Pretend Play

Did the “educational turn in curating" fail?

Cate Pasquarelli, "Lake" (detail), 2022. 3” h x 12” diameter (overall). Courtesy of the artist. catepasquarelli.com

[Note: This two-part text concerns the role of education in exhibition-making.  This first part attempts a diagnosis of the hurdles faced by recent practices; the second proposes a few ways forward.]

Last year I was approached by an international biennial with an invitation to potentially join their organizing team. The proposal was to help shape a pedagogical direction to the biennial in a way that could even help determine the curatorial focus. I enjoy doing collaborative research and planning; I also have developed education projects for several  biennials in the past and served as Pedagogical Curator of the Mercosul Biennial in Brazil in 2010-11, working with a team led by José Roca, one of the most exciting experiences of my career. This seemed like an opportunity to work like that again.

I started thinking about strategies for research, identifying possible local collaborators, sketching an action plan. Time was tight, but it was doable.

The biennial staff was very busy with their current edition, so I had to wait until it closed to start conversations. But even after that,  meetings did not go beyond general discussions: their leadership still was not clear about what they were hoping to achieve. I never received a white paper, planning timeline, or general action plan for the biennial project. Not having a curator meant that there was no thematic focus to grab on to, and since there was no mutually agreed process to determine what kind of curatorial team to look for either, we had a chicken-and-egg dilemma. The biennial had a director of education, but this person was never mentioned nor included in my meetings with them, which I found odd considering their mantra that the pedagogical component needed to be central to the biennial.

As the weeks and months progressed, their leadership continued to be distracted— traveling, taking breaks, busy with other matters, etc.  and nothing had been decided. I started growing concerned that we would not have enough time to agree on a plan or implement it properly. Under circumstances like these I try to be proactive, so I sent a few different proposals for structuring the biennial according to the time constraints.  All my proposals were met with silence; no Yes or No, no discussion at all. I offered to fly to meet in person with the team, but they said no, asking for more time to plan. At some point I was asked if I could spend three or four weeks at the city where the biennial would take place. But I hesitated: would I be there for three weeks to do what, exactly? I never got a clear answer, so I feared that my response might have been a deal-breaker.

After six months of sporadic zoom meetings and at least a month of unanswered emails, time was really running short and I wrote to them once again.  I argued that an experimental approach requires ample thinking and planning, which was another way of saying that there is nothing worse than trying to experiment when you are running out of time, which was the case there. If rushed, we  would either come up with a mediocre or messy biennial. Finally I was informed that they had decided after all against involving me given that they would work with local educators and giving the fact that I was far away it would be hard to work with me.

Aside from the question of how a local education approach would engage a multi-level international public (as it is an international biennial after all), that would include both art and non-art informed viewers, and while the intention of selecting local educators to recognize local autonomy was noble, this divorce at the root from any potential curatorial project  would either result in the education component becoming something completely disembodied from the exhibition or, if there was indeed to be an interpretive plan, it would seemingly revert to the usual role of education as derivative, not generative, of the curatorial vision— both unsatisfying and decidedly not groundbreaking scenarios.

This comfort-zone approach to education is something which we supposedly had overcome in the art world.  I thought about the hopes we had around the integration of pedagogy in curatorial thinking  15 or so years ago contrasted with what we have to show for it today. As those of us in the field of education know, evaluation and assessment are essential tools; so It would only make sense to evaluate how the particular concept of the “educational turn”  has evolved and been applied in contemporary art.

The relationship between pedagogy and art making became an important subject in the art discourse of the first decade of the 21^st century. Not only did it come about along with the emergence of socially engaged art  and the projects that many of us did during that period, but it also became a central concern for the curatorial field. In 2006, Irit Rogoff, Charles Esche and Kerstin Niemann developed a multi-faceted international project titled “A.C.A.D.E.M.Y” that included MuHka, Antwerp, the Van Abbe Museum Eindhoven, the Hamburg Kunstverein and Goldsmiths Department of Visual Cultures. They aimed to “collaborate on a project that would reconsider concepts of learning and teaching in the context of art making and artistic institutions. The project took the form of a series of exhibitions, events and publications, all questioning possible ways of extending the principles of learning and teaching beyond the frameworks and ambitions of formal art education.” The project was part of what Rogoff termed as “the educational turn”. In 2008-9 Sally Tallant and  I collaborated in organizing two sibling public gatherings, “Deschooling Society” at the Hayward Gallery in London and  “Transpedagogy” at MoMA, which in part had as their objectives to understand, in both practical and critical terms, what we meant by art-as-education. And then in 2010, Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson published the book “Curating and The Educational Turn”, which explored how education serves as a catalyst to revitalize the curatorial practice.

