Nummer 9. Artistic Education

Artistic Education

Nummer 9

Foreword and Acknowledgements

Texts on the Context of the Camp# Project From 2012 to 2016 the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences conducted a long-term research-­ based project on the performance and functionality of experimental formats in art education. It was run by a changing team of researchers and students and involved several collaborations with external cultural institutions. This publication presents a se­lection of the many findings of the project. We wanted to bring together at least some of our results and take the opportunity to critically reflect on the field that was demarcated over the course of the project, not least by staff and students from the Master Kunst [Fine Art]. We refer to this field, and have done for years, as «artistic education» (from the German «künstlerische Vermittlung»).

In doing so we have to accept that the German term is virtually untranslatable; the English equivalent is too readily confused with the more general conception of «art education» (studying art at an art college), whereas the more general German term «Kunst­vermittlung» (art education in museums and galleries) is not what is intended either. What we mean are the specific benefits and potentialities of an edu­cational practice which is directed both at viewers of art and at students of art and which itself uses artistic methods.

We started from observations made by Susanne Kudorfer, Alexandra D’Incau and Sabine Gebhardt Fink, the main initiators of the Camp# project.

Then we asked artists, educators, curators and students for their own reflections on the theme of this pub­lication. Our aim was to showcase the various parallel, consecutive and contextually diverse ac­ tivities that take place at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences and its partner institu­tions. These include the Camp# project, the artistic approaches of our graduates, the unique con­ ception of our Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and Art & Design Education and the activities of the research depart­ment within our faculty, with disseration projects and exchanges with non-European art schools.

The present publication is largely the result of highly productive long-term collaborations with the following institutions: the Migros Museum für Ge­ genwartskunst Zürich, the Kunstmuseum Luzern, the Historisches Museum Luzern and La Kunsthalle Mulhouse. Events were held at the following venues: the Kunstmuseum Luzern, Stadtraum Luzern, Master Kunst Littau-Reussbühl and in the context of the network modules «Art Education» and «Art Teaching». These network modules involved collaborations with ZHdK, HKB, HGK Basel and the Histo­ risches Museum Luzern. The project was realised in four and a half phases (Camp#1–Camp#4.5). The core team was made up of Alexandra D’Incau, Sabine Gebhardt Fink as overall director and Susanne Kudorfer; Bernadett Settele, Stephan Wittmer and Petra Wunderlich were also involved at various stages. An online publication is already available at http://1234camp.ch.

We would like to extend our warm thanks to all the contributors for their willingness to collaborate and engage in intensive discussions on the form and orientation of their texts. We are grateful to Jonathan Blower for translating the contributions from the German; the success of the project is in part down to his unflagging diligence and tenacity.

The same goes for Christian Schnellmann and the Agentur für Kommunikation and Design Velvet.

Special thanks are due to the Ernst Göhner Foun­ dation, without whose generous support the project could never have been undertaken.

For the provision of visual materials we would like to thank the Bund, Galeria Periferia, Debora Gerber, Nicole Heri, Stina Kasser, Maria Lichtsteiner, Anne Linke, Rahel Lüchinger, Urs Lüthi, Elia Malevez and Stephan Wittmer.

Wolfgang Brückle and Sabine Gebhardt Fink

Table of Contents

Page 6

What is Artistic Education and Why Do We Do it?

Introductory Remarks Wolfgang Brückle and Sabine Gebhardt Fink

An Experimental Art Education Format Rahel Lüchinger

Page 14

Artistic Mediation Can Storm the Museum!

Performative Strategies and Activism in the Research Project Camp# Sabine Gebhardt Fink

Page 20

Page 26

What Remains How the Unruly Content of Art Education Manifests Itself in Word and Image Alexandra D’Incau Artistic Education in the Gallery Space and Beyond

Page 30

Art Education, Traditional or Artistic?

A Collaboration between the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and the HSLU MA in Fine Arts Cynthia Gavranic and Alena Nawrotzki

Page 44

The Poussin in Question Cooking at the Flashpoint of Art Mediation Bearboz (Dominique Meyer), Lena Eriksson, Emilie George, Samuel Herzog, Sandrine Wymann

Page 22

I Can Use What I Learned at Camp Susanne Kudorfer

Page 41

Participatory Performance and Creative Art Education Linda Luv

I Can’t Draw Christoph Lichtin

Page 39

Artistic Education at the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art Stina Kasser

Camp#

Page 37

Artistic Approaches to Art Education

Page 54

Heterotopical States in Art Education Today Rachel Mader

Page 57

Artistic Education between Open Studio and Reality Check A Roundtable on Self-Directed Fermentation Processes on the Fine Arts and Art & Design Education Programme Stephan Eichenmann, Klodin Erb, Karin Fromherz, Susanne Hefti, San Keller, Marie-Louise Nigg, Chiara Ottavi, Sebastian Utzni

Page 66

Uncanny Materials.

Founding Moments in Art Education A Curatorial Exhibition, Research and Education Project Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht

Page 96

Contributors

Page 100 Imprint

Page 73

Critical Curriculum An Emancipatory Tool for a Post-Plantation System?

Siri Peyer

Page 75

Micro-Pedagogies Reflections on How to Teach Art Wiktoria Furrer Developing Concepts for Artistic Education

Page 82

Nine Days in Dhaka Lena Eriksson Introduction by Rachel Mader

Page 86 Teaching Pieces On the Potential of Aesthetic Education Silvia Henke

Page 91

Into the Open Risk as a Quality of Artistic Education Bernadett Settele

→ A German translation of this publication is available online at www.hslu.ch/aristiceducation

Fig. 1 Samuel Buri, steps up to a window at Kunst­halle Basel, to be used during the exhi­ bition Für Ver­ände­ run­gen aller Art [For Changes of All Kind] instead of the blocked main entrance, 1969

What is Artistic Education and Why Do We Do it?

Introductory Remarks Wolfgang Brückle and Sabine Gebhardt Fink

In 2005 the Kunstmuseum Luzern dedicated an exhibition to the artist Paul Thek, whose Ark, Pyr­ amid, Easter. A Visiting Group Show had been presented in the same city some four decades earlier.

It thus sought to reinvigorate an artistic position once acclaimed for its emphasis on processuality and situational specificity. The museum spaces were to be experienced as a «laboratory», with the primary purpose of reassessing Thek’s work. Seven years later, the same museum, now under the leadership of Susanne Neubauer, presented another exhibition on the same artist: Paul Thek in Process. On this occasion another aspect of Thek’s work became the object of engagement with the museum as institution; this engagement with his work was defined in terms of «education as research and transformation of institutions and relationships». The two participating institutions were the Kunstmuseum Luzern and the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences.1 Events held alongside the exhibition took place in parallel with the development of a centre of excellence on art education and were followed up with a series of educational events even larger in scope and significance. These events were initiated by the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Luzern, joined now by other art organisations. They formed the core of an emphatically situative and processual research project called Camp#, which was able to build directly on the results of previous research in Switzerland (fig. 2).2 Its fundamental questions were these: What new challenges will art education have to face? What artistic methods can be integrated into innovative practices of art education? To what extent can educational activities be derived from artistic processes? What should the things that arise out of these conditions and criteria be called?

In dealing with these questions it proved helpful to go back to artistic positions from the 1960s and 1970s. Many of these positions are now unfamiliar to all but a small circle of cognoscenti, not least because of the pivotal shift from a focus on the finished work of art to processuality, and to the socialising or socially formative role of artistic activity. For Camp# it was precisely this aspect that still seemed to hold the greatest future promise, and our school’s research on performative positions from the 1960s virtually propagated itself. Yet there was no question of restaging or re-enacting these performative positions; rather, we were aiming to reactivate artistic strategies in the context of research-based teaching and education. These strategies included collective working, communication processes as artistic content, intervening and working within the exhibition space itself and critical engagement with the idea of a transformation of materials and experiences in the education

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process. In the context of project seminars, our research on new art education formats took its cues from the camp aesthetic of Thek’s art. Susan Sontag’s «Notes on Camp» provided the groundwork here. In that essay she describes a whole catalogue of features that are to be regarded as «camp» – a word that confers the elevated status of style onto role play, the apparently kitsch and the tastelessness of hyperbole. In the context of Camp#, Thek’s conceptualization of the term took us beyond our immediate engagement with his work. The new «sensibility» described by Sontag could be read as a manual of alternative practices for the appropriation of aesthetic objects. But it was also time to go beyond the scope of her essay.

She had explained that camp was equivalent to a «triumph of the epicene style». More recently, however, theoretical studies have suggested a closer conflation of queer and camp.3 In other words, the full potential of Sontag’s concept will only be appreciated once we come to regard it as an invitation to explore possibilities for the production of meaning beyond conventional distinctions between high art and pop, art and kitsch, conventional gender identities and the value hierarchies bound up with all of the above. The Camp# project sought to make room for precisely that, with a view to a new understanding of artistic education.

What is behind this approach? Artistic mediation may at first be taken to mean pretty much anything, and with that in mind it’s easy enough to say that art education itself is an art form.4 We can even say that it predates the modern understanding of art. Take, for example, the ancient architect Dinocrates who, according to Greek legend, presented himself to Alexander the Great wearing nothing but a lion’s skin, a wreath of poplar and an anointment of oil, holding a club in his left hand and a model of a city in the other; his aim being to convince the ruler to transform a mountain into a vast statue with surroundings fit for a town.5 Dinocrates’ appearance – which could even be called a performance – was essentially a method of persuasion with a purpose, though it is also an early instance of what artistic education endeavours to do today. It wants to facilitate the experience of conceptual content through interventions in the visible world; it wants to initiate thought processes and generate attitudes in the application of artistic strategies without necessarily implying that any previously defined content of the art in question is the subject of those cognitive processes.

Works of art can also be regarded as means for art education in their own right; Samuel Buri’s temporary steps leading up to a window of the Kunsthalle Basel, erected in 1969 for the entirely process-oriented exhibition Für Veränderungen aller Art [For Changes of All Kind], are a case in point (fig. 1). In line with such aspirations, «experience»

eine arbeitstagung zu vermittlung als forschung und zur veränderung von institutionen und verhältnissen

Kunstvermittlung in transformation fr /sa 9.–10. märz 2012

Das Projekt Kunstvermittlung in Transformation (KiT) hatte das Ziel, Perspektiven für die Entwicklung und Beforschung der institutionellen Kunstvermittlung zu erarbeiten. Die Ergebnisse aus den fünf Teilprojekten sollen in dieser Tagung dem Berufsfeld vorgestellt werden und als Grundlage der Diskussion und Weiterentwicklung dienen.

Mit gezielt eingeladenen ExpertInnen bearbeiten die TeilnehmerInnen und die KiT-Forschungsgruppen Fragestellungen weiter, die sich während des Projektes entwickelt haben. Die Ergebnisse des Projektes werden so in den internationalen Kontext des Berufs- und Forschungsfeldes eingespeist, um gemeinsame Perspektiven zu entwickeln.

Kernfragen sind erstens die Transformation von Kunstvermittlung durch Forschungsvorhaben, besonders hinsichtlich der Entwicklung von Freiräumen und eines Verständnisses für vermittlerisches Arbeiten in Ausstellungsinstitutionen.

Zum zweiten rückt der Bezug zwischen Theorie und Praxis in den Fokus, insbesondere Fragen der Anwendung von Theorien und Verfahren aus unterschiedlichen Forschungsbereichen und Disziplinen in der (und durch die) Kunstvermittlung, sowie die Wechselwirkungen zwischen «reflek-

tierter» Praxis und «praktischer» Theorie, wie sie vom handlungsleitenden Modell der Aktionsforschung vorgeschlagen werden.

Auf Basis dieser Fragen sollen die Potenziale der Verbindung der Arbeitsweisen von Vermittlung und kooperativer Forschung in Institutionen untersucht werden. Weiterhin soll die Bedeutung der Erkenntnisse für Forschung und Lehre an den Schweizer Kunsthochschulen reflektiert werden.

Die Ausgangslage in der Praxis lässt sich wie folgt charakterisieren: Nach wie vor bildet eine forschende Haltung und Raum für Reflexion im Alltag der Kunstvermittlung an Museen eine Ausnahme. Während erste Museen in Grossbritannien die Forschung in der Vermittlung bereits in ihre personellen Strukturen integriert haben und Forschungsprojekte unter Beteiligung von LaiInnen und ExpertInnen auch auf anderen Gebieten selbstverständlich stattfinden, ist die Situation im institutionellen Kontext – vor allem der hiesigen Kunstmuseen – weiterhin zurückhaltend bis prekär. Für eine zeitgemässe Weiterentwicklung dieser Organisationen erscheinen jedoch gerade Projekte, wie sie im Rahmen von «Kunstvermittlung in Transformation» (KiT) stattgefunden haben, wegweisend,

indem sie gegebene Strukturen und Arbeitweisen hinterfragen und Ausblicke in weiterführende Praxen aus anderen Disziplinen eröffnen.

Schweizer Kunsthochschulen leisten derzeit viel Entwicklungsarbeit, besonders im Bereich der künstlerischen Forschung und in Vorhaben mit interund transdisziplinärer Ausrichtung. Das Forschungsund Aktionsfeld Kunstvermittlung könnte hierin in Zukunft eine wichtige Rolle einnehmen, insofern es beide Kriterien, das Künstlerische wie das Interdisziplinäre, beinhaltet. Im Modellprojekt Kunstvermittlung in Transformation stellten wir die Notwendigkeit von Praxis ins Zentrum. In Kooperationen zwischen Hochschulen und Museen wurden Projekte entwickelt, die Forschung und vermittelnde Praktiken verbanden und auf der Zusammenarbeit in heterogenen Gruppen von Forschenden aus verschiedenen Disziplinen, langjährig Erfahrenen und BerufsanfängerInnen, basierten.

Ziel der wissenschaftlichen Tagung ist damit auch das Zusammenführen bisher weitgehend getrennt agierender und denkender Arbeitsfelder. Die bei KiT als Modell entstandene Forschungs- und Praxisgemeinschaft soll auf der Tagung geteilt und erweitert werden.

Kunstmuseum luzern

has meanwhile become a central concept in the debate about museum-based education work.6 However, there haven’t been all that many attempts to incorporate artistic work into art education. Also, artistic work has only very rarely become part of the more general conception of an education that wants to achieve more than an understanding of a specific object. Bertolt Brecht’s «Lehrstücke» [teaching pieces] and the «Schuloper» [school-opera] he developed with Kurt Weill are rare exceptions. As a consequence, the former are frequently mentioned on the following pages, even though they don’t relate explicitly to the visual arts.7 All the same, these approaches already describe the basic shape of aesthetically motivated processes of collective consciousness, and the emancipatory approaches of the 1960s and 1970s would point in the same direction.

This goes for Hélio Oiticica and Ana Mendieta in Latin America just as it does for John Cage in the USA, with his Teaching and Learning as Perfor­ mance Arts of 1970. It also goes for many other American artists who were then exploring new paths to social relevance. In the German-speaking countries the practice of Joseph Beuys is especially relevant. When he explained paintings to a dead hare in an artistic action of 1965, the line between art and art education momentarily evaporated, as it did in 1972 when he offered to take the recently arrested RAF members Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof on a guided tour of documenta 5. The same could be said of his Forum for Direct Democracy in 1973 and of several other Beuysian community building actions. For Beuys, these ac-

← Fig. 2 «Kunst­­­­ver­ mittlung in Transformation» [Art Education in Transformation], publicity poster for the 2012 Lucerne conference of the project group comprising the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel HGK/ FHNW, Institut Lehrberufe für Ge­staltung und Kunst; the Hochschule der Künste Bern, Master Art Education; the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences; the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Institute for Art Education

tivities were by no means incompatible with the artist-as-genius persona. And in any case, it is of course only with reservations that his guided tour for a dead animal can be regarded as an educational act. The reason he chose to focus on the hare at all was because, as he himself put it, he didn’t want to explain art to other people and because one might otherwise to «talk one’s mind to death» as, he said, so often happens in politics and academia.8 In any case, his actions mean that alternative methods of engaging with art can now take Beuys as a point of reference. This was certainly true of the Visitors’ School installed at documenta 5 by Bazon Brock, former dramaturg of the Stadttheater Luzern and a fellow traveller with Beuys, whose allure of genius he sometimes seemed to adopt. The changed idea of democracy that emerged in the early 1970s also brought about a progressive democratization in the self-conception of museums with permanent collections, and academics working in the field started to debate new concepts of art education.9 But few went as far as Beuys, who wanted to see conventional conceptions of knowledge transfer replaced with imagination, inspiration and intuition. This idea remains influential even now. Even the recent trend for artists to set up schools for education in aesthetic thinking can be associated with the Freie internationale Hochschule für Kreativität und interdiszipli­ näre Forschung [Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research] established by Beuys and others in 1973 (fig. 3).

However, more obvious sources for the present conception of emancipatory artistic education can be found in certain projects from the last two decades which refer – though rarely explicitly – to the en­deavours mentioned above. To cite one example of this new tendency: Olivier Desvoignes and Marianne Guarino-Huet, otherwise known as Genevabased collective microsillons, have positioned themselves between art and pedagogy. Their work is inspired by critical pedagogues such as Paulo Freire and Moacir Gadotti and is based on the idea of an experimental laboratory for socio-political and institutional inquiry, on accompanying audiences through the processes of learning about and experiencing artworks rather than producing singular interpretations of them.10 Another example is the series of events organised by Kunstcoop© and held at Berlin’s Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst from 2001 to 2002. In an early essay on this collective, Carmen Mörsch described their educational work as «context specific art education spanning pedagogical, political and artistic action, developed in dialogue and friction with various institutions and interest groups». This group has now started referring to its own work as «artistic art education».11 To give one further example: in various projects that combine the production and

communication of knowledge, this collective sets out to question the individual and often stereotypical ideas of those who are involved in their education projects and to create «the potentialities of open outcomes and, hence, the possibility of autonomous appropriation» for all participants.12 Many of the contributions printed in the present publication use similar words to advocate for appropriation as a process in which the open artwork and open, anti-hegemonic dialogue are mediated together.

Nowadays it goes almost without saying that art education practices are no longer to be understood as acts of mere translation or commentary.

It would be hard to find anyone who would deny outright the part they play in constructing the meaning we find in works of art. Still, it would be wrong to say that the permeability of the boundaries between artistic gestures and the discourse that surrounds them has led to a widespread acceptance of new conceptions of art education.

To be sure, Irit Rogoff and others have identified an «educational turn» in curating.13 But they were primarily referring to artistic work. The objectives, commissions and role models of most art institutions can scarcely be distinguished from aspirations and approaches that seemed laudable several decades ago. The «grand pedagogy» that Brecht introduced as a means of counteracting the distinction between actors and audience has not been realised, or – to take just a couple of partic­ ipatory experiments from the field of action art – has not been quite as successful as he had hoped.14 Camp# was conceived as a series of steps leading in that general direction, a series of stations – or camps, as it were – in that discursive field. Hence the name.

The Camp# project was developed and delivered on the assumption that artistic strategies for art education can be used by pedagogues, educators and artists alike. We maintain that the substance of art production and art education cannot always be distinguished from one another. Whether contextualisation happens in the field of art, education or art teaching ultimately depends on the institutional position and the discursive framework of the practice in question. This emancipatory conception of artistic education excludes all normative definitions of what an artistic strategy is and all notions of what is ostensibly alien to it simply because it does not stem from the artist or is not part of the work. This is especially applicable when such distinctions are bound up with valorisations or devalorisations of gestures, processes and results. For the planning of art exhibitions this means that artworks and educational activities ought not to be set up in binary opposition to one another; their pairing is not to be modelled on the relation of Holy Scripture to exegesis. For visitors

→ Fig. 3 Freie inter­na­tionale Hochschule [Free International Uni­versity], poster with in­formation about events at documenta 6 in Kassel, 1977

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to an exhibition it means that an experience of the work itself need not carry more weight than their experience of activating a personal interaction with the world, and that «reception» is an inadequate description of that activity. It produces what Eva Sturm has referred to as «spoken or bodily knowledge».15 And the implication of all this for the practicing art educator is that the transmission of knowledge is not necessarily of greater value than the production of an event in which social and aesthetic experience overlap.

This brings us back to the idea that any artistic statement can become a tool in the educational process, though that process does not have to be about some previously determined content of the artwork. Artistic art education aims to bring about something previously non-existent, such as the capacity to shape one’s own aesthetic perception, the experience of creative mental activity or an experience of freedom within a community which facilitates and holds such events. In this respect, the processes initiated in the context of artistic education are paradigmatic of free social discourse itself, and critical debate about innovative educational practices has to try to live up to the urgency of progressive forms in the negotiation of socio-political positions. Artistic strategies in the field of art education usually have what it takes to resist classification, the dominance of the canon and the normalisation of modes of behaviour and experience. Everyone is qualified to participate in the debate, and the number of participants increases in line with the number of legitimate modes of participation.

La Kunsthalle in Mulhouse began developing its current art education programme in cooperation with artists some time ago. While the usual division of labour has been retained, artists have worked together with art educator Emilie George as well as with teaching staff and school pupils.

Keeping track of all the approaches that seem to respond to the same call for alternative models of art education is not an easy matter. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Institute itself began making art students into art educators as early as 2014, and it is characteristic of the context created by these sister organisations that they were able to establish a Chicago Social Club with reference to two works of art, by Oiticica and Beuys, that were temporarily on display in the city.16 Here in Switzerland, the Camp# project was ahead of the curve in 2012. Several institutions have instigated similar endeavours since then. One of them is the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, where Alena Nawrotzki and Cynthia Gavranic have sought to make exhibitions of contemporary art more accessible through new forms of education.

Part of their work involved collaboration with students on the Master’s degree in Fine Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences in cooperation with Stina Kasser, Rahel Lüchinger and Elia Malevez.17 The significance of the resulting educational interventions lay in their provision of translations that generated new artistic practices based on works from the permanent collection, with the results becoming part of the education workshops. Lüchinger and Malevez, for example, created the framework for an open-ended masked play that turned the museum space into a stage and its visitors into actors. In line with Brecht’s alienation effect, everyone who participated was constantly kept aware that their actions were part of an enactment. Kasser took a slightly different approach when she observed and interacted with the successive movements of exhibition visitors and transformed them into drawings. Yet this also made the visitors aware of their own roles. Both approaches, to borrow a phrase from Eva Sturm, are instances of art education «from an artistic perspective».18 Art education based on the creative activity of exhibition visitors has been around for some time, although primarily in the context of museum education programmes for school groups and teaching staff.19 Under the direction of Christoph Lichtin, the Historisches Museum in Lucerne profited from this approach for the mediation of cultural history, half-ironically and in collaboration with Debora Gerber and Nicole Heri, who were both students on the Master’s degree in Fine Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences at the time.

This project came about in the context of the exhibition Schöner Leben [A More Beautiful Life],

which looked at the historical importance of the local art school for the city of Lucerne. The school may be known for its special emphasis on the teaching of craft skills, but it has long since put particular importance on other approaches to teaching art, too. The Master’s degree in Fine Art not only promoted the Camp# project; it also aims to set art education at art school within a broader research discourse. One long-term collaboration with artist Lena Eriksson and La Kunsthalle in Mulhouse involved just such a practice-based research activity. Art education officer George and director Sandrine Wymann were involved in the development of art education workshops that find playful expression in their contribution below. To put it into context, here is how they manage their programme: La Kunsthalle runs a residency en­ abling one artist to develop a product that then serves as the basis for an interpretation of works by other exhibited artists. He or she may come up with a map or a word game or something else.20 It was on this residency that Linda Luv, a gradu­ ate of the Master’s degree in Fine Art at Lucerne, was able to create her participatory performance project on sustainable approaches to food and consumption. On the occasion of an exhibition opening at La Kunsthalle she was able to involve various participants: young people who helped prepare the food, local campaign groups for the prevention of food waste and the organisers from La Kunsthalle itself.

As with the Master’s degree in Fine Art at Lucerne, the Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and Art & Design Education works to emphasise artistic practices in the education process. The foundations of the current curriculum were developed

by Karin Fromherz. Some of the practices for the transmission of skills that have become more prominent since then are based on tutors’ attempts to undermine the expert paradigm. One aspect of this tendency is what Sebastian Utzni calls a new «science of walking».21 A recent conversation among tutors and students, which is printed in this publication, gives some insight into the strategies he is pursuing within that framework. To a certain extent they turn the content of teaching from its head onto its feet. The radically emptied classroom in building 745 at our campus follows the same principle of producing spaces of experience and potential. Jochen Gerz had tried something similar with his own students in 1982 when he abandoned them in a dark room without any tools, and Jean Baudrillard’s description of his own practice as a writer has a similar resonance, albeit in a different context: he wanted his writing to produce «an empty space», a space laden with virtuality «like a black hole».22 As with the strategy behind our colleagues’ practice, the philosopher’s metaphorical description of creative thinking is about

→ Fig. 4 Seminar by art critic and curator Elvia Rosa Castro at Tania Bruguera’s Catédra arte de conducta [Behavior Art School], Havana, around 2004

resisting a dominant discourse where the Logos demands comformity in the mediation of experience. It’s about the conditions of aesthetic experience, about eventful teaching situations.

But an event is also a political category. This is clear from endeavours to put artistic education into the service of socially emancipatory processes, as Doris Stauffer and Artur Żmijewski do. In this respect, too, we can refer back to approaches that go back several decades. In the 1960s and 1970s the abovementioned Brasilian pedagogue Freire was engaged on a series of studies on the political participation of marginalised societal groups, with the emancipatory objectives of these studies being amply clear from their titles: Freire was referring to the proponents of innovative educational work as «artists» even then, just as he set about abolishing the distinction between students and teachers in knowledge exchange scenarios. These ideas became the forerunners of Jacques Rancière’s approach to new conceptions of educational exchange, which have become far more familiar in Europe.23 Both approaches were concerned with the empowerment of people involved in education processes. Neither is about instruction; ideally people should arrive at a point where they can shape their own experiences and assimilate material to their own interests with or without educational experts. In 2002 the artist Tania Bruguera established the Cátedra Arte de Conducta in Cuba, a chair for the art of socially responsible behaviour. Civic action was to be promoted and encouraged in cooperation with other artists (fig. 4).24 Meeting such demands can be a challenge even for western societies. This applies to educational practices as methods for the creation of transculturality.25 It also applies to the need to keep history alive. In 2016 the curators Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht mounted an ex-

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hibition that brought to light Viennese plans from 1941 for a master school of art education and the training of secondary school art teachers. The archival materials alone furnished an example of the educational turn in the exhibition world, but the curators also asked former students from the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien to find artistic approaches to the historical facts. Hence the curators tested the «changing regimes of art education» that they would then also make the subject of a conference panel together with Sabine Gebhardt Fink at Loughborough in 2017.

The need for political participation, feminist critique and the decolonisation of knowledge runs through all the contributions in this publication.

Collaborative work, collective learning, experimental teaching formats, intensive dialogue with various audiences, organisational models that avoid exclusion and an appreciation for the different levels of knowledge across society are key to achieving these aims. Experiences gathered on the Camp# project and elsewhere all lead to this conclusion. In a recently published study, Angelika Doppelbauer suggested that artistic education can no longer be regarded as the panacea that she says people were looking for years ago.26 But noone ever claimed that artistic education was the solution to every problem in our interactions with students and audiences. We don’t intend to romanticise the role of the artist again, and we don’t espouse grand theories. And that is only right and proper in light of what Rogoff has described as the «low-key, uncategorizable, non-heroic» educational practices of contemporary art.27 Along with the other voices in this publication, however, we believe that artistic education is of political significance when its aim is the mutual inspiration of all parties, and that a specific form of aesthetic experience therefore has political significance, too.

In these introductory remarks we have not indicated the contents of the contributions that follow, and we have only mentioned contributing authors and their positions within the network of relationships between the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences and other institutions insofar as these positions were crucial to the Camp# project.

We hope that the connections between the contributions to this issue of Nummer magazine will suggest themselves to readers, though we are aware that they might have been organised differently. In any case, the subject matter negotiated here under the rubric of artistic education thrives on unoccupied areas within the field and on a sketchiness that is characteristic of contributions other than just those of Bearboz and Luv. The discursive framework of the needs, expectations and interests that go hand in hand with innovative educational practices can only be suggested here.

The experiments go on.

1 Participants: Alexandra D’Incau, Prisca Wüst, Patrick Rohner, Chris Aschwanden, Susanne Kudorfer, Stephan Wittmer, Sarah Bühler, Lukas Geisseler, Sabine Gebhardt Fink and other students on the Master’s degree in Fine Art. 2 The Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences also partici­pated in this earlier project, which involved several Swiss research institutions and cultural organisations. See Carmen Mörsch and Bernadett Settele, «Vorwort», in: Kunstvermittlung in Transformation.

Perspektiven und Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes, eds idem., Zurich 2012, pp. 4–6, esp. p. 4.

3 Susan Sontag, «Notes on ‹Camp›», in: Partisan Review 31 (1964), pp. 515–530, esp. p. 519, and Doris Leibetseder, Queer Tracks. Sub­ver­ sive Strategies in Rock and Pop Music, London and New York 2012, p. 61.

4 Dieter Ronte, Ist Kunst vermittelbar?

Ist Kunstvermittlung eine Kunst?, Vienna 1998, p. 16 and p. 27 f., refers to neo-Gothic buildings as contributing to the «Vermittlung» of the Middle Ages and to the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling as «Vermittlungs­ arbeit». In both instances, «medi­ ation» rather than «education» comes closer to what Ronte wants to express.

5 Vitruvius, On Architecture, vol. I, ed. and trans. Frank Granger, London, 1931, pp. 72/73 (Book 2, Preface). The city model first started appearing in the hand of the architect when Francesco di Giorgio gave visual form to the account in the fifteenth century.

6 Cf. Kristine Preuss and Fabian Hofmann, «Einleitung», in: Kunst­ vermittlung im Museum. Ein Er­fah­rungsraum, ed. by idem, Münster and New York 2017, pp. 11–27, esp. p. 16. An account of the exhibition Für Veränderungen aller Art can be found in Werner Jehle, «Basler Kunstchronik», in: Das Werk 57 (1970), no. 1, pp. 63–64, with a derisive mention of Buri’s «chicken ladder» on p. 64.

7 See Kurt Weill and Hans Fischer, «Aktuelles Zwiegespräch über die Schuloper», in: Die Musikpflege 1 (1930), pp. 48–53, esp. p. 49, and Bertolt Brecht, «Zur Theorie des Lehrstücks» [1930/1931], in: idem, Werke. Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, eds Werner Hecht et al., 31 vols, Berlin 1988–2000, vol. 21.1 [Schriften 1], p. 397. Having rehearsed the schoolopera Der Jasager [He Said Yes] at the Karl-Marx-Schule in Berlin, where cooperative forms of edu­ cation were already being tested, Brecht conferred with pupils on possible changes and then incorporated them.

8 Cf. Dorothee Richter, Fluxus.

Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autor­schaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft, Zurich 2012, p. 293 f.; Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys. Leben und Werk, Cologne 1984, p. 155; Kristina Lee Podesva, «A Pedagogical Turn. Brief Notes on Education as Art», in: Fillipa no. 6 (2007), pp. 10–11, esp. p. 10.

9 Cf. for instance John Kinard, «Mittler zwischen dem Museum und der Gemeinschaft», in: Neue Museumskunde 16 (1973), pp. 11–14, and Hilmar Hoffmann, «Das de­mo­ kratische Museum. Anmerkungen und Beispiele», in: Plädoyers für eine neue Kulturpolitik, eds Olaf Schwencke et al., Munich 1974, pp. 155–168, passim. In Frankfurt on the Main at that point Hoffmann was developing the argument that film, jazz, media culture, sub-cultures and leisure activities were to be acknowledged as aspects of a culture worthy of support and transmission; this argument can be understood as the dialectical obverse of what Sontag described as camp.

10 Ursula Meier, «Microsillons.

Zwischen Kunst und Pädagogik», in: Kunstbulletin no. 1/2 (2010), pp. 18–25, esp. p. 25.

11 Cf. Carmen Mörsch, «Arbeiten in Spannungsfeldern 5. Zwischen Vermittlung, Kunst, Dekonstruktion und Transformation», in: Zeit für Vermittlung, ed. by the Institute for Art Education at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, n.d.

[2013], pp. 126–135, esp. p. 126, https://www.kultur-vermittlung.ch/ zeit-fuer-vermittlung/download/ pdf-d/ZfV_5_FV.pdf (retrieved 10 March 2019), and anon., «Von der Marktlücke zum Pilot_innenprojekt.

