Education in the Expanded Field: Critical Pedagogy as Poetics in Contemporary Art

Conference held by Sven SPIEKER
Professor and Chair, Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
on Wednesday, June 20, 2012, at 5 p.m.
at the New Europe CollegeStr. Plantelor 21, Tel: 021 307 99 10, Bucharest

*** I want to devote this lecture to what I am calling “the expanded field of education in contemporary art” in the first two decades of the 21st century. I am guided by the fervor with which the art world has embraced, over the last decade or so, topics such as learning, education, pedagogy, teaching, research, and study as a critical practice, proposing either to work within institutions of education, or making education the focus of their work. These tendencies do not necessarily promote knowledge as a universal end in itself, on the contrary. […] United in their opposition to the political status quo; the failures of public education; and the consequences of neo-liberal capitalist economic policies all over the world, the artists I want to discuss here promote teaching and study as an open-ended and even “poetic” practice that would not be grounded in the manipulative pedagogy of Platonic dialogue with its predictable “learning outcome” (the battle cry of the Bologna process): education, they argue, means unpredictable adventures in the realm of knowledge.

*** Sven SPIEKER teaches in the Comparative Literature Program; the Department of Art and Art History; and the Department of Germanic, Slavic, and Semitic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in European modernism, with an emphasis on the Eastern European avant-gardes, contemporary art – with an emphasis on Eastern Europe -, and critical theory. Spieker has published on topics ranging from the Russian avant-garde (Malevich, Rodchenko, Dziga Vertov) to late 20th-century art in Russia and Western Europe (Ilya Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov, Marcel Duchamp, Martin Kippenberger). His essays and articles have appeared in German, Russian, Swedish, Polish and English. Spieker has organized several international conferences (most recently, The Office in the Studio: The Administration of Modernism at the University of Jena, Germany; and in 2011 a roundtable on critical curatorship in Eastern Europe at the College Art Association Meeting, New York City. Participants: EmiliaKabakov; Cosmin Costinas; Piotr Piotrowski; Victor Misiano; Karel Cisar; Lolita Joablonskiene). Spieker's latest book publication focused on the archive as a crucible of European modernism (The Big Archive, MIT Press, 2008). Spieker is the editor of ARTMargins (www.artmargins.com).Current projects include a Critical Anthology of Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe, and a study of Kazimir Malevich in the media age. ***