“Can I go into the artwork?” Material–relational situations with abstract art

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to study museum educational situations, where 5–7-year-old children encounter abstract art, from a new materialist perspective. The children visit an exhibition curated by me, where abstract modernist art is mediated, with an emphasis on multisensory experiences and experimentation. The visits were recorded with stationary and action cameras. By focusing on material–relational situations, I investigate how learning takes place when the children engage with the museum educational setting. A girl asks a surprising question that challenges the takenfor-granted beliefs about what art can be. The children break rational and logical patterns by creating abstract art, and “aesthetic-intuitive order” takes place in the compositions. A child and an adult relate differently to the agential “teaching matter.” Embodied and material pedagogy with abstract art indicates how “making sense” of the world is not only done in verbal and logical ways but also by experimenting with bodies and senses with teaching matter.

A Thousand Concepts and the Participating Body: Concept Play Workshops at Kunsthall 3,14

“…Creating concepts, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari ([1991] 2009) and Elisabeth St. Pierre (2019), was central in the PhD thesis, concerning especially the philosophical concepts of abstraction (Kukkonen 2022a) and material-relational situations (Kukkonen 2022b(Kukkonen , 2023. Through concrete, playful and artistic experiments (Kukkonen 2022a(Kukkonen , 2023 and by reading Deleuze and Guattari's ([1991] 2009, [1980 2020) philosophy, I defined abstraction as the representation-breaking and uncertainty-provoking quality in art that challenges patterns and traditions and contests what is already known.…”

“…Creating concepts, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari ([1991] 2009) and Elisabeth St. Pierre (2019), was central in the PhD thesis, concerning especially the philosophical concepts of abstraction (Kukkonen 2022a) and material-relational situations (Kukkonen 2022b(Kukkonen , 2023. Through concrete, playful and artistic experiments (Kukkonen 2022a(Kukkonen , 2023 and by reading Deleuze and Guattari's ([1991] 2009, [1980 2020) philosophy, I defined abstraction as the representation-breaking and uncertainty-provoking quality in art that challenges patterns and traditions and contests what is already known. Art with abstraction provokes materialrelational situations, a concept I formed from the writings of the art historian and curator Dorothea von Hantelmann (2014) and the material and embodied pedagogy underpinned by new materialisms by the artist-researcher-teacher Tara Page (2018Page ( , 2020.…”

“…Visitors are no longer understood as passive receivers of information, but as active co-creators of knowledge and experiences. As I have also noted elsewhere (Kukkonen 2023), this paradigm shift has emerged with contemporary art's immersive and spatial artforms since the 1960s (von Hantelmann 2014), constructivist perspectives in museums (Hein 2006), relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 1998), relational and performative perspectives in art education (Aure 2011;Illeris 2015Illeris , 2016Skregelid 2019), participatory methods (Simon 2010) and phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty 2012) and pragmatic (Dewey [1934] 1980) educational philosophies. Participation-everything from a dialogue to sensory activities and interactive experiences in immersive installations-has become the keyword in educational activities.…”

“…During the past year, I have created the method during three exhibition periods with three philosophical concepts: time, intelligence and system. The method is inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's (Deleuze and Guattari [1991] 2009) philosophy of creating concepts, Deleuze's emphasis on the experimental aspects of bodies in becoming (Deleuze [1970] 1988), new materialist theory-practice (Kontturi 2018;Kukkonen 2022aKukkonen , 2022bKukkonen , 2023O'Sullivan 2006) and new materialist theories of pedagogy (Page 2018(Page , 2020 where learning happens by engaging with bodies with matter in a socio-material world.…”

“…How can the Concept Play Workshop challenge neoliberal tendencies? The method is situated in the field of post-approaches in museum and gallery education; studies that work with, for example, post humanism and new materialisms (e.g., Feinberg and Lemaire 2021;Hacklin 2022;Hackett et al 2018;Kukkonen 2023;MacRae et al 2017, decolonial theories (Mulcahy 2021) and cartographic methods to explore inclusion within museums (Rieger et al 2019). Post-approaches emphasize the performative entanglements of both human and more-than-human bodies in learning, centering not only on verbal and cognitive perspectives, but also on embodied, material and emplaced knowing (Hackett et al 2018).…”