Performing the Museum as a public sphere

The art museum Lentos will be five years old in May, 2008. A conference will take place on the occasion, offering the possibility of thinking about the contemporary understanding of public art museums and galleries as spaces for gallery education. We start from the assumption that high quality gallery education of modern and contemporary art fragments the monolithic transference of authoritative knowledge into a multiplicity of voices. Each power of naming multiplies into many manifest activities and discourses. At this point, the public becomes engaged in the creation of the museum. Performing the Museum  means, in a sense, that all participants of a museum (from the director to the public) performatively create and invent it in every situation through their activities and speech. In this way, gallery education gains a key role. Understanding the museum as a place of "Differend" means that all participants' multitude of meanings should not change into a dialectical movement or rather unambiguousness, but rather can be cultivated them as a manifestation of difference.
Thinking of the terms "performativity" together with "Differend" in relation to gallery education in this way implies that institutional settings do not simply analyse and criticize themselves, but might be shifted a bit through their own actions.

Gallery education as "Differend"

The discussion regarding a contemporary, critically engaged practice of museum pedagogy and gallery education has been taking place since the end of the 1990s in germany.
"Contemporary" means: under critical reflection of the historical and contemporary discourses regarding art, gallery education, the public, participation and education. The criteria developed from this debate - definitely to be seen as interdependent - could be:

- disengaging gallery education from the "subaltern - fateful dependency" of the
respective institution and the securing of its "individual - critical place." 
- active discussion with the visitors perceptions and their ways of interacting.
- constitutive inclusion of the visitors diverse contextual knowledge.
- critical mediation of authoritative kinds of knowledge.
- reflection and transparency regarding institutional operations.
- participation in the sense of a taking part in the work of representation.
- interdisciplinary ways of accessing all of these aspects.

Corresponding and complementary are the following ideas
Gallery education as "Differend" is ... :

- When it operates against existing and unquestioned power mechanisms.
- When it helps to see more clearly how things are built and inter-operate.
- When it considers all participants as "relative subjects"
- When it does not continue the great narratives of emancipation but understands itself as part of a continualy critical structure, testing all the time, whether hegemonies are not unfurling in the blind spots again.

How all of this becomes possible is intended to be discussed in an exemplary way at the conference together with  artist-art-education-museum-workers from the European realm (England, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Swizzerland, Austria) who are committed to these criteria.

© Carmen Mörsch und Eva Sturm 2007

The project is supported by the Culture 2000 programme of the European Union as part of Transform (transform.eipcp.net)