Peer led workshop seminar led by Emma Cocker on’ The Profession: Definitions and Relationships: Galleries, artists, art’ at the engage Summer School, Arona, Italy, 2005.
What I hoped for this session was to set up a discussion space to explore the relationship between artists, art and galleries. I am interested in the possibility of a discussion which takes up some of the debates of the last ten years to examine how gallery education may need to change, challenge, appropriate, or distinguish itself from other models and practices (which might include artistic, curatorial, and social examples). I am interested in how gallery education might need to re-evaluate its languages and values in relation to a changing context in which new models of artistic practice have developed out of or from socially engaged art, through practices that could be framed or understood within the context of Nicholas Bourriard’s term of ‘relational aesthetics’, and through a raft of theoretical arguments that explore the dynamic of encounter, exchange, dialogue, & interactivity. Since gallery education’s emergence as a profession, much has changed in relation to new forms of art practice; and in response to the spectrum of new emergent approaches adopted by artists in relation to art, the institution, and in relation to professional practice. So too, the art institution (ranging from both the art school, the gallery, and similar organisations) has been forced or coerced to make changes to begin to accommodate or operate with these new modes of practice.
