We Spoke About Hippies – Sarah Pierce
Conveying some persistent thoughts following a recent symposium at the ICA on the 'educational turn' in art.
"At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love."
As an introduction to the issues in the symposium, Mick Wilson identified the educational turn in art as a piqued interest in contemporary art in education, identified as a preponderance of projects, exhibitions and ancillary activities that take on paradigms found in pedagogy to elaborate a cultural practice. Mick presented these as a counter-balance to mainstream art education. As formal art education in Europe undergoes a largely bureaucratic makeover, another space in contemporary practice outside of the academy is making an appeal to alternative notions of the pedagogical. Instances of such appeals came in the form of large-scale projects, such as Manifesta 6, which initiated a temporary art school in Cyprus and was subsequently closed by the city of Nicosia, and Documenta 12, which cited education via one of the exhibition's three leitmotifs. In addition, Mick made reference to a rise in visibility of small-scale engagements concerned with pedagogy as a group encounter or durational space beyond the timeframe of an exhibition. The evening's discussion was proposed as an opportunity to take account of this activity as it was taking place, specifically to think about what is at stake in the turn to an informal educational praxis.
The panel consisted of five speakers: Liam Gillick, Andrea Phillips, Dave Beech and myself, with Adrian Rifkin as the respondent. Early on, Liam signalled a problem. The problem, to paraphrase, is this: The productive potential of this educational turn does not rest on the moments when we stop to take account of it. Its relevance lies elsewhere, in other discussions. It's not that we can't recognise an educational turn, we can. It's not that this educational turn doesn't call for analysis, it does. It's that when asked to account for its productive potential, we lose sight of our subject. We pivot our observations around formalised encounters like art education and we enlist what we know. We forget that this educational turn is not one thing. It is not one place or one time. In taking account, we circumvent what is at stake: other discussions, elsewhere.
As we negotiate what is at stake in the educational turn, perhaps we should think about the moments when we gather to take account of its productive potential. It still seems important to resist the institutional imperative to measure 'potential' through this type of legitimating exercise. At a certain point in the discussion at the ICA, the term 'nostalgia' came into play. First, it was in reference to exhibitions that use a pedagogical aesthetic to signal the kinds of reclaimed, equalised spaces found in popular education. Then, when Dave Beech cited civil disobedience as an example of grassroots organising that has particular resonance in art practice, one member of the audience wondered if this too tended towards nostalgia. What soon became clear was that nostalgia was a pejorative. It was a way to regulate certain expressions of desire in need of correction. This left us somewhat bereft. It seemed that nostalgia befit any practice that identified with education on any level. It is hard to answer why we needed to read the kinds of productive potentials we were dealing with as misguided misreads of past political situations. Was it to make their outputs more legible or less relevant? Either way, we obscured other perhaps more relevant and compelling conflicts in these practices. In the moments that we disavowed those who desire other discussions, elsewhere, we simultaneously dismantled our own productive potential.
Which brings me to a poignant moment in the evening, which Adrian Rifkin introduced, and which I will name here as, "The Marxist vs. The hippy." The Marxist arrives with politics intact, prepared and knowing the correct course of action to follow. The hippy arrives chaotically, unprepared, unknowing and distracted. Yet, really, the hippy knows everything and the Marxist knows nothing. With a sense of displaced nostalgia, Adrian longs to be the hippy, the one inscribed with the anticipation of not knowing anything while knowing everything. He mused, “I'm faintly nostalgic for what happens next, which is tomorrow... because I want to see what it will contain and how we can rethink art and education in their unfixed and changing relations”. What if we were to read the productive potential of an educational turn in anticipation of what we may find out, as opposed to what we already know? How might this allow us to speak about the things we love and believe in without feeling embarrassed, retrograde or fanatic?
While sitting outside on the UCLA campus last April, I observed a small group of students convene and begin an anti-war demonstration against the US occupation of Iraq. Carrying placards and with a megaphone at hand, they took turns calling out several rounds of chants as they strolled along the pathway that encircles the Arts quad. After a while, they concluded the protest and dispersed, giving each other hugs and kisses and high-fives. I suddenly felt like I was watching Epic theatre. Like a band of actors in Brecht's Galileo, the protesters momentarily suspended the scene of the academy, demonstrating the political as anachronistic ritual, available and remote at once. I was drawn in and confused: Do I get up and join the demonstration? Do I stay where I am? I happened to be on the campus to interview Mary Kelly for my research in relation to Nought to Sixty. Specifically, I wanted to ask her about the State of British Art Debate, held at the ICA in 1978. In speaking about the event, which she remembered well, Mary noted that it was always acceptable in those settings to situate your political thought in Marxist theory, but as soon as someone tried to shift this to include gender, it was like a bombshell had been set off in the room.
During our interview, I mentioned to Mary the demonstration I had witnessed a few hours before. She smiled, which I read as approval. Not just for what the students were protesting, but for their organised presence on campus. It was our take on the students' experience of course, but we decided protest is better when it's fun.
Sarah Pierce is an artist and organiser of The Metropolitan Complex.