Bad Education

The edu­ca­tional turn is a well-documented trend in con­tem­po­rary art as evi­denced by the pro­lif­er­a­tion, in the past 10 years, of artist-run schools and ped­a­gogy projects, such as work­shops, lec­tures, and dis­cus­sion groups. More than just bor­row­ing edu­ca­tional forms, artists are also adopt­ing processes and method­olo­gies that ped­a­gog­i­cal frame­works offer, such as col­lab­o­ra­tive dia­logues, action research, and expe­ri­en­tial learning.

Though artists and edu­ca­tors may over­lap in process, there are dif­fer­ent cri­te­ria, expec­ta­tions, and out­comes for projects that are invested in the world of art, and projects that are invested in the world of edu­ca­tion. Is it pos­si­ble that a good art­work amounts to a bad edu­ca­tion? What are the expec­ta­tions of each field, whose cri­te­ria will we use to eval­u­ate these projects, and where is there convergence?

Helen Reed met Pablo Helguera at the MoMA Staff Café, in New York to chat about some of the cur­rent inter­sec­tions between art and edu­ca­tion. Helguera has worked between these fields for over 20 years. He observes, in his pub­li­ca­tion Edu­ca­tion For Socially Engaged Art that “edu­ca­tion today is fueled by pro­gres­sive ideas, rang­ing from crit­i­cal ped­a­gogy and inquiry based learn­ing to the explo­ration of cre­ativ­ity in early child­hood. For this rea­son it is impor­tant to under­stand the exist­ing struc­tures of edu­ca­tion and to learn how to inno­vate within them. To offer a cri­tique, for exam­ple, the old-fashioned board­ing school sys­tem of mem­o­riza­tion today would be equiv­a­lent, in the art world, to mount­ing a fierce attack on a nineteenth-century art move­ment.”[i] With this acknowl­edge­ment in mind – of the blind spots between dis­ci­plines – we dis­cussed the rela­tion­ship between pre­sen­ta­tion and mak­ing, learn­ing out­comes ver­sus abstract edu­ca­tion, and how to be rev­o­lu­tion­ary and at the same time institutional.

Helen Reed: As a place to start, I want to refer to the intro­duc­tion of Edu­ca­tion for Socially Engaged Art. You men­tioned that you came to art and edu­ca­tion simul­ta­ne­ously, and that con­se­quently you noticed many sim­i­lar­i­ties between the two fields. Can you describe the kinds of crossovers that you noticed, and how these par­al­lels influ­enced your practice?

Pablo Helguera: I was at the School of the Art Insti­tute of Chicago, which hap­pens to be a school and a museum. It’s an insti­tu­tion that is con­nected by a bridge, between the school and the museum. Imme­di­ately, I was exposed to a rela­tion­ship with art that was between pre­sen­ta­tion and mak­ing. I was broke as a stu­dent and I started work­ing at the museum, first as part of a paid intern­ship. I would cross the bridge all the time, between one place and the other. I would be in my dirty paint­ing clothes in the class­room then I would get very preppy to go into the other envi­ron­ment. I did not think any­thing about being in the edu­ca­tion depart­ment, but I just hap­pened to grav­i­tate there because I was bilin­gual and because they needed peo­ple for out­reach, etc. I made sense there. So it’s not some­thing that I par­tic­u­larly chose.