Rückblick auf das Projekt Kunst­ coop©», http://www.kunst­ imkontext.udk-berlin.de/project/ rueckblick-auf-das-projekt-kunst­ coop (retrieved 28 March 2019).

12 Cf. www.trafo-k.at (retrieved 8 April 2019) and Renate Höllwart, «Wessen Bildung? Wessen Zu­ kunft? Eine Webplattform will Zugänge schaffen, Raum nehmen und verknüpfen, was da ist», in: Die Generationen Y und Z zwischen Kultur und Wirtschaft, ed. Erna Lackner, Innsbruck 2015, pp. 161–163, esp. p. 162.

13 Irit Rogoff, «Turning», in: e-flux journal No. 0 (2008), pp. 1–10, esp. p. 1 f.

14 Bertolt Brecht, «Die Grosse und die Kleine Pädagogik» [1930/1931], in: Brecht 1988–2000, vol. 21.1 [Schriften 1], p. 396.

15 Eva Sturm, «Die Position ‹von Kunst aus› in 9 Punkten dargelegt.

Rede für kunstvermittlungsin­ teressierte Leserinnen und Leser.

Oder: Vom Arbeiten mit Kunst», in: Ortsgespräch. Ein Kunstver­ mittlungsprojekt der Städtischen Galerie Nordhorn, ed. Veronika Olbrich, Nordhorn 2012, pp. 14–24, esp. p. 17 f.

16 See Judith Russi Kirshner and Lisa Wainwright, «The Art Museum and the Art School. Negotiating Collaboration in Chicago», in: Academics, Artists, and Museums.

21st-Century Partnerships, eds Irina D. Costache and Clare Kunny, Abingdon 2019, pp. 3–14, esp. p. 5 and p. 12 f.

17 Artist Maria Josefa Lichtsteiner ran the module. The other participants were Nicole Heri, Yvonne Imhof, Lorena Linke, Elia Malevez, Cécile Schneider, Violetta Szikriszt, Stefan Tschumi, Astrid Welburn, Martin Wohlwend.

18 Sturm 2012, p. 15 and passim.

19 Jehle 1970, p. 64, appears to have been irritated by the artistic activities provided for the children who attended the opening night of the exhibition Für Veränderungen aller Art. 20 For art education at La Kunsthalle see http://kunsthallemulhouse. com/mediation (retrieved 8 April 2019).

21 In a conversation with the authors on 8 Feb. 2019.

22 Cf. the description of a video piece based on Gerz’ action in anon., «Jochen Gerz. ‹Nachher, nachher›.

1982» [cat. no. 7.2], in: Jochen Gerz.

In Case We Meet, eds Jean-Michel Bouhours and Georges Heck, exh. cat., Paris: Centre Pompidou 2002, p. 102, and Jean Baudrillard, «Viralität und Virulenz» [1990], in: Digitaler Schein. Ästhetik der elektronischen Medien, ed. Florian Rötzer, Frankfurt am Main 1991, pp. 91–92, esp. p. 91.

23 See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation [1987], Standford 1991, p. 15 f. and passim; Paulo Freire, Education.

The Practice of Freedom. [1967], London 1976; idem, Pedagogy of the Oppressed [1968], New York 1970; idem and Myles Horton, We make the Road by Walking. Conversations on Education and Social Change, Philadelphia 1990, p. 181: «The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students».

24 Cátedra Arte de Conducta [Behavior Art School], Havana, 2002–2009; see http://www.taniabruguera.com/ cms/492-0-Ctedra+Arte+de+ Conducta+Behavior+Art+School.htm (retrieved 30 March 2019).

Bruguera’s conception of political action as art is discussed in Verónica Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics. Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art, London 2016, p. 42 ff.

25 See Inga Ermjan, Transkulturelle Kunstvermittlung. Zum Bildungs­ge­halt ästhetisch-künstlerischer Praxen, Bielefeld 2016, esp. p. 173 ff. and passim.

26 Cf. Angelika Doppelbauer, Museum der Vermittlung. Kulturvermittlung in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Vienna 2019, p. 17, with a vague reference to Dürfen die das? Kunst als sozialer Raum, eds Stella Rollig and Eva Sturm, Vienna 2004.

Jugding from the two editors’ «Einführung» on pp. 13–24, esp. p. 15, Doppelbauer slightly exaggerates their claims.

27 Rogoff 2008, p. 6.

Camp# 12 ⁄ 13

Artistic Mediation Can Storm the Museum!

Performative Strategies and Activism in the Research Project Camp# Sabine Gebhardt Fink

In a lecture performance titled Is a Museum a Battlefield? Hito Steyerl admonishes her spectators to constantly reassert their claim to the museum as a public place. She goes on to demonstrate the reliance of contemporary art institutions on private sponsors with reference to her own exhibitions at the Istanbul Biennial and The Art Institute of Chicago. Both exhibitions were sponsored by the US American weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. From Steyerl’s own investigations it emerged that the bullet that killed her friend Andrea Wolf had been supplied by the same manufacturer. Steyerl thus linked the subject of her work to personal experience. But even for the spectators of this drama – where the unwitting artist was herself made complicit in the machinations of the arms industry – the museum is a stage for conflicts of interest. These conflicting interests have to be subject to permanent public scrutiny if the public are to be reached at all.

This was the intention of the research project Camp# and its two related fields of activity, which I drew up in 2012 as a way of making the museum accessible to new forms of public audience. The two fields, «Vermittlung» [education/mediation] and «Didaktik» [didactics], were closely interlinked. The project ran from 2012 to 2017 and was co-organised by the education department at the Kunstmuseum Luzern and the MA Fine Arts degree

at Lucerne School of Art and Design (fig. 1).1 Over the course of the project Susanne Kudorfer, Alexandra D’Incau and I worked on new educational formats such as the «Open Classroom», the «Outdoor Intervention», «Invitations» and «Collaborations». In the area of didactics Bernadett Settele and Susanne Kudorfer developed a programme of further education (for teachers) with a particular focus on strategies of self-empowerment. Other participants included lecturers on the MA Fine Art degree, numerous students majoring in Art in Public Spheres and Art Teaching as well as various other actors and students from other art schools.

Our project set out to use various artistic education strategies without wanting to produce any art. We designed the experimental formats by translating artistic strategies into the context of education and teaching. Our working methods were derived from analysis and engagement with works of art by artists such as Paul Thek and Ana Mendieta, who are familiar in Lucerne thanks to two recent exhibitions: Paul Thek in Process by Susanne Neubauer (2012) and Neunzehnhun­dert­ siebzig. Material, Orte, Denkprozesse [Nineteenseventy: material, sites, thought processes] by Eveline Suter (2013). Each initiator of the research project wanted to create radical personal approaches to works of art. We were guided by sentiments expressed by Michael J. Hannafin, Susan

M. Land and Kevin Oliver when they described the «processes wherein the intents and purposes of the individual» are used «as a means for empowerment and agency.»2 At the same time we were aiming to establish forms of community that went well beyond the normal contexts of teaching and education. Personally I sought to reactivate the museum space as a space for public discourse and action, to make it accessible to various groups of actors in completely new or unusual ways. In retrospect the project could be seen as a temporary museum within the museum. The situation of the group in the building realised for Camp#1 by Stephan Wittmer neatly epitomised this invisible space within a space and recalled the provisional wooden structures or Penetràveis [Pentrables] designed by Hélio Oiticica as housing for experimental ideas, actions and everyday practices. As with Oiticica’s work, Wittmer’s building only revealed itself to visitors once they had become physical parts of the acoustic, semantic, visual and tactile ensemble.3 Lukas Geisseler produced a similarly discursive installation for Camp# with his mobile conversational coffee bar, the «TrinkTheke» [Drinks counter].

Aside from that I was especially interested in practical engagement with critical feminist positions. There was more to this than mere experimentation with alternative forms of teaching, me-

diation and engagement; the process of mediation had to visualise the counter-arguments on dominant social roles and behavioural patterns. Feminist positions were particularly prevalent in the performance art of the 1970s, and the history of performative art still bears their imprint to this day; Ana Mendieta, for instance, was a major player in this respect. Yet the significance of such artistic positions for emancipatory endeavours and the other political preoccupations of western societies is still only loosely anchored in consciousness. It’s now ten years since Red Chidgey made the promotion of collective awareness of these processes into a fundamental societal postulate. We subscribed to that view and our project sought to make a significant contribution to it.4 In analysing feminist artistic strategies, for example, we related our knowledge of the texts to reflections on the artistic positions exhibited in the «Open Classroom». In Camp#1 we worked with texts including Jean-Luc Nancy’s La Communauté désœuvrée and Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images malgré tout. Our classroom was «open» insofar as museum visitors who happened to be present were not excluded. Our intensive debates about the construction of a productive form of community, about the challenges of communality and about the abhorrence of collective criminality in Nazi Germany led to self-criticism within the group,

→ Fig. 1 Camp#1–4.5 announcement poster

Der Umgang mit unterschiedlichen Denk- und Handlungsformen bereichert die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Museum, Lehre an der Kunsthochschule und unterschiedlichen Publika mit ihren Anliegen vor Ort.

Ausgehend von der Samml u n g i m Ku n s t m u s e u m Luzern wurden verschiedene künstlerisch vermittelnde Praxen kollaborativ realisiert.

«Wir wollen eine andere Form von Öffentlichkeit herstellen: Gastgeberschaft, Diskussion, Begegnung, Austausch.»

C a m p # 1

KüNSTLERISCHe VeRmITTLuNG: PRAXISBASIERTES FORSCHuNGSpROJeKT Projektformate:

#1

#2

Open Classroom / Film / Studierenden-Blogs / Webmagazin / Performative Interventionen in Museums- und öffentlichen Raum / Ortspezifische Vermittlung ohne «Backstage» / Vom Expertenaustausch zur Selbstermächtigung

Projektziele:

– Künstlerische Strategien in Formate der Kunstvermittlung übersetzen.

– Lehre und Forschung verknüpfen in den Bereichen: Konstruktionen von Gemeinschaft, Ausstellungsdisplays, kollektive Arbeitsformen.

#3

#4

D O K U M E N T A T I O N : W W W . 1 2 3 4 C A M P . C H Master

Kunst

Luzern

Projektleitung: Sabine

Gebhardt

Fink

Projektteam:

Susanne Kudor fer (Projektpartner Kunstmuseum Luzern), Alexandra d’Incau, Bernadett Settele, Stephan Wittmer

L a u f z e i t : 2

0 1

2

–

2

0 1

6

F ö r d e r u n g : Ernst

14 ⁄ 15

Göhner

Stiftung

to a questioning of our own understanding of community and critical engagement with the male-dominated network of the artist Paul Thek as shown in the exhibition. For us this confirmed one of Melissa Autumn White’s theories: by reflecting on how we frame and enact our political concerns we gain the key to the realisation (or non-realisation) of their subversive and transformative potential.5 Performative artistic strategies from the 1960s and 1970s can also be made out in the attention to cooperation and care as essential elements of an artistic work. This goes for Suzanne Lacy’s In­ ternational Dinner Party of 1979 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and for the Damengöt­ tinnen am Äquator [Lady goddesses on the equator], performed with Monika Dillier and others at the Theater Basel in the same year. This topic also became a subject of our analysis of the permanent collections at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. Strategies that seemed important to us are often obscured or made invisible to contemporary audiences by film-based formats of documentation or the object fetishism of exhibitions.6 The activation of the «Open Classroom» and alignment with exhibited positions meant that these omissions with respect to feminist and critical positions were made visible and that the domestication of activism was undone.

Regardless of the fact that female performance activists are in the majority, contemporary surveys mainly present male positions or those that closely conform to the art market, so that the critical voices effectively disappear from the collective consciousness.7 This being the case we came up with the idea of a built Camp# architecture as a mobile conversational space. Discussion of the matter would not take place outside the exhibition – at the university or in the museum’s lecture hall – but would be integrated into the galleries of the exhibition itself, so that theory and mediation would have a permanent place alongside practice (fig. 2). We created platforms, opportunities for dialogue, for making art, for developing theories and for mediation and education. Particularly in the context of the regular «Tuesday afternoon sessions» we worked with different groups of students to develop various empowerment formats such as Camp#3’s «Ich sehe dich» [I see you] – a drawing workshop with direct visitor feedback (figs 3 and 4). Using the available texts, reflections and ideas we sought to support participants in individual and group actions that facilitated the elaboration of experimental formats. This stage of the Camp# project also featured a dance event and a discussion session at the «Trink-Theke». Together with the students we invited some very disparate groups to visit the museum; in the context of the exhibition Unter neuen Bäumen [Under new trees], for instance, we invited one group of people who

lived in the neighbourhood of a particular farmhouse in Kriens near Lucerne that was once painted by Swiss artist Robert Zünd. It was our express intention to call forms of «conversational model» into being. Krasny describes what she herself has called the «conversational model» as an ephemeral artform that facilitates non-hierarchical exchange in the form of a «labour of care». According to Krasny, this sort of practice is to be understood as art produced in collaboration with other co-authors.8 By contrast, we saw the actions of our project not as ephemeral artforms, as Krasny defines them, but as translations of those artforms into a context that mediates between practice, reflection and debate.

Our role as initiators is something I now regard critically insofar as we reproduced the «invisible labour» trap: the significance of our labour is not fully appreciated because we did not assume a position of authorship. Still, one aspect of non-hierarchical collaboration at our regular meetings was a success. I shall refer back here to an instance of contemporary artistic practice in order to clarify exactly what I mean by that. Berlin based artist Okwui Okpokwasili together with Peter Born and various other actors exhibited a work called Sitting on a Man’s Head at the Berlin Biennale in 2018. The title describes a traditional form of protest in Nigeria, where waves of interchangeable protestors converge on the workplaces of those who make important decisions in order to bring about political change. The group identity of each individual actor is unimportant. The crucial thing is the alternating appearance of actors who share the same common concern, which thereby achieves visibility.

In our efforts for the cause of self-empowerment we too were bound together by a common concern and by our alternating appearance at exhibitions and in public places. This practice continued in actions connected to venues such as the Zollhaus (a recently established student-run space) and Neubad (a former bathing facility turned temporary cultural centre), and in actions in the urban realm.

The mentoring functions practised by us initiators at every stage of the Camp# project served the same purpose: we gave feedback, held input talks on artworks or artistic positions at shows such as the landscape exhibition, made materials available and developed a culture of dialogue and mutually respectful criticism with the individual groups (fig. 5). We had to be constantly mindful of how other possible participants and those on the sidelines could be included. In my experience this educational setting without «backstage» – as Dorothee Richter describes the strategy of artistic production in the 2010s – was extremely productive.9 It meant that the physical space of the exhibition was generating new spaces all the time: an alternative art space, a debating club, a communal

↖ Fig. 2 Camp#1, construction for gatherings and collective work in the exhibition space, 2012, Kunst­museum Luzern

↓ Fig. 3 Camp#1, entrance badge, 2012

← Fig. 4 Camp#4, «Ich sehe dich» [I See You], teaching materials, spring semester 2015

↑ Fig. 5 Camp#3, «Landschaft» [Landscape], open classroom, Kunst­museum Luzern, 3 Sept.

2015 ↗ Fig. 6 Camp#4.5, open classroom in the context of the network module, 13–15 Jan. 2016, ZHdK, HSLU D&K, HKB and HGK, Lucerne

↘ Fig. 7 «Strollology», artistic education and public interventions. PASOS

by Juan Carlos Diaz Bueno. Kor­ rektur [Correction]

by Erik Borgir.

Participants: Alaya Battalova, Rosalin Birnstil, Michèle Fella, Christina Hauser, Emilie Inniger, Flora Karetka, Eva Sulai Koch.

Collaboration between MA Fine Arts HSLU D&K, the Theatre Lucerne and the MA Music and Art Performance, 8 June 2018

16 ⁄ 17

space for eating and drinking. This sort of «paramuseum space» can be understood as a social, micro-economically modelled public space.10 In this space there was an exciting redefinition, a productive storming of the museum or, as Sezgin Boynik put it, an «unlearning» of what constitutes the museum.11 During Camp#2 we sought to expand performative educational formats into the external space of the museum and the broader urban environment.

In doing so we aligned ourselves with the performative strategies of female artists from the 1970s.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s conception of the performative act, I define as «performative» the moment of «generatiion» in the act of «re-naming», the creation of a common space for speech and action in defiance of pre-existing power structures and architectures.12 This concept of performativity is fundamental, particularly when questioning determinist gender attributions – as in the performance art of the 1970s. But there were also many performance artists in the 1990s who engaged with the concept of the performative act from feminist or queer perspectives: Andrea Saemann and Chris Regn, for instance, or Dorothea Rust and the «Künstlerinnenkollektiv marsie» [marsie women’s art collective]. Our attempt to make a clearly performative space meant we had to go beyond the space constructed for Camp#1.13 But we also had to avoid marginalising participants as the others of artistic production; they were not to become objectivised subjects on whom artists confer the privilege of participation. Hal Foster has described the power effects that go hand in hand with this sort of objectivisation in a study of participative art from the 1990s. They occur when work in the community, institutional political engagement and the overstepping of existing institutional boundaries are undertaken only for the sake of social outreach targets, economic gain and the commercial success of participating artists.14 We need to ask how we can make cultural capital into «common property», how new enclosures can be opened up and made more transparent.15 In this context «common property» means both the museum space and the space of art education, which needs to be reclaimed time and again – physically and performatively as well as metaphorically – and opened up to current political concerns. Democratic societies depend on these metaphorical spaces of revolutionary change.

In a lecture held at the Artists Space in New York in 2015 Steyerl remarked that people stormed the Louvre on several occasions so that the paintings would remain accessible to the public. These days the issue is not so much the public accessibility of space as the accessibility of ideas and the cultural contexts of the paintings. These do need to be stormed, i.e. made comprehensible to the

public. This is why it’s important to reactivate artistic strategies as such, but also to translate them into conversational formats and update them through mediation. This process is sometimes called «re-performance»; Chidgey had introduced it as «re-mediation». For her it was an essential element in the maintenance of cultural memory: «Unlike the traditional archives of history, the archives of cultural memory consist not only of the stories, images or documents of the past, but also of the acts of transfer.»16 I hope we’ve been able to facilitate such acts of transfer beyond the Camp# project. But such action isn’t everything; the view from outside is important too. This we achieved in stages three and four in collaboration with artists such as Emma Smith, who was invited

by Susanne Kudorfer.

The difference between re-performance and transformative mediation can be clarified again with reference to this example. An essential element of re-performance is the media framework within which the action takes place. If the artist acts in the context of performance art and in the urban realm, her or his action is a re-performance.

If the action makes reference to thematic precursors from the museum context – exhibited works, for instance – then the artist’s focus (or that of the mediator) shifts to the question of artistic mediation. Hence performance as an act of artistic mediation is born of the desire to transform the status quo, to overwrite knowledge with one’s own experience and critical commentary. Tested in the group for more than four years, our conversational model could just as well have been declared an ephemeral artform if we had chosen to frame it as such. But it can also be understood as an act of transfer, a transfer of existing knowledge and action in the context of art, as a collective and non-hierarchical form of exchange and as a re-mediation of documents, images, artefacts and actions in the field of mediation. In this way counter-memories of feminist performative strategies, for example, can be re-inscribed into the prevalent cultural memory; in this way corresponding counteractions can be realised in museum spaces. The participants carry these actions and symbols forward. This goes for the people at the desk and for the former students and their current projects – Charlotte Cooseman’s, for instance. Curatorial thinking can thus be expanded to include thinking in conversation. The museum space of objects, documents, artefacts and relics will be opened up to actions, discussions and the production of visible forms of a different memory. This will help integrate feminist and other activities into curatorial and conservationist narratives: conversation, interaction, co-authorship, collective exchange. As a result we will see diverse new «disputed memories» emerging between female and

male experts, students and the public at large, always an exchange of opinions in processes of negotiation.17 During Camp#4.5 we also learned about times when this form of exchange perhaps doesn’t work so well (fig. 6). In the context of a network module there was a four-day workshop where the results of the Camp# project were evaluated. The participating students were very much focused on knowledge transfer and perception-related debates, along the lines of existing art education.

This was what was familiar to them from school and college classes. The brevity of the workshop didn’t allow enough time for the students to independently appropriate our methods, so the transfer didn’t happen. An open, unconventional invitation for students to develop mediation formats based on their own questions can be too great a challenge and may trigger aggression if no artistic or critically discursive practice is provided as a starting point. In other words, the emergence of a «conversational model» depends on an atmosphere of trust, which has to be built up among a group that’s been working together for an extended period (fig. 7). Projects developed on the basis of artistic strategies are time consuming. At least a year is required before implementation. Curators need to be open to experimental educational formats and trusting of one another. Additional resources such as material, labour and space are necessary, ideally funded from the public purse or by charitable foundations. But ultimately they also depend on a public desire for critical dialogue, active collaboration on collective memories and potentially revolutionising counter-memories.

1 The network is called «Mobiles Kompetenzzentrum für Kunst­ vermittlung KoKüV» [Mobile Center of Excellence for Art Education].

The Camp# project was sponsored by the Ernst Göhner-Stiftung from 2012 to 2016.

2 Cf. Michael J. Hannafin, Susan M. Land and Kevin Oliver, «Open Learning Environments. Foundations and Models», in: Instructional Design Theories and Models. A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory, ed. Charles M. Reigeluth, Mahwab 2009, pp. 115–140, esp. p. 118.

3 Sabeth Buchmann, «From ‹Antropophagia› to ‹Conceptualism›», in: Following Loosen Threads. Scanning Hélio Oiticica Today [The Journal of the Permanent Forum], 2007, http:// www.forumpermanente.org/en/ journal/following-loosen-threadsscanning-helio-oiticica-today/fromantropophagia-to-conceptualism, (retrieved 29 Oct. 2018).

4 Red Chidgey, «Hand Made Memories. Remediating Cultural Memory in DIY Feminist Networks», in: The Transnational Studies Reader.

Intersections and Innovations, ed. Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, London and New York 2008, pp. 87–97, esp. p. 87.

5 Cf. Melissa Autumn White, «Queers without borders? On the Impossibilities of ‹Queer Citizenship› and the Promise of Trans­ national Aesthetic Mutiny», in: The Transnational Studies Reader 2008, pp. 117–134, esp. p. 119.

6 Cf. Dorothee Richter, «Revisiting Display. Display and Backstage», in: On Curating no. 22 [Politics of Display] (2014), pp. 7–15, esp. p. 12.

7 One of the texts was Christian Klemm, «Schweiz», in: Landschaft im Licht. Impressionistische Malerei in Europa und Nordamerika 1860–1910, ed. Götz Czymmek, exh. cat. Cologne: Wallraf-RichartzMuseum, 1990, pp. 146–155.

8 Cf. Elke Krasny, «The Salon Model.

The Conversational Complex», in: Feminism and Art History now.

Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice, ed. Victoria Horne and Lara Perry, London and New York 2017, pp. 147–163, esp. p. 147 and p. 160.

9 Richter 2014, esp. p. 8.

10 Cf. Nora Sternfeld, «Das Museum deprovinzialisieren. Was wäre ein Museum, wenn es kein westliches Konzept wäre?», in: Body Luggage. Migration of Gestures, ed. Zasha Colah, exh. cat. Graz: Steirischer Herbst, 2016, pp. 200–203, esp. p. 202 with reference to Bonaventura Soh Bejeng Ndikung.

18 ⁄ 19

11 Sezgin Boynik, «Between Privileges of Unlearning and Formlessness of Anti-Knowing. Ideologies of Artistic Education», in: Forms of Education. Couldn’t get a sense of it, ed. Aeron Bergman, Alejandra Salinas and Irena Boric, Zagreb 2016, pp. 232–361, describes this «unlearning» in educational contexts in detail.

12 Cf. Judith Butler, Anmerkungen zu einer performativen Theorie der Versammlung, Berlin 2016, p. 41.

13 Cf. the students’ BLOG [MA Fine Art archive] and www.masterkunst-luzern.ch/2013/01/camp-1/.

14 Cf. Hal Foster, «The Artist as Ethnographer?», in: The Traffic in Culture. Reconfiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, Berkeley and London 1995, pp. 302–309, esp. p. 303 and p. 306.

15 Cf. Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, «Commons als transformative Kraft. Zur Einführung», in: Commons. Für eine neue Politik jenseits von Markt und Staat, ed. Silke Helfrich and HeinrichBöll-Stiftung, Bielefeld 2014, pp. 15–23, esp. p. 16.

16 Chidgey 2008, p. 88. The process appears as a «re-performance» in a presentation of the research project «Archiv Performativ»; see archiv performativ 2012, http:// www.zhdk.ch/?archivperformativ (retrieved 30 Nov. 2018).

17 Cf. Chidgey 2008, p. 89.

I Can’t Draw Christoph Lichtin

You need a lot of experience of drawing before you can possibly know that you can’t draw. As we develop from children into young adults, many of us will come to the realisation that what we’ve put down on paper clearly has very little to do with what we wanted to represent. At some point or other our «ability» gets in the way, likewise the comparisons we make with others. There are some people who actually are able to put things down on paper, be it a horse, a mountain range or a person. A successful drawing certainly requires technique, a bit of practice and the capacity for abstraction. But I maintain that everyone can be a draughtsperson, that everyone can draw. Just as everyone with ten fingers can play the piano. It might not sound like Mozart, but the act of playing feels fantastic. And so it is with drawing. You just need to put aside your expectations and prior knowledge of art, forget those who «can» and become someone who «does». When you do you’ll be reclaiming a fantastic cultural technique. But that’s easier said than done. How, exactly? It would certainly help if someone could provide support and create an environment that might offer an easy way in.

In the summer of 2018 Nicole Heri and Debora Gerber conducted a wonderful three-day workshop on just this topic as part of their MA Fine Art course on Art in Public Spheres at Lucerne School of Art and Design. «The Royal View» encouraged passers-by at three difference sites in Lucerne to look at the landscape of the lake and the mountains and to do so as if they were Queen Victoria

of England, who made drawings and watercolour paintings at the same locations a hundred and fifty years ago. With easels, paints and drawing paper, the two students set themselves up on the Gütsch above the city, on the Reuss Bridge and on the waterfront and then invited people not just to be creative, but also – with reference to the Queen Victoria exhibition that was happening at the Historisches Museum at the time – to look at Lucerne and the surrounding landscape with a royal gaze.

In order not to discourage participation by setting the bar too high they prepared the paper and drew out the scenery and silhouettes of mountains and buildings in advance. So the most difficult bit had already been done; the outline just needed colouring in (figs 1–2). This sort of colouring in has a bit of a bad name. It’s for kids. But that’s exactly what makes it so good for finding academic discourse outside the art college, for going into the public sphere and entering into creative dialogue with people who aren’t practising artists. In the 1960s Andy Warhol called his own colouring-in works «Do It Yourself» pictures. His artistic strategy created pop icons by taking visual motifs from the world of everyday culture and transposing them into the art world. Colouring-in books were already a part of everyday life by that point, so turning them into works of art was a bold gesture. And Warhol’s paintings of colour fields and corresponding numbers (best not actually colour them in) have in fact made it into the museums. Art has co-opted the topos of artistic inability and canonised the antiacademic in a way that still reverberates today.

For Queen Victoria, drawing was an everyday activity. She not only kept a diary every day but also made thousands of drawings. The Royal Collection lists 4253 inventory items, including many filled sketchbooks (their individual pages aren’t even included in the total). Along with writing, drawing for the Queen was a way of preserving memories.

Looking at her daily duties as described in the diaries, you have to ask how she was able to fit it all in. Besides the writing and drawing she also had nine children to raise and an empire to rule. The importance of drawing for Queen Victoria is comparable to what our smart phones are to us. We constantly record our experiences by taking photographs of what we see. The Queen, incidentally, was also enamoured of photography and even had her own court photographer. But drawing was an easy mnemonic technique that was always ready to hand. Queen Victoria was of course just as enthusiastic as we all are about the landscape of Lake Lucerne. Likewise the passers-by who participated in the workshop and perhaps took up brushes again for the first time in many years. From the pedagogical perspective the project was unusual because of the setting, and the two artists behind it had also thought about those who didn’t step up to the easel. This bigger picture included passers-by who only briefly looked at what was going on and then asked themselves whether they might also have dared to step up and have a go.

And that message was the quintessence of the whole project: drawing can be an everyday action; it is private and derives its value from the signifi-

Figs 1–2 «Der könig­liche Blick» [The Royal View], 9 June 2018, Lucerne, Reussbrücke

cance we attach to moments of deep contemplation and our memories of them. But there is something provocative about drawing in public because it raises questions about capability and competence. Nicole Heri and Debora Gerber granted that competence to everyone, putting passers-by at the centre of a public performance in the middle of the city, far from the school rooms of our past.

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I Can Use What I Learned at Camp Susanne Kudorfer

The art education projects from Camp#1 to Camp#4 are well documented. The first edition was accompanied by a blog. The website 1234camp.ch was created retrospectively as a full project overview.1 Why write about it again? I want to take this opportunity and the distance it affords to reflect on the conditions and results of «artistic» art education, which has had an ongoing influence on my work as an art educator. I am concerned here with collaboration, the potentialities of spaces and trust in the process.

Camp# followed up on the research project «Kunstvermittlung in Transformation» [Art Education in Transformation] and the «Entwicklungs­ projekt Kompetenzzentrum für Kunstvermittlung» [Centre of Excellence for Art Education Development Project].2 From 2008 to 2012 the Kunstmuseum Luzern was set to reflect upon and further develop its in-house educational programmes in collaboration with people from the higher education sector. This was a continuation of the «Treffpunkt Kunst» [Art Assembly] project, which was realised between 2003 and 2004 and had given rise to the «Student Snacks» [Studentenfutter] format. The educational formats «by Students for Students» were developed during educational events led by staff from the Kunstmuseum Luzern as part of the BA Fine Arts and Art & Design Education at the Lucerne School of Art and Design.

The potential target audiences for the formats developed in the context of the Camp# project module of the professional practice MA were defined by the participants themselves. I imagined that the specific interests of the students could be combined with the addressing of individuals or groups who would bring their own perspectives to these questions. Activities developed in this way could be made public via museum and university programmes or confined to the group of participants. Most of the Camp# project activities were aimed at people who were already part of the museum’s target audience anyway. Museum visitors met students while the students were working on their projects. They became involved if they happened to be there by chance or came specifically for an advertised event.

← Fig. 1 Robert Zünd, Haus unter Nuss­ bäumen (Schellen­ matt) [House under Nut Trees (Schellen­matt)], 1863, oil on canvas, 77.0 × 103.7 cm, property of the Swiss Federation, Gottfried KellerStiftung Bern, Sammlung Kunst­ museum Luzern ↙ Fig. 2 Still from Rebekka Friedli and Ximena Gomez della Valle, Unter neuen Bäumen [Under New Trees], 2014, three-channel video installation, 9'27" loop ↘ Fig. 3 Rebekka Friedli and Ximena Gomez della Valle, Unter neuen Bäumen [Under New Trees], 2014, three-channel video installation, 9'27" loop, in­ stallation view at Kunstmuseum Luzern, 21 May 2014

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Camp#3 reached a specific group of people.3 Beginning with the exhibition Ins Offene! [Into the Open!], which featured landscapes from the art museum collections, our seminar initially worked with landscape paintings and landscape-related concepts. Our materials were artworks, texts and films. Students Rebekka Friedli and Ximena Gomez della Valle wanted to combine Robert Smithson’s theory of «Non-Sites» and analyses of historic works of art with contemporary experiences of landscape and thus lend form to this involvement.4 For practical reasons they chose a site near Lucerne. Robert Zünd’s painting Haus unter Nussbäu­ men (Schellenmatt) [House under Nut Trees (Schellenmatt)] (1863) is associated with an address in Kriens. Friedli and Gomez della Valle developed the project «Unter neuen Bäumen» [Under New Trees] having visited and documented the environs of this house (figs 1 and 2). While they were recording sounds and images they got talking to local residents. Once the piece was finished they invited people from Kriens and the surroundings of the Schällenmatt to an event at the museum. After a production period of over half a year, the threepart film projection with audio track was set up in the education room of the museum (fig. 3). The fact that the room was originally a gallery and therefore had a similar atmosphere to the adjoining galleries was beneficial to the piece, which was read as an art installation.

