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Browsing through the most important, and less orthodox, experiences and theories in the modern history of education in Europe, it soon becomes clear that the best versions of pedagogy have always stemmed from models that are alternative, if not outright antagonistic, to the ones administered by the social construct. Which is to say — as Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology — ones alternative to “the ideas of the ruling class … [and] therefore, the ideas of its dominance”,[1] which are also conveyed by those who teach, and offloaded upon those who learn.
When it rejects, disowns, and travesties the vast speculative and experimental galaxy made up of so many names from John Dewey to bell hooks, Paulo Freire and Joseph Beuys, the so-called “educational pact” even in the best cases goes no further than the transmission of information and instruction in specific skills. Or — as has surreptitiously happened since the creation of compulsory state education for all citizens — it is reduced to the combination of the daily state-administered education with other demagogic practices. Over the last few decades, the hegemonic policy designs have thus become intertwined with those of the neoliberal economy. This has reduced education to a branch of investment, and — from the standardisation of courses to incentives for “competitiveness” — has shrunk the idea of schooling to its managerial interpretation. All this has aggravated the worst features of traditional approaches to teaching.[2]
Antithetical to this standardisation, to the enshrinement of efficiency, and to the measurability of performance, a radical pedagogy is one that zeroes in on the origin of the concept of education, and revisits its foundations. This means questioning its vertical logic, the assumption that knowledge consists of a wealth of data to be transmitted, and the imbalance in the power relationship between teachers and students. The radical educator, in this perspective, acts accordingly: she chooses horizontal formats for communication, prefers listening and knowledge-sharing practices, rejects the pathetic privilege of the professor’s position and, primarily, focuses on learning rather than teaching. She thus dismantles the hierarchy between teacher and student and, even more effectively, recognises the mutual character of any meaningful educational action.
The experience of art could hardly be further from the dynamic of education-by-transmission — not only with respect to artistic creation, but also with respect to its critical exegesis (learning to comment on it) and understanding (learning to look at it, to enjoy it). It is impossible to teach — as if it were just any old set of objective skills — the functioning of that complex relationship that ties the artist’s gaze on the world to the outcome of this observation, i.e. the artwork itself. We have already spoken of a “radically” inclined pedagogy, meaning one which cannot be shaped by the imperatives of finalism and functionalism. And an artistic pedagogy (education in producing art, in commenting on it, in getting to grips with its epiphanies) is completely impossible to reconcile with the neoliberal model.
The debate on the functioning of art schools, and the wishlist for the best possible ones, runs in parallel to the history of modern pedagogy, and is equally dense and varied. The Belgian theorist Thierry de Duve wrote about the two main schools of thought that, in their irreconcilable opposition, have in part fossilised the possible evolutions of the educational system: namely, the academic school, of nineteenth-century roots, and then the school inspired by that bastion of modernism, the Bauhaus of Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky and Albers, which recently marked its centenary.[3] Even if we do not share De Duve’s conservatism, he is still relevant and worth quoting here. He articulates his examination in a triad of antinomies which both educational institutions and teachers struggle to move beyond. Academic education believes in talent, while the Bauhaus model is entirely invested in creativity; while in the traditional context, the taxonomy of artists and the arts is structured by the logic of craft and everything connected to craft knowledge (even in English translations, De Duve uses the French term métier), among the pioneers of modernism the medium, i.e. materials, techniques and processes, instead prevail. Moreover, while the academy rooted in the nineteenth century cultivates imitation — based on the observation and copying of nature, of the antique, and of the masters — the disciples of the Bauhaus school instead favour invention, which “indicates a liberation of the student’s creativity, an actualisation of his artistic potential”.[4]
