The Precarious Pedagogy of Art Working the Museum’s Ruins

Abstract

The inflecting intensity of artworks will be characterized as an affirmative critique of the archival objectives of the museum in the article that follows. It will be argued that the nuanced, vibrant materiality of art, the pedagogy that constitutes its aesthetic experience, enables ways of working out of the limits of the museum’s archival aspirations and determinations. By inflecting such definite archival objectives indefinitely, the evocative potentiality of art intensifies museum experiences as matters of thinking with and through precarity. A precarious museum affects differentiated ways of being and thinking with artworks inside and the world outside of its galleries and exhibitions as a coconstituted ecosystem. Considering the indeterminate condition of our times, such experiences with and through art in the museum are constitutive in generating immanent pedagogical potentialities for art education research and practice.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Thinking alongside and across the writings of the several scholars invoked in this article was to evoke experimental ways of thinking; to speculate about the encounter and potential alliances between and among disparate and disjunctive scenarios of thought across the inside and outside of the museum; and in doing so, to elicit differential ways of imagining, intuiting, and engaging with the museum in rhythm with the affecting power of its artworks. As such, the article assumes that the reduction of such encounters reduces the pedagogical potential for thinking and performing the museum’s historical and institutional practices otherwise.

² Proust’s comparison of a museum to a train station, and his love of Gare Saint-Lazare, is interesting considering that Monet’s painting, which once hung in the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, has been hanging in the Musée d’Orsay, the converted Beaux-Arts railway station, Gare d’Orsay, since 1986.

³ In distinguishing between two kinds of art politics, Massumi (2011) wrote: “Artistic practices that explicitly attempt to be political often fail at it, because they construe being political as having political content, when what counts is the dynamic form. An art practice can be aesthetically political, inventive of new life potentials, of new potential forms of life, and having no overtly political content” (p. 54, emphasis added).

⁴ Regarding the rhythmic process of “eternal recurrence,” see Nietzsche’s (1968) The Will to Power (pp. 544–550); and Dewey’s (1934/1958) “flux of change” (p. 16). See also Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) conceptualization of the recurring conjunctions of the rhizome: “and… and… and…” (p. 25).

⁵ The Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.) defines “scenario” as “a postulated or projected situation or sequence of potential future events; (also) a hypothetical course of events in the past, intended to account for an existing situation, set of facts, etc. Also more generally: a set of circumstances; a pattern of events.”

⁶ The Spinozan quandary, “we do not even know what a body can do” (de Spinoza, 1996, pp. 71–72), begs the question as to what happens, ethically, when bodies encounter contingent circumstances that are outside their scope of experiences and understandings. According to de Spinoza, such embodiment constitutes a potentiality for affecting and being affected—by a “prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in the capacity to act” (Massumi, as cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. xvi).

⁷ About the futurity of art, Deleuze (2006) wrote: “There is no work of art that does not call on a people who does not yet exist” (p. 324).

⁸ Regarding the contingent potentiality of discourse, see Foucault (1972, pp. 49, 135–140).

⁹ The neologism mol(ecul)ar is sociologist Peter Kraftl’s (2014) conceptualization of the dialogic dissonance between molar and molecular biopolitics from which an affirmative governance of life emerges (pp. 284, 288).