Alliances For Unlearning

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

Author(s): Carmen Mrsch
Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 26 (Spring 2011), pp. 5-13
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art and
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4 | Aferall
Bro trafo.K,
So, what does
this have to do
with me, anyway?',
Transnational
Perceptions of the
History of National
Socialism and the
Holocaust, Vienna
200911, funded
by the Sparkling
Science' programme
of the Austrian
Federal Ministry for
Science and Research.
Courtesy Bro trafo.K
Contexts: Gallery Education | 5
[G]allery education, as it has developed since the mid-1970s, has been both
a distinct and overlapping artistic strategy which is integrally connected to radical
art practices linked to values aired and explored in the liberation movements of
the 1960s and 70s, and particularly the womens movement. It is an individual
strategy among many (including, for instance, small-scale exhibition, small press
and small magazine publishing, alternative libraries and archives) to shif art
from a monolithic and narcissistic position into a dialogic, open and pluralist
set of tendencies that renegotiate issues of representation, institutional critique
and inter-disciplinarity.
1

Tis is how Felicity Allen, head of the Learning department at Tate Britain until recently,
began an article in 2008 titled Situating Gallery Education, in which she undertook to
contextualise this eld of practice in England with regard to both history and feminism.
Tis was one of the rst attempts to theorise
and historicise gallery education in this
way. Gallery education is located also
and especially in conjunction with the
educational or pedagogical turn in
curating at the edges of the art eld and
of the attention of those writing within
it. Stating this does not necessarily mean
lamenting the situation: operating at
the edges and developing a semi-visible
practice has special potentials and
qualities.
2
Tis article contains speculations of its own about the functions of gallery
education for the institutions in which it takes place, and about the concepts of pedagogy
and learning that are inscribed in these functions.
3
It also speculates about the pedagogical
functions of the absence of educators (who are generally female) and of the gallery
education that does not take place in institutions that regard themselves as institutions
of critique in Andrea Frasers sense.
4

Alliances for Unlearning:
On the Possibility of Future
Collaborations Between Gallery
Education and Institutions
of Critique
Carmen Mrsch
Facing the omission of gallery education
from recent discussions of pedagogy,
Carmen Mrsch presents critical gallery
education as an alternative to the bind
between emancipation through the will
to educate and emancipation through the
presumptive equality of all subjects.
1 Felicity Allen, Situating Gallery Education, Tate Encounters [E]dition 2: Spectatorship,
Subjectivity and the National Collection of British Art (ed. David Dibosa), February 2008. Available
at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/tate-encounters/edition-2/
(last accessed on 18 October 2010).
2 Visibility means not only improved opportunities for agency and articulation, but also an increase
in control and regulation. See the allusion in F. Allen, Situating Gallery Education, op. cit.;
Veronica Sekules, The Edge Is Not the Margin, in Access all Areas, Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern
Art, 2010, pp.23553; and Carmen Mrsch, Kunstcoop: Kunstvermittlung als kritische Praxis,
in Viktor Kittlausz and Winfried Pauleit (ed.), Kunst Museum Kontexte: Perspektiven der Kunst-
und Kulturvermittlung, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006, pp.17794.
3 I use the term function not in a determinist, functionalist sense, but rather based on the concept
of the author function as introduced by Michel Foucault: as a historically evolved, non-intentional
occurrence, which is still structured by power relations and domination, and which is involved in
producing the mechanisms of order and exclusion, by which it is itself conditioned. See M. Foucault,
What Is an Author? (1969), Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F.
Bouchard and Sherry Simon), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.11338. I prefer function
rather than effect, in order to leave no doubt that the use, the concrete arrangement and the dispensing
of gallery education along with the associated consequences does not necessarily involve individually
intended effects, but nevertheless those that are based on active actions guided by certain interests.
These effects can be analysed in terms of which interests are respectively dominant at a certain time
and in a certain context and which narratives are hegemonic.
4 Its not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. Its a question of what
kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalise, what forms of practice we reward,
and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalised, embodied, and
performed by individuals, these are the questions that institutional critique demands we ask, above all,
of ourselves. Andrea Fraser, From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique, Artforum,
vol.44, no.1, September 2005, pp.27883.
6 | Aferall
Allens article was published in the second edition of the e-journal Tate Encounters
[E]ditions. Tis publication accompanies the research project Tate Encounters: Britishness
and Visual Culture that Tate Britain conducted from 2007 to 2010 in cooperation with
the London South Bank University and Chelsea College of Art & Design. In this project
a research group composed of academics, museum staf and undergraduate students with
various ties to immigration investigated how Britishness is produced through the displays
of the museum.
5
Te data and intermediate results made available on the projects website
show 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 educative
and curatorial work of Tate Britain. Tate Encounters is informed by insights from
decades of feminist and critical museology, and by attempts to develop ideas of institutional
practice accordingly.
6
In their engagement with the displays and the staf of Tate Britain,
for instance, the students developed their own visual and verbal approaches, which they
linked through the production of ethnographic videos to other contexts specically
relevant to them. Tese co-researcher productions were in turn associated with a series
of 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 cultural
policy and the role of museums in social regeneration; and narratives of British visual
culture that could be accessed through curatorship.
7
Te project sought to dissolve the
hierarchies between researchers and the researched, and between teachers and students,
in favour of a transversal alliance, but without trivialising the power relations and
hierarchies of the setting. Indeed, in this attempt to conduct visitor research as research
in cooperation with visitors, the project is highly self-reective and meticulous in its
treatment. Gallery educators in the German-speaking world have conducted similar
projects as a research component of their work as a critical practice.
8
Twenty freelance
and precariously employed gallery educators worked as a team at documenta 12 (2007),
for example, to carry out analyses aimed at changing the practice and conditions of gallery
education into forms of militant research that is, as performance and intervention.
9

