The text below was originally submitted to an anthology, which is now unlikely to be published. It is a longer text than I would normally post here, but I believe strongly in what I wrote here so wanted to get it out into the world. I hope you enjoy.
Introduction
Some texts emerge unexpectedly. This essay, for example, was prompted by a post I read on the artist, curator and educator Pablo Helguera’s LinkedIn page in 2023. In a refreshingly honest statement, Pablo wrote:
‘Sometime in the mid-2000s, we saw the emergence of a trend of embracing pedagogical models in both art and exhibition-making. The term the ‘educational turn’ in curating became common currency. But it kind of led to a dead-end, laden with unsatisfying and didactic exhibitions, overly theoretical publications and boring programming. Now, a decade and a half later, it might be worthwhile figuring out what happened.’
I was working in gallery education during the mid-2000s and witnessed the gatherings, publications and exhibitions that self-consciously sought to explore the relationship between pedagogy and curation in the art museum. The so-called ‘educational turn’ appeared to offer the potential to de/re-construct formal and museum education, art-making and exhibiting. Yet, although some interventions took place in galleries and museums, gallery education activities seemed to be intentionally excluded. I, like Pablo, was largely uninspired by the educational turn activities and outputs I saw then, and encouraged by Pablo’s provocation, this text interrogates the ‘movement’ now.
Crucially, this paper is neither comprehensive nor objective. Rather, by drawing on my own recollections and research, I consider key differences between what were almost always curatorially situated educational turn interventions with activities designed by museum educators. My aim is to address Pablo’s underlying question – why were educational turn interventions ultimately unsatisfying? – whilst also illuminating the qualities of gallery education that make those practices pedagogically compelling.
A brief review of the origins of the Educational Turn and Gallery Education
Although gallery education has been a feature of art museums since the late 1960s, the educational turn emerged at a specific moment in the mid-2000s when higher education in the UK and Europe was experiencing profound shifts. At the same time ‘socially engaged practice’ or ‘social practice’ was also gaining visibility. Both trends shaped the rationale behind and processes and aesthetic manifestations of the educational turn.
Broadly, the early twenty-first century witnessed a transition within higher education in Europe towards a more standardised, market-driven economic model. Notably, the 1999 Bologna Declaration was perceived by some academics to manifest a political reorientation away from a university culture centered on pure scholarship to a model that privileged profit and bureaucracy. This in turn was seen to curtail opportunities for more open-ended pedagogy.
In response, academics, artists and curators working in higher education in Western Europe sought alternative space to instigate more liberal education activities. As academic Irit Rogoff describes in relation to the Academy project (2006) at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven: ‘our interests were in the possibilities for the museum to open a place for people to engage ideas differently – ideas from outside its own walls. So, the museum, in our thinking, was the site of possibility, the site of potentiality’. The educational turn saw those frustrated by the university pedagogic environment bringing their conceptions of teaching and learning to the museum space. Locating themselves as disruptors, they connected with curators, working together to initiate exhibitions and discursive interventions that were intended to function as educational platforms.
In some instances, elements of such socially engaged artists’ practice were clearly pedagogic. Tania Bruguera established an art school – the Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behaviour Art School) – in Cuba in 1998, while Tim Rollins’s work with the Kids of Survival (KOS) saw him ‘teaching’ young people. However, in my experience, once these artists transferred to the art museum and their practice was mediated through curatorial departments, their work became less about long-term, dialogic co-production and learning and more concerned with a performative ‘pedagogic’ moment, or even a spectacular confrontation. It is this tendency within museum-situated socially engaged practice towards a highly choreographed moment or aesthetic encounter that in part shaped the educational turn.
While the educational turn responded to shifts in university teaching, the strand of education that developed in museums in the late 1960s was in response to criticisms of cultural elitism. This critical impetus informed a model of gallery education that sought to attract a wider public and empower audiences to engage directly with institutions and art. Particularly in the UK (although also in North and South America, and Western Europe), during the 1970 to 1990s, pedagogic practices emerged that drew heavily on critical and emancipatory pedagogy, but also on models of early childhood education, co-constructive learning and on the principles and methodologies of art practice.
