HANNA OHTONEN:

The World
Between Us –
Contemporary
Museums as Public
Spaces.
Case study:
EMMA
Master’s Thesis
ABSTRACT

ENGLISH
This thesis looks at the term “public space” and its relation to contempo-
rary museums, using the case study of EMMA Espoo Museum of Mod-
ern Art. At a time when the relevance of museums to societies is being
questioned, this research looks at the public nature of museums in an
attempt to examin why they are under scrutiny. The aim of the research is
to understand what the term public work (Fin. Yleisötyö), used by Finnish
museums of today, means and could mean if the term would correlate
with the original signification of the word “public”. By dissecting and
analysing both the words “public” and “space”, it outlines a theoretical
narrative of the term in order to apply it to the case study and to mu-
seums more broadly. By bringing together museums and public spaces,
the research aims to highlight and question the mission and purpose of
contemporary museums while outlining possibilities for their relevance in
this and future moments.

2
FINNISH
Tämä opinnäytetyö tarkastelee termiä “julkinen tila” suhteessa nykymu-
seoihin, esimerkkimuseonaan Espoon Modernin Taiteen Museo EMMA.
Museoiden merkitystä yhteiskunnalle on kyseenalaistettu paljon viimeai-
koina, ja tämä tutkimus pyrkii selvittämään mistä se johtuu tarkastelemal-
la museoiden julkista luonnetta. Tutkimuksen tavoitteena on ymmärtää,
mitä termi “yleisötyö” merkitsee nykymuseoissa, ja mitä se voisi merkitä,
jos se korreloisi sanojen “yleinen” ja “julkinen” alkuperäismerkitysten
kanssa. Purkamalla sanat “julkinen” ja “tila” osiinsa ja analysoimalla niitä,
tutkimus rakentaa “julkisen tilan” teoreettisen narratiivin ja soveltaa sitä
sekä tutkimusen esimerkkimuseoon että museoihin yleensä. Tuomalla
museot yhteen julkisten tilojen kanssa tämä tutkimus pyrkii tuomaan
esiin ja kyseenalaiseksi nykymuseoiden tarkoituksen, hahmottaakseen
lopulta niiden olennaisuuden mahdollisuuksia sekä tässä hetkessä että
tulevaisuudessa.

3
TABLE OF
CONTENTS

1. BACKGROUND
1.1. Foreword
1.2. Research, method and materials
1.3. The turn of terms

2. ONTOLOGY
2.1.. A (very brief) history of public museums
2.2.. Remaining public – mission impossible?
2.3. What is (a) public?
2.4. Lost in translation, vol. 1
2.5. The act of being (in) public

3. CASE STUDY:
EMMA ESPOO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
3.1. Introduction and the material
3.2. A (very brief) history of EMMA
3.3. Terminology of the public work in EMMA

4. ANALYSIS
4.1. From education to public work and accounts
4.2. Three jobs, one label

4
5. TWO THEORIES ON BEING PUBLIC
5.1. Hannah Arendt and the public realm
5.2. Juergen Habermas and the public sphere
5.3. Lost in translation, vol. 2

6. PUBLIC ACTIONS IN A PUBLIC SPACE

6.1. “(Social) space is a (social) product”
6.2. Space as a representation
6.3. The (social) actions that form a museum
6.4. From public realm and sphere to a public space

7. THE COALITION OF EDUCATION AND PUBLICNESS

7.1. The role of education
7.2. Critical Gallery Education: Levelling the hierarchies
7.3. Education of EMMA
7.4. Transparent voices

8. MUSEUM AS A PUBLIC SPACE

8.1. What could we really learn from Arendt and Habermas?
8.2. Dialogue, participation, contacts and conflicts
8.3. Unlearning, para-sites, dialogical contemporaneity:
examples of museum practices
8.4. Conclusion in theory
8.5. Conclusion in practice: public work of the public realm

9. BIBLIOGRAPHY

THANK YOU

10. ANNEX

5
“How we define public space
is intimately connected with
ideas about what it means
to be human, the nature of
society, and the kind of political
community we want. While
there are sharp divisions over
these ideas, on one point nearly
everyone agrees: supporting
things that are public promotes
the survival and extension of
democratic culture.”
(Deutsche 1996: 269)

6
 1.
BACKGROUND

7
1.1. FOREWORD
The Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA) was started by the Espoo Art
Museum Foundation in 2003. Its daily functions of displaying art began
the same year under the title of Galleria Otso, which was at that time the
only art gallery in the city of Espoo, Finland. The City of Espoo’s art col-
lection was assigned to the care of the future EMMA, and is for most part
located around the city in public and semi-public spaces. EMMA opened
in 2006. From its very beginning, education, pedagogy and relations with
the public were central to work done for and in EMMA; Museum Director
Markku Valkonen and Chief Educator Nana Salin, who held central roles
in building up the institution, felt this was an important path to take.
In 2014, Salin remains responsible for the Department of Education in
EMMA, leading a team of 12 art education professionals as the Chief Cu-
rator of Education and Accounts. In 2012, Valkonen retired and the current
director, Pilvi Kalhama, took up his position.
The educational work of EMMA started in 2003 and its tenth an-
niversary occurred last year. To celebrate and evaluate the work accom-
plished, the museum approached CuMMA, a Masters course in Curating,
Managing and Mediating Art in Aalto University, looking for a student to
conduct this research. Throughout my studies in CuMMA, I have been
interested in the relationship between art institutions and their publics, so
I was interested in pursuing this opportunity in my Masters Thesis.

1.2. RESEARCH, METHOD AND MATERIALS

The nature, content and terminology of the work done between museums
and their publics has changed throughout the years, and it will undoubt-
ably continue to evolve. In Finland, most museums now refer to their
educational departments as undertaking “yleisötyö”, public work, and the
activities that take place under this label are varied. At a time when the
relevance of museums to societies is being questioned, this research looks
at their public nature, trying to find out why they are under scrutiny. The
aim of the research is to understand what the term public work means
and could mean if the term would correlate with the original signification
of the word “public”. By bringing together museums and public spaces,
the research aims to highlight and question the mission and purpose of
contemporary museums while outlining possibilities for their relevance in

8
this and future moments.
In order to understand what the word “public” means in contemporary
museums, I have gone to the very roots of the word in an attempt to to
formulate a coherent narrative of its theoretical journey . By dissecting
and analysing both the words “public” and “space”, I have outlined a the-
oretical narrative of the term “public space” , applying it to my case study
EMMA as well as to museums more broadly. Starting with an assumption
that words matter in the process of formulating concepts, situations and
relationships, I have examined EMMA through a discourse analysis of the
terms and conditions used to define and discuss the public of this particu-
lar museum.
At my use have been the archival materials of the Department of Pub-
lic Work of EMMA which consist of the museum’s annual reports, project
reports, archived email exchanges, public questionnaires, plans of action
and strategies. Additionally, I have interviewed the staff of the department
and followed both guided tours and workshops in the museum in order to
understand how work with the public of EMMA is constructed, along with
its general vision and position in the museum. I have used the interviews
as source material.
I have conducted a theory-driven analysis of the archival material
and of ethnographic observations of the museum building and its use.
My theoretical material comes from the fields of art theory, critical
theory, curatorial theory as well as museum and gallery education. With
my research question—Are contemporary museums public spaces?—as a
guiding principle, I have tested its working hypothesis against an ongoing
movement between archival and empirical data and theoretical material.
The history of being public starts with philosophical theories of the
public realm, which I have outlined with two examples: one from Hannah
Arendt and the other from Juergen Habermas. I have looked at their rela-
tions to museums throughout history, concentrating on the concept of a
public space. I have felt this to be a relevant point of entry into a contem-
porary understanding of what it means for something to be public, as the
concept of public space is today rife with contradictions, as well as often
discussed together with questions of art and its spaces.
I have tried to dissect both the words “public” and “space”, bringing
them together with an overview of EMMA as a social and physical con-
struction. I have also analysed the implications these have on the rela-
tionship between the institution and its public. Understanding education

9
as a vital part of this relationship, I have looked at different educational
discourses and examined EMMA’s public work in the light of the theories
I have chosen and the conclusions these have elucidated. My aim has
been twofold: to understand and define both the current and intended
nature of the relationship of EMMA and its public, and to examine its
mission and vision in relation to its practice in an attempt to map out its
possible futures.
I have used images of artworks by artist Tiina Raitainen to illustrate
this research in the hope that they can provoke questions concerning
spaces of art and exhibition, public spaces, art institutions and art as an
institution. I’ve found these topics useful when considering contempo-
rary museums of art as public spaces.

1.3. THE TURN OF TERMS

Within the last ten years or so, art projects and spaces around the world
have experimented and incorporated, process-based, project-formed
and open-ended working methodologies within their daily functions. New
terminologies have thus entered the language of the art field—words like
“forum”, “laboratory” and “research project” have become the fashion-
able lingo of the field, and within this the work of art institutions has also
started changing. Museums are now immersed in this process of change,
and EMMA would appear to be no different. With the directorship of Pilvi
Kalhama, the museum has started a new way of producing exhibitions
called “the project model”, in which all departments contribute to the
production process from as early on as possible. There is an exhibition
space in EMMA called the Agora which will shortly be accompanied by a
new permanent exhibition space called Passage and a project space called
Arena. These are all words present within the new arts lingo , suggesting
open spaces where people come together and things happen in a more
impromptu manner than has previously been the norm for museums.
In observing EMMA within a process of change, researching and ana-
lysing the terminology used by the museum can be helpful. I hope it can
also provide the museum some tools for thinking about where it is coming
from and towards what it may be moving. I am concentrating on the term
“public” and its different uses in order to find out whether the relationship
of EMMA and its public is also changing, and if so, how.

10
 It is fruitful to consider the term “public space” and its educational
possibilities within the context of the art museum. Firstly, art is a sphere
that in its essence maintains a loaded relationship with its public, sup-
porting multiple ways to question, contest and discuss ideas of public
space . It is a field in which utopias and parallel universes are imagined,
resulting in its capacity to progress social culture. It is a world that is tied
to the political, even when it does not set out to exist that way. “From
the point of view of the theory of hegemony, artistic practices play a role
in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order, or in its
challenging, and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension”,
says Chantal Mouffe (2013: 91). Secondly, museums are built on the resto-
ration and rupture of socio-political issues inherent within art and culture.
Thirdly, they are institutions that create and pass on knowledge, result-
ing in an inextricable relationship to education. Within this lens is the
possibility to question the hegemonic hierarchies that dictate how ideas of
being public are accessed through information and knowledge.

11
 .2
YGOLOTNO

12
 2.
ONTOLOGY

13
2.1. A (VERY BRIEF) HISTORY OF PUBLIC MUSEUMS
Museums began as and are often still expected to be institutions that
bring culture and knowledge to all. Prior to the 17th century, art collections
were owned and housed by the courts and only accessible to the prince
and his court members, in essence the highest class of society. The Age of
Enlightenment1 repositioned the private, princely collections of art and
other valued objects into the public domain, resulting in the establishment
of museums. “While the art collections of royalty and wealthy buyers were
the forerunners of public art galleries, and the royal menageries became
the predecessors of modern zoological gardens, the museum emerged
from the private ‘cabinet of curiosities’ to become the public collection
of history, anthropology, geography and technology” (Barrett 2012: 46).
This provided an opportunity for the people with no extended education
to teach themselves about the world they inhabited (Hooper-Greenhill
1992: 9). The purpose of the public museum was to act as an instrument
of education, representation and conservation of history and of historical
objects (1992: 9). The mission of social equality, achieved through learning,
embedded an educational remit within museum practice, through which
“the establishment of a museum or art gallery was seen as an educational
act itself” (1992: 15).
Though democratic in principle, the act of opening up the collections
to the lower societal classes was not only motivated by the principles of
enlightenment and freedom. As the public educated themselves about
the world and its history, they also learned about colonial wealth and the
power of the state (Barrett, 2012: 57). Nick Prior frames the mission of the
18th century museums quite clearly with one sentence: “Visitors were
subjects, not citizens and power was represented ‘before’ them rather than
‘for’ them” (Prior 2002: 35). This meant that information moved top-down,
from the state to the public, however the public was also exposed to how
the state expected them to act—in other words, how to behave as model
citizens (2012: 57). Given that the museums were closely bound to the
states they inhabited, there was no room for questioning their authority.

1 The Age of Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement of the late 17th
and 18th centuries emphasising reason and individualism rather than tradition. It
was heavily influenced by 17th-century philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and
Newton, and its prominent exponents include Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau,
and Adam Smith.

14
 However, as the museums offered free entry to the general public,
they were seen as “places where the classes could meet harmoniously in
public” and “spend their leisure time in fruitful and educational leisure”
(Hooper-Greenhill, 1992: 14-15). Together with libraries and parks, muse-
ums were understood as neutral, common spaces, free from class dis-
tinction—in other words, as public spaces— from the beginning of their
history.

2.2. REMAINING PUBLIC – MISSION IMPOSSIBLE?

With time, the representative mission2 of the museums was questioned
and finally turned around completely, when Peter Vergo’s 1989 collection
of theoretical writings, The New Museology, articulated the discussions
and debates that were circulating the fields of critical theory and museol-
ogy about the museum’s relationship to their publics. Many of the authors
featured in Vergo’s book were influenced by Pierre Borudieu’s sociological
research on museum visitors (Bourdieu 1969, 1979), which positied that,
instead of presenting the variety of cultures the visiting public itself em-
bodied, “museums reproduced for visitors the existing class-based culture,
education, and social systems” (Barrett 2012: 3). The ideas brought forward
by new museology re-constructed the thinking around the purpose of mu-
seums and brought a notion of true democracy to the fore, as it argued for
a museum practice that would emphasise the experiences of the visitors
and unfold the modes of operation that put the collections in their centre.
New museology also brought into question the meaning of a singular
“public” and the (im)possibility of ever forming such a cohesive unit.
In the contemporary field of art and curating, the word “public” is used
rather loosely—to explain, cover, define and even advance different mat-
ters and constituencies. It is an everyday word in this business, however
there is an assumption that we the art workers, inherently understand

2 Analysed by Carol Duncan, among others, in: Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals:
Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge, 1995. Representative here means
that the museum represents objects, knowledge and power in an unquestionable
form.

15
 Tiina Raitanen: THE NOTION, Mondes Pararléls / Pararlel Worlds, Eglise St. Merry,
Paris 2013. Found timber, wood from recycled fruit boxes, styrofoam, acrylic, plexiglass,
cardboard, silicone, epoxy resin

16
what and who the public is. However if questioned, we inevitably fail to
reach a unified answer. A public is imperative to a museum, yet no one
has the ultimate recipe for finding it, keeping it nor engaging with it.
Surprisingly little critical research has been done about the term in this
context (Barrett 2012: 1), though the nature and use of it are as unambigu-
ous as they are frequent.
Museums are seen as public buildings (Habermas 1989: 2) as they are
both supposedly open to everyone and are, mostly, under the authority of
the state. This also enables them to be constituted as public spaces. Often
the audience of a museum is called “a public” and the stated missions of
contemporary museums remain in the democratic realm of making art
available for everybody. Being public is, in other words, central to the
existence of museums.
However, this existence is weighted with contradictory elements. Not
allowing public interests be compromised by those who fund the muse-
um—be it state or corporate organisations—has always been a balancing
act3. Museums are constantly accused of either elitism or populism: of
being only for a specific, high end audience or of trying too hard to bring
in “new customers” (Barrett 2012: 101, Prior 2008: 51-52). Both parts of the
dichotomy are equally disheartening and yet, sadly, belong to the every-
day life of contemporary museums of art. The 21st century has witnessed
a move “from the nineteenth-century model of the museum as a patrician
institution of elite culture to its current incarnation as a populist temple of
leisure and entertainment” (Bishop 2013: 5).
Indeed, the museum publics of today are often seen as customers.
Given the particular context of economic crisis means museums are now,
more than ever, under pressure from their funders to show numerical
results of how they attract increasing numbers of visitors. Critical theory
has claimed that postmodernity has produced museums as sites of the
spectacle, with a main intention to entertain, order desire, and finally
create consumption (Prior 2008: 51-52). In a battle for the free time of their
possible publics, museums are often attempting to offer “fun days out”,
resulting in accusations by art professionals of dismantling art’s authority
and of capitalising the art field. However, if a museum produces exhibi-

3 See for instance: Bishop, Claire. Radical Museology. London: Koening Books,
2013; and Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2012

17
tions for “art specialists”, it is easily accused of elitist practices that leave
out those publics with limited further education in contemporary art. It is
indeed hard to keep everyone happy, and to define the relation contempo-
rary museums have to their publics as being public.
Among all public institutions of the 21st century, capitalism has started
its work on museums, slowly turning them into organisations that offer
services and commodities, experiences and uplifts. Museums are priva-
tised, both on the level of ownership and organisation and within mission
and vision. This has always been the norm in the museums of the US, but
recent years have seen an acceleration in the situation, wiping off all pre-
tence of separation between public and private interests in the operations
of American museums (Bishop 2013: 9). In Europe, government funding of
museums is slowly decreasing, increasing their need for and dependency
upon corporate sponsorship (2013: 9).
Here we are in the heart of the word “public” and its problematic
nature today: the consumer logics of contemporary society confuse and
mangle the spheres of the public and the private. It is almost impossible to
know when the information we are given is filtered by corporate inter-
ests, be it in the context of the news or institutionalised education. “The
blurring of the lines between art and advertising is such that the very idea
of critical public spaces has lost its meaning”, says Chantal Mouffe (2013:
85). She continues: “With the pervasive control of the market, the distinc-
tion between public and private has ceased to be pertinent, since even
the public has become privatised”. Sponsorships, stock markets and other
capitalist powers-to-be dictate most of what happens in the contemporary
world, and even when someone or something stands against them, they
tend to find a way to hijack the counter logics used by the rebellion.
My research question—Are contemporary museums public spaces?—arose
from an interest in the relationship between today’s art museum and its
public, and from a question of what a public space means, both in this
relation and in the contemporary world in general. I feel the relationship
between a museum and its public, as well as the word “public” in all its
meanings, is indeed what defines the educational if not the entirety of the
work of a public museum.
New museology had its start in the early 1980s, which was for muse-
ums a time of funding cutbacks and questions of social relativity, elitism
and accessibility (Barrett 2012: 3). In today’s Finland, this sounds like an
all-too-familiar environment. This research looks at publicness and public

18
spaces, education and the visiting public in relation to contemporary
museums and most specifically, to EMMA. With this I wish to think about
what it means in today’s society for a space, and an institution, to be pub-
lic. This is the question I start my research with.

2.3. WHAT IS (A) PUBLIC?

What do we mean when we use the word public –
in an art museum or in general?

Who is addressed and by whom?

Does someone answer and if not, does it make a difference?

“Public” is an inherently social word indicating situations, relations and

subjects between a generality of people. To be public is to establish a
relational position, speaking of multitudes that are also somehow unified.
Public is considered to be a word that defines open contexts and acces-
sible situations while maintaining currency within the sphere of democ-
racy. It is also often used to construct a community of sorts—some group
of people that have come together. Its opposite, “the private”, is mainly
used to understand things that are not public; in a way, public defines
and secedes the private. Both terms are loosely used in various ways and
contexts, and their uses keep changing with time. This has resulted in a
cacophony of definitions and meanings that can be attributed to the word
“public”, and for this reason its use is sometimes mischievous. It is one of
those words that is easy to slip into promises and manifestos. It is often
used without authority to back up criticised actions:”this is what the pub-
lic wants”, for example, is a statement often heard in media, politics and
arts. Yet rarely is there any proof of a public opinion, a public will or wish
that could be truly categorised as being that of the people as a whole.
The Oxford Dictionary of English (2014) defines the word “public”
(noun) as describing “ordinary people in general; the community”. As
an adjective it is used when concerning the people as a whole, or when
something is open to or shared by all the people within a somewhat
limited area, like a country, situation or event. Thinking about the context
of an art museum, the word “public” can operate twofold. It is related to

19
the visitors of the museum and to its broader community, but at the same
time, given museums are often “public institutions”, funded and governed
by the state, their staff can be considered “public servants”.
In order to situate and fully understand the question this research
poses within the proposed context of the Finnish museum, we need to
consider the wording of the question—”are contemporary museums public
spaces?—from a linguistic perspective.

2.4. LOST IN TRANSLATION, VOL. 1

My interest in the topic of this research starts from the term “public work”
(Fin: yleisötyö) and its ambiguous nature. In 2011 EMMA, as well as many
other Finnish museums, started using the word “yleisötyö” for their work
with the people who come, and are hoped to come, to the museum – the
audience, the visitors, the public. Translating this term into English one
would have to choose between “audience work” and “public work” ( ie.
work done with a public).
Here we get lost in translation, but this confusion provides us with an
insight into the word “public” one may otherwise find hard to understand.
Depending on the situation of use, “public” translates into Finnish as
“yleisö”, “yleinen” or ”julkinen”. The words, though quite similar, mean
very different things.
“Yleisö” means an audience, a set of spectators at an event.
“Yleinen” is an adjective describing things that are general. It assumes
commonality, for example: “public opinion” translate as “yleinen mielipi-
de”, “general knowledge” as “yleinen tieto” (or “yleistieto”).
“Julkinen” is closest to the English word “public”. It is used when
discussing a public space, for example, or to encapsulate information that
is openly shared with the general people, like the inhabitants of a state.
However, the Finnish word describing “public” as a set of people is rarely
translated as it should; “julkiso” is usually replaced with “yleisö”. I return
to this topic later in the chapter “Lost in translation, vol. 2”.
Though they sound very similar, the words “yleisö” and “yleinen” are
not synonymously linked to each other, but are both considered syno-
nyms for the word “yhteisö” – a community. They are words for things
that are publicly shared within a community of sorts.

20
 Tiina Raitanen: LOUHIKKO / A FIELD OF JAGGED ROCKS.
From: Titanik Galleria, Turku, 2014. Concrete, coloured concrete and materials, trash and
old sculpture studies from the studio casted inside the pyramid

21
2.5. THE ACT OF BEING (IN) PUBLIC
What defines the use of words in museums? Is it a calculated thought, an
act of instinct or an acquired habit?

The word “audience”—often used by EMMA in their English materials

and by contemporary museums in general—is different to “public” in the
sense that it specifies both a set of people while determining their actions.
The audience comes to observe something that happens, possibly on a
stage. Its function is encapsulated in the word itself; its Oxford Dictionary
of English (2014) definition is “the assembled spectators or listeners at a
public event, such as a play, movie, concert, or meeting, people who watch
and/or listen.” EMMA also often talks about “attenders” or “visitors”
(both translate from one word used by EMMA: museokävijä. See: Annex:
EMMA Education: history) of the museum. Attender is a neutral word that
does not, as such, define the act of the one who comes into the museum.
It is not someone who is expected to spectate (as an audience could be),
nor to represent a community (as a public may be). The word mainly refers
to being present, of entering a space with no expectations from either the
attender nor the provider. “Attender” more closely evokes the Finnish
word “kävijä”, which could be understood as a visitor guest that would be
treated as such, possibly expecting and being granted hospitality.
The word “public” creates a space outside the fields of spectator audi-
ences and attenders that is wider, bigger and more multidimensional.– As
mentioned it implies something that is open, accessible and known to all.
It also refers to a communal existence where a whole is shared by its parts.
However different the implications of these terms, in the Finnish
museum context they are used interchangeably. This may happen without
premeditation, out of habit or because of an assumption to reinforce gen-
erally used “museum lingo”. It may also be a result of deliberate contem-
plation and calculation. Whatever the motivations, the terms is used to
describe how the work and relations of a museum determine the very na-
ture of how the choose to be presented, understood, accepted and adopt-
ed. The museum patron will, on the whole, adhere to their role as dictated
to by language and rarely question it. If we are referred to as a visitor, we
assume to role of someone momentarily inhabiting another’s space. If
we are given the role of an audience member, we expect to be spectating
something. But what do we think of when we are labeled a member of a
public? The term is so loose these days and its political connotations so

22
lost from the original that it is hard to define what exactly it connotes, and
what is expected.
If we categorise all work done with the public under one label—public
work—we merge together a large group of activities with very different
aims, mediations and outcomes. I am suggesting that we are losing the
term “public” due to its ambiguity and non-premeditated use . Its strongly
political, social and democratic nature is liquefied into an emptiness with
as many uses and meanings as there are people to speak it.
As contemporary museums’ functions and reasons for existence are
questioned and redefined, so are, automatically, the actions and roles of
their publics. The relationships between museums and their publics are
definitive for the institutions and imperative for their perseverance. For
this reason, I would claim, it is important to focus on these relationships,
and to dig into what the word “public” does and could mean in a museum
of today.

