de)Fending Art Education Through the Pedagogical Turn

(de)Fending Art Education Through the Pedagogical TurnIn this article I lay out how engaging with the issues and practices of the pedagogical turn in art, a significant shiftoccurring in art practice in recent years, invited and echoed my re-practicing of current curricular, pedagogical, and structural aspects of art education at the postsecondary level. I begin with a survey of art projects using educational forms as a medium along with some examples, pulling particularly from the free university movement. Then I reconsider the educational turn from within the institution as an alternative to projects that have worked alongside higher education. This reconsideration leads to an exploration of possible ways we might rupture naturalizing discourses and practices in art education within academia.Pedagogical Turn in Art"The straitjacket of efficiency and conformity that accompanies authoritarian models of education seems to beg for playful, interrogative, and autonomous opposition. Art is just one way to release this grip" (Bishop, 2007, p. 89).Knowledge production within higher education has been subsumed by the market ideals of neoliberalism, systematizing academic work into predictable outcomes that are comparable. Higher education has been undergoing an institutionalization (Aronowitz, 2000; Readings, 1996) that redefines our practices of teaching, organization of time and space, definitions and valuation of activity, assessment of learning, and accreditation of teachers. As Larrosa (2010) notes, "[w]hat we have is an attempt to make the logics of the internal performance of the university strictly function in accord with the economic logics of capital and the governmental logics of the state" (p. 693). These changes are in response to the forces, structures, and ideologies of our larger society.What many are referring to as the pedagogical turn in art is symptomatic of these institutional struggles (Krauss, Pethick, & Vishmidt, 2010). In this current rendition, education as art is being re-practiced as a form of critique focused on the institutionalization of education within the knowledge economy. Perhaps it is possible, as artist educator Bert Stabler shares in a recent interview (Ngo, 2010), "[b]y remaining at the margins of culture, fine art has ... managed to open up possibilities that education has not" (p. 213).The educational or pedagogical turn-a shiftin artistic and curatorial practices-embraces a diverse range of projects using education as form and pedagogy as medium that reflects the current move away from media-based to distributive practices (Allen, 2011). This shiftin focus takes education out of a supporting role or the position of afterthought as simply an addition to an existing exhibition structure, "towards a situation in which educational structure has been developed as a semi-autonomous project in its own right" (Gillick, 2010, p. 168). Moreover, these projects are not as beholden to existing educational and institutional structures, freeing them up to experiment with education as alternative cultural practices. As such, pedagogical practices as art practice or artist-driven education projects embrace self-education as they concurrently confront interrelations among education, institution, power, and market capitalism.Through dematerialized mediums such as talks, lectures, classes, discussions, knowledge exchanges, reading groups, schools, and so on (Podesva, 2007), educational projects act as artwork. Further, knowledge production comes about through the project and does not exist a priori, so learning within open forums of idea exchanges occurs without a student or master, but through equality in roles. These projects focus on the processual and the open-ended in self-organizational education within a pedagogical aesthetics (Rogoff, 2008, n.p.). In surveying art projects using educational forms as medium, Podesva (2007) posits these shared concerns and characteristics:1. …