SZTUKA CZY ZUPA SPOŁECZNA ODPOWIEDZIALNOŚĆ EDUKACJI MUZEALNEJ

The author, practitioner and theoretician of museum education in the spirit of participation, develops a mission of social responsibility of museum education and is involved in discussions about the performative turn in the humanities. He analyses the agency of museum institutions, the effects of exhibits and exposition rhetoric, the effects in the public non-artistic sphere and finally distinctive effects in the symbolic sphere. He sees a museum as a mediator for arousing conflicts where mediation is supposed to lead to the emancipation of audience. Its embodiment would be a high-brow educator who, as an ‘unwanted outsider’ destroys the existing status quo. The author reinterprets speculative museum findings by presenting three sets of activity of the Department of Education of the Museum of Art in Łódź. The first project, Avant-garde in Szczekociny, deals with the cooperation of community art with urban and rural society of Szczekociny, a commune with less than 4000 residents. The second one is the Coco&Vinci Project, according to which the museum education has become a vehicle of documented social advancement of pupils of Łódź reformatory. The third project, Gallery of jeans, is a project of a creative common room, in which activities related to art for children who are brought up in the gates of tenement houses in the neglected downtown of Łódź give way to volunteer social work. For two last projects, the author outlines a broader, not only museum-related, interpretative context which he sees for example in the Situational International or in the radical pedagogy. The common point here is the pursuit of emancipation. The author proves that socially responsible museum education must take into account the openness of a museum institution on different but equally valuable world orders. He also argues that a museum educator who facilitates a subjective change of participants in activities should be ready for it themselves. The emphasis on educator’s ethics is thus the polemics with arguments of the Polish museum environment who insist on a systemic way of training educators.