23
 .3
:YDUTS ESAC
OOPSE AMME
FO MUESUM
TRA NREDOM

24
 3.
CASE STUDY:
EMMA ESPOO
MUSEUM OF
MODERN ART

25
3.1. INTRODUCTION AND THE MATERIAL
My case study EMMA is very centred around its public both in its mission
and its operations. The educational department is relatively big consider-
ing the size of the museum in general, and the wish to think of the public
and to interact with it has been strongly carried through in the museum’s
work since its beginning in 2003. The museum also has a public collection
that used to belong to the city, and unofficially is still seen this way. This
collection started in 1955 with the ideology of bringing art to the schools
of Espoo, so from the beginning it was spread around the city, in its public
spaces and buildings, which is how it remains4.

EMMA’s “Mission, Vision and Values” (See: Annex: Mission, Vision and
Values) mentions relating to its public in three ways:

1) “EMMA activates its public, stimulates discussion and influences

the surrounding community”.
2) “EMMA maintains an active dialogue with its staff, customers
and interest groups, and participates in public debate.”
3) “EMMA is easily approachable and maintains genuine dialogue
with its customers”.

An active dialogue with the “outside world” seems important to EMMA;

it has been made clear in my discussions with the staff of its education-
al department, especially with Nana Salin (See: Annex: interviews), and
through its repeated mentions in EMMA’s annual reports (See: Annex:
EMMA Education: history). I would also argue for a dialogue to be essen-
tial to any functioning relationship. For these reasons I have maintained
it is important to concentrate on this when analysing the relationship of
EMMA and its “public”.
I have gone through EMMA’s archival material and annual reports
from 2003 to the present time, analysing the uses and changes of the
terms with which the public is referred to, while mapping out how “public”
has been addressed and understood within the whole of the museum.

4 This relationship between the museum, the collection and the city was
researched in an exhibition project the students of CuMMA executed in 2013-14,
called AYE/NO/ABSENT – Collection of Realities. The project was a collaboration
between CuMMA, Aalto University and EMMA.

26
Through looking for examples of an active dialogue, I have tried to un-
derstand the intentions and goals of the museum’s public work and the
nature of the relationship between the museum and its public.
I will start my report on this research process with a short history of
the museum’s beginning and continue on to present an outline of how the
terminology of the educational or public work of EMMA has developed
throughout the years.

3.2. A (VERY BRIEF) HISTORY OF EMMA

Espoo city art collection was established in 1955 and in 2002 it was turned
into the collection of the Espoo art museum. In 1985, Gallery Otso was
started in order to maintain art activities in Espoo. In 1992, the Cultural
Board proposed to the City Council that a cultural space could be sited in
the WeeGee building, and in 1997 the council gave Gallery Otso permis-
sion to rent the space.
In 1999, the collection of the Saastamoinen foundation was moved
in the WeeGee building and placed under the care of the City of Espoo.
Simultaneously the Foundation of Espoo Art Museum was established by
the City and by the Saastamoinen collection. In 2002, Gallery Otso was
taken under its wings and Markku Valkonen was elected the Director of
the art museum.
In 2003-04, Espoo Art Museum Foundation worked towards the build-
ing of EMMA, as well as maintaining an exhibition program in Gallery
Otso. Though the museum itself did not open to the public until 2006,
the museum staff developed and started its educational work in 2003.
Through this and the close involvement of Chief Educator (now Chief
Curator of Education and Accounts) Nana Salin in planning and imple-
menting the museum’s strategies, educational work has become central to
how the museum is run.

27
3.3. TERMINOLOGY OF THE PUBLIC WORK IN EMMA
Here follows a list of the terms with which the public has been referred
to in EMMA’s yearly reports, from 2003 to 2013. Original Finnish terms
follow the English ones in brackets when needed, and all translations are
done by myself, then checked by the museum staff.

2003
The name of the department: Art Education (Taidekasvatus)
Public referred to with terms: customers (asiakkaat), for example customer
logistics (asiakaslogistiikka), visitors / spectators (katsojat), attender
/ visitor (kävijät), public / audience (yleisö). Also used: pedagogical
activities (pedagoginen toiminta)

2004
The name of the department: Museum Pedagogy (and pedagogical
activities) (Museopedagogia)
Public referred to with terms: spectators, spectating people, visitors
(vieraat)

2005
The name of the department: Museum Education (and pedagogical
activities) (museo-opetus ja pedagoginen toiminta)
Public referred to with terms: public / audience (yleisö)

2006
The name of the department: Museum Education
Public referred to with terms: public / audience (yleisö), attenders /
visitors (kävijät), customers (asiakkaat) (when referring to the customer
happenings held by collaborative companies)

2007
The name of the department: Museum Education
Public referred to with terms: public / audience (yleisö), visitors (vieraat),
attenders / visitors (kävijät)

28
2008
The name of the department: Museum Education
Public referred to with terms: attenders / visitors (kävijät)

2009
The name of the department: Supplementary program (Oheisohjelmisto)
Public referred to with terms: attenders / visitors (kävijät)

2010
The name of the department: Supplementary program (Oheisohjelmisto)
Public referred to with terms: attenders / visitors (kävijät)

2011
The name of the department: Public work (yleisötyö) and Program
(ohjelmisto)
Public referred to with terms: public / audience (yleisö), attenders /
visitors (kävijät)

2012
The name of the department: Public work
Public referred to with terms: attenders / visitors (kävijät)

2013
The name of the department: Public work and accounts (yleisö- ja
asiakkuustyö)
Note: On EMMA’s website department of public work, i.e. yleisötyö, is
translated into English as Education

Public referred to with terms: museum visitors (museovieraat), public /

audience (yleisö), museum users. Also used: public basis (yleisöpohja)

Longer English translations of the yearly reports for the parts of education
and public work are found in the Annex: EMMA’s history.

29
 .4
SISYLANA

30
 4.
ANALYSIS

31
4.1. FROM EDUCATION TO PUBLIC WORK AND
ACCOUNTS
From 2003 to 2008 the department names, as well as the titles of the staff,
have had a strong educational emphasis. Simultaneously, the terms that
refer to the public have been various and changing, and arguably inco-
herent.
From 2009 to 2010 the department was called Supplementary Pro-
gram, which implies a change in the understanding of the work from ed-
ucation to a direction of entertainment and happenings that complement
the already existing exhibition.
From 2011 onwards ,the term public work (Fin: “yleisötyö”) has been a
key part of the title of the department. First the word “program” remained,
then stood on its own for one year. It now has a new companion, “Ac-
counts”. The current title of the department is confusing in its English
translation. In Finnish the department is called “Yleisötyö ja Asiakkuudet”.
However, its English translation in the museum’s materials, Education
and Accounts, is not direct.
“Yleisötyö” would mean in English “Public work”. This word is gener-
ally not used in museums of the English speaking world. I assume this is
why it is translated in EMMA’s materials as “Education”. However dictat-
ed by the necessity of general lingo, this choice in translation creates a bit
of a confusion, as public work can be understood differently—more widely
and ambiguously—to education, which is rather descriptive.
“Asiakkuudet” translates into English as “customership” in plural.
Again, there is no word used in English for the plurality of customership,
and this may be the reason the word chosen for the English materials,
“Accounts”, stands out as an anomoly. Normally when the English word
“account” is used in plural, it means accounting (Fin: “kirjanpito”) which
implies an economic frame, like the act of book keeping. I believe the
intended understanding here is, however, closer to the Finnish word used
in the title of the department: a plurality of customership, referring to the
different publics that come or are hoped to come to EMMA5.
The confusion created by these translations is at the heart of why I
find the term “public work” so interesting: it can define a whole set of

5 This was explained to me by a member of staff from EMMA’s Dept. of Education

in an unrecorded conversation.

32
differing activities that address and/or involve a public, but it does not
include or mean education alone. Yet this term is now used widely in the
Finnish museum world in place of what used to be called “education” or
“pedagogy”. The departments of museum education have, through a cho-
sen term and the expectations this implies, opened up a multidimension-
al, multitasking operative that is very hard to define in practice.
Indeed, “public work” is a very definitive term for a department that
entails all work done with the public, including education, outreach and
marketing. However, in thinking of a department whose mandate used to
be solely to educate, I wish to consider what happens to the very nature of
education when it is labeled under the same title and combined, in prac-
tice, with public relations and a rhetoric of service.
What does “public” mean when it entails several different relation-
ships, initiatives and operations? Does a consideration of the museum’s
public as customers affect how the public-customers are encountered?
How does the chosen language determine the public’s actions?
The terms which refer to the public in the rest of EMMA’s materials
are no more full of contrast as the titles of the educational department.
In fact, the most used terms are the most neutral ones, attenders/visi-
tors and public/audience. The latter, as mentioned before, highlights the
difficult nature of the Finnish word for public: it can mean the public as in
a generality of people, or the audience as the receiver of a rather passive
form of spectatorship. I will return to this dilemma in the chapter “Lost in
translation, vol. 2”.

4.2. THREE JOBS, ONE LABEL

In returning to the annual reports of EMMA, I will now highlight some
quotes to explain my interest and concern with the relationship of the
“public”, the “education” and the “accounts”. When examining the rela-
tionship of EMMA and its public, this is the question that intrigues me
the most: how do these three terms and missions correlate? Does their
entwinement also mix public and private interests together?
Firstly though, I would like to point out that the reports, though an
account of things that have happened, are also a tool of representation.
Through them the museum presents itself and its activities to the outside
world. This would suggest that topics and words are carefully chosen, but I

33
have no proof of this assumption. What can be said with the definition of
an annual report6 in mind is that they represent how the museum wants to
be seen, as well as what it feels it has managed to do. They do not include
everything and may for this reason leave out aspects that would contra-
dict my analysis and support an understanding of “public” even similar to
what I will suggest later with the support of chosen theoretical materials.
The annual reports indicate that the public work of EMMA converges
into one overarching stream yet forks into three tributaries of different
aims and purposes. The public work of the museum includes educational
work, marketing or public relations, and work that is understood as cus-
tomer service.

In addition to art educational activities, the public work in EMMA

includes customer work and public services. [...] It makes sure the
public is taken into account when planning and implementing the ex-
hibitions. Public work takes notice of different kinds of learners in the
contents and creates possibilities for the museum goers to participate,
have a dialogue, encounter and share experiences. Central to the
work is deepening the public’s understanding of the arts, experiencing
and acting together, increasing sociability and communality. Public
services take care of customer service and guarding the exhibitions.
Museum educators, guides and guards hold an important role be-
tween the museum and the public, as well as in offering the services of
the museum.
Annual report of EMMA, 2012

The lines between the aforementioned tributaries of different aims and

6 An annual report is a comprehensive report on a company’s activities

throughout the preceding year.

34
purposes seem to blend into each other which makes the reading of the
reports rather difficult. It is hard to distinguish between what is done with
what purpose, as education, services and marketing fall in and out of each
other repeatedly. This union of different missions under the name Educa-
tion and Accounts is clearly visible in the following two quotes:

Public work is done with the means of art education, artistic work
and marketing.
Public work aims to increase visitors’ understanding and apprecia-
tion of the arts. The program deepens the viewing experience, builds
the acknowledgment of the arts, advances the museum sales, reaches
out for new audiences and establishes the current ones. Its object is
to widen the ground of audience both with quantity and quality. The
voice of the public is listened to with, for example, audience research
and feedback. The aim [of the public work] is to continuously improve
the exhibitions, program and services of EMMA.
Annual report, 2011

Tours, workshops, happenings and other services were sharper pro-

ductised in order to increase the reputation of EMMA as a provider
of services in addition to the exhibition program.
Annual report, 2010

For the first three years the reports do not include much descriptive text,
but rather lists of things that have been achieved. However, already here
the activities of the educational department can be seen as entwined with
the public relations of the museum. For example, in 2004 “The Museum
Educators held two exhibitions informing about the museum activities,
one in the city hall and the other in Sello library” (Annual report, 2004).
Though there are several ways to understand the word used here, “in-
forming”, it is a task that is generally categorised in organisations as one of
“public relations”.
EMMA, like most museums in Finland, collaborates with business-
es on productions of exhibitions or events, often in the form of projects
within the Educational Department. For example, in 2004 the museum
collaborated with the Office of Espoo Culture, School of Ruusutorppa and
flag factory FinnMar Oy on a project in which children created flags for
the esplanade in Alberga, Espoo. In its early history, the educational space

35
called Ilme in EMMA showcased exhibitions that were “built around the
themes of the museum exhibitions, together with collaborative business-
es. The first year included a cover exhibition by Eeva magazine” (EMMA
yearly report, 2009). Today it functions mainly without business relations,
using them occasionally in the manner of the rest of the museum—in the
form of exchanges. With these transactions the museum receives materi-
als it needs (for example paint, crafts materials, wallpaper) from business-
es that produce these in exchange for a visibe presence in the museum.
This is the nature of most of EMMA’s business relationships today.
On occasion, EMMA hosts VIP events for customers of collaborative
organisations, for example HOK- Elanto (former S-group), which is a
national supermarket corporation7. The museum organises and promotes
private, chargeable workshops for children’s birthday parties and for adult
and business groups (Taidekuohut, Engl. Art Bubbles). With these kinds of
events, the idea of marketing is entangled within education, and educa-
tional initiatives are positioned as entertainment. This mode of operation
has been very common in American museums, where corporate inter-
ests dictate the activities of museums thorough funding. In recent years,
corporate collaborations have entered the Finnish museum field widely
and are now a common presence in all larger museums here. No muse-
um mentions publicly how the sponsors and other corporate relations
affect the decision making processes and practices of the museums, but
throughout discussions with the staff of EMMA I have understood that
the collaborative businesses of the museum do not have an input in the
concepts and programming of exhibitions.
The events that happen around the exhibitions of EMMA are often
promotional and appear as an attempt to gather a greater audience to the
museum. This form of acting is also common to other big museums in
Finland, after all it is a common believe that events are the most enter-
taining of the museum’s activities. Like EMMA, some museums combine
education and events while others incorporate them into marketing8, or a
department of their own9.

The happenings are organised in order to awaken interest towards

EMMA and to reach out for new audiences.
Annual report of EMMA, 2011

36
Through the language of the annual reports and other archival material,
the relationship between the museum and its public appears as a two-sid-
ed affair. Education and public work are central to the museum in many
ways, but simultaneously their mission and strategies seem varied. With
this research I wish to find out why this is, and whether it would make
sense to consider another way of operating.

The following chapters are dedicated to my attempt to understand and

define what it means for something to “be public”, and to contemplate
what this can mean in a contemporary museum of art, especially when it
engages in “public work”. In the word “public” I see a combination of the
very old and the most contemporary—its use today appears to engage in
both perspectives of time. The newest lingo and working methods of art
and its institutions would seem to refer to the very roots of the word “pub-
lic”, which is the motivation for starting my theoretical encounters with
two theories from this era.

7 The relationship with HOK- Elanto would appear to have started in 2007.
8 Finnish National Gallery Ateneum does not have a department of public work,
but one that is responsible for collections, exhibitions and events.
9 Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art has a theatre that organises a lot of
events in Kiasma. However, the department of public work, called in English “the
Public Programmes”, organises events as well, like EMMA.

37
 .5
SEIROEHT OWT
GNIEB FO
CILBUP

38
 5.
TWO THEORIES
OF BEING
PUBLIC

39
A differentiation of private and public could be said to start with the An-
cient Greeks. The functions of the cities of Ancient Greece were divided
into two categories: those that happen at home in the realm ordered by
the master of the house, and those that took place in public in the agora
or more generally within visibility and audibility of other masters. This
visibility and audibility of others is seen as the starting point of the public
space (Habermas, 1989). Agora of the Ancient Greek city was the gathering
place in which artistic, political, spiritual and athletic activities took place.
It is the first space to which history has referred to as a place of the public
realm, and a term contemporary culture still uses for describing such
spaces. EMMA’s use of the name Agora for an exhibition space could
suggest a relation between the museum and the notion of being public I
aim to describe here.
Public realm, public sphere10 and public space have been subjects
of interest and contemplation to theoretics in the fields of social and
political sciences, art and cultural studies, geography as well as archi-
tecture throughout the 20th century. The use of these words is entwined
and mangled together, and often they are used when talking about the
same thing. However only public realm and public sphere mean the same
thing—an immaterial existence of something public—and public space
refers to an actual, physical space. The first two can be understood as an
attitude or an atmosphere; something that happens in a space that is not
bound to any specific site. They are what philosophy has used in defining
what “being public” means.
The historical beginning of the definition of publicness started with
the publishing of Hannah Arendt’s book Human Condition in 1958, which
looks at the possibilities of humans coming together. As history often goes,
the female author was only recognised years after her work was published,
and the male authors who brought out works on the same subject and
were clearly influenced by Arendt became, in the meantime, known as the
voices of these theories. Juergen Habermas’s book The Structural Trans-
formation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois
Society (STPS. English Translation: 1989) was said to be the starting point
of the modern discussion about the public sphere, even though Habermas

10 Public sphere and realm translate rather awkwardly into Finnish as “julkisuus”,
which could be again translated into English as “publicness”. I explain this in more
detail in chapter “Lost in Translation, vol. 2

40
himself has admitted the influence Arendt had on his work, and refers to
Human Condition in the STPS. In the following chapters I will give short
introductions of the way Arendt and Habermas have discussed the terms
“public realm” and “public sphere”11. I will also highlight a few examples of
critiques of these theories and, together with these, try to find connective
points to how we could understand contemporary museums and their use
of the term “public”. To do this, I will concentrate on the idea of museums
being public spaces,in an effort to define what this could mean in reality.

5.1. HANNAH ARENDT AND THE PUBLIC REALM

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a political theorist working in 1960s Eu-
rope and America with an interest in the idea of humans as a plurality and
in the themes of democracy, power and authority. Her influential book
called The Human Condition (1958) considers the relationship between a
public realm and political action, investigating the categories of vita acti-
va12, labor, work and action while situating them in the four realms of the
political, the social, the public and the private.
Arendt’s understanding of public and private realms follows the life of
the Ancient Greeks, where the public realm was understood as one of po-
litical activity and the private as the site of life’s necessities, mostly placed
in the household. She defines the term “public” in two ways. Firstly, as
things appearing so that everyone can see and hear them, as she believes
appearance constitutes for us the reality (1958: 50). Secondly, “public”
signifies for her the world as a whole, “insofar as it is common to all of
us and distinguished from our privately owned place in it” (1958: 52). She
differentiates this understanding of the world from the earth or nature,
explaining it as relating more to “the human artefact, the fabrication of
human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit

11 Arendt talks about the “public realm” and Habermas about the “public sphere”. I
have chosen to use the term from Arendt, apart from when referring to the theory
from Habermas.
12 Vita Activa is a term originating from Ancient Greek polis (see also: “Habermas
and the public sphere”). It means active life, or human existence in speech
and action. Arendt distinguishes this term from vita contemplativa, meaning
contemplative life.

41
 Tiina Raitanen: WALL. From: Jatkumo / Continuum, Galleria Aarni, Espoo, 2013.
Exhibition wall, dyed leftover wood shavings from an installation, parts of old works.

42
the man-made world together” (1958: 52). Arendt’s vision of the Ancient
Greek polis bears similarities to the Habermasian understanding of public
sphere; it is understood not as a physical location, but as something that
“arises out of acting and speaking together” (1958: 198), with the distinc-
tion that Habermas’s theory relied only on speech and writing.
Arendt organises the activities of vita activa through their placement
in the realms of private and public, situating labor—sustenance of life
such as production of food and shelter—in the private realm and work—
production that leaves something behind—in the public. Arendt considers
action, the third activity, as specifically political and as one that can only
take place in the public realm. To her, action consists of two important hu-
man conditions: plurality and freedom. She describes action as “the only
activity [of vita activa] that goes on directly between men without the in-
termediary of things or matter [...] correspond[ing] to the human condition
of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit
the world” (Arendt 1958: 7). Plurality, for Arendt, is the condition—a mode
of existing together—in which action can take place. She argues that this is
because “we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is
ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live” (1958: 8).
By freedom, Arendt means something given to us all through birth—a
capacity to make beginnings. She sees freedom as action come to life, as
“a freedom expressed in action” (Thuma 2011: 1), and as an activity that is
closely bound to natality. For Arendt, the fundamental human capacity of
freedom is the inevitable state of being able to create new beginnings, like
we are new beginnings ourselves through birth (1958: 177).
In other words, for Arendt, action—an essential activity to a fulfilled
human existence—means to take initiative and to do something, possibly
unexpected, together with others in plurality, and in public. In the same
way that art needs an audience, action, in Arendt’s opinion, needs the
presence and acknowledgement of others in order to exist and remain
meaningful. Andrea Thuma describes Arendtian freedom as follows:

It is the human freedom to act, to speak, and to create shared spaces

through interaction with others. This interaction requires that a
plurality of human beings communicate with each other about the
terms of their coexistence. Plurality is thus both a basic existential fact
of human existence which requires interaction, communication and
cooperation, so that a shared life with others becomes possible, and

43
 plurality enables action and speech within shared spaces, because in-
teraction is contingent upon the presence of others. At the intersection
of these two notions we encounter the true meaning of the political: It
is the realisation of freedom through interaction with others in public
spaces. (Thuma 2011)

Human Condition describes the modern age as the time that brought upon
the realm of the social. In Arendt’s view, society became a collection of
private needs, like one big household (1958: 39). She claims the social and
private realms are sites of necessity, creating an opposition between them
and the public realm, which entails everything left outside of necessity—
the public affairs and the politics. Arendt explains modernity comparing
the ancient and modern views on the private realm: in the ancient world,
privacy was seen as a deprivation of something and taking part in the
public realm was the essence of humanity. In contrast to this, today the
private realm is enriched “through modern individualism” (1958: 38) and
with this seems to us not a deprivation but a normality. She explains that
through this change in our world order, “the two realms indeed constantly
flow into each other like waves in the never-resting stream of the life pro-
cess itself” (1958: 33). This means that the public realm, as Arendt defines
it, has been abandoned by the modern people. She describes this rather
beautifully:

The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet
prevents our falling over each other, so to speak. What makes mass
society so difficult to bear is not the number of people involved, or at
least not primarily, but the fact that the world between them has lost
its power to gather them together, to relate and to separate them. The
weirdness of this situation resembles a spiritualistic séance where a
number of people gathered around a table might suddenly, through
some magic trick, see the table vanish from their midst, so that two
persons sitting opposite each other were no longer separated but also
would be entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible. (1958:
52-53).

