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Alliances for Unlearning: On the Possibility of Future Collaborations Between GalleryEducation and Institutions of Critique

Author(s): Carmen MrschSource: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 26 (Spring 2011), pp. 5-13Published by: The University of Chicago Presson behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art andDesign, University of the Arts LondonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/659291.

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Bro trafo.K,So, what doesthis have to dowith me, anyway?',Transnational

Perceptions of theHistory of NationalSocialism and theHolocaust, Vienna200911, fundedby the SparklingScience' programmeof the AustrianFederal Ministry forScience and Research.Courtesy Bro trafo.K

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Allens article was published in the second edition of the e-journal ate Encounters[E]ditions. Tis publication accompanies the research project ate Encounters: Britishnessand Visual Culture that ate Britain conducted from to in cooperation withthe London South Bank University and Chelsea College of Art & Design. In this projecta research group composed of academics, museum staff and undergraduate students withvarious ties to immigration investigated how Britishness is produced through the displaysof the museum.5Te data and intermediate results made available on the projects websiteshow that during its course the museums Cultural Diversity Policy, among other things,was radically called into question, and this implied the need for changes in the educativeand curatorial work of ate Britain. ate Encounters is informed by insights fromdecades of feminist and critical museology, and by attempts to develop ideas of institutionalpractice accordingly.6In their engagement with the displays and the staff of ate Britain,for instance, the students developed their own visual and verbal approaches, which theylinked through the production of ethnographic videos to other contexts specificallyrelevant to them. Tese co-researcher productions were in turn associated with a seriesof interviews with various experts on topics such as education practice within the museum;the status of digital media in museum practice and culture; the racialisation of culturalpolicy and the role of museums in social regeneration; and narratives of British visualculture that could be accessed through curatorship.7Te project sought to dissolve thehierarchies between researchers and the researched, and between teachers and students,in favour of a transversal alliance, but without trivialising the power relations andhierarchies of the setting. Indeed, in this attempt to conduct visitor research as researchin cooperation with visitors, the project is highly self-reflective and meticulous in itstreatment. Gallery educators in the German-speaking world have conducted similarprojects as a research component of their work as a critical practice.8wenty freelanceand precariously employed gallery educators worked as a team at documenta (),for example, to carry out analyses aimed at changing the practice and conditions of galleryeducation into forms of militant research that is, as performance and intervention.9

My own involvement in the documenta project consisted of leading and supervisinga team-based research process, and resulted in the thesis that gallery education, depending

on how it is organised, fulfils various institutional functions:10an affirmativefunction,when it conveys information about art institutions and what they produce to an initiatedand already interested audience as smoothly as possible, and a reproductivefunctionto the extent that it endeavours to bring in children, young people and others uninitiatedto these institutions and thus ensure the continuation of their audiences. It can also assumea critical deconstructivefunction when it joins together with the participants to question,disclose and work on what is taken for granted in art and its institutions, and to developknowledge that enables them to form their own judgements and become aware oftheir own position and its conditions. Finally, gallery education can sometimes have a

5 There were two conditions for participating in the research project: the undergraduate students hadto come from a family that had migrated to England (from where was irrelevant) and in which theywere the first to attend a university. See http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/tate-encounters/ (last accessed on 18 October 2010).

6 This project will be published as: Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh (ed.), Post CriticalMuseology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

7 The extensive output of visual productions and research papers is accessible in its entirety at:http://process.tateencounters.org/ (last accessed on 13 November 2010).

8 Current examples of this would be the project Doing Kinship with Pictures and Objects: A Laboratoryfor Public and Private Practices of Art (200912) at the Austrian Museum of Folk Life and Folk Art,where the research team includes the two gallery educators Andrea Hubin and Karin Schneider;see A. Hubin and K. Schneider, Doing Research with Anthropologists, Designers, Mediators and aMuseum: A Project on, for and with Families in Vienna, Engage Magazine, issue 25 (Family Learning),Spring 2010, pp.3140. There are also the research and education projects of trafo.K, the Vienneseagency for cultural education described in Nora Sternfeld, Unglamorous Tasks: What Can EducationLearn from Its Political Traditions?, e-flux journal, issue 14, March 2010. Available athttp://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/125 (last accessed on 29 October 2010).

