Two texts have got me thinking recently. The first is a text by the art historian Griselda Pollock first published in 1985/6 and recently republished in a small book produced by Sternberg Press. The second is the chapter ‘Pedagogic Projects: ‘How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art’ in Claire Bishop’s book ‘Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship’, which was published in 2012. Both essays have helped in my ongoing exploration of how we can understand and value artists’ ‘education’ work in museums.
Griselda Pollock’s text, the original version of which was a lecture given at the Royal College of Art, is a critique of art and art school pedagogy and practice from a feminist perspective. At the heart of her critique is a deconstruction of the ‘unquestioned notions of individualism’ in art history and society that celebrate ‘the idea of the self-motivating and self-creating artist who makes things that embody that peculiarly heightened and highly valued subjectivity…. a Romantic idea of the artist as the subjectivity whose works express both a personal subjectivity and a universal condition.’
Drawing on theorists including Karl Marx, Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, and Roland Barthes, Pollock argues instead that art is produced and received communally. Art’s ‘community’ includes all those practical activities that are necessary to make an artwork such as weaving canvas, manufacturing technology, or quarrying stones. It also includes the ‘conversational community’ who provide the wider conceptual context – the ‘commonality of terms, ambitions and criteria of assessment’ – that allow an art work to be understandable.
From this, Pollock argues that discerning the meaning of art is not about interrogating the individual artist’s biography and intentions, but instead requires the viewer, as a participant in this ‘social practice’, to create meaning from an awareness of their own positionality and the social and cultural conditions of the art work’s creation. In other words, we need to understand art itself as a collective enterprise – made by many and only meaningful within social and historical contexts of creation and reception. It is this ontological framing of art as a shared activity rather than as a singular creative enterprise which resonates for me.
Claire Bishop’s text addresses similar themes to those explored by Griselda Pollock, while focusing specifically on artistic practice that ‘claims to be pedagogic’. She begins the chapter by posing the interesting contradiction that ‘art is given to be seen by others, while education has no image’ before suggesting that participatory art ‘forecloses the traditional idea of spectatorship and suggests and new understanding of art without audiences, one in which everyone is a producer’. It would appear that Bishop too is advocating for a collective understand of art where the boundaries between artist and audience are reformed.
However, the chapter reveals that Bishop is uncomfortable with this position. She details various artists’ projects whose relational and/or educational practice involves direct participation by members of the public. Yet she admits that she often struggles with these projects’ visual and conceptual ‘rewards’. Notably she finds it difficult to reconcile the value for those participating directly, with the value given to those who are spectators. I share Bishop’s reservations about some of the artistic/education practices that were fashionable at the time she wrote the book and her exploration of artists who grapple with the participation/spectatorship dilemma in different ways is illuminating.
But what is actually most useful for me in Bishop’s text is her acknowledgment that we need to find different ways of judging and valuing art practices that involve both art and education. In her closing sentence to the chapter she makes the rallying cry that ‘we learn to think both fields together and devise adequate new languages and criteria for communicating these transversal practices.’ I could not agree more.
We need to move beyond judging artist led education practices, especially those commissioned by education/learning curators in museums, according to the individualistic criteria so effectively critiqued by Griselda Pollock. If we fail in this, we will continue to misunderstand and misrepresent a practice that is both art and education and also potentially something else that requires new language and ways of thinking.
PRAM 