«Under New Trees» was presented and compared to the painting it was based on in a moderated discussion at an event held on 3 September 2014 (fig. 4). There were contributions from the artists, their family members, friends, students, museum staff, university staff and people from Kriens, including the current residents and owners of the Schällenmatt. First the group watched the projection in silence, then they discussed it before the related painting from the Ins Offene! exhibition. Targeted individuals and other involved parties dealt with questions about representation, preservation and the evolution of a «landscape».

One particular thing I remember was the nuanced discussion of the atmosphere of the place. The blurred images of the film formed a strong contrast

to the wealth of detail in the painting. Despite all the new buildings and changes, the place retained its idyllic atmosphere – that was how the artists summed it up. One obvious explanation for this is the care with which the land is treated by its current owners, to whom the preservation of this quality is important. I had expected to find a strong contrast to Zünd’s depiction of the landscape idyll, which is now in the middle of a heavily exploited settlement area. I was aware that the idyll was far from reality even when it was originally painted, but that only increased my astonishment at what I saw in «Under New Trees».

The piece by Friedli and Gomez della Valle drew links between a work from the museum collections and a town in the vicinity of the museum. It created an educational space, an interstitial space that brought people together, encouraged them to talk to each other and illuminated a common interest. Even without words the juxtaposition worked as a form of reflection and an impetus to reflection. In the recent discourse on creative art education Pierangelo Maset has proposed a definition that to me seems quite apt here: «Art education shouldn’t try to break down findings imported from art discourse; it needs to break out into a dimension of its own. The practice of art education is about creative artistic processes and the formation of differences. […] The adjectives ‹creative› and ‹artistic› ought not to be understood to mean that education somehow needs to be ennobled by art or creativity; they are indicators of a kind of art education that itself generates forms and contents, an art education that is more than just the servant of works, people or institutions.»5 Friedli and Gomez della Valle worked entirely in line with these sentiments in the research and the development of their project; they not only used creative

↑ Fig. 4 Education event for Unter neuen Bäumen [Under New Trees] on 3 Sept. 2014 ↗ Fig. 5 Stephan Wittmer and students installing the Camp#1 edu­ cation space, 2012

methods but also developed an independent and well-defined form of creative art education.

Physical and social spaces played an important role in the various editions of Camp#.6 The debate about spaces was particularly intensive during Camp#1. One gallery space at the museum was left unused between two concurrent exhibitions.

As hinge, bridge and container, this space served as a basis for the collaboration between museum and university. After preliminary consideration of the aims of the educational project to be developed there the core team started building. In that high, windowless gallery a space within a space emerged from scaffolding, cladding boards, Stephan Wittmer’s old tent and the material remains of Noriyuki Kiguchi’s performative project from Museum Night 2012 (fig. 5). We invited a wide variety of groups and acquaintances to join us in the space. A collaboratively created programme was advertised and took place under the title «CoWerk Schuppen» [Co-Work Shed].7 A social space emerged that extended the physical and institutional space of the art museum. Here, too, the Camp# project went beyond the conventional target audience of the museum.8 In an evaluation meeting that served as a basis for the digital documentation of the project, Sabine Gebhardt-Fink, Alexandra D’Incau and I identified another important quality of Camp#: it was a long-term, process-oriented collaboration. Regular meetings with a degree of pressure to come up with the goods were a constant in our work.

Sometimes things didn’t go quite to plan. For the Camp#4 group exhibition Von Angesicht zu Ang­ esicht [From Face to Face], which featured portraits and works depicting bodies and figures, the students wanted to bring the actual activity of bodybuilding into the exhibition galleries. Despite

our best efforts, no-one could be found who was willing to demonstrate and discuss this practice in the museum. Alexandra brought in art historian, curator and bodybuilder Jörg Scheller, who had worked on the theme before. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to attend on the prearranged date, so Alexandra and I led the event with students and other interested parties. We projected films of bodybuilding competitions and used texts by Scheller as a starting point for discussion with those who were present. The event took place in the central exhibition space alongside Ferdinand Hodler’s Holzfäller [Woodcutter] and the mixed-media sculpture The Revenge from Urs Lüthi’s series Art is the Better Life (fig. 6).

In another sub-project associated with this exhibition the students acted as artists and performers. They swarmed inside and outside the museum, making rapid sketches and portraits of passers-by (fig. 7). Existing infrastructure such as folding museum stools and postcard display stands were used and hacked to take the museum to the outside world and to distribute the drawings among members of the public. The limits and boundaries of what is permissible and acceptable in the museum context were tested and blurred. The museum staff responded to these processes positively, with a degree of trust and a sense of adventure. During Camp#2 I became slightly irritated with my role as the person who had to decide what was or was not acceptable, and I ended up blocking some potential developments. In Camp#4 I was able to let the process flow. In making decisions the students acted responsibly, consulting museum staff at the desk and in the galleries about how far they wanted to go and why – and without paying attention to whether or not I was there to mediate. Perhaps it is this trust in the potential of

↑ Fig. 6 Urs Lüthi, The Revenge (from the series Art is the Better Life), 2003, mixed media sculpture and objects on wooden plinth, Kunst­museum Luzern, on permanent loan from the Bernhard Eglin-Stiftung ↗ Fig. 7 Ich sehe dich [I See You], Camp#4, drawing with students, April 2015

collective work that I have acquired and continue to use as a result of the Camp# project: initiate processes, absorb impulses, develop concepts step by step and deal with the uncertainties together. That sense of the word «creative» sits well with a concept of art that is broad without being arbitrary.

1 See http://1234camp.ch/ and http://thekmosercamp.tumblr.com/ (both retrieved 11 June 2018).

2 See http://projektraumkunst­ vermittlung.ch/archive/ and https://www.grstiftung.ch/de/ search~grs-047-07~.html?search=kudorfer (both retrieved 1 Aug. 2018). The abovementioned development project was initiated by Peter Fischer and Brigitte Bürgi. I was involved from 2009 to 2013.

3 See http://1234camp.ch/camp-3/ (retrieved 24 July 2018).

4 The basis of this approach was drawn from Robert Smithson, «A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites» [1968], in: idem, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley 1996, p. 364, and from the paintings discussed in Landschaft im Licht. Impressionistische Malerei in Europa und Nordamerika 1860–1910, exh. cat. Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, 1990.

5 https://archiv.ask23.de/draft/ archiv/misc/mediation_maset. html (retrieved 1 Aug. 2018).

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6 See Susanne Kudorfer, «Die Räume der Kunstvermittlung», in: Kunst­vermittlung in Transformation.

Perspektiven und Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes, eds Bernadett Settele and Carmen Mörsch, Zurich 2012, pp. 52–78, esp. p. 52 and 76 f.

7 http://thekmosercamp.tumblr.com/ cowerkschuppen.

8 Our activities harmonised with one requirement of Carmen Mörsch, «Arbeit in Spannungsverhältnissen 2. Adressierung und das Paradox der Anerkennung», in: Zeit für Vermittlung, ed. Institute for Art Education der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste [2012], http://kultur-vermittlung.ch/ zeit-fuer-vermittlung/v1/ ?m=2&m2=6&lang=d: «If a cultural facility regards itself less as a maker of a product that can be marketed and more as a contributing actor – in its local context as well as in the art world – then it will require forms of address that go beyond the orientation of a single target group and instead initiate collaborations between the institution and various target audiences.»

What Remains How the Unruly Content of Art Education Manifests Itself in Word and Image Alexandra D’Incau

As part of the Camp# training module at the Lucerne School of Art and Design we set out to create a space for artistic education that would encourage all participants – students and visitors alike – to explore new forms of action. The module was part of a teaching-oriented research project conceived by Sabine Gebhardt Fink. The initiators of the project established a collaborative working structure. The project had less to do with the «transmission of information about the arts than the formation of an aesthetic mentality and an attentiveness to creative processes».1 The particular challenge of this collaboration was that it had to mediate between two distinct structures at once.

On the one hand it was a masters seminar on professional practice in the field of «exhibitions and education», with Bologna compliant module description, information on European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) points and the requisite labour resources plus content, teaching methods and learning objectives. On the other hand the chosen venue of the Kunstmuseum Luzern is characterised (like many other art institutions) not just by the art it displays but also by structural conditions such as premises, staff, opening hours, educational expectations and specific standards, regulations and codes of behaviour. And as individual educators, project initiators and lecturers with our own conceptions of art and our own personal attitudes, expectations and abilities, we encountered some engaged students who had their own ideas and artistic practices but also some who just needed credits.

The format of the Camp# project as I saw it was meant to promote autonomous, artistic studentled education initiatives where students would draw on the permanent exhibition at the museum to create their own content, going with the flow of creative processes and trusting in the «inherent logic of the artistic».2 One fundamental aspect of artistic education processes such as these seems to be that associated intentions, individual experiences and subjective findings are often elusive or difficult to verify. Could it be that even artistic education might lose the force of the speakable and demonstrable, and does this render all attempts at documentation obsolete or difficult to analyse? Events, methods and findings of an aesthetic, reflexive or procedural nature are usually recorded verbally or in writing before, during and after artistic education. Projects, ideas, formats and methods generally have to be described and explained in applications and final reports, on websites and flyers. But depending on the format and context, the aim might be to provide information, to take a position, to make ephemeral perceptions tangible or simply to arouse curiosity. With this in mind we make conscious decisions in favour of certain terminologies and tonalities, and this always points to specific attitudes that we identify with within the field. This was also true of the Camp# project.

There is plenty of material about the format of the Camp# project available online in the form of visual and written documentation.3 In my analysis of the ephemeral effects of artistic education I

want to look at three examples of these visual and narrative traces of communication. I’ll investigate the information and views they contain on artistic education through the following two questions: What contexts, frameworks and systems of knowledge are suggested by the various sources that different actors and institutions use? What methods and practices are indicated and how congruent are they with the various perspectives? Though this small sample is by no means representative, I’m interested in what has prevailed and what remains of the hopefully transformational but also potentially chimerical content of art education when it is talked about and written about, and when we look at the photographic documentation relating to it.

Initially I searched for the word «camp» on the web­site of the Kunstmuseum Luzern. Prior to August 2018 there was one result, on the «education» page. Scrolling down, I came across the title «Camp», a term that may have seemed quite cryptic to the uninitiated. Beneath it was a single sentence that summarised the contents and concerns of the term with incredible precision.4 The page cited collaborators and thus referred to the cooperation between the museum and the MA fine art course at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. At the same time it immediately became clear that this educational format had nothing to do with the traditional guided tour. Instead it spoke of «strategies», «inputs», «forums» and «public expectations», which seemed to suggest significant activity, involvement and perhaps even participation. It also mentioned the timeframe – «one

↙ Fig. 1 Flyer for Alexandra D’Incau’s open classroom in the context of Camp#3 ↘ Fig. 2 Installation of Camp#1 during autumn semester 2012/ 2013, Kunst­ museum Luzern

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semester» – which again implied a process-based approach. As for institutional specifications, it was clear that these strategies and formats would evolve with the changing exhibition programme.

My second source was the MA Fine Art microsite.5 There I found a flyer for Camp#4: an invitation to an «open classroom» event. The desaturated background image shows a fairly dynamic, albeit ambiguous scene: there are two people arranging small card drawings in a circle on the floor. A third figure has been frozen by the camera mid-stride, so it’s slightly unclear whether that person is entering or exiting the circle of cards (fig. 1). The folding chairs and the exhibits on the white walls and plinths suggest that the group is in a museum gallery. One figure has a folded chair nonchalantly hung over their shoulder, which could be read as an indication of a certain familiarity with the museum context. There is a thick black Edding marker on the bench in the foreground – not the sort of thing that would normally be tolerated in a museum! From the text it is evident that this was a public event not intended for any group in particular, that the meeting point was in the museum foyer and that the event then moved into the museum. The «open classroom» had start and end times, but it looks like latecomers were able to join in without any problem. The webpage also mentions readings and discussion – fitting for a classroom. Image and text give the impression of a rather low-key, informal event, and that indisputable expertise and primarily art-based knowledge transfer were not priorities for the Camp# project.

There wouldn’t be representatives of one camp

telling their counterparts in the other how things were here. Instead the format and its actors would focus on evolution and experimentation with possible responses, foregrounding creatively inquisitive access to art. This access would create space for spontaneous action, which really can be an impediment for some visitors. At the same time, though, the note about group readings and discussions suggests more of a discursive format. The caption contains lots of concrete information about the event organisers, mentions a network of experts and gives a number of objectives, which can trigger participation aversion and can be difficult to decipher when there are so many listed in such a concise format. In other words: photograph, text and caption convey highly contradictory messages.

My third source is an illustration from the Camp# project online documentation (fig. 2).6 The photograph reproduced here was taken during Camp#1.

We project initiators were still very much involved in the events at that stage. Nonetheless, we tried to operate as co-actors rather than leader or lecturer figures. The photo shows me with my three team members Patrick Rohner, Prisca Wüst and, in the mirror, Susanne Kudorfer in one of those contemplative moments that are typical of projects that run for several months. Engrossed in our smartphones or laptops, we are shown indulging our thoughts and ideas collectively but also individually. It is not a representative image and it doesn’t do us or the project many favours, but it does give an unadorned view of a process that wasn’t always pretty and didn’t always run according to plan. Our weekly meeting point was a temporary education space: a regular gallery between two separate exhibitions but also serving as a connecting space between them. There was no private area or safe haven; no meeting room behind the scenes. All action and contemplation was visible to everyone – visitors included – along with fatigue and exasperation. This is entirely in line with Dorothee Richter’s analysis of the «politics of display», where backstage situations in the context of exhibitions are regarded as important reflexive strategies for the exhibition world and the space of contemporary art.7 In the above readings of these three visual sources I have considered the expectations and conditions of the Camp# project along with its modes of representation. Although these kinds of sources always entail the translation of physical, aesthetic and procedural experience, it can be shown by way of conclusion that such paratexts – i.e. the linguistic formulations and the photographs we decided to publish on the project website or as flyers – nevertheless convey significant amounts of information concerning our interest in art education.8 These texts and images, which

illustrate the phases and traces of a process that lasted several years, framed and supported our projects and approaches. After the project they form an archive that conveys more than just visual impressions; they indicate specific attitudes and strategies. My three samples show that Camp#, its sub-projects and online documentation conveyed and explained a process-based understanding of education that started with art and employed diverse modes of thought and action. The texts and images contain numerous signs that participants in the galleries never shied away from engaging with highly diverse audience groups or from subversive or unruly actions. All the images show that participants dared to stake claims to space for their own artistic projects and interventions right at the heart of the museum. In order to facilitate these kinds of approaches, which go beyond the ostensibly predictable objectives of art pedagogy, we initiators always sought to give actors the opportunity for eye-level encounters. But of course it takes time for theory, art education and an inquisitive attitude towards it really to interact in that way; above all there has to be a trusting environment of mutual respect where all participants can embrace process, autonomy, immediacy and the unfinished.

1 Cf. Pierangelo Maset, «Perspektive Kunstvermittlung», contribution on Mediation. Wie ist Kunst im öffentlichen Raum vermittelbar? [conference of 2006, released 2007], https://ask23.de/resource/ misc/mediation_maset (retrieved 19 Nov. 2018).

2 Cf. Maset 2007.

3 Besides the official project website 1234.camp.ch there is also the blog administered by the core Camp#1 team, cf. http:// thekmosercamp.tumblr.com/.

In addition, Stephan Wittmer published Nr. 07_The Camp, a photographic record of subjective sensations and key moments that effectively accompanies the process of the first edition; see http://www.957.ch/ 957_Backlist.html.

4 «In a series of public forums held over the course of a semester, HSLU students on the MA Fine Arts degree developed strategies, educational formats and inputs for current exhibitions.» That entry no longer exists; cf. https:// www.kunstmuseumluzern.ch/ hochschulen (retrieved 18 Nov. 2018).

5 Cf. http://www.master-kunstluzern.ch/2014/05/camp-3_ landschaft-laedt-ein-kunstmuseumluzern-21-05-2014-1600-uhr/.

6 Cf. http://1234camp.ch/kontexteund-diskurse/.

7 Dorothee Richter, «Revisiting Display. Display and Backstage», in: On Curating no. 22 [Politics of Display] (2014), pp. 7–15, esp. p. 10 and passim.

8 The principle of the paratext stems from literary studies but also presents productive points of contact for art scholarship and practice because it opens up a dynamic field between work and frame. Cf. Lucie Kolb, Barbara Preisig and Judith Welter, «Dynamiken des Werks?», in: Paratexte.

Zwischen Produktion, Vermittlung und Rezeption, ed. Lucie Kolb, Barbara Preisig and Judith Welter, Zurich 2018, pp. 7–15.

Artistic Education in the Gallery Space and Beyond

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Art Education, Traditional or Artistic?

A Collaboration between the Migros Museum fĂźr Gegenwartskunst and the HSLU MA in Fine Arts Cynthia Gavranic and Alena Nawrotzki

The Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (est.

1996) has always advocated a dynamic conception of art history and has always tested the limits of traditional genres, artforms and institutional conventions. Its guiding principle is processuality. This is reflected particularly clearly in the intimate relationship between its collections and its exhibition policy. As a place of both production and reflection, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst is dedicated to strategies of contemporary art which, since the 1990s, have increasingly tended to focus on their own institutional contexts. Newly generated thematic fields with inquiries into the conditions of artistic production and reception or the practices of curating and collecting remain subjects for artistic criticism and theoretical debate. The following reflections on educational practices at the museum should also be seen in this context.

Lucerne Students as Art Educators

During the winter of 2016–2017 the museum looked back on its twenty year history with an exhibition entitled 20 – An Exhibition in Three Acts. This retrospective was understood as a living and open engagement with the history of the institution and its collections, its curatorial and conceptual programme; and the very format of the museum was up for discussion. How do we go about describing the cultural DNA of a contemporary art museum?

What should it do? Where are the productive interfaces between a progressive conception of art and the traditional activity of supervising collections? These and other questions were illuminated in a variety of laboratory situations that facilitated intensive debate about theoretical approaches and practices that still shape the identity of the museum to this day. And for once, the goings-on behind the scenes became a topic in their own right during this anniversary project. Art production, conservation and art handling are fundamental to the day-to-day running of the museum, and they constituted a major focus of the exhibition. A diverse accompanying programme of artists’ talks, symposia, workshops, seminars and performances provided thematic insights while a temporary coffee bar in the exhibition space invited visitors to discuss in depth what they had seen in the galleries.

One focus of the anniversary exhibition was art education. As part of an effort to make visible, to expose and to critically negotiate our art education practices, the atelier responsible for this area was hauled out of its usual quarters in the basement and integrated into the exhibition space. In collaboration with several Swiss universities (besides Lucerne, the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, the Hochschule der Künste Bern and the Pädagogi­

← Fig. 1 Workshop for children and adults by Violetta Szikriszt in the context of the exhibition 20 – An Exhibi­ tion in Three Acts (15 Oct. 2016 to 5 Feb. 2017), Zurich, Migros Museum für Gegenwarts­ kunst, 17 Jan. 2016 ↘ Fig. 2 Seminar at the exhibition 20 – An Exhibition in Three Acts (15 Oct. 2016 to 5 Feb. 2017), Zurich, Migros Museum für Gegen­warts­kunst, with students under the direction of Alena Nawrotzki, director of education and programming at the Migros Museum für Gegenwarts­ kunst, and Maria Josefa Lichtsteiner, lecturer at HSLU D&K, 3 Nov. 2016 ↓ Fig. 3 Rollentausch [Role Reversal], education project

by Rahel Lüchinger and Elia Malevez in the context of the exhibition 20 – An Exhibition in Three Acts (15 Oct. 2016 to 5 Feb. 2017), Zurich, Migros Museum für Ge­gen­wartskunst, 14 Dec. 2016

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sche Hochschule Zürich) we created an experimental art education platform where staff and students could together experiment with new, project-specific strategies and formats that considered aspects such as critical processes and cultural participation.

The questions brought up by students and staff from the HSLU Master of Arts in Fine Arts were extremely productive for our collaborative project; these questions touched on social contextualisation, interdisciplinary thinking and experimental approaches.1 The museum provided the space and the students of Maria Josefa Lichtsteiner and Jean-Pierre Grüter were given the freedom to develop educational projects that were then put into practice with visitors to the museum (fig. 2). Once we had harmonised the very different working methods and timeframes of the university and the museum, discourse and cooperation was positive and enriching. The students were engaged and able to take advantage of the potential of the experimental platform at the museum, using it for their own practices in various different ways: there were role plays with remarkable results (Rahel Lüchinger and Elia Malevez, fig. 3), material-based experiments (Nicole Heri, fig. 4, and Violetta Szikriszt, fig. 1), a spatial drawing project (Stina Kasser) and performative trampolining in front of artworks (Yvonne Imhof and Martin Wohlwend, fig. 5), to name but a few.2 We were delighted to see such diverse content in these formats, but also that they appealed to quite different groups of people: from family afternoons with open studios

to roundtable discussions with panels of experts.

The extra effort required on all sides clearly paid dividends in that it resulted in knowledge gains for both institutions.

For the students, the concrete practical experience was especially valuable. This included not only conception and material planning but also definition and organisation of target groups. Although museum staff were always there to lend a hand, choosing and inviting participants posed a major challenge for some of the students, whereas for the museum the collaboration provided enriching insights into university practices. Trialling various formats gave an indication of the possibilities but also the limits to available time, materials and communications in the museum context. For the art education team at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, the results were clear: the artistic research methods adopted by the students on the basis of Helga Kämpf-Jansen’s suggestions represented a refreshing approach to art education and have encouraged us to reflect on both the place and the possibilities of incorporating artistic formats into the museum context.3

Why Does the Museum Need Artistic Education?

If we want to better understand artistic education in the museum, and with it the relationship between art education, the institution and artistic practices, there are several questions that first need answering. What are the fundamental elements of successful art education? Should we divide the field into «traditional», non-artistic art education on the one hand and artistic education on the other? Do you have to be an artist to qualify to do the latter? To what extent can traditional formats be reinvigorated by artistic art education?

This debate seems particularly important given the ongoing issue of digitalisation, which has affected the art world and the museum landscape in equal measure – primarily in light of new educational projects currently being developed outside the museum, including for instance the Swiss #letsmuseeum and Amuze projects, which seek to enrich the experience of artworks through associations and emotions. Under the watchword «infotainment» these projects want to share a new perspective on art and cultural institutions and thereby reach a younger audience that tends to avoid the museum as a place that seems distant from everyday life.4 So it looks as though effective art education is shifting in the direction of infotainment and that traditional art education has perhaps become an anachronism. Even just the word «traditional» suggests the idea of an unconsidered, affirmative, reproductive attitude.5 But in our opinion the distinction is not quite so clear cut. Where you draw the

line between the two sides will ultimately depend on context and the way you approach the artworks and the theme of the exhibition. Carmen Mörsch has listed the elements that contribute to the success of an art education project: careful control of participant congestion and group sizes to avoid overcrowding stress; observance of safety regulations while ensuring the audience always feels welcome; consideration of and measures appropriate to the requirements of the target audience.6 Further to these aspects, Janna Graham describes art education in general as a bridge for translating museum themes for the benefit of a certain public.

She notes that art education – though often cited as justification for the existence of art institutions – is generally accorded a secondary position. In this context Mörsch regrets that there is not more questioning of power structures – with respect to the working conditions of art education officers.7 We share her opinion on the centrality of these factors and maintain that both realms ought to be subject to permanent critical enquiry in order to drive the discourse forward. Does artistic art education have more scope for action, more freedom of movement if it can develop its own practices and processes rather than just employing existing artistic procedures?8 We would like to respond to this question with reference to art education practice at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst. We would not define this practice as artistic art education, and yet it cannot be called traditional either. Art education at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst starts with the artwork and the artist’s practice and subject matter, then creates a connection between the art and the individual everyday lives of the public, then makes art experientially accessible and traces its links to art history. The formats we choose are geared towards the specific requirements of the audience in question. The exhibitions at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst create the ideal conditions for this because they are socially relevant, they can be experienced spatially and because they consider the artworks in terms of process.

Our art education team comprises expert art theorists and art historians as well as creative artists. Besides guided tours, our central elements are workshops for audiences from all school age groups as well as for families, people from various generations and people with disabilities. Throughout the discursive exhibition visit and the deeper creative engagement that happens in the art education atelier afterwards, the process and the creation of the artwork always remain at the forefront. The objects created in the atelier take a back seat. Contemporary art in particular seems impervious to comprehension by the general public; it can rarely be understood in terms of «beauty» or

«skilful artistry». As Jean-Christophe Ammann has aptly put it: «The work of art is actually a sensibly perceptible conceptual object».9 In the following examples we give brief descriptions of three ninety minute workshops from the schools context.

1. In 2014–2015 we ran workshops for young people in conjunction with our Wu Tsang exhibition; they went under the title «Selfies vom unbekannten Ich» [Selfies of an unknown ego]. These workshops began with discussion of Wu Tsang’s work and related themes such as gender fluidity, the search for identity and gender construction. Conchita Wurst and her victory at the Eurovision Song Contest in 2014 were consciously built into these discussions.10 During the creative part of the workshops the young people made each other up as women or men and acted out the other gender in short performative sequences. The creation of an artistic product in the more traditional sense was put aside in favour of this performative element.

2. In 2015–2016 we held workshops alongside the group exhibition Resistance Performed, Aes­ thetic Strategies under Repressive Regimes in Latin America. The workshops were entitled «Was macht Ihr denn da? Kunstaktion im öffentlichen Raum!» [What on earth are you doing? Artistic action in the public realm]. They explored the per-

↑ Fig. 4 Nicole Heri’s workshop for families in the context of the exhibition 20 – An Exhibition in Three Acts (15 Oct. 2016 to 5 Feb. 2017), Zurich, Migros Museum für Ge­gen­­warts­kunst, 29 Jan. 2017

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formative elements of actionism and were likewise aimed at young people.11 These workshops dealt with the everyday pressures that young people are subject to, such as shitstorms on social media platforms. The creative element of these workshops drew inspiration from artistic performances in the public realm: groups of young people took up positions at the tram stop in front of the museum wearing masks and bearing placards with slogans such as «Against Dismantling Education!». The young participants then discussed public reactions and lessons learned from the brief campaign.

3. The workshop «Zauberklänge im Traumland» [Magic sounds in dreamland], which was aimed at seven to twelve-year-old children and ran alongside the exhibition of a work by Pipilotti Rist, was centred on sound experiments.12 In order to get a different perspective on Rist’s immersive, dreamlike video installation, the children looked at the exhibition while crawling along the ground in sequence, then listened to the sounds of the exhibition while lying on their backs. In the art education atelier later on they explored the sounds made by everyday objects, and this fed into a short sound piece performed by the whole class. This exercise was not about making instruments so much as the experimental group process.

These instances of art education practice at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst can hardly be called traditional, and yet our art education officer is not an artist either. So what should we call them if not traditional or artistic? We need a term that is both flexible and capable of encompassing a variety of traditional and artistic methods.

Artistic Art Education and Artistic Attitudes

Our initial question about the definition and qualification of artistic art education seems to suggest that there is a certain competitive mindset on the part of the various parties, with traditional museum art education on one side opposing artistic art education on the other. We see this attitude as neither timely nor productive, especially since twentieth-century practices of museum representation have been subject to extensive criticism by theorists, artists and activists. This criticism has given rise to a processual conception of museums with social relevance and change at the forefront. Here we might recall Nora Sternfeld’s five strategies for the post-representative museum. She posits the following actions as a desirable alternative to the traditional combination of collecting, display, organisation, research and education: 1. Challenge the archive, 2. Appropriate the space, 3. Organise a counter-public, 4. Generate alternative knowledge, 5. Radicalise education.13 This framework of practices also entails certain expectations of the relevant educational activities.

But can we on that basis find a less divisive approach that might be more productive for both sides?

Comparable questions were discussed by Susanne Kudorfer, Christoph Lang and a cohort of students as part of the Art + Mediation research module and in the context of the Swiss research project «Kunstvermittlung in Transformation» [Art Education in Transformation] at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. One focus of this module was collaboration between artists and art educators. Artist and media theorist Michael Lingner, an invited speaker, said that questions about form and format in art education were artistic questions. This provided an opportunity to discuss how art educators would fare within Lingner’s «expanded concept of art education» if they were not also artists.14 Art education could be artistic, he said, if conducted by artists. On this point there was some discussion of the risk that context and audience could be forgotten if art education were to become an art project in its own right.15 Eva Sturm describes this conflation as follows: «In this instance an artistic reaction to an artistic work becomes an exemplary act of mediation, and the act of mediation becomes an artist action.»16 Mörsch is critical of this view: «That being the case, the heroic role that art and artists in particular have assumed as pedagogical actors in the educational turn seems problematic. From this perspective the artists always seem to function as the better, more radical pedagogues and art is presented as a working alternative in the face of the failure of educational approaches and their protagonists – as though artists were somehow able to avoid wielding power when employing pedagogical methods and entering into collaborative projects.»17

← Fig. 5 Performative trampolining by Yvonne Imhof and Martin Wohlwend in the context of the exhibition 20 – An Exhibition in Three Acts (15 Oct. 2016 to 5 Feb. 2017), Zurich, Migros Museum für Gegenwarts­ kunst, 24 Nov. 2016

The questions about artistic art education that were raised in the context of the research module at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts & Sciences produced no definitive answers, but the discussion did lead to a consensual definition of artistic educational activity as the realisation of a consciously artistic «attitude» in favour of exploratory education.18 These definitions and borderlines were also a concern for us during the art education project we conducted in conjunction with our anniversary exhibition. We saw the designation of an «artistic attitude» as highly appropriate and relevant. In our opinion this approach facilitates progressive art education because an artistic attitude in art education tends to promote curatorial, artistic and educational knowledge production. Both artists and non-artists are capable of adopting such an attitude, and it also allows for traditional educational methods. Hence it can also be applied to the practice of art education at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, which is based on participatory processes, exploration and performative action that transcends distinctions such as «right» or «wrong», «beautiful» or «ugly». So the question of educational attitudes could then be extended further; this might help with the exploration of unusual and apparently problematic methods and could contribute to an understanding of art education as a living and open-ended process.

To summarise, then, we would say that the distinction between artistic and non-artistic formats in current art education discourse ought to be put aside in favour of a new scenario. In this new scenario, the irreplaceable qualities of artist art educators would become part of the day-to-day life of the museum. The museum needs artistic art education because its specific qualities mean that it is able to question and reinvigorate conventional notions of art education and because it need not necessarily enter into competition with a profession practised by other experts. We would advocate a culture of collaborative, creative and mutual inspiration on the basis of mutual respect and openness.

1 The foundations of the Lucerne method are described by Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Jean-Pierre Grüter, Alexandra D’Incau and Peter Spillmann, «Art Teaching als kritische Praxis», in: Art Education.

Ein Reader (What’s Next Bd. 2), eds Torsten Meyer and Gila Kolb, Munich 2015, pp. 103–105, esp. p. 104.

2 The following is a summary of all the projects: workshops for families (Nicole Heri); sensory experience – Karla Black (Lorena Linke, Cécile Schneider); performative spatial drawing project (Stina Kasser); role play (Rahel Lüchinger, Elia Malevez); film on art criticism – Karla Black (Stefan Tschumi); workshop for children and adults (Violetta Szikriszt); performative educational trampolining (Yvonne Imhof, Martin Wohlwend); and a (regrettably unrealised) concept for an exhibition project with Migros staff (Astrid Welburn).

3 See Helga Kämpf-Jansen, Ästhetische Forschung. Wege durch Alltag, Kunst und Wissenschaft. Zu einem innovativen Konzept ästhetischer Bildung, Marburg 2012; and Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Jean-Pierre Grüter, Alexandra D’Incau and Peter Spillmann 2015, p. 104.

4 See David Streiff Corti, «Auf ins Museum. Neue Öffnungs­ zeiten», in: Z-Magazin der Neuen Zürcher Zeitung, 2 Dec. 2018, pp. 42–47, esp. p. 45 ff.

5 See Carmen Mörsch, «Vorwort», in: Kunstvermittlung in Transfor­ mation. Perspektiven und Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes, eds Bernadett Settele and Carmen Mörsch, Zurich 2012, pp. 4–6.

6 See Carmen Mörsch, «Sich selbst widersprechen. Kunstvermittlung als kritische Praxis innerhalb des Educational Turn in Curating», in: Educational Turn. Handlungsräume der Kunst- und Kultur­ vermittlung, eds Beatrice Jaschke and Nora Sternfeld, Vienna 2012, pp. 55–78, esp. p. 56.

