Art & the Public Sphere - Politicizing Artistic Pedagogies: Disciplines, Practices, Struggles, Apr 2022

The purpose of this article is to explore how the process of depoliticization occurs in neoliberal governance, with the aim of identifying approaches to counter its control over the way we live together. Depoliticization is a process of neoliberal political and social organization that undermines democracy. An instance of how depoliticization happens is through a lack of accountability in the way that government devolves responsibility through non-governmental agencies or quangos. Arts Council England is a quango with an increasingly instrumental policy agenda. Arts-based participation is being fostered through policy agendas; art projects that are funded in this arrangement are expected to promote social inclusion or audience engagement. While this is superficially laudable, a reduced gap between state policy objectives and commissioned artistic outcomes sees artworks utilized as interpretive publicity for policy objectives. In this way, the funding of the arts can be considered as part of the wider process of depoliticization. Yet, we argue, contra much of the depoliticization literature with its formalist understandings of power, that politics is not limited to the actions and non-actions of the state alone and can be radically understood as an everyday process. In this conception of politics, we conclude that certain forms of art practice, those that employ social praxis and critical citizenship through critical pedagogical and participatory methods, can perform a politicizing function and thus potentially reshape democracy in more emancipatory ways.

The Glasgow Effect is the name given to a public health mystery: Why do people in Glasgow, Scotland, die younger than similar post-industrial UK cities such as Manchester and Liverpool? Ellie Harrison appropriated this name to title an artwork where she confined herself to Glasgow for 2016. During that year the only vehicle Harrison used was her bike and she actively engaged with a variety of communities where she lives. The artwork’s invocation of Glasgow’s poor health record in combination with the £15,000 of public funding awarded to Harrison hit a nerve with some Glaswegians that led to outrage on Facebook. Subsequently, Harrison and her artwork were demonized by a broader UK media. Why fund a middle-class English artist’s ‘poverty safari’ in Glasgow when so many others never have the chance to leave? This article grapples with the educative potential of The Glasgow Effect. Harrison began the project because her teaching job in Dundee required her to ‘write and submit a significant research grant application’. That application’s success prohibited Harrison from travelling from her home in Glasgow to her job in Dundee; making her unable to teach. By enacting a complete dematerialization of markers of success – motorized travel and related carbon emissions – the artwork, and subsequent book, publicly challenge preconceived notions of ‘good career progression’, offering a critical artistic pedagogy that explodes success fantasies that hang on internationalization, excess travel and ultimately vast amounts of carbon emissions.

The history of art, more accurately described as the history of western art, has been premised on a history of cultural imperialism that privileges certain traditions and ideologies over others. The decline of the discipline within the academy in recent decades and replacement in many cases with the more critically evaluative and broader area of critical and contextual studies (CCS) has filled a function in art and design education but needs to be critically interrogated for its relevance and its pedagogical usefulness in thinking about the politicized discourse of art. Attempts have been made within the academy to decolonize the curriculum. Within the context of CCS this entails ensuring standardizing the approach to the subject but not the content, which would be neither desirable nor possible given the decentralized way in which CCS is staffed. A standardization of approach means the inculcation of critical reflexivity when considering structures of knowledge, which helps identify gaps in the curricula and ways of addressing these. Decolonizing is a process that needs to be continuous and reflexive in order to embed significant change.

The past fifteen years have seen a rich debate situating the curatorial in the expanded field of exhibition-making, towards dialogical and discursive formats. Under the umbrella term the ‘educational turn’, pedagogical programmes have explored classroom aesthetics and the emancipatory potentials of pedagogy in the arts and curating – within and outside arts institutions. This article investigates the relevance of such pedagogical programmes in the cultural sector that aim to generate an open resource for long-term critical debates and collective thinking. The article reflects on the role of cultural institutions in wider discussions around the neo-liberalization of formal education and the political potentials of new pedagogical initiatives. It draws on decolonial problem-posing pedagogy to counter the increasing cultures of anti-intellectualism and anti-complexity in the United Kingdom (UK). The text reflects upon the experience of the CAMPUS Independent Study Programme, I curated in 2019–20 at Nottingham Contemporary, a contemporary art centre in the United Kingdom. Contrary to the popular claim for alterity and outsideness, this article demonstrates the political role of embeddedness and radical interdependence in critical pedagogical initiatives in contemporary art institutions.

