This special edition of the International Journal of Lifelong Education brings together scholars and practitioners who query the pedagogical roles, purposes and practices of contemporary museums and art galleries and discuss new forms of museological enquiry, adult education and curatorial praxis aimed to disrupt problematic institutional traditions or respond to a troubled world. Tackling the politics and operations of adult education, curation and their pedagogical inter-connections within these institutions is important as it requires us to ask difficult questions about knowledge production and cultural representation in both the past and the present.
According to Preziosi (Citation1996, p. 97), we live today in ‘a profoundly museological world’. These institutions have become such dominant features of our social, cultural and pedagogical landscapes that it is ‘inconceivable to think ourselves back to a world without them’, to think outside the shadows cast by ‘the massive and dazzling familiarity [of these] extraordinary inventions’. For Clover and Sanford (Citation2016), and Christensen-Scheel in this volume, museums and art galleries are ‘contact zones’ with no singular, hegemonic reality. They are neither neutral nor impartial; they do not speak with one commanding, institutional voice but ‘are about individuals making subjective choices’ (Marstine, Citation2006, p. 2). Institutional practices are guided on one hand by deep conservatism and the indemnity of historical, cultural, aesthetic and knowledge authority. Yet there are increasing practices of resistance, of deconstruction and of the reconstruction of new narratives and programming aimed to position these institutions as actors on the stage of struggle for social justice and change (e.g. Illeris, Citation2006; Janes, Citation2009; Steedman, Citation2012).
Since their inception, education and learning have been highly contested in museums and art galleries. Their nature and purpose are marked by long-standing disputes about both means and ends. For Burnham and Kai-Kee (Citation2011, p. 3) museum education problematically ‘lacks not only a history, but a theory of its own’. This has weakened its ability to stand up against the powerful practices of preservation, conservation and particularly, curation. Therefore, whilst Phillips (Citation2010, p. 85) believes ‘pedagogy is installed in the armoury of contemporary curating’, others see them as continuing in hierarchical opposition. Using a particularly poignant analogy, Clover and Bell (Citation2013) illustrated through their study how curators were understood by the educators to preside in a proverbial ‘House of Lords’, whilst the museum educators were seen to labour along the backbenches of the institution’s ‘House of Commons’.
Adult education in museums and art galleries is undertaken in two primary ways. The first is through curated exhibits and displays. Both permanent and temporary exhibitions showcase artworks, objects, histories, images, people and places and use curatorial statements to guide the visitors. For Hall, Evans, and Nixon (Citation2013, p. xxi), this makes ‘exhibitions and displays … like a language’. They speak to us, tell us stories in order to produce and shape meaning about ourselves, our cultures, our histories and our world. Further, exhibits and displays are primarily visuals and these ‘are never transparent windows on to the world’ (Rose, Citation2001, p. 6). They too interpret the world in very particular ways which govern ‘how we see, and how we are able to see’ (p. 6). Problematically, exhibits and displays have tended to be presented to the public as ‘fact’, rather than the outcome of particular processes and practices which have deep cultural, social, political and pedagogical implications (Macdonald, Citation1998). For example, exhibits and displays tell us confidently who the great masters and history-makers are because they are featured. What they fail to mention, as feminist cultural theorists and adult educators remind us, is who and what is missing. In other words, although colonising, patriarchal, sexist and racist ideologies are embedded in the fabric of exhibitions, they hide in plain sight and without critical visual and discursive skills it is demanding to render them visible and decode them. Finding ways to enhance critical consciousness and visual literacy in ways that illuminate an institution’s problematic ideological assumptions responds to Freire’s belief that to empower people is to teach them to uncover the falsities and pretexts of the powerful. Voelkel and Henehan and Taber in particular, in this volume respond to this, as well as to Adrienne Rich’s (Citation1972, p. 18) argument that ‘until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman … is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society’.
The second pedagogic strategy of museums and art galleries is developing organised activities for adults that range from art-making workshops to public seminars, from higher education courses to pop up and guided discussions around specific artworks or objects. How these strategies are enacted depends on the perspectives of education, knowledge creation and learning that one takes. Historically, the educator–visitor transference of information model prevailed and there is evidence, as various authors in this volume note, that it remains. Based on the educators’ or curators’ knowledge authority as subject and content specialists, information presumed to be objective and value free is spread ‘downward’ to visitors in ways that preclude contestation, questioning and even thinking. Similar to universities, the mechanisms and rituals of power of these institutions rely heavily upon maintaining what Christensen-Scheel in this volume calls ‘blind visitors’, upon maintaining masters and non-masters, knowers and non-knowers, experts and non-experts.
