Nathaniel Prottas

11 Beyond Interpretation: A Brief Case

for Presence at the Heart of Art Museum
Education
The conference from which the collected papers in this book arose was inspired by
a desire to move beyond hermeneutics to explore the idea of an object’s presence. A
focus on presence is, however, not entirely new in the academic humanities. In
1966 Susan Sontag famously called for art criticism based on an “erotics of art” rather
than hermeneutics, writing that the “function of criticism should be to show how it is
what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”1 Nearly forty
years later, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht took up this rallying call against interpretation
through his vision of humanities that focuses on “what meaning cannot convey,”
namely “presence.”2 But while the articles in this edited volume largely articulate re-
sponses to such provocations in relation to academic art history, here I would like to
make a brief case for museum education’s ability to support the experience of a
work’s presence. I will argue that museum education can (and should) expand its
focus beyond hermeneutical interpretation in ways often impossible for academic art
history. Certainly meaning-making and experiencing presence can and perhaps must
take place simultaneously. Still, through an examination of two central theorists of
experiences with art – John Dewey and Hans Georg Gadamer – I will argue that mu-
seum education is particularly suited to supporting experiences of the presence of art.
I will focus on how museum education can support engagement with a work’s
presence in two ways: first, through supporting viewer participation, and second,
by recognizing the performative nature of the art itself. As a result, I will suggest
that popular museum education theories of participation have as much to tell us
about art’s own presence and performative nature as they do about visitor engage-
ment. Although the literature discussed here is known to various fields, it is rarely,
if ever, discussed in relation to museum education and theories of participation. My
hope is that by laying out this as-of-yet unexplored historiography of the field’s re-
lationship to meaning-making and presence, we can gain a clearer picture of how
much museum education can (and already has) added to our ability to experience
the presence of a work of art. The article thus aims to serve as a brief overview of the
methodological foundations and history of the field in relation to presence. It should

1 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Straus and Giroux, 1968).
2 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stan-
ford University Press, 2004).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110722079-012
224 Nathaniel Prottas

be read as a pendant to Rika Burnham’s essay in this volume, which offers a case
study of an encounter with a work by a group.
Despite the potential for museum education to support the art object’s presence,
the field has long valued collective meaning-making and interpretation. The field’s
interpretative tendencies can largely be explained by the similar focus on meaning-
making found in the two disciplines that have most influenced art museum educa-
tion: art history and educational theory.3 The latter’s influence has received much
scholarly attention, with museum programming often discussed in tandem with ped-
agogical concepts. Beginning in the 1980s and early 1990s, early thinkers on the con-
struction of meaning in museums – most notably Elaine Hooper-Greenhill and Mieke
Bal – stressed how curators and museums naturalized the narratives museums tell.
Both scholars revealed how the curatorial choices – from object selection, to installa-
tion, to texts – represented particular perspectives, arguments, or cultural norms that
had gone unnoticed by scholars and museum visitors. In addition to uncovering the
constructed nature of meaning created by the museum’s staff, Bal and Hooper-Green-
hill explored how visitors constructed meaning, combining the curatorial and design
decisions with their own prior experience and knowledge to create new stories, some-
times quite distinct from those the museum wished to convey.4 Because Bal focused
on reading the museum like a text and not on the visitor or the larger educational
goals of the museum, her work has been less widely influential in museum educa-
tion. Hooper-Greenhill, however, connected museum studies and education, drawing