However, the cultural crisis that has radicalised the Planet since the middle of the last century has also rendered the champions of modernism obsolete. Thus the antithesis between the two paradigms has faded and, in that grey area that seems to prevail over the educational universe, little has moved. According to De Duve, a new triad of notions has emerged (as a response or opposition to the previous dyads): attitude, practice and deconstruction. The first emerged in the late 1960s and received its confirmation in the exhibition curated by Harald Szeemann, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969. What “became form” here were the attitudes of Hans Haacke, Eva Hesse, Jannis Kounellis and other artists, understood as critical, personal and sometimes political capacities, positions influenced by historical culture, social issues, cognitive science and philosophy. Unfortunately, when educational systems do not manage to influence the world outside the classroom, they more easily stop at a supine emulation of it. Thus, the creative attitudes of artists have faded, to become merely automatic ones — abstract formats that debase invention at least as much as the imitatio naturae of the (seemingly) distant, academic reverence for the past did. The medium, meanwhile, has run aground in practice, definitively disembodying the relationship with technique. The duality between imitation and invention has been synthesised in a deconstruction, which de Duve ascribes to the influence (though I would say, to a hasty reading) of French Theory, with the result that “students who haven’t had the time to construct an artistic culture of any kind are being tutored in the deconstructive suspicion proper to our time”.[5]
The truth, once again, is that the universe of teaching (with art teaching in the lead) is an expression of that same social construct that absorbs, undermines and therefore neutralises innovation, provocation and any aesthetic reversal. Thus, instead of encouraging experimentation and seeking divergent thinking, teachers — with some sporadic, heroic exceptions — prefer to adhere to ministerial instructions or trends dictated by the market, pre-packaged opinions and the automatisms of current taste. Today dominant is the tendency towards professionalisation, a passively accepted paradigm that hinders a full personal and creative flourishing, amidst the reification of talent and the travestying of the artistic attitude. On the other hand, amidst the conformist greyness of most museums and galleries, it is only in art schools — along with a handful of institutional spaces and situations that are largely peripheral (with respect to political power and the market) — that an authentic, fiercely independent experimentation may still really take place. This can only happen only on condition that we have the courage of radicalism, and the strength to dismantle the architectures of a way of teaching that has become beached between the theoretical dross of the last century and the financial interferences of the present.
However, neither of the two models outlined by de Duve is sufficient to understand and address the transformations taking place, nor is any combination or evolution of them. The same theorist had also elaborated another, equally futile, triad: (critical) judgement, tradition and simulation;[6] and years later, Daniel Birnbaum, in an irresistible literary conversation between Adorno and the Devil, has this latter voice the triad made up of hospitality, collaboration and exchange, which “at least seems to sum up what you’ve been up to in the past decade”.[7] But is it possible to think our way out of such a dialectic, amidst the lingering postmodernity that so struggles to finally say goodbye? Is it possible to build a present and design a future of pedagogy in propositional terms, without forgetting the past? There is in fact a — mostly none-too noisy — archipelago of centres for experimentation, of spaces dedicated to researching the enormous potential that art possesses when it is understood as pedagogy. These are places — sometimes passing experiences, often courageously defended — that understand pedagogy in the most libertarian of interpretations. That is, as an exercise of thought, a cognitive device, an exploratory adventure, for those who create it, for those who observe it, and for all those involved in the indecipherability of its production and manifestation.
More than elsewhere, in the art world the educator ought to aspire to a radical vision. She should be well-informed of the traditional school structure and its contiguity with the geometries of power, and inspired by the history of anarchic and libertarian experimentation. And finally, she should be daring enough to think of herself as a provocateur, an iconoclast capable of putting into question the sacred and the magnificent, the untouchable and that which is done for the sake of convenience. All this means an education through art, before and better than an education in art.
[1] K. Marx, F. Engels, The German Ideology, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Lawrence & Wishart, 1975–2004, Vol. 5.
[2] The subjugation of education to the economy can be seen in between the lines of the controversial Bologna Process, 1999. It was devised to create a Europe-wide higher education area, in which all the European Union member states’ education ministers participated; for a quick overview of the process see, among others: D. Lesage, The Academy Is Back: On Education, the Bologna Process, and the Doctorate in the Arts, in “e-flux – journal” March 2009, <https://www.e-flux.com/journal/04/68577/the-academy-is-back-on-education-the-bologna-process-and-the-doctorate-in-the-arts/> (September 2023).
[3] T. de Duve, Faire école (Ou la refaire?), Les Presses du réel, 1992; When Form Has Become Attitude – And Beyond, in Through in Contemporary Art in 1985, Second Edition. Edited by Zoya Koetir and Simon Leung, John Wiley & Sons, 2013.
[4] Ibid, p. 26.
[5] Ibid, p. 32.
[6] Cf. Id., Faire école… cit.
[7] D. Birnbaum, Teaching Art: Adorno and the Devil, in S. H. Madoff (ed.), Art School (Propositions for the 21stst Century), MIT Press, 2009, p. 241.