9 For a contextualisation of this project, see Janna Graham, Spanners in the Spectacle: Radical

Research at the Front Lines, Fuse Magazine, April 2010, n.p. Also available at http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201004/2010214291.html (last accessed on 13 November 2010). On the concept of militantresearch, see Marta Malo de Molina, Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-inquiry, Co-research,Consciousness-raising (ed. Notas Rojas Collective Chapel Hill, trans. Maribel Casas-Corts andSebastian Cobarrubias), February 2006, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en(last accessed on 29 October 2010).

10 For more detail on this and for an explanation of gallery education as critical practice, see C. Mrsch,At a Crossroads of Four Discourses: documenta 12 Gallery Education in Between Affirmation,Reproduction, Deconstruction and Transformation, in C. Mrsch et al. (ed.), documenta 12 education#2: Between Critical Practice and Visitor Service, Berlin and Zrich: diaphanes, 2010, pp.931.



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transformativeeffect, in the sense of changing society and institutions, if it does notcontent itself with critical questioning, but rather seeks to influence what it conveys for example, by shiing the institution in the direction of more justice and less discursiveand structural violence. Tese four functions are not to be imagined hierarchically or as strictly chronological in the sense of arising from sequential stages of development. In gallery educationpractice there are usually several of these functions active at the same time. A deconstruc-tive or transformative gallery education, for instance, can hardly be imagined withoutsome affirmative and reproductive aspects. At the same time, the friction between galleryeducation and its host institution increases the more the critical functions come into play.Te various functions are additionally affiliated with different discourses on pedagogy andeducation: implicit conceptions of what education is, how it occurs and whom it addresses.For instance, neither the affirmative nor the reproductive function is self-reflective in thesense that their engagement in education is not queried in terms of its value codings andnormalisations. Yet these two strategies differ in the question of the howand the whoofeducation. Te affirmative function addresses, first and foremost, the expert audience players in the art field.11Te methods used for this type of educational work althoughit is rarely called that are developed in the academic field, derived from methodologicalcanons that are generally instructive and limited to verbal expression in the form oflectures or debates. Te reproductive function, on the other hand, is oriented (from theperspective of the institution) towards the excluded, i.e. specifically absent parts of thepublic, especially children, young people and families. Tey are imagined as remote fromart and as laypeople. For this reason,methods of playful learning are oen derived fromprimary school and kindergarten educational practices and from institutionalised leisureactivities for children and young people. Tey are oriented to the constructivist turn inlearning theory,12according to which it is less a matter of instruction in contents than ofproviding environments that stimulate manifold and complex processes of independentlyconstructed meaning. Along with learning specifics, the point in these programmes isalso general in the sense of learning a love of art: 13generating positive experiences withinthe institution, recognising arts values and relevance and generating a desire to return.

In comparison, the deconstructive and the transformative functions are based on aself-reflective understanding of education and learning. Education itself becomes the objectof deconstruction or transformation: subject matter, addressees and methods are subjectedto a critical examination of the power relations inscribed in them, and this in turn becomesthe subject of the work with the audience. Questions are raised, such as: who determineswhat is important to communicate? Who categorises target groups and to what end?What gallery education is permitted within the institution, and what is consideredinappropriate and by whom? How do certain methods of teaching and learning implicitlycreate the subjects of teaching and learning? Sometimes the positions of those teachingand those learning change in this practice of querying: that is, the educational processis understood as a mutual process, even though it is structured by the aforementioned

power relations. With the deconstructive function, the primary educational objective is the develop-ment of a critical attitude. Tis does not necessarily mean aspiring to change the conditionsof the educational framework itself.14In the understanding of education associatedwith this function, engaging with art and its institutions is a relatively sheltered area ofexperiments under complex conditions, which aim to enhance the capability for agency,critique and creativity. Methods borrowed from artistic procedures are applied moreoen here. For its part, the transformative function emphasises the structural progressionof the institution in the direction of more social justice and less epistemological and

11 Due to a lack of self-reflexivity in terms of educational methodology, however, this is rarely madeexplicit, but is articulated instead through discursive practices: through the manner of addressing

the audience, the content of the research and the context of the discussion.12 George E. Hein, The Constructivist Museum, in Eileen Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), The Educational Role

of the Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp.7379.13 See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public(1966,

trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.14 Deconstruction depends on the existence of the dominant text in order to be able to work in it.

