ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
projects, this art must tread the fine line of a dual horizon – faced towards
the social field but also towards art itself, addressing both its immediate
participants and subsequent audiences. It needs to be successful within both
art and the social field, but ideally also testing and revising the criteria we
apply to both domains. Without this double finality, such projects risk
becoming ‘edu- tainment’ or ‘pedagogical aesthetics’. These latter will never
be as compelling as Summerhill and La Borde – examples that establish their
own institutional frameworks and operate in ways that continue to trouble
the parameters of existing social structures. If artists ignore the double finality,
viewers may rightly wonder whether Guattari’s question should in fact
be reversed: how do we bring a work of art to life as though it were a classroom?
Pedagogic art projects therefore foreground and crystallise one of
the most central problems of all artistic practice in the social field: they
require us to examine our assumptions about both fields of operation, and to
ponder the productive overlaps and incompatibilities that might arise from
their experimental conjunction, with the consequence of perpetually reinventing
both. For secondary viewers like ourselves, perhaps the most
educational aspect of these projects is their insistence that we learn to think
both fields together and devise adequate new languages and criteria for
communicating these transversal practices.
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