The artist-as-educator: dialogue, community and the institutional site

The thesis seeks to examine current evaluations of events or projects delivered by artists within the educational function of the museum. The hybrid nature of the practice, situated as it is amongst several disciplines and their associated evaluative models, tends to be written about from one position or disciplinary ‘mind-set’. Texts written out of an educational context tend to emphasise participants’ experience and the perceived educational and/or social benefits rather than the aesthetic or political. It appears that the hybridity of the practice, counter-intuitively, tends toward a conservative approach when it comes to reflection and evaluation, as if those engaged in this relatively new way of working were using evaluation to argue a case rather than open up the field to enquiry.

Critiquing the tendency of such evaluation to reinforce the institution and others’ agendas, the thesis seeks to gain some critical purchase on the artist’s own understandings of practice using a ‘quadri-hermeneutic’ methodology inspired by data-oriented research and current and historic debates in hermeneutics and critical theory.

The main body of the thesis consists of an analysis of three artist-led projects. The methodology is applied to three types of data, each relevant to a particular project: a series of photographs documenting an event for older people, a transcript of a discussion with postgraduate students (both which took place at Tate Modern) and a transcript of an interview with a project curator at the Serpentine Gallery. The application of the methodology aims to disturb the artist’s a-priori understandings by provoking doubt through the production of multiple (sometimes contradictory) interpretations of the data.

Rather than a conclusion, the final chapter of the thesis indicates how the partial resolution of the doubts and conflicts which emerge from the evaluative process provokes a shift in emphasis in the positioning of more recent projects. The thesis argues for self-evaluation as a form of continuous research capable of resisting the artist’s conscious and unconscious accommodation of others’ agendas, and offering new possibilities for