My own involvement in the documenta project consisted of leading and supervising
a team-based research process, and resulted in the thesis that gallery education, depending
on how it is organised, fulls various institutional functions:
10
an afrmative function,
when it conveys information about art institutions and what they produce to an initiated
and already interested audience as smoothly as possible, and a reproductive function
to the extent that it endeavours to bring in children, young people and others uninitiated
to these institutions and thus ensure the continuation of their audiences. It can also assume
a critical deconstructive function 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 develop
knowledge that enables them to form their own judgements and become aware of
their 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 had
to come from a family that had migrated to England (from where was irrelevant) and in which they
were 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 Critical
Museology: 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 Laboratory
for 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 a
Museum: 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 Viennese
agency for cultural education described in Nora Sternfeld, Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education
Learn from Its Political Traditions?, e-flux journal, issue 14, March 2010. Available at
http://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 militant
research, 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 and
Sebastian Cobarrubias), February 2006, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en
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.
transformative efect, in the sense of changing society and institutions, if it does not
content itself with critical questioning, but rather seeks to inuence what it conveys
for example, by shifing the institution in the direction of more justice and less discursive
and 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 education
practice 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 without
some afrmative and reproductive aspects. At the same time, the friction between gallery
education and its host institution increases the more the critical functions come into play.
Te various functions are additionally afliated with diferent discourses on pedagogy and
education: implicit conceptions of what education is, how it occurs and whom it addresses.
For instance, neither the afrmative nor the reproductive function is self-reective in the
sense that their engagement in education is not queried in terms of its value codings and
normalisations. Yet these two strategies difer in the question of the how and the who of
education. Te afrmative function addresses, rst and foremost, the expert audience
players in the art eld.
11
Te methods used for this type of educational work although
it is rarely called that are developed in the academic eld, derived from methodological
canons that are generally instructive and limited to verbal expression in the form of
lectures or debates. Te reproductive function, on the other hand, is oriented (from the
perspective of the institution) towards the excluded, i.e. specically absent parts of the
public, especially children, young people and families. Tey are imagined as remote from
art and as laypeople. For this reason,methods of playful learning are ofen derived from
primary school and kindergarten educational practices and from institutionalised leisure
activities for children and young people. Tey are oriented to the constructivist turn in
learning theory,
12
according to which it is less a matter of instruction in contents than of
providing environments that stimulate manifold and complex processes of independently
constructed meaning. Along with learning specics, the point in these programmes is
also general in the sense of learning a love of art:
13
generating positive experiences within
the institution, recognising arts values and relevance and generating a desire to return.
In comparison, the deconstructive and the transformative functions are based on a
self-reective understanding of education and learning. Education itself becomes the object
of deconstruction or transformation: subject matter, addressees and methods are subjected
to a critical examination of the power relations inscribed in them, and this in turn becomes
the subject of the work with the audience. Questions are raised, such as: who determines
what is important to communicate? Who categorises target groups and to what end?
What gallery education is permitted within the institution, and what is considered
inappropriate and by whom? How do certain methods of teaching and learning implicitly
create the subjects of teaching and learning? Sometimes the positions of those teaching
and those learning change in this practice of querying: that is, the educational process
is 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 conditions
of the educational framework itself.
14
In the understanding of education associated
with this function, engaging with art and its institutions is a relatively sheltered area of
experiments under complex conditions, which aim to enhance the capability for agency,
critique and creativity. Methods borrowed from artistic procedures are applied more
ofen here. For its part, the transformative function emphasises the structural progression
of 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 made
explicit, 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 intention
of breaking it open. Jonathan Culler, Dekonstruktion. Derrida und die poststrukturalisitische
Literaturtheorie, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988, p.95.
8 | Aferall
structural violence in the world at large, an objective linked with fostering critique
and self-empowerment. For this reason, the transformative methodological instruments
are also oriented towards strategies of activism and towards the epistemologies and
methods of critical pedagogy with a special reference to Paulo Freire, for whom the
transformation of language and of verbal action was a constitutive (although not the
sufcient) element for an education aiming to change the world.
In this logic there are no xed and predened addressees. Te concept of target
groups, which is common for the reproductive approach, is superseded by an interest
in forming alliances and in cooperation. Of course, however, here too there is a hidden
curriculum: what is expected and claimed is the fundamental afrmation of a critical
appropriation of art and its institutions.
Gallery education that understands itself as a critical practice focuses on elements of
the deconstructive and the transformative function. It conveys knowledge as represented
by exhibitions and institutions and examines their established functions while rendering
its own position visible. Accordingly, it attaches special importance to providing the
necessary conceptual tools for appropriating knowledge, and adopts a reective stance
towards the means of education, instead of relying on individual aptitude or a striving for
self-fullment. While it seeks to broaden the institutions audience, it does not indulge in
the illusion that learning in the exhibition space is solely connected to play and recreation.
15

