Emancipatory Artistic Practices: Alternative Strategies in Art Education Keywords: art, education, Arte Útil, Ruangrupa, Gudskul, Ruya Foundation, artist school Abstract Art education is not taken seriously in most schools and museums worldwide. Even in art universities there are problems that require attention. This essay aims to analyze three different projects/schools that have an alternative approach to art education and consequently to diffuse art to society. They are: Escola de Arte Útil, Ruya Foundation and Gudskul. They prove that it is possible to teach art in a more modern and effective way even in poor countries or those in conflict. Art is knowledge and it needs to be spread out.
Art is not a democratic subject. Museums were created with the need for a space for collections of objects by and for the wealthy people and to perpetuate knowledge (Pinto, 2012). Even today they are seen as elitist spaces. In Brazil, for example, 70% of the population have never visited a museum (Ipea), and classes A and B make up 82% of the visitors (Instituto Oi Futuro). As far as the lack of popularity of museum spaces is concerned, John Cotton Dana wrote an essay called The Gloom of The Museum. They become lost in their idea of a museum and forget its purpose. They become lost in working out their idea of a museum and forget their public. And soon, not being brought constantly in touch with the life of their community … they become entirely separated from it and go on making beautifully complete and very expensive collections but never construct a living, active, and effective institution. (1917, p.25)
Recently, efforts have been made to change this vision and draw more people to art spaces. Art and museums consequently are - or should be - important in the construction of knowledge in society and cultural transformation. One problem is the educational role of the museums. The creation of the art educator function within the museum space was late, only in 1852, at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Ana Mae Barbosa, an authority in art education in Brazil says that “in most museums the art educator is an appendix and is even directed, oriented by the curator . . . it is the art educator’s role to only guide the reading or play the proposed
animation” (1999, p.84). Barbosa, who was a student of Paulo Freire - one of the most remarkable thinkers in the history of pedagogy and patron of Brazilian Education developed a Triangular proposal to art education in Brazilian schools and different approaches to the educational program in MAC-USP (Museum of Contemporary Art, University of São Paulo) where she was a director. She is an advocate of art as a learning tool and not as a complementary - often forgotten - discipline. As a museum director, she proposed that the curator and the art educator should both have the same responsibility. This is about the same as what the Uruguayan artist and critic Luis Camnitzer thinks. One of his most famous work is “A Museum is a School”. That's exactly what he believes and tries to develop. He was named pedagogical curator of the 6th Mercosul Biennal, a project awarded by the Culture Minister of Brazil, one of its 2007 Cultura Viva prizes. The whole event was an educational tool. The intention was to encourage the perception of the visitors as much as the artist's. They prepared the school and the teachers before visiting the Bienal months and also sent exercises about contemporary art to the children with months in advance. They were also “proposing a work of art primarily as a solution to a problem and not as a hedonistic object” (Camnitzer, 2009, p. 17). Also emphasizing that art can improve and expand knowledge and undermine the elitist vision and powerful structure of the art market. There are also some problems in the traditional pedagogy of art universities. Pablo Helguera in Education for Socially Engaged Art wrote that: Traditional pedagogy fails to recognize three things: first, the creative performativity of the act of education; second, the fact that the collective construction of an art milieu, with artworks and ideas, is a collective construction of knowledge; and third, the fact that knowledge of art does not end in knowing the artwork but is a tool for understanding the world. (2011, p.80)
He is also critical about two points in the art universities. First, Helguera thinks that the environment is very often artificial and not challenging enough. It is very different from the art market in general. Secondly, the segmentation in art universities such as painting, sculpture and multimedia can be problematic, primarily when thinking about post-minimalism practices - where a concept is heading the technique.
