The "Displaying Art Education" project investigates the visual representation of education and communication activities from a range of different perspectives. The project is created as a research partnership between the ICS and the Institute for Art Education (IAE). Representation materials from 32 museums – including flyers, publications and websites – are analysed, with a focus on contemporary art from Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
The "Displaying Art Education" project puts the spotlight on the representation of public education activities, specifically their visual and textual representation and production, as a subject that has largely been neglected by academic research to date. Since this topic is at the intersection between critical reflection and theorizing on art education, on the one hand, and the domain of visual culture research, on the other, the venture is undertaken as a collaboration between the Institute for Art Education (IAE) and the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS) at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The collaboration is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). The project team, comprising Stephan Fürstenberg, Prof Nanna Lüth and the microsillons collective (Olivier Desvoignes/Marianne Guarino-Huet), includes members with a range of linguistic, national and professional backgrounds, scholars, artists and art educators with differing perspectives on art education and representation practices. They collect representation materials from 32 museums and exhibition institutions from Switzerland and Liechtenstein, with a focus on contemporary art. The material corpus for the study comprises 712 documents, including more than 2,000 images from seven years, and includes flyers, brochures and websites, along with books produced by museum education departments.
Stephan Fürstenberg carries out a more detailed examination of the predominant representation modes of two specific participants in the process: the art educator and the audience. The main focus here, drawing on historical image examples, is on teasing out the production of a difference between these two participants, and the order structures and representation traditions manifested in the representations. In the context of his analysis, gaze, posture and gesture become significant signs in terms of the representation and creation of authorized spokespersons, exhibition dialogues or a "wide" audience.
What roles do the art works play in the representation of art education? This question is examined by Nanna Lüth with her analysis "from art outwards". Already from the spatial layout of and responses to the art in the photographs, it is possible to identify some specific forms of learning and experience. In a further step, she then links the visual analysis of the material to art didactics concepts, enabling her to formulate the art education trends manifested in the representation material.
The microsillons collective raises the question as to whether the representation of art education of the museum as an institutional structure creates an "other", "more human" face. In its analysis, microsillons identifies differences between the representation modes of art education, on the one hand, and usual representations of contemporary art museums, on the other, and interprets these differences with reference to museum theory texts.
Partnership project of the Institute for Art Education (IAE) and the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS). Initial results from this research project are published in September 2013 in the eJournal Art Education Research No. 7.