7 See Janna Graham, «Die Anatomie eines UND», in: Ausstellen und Vermitteln im Museum der Gegenwart, eds Carmen Mörsch, Angeli Sachs and Thomas Sieber, Bielefeld 2017, pp. 203–222, esp. p. 203; and Mörsch, 2012, p. 396: «Allowing yourself to question the power effects of truth and the truth discourses of power is anything but self-evident to an art educator. […] Or asking why it always has to be about ‹dismantling thresholds› or ‹leading› people to something. Because to ask such questions is to saw off the branch you’re sitting on, to put your own conditions and postulates into abeyance.»

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8 See the glossary of the Institute of Art Education (IAE) at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste: https://www.zhdk.ch/forschung/ iae/glossar-972/kuenstlerischedukative-projekte-3832 (retrieved 4 Nov. 2018).

9 Jean-Christophe Ammann, Bei näherer Betrachtung. Zeitgenössische Kunst verstehen und deuten [2007], 3rd expanded edn, Hamburg 2009, p. 13. See also Christian Saehrendt and Stehen T. Kittl, Das kann ich auch! Gebrauchsanweisung für moderne Kunst, Cologne 2009.

10 Wu Tsang. Not in my language, 22 Nov. 2014–8 Feb. 2015.

11 Resistance Performed. Aesthetic Strategies under Repressive Regimes in Latin America, 21 Nov. 2015– 7. Feb. 2016.

12 Collection on Display. Pipilotti Rist, Show a Leg (Raus aus den Federn), 25 Aug.–11 Nov. 2018.

13 See Nora Sternfeld, «Im postrepräsentativen Museum», in: Ausstellen und Vermitteln im Museum der Gegenwart, eds Carmen Mörsch et al., Bielefeld 2017, pp. 189–201, esp. p. 190; see also idem., p. 196.

14 See Christoph Lang, «Künstler in die Schule – Vermittlerinnen ins Museum? Zum Forschungsmodul Kunst + Vermittlung», in: Kunst­ vermittlung in Transformation 2012, pp. 86–92, esp. p. 89. Christoph Lang is now rector of the Zürcher Schule F+F für Kunst und Design.

15 Lang 2012, p. 90.

16 Eva Sturm, Vom Schiessen und vom Getroffen-Werden. Kunst­­päda­gogik und Kunstvermittlung «Von Kunst aus» (Kunstpäda­go­­gische Positionen Bd. 7), eds Karl-Josef Pazzini et al., Hamburg 2005, p. 34.

17 Mörsch 2012, p. 399.

18 See Lang 2012, p. 89 and p. 91.

Figs 1–12 Stills from Elia Malevez’ video documentation of Rollentausch [Role Reversal], education project by Rahel Lüchinger and Elia Malevez in the context of the exhibition Fortsetzung folgt.

140 Jahre Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst [To Be Continued: 140 Years of the Lucerne School of Art and Design] with Jonas Etter, Martina Lussi, Peter Roesch, Roman Signer (9 Dec. to 7 Jan. 2017), Emmenbrücke, Kunstplattform akku, 14 Dec. 2017, http:// abendschule.biz/ category/donnerstag/

An Experimental Art Education Format Rahel Lüchinger

In my practice as art mediator I often find myself asking how much content and structure an educational format ought to provide. How much of myself should I bring to it and how can I encourage and prompt participants to develop as deep an understanding as possible of the artworks in question? At the same time I also encounter strongly held negative opinions about art. Certain participants either can’t or don’t want to engage with art, to say nothing of contemporary art; I often hear them say things like: «That’s not art at all», «I could do that myself», «A child could have done that» or «I don’t get it anyway». I want to show these people a new way of approaching art and hopefully also counteract some of their preconceived ideas.

I also asked myself how the experience of art education could be delivered using artistic means.

Individual understanding and making art accessible are far more important to this kind of education than the knowledge of the educator. From these three motivations Elia Malevez and I developed an interactive, experimental educational format.

Taking our own artistic practices as our starting point we employed and combined existing concepts of art education. The central element was a role-play in the museum context. We assigned each character a face mask and three to five statements and questions corresponding to a specific role within the museum institution, such as curator, director and invigilator. The masks could be seen as an artistic intervention but the ability to change

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characters was also a didactic method; it enabled participants to think about other ways of looking at artworks and to work through them playfully.

This meant they were able to bring their own perspectives to the work while also overcoming rigidly held opinions. This happened during the performance of the piece, the discursive process of negotiation and even in the short period of preparation. Changing characters inevitably involves taking a new point of view and breaks down barriers between recipients on the one hand and the authorial position of the artist on the other.

A few words on how our experimental education project was organised: the role-play unfolded as a fictive press event. The participants were given masks of real people from the museum where the event took place (the director, a curator, an artist).

These were confronted with various fictive journalists and art critics from the tabloids, the broadsheet cultural supplements and professional publications. One mediator adopted the role of press spokesperson for the museum in question. The second mediator played the part of the ghost of a person from the museum’s past. This might have been Gottlieb Duttweiler at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst [Migros Museum for Contemporary Art], for example, or, when the event was at the Kunstplattform akku [akku art platform] in Lucerne, Seraphin Xaver Weingartner as founding director of Lucerne’s Kunstgewerbeschule [School of Applied Arts], established in 1877.

At first we observed only stuttering monologues in the performances. These were moderated and deepened by the press secretaries. The knowledge required for this was based on the notes we had prepared in advance for each of the characters.

After a few minutes, though, some of the more active participants managed to insert some of their own comments into the conversation about the exhibited works. Participants initially held their masks rigidly in front of their faces as though they were at an antique theatre, but the protective role of the masks gradually became less important; they were transformed into memory aids as the performance progressed. By the end of the piece all participants had been actively involved in the conversation. After about twenty minutes the ghost of the museum brought the conversation to a close with a summary of the whole event. By providing this summary from an external perspective we wanted to give participants the opportunity to reflect on the interactive and partly performative discourse in which they had been involved.

Here we were drawing on Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect, which always points up the staging, making the viewer aware of it in order to avoid emotional identifications and, in our case, encourage reflective engagement with the art world and the museum as an institution.1 Reactions to our mediation work covered a broad spectrum. Some participants were very engaged, others only participated in conversations when they were directly addressed. What was remarkable was the number of opinions voiced that had not been provided with the character descriptions for the role-play. These declined markedly in the course of the debates. It became clear that a sensitively moderated, interactive format could accommodate contradictory opinions. The advantage was that even personal opinions were not judged. Participants could «say nothing wrong» because they were always able to hide behind their characters. Even potential responses to an individual’s statements were made in character and did not represent the opinions of any one participant. The freedom thus created generated space for exploratory dialogue between artwork, artist and museum.

Preliminary work for this format and getting conversation started between participants might have been labour intensive, but in our view it was worth it. The various and often pointed perspectives that came up in relation to the museum as part of the art world made it possible to address many aspects of artistic production in a very short space of time. The momentum created during our interactions not only promoted open-mindedness with respect to the artworks used in the role-play, but also achieved a degree of engagement in the par-

ticipants that lasted for the duration of their visits to the exhibition.

In this format the role and responsibility of the art educator can best be described as that of a «flanking» moderator. This also entails a radical rejection of schoolroom situations where «bearers of knowledge» explain everything in monologue form. Our format offered participants a combination of artistic understanding, detailed knowledge of the artwork and the persons involved and an activation of directly experienced self-efficacy.

This allowed for a transmission of experiential knowledge that went beyond the constraints of the format. The participants were equal parties in a process of experiential dialogue where speaking and listening were not simply interpreted as activities conducted by museum staff on one hand and visitors on the other.2 Our playful, interactive format called for some labour-intensive preparatory work and full accompaniment at the implementation stage. Since it takes time to prepare the characters, it is a good idea to plan and implement the format as a pair.

The role-play situation is also critical. Not all participants will be keen and engaged – conventional expectations of tours and art education formats will often get in the way of the practice described here. But the format we elaborated and implemented on three occasions was at least partly successful. In future we would put greater emphasis on reducing the rigid structure and seek to fine tune it in accordance with the aims described above.

1 See Bertolt Brecht, «Über experimentelles Theater» [1939], in: idem, Werke. Grosse kommen­ tierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., 31 vols, Berlin 1988–2000, vol. 22.1 [Schriften 2], pp. 540–557, esp. p. 554.

2 Cf. Charles R. Garoian, «Performing the Museum», in: Studies in Art Education 42 (2001), pp. 234–248, esp. p. 242 and passim.

Artistic Education at the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art Stina Kasser

When I first saw the performance photographs exhibited on the upper level of the Migros Museum in Zurich I immediately felt an irresistible urge to move. Although I was visiting the museum as part of a professional practice module on art education, I followed the urge – and moved. Doing so released a tension that had been building up inside me, a tension between the strong vitality of the works and the rather rigid hanging of their «photographic documentation». My first thought was to work with these performance pieces and transpose the movement contained within them back into the surrounding space. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time for any art education about them.

During the same visit I also realised that the performance photographs weren’t the only works in the collection that implied movement; the paint-

↑ Fig. 1 Stina Kasser, action at the «Artistic Mediation» work­shop on the occasion of the ex­hi­bition 20 – An Exhibition in Three Acts (15 Oct. 2016 to 5 Feb. 2017), Zurich, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 28 Jan. 2016

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ings on the ground floor also had dynamic potential. On the one hand these works encapsulate the movement of the artist as author. On the other hand I felt that the contrasts and connections between the individual paintings, the poses and attitudes of the depicted human and animal bodies, and even the representations of geometric forms, were ripe for transposition into bodily movement. This approach to moving in space, incorporating the space and the objects within it, is something I’m familiar with from many years of improvisation work at Heinz Gubler’s experimental theatre. He uses exercises from Japanese Noh theatre, though he has adapted them to our specific cultural situation. The whole approach had a lot to do with spatial tension and exploring new patterns of movement.

← Fig. 2 Stina Kasser, action at the «Artistic Mediation» work­-shop on the occasion of the ex­hi­bition 20 – An Exhibition in Three Acts (15 Oct. 2016 to 5 Feb. 2017), Zurich, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 28 Jan. 2016

So anything in the gallery space could become part of the improvisation. From this perspective, every visitor entering the gallery at the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art automatically became part of a charged spatial situation. I made a conscious decision that artistic education relating to these works would be conducted without words.

This shifted the focus to an intuitive reception of the paintings, a reception not based on knowledge.

While I rolled out rolls of white paper between the works I started to become involved with the space and the elements it contained: I drew, wrote, rolled, ran, span, lay and crouched… for two hours without interruption (fig. 2). When visitors came into the gallery I distributed black drawing pencils as an invitation to participate.

This project is an experiment. At this point I still can’t say to what extent visitors experience the exhibition differently as a result of my interventions, whether they become actors themselves or whether my presence communicates anything at all. In this way I consciously avoid any unequivocal classification as art educator. The aim of my intervention as an artist is the immediacy of the event itself, ideally a performative moment. But I am also aware that it could all go wrong. For example, people might not dare to enter the gallery at all. Some don’t even react to the happening I’m trying to create; they move past me tentatively or just watch (fig. 1). Every reaction or non-reaction on the part of the visitors – even if they just have a glance and move on – changes the bigger picture and the tension in the gallery.

German psychoanalyst and art educator Karl-Josef Pazzini asserts that art only exists as applied art.

In a text written together with Carmen Mörsch, Eva Sturm responds with the following objection: «This latter idea already contains a characterisation of the ambit of art education – the name is, first of all, impossible and, secondly, boundless. It is impossible because it gives the impression that we can mediate or communicate art. But the fact is, we can’t. Our thesis is that we can only ever create certain spaces, spaces where something may happen that has to do with the people who have something to do with art, and with the works of art with which those people have something to do. By contrast, the word Vermittlung (education, mediation or communication) suggests arrival and connection. Instead, encounters with works of art ought to centre on the uncommunicable: things that can’t be taught or conveyed. Art has to do with things that cannot be shown or said, and that’s what makes things difficult and exciting for art education, whatever form it takes, be it text or action, audio guide or performance. It will always come up against one or more boundary where the question of representability becomes virulent.»1 I regard my action as an act of mediation in the sense described here by Sturm.

After the action I rolled up several metres of drawings and removed them from the Migros Museum; they are now in my cellar. One could say that I removed art from the museum. But where’s the art in that? In the drawings on the paper or in the act of removing them? Perhaps more likely the latter. As I was rereading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book about The Little Prince a few weeks ago I was really moved by the story because it showed me that things are only as valuable as the value I give them.2 My intensive involvement with the works in the Migros collection gave them value; I lent them my attention and brought out a potential that was contained within them. By filling the gallery with life and actions I showed visitors that the gallery could be a space of action. When visitors sought connections between my movements and the hanging collection, when they themselves began to write and draw on the paper, they became active. In this way the visitors too were able to use the gallery space as the basis for a new relationship to the artworks exhibited within it.

1 Carmen Mörsch and Eva Sturm, «Vermittlung, Performance, Widerstreit», in: Art Education Research 1 (2010), no. 2, pp. 1–6, esp. p. 1; cf. before that Karl-Josef Pazzini, «Kunst existiert nicht, es sei denn als ange­-wandte», in: Thesis.

Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar 46 (2000), no. 2 [Tatort Kunsterziehung], pp. 8–17, esp. p. 8.

2 Cf. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Der kleine Prinz [1943/1946], Düsseldorf 1950, p. 73 and passim.

Fig. 1 Linda Luv, Eating Sense, 14 Feb. 2018, performer and guest interacting with sculpture, Mulhouse, La Kunsthalle

Participatory Performance and Creative Art Education Linda Luv

← Fig. 2 Linda Luv, Eating Sense, 14 Feb. 2018, sculpture made of crackers, Mulhouse, La Kunsthalle

In the Autumn semester of 2016/17 the MA Fine Art course at Lucerne School of Art and Design held a creative exchange with La Kunsthalle in Mulhouse on the subject of art education. In this research module students were investigating creative educational strategies. For several years now La Kunsthalle has been inviting artists to develop tools that can be integrated into the education programmes associated with its current exhibitions. An initial workshop led to a proposed collaboration between La Kunsthalle and myself as a performance artist.

For the occasion of a performative VIP drinks reception at Art Basel 2017 I developed a performative event that addressed the theme of the exhibition. It was realised in cooperation with Épices, a culinary school and social enterprise, and with several other partner institutions. I was acting in various capacities at the same time. As an artist I developed a performance that connected and critically engaged with the issues of food waste, surplus production, excessive consumption and the equally topical debate about refugees. The piece was performed in collaboration with the Épices culinary school and its students, who appeared as performers. Creative art education made up a large part of the process, and the educational requirements of a participatory project involving newcomers to performance art was challenging for me. Besides communicating knowledge and information about performance, I was really keen to provide some topical food for thought. Throughout the implementation period there was constant exchange with La Kunsthalle; during discussions I had to communicate my own artistic practice in order to strike a balance between service provision and artistic freedom.

The performance proved very popular and was followed up with an invitation to spend a year in residence at La Kunsthalle. The aim was to elaborate artistic concepts for drinks receptions at four exhibitions in 2018, in a performative collaboration with the Épices culinary school. This continuation of my work allowed me to build on various aspects of art education and to investigate why previous mediation work had succeeded. It also meant that the performative relation between eating and the various exhibition contexts was opened up to the general public.

Participation, Mediation and Artistic Expectations

The different parameters of this collaboration confronted me with new challenges. As organiser of a participatory performance project for young people without much knowledge of art, I had to adjust my expectations to the given situation; preparing the performance required some introduction to performative strategies. And after my first piece there was also the desire to set all subsequent performances in the context of current exhibitions and to present the performances to the public as a creative mediation tool for accessing the content of the exhibitions. I tried to combine these parameters with my own performative artistic position.

From 15 February to 29 April 2018 La Kunsthalle held an exhibition entitled The Live Creature. The title was a reference to the first chapter of John Dewey’s Art as Experience, a book published in 1934. According to Dewey, art can only be understood and will only provoke conscious engagement with the relevant themes when it constructs an everyday experience and facilitates interaction

between work and viewer. The work needs to integrate with the everyday life of the individual through an experience. In this respect the performance Eating Sense operates as an extension to the exhibition. What interesting overlaps does eating suggest as a theme and what place does it occupy in our everyday experience? The sense of taste is so important in everyday life that it has become a permanent fixture of every language. The adjectives «sweet», «sour», «bitter» and «salty» describe more than just taste; we also use them in other contexts to give verbal expression to experiences, impressions and feelings. Embedded in turns of phrase such as «sweet nothings» or «ending on a sour note», taste helps us describe and record our everyday experiences. The only taste sensation not yet firmly anchored in language is «umami», which was only discovered in the twentieth century. With these observations in mind I created edible sculptures for my performance based on the five taste sensations and their corresponding words. They were presented as exhibition objects and allocated to the performers, who acted as invigilators and sculptors. The performers interacted with the work by trying to maintain it (fig. 1). The visitors helped themselves to the work, slowly devouring it. They were actively incorporated into the work; the sculptures changed as they ate (fig. 2). The result was an interaction between viewers, consumers, artwork and performers.

visualised. «I was totally zen», said one actor after her first experience as a performer; understanding performance through the process of performing had turned out to be a successful artistic strategy.

Ever since that first collaboration for Art Basel there has been an ongoing cooperation between the Épices culinary school and the Bio Coop supermarket. Every week, Épices collects food that can no longer be sold and puts it to good use. The director of the school, Isabelle Haeberlin, says that this arrangement has already led to more ecologically conscious buying behaviour. The various projects also strengthened the ties between the long-term partners La Kunsthalle and Épices and ultimately led to Épices planning a partnership with the university canteen with which it shares a building. This means that the demand for a sustainable approach to food can now be implemented in the context of a long-term collaboration.

The Meaning of Food Performances

In the 1960s the artist Daniel Spoerri coined the term «Eat Art» and performed as an artistic chef, among other things. His still lifes of the leftovers on dining tables were an attempt to record a bit of everyday life and culture. This was the beginning of food performances. Eating is something we are all familiar with, and the act of eating provides an opportunity to force consumers into new roles by introducing small changes or unusual mechanisms of preparation and consumption. Without food we cannot survive. Yet some of the ways we consume food (and other natural resources) are extremely wasteful. As one aspect of an opulent and luxurious lifestyle, food can also be more than just the satisfaction of a basic need, and has been for a long time. Food has been recognised as a part of cultural heritage ever since French cuisine was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2010, if not earlier. Food is often mixed up in some way with international political problems. Food performances are able to break through conventional habits of food consumption and subject everyday practices to critical scrutiny. Food is still scarce in many countries, and yet a third of all food is thrown away. Food performances can help people see that this is a controversial issue. Food performances are critical kitchens serving up food and experience; they seek to promote activism by providing food for thought.

Creative Art Education, Result and Impact

As a result of our collaboration, La Kunsthalle decided to turn the performative, agitational, educational space of their drinks receptions into an ongoing residency. Treating the drinks reception or exhibition opening scenario as an extended exhibition space means, on the one hand, that actionism can be used to give the exhibition greater appeal for larger audiences. On the other hand the public is introduced to the theme of the exhibition at the sensual level, through the consumption of food and drink. The eating and the experience of the performance produces a convivial atmosphere and more focused discussion of the exhibition.

Questions about what is being eaten, the significance of each performative act and how they relate to the exhibition make people more aware of the exhibition than they would be at a more conventional exhibition ritual, where the opening drinks take centre stage.

Besides the visitors, the performers are also integrated into the mediation process. I work with lay people who don’t tend to be familiar with the concept of performance. So the performing of the performance and the preparation of food becomes a site where artistic work and its meaning are

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The Poussin in Question Cooking at the Flashpoint of Art Mediation Bearboz, Lena Eriksson, Emilie George, Samuel Herzog, Sandrine Wymann

So... / Who’s the chef? / The aim is to think about the work. When the relationship itself becomes the work. When the work reveals itself little by little. / For [Erwin] Wurm, the audience make a fool of themselves. An audience. / Works conceived with an audience. / A protocol‌

On a hot summer’s day in the year 2018 we – an art mediator, a cartoonist, a chef, an artist and a cook from the kitchen of the Association Épices – gathered around a chicken which, though far too small, posed the immediate question of mediation. We had come together for a collaborative action and a radical, self-organised lunch. While we planned, debated, cooked, discussed and ate, we wanted to research the specifics of art mediation at La Kunsthalle. We moved constantly back and forth between various levels of action and reflection, since art mediation at La Kunsthalle is not something introduced or imposed on the art from the outside. Rather, art mediation is itself a creative act and a natural part of every artistic practice. The action at Épices was recorded live by Dominique Meyer, alias Bearboz.

I’ll start by defining the audience. To start with a definition is to exclude things. Like the emperor’s new clothes. / Ah! That’s a work! / Forensic investigation of the work of Rabih Mroué… Video of a drowned person seen through the eyes of a criminalist. / And what else did the police inspector say? / He found it interesting that the exhibition was open to everyone. / Shall we start by cutting the cucumbers? How far can you liberate yourself from an artistic attitude? / An Indian tourist comes to see my ex­hibition. He wants to buy a sample of my saffron. But I’m not a spice whole­saler.

He didn’t get the fiction… So is that still art mediation? He wanted to do business. We were in a fiction of the fiction.

Does the work trigger something, or does it communicate something? / If the Swiss toilets are in the north… I gave him the saffron to give the guy a chance… (but also to get rid of him!) / Can art mediation fail? With some of the films I saw as a teenager, it was only years later that I realised why they were interesting. / Artists never put a «?» after the question… This work is a work of art. In my case that’s not clear at all. I had to write about exhibited works… Some don’t want you to say anything. Some explain themselves. Some wanted me to be their secretary.

What makes a work a work? When does a work become a work? This courgette… Here becomes a work. / And this one? / Is it important to restore the «workness» to the work? I think it is. / Me too. We had three newspaper articles about Utopia House with the word «education» in the title!! / I’m removing the acidity… one of my grandma’s recipes. / If you chop like Lena you’ll create a work of art. We haven’t got any tomatoes. Couldn’t we pinch them?

It must be either real – or what? An Italian came up to me and asked, «Sorry… what’s fiction?» I thought that was pretty good. Understanding is a sense of achievement. / Doing his job… And making the most of what you’ve paid for: I want to see everything… But charging for entry doesn’t increase attendance… I can’t understand what you’re saying when I’m standing here! / This is going to be a strange combination. I didn’t have my eyes in their sockets this morning (I love this expression). [Two pairs of glasses.] / Shall we make a smoothie? (We shouldn’t have cut the melon…)

Coleslaw. Polenta. Braised radishes. Poussin. / Sandrine wants us to finish the cabbage too. / Done!

That’s more than just art mediation ‌

What responsibility do the audience have? / Two years ago I would have said: to be stupid. In the sense that the work can open their eyes.

You do it all the same. Even though it’s difficult. / Typical. The batteries are dead. / How many pages? / And what’s that got to do with baking?

And the postcolonial cucumber. You mix it all up together. That’s cooking! / Mischkratzene Hühnschen [poussin]… Are we done?

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Artistic Approaches to Art Education

Heterotopical States in Art Education Today Rachel Mader

When Michel Foucault introduced the term heterotopia in the late 1960s he wanted to add the idea of «other spaces» to his diagnosis of the «epoch of space» in which we live. This suggestion, which would never be fully elaborated, seemed to him the necessary corollary of a concept of space which, although a «set of relations and sites» that foresaw a dynamic and inclusive model, nevertheless contained spheres that were located as it were «outside all places» as «counter-sites».1 As examples Foucault cited prisons, cemeteries and psychiatric institutes, but also libraries and museums, gardens, brothels and colonies. Just listing them revealed the characteristic traits of heterotopical spaces: they are real – unlike utopias – but not clearly defined; every society has its own heterotopias and their functions change over time, but they reflect the «real sites within the culture», perhaps by deviating from them and even by negation. This difference is the site of social concerns at once indispensable and counter-intuitive, and generally they contain several superimposed and otherwise separate spaces, which leads to a condensed but also reconfigured representation of just these spaces.

Current discourse about art education has certain characteristics that call for its interpretation as a heterotopical site. This attribution forces itself upon us at the very point where art education itself is at stake and where its role is being fought over from various perspectives. In this context artist-initiated schools constitute an act of self-authorisation that nevertheless needs to be effective beyond the circles of those directly involved and is

to be read as an educational act from the artistic perspective. This also applies beyond decisions in favour of specific contents or formats of learning; and it also applies where most of these initiatives regard artistic access to education as particularly well suited to opening up access to a broad, non-exclusive public. As arguments are differentiated in a climate of increasing uncertainty about the place and function of art education, the idea of a counter-site in a seemingly heterotopical mould is held up and lauded even as social inclusion and relevance are asserted and expected. In this way the space of artistic education inevitably finds itself in a political arena. Here art has to defend the autonomy of its free spaces just as creativity is elevated to a social and economic imperative that feeds – in a circular argument – on the productivity of those self-same free artistic spaces.2 In this context the numerous art schools that have been shaped and initiated by artists over the last two decades look like attempts to assert the inherent constructive value of the heterotopical state.

Overlapping Arguments

The current controversies involve at least three groups of interested parties. First there is educational policy, which complains of dwindling funds and struggles to find broad-based political arguments to stop the gap. Then there are those who shape the art schools (active in administration, research and teaching), whose voices have been getting louder for a good twenty years or so, and the beneficiaries of their activities, predominant-

ly the students. These last two communities tacitly agree on the need for change and development.

If their explicit suggestions, demands and criticisms appear to have little in common, this is due to the differing diagnoses upon which they base their arguments and the social role they attribute to education, or rather to those undergoing education. The many self-organised art schools that have been instituted worldwide since the late 1990s are a fitting way into a discussion of the starting situation.3 They were founded in response to developments which, according to the appraisals of their founders, had seen courses become ever more removed from the real task of preparing students for the complex organisation of modern society. Instead, the organisation and contents of the «MFA complex» – this being the ambivalent description of art education in the USA used by those responsible for the Bruce High Quality Foundation University (New York, 2009–2017) – were now seen as a reaction to socio-political needs and not as an active force for shaping them.4 In the Anglo-Saxon context this implies both university fees, which often entail years of debt, and, in the west as a whole, an administrative framework that tends to be described as inflexible and therefore exclusive.

This not only produced a standardised demographic, since it was no longer realistically possible to combine study and gainful employment with family, political or other responsibilities. The development of course material was also a consequence of socio-political standards; though based on upto-date estimations it was hardly ever able to confront or counteract them with future oriented visions or a firm canon of value. It is precisely these demands that the self-organised art schools appear to follow when they cite this criticism generally more explicitly than the values upon which their activities are based. Their reliance on rigid frameworks, unartistic principles of design and organisation and hierarchical positioning, though, leads back to a self-conception in which art is asserted as a uniquely productive social force as well as a space for criticising and reflection upon it.

Don’t Educate; Learn

In their fundamental concern with thinking about educational processes from the student perspective, these self-organised art initiatives are closely related to reform pedagogy. They differ from it, though, by the thoroughly political impetus upon which their activities are based. This political impulse is by no means only to be found in their criticisms of the abovementioned institutional and education policy developments. It is perhaps most clear where the initiatives were called into being by actual expediencies. This was the case, for instance, with the Silent University, which has been implemented at various sites since 2012. This no-

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madic platform founded by artist Ahmed Ögüt is regularly organised and substantially run by asylum seekers and refugees working in collaboration with art institutions. Using the Time Bank model, each person passes on their specific knowledge to other interested parties, something that would usually be disallowed given their status as migrants. Use of non-exclusive language is at once a requirement and a necessity; the claim to university status attests to the earnestness and confidence of the initiative, which is still running today.5 Socio-political opportunity also provided the impetus – albeit in quite a different way – for artist Tania Burguera’s Cátedra Arte de Conducta (Behaviour Art Department). Between 2002 and 2009 her flat in Havana served not only as an alternative to the decrepit Cuban art school where she had once studied and graduated but also as an art market that, in its final years, came to monopolise the Cuban art world. But Burguera’s real aim was to mobilise art for transformational social processes; she wanted to teach her students the craft of «civic action».6 Another politically motivated project is the Open School East in the east end of London, which was founded in 2013 to meet the particular needs of the British situation. It offers free tuition in exchange for collaboration in its programme. Hence it is collaboratively organised, relies on experimental forms of teaching and maintains regular dialogue with the broader public through a diverse programme of events. The parameters it sets for art education could hardly be more different to those that have recently been adopted in the British education landscape.

My brief description of these initiatives indicates that they are very much about sweeping changes. They reach well beyond current political concerns, addressing both substantial and structural factors and sometimes even postulating new concepts of knowledge. The faculty at Bruguera’s art school, as is the case with many other self-organised initiatives, is made up of representatives from various professional groups and is adapted to the needs of the students; it comprises «lawyers, scientists, filmmakers, ex-prisoners, housewives, journalists – anyone».7 The curriculum, which takes shape as the course progresses, is likewise a logical consequence of the view that its design and content ought to be based on the interests and needs of the students. For according to the organisers of SOMA, an artist-run initiative based in Mexico City, an educational programme can only remain relevant through constant adaptation.8 Such a position almost inevitably results not only in a high level of multidisciplinarity but generally also in an inclusive organisational model that is collectively drafted and maintained by tutors, organisers and students.

Olafur Eliasson’s Institute for Spatial Experiments (2009–2014) was committed, with an exemplary radicality, to the continual reinvention of teaching formats – this being another near universal characteristic of such initiatives. Even a brief look at the thorough documentation on the website shows that classic learning environments and classrooms are found only rarely here. Instead there are walks down inhospitable urban alleys, guided tours for the practice of simulated blindness, collective excursions to distant wastelands, dancing flashmobs on public transport and, time and again, long dinner tables for the enjoyment of thematically oriented meals.9 Eliasson’s reasoning for this approach: «We decided not to retreat to some safe haven of academic comfort. You’re not ‹rehearsing› being an artist while you’re in school to then be a ‹real› artist afterwards. The idea was that you are a real artist at all times.»10 All these initiatives also insist on the productivity of collective learning institutions. This approach was described by the initiators of the Copenhagen Free University, one of the first self-organised art schools, as «rather socialized research than learning».11 This formulation gives rise to the question of how learning and knowledge are to be conceptualised at all. Whether implicitly or explicitly, all the initiatives debate this issue on a very fundamental level. The most common attacks not only invoke Jacques Rancière’s arguments in criticising hierarchical conceptions of education and one-sided views of the relationship between teacher and student.12 They also question the content of knowledge itself, which is too often oriented towards abstract and sometimes controversial quantities and too rarely oriented towards competencies students want.

A Way Out of the Circular Argument

The apologists of supposedly disappearing values and opportunities are opposed by the prophets of an uncertain but beneficent future for the arts.

With recourse to a now centuries-old history of art education and the instrumental social purpose that marked its beginnings, these prophets postulate a stronger connection between artistic developments and the pressing themes and issues that affect society as a whole.13 In a way that seems self-evident but is rarely explained, this assertion feeds on the universality of the «creative imperative». Its advocates rely on the «social impact» of the arts, which Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett have described as being under constant siege.14 The prophets attempt to define the site of art education for the future against a backdrop of social relevance – and thus potentially to release it from its heterotopical state. Contrary to this – at least that is how it appears at first glance – the

concrete activities of the artist initiatives seem to insist on a situated and process-based conception of education and knowledge. And precisely the specific localism of their organisational forms and learning contents – a mechanism that Foucault identifies in all heterotopias – produces socially fruitful situations in that these are «simultaneously represented, contested and inverted».15 They function as «counter-sites» by maintaining the necessity of what they do, though there is apparently no place for them in «real spaces».

The fact that most of the abovementioned artist initiatives emerged from what are regarded as traditional institutions and are run in close cooperation with them or even initiated by them is to be interpreted not so much as a paradox as the persistence of heterotopic states, which are not to be grudgingly acknowledged so much as tolerated and indeed even defended. They serve the practical, theoretical and political continuation of the debates about artistic education that are framed by a diffuse matrix of uncertain visions, current constraints (such as the obligation to demonstrate impact alongside political determinants) and alleged trends (such as the educational turn). Artists’ proposals for art education are valuable because they sketch out tangible and space-sensitive possibilities while also supporting and maintaining the negotiation of meaningful learning and knowledge contents quite incidentally.

1 Michel Foucault, «Andere Räume» [1967], in: Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik, ed. Karlheinz Barck, Leipzig 1992, pp. 34–46, esp. p. 38 f.

2 Marion von Osten took the pa­ rameters of the creative imperative as the basis for the 2002 exhibition Be Creative (Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich), where she traced the transformation of the «creativity concept from lib­eration myth to requirement under post-industrial conditions» through thematic emphases on new work, creativity techniques and new urban lifestyles; see Marion von Osten, «Be Creative!

