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Alliances for Unlearning: On the Possibility of Future Collaborations Between

Gallery Education and Institutions of Critique

Article in Afterall A Journal of Art Context and Enquiry · January 2011

DOI: 10.1086/659291

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Afterall • Journal • Alliances for Unlearning: On Gallery Education an... https://www.afterall.org/journal/issue.26/alliances-for-unlearning-on-th...

– Spring 2011

Alliances for Unlearning: On Gallery Print

Education and Institutions of Critique Share

Carmen Mörsch

Buero trafo.K, ‘So, what does this have to do with me, anyway?', Transnational
Perceptions of the History of National Socialism and the Holocaust, Vienna 2009-11

… [G]allery education, as it has developed since the mid-1970s, has been both a
distinct and overlapping artistic strategy which is integrally connected to radical
art practices linked to values aired and explored in the liberation movements of the
1960s and 70s, and particularly the women's movement. It is an individual strategy
among many (including, for instance, small-scale exhibition, small press and small
magazine publishing, alternative libraries and archives) to shift art from a
monolithic and narcissistic position into a dialogic, open and pluralist set of
tendencies that renegotiate issues of representation, institutional critique
and inter-disciplinarity.1

This is how Felicity Allen, head of the 'Learning' department at Tate Britain until recently,
began an article in 2008 titled 'Situating Gallery Education', in which she undertook to
contextualise this field of practice in England with regard to both history and feminism. This
was one of the first attempts to theorise and historicise gallery education in this way. Gallery
education is located - also and especially in conjunction with the 'educational' or 'pedagogical'
turn in curating - at the edges of the art field and of the attention of those writing within it.
Stating this does not necessarily mean lamenting the situation: operating at the edges and
developing a semi-visible practice has special potentials and qualities.2 This article contains
speculations of its own about the functions of gallery education for the institutions in which it
takes place, and about the concepts of pedagogy and learning that are inscribed in these
functions.3 It also speculates about the pedagogical functions of the absence of educators
(who are generally female) and of the gallery education that does not take place in institutions
that regard themselves as 'institutions of critique' in Andrea Fraser's sense.4

Allen's article was published in the second edition of the e-journal Tate Encounters [E]ditions.
This publication accompanies the research project 'Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual
Culture' that Tate Britain conducted from 2007 to 2010 in cooperation with the London South
Bank University and Chelsea College of Art & Design. In this project a research group
composed of academics, museum staff and undergraduate students with
various ties to immigration investigated how Britishness is produced through the displays of
the museum.5 The data and intermediate results made available on the project's website show
that during its course the museum's Cultural Diversity Policy, among other things, was
radically called into question, and this implied the need for changes in the educative and
curatorial work of Tate Britain. 'Tate Encounters' is informed by insights from decades of
feminist and critical museology, and by attempts to develop ideas of institutional practice
accordingly.6 In their engagement with the displays and the staff of Tate Britain, for instance,
the students developed their own visual and verbal approaches, which they linked through the
production of 'ethnographic videos' to other contexts specifically relevant to them. These
'co-researcher productions' were in turn associated with a series of interviews with various
experts on topics such as education practice within the museum; the status of digital media in
museum practice and culture; the racialisation of cultural policy and the role of museums in
social regeneration; and narratives of British visual culture that could be accessed through
curatorship.7 The project sought to dissolve the hierarchies between researchers and the
researched, and between teachers and students, in favour of a transversal alliance, but without
trivialising the power relations and hierarchies of the setting. Indeed, in this attempt to
conduct 'visitor research' as 'research in cooperation with visitors', the project is highly
self-reflective and meticulous in its treatment. Gallery educators in the German-speaking
world have conducted similar projects as a research component of their work as a critical
practice.8 Twenty freelance and precariously employed gallery educators worked as a team at

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documenta 12 (2007), for example, to carry out analyses aimed at changing the practice and
conditions of gallery education into forms of 'militant research' - that is, as performance and
intervention.9

My own involvement in the documenta project consisted of leading and supervising a

team-based research process, and resulted in the thesis that gallery education, depending on
how it is organised, fulfils various institutional functions:10 an affirmative function, when it
conveys information about art institutions and what they produce to an initiated and already
interested audience as smoothly as possible, and a reproductive function to the extent that it
endeavours to bring in children, young people and others uninitiated to these institutions and
thus ensure the continuation of their audiences. It can also assume a critical deconstructive
function when it joins together with the participants to question, disclose and work on what is
taken for granted in art and its institutions, and to develop knowledge that enables them to
form their own judgements and become aware of their own position and its conditions.
Finally, gallery education can sometimes have a transformative effect, in the sense of
changing society and institutions, if it does not content itself with critical questioning, but
rather seeks to influence what it conveys - for example, by shifting the institution in the
direction of more justice and less discursive and structural violence.

