Displacement as a Didactical Strategy : How to use contemporary art methods in school education

Referring to the artist Robert Smithson, Brohl (2003) unfolds the “displacement” as an (art-)didactical strategy and form of learning, as well as a method of art-based research. On the one hand she recurs to Foucault's interpretation of space and sites as nodal points of disparate discourses, institutional linkages, historical bondings etc. On the other hand she refers to theories of everyday practical acting and to positions of a special branch in art, “Land Art”. Brohl (2008, p.35) writes, “displacement at first describes a spatial relocation of art situated in the institution of the museum and then moved to public spaces. Displacement signifies a change in the understanding of art: The production of art works is replaced by the discursive practices of doing art based on a special location. Moreover, displacement is the special artistic work of the reading of a location by another location, the intuitive relating of materials, information and associations.” Fundamentally, the principle of displacement is based on the reciprocal interpretation of an object (here artwork) and its context. Hereby, not so much the “truth of the things” is the matter. Brohl moreover illustrates how an object invades and also sometimes intervenes in common discourses and semantic fields. In this way new issues can merge into familiarities (vgl, Waldenfels 1999, p. 167). Connections between facts can be built that have not been conceivable before. Via displacement, these discourses can be clarified and reflected. At the same time, discourses can be put into question and so be changed by other, new forms of use of things and their reasonable foundations (cp. Brohl 2008). This is a quite exact description of a learning process… This parallel is used for the practise in a school that uses contemporary art concepts and methods not as a topic of itself but as a method which includes all of the school subjects. In the presentation we will follow, step by step, a teacher manual (working procedure) followed by some pupil examples from a site ...