Der kreative Imperativ. Anleitung», in: Be Creative! Der kreative Im­pera­tiv, exh. cat. Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, 2002, pp. 1–4, esp. p. 4.

3 An extensive albeit incomplete list can be found at http:// www.teachablefile.org/1904 (retrieved 20 Nov. 2018).

4 See Sam Thorne, School. A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education, Berlin 2017, p. 168.

5 See Thorne 2017, p. 86 ff.

6 See Thorne 2017, p. 60.

7 Tania Bruguera cited in Thorne 2017, p. 66.

8 SOMA cited in Thorne 2017, p. 269.

9 Http://raumexperimente.net/en/ (retrieved 20 Nov. 2018).

10 Olafur Eliasson cited in Thorne 2017, p. 280.

11 Jacob Jacobsen (for Copenhagen Free University) cited in Thorne 2017, p. 193.

12 See Jacques Rancière, Der un­ wissen­de Lehrmeister. Fünf Lektionen über die intellektuelle Emanzipation [1987], Vienna 2007.

13 On this see in particular Jeroen Chabot, «Reflections on Art Education», in: Re-Inventing the Art School 21st Century, ed. Willem de Kooning Academie, Rotterdam 2009, pp. 3–25, and Florian Cramer, «Interventions, Experimentation, Markets. Art Education and CrossDisciplinary Creative Practice», idem, pp. 27–43.

14 Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett, The Social Impact of the Arts. An Intellectual History, Basingstoke, Hampshire 2010.

15 Foucault 1992, p. 39.

Artistic Education between Open Studio and Reality Check

A Roundtable on Self-Directed Fermentation Processes on the Fine Arts and Art & Design Education Programme Stephan Eichenmann, Klodin Erb, Karin Fromherz, Susanne Hefti, San Keller, Marie-Louise Nigg, Chiara Ottavi, Sebastian Utzni Conversation organised and transcribed by Marie-Louise Nigg, edited by Wolfgang Brückle and Marie-Louise Nigg

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The following conversation between students and teachers from the Bachelor Fine Arts and Art & Design Education degree programme took place in the summer of 2018 at the «Restaurant Bahnhof» in Emmenbrücke, not far from the new site of the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences in the Viscosistadt district. This quarter has recently been undergoing major redevelopment, but its little railway station has become an important intersection too. The intersection is emblematic of our conversation at a moment when all forms of higher education – including the study of art – are trying to keep up with changing social and cultural challenges. Artistic production is no longer confined to the studio or to major artistic capitals; restaurants too can be artistic workplaces or «post-studios». A permanent discourse with people inside and outside the art world is essential both for art and for art education. The following contribution presents a kaleidoscope of various voices and perspectives from students, assistants, course directors, tutors and lecturers – but individual artistic attitudes are always front and centre. Contributors to the conversation were Klodin Erb and Karin Fromherz (practical tutors), Marie-Louise Nigg (theory lecturer), Stephan Eichenmann and Chiara Ottavi (students), Susanne Hefti (course assistant) and San Keller and Sebastian Utzni (course directors). The conversation began with each contributor drawing their own «curriculum vision» on a beermat and then explaining it to the others.

Stephan: The beers on my beermat stand for all the things that can happen during an art degree. I’ve drawn chairs between them. These visualise the opportunity to take a seat. There’s plenty of room for dialogue, for collective discussions about artistic self-identity and so on. That’s one thing I really value about this course: the tutors and lecturers are always creating new space to fill.

Susanne: I’ve drawn the curriculum as a game of snakes and ladders. You start at the bottom left, make progress, have setbacks or drop all the way down again.

Thankfully there are cushions laid out at the bottom to break your fall. This represents the protected space of the study environment, where you’re able to move forward and back.

Marie-Louise: I cut the beermat up and made a spiral that you can open up in space like a 3D model. A curriculum in my opinion shouldn’t just be linear; it ought to move up in a spiral. It will always follow some continuous axis but constantly passes points of intersection with the next level; that’s where you find the workshops, theory courses or projects, for example. Old and new knowledge, old or more recently acquired skills, wind their way up and get reinterpreted, reconsidered or even rejected.

Chiara: We were supposed to draw the curriculum on a beermat, but instead I’ve scratched the image off so there’s nothing left but a blank white surface. This stands for the ability students have to freely choose the media, subjects and skills that they want to immerse themselves in during their studies – a kind of carte blanche.

Sebastian: Destruction can open up new perspectives too. The exciting thing about Chiara’s model is that it talks about possibilities rather than problems. The work of an artist consists in choosing a certain possibility, making something out of it and taking up a position. My own drawing shows three scoops of ice-cream representing an art degree: studio, foundations and theory. It’s all one project and

the three scoops ultimately melt into an individual artistic attitude. These artistic positions and attitudes can then be used to develop strategies for mediation and education. They then recur as micro-practices at various locations in the everyday life of the student.

San: At first I was annoyed that both sides of the beermat were printed and we didn’t have a blank surface to draw on. But that’s how things are in reality: particularly in an institutional context, you’re always going to be working within existing parameters and structures, even if you’re making art or having an exhibition in the public realm. The question is: How do I deal with those parameters? As an artist, tutor and course director, it’s the interaction and the interplay that are central to my work, though I like initiating new formats too. Our task, as I see it, is to question everything that seems self-evident in a struggle against stolidity… There’s something very stolid and Swiss about this beer, «Feldschlösschen». That prompted me to add the word «international» to the lettering. We live in a globalised world with huge social tensions, after all. Our new internship for refugees is one example of the attempt to bring these global problems into the institution. The institution can’t be a closed book. Diversity is about more than just teaching in English. It has to mean that we recognise the limitations of our own ideas about art and distance ourselves from the stereotype of the white, male, middle-class artist.

Karin: I’ve instrumentalised the Feldschlösschen and made it into our artistic education. Okay, so we don’t brew beer, but we do create conditions that are conducive to individual fermentation processes and artistic development. When they’re done, the students should come away with a spectrum of competences that are reflected in their portfolios. In beer production the fermentation process is stopped by external controls, whereas emerging artists are trained to become competent autodidacts, masters of their own learning processes. But what does that mean in practice? We don’t set them tasks and objectives or evaluation criteria. Instead we teach strategies for augmenting their own intrinsic motivation.

They should be learning the art of learning – and we regard this competency as an artform, just as we see our own didactic approaches as artistic phenomena.

And how do we augment their intrinsic motivation? By giving the students a say in the curriculum. We had about a hundred students present sixty projects to each other and we let them choose thirty of those projects for realisation. That was how the present study programme was created, and that’s how we achieve such a high level of currency in the content. And there’s another factor that feeds into this approach: the study–work–life balance isn’t what it used to be. Many students have additional family obligations and work commitments. So external projects and employment opportunities have to be better integrated into the education programme. Even the Swiss government defines artist professionality in terms of whether a person earns at least fifty percent of their living costs from art; membership of Visarte, the professional association for Swiss visual artists, also depends on this criterion. Art schools need to prepare their graduates for this sort of professional flexibility after graduation by promoting a range of competencies and professional networks.

Klodin: I took the «n» out of Feldschlösschen and made the word «Kunst» [art] out of it. This act of overwriting stands for the artistic transformation of pre-existing material. Behind the Swiss emblem I’ve written the word «revolution» because from here we’re in a position to develop revolutionary aesthetics and content, and without even thinking about economic interests. This includes developing a sense of the collective «we». We need to start by having intensive discussions among ourselves about what it means to make art and what it means to become an artist.

That can happen collectively in the studio, during lectures or in individual conversations with tutors and lecturers. First-year students ought to be able to see themselves as empty boxes that get filled up over the course of their studies. They also need to be able to listen to their inner selves and decide what they’re interested in beyond the things that are available to them at art school.

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Karin: I see the empty box in terms of the students themselves having to develop their own expectations about their education. Art is always internally motivated.

Artists follow their own impulses and this builds up their trust in themselves as an important tool and medium. So artistic action presupposes emotional involvement. Our task as tutors is to allow this state to arise or to bring it about somehow, even if that means producing friction and provocation. We force our students to react. The resulting actions will ideally involve reflection and become part of a learning process; it has to be more than just navel-gazing. Students need to acknowledge their capabilities and talents, but also their weaknesses and the flaws in their actions, and they need to determine their own developmental objectives as they go along. If we’ve achieved what we set out to do, the students should emerge from their degree courses with the ability to direct their own development in the context of their own aesthetic practices.

Chiara: In the first studio period there were always times when I did nothing. In the second year I learned to come up with my own projects in these empty moments. It’s nice that we have so much time to think; I just think it’s a shame it took me a year to realise that. That’s a really big challenge for someone who’s not previously made any art, or someone who’s only done a year’s foundation course.

Sebastian: Your case is a good example of how this learning process ought to work. One year is almost too little time to have come to that realisation. After all, in a world concerned only with speed and instantly profitable results, it is a rare and precious thing to have enough time to get things wrong and then step back and start working on something else. That’s positive procrastination. You can fill that time by applying the sort of micro-practices of art education that I’ve just mentioned: students setting their own expectations, reflecting things back, learning-by-doing approaches or action-based teaching methods.

Susanne: Maybe we need to accelerate our degree courses so they can have an element of deceleration again. The students would then have to decide where to spend their time and what they wanted to spend it doing.

Karin: Withdrawal is a pretty good strategy for that. In this case the empty box is no longer the student; now it stands for an unoccupied time period, a learning space shaped by the students themselves. Our curriculum consciously switches between phases of high and low contact time: it’s based on the interplay between free studio phases and pre-existing foundation blocks in the form of compulsory elective courses. In the studio phases the students – individually or in groups – work to their own plans, organise workshops and draw on the relevant practical offerings that the tutors provide. For example: the students organised a ceramics workshop and the project Vollkrass politisch [Proper Political], they staged an exhibition in the old town of Lucerne and set up a film club. This sort of thing expands their management and networking skills, improves their speaking and writing competencies and helps them develop independent attitudes on current social issues. Creating an empty space that brings out the student’s expectations of the course they’re on is well suited to that.

San: Karin mentioned the film club. I think that kind of activity is essential. I myself organised a police film festival as a new format. I’ve brewed beer with my students; organised a full-moon crit; I once invited students round to my place for a kind of «lie-in». Once I subjected myself to public interrogation by my colleagues, and there were students there too. The space was furnished like an office in an attempt to subvert the academic system.

Karin: At that time I was asking our students to give San and me marks for our different roles, since teaching is always about involving students in the value generation process, like by flipping the student–teacher relationship on its head for a moment. Also, that invites reflection and expands the space for the negotiation of communicative processes. By doing that we’re able to create something new, an event. That has something to do with strategies of artistic education as well.

Sebastian: In that way we can be surprised by new situations ourselves. Stephan put his finger on it right at the beginning when he said we want to create a space where we can become an event unto ourselves.

Marie-Louise: So the studio remains the central place of education and a space for dialogue, though it isn’t modelled on the art academy; instead it’s like a postpost-studio, an important space for experimentation and reflection on social action.

Sebastian: It’s the methods that particularly interest me. There’s a lot of potential there. The empty box represents the things you initially put aside – everything conventional and familiar; specific techniques, media and materials – in order to spend more time thinking about how to do things. The beermats make our artistic methods comprehensible. For example: I always put my beer right in the centre of the beermat, whereas someone else might place it eccentrically or just never pays attention to that sort of thing. When my son Rocco plays with his cars, he lines them up next to each other differently every time; arranging is one of his key practices. I think many students learn self-development by grappling with their own methods and strategies. That’s why, on the very first day, we not only ask them about their work but also where and when they want to make it, and who should be there to see it.

Susanne: No-one’s an empty box; we’re all immersed in our smartphones these days. That’s why I don’t like this metaphor. You need certain abilities to establish yourself in this vacuum or make something of yourself. The most important thing is for us to pass on as much knowledge and as many skills as possible – and that includes technical and craft skills – in the foundational courses. I think the really crucial thing is to develop an independent attitude towards your own work, to learn to take yourself seriously. This only happens when you grapple with concrete contents and capabilities, in theory also. You can’t take up a position by withdrawing into yourself.

Sebastian: You’re right; skills are important too, not just the person. But an independent attitude doesn’t emerge from the nurturing of technical skills either, and perhaps not at all if you never move outside your familiar surroundings.

Everything at university becomes familiar all too quickly, and it shouldn’t be that way. We used to say: «Move around without touching the floor». It sounded a bit like a game for children, and also a sort of a micro-praxis. And of course it wasn’t at all easy. First the students came together so that a few of them could stand on top of the others and not on the floor. And with that they’d already realised something: they were a group. Then they got together to erect platforms everywhere.

Again it became clear that they could achieve things together as a group. Our aim is to engender that sort of capacity for action.

Karin: The open-plan architecture of the studio also tends to reinforce group consciousness and promotes reflection on existing and potential working environments. In the large studio the meeting space has to be collectively defined and everyone’s individual workspace requirements have to be negotiated; these are important learning objectives. Now there are areas with double-height studio spaces. Someone’s built a micro-gallery and a teahouse with a house number.

There’s even a sauna, and right next to it a tent made of bamboo canes and white sheets. At first glance this sort of organic architecture is reminiscent of a favela, a Chinatown or a newly renovated Berlin-Kreuzberg. In our classes we want to create connections to other life-worlds and in that way reflect these organic studio structures.

San: Another time we asked thirty students to come to the windowless waste disposal room and told them to dance until the room temperature reached thirty degrees. It worked. We can effect change. Our aim – with a little nod to Joseph Beuys – was to communicate that.

Marie-Louise: But dancing itself doesn’t create any friction, right? At any rate, you all want to generate attitudes, albeit in very different ways. And could it ever look the same for every student anyway? By dancing the students all left their mark on the space; to a certain extent they actually created the space by dancing there. But its realisation looks different to each and every student. So I’d like to replace the empty box with the metaphor of the black box flight recorder. I think

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studying is like looking for it and then deciphering it. As a lecturer in art theory I meet with students to discuss their dissertations; I view and go through their recordings so that they can develop their own hypotheses in the interplay between theory and practice. That’s essential before you start to demarcate your own theoretical field in our pluralistic information society. For this conversation we were all given the same beermat to start with, but the reality is that the students come to us with various different expectations; they don’t just draw their own «beermats» apropos of nothing. In a world that’s so digitalised, globalised and transcultural, that’s a challenge for us all. What sort of expectations can we build upon and what sort of expectations do we want to build upon? What views do we intentionally dismantle? Are we reinforcing diversity or are we consciously privileging some offerings over others?

San: I think the intensity of your own assertions are central to artistic work. In this sense teaching can also be understood as performance, and performance as a teaching format. For every student the ability to adopt a position comes from a specific context, in the interaction between resistance and the free space that students can take up at any time. That’s why I find Chiara’s approach to the beermat brave and independent. According to our course specifications this blank sheet really shouldn’t exist at all. Chiara was playing with structures. But the question for her now is what she does with this tabula rasa, whether she can develop an assertion of her own artistic work and make it visible in the discussion that follows. It might elicit an aggressive reaction, but it could also create productive spaces, contradictions, innovation. In this much we’re emulating John Baldessari’s approach to teaching art.

Marie-Louise: But how do you get to the point where you can assert your own work? Over the last few years I’ve noticed increasing levels of uncertainty among the students, particularly with respect to the pressing social and political questions of the day. Should they plough through as many courses and offerings as they can while they have the chance? Or – and I’m playing devil’s advocate here – in a post-disciplinary era where basically anything can be relevant to art and where there’s no canon anymore, shouldn’t we be rethinking the specialisation of the art schools in order to facilitate independent positioning and the transgression of boundaries? After all, Klodin’s notion of revolution is only feasible if there’s something there to depose.

Klodin: The word «revolution» is obviously a bit worn-out. It might initially be a case of defining new rules and conventions for living together, so you’d have something to experiment with and test out in a sort of laboratory situation.

Karin: After twenty years of teaching, I think exactly that would be the difficulty: there’s a lack of involvement – the necessary precondition for artistic action. I don’t think you need to narrow the parameters; it needs friction and irritation. One objective the curriculum stipulates for the first semester is to bring students out of their shells with targeted provocations, to activate their curiosity and nudge them out of their comfort zones. My task as a tutor is to confront students with questions while they’re in the middle of the creative process, to question their decisions and to provoke further questions – questions that drive the process forward rather than holding it up.

Stephan: It’s often said that we ought to take on more social and personal responsibility. And I’m all for that. We should use this space, this protected academic context, to develop attitudes that help us survive in the outside world. If the tutors don’t like my work for some reason, they should just say so. But false, didactic friction would just annoy me.

Sebastian: This reminds me of Richard Sennett’s dialogue about manual and mental labour. There has to be an irritating intervention to force you to act. But you don’t always have to know what you’re going to do in advance. What’s important is that you think about what you’ve done afterwards, in the presentations and the theory modules. Our basic aim is to put every student on the path of making while bearing in mind that some will need more freedom and others will need more guidance. That starts as early as the orientation week in the first semester, when our new students make a piece within twenty-four hours and stage their

first exhibition together. That immediately gets them talking to each other about their work and their views.

San: Looking at possible consequences is another way of motivating students to act. Before this meeting we were out watching skydivers at the military airfield in Emmen. You have to pull the cord yourself to release the parachute – otherwise you suffer the consequences. And that’s a reality that can be instructive for us as artists. We’re actually talking to a colonel about doing a module together. Everyone has to pull some kind of string. The question has to be: Where are your strings?

Where are society’s? What do you have to pull on to open things up? What can you do to make something happen in the art school context? What about outside the institution? The social system has recently changed to the point where it’s become virtually obligatory to fill up all your free time and breathing space. I often hear people say they study art because that sort of education is good preparation for dealing with those social freedoms. On our courses everyone has to learn self-discipline. There are always some students who can’t handle it. But that’s exactly why communicating those methods is so crucial.

Marie-Louise: To what extent can that also be described as an artistic approach?

Sebastian: I’d say the approach has its origins in art. But it’s available to all sorts of people. Almost all of us in this group have an artistic background; that’s the basis of our knowledge and experience. The concept is artistic, but the contents might look different. If my students are treading water, I ask them something like this: What are the principles by which you act and organise things in your daily lives? Let everyday life be your guide! We’re sitting here having a beer. Everyone goes about it a bit differently. The table in front of you might look more or less chaotic, more or less organised. These micro-principles are transferable. Do I create order or chaos?

Karin: The fact that Sebastian and I both describe the beermat differently already tells you that we need individual approaches if we’re to help our students realise their potential. As a tutor I try to direct more attention to the differences between their individual strategies, thinking and methods. That should come out in more than just their artistic work. Describing your work in a sophisticated and accurate way is something that has to be taught and learnt – and theoretical and practical teaching can be mutually supportive in that.

Sebastian: Right, our strategies. As I see it, ideally we should advocate a strategy rather than teaching a medium or a skill or a style. There’s a «Karin strategy», a «San strategy», a «Sebastian strategy», a «Klodin strategy» and a «Susanne strategy». Our students might need one or two of them, or perhaps another one in another case, depending on the tasks they’ve set themselves. They can get these strategies from us. In «Concept and Research» I let myself be guided by everyday practices in order to convey a sense of that strategy to the students. We walk from the university to Sonnenplatz and get a coffee at Migros. We repeated that all day long, half a dozen times. How many different ways can that play out?

What sort of dynamics emerge from the repetition? Even repetition can have the character of an event if there’s some experience of boredom. And the students should learn to think in terms of practices. From that they might take something similar to Georges Perec’s 1974 essay on «Espèces d’espaces» [Species of Spaces] or his 1989 L’Infra-Ordinaire [The infra-ordinary], but in a different way, or something like the Fluxus artists and their dissolution of the distinction between art and life.

San: We definitely don’t accept any sort of separation between art education, the life of the artist and other life practices. I am always me.

Marie-Louise: Thinking about exhibitions from the different perspectives of practical tutors and theory lecturers and in conversation with curators and art education personnel also makes students aware of the different ways of accessing art and the different actors in the art system. That’s why we bring internal and external actors into our theory classes. By the same token, we’ve also had lectures in the studios recently. Recognising the institutionally and socio-historically deter-

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mined interaction between understanding these roles and understanding art is still an important aspect of the theory module. And given the increasing significance of verbally transmitted artistic practices in a global and digital environment, to me it seems more important than ever. This theory–practice transfer on the spatial, personal and substantial levels and the interplay between knowledge transfer and comprehension of artistic practices helps students position themselves with more confidence.

Klodin: But even here you can supplement the theoretical, reflective approach with forms of artistic mediation. I took a group of students to Biel while I was setting up an exhibition there. They stayed at the Centre Pasqu’art. They worked with me and appropriated certain practices; I wanted to produce a spatial and temporal overlap of practice and theory, action and observation. The museum became a school because we appropriated it for ourselves.

Sebastian: I don’t agree with the separation of theory and practice anyway. Ideally you’d dissolve the dichotomy altogether. We always used to have specific rooms for theory; now the theory classes only happen in our rooms. That’s a blow, but right now it’s a good thing: in the breaks the students go to their studios, and what they do there flows straight back into the theory.

Marie-Louise: There are also conceivable alternatives for theorising in the narrower sense, for theorising as an independent element of art education. In my classes, for example, I ask the students to create visual models of the terms and concepts they encounter in the texts we’re studying. In a similar way, San and Sebastian suggested we use painted beermats to visualise our individual visions of artistic education for today’s conversation and turned them into vehicles for the formation of ideas: the beermat as an everyday object that’s now serving as a terrain vague that we’re plotting together. Can artistic theorising work that way for you?

Sebastian: We just look for artistic ways to communicate models of artistic practice. In my experience conversations about our students’ approaches are often quite superficial because their work is right there in front of us. So I can’t see any more works now. And I’ve actually started refusing to look at them; these days I only do «walk and talk» tutorials. It gets you moving, and gets the mind moving too. Memory’s another factor; you have to adjust your priorities when someone’s talking about something that’s not there. Is that an artistic encounter between two people interacting on account of the conceptual framework we set ourselves, or is it an art lesson or a theoretical process? Hard to say. And by the way: sometimes the student’s work doesn’t make the distinction any easier.

Chiara: I once took a guided tour at the Kunstmuseum Luzern – unannounced and without speaking. I walked from painting to painting with nothing but a sound system. It’s hard to say whether I was mediating or just imitating mediation or performing some sort of artistic action.

San: Movement is always a good way to combine thought and action. We ask our students to use the «Deming wheel», a paradigm from the world of business: plan, do, check, act. They have to present a plan, implement it, measure the results and then improve or reject the plan. It’s a great model. But we don’t teach it as a lecture. We cleared out the south studio and wrote the four concepts in the four corners. Sebastian and I then walked from one corner to the next and talked about each concept. The students had to walk along behind us the whole time if they wanted to hear anything. And just as they got settled, they’d have to start off again.

That was how we introduced a bit of bodily spatial experience to the lesson.

Chiara: We’ve talked about how students come to their work or think about their work, but we haven’t yet talked about the importance of the materials and resources involved in the process of realising their ideas. And that can be a problem if students aren’t able to realise large format works or can’t use the materials they need because they don’t have the money to pay for them.

Karin: Lack of funds is often a real problem. Many students have to take on paid work in parallel with their studies. But I’ve rarely seen cases of ideas that couldn’t be realised. There was one occasion when two students spent 12 000 Swiss francs on their degree show. They made the earning of money during their final semes-

ter into an artistic concept and documented the concept in various ways, for instance by working during class time and recording their earnings. Ultimately they were able to implement their plan and then, as the climax of their critique, sold it for one Swiss franc at the private view. Even earning money can be the subject of artistic critique.

San: The other thing is the radicality, the urgency that’s provoked by a lack of resources. If you’re not entirely tied to a certain form or medium or material then you can find another way of realising your ideas. Artists who make large, expensive, materially intensive installations will have to put some of their energy into the procurement of money and materials for their projects. By doing this they develop a special knack for negotiating with companies and authorities; that’s just part of the inevitable reality check. But they also learn how to develop a project collaboratively, how to work together and share things with other people. As an artist you have to be open to questions, but then also capable of pulling back from them and isolating yourself again. I call this the «dramaturgy» of artistic development. You can also learn these side skills at college by talking to us course directors. And there are always several ways to realise an idea – that much is clear from our different beermat designs.

Stephan: And that’s also reflected in the works in the current degree show, where you can see all the different «beers» that have been produced over three years of study or fermentation. There’s a beer for everyone. I quite like this one, the other’s a bit bitter.

If you’d like to con­ tinue the conver­sation we’ve started here, write your curriculum on a beermat and post it to Hochschule Luzern – Design & Kunst, Kunst & Vermittlung, Nylsuisseplatz 1, 6020 Emmenbrücke, Switzerland. We’ll then invite you and other participants to join us for a beer at the Restaurant Bahnhof in Emmenbrücke. Whether it’s short or long, a cur­riculum is never finished!

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Fig. 1 Unheimliche Materialien. Grün­ dungs­momente der Kunsterziehung [Uncanny Materials: Founding Moments of Art Education], curated by Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht, view of the archival installation, exhi­bi­tion at xhbit Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 11 March to 5 May 2016

Uncanny Materials.

Founding Moments in Art Education A Curatorial Exhibition, Research and Education Project Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht

On 9 July 1941, a decree stipulating the foundation of a «master school for art education and the training of secondary school art teachers» went out to the Akademie der bildenden Künste [Academy of Fine Arts] in Vienna from the Nazi regime’s Reich Ministry of Science, Education and National Culture. The very first document announcing these plans for the establishment of the Master School, previously filed under reference no. 700/1940, is reported as missing.

For a period of eighteen months, curators Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht shared the task of preparing the exhibition Unheimliche Materialien.

Gründungsmomente der Kunsterziehung [Uncanny Materials. Founding Moments of Art Education], which was held at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in 2016. During this period Krasny and Mahlknecht simultaneously occupied the hereand-now of 2016 and the there-and-then of 1941.

Their aim on the seventy-fifth anniversary of those founding moments was to relocate the Master School for Art Education – which had been all but erased from institutional memory – within the historical context of 1941 and the contemporary context of the Akademie in 2016.1 The curators took a research-based approach to questions of institutional memory, Nazi (art) education policies and curriculum-making and the relationships between the politics of remembrance and artistic research.

Central to this curatorial approach were archival materials and close collaborations with artists, activists, theorists and students. Such collaborations bring together shared concerns and disparate modes of knowledge from the arts and other disciplines (in this case history) and are central to critical art education. Krasny and Mahlknecht’s curatorial approach was based squarely on dialogue and collaboration across the disciplinary boundaries of art, education, art education and curating, since the meanings attributed to (artistic) art education within Uncanny Materials. Founding Moments of Art Education were manifold. These meanings, which will be elaborated in the course of this text, relate both to the historical trajectory of the teaching of art education during the Nazi era and to the contemporary practices of art and education in a critical self-reflection of the contaminated histories of art education.

Krasny and Mahlknecht found themselves haunted by one question, which they asked themselves on a daily basis: What have we forgotten?

While this question could be seen as a typical example of curatorial anxiety about keeping hold of the various strands of preparatory work involved in mounting an exhibition, here it takes on a different dimension entirely. What’s haunting is the toll of erasure. According to Avery Gordon, the erasure of memory results in «ghostly matters».2 The curators were confronted with this sort of ghostly

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matter when consulting the records in the holdings of the archives at the Akademie der bildenden Künste. Avery designates haunting as a feeling that «prompts a something-to-be-done». The curatorial work was motivated by such haunting and led to the adoption of two strategies: uncovering and relocating. What needs uncovering? What do these erased and repressed legacies mean for art education in light of the Master School for Art Education and a teacher training curriculum rooted in the ideological foundations of Nazism? How do we uncover the micro-machinations of ideology in the subjects taught according to the university curriculum of 1941? How do we find the books and journals that students were obliged to read for their training? And how do we relocate these findings within the history of 1941, the year the Nazi regime started planning the «Final Solution of the Jewish Question» and the systematic murder of Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, political opponents and prisoners of war? Where do we locate the micro-history of the Master School with its allocations of 45,000 Reichsmarks for teaching materials and 20,000 Reichsmarks for heating in the broader context of the Second World War? How do we relocate the ghostly matter of the Nazi regime within art education; how do we relocate its uncanny archival materials – on the suggestion of Nora Sternfeld – in the present context of post-Nazi memory work; and how, with Michael Rothberg, do we relocate it in the global context of decolonization? The curators shared these questions with a group of contributors which included activists, artists, historians, theorists of memory, art educators and students. At the time many of them were teaching or researching at the Akademie der bildenden Künste, which entailed a degree of institutional embeddedness and multiple perspectives on the issues of memory and remembrance.

This text takes the form of a reflective curator’s tour. The educational format of the tour is adopted here to share some of the curators’ concerns, thoughts and feelings toward their subject and to introduce the artists’ contributions to the exhibition as they uncover and relocate the aesthetic, ideological, historical and political dimensions of 1941 within the founding moments of art education.

On entering the xhibit gallery at the Academy visitors found themselves confronted with an archival installation (fig. 1). The walls presented a chronology of the founding moments of the Master School for Art Education based on records held in the Academy Archives.3 This micro-historical timeline was accompanied by a presentation on the global dimensions of the year 1941, for example: «Z.Vc239/VaEViia 9 July 1941. Reich Ministry of Science, Education and National Culture.

Decree authorising the establishment of the Master School for Art Education […]. // 31 July 1941.

Hermann Goering puts Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Reich Main Security Office, in charge of the ‹Final Solution to the Jewish Question›». Copies of original archival documents in grey folders were provided for visitors to read and examine at two tables with chairs. Floor-to-ceiling banners in the narrow corridor leading to the main exhibition space featured reproductions of pages from the handwritten book catalogue of the Academy Library. The two curators had hoped to find evidence of the ideological orientation of new reading material acquired by the library in 1941. One example was the journal Die Kunst im Dritten Reich [Art in the Third Reich]. Following the trail of the catalogue to the actual copies of the journal, the curators found that the publication was used in an «Art Appreciation Seminar»; there was a stamp to prove it. Die Kunst im Dritten Reich was released by the Nazi Party publishers, Franz-Eher-Verlag, and edited by Alfred Rosenberg, who was responsible for monitoring the entire intellectual and ideological training and education of the Nazi Party.

In the following room, the largest space at the xhibit gallery, was an arrangement of works by artists Anna Artaker, Lena Rosa Händle, Ramesch Daha and the Sekretariat für Geister, Archivpolitiken und Lücken [Bureau for Ghosts, Archival Policies and Gaps]. Each of these artworks engendered a specific politics of memory and addressed the relationships between Nazi ideology and artistic education, art education, gender politics and the transnational directions that remembrance can take.

Anna Artaker and Lena Rosa Händle both focused on uncovering neglected connections between Nazi ideology and art education. They started by looking at typical contemporary publications: the yearbook published by the Akademie der bildenden Künste in 1941 and the seminal magazine Jugend and Kunst |Youth and Art], published by the National Socialist Association of Teachers.

Anna Artaker’s Annotated Yearbook 1941, 2016, was a research-based work commissioned for the exhibition (fig. 2). It covered the entire length of the wall with what looked like page proofs, complete with tick marks and page information for the 1941 yearbook. Annotations with biographical information were made against all works by teachers and students active at the Akademie der bildenden Künste at the time.4 The annotations focused on complicity with the political regime, indicating those who were members of the Nazi Party as well as those who were subject to denazification or rehabilitation after the Second World War. The large number of party members and the continuities and lack of institutional change after 1945 were thus made amply clear. Artaker’s work also raised the question of further materialist analysis of art historical subject matter. Such analysis

would help better understand the production, use and ideological implications of architecture and infrastructure that was celebrated as part of an idyllic landscape – even though it depended on the brutal exploitation of forced labour at sites such as the granite quarries at Mauthausen concentration camp, which provided building materials for industry and for Hitler’s monumental architectural projects.

Also commissioned for the exhibition, Lena Rosa Händle’s artwork Mädchen unter Bäumen [Girls under Trees] interlaced tangible moments of the gendered regime of art education with lesbian life and its persecution by the Nazi regime. Händle digitally reprinted a photograph she found in an edition of Jugend und Kunst from 1941. The photograph showed a tapestry entitled Mädchen unter Bäumen, embroidered by school girls in Wuppertal in a laborious collaboration with their needlework teacher. The original ornamental wall decoration intended for the classroom shows girls beneath trees, framed by the following words: «Ye people, learn from the meadow flower, how ye can please God and be beautiful as well». Needlework was a central subject in the curriculum of the Master School for Art Education; it prepared girls for their future role on the «home front». In contrast to this, two personal adverts were embroidered into a print that hung from the ceiling of the exhibition.