Crucially too, in the 1970s and 1980s UK gallery education was intertwined with the burgeoning community arts movement, which was itself informed by broader community development ideologies. The principle of actively involving communities underpinned community arts and gallery education’s aim to ‘use’ art to address issues, challenge societal structures and bring about change. Thus, by the early 2000s gallery education within institutions including Tate Liverpool and London, the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Arnofini, Bristol and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham was deeply theorised and informed by the ambition to both democratise culture (that is, make ‘high art’ in art museums more accessible) and promote cultural democracy (that is, support the public to create and celebrate the rich variety of culture within the museum and beyond).
Gallery education and the educational turn clearly have similarities. Both situate the museum as a potentially emancipatory space and draw on shared artistic and theoretical antecedents. But where gallery education foregrounds process and dialogue that actively deconstructs exhibitions and institutions, arguably the educational turn was largely premised on the concept of ‘the exhibition as school’ as curator Sam Thorne has described it. With the latter, the symbolic form and performativity of the educational encounter dominated, not the pedagogic process. As Irit Rogoff said, museums were situated largely as ‘spaces of display’ not sites of contestation where the public might be empowered to question these very mechanisms of display within wider institutional and epistemological hierarchies.
Participation
In a revealing comment within a reflective text on the educational turn, Dave Beech acknowledges that ‘there is no viewer in the art of encounter and if by chance a viewer turned up, then their activity would probably be seen as a troubling social presence affecting the inter-human activity that it views’. What was unacknowledged at the time (but revealed here) is that in many ways the educational turn was noticeably solipsistic and exclusionary. Despite activities taking place in public institutions and rhetorically claiming to seek change within broader culture, the active players in the events and the audience that was addressed by the educational turn were almost exclusively a small group of academics, curators, artists, art students and arts policymakers. The wider public – including the families, schoolchildren and young people who might visit a gallery – were seemingly only hypothetically invited or expected to participate.
| Vignette One To illustrate this point, I will relate my experience of two associated events that were integral to the educational turn. I visited the Wide Open School exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London (2012), accompanied by a 12-year-old boy. We travelled through eerily empty gallery spaces to take our places in a booked workshop being run by the artist Tim Rollins and the KOS. There was one other member of the public doing the workshop, which involved inking out the lines of pre-printed sheets of music. These were then pinned up to form a complete artwork on the wall. The artist’s participation was minimal, as the instructions were simple and deviation from the prescribed activity was not permitted. My companion was not, it must be said, very interested in this process. In my memory we were allowed to take one sheet home, but on no condition were we to claim any part of the work as ours. The artwork was the legal property of Tim Rollins and, as he said, he would have no qualms about suing us if we attempted to sell it. It was a somewhat chilling message for the young person with me. In contrast, the 2010 ‘Deschooling Society’ conference, held at the start of the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine Gallery research project, which preceded Wide Open School was a vibrant, over-subscribed two-day event, attended by the citizens of the art world. Presentations were given, ideas debated and theoretical scenarios mapped out. As I recall, the energy in the room was palpable. |
I sketch these two experiences, not so much to critique Rollins, but to reinforce Dave Beech’s point that the wider public’s experience was of negligible importance. In contrast, the texts written by the art professionals immersed in the movement reveal the value that these curatorial/educational initiatives brought to them. These essays reveal how exploring ideas and questioning institutional norms allowed for rich research and engaging learning. But essentially and perhaps ironically it was only those directly engaged in the learning/research/discursive process that conferences such as ‘Deschooling Society’ who could connect meaningfully with it.
Symbolic Versus Emancipatory Pedagogy
A further indication of the exclusionary tendency within the educational turn lies in the aesthetics that became associated with it. ‘[A] table in the middle of the room, a set of empty bookshelves, a growing archive of assembled bits and pieces, a classroom or a lecture scenario’ rapidly became synonymous with what Irit Rogoff refers to as ‘pedagogical aesthetics’ that stood in for a process that had happened elsewhere. But, as Eszter Lázár astutely observes, displays that evoke a classroom are not necessarily engaging or accessible to the viewer. Lázár asks whether ‘these programs, which are based on the premises of democratic methods and the voicing of different opinions, exclude rather than include “outsiders”’. Despite the educational turn proponents’ claims that these artistic interventions were pedagogically transformational, arguably what the visitor experienced was no more than a symbolic manifestation of a notional transformational encounter.