But the moment I started to real­ize that teach­ing is very much con­nected to per­form­ing then I started notic­ing points at which things started to con­nect. When I grad­u­ated from school I was already doing per­for­ma­tive lec­tures and the like. I started becom­ing inter­ested in what became known as Insti­tu­tional Cri­tique, artists who were appro­pri­at­ing the modes of dis­play within muse­ums. So I was doing a lot of that in the early 90s. I became very inter­ested in fic­tion and the whole idea that you, as an artist, can con­struct this envi­ron­ment that really ques­tions the limit of what you con­sider real­ity. Muse­ums become par­tic­u­larly attrac­tive when you are inter­ested in fic­tion. That is what a lot of Insti­tu­tional Cri­tique artists do, mod­i­fy­ing cer­tain aspects of the inte­rior of the space, which all of a sud­den make you real­ize that there is some­thing else going on. In doing so, you are alter­ing the pro­to­cols, the reg­u­lar expec­ta­tions. So I started doing that, but I still didn’t see a direct con­nec­tion to edu­ca­tion for a while. But even­tu­ally I real­ized that the best thing I can do is to bring what I’m learn­ing from the envi­ron­ment of the insti­tu­tion into my own work. And I started cre­at­ing fic­tional muse­ums, fic­tional artists, and those fic­tional artists started hav­ing biogra­phies and bod­ies of work and inter­pre­tive mate­ri­als. I was much more inter­ested in the periph­eral com­po­nents of an art­work than the art work itself.

I remem­ber once, in Port­land, I did a piece at a Uni­ver­sity that was called Mock Tur­tle. There was a whole exhi­bi­tion around an object that nobody could see, but there were hun­dreds of labels and inter­pre­tive mate­ri­als around this object. Sup­pos­edly it’s a tur­tle that you can see inside a box, but you can’t really see it. It’s this idea of how the object is basi­cally unnec­es­sary; it’s really more the sto­ries around the object and how the con­tex­tual frame­work, the inter­pre­tive frame­work of the object is what really mat­ters in the end, and that this is what really influ­ences our per­cep­tion of it.

By that time, Rela­tional Aes­thet­ics was in vogue. Artists were out there doing projects that were based on cre­at­ing inter­sub­jec­tive rela­tion­ships. But I became sus­pi­cious of the qual­ity of those exchanges. I remem­ber I was work­ing at the Guggen­heim, see­ing artists like Rirkrit Tira­vanija pre­sent­ing projects. And I remem­ber, for exam­ple, once, Rirkrit say­ing he wanted to do a project that used a gallery for children’s activ­i­ties. I remem­ber the cura­tor call­ing us in the edu­ca­tion depart­ment and being like “Quick, quick we have to come up with kids and bring them to the gallery to do activ­i­ties with them.” Noth­ing against Rirkrit, but I felt that the whole project was so hap­haz­ard and so arti­fi­cial. Because really, we are pre­tend­ing that we are doing edu­ca­tion here, that we were cre­at­ing a great expe­ri­ence for these kids. I have no idea what ended up hap­pen­ing with the project. But those were the kind of expe­ri­ences that made me sud­denly real­ize: isn’t it inter­est­ing that I’m here, a mere edu­ca­tor, like many other edu­ca­tors who actu­ally know very well how to pro­duce these expe­ri­ences, that’s our exper­tise; and yet we have absolutely no power over this cer­tain sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple, who know absolutely noth­ing about these audi­ences, decide they want to do an edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence for them in the guise of an art­work, which has to hap­pen promptly and effi­ciently. And the action will likely be cov­ered by art mag­a­zines; by peo­ple who know absolutely noth­ing about these audi­ences, and then they will most likely be con­vinced that some­thing really great hap­pened. While those, who sup­pos­edly the activ­ity was cre­ated for, most likely were hur­ried into a sit­u­a­tion self-proclaimed as edu­ca­tional and per­haps manip­u­lated into being pho­tographed as part of the documentation.

This is a very com­mon ten­dency of muse­ums that dates back to the 80s when insti­tu­tions were try­ing to do mul­ti­cul­tural inclu­sion in gal­leries. So you would bring a bunch of kids from the low income neigh­bor­hoods, give them a T-shirt from the museum and stand them in front of the steps of the museum, and then show the photo to the fun­ders. What­ever they do there, what­ever expe­ri­ence they have there doesn’t really mat­ter, what really mat­ters is that those kids of color are in front of the gates of the museum. Those are the kind of expe­ri­ences that made me real­ize that I don’t want to make that kind of “rela­tional” art. I don’t want to make art that’s about say­ing that I did some­thing. I want to make art that does some­thing. I don’t always care whether peo­ple under­stand or not that I am doing it, but I want to know for my own sake that what I did had that impulse.