3 The emergence of museum education as an independent field has a long and complex history that
is still largely waiting to be written. In an American context, see Elliott Kai-Kee, “A Brief History of
Teaching in the Art Museum,” in Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience, ed. Rika
Burnham and Elliott Kai-Kee (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011), 19–58; George E. Hein, Progres-
sive Museum Practice: John Dewey and Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2012), esp. chapter 6, “Pro-
gressive Education in Art Museums.” See also “Professionalizing Practice. A Critical Look at Recent
Practice in Museum Education,” ed. Briley Rasmussen and Scott Winterrowd, Thematic issue, Journal
of Museum Education 37, no. 2 (2012); Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and
the Changing Museum (New York: Random House, 1997); Emily Curran, “Discovering the History of
Museum Education,” Journal of Museum Education 20, no. 2 (1995): 5–6. Of course, museum educa-
tion also has an international history, but because the academic study of museum education is
largely done by practicing museum educators, there is relatively little study of how international his-
torical developments of the field relate to each other. For a notable exception, see the Journal of Mu-
seum Education’s special issues “European Context” from 1994 and “Museum Education in Latin
America” from 1996. A broader study of the histories of museum education across national bound-
aries still needs to be written.
4 Mieke Bal, Looking In: The Art of Viewing (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 2001), chapter 3;
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992); Ei-
lean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (New York: Routledge,
2000).
 11 Beyond Interpretation 225

attention to how “interpretive communities” create meaning and argued explicitly for
the museum as a space dedicated to joint meaning-making.5
Hooper-Greenhill was at the forefront of this move toward joint meaning-
making in museums studies and education. Indeed, the 1980s and 1990s came to
be defined through the act of “shared meaning-making,” as museum scholar Lois
Silverman argued in 1995.6 Throughout this period and today, the main theoretical
framework for shared interpretation has been the educational theory of constructiv-
ism. Constructivist education – both in the museum and in pedagogical theory –
stresses the active nature of the learner in the process of constructing learning, as
opposed to the so-called banking model in which passive learners are filled with
knowledge by teachers or educators.7 Museum education theorist George E. Hein,
however, has perhaps made the largest contributions to understanding how educa-
tional programs in the museum can help visitors construct meaning, advocating
strongly for the importance of constructivism in museums.8 Following Hein’s lead,
museum education has almost uniformly embraced constructivism, transferring a
theory created in the context of formal learning environments into the informal
learning space of the museum.9 Museum educator Elliott Kai-Kee made the explicit
connection between constructivism and an interest in interpretation, writing that

5 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, “Interpretive Communities, Strategies and Repertoires,” in Museums

and Their Communities, ed. Sheila Watson (New York: Routledge, 2007), 76–94.
6 Lois H. Silverman, “Visitor Meaning-Making in Museums for a New Age,” Curator: The Museum
Journal 38, no. 3 (1995): 161–170.
7 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Maya Bergman Ramos (London: Penguin Random
House, 1970), 45.
8 Hein’s influence can be felt across the field with many educators accepting his call for shared
meaning-making in educational museum work. See, for example, Lois Silverman, “Making Meaning
Together: Lessons from the Field of American History,” Journal of Museum Education 18, no. 3
(1993): 7–11; Olga Hubard, Art Museum Education: Facilitating Gallery Experiences (New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2015); John Howard Falk, Identity and the Museum Visitor Experience (Walnut
Creek: Left Coast Press, 2009); Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum.
9 George E. Hein has written copiously on museum education and constructivism, largely in relation
to John Dewey. See George E. Hein, Progressive Museum Practice: John Dewey and Democracy
(New York: Routledge, 2012), esp. chapter 1, “Educational Theory.” See also George E. Hein, Learning
in the Museum, Museum Meanings (New York: Routledge, 1998), 16–25; George Hein, “The Construc-
tivist Museum,” Journal of Education in Museums 16 (1995): 21–23; Lynn D. Dierking and John H. Falk,
Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Lanham: AltaMira Press,
2000), esp. 10–11; Kodi R. Jeffery-Clay, “Constructivism in Museums: How Museums Create Meaning-
ful Learning Environments,” Journal of Museum Education 23, no. 1 (1998): 3–7; Susanne Gesser, Mar-
tin Handschin, Angela Jannelli, and Sibylle Lichtensteiger, eds., Das partizipative Museum: Zwischen
Teilhaben und User Generated Content (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2012). On the museum as an infor-
mal learning space and “free choice learning,” see John Howard Falk and Lynn D. Dierking, Lessons
Without Limit: How Free-Choice Learning Is Transforming Education (Walnut Creek: AltaMira, 2002).
226 Nathaniel Prottas

