In 2009, Maria Acaso published the book “Art education is not crafts. New practices in teaching arts and visual culture”, the content of which is as relevant today as it was six years ago. While the role that art education plays in compulsory education is increasingly secondary, Acaso claims the need to reinforce art education, to create critical visual thinking. If we take into account that we are subjected to a constant avalanche of images, it seems sensible to think that, as critical and responsible citizens, we need to know how to read images and their mechanisms. Otherwise, we become illiterate in the face of images and, therefore, slaves to messages. Although perhaps that is precisely what is expected of us in this world that increasingly resembles the one George Orwell described in “1984”.
Surely these critical and catastrophic arguments do not convince everyone. Furthermore, the lack of concrete and reliable evaluation data is usually one of the most characteristic tics of the contemporary art world, which always resists being reduced to figures and statistics. To correct this defect, a study was carried out in the United States, randomly selecting 11,000 students from various schools who were given access to a series of artistic activities (exhibitions, workshops, plays, etc.) that their schoolmates did not have. To evaluate the results of this experiment, improvements in not only academic aspects were taken into account, but also other creative skills necessary to live in the global economy of the 21st century. The study also concluded that being exposed to art from a young age contributes to better personal development and higher self-esteem, has a positive impact on values such as tolerance and empathy, and contributes to the development of critical thinking, a greater capacity for observation and analysis.
While society governed by the laws of the economy or, worse, debt, prefers to ignore these options, the art world has long been experiencing an approach to educational issues. There is a shift towards education that became very visible in 2006, when the curators of Manifesta 6 in Cyprus decided to replace the exhibition format of the biennial with the creation of an art school. Although the event was finally cancelled for various reasons, since then there have been numerous curatorial proposals based on educational formats, long or short-term pedagogical projects or free and participatory schools.
Since last year, in Espai 13 of the Fundació Miró in Barcelona and under the curatorship of the Azotea collective (Ane Agirre and Juan Canela), work has been done in this direction from hybrid and transversal formats. The Lesson 0 cycle focuses on proposals related to pedagogy that investigate renewed forms of knowledge creation. Seminars, artist residencies in secondary schools, work sessions with teachers or research into educational models are some of the focuses of a proposal whose results will certainly not be visible in the short term, but will be of great relevance for the future.
[Article published in Bonart, 2015]