These four functions are not to be imagined hierarchically or as strictly chronological - in the
sense of arising from sequential stages of development. In gallery education practice there are
usually several of these functions active at the same time. A deconstructive or transformative
gallery education, for instance, can hardly be imagined without some affirmative and
reproductive aspects. At the same time, the friction between gallery education and its host
institution increases the more the critical functions come into play. The various functions are
additionally affiliated with different discourses on pedagogy and education: implicit
conceptions of what education is, how it occurs and whom it addresses. For instance, neither
the affirmative nor the reproductive function is self-reflective in the sense that their
engagement in education is not queried in terms of its value codings and normalisations. Yet
these two strategies differ in the question of the how and the who of education. The
affirmative function addresses, first and foremost, the expert audience - players in the art
field.11 The methods used for this type of educational work - although it is rarely called that -
are developed in the academic field, derived from methodological canons that are generally
instructive and limited to verbal expression in the form of lectures or debates. The
reproductive function, on the other hand, is oriented (from the perspective of the institution)
towards the excluded, i.e. specifically absent parts of the public, especially children, young
people and families. They are imagined as 'remote from art' and as 'laypeople'. For this reason,
methods of playful learning are often derived from primary school and kindergarten
educational practices and from institutionalised leisure activities for children and young
people. They are oriented to the constructivist turn in learning theory,12 according to which it
is less a matter of instruction in contents than of providing environments that stimulate
manifold and complex processes of independently constructed meaning. Along with learning
'specifics', the point in these programmes is also 'general' in the sense of learning a love of
art:13 generating positive experiences within the institution, recognising art's values and
relevance and generating a desire to return.

Education itself becomes the object of

‘In comparison, the deconstructive
deconstruction or transformation: subject
and the transformative functions are
matter, addressees and methods are
based on a self-reflective
subjected to a critical examination of the
understanding of education and
power relations inscribed in them, and this
learning.’
in turn becomes the subject of the work with
the audience. Questions are raised, such as:
who determines what is important to communicate? Who categorises 'target groups' and to
what end? What gallery education is permitted within the institution, and what is considered
inappropriate and by whom? How do certain methods of teaching and learning implicitly
create the subjects of teaching and learning? Sometimes the positions of those teaching and
those learning change in this practice of querying: that is, the educational process is
understood as a mutual process, even though it is structured by the aforementioned power
relations.

With the deconstructive function, the primary educational objective is the development of a
critical attitude. This does not necessarily mean aspiring to change the conditions of the
educational framework itself.14 In the understanding of education associated with this
function, engaging with art and its institutions is a relatively sheltered area of experiments
under complex conditions, which aim to enhance the capability for agency, critique and
creativity. Methods borrowed from artistic procedures are applied more often here. For its
part, the transformative function emphasises the structural progression of the institution in
the direction of more social justice and less epistemological and structural violence in the
world at large, an objective linked with fostering critique and self-empowerment. For this
reason, the transformative methodological instruments are also oriented towards strategies of
activism and towards the epistemologies and methods of critical pedagogy - with a special
reference to Paulo Freire, for whom the transformation of language and of verbal action was a
constitutive (although not the sufficient) element for an education aiming to change the world.

In this logic there are no fixed and predefined addressees. The concept of 'target groups',
which is common for the reproductive approach, is superseded by an interest in forming
alliances and in cooperation. Of course, however, here too there is a 'hidden curriculum': what
is expected and claimed is the fundamental affirmation of a critical appropriation of art and its
institutions.

Gallery education that understands itself as a critical practice focuses on elements of the
deconstructive and the transformative function. It conveys knowledge as represented by
exhibitions and institutions and examines their established functions while rendering its own

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position visible. Accordingly, it attaches special importance to providing the necessary

conceptual tools for appropriating knowledge, and adopts a reflective stance towards the
means of education, instead of relying on 'individual aptitude' or a striving for 'self-fulfilment'.
While it seeks to broaden the institution's audience, it does not indulge in the illusion that
learning in the exhibition space is solely connected to play and recreation.15 Ideally, gallery
education acknowledges the aforementioned constructivist concept of learning processes, as
well as the enriching potential of gaps found within language and comprehension.16 That the
knowledge of both visitors and educators is considered equal sets this practice apart from
mere service work: critical gallery education opts for controversy. In theoretical and
methodological terms, it works along the lines of a critique of domination, addressing issues
such as the production of gender, ethnicity or class categories in the institution, and the
related structural, material and symbolic devaluation of gallery education, which I will return
to later. It analyses the functions of (authorised and unauthorised) speech and the use of
different linguistic registers in the exhibition space. Recipients are not regarded as
subordinate to any institutional order; rather, the focus is directed at their possibilities for
agency and code-exchange in the sense of a 'practice of everyday life'.17 It also favours a
reading of institutional order that, far from being conceived as static, leaves leeway for
working within the gaps, interstices and contradictions generated by the configuration of
rooms and displays of the exhibiting institution.18