For Arendt, a fulfilled human existence must belong to both the private
and the public realm. In Human Condition, she tries to bring the political
back into the modern life, seeking a revival of the meaning of the public

44
realm and action as enabling freedom. She sees this happening only if
“citizenship” is reactivated and spaces for public action restored. Though
she understands the public realm as a spaceless realm between people in
action and speech, she feels this cannot occur without a physical, pub-
lic space. As in her description of the table around which people have
gathered, democracy can only be debated face-to-face, in a shared space
where different opinions can be discussed. She does not believe in a
“public opinion”, like Habermas, that is unanimous and collective, nor in
private, individual opinions living together, side by side. She believed that
the only opinions that could be said to represent a public were ones that
arouse from debate and confrontation between citizens in a public space.
For Arendt, the coming-together of different perspectives is the only way
anything resembling a unified view could be achieved.
Arendt’s theories have been criticised over time for several reasons.
Habermas, for example, has called into question Arendt’s ability to relate
her theories to the modern, capitalist society as he feels she has remained
too tightly bound to Classical Greek philosophy (Habermas 1974). The
most common critique of Arendt’s political theory might be that it is con-
tradictory in nature because it contains ideas of both elitist and democrat-
ic natures (Canovan 1992). Her theory of action has also been criticised as
both participatory and heroic (Parekh 2008). This is something that, for
me too, seems rather paradoxical, as does Arendt’s notion of the human
as an almost divine being that defines and rules the world we inhabit.
Nevertheless, her ideas about publicness and plurality are, in my opinion,
both agreeable and applicable to the consideration of museums as public
spaces.
What concretely relates Arendt’s theories to art and the museum is
her interest in storytelling and in theatre. Arendt believed that people act
and speak without knowledge of where this will lead , and only a narra-
tion of their stories and actions can reveal their meaning. “Storytelling,
or the weaving of a narrative out of the actions and pronouncements of
individuals, is therefore partly constitutive of their meaning, because it
enables the retrospective articulation of their significance and import” (D’
Entrèves 1994: 75). In a way, a representation of an action enables a more
specific understanding of the act, as it places it in relation to other actions.
This could be understood as a mission for art, and is indeed referred to as
such by Arendt herself. However, for her the nature and linking of speech
and action are irreplaceable. Theatre is positioned as the only art form

45
she feels can truly represent a story, and not just to the viewer but to the
actor herself who only through “mimicking” and repeating the story can
enter the viewpoint of “the hero” (1958: 187). I will return to this thought
of participatory existence in a moment, but let us first look at Arendt’s
consideration of narratives from the perspective of the traditional tasks of
the museum.
Arendt claims that in narratives we can preserve the memory of signif-
icant actions. She says, “if the world is to contain a public space, it cannot
be erected for the generation and planned for the living only; it must
transcend the life-span of the mortal men” (1958: 55). Museums, then, hold
a significant meaning as the institutions persevering human actions, as
agents of remembrance, and, most importantly in this context, as possi-
ble public spaces. Arendt points out that indeed in remembrance lies the
reason the Greeks valued poetry and history, as they kept alive beneficial
deeds for future generations (D’ Entrèves 1994: 75).
But, just as a museum needs its public, a story needs an audience to
enable the activation of its lessons. Arendt sees this as one of the primary
functions of the Greek polis. She states that “men’s life together in the
form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities,
action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-
made ‘products’, the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would
become imperishable” (1958: 31).
To return to the idea of human existence as requiring of public partic-
ipation, I want to consider the meaning of a participatory museum. From
the viewpoint of Arendt’s theory, I would claim that for the museum to be
truly public, it would need to be truly participatory; in this sense, it would
have to allow “everyone” to take part in the process that is the museum,
not only in what it represents and offers. I will return to this claim in more
detail when thinking about the museum as a public space.
To end my brief encounter with Arendt, I wish to bring in another
thought that relates her theory to the word “public” within the context of
a museum, or indeed within any public institution. Arendt sees action as
directly related to communicative interaction and to language, because
in order to act in relation to others, we have to be able to articulate the
meanings of our actions (1958: 178-9, 184-6, 199-200). To consider this
relation reciprocally, words, for Arendt, can also not exist without actions.
She claims that “[p]ower is actualised only where word and deed have not
parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where

46
words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds
are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create
new realities“ (1958: 200).
Relating this to the consideration of the term “public” in the muse-
um world, it seems to me important to find a use of the term that stands
behind what it says. If being “public” is discussed unclearly and used with
hidden intentions, the term cannot be truly understood, nor trusted.

5.2. JUERGEN HABERMAS AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE

In 1962 sociologist and philosopher Juergen Habermas (born in 1929)
wrote the book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a category of Bourgeois Society (1989), henceforth referred to
as STPS, which describes the narrative of the bourgeois13 public sphere in
the 18th and early 19th centuries. It, too, bows back to the Greek city-state
of ancient Athens, where polis, literally translating to ‘city’ or ‘citizenship’,
was separated from oikos, which could be translated as the private realm,
a realm of each individual’s own. In the polis, “the public life, bios poli-
tikos, went on in the gathering place (agora)” (Habermas 1989: 3). However,
Habermas did not see the public life as space bound or only possible in the
agora, but mentions it happening also in other locations. He understood
the public sphere of the polis as a state that was reached in discussion, for
example in the court of law or in consultation, or common action, like war
or athletic games (1989: 3). Habermas thought the Greek public sphere to
be the state in which things took shape and became “visible to all” (1989:
4).
Habermas’ theory traces the transformations of the social structures
occurring in England, France, US and Germany from the late 17th century
onwards between the bourgeoisie and the state authorities. He demon-
strates a turn in the history of these countries, during which the centre

13 “Bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie” are terms deriving from French and used in
social sciences. They are used to refer to the upper middle class and specifically
to their materialistic values or conventional attitudes. In Marxist philosophy they
refer to the social class possessing the means of production and upholding the
interests of capitalism. “Bourgeoisie” refers to the members of the upper middle
class and “bourgeois” is an adjective.

47
of the public sphere was moved from the court to the city and its occu-
pants, enabling for the first time the bourgeois society’s admission into the
cultural world and eventually into the political decision-making processes
of the state (1989: 62). Referring to the Greek polis, Habermas explains the
new city of the 17th and 18th centuries as a place where the citizens met in
discussions and contemplated the important issues of their time. Culture
was very central to the process, as it was through cultural activities that
the first relationships between the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie were
formed and the non-productive and politically inactive aristocrats made
connections to the important writers, artists and scientists of the bour-
geoisie (1989: 31). However, in these early stages of the conception that
was to be considered the public sphere, the nobility still held the authority
of the general discourse, keeping it, according to Habermas, on the level of
chitchat and puns instead of critique and arguments (1989: 31).
When Philip of Orléans moved the court from Versailles to Paris, the
French court lost its central function in the public sphere, or indeed its po-
sition “as the public sphere” (1989: 30). When the cultural activities moved
from the court to the city, the whole public sphere, not only its central
point, changed (1989: 30-31). The city as the space of culture allowed all
the citizens into the cultural world as the general public who nevertheless
has the capacity to critique and form its own opinions. Habermas is keen
on the idea of a “public opinion”, which today it is necessary to problem-
atise as it is impossible to speak of cohesive unity as such that accurately
represents the sentiments of any city or country of the world. However in
considering Habermas’s theory it is important to remember he was talk-
ing about the opinion of a general public that was replacing or forming in
parallel to the court and its aristocrats. He was describing an enlargement
in the concept of a public that was reaching through the highest barriers of
class society.
The cities gained more and more power through these new institutions
where the people could meet and discuss. The sites of the bourgeois public
sphere were, in Habermas’s understanding, the coffee houses, salóns, pub-
lic squares and the media. As the aristocrats and the “intellectuals” of the
bourgeoisie met and discussed the cultural issues around literature, arts
and the theatre, the topics soon expanded to the fields of commerce and
politics (1989: 33). These debates produced actual changes in how t the city
was run, in this way allowing the bourgeoisie to finally contribute to the
processes of political decision making.

48
 The discussion groups in the coffee houses and salons varied, but
some characteristics could be found in all of them through the common
will to maintain a continuous discourse between private individuals
(1989: 35-36). Firstly, a social discussion in which status was completely
disregarded was demanded (1989: 36). Habermas notes that though rules
of the commerce were also avoided, in reality they were hard to bypass
(1989: 36). Secondly, issues that had been understood as self-evident
were now questioned. Fields like philosophy, art and the pulpit had so
far been interpreted only by the church and the state officials. As these
issues now reached the more general, bourgeois public, they were subject
to their opinions and their authoratative position questioned. Indeed, this
is where the discussion about the commercialisation of fine art stems from
(1989: 37).
Here we reach the point in Habermas’s theory that is important to
understand in relation to the contemporary museum and its mission: the
development that brought culture into a commercial form also made pos-
sible the public discussion around it, leading to the third characteristic of
the Habermasian public sphere, that of principal openness (1989: 37).

However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could

never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique,
for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more
inclusive public of all private people, persons who—insofar as they
were propertied and educated—as readers, listeners and spectators
could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject
to discussion. The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their
significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to
participate. Wherever the public established itself institutionally as a
stable group of discussants, it did not equate itself with the public but
at most claimed to act as its mouthpiece, in its name, perhaps even as
its educator—the new form of bourgeois representation. The public of
the first generations, even when it constituted itself as a specific circle
of persons, was conscious of being part of a larger public (1989: 37).

What this turn did to the arts is explained in a clear manner by Haber-
mas as he uses the example of the audience of a musical concert. The
appearance of a literary and viewing public was not a change in the public
but rather the birth of it (1989: 39). Until the end of the 17th century, all

49
music remained tied to the representative publicness of the court and the
church, highlighting their ceremonial grandness and value. Composers
worked for the court or the church along with writers and actors who
worked for the monarchy. As public concert bands were formed, it was
the first time the bourgeoisie was allowed to hear music on its own terms,
and indeed the first time a public gathered to listen to music for the sake
of music itself: “admission for a payment turned the musical performance
into a commodity; simultaneously, however, there arose something like
music not tied to a purpose. For the first time an audience gathered to
listen to music as such” (1989: 39). Though the concerts, for example,
were only open to those that could afford to pay for them, this shift in the
nature and existence of the arts was substantially important to how we
understand and live with the arts today.
Released from its functions in the service of social representation, art
became an object of free choice and of changing preference. “The ‘taste’ to
which art was oriented from then on became manifest in the assessments
of lay people who claimed no prerogative, since within a public everyone
was entitled to judge” (1989: 39-40). Museums held a similarly important
role to concerts and the theatre in institutionalising the judgement of lay
people: “discussion became the medium through which people appropri-
ated art” (1989: 40). Culture was written about and criticised by whoever
felt the need to do so in “the world of letters”— this occurred in numerous
pamphlets and publications that circled the bourgeois city, forming the
basis for discussions in the coffee houses and salóns. These writings and
their most enthusiastic authors evolved their practice into what today is
known as art criticism, maintaining an important role in the art world of
the 17th and 18th century even as their publics expanded. As many writ-
ings were conveyed in the form of dialogue, they adhered closely to the
spoken word which enabled the discussion to occur across multiple medi-
ums and platforms before returning to face-to-face discourses (1989: 40).
Talking about the world of letters, Habermas comes to think about how
only through the critical accumulation of art, philosophy and literature
can the public end up enlightening itself, or even understand itself as
the living process of enlightenment (1989: 42). “In the Tatler, the Specta-
tor, and the Guardian the public held up a mirror to itself; it did not yet
come to self-understanding through the detour or a reflection on works of
philosophy and literature, art and science, but through entering itself into
‘literature’ as an object” (1989: 43). “The public that read and debated this

50
sort of thing read and debated about itself” (1989: 43).
Habermas understood the public sphere as an abstract state, created
by discourse among the general public. However, his theory of the subject
has been interchangeably referred to in relation to public space in more
concrete and spatial examples as well. Though the sites of the public
sphere in Habermas’ opinion were the coffee houses, salóns and public
squares, an important portion also happened in the media. Habermas, in-
deed, understands the public sphere as something that “happens” instead
of “existing”.
To clarify Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, we can see that the
private realm in a Habermasian sense is constructed out of five compo-
nents:

1 the civil society (as in the realm of commodity exchange and social
labor)
2 the internal space of the conjugal family
3 the public sphere in the political realm
4 the public sphere in the world of letters (clubs and press)
the “town” (as the market of culture products)

The first two reside clearly in the private realm, constituting the “private
sphere”, and the latter three are the ones that make up the “public sphere”
as Habermas understands it. Opposite of the private realm is the realm
of public authority, made out of the state and the court. In other words,
the public sphere was born between the private and the public realm, as
the public, meaning the bourgeois people, took part in the political realm.
Habermas saw this act as one that democratised the decision-making pro-
cess, giving a voice to “the people”. As such, the Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere traces the history of influence of the “public opinion”
(Habermas 1989) on the political decision-making process of the state.
“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of
private people come together as a public”, states Habermas, continuing:
“they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the
public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general
rules governing relations in the basically privatised but publicly relevant
sphere of commodity exchange and social labor” (1989: 27).

A very important explanation of the period and the happenings Haber-

51
mas describes in STPS is given by Thomas McCarthy in his introduction
to the English version of the book: “[T]he emergent bourgeoisie gradually
replaced a public sphere in which the ruler’s power was merely repre-
sented before the people with a sphere in which the state authority was
publicly monitored through informed and critical discourse by the people”
(McCarthy 1989: xi). In other words, the bourgeoisie took over the public
sphere, so far completely controlled by the representation and status of
the Monarchical or feudal governments, and replaced it with one in which
they were in control of the topic and manner of discussion. This carries a
noteworthy resemblance to the ideas of new museology. What it set out to
dissemble was, as Prior put so well, the former structures in which muse-
ums represented power before the citizens instead of for them (Prior 2002:
35). I will return to this parallel notion of the representation of power later
in chapter 6.3.
It is also important to note that the period described in STPS is also
when the “public” museums as we know them were born (Barrett 2012:
24). Art and culture in general played a significant role in Habermas’ pub-
lic sphere as the bourgeois public took on criticism of art, theatre, music
and literature both in discussions as well as in writing. What Habermas
called “the world of letters” (Habermas 1989) was a vibrant and effective
circulation of pamphlets and letters. Written by anyone taking part in the
public discussions, they stated the private opinions of those participants.
However, Habermas did not see art or the museums as central actors in
his theory, as he believed the role of words, both spoken and written, to be
most important.
Since its English translation, STPS has been widely criticised for sever-
al reasons. I’ll briefly mention the most important critiques:

1 The theory of openness and public access is based on a public

sphere that took place in spaces only open for educated male
citizens in possession of property (Fraser 1990). This can hardly be
seen as a public and open sphere anyone can enter, as it closes out
most of the population of the world.
2 The concept of a “public opinion”, introduced by Habermas, works
against the idea of radical democracy, as it organises a wide set
of different and even opposing opinions under one category, as if
such a consensus amongst a whole set of people, for example the
inhabitants of one country, could ever exist.

52
 3 Habermas’ theory is also built solely on the Western world and the
developments of a certain time, leaving out a big portion of the
word geographically as well as time-wise (Eley 1992, Howell 1993
Ryan 1997).
4 Another central critique of STPS has been its lack of consideration
for spatiality; in other words it talks about the public sphere with-
out looking at the spaces in which it occurs (Barrett 2012).
5 Habermas states a clear preference of literary discourses above
other forms of conversation or culture, which has been a subject of
critique (Barrett 2012).
6 The critics of Habermasian public sphere have noted that, parallel
to it, there have existed other public spheres, so called “coun-
ter-publics” (Eley 1992, Ryan 1997), including, for example, nation-
alist publics, female publics and working-class publics.

The Habermasian public sphere has later been called the representative,
classical and traditional public sphere (Deutsche 1996: 58).

53
5.3. LOST IN TRANSLATION, VOL. 2
Habermas himself, as well as all translators of his work, found it almost
impossible to assign the word “public” a meaning that would allow it
interchangeable explanations that were suitable for all possible situations.
Veikko Pietilä, translating Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere into Finnish, explains that Habermas uses two words to
describe two different kinds of publicness; “Öffentlichkeit” (Engl. “public”)
and “Publizität” (Engl. “publicity”) (Pietilä 2004: 10).
The first, “Öffentlichkeit” (in Finnish “julkisuus”) means the opposite
of “private” (in Finnish “yksityisyys”) (Pietilä, 2004: 10). It is related to
public space, public institutions and other examples explained previously
in “Lost in translation, vol. 1”.
The second, “Publizität” (translated by Pietilä into Finnish as
“julkisuustyö”, i.e. the work done for publicness), is understood as being
not-hidden. Habermas used the term “Publizität” mostly when referring
to something having been hidden outside of the public sphere and then
having risen or emerged into the public light. Pietilä explains that previ-
ously the word would have meant materials becoming or being demanded
to become public, but now it also relates to publicity as a furthering of
materials by sharing their positive features (Pietilä, 2004).
If we consider the work by Pietilä seriously and bring it into the con-
text of contemporary museums, we must understand “Publizität” as the
work of public relations: as advertising the museum and keeping up its
public appearance. Public relations chooses carefully the information it
shares about the object of its work—not all information is publicised.
However, linguistically “Publizität” is the word for “public work”, which
creates confusion about what public work in a museum really is. Is it all
public relations? Again we hit the wall of a complicated relationship be-
tween advertising and education.
Let us go back to Pietilä for an answer.
In translating STPS, Pietilä was also contemplating a Finnish term for
“Publikum”, which from German to English can translate either as “audi-
ence” or “public”. Pietilä decided to translate it with two Finnish words,
“julkiso” and “yleisö”, both of which would translate to English as “public”
(with the latter referring to “audience”). When talking about a group of
people discussing in public, Pietilä would call them “julkiso”. This is a term
almost lost from the daily use of Finnish language. The English translation
in STPS for this is “the public as carrier of public opinion” (Habermas,

54
1989). This is the active public of the Habermasian public sphere.
When people were at the receiving end of information, Pietilä would
call them “yleisö”. He notes, importantly, that to talk about a group of
people discussing publicly in contemporary Finland, one has to think of
another word than “yleisö”, because this is so riddled with the notion of
receiving (for example the information of mass media) or being talked to
(Pietilä, 2004). Again, this refers to the difference of representing power
before people and for them, as mentioned here before in relation both
to Prior (2002) and Habermas (1989). If thinking about the English terms
through this contemplation, I would understand people receiving infor-
mation as an audience, and people taking part in creating information as
a public.
Looking back on Vita Activa from Arendt as well as Publikum from
Habermas, I would suggest that a public is defined by the actions it takes.
Pietilä’s thoughts on the linguistics of the term “public” backs up this
thought: an audience (Fin: yleisö) receives passively, whereas a public (Fin:
julkiso) is an active element in the process of sharing information.
This would mean that the term that started this whole contemplation,
“public work” (Fin: yleisötyö) would have two, distinguishably different
functions in a museum: one of publicity, or of working for an audience,
and the other of working with the public. I would choose the latter as
indicative of the field of museum education, especially if we understand
education as a process of learning together. This analysis of the terms in
Finnish shows, in my opinion, that it would be more accurate and descrip-
tive to use the lost Finnish term “julkiso”, instead of “yleisö”, in the context
of museum education. This way it could be thought of as public work that
refers to the meanings that Arendt and Habermas allocated the term “pub-
lic” when beginning its definition.
I have started a process of taking apart the term “public space” by
analysing the definitions of “public”. I will now move on to dissecting the
term “space” and then try to rearrange these parts into a concept of public
space that could be applicable to a contemporary museum.

55
 .6
SNOITCA CILBUP
CILBUP A NI
ECAPS

56
 6.
PUBLIC ACTIONS
IN A PUBLIC
SPACE

57
6.1. “(SOCIAL) SPACE IS A (SOCIAL) PRODUCT”
The chapter borrows its name from a passage in Henri Lefebvre’s book
“The Production of Space” ( Lefebvre 1991: 26). In this book Lefebvre looks
at the different ways space has been defined by humans: through, for
example, mathematics, physics, imaginations, energy and social relations.
“The Production of Space” sets out to expose how space is never a neutral
entity, born in a vacuum nor existing solely as a physical dimension, but
rather that it is always produced by its inhabitants and their actions (1991:
1-68). Lefebvre explains that we understand different spaces through the
actions that humans perform in them (for example a room, a market place,
a museum), and that these actions are always social (19919: 16). In other
words, though the physical dimensions of spaces can exist without occu-
pying humans (for example natural spaces), for us, space is always defined
through human relations in and around it.
Lefebvre’s book considers the different implications our relationship
to space has in the society and in the process of producing and inhabiting
spaces itself. He says:

It is beyond dispute that relations of inclusion and exclusion, and of

implication and explication, obtain in practical space as in spatial
practice. ‘Human beings’ do not stand before, or amidst, social space;
they do not relate to the space of society as they might to a picture, a
show, or a mirror. They know that they have a space and that they
are in this space. They do not merely enjoy a vision, a contemplation,
a spectacle – for they act and situate themselves in space as active
participants (1991: 294).

Michel de Certeau says that space is “a practiced place” (de Certeau 1984:
117). CuMMA Professor Nora Sternfeld explains this quote further: “[I]
t is a social space, which is not already there, but one which needs to be
be constantly (re)produced. This means space is constructed through a
performative act, and it is something that lies between us (Sternfeld 2013:
9). As much as no human is an island, no space comes together without
social relations, nor without active participation. This relates to Arendt’s
theory about action as an unquestionably social entity; as we exist always
in relation to others, space as an element can be understood as something
that happens between us. We may not consciously build the social con-
structions that form spaces, but we reinforce and reproduce them through

58
Tiina Raitanen: Image of a gallery floor at Galerie Richard, Paris,
before Raitanen removed pieces of it. 2013

59
our everyday actions.
If we consider an exhibition space, like a museum, as an example of a
space in relation to Lefebvre’s and de Certeau’s thoughts, we can under-
stand that though its most important function is to show something, it
cannot do this in a vacuum of neutrality. The space around the art or other
objects on show has a distinct role to play in what happens inside of it; it
can be grasped in the manner in which the objects are shown and looked
at, and what else happens in the process. This “else”—in other words, the
social relations that form a space—plays a central part in the understand-
ing of a public, a public realm and of the role of education and mediation
in museums.
To return to the title of this chapter, Lefebvre himself acknowledges
that his is a rather obvious statement, but one that requires careful exam-
ination. He states: “space [...] also serves as a tool of thought and of action;
[...] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control,
and hence of domination, of power” (1991: 26). When a space is created for
a specific purpose—an activity—its future use is considered from different
angles. How will people use the space? How will they not? What will their
experience of it be like? What is needed, what should be avoided? This
construction in itself is a process of asserting control; in order to create a
functioning space, one must consider the actions that are hoped for (and
not) to be brought into it. Once a physical space is ready, the activities
inside it create, affirm and challenge its planned uses, doing the same to
the power relations and means of control asserted within it.
Gallery educator Carmen Mörsch believes that noticing, understand-
ing and making visible the “hidden curricula” of an exhibition space—
the expectations for appropriate uses of the space, the regulations and
disciplinary measures and what these teach the visiting public—is central
to gallery education (Mörsch 2013: 9). She asks: “How does the mediation
reinforce or counteract them [the hidden curricula]?” (2013: 9).
If spaces are produced by our active, social engagement, they can also
be changed through the same formula. If we understand the role we have
in creating a space, we may be able to see what could be done differently,
and what steps could be taken towards a more public space. Following
Mörsch’s question, the hidden curricula of a space could be made public
and questioned, allowing perhaps an opening into the social relations that
produce a museum as a space.