In autumn 2020 the open-air construction fence exhibition Face It! of Vienna’s city museum (Wien Museum) was repeatedly damaged and marked with graffiti during demonstrations against measures taken by the government to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, the museum decided to re-curate the initial exhibition and exhibited the protesters’ graffiti markings instead. Approaching these events through situational analysis, I interrogate their political and politicizing dimension in reference to Chantal Mouffe’s idea of ‘agonistic pluralism’ and a radical democratic conceptualization of museum practice. By delineating their agonizing effect, I argue for a conflict-attuned notion of graffiti-based cultural practices in order to foster their democratic potential. In the end, I assess the museum’s decision to re-curate and ask if it contributes to a democratization of its practice and furthermore which role (re-politicized) museum education did and could play in this context.

Once again, the COVID-19 pandemic has tragically made visible on whose shoulders the functioning of our society rests. While precarious workers faced depletion and increased time-poverty, the privileged gained an extra portion of leisure time. Under the present conjectures, politics of time allocation have exacerbated. We are a Vienna-based feminist art collective, which during the pandemic experienced an urge to shift our work on unpaid care work towards the dimension of self-care. We stress on the feminist potential of practices of self-care, to subvert, as a collective action, neo-liberal notions of individualized ‘self-carishness’. In this article, we illustrate this shift with an array of selected artworks, which problematize the social relations around unpaid and underpaid labour in relating to historical sites. Hereby we search historically meaningful venues of feminist struggles to create a public sphere of discussion. Our artwork consists of a range of emancipatory practices from performance to fine arts, including pieces like public psychotherapy consultations, a video installation of the invisibility of the cleaning body, a performance of ‘the mother that is not present’. Besides exhibiting, the collective also engaged in editing an art book, featuring artist workshops on the legal dimension of care, labour union activism, feminist writing and other collective strategies of taking back self-care.

Artworks operating at the intersection of art and education often attempt to challenge dominant education systems in suggesting alternative pedagogical models that could function outside the official academic realm, proposing radical changes to the latter. However, the lack of continuity of alternative education models implemented by artists and curators within universities’ art and design departments fails to provide a longer-term change. This article stems from our research on the usological turn, a recent shift from spectatorship to usership according to which artists and curators tend to create art projects which situate themselves as part of a broader usership. Using an autoethnographic approach, we will analyse how the principles of the art group Arte Útil intersects with the undercommons. Hence, we explore how they apply an alternative method, through participatory curriculum planning, as a tool for change within the institution of education.

How do the disciplinary boundaries of arts education shape art’s political horizons? Sixty-five years on from CP Snow’s controversial lecture The Two Cultures, both his protagonists (on one side the arts and humanities, on the other the sciences, management, finance) have claimed significant epistemological, political and practical ground. The distance that separates them, however, appears greater than ever. Art often stands in opposition to the hegemonic tendencies of positivist forms of knowledge, dismissing them as incompatible with its political goals. Given the formal disciplinary setting of art education, exacerbated in the competitive modern academy, I suggest that such restrictions to art’s epistemological and practical horizons are, in fact, politically counterproductive. I propose that by rejecting an array of knowledges – particularly those based on ideals such as rationalism, evidence and epistemological certainty – as a priori incompatible with artistic practice, artistic education may be doing a considerable disservice to the political and social interventions of art that are shaped by it. To suggest that art could tactically engage with alternative forms of knowledge to expand the political field, I propose artist group Forensic Architecture as an example of a practice that circumvents traditional disciplinary limitations to, in Snow’s parlance, become a bona fide culture characterized by political credibility, albeit at the expense of limiting art’s epistemic influence in the process.

The university has now, totally, found its way into our homes. First through demands of the kitchen table to provide the setting for teaching preparation. Then inadvertently: the endless work done with others in mutable workspaces, such as the home, characterizing that same teaching. And now recently, the coronavirus pandemic has found a new, hybrid, teaching space – (working from) home. So, where else is there ‘to seminar’? These questions are not new: Roland Barthes made an everlasting call to ‘outline a space and call it: seminar’. Henk Slager, whose plea in 2017 to ‘[re]activate [the] “unpredictable rhythm” of the seminar’ echoed Barthes, following artists, activists, teachers and organizers calling for new alternatives to ever-institutionalized formats and modes of education. Much of this – sentimentalizing, reproducing, extracting educational forms – is held within the discursive framework of art’s ‘Educational Turn’. In the light of impact that the ‘move online’ has had on art education I am reframing this question of the seminar’s ‘where’ else and ‘what’ else, again in 2022. Once obvious spaces of art education, clearly defined, are left empty, expensive, expansive and broken. Where ghosts and infrastructures contend with one another, the mechanisms of universities are, in theory, open bare; their complex continues to be impenetrable. This text constellates a set of infrastructural considerations to take stock of what it means to ask this question of ‘where’ else and ‘what’ else in 2022.