Furthermore, critical gallery education addresses the ways in which the market influences the
structure, presentation, perception and reception of art, and thereby counters the middle-class
illusion that art is detached from the economy to which it is actually closely tied. It considers
the cultural and symbolic capital of art and its institutions as constituents of inclusionary and
exclusionary processes in the art field. At the same time, it acknowledges and communicates
the fact that symbolic capital gives rise to a desire, and develops both strategic and sensuous
ways to appropriate such capital. Finally, it seeks to transform the institution into a space in
which those who are explicitly not at the centre of the art world can produce their own
articulations and representations. In this sense, it links institutions to their outside, to their
local and geopolitical contexts. The field thus derives its complexity from art, the core subject
on which its methodological repertoire is grounded.

Summarised so programmatically - one could almost say paradigmatically - the approach of a

critical gallery education practice seems to be something that must be in a permanent state of
what Derrida called 'à venir', in coming.19 Just as in other fields - such as curating, for
example - a critical approach (in this case, gallery education as a critical practice) is a minority
position. However, as Felicity Allen describes, the historical connections (in personnel,
content, structure) of this field of work to civil rights movements, to feminism and to the
intersection of art and political activism show that the critical paradigm in gallery education
does exist.20 Indeed, it has been present for at least forty years as an aspiration. One current
example relevant in this context is the work by the Youth Council of the National Gallery of
Ontario in Toronto, initiated by Janna Graham and now under the direction of Syrus Marcus
Ware, which was established in 2000. In this project adolescents and young adults developed
a programme in cooperation with other groups from the city, with contributions (exhibitions,
performances, interventions in the collection, zines, lectures, radio programmes, workshops)
on topics such as the function of the gallery in relation to national citizenship; policing and
police violence in urban space; or the link between art, activism and institutions in Toronto.21
In Vienna the organisation trafo.K produces
‘Critical gallery educators have to
gallery education projects for the Museum of
navigate manifold ambivalences.
Modern Art Vienna (MUMOK), the
They are representatives of the
international book fair Buch Wien, the
institution, so they have no
Vienna Mozart Year, the Museum of the City
opportunity to imagine an
of Linz and others that, according to Nora
uncompromised 'outside' for their Sternfeld, 'overcome the function of
work or themselves as heroic figures.’ reproducing knowledge and become
something else - something unpredictable
and open to the possibility of a knowledge production that, in tones strident or subtle, would
work to challenge the apparatus of value-coding'.22 Adela Železnik, Curator for Public
Programmes at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, is part of the Radical Education Collective
(REC), which was founded in 2006 'to find ways of "translating" radical pedagogy into the
sphere of artistic production, with education being conceived not merely as a model but also
as a field of political participation'.23 In Oldenburg, Germany, Nanna Lüth and her colleagues
at the Edith Russ Site for Media Art conduct media (art) education with the aim of
encouraging its participants 'to better understand the strategies and codes of a media world
that is entirely commercial in character'.

The latter project is one of the few I know of that is located in a small art institution, which at
least partly sees itself as an 'institution of critique'.24 Perhaps surprisingly, gallery education
projects that attempt to be critical and aim for changes in the sense described above are
usually part of large, often national art institutions, which accordingly have a powerful
position in the art system and operate as global players in the art market. Projects there
become entangled in special contradictions. Their critical potential is particularly exposed to
the dangers of neoliberal appropriation, becoming instrumentalised in the context of an
imperative positing of education in the so-called 'knowledge society' and the concomitant
revaluation of 'soft skills' within society.25 In some cases they are almost fig leaf measures in
conjunction with diversity and audience development policies. They assist the institutions in
presenting themselves as progressive and socially responsible, while leaving the internal logics
of operation, which usually function in a strictly hierarchical and less socially aware way,
unchanged. More recently, there have been discussions about examples in England, where
major art institutions like to make use of the added value of artistic-pedagogic collectives in
the sense of radical chic, but (re-)act inconsistently when these collectives question the logic of
operations and the structures of the host institutions with the same radicality.26 Not least of
all, gallery education projects intended to have a transformative effect frequently have, at best,