60
 Tiina Raitanen: CONFUSION 1.
Shape from a broken gallery floor (see previous image).
Acrylic glass, acrylic paint, plywood, 2013

61
6.2. SPACE AS A REPRESENTATION
In the light of the previous chapter, spaces can be thought of as rep-
resentations of the social relations that make them. The role of representa-
tion is not, however, in any way a passive one. Spaces can be read, under-
stood and defined as representations of social formations, but at the same
time they can be created and used as tools for representing power (Ben-
nett: 1995). Such acts are almost always hidden or forgotten by us through
a history that has repeated them so long they have become invisible.
For example, churches were built, in their beginning, to represent the
power of God and through this, the power of the church itself. The spaces
of churches were designed to alert people to this power, and to demand
its respect. Similarly, as mentioned in the very beginning of this research,
along with presenting the public with certain objects and knowledge, the
task of early museums was to represent the state and its colonial power to
the public visitors (Barrett, 2012: 45-57). Indeed, museum buildings have
been compared to churches, temples and palaces throughout time, and
many were built to resemble these forms from the 18th to the mid 20th
centuries (Duncan 1995). When entering a contemporary museum, we are
prone to forget these early intentions, let alone know of their existence.
Yet this history still determines how museums as spaces are built and
used.
In 1976, Brian O’Doherty wrote three articles about the turn towards
context in 20th century art, foremost in his analyses of the white cube
exhibition space. In one of them he claims that “[w]e have now reached
a point where we see not the art but the space first” (O’Doherty, 1976: 14).
Describing the modern gallery space he continues: “Some of the sanc-
tity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the
experimental laboratory joins with the chic design to produce a unique
chamber of aesthetics” (1976: 14). O’Doherty sees the gallery space as one
that is built with no intention of housing people or bodies. Its purpose
is to elevate art from the everyday, and this includes the presence of
the public. Rosalind Krauss has analysed museum spaces with a similar
rhetoric: in 1990 she claimed that in all their grandeur, the museum spaces
themselves would become the cause of their visiting public’s feelings
of euphoria, instead of the art displayed within (Krauss 1990: 14). Claire
Bishop believes Krauss’ prediction has come true today, with “the extreme
iconicity of new museum buildings”, mentioning examples of Pompidou
Metz, MAXXI and the future buildings of Guggenheim (Bishop 2013: 11-12)

62
– one of which is planned to open in Helsinki.
Like many other museums, EMMA is elevated from the street level
with a relatively big set of stairs. The act of climbing them and the fact
that the air in the gallery spaces is different to the one in the foyer14 result
in a ritual of sorts that can alter one’s act of being in the space. The general
look of the museum is contemporary, as the space is an old printing fac-
tory and made mostly out of concrete. As such, it does not in my opinion
resemble a church or a palace. However, the space is large, quite high and
without permanent dividing walls, which can create an aura of grandeur.
Though there exists a wide variety of museum practices in the con-
temporary world, and with them different kinds of representations, most
art museums represent their objects, be they historical or contemporary,
as masterpieces that are as holy and as they are elevated. This is mostly
done by the construction of the space the objects inhabit and by how the
public is guided to act in them. Today the powers represented by museums
are usually ones of knowledge and taste, both of which arguably already
existed in the beginning of museums. Their representation follows the
same formula that was used for representing the power of the state; the
uses of space, regulations of actions and the institutional language all
work together to create a feeling of greatness and power, and a general
understanding that this is a site of unquestionable knowledge.

6.3. THE (SOCIAL) ACTIONS THAT FORM A MUSEUM

Much of this representation happens through the language used by the
museum. The exhibition texts are of great importance in ascertaining how
the museum speaks to, and is perceived by its public. For example, if an
artist is called a “master” of a time period or a medium, or an artwork is
referred to as a “masterpiece”, this creates an immediate understanding of
value. How a text talks about historical events or works of art determines
how it presents itself in relation to knowledge; statements can be posi-
tioned t as facts or left up to interpretation. The knowledgeable status of a
museum or an exhibition is formed by what it says about itself and what
it chooses to leave out. For example, the artworks shown and the infor-

14 The levels of temperature and humidity need to be regulated to ensure ideal

conditions for the restoration of artworks.

63
 Tiina Raitanen: CONFUSION 2.
Shape from a broken gallery floor (see previous image). Acrylic glass, plywood, 2013

64
mation provided is always chosen by someone (often the curator), but it
is up to the signage in the museum to make this process of selection—or
inclusion and exclusion—clear. A great part of the role of the public being
someone who knows or as someone who learns comes into being through
language; text can talk to you or with you, and the difference between the
two determines the modes of representation and action.
Spaces guide and lead us into how to perform in them, and indeed,
how we perform them, described by Carol Duncan as the rituals of space
(Duncan 1995). Art museums have their own specific rituals of use that
create the essence and environment of the spaces themselves. Most of
the regulations in a museum exist in order for the artworks to be properly
stored. For example, touching is generally not allowed and this is ex-
pressed via signs, like in EMMA. The desired modes of acting are suggest-
ed not only by the general understanding of how one should act in a mu-
seum but how the guards and guides both present themselves and tell you
to behave. This social interaction is subtle, but holds a great importance in
the creation of the space and our interpretation of it. Most of what creates
the representational nature of EMMA is built with social performances
instead of architectural choices.
Similar to a church, museum spaces suggest a silencing of voices.
Though regulating volumes and sounds can be said to be done in order to
allow people to hear (for example the soundtrack of a video work), there
exists a general understanding that museums are places where you should
be quiet. In EMMA, the sounds of guided tours offer a break in this si-
lence, while the staff who stand in the gallery spaces to guard the artworks
are clearly socially present, creating, at least for me, the possibility of an
invitation to initiate dialogue and discussion. In contrast, when walking
around the museum with two three-year-old children who speak and
move differently to most adults, I was followed by two guards throughout
our visit. This made me feel like the children’s potential forms of action
caused the guides to be alert, again resulting in the feeling that there was
an invitation for a form of action and behaviour in the museum which our
party did not fulfil.
Similar situations have taken place in most Finnish museums I have
visited with children. This contrasts to, for example, Tate Modern, in
which I have seen school groups lying on the ground of the exhibition
spaces, drawing and chatting rather loudly. EMMA offers children possi-
bilities to experience the museum and its works in different ways outside

65
of the main exhibitions (for example in the “Ilme space” one is always
allowed to touch what is on display). There is also one touchable art work
on permanent display next to “Ilme”, and an “Art Pack” including toucha-
ble works that are used in workshops.
It is a hot potato debate that provokes a questioning of how art spaces
should welcome their visiting public, and the amount and kind of medi-
ation these spaces really need. Some believe that educational activities
break the sanctity of the art when entering the space it is given (Kuumola
2014). However, if we left art in its holy solitude of an elevated white cube,
could we then call its space public? I have argued before that where an in-
dependent and/or commercial gallery space can choose to isolate the art
it shows in a manner that pleases only its managers, then a museum that
claims to be a public institution is silencing a different kind of responsi-
bility towards its public (Kokkonen, Ohtonen 2014). A public institution
should, in my opinion, consider what it means to be public and how it is
fulfilling this claim. This consideration would include looking at how its
space functions and what kind of activity it invites and accommodates.

6.4. FROM PUBLIC REALM AND SPHERE TO A PUBLIC

SPACE
With the above theories from Lefebvre and others, we can now move
to thinking about how publicness can come together with the notion of
space. If we understand space as social construction, then the activi-
ties that are inside defining the public space would be somehow socially
public. What would this simple suggestion mean in reality? What would
public, social relations really be like? In order to move forward and im-
agine this, let us return to Arendt and Habermas for their visions of public
spaces.
Arendt and Habermas both see the public realm to be the result of
people coming together and expressing, as well as discussing, their own
opinions. Arendt’s notion of the act of coming together is wider than
Habermas’s, investing also in the common acts that follow the sharing
of opinions (Arendt 1958: 200). Both authors insist on the public realm to
allow contestation and disagreement, and indeed believe these to be the
foundation of forming a public.
Neither Arendt nor Habermas go, in their theories, deep into detail

66
about what a public space is, but they discuss spaces in which the public
realm appears. Both believe that for politics and democracy to happen, the
public realm is needed, and that this can only exist in spaces that allow its
demands to come true. Don Mitchell writes about the distinction between
a public sphere15 and a public space as follows: “The materiality of this
sphere is, so to speak, immaterial to its functioning. Public space, mean-
while, is material. It constitutes an actual site, a place, a ground on which
political activity flows” (Mitchell 1995: 117). In other words, a public space
is the site of the public realm.
It is pretty much impossible to make spatial distinctions between a
private and a public space today. “A private space” does not only mean
the privacy of a household anymore, but also spaces that are corpo-
rately owned. For example, shopping malls could appear to be public,
but are often not owned by the state but by private businesses. A lot of
contemporary spaces operate in between the private and public through
investments in capital from the state as well as from private businesses.
The streets of a city could be, for example, considered public spaces that
the city owns and shares with all their users, but shops that stand along
these streets hold economic power in the decision-making processes that
concern the use of the streets. Public spaces should be considered free for
all to express their opinions, but the laws of all countries in the world hold
specific as well as vague regulations of what this really means[13].
Internet and social media have brought forward more varied and
complex ways of voicing one’s opinion publicly, blurring the boundaries
between corporations and individuals as well as the spatial boundaries of
private and public. Notions of space are lost online, and at the same time
“online” has become a space itself, still waiting for a clearer definition.
Habermas describes the world of letters of the bourgeois public sphere
as one in which everyone had a voice, and the voices were distinguished
(1989). Online authorship is a vague and often secondary definition: name-
less voices fabricate “public opinions” though their origin, and through
this, their legitimacy is completely compromised. At the same time media
as a whole has been compromised by capital forces, and it is no longer

15 Mitchell is referring here to Habermas’ writings, and therefore uses the term he
has used; “the public sphere”. As I am referring more to Arendt than Habermas, I
am generally using the term “public realm”, although understand these two mean
the same thing.

67
 Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE.
Concrete container, photographs from different museums and art galleries, 2014

68
easy to know whose voice one is listening to when engaging with it.
As the world of commerce flows with increasing ease and persistence in
and out of private and public realms, blurring their boundaries for good,
Arendt’s theory about the modern world losing its public realms as sites
for political action seems frighteningly accurate. For this reason it is of
utmost importance to discuss the contemporary state of these spaces.
Although Habermas’s public sphere was described by him as an open
platform, it aimed for the maximisation of economic profits. The bourgeois
wanted a voice in the political decision-making process to ensure they
would be listened to when decisions about commodity exchange were
made (Habermas 1989). Habermas’s theory could be then understood as
a theory of a restricted public, in the sense that its inflection was aimed
at economical profits of a certain, bourgeois group of people. German
filmmaker Alexander Kluge has renamed the Habermasian concept of a
public sphere as a “pseudo-public sphere” (1981-82: 122), as he believes that
Habermas’s idea of a sphere in which the public could take part in the po-
litical decision-making process is actually one that represses debate. Kluge
determines a representative public sphere as representative only because
it involves exclusions, representing nothing but a part of reality “selective
and according to certain value systems” (1981-82: 122).
If we think of a public space as one that is open and accessible to all,
we have to consider what this really means. Firstly, economical gain
of any sort should not intervene in this space, as this would put the
needs and goals of some—the ones gaining—in front of others. Secondly,
contradictory voices should be allowed if we agree there is really no one
opinion of the public. Rosalyn Deutsche explains the relationship between
contemporary capitalism and the concept of the public realm as follows:
“Since capitalism requires the preservation of the illusion that an abso-
lute boundary divides the public and private realms, the contradictions
that gave birth to the public sphere are also perpetuated and ‘reconciled’
in its operations” (Deutsche 1996: 58). In other words, it is important for
capitalism that there is no sphere or realm of active political debate, as this
would enable contradictory voices that may endanger the capacity of the
ongoing growth of capital to be heard. An understanding of a unified pub-
lic and its unified opinion is easier to manage and guide into the desired-
direction. Habermas does not see a problem in the economical interest of
the public members influencing their opinions, but Arendt makes it
clear she believes this jeopardises the nature of publicness and allows

69
private matters into the realm of the political and cultural.
For Arendt, the public realm is vital to a human existence.She
understands it to be purely social, always in relation to other human
beings, and t the only place in which action—her definition for the po-
litical interaction that sustains the human condition of plurality—can
take place (Arendt 1958: 7). Through an understanding of our existence
as relational and plural— an ongoing social activity—we can research
the public nature of spaces by looking at how they are socially con-
structed.
Deutsche sees a direct lineage between public art and public space,
believing that art and space are concepts that share an origin in social
production (1996: 72). She refers to critical art practices and to critical
urban studies as “inquiries [that] investigated the ways in which social
relations produce, respectively, art and the city” (1996: 72), understand-
ing these practices as both de-fetishising and demystifying the art
object and the space of a city by unveiling them as social practices.
One project, then, for imagining a public space, would be that of
demystification. Lefebvre claims that the construction of spaces as
arenas of control and power is possible because their social relations
are hidden with a double illusion of transparency and realism (1991:
27-30). We take in spaces as we encounter them, believing that they
hide nothing and constitute only the physical form we can see. In
other words, we forget they are constructions of any sort. A truly public
space would somehow make visible the social relations that have cre-
ated sustain and surround it. Deutsche says of this demystification:

“Space and art can be rescued from further mystification only by

being grasped as socially produced categories in the first instance,
as arenas where social relations are reproduced, and as them-
selves as social relations” (1996: 72).

If we are to consider Arendt and Habermas in this context, we should

return to how they understand a public space as an arena for the pub-
lic realm. In the light of social relations this would mean and alongside
of the process of demystification, contradictory relations in speech
and action are allowed to exist. Chantal Mouffe introduces a concept
of an agonistic public space16 which does not reach for consensus but
rather on the contrary comes into being where “conflicting points of view

70
are confronted without any possibility of a final reconciliation” (Mouffe
2013: 92). Mouffe argues that this kind of understanding of a public space
is very different to Habermas’s understanding of the public realm “as the
place where deliberation aiming at a rational consensus takes place” (2013:
92). “Liberty engenders contradictions which are also spatial contradic-
tions” (1991: 319) writes Lefebvre. Together with Deutsche, he believes that
the space of capitalism depends on consensus, as it is bound up with ex-
change and growth (1991: 57). If a public space is formed on the allowance
of contradiction in social relations, then despite the opinion of Habermas
it cannot exist together with the interests of capitalism.

The contemporary museum is thus faced with a dilemma: how to exist as

a public institution if severance from a commercial interest is required?

Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt see the contemporary public realm as
one that is mostly privately owned and determined by capitalist interests,
with a public defined as a mass of consumers and spectators (Deutsche
1996: 59, Kluge 1981-82: 212). Despite this rather depressing, although no
doubt accurate reading of the current state of publicness, they envision
a possibility to construct an “oppositional public sphere, an arena of
political consciousness and articulation of social experience that chal-
lenges these relations” (Deutsche 1996: 59). Rosalyn Deutsche sees art and
its presentations as a practice that can take part in this construction. She
explains that contemporary artists and critics have reached out to create a
cultural or aesthetic public realm; indeed this can operate as a non-phys-
ical space and a social entity (1996: 59). This public realm is based on the
idea that art cannot assume that it will always automatically have a public,
but rather it must itself take part in the task of forming one.
Deutsche believes this idea breaks down boundaries between public
and nonpublic art, giving all exhibition venues the potentiality of a public
realm while at the same time rendering untrue the idea that an artwork
placed outside of privately owned galleries would automatically address a
public (1996: 59). She concludes: “Rather than a real category, the defini-
tion of the public, like the definition of the city, is an ideological artefact,
a contested and fragmented terrain” (1996: 59). She continues by citing

16 I explain this term in more detail later in this chapter.

71
Craig Owens’ observation: “The public is a discursive formation suscep-
tible to appropriation by the most diverse—indeed, opposed—ideological
interests” (Owens 1987: 18). However for Deutsche, it is not enough to
announce a new kind of public realm through political activity and claim
this as the answer to today’s “public”. She thinks it is only a start, and one
which leads to a new question: “Which politics?” (1996: xxiii).
Deutsche believes that in order to understand the public as the creator
of the dialogues that define a public realm, it is crucial to identify the
interests behind those who speak, and the mechanisms that allow them to
have a voice (1996: 59). She feels this can only happen through answering
the following question from Owens: “Who is to define, manipulate and
profit from ‘the public’?” (Owens 1987: 23).
I would argue that a truly public space is perhaps impossible to create.
While the aim for building such as space is crucial for a democratic so-
ciety, it is inevitable that we cannot socially organise ourselves without
some form of exclusions (Barrett 2012: 83). The notion of a truly public
entity can be compared and identified with Chantal Mouffe’s theory about
agonistic17 politics. Mouffe’s research on political theory has shown that
political identities cannot be formed without the acceptance of antago-
nism18 (Mouffe 2013: 5). This means that a harmonious democracy of a
unified, public opinion is impossible to reach, and without accepting this,
democracy will fail. Mouffe explains that political identities, just like any
other, are formed via social relations through an affirmation of difference.
No “us” can exist without a “them”, and without such an identification
our political aspirations fall into indifference. Mouffe suggests that vibrant
democracy can be formed if we act in “agonistic struggle” with each other
(2013: 7). Agonism, which Mouffe describes as struggle between adversar-
ies, differs from antagonism, a struggle between enemies, in that adversar-
ies acknowledge that their opponent has a right to fight for the victory of
their position. If antagonism was understood as a battle or a war, agonism
could be seen as a peaceful argument between respecting, though oppos-
ing, parties.

17 Contradictory response, Oxford Dictionary of English, 2014.

18 Active hostility or opposition. Oxford Dictionary of English, 2014.

72
 Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE.
Image from Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais Paris, 2013

73
 .7
NOITILAOC EHT
NOITACUDE FO
DNA
SSENCILBUP

74
 7.
THE COALITION
OF EDUCATION
AND
PUBLICNESS

75
7.1. THE ROLE OF EDUCATION
In order to imagine a museum as a public space, we should first consider
it as a space per se. I would like to do this by thinking about the social
activities that form the contemporary museum. The most important
activity of a museum could be said to be the preservation and presenta-
tion of cultural heritage. If we agree with this articulation of the space of a
museum as a social construction, we can see that the core of the museum
practice is built on contact between its staff. The museum’s mission and
vision can be seen to be implemented through the correlation of staff and
board activities. However, in addition to these important relationships,
the museum is also constructed upon social relations towards and with its
public. Education, or what we could now also call the public work, holds a
significant role in the formulation of this relationship.
Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, a professor of Museum Studies in the Uni-
versity of Leicester, has researched museum education widely and intro-
duced to its field the concept of the post-museum that is centred around
learning and dialogue (Hooper-Greenhill 2000, 2007). She describes it as
follows:

One of the key dimensions of the emerging post-museum is a more

sophisticated understanding of the complex relationships between
culture, communication, learning and identity that will support a
new approach to museum audiences; a second basic element is the
promotion of a more egalitarian and just society; and linked to these
is an acceptance that culture works to represent, reproduce and con-
stitute self-identities and that this entails a sense of social and ethical
responsibility. (2007: 1)

To explain a bit further: in attempting to create truly accessible spaces,

the post-museum aims for practices that understand and respect cultural
diversity and their own role in shaping it. Instead of just accumulating
new objects for its collections, it searches for new ways to engage with the
objects it already has, and possibly goes so far as to return objects gathered
to its collections through colonial actions to the countries of their origin
(Barrett 2012: 109).
Even if a museum is not intentionally shaped towards a “post-muse-
um”, advanced technology, entertainment based consumption and ques-
tions of the social relevance of art and collections have shifted the focus

76
of most museums towards their publics. Many, like EMMA, have taken
education as their primary task (Hooper-Greenhill 2007: 2, EMMA inter-
views). If we consider the museum’s most basic activities to be display and
interpretation, we can see the umbrella of a task under which they stand
is the formulation and sharing of knowledge—an attribution of meaning
which can also be understood as an educational activity. However muse-
ums see their own functions, their foundational tasks remain in the fields
of producing knowledge and learning.
If we understand, then, the most central activity of the museum to be
one of education, we can argue that the social constructions that form the
space of a museum are also built around it. For a long time, the perception
of a museum as an educating institution has helped to reinforce rather
old-fashioned ideas about education as a process of transferring knowl-
edge from the teacher-expert (here the museum) to the blank canvas of a
novice-student (here the visiting public). This has resulted in a particular
construction of the museum space in which it is positioned, like a church
or a school, as a house of higher knowledge. This hierarchical understand-
ing of the museum in relation to its visiting public has influenced the op-
erations of the museum from its very beginning, and is still present in how
contemporary museums are built and used. For example, it is a commonly
understood that the museum presents information as facts, not fiction nor
someone’s opinions. Museum exhibitions often enforce a narrative that is
designed by a curator (or a team of curators) whose creative ideas, un-
derstandings and positioning of history influence what is displayed and
how, however this information is both delivered and received with factual
authority (See: Hooper-Greenhill 2007).
However, the field of education has for a long time moved towards
a more learner-centred understanding of itself, calling into question the
power relations that form and guide its old model. This has also influ-
enced how museums think about and produce education, insofar as most
museums in Britain shifting from the term “museum education” to one of
“museum learning” (Hooper-Greenhill 2007: 4). Education and knowledge
in museums is produced more vertically and democratically with their
publics instead of as a hierarchical practice.

77
Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE.
Image from Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 2013

78
7.2. CRITICAL GALLERY EDUCATION: LEVELLING THE
HIERARCHIES
To think further about what a democratic relationship between a museum
and its public could mean, I wish to look at Carmen Mörsch’s theory of the
four different discourses of gallery education, and her definition of critical
gallery education. Mörsch believes that the current institutional perspec-
tive in art education can be divided into four distinct discourses: affirma-
tive, reproductive, deconstructive and transformative. The first and most
common of these, the affirmative discourse, affirms the generally under-
stood missions of the museum—collection, research, care, exhibition, and
promotion of cultural heritage—through practices such as lectures and the
production of exhibition catalogues, mostly directed at an expert public
specialised in art (Mörsch 2009: 9). The second, also dominant form of
discourse, the reproductive, “assumes the function of educating the public
of tomorrow and, in the case of individuals who do not come of their own
accord, of finding ways to introduce them to art” (2009: 9). This form of
discourse reproduces the museum as the expert in art, positioning it as
an agent that provides access to important cultural heritage (2009: 9-10).
Workshops for schools, family programs, services for people with special
needs and events of larger audiences are examples of reproductive dis-
course in gallery education.
The latter two, deconstructive and transformative discourses are rarely
encountered in Western museums. Deconstructive discourse is tied to
critical museology and its purpose is “to critically examine, together with
the public, the museum and the art, as well as educational and canonis-
ing processes that take place within this context” (2009: 10). It is, in other
words, self-reflective and self-critical of the museum institution and the
art it exhibits; it deconstructs the museum and takes a close look at it
while not avoiding criticality. The fourth and most uncommon form of
discourse, transformative, “takes up the task of expanding the exhibiting
institution to politically constitute it as an agent of societal change” (2009:
10).
The practices of transformative discourse aim to take down the hierar-
chical differentiation between curatorial and educational activities of the
museum, as well as the hierarchies between the museum and its public.
The educators and the public work together to “uncover institutional
mechanisms” and “improve and expand them” (2009: 11), in other words,
to transform the museum.

