Programmatic Images: Learning Site’s Learning Posters and the Iconoclasm of Relational Art

Few would probably characterize contemporary relational and social art by a distinctive richness in its use of pictorial means of expression. Relational art often turns to other media such as design, performance, and installation in order to invite the art audience to participate in activities within or outside the spaces of the art institution. Here pictorial media, typically photography, is employed to document activities in order to represent events in exhibitions, catalogues, etc. An interesting exception to this approach is Danish art collective Learning Site--co-founding members of N55, Rikke Luther and Cecilia Wendt. Inspired by graphic traditions within the field of pedagogical and instructive charts, Learning Site’s posters demonstrates an obvious instructive function which supports a social and relational project context, but these posters also challenge the established pictorial genres from which they set off. This presentation performs an analysis of selected Learning Site posters and discuss findings by means of a concept of pictorial futurity; a concept that is concerned with pictorial genres such as visions, plans, scenarios, and prognoses, and which defines pictorial media in terms of development (planned, designed, programmed, etc.).