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only reforming effects within the institution. This is evident in the case of the documenta 12
research and education programme. The documenta 12 programme was possible because the
educational turn in curating was taken up and continued by the artistic director Roger M.
Buergel and curator Ruth Noack. With their support, education at documenta 12 was able to
operate self-reflectively within the framework of the exhibition and to open up space for
experiments (though adequate financial resources were not made available by the institution).
Yet the reception of this experiment was and is limited almost exclusively to specialists, taking
place within the professional community of gallery education.27 At the institutional level it
was not possible to establish gallery education as a critical practice, as the management of the
documenta GmbH argued that the mode of gallery education was the responsibility of the
respective artistic directors. Based on the same argument, it was not possible to extend the
collaboration with a local audience that had been initiated through the project's 'Local
Advisory Board' after the exhibition closed.28 What was achieved, however, was the institution
of a principle of openness on the part of documenta for future work with children and young
people in the exhibition. It is possible that this will change in the 2012 iteration of the
exhibition, but it is too early to tell.29

'Institutions of critique', on the other hand, rarely work together with gallery educators, even
when their resources allow them to do so. I would like to speculate on the reasons for this and
on the function of the absence of gallery educators in these spaces. The fine line between
disrupting and stabilising dominant orders is very narrow for critical practices in
neoliberalism, where critical gallery educators have to navigate manifold ambivalences. They
are representatives of the institution, so they have no opportunity to imagine an
uncompromised 'outside' for their work or themselves as heroic figures. Due to the
presumption that their position is insuffciently radical, they are frequently subjected to
disregard or contempt from critically positioned actors in the art field, from whom they would
prefer to receive interest and support. In reflections on pedagogy currently undertaken by
curators and artists, gallery education does not appear as an independent practice with its own
history and controversial discourses, but is treated instead - if at all - in casual asides. '(Here
should I be clear that I am not referring to the work traditionally carried out by museum and
state-funded gallery education and interpretation departments…),' emphasises Andrea
Phillips in brackets in her article about 'Education Aesthetics' in the publication Curating and
the Educational Turn (2010).30 In the same book, Simon Sheikh reflects on Andrea Fraser's
1984 performance Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, taking it for granted that gallery
education, which he calls 'mediation', still exists in 2010 solely to teach people the 'right' way
to look, from the perspective of the institution, and the 'right' way to understand the works.31
Has he not noticed the post-structuralist and power theory reflections in this field? It is hard
to imagine that a protagonist from gallery education would write an article about the
'functions of curating' without basic knowledge of this practice. That this does not seem to be a
problem the other way around indicates the hierarchies between curating and educating: the
lack of knowledge about the history and discourses of gallery education involves a 'sanctioned
ignorance', in Gayatri Spivak's sense, an unknowing that strengthens one's own position of
power.32 This could be considered the first pedagogical function of the absence of gallery
education in institutions of critique. For a gallery education that sees itself as a critical practice
could be also realised in this kind of institution, i.e. it could question and work on mechanisms
of exclusion, naturalisations and power relations there as well. This, however, could be seen as
calling the critical position on the part of curators and artists into question. If curators did not
want this to happen, then it would be a sensible strategy of territorialisation to regard their
actions as being identical with the actions of gallery education.33

This is not the case, however. The audience attracted by events organised by curators and
artists is far more delimited than the groups accessed by gallery educators. The many
'academies', 'schools', 'seminars', 'workshops', 'sessions', 'encounters' and 'lessons' initiated in
the course of the 'educational turn' are largely attended - at least as far as I have been able to
observe - by people who are similar in habits, lifestyle and attitudes to those of the curators.
For those who accept the invitation, being in these spaces and engaging in

social interaction and collective artistic and intellectual production signifies an increase in
symbolic and cultural capital. In this way, these spaces are no different from the art spaces
that are regarded as hegemonic and bourgeois. Critical gallery education practice, on the other
hand, involves a tremendous capacity for embarrassment. It takes places in rooms that
sometimes smell more of sweat and squashed lunch packages than of brand new furniture and
freshly painted walls. It requires a willingness to take seriously views that

substantially deviate from one's own position and aesthetics much different from one's own
taste; it requires radically alternating between registers of language and aesthetics.
Pedagogical expertise means having an idea of how to react to the effects of educational and
knowledge hierarchies in the face of different world views, utopias and desires, other than by
feeling embarrassed, turning up one's nose, becoming defensive or being helplessly silent.

Moreover, gallery educators cannot expect that their audience will be willing to accept a
critical stance. An audience that rejects this expectation eludes the educational intentions
inherent to the deconstructive and transformative functions of promoting a capacity for
critique and agency. There is a pedagogical paradox here, which is constitutive for gallery
education work: in certain situations, a participant's refusal to take part in working on
deconstruction/transformation and his or her insistence on different, independent interests
could be a self-empowering act. These and other paradoxes call for a mode of 'unlearning
privilege' on the part of critical gallery educators,34 an active reflection - in other words, one
that is consequently also articulated in action - in relation to the privilege of one's own
position, colliding languages and habitual constitutions. Nora Sternfeld aptly calls this work
an 'unglamorous task'.35 And this could be seen as the second function of the absence of
gallery educators in institutions of critique: enabling the concentration on glamorous tasks,
the collectively produced preservation of the aura and exclusivity through the peer group.