79
 Mörsch points out that the different discourses cannot be arranged
in order of value or relevance, nor found in practice without intermin-
gling with each other; most education that takes place in art institutions
embodies several, simultaneous discourses (2009: 11). They also all relate to
education in different ways: affirmative and reproductive discourses pre-
determine and do not change the position of teachers and pupils as well
as the educational topics (2009: 12). Deconstructive and transformative
discourses take education itself as as their subject: “The power relations
inscribed in its contents, addressees, and methods are critically examined,
and this critique is integrated back into educational work with the public”
(2009: 12). Mörsch gives examples of questions from such discourses from
the educational program of Documenta 12:

Concrete questions posed were, for example: Who defines the im-
portance of that which is to be conveyed in gallery education? Who
categorises so-called ‘target-audiences’ and to what purpose? How
far can gallery education go in its subject matter and methods before
the institution or the public deem it inappropriate or threatening?
How do certain approaches to teaching / learning implicitly generate
teaching and learning subjects? (2009: 12)

Mörsch introduces critical gallery education19 as a practice that combines

deconstructive and transformative discourses. This examination makes
visible the ways in which exhibitions and institutions represent knowl-
edge while remaining transparent about its own position (2009: 19). She
says that though critical gallery education seeks to broaden its public, it
does not restrict itself nor its image to play and recreation (2009: 19).

It makes a point of incorporating the specific knowledge of those

partaking in the practice of gallery education, visitors and educators
alike. [...] That the knowledge of both visitors and educators is consid-
ered on equal terms sets this practice apart from mere service work.
[...] It analyses the functions of (authorised and unauthorised) speech

19 Critical gallery education is a practice born within the last 30 years out of
critical pedagogy, psychoanalysis, theory of performativity, deconstruction,
cultural studies, post-colonial, feminist, and queer theory and practice, among
others. Mörsch,2009.

80
Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE. Image from Louvre, Paris, 2013

81
 and the use of different linguistic registers in the exhibition space.
Together with those who participate in gallery education, it attempts
to generate counter-narratives and thus to disrupt the dominant
narratives of the exhibiting institution. (2009: 20-21)

The criteria of being public outlined with this research correlates with
what Mörsch describes as critical gallery education. In thinking about an
art institution that functions as a public space, a space that is of the pub-
lic, I would suggest critical gallery education is a helpful tool. By locating
the public in the centre of their activities, museums can move towards the
notion of a public space. Abandoning the role of an expert in-the-know,
museums are indeed transforming from institutions of education to ones
of learning, levelling the social hierarchies that are produced by the con-
cept of knowledge transfer20. Understanding and recognising the variety,
legitimacy and conflicting nature of knowledges within the public enables
museums to become spaces of the public rather than spaces producing for
the public.

20 Transferring knowledge means information moving from an educator to an

educated subject as it is given, without questioning. This is a concept referred to by
Carmen Mörsch and Nora Sternfeld among others.

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7.3. EDUCATION OF EMMA
As I have analysed the discourse of EMMA’s written materials, I would
now like to look at the practice of its educational department in the light
of Mörsch’s theory of the four different types of discourse in gallery edu-
cation. The activities undertaken by the department are:

1 Information: texts available in the exhibitions and online, guided

tours, information from the guards of the exhibition, information
to those with special needs, audio guides, different kinds of tour
guides for individual members of the public, exhibition catalogues
2 Educational material: learning material for school groups and
teachers, educational information for people visiting on their own,
lectures, talks, online service for schools, educational projects out-
side of the museum
3 Open and private events and workshops

Most of the education of EMMA falls into the first two categories of
Mörsch’s theory, which, as mentioned, are the most used forms of dis-
course in the museum field: affirmative and reproductive discourse. This
means that EMMA provides education for both an “expert” audience
and the general public. It offers information that deepens and broadens
access to the exhibitions, affirming as well as reproducing the knowledge
and mission of both the exhibitions and the museum in general. It trusts
learning that happens through listening, reading and doing: much of the
educational material takes the form of text and speech, and the majority
of workshops as well as the events provide opportunities for creating art
with different materials. Through trying out artistic activities themselves,
the public is taught about art, art history and the themes, subjects and
materials of the exhibitions.
After following EMMA’s guided tours, participating in its workshops
and conducting discussions with its staff, I have come to the conclusion
that the educational team of the museum is highly professional. They are
well-informed about the exhibitions, art history and the exhibited artists,
and are pedagogically capable teachers. They combine their own experi-
ences as well as learner-specific examples within the formal information
of the museum, and display skills of tempering their speech and action
according to the group they are working with. Their manner and discourse
are pleasant, approachable and professional, and they are accessible to the

83
public when present in the exhibition space.
The information and education provided by the activities of the
department are well planned in advance. They follow a certain protocol
which the members of the team are also instructed to follow. Elements
of the two latter discourses from Mörsch enter education provided by
EMMA rarely and in small portions: for example, during a guided tour a
guide may mention a conflict of interest between the wishes of an artist
and the requirements of museum practices, but this is done in passing
within other information that allows no room for questioning the insti-
tution further. Though the nature of the discourse during the tours and
workshops is conversational, they are still situations ordered by the staff,
and the room provided for questions is formal, short and usually in the
end of the encounter.
The textual discourse of EMMA is informative. It mostly avoids quali-
tative words that some museums use, like ones that pronounce the exhibi-
tions, artists or artworks as, for example, “brilliant”, “extraordinary” or “the
best”21. However, it speaks from a position of authority and knowledge;
again, the information given is not questioned nor placed under possible
questioning, but given to the public in a factual format.
Generally it is difficult to locate dialogue with the public in the dis-
course of EMMA’s education, nor in EMMA in general, even though it is
a valued part of the museum’s mission and vision. In a way the discourse,
the museum and its staff give out an “aura” of being there for a dialogue,
but in the end this does not really seem to happen. Could this be because
of a wish to appear professional and provide the (mostly paying) public
with an experience they can be happy with? Does the understanding of
public as customers create a mentality of service that unintentionally
disrupts the formulation of true dialogue?
One project, however, caught my attention because of the dialogical
nature of its educational purposes, implementation and outcomes. This
project, called Taide on siistii – art is cool, was produced in collabora-
tion with schools in Espoo, starting in the first year of the public work
of EMMA, in 2003. During the years 2003-2006 five different school
class groups from Espoo were given the opportunity to become familiar
with artworks from EMMA’s collection as part of their studies within the
curricula of four different subjects. EMMA’s educators took artworks from

21 These are words I have encountered in other museums around the world.

84
the collection to the schools, working closely with the school teachers and
with the groups of students. The groups worked in different ways with the
artworks in school, undertook trips outside of school and hosted visits
from different artists. The aim of the project was to provide the students
with a wide understanding of art and its meaning for humanity as well
as the society. The project was given a respectable amount of time and
collaborative consideration.
In 2006, the project concluded with the production of a web service
for schools that was based on the information gathered during the first
three years. The service is aimed at especially 5th and 6th graders, and its
objective is to allow the students to learn about the functions, aims and
collections of the museum as well as to combine different subjects with
art. The service as a whole is available to the teachers and study groups
of the schools in Espoo, and parts of it are published on EMMA’s website.
This enabled the process to continue past the time constraints of a single
project, and the information gathered to be shared extensively.

With the project EMMA wanted to inform schools and their students
about the variety of possibilities cultural institutions can offer in sup-
port of teaching. […] Learning with web material offers the schools a
way to make art a part of the school work with no limitations of time
and space.
EMMA archive, a press release on the web service called Taidemuseokoulu,
Engl: Art museum school

Art Is Cool ended in the spring of 2006, after which it was turned into
a closed web service called Opit, now available for school groups and
teachers of Espoo. The meaning of the project is to bring forward the
possibilities cultural institutions bring to education and to give schools
a chance to use art as a part of their work in a time wise free manner.
Yearly report, 2006

The project was built on reciprocal conversations between the artists, mu-
seum educators, students and school teachers. The reports about it show
that the students’ interests and opinions influenced the dialogue between
the museum and the school as well as the learning material produced by
the project. The learning material is available for the schools and their stu-
dents for free, and it offers multiple ways of thinking about art in the con-

85
text of school work. This means that the study groups as well as individual
students can use the information provided by the museum according to
their own needs and concerns: the material is not ready information about
art but rather provides tools for thinking about different subject with art.
Within this project there appears to be no market logic of providing
consumable information to paying customers. The whole concept and its
implementation seems to be built on education alone, and the museum,
to my knowledge, is providing the students and schools with tools for
working with art themselves instead of complete answers and ready in-
formation. I see this project as a good example of how EMMA would seem
to want to work with its public; it is based on dialogue and its public—the
learners—are central to how it is produced and formed from the begin-
ning.

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Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE.
Image from Städel Museum, Frankfurt, 2013

87
7.4. TRANSPARENT VOICES
When space is pictured as a closed entity, conflicts—and social groups
associated with conflict—appear as disturbances that enter space from the
outside and must be expelled to restore harmony. Against nostalgic imag-
es of space that externalise and delegitimise conflict, [I] stress the impor-
tance of remembering that we cannot recover what we never had. Social
space is produced and structured by conflicts. (Deutsche 1996: xxiv)
As the stakeholders in the museums are varied—from state to museum
staff, the public and collaborative corporations—so too are their interests
towards the museum’s activities and outcomes. There is no single line of
production in a museum, but several parallel and sometimes conflicting
ones. This is the reality of today, and though it is not easy to manage, it
can still be meaningful in several ways.
It is clear there is no simple strategy to integrating the presence of the
public within a contemporary museum. While museums may be, at least
for the time being, unavoidably bound to conflicts of private and public
interests, I still believe it is possible to move towards the existence of the
museum as a public space by making these conflicts visible.
Nick Prior believes that it is possible for museums to persist as mean-
ingful contributors to contemporary society if they engage with the idea
of “ double-coding” (Prior 2003: 52). He understands the most successful
museums to be the ones that manage to hybridise into what he calls the
“hypermodern” institutions, ones that combine “tradition with consumer
populism, drawing on, whilst transforming, cultural modernity” (2003: 52).
In Prior’s view the museums must accept and indeed exploit their dual-
istic nature as institutes between history and contemporaneity. He says:
“This suggests that museums are not just passive loci of external patterns
and processes but self-reflective agents of social and cultural change
themselves” (2003: 52).
Prior gives credit to contemporary museums for being able to cater
for such a variety of people from scholars and museum professionals
to school children and people with special needs. He reminds us of the
multitude of ways museums today offer to get inside and become knowl-
edgeable about their collections and exhibitions. This is definitely true:
contemporary museums understand that their public is a multifaceted
mixture of different people. Yet this understanding is not enough to tap
into the ideologies of being public. If museums only offer what they be-
lieve the different kinds of publics need, there is no dialogue, and there-

88
fore no actual public involvement in the creation of museum activities.
Prior says: “The museum does not just rest on the (curatorial) authority
of its collection […] but finds ways of responding to the different frames
of reference of the audience —encouraging unexpected readings of the
collection and inviting visitors to discover alternative routes” (2003: 65). In
this quote I would like to concentrate on the unexpected and the alterna-
tive.
It stands to reason that the perception of the museum as a purveyor of
knowledge that is both rarefied and expert could be dismantled through
the consideration of the very concrete acts of creating and using physical
spaces, displaying objects and representing knowledge; of addressing the
public with certain kinds of language; and by constantly making visible
as well as questioning the choices behind these actions. One example of
this resistance can be found in the Victoria and Albert Museum in Lon-
don’s exhibition Disobedient Objects (2014-2015), which displays objects
of rebellion from grassroots movements for social change from around
the world22. Each object is accompanied with two didactic panels: one
explains the purpose and origin of the object while the other displays
a quote from someone involved in making the object or organising the
protest in which it has been used. In this way the singular voice of the mu-
seum is silenced by multiple other voices present in the didactics, offering
insights from a variety of people and positions. However, the didactics
also acknowledge that the exhibition is curated by Museum employee
Catherine Flood and a team of staff. Due to the necessity of working with
objects from these and other collections, to completely escape the voice of
the museum could be considered impossible.
Claire Bishop has criticised the need introduced by Prior for a “hy-
permodern” museum, naming this “condition of taking our current
moment as the horizon and destination of our thinking” (Bishop 2013: 6)
as a presentism that dominates the use of the term “contemporary” in art
today. She feels that both the practices and the spaces of museums in the
21st century represent contemporaneity in image (“the new, the cool, the
photogenic, the well-designed, the economically successful”), rather than
in their “concern for collection, history, a position or a mission” (2013: 12).
In her book Radical Museology (2013) Bishop outlines a different model of

22 From the V&A website: http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/

isobedient-objects/

89
contemporary for the context of art museums. She understands the con-
temporary as “a dialectical method and a politicised project with a more
radical understanding of temporality” (2008: 6).
With this in mind, I would like to return to the concept of critical
gallery education introduced here before by Carmen Mörsch. In suggest-
ing that critical gallery education can make visible and address the “ways
in which the market influences structure, presentation, perception, and
reception of art” (2009: 20), she makes the matrimony of art—its institu-
tions and capital—visible to the public. This potentially empowers those
who do not function in the centre of the art world to produce their own
images, linking “institutions to their outsides, to their local and geopoliti-
cal contexts” (2009: 20).
Though they leverage it in different ways, dialogue remains central to
the theories of Prior, Bishop and Mörsch. It is also a fundamental impor-
tant in EMMA’s mandate. In the following chapter, I give examples of
museum practices that concentrate on different notions of dialogue and
extend what Bishop refers to as a model of dialogical contemporaneity.
First, I will return to the theories of “public” from Arendt and Habermas in
relation to openness and participation.

90
91
 .8
A SA MUESUM
ECAPS CILBUP

92
 8.
MUSEUM AS A
PUBLIC SPACE

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8.1. WHAT COULD WE REALLY LEARN FROM ARENDT
AND HABERMAS?
In order to move towards a final analysis on practice as both subject and
object, I now briefly return to Arendt and Habermas in order to consider
what their theories on the idea of public could mean for a contemporary
museum. Both theorists see “public” as a denotation of democracy, and
public realm as something everyone should be able to participate in.
Even though the “everyone” in these theories can be questioned given the
proponents were primarily educated, bourgeois, financially stable male
subjects, we can still talk about “public” as something shared and open
while imagining what this would mean today in the context of a museum.
Channelling Arendt and Habermas, we could ask: if we talk about a public
of a museum, does it really mean everyone? If the museum is open as a
public institution, does it allow everyone in, no matter their education,
financial status, sexuality, ethnicity, age, political views, religion…?
To both Arendt and Habermas, the publicness of a public realm does
not only mean open doors but rather openness to actual participation. A
public realm is only public when it is made collaboratively by its partic-
ipants. Both theorists emphasise freedom of speech and voicing one’s
opinions, but for me it is important here to take into account the one step
Arendt takes to progress the idea of participation: she feels action has to
be related and consolidated with what is spoken. What then would it mean
in a museum and with art if the public comes together in both speech and
action? Arendt says that action is plurality and freedom when we come
together to take initiative. I would see this as an ideal for a participatory
museum—to not only allow the public a voice, but to trust them to bring
forth the topics, subjects and motions.
Habermas’ idea of participation comes from the historical events
within which the bourgeois public opinion had an effect on the politics of
the state through a dialogue that was formed between these two entities.
If we consider EMMA’s strategy, mission and vision from the perspective
of these two theories, I would focus on the promise of participation and
dialogue with the public. Could this mean that the public would be wel-
comed to take part in the museum on the level of decisions and concepts?
If we are to understand the people who come and are hoped to come to
EMMA as a public, then we have to consider what this means on the level
of activity: are the people inside the museum its staff and their visitors,
or could they all be understood as one public working together? If there is

94
a dialogue, what does it result in, and what is meant with participation in
EMMA?
The idea of public participation in the museum can lead us to the
final point I wish to raise from the theories of Arendt and Habermas: the
allowance of conflict. Both theorists believe that the public is formed in
discussion. Again, I would like to take one more step here with Arendt,
who sees the public realm as a zone of contestation and conflicting opin-
ions. Indeed she believes that it is in the discussions and actions that arise
from not agreeing that enables the public realm to be formed. I would then
conclude that a public of a museum should have many voices, and that
these should be allowed a position even when they are different with each
other and with those of the museum. Thinking with Arendt, these voices
should also be allowed a form of action and provided with an initiative to
become something more than words.

8.2. DIALOGUE, PARTICIPATION, CONTACTS AND

CONFLICTS
In understanding a participatory museum as a space where conflicts can
take place and give room for a public to come together, I would like to
briefly examine the theory of a contact zone (2012: 110); a concept from
Mary Louise Pratt (1991) that James Clifford has related to museums (1997).
A contact zone is a social space in which previously separated, different
cultures meet because of a common cause, trying to find a way to coexist
by battling, usually, asymmetrical relations of power (Pratt 1991, Clifford
1997: 192). It is a concept built on learning from the other in communica-
tion, and an attempt to create a representation of those with less power in
collaboration with those in authority. Clifford introduced ideas of collab-
oration and sharing of authority in relation to museum collections, and
later others have developed his concept of the museum as a contact zone
in directions of spaces of encounters23.

23 See, for example: Mason, Rhiannon. “Cultural Theory and Museum Studies”. In
A Companion to Museum Studies. Sharon MacDonald (ed). Maiden, MA: Blackwell,
2010, 17-32, or: A conference about museums and the contact zone: “Re-visiting the
Contact Zone: Museum, Theory and Practice”, 17-21 July 2011, Linkoping, Sweden.

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 Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE.
Image from Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2013

96
Claire Bishop has criticised the social, ethical and participatory turns in
art since the 1990s24, noting how this change in focus from the art object
itself to its observers and their relationship to it recreates audiences as
co-producers or participants (Bishop 2012: 2).This therefore changes the
role of the public through their expected activity around and with art. This
change has been generally considered a turn from passive spectatorship
to an active one, but this is a binary Bishop judges as too simplistic and
unhelpful (2012: 8). She calls for a “more nuanced (and honest) critical
vocabulary with which to address the vicissitudes of collaborative author-
ship and spectatorship” (2012: 8), and sets out to explore this in her book
Artificial Hells. Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship (2012).
Though I have mentioned in this research the same binary of passive
versus active public as relevant, my point of view brushes shoulders with
the that of Bishop. While Bishop considers the passive and active roles
of the public through the action of making art, I have thought of them as
forms of participation in the process of being a spectator. In other words,
Bishop’s critique stands against an assumption that participation in art, no
matter in what form and with what consequence, is a good thing, and the
old fashioned looking and contemplating of art is its understudy. She feels
this reduces, falsely, one kind of spectatorship under another (2012: 37-38).
I agree with this analysis, however, my understanding of a passive/active
spectator or member of a public is based on a more subtle form of action. I
talk about a passivity where the spectator takes in information as a given,
compared to an activity of critical contemplation. In other words, I am fo-
cussing on the activity of a spectator as distinct from that of a participator
if we are to understand participation as Bishop does—as a co-creation of
art.
Bishop’s most central criticism around the contemporary discourse of
participation is that the turn to a social understanding of art has brought
in a call for ethics that often flattens the political aspects of works that

24 From the ‘90s until today a new form of artistic production has grown into a
norm from what was, in the ‘60s-’80s, considered an “outcast” of the art world.
What used to be understood as community art has developed into a set of genres
that link in and overlaps as socially engaged art, dialogic art, social practice etc.
This change has been called by the art world as a turn to ethics or participation and
the social, among others. See for example Grant E. Kester, 2004 and Claire Bishop,
2012.

97
aim to do just the opposite. She explains that emphasising compassion
and empathy towards the other—often the participating public—can
easily result in confining anything disruptive (2012: 25). In other words,
“an ethics of interpersonal interaction come to prevail over a politics of
social justice”, and “sensitivity to difference risks becoming a new kind of
repressive norm” (2012: 25). This criticism of privileging empathy in her
rather provocative statement is worth considering in light of a discussion
around what is public.
Bishop claims that in participatory art, we sometimes position the
public/participants as being incapable of critical thought; “as dumb and
fragile creatures, constantly at risk of being misunderstood or exploited”
(2012: 26). She believes that in concentrating on who speaks for whom and
how, we end up second-guessing how the other will respond and, through
this, place ourselves on a high horse of always being in the know. Bishop
argues that “unease, discomfort or frustration—along with fear, contra-
diction, exhilaration and absurdity—can be crucial to any work’s artistic
impact” (2012: 26). She does not highlight ethics per se, but rather claims
they can exist more efficiently without a place on the central stage.
If we understand being public in relation to the public realm of Arendt
and Habermas, it can be useful to look at their texts next to these claims
from Bishop. In the contemporary museum context, public participation
is often highly appreciated and even used as a tool for fishing for funding
and justifying exhibitions. However, in the light of Bishop’s comments,
participation as a means to an end can be both questioned and contest-
ed. With the attempt to create space and reach out to a certain group of
people comes the very real possibility of dictating what these people may
need. Simultaneously, valuing participation without critically considering
its content can result in pre-given actions that fulfil nothing other than a
box to be ticked by the institution providing these kind of “possibilities”.
Neither of these examples correlate with the ideology of a public realm.
They only reinforce hierarchies and walls between artists, institutions and
the public while destroying all possibilities of forming a public space25.
Bishop states participatory art, or any form of art, can be contradictory
and create unease, and indeed by doing so generate valuable ideas and

25 See also: Steedman, Marijke (ed.). Gallery as Community: Art, Education,

Politics. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2012.

98
affects for the participating public. Her ethical framework suggests we pay
attention to these ideas and affects, rather than aim for social consensus
(2012: 26). I would argue that in working towards a publicness in an art
institution, this is what participation can mean: an allowance of all voices
and opinions. This means we are not closing out but indeed working
through contradictions together with the public. Based on how they cur-
rently define their role, this kind of activity would fall mostly within the
actions of the department of education.
Nora Sternfeld reminds us, that this is not an easy task, nor one
without conflicts in itself. “[U]nderstanding art education as a space of
possibility also means dealing with all the problems that open processes
entail”, says Sternfeld (2012). “Because, after all”, she continues, “when
participation is at stake, and it is impossible to clearly determine the focus
in advance, then we have no answers, we run into problems and setbacks,
difficulties, confrontations, questions… However, precisely these challeng-
es are where the power of participation lies” (Sternfeld 2012).
For Bishop, the overlapping of art and education results in the death
of the spectator in a traditional sense and in the formulation of a public
as producers, placing more responsibility and pressure on the spectator to
take an active role in the process and delivery of art (2012: 241). In the con-
text of a museum, however, I would argue that the overlapping of these
previously rather separated fields—curation and education—can simulta-
neously remove the pressure of the department of education by expand-
ing its field from supplementary activities to respectable, decision-making
parts of the exhibition productions. Indeed Bishop herself notes that the
educational turn in curating26 has paralleled the growth of the depart-
ments of education in museums (2012: 24). I would see this as a possibility
during the process of creating public space within a museum; when the
educational department has an active and decisive role in the production
of an exhibition, its activities are built in the production instead of being
placed on top of it. They can influence and question the curatorial instead
of reinforcing its ready message, and through this allow the public a truly
open visibility into the exhibition as well as a possibility for a critical

26 Around the late 1990s there was a tendency towards curatorial concepts
co-opting educational formats, methods, models and processes, which has been
labelled the educational turn. See: Educational Turn in Curating. Paul O’Neill and
Mick Wilson (eds.). London: Open Editions, 2010.

