350 : PROPOSITIONS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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The Academy as an Alternative ? ELS DE BRUYN, NICO DOCKX & JOHAN PAS

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Autoplanification Revisited NIKOLAUS HIRSCH

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Can You Feel the Air ? These Openings Are not Just Something to Look at, They Are Something to Breathe With NICO DOCKX

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Exit Interzone Augenblick und Einmaligkeit JAN M AST

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Extra University DIETER LESAGE

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Teaching&Learning Goes Face-to-Face and Mind-Direct LOUWRIEN WIJERS

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Presenting Words As Sculptures to Celebrate Love OLAFUR ELIASSON, ERIC ELLINGSEN & CHRISTINA WERNER IN CONVERSATION WITH NICO DOCKX

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Jan Meda — Großes Feld INSTITUT FÜR RAUMEXPERIMENTE

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Yeast THOMAS BAYRLE

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Because Our Interview Might Be a Year From Today THOMAS BAYRLE & NIKOLAUS HIRSCH IN CONVERSATION WITH NICO DOCKX

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Jef Geys, Between Teacher and Artist Jef Geys, tussen leraar en kunstenaar LOUISE OSIEKA

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Some Drawings, a Painting, Antwerpen 1948–49 GUSTAV METZGER WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAN MAST

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Academy Effects Project Work as Emancipatory Practice BEATRICE VON BISMARCK

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MacLean 705 and Nomadic Studies JOSEPH GRIGELY

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Deskilling / Deschooling VIVIAN SKY REHBERG

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Responsibility Is not Only Dreaming of Something During the Night, It Is Also Doing Something During the Day MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO

IN CONVERSATION WITH

NICO DOCKX

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Mobile Medium University Program Academical Tour 2015–16 LUC DELEU & T.O.P. OFFICE WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JOHAN PAS

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Teaching Narrative RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA

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The Work of Art Is a Verb RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE IN COLLABORATION WITH NICO DOCKX

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Art for All, All for Art Experimenting With Art at the University Campus ROGER D’HONDT

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From Future Academy to Future Museum CLÉMENTINE DELISS IN CONVERSATION WITH NICO DOCKX

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Train Schools / School Trains Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt Revisited HANS ULRICH OBRIST

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Nobody Can Teach You, but Yourself YONA FRIEDMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH NICO DOCKX

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Lycée David D’Angers, 2013 JEAN -BAPTISTE DECAVÈLE & NICO DOCKX

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The Artist in Search of an Academy Radical Pedagogies of the Sixties and Seventies JOHAN PAS

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Open Letter to Students of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, 25 December 1861 GUSTAVE COURBET

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Colophon

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MuHKADEMY 26.09.2013 — 05.01.2014

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Griet Blanckaert ( born 1964 ) was trained as a restorer of paintings at the Laboratoire d’Etudes des Oeuvres d’Art ( Université Catholique de Louvain ) and then obtained her MA in Art Sciences at the Catholic University of Leuven ( 1988 ). Since 1986 she has worked with various institutes, museums and private individuals, including the National Higher Institute and Artesis College ( 1988–2000 ). Initially she focused on the art of the old masters and “large formats”. Over the course of time she has added modern and contemporary art to her areas of interest. Since 2010 she has been involved again in the Conservation-Restoration programme at Artesis College. She is currently involved in the integration of this curriculum in the programme of the University of Antwerp.

Els De bruyn, Nico Dockx & Johan Pas

THE ACADEMY AS AN ALTERNATIVE ?

Today, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp finds itself more or less “squeezed” between 350 years of history and an unspecified number of years to come.

The Antwerp Academy encompasses not only a school, but also an architectural site, an art collection, a library, an archive, and a part of the personal memories of ( former ) students and teachers. These resources contain many stories, waiting to be unearthed. How can this

that will be discussed in greater detail later. We invited different artists and authors to contribute to this anthology of alternatives. Some of the ideas in this book were presented in the fall of 2013 as part of the MuHKADEMY program in the M HKA, a temporary academy in a museum for contemporary art, conceived by the editors of this book for the Happy Birthday Dear Academie anniversary project. To stress the relationship

vast archive of academic ideas, practices and products be relevantly reloaded ? The many recent exhibitions, discursive projects and publications about the Antwerp Academy all bear witness to the fact that this school is trying to find a way to live with its long history. Turning the burden of tradition into a tool for the future might be one of the biggest challenges the Antwerp Academy has come to cope with. Is it possible to combine the historical dimension of the art academy with the intention of becoming a laboratory for advanced artistic research ? What is needed to shift the ballast to achieve the right balance ?

between MuHKADEMY and Pro-Positions, documentary images from this project interweave with the various essays. The essay The Artist in Search for an Academy looks back at inspirational projects and proposals by advanced artists of the sixties and seventies, an extremely fertile period that still contains many hidden treasures.

