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Antonio Martínez Caler President of Granada Regional Council
The transducer museum Yolanda Romero Gómez
María Asunción Pérez Cotarelo Regional Delegate for Culture
In these times of crisis it is right to continue to claim the status of a necessary public service for the museum. It is likewise necessary to redefine what we understand by the adjective “public”. In our view, one of the preeminent fields for the public museum is the development of links with the community. Today more than ever, the public museum must strive to develop its own social fabric, for an artistic institution is built upon its relations with the people that visit it, criticize it and actively participate in its programmes. Without them, it would not exist.
While in general terms the project to which this publication belongs is probably one of the most complex undertaken by the José Guerrero Centre since its inception, it is especially so with regard to its educational dimension. Indeed, we believe that in this sense it is one of the most ambitious projects ever to have been presented by a museum institution in Spain. From the outset, the José Guerrero Centre has been highly aware of its educational function and has carried out a number of programmes well received by the educational community. However, until now it had not made a substantial approach to that essential component of any museum, the object in the exhibition, as a theme in itself. The TRANSDUCERS project was set in motion in order to close this gap. Its nature and aims are described in the following pages by the Centre’s Director, by Antonio Collados and Javier Rodrigo, the curators and authors of the project, and by two outstanding commentators on the extensive field of art, education and activism – Grant Kester and Aída Sánchez de Serdio, who were invited to provide it with a suitable contextualisation. The Diputación de Granada is proud to promote work of such scope and with such a strong commitment. All the participating artists and cultural workers show us that art does not have to be removed from the problems affecting the various communities making up social reality, but rather the opposite, that it can be an efficient instrument with which to combat them. As such, it must be known, shared, socialised and used together with other instruments in order to implement truly emancipating policies. The complexity of TRANSDUCERS, which is much more than a mere experimental exhibition, required the support of other institutions that took immediate interest in the project. The Ministry of Culture and the International University of Andalusia by way of its arteypensamiento group have made generous contributions, and the University of Granada and the Department of Education of the Junta de Andalucía have also collaborated by providing some of their own facilities for the correct operation of the project. I am grateful to all of them for their trust and the guarantee of their individual contributions, and I hope that this book, conceived as another instrument or practical guide, will be of use in furthering both the theory and the practice of fairer, more democratic realities.
The museum of today moves between the “attraction” of homogeneous, generic, multitudinous and, in most cases, captive audiences, and the “construction” of audiences as understood by Michael Werner, i.e., public agents that examine, question, reject, opine, judge and show an extraordinary link of belonging with the institution, even though they be minority. Thus, in contrast to the accommodating spectator there is the public agent, and in contrast to the global audience, which we have by default, there is the local audience, with whom we can work. There is no doubt that collaboration with local audiences is closely linked to the development of education departments and programmes of museum activities. It is well known that the presence and expansion of such departments in museums and art centres has undergone unprecedented growth in recent years, most probably due to the idea of distance between the institution and its visitors, and the economic need to attract new audiences resulting from the conversion of the art institution into an entertainment industry. But when education in an art centre is mentioned, it often continues to be considered a peripheral activity, subordinate to other traditional and supposedly natural events in art centres (especially exhibitions). In the José Guerrero Centre, our aim is for education to be one of our central activities. But, what is our concept of education? We understand it and aim to develop it as a task of mediation based on exchange, conversation or experience with the public. We attempt to promote horizontal education based on the pedagogy of the question, rather than the answer, which respects the knowledge of the learner without eliminating the necessary confrontation between the work and the spectator, i.e., the subversive power of the work of art. Teaching cannot invalidate the possibilities of art as an agent of disturbance and transformation but, on the contrary, must stimulate them. That is the challenge.
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