The practitioner of deconstruction works within a system of concepts, but with the intentionof breaking it open. Jonathan Culler, Dekonstruktion. Derrida und die poststrukturalisitischeLiteraturtheorie, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988, p.95.



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structural violence in the world at large, an objective linked with fostering critiqueand self-empowerment. For this reason, the transformative methodological instrumentsare also oriented towards strategies of activism and towards the epistemologies andmethods of critical pedagogy with a special reference to Paulo Freire, for whom thetransformation of language and of verbal action was a constitutive (although not thesufficient) element for an education aiming to change the world. In this logic there are no fixed and predefined addressees. Te concept of targetgroups, which is common for the reproductive approach, is superseded by an interestin forming alliances and in cooperation. Of course, however, here too there is a hiddencurriculum: what is expected and claimed is the fundamental affirmation of a criticalappropriation of art and its institutions. Gallery education that understands itself as a critical practice focuses on elements ofthe deconstructive and the transformative function. It conveys knowledge as representedby exhibitions and institutions and examines their established functions while renderingits own position visible. Accordingly, it attaches special importance to providing thenecessary conceptual tools for appropriating knowledge, and adopts a reflective stancetowards the means of education, instead of relying on individual aptitude or a striving forself-fulfilment. While it seeks to broaden the institutions audience, it does not indulge inthe illusion that learning in the exhibition space is solely connected to play and recreation.15Ideally, gallery education acknowledges the aforementioned constructivist concept oflearning processes, as well as the enriching potential of gaps found within language andcomprehension.16Tat the knowledge of both visitors and educators is considered equalsets this practice apart from mere service work: critical gallery education opts for contro-versy. In theoretical and methodological terms, it works along the lines of a critique ofdomination, addressing issues such as the production of gender, ethnicity or class catego-ries in the institution, and the related structural, material and symbolic devaluation ofgallery education, which I will return to later. It analyses the functions of (authorised andunauthorised) speech and the use of different linguistic registers in the exhibition space.Recipients are not regarded as subordinate to any institutional order; rather, the focusis directed at their possibilities for agency and code-exchange in the sense of a practice

of everyday life.17It also favours a reading of institutional order that, far from beingconceived as static, leaves leeway for working within the gaps, interstices and contradic-tions generated by the configuration of rooms and displays of the exhibiting institution. 18

Furthermore, critical gallery education addresses the ways in which the marketinfluences the structure, presentation, perception and reception of art, and therebycounters the middle-class illusion that art is detached from the economy to which it isactually closely tied. It considers the cultural and symbolic capital of art and its institutionsas constituents of inclusionary and exclusionary processes in the art field. At the sametime, it acknowledges and communicates the fact that symbolic capital gives rise to a desire,and develops both strategic and sensuous ways to appropriate such capital. Finally, it seeksto transform the institution into a space in which those who are explicitly not at the centre

of the art world can produce their own articulations and representations. In this sense,it links institutions to their outside, to their local and geopolitical contexts. Te field thusderives its complexity from art, the core subject on which its methodological repertoireis grounded. Summarised so programmatically one could almost say paradigmatically theapproach of a critical gallery education practice seems to be something that must be in

15 One example of this is the activities of the group Kunstcoop in the Neue Gesellschaft fr BildendeKunst in Berlin, 19992001. This group worked with artistic and performative means and involvedgroups that would not have visited the Kunstverein otherwise. The formats usually associated withfun and pleasure were simultaneously serious confrontations with the contents of the exhibitionsand the art institution itself, which called for a high degree of engagement and concentration onthe part of the participants, offering a space at the same time to reflect together on the didactic means

that were used and to change them as needed.16 See Shoshana Felman, Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable,Yale French Studies, The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary Genre, no.63, 1982, pp.2144;and Jrgen Oelkers, Provokation als Bildungsprinzip, in Landesverband der KunstschulenNiedersachsen, Bielefeld: Bilden mit Kunst, 2004, pp.93113.