These embroideries alluded to a poster indicating the only publicly visible codes of lesbian subculture at the time. One of the texts read: «Girl seeks correspondence with modern female friend»; another read: «Lady seeks female friend for cinema and theatre». The youth educator Lisbeth L., who had placed the adverts in the Viennese Wochenschau newsreel in 1942, was brought to trial together with her lover and sent to prison for «fornication abhorrent to nature».5 Mädchen unter Bäu­ men recalled a particular moment in the history of the ideologization of female art education in Germany and Austria while also redressing the obliteration of lesbian life under the Nazi regime by counteracting its erasure from memory.6 The installation Heimgesuchtes Material [Haunted Material] by Nina Höchtl and Julia Wieger, collaborators at the Sekretariat für Geister, Archivpolitiken und Lücken [Bureau for Ghosts, Archival Policies and Gaps], also addressed the issue of erasure, though in a very different way. The artists regarded erasure as a covering up, the silencing of a history chosen to be forgotten. They invoked the memory work of feminist theorist Frigga Haug, which takes women’s experiences as its subject matter and activates collective memory as a research tool aimed at political self-determination and the transformation of society.7 Haugg’s concept of memory work is rooted in remembrance as a field of socio-political and cultural contestation

and conflict. Heimgesuchtes Material was presented in folders of printed matter at a collective research station of tables and chairs. While Händle’s work emphasized the search for an erased lesbian culture, the documents presented and used in workshops by the Sekretariat für Geister, Archiv­ politiken und Lücken confronted the complicity of the Austrian Association of Women Artists (Verband Bildender Künstlerin Österreichs – VBKÖ) with the Nazi regime. The VBKÖ dates back to 1910 and is the oldest artist-run all-women art space in Austria. But by 1938 the association had expelled its Jewish members and held propaganda ex­hibitions with titles such as Kreuz und quer durch unsere Gaue [The Length and Breadth of our Counties].8 This case study stressed the importance of critical feminist memory work and addressed the experiences of women today, confronting them with the gendered complicity of women and feminists who actively supported and promoted the Nazi regime.

In an essay on the role of sites of memory as contact zones, Nora Sternfeld points to the contested and conflictual field of post-war memory and remembrance against the background of transnationality, postcolonial theory and critical migration studies.9 In this light, hegemonic national narratives of commemoration have been disrupted. Sternfeld emphasizes that with national memory there is a danger of harmonizing and levelling out political processes of negotiation, while the question of what and how to remember still remains central to present-day memory in the global context. The constellation of artworks in the gallery generated «contact zones» where the multiple perspectives of the various works came together.10 The diverse perspectives of the artworks – which included critical memory work, intersectionality, gender, transnational and decolonial perspectives – correspond to and inform the current curriculum at the Institute for Education in the Arts.

Each of the artworks and interventions by Zsuzsi

↖ Fig. 2 Unheimliche Materialien. Grün­ dungsmomente der Kunsterziehung [Uncanny Materials: Founding Moments of Art Education], curated by Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht, view of Anna Artaker’s KOMMENTIERTES JAHRBUCH 1941, 2016, exhibition at xhbit Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 11 March to 5 May 2016 ↗ Fig. 3 Unheimliche Materialien. Grün­ dungsmomente der Kunsterziehung [Uncanny Materials: Founding Moments of Art Education], curated by Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht, view of Zsuzsi Flohr und Eduard Freudmann’s Ein Stein steht hier. Forma­ tionen des Erin­ nerns 1949–2016, 2016, exhibition at xhbit Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 11 March to 5 May 2016

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Flohr and Eduard Freudmann, Ramesch Daha and Minna Henriksson opened up a specific direction of memory; they emerged from sites and objects situated in and connected to Vienna, Tehran and Helsinki and rethought the transnational trajectories and perspectives of personal and collective memory.

On the invitation of the curators, Flohr and Freudmann revisited a 2015 public performance at Morzinplatz in Vienna, where the Jewish owners of the Hotel Métropole had been expropriated in 1938. The hotel became the largest Gestapo headquarters of the Nazi regime. The site also witnessed Vienna’s first grassroots memorial, which was illegally installed by a group of Holocaust survivors in 1951. Using black thread to construct a timeline of monuments and commemoration in the form of an installation resembling a wall painting, their work evidenced the layered histories of memorialized public space (fig. 3). Memory work today necessarily has to include the historiography of the production of remembrance and can honour the commemorative work performed by previous generations. Flohr and Freudmann’s work also showcased a video documentation of their public performance as they combined ritual, theatre and discourse. Its various complex layers included Holocaust survivors’ demands for a monument after the Second World War and a debate on contemporary commemoration strategies, with different victims’ groups negotiating their right to memorialized representation.

While Flohr and Freudmann’s work Ein Stein steht hier. Formationen des Erinnerns 1949–2016 [A Stone Stands Here, Formations of Remembrance, 1949–2016] relocated the complex coexistence of conflictually negotiated memory practices over time on a site in Vienna, Daha’s Unlimited History of 2013 addressed the spatial expansion of memory practices to include territories outside the European theatres of war. This work evolved as a trajectory spanning Nazi Germany and the initially neutral Iran, which was invaded by British and

Soviet troops on 25 August 1941. The installation included three large-scale paintings, two vitrines with personal and public documentary and archival material, the artist’s research diary and a video showing her grandmother remembering the Tehran conference of the Anti-Hitler coalition in 1943 (fig. 4). Her memories provided the point of departure for multidirectional research into both Daha’s family history and official historical narratives such as the building of the Trans-Iranian railway, a prestigious initiative by Reza Shah Pahlavi, realised in collaboration with engineers from Nazi Germany. Daha’s combination of historical material and contemporary images by photo journalists revealed the many connections between unknown moments in the intertwined histories of Nazi Germany, Iran, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, highlighting the complexity and conflicted lines of memory and remembrance.

In the last room of the xhibit gallery, Hansel Sato and Minna Henriksson showed works that uncovered ghostly matters in public symbols, both bodily and spatially. While Sato used his personal memory, Henriksson employed a research-based approach to the urban environment and archives.

Parallaxe from 2016, a newly commissioned work by Hansel Sato, follows the military goosestep through childhood memories of his native country, Peru. Sato remembers being trained to perform the Prussian goose-step for uniformed school parades and military ceremonies commemorating the liberation struggles of the Latin American nations, where the army was symbolic of patriotism and national self-determination.

Later he came to learn the history of the goosestep as part of his immigrant experience in Vienna, where goose-stepping symbolized the Nazi drill and was considered synonymous with the German Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Sato’s comic-strip illustrations feature a first-person narrator reflecting on the educational experience that conditioned his young body to perform the goose step (fig. 5).

↖ Fig. 4 Unheimliche Materialien. Grün­ dungsmomente der Kunsterziehung [Uncanny Materials: Founding Moments of Art Education], curated by Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht, view of Ramesch Daha’s Unlimited History, 2013, exhibition at xhbit Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 11 March to 5 May 2016 ↗ Fig. 5 Unheimliche Materialien. Grün­ dungsmomente der Kunsterziehung [Uncanny Materials: Founding Moments of Art Education], curated by Elke Krasny and Barbara Mahlknecht, view of Hansel Sato’s Parallaxe, 2016, exhibition at xhbit Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 11 March to 5 May 2016

In a recent essay on cultural memory in the postcolonial context, Michael Rothberg has emphasized the transnational and transcultural importance of memory and, crucially, has pointed out the absence of colonial involvement in memory studies.11 In this vein, art education has to both confront historical wounds and open up transformative memory work. The performance Wer hat Angst vor dem Museum? A LOOK BACK INTO THE MUSEUM [Who’s Afraid of the Museum? A LOOK BACK INTO THE MUSEUM] by Imayna Caceres, Pedra Costa and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt, which took place in the largest space of the exhibition on 16 March 2016, raised the issue of the epistemic and museological violence turning racialized subjects into exposed objects. The performance was seeking a practice of art education that could decolonize the museum and the university. Standing behind two microphones and surrounded by the audience, Caceres and Melgarejo Weinandt addressed the institution and its memory practices from decolonial, queer, developing world and Latin American intersectional identities.

Finally, Henriksson’s Hidden evolved as an extensive wall installation comprising landscape painting, photocopies of crossword puzzles from a Finnish newspaper, photographs of swastika ornaments in public spaces in Helsinki and correspondence between the artist and the Bank of Finland. Henriksson’s research started with the discovery of a Nazi stamp on the back of a Finnish landscape painting that she had been given as a present by her grandmother. This prompted an intensive investigation of the swastika ornament.

Henriksson uncovered its extensive application in Helsinki from the late nineteenth century on.

She found it on buildings and in public spaces, in crossword puzzles in the Suomen Kuvalehti newspaper from 1939 to 1944 and on the 1889 Aino triptych by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, owned by the Bank of Finland. Tracing and relocating the swastika in Finnish public spaces opened up largely unknown moments of transnational connections

with fascistic mythology; these reverberated in the collective memory when excavated and critically addressed through artistic interventions.

The curatorial exhibition, research and education project provided evidence for new kinds of art educational memory work bringing together artistic and historical research. Translating the artworks into a spatial contact zone, the history of art education was not memorialized as an act of closure relegating its history to history, but rather opening up its history with its uncanny materials to today’s memory practices through historical and artistic research. This approach was also enacted in an extensive accompanying programme which included a lecture performance, workshops and teach-ins, a politics-of-history walking tour of Vienna and the international symposium Turning (to) the Archive. Institutional Histories, Educational Regimes, Artistic Practices and Politics of Remem­ brance. Rather than commenting on and drawing conclusions about institutional memory in relation to Nazi education policies, these events raised a wide range of questions on the politics of remembrance and artistic practice, and on the archive and its materials within critical historical research, art education and teaching.

Transnational lines of research and locally specific excavations of erasures both rendered these ghostly matters public as they were uncovered and relocated. While remembrance was achieved, it will always be subject to constant and active political conflict and negotiation. What remains for the future is a more thorough incorporation of these findings and memory practices into the curriculum, into teaching and institutional history.

There is as yet no commemorative plaque at the Department for Art and Education and no dedicated annual lecture to commemorate its founding moments.

1 Initiated and commissioned by political student representatives from the Akademie der bilden­den Künste, important activist scholarship was conducted by a group of historians and art historians who, for the first time, were able to shed light on the complicity of the Akademie der bildenden Künste with the Nazi regime. Irene Nierhaus, «Adoration und Selbstverherrlichung. Künstlerische und kunstpolitische Schwerpunkte an der Akademie der bildenden Künste von den dreissiger bis Ende der vierziger Jahre», in: Im Reich der Kunst. Die Wiener Aka­demie der bildenden Künste und die faschis­ tische Kunstpolitik, eds Hans Seiger, Michael Lunardi, Peter Josef Populorum, Vienna 1990, pp. 65–141, provided important insights.

2 Gordon Avery, Ghostly Matters.

Haunting and the Sociologial Imagination, Minneapollis 2008, p. 7 and passim («ghostly matters»), and p. 194, p. 201 («haunting»).

3 This archival research was conducted by historians Ina Markova, Rosemarie Burgstaller and Sophie Bitter-Smirnov.

4 The biographical information was taken from Verena Pawlowski, Die Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien im Nationalsozialismus.

Leh­ren­­de, Studierende und Ver­wal­­­tungs­personal, Vienna 2015, passim.

5 Claudia Schoppmann, Verbotene Verhältnisse. Frauenliebe 1839–1945, Berlin 1999, contains a history of these advertisements from 1942.

6 The contemporaneous emergence of female art education and the ideological positioning of women as German mothers, houseworkers and wives has not yet been examined in any detail.

7 Frigga Haug, Erinnerungsarbeit, Berlin and Hamburg 1994.

8 For more information, see Nina Hoechtl and Julia Wieger, «The VBKÖ’s Archive as a Site of Political Confrontation, or How Can You Sing Out of Tune?», in: All-Women Art Spaces in Europe in the Long 1970s, eds Agata Jakuboska and Katy Deepwell, Liverpool 2018, pp. 119–143, pp. 127 f.

9 Nora Sternfeld, «Errungene Er­in­ nerungen. Gedenkstätten als Kontaktzonen», in: Erinnerungsorte in Bewegung. Zur Neugestaltung des Gedenkens an Orten national­ sozialisitscher Verbrechen, eds Daniela Allmeier et al., Bielefeld 2016, pp. 77–96, p. 79 f.

10 Sternfeld 2016, p. 82, refers to James Clifford’s 1997 application of Mary Louise Pratt’s earlier notion of «contact zones», arguing for museums as places of con­ flictual and collaborative spheres of interaction and contestation.

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11 See Michael Rothberg, «Remembering Back. Cultural Memory, Colonial Legacies, and Postcolonial Studies», in: The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Graham Huggen, Oxford 2013, pp. 359–379.

Fig. 1 CATPC artist Jeremie Mabiala and The Art Collec­ tor in the white cube, Lusanga, DR Congo, 2017

Critical Curriculum

An Emancipatory Tool for a Post-Plantation System?

Siri Peyer

In August 2014 the Van Abbemuseum showed video works by Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari and Dan Graham on a palm oil plantation 650 kilometres south-east of Kinshasa. This presentation of American artists at a site not generally regarded as a centre of western art was organised by Dutch artist Renzo Martens and his Institute of Human Activities (IHA).1 The stated aim of his long-term project is the creation of a local zone for critical reflection and artistic production, which would in turn have a positive influence on the living conditions of the local population. To this end an International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality (LIRCAEI) was established and resident former plantation workers came together to form the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC). Members of this association participate in workshops where they are taught about visual art by Kinois artists Mega Mingiedi, Eléonore Hellio and Michel Ekeba. According to Martens’ concept, the next step – with the help of artistic production from these workshops – is to establish a transnational model for the distribution and sale of works. This is supposed to create an economic cycle: the clay sculptures produced in the workshops are 3D scanned; the digital data is used to make negative forms in Europe; these forms are then used to cast chocolate sculptures and the sculptures are then presented and sold at exhibitions, primarily in Europe and North America. The profits generated in this way go back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and are used by CATPC members to acquire land to plant sustainable fruit and vegetable gardens. Martens calls this autonomous agrarian economy the post-plantation system.

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With the help of pedagogical models and participatory formats, Martens’ artistic practice promises to create a place that allows the local popula­ tion to overcome their precarious circumstances.

But how exactly is this promise pedagogically implemented? The workshops and associated lectures (Dutch art critic Laurens Otto was invited to speak about the white cube, for example) constitute the «Critical Curriculum». On the one hand this offers a sort of introductory course on contemporary western art, on the other it allows participants to take up artistic production themselves.

The main content of Martens’ concept is that plantation workers participating in the workshops should try to produce self-portraits. Presenting these portraits at exhibitions in the western art world will confront that art world with subjects who have hitherto had no voice in artistic discourse. In this context the clay sculptures – now transformed into chocolate sculptures – are supposed to represent the perspective of formerly colonised Africans who are still disadvantaged to this day. The chocolate sculptures mark out the distance between the object of socio-critical art and the site of its reception. The fact that sales revenues are being returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo is supposed to draw attention to the privileged position of western artists and the economic disparity between the various actors involved in the project. After all, these Congolese artists and their artistic production would never have achieved international renown and would never have benefitted from the associated financial gains without the fame of the western artist who was responsible for the concept: Martens.

Martens’ designation of the workshops as a «Critical Curriculum» is probably intentionally suggestive. It seems to invoke a particular body of educational theory, the «critical pedagogy» of the 1960s. The founder of this tendency was Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire. His ideas were shaped by the experience of a literacy campaign he pioneered in Brazil. Its aim was to facilitate participation in political processes – particularly elections – by helping illiterate people acquire reading and writing skills. In this sense critical pedagogy regarded culture and education as an emancipatory process. Teaching and learning was about more than just conveying and acquiring knowledge. It was about developing an awareness of existing power structures and their corresponding policies.

Education was to help transform students into mature subjects who could shape society according to their own ideas. They were to acquire a better understanding of the factors that controlled and influenced their lives by being taught how to decode unarticulated values, norms and ide­as. Education was to be understood as a process of socialisation, or, as a Freire put it, a «praxis of freedom».2 In this respect the designation «Critical Curriculum» is an apt reference to emancipatory theories, for the IHA also endeavours to transform the participating plantation workers into independent producers of culture. At first glance, though, this objective appears to be facilitated more by the production of surplus value than by the educational processes enacted in the Curriculum. For the producers, the profits generated are a wage that offers escape from the precarious terms of employment at large multinationals and allows them to take part in the global creative industry. In interviews Martens has described this objective, rather cynically, as the prospect of «finishing a day in the studio to relax with a cold beer».3 This remark throws up a few questions: Does participating in the manufacture of artistic products under the direction of a western artist, Martens, and according to his specifications really only facilitate the change from very badly paid to somewhat better paid wage labour? Does the conceptual system and structure of the Critical Curriculum merely reproduce colonial hierarchies? Or does the complicated construct actually leave room for diverse individual learning processes that can only be judged from afar with difficulty, if at all? Every educational context involves a covert or «hidden curriculum», that is, content that is not officially on the curriculum, the implicit and possibly unintentional mediation of extra-curricular values and norms.4 In the case of Martens’ Critical Curriculum, the non-participant can only speculate about what implicit messages were communicated to CATPC participants in their encounters with successful

representatives of contemporary western art.

Moreover, all the teachers had experienced western educational processes either partially or exclusively. In this respect the artistic production of the Congolese participants represents just one part of the economic cycle and can only be regarded as a vehicle of independent educational experience with some qualifications. At the same time, though, collective artistic production allows the participants to meet and spend time together. This creates a free space for diverse subjective and intersubjective experiences, which are difficult to convey to audiences through conventional project communication channels.

One indication of the emancipatory potential of the Critical Curriculum can be gleaned from Eléonore Hellio’s description of her experience in the workshops.5 Contrary to the original brief, the sculptures produced were not really self-portraits (fig. 1). Instead they became a means of discussing surviving memories of local tribes or clans. The participants saw the production of sculptures as an opportunity to represent their own history and identity as part of a collective history and identity.

As objects, the sculptures themselves were apparently of little concern to their makers. Instead their discussions tended to focus on forces that the local Kikongo language calls luyalu, which can be translated as «to govern». For the Congolese, then, the sculptural manifestations were of less interest than the spirit that finds temporary refuge in them as objects.6 The fact that participants used what was actually quite a specific brief to pursue their own interests and that teachers reported this substantial shift in discussion via publications intended for western art audiences demonstrates the beginnings of a process of self-reflection.

These reciprocal processes of negotiation may well contain the seeds of a transformative process of learning.

1 The project was a collaboration between the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent and the Akademie der Künste in Cologne, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the engineering company Witteveen+Bos, the chocolate makers Barry Callebaut and the production companies Pieter van Huystee Film & TV, VPRO and Intifilms, see http:// www.humanactivities.org/en/ partners-2/ (retrieved 23 Jan. 2018).

2 See Paulo Freire, Pädagogik der Unterdrückten. Bildung als Praxis der Freiheit, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1973, esp. p. 71 f.

3 J.J. Charlesworth, «How the Dutch Provocateur Launched an In­dependent Cultural Economy With Plantation Workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo», in: Art Review (April 2015), pp. 84–87, esp. p. 87.

4 See Henry A. Giroux and David Purpel (eds), The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education. Deception or Discovery? Berkeley 1983.

5 Eléonore Hellio, «The Luyalu of the CAPTC, a Magnetic Field in Lusagna», in: CATPC. Cercle d’art des travailleurs de plantation congolaise. Congolese Plantation Workers Art League, ed. Eva Barois De Caevel and Els Roelandt, Berlin 2017, pp. 58–63, esp. p. 62.

6 J. A. Koster, «Colonialism and the Creative Economy», in: CATPC 2017, pp. 278–302, esp. p. 288.

MicroPedagogies Reflections on How to Teach Art Wiktoria Furrer

Artur Żmijewski’s workshop How to Teach Art throws up questions about education in, through and with art. It investigates the necessary conditions for teaching, learning and even making art.

Polish artist Żmijewski is known for his work with displaced pictures of the disabled body and with displaced people in general: refugees or prison inmates, for instance. Together with the participants of his workshop Żmijewski conducted a theoretical and practical experiment dedicated to the subconscious side of artistic processes. The results were shown under the same title as part of an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich curated by Katharina Weikl and Daniel Baumann: 100 Ways of Thinking (2018).

At the Kluspark old people’s centre Maria asks the man on the stage in the theatre: «Are you doing some sort of exercise there, Herr Bärtschi?» The hundred-year-old Herr Bärtschi is standing on stage in his vest and underpants. His arms are describing circles in the air. Maria is filming him with a rattling 16mm Bolex camera. «Thank you, that’ll do. Maybe something for the legs?» One hand paints dark green serpentines that coalesce into a coherent form on the paper. Suddenly someone pours ink onto the surface between the lines; it spreads out over the paper like a flood, totally obscuring some of the dark green parts. A third person deftly flips the whole sheet right over. A rill of black ink runs down the back. There’s a group drawing with chalk; someone draws broad lines across the blackboard with a wet sponge; skeletons come into view and are moved. I myself am leaning with my back to the blackboard, a re-

lief-like protuberance on the painted surface; chalk squeaks on the blackboard around me, dropping powder onto my head.

These three scenes are from Artur Żmijewski’s How to Teach Art workshop, which took place in Zurich from April to August 2018 with doctoral students from the «Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices» programme, which was funded by swissuniversities.1 The workshop was dedicated to the question of how and whether art can be taught at all. What is needed to get an artistic process going – for an artist to remain vulnerable without being exposed? Not content with mere theoretical reflection, Żmijewski wanted his partipants to perform and thus experience a series of artistic exercises in various media: drawing, collage, digital and analogue photography, video and 16 mm film (fig. 1).

The Micro-Pedagogical Perspective

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At a stroke, the workshop threw up a question and supplied the performative vehicle through which to investigate it. It turned the participants into researchers even as they remained the object of research. Hence the analysis of art as a mode of teaching always resounded as a self-referential echo. And that happened to coincide with my particular interest in artistic pedagogies. How do experiential spaces come into being, how are they engendered in art workshops, laboratories and temporary schools? How do their «enabling constraints» work?2 I’m interested in the procedures and design methods of how to teach art, not with

← Fig. 1 How To Teach Art, exhi­bition view of 100 Ways of Thinking at Kunsthalle Zürich (25 Aug. to 4 Nov. 2018) ↘ Fig. 2 Theory sheet used in How to Teach Art, ex­hibition view of 100 Ways of Thinking at Kunst­halle Zürich (25 Aug. to 4 Nov. 2018)

a more general consideration of art and education.

How did Żmijewski and we as participants facilitate the work How to Teach Art? Primarily it seems to have emerged from the organisation of the content of the workshop: spaces, periods, media, materials and pedagogical impulses in the form of exercises and instructions.

But these didactic structures always give rise to unique consequences; they are intersected by inestimable effects and side-effects, depending on context, situation and group constellation.

Hence spatial, temporal, material and pedagogical accents simultaneously yield an undercurrent of affective infrastructures, as though a second floor had opened up beneath the choreography of the process to partake in the constitution of events in the workshop in a unique and subtle but influential and, as it were, unpredictable way.3 Affective infrastructures modulate the way people speak, how people work together and how people relate to one another (tonality, modality and relationality). The concept of micro-pedagogies is intended to describe this interplay of affective infrastructures and didactic structures (exercises, spaces, media and periods). It will be used to flush out moments of insight that discharge as events, crises, jokes or failures.

As the workshop showed, micro-pedagogies are unruly by nature.4 Controlling them is not or is not entirely in the gift of the artist. With this in mind the micro-pedagogical view looks at the tension between various participant movements that constitute one experiential space. Micro-pedagogies are more than the sum of the individual agendas that the participants bring with them. They may run counter to the regime of didactic structures presented by Żmijewski and yet still move within the framework created by him. Their unruly dispo-

sition seems to suggest that the micro-pedagogical concept creatively subverts pedagogy as programme.

Figures of Passibility

The aim of teaching art, according to Żmijewski, is to radicalise subjectivity, since artists should articulate themselves in society and participate in social processes through their work. Artistic education is therefore tantamount to the formation of an intuitive instinct for social relevance. Intuition is the proper instrument of art. This instrument is a key to the world and brings to light insights that would otherwise remain hidden. Art configures knowledge of the self and the world, though in a sometimes agonisingly incomplete way. From Żmijewski’s perspective, artists look for conditions that will allow intuition to be effective in them. The task of artistic education, according to Żmijewski, is «to let people have open access to all possible mysteries/ horrors/ treasures hidden/ closed/ blocked in the air, earth, body. You have to be so sensitive to find what is hidden in all these ‹places›. The task of the teacher is to support your sensitivity – we could even say ‹selective sensitivity›.»5 The exercises where Żmijewski presented us with photographs from the First and Second World Wars served exactly that purpose. In considering his disturbing images we first had to overcome the reflex of moral judgement and intellectual distance.

Analytical thinking inevitably capitulates when confronted with the task of affirming or negating the horror of the concentration camp or the maimed foot of an infant.6 These exercises were intended to loosen our rational armour so as to make us more receptive to intuitions and inklings.

As the basis of the workshop, then, individual and collective exercises can be read as a figuration of

passibility.7 Passibility – or sensibility and receptiveness – unfolded with the rhythm of the increasing intensity of the content of the tasks. Practicing passibility meant accepting that regimes of perception were perforated, modes of thinking became porous, that modes of subjectivation became more dynamic and diaphanous. But exposing the work to intuition entails certain risks. How to Teach Art therefore also focused on the dark inner lining, the sometimes cruel side-effects of the artistic process. «But that’s exactly what we are looking for,» writes Żmijewski, «all these hidden tracks which define society, political life, shape of our countries and our individual fate. All possible symptoms which occupy our bodies and psychic life – which look like illness, strain, trauma or moral devastation and so on – they are our brutal friends. They show us the track and whisper, whisper and whisper when in which moment we should find a way to the surface consciousness.»8 The media that Żmijewski brought with him and patiently taught us to use also effected an aesthetic modulation of receptivity. The hundred-year-old Voigtländer plate camera and the 16mm Bolex were more than just technical means; Żmijewski consciously deployed them as didactic instruments.

The cameras were relics of material history; they were not neutral. As a consequence of their use for colonial exploitation, in the representation of injustice, they were implicated in the waging and depiction of war and violence. Against the backdrop of our workshop discussions even just the choice of this medium brought to mind the repressive history of the medium and demanded an artistic approach to it. The medium also brought to the images an intrinsic subjectivity that could not be explained away with reference to the technical recalcitrance of the medium. The technical mishaps, torn film reels, contaminated prints and over-exposed sequences were all Freudian slips of the medium. Lack of experience minimised capacity for control, turned attention to eventful moments in the creative process and prepared the ground for intuitive approaches and working methods. In this respect the cameras were more than just materials. They had agency, were delegates of an emergent micro-pedagogy in that their function representing the unconscious turned them into media of perception.

moments – were striking features of our collective works. They became visible in the «Blackboard Conversations» and on the «Theory Sheet», physical manifestations of our theoretical discussions.

One participant, Maria, described the Theory Sheet (a large roll of paper) as both a stage and a mobile archive that accompanied us on our repeated journeys back and forth between workshop venues at the Zurich University of the Arts and the Corner College. We overpainted and overwrote the paper until it became incomprehensible and even torn in places. The palimpsest contained provisional insights, unmarked results and contradictory statements in stark juxtaposition.

Everything served as a vehicle for further discussion. In its function as scene, surface and substrate for collective drawing, speech and discourse, the Theory Sheet activated reflection beyond hierarchical knowledge systems, truth claims and the customary connection of cause and effect (fig. 2).

In the top-lit room at the Zurich University of the Arts Żmijewski discovered a blackboard that extended almost the entire width of the wall. In the tradition of Grzegorz Kowalski, his former professor from the art academy in Warsaw, he made this blackboard into the material and catalyst of our collective work. In the Blackboard Conversations we asked questions on the board relating to new problems or unresolved issues from the prior discussions on the Theory Sheet. Initially we asked about the origins of the images deposited in the

Collective Mind

Intuitive action is not confined to isolated individuals. Passibility already encompasses making reference to a situative field that is shared with others and thus becomes a condition of collectivity.

Collectivity is never given and certainly not gifted, not even in a workshop. Modalities of collective thinking and the redistribution of roles – where both are to be understood as micro-pedagogical

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collective unconscious. At first cautiously and hesitatingly, wrapped in concentrated silence, we began to draw: symbols, forms, words, formulae.

In the frenzy of mark-making we neglected linguistically structured thought in favour of intuitive modes of thinking: incomplete, unformed statements, vague figures, unconscious visions. Little by little the marks coalesced into diagrams, images, stories narrated by several voices at once, without beginning or end, cause or effect. The silent, almost automatic painting activated other registers than that of the Logos. Space was opened up for imagination, eventfulness, diversity of meaning. In the bustle of synchronous but nonchoreographed movements, the word «TIME» suddenly appeared in the middle of the blackboard, written in capital letters with a wet sponge.

As the water dried we stood still. We stopped looking for further answers. It was as if the blackboard had become the agent of collective consciousness, an authority that tolerates no contradiction, like the Delphic Oracle. The board had developed its own agency – and literally, not figuratively. I was no longer sure who was serving whom, what it was that was working and speaking through me, who was whose medium.

Pedagogies of Crisis

Crisis is not just a corollary but also the condition of artistic work; that at least is the narrative construction Żmijewski gives it. As an artist he pre-

↑ Fig. 3 Carla Gabri, Ohne Titel [Untitled], 2018, in the context of How To Teach Art, «Face Mask»

sented himself to us as though damaged or completely worn out by the artistic process. His injured and vulnerable bearing elicited a similarly fragile, communicative disposition from the participants.

The unsparing way in which Żmijewski spoke of himself co-defined the field of the pronounceable.

This encounter with those present, without gradual approach or clarification of intentions, determined the tonality of the whole workshop. His urgent and compelling mode of address made all participants aware that they were able to engage with one another and speak openly to one another; Karen Barad has called it «response-ability».9 One workshop participant, Nastasia, put it well: «Artur is not the sort to round off corners» – neither in his art nor in his teaching. The spectrum of authority and self-authorisation was reordered by crises.

These crises struck us workshop participants in various strains and manifestations.

Questions of power and the possibility of its critique played a major role in the encounter between Żmijewski – a famous artist and older man – and his young, exclusively female participants. The whole situation was fundamentally imbalanced.

Wiktor Gut, one of Żmijewski’s teachers, sees every student–teacher encounter as «A teacher’s encounter, conversation with a student is not a partner relationship. […] The relationship old–young is the most diverse polarity. The phenomenon of an encounter that we call teaching brings the possibility of creation, resultant from personality,

experience, sensitivity, responsibility and the lack of it – of both teacher and student. This is a potential situation and it is not obvious which features of the dialogue participants will be critical in the entire creative process.»10 Teaching here appears as relational tension and, at the same time, space for social sculpture. Micro-pedagogy turns attention toward just this critical malleability of situations. In her search for artistic identity, one of the participants, Carla, distanced herself from the demanding exercises by dismantling the power constellations of the workshop in her pictures. When required to make a photograph of a face mask inspired by ritual aboriginal face paintings, she had Żmijewski paint and then photograph her own face in the most radical form of face painting: blackface.

Her image not only points out his witnessing and complicity in this problematic form of face painting; it also exposes his authority gesturally, since she had him depress the shutter. She asked Maria to photograph the scene. The resulting image is uncomfortably close to a photograph taken by Otto Haeckel in German East Africa in 1912 and similar images produced by the repressive European culture of portrayal (figs 3 and 4).

Nastasia vehemently resisted the insistence on social relevance, which Żmijewski regarded as being a particularly pressing need for the «privileged province» of Switzerland, and refused to partake in his obsessive engagement with difficult themes such as death, disease and depression.

↑ Fig. 4 Otto Haeckel, Ohne Titel (Deutsch-Ostafrika) [Untitled (German East Africa)], 1906, photograph, 8.9 × 13.7 cm

Going against the theme of the «Study of the Body» exercise, Nastasia was the only participant to film a pregnant friend rather than someone over eighty years old. She defended her own alternative artistic practice, where she focuses on her inner world and personal relationships, her family and friends.

