Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

pedagogic projects
kids and the science teacher – and this social relationship operated as a belated
corrective to his own experience of feeling disengaged at school. Einstein Class,
like many of Althamer’s works, is typical of his identifi cation with marginal
subjects, and his use of them to realise a situation through which he can retroactively
rehabilitate his own past.
In exhibition, Althamer has attempted to deal with the problem of documentation
performatively: when the Einstein exhibition opened in Berlin,
the teacher and kids all travelled to Germany for the opening as a continuation
of their education. 35 When the fi lm was screened in London in 2006,
Althamer insisted that the Polish boys be invited to the opening, and their
local equivalents hired to supply a dubbed translation for the fi lm. As in
many of Althamer’s projects, altruism is inseparable from institutional
inconvenience and upheaval (which the London exhibition made explicit in
its title, ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’). 36 Althamer’s subsequent
projects with students, such as Au Centre Pompidou (2006), attempted to
visualise an educational process through a collectively produced puppet
show. And yet, for both this project and Einstein Class, one feels as if the
visual outcome was forced, produced as a result of institutional pressure
for visibility. At their best, the eccentricity of Althamer’s ideas are self-
suffi cient and need no visual documentation.
Althamer’s own academic formation is worth attending to, since it
underlies many of his more vivid projects. Althamer was part of the so-
called Kowalski Studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, along with
many of today’s leading generation of Polish artists, including Artur
Żmijewski and Katarzyna Kozyra. Professor Grzegorz Kowalski rejected
the traditional model of ‘master’ to ‘apprentice’ in favour of ‘visual games’
– open- ended tasks that also functioned as a form of collective analysis,
both critical and therapeutic. Under the working title ‘Common Space –
Private Space’, Kowalski foregrounded the work of art as an effect of
complex non- verbal communication performed by artists in interaction
with each other, neutralising individualism. 37 Kowalski derived this technique
from the architectural theory of his teacher, Oskar Hansen, who in
1959 had proposed ‘open form’, in which a structure can be added to,
encouraging participation and a more vital relationship with reality, in
contrast to ‘closed form’, to which it is impossible to incorporate additions.
38 One of the basic tenets of open form is that ‘no artistic expression is
complete until it has been appropriated by its users or beholders’, whereas
closed form reduces subjectivity to a passive element within a larger hierarchical
structure. 39 As the curator Łukasz Ronduda has argued, when
Hansen’s idea of open form is translated into art, it brings about a ‘death of
the author’, opening the way towards ‘experimentation and highly complex
(trans- individual) collective projects’. 40 Kowalski adopted Hansen’s ideas
as a pedagogic principle, but differs from his teacher’s austere rationalism
in encouraging a more subjective, poetic and quasi- Surrealist approach.
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