The double publication Contradictions & Pro-Positions is part of a strategy for facing up to this challenge. The first volume, Contradictions : The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, intends to be a critical biography of a well-respected art school. Fifteen essays by experts and scholars on the history of the Antwerp Academy shed a light on different aspects of its rich history. Within that history, starting with the mid-seventeenth century and continuing through until today, the nineteenth century is a pivotal moment. The Antwerp Academy has become internationally successful and has hosted many foreign students, but it has also fallen victim at times to ( local ) historicist and traditionalist thinking. In spite of attempts to modernise its curriculum, the Academy gradually lost connection with the fast pace of the artistic avant-gardes and put itself into a kind of splendid isolation, only to wake up from its dreams of the past more or less a decade ago. This awakening Sleeping Beauty faces an uncertain future. That is why we wanted a second book to provide a dialogue and interaction with the first.

Pro-Positions : Art and / as Education focuses on artist-driven pedagogies and educational projects that relate both to the academies and the avant-gardes. We took our inspiration from Robert Filliou’s groundbreaking Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, a book 7

Some of these nuggets should be valued for still being ( or for once again being ) very relevant for today’s thinking about tomorrow’s art ( school ). In a period that witnesses the formatting of art by a globally extending art market, the formatting of education by an internationally streamlined educational system, and the formatting of teaching by ever-expanding ICT-systems, the stubbornness of avant-garde art can be of crucial importance. The tensions that might arise from the reading of Contradictions & Pro-Positions should be seen as possibilities for reconsidering art and / as education. ( Re- ) thinking an academy for the future is impossible without reflecting about its history and without working in its present. This book is part of that present.

Els De bruyn ( born 1977 ) studied Political and Social Sciences at the University of Antwerp. Since 2008, she coördinates artistic research at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. In 2009, together with Johan Pas, Nico Dockx, Bert Danckaert, and Thomas Crombez, she founded Track Report, a publication platform for research in and about art. In order to make artistic research more accessible to students she organises, together with visual artists, diverse symposia and research days, a large number of masterclasses, as well as the series of films and lectures Academiegasten ( Academy Guests ), together with Sonja Spee (Head of Visual Arts of the Royal Academy) and the teachers of Visual Arts.

Nico Dockx ( born 1974 ) works as a visual artist, curator, publisher and researcher with a fundamental interest in archives. His interventions, publications, soundscapes, texts, images, installations and conversations — which are usually the result of collaboration with other artists — embody the relationship between perception and memory, which he interprets differently each time. He graduated from the HISK Antwerp in 2001. His work has won him a DAAD grant ( 2005 ) and various prizes : the Greatest Belgian ( 2005 ), the Cera Prize ( 2005 ), the Ars Viva Prize ( 2007 ), and the Young Belgian Art Prize — the Emile & Stephy Langui Prize ( 2009, together with Helena Sidiropoulos ). Since 1998 he has exhibited his work at home and abroad, as well as publishing more than forty artists’ publications with his independent imprint Curious. He is co-founder of interdisciplinary projects such as Building Transmissions ( 2001–2013 ), Interfaculty ( 2007 ), Extra Academy ( 2010 ) and Dog Republic ( 2012 ). He is represented by LIGHTMACHINE agency and Esther Donatz Gallery. Together with Louwrien Wijers and Egon Hanfstingl, he delivered his PhD project, The New Conversations, at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, in 2014.