Ideally, gallery education acknowledges the aforementioned constructivist concept of
learning processes, as well as the enriching potential of gaps found within language and
comprehension.
16
Tat the knowledge of both visitors and educators is considered equal
sets 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 of
domination, addressing issues such as the production of gender, ethnicity or class catego-
ries in the institution, and the related structural, material and symbolic devaluation of
gallery education, which I will return to later. It analyses the functions of (authorised and
unauthorised) speech and the use of diferent linguistic registers in the exhibition space.
Recipients are not regarded as subordinate to any institutional order; rather, the focus
is directed at their possibilities for agency and code-exchange in the sense of a practice
of everyday life.
17
It also favours a reading of institutional order that, far from being
conceived as static, leaves leeway for working within the gaps, interstices and contradic-
tions generated by the conguration of rooms and displays of the exhibiting institution.
18

Furthermore, critical gallery education addresses the ways in which the market
inuences the structure, presentation, perception and reception of art, and thereby
counters the middle-class illusion that art is detached from the economy to which it is
actually closely tied. It considers the cultural and symbolic capital of art and its institutions
as constituents of inclusionary and exclusionary processes in the art eld. At the same
time, 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 seeks
to 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 eld thus
derives its complexity from art, the core subject on which its methodological repertoire
is grounded.
Summarised so programmatically one could almost say paradigmatically the
approach 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 Bildende
Kunst in Berlin, 19992001. This group worked with artistic and performative means and involved
groups that would not have visited the Kunstverein otherwise. The formats usually associated with
fun and pleasure were simultaneously serious confrontations with the contents of the exhibitions
and the art institution itself, which called for a high degree of engagement and concentration on
the 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 Kunstschulen
Niedersachsen, 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 Encounters
mentioned above.
a permanent state of what Derrida called venir, in coming.
19
Just as in other elds
such as curating, for example a critical approach (in this case, gallery education as a
critical practice) is a minority position. However, as Felicity Allen describes, the historical
connections (in personnel, content, structure) of this eld of work to civil rights movements,
to feminism and to the intersection of art and political activism show that the critical
paradigm in gallery education does exist.
20
Indeed, it has been present for at least forty
years as an aspiration. One current example relevant in this context is the work by the
Youth Council of the National Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, initiated by Janna Graham
and now under the direction of Syrus Marcus Ware, which was established in 2000. In this
project adolescents and young adults developed a programme in cooperation with other
groups from the city, with contributions (exhibitions, performances, interventions in the
collection, zines, lectures, radio programmes, workshops) on topics such as the function of
the gallery in relation to national citizenship; policing and police violence in urban space;
or the link between art, activism and institutions in Toronto.
21
In Vienna the organisation
trafo.K produces gallery education projects for the Museum of Modern Art Vienna
(MUMOK), the international book fair
Buch Wien, the Vienna Mozart Year, the
Museum of the City of Linz and others that,
according to Nora Sternfeld, overcome
the function of reproducing knowledge
and become something else something
unpredictable and open to the possibility
of a knowledge production that, in tones
strident or subtle, would work to challenge
the apparatus of value-coding.
22
Adela
eleznik, Curator for Public Programmes
at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, is
part of the Radical Education Collective
(REC), which was founded in 2006 to nd ways of translating radical pedagogy into
the sphere of artistic production, with education being conceived not merely as a model
but also as a eld of political participation.
23
In Oldenburg, Germany, Nanna Lth and
her colleagues at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art conduct media (art) education with
the aim of encouraging its participants to better understand the strategies and codes of
a 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.
24
Perhaps surprisingly, gallery
education projects that attempt to be critical and aim for changes in the sense described
above are usually part of large, ofen national art institutions, which accordingly have a
powerful position in the art system and operate as global players in the art market. Projects
there become entangled in special contradictions. Teir critical potential is particularly
exposed 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 Karen
Raney (ed.), Engage Magazine, no.15, 2004, pp.3337; and C. Mrsch, To Take All That Learning and