17 See Michel de Certeau, LInvention du quotidien: Les Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard, 1980.18 See Irit Rogoff, Looking Away Participations in Visual Culture, in Gavin Butt (ed.), Art After

Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.11733; or the research project Tate Encountersmentioned above.



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a permanent state of what Derrida called venir, in coming.19Just as in other fields such as curating, for example a critical approach (in this case, gallery education as acritical practice) is a minority position. However, as Felicity Allen describes, the historicalconnections (in personnel, content, structure) of this field of work to civil rights movements,to feminism and to the intersection of art and political activism show that the criticalparadigm in gallery education does exist.20Indeed, it has been present for at least fortyyears as an aspiration. One current example relevant in this context is the work by theYouth Council of the National Gallery of Ontario in oronto, initiated by Janna Grahamand now under the direction of Syrus Marcus Ware, which was established in . In thisproject adolescents and young adults developed a programme in cooperation with othergroups from the city, with contributions (exhibitions, performances, interventions in thecollection, zines, lectures, radio programmes, workshops) on topics such as the function ofthe gallery in relation to national citizenship; policing and police violence in urban space;or the link between art, activism and institutions in oronto.21In Vienna the organisationtrafo.K produces gallery education projects for the Museum of Modern Art Vienna

(MUMOK), the international book fairBuch Wien, the Vienna Mozart Year, theMuseum of the City of Linz and others that,according to Nora Sternfeld, overcomethe function of reproducing knowledgeand become something else somethingunpredictable and open to the possibilityof a knowledge production that, in tonesstrident or subtle, would work to challengethe apparatus of value-coding.22Adelaeleznik, Curator for Public Programmesat the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, ispart of the Radical Education Collective

(REC), which was founded in to find ways of translating radical pedagogy intothe sphere of artistic production, with education being conceived not merely as a model

but also as a field of political participation.23In Oldenburg, Germany, Nanna Lth andher colleagues at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art conduct media (art) education withthe aim of encouraging its participants to better understand the strategies and codes ofa media world that is entirely commercial in character. Te latter project is one of the few I know of that is located in a small art institution,which at least partly sees itself as an institution of critique.24Perhaps surprisingly, galleryeducation projects that attempt to be critical and aim for changes in the sense describedabove are usually part of large, oen national art institutions, which accordingly have apowerful position in the art system and operate as global players in the art market. Projectsthere become entangled in special contradictions. Teir critical potential is particularlyexposed to the dangers of neoliberal appropriation, becoming instrumentalised in the

19 See Jacques Derrida, Voyous, Paris: ditions Galile, 2003.20 For historical examples, see C. Mrsch, From Oppositions to Interstices: Some Notes on the Effects

of Martin Rewcastle, The First Education Officer of the Whitechapel Gallery, 19771983, in KarenRaney (ed.), Engage Magazine, no.15, 2004, pp.3337; and C. Mrsch, To Take All That Learning andPut It Together with All That Art: Loraine Leesons Artistic-Educative Projects in the Context ofEnglish Cultural Policies, in NGBK (ed.), Art for Change Loraine Leeson, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2005.For examples from the 1990s, see the work by the group Kunstcoop at the NGBK in Berlin, in ibid.,pp.10833; the project Strdienst at the Museum for Modern Art Vienna, in NGBK (ed.), Kunstcoop,Berlin: Vice Versa, 2001; and E. Sturm, Zum Beispiel: StrDienst und trafo.K Praxen derKunstvermittlung aus Wien, in Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (AdKV ) (ed.),Kunstvermittlung zwischen Partizipatorischen Kunstprojekten und interaktiven Kunstaktionen, Berlin:Vice Versa, 2002, pp.2637.