Johan Pas ( born 1963 ) obtained his PhD in Art Studies at the University of Ghent with his research on the International Cultural Centre ( ICC ) as experimental art platform. He currently teaches modern and contemporary history of art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. He is editor-in-chief of Track Report ( a publication platform for research in and about art ) and together with Thomas Crombez he mans the research cell ArchiVolt ( archives and avant-gardes ). Since 1993 he has curated some thirty exhibitions about contemporary visual arts. His research focuses on the presentation and publication history of the visual arts after 1958. He also dedicates himself to collecting and studying publications from the neo-avant-gardes. His own recent publications include Multiple / Readings. 51 kunstenaarsboeken ( 51 Artists’ books, 2011 ), Fred Bervoets. Prent Werk ( Print Work, 2011 ), and Neonlicht.

Paul De Vree & de Neo-avant-garde ( Neon Light. Paul De Vree & the Neo-Avant-Garde, 2012 ).

Griet Blanckaert ( born 1964 ) was trained as a restorer of paintings at the Laboratoire d’Etudes des Oeuvres d’Art ( Université Catholique de Louvain ) and then obtained her MA in Art Sciences at the Catholic University of Leuven ( 1988 ). Since 1986 she has worked with various institutes, museums and private individuals, including the National Higher Institute and Artesis College ( 1988–2000 ). Initially she focused on the art of the old masters and “large formats”. Over the course of time she has added modern and contemporary art to her areas of interest. Since 2010 she has been involved again in the Conservation-Restoration programme at Artesis College. She is currently involved in the integration of this curriculum in the programme of the University of Antwerp.

Nikolaus Hirsch graphic concept by Matthias Görlich

AUTOPLANIFICATION REVISITED

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Like most visionary architects, the greater part of Yona Friedman’s ideas, drawings, and models have remained ideas, drawings, and models. Only a few of his designs have been realized to date, the largest being the Henri Bergson / David d’Angers High School in Angers, France, in 1980.

The commission for designing this project enabled Friedman to test his ideas of self-planning ( which he himself called autoplanification ) by a group of future users. In different stages and given a set of rules, the users were given a chance to plan the layout of the building that was to be executed using an industrial construction system. Defining and indicating their use of the building, Friedman created diagrams for its two floors. He then proposed to have the interior rooms be designed by the parents of the students and teachers. This process was meant to be repeated whenever desired.

In order to revisit the idea of autoplanification, I took a Friedman diagram and asked a number of artists, architects, and writers to draw a classroom based on it. The results ( from Douglas Gordon, Michel Müller, Julika Rudelius, Olaf Hackl or Sina Najafi ) range from childlike classrooms to speculations on future academia ( from Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomás Saraceno, Joseph Grima, Holger Wüst, and Superflex ). Together the drawings form the potential of an emerging art school based on Friedman’s core concept. A model that allows for a maximum of autonomy within the individual classrooms, yet creates a minimum degree of coherence.

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Rirkrit Tiravanija Superflex Sina Najafi Douglas Gordon Michel Müller Holger Wüst Olaf Hackl Julika Rudelius

No More Corrupt Institution The New Classroom Cabinet Film Class Circulation Tower is Ours Keep Me Home Electric Art

Joseph Grima Tomas Saraceno

Everyone Learning from Everyone Multiuniverse School

Lycée David D’Angers, Diagram by Yona Friedman, 1978

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Lycée David D’Angers, Photograph by Nico Dockx, 2013

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Rirkrit Tiravanija, No More Corrupt Institution

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Superflex, The New Classroom

Sina Najafi, Cabinet

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Douglas Gordon, Film Class

Michel M端ller, Circulation

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Holger W端st, Tower is Ours

Olaf Hackl, Keep Me Home

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Julika Rudeliu, Electric Art

Joseph Grima, Everyone Learning from Everyone

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Tomรกs Saraceno, Multiuniverse School

Nikolaus Hirsch ( born 1964 ) is a Frankfurt-based architect and curator. He was the director of St채delschule and Portikus and previously taught at the AA in London and UPenn in Philadelphia. His architectonic work includes the prize-winning Dresden Synagogue ( 2001 ), Bockenheimer Depot Theatre ( with William Forsythe ), unitednationsplaza ( with Anton Vidokle ), European Kunsthalle, and the Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi. Hirsch curated Cultural Agencies ( Istanbul, 2009 ), I knOw yoU ( Dublin, 2013 ), and Folly for the Gwangju Biennale ( 2013 ). Current projects include The Land Workshop ( Thailand ) and Real DMZ ( Korea ). He is the author of On Boundaries ( 2007 ), Institution Building ( 2009 ), Cybermohalla Hub ( 2012 ) and co-editor of the Critical Spatial Practice book series.