“the interpretive turn was manifested by the embrace of constructivist theories of

learning” in the 1980s and 1990s.”10
A commitment to shared meaning-making did not stop in the 1990s. Educators
working in the 2000s and 2010s largely continued to stick to constructivist educa-
tional goals. The democratization of meaning through constructivism has been par-
ticularly attractive to museums in recent years, as they have redefined themselves
as spaces of social justice; the democratic impulse of constructivism has offered a
model for an increased focus on reaching wide and varied communities and honor-
ing categories of knowledge traditionally excluded from the museum.11 Indeed, the
radical shift in understanding the production of knowledge in the museum by
scholars such as Bal, Hooper-Greenhill, Hein, and those who have followed in their
path has provided the foundation for the shift from space-of-knowledge transfer to
a cacophony of voices and interpretations so central to the contemporary museum’s
mission. The vast literature on participation in museums published in the last ten
years reflects this connection between social activism and the well-ingrained nature
of constructivism, with priority given to interpretation. This can range from curator-
public collaborations in writing histories and interpreting art or joint ventures in
collecting and making exhibitions; almost all such programing and literature fo-
cuses on joint interpretation as an act of the shared ownership of art.12 The central
role of constructivism in museums has thus often led to the unspoken assumption
that meaning-making and knowledge must necessarily anchor our practice. Its po-
litical potential to create space for new voices and to question long-standing narra-
tives of history and art makes constructivist meaning-making a powerful tool for
museum educators in their mission to create the visitor-centered museums that engage
critically with post-colonialism, racial equality, queer identities and anti-ableism.

10 Kai-Kee, “Brief History of Teaching,” 45.

11 Recently calls for a radically democratic museum have been made by Nora Sternfeld. Although
her work calls for a rethinking of the museum’s inherent possibility for radical change, it still
largely relies on strategies of meaning-making. See Nora Sternfeld, Das radikaldemokratische Mu-
seum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). But for decades now, the call for shared meaning-making has been
framed as a democratic impulse to opening art to all visitors. See, for example, the early essay by
Rika Burnham, “If You Don’t Stop, You Don’t See Anything,” Teachers College Record 95, no. 4
(1994): 520–25.
12 In addition to meaning-making, the term “competencies” has, in recent years, come to play a
central role in the formulation of education’s goals. The vague term encompasses such things as
“critical thinking skill” and “visual literacy” but those are nonetheless often accomplished via an
interpretive search for meaning. The literature on participation is massive and cannot be cited in
total here. Some important recent publications include: Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum
(Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010); Beatrice Jaschke and Nora Sternfeld, “Zwischen/Räume der Parti-
zipation,” in Räume der Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: Verband österreicher Kunsthistorikerinnen und
Kunsthistoriker, 2015); Gesser et al., Das partizipative Museum.
 11 Beyond Interpretation 227

This is not to say that there has been no interest in nonhermeneutical engage-
ment with art in the field at all. Olga Hubard has argued that art museum education
has long looked for alternatives to intellectual engagement with art, recognizing the
importance of emotion. But she notes that emotional or physical reactions to art have
been often looked down upon, a fact she traces to the Cartesian interest in intellect
and rational engagement. Recently educators have begun to explore the nonherme-
neutical potential and a new focus on embodiment with programs aimed at move-
ment and nonverbal responses, anything other than the long-standing conversations
about close looking.13 And, indeed, programs that propose to support nonverbal or
emotional responses to art have existed for some time. For example, as early as the
1960s, Phil Yenawine’s Arts Awareness at The Metropolitan Museum of Art intro-
duced movement-oriented programming, while more recent interest in embodiment
has led to sessions at the American Alliance of Museums as well as a string of articles
and book chapters arguing for new forms of programming that prioritize emotional,
artistic, or physical responses to art rather than intellectual ones.14
The push away from interpretation in these programs and writings marks an
important shift in museum education’s methodological focus. However, much of
the literature and work on embodiment focuses entirely on visitor experience,
largely discussing art only as it relates to the effect it has on the viewer. And while
a shift toward embodiment offers new potential for museums, I believe that the
models for engaging with art through verbal dialogue can be shifted to nonherme-
neutical experience with art in ways that honor and center our experience on art’s
presence as much as our personal response to it.15
But before considering this, we need to look briefly at the other major influence
on art museum education, namely art history itself. The study of art history, when
discussed at all in museum education, has been less closely related to learning styles
and more often linked to the value of certain categories of information.16 That art

