I N T R O D U C T I O N

The heresy Of dIdacTIc arT

sven spieker and tom holert

笔记: This double issue of ARTMargins consists of two sections. First comes
a special issue, edited by Sven Spieker and Tom Holert (“The Heresy of
Didactic Art”), followed by a section where we offer four new research arti-
cles on topics aligned with other editorial priorities (PP. 126–225).

In the special issue, we are interested in the multiple, and often strate-
gic, connections between art and alternative, radical pedagogies. 的
课程, the confl uence of art and radical pedagogy is nothing particu-
larly new. The past twenty years, 尤其, have witnessed a resurgence
of all manner of debates and initiatives that attend to the role that con-
temporary art plays or could play in the development of critical educa-
tion and pedagogy. Below the radar of academic art history, varying
cross sections between artists’ movements and pedagogy have com-
bined Black, feminist, LGBTQ+, or disability activism, as well as work-
ers’ or anarchists’ struggles and organizing to shape art practices that do
not shy away from teaching or from a relational epistemology of truth.
Especially pertinent in this regard has been the enlistment of art in vari-
ous forms of militant education as a means to oppose the hegemonic
(visual) pedagogy of colonialism.

The notion of an “educational turn,” referring both to increased
awareness of the educational functions of art and to various cultural insti-
tutions beyond art education proper—with its blossoming occurring

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_e_00312

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around 2010—is often used to describe this conjuncture between radical-
ness and pedagogy, and the term continues to hold considerable discur-
sive sway over the art world today.1 Indeed, the idea of an “educational
turn”—only the latest, it should be noted, in a series of such turns over
the long 20th century—has become an umbrella for many intersections
of art and pedagogy, up to a point where the two concepts appear, 今天, 到
be virtually synonymous. 的确, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say
that the history and epistemological structure of contemporary art has
now entered what can be referred to as the “posteducational” stage.

Of particular importance for the posteducational ubiquity of the

pedagogical in contemporary art are the struggles, contradictions, 和
dead ends that result from the current, often uneasy, coexistence of aes-
thetic production, institutional reform, the neoliberal financialization
and marketization of education, the surge in machine learning, 和
overall “educationalization” of society. Today more than ever, the radical
pedagogies and countereducational institutions designed by artists all
over the world confront the escalating educationalization of society at
大的, a development that characterizes the neoliberal regimes of the
present as little else can. Predicated on constant assessment and evalua-
的, testing and ranking, the neoliberal governmentality has placed the
economies and politics, the political economy of education, center stage.
The logic of “human capital” renders the subject in terms of “employ-
能力,” and thus dependent on the training and education purchased in
one of the various niches and layers of the financialized education mar-
kets. As Susannah E. Haslam has noted, there is “a problem manifest
through contemporary art’s co-option of educational forms and educa-
tional initiatives; its interrogation of (选择) sites of knowledge pro-
归纳法; and its matrix of artistic work and theoretical discourse defined
by the Educational Turn, as it has become inscribed into art’s history
and theory.”2 It is thus advisable to refrain from any undifferentiated
embrace of the educational turn’s alleged blessings.

The education in contemporary fine arts, clearly, is one of those

niches and layers mentioned above, and a highly differentiated one at
那. What does it mean to be a “learner” in the arts? It can surely imply

看, 例如, Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” e-flux Journal, 不. 0 (十一月 2008), https://www.e-flux
.com/journal/00/68470/turning/, and Curating and the Educational Turn, 编辑. Paul O’Neill
and Mick Wilson (阿姆斯特丹: Open Editions/de Appel, 2010).
Susannah E. Haslam, After the Educational Turn—Alternatives to the Alternative Art School,
博士论文, Royal College of Art, 伦敦, 2018, 16.

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many things, from costly, high-end MFA studies at a prestigious art
school to self-organized grassroots education at an alternative academy
founded by artists. The proliferation, in the field of contemporary art, 的
different modes of institutionalization—from basic to beta, from alterna-
tive to para—has resulted in the emergence of a wide spectrum of art
educations, ranging from formal or academic schooling to more infor-
mal models. This proliferation pertains not only to the training of future
artists and cultural workers but also to museums, galleries, biennials,
festivals, 博览会, auction houses, and independent art spaces. And while
some of these initiatives and venues seem to respond to the very same
neoliberal imperatives they profess to critique, others offer tools for
negotiating, if not for transcending or fully abandoning, those impera-
特维斯. 的确, the enthusiastic rediscovery of texts from the 1960s’ tradi-
tion of alternative and radical pedagogy—including Paulo Freire, Ivan
Illich, or Augusto Boal—and the burgeoning embrace of feminist, deco-
lonial, 失能, antifascist, and abolitionist education have no doubt
contributed to this development. 尽管, on the institutional level, 艺术
museums face, and sometimes give in to, the ever-increasing pressure
to generate revenue, many among them still make an earnest effort to
recalibrate their offerings in sometimes daring, adventurous ways. 在
the process, the educational department, neglected and even denigrated
for decades, has begun, hesitantly at times, to move to a central position
within the museum hierarchy.