Nico Dockx

CAN YOU FEEL THE AIR ?

THESE OPENINGS ARE NOT JUST SOMETHING TO LOOK AT, THEY ARE SOMETHING TO BREATHE WITH I personally think that teaching and learning should be driven by personalities and practices rather than a curriculum. It is very important to underline this notion of education as process rather than curriculum. I feel that there is something radically wrong with the idea that education has to be conceived of as it has been for the last couple of centuries as the acquisition of certain levels of know-how, in the form of credits, titles, and

How to Work Better, Fischli / Weiss, 1991

An A4 photocopy of this ten-point manifesto by Peter Fischli and David Weiss has been wandering around my personal archives since I visited their In a Restless World 1 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston in 1997. Now and then, it happens that I consciously as well as accidentally revisit this archival document which always brings me lots of inspiration and motivation. I love this work as it acknowledges their strong awareness of the idea of practice rather than production. Within the context of writing this short essay on art and / as education, I would like to share with you these 10 statements and also simultaneously add here and there some personal experiences and thoughts on teaching and learning as possible breathing exercises that can be used to question our existing educational system, and its primary function for art students, their teachers, the art world and the social environment in which we are acting as artists.

1 Peter Fischli and David Weiss — In a Restless World, The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, October 15, 1997 — January 11, 1998.

01 The advantage of an art school should be that the art students get to meet other artists that are practicing.

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degrees. Education is not that kind of information. It is about participating in a collective sphere of challenging and critical exchanges and collaborations rather than being taught specific skills and techniques ( even if knowing that certain techniques can be helpful ). It is necessary that we set up a situation where various things can happen, where you can find some oxygen to think of the field of research in terms of a creative process bringing together that which cannot always be joined. And, when entering into a situation you do not know anything about it because you come short of knowledge, you should be able to bring something, which is not about tackling a situation with knowledge but about reacting to it. This can encourage us to work blindly without prejudices which could limit our curiosity.

02 Curiosity is the main constant in my practice as an artist. It gives movement. It is about moving, shifting, evolving, experiencing and setting the known at risk.

“Whatever you do, do something else. Whatever you think, think something else.” Art education should be a sort of proactive performance, most likely a responsive model of how to simultaneously think and do, not as a kind of agenda to cut and paste. This motion takes place in the interface between our different perceptions of what it means to research something in art and science. What is important is to create various connections in between and amongst different positions and disciplines without letting these impulses degenerate into interdisciplinary dogmas. The specificity of the arts is perhaps its self-organization, its use of observation, and its experiential approach to developing ideas and encoding new forms of representation. Artists should not be viewed as specialists or limited to activities defined by certain areas of speciality — which are killing our thinking. They should in fact question this philosophy

of specialization that is foisted onto art education by either scientific models or economic criteria of assessment. Besides specializing, you have to learn to be undisciplined as well as to learn about what is going on around you. It has to do with the attitude of your engagement into research. Specialists are often too protective of their own prerogative, and do not actually work with other colleagues, therefore their students do not learn how to construct a diagonal axis in their research methodology. According to me, the logic of teaching contemporary art remains one of doing some erasures of both students’ and teachers’ preconceptions of art and to view art as a work in progress, a sort of echo of an unfinished business that seeks new and personal vocabularies of artistic research which maybe makes you see the same things with a new light.

The intention of a work is not to defend a thesis but to contribute something to our conversations, to our life.

Individual thinking serves as the foundation for making, but the creative act is carried out within a sticky setting of coming together and many collaborations rather than

self-doubt, self-introspection, and self-discipline because to really become an artist one has to do with making a very deep and hard to get at decision. Education means to draw out of us the best of ourselves. Working alongside these young artists always makes me forget to teach. Education is actually something in between people, and art is basically about the fact that you make a choice.

the hierarchical structure of the traditional artist’s studio, scientist’s laboratory or university’s classroom. The key to its economy is confidence.

and to avoid crystallization of any thought process, to reject all categories of fixed taste, and to suspend the constraints of both personal and historical conditioning, hereby enabling one to acquire new and trembling perspectives. The participants of a 21st century academy should act as diagnosticians of their own art education and forecast future conditions for independent research — running their own projects with lightweight supervision. They should work with forms of knowledge that are fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising, subjective, uneconomic, even produced in the kitchen… and install workshops as a real space for cultural production and not only as an exercise for a pedagogical project.