Put It Together with All That Art: Loraine Leesons Artistic-Educative Projects in the Context of
English 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 der
Kunstvermittlung 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. Graham
and Yasin Shadya, Reframing Participation in the Museum: A Syncopated Discussion, in Griselda
Pollock 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 and
presentations, we will also hold exhibitions intended to address subjects which are socially
relevant 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
Critical gallery educators
have to navigate manifold
ambivalences. Tey are
representatives of the
institution, so they have no
opportunity to imagine an
uncompromised outside
for their work or themselves
as heroic gures.
10 | Aferall
context of an imperative positing of education in the so-called knowledge society
and the concomitant revaluation of sof skills within society.
25
In some cases they
are almost g leaf measures in conjunction with diversity and audience development
policies. Tey assist the institutions in presenting themselves as progressive and socially
responsible, while leaving the internal logics of operation, which usually function in a
strictly hierarchical and less socially aware way, unchanged. More recently, there have
been discussions about examples in England, where major art institutions like to make use
of the added value of artistic-pedagogic collectives in the sense of radical chic, but (re-)act
inconsistently when these collectives question the logic of operations and the structures
of the host institutions with the same radicality.
26
Not least of all, gallery education projects
intended to have a transformative efect frequently have, at best, only reforming efects
within the institution. Tis is evident in the case of the documenta 12 research and educa-
tion programme. Te documenta 12 programme was possible because the educational
turn in curating was taken up and continued by the artistic director Roger M. Buergel
and curator Ruth Noack. With their support, education at documenta 12 was able to
operate self-reectively within the framework of the exhibition and to open up space
for experiments (though adequate nancial resources were not made available by the
institution). Yet the reception of this experiment was and is limited almost exclusively
to specialists, taking place within the professional community of gallery education.
27

At the institutional level it was not possible to establish gallery education as a critical
practice, as the management of the documenta GmbH argued that the mode of gallery
education was the responsibility of the respective artistic directors. Based on the same
argument, it was not possible to extend the collaboration with a local audience that had
been initiated through the projects Local Advisory Board afer the exhibition closed.
28

What was achieved, however, was the institution of a principle of openness on the part of
documenta for future work with children and young people in the exhibition. It is possible
that this will change in the 2012 iteration of the exhibition, but it is too early to tell.
29

Institutions of critique, on the other hand, rarely work together with gallery
educators, even when their resources allow them to do so. I would like to speculate on the
reasons for this and on the function of the absence of gallery educators in these spaces.
Te ne line between disrupting and stabilising dominant orders is very narrow for critical
practices in neoliberalism, where critical gallery educators have to navigate manifold
ambivalences. Tey are representatives of the institution, so they have no opportunity
to imagine an uncompromised outside for their work or themselves as heroic gures.
Due to the presumption that their position is insufciently radical, they are frequently
subjected to disregard or contempt from critically positioned actors in the art eld,
from whom they would prefer to receive interest and support. In reections on pedagogy
currently undertaken by curators and artists, gallery education does not appear as an
independent practice with its own history and controversial discourses, but is treated
instead if at all in casual asides. (Here should I be clear that I am not referring to
the 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 University
Press, 2001.
26 See, for example, the consequences of the invitation to the Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination 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 activist
strategies learned in the workshop to denounce the employment and sponsoring practices of Tate
itself. 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 the
group Platform at the Arnolfini in Bristol, where the art institution itself became the centre of
attention as a polluting factor. See http://blog.platformlondon.org/content/c-words-ripples-continuing
27 The activities and results of the project have been gathered in two volumes: Ayse Glec, Claudia
Hummel, C. Mrsch, Sonja Parzefall, Ulrich Schtker and Wanda Wieczorek (ed.), documenta 12
education 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 by
Tate Encounters in Tate Britain, or by the Edgware Road Project of the Serpentine Gallery, which
should 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 programme
at documenta 12, see C. Hummel, What Does aushecken Hatching Ideas Mean?, in A. Glec et al.,
documenta 12 education 1, op. cit.
Education Aesthetics in the publication Curating and the Educational Turn (2010).
30