21 See http://www.ago.net/youth-council-archive (last accessed on 22 October 2010). See also J. Grahamand Yasin Shadya, Reframing Participation in the Museum: A Syncopated Discussion, in GriseldaPollock and Joyce Zemans (ed.), Museums after Modernism: Strategies of Engagement, Oxford and

New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.15772.22 N. Sternfeld, Unglamorous Tasks, op. cit.23 See http://radical.temp.si/history/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010).24 As the Edith Russ Site describes itself, The focus is on the content of the artwork and technologys

influence on shaping and defining artistic ideas. Beyond the programme of discussions andpresentations, we will also hold exhibitions intended to address subjects which are sociallyrelevant and future-oriented. The exhibition programme, which is largely publicly funded,frequently takes into consideration queer, feminist and media-activist positions.See http://www.edith-russ-haus.de/index.php/Kunstvermittlung/Kunstvermittlung?userlang=en(last accessed on 25 October 2010).

Critical gallery educatorshave to navigate manifold

ambivalences. Tey arerepresentatives of theinstitution, so they have noopportunity to imagine anuncompromised outsidefor their work or themselvesas heroic figures.



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context of an imperative positing of education in the so-called knowledge societyand the concomitant revaluation of so skills within society.25In some cases theyare almost fig leaf measures in conjunction with diversity and audience developmentpolicies. Tey assist the institutions in presenting themselves as progressive and sociallyresponsible, while leaving the internal logics of operation, which usually function in astrictly hierarchical and less socially aware way, unchanged. More recently, there havebeen discussions about examples in England, where major art institutions like to make useof the added value of artistic-pedagogic collectives in the sense of radical chic, but (re-)actinconsistently when these collectives question the logic of operations and the structuresof the host institutions with the same radicality.26Not least of all, gallery education projectsintended to have a transformative effect frequently have, at best, only reforming effectswithin the institution. Tis is evident in the case of the documenta research and educa-tion programme. Te documenta programme was possible because the educationalturn in curating was taken up and continued by the artistic director Roger M. Buergeland curator Ruth Noack. With their support, education at documenta was able tooperate self-reflectively within the framework of the exhibition and to open up spacefor experiments (though adequate financial resources were not made available by theinstitution). Yet the reception of this experiment was and is limited almost exclusivelyto specialists, taking place within the professional community of gallery education.27At the institutional level it was not possible to establish gallery education as a criticalpractice, as the management of the documenta GmbH argued that the mode of galleryeducation was the responsibility of the respective artistic directors. Based on the sameargument, it was not possible to extend the collaboration with a local audience that hadbeen initiated through the projects Local Advisory Board aer the exhibition closed. 28What was achieved, however, was the institution of a principle of openness on the part ofdocumenta for future work with children and young people in the exhibition. It is possiblethat this will change in the iteration of the exhibition, but it is too early to tell.29

Institutions of critique, on the other hand, rarely work together with galleryeducators, even when their resources allow them to do so. I would like to speculate on thereasons for this and on the function of the absence of gallery educators in these spaces.

Te fine line between disrupting and stabilising dominant orders is very narrow for criticalpractices in neoliberalism, where critical gallery educators have to navigate manifoldambivalences. Tey are representatives of the institution, so they have no opportunityto imagine an uncompromised outside for their work or themselves as heroic figures.Due to the presumption that their position is insufficiently radical, they are frequentlysubjected to disregard or contempt from critically positioned actors in the art field,from whom they would prefer to receive interest and support. In reflections on pedagogycurrently undertaken by curators and artists, gallery education does not appear as anindependent practice with its own history and controversial discourses, but is treatedinstead if at all in casual asides. (Here should I be clear that I am notreferring tothe work traditionally carried out by museum and state-funded gallery education and

interpretation departments), emphasises Andrea Phillips in brackets in her article about

25 See Pen Dalton, The Gendering of Art Education, Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open UniversityPress, 2001.