They should allow events to change them. An art school is not concerned solely with the process of learning, but can be and often is an active site of creativity. I see the academy as an environment of spaces that belong to the students. The crux of the work is to build temporary communities by connecting different people and their practices, and causing the conditions for triggering sparks in between them and materializing

03 Confidence and patience make you feel at home in your own skin. This confidence, this inner strength makes you to continue your life and work by following your own questions, not outside pressures. One thing I find extremely essential nowadays, is the fact that we should have time available and that this time should be as long as possible. I enjoy the notion of slowness I experience in trains and airplanes. Traveling always gives me time to think, to dream, to wander,… to look and listen differently. It is like being in a corridor where and when you often encounter an expanded but still measurable and tangible now. It produces a moment, an arrow. Your arrow. Our arrows. When you move into another sphere of working, it is not an exercise of unilateral transfer or appropriation but rather about creating contact zones and transmitting reciprocity. As a teacher, one should be an emancipator traveling with the students on a journey of the mind. What I personally find most interesting about teaching art is the involvement with helping young artists to gain sense of their own criticality and agency.

Explanation is not only the brutal weapon of pedagogy but also the very connection that creates a social order.

Students should be regarded as competent partners involved in the design of their own learning environment hereby rethinking our conventional teacher-student systems of instruction and assignment. Teaching something that one knew nothing about would encourage them to use their own intelligence. Art education should help them to navigate through the complex environment within which their work will operate. When I am teaching I never say : “This is good and / or this is bad”, but I will talk and lead them to very specific moments of

04 So, a far more significant approach would be to help young people understand what it means to be able to choose. We know that teaching is a political act and involves preparing people to take action in the world. And, because education is not neutral, there is an intrinsic intentionality in its actions, conferring immense responsibility on those who teach at any level. Therefore it is crucial to engage in creative perceptions for which we currently have no definitions,

something that is maybe essentially blurry. Its program should be ad hoc, incomplete, determined by the users and like a swarm or meteorological system, its behavior should be unstable, indeterminate and unknowable in advance so that authorship is dispersed across many initiators and participants. If we want to find out how far the possibilities of education could go, we should not only develop a system to reach certain aimed ideas, but also live inside the processes of education so as to experience a real exchange. Today, if we want to teach someone something we have to teach in silence, with our behavior.

05 The artist Robert Rauschenberg once mentioned : “Silence as an artistic strategy should not be understood as

mere political indifference, rather it can be conceived as a strategy of resistance opening our perception and interpretation to other voices and points of view.” Insight comes from listening to one another and to oneself, rediscovering the understanding that comes from intuition and curiosity, and with which one arrives at spontaneity and improvisation. Intelligence starts with improvisation.

If you sit down again and again with someone things start to happen. Intuition is wild, each and everyone of us becomes conservative as soon as he / she wants things to work out smoothly. Learning is improvisational and like an interactive dance that is anything but simple and obvious ; but yet perhaps the only antidote that we have left against the banality that turns knowledge into power. It is important to emphasize that we do not stand on solid ground and that we start to lay down paths of thinking and doing that give up foundations.

This implies that the definition — and thus also the method — of the work of art is invented and re-invented again during its artistic process and cooked up fresh each time. The further back in time you aim your school the more confident your teachers can be and the more the school delivers answers to known questions. While, the closer you are at the present the more questions arise for which you don’t have answers yet, and if you start to aim your school towards the future of the profession you will have almost only questions that make us imagine what would / could be the artist of the future.

The task I see for art schools today lies in reconciling the experimental, a-conceptual, and radical practices of the individual artist with the unruly, unpredictable, and asymmetrical relations that constitute the world in which such art is fashioned and realized. From this perspective the art academy, on account of its curricular reformulation incorporating the freedom of thinking space, can become an emergent location in the cultural field where innovative processes with regard to production, reflection and presentation as well as opportunities for error and misunderstanding in what we do will be generated.

Maybe, an attempt precisely to reach the point where you are able to make mistakes, because that is — to me — a real form of learning.

