Art Gallery Education Between Translation and Dialogism: Artwork, Learning and Pedagogy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on insights drawn from multidisciplinary studies of the arts and translation studies, this article aims to conceptualize the work of translation within art gallery education. It unpacks and characterizes a mode of translation that is unique and necessary for an engaging art gallery education, taking multiple and subtle forms, operating on different facets of the conception and delivery of art gallery education activities. This includes a resourceful way of translating different values that could pull art gallery education in different directions, i.e. making different values translatable into one another, including the aesthetic value of the artwork, the value of learning and education for diverse and multiple users and participants, as well as the values that participants bring into an art gallery education. An indispensable component of art gallery education still consists of bringing into play an element of propositional knowledge about art, not as an end in itself based on the traditional parameters of the cultivation of taste and appreciation, but to develop experimental and creative dialogical forms of engagement and relational aesthetics. The ultimate aim is to use the arts as a platform for a pedagogic translation driven by the principles of dialogism and a collaborative ethos.