Education (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)

Art's recent “educational turn” is viewed within a wider-ranging narrative of alternative ideas of education through art.

This book will be an original and indispensable resource for all who believe in the importance of art in the wider educational realm. Framing the recent “educational turn” in the arts within a broad historical and social context, this anthology raises fundamental questions about how and what should be taught in an era of distributive rather than media-based practices.

Among the many sources and arguments traced here is second-wave feminism, which questioned dominant notions of personal and institutional freedom as enacted through art teaching and practice. Similarly, education-based responses by the art community to the catastrophes of World War II and postcolonial conflict critically inform contemporary art confronting the interrelationships of education, power, market capitalism, and―as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe it―the global condition of war.

These writings by artists, philosophers, educators, poets, and activists center on three recurring and interrelated themes: the notion of “indiscipline” in theories and practices that challenge boundaries of all kinds; the present and future role of the art school; and the turn to pedagogy as medium in a diverse range of recent projects. Other writings address such issues as instrumentalism and control, liberation and equality, the production and the politics of culture, and the roots of research-based practice and experimental participatory works.