In the same book, Simon Sheikh reects on Andrea Frasers 1984 performance Museum
Highlights: A Gallery Talk, taking it for granted that gallery education, which he calls
mediation, still exists in 2010 solely to teach people the right way to look, from the
perspective of the institution, and the right way to understand the works.
31
Has he
not noticed the post-structuralist and power theory reections in this eld? It is hard
to imagine that a protagonist from gallery education would write an article about the
functions of curating without basic knowledge of this practice. Tat this does not seem
to be a problem the other way around indicates the hierarchies between curating and
educating: the lack of knowledge about the history and discourses of gallery education
involves a sanctioned ignorance, in Gayatri Spivaks sense, an unknowing that strengthens
ones own position of power.
32
Tis could be considered the rst pedagogical function
of the absence of gallery education in institutions of critique. For a gallery education that
sees itself as a critical practice could be also realised in this kind of institution, i.e. it could
question and work on mechanisms of exclusion, naturalisations and power relations there
as well. Tis, however, could be seen as calling the critical position on the part of curators
and artists into question. If curators did not want this to happen, then it would be a sensible
strategy of territorialisation to regard their actions as being identical with the actions of
gallery education.
33

Tis is not the case, however. Te audience attracted by events organised by curators
and artists is far more delimited than the groups accessed by gallery educators. Te many
academies, schools, seminars, workshops, sessions, encounters and lessons
initiated in the course of the educational turn are largely attended at least as far as I have
been able to observe by people who are similar in habits, lifestyle and attitudes to those
of the curators. For those who accept the invitation, being in these spaces and engaging in
social interaction and collective artistic and intellectual production signies an increase in
symbolic and cultural capital. In this way, these spaces are no diferent from the art spaces
that are regarded as hegemonic and bourgeois. Critical gallery education practice, on the
other hand, involves a tremendous capacity for embarrassment. It takes places in rooms
that 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 that
substantially deviate from ones own position and aesthetics much diferent from ones
own taste; it requires radically alternating between registers of language and aesthetics.
Pedagogical expertise means having an idea of how to react to the efects of educational
and knowledge hierarchies in the face of diferent world views, utopias and desires,
other than by feeling embarrassed, turning up ones nose, becoming defensive or being
helplessly silent.
Moreover, gallery educators cannot expect that their audience will be willing to accept
a critical stance. An audience that rejects this expectation eludes the educational intentions
inherent to the deconstructive and transformative functions of promoting a capacity for
critique 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 on
deconstruction/transformation and his or her insistence on diferent, independent
interests could be a self-empowering act. Tese and other paradoxes call for a mode of
unlearning privilege on the part of critical gallery educators,
34
an active reection in
other words, one that is consequently also articulated in action in relation to the privilege
of ones own position, colliding languages and habitual constitutions. Nora Sternfeld aptly
calls this work an unglamorous task.
35
And this could be seen as the second function of
the absence of gallery educators in institutions of critique: enabling the concentration on
glamorous tasks, the collectively produced preservation of the aura and exclusivity through
the peer group.
30 Andrea Phillips, Education Aesthetics, in Paul ONeill and Mick Wilson (ed.), Curating and the
Educational 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 themselves
as 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 York
and London: Routledge, 1990, p.9.
12 | Aferall
It is in this context that the current popularity of the philosopher Jacques Rancire,
and especially his book Te Ignorant Schoolmaster (1983),
36
in the art eld is signicant.
Tere is hardly a statement in conjunction with the educational turn that can do without
a reference to the radical democratic vision of self-learning, which Rancire discusses
using the historical example of the linguistics and literature professor Jean-Joseph Jacotot
and the method of universal learning he developed in Leuven in 1818. According to
this 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 is
superuous, because every individual has in principle the same intelligence. Yet what
other preconditions did Jacotots students have? Tey most likely came from bourgeois
families and schools, because who else went to the university in Leuven in the nineteenth
century? 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 the
art eld usually do. Among the latter, the everyday use of Rancires theses has the function
of framing their own exclusionary actions as a radical democratic gesture and thus no
longer questioning, let alone changing them. Te reference to every subjects capability