13 Olga Hubbard, “Complete Engagement: Embodied Response in Art Museum Education,” in Art
Education 60 no. 6 (2007): 46–53; For a discussion of these new models, see Elliott Kai-Kee, Lissa
Latina, and Lilit Sadoyan, Activity-Based Teaching in the Art Museum: Movement, Embodiment,
Emotion, Getty Publications (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020).
14 The American Alliance of Museum’s panel was accounted on their website: https://www.event
scribe.com/2019/AAMers/fsPopup.asp?efp=V01ITUNZU1o2Mzkz&PresentationID=490103&rnd=0.
2452691&mode=presinfo, (consulted 4 September 2020).
15 In their recent work, Kiersten Liatham and Emilie Sitza have advocated for noninterpretive
goals. Their work has primarily focused on the visitor-side of experience, arguing for learning
through failing, stopping, and questioning. See Emilie Sitzia, “The Ignorant Art Museum: Beyond
Meaning-Making,” International Journal of Lifelong Education 37, no. 1 (2018): 73–87; Kiersten
F. Latham, “The Poetry of the Museum: A Holistic Model of Numinous Museum Experience,” Mu-
seum Management and Curatorship 22, no. 3 (2007): 247–63.
16 On the relationship of academic art history and museum education in its infancy in the United
States, see Kai-Kee, “Brief History of Teaching,” 23–24. On the dangers of this relation, see Melinda
228 Nathaniel Prottas

history has influenced art museum education should, however, come as no surprise;
museum educators read art history books, articles, and catalogues to prepare for pro-
grams. And as I argue elsewhere, the close relationship between the fields means
that methodologies of art history find numerous parallels in art museum education.17
Similarly, Melinda Meyer notes the danger of the museum educator’s propensity to
emulate curatorial methods, often unintentionally.18 In particular, iconographic anal-
ysis and the related search for meaning have deeply influenced museum education,
notable in many highlight tours where guides and docents “decode” works of art for
the public.
Like constructivist educational theory, art history has embraced the postmod-
ernist belief in the contingent and constructed nature of truth, rejecting traditional
iconographic analysis built upon Panofskyan historical distance. This shift has,
however, done little to stop the interpretative mechanisms of art history, only shift-
ing awareness of interpretation’s historical contingency. And for all of the changes
in methodology in art history over the last decades, its emphasis on hermeneutics
has continued to be mirrored in museum education as educators have read and ab-
sorbed its approaches. And it can certainly be no coincidence that postmodern art
historical writing arose coevally in the 1980s with the influx of constructivism in
the museum. After all, both constructivism as it is used in the museum and the art
historical questioning of historical distance and objectivity are products of post-
modernist understandings of knowledge production.19
Although little research on the topic has been done, I suspect that the postmod-
ernist shift in thinking evident both in educational theory and art history equally af-
fected art museum education’s move toward joint meaning-making and an awareness
of the contingency of meaning and interpretation. As a field that really only began to
develop a set of theoretical and professionals standards in the 1980s, its foundation
evolved parallel to dramatic shifts in education and art history. Educational theory
supported the claim that meaning should be made collectively and was flexible, just
as art history bolstered this approach through an increased self-awareness of its own
inability to ever impartially construct interpretation or meaning. It should thus come