06 2

Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts / Lehren und Lernen Als Auffuehrungskuenste — by / von Robert Filliou — and the Reader, if he wishes / und dem Leser, wenn er will — with participation of / under Mitwirkung von John Cage, George Brecht, Dorothy Iannone, Allen Kaprow, Marcelle, Diter Roth, Benjamin Patterson, Vera — Bjössi, Karl Rot, Joseph Beuys — editor Kasper König, ©1970 Verlag Gebr. König, Köln — New York.

You should admit mistakes and doubts. These irregular structures are very interesting not only because of the richness of shapes and processes they produce but also their exceptional tolerance to imperfection. For example, cooking admits — even imposes — imperfection and improvisation. We should consider everything as experiment. The neuroscientist Francisco J. Varela said that : “If you have a brain problem, that is because your brain is too regular. So, you need irregularity of the brain so that your brain is able to explore and create information. But in other cases, such as metabolic systems, you need very regular relations.” So, if you are open to mistakes, surprises and doubts, the unexpected and unscripted might happen and hereby expanding your capacity for 29

translation, interpretation and transformation to become a bridge which creates the possibility in trespassing borders, mixing languages and opening up something else. You always have to have yet another activity that no one knows about, building a sort of reservoir of ideas that you do not exploit directly ( like a garden ).

To contribute a thinking that throws together very different elements to come up with a curious assemblage which does not have the rigor of the disciplines from which it emerges but produces one of its own. Quoting philosopher Gaston Bachelard : “Each and everything secrets its own methodology.”, I would like to mention that one of the greatest strengths of art is that most of time it proposes a non-applicable model that can be applicable at very different times but in some way also resists an immediate consumption. Art is perhaps never made but always being made ? When outcome drives the process we will only go to where we have already been, but if process drives the outcome we may not know yet where we are going.

07 Working outside or in the margin of existing curricula implies voluntary input and deep engagement.

It is a way of rerouting the circuits through which art is produced, distributed, evaluated and consumed.

We urgently need to think and find new forms of learning — necessarily autonomous in their structure and thinking — which could disturb the existing coordinates of art education and curve out spaces where a favorable exchange of feelings and thoughts can be developed, which is much more important than criticizing something. Autonomy does not only mean the political independence of the academy as an institution, but also and mainly the epistemological principle of the freedom of research. Rather than being against, it is about being complementary including all possibilities to imagine and create a diversity of ways of being. When you make space explicit, you make it negotiable. It is not a territory on which pedagogy happens rather the collective activity of making and defending this space is pedagogical. Since I started to teach and learn as performing arts 2, I have tried as much as possible to facilitate and support a student-led learning environment and to install collective and practical experimentations through the making of artistic work. The most striking thing about a group is the circulation of information and the capacity to forge links with others, hereby avoiding debates to impose one’s opinion onto others but instead exchanging ideas — as they aren’t anybody’s, they are just floating around. You can not possess ideas, you can only share them with others. So, what does it mean authorship ? More than designing a new kind of art, such an experiment hopes to design a new kind of artist dropping out of time for moments, repairing to a different place and moving in between times — herewith opening up rather than occupying authorship.

08 There is this sense that first and foremost we are a community of working artists, and so we are not just a group of teachers and students being filtered through an educational system towards degrees and titles. Any organization that wishes to be meaningful — not only to the world outside, but more importantly to itself — must re-examine and self-reflect at each step in its process, to do otherwise is a symptom of death. It is interesting to permanently change the way in which you work as otherwise you risk your work becoming predictable, and that is why I believe in the type of art academy where unpredictability and non-linearity imply the existence of multiple solutions, meaning to choose between various possibilities. The art academy of the 21st century should be an agent not only of artistic growth but also of social relevance and enhancement, and needs to understand that this reciprocity between inside and outside is essential to its future. It must invite the community into its discourse. So, I would like to stress this notion of an educational program that is perhaps based on a sociological idea in which conversation replaces curriculum and where and when people can express and explain what they really want without neglecting the community, and also produce differences from which new things can emerge. Conversation is a very physical activity and a collective project, it is a sort of metabolism. It is important that we do not use differences for arguments, but keep these differences to find out that diversity appears, disappears and reappears in the way things are arranged inside, which is the meaning of self-organization, a basic concept in non-equilibrium physics. For example, the purpose of the different foods serve the same aim, to make some protein or something else which nourishes our body and mind so that each person makes and likes his own choices.