26 See, for example, the consequences of the invitation to the Laboratory of InsurrectionaryImagination to conduct a workshop with the title Disobedience Makes History for Tate Modern(January 2010). The group Liberate Tate came out of the workshop, which in turn used activiststrategies learned in the workshop to denounce the employment and sponsoring practices of Tateitself. See http://www.frieze.com/blog/entry/unhappy_birthday/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010).Another example is the discussions that arose about the exhibition and event series C-Words by thegroup Platform at the Arnolfini in Bristol, where the art institution itself became the centre ofattention as a polluting factor. See http://blog.platformlondon.org/content/c-words-ripples-continuing(last accessed on 25 October 2010).

27 The activities and results of the project have been gathered in two volumes: Ayse Glec, ClaudiaHummel, C. Mrsch, Sonja Parzefall, Ulrich Schtker and Wanda Wieczorek (ed.), documenta 12education 1: Engaging Audiences, Opening Institutions. Methods and Strategies in Education at documenta

12, Berlin and Zrich: diaphanes, 2009; and C. Mrsch et al. (ed.), documenta 12 education 2, op. cit.28 It would be interesting to investigate whether and which long-term changes might be effected

by a project like the Youth Council on the institutional policy and the structures of the NGO byTate Encounters in Tate Britain, or by the Edgware Road Project of the Serpentine Gallery, whichshould also be mentioned in this context. See http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/06/edgware_road.html (last accessed on 25 October 2010).

29 For the deconstructive approach of Hatching Ideas, the children and young peoples programmeat documenta 12, see C. Hummel, What Does aushecken Hatching Ideas Mean?, in A. Glec et al.,documenta 12 education 1, op. cit.



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Education Aesthetics in the publication Curating and the Educational urn().30In the same book, Simon Sheikh reflects on Andrea Frasers performance MuseumHighlights: A Gallery alk, taking it for granted that gallery education, which he callsmediation, still exists in solely to teach people the right way to look, from theperspective of the institution, and the right way to understand the works.31Has henot noticed the post-structuralist and power theory reflections in this field? It is hardto imagine that a protagonist from gallery education would write an article about thefunctions of curating without basic knowledge of this practice. Tat this does not seemto be a problem the other way around indicates the hierarchies between curating andeducating: the lack of knowledge about the history and discourses of gallery educationinvolves a sanctioned ignorance, in Gayatri Spivaks sense, an unknowing that strengthensones own position of power.32Tis could be considered the first pedagogical functionof the absence of gallery education in institutions of critique. For a gallery education thatsees itself as a critical practice could be also realised in this kind of institution, i.e. it couldquestion and work on mechanisms of exclusion, naturalisations and power relations thereas well. Tis, however, could be seen as calling the critical position on the part of curatorsand artists into question. If curators did not want this to happen, then it would be a sensiblestrategy of territorialisation to regard their actions as being identical with the actions ofgallery education.33

Tis is not the case, however. Te audience attracted by events organised by curatorsand artists is far more delimited than the groups accessed by gallery educators. Te manyacademies, schools, seminars, workshops, sessions, encounters and lessonsinitiated in the course of the educational turn are largely attended at least as far as I havebeen able to observe by people who are similar in habits, lifestyle and attitudes to thoseof the curators. For those who accept the invitation, being in these spaces and engaging insocial interaction and collective artistic and intellectual production signifies an increase insymbolic and cultural capital. In this way, these spaces are no different from the art spacesthat are regarded as hegemonic and bourgeois. Critical gallery education practice, on theother hand, involves a tremendous capacity for embarrassment. It takes places in roomsthat sometimes smell more of sweat and squashed lunch packages than of brand new

furniture and freshly painted walls. It requires a willingness to take seriously views thatsubstantially deviate from ones own position and aesthetics much different from onesown taste; it requires radically alternating between registers of language and aesthetics.Pedagogical expertise means having an idea of how to react to the effects of educationaland knowledge hierarchies in the face of different world views, utopias and desires,other than by feeling embarrassed, turning up ones nose, becoming defensive or beinghelplessly silent. Moreover, gallery educators cannot expect that their audience will be willing to accepta critical stance. An audience that rejects this expectation eludes the educational intentionsinherent to the deconstructive and transformative functions of promoting a capacity forcritique and agency. Tere is a pedagogical paradox here, which is constitutive for gallery