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It is in this context that the current popularity of the philosopher Jacques Rancière, and
especially his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1983),36 in the art field is significant. There is
hardly a statement in conjunction with the 'educational turn' that can do without a reference
to the radical democratic vision of self-learning, which Rancière discusses using the historical
example of the linguistics and literature professor Jean-Joseph Jacotot and the method of
universal learning he developed in Leuven in 1818. According to this conception, the
pedagogical relationship has always been constitutive of inequality, because one person
presumes to have knowledge to be conveyed to others. In contrast, an emancipatory process of
learning is self-controlled. The position of the teacher is superfluous, because every individual
has in principle the same intelligence. Yet what other preconditions did Jacotot's students
have? They most likely came from bourgeois families and schools, because who else went to
the university in Leuven in the nineteenth century? Jacotot's students, who taught themselves
French on the basis of a bilingual text, remained among themselves, just as self-learning
groups in the pedagogical spaces of the art field usually do. Among the latter, the everyday use
of Rancière's theses has the function of framing their own exclusionary actions as a radical
democratic gesture and thus no longer questioning, let alone changing them. The reference to
every subject's capability for self-empowerment ironically leads to a belief in distinction - as
one does not feel obliged or even entitled to make an effort to reach those who do not feel they
belong in emancipatory spaces, because that would be paternalistic, after all. Ruth
Sonderegger, a philosopher who specialises in Rancière's work, notes that regardless of
Rancière's dislike ('Abneigung') of Pierre Bourdieu's analyses, it still remains necessary to pay
attention to normalisation and exclusion in the art field:

In my view, it is quite astonishing that Rancière does not see Bourdieu's research on the art
field as a complementary endeavour. Indeed, both are interested in the question of what art
can contribute to the classification of social space as a practically sensual physical space […]
with the only difference that one emphasises emancipatory effects and the other normalising
effects. Rancière's archival evidence for the self-emancipation of joiners, floor layers and
metal smiths with a love of literature seems just as convincing to me as Bourdieu's evidence
that the discourse maintained by various institutions about the disinterestedness of art
beginning in 1750 is anything but disinterestedness, but rather a strategic means of
establishing and fixing class boundaries along a new kind of capital: namely cultural
capital. 37

On 18 and 19 September 2010, there was a symposium in Vienna with the title 'educational
turn: Internationale Perspektiven auf Vermittlung in Museen und Ausstellungen'
('International Perspectives of Education in Museums and Exhibitions').38 In her introductory
lecture, Sternfeld, one of the organisers, called this event a re-appropriation of the discourse
taking place in the curatorial field by gallery education with a critical self-image. She also
referred to how gallery educators and their knowledge have previously been consistently
overlooked in the attempt to propose curatorial action, in the course of the 'reflective turn', as
a way of generating, conveying and experiencing knowledge beyond setting up exhibitions. In
her view, curatorial action comes closer in this way to gallery education. It adapts the
promises of the pedagogical, but without having to be confronted with the tension between
these promises and the impossibility of fulfilling them entirely in pedagogical practice. She
emphasised that this is a patriarchally structured omission, because it is based on
hierarchically placing production over reproduction and distribution (in this specific case:
generating knowledge in comparison with passing on knowledge). Unlike the present text,
which attempts to illuminate the reasons for this omission and to raise the question of which
function inheres in it (or also: who exactly been consistently overlooked in the attempt to
propose curatorial action, in the course of the 'reflective turn', as a way of generating,
conveying and experiencing knowledge beyond setting up exhibitions. In her view, curatorial
action comes closer in this way to gallery education. It adapts the promises of the pedagogical,
but without having to be confronted with the tension between these promises and the
impossibility of fulfilling them entirely in pedagogical practice. She emphasised that this is a
patriarchally structured omission, because it is based on hierarchically placing production
over reproduction and distribution (in this specific case: generating knowledge in comparison
with passing on knowledge). Unlike the present text, which attempts to illuminate the reasons
for this omission and to raise the question of which function inheres in it (or also: who exactly
profits from it and how), Sternfeld's lecture stressed the common interests and potential
possibilities for cooperation between the two fields. Ultimately, in her view, both educative
and curatorial action with critical aspirations involve the attempt, a minoritised one, to make
the actualisation of critical, pedagogical approaches productive for a new institutional
practice, away from representation towards processual spaces of agency, and to turn the
disciplinary link (from a historical perspective) between art and education into an
emancipatory project. Janna Graham, for her part, emphasises in her article 'Spanners in the
Spectacle: Radical Research at the Frontlines' (2010) the shared battle against precarious
working conditions in the art field and against the neoliberal appropriation of creativity as an
economic factor, seeing here the urgent necessity of forming alliances between artists,
curators and gallery educators, and especially between these and activists: If the project of an
'educational turn' is indeed to find new strategies for opposing, exiting or even surviving these
new regimes of arts education, it is necessary then to move beyond professional distinctions,
to include those actively engaged in the struggle between the education of a neoliberalised
'creative class' and the creation of emancipatory and critical education.39 In conclusion, I
would like to emphasise another potential shared interest between curatorial and educational
action in conjunction with the 'educational turn': engendering queer spaces in the sense that
the desire to become free from contradictions, in one way or another, gives way to the logic of
action of open-ended work in and with the contradictions. The antinomy, alluded to above,
between emancipation through the will to educate and emancipation through emphasising the
presumed principle equality of all subjects (represented here by the two theoretical positions
of Rancière and Bourdieu respectively), between exclusionary action and paternalist action, is
complex and not to be resolved in practice. Critical gallery educators are just as aware of this