A. Meyer, “When Little Girls Become Junior Connoisseurs: A Cautionary Tale of Art Museum Educa-
tion in the Hyperreal,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 40, no. 3 (2006): 48–58. On the opportunities
created by studying the relationship between the fields, see Nathaniel Prottas, “Contextualization
and Experience in the Museum: Hans Georg Gadamer, Art History, and Dialogical Teaching,” Journal
of Aesthetic Education 51 (2017): 1–25.
17 Prottas, “Contextualization and Experience.”
18 Meyer, “When Little Girls.”
19 Constructivism itself is not a product of postmodernism as its foundations go back to the early
twentieth century, with thinkers such as Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky in addition to John Dewey.
But its further development, particularly in the field of museum education, clearly reflects a post-
modern critique of knowledge and power.
 11 Beyond Interpretation 229

as no surprise that, influenced by these two fields, museum education likewise fo-
cused its attention largely on the process of meaning-making and interpretation.
It is in the space between the fields of education and art history/theory that we
find two influential thinkers on engagement with art, Gadamer and Dewey. Al-
though their work has largely been mobilized in the search for meaning, they, in
fact, offer museum educator’s a way out, encouraging experience and supporting
the presence of art. Dewey’s founding work on constructivist learning has deeply
influenced museum educators, evidenced in the recent work of Hubard and Hein,
as well as in the education center at the new Whitney Museum of American Art,
which was once named after him. Indeed, according to David Ebitz, Dewey counts
among the most often cited thinkers for museum educators, and he is quoted regu-
larly in the literature.20 Gadamer remains far less prominent in museum education
than in art history (where he has also often been overlooked), but he notably serves
as a foundational thinker for Burnham and Kai-Kee’s groundbreaking book, Teach-
ing in the Art Museum.21 Burnham and Kai-Kee use both thinkers to argue for a the-
ory of museum education based on meaningful and prolonged experiences with art.
In addition, Hubard, Ebitz, and Hooper-Greenhill have all noted parallels between
Dewey’s constructivism and Gadamer’s dialogical, socially and historically contingent
engagement with art.22 But museum education has primarily interpreted Dewey (and,
to a lesser extent, Gadamer) as advocates solely for the goal of meaning-making with
the public, in line with the above-discussed focus on hermeneutical interpretation. As
a result, museum education has long overlooked the fact that our theories of visitor
participation also have embedded within them a theory of art itself as performative.
A closer study of Gadamer’s and Dewey’s thinking on art reveals the inexorable
link between their theories of participation/engagement and a definition of art, nota-
bly as a performative act that becomes present due to its engagement with the viewer.
And while interpretation certainly plays a role for both thinkers, it does not define or
fully explain our engagement with art. Let us begin with Gadamer and one of his
most influential essays “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” which summarizes his

20 David Ebitz, “Sufficient Foundation: Theory in the Practice of Art Museum Education,” Visual
Arts Research 43, no. 2 (2008): 14–24 at 1.
21 Museum education has been less explicit in its mobilization of Gadamer. See, however, Hein,
Progressive Museum Practice; Hubard, Art Museum Education, 1–2; and Ebitz, “Sufficient Founda-
tion,” 17. See also Cherlyn Meszaros, “Un/Familiar,” Journal of Museum Education 33, no. 3 (2008):
239–46. Although Michael Ann Holly, for example, has explicitly argued for a return to Gadamer’s
thinking on the immediacy of experience, the moment of our encounter with a work of art in the
here and now and a rejection of Erwin Panofsky’s neo-Kantian iconographic interpretation of his-
torical meaning (“Painted Silence, Painted Presence,” in Samuel H. Kress Lecture in Museum Educa-
tion [Boston: Frick Collection, 2014]).
22 Ebitz, “Sufficient Foundation,” 17; Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual
Culture, 116–19.
230 Nathaniel Prottas

