is being challenged bynon-official structures, the museum has to assume its role as a key space in the processes of learning and of formation of the individual. In this respect it is significant that an institution such as the MACBA is currently leading an educational project like the PEI (Independent Studies Programme), which favours a real commitment to improving functionalities educational. Starting from a critique of the systems of official education, the PEI seeks to transform the museum into an educational context that, by virtue of its presence in the social fabric, opts for a more direct contact with reality than that of the university sector. We need to ask ourselves, however, if the museum is capable of initiating independent courses of study, given that in some degree it mimics the university hierarchy and accepts this as an institution legitimated by itself or by what it stands for rather than by whatever intrinsic value may reside in the educational project as such.
The role of the platforms set up by artists, engaging with art as a vital space for education by means of a free interchange and redefinition of educational formats on the basis of para-institutional spheres initiated by a number of adventurous curators, obliges the institution to rethink its model. The art institution responds to, reacts to and participates in the art context, interiorizing certain behaviours and filtering these through its slow-moving machinery. Offering the art institution as a space for a critical education could serve to generate a highly constructive debate about educational models on the basis of the options really available, and by making possible a degree of self-education on the part of the user that goes far beyond the bases of traditional education. |
|
|