For the artist and teacher Marina Abramovic, the problems are also in the teachers. Some of them are stuck in the past “still painting the Acropolis” (2009, p.182) while others artist that would turn out good professors don’t really have an interest on doing that. She also indicates that most universities do not help or teach the students how to make a living out of their work, how to sell and approach galleries. To summarize, museums are trying to be democratic spaces but they need not only to focus on exhibitions but also to be more inclusive and rapidly meet the needs of the political and cultural atmosphere. Also including the citizens, diffusing erudition and cultural activities. Education departments should be reinforced and prioritized alongside curation. At schools, art education is poor and, at universities, there are some issues yet to be solved. So, with all these problems about the accessibility to museums and especially in art education, projects and schools with innovative approaches are trying to fill these gaps. Ruya Foundation Ruya Foundation is a Baghdadi non-profit organisation founded in 2012 by Tamara Chalabi. She created the Ruya foundation to promote culture in the country and one of its biggest achievements was the National Pavilion of Iraq at the Venice Biennale, which has been taking place since 2013. It was set up to be a bridge between Iraq and the world and vice versa. In Iraq and the Middle East in general, the art market is very restricted and opportunities are rare to artists. In the 2019 list of The 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World by the Hyperallergenic site, Artists Living in Iraq occupied the 13th position. They say that “It’s not just artists, but everyone still living in the shattered country . . . This is particularly painful because the best choice available for an Iraqi artist today is starting to look like an exile, as evidenced by the number of Iraqi expats in the exhibition.” In Ruya, things are not so different. The foundation was formed by a group of expat art lovers to preserve Iraqi culture. The Foundation has some interesting ongoing projects. One of them is Ruya Notebooks launched in January 2017. They publish two books a year with texts chosen by an artist or curator translated to Arabic. They are distributed for free in specific places in Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and UAE. The aim is to overcome the lack of educational art texts that are “restricted by socio-economic factors, one of the most limiting being the ability to speak a Western European language” (Ruya, 2018).
The foundation has also the Ruya Shop and Ruya Labs. The first is a contemporary art library and projection space in Baghdad since December 2017. In this space there is a weekly book market and projections and videos of contemporary artists. The latter is a project composed of workshops given by artists. One of them is a project by the artist Francis Alÿs called Creativity for Survival: Art Workshops in Refugee Camps in Iraq. The foundation is setting up a permanent art space in Camp Shariya in northern Iraq, which will facilitate adult refugees engaging in art through a program of talks, classes, and workshops led by a range of local and international artists including Alÿs, whose work has dealt with spatial justice and land-based poetics. (Berkholz, 2015)
However, in 2018, the Foundation inaugurated the Ruya Maps. It is an initiative that aims to exhibit works by artists who live in conflict zones and are not acknowledged in Europe. The first artist chosen for this project was Pepe López from Venezuela. This is quite contradictory as the purpose of the Foundation is to promote art and culture from Iraq and Middle East. Escuela de Arte Útil Tania Bruguera is an artist born in Havana, Cuba, in 1968. She was raised in a context of a revolutionary and communist country. Her father, Miguel Brugueras, was a diplomat and minister in Fidel Castro government. In 1998, she formulated a school called Catédra Arte de Conducta (behavior art school). It was the first program focused in in Latin America.The school ran through 2002-2009 in the artist’s house in Havana. It was an alternative space of art studies with professors from several different areas. The workshops lasted a week and were free. It was a pioneer system to teach art in Cuba. She described it as “focused in the discussion and analysis of sociopolitical behaviour and the understanding of art as an instrument for the transformation of ideology through the activation of civic action on its environment” (Bruguera, n.d.). Born in a utopian Cuban environment, she thinks that art has to “transform some spaces in society” (Ibid). She also describes herself as an artist and activist and her work is seen by some critics as time specific art because they rely on the socio-historical context of a country, society, neighbourhood, etc. The Catédra Arte de Conducta was an embryo for the Escuela de Arte Útil, an ongoing project. Arte Útil can be translated to ‘art as a tool’ or ‘useful art’. The idea of what
constitutes Arte Útil has been discussed upon judiciously over the last years, and it was coined only in 2012. It was formulated by Tania Bruguera and curators at the Queens Museum, New York, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Grizedale Arts, Coniston (Asociación Arte Útil, 2019). The school's methodology focus on spotting a problem, who causes it, who it affects, and then propose a solution that still hasn’t been thought of. There are goals and beneficial outcomes and failure is not a possibility: ”the work is not only for the art world but for the people in the place where that reality is” (Bruguera, 2009, p.181). In an interview with the artist for the Select magazine in 2019, Muniz and Alzugaray wrote that “the classes are composed of case analyses and proposals for concrete problems, through multiple voices, with their irregularities and dissonances, which are looked over by mediators who try to reach a common place through the rigorous criticism of the projects”. The school of Arte Útil is implemented in several museums and other institutional spaces around the globe. The project is free and accessible to anyone. Bruguera intends to involve the public that normally don’t visit such spaces and sneak this kinds of projects into the institutions (Bruguera, 2017). They have an archive of over 200 projects of Arte Útil from all over of the world which is available on their website. Some of those are from students and others from famous artists, such as Vito Acconci and Joseph Beuys.