thinking on art and our experience with it.23 Here he argues that the separation of
art from the world and aesthetic consciousness ultimately makes art meaningless.
Gadamer refutes Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic consciousness, writing that the “mere
onlooker who indulges in aesthetic or cultural enjoyment from a safe distance,
whether in the theater, the concert hall, or the seclusion of solitary reading, sim-
ply does not exist.”24 In order to support his argument, Gadamer makes an impor-
tant linguistic move, replacing Kant’s Erlebnis with Erfahrung. While both words
can be translated as “experience” in English, this move is significant in German.
Erlebnis derives largely from nineteenth-century philosophy, importantly the
work of Wilhelm Dilthey, and belongs to aesthetic consciousness as a lived experi-
ence in its interiority that isolates it from the flow of everyday experience.25 Ga-
damer’s theory of Erfahrung expressly seeks to overcome the isolated, alienated
experience, in which the Erlebnis is intense but momentary and entirely subjective.
In contrast, Erfahrung implies an open, expressive, communicative, performative ex-
perience, one founded in community.26 Gadamer thus claims that our relationships
with artworks are ongoing, negotiable, and change in relation to our lived lives; they
are thus not entirely private. As a play of public performance, Erfahrung represents
an engagement with art that becomes a public process of dialogical exchange, not a
private imaginative process.
But Gadamer extends this argument in an important manner for museum educa-
tors who facilitate participation and engagement with art; he moves beyond the view-
er’s experience with art, considering art’s role in its encounter with us. Gadamer
contradicts the long-held Western definition of art, dating back to Plato, as appear-
ance in opposition to reality.27 He achieves this by repositioning the definition of art
in relation to the experience we have with it, writing that art can be understood “only

23 Michael Kelly writes: “To recover the work of art, which is the aim of Gadamer’s critique, he pro-
poses that we renounce aesthetic consciousness, thereby giving up the ‘purity’ of the aesthetic,
which in turn seems to imply, more significantly, that we give up the autonomy of art, at least to
some degree” (“A Critique of Gadamer’s Aesthetics,” in Gadamer’s Reproductions: Reconsidering Phil-
osophical Hermeneutics, ed. Bruce Krajewski [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004], 111).
24 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, trans. Nicholas Walker
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 130.
25 As Thomas M. Jeannot notes, Dilthey wished to escape the neo-Kantian ideals with this term,
but Gadamer felt that he did not succeed. See Thomas M. Jeannot, “A Propaedeutic to the Philo-
sophical Hermeneutics of John Dewey: “Art as Experience” and “Truth and Method,” Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2001): 1–13 at 9.
26 Jeannot, “A Propaedeutic.”
27 In German he argues that art is a Bild not an Abbild and thus that it is a Darstellung. For Gadamer,
once art qua appearance becomes autonomous from reality and is seemingly related only to itself, it
continues to be defined by the very reality from which it won its autonomy, at least so long as appear-
ance is defined as such only in opposition to reality – as it was for Plato and Kant. If it is defined in
this way, autonomous art has no truth. At the same time, it has no efficacy in the world and is thus
alienated from reality (even as it is defined by it); its only remaining relation to reality is to mask or
 11 Beyond Interpretation 231

on the basis of the mode of being of the work of art itself” and thus positing that
understanding is an effect of the work itself.28 Gadamer argues that the “aesthetic dif-
ferentiation” of the work from its performance is an abstraction that reduces the
being of a work of art. Art is a presentation that “finds its genuine fulfillment simply
in the fact that what it presents is emphatically there.”29 Art is thus not a completed
work but instead a “structure” open to the spectator who experiences it, and thus it
is completed by the performance.30 Only through dialogue, through art’s perfor-
mance of encounter with the looker, can art define itself and come into being through
its presence with us in the here and now. Without this engagement, the work of art,
in effect, does not exist. And thus Erfahrung for Gadamer comes to define not only
our relationship to art, but art itself as active, performative, and present only through
our engagement with it.31
Like Gadamer, Dewey bemoans the separation of aesthetic expression from the
object, suggesting that Kant denigrates experience by insisting upon the stark dis-
tinction between subject and object. Dewey argues, “When artistic objects are sepa-
rated from the conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built
around them that renders almost opaque their general significance.”32 He goes on:
“There is a difference between an art product (statue, painting, or whatever) and a