As a gesture of care and conviviality this practice is no less socially relevant. The reflexive actualisation of this clash also took place in conversations, autobiographical writings and on the facebook group forum.

I myself had doubts about the supposed inaccessibility of artistic processes. My ideas, fantasies, even dreams circled endlessly round our blackboards, the progressive infill of the Theory Sheet and the blackboard in the top-lit room; for me these things were media for intuitive and collective work on the unknown. But suddenly these promising black planes, manifestations of self-awareness, were transformed into black boxes. And black boxes have to shatter to reveal their content.

Is Anticipated Resistance Resistant?

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For Żmijewski, life as an artist is characterised by crises, since crises are both condition and consequence of artistic work at the limits of the pronounceable. This being the case, Żmijewski’s How to Teach Art sought to deal in a controlled way with crises that came up in the artistic process.

Art education ought to make it possible to practise dealing with them. Like art, teaching too is «a dangerous or potentially dangerous situation». The workshop created a situation that was not only capable of triggering resistance but also, paradoxically, of anticipating it. Now one may ask whether crisis is subsumed by artistic calculus and whether anticipated resistance really loses its bite.

Everyday politics has taught us that crisis provocation has become a form of crisis management.

In the workshop, crises became a didactic means whose consequences nevertheless remained uncontrollable. In fact they engendered an epistemic reversal. In its concern with transgressive themes, crisis as a moment of transgression contains an ambivalent potential (crisis, from the Greek verb krinein – to divide, to distinguish – denotes a «decisive turn»). Carla and Nastasia turned crisis into self-empowerment.

Not to be underestimated in the treatment of questions about the productivity of micro-pedagogical practices is the affective participation of individuals, their engagement or their resistance in relation to themes and also the collective vibrations, moods and peculiarities of a fragile group constellation. Alongside the didactic structure a micro-pedagogical perspective has to illuminate precisely these aspects. This being the case, the micro-pedagogies of Żmijewski’s workshop are to be described as practices of relationality that flare up in the rips and cracks of the didactic structure: references of the actors to one another and to the rigorous framework of the workshop.

1 Organised in cooperation with the Centre for the Arts and Cultural Theory (Zentrum Künste und Kulturtheorie, ZKK), the ERC project Performance Art in Eastern Europe, the SNF project Exhibiting Film at the University of Zurich (Universität Zürich, UZH), the UZH Film Studies Seminar, the UZH Slavic Studies Seminar and the Institute for Theory (Institut für Theorie) at the Zurich University of the Arts (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, ZHdK); participants: Wiktoria Furrer, Carla Gabrí, Ekaterina Kurilova, Nastasia Louveau, Maria Ordóñez, Anja Nora Schulthess, Dimitrina Sevova, Valentina Zingg.

2 This concept stems from the practice of Erin Manning at the SenseLab; cf. Erin Manning, «Creative Propositions for Thought in Motion», in: Inflexions no. 1 [How is Research-Creation?]

(2008), pp. 1–24, esp. p. 8, http://www.inflexions.org/n1_ manninghtml.html (retrieved Nov. 2018).

3 Wiktoria Furrer and Sebastian Dieterich, «Micropracticing the Local, Localizing Micro­ practice», in: Artistic Research.

Being There. Explorations Into the Local, ed. Luisa Greenfield et al., Copenhagen 2017, pp. 75–87, esp. p. 80.

4 The concept of «micro-pedagogy» has not yet been exploited for the purposes of aesthetic education.

It has been introduced to the discourse of educational science only in the form of transitions and punctuations between pedagogical figures, as pedagogical improvi­ sation by teachers; cf. Stefan Danner, Erziehung als reflektierte Improvisation, Bad Heilbrunn 2001, p. 11. In my research I describe micro-pedagogy with reference to the concept of micro-practice; cf. Furrer and Dieterich 2017, esp. p. 76 ff.; Elke Bippus, «Adrian Pipers Funk Lessons. Eine Mikropraxis transformierender Affirmation», in: Kunst und Wirklichkeit heute. Affirmation, Kritik, Transformation, ed. Lotte Everts et al., Bielefeld 2015, pp. 201–221, esp. p. 216 ff.; Silvia Henke and Wiktoria Furrer, Mikropraxis ästhetischer Bildung in sieben Vignetten, Lucerne 2017, and idem, Ästhetische Bildung.

Radical Pedagogies, Lucerne 2017, both accessible at https:// sinergia-pat.ch/texte/ (retrieved Nov. 2018).

5 Artur Żmijewski on 30 May 2018 in the facebook group How to Teach Art. 6 The task was described as follows: «Using abstract forms and maximum five colours (white, black, grey red and blue), confirm the image» and «Using abstract forms and maximum five colours (white, black, grey red and blue), deny the image».

7 On the concept of passibility see Michael Mayer, Humanismus im Widerstreit. Versuch über Passibilität, Paderborn 2012, and idem, Tarkowskijs Gehirn. Über das Kino als Ort der Konversion, Bielefeld 2012, esp. p. 10, p. 79, p. 104 f.

8 Artur Żmijewski on 30 May 2018 on the facebook group How to teach Art. 9 The term «response-ability» was coined by Karen Barad. It is helpful when considering the communicative disposition and tonality of the workshop because it allows the speaker to take the opportunity to answer even where there is an imbalance of power. Barad is emphatic: «First of all, agency is about response-ability, about the possibilities of mutual response, which is not to deny, but to attend to power imbalances.

Agency is about possibilities for worldly re-configurings. So agency is not something possessed by humans, or non-humans for that matter. It is an enactment.»

Karen Barad in: Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, «Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers». Interview with Karen Barad, in: idem, New Materialism. Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbor 2009, pp. 48–70, esp. p. 55.

10 Wiktor Gut, «Teaching», in: Dwie pracownie. Kowalski – Gutt, ed. Karol Sienkiewicz, exh. cat.

Warsaw: Salon Akademii, 2012, pp. 56–62, esp. p. 57.

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Developing Concepts for Aristic Education

← Fig. 1 On the first day Rachel and I arrive half an hour late. The room has already been set up for our workshop. All the participants are waiting. On the second day we arrive on time, but most of the partic­ ipants turn up late. On the third day we agree that we will hence­forth start with the programme ex­ actly half an hour after its announcement – one way or another, a sort of punctuality.

Nine Days in Dhaka Lena Eriksson Introduction by Rachel Mader

Lena Eriksson’s drawings were made during an art education workshop that we ran together at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2017. This was a second, specially adapted version of a similarly structured event that we had organised earlier the same year for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in the southern Indian town of Kochi, where there were 25 participants from India and Bangladesh as well as five student assistants from the Lucerne MA Fine Arts degree.

Art biennials have now become a global phenomenon. They are all very different in terms of their respective local connections, but art education activities are rare at such events, which are after all inherently international in scope. Still, the festive character of a biennial attracts broad swathes of the public and there is an increasing need for forms of mediation that facilitate more diverse and inclusive access to the works of art on display. Our purpose with the Spaces for En­ counters project – this being the title of the abovementioned first workshop and the planned online

platform for translocal art mediation – was to develop art education activities that promoted various perspectives and took an emphatically inclusive approach. Artistic art education strategies proved particularly serviceable in this respect because they tended to mobilise in a playful way the curiosity and the various perspectives of the visitors rather than relying on expert knowledge.

During the workshops we developed a set of «tools» based on the cultural references, viewing habits and interests of the local participants. With the help of simple instructions, these tools were prepared in such a way that they could be adapted to specific local conditions. The regular reports we have since received about the various ways in which our toolkit has been used by both groups of workshop participants show that it has developed into an instrument that can be applied quite widely.

Lena’s drawings chart the creation of this toolkit while also bearing witness to the fact that we too had much to learn.

→ Fig. 2 Rachel has imported 25 fondue forks, two fondue pans and 2.5 kg of dark chocolate. She buys the fruit from the grocer near the hotel. Artist and workshop participant Tarana has succeeded in negotiating a good price for her which, Rachel says, is very tough.

The chocolate fondue brings joy to everyone.

→ Fig. 3 I have imported: 2 kg potatoes, 900 g pasta, 1.2 kg cheese from the Swiss alps, eight medium onions, 3.6 kg apples, five cinnamon sticks, one can of pear syrup, one litre of cider and 25 pinches of dried alpine flowers. On the first evening we all cook: Swiss alpine macaroni.

At least this is concrete.

→ Fig. 4 Dhaka Art Summit expects about 35,000 visitors per day.

← Fig. 5 One can be as organised as possible, foresee every eventuality, plan everything down to the last detail – but in the end it is the traffic that dictates the agenda. Tarana reveals that, in the mornings, it takes her two hours to get to work. In the evenings, it can take twice as long for her to get home.

← Fig. 6 In Bangladesh, ‘Art Mediation’ is not a common term.

← Fig. 7 At night merchants throw tarpaulins over their booths and goods and tie them up together. I am amazed that this is adequate protection from theft.

→ Fig. 8 On the last day of our workshop the seminar room is occupied.

We move into one of the vacant gallery spaces.

The improvised setting makes communication more difficult.

Sitting on the floor is bad for the bones. Every­thing is strenuous, every­­thing is more chaotic. None­ theless, the discussions are animated.

→ Fig. 9 On the way back to the airport our taxi takes us parallel to the railway lines. I see people riding the roof of a train and I ask myself why on earth they would do that.

I have so much more to learn about this country.

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Teaching Pieces On the Potential of Aesthetic Education Silvia Henke

Proceeding from the concepts of «aesthetic education» and the Brechtian «Lehrstück» [teaching play or teaching piece], this paper sketches out the possibilities for creative didactics in teaching situations. It asks whether and how the teaching of aesthetic processes in art, design and film education can provide an impetus for independent teaching and demonstration practices, and how didactic principles can develop within them as an independent aesthetic practice.

Aesthetic Education in the Theatrical

In a concrete educational situation, where individuals can and should learn from others, the theatrical has at least three advantages over other media: it can bring people together, it can convey messages directly and it can enact wisdom through actions and reactions. I use the word wisdom rather than knowledge advisedly here. Didactic or educational theatre involves the audience in the search for truth insofar as the people on the stage spend a lot of time not knowing what they are doing or what is happening to them. That is the basis of the affinity between theatre and certain forms of didactics, and in that respect also between theatre and the performative or creative mediation of insight; this idea is more clearly expressed in the word «wisdom» than it is in a positivistic conception of knowledge. Wisdom refers to the developing subject, to emotional experiences and insight into connections and relationships. For this it will be useful to look at the emancipatory

tendencies in Friedrich Schiller’s concept of aesthetic education and Bertolt Brecht’s theory and practice of the teaching play, to which Milo Rau also often refers.

In 1795, under the title Über die ästhetische Er­ ziehung des Menschen [On the Aesthetic Education of Man], Schiller arrived at a definition of the aesthetic that shifted the focus away from art as a restrictive concept and genre. If we assume, with Schiller, that aesthetic objects have specific effects, then it becomes possible to conceive of an aesthetic education that is emancipated both from reductionist polarisations between art and knowledge (or science) and from those between theory and practice – polarisations that tend to recur time and again at schools of art and design. According to Schiller’s conception of aesthetics, the crucial thing is that the beautiful – which I understand in a modernising sense as the sensual-picturesque – serves as a basis for a liberation of the «intellectual faculties», and according to «their own laws».

Aesthetic education is therefore a composite in which «sensuousness and reason are active at the same time».1 Brecht brought this simultaneity of sensual and meaningful experience together programmatically in his epic drama, specifically in the theoretical practice of his teaching plays. How and why is this theory still central and illuminating for an exemplary appropriation of knowledge through art?

Firstly: for Brecht it always went without saying that theatre audiences ought to learn something.

In this sense, art and instruction for Brecht make

→ Fig. 1 Still from The Gold Rush, USA 1925, dir.

Charlie Chaplin

a symbiotic appearance not only in his epic drama and the teaching plays but also in his poetry and operas. He was always concerned with the moral of a work as its actual subject matter or teaching material. The aim of Brecht’s demonstrative morals seems clear: he always tried to make the structures and effects of power transparent and thus capable of being changed.2 Brecht was never interested in whether his teaching plays were theory or practice. For him the teaching plays were as entertaining as they were moralising. Moreover, they were intrinsically set up as investigations.3 And he was quite clear that the merging of genres and functions as he states them here – theatre, illustration, parable, aphorism, moral, research – was also problematic. That is why his writings from 1935 to 1937 no longer deal with the fundamental question of whether the teaching play should teach a moral and instead address the more concrete problem of how it ought to do so. With that in mind, the teaching play can usefully be considered as a model of aesthetic education.

The moral in Brecht always seems to be in competition with something else, which may explain the message of Mac the Knife’s motto: «Food is the first thing. Morals follow on»; only a socialist society, having first provided for the material needs of all, then also has the right to demand morality from its members.4 But is it that simple?

Brechtian theatre features all shades of hunger.

There is more to Brecht than food production and the abolition of hunger. Hunger instead proves to be an ambivalent energy because it always relates

to something other than food: ambition, pleasure, needs and desires. A full spread satisfies none of these things. What if, contrary to the socialist interpretation of the teaching play, hunger or appetite were a more interesting way of experiencing one’s own body as a site of conflict than the fulfilment of basic needs?

Given the impossibility of completely satisfying all urges, the requirement that feeding should come before morality is ambivalent and suggests a force of which Brecht did not speak, though he did demonstrate it in his plays and characters. One could call it the force of the insatiable – a force that is intrinsic to both learning and living. It can be challenging and maddening, but it is productive, albeit in an ambivalent way. It is the convergence of curiosity and ambition, compulsion and moderation. When this force comes to light, the message or moral cannot be unequivocal. In fact it can change into its opposite or give rise to a scene quite different to what it seemed. Rainer Nägele calls this the ob-scene, the other scene of the scene; it is not a scene of knowing morality.5 It is active in the acting or learning subject and cannot quickly be rationalised didactically.

Teaching Piece 1: The Intangible in the Didactic

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To what extent can the necessity for wisdom, an ethical and creative attitude, be effective with Brecht’s didactic impetus today? The following is an attempt to summarise Brecht’s didactics in

three points that may also be of service for the possible specifics of teaching at an art school.

1. Thinking is practical: Brecht was aware of the ambiguities of teaching and learning. His ideal students were simple, uneducated people – beggars, workers, mothers, thieves – he tried to find simple teaching situations and simple messages in order to release the emancipatory power of learning itself. The didactic credo from the central verse of Brecht’s Lob des Lernens [In Praise of Learning] runs as follows: «Learn on, man put away! / Learn on, man put in prison! / Learn on, woman in kitchen! / Learn on, old age pensioner! / It’s you who’ll have to give the orders / Go off and find a school, if you’re homeless! / Go get yourself knowledge, you who freeze! / Starving, you reach for the book: it is your best weapon. / It’s you who’ll have to give the orders.»6 The young people at our art and design schools are not uneducated, but they don’t come to learn political practices, nor even necessarily to assume positions of leadership. They don’t primarily come to obtain knowledge through reading either. If sweeping generalisations are possible at all here, art students come to learn a creative and artistic design practice. And for that, like Brecht’s workers, they need manual skills and a thinking practice that helps them understand their lives and their environment. Hence they need a theoretical practice as a basis for developing their own thinking, both in words and in design.

2. Open dialectic and interruption: By taking the power of aesthetics seriously in the learning situation, Brecht not only admitted the dialectic of the learning situation but also used it in such a way that «moods and trains of thought [led] to attitudes» – and vice versa.7 There needed to be an open dialectic with an awareness of both position and counter-position. Wolf Biermann calls this dialectical method of learning through non-comprehension the first «Brechtian interruption», clearly emphasised in the learning play Die Mutter [The Mother], for instance.8 The learning workers in this piece demand to be taught the words «worker», «exploitation» and «class struggle» instead of the words «branch», «nest» and «fish». The interruption here does not consist in the inversion of the roles of teacher and pupil; it happens instead in the dialectical switch: although the common everyday words have been replaced with political concepts, the workers have also learnt to read through the ostensibly meaningless words that they rejected; they have implemented their «attitudes» through the «moods» of other words.

3. Sense and sensuality: The aesthetics of education cannot simply be translated into the dialectical didactics of the teacher–student position.

Instead, the aesthetic is to be conceived, according to Theodor W. Adorno, as a «fraying» of overlapping forms of artistic expression.9 These over-

laps happen both in the teaching plays and in teaching itself when language, images and interactions come together – when interactions, which are both sensual and meaningful, thus produce real experiences. In the words of art pedagogue Karl-Joseph Pazzini: «All education is aesthetic because it provokes transitions from sensuality to sense, though that meaning is always undermined by the sensual, the physical. Unbelievable.»10 If we take seriously the aesthetic element of education in this sense then the teaching play can also be redefined beyond the differentiation of theory and practice. The teaching situation, like the teaching play, is also about aesthetic processes that go back to art – without being equivalent to it: diagrams and wall charts contain graphic, gestural and visual elements pertinent to a kind of demonstration that is crucial to learning, hearing, seeing and speaking – before anything can be known. Transcripts and collective readings, teaching dialogues and critical questions have poetic, rhetorical and atmospheric qualities that can be projected onto more than just their pedagogical functions.11 In this sense aesthetic education is also trans-individual (fig. 2).

Teaching Piece 2: Alienation Gestures

Brecht learnt not only from the theatre; many of his insights on contemporary acting came from the cinema. When he first engaged seriously with the question of teaching as an aesthetic practice, he came across the famous scene in The Gold Rush where Charlie Chaplin’s character cooks and eats his boot (fig. 1). Chaplin’s source was a nineteenth-century legend about a group of gold diggers getting snowed in in Sierra Nevada. To avoid starvation they ate not only their own shoes but ultimately also each other. Chaplin was less interested in the story itself than in the way it represented the existential conflict between hunger and the greed for gold. In an addendum to the boot scene from The Gold Rush he has little bread rolls dancing away like ballerina’s shoes. He was interested in the transformation of urges, the transformation of bodies and matter into food and, above all, the point where an object loses its identity and starts to seem unfamiliar.

Brecht discovered this scene just as he was about to introduce the alienation effect as the revolutionary element of his epic drama. For this he was constantly rethinking it: Brecht was convinced of the critical epistemological power of the alienation effect. Its potential lay not only in the fact that the audience would see something new through it (every teacher wants to show something new – it is a pedagogical impulse intrinsic to teaching); Brecht was hoping that alienation and the non-evident – whether in theatre,

cinema or the classroom – could reveal new things in the already familiar. With reference to the «Street Scene», Brecht describes alienation as follows: «Briefly, this is a technique of taking the human social incidents to be portrayed and labelling them as something striking, something that calls for explanation, that is not to be taken for granted, not just natural.»12 Simply demonstrating or performing is not enough. The label as «something striking» in the incident portrayed leads to the core of Brecht’s theory of alienation: to alienate is primarily to demonstrate or show: «Showing Has to Be Shown! […] All attitudes must be based on the attitude of showing.»13 Brecht was always very sure of the political purposes he was pursuing with the alienation effect, but he was never quite so sure of its aesthetic dimension. Perhaps there is no theory to it. What exactly is the unknown element, the non-evident aspect of the boot scene in The Gold Rush? What happens to the boot when it is alienated as a thanksgiving turkey? Can we regard it as a social analysis of the relationship between people, hunger and animals? Or should we see the lack of meat – and the boot as a painful reminder of that lack – as punishment for the gold digger’s greed? Or, as we watch and empathise, are we simply supposed to observe that leather is a special material which, divested of its natural function as a garment, is first shown as a little house for feet and then cooked as a broiler? And might the metonymic power of this alienation not suddenly give us the impression that Chaplin is stuffing himself with the shoe in order, perhaps, to show the stupid gold digger across the table where his greed for gold will lead? For in this scene Chaplin does in fact act like a teacher who uses the meal to teach his starving student a lesson – while devouring a part of himself in the process. Is that not a mechanism that comes into force in many teaching situations, where teachers themselves embody a piece of the lesson?

↖ Fig. 2 Charles Mo­ser, «Sachzwang» [practical constraint] – student art and education workspace, Lucerne, HSLU D&K, 22 Oct. 2014. On a Hermes Baby typewriter the students collated a list of words that seemed foreign or sus­pect or promising or interesting for their artistic education. Other words and phrases included «core objective», «clockwise», «ascension», «opportunity costs», «border­line». Without being enunciated, these words had an impact on the emerging works. Every week a new «verbal observer» was chosen and written on the black­board, usually by Rafael Lippuner as initiator of the project. ↗ Fig. 3 Charles Moser, Der Schamane [The Shaman], student art and educa­tion workspace, Lucerne, HSLU D&K, Oct. 2014

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But the Chaplin film is silent. Nothing is said, nothing explained. It is all just demonstration, so at first it remains completely open in its didactic intentions. Brecht gets caught up on a single gesture in his viewing of the scene: «A-effect in Chaplin: eating the boot (with eating habits, removing the nail like a chicken bone, forefinger splayed out).»14 This reference to the forefinger gives expression to the gestic physicality of the didactics, which Brecht found so interesting, in its simplest and most basic form. But a closer viewing reveals that it is not the forefinger that Chaplin splays, but rather the nail as though it were his forefinger. The fact that Brecht remarks on this particular detail begs the question: What does this gesture teach, what is the finger (nail) pointing to? Does this ostensibly clear pointing gesture not in fact render everything unclear? Or is the viewer’s attention intentionally drawn to nothing at all, so that nothing is pointed to but the method of pointing itself? Playful, cruel, absurd, perhaps even a little sadistic – like good teaching sometimes can be?

Attentiveness to the small gesture was developed for so long in Brecht’s conceptualisation of epic drama that it eventually became the keystone of his theory of alienation. And the potential of the gesture was duplicated. On the one hand it was part of the actor’s repertoire as a specific technique for pointing out social significance. On the other it became a rhetorical force that Brecht would discover as a specific form of overdetermination in poems, pictures and speeches.15 Walter Benjamin’s writings on Brecht emphasise the dialectical function of the gesture and even go so far as to call it the «mother of dialectics». The gesture is the moment at which reader and viewer pause and marvel; and their wonder is conceived as being temporal, as a «blockage in the stream of real life».16 The gesture, we might add, also teaches us something about learning in that something is understood, in that it is not at first understood. It is the opposite of Powerpoint, which

shows what it says and says what it shows.17 Brecht had to explain time and again exactly what the artistic value of the teaching play was. He under­ scored the point that the A-effect, and especially the gesture at its micrological core, had nothing to do with art and was just «a little sub-incident».18 Hence it is theory and practice, movement and language. It is embodied thinking.

Teaching Piece 3: Transparency, Desire and Knowledge

At the start of the academic year 2015–2016 Charles Moser photographed a teaching situation at Lucerne School of Art and Design; the photograph shows the newly arrived cohort of students on the Fine Arts and Art & Design Education study programme (fig. 3). An essential module on «transparency» familiarised these students with the possibilities of various media and materials. It also sought to expand their ideas about transparency, to multiply associations and thereby lay foundations for the individual formulation of tasks. The basic idea came from Stefan Gritsch (pictured in the photograph); Charles Moser and Rachel Lumbsden (also pictured) collaborated. Gritsch recalls: «‹Transparency› was my favourite module.

I originally designed it as a ten-day course back in the 1990s, then reactivated it for the BA as a basic, cross-media module, then built on it with Charles and Rachel. It was always a huge success. The things that came out of it were amazing. Everyone had a brilliant time, and it really was illuminating.

In this picture you can see me trying to introduce the theme to them, and naturally everything looks rosy to me. I’d put a shopping bag over my head – I still have it in my cardboard box, which was full of other utensils and objects that formed subjective connections for the conceptual pairing of transparency and opacity.» And Moser adds: «Stefan often worked with performance when he was teaching. On this occasion he put the bag over his head with the opening to the rear, like a cockscomb. This sudden transformation in the person of Gritsch was the trigger for the photograph. I’ve only just noticed the signal effect of Rachel’s gesture now; it’s as though she sensed danger. The teacher Gritsch was standing there like some sort of snooper, suicide or pervert – someone cutting off their own source of oxygen. This moment of transformation really grabbed the students too – a strange teacher becoming stranger still, someone breathing their own exhalations. That was what was special about that moment.»

An unfamiliar teacher teaching transparency by making things obscure. The gesture as the core of alienation here used as an aesthetic practice, a form of aesthetic thinking and teaching producing no predictable results. And for that it perpetuates

itself in Charles Moser’s memory all the more. The teaching piece can be a micrological event within the lesson. It has the power to open things up, to arouse curiosity, to leave an impression. The alienating gesture is crucial to it because it is capable of awakening the desire for knowledge, though without satisfying it too quickly. The gesture that generated transparency in Gritsch’s teaching piece is more than ambivalent; it serves the production of a singular knowledge: a syllabus which, depending on the circumstances, may at times be toxic, dangerous, or unnervingly funny – and at times beneficial as well.

1 Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man [1795], trans.

Reginald Snell, New York 2004, p. 92 and p. 98.

2 Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Quand les images prennent position, Paris 2009, where Brecht’s use of photography in the Kriegsfibel [War Primer] of 1939–1944 is subjected to thorough political, pictorial and pedagogical analysis.

3 Bertolt Brecht, «Vergnügungstheater oder Lehrtheater?» [1935], in: idem, Werke. Grosse kommen­ tierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht et al., 31 vols, Berlin 1988–2000, vol. 22.1 [Schriften 2], pp. 106–116, esp. p. 111.

4 Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera [1928], trans. Ralph Manheim & John Willett (The Collected Plays, vol. 2, pt. 2), London 1979, p. 55 (Act 2, Scene 6).

5 Cf. Rainer Nägele, Der andere Schauplatz. Büchner, Brecht, Artaud, Heiner Müller, Frankfurt a. M. and Basel 2014, p. 40 ff., which explores the use of the word «mouth» as metaphor and points up the textual opening of another scene of the scene, one determined by the «ob-scenity» of the impulse.

6 Bertolt Brecht, The Mother [1933], trans. Steve Gooch, London 1978, p. 32; for the German see Bertolt Brecht, «Die Mutter» [1933], in: Brecht 1988–2000, vol. 3 [Stücke 3], pp. 261–324, esp. p. 290.

7 Bertolt Brecht, «Zur Theorie des Lehrstücks» [1930/1931], in: Brecht 1988–2000, vol. 21.1 [Schriften 1], p. 397.

8 Cf. Wolf Biermann, Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten! Die Auto­ biographie, Berlin 2016, p. 432, and Brecht 1933, p. 287 ff.

9 Theodor W. Adorno, «Die Kunst und die Künste» [1967], in: idem, Ohne Leitbild. Parva Aesthetica, Frankfurt a. M. 1967, pp. 158–182, esp. p. 164.

10 Karl-Josef Pazzini, Bildung vor Bildern. Kunst, Pädagogik, Psychoanalyse, Bielefeld 2015, p. 23.

11 Thus the concept of aesthetic education proposed here can be related to and at the same time distinguished from the notion advocated in Jacques Rancière, Der unwissende Lehrmeister. Fünf Lektionen über die intellektuelle Emanzipation [1987], Vienna 2007, p. 27 ff. and passim, since it looks for the process of education not only in the student–teacher relationship but also in minor aesthetic events of the pedagogical.

12 Bertolt Brecht, «The Street Scene: A Basic Model for an Epic Theatre» [1938/1940], in: idem, Brecht on Theatre, eds Marc Silberman, Steve Giles & Tom Kuhn, London 2015, pp. 176–183, esp. p. 180.

Translator’s note: The Brechtian terms, «Verfremdung» and «Verfremdungseffekt» are translated here as «alienation» and «alienation effect»; for a more nuanced discussion of these concepts see the editors’ introduction to Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, eds Marc Silberman a. o., London 2015, pp. 4 f.

13 Bertolt Brecht, «Showing Has to Be Shown» [c. 1945], trans. John Willett, in idem, Poems Part 3, 1938–1956, eds John Willett & Ralph Manheim, London 1976, p. 341.

14 Bertolt Brecht, «V-Effekte bei Chaplin» [1936/1937], in: Brecht 1988–2000, vol. 22.1 [Schriften 1], p. 223.

15 See Ruth Berlau’s accompanying text to the Kriegsfibel. According to her interpretation, concrete truth for Brecht is gestural in the pictures of the primer; it is concealed in the documentary. Cf. Bertolt Brecht, «Kriegsfibel. Text/Fassungen» [1955], in: Brecht 1988–2000, vol. 12 [Gedichte 2], pp. 409–436, esp. p. 416 f.

16 Walter Benjamin, «Was ist das epische Theater? Eine Studie zu Brecht» [1931/1966], in: idem, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al., Frankfurt a. M. 1974–1989, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 519–531, p. 530 and p. 531.

17 Cf. Pazzini 2015, p. 152 ff.

18 Brecht 1938/1940, p. 181 f.

Into the Open Risk as a Quality of Artistic Education Bernadett Settele

Any definition of what «artistic education» is will inevitably also involve the question of what we mean by the attribute «artistic». Are we referring to the author or the approach? And is it not the case that education tends to be discussed in terms of an antithetical relationship to art? German discourse on art education [Kunstvermittlung] (or, more accurately, education in and through the arts), has tended to address the close but often fraught relationship between art and education.

In the work of authors such as Eva Sturm, to whom I shall return, art education has become an independent and fully fledged theoretical concept which is now used to negotiate the concept of art itself. The following contribution explores how the charged proximity of art and education is presented in the specialist discourse around it. The openness, incompleteness and uncertainty of aesthetic experience is a much discussed topos, but there are other possibilities too. In the following I go into a discourse that negotiates openness from the perspective of risk and thereby shows that it takes its inspiration from the level of bodily significance.

The result is a quality of aesthetic experience that can also be found in bodily exertion, in putting your physical integrity on the line, even in the transgression of norms and propriety. Lastly, on the basis of an assignment from the CAMP project, I develop the hypothesis that there is worthwhile resistance and, simultaneously, perhaps the greatest risk in exposing yourself in the presence of others as an artistic mediator with your own practice, experience and afflictedness.

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The German term Künstlerische Vermittlung [artistic education] is often read in two ways. It either denotes a formative educational process [Bildung] initiated by artists, whereby the art education – which may entail a transformation – is designated as «artistic» because of its practitioners. While this self-designation is not official, there is nonetheless a certain status enhancement if the educators are also artists. In the other reading, the form of the artistic education is deemed to be of greater importance than the person conducting it.

In this case the attribute «artistic» designates qualities that can and should develop as a result of this sort of art education. As with participatory artistic practices, artistic education also works processually and relationally, with sequences and relations that cannot and should not be fully represented. It might consist of a diffuse action, a conceptual postulate with minimal visibility or a more or less transitory intervention at an exhibition. In the context of our expanded conception of the work of art, the minimal evidentiality of this practice is all too easily subordinated to the authorial control of the artist, who symbolises the circumstance that art is happening while also standing for the possibility that Bildung, or some formative educational process, will ensue. The evident danger here is that everything an artist initiates as art with or in the presence of others is already deemed artistic education.

But these are not the only two interpreta­tions. There is a further reading based on the notion that art is always formative and educational.

In its extreme form, the radical version of this polemic has given rise to the hypothesis that every imaginable attempt to approach art in a professional, collaborative way is automatically discredited.

Those who insist that art is intrinsically formative or educational will tend towards the view that it requires no explanation or mediation; art education, artistic education or education in and through the arts then becomes an illegitimate practice with the dubious appeal of unauthorised appropriation.

This would imply that everything undertaken by a practitioner of artistic education – explanation, interpretation, the creation of social situations, art outreach projects – is already going too far. If everything ventured by art has only to serve art and its truth, mediation would only be relevant to groups of people who are incapable of accessing it independently.1 I certainly wouldn’t deny that art is effective and formative, but the insinuation of a single, intrinsically given truth or meaning that can only be spoiled by application or extension does not sit well with me.2 So here I shall only deal with certain qualities that go hand in hand with the second interpretation of Künstlerische Vermittlung. And I supplement the qualifier «artistic» with the more accurate definition of risk as the specific formulation of «openness» – a term that has occupied a prominent place in the theory of art pedagogy once before.

Openness and Risk in Art Pedagogy

One of the first specific and potentially risky qualities of art education is that it represents a move into the open. Speaking of the unplannability of what happens in his own conception of this aesthetic operation, Pierangelo Maset writes that this entails «not giving up the risk of the open in favour of incremental mediatory steps and [instead] undertaking the artfulness of mediation as mediation».3 This aesthetic operation does not process artistic positions into readily comprehensible bitesize pieces. Its underlying argument implies willing submission to contemporary positions in a logic that allows them to have their effect, albeit at a reduced rate and in a way more like a vaccine.

