Questions of aesthetic and transdisciplinary education pervade the artistic field in many guises: What forms of knowledge are important for contemporary art? How do contemporary works form their audience? What pedagogical models are utilised to this purpose? What learning processes are set in motion by locally situated practices, at a global level as well?
The summer issue is devoted to the third leitmotif of documenta 12 – “What is to be done?” – and (for the time being) concludes a critical examination that was started three issues ago. Whereas the initial focus was on questions regarding the specific topographies and aesthetic strategies that are emerging during the current ubiquitous reversions to the history of modernity, attention is now directed towards the particular processes of education that are also being triggered. In this regard, »Learning From …« means more than some kind of reflexivity that can be updated arbitrarily, and even militates against any overhasty determination of which cultural material needs to be caught up on or newly taught. The precise object of this imparting of knowledge remains undefined inasmuch as it is constantly being generated and revalued by the type of access.
In the context of democratic politics, this shifting of objects or regeneration is evident from a wide range of symptoms. Jacques Rancière has diagnosed it as a rampant scepticism towards democracy. In an interview, he describes the unexpected turns that learning from the »democratic excesses« of the past can take at the current time. In the course of this revision, not only is every emancipatory project falling increasingly into disrepute, but all serious forms of political understanding are also being rejected one by one. Irit Rogoff, on the other hand, thinks about what kind of shift in the concept of education itself is being called for by the present circumstances. Away from merchantability, utility and efficiency towards aspects such as access, urgency and potentiality – such are Rogoff’s propaedeutics of a new theory of knowledge at a time of instrumental creative thinking. She finds indirect support in the article by Beti Žerovc, who looks at training programmes for curators and their increasingly neo-liberal cast.
Finally, numerous articles examine the concrete promises of »Learning From …«. Whether they deal with the debate about monuments to past and present wars (Tony Chakar), the themes of National Socialism and destruction in art (Susanne Neuburger, Hedwig Saxenhuber), or the after-effects of former cultural-revolutionary projects (Nicolas Siepen, Benjamin Paul, Christa Benzer) – they all focus on the question of what form of revision and what specific resistance result from this reversion to the past.
In this way, a thematic cycle runs full circle, without the openness of this learning being brought to a close or all its ramifications being determined once and for all.