veil it. So Plato’s ontology of art seems to resurface in Kant: art qua appearance is – again – a lie. See
Kelly, “Critique of Gadamer’s Aesthetics,” 105. This notion is essential to Gadamer’s theory of
“historically effected consciousness” (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewusstsein), which asserts the ac-
tive, working nature of artworks. For Dewey’s position, see Jeannot, “Propaedeutic to the Philo-
sophical Hermeneutics,” 7.
28 Gadamer, Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, 100.
29 Daniel L. Tate, “In the Fullness of Time: Gadamer on the Temporal Dimension of the Work of
Art,” Research in Phenomenology 42, no. 1 (2012): 92–113 at 95.
30 Gadamer writes copiously on the relationship of viewership to the performance of art and on
art’s own need for the viewer to manifest itself – that is, to become present. And Kant is not his
only interlocutor; he calls on Søren Kierkegaard’s theory of Gleichzeitigkeit (simultaneity), arguing
that it means that “in its [art’s] presentation this particular thing that presents itself to us achieves
full presence however remote its origin may be.” In order to achieve this interaction that creates
contemporaneity and thus presence, Gadamer borrows Martin Heidegger’s concept of “tarrying.”
See Tate, “In the Fullness of Time,” 101.
31 Gadamer here is also critiquing Plato’s claim that art is not truth but instead an imitation of
truth. While for Plato, art is ontologically incapable of truth and because it is unaware of its limita-
tion, it continues to lay false claim to truth, according Gadamer, art is appearance but not merely
appearance – it is its own truth. Gadamer writes, “Every such presentation is an ontological event
and occupies the same ontological level as what is represented.” Quoted in Kelly, “Critique of Ga-
damer’s Aesthetics,” 105.
32 John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Milton Balch, 1934). Jeannot suggests that Dewey’s
opening chapter of Art and Experience (“The Live Creature”) parallels precisely Gadamer’s critique
of aesthetic continuity (“Propaedeutic to the Philosophical Hermeneutics,” 6).
232 Nathaniel Prottas

work of art. The first is physical and potential, the latter is active and experience.”33
Thus, like Gadamer, Dewey asserts that art performs in the encounter and is defined
through performance; the physical work of art is simply a potential object, waiting
to engage with us to bring it to life and create experience. The act of looking at a
work of art is not a passive one for the viewer or the art according to Dewey. Rather,
in the act of looking, we both create the work and are influenced by it, a process he
defines as “doing” and “undergoing.”34
The suggestion that art might act upon us is, of course, hardly new in art his-
tory and visual studies. W. J. T Mitchell has asked us to consider what pictures
“want,” while Keith Moxey has drawn attention to that which “exceeds the possibil-
ities of a semiotic interpretation.”35 Similarly, Georges Didi-Huberman has long ral-
lied against Panosfkyian iconographic interpretation in favor of how art itself can
embody significance, while Horst Bredekamp proposed a form of visual agency in
the term Bildakt.36 And in the field of art museum education, Burnham and Kai-
Kee, whose work relies heavily on Gadamer and Dewey, have similarly argued,
“Artworks are not static, passive recipients of interpretation. They play to an audi-
ence, acting on their viewers.”37 Burnham’s conversation and article in this volume
further explores her thoughts on presence in museum education.
This idea of art’s performative nature allows museum educators to rethink how
we mobilize Dewey’s and Gadamer’s work to structure engagement and participation
in the museum. By shifting our attention to the role of art in our engagements in the
museum, joint meaning-making and interpretation come to be only the surface of
what we as educators achieve when considering the theorists’ writing on engagement
with art. While both thinkers offer theories of constructing meaning, that meaning is
always contingent upon the active performance of art in its encounter with us. As
such, meaning, participation, and presence of art remain inexorably linked. By en-
couraging deep engagement with art, we actually allow it to perform itself, thus, in
effect, creating the art with each encounter.38 Such thinking encourages and vali-