99
response. Yet, it is important to bear in mind Bishop’s worry about the
distribution of power paralleling the distribution of labour: it should not be
the task of museum education nor of the process of public space to divert
work and responsibility from the institution onto its visiting public.
Educator and artist Felicity Allen worked as the Head of Education at
Tate Britain for seven years shortly after the museum’s re-branding from
Tate Gallery to Tate Britain. She sees museum education as a practice that
can challenge formal education, position itself as a field of experimenta-
tion, and direct critique and questions inwardly. Her vision derives from
radical art and curatorial practices of the 1970s as well as from feminist
discourse, both of which she sees as influential to gallery education in
Britain (Allen 2012: 57).
Allen states that in order for the museum to reflect and respond to the
contemporary notions of public and shared cultures, different types of
knowledge and experience should be channelled into the museum and
produced within it through the points of entry that both staff and visitors
would hold interesting. Importantly, this model of working brings togeth-
er the staff of the museum and its visiting public. Like the idea of criti-
cal gallery education from Mörsch, Allen’s vision of museum education
combines the knowledges of the museum with the ones of its public, and
understands them as a unit capable of working together as democratic
partners.
Here participation can be understood differently to the mode of action
Bishop criticises. In fact, “participation” may not be the right word for the
collaboration between the museum’s staff and public that Allen discusses.
However, it is important to look at these suggestions next to each other.
Bishop is wary of the division of labour if the public is invited to take
on an active and decisive role within the museum’s practice. She also
suggests that emphasis on social and educational aspirations may flatten
the possible politics of art. Allen’s understanding of museum education is
political in itself; it is a porous and liminal space, positioned on the edges
of the institution, where it does not stand in the limelight like the art of
the exhibitions, and for which reason it is capable of experimentation,
reflection and questioning (2013: 57).
Could Allen’s model of museum education deflate the fears voiced by
Bishop? Let us return to Mörsch’s analysis of educational discourses for a
possible answer.
The self-reflexivity Allen suggests for the education of museums falls

100
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Image from Galerie Richard, Paris, 2013

101
into the category of deconstructive discourse: the museum, its exhibitions
and the education itself are all placed under possible criticality. The col-
laborative work between the museum staff and the public could be seen as
a form of transformative discourse; its aim is to produce dialogue that can
affect the museum and its educational work, improving and expanding
them. Mörsch believes the transformative discourse can move the muse-
um towards an agency of societal change (Mörsch 2009: 10). This would
suggest that the possible political agendas of art would not be flattened
in the process. However, I am unable to answer Bishop’s question about
the division of labor in such form of education. I can only suggest that the
museum practicing such openness, public participation or collaboration
should consider the issues of labor responsibly.
Allen acknowledges the importance of expertise in the museum
context, accepting that this may be an impossible position to challenge.
However, by placing itself on the edges of the museum, she says, educa-
tion can—more easily than curation—act as a space of not-knowing.
I would like to consider what could follow if the attitude of standing
on the edge would be undertaken within the curatorial functions of a
museum. I believe that separating education from curation and inserting
it on the top of a complete and finished exhibition does not function as a
process of mediation, nor give space for an understanding of a truly public
practice27. It merely dictates the exhibition in question and, following
Mörsch’s model of educational discourse, affirms and reproduces the
ready and unquestionable knowledge of the exhibition.
As mentioned here before, the practices of transformative discourse
aim to take down the hierarchical differentiation between the curatori-
al and educational activities of the museum, as well as the hierarchies
between the museum and its public. In the following I will give examples
of museum practices that, in my opinion, do exactly this, and through
this expand their functions towards the notion of a public space I have
outlined.

27 See: Kaija Kaitavuori, Laura Kokkonen, Nora Sternfeld (eds.). It’s All Mediating.
Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

102
8.3. UNLEARNING28, PARA-SITES, DIALOGICAL
CONTEMPORANEITY: EXAMPLES OF MUSEUM
PRACTICES
An example of a practice that works on the edges of an art institution
and integrates curatorial initiatives with those of education is the Centre
for Possible Studies at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Since 2008 the
Centre has worked on the Edgware Road Project that takes its name from
a long road near the Serpentine that cuts through most of the city and
therefore houses different kinds of neighbourhoods, living conditions and
societal classes. The project is situated on the Edgware Road and its main
interest is to work with its inhabitants. It brings international artists and
scholars to collaborate with the neighbourhood residents and workers on
studies that are “born of a kind of thinking in and with the complex condi-
tions and transactions of the road”29. These collaborations investigate,
activate and imagine futures for the Edgware Road and its inhabitants,
taking the form of residencies, commissions, exhibitions and publica-
tions30.
The Centre, though forming and appearing through individual pro-
jects, is based on long-term relationships and dialogues. The Edgware
Road Project started with a four-year-long project called “Dis-assembly”
(2002-2006) run by Sally Tallant. The educational team of the Serpentine
worked with the staff and students of North Westminster Community
School, choosing four artists31 to engage with the Edgware Road com-
munity at large by means of introduction from the school community
(“On the Edgware Road” 2012: 9). Its aim is to function as a “meeting
place between local people, visitors to the Road and artists”, and to “work
across constituencies, to question relationships of power, to place the
right to research in the hands of those for whom the results might be most
important, and to begin each project with the question: what is possible?”
(Graham 2012: 21).

28 Unlearning is a term used in contemporary education meaning that in order to

build new knowledge, we sometimes need to understand our previous knowledge
of the subject is not accurate, and unlearn it.
29 www.centreforpossiblestudies.wordpress.com
30 www.centreforpossiblestudies.wordpress.com
31 Christian Boltanski, Runa Islam, Faisal Abdu’Allah and architect Yona
Friedman

103
 Returning to the concept of public participation, the Centre for Possi-
ble Studies addresses alternative forms of education that hold co-research
important, such as Participatory Action Research, Institutional psychol-
ogy and theatre for change32. Co-research aims to combine lived experi-
ence with equality, and to transform participation from “subject/object to
subject/subject” (2012: 21-22). It “marks a re-orientation of the social and
political role of the arts, but not its erasure” (2012: 22).
The current director of the Centre and the Projects Curator of the
Serpentine, Janna Graham, insists that art, aesthetics and culture hold an
important role in the co-creation of spaces for “reflection, analysis and
action” (2012: 22). She sees them as fields for co-research between insti-
tutions and their publics, and as tools for working communicatively in
relation to the real world and its struggles (2012: 22).
A key factor in the way the Serpentine works with the Centre for Pos-
sible Studies is that the educational work that happens inside the gallery
also stems from The Edgware Road Project, bringing subjects and topics
from the surrounding community into the gallery, and not the other way
around. This aligns the hierarchies of knowledge, education and action of
a communally-built program with that of an institution33. The relationship
that the Centre holds with the Serpentine could be described with a term
from Janna Graham; one of a “para-site”, or as Allen describes a process on
the edges of an institution. Graham explains:

While many activist tendencies in the United Kingdom are skeptical

of pedagogical agents within arts institutions: for their adoption of
a service mentality, their unquestioning fulfilment of reformist social
agendas, their complicity with the corporatisation of education, few
articulate what might be described as a ‘para-sitic’ agenda within
arts pedagogy. This para-sitic agenda does not claim a position of
freedom from these entanglements but rather the active occupation of
this terrain as sites of critique and struggle.”
(Graham: 2012, from Sternfeld: 201434).

32 See: Reason, Peter, Bradbury-Huang, Hilary (eds.). The SAGE Handbook of

Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice. London: Sage, 2008 and http://
www.tfacafrica.com/methodology/
33 This reading of the educational program was learned from Janna Graham and
Amal Khalaf during an interview in October 2014 in London.

104
I would now like to return to Bishop’s model of dialogical contemporanei-
ty35 and look at two museums which she has given as examples of practic-
es that perform it. This model is a “rethinking of the museum, the category
of art that it enshrines, and the modalities of spectatorship it produces”
(Bishop 2013: 9). In its centre is a suggestion for working with collections
and with publics in new and testing ways. The museums Bishop intro-
duced in Radical Museology (2013) have worked with their collections in
ways that reconsider “contemporary art in terms of a specific relationship
to history, driven by a sense of present-day social and political urgencies”
(2013: 27). They are driven by clear political commitments and refuse to
have market interests influence their displays. “These institutions”, says
Bishop, “elaborate a dialectical contemporaneity both as museological
practice and an art-historical method” (2013: 27).
First example from Bishop is the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven,
Netherlands, which has, under its current director Charles Esche, experi-
mented relentlessly with its collections and archive, working with rela-
tively long term projects and a sentiment of research. For example, their
18-month program Play van Abbe (2009-2011) asked questions such as
“who are these ‘players’ within a museum and which stories do they tell?
How does the current director present the collection? In what way does an
art museum position itself both in the present and in the past?”36, placing
institutional transparency and historical contingency in its centre. Esche’s
direction is based around ideals and concerns, one of which is the “social
value of retelling histories that lead to other imagined futures” (Bishop
2013: 34). An example of his research into the idea of retelling histories
is the fourth part of Play van Abbe, an exhibition called The Pilgrim, The
Tourist, The Flaneur (and the Worker) (2011), in which the public was in-
vited to play different roles—those of the exhibition title—that determined
how they experienced the exhibition and the collection it displayed. With

34 Sternfeld quotes Graham in “Sailing in Search of Radical Education, Don’t Take

the Next Turn”. CuMMA Papers #10, www.cummastudies.wordpress.com/cumma-
papers/ , 2014. Graham’s text is from: Janna Graham, “Para-sites/ Para-siten wie
wir” in schnittpunkt, ed. Beatrice Jaschke, Nora Sternfeld (educational turn.
Handlungsräume der Kunst- und Kulturvermittlung: Wien 2012), 131.
35 With this Bishop means practices in which “the contemporary” is understood
as a dialectical method and a politicised project with a more radical understanding
of temporality. (Bishop 2013: 6)
36 Van Abbemuseum website: www.vanabbemuseum.nl/en

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Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE. Image from Louvre, Paris, 2013

106
different tools and guidance, it was hoped the public would understand
that there is no one way to look at an artwork, and that their own judge-
ments, mindsets and histories affect how they see and relate to art. “The
roles [were] not meant to clarify whether something is good or bad art, but
open up new perspectives for the visitor on the artworks, the exhibition
and the museum as a public place for experience and exchange”37.
This way of looking at a collection of a museum occupies the dialecti-
cal contemporaneity Bishop talks about: the exhibition—though showcas-
ing artworks—focuses on the public using parallel, educational initiatives
that are not, at least in full, predetermined. The art, the exhibition and the
museum are all placed under a looking glass, and the public is encouraged
to take charge of formulating their own experiences and opinions. Even
though we may presume this is what happens in an exhibition anyway,
the hidden curricula, the modes of representation and the general idea
of museums as institutions of superior knowledge often pacify the public
and disable their critical questions.
Another example of dialectical contemporaneity is evident in the
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid’s different kind of
curation of the their permanent collection. “[I]n the past few years the mu-
seum has adopted a self-critical representation of the country’s colonialist
past, positioning Spain’s own history within a larger international context”
(Bishop 2013:38). Placing, for example, documentary film, newspaper clip-
pings and literature alongside visual artworks, the curatorial choices of the
museum shine a critical light on the collection and its subjects, expanding
and examining the way museums create and showcase history. Reina
Sofia, following the visions of its director Manuel Borja-Villel, conceives
itself as an “archive of the commons, a collection available to everyone
because culture is not a question of national property, but a universal
resource” (2013: 43). The museum is attempting to work with its artworks
as if they were documents, and is finding ways of allowing the public to
get closer to them; akin to going to the library, their public can look at and
handle the artworks by themselves.
The educational program of the museum is at the centre of the whole
institution, aiming for radical education that mobilises the public to relate

37 http://vanabbemuseum.nl/en/programme/detail/?tx_vabdisplay_
pi1%5Bptype%5D=18&tx_vabdisplay_pi1%5Bproject%5D=753

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to the artworks psychologically, physically, socially, and politically while
understanding the public and the institution as equal in intelligence38
(2013: 43). It attempts to direct the focus of its activities such as art classes
and workshops towards an understanding of the “museum as a discursive
apparatus” (2013: 44). Alongside these standard educational activities of an
art museum, Reina Sofia houses long-term programs that can include, for
example, free seminars for young artists, researchers and activists who are
battling unemployment (2013: 44).
Bishop’s suggestion of a museum practice as dialogical contempora-
neity recreates the public as knowledgeable subjects that understand the
content of an exhibition as one of many arguments and positions, and not
as an ultimate truth. It de-fetishises the art objects and demystifies the
museum, moving the institution towards a notion of a public space.
An example of a Finnish museum that falls into the category of dialog-
ical contemporaneity is Mestariduunari (Engl: Master Worker), a project
of the Finnish Labour Museum Werstas in Tampere. Mestariduunari was
directed at students of vocational schools, a group often left outside of
museum education as often the adult content of educational programs is
centred around academic or historical information, both of which are not
relevant to vocational teaching. The project started with fieldwork under-
taken by its creator, Museum Educator Karoliina Suoniemi, who visited
vocational schools in Tampere to learn about their modes of education
and discuss with teachers and students what would be relevant for them
in the Labour Museum, and in museum education more generally.
The project functioned in two parts: as guided tours of the museum
exhibitions that were specifically built for each learner group, and as
documentation and ephemera from the learners themselves. The guided
tours were formed so that students of specific vocational skills would get
to know the parts of the exhibitions that relate to the histories of their
professional fields. All the tours ended with workshops in which the
students learned about a craft or method of working that was relevant to
their future practices. The students documented their learning process,
one learner group per year. In collaboration with audio visual students
and the Museum Educator, the students of specific fields would document

38 Bishop refers to concepts of education from Jacques Rancière’s book The

Ignorant Schoolmaster.

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the everyday life of their studies by filming, photographing, drawing and
interviews. These documents were first exhibited in the museum galleries
and then deposited in the museum’s collections.
The documentary projects have given the Labour Museum relevant
information about the contemporary situations of vocational studies in
Finland, but most importantly, supported the professional identities of
the learners. Studies of the project have shown that by looking at, talking
about, documenting and showcasing their chosen profession as well as
their studies, the students have understood the relevance of these in the
broader contexts of labour and society39.
In general, Mestariduunari is an example of educational practice that
brings content to the museum and its collection from and by the public.
This process provides points of entry into the museum as well as learning
experiences that are relevant to these specific publics. The project—as well
as all of my examples here—lasted for a relatively long time period, oper-
ating in project format for three years (2011-2014), after which it was incor-
porated into the museum’s educational program as a permanent feature.
Similar processes are described by Hooper-Greenhill in relation to
her concept of the post museum. She suggests an exhibition format that
is not something set in time and the event of display, but part of a set
of events that can take place before, during and after the actual display
(Hooper-Greenhill 2000: 152). She gives a set of practical examples of such
events:

The establishments of community and organisational partnerships;

the production of objects during educational programs which then
enter the collections; periods of time when specific community groups
use the museum spaces in their own way; writers, scientists and artists
in residence; or satellite displays set up in pubs and shops. During
these events, discussions, workshops, performances, dances, songs,
and meals will be produced or enacted. (2000: 152)

39 This, as well as all information about the project, came to me through an

informal interview of Karoliina Suoniemi.

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Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE. Image from Palais de Tokyo, 2013

110
Jennifer Barrett relates the term “public” in museums to the ones of “pub-
lic realm” and “public space” through the example of Australian muse-
ums. She explains how the indigenous40 communities in Australia have
challenged the country’s museums “by insisting on new ways of under-
standing the relationship between museums and source communities”
(Barrett 2012: 127). One way this has been achieved is by understanding
the museum as a “‘keeping place’, which communities may choose to use
or modify for their own purpose” (2012: 127). Again, the public is given a
share in the authority over the museum and its collection as the museum
actively and re-actively listens to its public, instead of just speaking (pro-
ducing knowledge) itself.
Barrett places importance on the context of her example to question
the interchangeable use of the terms “public”, “visitor” and “audience”. She
suggests that it would not be posisble for indigenous communities to af-
fect and inform the museum had they been seen as visitors, audiences or
individual, paying customers (2012: 127). I would expand on this sentiment
and note that the words we choose have an effect over how we act and
what we expect from others— is “we” the public or the institution.
What all my examples here have in common is that they are long-
term projects that take on the format of (co-)research, meaning they are
produced, one way or another, in dialogical collaborations with the public.
They test and blur the boundaries between curatorial and educational
initiatives, folding them on and into each other in an ongoing manner. By
doing so they form, in my opinion, a ground from which a museum as a
public space can be understood.

40 Indigenous Australians are the original inhabitants of the Australian continent

and nearby islands.

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8.4. CONCLUSION IN THEORY
I am concluding this research with a claim that though the mission of
being or becoming public is a democratic one, such a thing as a truly
public space can only be achieved in its own endeavor. A space can only
exist as a contested and conflicted zone of differing social relations, but in
recognising the possibility to bring forward and question it over and over
again, we can see how space can be turned into public practice. This form
of democracy could be called, as per Chantal Mouffe, an agonistic one—a
democracy of equal arguments and the conflicts produced.
Along with the allowance of conflict and conflicting voices, the aspira-
tion for publicness requires a transparency about the positions from which
these voices are speaking. A public space is never resolved and ready, but
rather in constant motion from one site to the other, therefore its creation
and maintenance are ongoing tasks. It does not consist of one public but
one of many and their counter-publics, and it has no room for private
interests of creating capital. It does not represent anything concrete, but
makes visible as well as questions the power relations, ownerships, inter-
ests and claims that stand behind the construction of the space.
If we consider museums as public spaces or indeed as public institu-
tions, and if we understand their educational practices as public work, we
have to reflect upon how they could house and produce this kind of ago-
nistic democracy. We should also consider what being public would mean,
both in the generality of museums and in specific cases of single muse-
ums, through a questioning of the relationships, barriers and hierarchies
as well as the shared and contested terrains between institutions and their
publics.
Irit Rogoff, the visiting professor of CuMMA and the professor of
Curatorial/Knowledge in Goldsmiths College, London, has researched in
length the questions of learning and criticality within art and its institu-
tions. She insists that it is impossible for us to speak outside of what we
live and know—in other words, we can only truly examine critically some-
thing we take part in ourselves. She says about criticality: ”In ’criticality’
we have that double occupation in which we are both fully armed with
the knowledges of critique, able to analyse and unveil while at the same
time sharing and living out the very conditions which we are able to see
through” (Rogoff 2004). There is no point in positioning ourselves outside
of what we are criticising, because from there it is impossible to know
what really goes on on the inside, and what could be done differently.

112
Rogoff says: “As such we live out a duality that requires at the same time
both an analytical mode and a demand to produce new subjectivities that
acknowledge that we are what Hannah Arendt has termed ‘fellow suffer-
ers’ of the very conditions we are critically examining” (2004).
Rogoff’s suggestion of criticality could be understood as two-fold with-
in a museum: the institution can act in criticality towards itself but also its
surroundings if it understands itself as an active and entwined part of the
world, the local area, and its public. In looking at itself and inviting others
to contribute to this reflection, it does not only have to pick at faults. As
I have aimed to articulate with examples of museum practices, inviting
the opinions and stories of the public enables museums to move forward
towards an existence that is more enmeshed with its surroundings. This
can ensure all the aspects of the museum’s practice—not only the new
and critical—are relevant to its public.
To progress I would suggest an analysis of compassion—an under-
standing of the museum as a space shared between all who occupy it,
subject to a shared analysis of what it is and could be. This is what I have
described above as being a true, public participation in the museum. Ro-
goff has introduced a very useful tool for a shared analysis of the possible
in the context of an art institution and it is a question to ask ourselves
collectively: “What can we learn from the museum beyond what it sets out
to teach us?” (Rogoff 2008). She explains this does not mean focusing on
the expertise, possessions and displays of a museum, but rather looking at
the “possibilities for the museum to open a place for people to engage ide-
as differently—ideas from outside its own walls” (2008). Rogoff wishes to
think about education through a notion of access. She doesn’t suggest that
things should be made as easy as possible, but that we all have the ability
to formulate our own questions. This is a key concept to consider when a
museum produces information but so often is also the one producing the
questions, even when it wishes to receive answers from the public. For
example, customer questionnaires tend to create a narrow field of think-
ing and speaking, even when they truly want to hear what people think
and speak, because the questions come from the institutions and not the
public itself.
This understanding of access could be what designates a space as
public, as described by Arendt: we should not only think about how
everyone can enter, but about how everyone can speak and act from their
own initiatives. In mapping out a public realm within contemporary art

113
institutions, Simon Sheikh says: “It is a question of to and for whom one is
speaking, and on what premise” (Sheikh: 2005). He suggests an imagining
of a public realm that is a stream of continuous counter-publics and of “an
(o)positional and/or participatory model of spectatorship” (2005).
If the public themselves have no effect on the museum, it cannot be
their space, but one they visit. I believe the only way to be a public space is
to relinquish control, and to make visible the actions, contradictions and
conflicts this creates. If a museum is capable of really opening its doors,
it sets itself up for criticism and self-reflection. This is by no means an
easy task but one that could allow the public to take part in the museum
as a whole. It would mean that the conflicting interests of the museum’s
stakeholders would also be made transparent and placed under possible
scrutiny.
Sheikh believes that art institutions play a key role in formulating a
new, applicable understanding of the public realm as the spatial formation
of, or a platform for what Chantal Mouffe (2013) calls “the agonistic public
space”. Sheikh claims it is not the job of art institutions—if we consider
them to be democratic and public—to try to formulate consensus, but
rather to “defuse the potential of hostility” (2005). This is, indeed, what
Mouffe suggests with “agonism”. Instead of the public realm operating in
a space of unfulfilled potential, museums could be redefined as the sites
where the contemporary existence of publicness is re-created.

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8.5. CONCLUSION IN PRACTICE: PUBLIC WORK OF THE
PUBLIC REALM
With this research I hope to have explained how the term “public” is cru-
cial in thinking about and forming a functioning, dialectical relationship
between the museum and its surroundings. I have also tried to understand
the role of education, and of the public work (Fin. yleisötyö) in placing the
museum in relation to that which operates beyond its walls.
In tracking terminology used by museums, in particular by EMMA, I
have aimed to map out the potential for a process of shifting in museum
practice both in general and in the specific case study, and to imagine
where the adaptation of terms that point to the very roots of the word
“public” could take museums of tomorrow. I have given examples of mu-
seum practices that look for new ways to build and hold relationships to
their publics, already adapting some of the ideologies of the public space.
All of them, as mentioned, work with blurring the boundaries between the
curatorial and the educational. It is indeed how I believe museums can
move towards new kinds of futures and towards new kinds of publicness.
For this reason I have concentrated on education as a possible site for the
possible futures.

[A]t this moment in which we are so preoccupied with how to partici-

pate and how to take part in the limited space that remains open, ed-
ucation signals rich possibilities of coming together and participating
in an arena not yet signalled. [...] If education can release our energies
from what needs to be opposed to what can be imagined, or at least
perform some kind of negotiation of that, then perhaps we have an
education that is more. (Rogoff 2008)

In looking at EMMA’s public work department—The Education and

Accounts—I have tried to understand what public work in EMMA really
means, including what kind of relations it creates to the public and how
they correlate with both with my outlined theory of “the public” and what
the museum seems to aspire to.
It would appear to me, through my research, that EMMA wishes for
education—or public work—to be central to its practice. However, with-
in the very construction of the museum there lies a duality produced by
the rather conflicting relationship of education and public relations: the
private and the public are bound together in a way that is inseparable.