Tania, who is the head of the project, has a decolonial way of thinking about the world, as she is Cuban. But the partners and other international correspondents are mainly from Europe and the United States. She should involve more people from Cuba and Latin America in the Association of Arte Útil. Another problem is that the project is only implemented in institutional spaces, because, like it was said in the introduction, museums are not democratic spaces yet, especially in underdeveloped countries; sites that the project should cover more often.
Gudskul Before talking about the school, it is important to say that ruangrupa is a collective from Jakarta, Indonesia formed in 2000, which is standing out in the art world. They have participated in several exhibitions, such as Istambul and São Paulo Biennals and are curating the next Documenta 15 (2022). The group has eleven members and their work involves artists and other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technology and media focusing on Indonesian issues.
In February 2019 they launched Gudskul with two other groups: Serrum and Graphic Huru Hara (GHH). Gudskul is designed as a learning space for collective work simulation that emphasises the importance of critical and experimental dialogue, through a process of sharing and experiential learning. In Gudskul, participants will be directly involved in an art ecosystem and collaboratively determine artistic work practices together with access to resources and networks of work both nationally and internationally that have been built so far. (Gudskul, 2019)
Indonesia is an archipelago that was a disputed territory from the twelfth century by the Arabs and then the Europeans, specially the Dutch, that dominated the area until the end of Second World War. Nowadays, the access to contemporary art education is scarce. So, Gudskul was developed to fight with this art context through the practice of collaboration, collective and open art ecosystem development. The non-profit school offers a one-year program with short courses and eleven different subjects such as: collective sustainability strategy, collective practice thought and public relations. Among their values are: equality, sharing, solidarity, friendship and togetherness. The target audience are artists, art managers, curators, researchers, and cultural practitioners. None of the courses are free, but they have several financing options. They also have a special program for kids called ruruKids where they "encourage children's self-confidence, ability to express and think critically, and invite them to share knowledge with their friends” (Gudskul, 2019). Unfortunately, the courses have to be paid for and they have a target audience, which are factors that exclude some people that may want to participate.
As Camnitzer says, “it is a fact that institutional art education is still operating in the past and that it isn’t correctly addressing a high-powered market or any true social involvement” (2009, p.215). Artist schools are not new, they have existed for a long time. There are the famous Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany and Black Mountain College in North Carolina, United States, also the important Free International University (FIU) for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research by artist Joseph Beuys. In Latin America, “art education takes place as much in artist studios and through community actions as it does in university settings” (Camnitzer, 2009, p. 204). To name
a few important artist schools that occurred - some still exist - in the region: Escuelita del mal by Paulo Licona and Escuela de Garaje in Colombia, “Escola” Oysi in Chile, SUBescuela in Argentina, La Escuela del Sur in Uruguay, Escola da Floresta, Escola Por Vir and Torreão in Brazil and Escuela Panamericana del Desasosiego by Pablo Helguera. These three projects described above were born in underdeveloped countries with their particular issues and conflicts. It is a fact that they were conceived by established artists, and in the case of Ruya, a wealthy woman. Of course, they do not solve all problems as they are a government's responsibility, as well as museums', teachers' and so on. But they are playing an important role in art education with creative and innovative ideas, spreading knowledge and giving hope to future artists. It can make a difference not only in the art world but to the world.
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