09 Why an Interfaculty ? 3 Why an Extra Academy ? 4 Perhaps it is a sort of residency that offers no diplomas, and which is not a recapitulation of something that exists in an obvious way, but a quest for something we don’t know yet. A welcoming — not imposing — complementarity to what has gone before and a strong desire to undo the coordinates that locate art at any given moment must be the keys to any propositional plan for

Nico Dockx see page 8.

an experimental art school. The class-based hierarchy between popular culture and fine arts, as well as the academic subdivisions into sculpture, painting, drawing, photography, new media, etc. should not need to be dissolved ; but instead additional faculties of knowledge should be introduced through an invitation to embark on new cultural productions. The intention of the work is not to defend a thesis but to make a contribution to life refreshing its many different sensibilities through playful actions of criticality. It could be a place where people can engage their imagination, try out different scenarios of learning, should not have expectations, cook and eat together, talk about social issues, go on field trips, make art and undoubtedly much more. These projects make us think about the potentialities of an art school without walls, perforating the domination of the old routines André Malraux spoke about in his book The Museum without Walls, and developing ideas for which you may not have an answer, or will not need to provide any kind of legitimate, final product but where you move towards discovery, going beyond established programmes of research. How to imagine our education as a sort of archipelago that would accordingly not house a synthesis serving to standardize, but a network of interrelationships between various traditions and perspectives ? An interfaculty or an extra academy is not here to illustrate previously established findings but to function as an active laboratory, where it is precisely through an almost total elimination of your own presence as a personal and subjective author that you allow a polyphonic subjectivity to emerge and resonate — made up of meetings without hierarchy — and to construct spatial conditions which facilitate and communicate the appearance of new conversations, latent encounters and other indeterminate events. I am always already looking for people and social processes because I do not see art as a finished product but as a curious sequence of collective efforts and energies adding things to other things in search for another color, another view. Today, too many things are planned and speculated upon, so it is perhaps a question of growing very personal methods of research and creating an off-beat ambience based on reciprocity and generosity. To me, the best investment we can make, is to give.

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3 Interfaculty started during a symposium event at the Mori Museum in Tokyo ( organized by Clémentine Deliss and David Elliot within the context of the Documenta12 magazines project ) as a joint proposal by Nico Dockx and Jan Mast for a potential faculty of the Future Academy. From 2008 Nico Dockx has been implementing some Interfaculty ideas in his teaching and research activities at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp collaborating there with some young artists under the name of INTERFACULTYgroup.

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EXTRA ACADEMY is the spontaneous alliance of Extra City — Kunsthal Antwerp and the two art schools of the city, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and St Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp.

It is initiated by artists Nico Dockx and Steve Van den Bosch and unfolds in close collaboration with a network of guests and students. EXTRA ACADEMY is a small-scale structural service, ‘in progress’, offering different tools and trajectories in guise of a supplement to or disturbance of academic models and reflexes. Its program of lectures, performances, workshops and screenings is open and is designed to trigger alternative questions about modes of knowledge production, of research and practice. It probes gaps and unexpected solutions, insisting on the point where ideas emanating from either mainstream critical discourse or marginal practices materialize, where they are confronted with their practical consequences.

It believes that theory is not an allegory of practice.

EXTRA ACADEMY listens, looks and wonders. It collects and distributes conversations, it inquires about the educational turn in the arts and about the turn that will dislodge it, while providing time and space for a plasticity of ideas to manifest.

Jan Mast

EXIT INTERZONE AUGENBLICK UND EINMALIGKEIT

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How to survive ? 1 After being bombarded with an unstoppable stream of data that claims to have the invisible merits of objectivity — if only by the sheer number of contributors and methodologies that were involved — during years at educational, cultural and social institutions, I had been brainwashed by the idea of The Unsurpassable Mountain Past. After years of trying to neglect, belittle or ignore this giant, I came to a point were I realised that our history is inevitable. Even more; it might function as a positive and extremely important source of water to the burning desert that is our mind.

1 Reworked excerpt from the lecture 'Tales of Needs or : Interfaculties and Morphologies from a subjective point of view', Jan Mast, 2011, Universidad de Vigo, Spain.