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irresolvability as critical curators - but they may sometimes draw different conclusions from it.
In my view, collaboration under these auspices, bringing these conflicts into the artistic-
educative spaces of the 'educational turn', would in fact open up new possibilities for what an
institutional practice following institutional critique could be.

It would be hard work, though. A precondition for forming an alliance of this kind - if it wants
to do justice to the egalitarian claims of the 'educational turn' - would be the recognition of
gallery education as an independent cultural practice of knowledge production in the
curatorial field as well, while simultaneously questioning and processing the aforementioned
hierarchisation of production and reproduction/distribution. Another precondition would be
to make room in art spaces in the sense of 'unlearning privilege', and that the occupation of
space should be motivated by activist positions - with all the possibly disastrous consequences
this might have for the aesthetic and intellectual glamorousness of the peer groups previously
operating in it.

It may be possible to create these conditions as one effect of productive encounters in coming
years - in case the 'educational turn' proves to be a real turn and not 'simply another in a string
of long-term social and political projects that are routinely "discovered" (like Columbus
"discovered" America) by the contemporary art world to satiate an endless demand for
circulation of the "new"'.40

Translated from German by Aileen Derieg. The text's full title is 'Alliances for Unlearning: On
the Possibility of Future Collaborations Between Gallery Education and Institutions of
Critique'.

Footnotes
1. Felicity Allen, 'Situating Gallery Education', Tate Encounters [E]dition 2: Spectatorship,
Subjectivity and the National Collection of British Art (ed. David Dibosa), February 2008.
Available at http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/tate-encounters
/edition-2/ (last accessed on 18 October 2010).↑
2. Visibility means not only improved opportunities for agency and articulation, but also an
increase in control and regulation. See the allusion in F. Allen, 'Situating Gallery
Education', op. cit.; Veronica Sekules, 'The Edge Is Not the Margin', in Access all Areas,
Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2010, pp.235-53; and Carmen Mörsch,
'Kunstcoop©: Kunstvermittlung als kritische Praxis', in Viktor Kittlausz and Winfried
Pauleit (ed.), Kunst - Museum - Kontexte: Perspektiven der Kunstund Kulturvermittlung,
Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006, pp.177-94.↑
3. I use the term 'function' not in a determinist, functionalist sense, but rather based on the
concept of the 'author function' as introduced by Michel Foucault: as a historically evolved,
non-intentional occurrence, which is still structured by power relations and domination,
and which is involved in producing the mechanisms of order and exclusion, by which it is
itself conditioned. See M. Foucault, 'What Is an Author?' (1969), Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice (ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. D. F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon),
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.113-38. I prefer 'function' rather than effect, in
order to leave no doubt that the use, the concrete arrangement and the dispensing of
gallery education along with the associated consequences does not necessarily involve
individually intended effects, but nevertheless those that are based on active actions
guided by certain interests. These effects can be analysed in terms of which interests are
respectively dominant at a certain time and in a certain context and which narratives are
hegemonic.↑
4. 'It's not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution. It's a question of
what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalise, what forms of
practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art
is internalised, embodied, and performed by individuals, these are the questions that
institutional critique demands we ask, above all, of ourselves.' Andrea Fraser, 'From the
Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique', Artforum, vol.44, no.1, September
2005, pp.278-83.↑
5. There were two conditions for participating in the research project: the undergraduate
students had to come from a family that had migrated to England (from where was
irrelevant) and in which they were the first to attend a university. See
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/majorprojects/ tate-encounters/ (last
accessed on 18 October 2010).↑
6. This project will be published as: Andrew Dewdney, David Dibosa and Victoria Walsh
(ed.), Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum, London and New
York: Routledge, 2011.↑
7. The extensive output of visual productions and research papers is accessible in its entirety
at: http://process.tateencounters.org/ (last accessed on 13 November 2010).↑
8. Current examples of this would be the project 'Doing Kinship with Pictures and Objects: A
Laboratory for Public and Private Practices of Art' (2009-12) at the Austrian Museum of
Folk Life and Folk Art, where the research team includes the two gallery educators Andrea
Hubin and Karin Schneider; see A. Hubin and K. Schneider, 'Doing Research with
Anthropologists, Designers, Mediators and a Museum: A Project on, for and with Families
in Vienna', Engage Magazine, issue 25 ('Family Learning'), Spring 2010, pp.31-40. There
are also the research and education projects of trafo.K, the Viennese agency for cultural
education described in Nora Sternfeld, 'Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education Learn
from Its Political Traditions?', e-flux journal, issue 14, March 2010. Available at
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/125 (last accessed on 29 October 2010).↑
9. Research at the Front Lines', Fuse Magazine, April 2010, n.p. Also available at
http://www.faqs.org/ periodicals/201004/2010214291.html (last accessed on 13
November 2010). On the concept of 'militant research', see Marta Malo de Molina,
'Common Notions, Part 1: Workers-inquiry, Co-research, Consciousness-raising' (ed.