115
 Tiina Raitanen: ERROR TILASSA / ERROR IN SPACE.
Image from Musée National D’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 2013

116
Having detected such coexistence of education and consumerist public
relations, I have sought clarification about how this kind of practice un-
derstands and determines “the public”.
Though it is a common practice in contemporary museums worldwide,
I am concerned about the possibilities of education, service and advertis-
ing working together towards shared goals and under the same construc-
tions of labor, function and responsibilities. It is evident that the generally
understood aims of education, service and advertising are vastly differ-
ent. I would argue that ideally, education is a process by which a person
learns to understand available knowledge, use it in various ways and even
question it if needed, and this is not an attitude that advertising or service
usually fosters. In fact, they may even compromise, impinge upon or con-
tradict the nature of such learning.
Customer service could be said to exist to make things comfortable,
whereas education, or more precisely, learning, is not always comforta-
ble. Indeed, when one really learns something, it involves the sometimes
painful process of tearing down old knowledge and recognising the limits
of one’s understanding. Advertising takes the idea of service—of providing
people with what they need—to an eamplified level: it tells people what
they need and offers it to them. Its sole purpose is to create consumers for
the product it is selling. It has no intention to educate, to formulate new
knowledge or to question anything except old forms of consumption.
I have come to the conclusion that the chosen, second word in the title
of EMMA’s public work—Accounts (Fin: Asiakkuudet)—is descriptive of
how the public is seen as customers, and therefore incorporating all work
done with the public under one department can be justified. However, if
aspiring to such a public space which I have outlined with this research,
an understanding of the public as customers and consumers would be dis-
ruptive. The blurring of market logics with the initial tasks of museums—
to collect and conserve cultural history and to educate the public about
it—results in a blend of public and private interests that is paradoxical. I
believe that if the intention of public work remains in the field of educa-
tion, it should be kept as isolated from commercial interests as possible.
Felicity Allen says about this:

Whether or not a Education department attracts corporate fund-

ing, it is inevitably hooked into the economy of the whole institution;
whether its work is negotiated in terms of strategy or poetics, its

117
 potentially radical aspects can only survive if it identifies as distinct
from corporate social responsibility. (Allen 2012: 70)

I understand that it may be impossible for museums to completely escape

customer logics because it may be the only way for them to survive this
and future economic challenges. However, I have suggested with some
examples from both theory and practice, that there may exist a modus
operandi by which the museums can exist while taking into account the
necessity to in some ways bind together public and private interests.
This balancing act is similar to the notion inherent within the agonistic
democracy: a transparent self-reflection that goes on contesting itself and
its critics. With this I wish to provoke a consideration of the conditions
EMMA operates within, and about the different ways they could be used
and contested. We can look to Mouffe who states,

“[F]ar from being condemned to playing the role of conservative insti-

tutions dedicated to the maintenance and reproduction of the existing
hegemony, museums and art institutions can contribute to subverting
the ideological framework of consumer society. Indeed, they could
be transformed into agonistic public spaces where this hegemony is
openly contested.” (Mouffe 2013: 100-101).

Due to the collegial manner in which EMMA’s staff discuss their pub-
lic and their public work, and because of the changes in the museum’s
practices and language that would suggest a move towards a more open
understanding of being public, I want to imagine EMMA as a space of and
not only for the public. I propose this would mean a new kind of thinking
of the participation of the public—not as customers and visitors, but as
co-researchers. I understand it is an unstable route, and one for which
failure will likely at some point be encountered, but I believe it would be
worthwhile for a public museum, and for its department of public work,
to bravely persist. Failure should not be feared, as without it we would not
learn. If we think of a museum as a public space, the learning that hap-
pens within it should be collective—everyone, including the institution,
can learn with and from others, and by this logic, also fail. This would be
helpful to recognise when thinking about demystifying the museum and
levelling its hierarchies.
I have suggested that it is essential to not be afraid of failure, but mu-

118
seums should also not place weight on fear of public opinion nor underes-
timate their capacity to understand, adopt and produce knowledge.
In other words, I conclude that issues, topics and conflicts that arise from
the museum practice should be seized upon by the institution and im-
planted in conversations that bring the museum and its public to the same
table.
A museums’ educational staff, like those in EMMA, are often dedicat-
ed to the mission of democratising the museum through education, con-
versation and learning. This is a valuable asset for a museum if it wishes
to live in dialogue with the outside world. It can also be a foundation upon
which a whole museum practice is built, like in Reina Sofia. For this rea-
son I would suggest that the public work department of EMMA, as well as
all museums, should be most aware of the conflicts the museum produces
and repeats, enabling them to function as a space for both self-reflexivity
and criticality.
I have concluded that a public space can be produced only if the
social relations that created the space are made visible and contestable. In
museums in general I would see this as a process of making transparent
the constructions of (both public and private) interests behind the institu-
tional systems, positioning the museum, its collections and exhibitions, as
well as its knowledge of them under contestation. In EMMA specifically,
this would in my opinion also mean that the conflicting relationship of
private and public, of education and accounts, would be placed under
consideration and scrutiny.
With this research I would like to encourage EMMA to examine how it
understands and speaks to its public with criticality. What does the com-
bination of “Education and Accounts” do to the museum, its public and
most importantly, the relationship between the two? If the public is seen
as customers, does it affect the manner in which the museum educates?
If so, how does this happen and how can it be recognised and addressed
by the museum? Are the new spaces of EMMA descriptive of where the
museum wishes to go: will Agora become a public space, will Passage
function as a site for moving forward, and will this happen in parallel to
what goes on in the Arena?
By including images of Tiina Raitanen’s artworks, I hope to have
brought forward an idea about interesting and useful cracks in the realm
of the museum. I believe that through the cracks—the problems and
conflicts, the unfinished and unpolished, the openings of the possible—a

119
public space could be formed. An unstable and unfinished space may be
easier to enter, and to take part in but the cracks might well be where a
dialogue can take place, and for this reason I believe that the contact be-
tween the museum and its public should not always be polished, pleasant
and a service of entertainment.
With the example of Raitanen’s work I wish to also point out that art
and artists often have a capacity to discuss even the hardest of issues
in ways that are uniquely palatable to process. Within the context of an
art museum, this could become a possibility to formulate dialogues in
spaces that might otherwise feel impossible. For example, in Great Britain
collaborations with artists have been widely incorporated in educational
programs of galleries and museums41; artists run workshops as well as
artistically created guided tours, give courses and work with communities
outside the art spaces, broadening the work of the institutions both geo-
graphically and in content and mentality.
As mentioned prior, Arendt finds mass society difficult to bear because
she feels it has robbed from people the public realm that used to be able to
“gather them together, to relate and to separate them” (Arendt 1958: 52-53).
She refers to this in an imagined scene in which people gathered around
a table to see it suddenly vanish; at the same time those sitting opposite
each other become no longer separated, but also entirely unrelated.
I have come to believe that art has the power to make “the table disap-
pear”; it can bring us near to each other in situations that simultaneously
create a distance between us, and by doing so alert us to the existence of
distances between us in life in general. Through this, I have started to im-
agine art museums as the spaces in which we gather around such tables,
and education—or I would rather say learning—as the process that can
make us realise what has happened, and what could happen next, without
killing the magic of the disappearance. We need the table, its vanishing
and the mediation, but most importantly, we need the spaces, for it is in
them that I see a possibility for bringing back the public realm Arendt
longed for.

41 For examples see: Tate Modern, Camden Arts Centre and the Education of
Documenta 12.

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 .9
YHPARGOILBIB

122
 9.
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My warmest thank you to:
Aalto University, EMMA staff,
Felicity Allen, Janna Graham,
Riikka Haapalainen, Henna Harri,
Reetta Kalajo, Amal Khalaf,
Laura Kokkonen, Antti and
Pipsa Korhonen, Katie Lenanton,
mummokerho, Tiina Raitanen,
Irit Rogoff, Nana Salin, Nora
Sternfeld, Karoliina Suoniemi,
Selina Väliheikki, all the inspiring
guests of our study program and
my beloved peers in CuMMA.