The ongoing educationalist overhaul is—directly and indirectly—

informed by the educational and pedagogical practices of artists and art
institutions alike. With regard to the latter, it is worth noting that the
(邮政)educational turn of the past twenty years is affecting the institu-
tional framework for art production as well as its exhibiting, 活动
that are in their turn increasingly being framed as essentially educational
endeavors. 为了确定, the museum’s retooling as an institution devoted
to radical pedagogy dates at least from the 1920s, when the Soviet
Productivists sought to revolutionize the art museum under the banner
of collective art production and education for (并由) the masses.
然而, as the conversation between Annette Krauss and Ferdi Thajib
in this special issue also demonstrates, today the progressive nature of
the museum can no longer be taken for granted. 因此, 很多时候,
education by the institution and education for the institution—educating
the museum—have to be combined in order to effect tangible change
with regard to accessibility, intercultural opening, and audience develop-

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蒙特. 在此背景下, artists as much as policy makers may function as
educators and pedagogues vis-à-vis the museum and its overhaul. 为了
例子, as Pujan Karambeigi shows in his contribution, the effort to
dismantle the idea of the visitor as a universal subject by expanding the
number of sensorial channels through which the museum disseminates
its offerings—thus facilitating access to the institution by an extremely
diverse range of patrons with any number of physical or mental charac-
teristics—is complemented by artists using a variety of strategies to tran-
scend the idea of a normative recipient for their work—strategies that, 在
their turn, provide vital feedback for the museum’s educational efforts.

The COVID-19 pandemic has given the museum’s educational aspi-

rations even greater urgency. Within a few months, the virtual exhibi-
tion and the Zoom talk, as much as online seminars and conferences,
have profoundly reshaped our encounters with art and the discussions
其中, with important consequences for issues such as access justice or
the educationalist overhaul of the art institution. What Naomi Klein has
referred to as “the screen new deal”3 has unquestionably reached the art
世界, and if we do not learn how to survive amid the algorithmic rule
of social media and machine learning, our posteducational condition
might well turn out to be a disaster.

The impetus behind our special issue is ultimately historical, 或者
相当, genealogical. While we are interested in the way in which the
posteducation condition affects art institutions and art production, 我们
also want to ask after the more specific forms under which art and edu-
cation have asserted themselves in art production since the 1960s.
There is perhaps no single term that encapsulates this conundrum
quite as palpably as the didactic, an often vilified term that reentered
progressive art criticism in the 1960s, when the New York–based critic
Barbara Rose published an article by the same title in the pages of
Artforum, a publication that had until then viewed didactic art as synon-
ymous with “pedantic” or “academic.”4 For Rose, 相比之下, “didactic”
denoted less a dogmatic lesson than a work of art whose truth was to be
found in the conversations or discussions it set off. In Rose’s wake, 杰克
Burnham’s use of the phrase, again in Artforum, spoke to his concern
that the erosion of the boundaries between art and other domains—sci-

Naomi Klein, “Screen New Deal: Under Cover of Mass Death, Andrew Cuomo Calls On the
Billionaires to Build a High-Tech Dystopia,” The Intercept (可能 8, 2020), https://theintercept
.com/2020/05/08/andrew-cuomo-eric-schmidt-coronavirus-tech-shock-doctrine/.
Barbara Rose, “The Value of Didactic Art,” Artforum (四月 1967): 33–36.

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恩斯, 研究, the natural environment, social life—necessitated a new
critical approach based on research and production, along with a new
type of art as a form of organization and information handling. 作为
Burnham wrote, “the specific function of modern didactic art has been to
show that art does not reside in material entities, but in relations between
people and between people and the components of their environment.”5 In
Burnham’s view, the artist—whose activities can increasingly, 根据
to the author, not be distinguished from other types of social produc-
tion—acts as an organizer of society’s productive forces, using informa-
tion to model the relations between people and environments.