for self-empowerment ironically leads to a belief in distinction as one does not feel
obliged or even entitled to make an efort to reach those who do not feel they belong in
emancipatory spaces, because that would be paternalistic, afer all. Ruth Sonderegger,
a philosopher who specialises in Rancires work, notes that regardless of Rancires
dislike (Abneigung) of Pierre Bourdieus analyses, it still remains necessary to pay
attention to normalisation and exclusion in the art eld:
In my view, it is quite astonishing that Rancire does not see Bourdieus research
on the art eld as a complementary endeavour. Indeed, both are interested
in the question of what art can contribute to the classication of social space
as a practically sensual physical space [] with the only diference that one
emphasises emancipatory efects and the other normalising efects. Rancires
archival evidence for the self-emancipation of joiners, oor layers and metal smiths
with a love of literature seems just as convincing to me as Bourdieus evidence
that the discourse maintained by various institutions about the disinterestedness
of art beginning in 1750 is anything but disinterestedness, but rather a strategic
means of establishing and xing class boundaries along a new kind of capital:
namely cultural capital.
37
On 18 and 19 September 2010, there was a symposium in Vienna with the title educational
turn: Internationale Perspektiven auf Vermittlung in Museen und Ausstellungen
(International Perspectives of Education in Museums and Exhibitions).
38
In her
introductory lecture, Sternfeld, one of the organisers, called this event a re-appropriation
of the discourse taking place in the curatorial eld by gallery education with a critical
self-image. She also referred to how gallery educators and their knowledge have previously
been consistently overlooked in the attempt to propose curatorial action, in the course of
the reective turn, as a way of generating, conveying and experiencing knowledge beyond
setting up exhibitions. In her view, curatorial action comes closer in this way to gallery
education. It adapts the promises of the pedagogical, but without having to be confronted
with the tension between these promises and the impossibility of fullling them entirely
in pedagogical practice. She emphasised that this is a patriarchally structured omission,
because it is based on hierarchically placing production over reproduction and
distribution (in this specic case: generating knowledge in comparison with passing
on knowledge). Unlike the present text, which attempts to illuminate the reasons for
this 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 the
conference 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).
prots from it and how), Sternfelds lecture stressed the common interests and potential
possibilities for cooperation between the two elds. Ultimately, in her view, both educative
and curatorial action with critical aspirations involve the attempt, a minoritised one,
to make the actualisation of critical, pedagogical approaches productive for a new
institutional practice, away from representation towards processual spaces of agency,
and to turn the disciplinary link (from a historical perspective) between art and education
into an emancipatory project.
Janna Graham, for her part, emphasises in her article Spanners in the Spectacle:
Radical Research at the Frontlines (2010) the shared battle against precarious working
conditions in the art eld and against the neoliberal appropriation of creativity as an
economic 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 nd 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 between
curatorial and educational action in conjunction with the educational turn: engendering
queer spaces in the sense that the desire to become free from contradictions, in one way or
another, 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 and
emancipation 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 resolved
in practice. Critical gallery educators are just as aware of this irresolvability as critical
curators but they may sometimes draw diferent conclusions from it. In my view,
collaboration under these auspices, bringing these conicts into the artistic-educative
spaces of the educational turn, would in fact open up new possibilities for what an
institutional 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 be
the recognition of gallery education as an independent cultural practice of knowledge
production in the curatorial eld as well, while simultaneously questioning and processing
the aforementioned hierarchisation of production and reproduction/distribution. Another
precondition 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 all
the possibly disastrous consequences this might have for the aesthetic and intellectual
glamorousness of the peer groups previously operating in it.
It may be possible to create these conditions as one efect of productive encounters
in coming years in case the educational turn proves to be a real turn and not simply
another 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 an
endless demand for circulation of the new.
40

39 J. Graham, Spanners in the Spectacle, op. cit.
40 Ibid.
Translated from German by Aileen Derieg.

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Alliances for Unlearning: On the Possibility of Future Collaborations Between Gallery

Education and Institutions of Critique

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