“It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results,” wrote Sigmund Freud in 1937, taking stock near the end of his life of the field he almost singlehandedly invented. He continued: “The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.”(1) “On Education,” the first group show at the nonprofit contemporary art center Amant in Brooklyn, on view from March to August of this year, reflected on the current state of the first of these impossible professions. As befits any engagement with the subject-formation of children, Freud’s own impossible profession colored the whole affair, which filled all three of the gallery spaces that make up Amant’s twenty-one-thousand-square-foot East Williamsburg campus.

Organized by Amant’s chief curator, Tobi Maier, along with its associate curators, Patricia Margarita Hernández and Ian Wallace, “On Education” coincided with unprecedented crises in the US school system, from infant care all the way up to postgraduate studies. When I met Maier at the foundation’s café-slash-bookstore, he pointed out that the exhibition opened on the same day that President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the US Department of Education. In New York, full-time childcare for a two-year-old child costs an average of $23,000 a year;(2) in 2024, Stuyvesant High School, a public institution widely regarded as one of the city’s finest, offered only eight of its 781 seats to prospective students who identified as Black;(3) in April, Columbia University crumbled under pressure from the Trump Administration, putting its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “review”;(4) the CUNY Graduate Center pays a stipend of about $30,000 to students who must live in one of the world’s most expensive cities, and who face abysmal job prospects at the end of their doctorate programs.(5)

But what if education, as Freud stated all those years ago, has always been doomed to never satisfy? What if trauma is unavoidable? What felt radical about “On Education” was how it attended to the very real historical, economic, and social factors that contribute to teaching and learning’s many obstacles, while also making space for the idea that education itself might be an impossible project. “Unless living in complete isolation,” admits the coauthored introduction to the catalogue, “one is implicated in teaching by nature of cohabitation with other people.”(6) Relationality is inherently fraught, in other words. The traumatic effects of education—as sickeningly summed up by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s 1987 filmed performance of the father-son dynamic in Family Tyranny/Cultural Soup, which takes pride of place in the exhibition’s first room, stationed atop a red carpet that was designed to look like blood emanating from a felled, fuzzy monster sculpture by Stefan Tcherepnin—cannot be reduced to the less-than-ideal conditions in which it always takes place.

This premise elucidated Maier, Hernández, and Wallace’s choice to avoid making any explicit attempts to educate the viewer, or to set up new educational systems that promise better outcomes. Working in the wake of Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012) and its excoriation of participatory art, the curators largely eschewed practices they deemed “a mashup of relational aesthetics, institutional critique, and mutual aid.”(7) Instead, they focused on contemporary artists concerned with making things, be it videos or fuzzy monsters. There were no wall labels of any kind, though the exhibition guide did include a map and lengthy texts on each artist—an apparent argument for separating extra-artistic discourse from the work it attempts to explain. “The exhibition asks viewers to pause, reflect, and engage with the object not as a didactic tool,” the catalogue explains, “but as a site of attention and meditation.”(8) This focus on attention also tracks with Bishop’s follow-up to Artificial Hells, the book Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art Today (2024), which the curators cited as influential on their thinking on the importance of recentering the object.

(1) Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–39): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, and Other Works, ed. James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964), 248.
(2) “Why Are We Fighting for Two’s Too?,” New Yorkers United for Child Care →.
(3) Troy Closson, “Elite New York High School Admits 8 Black Students in a Class of 781,” New York Times, July 31, 2025 →.
(4) Meghnad Biazzo and Sacha Bose, “Inside Columbia’s Betrayal of Its Middle Eastern Studies Department,” The Intercept, April 16, 2025 →.
(5) “A Quick Guide to Doctoral Funding at the CUNY Graduate Center,” CUNY Graduate Center →.
(6) Patricia M. Hernández, Tobi Maier, and Ian Wallace, “Introduction,” in On Education (New York: Amant, 2025), 13.
(7) Hernández, Maier, and Wallace, “Introduction,” 11.
(8) Hernández, Maier, and Wallace, “Introduction,” 19.