Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

time for imagining and fantasising around the
aspirations of something impossible. I never heard
“that’s impossible” or “this has to be better thought
out”, or “that’s very expensive”. That immediate
unanimity and absence of confrontation was one
of the most frustrating and corrupting experiences
of my life.
We have divided this symposium into three
themes that do not just reflect the concerns of the
Biennial but are broad enough not to refer to art
as a narrow discipline. The themes chosen are:
Art for education/Education for art; Public for
art; and Community education.
In the first topic we hope to contrast positions on
the role of creativity in society and how it can be
fostered from the points of view of both artist
and educator. Bruce Ferguson has a history of
curating exhibitions that attempt to be
“interrogative” rather than “exhibitive”, and thus
shares the concerns of this Biennial. Ferguson was
also Dean of Columbia University School of Art
in New York and as such experienced the
problems presented by the professional and
specialist training of artists in the USA. For better
or worse, this image of the professional, generally
competitive and triumphalist artist, has gradually
been converted into one of the international
models. We are interested here in defining roles
for the artist in society in contrast with the nonartist,
and how the corresponding study plans
operate in relation to their conflicts with art as a
discipline and art as a metadiscipline.
The possibilities of the relationship between
society and creation inevitably involve political
decisions and concern the distribution of power.
Relational art and post-autonomous art are
discussed as alternatives to individualist
authorship. Harrell Fletcher is an artist who has
used art to activate both art and non-art
communities with the aim of dissolving the
boundaries between them. Thanks to artists like
him, who began working in Portland, Oregon,
that city is being converted into a new centre for
art in the USA, with its own characteristics that
are different from those of the rest of the country.
One of the features of many of Fletcher’s projects
is precisely the delegation of the artist’s traditional
authorship. His work is to facilitate the creative
work of others with an art that functions as an
educational form freed from specific teaching.
Another artist, Antón Vidokle, was one of the
organisers of Manifesta 6, the famous nomadic
alternative biennial, which on this occasion could
not be realised, due to political reasons related to
the division of Cyprus. Manifesta 6 wanted to
convert itself into a school of art rather than room
for consumption, and therefore promised to break
with traditional exhibitions. It is interesting how
chauvinism managed to kill a project without even
examining its ideology. Vidokle is also the initiator
of other projects like e-flux and unitednationsplaza.
Roberta Scatolini, from the Instituto Paulo Freire
in São Paulo, concentrates on something we might
call “cultural illiteracy”, a problem rooted in a lack
of knowledge about many cultural codes. That is
precisely one of the problems that touches closely
on the proposals of this Biennial. It is an ignorance
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