Rose’s and Burnham’s enlisting of the didactic, with different inten-
系统蒸发散, contends with the widespread disdain in which didactic art is still
held today, despite the fact that in the premodern and early modern
eras, art’s didactic functions were all but a commonplace. During the
European Middle Ages, Horace’s well-known formula “aut prodesse vol-
unt aut delectare poetae” (“the poets either want to instruct or to please”)
曾是, in the words of Norbert Kössinger and Claudia Wittig, a “universal
phenomenon” in literature and the arts.6 However, this dominance
ended with the Romantic era, coinciding with the demand that art exist
for its own sake, and culminating in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous denunci-
ation of the heteronomy of art as a form of heresy: “a heresy too palpa-
bly false to be long tolerated, but one which, in the brief period it has
already endured, may be said to have accomplished more in the corrup-
tion of our Poetical Literature than all its other enemies combined. 我
allude to the heresies of The Didactic.”7

Ever since Poe’s time, didactic art, which contradicts the autono-

mous art object that is at the center of the modernist project, 已经
associated with an unseemly overload of heteronomous elements that
are considered a distraction from art’s presumed essence. As Luis
Camnitzer has noted, “didactics is generally considered a dirty word. . . .
It is the primacy of formalism and the promotion of art for art’s sake
that led to a very simplistic definition of didactics and to its blacklisting.
In formalism’s dismissive definition of ‘didacticism,’ explicit messages
are viewed as dumbed down.”8

5
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7
8

Jack Burnham, “System Esthetics,” Artforum (九月 1968): 30–35, 31, emphasis original.
Norbert Kössinger and Claudia Wittig.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” . . .
Luis Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art (Austin: University of Texas Press,
2007), 34.

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相比之下, as Judith Rodenbeck shows here, in an article about
West German artist Marianne Wex’s extensive photographic research
project Let’s Take Back Our Space! (1977), the didactic was an extraordi-
narily productive, if usually unacknowledged and certainly undertheo-
rized, category in postformalist art of the late 1960s and 70s. 作为
Rodenbeck argues, Wex’s massive demonstration of gendered postures,
both in the form of a book and as part of an exhibition, enlists didacti-
cism in a collective feminist emancipation project that analyzes the
somatic self as a social construction, prompting in the process the very
corporeal awareness it analyzes.

The affective qualities of the didactic, an ambition to transcend nor-

mative ways of knowing and feeling as part of instruction and demon-
stration, are also in evidence in Hungarian neo-avant-garde artist Miklós
Erdély’s exhibition Hidden Green (1975), which was part of the artist’s
effort to install montage as a form of knowledge production. As Sándor
Hornyik notes in his commentary on Eszter Bartholy’s interpretation of
Hidden Green—of which we present the first English translation—in
his work, Erdély connected theories of creativity, including art, 和
everyday practice and scientific knowledge, a strategy that culminated in
他的 1975 “Creativity Exercises” workshop, where the artist used elements
of happenings and actionism in an effort to reshape artistic creativity
通过, 除其他事项外, elements of reform pedagogy.9 As
Timothy Ridlen argues in his review article for this issue,10 reform peda-
gogy is regaining its currency in our age of globalized neoliberal capital-
ism and monetized education, 通过, 除其他事项外, 它是
emphasis on individual educational needs, preempting in this way
insights about the situatedness of learning that have often informed
artistic projects engaged with education and pedagogy.

Both Wex and Erdély urge a flexible—we might even say, a down-

right haptic—approach to didacticism that stresses the concept’s Greek
根: didaktikos names first and foremost a teacher’s ability to convey
真相, as well as the ability to connect with an audience effectively.

For further details, see Sándor Hornyik, “Creativity, Collaboration, and Enlightenment:
Miklós Erdély’s ‘Art Pedagogy’,” in Dóra Hegyi, Zsuzsa László, and Franciska Zólyom, 编辑。,
Creativity Exercises: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond (柏林: Sternberg Press,
2020), 183–203.
Reviewing Hegyi, László, and Zólyom, Creativity Exercises, as well as Back to the Sandbox:
Art and Radical Pedagogy (Bellingham, WA: Western Gallery, Western Washington
大学, 2019).

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As Dora García’s artist project demonstrates, 有时, this audience is
ourselves. For García, studying, 阅读, and excerpting are (auto)didac-
tic ways of working through neoliberalism and its unceasing metabo-
lization of knowledge. Her notebooks are part of the very same “haptic”
approach to the didactic—an effort to demonstrate ideas—that also ani-
mates Wex and Erdély.

Our goal with this special issue is not to endorse, promote, or cele-

brate didactic art over its alleged (autonomous) 其他. 的确, we are
mindful of the historic, and thus frequently contradictory and disso-
nant, underpinnings of any didacticism, and we acknowledge the many
ways in which discourses of learning and education have been and are
being instrumentalized, not least by a variety of neoliberal and neo-
nationalist discourses and politics. 然而, as didacticism is being called
upon to fight a suspicious metaphysics of art and to turn art into an effi-
cient vehicle for political messages and ideological battle—how does
didactic art play out formally and aesthetically amid such struggles? 在
次, education and didactics are pitted against each other, 与
former referring to a notion of personal becoming, and the latter to per-
nicious forms of indoctrination. A genealogy of these terms and their
semantics may be helpful in arriving at a more differentiated picture of
the art/didactics conundrum. It may also help answer the question of
the extent to which didactics, this “bad object,” has been transvalued in
late-20th-century art.

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9 I N T R O D U C T I O N image

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