According to Maset, submission to the specificity of an artistic position leads to experiences and situations that cannot be determined in advance, much less planned for. In the logic of this argument it is the processes as well as the results, transformations or learning achievements that are contingent and not fully available. To use an analogy: it’s as though you were jumping into the open. That said, you’re not jumping out of the window on your own; there’s an artist there to hold your hand – perhaps Yves Klein in this instance.

The figure of «openness» in art pedagogy is aligned with the discourse around aesthetic ex-

perience. As an uncontrollable phenomenon with uncertain results, aesthetic experience – and thus also education in and through the arts – resists controlling interventions. It enriches modes of cognition with forms of sensory perception and stands for a switching of sense, for the endless formation of meanings. Aesthetic education calls into question the privileged position of language and rationality: affective reactions, physically perceptible states and precarious perceptual phenomena resist language even as they challenge it. For all the inadequacies of its access to the sensorially mediated qualities of experience, language attempts to bring forth something previously unsaid or unthought. As a point of transition, aesthetic education mediates between various modes of thought and reflection and brings them into a productive friction with one another. This transition has been and still is credited with an epistemic value: it produces an alternative form of knowledge.

As editors of a recent book on experientially open formative educational processes, Birgit Engel and Katja Böhme have said that they are interested in sensory aesthetic phenomena that «neither conform to a pattern of terminological clarity nor belong to the categories of operationalised mediatory logics».4 These discernible but indefinite phenomena baulk at clarity; this prepares a path into the openness of experience. There are elements of rationality critique and school critique in this sort of expert discourse on art pedagogy.

Depending on your point of view it can be directed against the privileging of linguistic access, against the idea that something can be fully didacticised or against standardisation and evaluation ac­ cording to the logic of competence. Interestingly enough, Maset still regards operations as positive, as the comprehension of art, whereas for Engel and Böhme the operationalised logics of mediation are already negatively connoted as formulaic recipes for art education. For Engel and Böhme the leap into the open is equipped with relatively concrete objects against which we push back, such as – to use the same analogy – the window frame of a school building.

A seemingly radical rhetoric which identified the aesthetic in the testing of boundaries, in a willingness to take sensory and physical risks, was espoused by Gerd Selle in 2005. Selle advocated open, risky approaches as a means of testing the body’s resilience to pain, injury and exhaustion: «Artistic approaches could combine experimental, exploratory movements with forms of communication that go beyond conventional designatory terminology.»5 As a «notorious didact of the here and now of the bodily presence of consciousness» he had been taken out of service with the emergence of the new media, wrote Selle one year be-

fore that. An elderly man and art pedagogue would like to see greater intensity and recommends that his students seek out bodily extremes and liminal experiences. But why the body metaphor? Isn’t that going too far? Elsewhere Selle provides a sophisticated explanation of his advocacy of risky (auto)formative education without risking actual effects, as though he were advocating violence and intrusions into the physical boundaries of others: «like art, the practice of art pedagogy thrives on the jeopardy of subjectivity.»6 The aesthetic subject emerges between self-preservation and self-jeopardization. On the one hand, Selle’s subject is still conceived as an active and sovereign entity; otherwise it could neither instigate nor reflect upon aesthetic projects. On the other hand the aesthetic subject experiences itself as sensorially decentred in the exercise of its senses. In much the same vein, Jörg Zirfas writes in favour of an aesthetics of risk, reflecting on experiential extremes such as pleasure, rapture and ecstasy in a «logic of transgression» of the seemly and the proper. Incidentally, Zirfas is also quite right to point out that aesthetic extremes – because «potentially dangerous» – are «always flanked with all manner of ritualizations».7 If the discourse of risky openness now seems past its best, it is still useful to follow discussions about risk.8 According to more current positions, venturing to step into the open, into indeterminacy and zones of unavailability, involves something that makes the leap or fall from the window productive: the formation of the subject, albeit understood as the formation of subjectivity, which has less to do with self-determination, sovereignty and self-identity and their heightened experience in moments of disappointment and deflation and is more concerned with responsivity, decentrings and openings. This way of thinking locates venturing into the open in the act of answering, in the responsive, which to a certain extent leads into medial interstices. In the context of this new phenomenological discourse, Andrea Sabisch recently published a monograph in which she works out the «fragile and volatile transitions» between the subject, the social and the image and dis­ cusses subject formation in the context of image emergence.9 Tracing this becoming, this being affected, promises a new, more nuanced concept of artistic education which incorporates Paul Ricoeur’s concept of aesthetic forms of «becoming other» and Gesa Heinrichs’ forms of «becomingin-difference».10

New Risks: An Example

Finally I want to link the foregoing discussion of risky structures and major experiential moments back to the outside world. A genuinely dangerous counterpart is the societal order. As it stands now.

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Embodied in the self. As a norm. We are, to speak with Judith Butler, passionately attached to power.11 The following words from Karl-Josef Pazzini can be read in that same sense: «Formative education happens at points of resistance. The desire to overcome boundaries mobilises, but also elicits fear».12 This idea can be applied to engaged and politically risky mediation. It represents a type of risk insofar as it invites us to attack existing structures and think about them differently. The logics of institutions and the way in which knowledge about art and approaches to art are institutionalised and framed may think that artistic education calls their very existence into question if it prescribes a logic of change and dehierarchisation.13 But what is riskier still – and Pazzini makes this clear – is calling yourself and your own role into question: the symbolic position is lost; an imaginary self-image starts to wobble, teeter, is doubted, recalibrated.

The Centre of Excellence for Art Education and Didactics organises a preview and preparation for the further education of teaching personnel. Susanne Kudorfer and I implement it for the Camp# project. This involves a group of art education students, including a number of prospective teachers and art educators, dealing with an exhibition. One of the lecturers – perhaps it is me – sets an assignment: the first tour should be about noticing two things: the thing that catches your own attention and the thing that catches your attention on behalf of others. Once the group has discussed the difference between these two points, the lecturers suggest retaining the former point as the topic and substantial basis upon which to build an educational strategy for the latter. So the connection to the target audience is to be ignored; the students are to develop their own genuine interests – interests that spring from their own artistic practices, their own artistic predilections or from entirely personal sources. «What is risky, worthwhile, productive about this exhibition? What strikes you?»

We ask these questions and tell the students to keep to this observation – this punctum in Roland Barthes’ sense.14 Rather than disregarding the things that move them, participants should explore them, honing and refining their questions without wanting to answer them straight away or conclude the questioning with respect to ideas about mediation.

In terms of the need for self-assurance as an artistic art educator, this didactic exercise involved several risky moments. Students had to disregard the content of the exhibition as assured knowledge and rely on their own artistic perspectives instead of speculating about target audiences and their interests. The verbal, performative or physical representation of the things that proved productive was also a complex demand, for to do

so is to give tangible form to something that is inaccessible or hard to verbalise and at best to reconstruct it for the others who were present. This in turn means exposing your own responses in the presence of others.

The exercise described above was indebted to the idea of shared reception. This idea also occurs in Sturm: «What happens in the process of shared reception, what is done to the work», she asks, «when an approaching subject picks up a line of flight and runs with it by producing (performing, drawing, speaking, writing) on a symbolic level something that generates a difference from the starting point; and if that which transpires diverges from conventional methods and discourse?»15 In this particular context Sturm is writing more about what happens to art during its reception than she is about what happens in the intersubjective and communicative situation of sharing.

But I’m going to tweak this argument slightly and instead argue that the real risk can be discerned in the individual subjects. As in the example from CAMP: it is embarrassing if someone is able to say what struck them but then cannot elicit the same response from others. The attempt to reconstruct the thing they were struck by turns the person in question into a performer of their own reception, their own process, their own response. This problem verges on the structural aporia of artistic education: self-exposure as an instance of artistic reception for the sake of sharing it with others.

The productivity of aesthetics in destabilising familiar patterns of thinking, notions of self-image and hitherto lived roles also affects the person who feels responsible for the art education. There is a risk: the risk that sharing with others – in artistic education – might fail. An artistic education that wants to strike its target must work on resistance to its own response.

1 On culturalist and classicist motifs of mediation and the thesis of «the arts as white property» from the perspective of critical race theory, see the recent article by Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, Amelia M. Kraehe and B. Stephen Carpenter II, «The Arts as White Property. An Introduction to Race, Racism, and the Arts in Education», in: The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts in Education, eds idem, New York 2018, pp. 1–31.

2 For the thesis that art only emerges when it undergoes application see Karl-Josef Pazzini, «Kunst existiert nicht, es sei denn als angewandte» [2000], in: idem, Bildung vor Bildern. Kunst, Pädagogik, Psychoanalyse, Bielefeld 2015, pp. 51–67. The concept of the continuation of art in the Deleuzian metaphor of lines of flight and elsewhere was coined

by Eva Sturm, Von Kunst aus.

Kunstver­mittlung mit Gilles Deleuze, Vienna 2011.

3 Pierangelo Maset, Ästhetische Operationen und kunstpädagogi­sche Mentalitäten, Hamburg 2005, p. 14 f.

4 Dust jacket text from Didaktische Logiken des Unbestimmten.

Immanente Qualitäten in erfahrungs­­offenen Bildungsprozessen, eds Birgit Engel and Katja Böhme, Munich 2015.

5 Gert Selle, «Der Körper als fremder und eigener», in: Die Kunst, der Körper, das Textile. Biografische Spuren in ästhetischen Prozessen, eds Norbert Schütz and Manfred Blohm, Cologne 2005, pp. 49–65, esp. p. 59.

6 Gert Selle, Ästhetische Erziehung oder Bildung in der zweiten Moderne? Über ein Kontinuitäts­ problem didaktischen Denkens, Hamburg 2004, p. 25; and idem, Kunstpädagogik und ihr Subjekt.

Entwurf einer Praxistheorie, Oldenburg 1998, p. 6.

7 Jörg Zirfas, «Eine Ästhetik des Risikos. Grenzgänge der ästheti­ schen Bildung», in: Lust, Rausch und Ekstase. Grenzgänge der Äs­thetischen Bildung, eds Eckart Liebau and Jörg Zirfas, Bielefeld 2013, pp. 9–28, esp. p. 24 and p. 23.

8 This context invites reflection on ek-static subjectivity with Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, New York 2004.

9 See Andrea Sabisch, Bildwerdung.

Reflexionen zur pathischen un d performativen Dimension der Bild­erfahrung, Munich 2018, esp. p. 9 ff.; see also Kerstin Hallmann, «Zwischen Performanz und Re­sonanz. Potenziale einer Kunst­ vermittlung als Praxis des Erscheinens», in: Formate der Kunst­ vermittlung. Kompetenz, Performanz, Resonanz, eds Pierangelo Maset and Kerstin Hallmann, Bielefeld 2017, pp. 79–89.

10 Gesa Heinrichs, Bildung, Identität, Geschlecht. Eine (postfeministische) Einführung, Königstein im Taunus 2001, p. 20 ff.

11 Cf. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection, Stanford 1997, pp. 6–8.

12 Cf. Karl-Josef Pazzini, «Grenz­ wertige Bildung an den entgrenzen­ den Künsten», in: Where the Magic Happens. Bildung nach der Entgrenzung der Künste, eds Torsten Meyer et al., Munich 2016, pp. 301–309, esp. p. 301.

13 For works in and on (art) institutions cf. Susanne Kudorfer, Nora Landkammer, microsillons and Bernadett Settele, «Arbeiten in und an Institutionen», in: Kunst­ vermittlung in Transformation.

Perspektiven und Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes, eds Elfi Anderegg et al., Zurich 2012, pp. 9–13; on «Change» cf. The Sage Handbook of Educational Action Research, eds Susan E. Noffke and Bridget Somekh, London 2008, pp. 1–5.

14 Barthes’ punctum concept had already been cited by Sturm 2011, p. 123.

15 Sturm 2011, p. 29 («something hit home and was shared»).

Contributors

Wolfgang Brückle, born 1968, has been working as a senior lecturer in the fields of art history, photography and cultural critique at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences since 2013. He studied art history and letters at the universities of Marburg, Dijon and Hamburg, where he was awarded a PhD in 2001. He worked as an assistant curator at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and as an assistant professor and senior research fellow at the universities of Stuttgart, Bern, Essex and Zurich. His fields of research include medieval art, art theory, museology, contemporary art and the history of photography.

He is currently the head of two SNSF research projects entitled Postphotography and Curating Photography in the Networked Image Economy.

Alexandra D’Incau, born 1980, studied photography in Zurich and Amsterdam and completed a Master of Arts in Fine Arts with a major in art teaching at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences in 2011. She was then employed as an artistic assistant on that course for five years, collaborating on the research projects Camp# and Kunstunterricht in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft [Art Teaching in a Post-Migration Society]. At present she is teaching visual design to future secondary school teachers at the FHNW School of Education; she has just completed an MA in education at the Universität Basel with a focus on the theory of education and educational research.

Stephan Eichenmann moved into the world of work after two semesters on the «Kunst & Vermittlung» [Fine Arts and Art & Design Education] course at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. He now works as a cabinetmaker in the Bern region.

Klodin Erb, born 1963, is an artist and tutor at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. She studied fine art in Zurich and has been working as a self-employed artist since 1993.

Her preferred medium is painting.

She regards herself as a conceptual painter who explores the essence of the medium in her various groups of work. She is convinced that painting is absolutely not dead and that critical engagement with the medium can lead to an independent and contemporary position. Her view of the world is supplemented by video works that encapsulate her artistic attitude. www.klodinerb.com Lena Eriksson, born 1971, is an artist and tutor on the Master of Arts in Fine Arts at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. In her artistic work she explores the poetic, absurdist and utopian potential of the everyday through performances, videos and drawings. Eriksson also sees mediation and the invention of educational formats as part of her artistic work. From 1999 to 2003 she was co-director of Kaskadenkondensator; from 2004 to 2009 she ran the Lodypop art space. Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration are another central concern, as realised in the projects Monday2Modnay, Neuland-mag.net and the Abendschule.biz.

Karin Fromherz, born 1968, trained as a handicraft teacher, visual designer and beekeeper. She teaches at universities in Lucerne and Zurich. She is currently reinvesting her service award for twenty years’ teaching in her own further education: an MA in film studies.

As former co-director of the BA Fine Arts and Art & Design Education she was responsible for the development and implementation of the current curriculum. Her interest in artistic education find its outlet in the CAS programme «Didaktik als Kunst» [Didactics as Art] (https://www.hslu. ch/de-ch/musik/weiterbildung/ cas-angebote/cas-didaktik-als-kunst).

Fromherz tends a ProSpecieRara garden with her family and is a member of the central committee of the professional association for the visual arts, Visarte, where she is responsible for education.

Wiktoria Furrer, born 1983, has been a research assistant at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences since 2017, where she is currently working on the Sinergia research project «Praktiken ästhe­tischen Denkens» [Practices of Aesthetic Thinking]. In 2018 she started a doctorate and has been working on the «Epistemologien ästhetischer Praktiken» project [Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practic­es] at ETH Zürich, the Universität Zürich and the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. She studied political science in Dresden, Breslau and Berlin and Cultural Media Studies at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, where she was subsequently employed as a research assistant at the Institute for Theory from 2012 to 2017. Furrer was a co-founder of Tatenträger AG, where she was active as a digital media youth support worker until 2015. For the preparatory course in Berlin she received funding from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Hertie-Stiftung.

Cynthia Gavranic, born 1969, has been art education officer at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst since 2014. She completed her studies with an MA in art history, a Master of Advanced Studies in Museology and the Certificate of the SVEB [Swiss Federation for Adult Learning]. From 2010 to 2015 she taught art history at the Gymnasium Liceo Artistico in Zurich; from 2011 to 2014 she was employed as an art educator at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen.

From 2003 to 2010 she was a curator at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zurich.

Sabine Gebhardt Fink, born 1966, has been Professor of Contemporary Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences since 2011 and is also director of the Master of Arts in Fine Arts – with majors in Art in Public Spheres, Critical Image Practices and Art Teaching. She studied art history in Munich and Basel and received her doctorate in 2002 for a thesis titled Transformation der Aktion [Trans­ formation of Action]. As a postdoctoral student she worked on the research project «Das Verhältnis der Künste» (The Relationship of the Arts) within the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. She also works as a curator and conducts research on art education, contemporary art, performance art and media theory around 1900. She was director of the Camp# project at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences; she is currently researching «Revolving Performance Histories» in the context of the arts and sciences research project Performance Chronik Basel.

Emilie George, born 1979, is an art education officer at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, where she is also responsible for outreach.

Having studied business adminis­ tration and technical administration in the performing arts, she served as director of the Biennale de la danse in 2004 (Europa) and 2006 (Danse la ville) and went on to become artistic coordinator of the Biennale d’art contemporain de Lyon. She is co-founder of the Franco-Cameroonian association Arbre à musique. At La Kunsthalle Mulhouse George contributes to the Recherche-action autour de la médiation. As director of this workshop she provides support to visiting artists as they produce works in close collaboration with each newly defined community, in particular the Utopia House project, which has been running since 2016.

Susanne Hefti, born 1984, is an artist. Her main interest is the analysis by documentary photo­ graphy of symptomatic architectures and sites as expressions of social and political processes. She generally produces her works on the basis of extended research trips to specific locations. She is currently preparing a doctoral dissertation on «Regressive Architectures» at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich. Her publication Skopje Walkie Talkie is due to be published this year by Spector Books in Leipzig.

Silvia Henke, born 1962, has been working as Cultural Studies Scholar and as Head of the De­ partment for Theory at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences since 2000. After her MA in Philosophy, French and German Literary Criticism at the Universität Basel, she worked as an assistant professor of German Literary Theory and Media Studies in the German Department of the same institution from 1990 to 1999. In Lucerne she has conducted research on art and religion in the post-secular era (sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation) and on transcultural art education (sponsored by Mercator Schweiz).

She is currently researching artistic thinking and aesthetic education.

Samuel Herzog, born 1966, is a freelance author. He eats, drinks, cooks and travels – and writes about it. Since 2001 he has been the managing director of HOIO, a company that imports herbs and spices from the fictional island of Lemusa (www.hoio.org). From 2002 until 2017 he was visual arts editor at the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

San Keller, born 1971, is codirector of the BA programme in Fine Arts and Art & Design Education at Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. He is well known for his participatory performances and ephemeral actions, which frequently approximate social experiments.

The overall tone of Keller’s oeuvre is critical, conceptual and playful and reflects on the relationship between art and life. His investigation of art as service provision ultimately gives the audience the opportunity to question outdated paradigms and experi­ence them in a new way while also placing them under critical scrutiny. His actions start with con­tractual arrangements that set out the rules for his works, but since these rely on the participation of others, the course they take and their ulti­mate outcomes remain unpredictable.

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Stina Kasser, born 1978, is an artist from Zurich. She works predominantly in the media of performance, video and installation, though a clear attribution of her work to just one medium is often impossible. In the summer of 2018 she completed her studies at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences with a Master of Arts in Fine Arts, majoring in Art Teaching / Arts in Public Spheres.

In her master’s work she dealt with (public) space, interiority and exteriority on tentnet.ch, working with her own texts and texts written by others. She then left the world of words behind to pursue her thoughts and to research performance art and tent building. Kasser is currently working on social art projects and is preparing for a career as an art teacher.

Elke Krasny, born 1965, is a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She holds a PhD from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. Her research connects architecture, urbanism, contemporary art and feminisms.

In 2012 she was a visiting scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architec­ture in Montreal. Together with Lara Perry and Dorothee Richter, Krasny organises a series of international conferences on feminisms and curating. Her exhibitions and books include In Reserve: The Household!

Historic Models and Contemporary Positions from the Bauhaus (Weimar); Hands-on Urbanism 1850–2012.

Vom Recht auf Grün (Vienna); and the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Recent essays include «Modernist Green. Changing Regimes of Labour», in: Into the Great Wide Open, ed. Andreas Rumpfhuber (2017), pp. 183–196; «Citizenship and the Museum. On Feminist Acts», in: Feminism and Museums. Inter­vention, Disruption and Change, ed. Jenna C. Ashton (2017), vol. 1, pp .74–99; and «Caring Activism. Collection, Assembly, and the Museum», in: Collecting in Time, eds Vera Lauf and Franciska Zólyom, https:// collecting-in-time.gfzk.de/en, Leipzig 2017, pp. 1–9.

Christoph Lichtin, born 1963, grew up in Solothurn.

Since September 2013 he has served as director of the Historisches Museum Luzern and head of the Cantonal Museums. He studied art history at the Universität Bern and, before his current employment, worked for nine years as collection conservationist at the Kunstmuseum Luzern.

Rahel Lüchinger, born 1981, is a visual artist and art educator. She lives in Zurich. Her artistic practice deals with materiality, presentation and economy. These issues also inform her work as an art educator, which often focuses on interactive processes and work on originals.

She has worked as an art educator at the Migros Museum für Gegen­ warts­kunst, at Akku Emmenbrücke and at the Kultur- und Kongress­ zentrum Luzern [Culture and Congress Centre in Lucerne]; at present she is working as a freelance artist and as an art education officer at the Aargauer Kunsthaus. Her work was last shown at the Kunsthalle Luzern.

Linda Luv, born 1985, is a performance artist. She lives in Zurich, Lucerne and Frankfurt.

Her artistic work occupies the (intermediate) space of transdisci­ Susanne Kudorfer, born 1967, plinary artistic practices. She deals is director of education and outreach with current issues such as luxury, at the Freilichtmuseum Ballenberg waste and overabundance; her and teaches at the Lucerne University work seeks out unbounded excess of Applied Arts and Sciences. She in a capitalist world; she explores studied art history, pedagogy and moments of transgression through social psychology. She worked her own institution, the Institut for the Kinder- und Jugendmuseum Myth. In the summer of 2018 she München until 1997, ran visitor completed the Master of Arts at the services at the Bavarian State Lucerne University of Applied Arts Painting Collections until 2008 and and Sciences. She has recently was director of art education and performed at ACT 17/18 in Switzerthe Kunstmuseum Luzern until 2013. land and at La Kunsthalle Mulhouse in France.

Rachel Mader, born 1969, is an art historian. Since September 2012 she has been director of the Art, Design & Public Spheres research group at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. Between 2009 and 2014 she directed a project entitled «The Organization of Contemporary Art: Structures, Production and Narrative» at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. Her publications include Kollektive Autorschaft in der Kunst.

Alternatives Handeln und Denkmodell, Bern 2012 (editor); Radikal ambivalent.

Engagement und Verantwortung in den Künsten heute, Zurich and Berlin 2014 (editor); «How to move in/ an institution», in: On Curating 21 [New Institutionalism] (2014), pp. 34–44.

Barbara Mahlknecht, born 1978, is a feminist researcher, curator, teacher and art educator.

She is a lecturer and researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

At present she is working on a PhD on social reproduction, Marxist feminism and the archive at Goldsmiths, University of London (AHRC scholarship). Her work focuses on the intertwining of curating, social reproduction and queer/feminist practice and theory, on the ideologies and histories of arts education, on the archive and its (un-)trans­ latability as well as on critical and feminist art education. Mahlknecht is part of Another Roadmap School / Another Roadmap for Arts Education and other networks.

Dominique Meyer (Bearboz), born 1970, is a French cartoonist who works in Paris and Mulhouse. He trained in the Atelier d’illustration at the École supérieure des arts décoratifs de Strasbourg and studied philosophy concurrently.

He works for the daily papers, in book design and as a teacher. His drawings have been published in comics, newspapers and magazines such as Charlie Hebdo. Reportagelike reproduction of the real world and the formal experimentation of the Oubapo comic movement are central themes in his work.

Alena Nawrotzki, born 1985, studied applied sciences at the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg and the Università degli Studi di Milano, focussing on «Art, the Middle Classes and the Literature of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century».

Since 2012 he has been responsible for programming and art education at the Migros Museum für Gegen­warts­kunst. Before that he worked at the Kunstverein in Hamburg and co-founded various project spaces.

Marie-Louise Nigg, born 1966, is a cultural scientist and lecturer in art and art theory at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. She wrote for several Swiss newspapers as a freelance art critic between 1993 and 2001. In 2014 she was awarded a doctorate at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for a dissertation published in 2017 under the title Gehen. Raumpraktiken in Literatur und Kunst [Walking: spatial practices in art and literature].

Besides spatial theory and the spatial arts, her research interests and teaching areas include attentiveness and awareness of others as well as kitsch and trash in theory and practice.

Chiara Ottavi, born 1995, is studying Fine Arts and Art & Design Education at the Lucerne University of Applied Arts and Sciences. She comes from Mendrisio and trained as a theatrical scene painter and set designer before her studies at Lucerne.

Siri Peyer, born 1978, has been Sebastian Utzni, born 1981, a research assistant on the is co-director of the BA programme «Kunst, Design und Öffentlichkeit» in Fine Arts and Art & Design [Art, Design & Public Spheres] PhD Education at the Lucerne University research programme at the Lucerne of Applied Arts and Sciences. He is a story collector and storyteller, University of Applied Arts and a visual artist working between Sciences since 2015, where she is and across various disciplines. He preparing her doctoral dissertation in the context of the project «What believes that everything is (probably) Can Art Do? Zur Relevanz von connected and he tries to make politisch engagierter Kunst seit 1960» sense of these connections without [What can art do? On the relevance searching for any grand unifying of politically engaged art since theory: «My work has no direct 1960] under the supervision of the political message. I am not expressHafenCity Universität Hamburg. ing what people should think or After training as a photographer at how they should act. For me my work the Hochschule für Gestaltung is more about making things visible. und Kunst in Zürich (2000–2004) and I try to create tools that allow people completing a Master of Advanced to start thinking or feeling about Studies in Curating at the Zürcher things happening.» Recent exhibiHochschule der Künste (2006–2008), tions include: NADA, New York 2018; Palais des Beaux Arts (BOZAR), she completed her studies in 2015 Brussels 2018; Art Rotterdam 2017; with a Master in Research on the Arts at the Universität Bern. She has Herrmann Germann Contemporary, curated numerous exhibitions and Zurich 2017; Raum für aktuelle co-curates and regularly publishes Kunst, Lucerne 2017; Haus Konstruktiv, articles on contemporary art.

Zurich 2016; Helmhaus, Zurich 2016; Kunstmuseum Olten, 2016.

Bernadett Settele, born 1976, www.sebastianutzni.com is an art theorist and an art educator.

Sandrine Wymann, She teaches on the Art Education master’s programme at the Zürcher born 1971, is a curator and, since Hochschule der Künste. Her 2008, director of La Kunsthalle research interests include the body, Mulhouse. She is also president of aesthetic education, contemporary Versant Est, the Alsace network for contemporary art. Wymann studied art and university teaching at the intersections of art, education economics and art history before and society with perspectives from working as a freelance curator and philosophy and cultural studies, art officer at the Institut Français gender studies and media studies. in Casablanca. A recurring theme At the Lucerne University of Applied in the many exhibition programmes and research projects she has Arts and Sciences Settele was most recently involved in the SNSF implemented as director of La Kunst­halle is the issue of mediation, research project «What Can Art Do? par­ticularly the practical application Zur Relevanz politisch engagierter of partici­patory and experimental Kunst seit 1960» [What can art do? projects. Selected exhibitions On the relevance of politically engaged art since 1960] (2015–2019). include Multipistes (2011); Daniel Gustav Cramer. Ten Works (2013); She is member of the board at the SFKP/SSPA (Schweizerische Rabih Mroué. Mer Méditerranée (2015) Fach­­gesellschaft für Kunstpädagogik) and Presque la Même Chose (2015). and is an affiliated member of the Since 2012 Wymann has run a working group on Affects, Feelings creative writing series in conjunction and Emotions at the Swiss Associa- with her exhibitions; the results tion for Gender Studies. will be published in 2019.

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Nummer journal

Imprint

Nummer is published once or twice a year and covers current developments at the Lucerne School of Art and Design. The publication brings together texts and images on research, training and further education along with features on special events, conferences and anniversaries.

Lucerne School of Art and Design

Previous issues: No. 1 urban.art.marks Kunst erforscht den Raum der Stadt [urban.art.marks. Artistic Research and Urban Space] No. 2 Destination Kultur Die Kultur des Tourismus [Destination Culture. The Culture of Tourism] No. 3 Postdigitale Materialität Vom Dialog des Handwerks mit den Optionen des Virtuellen [Post-Digital Materiality. On the Dialogue between Craft and the Options of the Virtual] No. 4 Made by …

Textilien im Zentrum [Made by… Textiles at the Centre] No. 5 Ultrashort, Hyperframe [Ultrashort, Hyperframe] No. 6 Nordwärts [Northwards] No. 7 Handwerker, Visionäre, Weltgestalter?

[Artisans, Visionaries, Creators of Worlds?]

No. 8 Forschung an den Übergängen.

Research at the Transitions

Nummer 9 – June 2019 Artistic Education Series editors Lucerne School of Art and Design, Gabriela Christen Issue editors Wolfgang Brückle and Sabine Gebhardt Fink Contributors Wolfgang Brückle, Alexandra D’Incau, Stephan Eichenmann, Klodin Erb, Lena Eriksson, Karin Fromherz, Wiktoria Furrer, Cynthia Gavranic, Sabine Gebhardt Fink, Émilie George, Susanne Hefti, Silvia Henke, Samuel Herzog, Stina Kasser, San Keller, Elke Krasny, Susanne Kudorfer, Christoph Lichtin, Rahel Lüchinger, Linda Luv, Rachel Mader, Barbara Mahlknecht, Dominique Meyer (Bearboz), Alena Nawrotzki, Marie-Louise Nigg, Chiara Ottavi, Siri Peyer, Bernadett Settele, Sebastian Utzni, Sandrine Wymann Proof-reading / German Wolfgang Brückle Translation and proof-reading / English Jonathan Blower Production Christian Schnellmann Design concept and type setting Velvet Creative Office, Lucerne Printer Druckerei Odermatt, Dallenwil Binder An der Reuss, Lucerne This publication and all its parts are subject to copyright. Any use that violates copyright restrictions without the prior consent of the editors is prohibited and punishable by law. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilms and electronic storage and processing. © 2019 Lucerne School of Art and Design hslu.ch/design-kunst/ ISBN 978-3-033-07192-6 Image credits Cover photo: Stephan Wittmer; p. 6 © Kunsthalle Basel, photo: Peter Heman; p. 11 unknown photo­grapher; p. 15 design: pengpeng, Lucerne 2017; p. 17 fig. 2 photo: Stephan Wittmer; p. 17 figs 3–4 photo: Thomas Fink; p. 17 fig. 5 photo: Susanne Kudorfer; p. 17 figs 6–7 photo: Sabine Gebhardt Fink; p. 21 photo: Christoph Lichtin; p. 22 © Gottfried Keller-Stiftung; p. 3 figs 2–3 © Friedli/Gomez della Valle; p. 24 fig. 4 © Friedli/ Gomez della Valle; p. 24 fig. 5 photo: Stephan Wittmer; p. 25 fig. 6 © Urs Lüthi p. 25 fig. 7 © Alexandra D’Incau; p. 27 fig. 2 photo: Stephan Wittmer; p. 30 photo: Violetta Szikriszt; p. 31 fig. 2 photo: Cynthia Gavranic; p. 31 fig. 3 photo: Maria Josefa Lichtsteiner; p. 33 Nicole Heri; p. 34 Yvonne Imhof & Martin Wohlwend; p. 39–40 photo: Patricia Vitale; p. 41/42 © Natalia Wespi; p. 57 photo: Anne Linke; p. 66–70 © Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, photo: Lisa Rastl; p. 72 © Thomas Nolf; p. 76/77 © Frank Brüderli; p. 79 © Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin; p. 87 Ronald Grant Archive/Alamy Stock Photo; p. 95 photo: Stephan Wittmer

Nummer 9 «Artistic Education» This publication on artistic approaches to the transmission of skills, knowledge and experience in the art world negotiates challenges and hurdles in a field only recently demarcated.

It takes its cues from artistic strategies realised in a series of research projects – starting with the Camp# project – and collaborations between the MA in Fine Arts at Lucerne School of Art and Design and its partners at the Kunstmuseum Luzern, the Historisches Museum Luzern, the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, as well as from innovations in the BA Fine Arts and Art & Design Education degree programme. It presents a forum of perspectives on the authors’ own experiences in the field of artistic education; on discourse in art theory on public involvement, artistic self-organisation and collective work; and on recent artistic and pedagogical confrontations with critical theory and postcolonial debates.