education work: in certain situations, a participants refusal to take part in working ondeconstruction/transformation and his or her insistence on different, independentinterests could be a self-empowering act. Tese and other paradoxes call for a mode ofunlearning privilege on the part of critical gallery educators,34an active reflection inother words, one that is consequently also articulated in action in relation to the privilegeof ones own position, colliding languages and habitual constitutions. Nora Sternfeld aptlycalls this work an unglamorous task. 35And this could be seen as the second function ofthe absence of gallery educators in institutions of critique: enabling the concentration onglamorous tasks, the collectively produced preservation of the aura and exclusivity throughthe peer group.

30 Andrea Phillips, Education Aesthetics, in Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson (ed.), Curating and theEducational Turn, London and Amsterdam: Open Editions and de Appel, 2010, pp.8396.31 Simon Sheikh, Letter to Jane (Investigation of a Function), in ibid., pp.6175.32 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (ed.),

Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead: Harester Wheatsheaf, 1994,pp.66111.

33 Since the term education is now in vogue, curators and artists increasingly refer to themselvesas educators, implying that their practice is already educative, since it is already a mediating practice.

34 See G.C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues(ed. Sarah Harasym), New Yorkand London: Routledge, 1990, p.9.



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It is in this context that the current popularity of the philosopher Jacques Rancire,and especially his book Te Ignorant Schoolmaster(),36in the art field is significant.Tere is hardly a statement in conjunction with the educational turn that can do withouta reference to the radical democratic vision of self-learning, which Rancire discussesusing the historical example of the linguistics and literature professor Jean-Joseph Jacototand the method of universal learning he developed in Leuven in . According tothis conception, the pedagogical relationship has always been constitutive of inequality,because one person presumes to have knowledge to be conveyed to others. In contrast,an emancipatory process of learning is self-controlled. Te position of the teacher issuperfluous, because every individual has in principle the same intelligence. Yet whatother preconditions did Jacotots students have? Tey most likely came from bourgeoisfamilies and schools, because who else went to the university in Leuven in the nineteenthcentury? Jacotots students, who taught themselves French on the basis of a bilingual text,remained among themselves, just as self-learning groups in the pedagogical spaces of theart field usually do. Among the latter, the everyday use of Rancires theses has the functionof framing their own exclusionary actions as a radical democratic gesture and thus nolonger questioning, let alone changing them. Te reference to every subjects capabilityfor self-empowerment ironically leads to a belief in distinction as one does not feelobliged or even entitled to make an effort to reach those who do not feel they belong inemancipatory spaces, because that would be paternalistic, aer all. Ruth Sonderegger,a philosopher who specialises in Rancires work, notes that regardless of Ranciresdislike (Abneigung) of Pierre Bourdieus analyses, it still remains necessary to payattention to normalisation and exclusion in the art field:

In my view, it is quite astonishing that Rancire does not see Bourdieus research

on the art field as a complementary endeavour. Indeed, both are interested

in the question of what art can contribute to the classification of social space

as a practically sensual physical space []with the only difference that oneemphasises emancipatory effects and the other normalising effects. Rancires

archival evidence for the self-emancipation of joiners, floor layers and metal smiths

with a love of literature seems just as convincing to me as Bourdieus evidencethat the discourse maintained by various institutions about the disinterestedness

of art beginning in is anything but disinterestedness, but rather a strategic

means of establishing and fixing class boundaries along a new kind of capital:

namely cultural capital. 37

On and September , there was a symposium in Vienna with the title educationalturn: Internationale Perspektiven auf Vermittlung in Museen und Ausstellungen(International Perspectives of Education in Museums and Exhibitions).38In herintroductory lecture, Sternfeld, one of the organisers, called this event a re-appropriationof the discourse taking place in the curatorial field by gallery education with a critical