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Notas Rojas Collective Chapel Hill, trans. Maribel Casas-Cortés and Sebastian
Cobarrubias), February 2006, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/malo/en (last
accessed on 29 October 2010).↑
10. For more detail on this and for an explanation of gallery education as critical practice, see
C. Mörsch, 'At a Crossroads of Four Discourses: documenta 12 Gallery Education in
Between Affirmation, Reproduction, Deconstruction and Transformation', in C. Mörsch et
al. (ed.), documenta 12 education #2: Between Critical Practice and Visitor Service,
Berlin and Zürich: diaphanes, 2010, pp.9-31.↑
11. Due to a lack of self-reflexivity in terms of educational methodology, however, this is rarely
made explicit, but is articulated instead through discursive practices: through the manner
of addressing the audience, the content of the research and the context of the discussion.↑
12. George E. Hein, 'The Constructivist Museum', in Eileen Hooper-Greenhill (ed.), The
Educational Role of the Museum, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, pp.73-79.↑
13. See Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their
Public (1966, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman), Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.↑
14. Deconstruction depends on the existence of the dominant text in order to be able to work
in it. 'The practitioner of deconstruction works within a system of concepts, but with the
intention of breaking it open.' Jonathan Culler, Dekonstruktion. Derrida und die
poststrukturalisitische Literaturtheorie, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988, p.95.↑
15. Deconstruction depends on the existence of the dominant text in order to be able to work
in it. 'The practitioner of deconstruction works within a system of concepts, but with the
intention of breaking it open.' Jonathan Culler, Dekonstruktion. Derrida und die
poststrukturalisitische Literaturtheorie, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988, p.95.↑
16. See Shoshana Felman, 'Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and
Interminable', Yale French Studies, The Pedagogical Imperative: Teaching as a Literary
Genre, no.63, 1982, pp.21-44; and Jürgen Oelkers, 'Provokation als Bildungsprinzip', in
Landesverband der Kunstschulen Niedersachsen, Bielefeld: Bilden mit Kunst, 2004,
pp.93-113.↑
17. See Michel de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien: Les Arts de faire, Paris: Gallimard,
1980.↑
18. See Irit Rogoff, 'Looking Away - Participations in Visual Culture', in Gavin Butt (ed.), Art
After Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp.117-33; or the research project
'Tate Encounters' mentioned above.↑
19. See Jacques Derrida, Voyous, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003.↑
20. For historical examples, see C. Mörsch, 'From Oppositions to Interstices: Some Notes on
the Effects of Martin Rewcastle, The First Education Officer of the Whitechapel Gallery,
1977-1983', in Karen Raney (ed.), Engage Magazine, no.15, 2004, pp.33-37; and C.
Mörsch, '"To Take All That Learning and Put It Together with All That Art": Loraine
Leeson's Artistic-Educative Projects in the Context of English Cultural Policies', in NGBK
(ed.), Art for Change - Loraine Leeson, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2005. For examples from the
1990s, see the work by the group Kunstcoop© at the NGBK in Berlin, in ibid., pp.108-33;
the project 'Stördienst' at the Museum for Modern Art Vienna, in NGBK (ed.),
Kunstcoop©, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2001; and E. Sturm, 'Zum Beispiel: StörDienst und
trafo.K - Praxen der Kunstvermittlung aus Wien', in Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher
Kunstvereine (AdKV ) (ed.), Kunstvermittlung zwischen Partizipatorischen
Kunstprojekten und interaktiven Kunstaktionen, Berlin: Vice Versa, 2002, pp.26-37.↑
21. See http://www.ago.net/youth-council-archive (last accessed on 22 October 2010). See
also J. Graham and Yasin Shadya, 'Reframing Participation in the Museum: A Syncopated
Discussion', in Griselda Pollock and Joyce Zemans (ed.), Museums after Modernism:
Strategies of Engagement, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007,
pp.157-72.↑
22. N. Sternfeld, 'Unglamorous Tasks', op. cit.↑
23. See http://radical.temp.si/history/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010).↑
24. As the Edith Russ Site describes itself, 'The focus is on the content of the artwork and
technology's influence on shaping and defining artistic ideas. Beyond the programme of
discussions and presentations, we will also hold exhibitions intended to address subjects
which are socially relevant and future-oriented.' The exhibition programme, which is
largely publicly funded, frequently takes into consideration queer, feminist and media-
activist positions. See http://www.edith-russ-haus.de/index.php/Kunstvermittlung
/Kunstvermittlung?userlang=en (last accessed on 25 October 2010).↑
25. See Pen Dalton, The Gendering of Art Education, Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA:
Open University Press, 2001.↑
26. See, for example, the consequences of the invitation to the Laboratory of Insurrectionary
Imagination to conduct a workshop with the title 'Disobedience Makes History' for Tate
Modern (January 2010). The group 'Liberate Tate' came out of the workshop, which in
turn used activist strategies learned in the workshop to denounce the employment and
sponsoring practices of Tate itself. See http://www.frieze.com/blog/entry
/unhappy_birthday/ (last accessed on 25 October 2010). Another example is the
discussions that arose about the exhibition and event series 'C-Words' by the group
Platform at the Arnolfini in Bristol, where the art institution itself became the centre of
attention as a polluting factor. See http://blog.platformlondon.org/content/c-words-
ripples-continuing (last accessed on 25 October 2010).↑
27. The activities and results of the project have been gathered in two volumes: Ayse Gülec,
Claudia Hummel, C. Mörsch, Sonja Parzefall, Ulrich Schötker and Wanda Wieczorek (ed.),
documenta 12 education 1: Engaging Audiences, Opening Institutions. Methods and
Strategies in Education at documenta 12, Berlin and Zürich: diaphanes, 2009; and C.
Mörsch et al. (ed.), documenta 12 education 2, op. cit.↑

