I like to think about art making as a kind of social practice, as a social activity as opposed to strictly a kind of specialized activity that is about producing a particular kind of object. As a social activity what I am involved in has primarily to do with a kind of education or is a relationship to education. When I work in museums it is specifically in relationship to how museums go about educating a public about art. And one can think about programs like this functioning in similar ways museums function, as doing the work of public education about a relatively autonomous and exclusively defined field that is then also very much abstracted or separated from the everyday experience of culture, of most people's lives. What I am interested in in working with museums is a kind of "counter education" to this. It is trying to create a situation where other understandings of culture and other understandings of art objects are possible. And not only from my position, but also from the position, from the location of people who go to museums who might be outside of the tradition in which I work. So, I think that people can understand art for example not only in terms of what artists intend, but also in terms of how they experience it socially.
http://www.mip.at/en/dokumente/1133-content.html
Posted by delpesco at July 31, 2006 11:03 PM