Are You Being Served?

There it sits, beached in the exhibition space on its oversized wooden wheels, its trays of pencils and piles of worksheets awaiting a class of schoolchildren and the zealous smile of an Education Officer. This is the Art Trolley, the trundling Panzer of institutional pedagogy, a front-line weapon in the museum and gallery sector’s fight for future hearts and minds. Like many visitors to Britain’s major art venues, I’ve stumbled across my share of these objects, cursing the way in which they obscure an exhibition’s hang, or else feeling oddly charmed by the bad behaviour of their pre-pubescent users (‘No, Joshua, Thomas Gainsborough is not “fucking rubbish”’). Right now the Art Trolley may feel like a sideshow to the big-top business of exhibition-making, but given the direction in which certain political and cultural winds are blowing, we can expect to see a great deal more of it – or rather its pimped-up, hyper-evolved descendants – in the next few years.

In December 2005 Britain’s Labour government announced a £9.4 million ‘investment’ (note that word’s spreadsheet hum) in museum and gallery education programmes directed specifically at children and adolescents. At a time in which government acquisitions grants are, by art market standards, little more than a pocketful of loose change, this spending decision is significant. First, it places a firm emphasis on the art institution as a place of school-age learning (rather than, say, as one of grown-up pleasures or of innovative curatorial practice, or even as somewhere that collects new work for today’s public and tomorrow’s). Second, it backs this up with semi-serious money: £9.4 million may buy little in the way of museum-quality art, but its buys an awful lot of Art Trolleys.

When the British Museum – the first publicly owned art institution in human history – opened its doors in 1759, its trustees let it be known that its collections were available to ‘the studious and curious’ to view free of charge. Their implicit position was that the visitor was responsible for bringing a certain degree of inquisitiveness to bear upon the exhibits, that the museum was a resource for willing autodidacts rather than a didactic body itself. Clearly, there’s a great deal that’s problematic about such an approach (the earl’s son, with his social and educational advantages, was far more likely to avail himself of the new institution than the costermonger’s daughter), but it sits in telling contrast to present-day museum and gallery education programming, with its accent on 360-degree ‘outreach’, and its Kevin Costner-like belief that ‘if you call them, they will come’. There’s a part of all people who experience art as meaningful that dreams of universalizing that experience, but the bald fact is that even if the most obdurate barriers to this are removed (and more often than not these are to do with opportunity, which is itself more often than not to do with social class), there will still be those who, having been led to the watering-hole, refuse to drink. On the evidence of numerous contemporary museum and gallery education programmes, the best an institution charged with achieving this goal can do is to point the way in a language supposedly spoken by those it wishes to convert, although whether this is done with any fluency is a moot point. (Significantly art, in these matters, is rarely if ever considered capable of pointing to itself.)

To think twice about the educational work carried out by museums and galleries, especially in the pages of what might be considered an élite publication, is a kind of thought-crime. Few sympathetic people of any political persuasion would set their face against the young, the socially excluded or indeed anyone fresh to art being given the opportunity to feel its unpredictable force. Few, too, would deny that art is associated with economic privilege, and that this needs to be balanced by a counter-discourse if a broad audience is to feel any stake in the form at all. And yet, for all this, the current emphasis on education – and its kissing cousin, interpretation – in the museum and gallery sector remains a sticky business. On one level it has led to many public exhibition spaces being wallpapered with such an overabundance of explanatory texts that the possibility of plural readings begins to close down, and the work on display risks being reduced to a cramped, out-of-breath illustration. (It’s perhaps useful to compare this, both in terms of aesthetics and of motivation, to commercial galleries’ habit of placing a discreet pile of press releases well away from the body of the show.) On another, perhaps more important level, it is indicative of a worrying co-opting of museums and galleries by a New Labour political culture in the service of distinctly New Labour ends. In his speech accompanying last December’s £9.4 million funding announcement, Culture Minister David Lammy described the educational work undertaken by art institutions as ‘helping to enhance and enrich delivery of the [National] Curriculum at all key stages’, while Schools Minister Andrew Adonis promised that ‘museums and galleries will have a central role to play in our “Education outside the Classroom” manifesto’. Reading these statements, it’s difficult not to fear for the intellectual independence of British art institutions. If significant parts of their education programmes are already tied, via funding conditions, to the implementation of government policy, may we look forward to a future in which subsidies for exhibitions arrive with a similar set of strings?