Yet there is a noticeable shift away from the unquestioned/able authority of the museum and art gallery toward more ‘visitor-centred’ learning approaches. Museum educators are now to be skilled in listening, supporting, probing and negotiating meaning (Burnham & Kai-Kee, Citation2011). They must act more as facilitators of learning using, for example, open-ended questioning strategies – what Marsden in this volume calls ‘dialogical co-creation’- to encourage the development of skills ranging from deeper aesthetic comprehension to social critique. Educators must ‘seek not the masterful production of expertise and the authoritative pronouncement of truth, but rather the co-production of question, ambiguity and enquiry, often determined by the simple contingencies of where people happen to begin a conversation’ (O’Niell & Wilson, Citation2010, p. 14). Whilst some argue this annihilates the importance of expertise and ‘dumbs-down’ the work of the institution (e.g. Furedi, Citation2004), others, such as Clover in this volume, believe it introduces new critical forms of expertise alongside content specialisation that can nurture more complex processes of knowledge exchange and critical social and institutional reflection. Challenging the authority of the institution, educator or curator calls into question assumptions about singular truths and absences both within the institution and beyond, and reframes adult education as a space of encounter, a more democratic practice of collective critical and creative exploration and engagement. Graham in this volume perhaps sums up the challenge of adult education best when she describes it as existing on a ‘fault line’ between liberatory and emancipatory trajectories and traditional practices that simply affirm neoliberal and elitist knowledges and values.
This volume centres around a number of critical questions: How are art galleries and museums actually responding pedagogically to a deeply neoliberal, neo-colonial, patriarchal and inequitable world? Are these institutions truly changing the stories they tell and their practices or are they merely voicing a rhetoric of change? What challenges do these institutions face in attempting to traverse the ‘fault’ line of change? What new research approaches and pedagogical and curatorial practices allow academics and visitors to engage more critically with museums and art galleries? Are education and expertise a thing of the past or do we need a more nuanced approach? How can we probe and render visible problematic assumptions behind the institution’s presumed authority and impartiality? As the contributors of this volume disrupt the sanctities of museums and art galleries, they offer ways to see, research, deconstruct, reconstruct, query, perform and name past and contemporary problems and to image future possibilities.
Faculty of Education, University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
[email protected] Sanford
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
[email protected] Johnson
University of Victoria, Victoria, Canada
[email protected]
References
- Burnham, R., & Kai-Kee, E. (2011). Teaching in the art museum: Interpretation and experience. Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum.
- Clover, D. E., & Bell, L. (2013). Contemporary adult education philosophies and practices in art galleries and museums in Canada and the UK. Adult Learner: Irish Journal of Adult and Community Education, 1(1), 29–43.
- Clover, D. E., & Sanford, K. (2016). Contemporary museums as pedagogic contact zones: Potentials of critical cultural adult education. Studies in the Education of Adults, 48(2), 127–141.10.1080/02660830.2016.1219495
- Furedi, F. (2004). Where have all the intellectuals gone? Confronting twentieth century philistinism. London: Continuum.
- Hall, S., Evans, J., & Nixon, S. (Eds.). (2013). Representation. London: Sage.
- Illeris, H. (2006). Museums and galleries as performative sites for lifelong learning: Constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of audience positions in museum and gallery education. Museum and Society, 4(1), 15–26.
- Janes, R. (2009). Museums in a troubled world. Abingdon: Routledge.
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- Marstine, J. (Ed.). (2006). New museum theory and practice. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
- O’Niell, P., & Wilson, M. (Eds.). (2010). Curating and the educational turn. London: Open Editions.
- Phillips, A. (2010). Education aesthetics. In P. O’Niell & M. Wilson (Eds.), Curating and the educational turn (pp. 83–96). London: Open Editions.
- Preziosi, D. (1996). Brain of the Earth’s body: Museums and the faming of modernity. In P. Duro (Ed.), The rhetoric of frame: Essays on the boundaries of artwork (pp. 96–110). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Rich, A. (1972). When we dead awaken: Writing as re-vision. College English, 34(1), 18–30.10.2307/375215
- Rose, G. (2001). Visual methodologies. London: Sage.
- Steedman, M. (Ed.). (2012). Gallery as community: Art, education, politics. London: Whitechapel Gallery.