— Overview
Întotdeauna
la un pas
de artă.
Always
one step away
from art.
A casual conversation about the life of being a teacher that shifted into a discussion about the education system with the art teachers.
Plastic/Fine art education is only about forms and techniques; it is taught without context, a contemporary term; it is taught without contemporary art, it is taught without art
“The Diary of a Discussion about Education and Other Things” refers to the subject Fine/Plastic Art Education (Educație Plastică), which is taught in compulsory general education. It is the only subject that would familiarize students with visual art and prepare an informed public for the current cultural context. In 2014 this subject was still taught to develop practical skills; school curricula focused on formal exercises with no relation to the current cultural, social, and artistic context. Assessment in this subject is based on quantifiable products in which elements of plastic language are the most standardized criteria. The student, the human subject, and its context are missing, as is critical thinking through art and personal development. For this reason, contemporary and recent art is not known at all, nor is it brought into the teaching strategy; the art constantly referred to in this subject is classical and modern Western art based on the most well-known works of art.
The installation contains a series of short texts extracted from the artist’s conversations with teachers who teach art education. The texts paint a picture of the insecurity and uncertainty of the teachers who teach this subject, even though most of them are teaching artists and their pedagogical work is highly creative. This is perhaps the weakness of education that Gert Biesta talks about in his famous work “The beautiful risk of education.”
Exhibitions
Diary of a Discussion about Education and Other Things, Magma Contemporary Art Space, Sf. Gheorghe, RO 2014
“Notes on Tomorrow”, a traveling exhibition as part of the CreArt Europe project, a Network of Cities for Artistic Creation, in Kaunas LT, Kristiansand NO, and Aveiro PT.
Diary of a Discussion about Education and Other Things, Conset Studio, Cluj-Napoca RO 2014
“The risk aversion that pervades contemporary education puts teachers in a very difficult position. While policymakers and politicians look at education in the abstract and from a distance and mainly see it through statistics and performance data that can easily be manipulated and about which one can easily have an opinion, teachers engage with real human beings and realize at once that education cannot be “fixed” that simply—or that it can only be “fixed” at a very high price. The desire to make education strong, secure, predictable, and risk-free is in a sense, an attempt to wish this reality away. The desire to make education strong, secure, predictable, and risk-free is an attempt to forget that at the end of the day education should aim at making itself dispensable—no teacher wants their students to remain eternal students—which means that education necessarily needs to have an orientation toward the freedom and independence of those being educated.
Gert Biesta—The beautiful risk of education