Jacqueline Bell observes that any ‘visual shorthand for pedagogy’ is unlikely to inspire viewers and can never be a substitute for in-depth teaching and learning. Likewise, Pablo Helguera notes that, there is a difference between ‘art that claims to be about social change and art that embodies social change’. Authentic emancipatory pedagogy involves focusing on the how of teaching and learning, as well as what is being taught, while attending to who is involved. It necessitates delicate facilitation and awareness of how power relations play out in the pedagogic moment. Allowing learners to develop their own understandings requires giving space to their experience and skills, and respecting expertise that might challenge, and even undermine the knowledge of the teacher. It is perhaps optimistic to imagine this complex process of meaning-making happening via an unmediated display of assembled books within an otherwise empty classroom in an art museum.
| Vignette Two In 2012 I undertook a piece of collaborative research to examine the assumptions, ambitions and ideas of Tate Learning colleagues. We interviewed the then senior management team to understand how they constructed ‘learning’, how they designed learning programmes and why, in their view, these activities provided transformational experiences. We discovered that learning is seen as a holistic process of change that takes place through questioning and conversation. This dialogue takes place between the visitor and an artwork, between visitors and staff, among visitors, staff and artists, and among visitors themselves. The goal of learning programmes is not to transmit a set of facts about art or art history but to facilitate new ways of thinking and experiencing the works in the museum. Programmes are intended to demonstrate to participants the value and relevance of their own knowledge in relation to art. Activities help learners to build on this knowledge to develop new understandings about art, themselves and the world. In a subsequent text, the Senior Curators for the Schools and Teachers programme articulated what was required to achieve this. They needed to create ‘a speculative space of exchange where ideas and expectations, including our own, are allowed to break apart as part of a process of making meaning collaboratively, part of a productive dismantling that shapes and builds understanding in the moment of being with art’. |
I share this research to highlight how gallery education supports visitors to create their own interpretations through deeply considered process-led programming. Emancipatory pedagogy within the art museum requires moving away from ‘preparing explanations in advance’ to ‘following the life of an idea, in public, with others’, as Anthony Huberman has observed. Best practice gallery education involves making meaning collaboratively, which means letting go, whilst also investing love and care in a pedagogic process involving the wider public.
Conclusion – Process and Unravelling
A key educational theorist beloved by those within the educational turn and gallery education is Paulo Freire, who states:
‘The task of the teacher, who is also a learner, is both joyful and rigorous. It demands seriousness and scientific, physical, emotional, and affective preparation. It is a task that requires that those who commit themselves to teaching develop a certain love, not only of others but also of the very process implied in teaching.‘
In saying this Freire suggests why educational turn interventions were quite often uninspiring to the museum visitor. For, if any educational process is to be engaging, both teacher and learner need to be fully invested in a long-term process and not simply given access to the outcomes. The challenge within the museum, however, is that lengthy (months, if not years in duration) and unpredictable processes do not fit easily within a dominant curatorial culture of temporary exhibitions and relatively short-term displays. In the museum an artist-initiated pedagogic process, as mediated through curatorial, can become ossified, captured in static and alienating forms of ‘aesthetic pedagogy’ that conform to the rituals and regulations of the museum, but offer little to the viewer if not further interpreted.
This may seem critical, but education works best when it is not concerned with display. Gallery education practices are more pedagogically valid than educational turn interventions because the former’s purpose is to facilitate processes of meaning-making for all those involved. These processes are often led by artists but are categorically not presenting an artist’s work. Or put another way, as a Tate Learning Curator commented: ‘the difference between an artist being invited into a Learning department and an artist invited by Curatorial is that with the [former], artists expect their idea to unravel to a certain degree’.
Engendering learning for those beyond the citizens of the art world in the museum involves a highly sophisticated form of unravelling: losing authority, moving away from aesthetics and the symbolic forms of education to focus on processes of change and disruption. It cannot simply be ‘presented’, and it takes skill and experience to create environments where this happens. The educational turn interventions may have provided rich and transformational learning for the curators and academics directly involved, but it was gallery education practitioners who were working during the mid-2000s that made the art museum a space of possibility for the wider population.
Bibliography
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