The publication of O’Neil’s and Wilson’s book in particular was exciting for contemporary art educators: we saw it as a long-awaited validation of our work. Also, coming on the heels of the Great Recession, the discussions on how art could broker empathy, cooperation and mutual understanding felt more important than ever.

However, what became clear later on was that the so-called educational turn in curating was not really about incorporating the values of education or its methodologies as actual educators understood them, or at least the theoretical debates it prompted did not seem to connect with actual practice. For example, the recurring wielding of the portmanteau “knowledge production” begged the question of exactly what pedagogical approach would be used to produce this knowledge, who would be able to lead or participate in this process, what kind of knowledge would be sought, and how it would be applied. Moreover, while the notion of applying pedagogical models in exhibition-making was an attractive one, there was no consideration of what kind of skills this would require, and seemingly no awareness of the simple fact that there is a giant difference between knowing something and knowing how to help others learn. The popularity in art circles around this time of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which as the author himself once suggested was meant as a provocation around antiquated learning models like  the banking system of education, had the adverse (and unintended) effect, in my view, of becoming a justification for amateur educating. Rancière used the story of 19th century educator Joseph Jacotot’s teaching methods to reflect on the notion of teaching something that you don’t know yourself as a means to intellectual emancipation; however, Rancière’s educational parable and study was too often misinterpreted as a justification to teach something one knows without knowing how to teach it, resulting in the reinforcement of hierarchies where the learned/stultifying master reigns supreme and unchallenged. It also must be said that, given the fact that there is a gender divide between the curatorial and education fields (a majority of professional art educators are women while the top echelons of curatorial leadership continue to be held primarily by men), this shift at times felt like a mansplaining of education by curators.

The appropriation of education theory without much consideration for its praxis resulted in a number of chaotic scenarios: in museums, curators with scant knowledge of education were often empowered to run education projects, which would usually result in them reverting to premodern lecture models, or, when adventurous, some attempted experimental learning processes that led to aimless and confusing programs. In other cases, “knowledge production” would mean a recycling of fashionable theories amongst self-selected groups of in-the-know curators and artists. And in cases where exhibitions wanted to “activate” the visiting public, tables with books laid out on a table in a poor attempt at a reading room (how many people come to a white cube gallery to sit by an uncomfortable table and read Deleuze for an hour?)

But the long-term side effects of these educational attempts were even more pernicious for the art world body. Art criticism (rightly, I might add) charged that these processes were uninteresting as exhibitions; they of course were even less interesting to the art market, leaving them to become a mere plaything for academics. As an aside, I suspect there is a genealogy between that criticism and the way that socially engaged art is typically received today by the art press (e.g. the last Documenta). Given both that education methodologies turned out to be too challenging to apply without expertise and that the negative reception of those curatorial experiments resulted in embarrassment, this led back to conventional curating, with education going back to its traditional supporting (i.e. not leading) role.

Sometime in 2008 during the Liverpool Biennial, when I participated in a small symposium to present the School of Panamerican Unrest, I entered into a back-and-forth with an artist collective who was presenting a pedagogical/collaborative project where it was unclear whether any actual learning had occurred. When I asked the members of the collective what sort of assessment they had made to know how/what participants had learned, they reverted to the position that the project was an artwork, and that it was not their job  (read: not their problem) to assess. This classic position of making a claim (pedagogical value in this case) while eluding proof by claiming artworks don’t need to prove anything became a recurring refrain of many participatory art projects— a mere mirage of education that in a later book I tried to argue needs to be called out as symbolic, not actual, participation. It is the difference between having a real, utilized library and having a faux bookshelf— either those that have fake leather spines or actual shelves that you fill with random leather volumes (such as distressed vintage cloth and leather tomes that are purchased by the foot). I have also termed this strategy in the past as “pretend play”: a performative presentation primarily for show.

I fully acknowledge the facetious title of this text:  in truth, I do not believe that the question of whether the “educational turn” failed is that useful or meaningful.  But the impulse to see art incorporate critical thinking and agency to instigate a democratic dialogue, genuinely recognized at the moment when the term was coined, remains relevant and must be reexamined.  I also want to recognize that the interest in education as an emancipatory force is sincerely shared by artists, curators and educators alike: no serious art professional aims to be inauthentic.  Education processes can help us share expertise, raise crucial consciousness and produce both significant and provocative art and dialogues. The question is how to not give up and settle for the expedient prop bookshelf.

[to be continued]