BxNU Symposium: In Need of Education
2 & 3 November 2018
In the UK (as elsewhere), mainstream education at primary, secondary and higher level is in financial and political crisis. In particular, the arts and other forms of cultural education are being divested in favour of the ‘hard’ subjects of science, technology, engineering and maths. The right to free, comprehensive education, a key aspiration of post-war welfare state endowment in the UK - is a diminishing mainstream political demand. This symposium asks, given such a context, what can and should education provision by museums and art galleries do and be?
Over two days at BALTIC we bring together education experts, artists, curators and thinkers who have profound experience of working within the fields of education, curating and pedagogy in gallery contexts; and who have differing views of the ways in which arts institutions can and should be used to support and extend education at a local and international level.
Chair
Andrea Phillips (BALTIC Professor & Director of the BxNU Institute of Contemporary Art)
Part 9: When asking what one institution (the museum) can offer another (education), what if the answer looks like neither?
Susannah Haslam (research practitioner and educator, London)
Tom Clark (curator, editor, writer and PhD researcher, Goldsmiths, London)
Among thinkers, educators, artists and curators, we observe an increasing imperative to inhabit a space between that demarcated by the institution of art and the institution of education. This space appears, in theory, to encompass what Michael Schwab has termed to be ‘indeterminate’; a place or form of practice without criteria to include or exclude, and one that in turn has, in theory, capacity to be autonomous. In practice, however, we encounter the inverse of this, where attentions concerning the organisational, infrastructural and curatorial practices between art, educational and political contexts are enmeshed, static in discourse. If this only works to continue critical diagnosis, instead we want to model an ambivalent space that already shimmers off the edges of these carefully protected competencies.