Funded by Arts Council Malta
November 2017
Seminar Pedagogic Projects: ‘How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?’ From Claire Bishop ‘Artificial Hells’.
The chapter re-evaluates the long-time artistic connection between art and life, and attempts to refer to the artistic interventions into social processes as art. It allows us to conceptualize public discussions and perceive them as works of art. The literature surrounding this includes the re-examination of the politics and potentialities of art education through a number of educational experiments. Bishop discusses how the idea of spectatorship has been put aside with the increasing interest of having art without audiences where everyone becomes a producer. This phenomena started in around 2000s and artists and curators have been increasingly engaged in projects that appropriate the methodologies of education as both a method and a form: lectures, seminars, libraries, reading-rooms, publications, workshops and even full blown schools.
The refreshing perspective that education has become art’s potential ally in an age of decreasing public spaces, rampant privatization and instrumentalized bureaucracy has superseded the elitist view of the relationship between art and academy. For instance, this is clearly visible in the increasing rise of museum education and other research networks with Universities. In 1968, Paolo Freire wrote ‘The Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, continued to emphasize the rupture away from authoritarian models of transferring knowledge and towards the goal of empowerment through collective (class) awareness. However, not everyone is in favor of this close proximal relationship between art, life and pedagogy as some think that this approach reflects a neoliberal impetus that renders education a product or tool in the ‘knowledge economy’. By claiming that ‘to be a teacher is my greatest work of art’, Joseph Beuys has become the best known point of reference for contemporary artists’ engagement with experimental pedagogy. In 1973 he opened the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research. Dedicated to realizing the capacity of each person to be a creative being, this free, non-competitive, open academy offered an interdisciplinary curriculum in which culture, sociology and economics were integrated as the foundations of an all-encompassing creative program.
Bishop attempts to discuss the spectatorial implications of art becoming education through a number of case studies of the following artists which we will discuss in class: Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan, Pawel Althamer, Thomas Hirshhorn. To conclude, this approach towards art and pedagogy initiates a number of challenges, such as, who and which artists has access to such resources? What are the criteria for judging a work of art? Do you need to experience them first hand to acknowledge this relationship? I would also add if it is ethical for an artist to work with an already existent structure instead of creating an independent body of its own?