128
10.
ANNEX

129
10.1. MISSION, VISION
AND VALUES OF
EMMA, STRATEGY
OF EDUCATION AND
ACCOUNTS
MISSION
EMMA enriches life through art
VALUES
Belief in the power of art
(EMMA believes that art can enrich life and
increase social well-being)
Open-mindedness
(EMMA is a pioneer in open-minded
decision making in all its activities)
Dialogue
(EMMA maintains an active dialogue with
its staff, customers and interest groups, and
participates in public debate)
VISION
EMMA is the best place in Finland to
experience art
• EMMA is an international and multi-
purpose art museum. It arranges major
exhibitions, happenings and media art
presentations. EMMA’s core interest is
modern and contemporary art
• The bedrock of EMMA’s work is its
professionally-managed collections, the
sounding-board for all its other activities.
In addition to being the embodiment
of cultural heritage, the collections are
displayed and studied.
• EMMA believes in the regenerating force
130
of art. EMMA transcends the limits of the
arts by creating new ways of experiencing
them physically and virtually.
• EMMA activates its public, stimulates
discussion and influences the surrounding
community.
• EMMA seeks new audiences and creates
a good atmosphere for receiving art. EMMA
is easily approachable and maintains a
genuine dialogue with its customers.
• EMMA respects professional skills,
education and cooperation. EMMA cares
for staff well-being and improves work
processes in accordance with the principle
of mutual respect.
• EMMA is a reliable and desirable
collaborator with all its partners.
• EMMA is integral to the enjoyment of
Espoo’s urban life and culture. It influences
the development of its environment
and strengthens its importance as an
international meeting place and tourist
attraction.
Strategy of Education and Accounts
The main aim of Education and Accounts
is to develop public participation and
interaction with art, art education,
customerships of the museum, sales,
increase of visitor numbers and the
functioning conditions of the museum.
With the profits gained from Education
and Accounts we develop the functioning
conditions of the museum and build
museum services of the future.
In the core of the strategy of
Education and Accounts is the customer
experience. Customers are the most
important reference group of the museum.
Strengthening the museum’s customer
centered operations, understanding
customer needs, gaining, keeping and
strengthening customer relationships
are central parts of the strategy.
Encounters with customers happen in
events we organise, during guided tours,
in workshops, corporate events and
collaborative projects in and outside of
EMMA. The base, services and program
of Education and Accounts rise from the
exhibitions and collections of EMMA.
10.2. INTERVIEWS
Interviews were held in the autumn of
2013 in EMMA, in Finnish. Translations
are done by myself.
NANA SALIN, CHIEF CURATOR OF
EDUCATION AND ACCOUNTS
This interview was done without a
recording and is therefore depicted here in
the form of notes that I have taken during
the interview, which happened in the form
of an open discussion.
Nana Salin’s education is one of an art
educator and of an art historian.
Many of the members of the educational
131
team have a background art history.
Salin has felt like she has had to
sometimes prove herself in the art field
because her art historical background is not
as strong as the educational. She wonders
about the hierarchies in the field related
to this, and believes that maybe it is not
always clear what an art educator does;
that her role is often to combine theory and
practice. She feels teachers and educators
are not valued enough even though it
is hard in Finland to gain a degree in
education.
Salin believes that the former director
Markku Valkonen chose her for the
job partly because, along with art and
education, she had a working background
in the field of restaurants and business, so
an expertise in customer relations. She says
Valkonen seemed to value a broad base of
knowledge.
Salin and Educator Katja Koskela
started the educational department of
EMMA together, deciding on its staff,
attitude, budget and so forth. They started
by building up projects in the local schools
and working with them in collaborations.
She describes the start of the museum
and the department as a lot of work
and responsibility. Salin was allowed to
build the department relatively big, and
to manage it mostly on her own, but the
budgets for doing this where small. She is,
however, happy today with the fact that
the department is as big as it is. Salin was
also collaborating with the architects when
the spaces for EMMA’s education were
planned. In the beginning (until 2005-2006)
she was collaborating with the department
of public relations when planning
sponsorships and corporate relationships.
Salin herself values art education
when recruiting for EMMA. She feels it is
important the staff has the capability to
share information with others, and to be
with others. For her, public work is essential
in museums. She also values constructs and
clear job descriptions; for everyone to know
what they are responsible for. She finds that
with a big department and relatively small
budgets a knowledgeable staff and strong
management are important.
She also feels it is important for her (and
the whole staff) to keep up with knowledge
about the collection and the artists the
museum represents.
At the moment the museum is trying
out a new model of working where the
heads of the different teams work together
as a guiding group. This way, says Salin, it is
up to them if collaboration in the museum
functions well.
Salin has tried to integrate the
educational department within the
curatorial and the managerial sides of the
museum for eleven years, and finally, she
says, they have a director who has the
courage to do it. She also mentions that
within Pedaali - The FInnish Association
for Museum Education this has been
a topic of conversations for years. She
feels it is not enough that the decision of
integration is made – now there is a lot of
work to be done.
She describes how it feels like they (the
staff members of EMMA and museum
132
educators in general) have sat alone
together for a long time, and that this way
concepts do not function well as entities;
some parts are glued over others.
Salin describes how she has visioned
EMMA from the beginning: As a space
for building a new kind of museum world.
An open forum, not only a “mecca of
knowledge”. A place where everyone can
enjoy themselves.
She feels it is important that the visions
come from inside the field, because, she
asks, who else would take the work forward.
She explains the field of museums has
changed a lot in the last ten years, and that
when EMMA started, she had to launch the
educational work of a museum to the field,
which was hard work especially when she
wanted the museum to do anything outside
of guided tours and lectures.
At the moment of the interview the
museum is waiting for its board to accept
its new strategy of public work. Salin feels
the new strategy has a lot in common with
what she hoped to do in 2003, when the
department started, but that this seems to
only now reach the level of official strategy:
Transparency, working with the public,
participatory work, public work for all age
groups, a constructivist understanding of
learning.
The directors of the museum board are
under a change at the moment. The board
holds an active and central role in the
decision making processes in EMMA.
The collaborations with local schools
are still a big part of the work of the
educational department in EMMA. They
have also worked for years with elderly care
centers, and planned programs of activity
for them together with the directors of the
centers. After launching the programs in
collaboration, the staff in the centers have
been able to overtake the programs. Salin
has been thinking about starting similar
work again as the last collaboration took
place in 2011.
About the new project model of
working in EMMA Salin says she would
have wanted to start it years ago. She feels
they would have helped in seeing the
museum as a whole and not only as a sum
of different departments. She feels this is
where they are now going with the new
director Pilvi Kalhama. She gives Kalhama
credit for her knowledge in public work
and feels this makes their working together
function well, and helps with the whole
staff of the department. She is also grateful
to Valkonen for the space she has been
given to develop the department into what
it is today.
Salin sees her own role as a
combination of a producer and an educator,
and feels that working this way has taken
time to be accepted in the field, though
today there are a lot of producers working
in education. She feels that in the field
of museums the models of working are
not catching up with their times, and the
changes that happen with them are not
responding to what is taught in the field.
133
She feels museums should be developed
into the direction of customer-orientation.
She gives an example of public libraries and
how they have changed more radically than
museums in the recent years.
Salin’s guiding principles in her work
are: To look at the work from the outside,
to self-reflect and question, to value
collaboration, manage entities and hold
clear goals. For her, the public is why she
does her work, not the art. Though art is
important to her, she wants to concentrate
on the public, and to taking art towards the
public.
REETTA KALAJO, MUSEUM EDUCATOR
Interview is transcribed from an audio file.
What are your job-description and
responsibilities?
Mainly to develop and organise content
for the public that mediates the contents
from the exhibition organisation. My
specific responsibility is to work with
schools and their students, from early
education to secondary schools, even
towards universities when needed. I’ve also
organised events - this has been a touring
responsibility in our department. Now we
start producing more events but in smaller
scale so that everyone is working on them.
I’ve worked for a year on the exhibition
of artist Birger Kaipiainen an for the first
time now been part of the project from
the beginning, bringing in the viewpoints
of the public work department. This was
the pilot exhibition for the project model.
It’s been very interesting, and I hope and
believe we will organise ourselves this way
in the future. The public work team will be
part of the productions from the beginning
- we’ve waited for this change for a long
time. I’ve worked in this field for ten years,
and a general hope has been for the whole
time to be part of the processes earlier.
Whom do you work with most closely?
I work with pretty much everyone. I work
with the guides, with Marja (Museum
Educator) especially on things like
feedback from teachers, and of course
with the exhibition team. Already before
the project model I was the one who took
part in the meetings with the rest of the
staff; these meetings were held more rarely
but there was an attempt to keep things
correlated. We also work closely together
with marketing because our events need
to be advertised. I work with other cultural
agents of Espoo who work with schools; we
have a team of people who are responsible
for school collaborations from different
cultural organisations. I also work on Kulps
which is a Culture and Sports organisation
that gives possibilities to schools to take
part in these activities.
When are you are in contact with the
public?
If you think of the public traditionally as
those who come to the museum, I am in
contact with them through guided tours
I sometimes give. I am in contact with
teachers whom I collaborate and give
information to. I try to go to the exhibition
134
spaces as often as possible, especially
to “Ilme”, the space in which we offer a
direct contact like an element of touching
to the exhibitions. I go there to organise
things so that it looks like I’m, for example,
tidying the place up, but I’m just “spying”
on people because I am interested to see
what happens there. The responsibility of
the space changes within our team, but I’ve
been responsible for it for some time now
with Marja.
What do you see to be the core mission of
EMMA’s public work?
I’ve thought about this in two museums; in
EMMA and in one before this. I’ve thought
about how in general the public work
should make the exhibition experience
possible for different kinds of audiences,
and to also invite people from the outside
of the museum to come in and experience
the art. Here specifically, because we work
closely with Espoo as an organisation and
because this museum is bigger, working
with bigger resources (than the one I
worked in before) I feel our responsibility
is bigger. We have a strongly societal task,
as a builder of an Espoo identity, but also
to offer possibilities for the local people
(and of course for others, too) to come and
experience art. I feel it is a good thing we
can be instrumental in. I see that as a strong
attribute here. I feel my responsibility is to
mediate and to converse about art with the
public.
What is meaningful for you in your own
work?
I always think of the experience with art,
the soul-searching that can happen and
be helped with mediation. It sounds a bit
silly but someone has called this work
harmonising – the way something is
difficult to say with words, or even with
images, but somehow you find it possible
to encounter yourself in an artwork. Seeing
how people light up and find some reason
to come to the museum.
I once worked with mental health
patients of young age in my previous job.
There was a boy there who was unable to be
in contact with others, but once he started
making an image, he became somehow
clear, we found a way of communicating
through it. Another memory is from a guide
here whom I saw work with a group of male
students with special needs. For 45 minutes
they were pretty much climbing the walls,
but as the guide just kept being patient
with them, finally they were sat on the floor
together, talking about the meaning of art.
Is there something you’d like to do
differently?
I have big hopes for the project model of
working. Now that I’ve seen how well it
functioned with the pilot project, I look
forward to what we can do when working
this way. I have great experiences about
how art can be helpful, through which I’ve
come to think I’d like to work on projects
135
that last long periods in time. To give
deeper experiences with art for kids, the
youth, adults, and to engage in deeper
contact with the public. I wish for long-
spanning projects. Here you encounter
people in moments, especially with tours
but also with projects.
Marja Vähäsarja, Museum Educator
Interview is transcribed from an audio file.
What are your job-description and
responsibilities?
Workshops; their planning and
implementation, and educating staff about
the program. I take part in other projects
within the department but workshops
take about 90 % of my time. I also plan the
open workshops and sometimes organise
publicity events outside of the museum,
and take part in seminars and educational
events of the field.
Whom do you work with most closely?
My job is very independent. Of course
together with the team of the public work
department; all our jobs are related to each
other and especially to the exhibitions.
But for now, for example what I present to
be the program of the workshops comes
independently from me.
Outside of the workshops you hold, are
there other situations when you are in
contact with the public?
I also give guided tours; sometimes there
is a need for extra staff to taken on tours.
In practice I’m prepared to host tours
about all our exhibitions. Sometimes the
educators only learn about the exhibitions
that they are teamed to work on but at
least until now I’ve learned about all of
them. I host almost all of the “Art bubbles”
(Taidekuohut) workshops, which are more
exclusive, for the adult audience. Their
quality is aimed to be kept stable. I feel that
especially with new contents it is important
for me to see how things work out and
function. Generally I’m in contact with the
public in the open workshops and events
we host.
Could you explain a bit more about how
“Art bubbles” function?
They are profiled as up-lifts from the
everyday, and as a strengthening of
working communities. The “bubbles”
(kuohut) etymology is to think of art as
something that lifts up spirits and creates
emotions.
What do you see to be the core mission of
EMMA’s public work?
I feel we try to offer moments of insight
and inspiration. We aim for accessibility;
one thing can be relevant to both a four-
year-old and adult if it’s planned well.
Participation; I see us having a red line
throughout everything which aims to bring
the customer’s own background and life
136
in the work, and of course mediating art,
through, for example, doing with one’s own
hands.
What is meaningful for you in your work?
Many things, I’m really happy to do all
the things I do here. I’m happy to be
independently responsible for my part.
Art education, I feel it’s really important
work. One gets direct feedback from the
public. Being in contact with the public
is important for me, and the time given
and individual nature of design work.
Compared to for example an art teacher
in a school there is more time here to plan,
think, research and read.
Is there something you’d like to do
differently?
I’d like the workshops to be more often
available to publics, so in that sense more
resources. I’d like like to design more
independent possibilities and spaces
for doing things in the museum, spaces
for taking time and a breath. I’d like to
collaborate more even though I like to be in
charge of things. It would be nice to work,
for example, on projects with local agents,
with youth groups, children… To receive an
impulse and request from the public.
Has the new project model affected your
work somehow?
In a positive way; I’ve been
incorporated in the planning of things
as early on as possible. I hear about the
general plans quite early and then move
forward from there myself. One could say
it would be good to have more people plan
the workshops, but I feel it is dynamic to
have one person deep in them as a process,
so that there is a professionality and a
unity to them. But of course it would be
good to freshen things up sometimes by
brainstorming together with others.
10.3. EMMA EDUCATION:
HISTORY
Based on the annual reports of EMMA, I
have outlined here the yearly activities of
the educational department of the museum,
starting from 2003. I have also looked at
the changes in how the public has been
addressed and understood within the whole
of the museum from 2003 to the present
time by examining the terms used when
referring to the public and the educational
work in the annual reports. Additionally, I
have quoted sections from the reports that
have talked about the aims and changes of
the educational work.
2003 Art Education
In the report public was referred to with
words:
customer logistics (asiakaslogistiikka)
visitors / spectators (katsojaa)
customers (asiakkaat)
weekend visitors (viikonlopun kävijät)
guided tours for public / audience
(yleisöopastukset)
pedagogical activities (pedagoginen toiminta)
137
In 2003 Museum Director and the whole
museum staff, including the two Museum
Educators so far recruited, were working on
the spatial design of the museum with Space
Designer Hannele Grönlund.
6 exhibitions were held in Gallery Otso and
they had 7700 visitors / spectators.
Art Education:
Planning and initiating a school project
called Taide on siistii (Engl: Art Is Cool)
Founding of a workshop space in the
WeeGee building
Starting of visits and workshop tours for
daycare groups from 2 daycare centers
Me taiteillaan (Engl: We Make Art) weekend
workshops for families
Designing and ordering a puppet called
Art Fairy Zirna from puppet artist Tuija
Leinonen
Recruiting and educating 7 freelance guides
Starting of the public guided tours
Initiating Taidebongari (Engl: Art Spotter)
tours for children
A trial run of Taiteesta Virtaa (Engl: Energy
From Art) recreational afternoons for
working communities
Museum Director held the first of three
lectures in Leppävaara library
Oppiva Kaupunki (Engl: Learning City)
project exhibition was held in the areal
library, introducing the pedagogical activities
of the museum
Taidepakki (Engl: Art Pack) project was
started. The project is a three-part moving
exhibition.
The Friends of Espoo Art Museum held
several lectures in the museum and made
plans of funding the pedagogical activities
of the museum in the future.
2004 Museum Pedagogy (and pedagogical
activities)
In the report public was referred to with
words:
spectators
spectating people
visitors
In 2004 the renovation work of the WeeGee
building was started.
Museum Pedagogy:
Deciding that the target group of the
dismantling / implementing art education
work is to be children and the youth
Continuing of the Art Is Cool project with
the two schools from 2003 and choosing 2
new schools for the next year
New project called Liplaputus (Engl: ?).
138
This was a collaboration with the Office
of Espoo Culture, School of Ruusutorppa
and flag factory FinnMar Oy. Project was
coordinated by textile artist Maiju Ahlgrén.
The starting point of the project was to
create a changing look for the Alberga
esplanade with schools, businesses and
local communities by using textile flags.
Flags painted by the school students stayed
in the esplanade square for over a month,
and were seen on a television program
called 45 minuuttia on channel 3.
Art Fairy Zirna’s guided tours for day care
children, a visit to Children’s Saturday in
Sello shopping center
Guided tours, workshops and Art Spotter
tours
The Museum Educators held two
exhibitions informing about the museum
activities, one in the city hall and the other
in Sello library
Chief Educator held several lectures
presenting the pedagogical activities of the
museum
Planning of two Art Pack projects, one for
day care centers (Pikkutaidepakki, Engl:
little art pack) and the other for upper
secondary schools
Planning of a museum pedagogical
publication about the Saastamoinen
Foundation
Museum Director continued with the last
two of his lectures in Sello library and
visited South Tapiola upper secondary
school on their open day.
2005 Museum Education (and
pedagogical activities)
In the report public was referred to with
word: audience / public (yleisö)
In 2005 the staff of the museum
concentrated on the planning and designing
of the museum spaces tightly together with
the house architects, consultants and other
agents of the building.
The pedagogical space, so called Media
Space was mostly designed and built, as was
the museum education space on the first
floor.
Museum Education:
Continuing of the Art Is Cool project with
the two schools from the previous year and
starting the project with one new school
Organising another exhibition presenting
the museum in Tapiola culture center
Taking part in several educational
happenings and conferences
Art Fairy Zirna and the Small Art Pack
visited 50 day care centers in Espoo
Art Pack was participated by almost 400
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upper secondary school students and adults
Chief Educator continued to promote
the future museum activities in several
happenings
2006 Museum Education
In the report public was referred to with
words:
Audience / public (yleisö)
visitors (kävijät) (sentence: Visitors,
professionals, media and critics)
(kävijämäärätavoitteet)
customers (when referring to the customer
happenings held by the collaborative
companies)
EMMA opened its first exhibitions to the
public.
Museum Education:
Opening of the two workshop spaces,
Paletti and Ilme
Starting of the guided tours and workshops
Organising lectures
Creating the modes of customer service
(asiakaspalvelukäytännöt) for the museum
Designing audio guidance
Initiating the booking system of the guided
tours
Recruiting personnel and planning work
shifts
Designing of Taide Friskaa Mieltä (Engl. Art
Freshens Up the Mind), planned to start
in 2007
Planning of a new project called Theater in
the Art Museum
Art Is Cool ended in the spring of 2006,
after which it was turned into a closed web
service called Opit, which is available for
school groups and teachers of Espoo. The
meaning of the project is to bring forward
the possibilities cultural institutions bring
to education and to give schools a chance
to use art as a part of their work in a time
wise free manner.
New art works were bought for and donated
to the Art pack. These opened up the
processes of working with different medias,
like sculpture and metal graphics.
Two new pieces of art were chosen for the
workshop space Ilme, both to be used in the
educational work.
EMMA’s first museum educational
publication called Herkkäkuuloinen (Engl.
Hearing Sensitive) was published. It opened
up the fairytaling activities [fairy tailing,
Fin: Sadutus is xxx] of the museum to the
public.
The first EMMA-paper was published. [This
is explained in the marketing section of the
museum action report]
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2007 Museum Education
In the report public was referred to with
words:
audience / public (yleisö), visitors (vieraat),
museum goers IS THIS A WORD? (kävijät)
“In the light of the visitor feedback, the aim
of the museum to create an atmosphere in
which the viewer has his/her own freedom
to think and experience the exhibited art
seems to have been realised.”
“The aim of the workshops was to support
the message of the exhibitions and open
up the contents of the art works through
the acts of oneself (itse tekemisen kautta).
Central to the workshops were also taking
time to be together, severing oneself from
the everyday routines and encountering
art.”
Chargeable guided tours were given to
groups that booked them in advance. In
the summer time the guides spent time in
the exhibition spaces, talking to people and
thus giving a chance to ask about the art
works without booking a tour.
Workshops:
Workshops were visited by school and day
care groups, vocational school groups and
organisations.
Two bookable workshops were offered to
the audience.
The contents and techniques of the
workshops spaces changed with the
exhibitions.
Graphic printing, expression, puppetry,
movement, crafts, origami, word art,
magnets and drawing to the street were
mediums used during the year in the
workshops. During the big Dali exhibition
the artist’s early techniques, syanotypy
(syanotypia) and frottage (frottaasi) were
tried out in the workshops. Additionally,
surrealist poetry, shadow puppetry and
drawing with phones was experienced, and
failrytaling continued.
S-group (S-ryhmä, a national supermarket
corporation) offered customer workshops
in EMMA.
Workshop birthday parties for children
became more popular (with 20 parties).
The public lectures were attended by a
varying number of people, from 5 to 50
people.
Art Pack received nine new art works.
Two information happenings were held for
teachers.
Texts for Art Fairy Information Corners
in the museum space were planned and
written.
Museum Education reported about the
exhibitions, tours and happenings through
the audience feedback in order to better the
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museum activities.
Museum educator took care of publicity
through newsletters.
During the Dali exhibition a play called
Enigma (about the life of Dali), written by
Kai Lehtinen, was [seen in the museum]
and fully booked from the start.
Maalaa Ilmaan! (Engl. Paint in the Air!),
designed by Wille Mäkelä and Tommi
Ilmonen:
During the Dali and Messager exhibitions
the public was able to try 3D virtual
drawing in the exhibition space. This
received great popularity and a general
wish in the feedback was to receive similar,
DIY possibilities in the future as well.
Events:
Name day of EMMA, during which visitors
received a free catalogue and a rose from
the S-group and a free concert was played
in the lobby.
A Living Art Work: a moving sculptor that
explained, in a positive manner, about how
to treat the artworks well. This was initiated
because people constantly touched the
artworks in the museum.
Evening of the Arts (a WeeGee happening)
included a performance that promoted
visiting the museum on rainy days.
Factory, a youth happening, organised
together with Cartes, Espoo center for art
and computing called in order to get closer
to an audience group that is hard for the
museum to reach and to strengthen the
local identity of the young. The happening
was supported by several collaborative
commercial partners.
Projects:
EMMA Art Museum School in Opit, an
online learning entity for 5th and 6th
graders, teaching about the meaning,
activities and collections of the art
museum.
Taide Friskaa Mieltä (Engl. Art Freshens Up
the Mind) project was started in two care
facilities for the elderly. With the Art Pack
art works, conversations, story telling and
music was initiated.
2008 Museum Education
In the report public was referred to with
words:
Visitor / museum goer (kävijä)
“Museum Education supported the
exhibiting and collecting activities with
guided tours, lectures, audio guides,
workshops, publications, articles and wall
texts.“
“Happenings were organised to promote
EMMA and to offer the audience up-lifting
experiences alongside the exhibitions.”
Workshops:
Enchanted Dragon (Fin. Lumottu
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Lohikäärme) for 1st -9th graders. Chinese
myths and symbols were researched
through calligraphy and poetry.
Leisurely Tiger (Fin. Kiireetön Tiikeri) for
business groups. This promoted valuing
moments and experiencing together.
Open workshops were organised for adults
in the evenings of the TEA! exhibition.
S-group customer days included non-stop
family workshops in which press print
images were created about a Chinese fairy
tale.
The birthday workshop parties were now
themed as “The treasure of the art fairies”.
The Art Pack collection was used by the
guides in workshops and on tours. The
objects in the pack were linked to the
exhibitions through time periods and
themes.
Participation Cards and Pedagogical Cards
were introduced to guided tours. First
pedagogical cards were about the topics of
conserving and image & word.
Two new project for school children:
Culture and exercise - guided tours by 3rd,
7th and 9th graders in EMMA.
Art Orienteering program in the Espoon
Opit- online service, which familiarizes
school children of Espoo with the public
artworks and environmental artworks
of the EMMA collection by proposing
assignments and routes around the city.
The material was designed together with
Espoo Office of Exercise and Education.
A collaborative project with the Espoo
Art School was initiated. Its intention was
to deepen the students knowledge of art.
The project is aimed to continue yearly,
establishing a permanent collaboration
between EMMA and the Art School.
Museum Education collected the visitor
reviews monthly, answering them if needed.
The community-driven nature of the
museum operations were developed through
received feedback.
Events:
Weekend for children and grandparents with
the Art Fairies. Workshops, music, fairy tales
and children’s story telling about art works.
The “living artwork” was present.
EMMA Soi (Engl. EMMA with music),
organised together with Tapiola Sinfonietta.
Musical Art Quarters, two concerts.
Pukutaidetta EMMAssa (Engl. Costume
Art in EMMA), organised together with
the fashion design students of former Taik
(now: Aalto Arts University), who designed
and organised a fashion show in the hall of
the WeeGee building. The exhibited dresses
remained on show in the museum for 1,5
weeks. Guided tours were organised around
the theme.
Dramatised guided tours for children in
the exhibition on Claude Monet, organised
together with Theatre Hevosenkenkä.
Fall in Love With EMMA!, targeted for adult
visitors. Chocolate poems, ikebana, music
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and a lecture on “diving within a painting”
were part of the program and its theme was
to be seduced by art.
Flowers and Media,designed by artist
Markus Renvall, in which museum tours on
bikes were offered to the public as a chance
to get to know the different architectures
of the four museums; EMMA, Helsinki
Art Museum, Gallen-Kallela Museum and
Driedrichsein Museum. Music, dance,
media art and performances were part of the
program and communality, openness and
interactivity were central to the happening.
[Later the happening was repeated yearly
with changing museums participating, and
functioned under the name Pää Pyörälle!-
Taidetta Fillaroiden” (Engl: Circle Your
Head!- Art on a Bicycle).]
Chinese Culture for the Youth, a
collaborative happening organised with
Espoo Culture and Youth Association
and CSSA (Chinese youth studying in
Finland) in order to help Finnish and
Chinese youngsters to get to know each
other.
Puppet show Monkey Rebellion in the
exhibition TEA! during one weekend.
Evening of Art (a WeeGee happening)
included a non-stop workshop and Art
Quarters with the Art Fairy about night
themed artworks.
Christmas Happening (a WeeGee happening)
included christmas themed Art Quarters.
2 information happenings for teachers
were organised in order to talk about future
exhibitions and the pedagogical program of
the museum. A lecture about the meaning
of contemporary art in education was held
in one of the happenings.
2009 Supplementary program
(Oheisohjelmisto)
In the report public was referred to with
words:
Visitor / museum goer (kävijä)
“Museum is an environment of learning
and experiences for all age groups. Museum
Education works as the interpreter and
deepened of the themes and messages
of the exhibitions and collections. The
activities of the Museum Education
makes learning about art and widening of
understanding possible for the public. The
building of the supplementary program
and the pedagogical goals require on-going
knowledge about the needs of the visitors,
as well as internal development, as new
ways of doing, experiencing and learning
about art are searched and created for the
public.”
“The Supplementary program of EMMA
offered the public numerous alternative
ways to get to know the exhibitions and
collections of the museum. It offered
knowledge and experiences, and created
means of approaching art that connected
different art forms.”
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“The budget was cut in half [due to a general
recession].”
Events:
Weekend of the Art Fairies
Fall in Love with EMMA
Night of the art (WeeGee happening)
Day of Espoo (WeeGee happening)
Christmas happening (WeeGee happening)
Pää Pyörälle!- Taidetta Fillaroiden” (Engl:
Circle Your Head!- Art on a Bicycle)
Guided tours:
Art Quarter, Art Hour, Art Fairy’s Hour for
children
Free and open guided tours on weekends,
others by order
Art Pack and Participation Cards were used
on tours with changing exhibitions
Lectures:
13 speakers gave lectures about the
exhibitions and the Saastamoinen collection.
Workshops:
Culture and Exercise tours for 3rd, 7th and
9th graders.
Workshops were held for day care and
school groups, business groups and families.
Central to them was taking time to be
together, severing oneself from the everyday
routines and opening up art through making
and doing by oneself.
Workshop spaces Ilme and Paletti changed
thematically with the exhibitions. Comics,
drama, fairy taling, jewelry, masks, collage,
recycling, graffiti, nature materials,
papermache, and crafts were used as their
techniques.
In the “Graffiti for grannies” workshop
elderly people from Espoo created a wall
piece for the workshop space Ilme. The
goal of the workshop was to familiarise
the elderly with contemporary art and the
possibilities EMMA has to offer. The group
continued the project in Helsinki’s Suvilahti
by creating an EMMA graffiti. This was
created in order to comment on the space
given for professional and legal graffiti art in
Helsinki.
Exhibition series for children was started
in workshop space Ilme. The shown
exhibitions are built around the themes
of the museum exhibitions, together
with collaborative businesses. The first
year included a cover exhibition by Eeva
magazine.
New audio guide was made with artist
Hannu Väinänen.
“Short-Cut” guides were made with four
artists, including songwriter Jippu and
choreographer Kenneth Kvarnström.
Art Fairy Conversing Moment texts were
written for the exhibitions, and route texts
created for adults.
Saastamoinen collection was made more
known through a series of articles on
contemporary art in school practice,
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published in the Opettaja (Engl. Teacher)
magazine.
2010 Supplementary program
(Oheisohjelmisto)
In the report public was referred to with
words:
Visitor / museum goer (kävijä)
“The Museum Education procedures a
supplementary program that opens up
the themes of the EMMA exhibitions and
collections, and creates interest towards
the museum. The program serves all age
groups, but offers also specific services to
children, the youth and the elderly. With
yearly socially responsible projects the role
of art and EMMA as a reliever of societal
and social problems was brought forward.
Tours, workshops, happenings and other
services were sharper productised in order
to increase the reputation of EMMA as
a provider of services in addition to the
exhibition program. Audiences that do not
normally come to EMMA were tried to
reach through the happenings.”
“A high customer satisfaction and a
returning customer talk about successful
museum activities and services.”
Happenings:
S-group customer day
WeeGee Christmas happening
“Pää pyörälle!- taidetta fillaroiden” (Engl:
circle your head!- art on a bicycle)
EMMA rocks
Fall in Love with EMMA
Let’s Go to the Museum – museum week
for school children and students
Art Fairies and the Space
Sivusilmin (Engl: with the corners of the
eyes) performances
Exhibition Cafe, event for museum workers
Guided tours:
Art Quarter, Art Hour, Art Fairy’s Hour for
children, Art Hour for the hard-at-seeing
Free and open guided tours on weekends,
others by order
Art Pack and Participation Cards were used
on tours with changing exhibitions
Workshops:
Art Coffee for the elderly
Sika Comic Workshop
Art Bubbles for adult and business groups
Art Fairy Workshop Party
Good Heavens! for day care and primary
school groups
Pig or a Super Hero for secondary school
and high school groups
Materials and methods in workshops:
Movement, body painting, pressing, dance
choreography with computer games,
fairytaling, water installation, building, silk
painting, wall painting, magnets, Camera
Obscura, beat boxing.
Workshop space Ilme exhibition:
Good Heavens! Painting installation with
artist Katja Tukiainen
Lectures and seminars:
Teacher Info
About Silk
146
About the Life of a Silkworm
Dialogue lecture with the artist Jorma
Puranen and art historian Marjatta Levanto
Meet the Artist: Katja Tukiainen, Marjatta
Tapiola, Anni Leppälä and Petri Eskelinen
To the Collections with choreographer
Kenneth Kvarnström
Oikotiet (Engl: Short cut) -tours, for visitors
to go on by themselves, new tours from:
Sinikka Nopola, Nasima Razmyar and
Signmark
Fairytaling chair ???
WeeGee camps for 7-10 year-olds
Art Freshens the Mind
On the road- project, one-year project for
the youth and the elderly together: looking
at the theme of the self and trying to loosen
boundaries between age groups. Painting
together the walls of the Tapiola metro
construction site.
2011 Public Work (yleisötyö) and Program
(ohjelmisto)
In the report public was referred to with
words:
audience, museum goer
EMMA worked on its strategy, formulating
its mission “EMMA enriches life with the
help of art” and values “belief in the power
of art”, “open-mindedness” and “dialogue”.
“EMMA public work is a genuine dialogue
with the public about art, with accessibility
at its root. The program, happenings,
guided tours, workshops, turns of speech, happening)
artist visits, projects, publications and texts Stories About Red – performances together
offer knowledge and deepen the experience with Metropolia Vocational School
of art for all age groups. Public work is done Black Feather and the Pirate – drama
with the means of art education, artistic performances with Theatre Hevosenkenkä
work and marketing. Evening of the Arts
Espoo Day
Public work aims to increase visitors’
understanding and appreciation of the Guided tours:
arts. The program deepens the viewing
experience, builds the acknowledgment Art Bridge
of the arts, advances the museum sales, Art Quarter
reaches out for new audiences and Art Fairy Hour
establishes the current ones. Its object is to Kulps! For 3rd, 7th and 9th graders
widen the ground of audience both with
quantity as quality. The voice of the public Workshops:
is listened to with, for example, audience All Clowning (Fin: Yhtä Pelleilyä) - circus
research and feedback. The aim [of the tricks and painting forms with new medias
public work] is to continuously improve Art Bubbles
the exhibitions, program and services of Art Coffee
EMMA”. A Thousand and One Journeys
Collective Collage
“The happenings are organised in order A Brush from a Feather, Laughter from a
to awaken interest towards EMMA and to Button
reach out for new audiences.”
Turns of Speech (Finn: Puheenvuorot):
“Drama is used in EMMA intentionally Artists Elina Merenmies, Anna Tuori, Yang
because it is a communal art form.” Fudong, Carolus Enckell
Filosopher Timo Kaitaro
Events: Open studio of the resident artist of
Tapiola, Oliver Minder
Circus of the Art Fairies Visit to former studio of Anitral Lucander
HOK-Elanto [former S-group] customer Curator Sanna Teittinen
days Art Historian Tuula Karjalainen
Art Marathon – WeeGee building and Art Critic Otso Kantokorpi
EMMA turn 5 years in age
EMMA With Music Under the Full Moon On One’s Own (Fin: Omin päin):
Christmas Happening (a WeeGee Little guide book: Joan Miró’s guide to the

147
must-see-works of the Miró Exhibition
Lick of the Sun - audio guide with author
Ilpo Tiihonen
Back Packing (Finn: Reppureissut) –
WeeGee text material provided to help
independent family visits in the building
2 Teacher Information Days
WeeGee Summer Camp
One new art work was purchased for the
Art Pack collection
Projects:
Art Freshens the Mind with Art Pack
2012 Public work
In the report public was referred to with
words:
museum goer
The new director Pilvi Kalhama started at
the head of EMMA.
“The focus was on internal functions of
the museum and a start was made to move
towards a model of project working. The
work done in 2012 laid a ground for 2013,
during which the focus was on increasing
the museum’s general impact and improving
customer-ships as well as collaboration with
organizations and reference groups.
In addition to internal improvements,
strengthening design and exhibiting
contemporary design were set as points to
emphasise in the museum’s general purpose
targets.”
148
“In addition to art educational activities the
public work in EMMA includes customer
work and public services. […] It makes
sure the public is taken into account when
planning and implementing the exhibitions.
Public work takes notice of different kinds
of learners in the contents and creates
possibilities for the museum goers to
participate, have a dialogue, encounter and
share experiences. Central to the work is
deepening the public’s understanding of
the arts, experiencing and acting together,
increasing sociability and communality.
Public services take care of customer service
and guarding the exhibitions. Museum
educators, guides and guards hold an
important role between the museum and the
public, as well as in offering the services of
the museum.”
“Guided tours and workshops provided
participation and built dialogue about art for
all age groups. “
Events:
Fantasy - WeeGee for children
Songs about love and being dumped -
collaboration with students from Music
Academy Juvenalia and Music Theatre
Tapiola
Evening of the Arts
Espoo Day
Art Rally (with exhibition BMW Art Cars)
5th Circle Your Head / Art on a Bicycle
Black Feather and a Pirate - drama shows
continued from 2011
A Journey in a Suitcase (Fin: Matka
Laukussa) - baby theatre in collaboration
with Metropolia Vocational School
Positive Negative Space - concert
Workshops:
Vauhtia ja Vimmaa (Engl: Fast and Furious)
- animation about a future city
Vilinää ja Vilskettä (Engl: Hustle and Bustle)
- time traveling to the future city
Colour Tuning - designing art cars
Colour Pit for children - thinking about new
coloring ideas for cars
Letter Forms jewelry workshop
Brush from a Feather, Laughter from a
Button - object collage
Kulps!
Tuning in Ilme workshop space, for families
Open workshops:
Formulate a Form
Futuro Lounge - collaboration with
Architect School Ark
Colour Tuning - designing art cars
ASO-day
Open workshops were increased and timed
for the weekends.
Turns of Speech:
Director of EMMA Markku Valkonen
Doctor of Filosophy Annamari Vänskä in
conversation with Art Historian Rikka
Stewen
Art Historian Jonni Roos
Artist Annie Conceicao-Rivet
EMMA Director of Education and Accounts
Nana Salin interviewing the spouse of artist
Juhani Harri
149
On One’s Own (Fin: Omin Päin)
Lick of the Sun - audio guide for the
exhibition Red
Children’s program changed its name
with artist puppet Sulo Sivellin, who
accompanied kids on tours, talking and
discussing about art and about being an
artist.
WeeGee Summer Camps
Teacher Information happening x 2
Mystery Shopping - research about EMMA
customer service and WeeGee ticket sales
desk
Non-visitor research with Humanistinen
ammattikorkeakoulu
SPAGU (Smart Space for Personal
Guidance) with WeeGee, researching
visitor movements in different spaces,
collaboration with Metropolia Vocational
School and Tampere Technical University
Success:
“Including the audiences clearer than
before in the production of the program
created good results.”
Customer Feedback:
“Most of EMMA’s customer feedback is
taken in online in a feedback system that
is shared with the rest of the WeeGee
actors. The online form for feedback can be
found on the websites of the museums and
the printed form in various places inside
WeeGee. Additionally, the form has been
actively used in EMMA with groups that
have used the museum services. Within the
year EMMA has also received feedback via
email. The guides and guards have actively
recorded in text the spontaneous feedback
given by customers in the exhibition halls.
The feedback has been handled within the
Public Work team and reported to the rest
of the staff. The feedback has been used to
improve the public based nature and the
accessibility of the museum. During the
year WeeGee received 414 feedback forms.”
for a wonderful take and style of exhibiting
art for children.”
“Our whole customer group as well as
ourselves were very happy with our visit
at the Art Bubbles and we will be bringing
our customers to similar happeningns in
the future.”

Some raised points:

Feedback was given mostly by 31-60 year-
old women. Most popular reason to visit
WeeGee was to spend one’s free time.

Raised examples of the feedback for the

tours and workshops:

“The guide was very knowledgeable and

inspiring. A wonderful detail was the
making of a word art piece at the end of the
tour. It was a nice surprise, and a unifying
thing.”

“Thank you for flexibility and

understanding during a tour of secondary
school students. The guides knew how to
take into account the state of mind of the
group, stopping at the pieces the students
were looking at when we were in the
exhibition space.”

“Our experience of the workshop was

positive and inspiring. The whole ensemble
was varied and interesting both for children
and adults. Special thank you to the guide

150
 Proofreading: Katie Lenanton
Graphic Design: Laura Kokkonen

151
 DEGREE PROGRAM
Curating, Managing and Mediating Art
Department of Art
Aalto University 2014

COLLABORATION WITH
EMMA Espoo Museum of Modern Art

ADVISORS
Nora Sternfeld and Felicity Allen

152