We return from vacation (although some have never left) by revisiting a short article published by the artist
Kristina Lee Podesva
in the online magazine
Fillip Review
last summer. In the article, titled “
A pedagogical turn: brief notes on education as art
“, Lee Podesva reviewed a set of experiences and projects that, in her words, “appropriate education as a mode of artistic practice, whether in the form of a school, knowledge exchanges, reading groups, laboratories, etc., which could be understood within the broader set of ‘site specific’ practices.” Lee Podesva traces a genealogy that goes from the teaching work of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, through the institutional critique of artists such as Andrea Fraser or Fred Wilson and relational aesthetics, to projects or works developed during this first decade of the 21st century such as the
Copenhagen Free University
(2001-2007),
Playshop
(2004), the
Momentary Academy
(2005) or the
School of Panamerican Unrest
(2006–2007).
Lee Podesva points out, following what Miwon Kwon pointed out in a 1997 article published in the magazine October and titled “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity” (pdf) that one of the points that most clearly distinguishes these practices from those mentioned above is a different relationship with the context in which they occur: “[…] distinguishing characteristic of today’s site-oriented art is the way in which the artwork’s relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are both subordinate to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate,” which does not exist a priori, but is generated through the work itself (adds the author). We could say that, unlike their supposed “predecessors”, these practices propose an effective redistribution of power insofar as, to a greater or lesser extent, they generate autonomous discursive spaces and define instituting frameworks for action.
On the contrary, the practices of relational aesthetics, in their fixation on social relations, would become entangled in the political and economic structures that they overlook; while for Lee Podesva, the political charge of Fraser or Wilson’s institutional critique is deactivated by its spectacularization within the very institutional framework towards which it directs its barbs. For his part, despite efforts to invite the public to participate collaboratively in the construction of meaning (with or without the authorization of the academic institution), Beuys never abandons the modern belief in the sensitivity and sophistication of the professor or the artist: Beuys presents himself as someone with a special vision of those issues that should merit our attention (be it direct democracy or free education).
The differences that Lee Podesva establishes between these artists and current practices that approach education as an art form serve to narrow down the historical context in (or of) which these practices emerge, referring to the rampant process of subordination of educational institutions to the neoliberal political agenda.
But as it is more entertaining and enlightening explained by the author herself, we refer you to the original text, not without first dropping a question that now comes to mind: how does the framing of these projects and initiatives in the field of artistic forms work? what consequences derive from it? what is the use that one and another social actors make or can make of it? said in another more inexact although perhaps more intelligible way: what strategic need, from a political perspective, or what utility does it have to ‘mark’ the Copenhanguen Free University or Playshop as works of art?