self-image. She also referred to how gallery educators and their knowledge have previouslybeen consistently overlooked in the attempt to propose curatorial action, in the course ofthe reflective turn, as a way of generating, conveying and experiencing knowledge beyondsetting up exhibitions. In her view, curatorial action comes closer in this way to galleryeducation. It adapts the promises of the pedagogical, but without having to be confrontedwith the tension between these promises and the impossibility of fulfilling them entirelyin pedagogical practice. She emphasised that this is a patriarchally structured omission,because it is based on hierarchically placing production over reproduction anddistribution (in this specific case: generating knowledge in comparison with passingon knowledge). Unlike the present text, which attempts to illuminate the reasons forthis omission and to raise the question of which function inheres in it (or also: who exactly

35 N. Sternfeld, Unglamorous Tasks, op. cit.36 Jacques Rancire, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation(trans. Kristin

Ross), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.37 Ruth Sonderegger, Institutionskritik? Zum politischen Alltag der Kunst und zur alltglichen Politik

sthetischer Praktiken. Symposium of the Deutschen Gesellschaft fr sthetik, paper given at theconference sthetik und Alltagserfahrung at Friedrich-Schiller-Universitt in Jena, 2 October 2008.

38 The symposium was organised by schnittpunkt, an exhibition theory and practice network.See http://www.schnitt.org (last accessed on 25 October 2010).



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profits from it and how), Sternfelds lecture stressed the common interests and potentialpossibilities for cooperation between the two fields. Ultimately, in her view, both educativeand curatorial action with critical aspirations involve the attempt, a minoritised one,to make the actualisation of critical, pedagogical approaches productive for a newinstitutional practice, away from representation towards processual spaces of agency,and to turn the disciplinary link (from a historical perspective) between art and educationinto an emancipatory project.

Janna Graham, for her part, emphasises in her article Spanners in the Spectacle:Radical Research at the Frontlines () the shared battle against precarious workingconditions in the art field and against the neoliberal appropriation of creativity as aneconomic factor, seeing here the urgent necessity of forming alliances between artists,curators and gallery educators, and especially between these and activists:

If the project of an educational turn is indeed to find new strategies for opposing,

exiting or even surviving these new regimes of arts education, it is necessary then

to move beyond professional distinctions, to include those actively engaged in the

struggle between the education of a neoliberalised creative class and the creation

of emancipatory and critical education.39

In conclusion, I would like to emphasise another potential shared interest betweencuratorial and educational action in conjunction with the educational turn: engenderingqueer spaces in the sense that the desire to become free from contradictions, in one way oranother, gives way to the logic of action of open-ended work in and with the contradictions.Te antinomy, alluded to above, between emancipation through the will to educate andemancipation through emphasising the presumed principle equality of all subjects(represented here by the two theoretical positions of Rancire and Bourdieu respectively),between exclusionary action and paternalist action, is complex and not to be resolvedin practice. Critical gallery educators are just as aware of this irresolvability as criticalcurators but they may sometimes draw different conclusions from it. In my view,collaboration under these auspices, bringing these conflicts into the artistic-educative

spaces of the educational turn, would in fact open up new possibilities for what aninstitutional practice following institutional critique could be. It would be hard work, though. A precondition for forming an alliance of this kind if it wants to do justice to the egalitarian claims of the educational turn would bethe recognition of gallery education as an independent cultural practice of knowledgeproduction in the curatorial field as well, while simultaneously questioning and processingthe aforementioned hierarchisation of production and reproduction/distribution. Anotherprecondition would be to make room in art spaces in the sense of unlearning privilege,and that the occupation of space should be motivated by activist positions with allthe possibly disastrous consequences this might have for the aesthetic and intellectualglamorousness of the peer groups previously operating in it.

It may be possible to create these conditions as one effect of productive encountersin coming years in case the educational turn proves to be a real turn and not simplyanother in a string of long-term social and political projects that are routinely discovered(like Columbus discovered America) by the contemporary art world to satiate anendless demand for circulation of the new.40

39 J. Graham, Spanners in the Spectacle, op. cit.40 Ibid.

Translated from German by Aileen Derieg.

alliances for unlearning

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