Whether this comes to pass or not, governmental emphasis on museum and gallery education reveals a deep distrust of art, except as a technology of ‘social inclusion’ – for which read something that will magically transform poor kids into aspiring members of the middle class. Predictably, New Labour hasn’t considered that this end might best be served by promoting public ownership of works of art, and has instead frozen or cut museums’ acquisitions budgets to such a degree that the Tate, which collects works from 1500 to the present day, receives only £2 million per year from Parliament with which to enhance its holdings – less than it received in the early 1980s under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative administration. It is tempting to conclude that both this and Lammy’s spending announcement are tied up with policy-makers’ obsession with the cultural sector producing quantifiable results: while it is difficult to measure the impact of a work of art on particular hearts and minds, it is very easy to measure the number of souls who have passed through an education programme. At any rate, it is hardly surprising that New Labour values museums and galleries primarily as agents of latte-flavoured ‘regeneration’ and as classrooms by another name. Tony Blair’s signature mantra, after all, is ‘Education, Education, Education’ – if he has any thoughts on the societal benefits of the numinous, he has so far kept them to himself.

The ambition of museum and gallery education departments should not be to abet the National Curriculum, an economic and political tool by which government hopes to shape a future workforce and a future electorate. If anything, art institutions should provide an alternative pedagogical voice, and one that draws on the questioning, questing spirit in which all the best art is made. Refreshingly, something of this was present in ‘Dis-assembly’, a project initiated by the Serpentine Gallery, London, at North Westminster Community School, an institution that educates around 2,000 11- to 16-year-olds on three campuses, and which was closed in July 2006 to make way for two partly privately funded City Academies – a fate usually meted out by New Labour to ‘failing’ schools. Prior to its closure, the Serpentine introduced the artists Faisal Abdu’Allah, Christian Boltanski and Runa Islam and the architect Yona Friedman into North Westminster, where they worked with the student body to create works of art that would commemorate not only their school but also the particular historical and communal identity that would disappear with it. Perhaps most effective in this regard was Boltanski’s revisiting of a piece he first made for an exhibition at the nearby Lisson Gallery in 1992, in which he made portraits of every pupil enrolled in a particular North Westminster school year. With the present-day students’ help the 1990s’ pupils were tracked down and re-photographed, creating a picture of yesterday’s tomorrow that was inevitably and occasionally heartbreakingly incomplete.

The Serpentine project culminated in an exhibition, also entitled ‘Dis-assembly’, which I visited a couple of days after North Westminster’s final bell. Walking through the school’s atrium, already heaped with abandoned textbooks and forgotten coursework folders, I met sixth-former Talal Hamdan, who talked me through the show. What impressed me wasn’t so much the works themselves (although these were often thoughtfully and beautifully produced) as the way in which Hamdan described art not as a curriculum subject but as a tool for thinking about the micro and macro stuff of history and politics, and the ethics and aesthetics of remembering the past. When I asked him whether his involvement in ‘Dis-assembly’ made him want to go on to art school or to make his living as an artist, he replied ‘no’, and there was something in this response that gave me a flash of hope. Perhaps it was because what he’d gained from the project wasn’t measurable by New Labour standards. His ‘learning outcome’ wasn’t a place at a particular higher education institution, or participation in Blair’s ‘creative economy’, but something much more valuable and much more subversive – a new way of reckoning with the world. For this the organizers of ‘Dis-assembly’ should be praised. I only hope that other museum and gallery education workers are willing – and able – to follow their lead.

Tom Morton is a contributing editor of frieze and curator of Cubitt, London.