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28. It would be interesting to investigate whether and which long-term changes might be
effected by a project like the Youth Council on the institutional policy and the structures of
the NGO by 'Tate Encounters' in Tate Britain, or by the Edgware Road Project of the
Serpentine Gallery, which should also be mentioned in this context. See
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/06/edgware_road. html (last accessed on 25
October 2010).↑
29. For the deconstructive approach of 'Hatching Ideas', the children and young people's
programme at documenta 12, see C. Hummel, 'What Does aushecken - Hatching Ideas -
Mean?', in A. Gülec et al., documenta 12 education 1, op. cit.↑
30. Andrea Phillips, 'Education Aesthetics', in Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson (ed.), Curating
and the Educational Turn, London and Amsterdam: Open Editions and de Appel, 2010,
pp.83-96.↑
31. Simon Sheikh, 'Letter to Jane (Investigation of a Function)', in ibid., pp.61-75.↑
32. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman (ed.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, Hemel Hempstead:
Harester Wheatsheaf, 1994, pp.66-111.↑
33. Since the term 'education' is now in vogue, curators and artists increasingly refer to
themselves as educators, implying that their practice is already educative, since it is
already a mediating practice.↑
34. See G.C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (ed. Sarah
Harasym), New York and London: Routledge, 1990, p.9.↑
35. N. Sternfeld, 'Unglamorous Tasks', op. cit.↑
36. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
(trans. Kristin Ross), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.↑
37. Ruth Sonderegger, 'Institutionskritik? Zum politischen Alltag der Kunst und zur
alltäglichen Politik ästhetischer Praktiken. Symposium of the Deutschen Gesellschaft für
Ästhetik', paper given at the conference 'Ästhetik und Alltagserfahrung' at Friedrich-
Schiller-Universität in Jena, 2 October 2008.↑
38. The symposium was organised by schnittpunkt, an exhibition theory and practice network.
See http://www.schnitt.org (last accessed on 25 October 2010).↑
39. J. Graham, 'Spanners in the Spectacle', op. cit.↑
40. Ibid.↑

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