33 Dewey, Art as Experience, 167.

34 Dewey, Art as Experience, 48–56.
35 Keith Moxey, “Visual Studies and the Iconic Turn,” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (2008): 131–146
at 132; W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
36 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art
(University Park: Penn State University Press, 2004); Horst Bredekamp, Theorie des Bildakts: Über
das Lebensrecht des Bildes (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011).
37 Burnham and Kai-Kee, Teaching in the Art Museum, 128.
38 On meaningful engagement with art, see Dewey’s differentiation between recognition and per-
ception (ibid. 56).
 11 Beyond Interpretation 233

dates a shift away from the consistent search for meaning to a celebration of encoun-
ters with artworks that do not require proof, footnotes, sources, or bibliography.
Such a position is, of course, controversial; scholars such as Nora Sternfeld
have criticized the tendency to bestow upon objects wishes, arguing that in so
doing we obscure the (often violent) agency of humans that led to the creation of
said objects.39 Similarly, museum educators have sometimes worried that arguing
that objects can speak might make those who cannot “hear” them feel shut out or
not welcome in a museum. But rather than take the argument of art’s performative
nature at face value, museum education can use it as a schema for thinking anew
about our goals. Whether art really speaks to us, really tells us what it needs us to
do, is certainly beside the point. We must take Mitchell more seriously when he
writes that we should act as if images have wishes, even if we know they do not. Let
us accept what Mitchell terms a “double consciousness” attending to images, namely
the simultaneous belief and denial of an image’s desires.40 We can begin to attend to
experiences with art that look beyond meaning via Mitchell’s proposed double con-
sciousness. We can begin to accept that works will seem different to us at different
times, that long exposure to works can affect us deeply and in variable ways, and
that a work’s importance is not tied only to its historical meaning. Rather, its affect in
the museum today defines much of its importance for the museumgoer.
This does not negate the act of meaning-making entirely; as Gumbrecht notes,
meaning and presence are closely intertwined. Nor does it invalidate history or schol-
arship.41 But a new focus on our role in bringing art into its presence through mu-
seum programming can help us to push against the iconographic decoding of images
that is often found in highlight tours, which frequently mimic the search for meaning
in art history. Instead it can encourage us to focus on art’s presence for us in the here
and now.42 It radically shifts our ideas of participation, which, while widely theorized
and discussed in museum-education literature, consistently assume that meaning-
making is participation’s goal. It means we can move beyond the “open artwork,” a
term that mostly boils down to the somewhat obvious point that different visitors will
interpret a work in different ways. Rather, by recognizing the role of art’s presence in
our encounter with it, we are reminded to attend seriously to the work, to honor its

39 Nora Sternfeld, “Der Objekt-Effekt,” in Gegen der Stand der Dinge: Objekte in Museen und Aus-
stellungen, ed. Christine Haupt-Stummer, Martina Griesser, Renate Höllwart, Beatrice Jaschak, Mon-
ika Sommer, Nora Sternfeld, and Luisa Ziaja (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 25–33.
40 Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 11.
41 I have argued elsewhere that Gadamer’s understanding of history allows our lived lives and the
accumulated histories of the object to engage with each other, making the object present in the
here and now without invalidating its histories (“Contextualization and Experience”).
42 For a discussion of this, see, for example, Meyer, “When Little Girls.”
234 Nathaniel Prottas

“wants” and its voice, and to shift our focus away from visitor-centered theories of
participation to consider art as an equal player in our dialogue with it. It reminds us
to hold back just a moment before discussing interpretation and to do what academic
art history struggles to do – to let a work open itself up to us and to experience its
presence in the here and now.