2 Interfaculty started a joint proposal by Nico Dockx and Jan Mast for a potential faculty of the Future Academy. The non-solid, ever-questioning structure of Interfaculty is also reflected in LIGHTMACHINE agency, a mobile production platform, jointly founded with Lieve Laporte that questions the role of the classic gallery and his own work, in which he avoids being labelled a monolithic person.

3

Gehrard Richter, introduction to : Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature, Stanford University Press, 2010.

It is a possibility — an example of choices made.

Classicists, impressionists, realists, modernists, post-modernists, the ‘big global villagist’, … and whatever kind of ‘-ist’. They are all inhabiting my mind. So many people.

Do they leave me some room on that vast ship – dwelling over the seas ? How to survive in that immense vortex of collective memories ? Maybe I should combine and cocktail-shake my questions and ask “how can I become useful again” ? …

And when you hear the sirens’ song, you will observe that all your attention will shift to an undefined point. Infinity. You can’t resist. Nobody can stop you walking towards the dangerous temptations of thoughts.

You want to sail over the edge of the world.

You need to. …

Build yourself a ship, a rocket, a planet. Travel over rainbows throughout the vast emptiness of space.

So many words.

Such simple questions.

I want cold ice cream, moist pussy and a pen.

Or a computer or anything, frankly. To communicate.

To share my stories. I want nothing and most of all I want no more definitions. No academies. No faculties.

No artists.

That's why I — paradoxically — coined Interfaculty during a brainstorm with Nico. 2 No more buildings.

No borders. Just space. Room for questions. And laughter. And sun. A vast universe of blurred definitions.

Every mind makes a space.

This book is a space too. It is also a tool. A possibility. Layers of contributions, dense stories and methodologies. Intentional defocussing. That's why I allow its framework to un-frame itself, to question within a fixed object. Layers over layers over layers. Adding new interpretations, shifting points of view, twisting vocabularies, de-bordering, Unheimlichkeit, titles and authors that untitle and de-author.

And photographs of skies.

These photographs are what I see. They are questioning what I see. Questions for me and for you.

"Photography as a way to freeze the present and create a memory of an irreproducible space." 3

Jan Mast ( born 1980 ) is active as a visual artist — though he prefers the less restrictive term Renaissance man — from an irresistible urge for the visibly hidden. Departing from his Petit Prince wondering love for the surrounding world and from a deeply rooted urge for literary escapades, he uses various media — texts, drawings, paintings, interactive installations, publications and films — to turn personal stories into abstract suggestions / experiences. He lives and works in Ghent as an artist, author, producer, designer and internet wizard. He is co-founder of interdisciplinary projects such as Morphologies ( 2003–… ) and Interfaculty ( 2007–… ), as well as LIGHTMACHINE agency ( 2005–… ) — a curatorial project and experimental production platform / gallery.

He was also deeply involved with Ontroerend Goed ( 2001–2006 ), Richard Foncke Gallery ( 2003–2005 ), and the non-profit On Line vzw ( 2001–2012 ), as a researcher and developer of digital archiving systems for artists. He is represented by LIGHTMACHINE agency.

Dieter Lesage

EXTRA UNIVERSITY

The title of my lecture, here at Extra City, is Extra University.

37

There are many different ways to understand this title and my lecture will consist both of an exploration of these different meanings, as well as of a critical investigation of possible links between these different meanings. Obviously, the title is also intended as a pun

things that universities are talking about when they talk about things that are “extra university”.

For me, as a professor at a university, my talk here at Extra City is certainly an “extra university activity”, for which I will get a fee, the sum of which I will declare as extra income to a tax office in Belgium, the country where I work, as well as a tax office in Germany, the country where I live. And for some of you too, either stu-

on the name of the place where we are. As I hope to make clear throughout my lecture, there is more to this pun than utter linguistic resonance. Indeed, there is a strong link between the topic of my lecture and places like Extra City.

In Latin, of course, “extra” can be an adverb or a preposition. As a preposition, it can mean “outside” and the example many Latin dictionaries give of the use of “extra” as a preposition meaning “outside” is the expression “extra urbem”, “outside of the city”.

As an adverb, “extra” in Latin can mean “on top”, a meaning which is very vivid in our contemporary use of the word, if one thinks of all the useless “extra’s” one always gets when buying anything that you really need.

As an adverb, “extra” in Latin can also mean “apart from”, a meaning which today seems to be lost : “extra quam qui”, “apart from the one who”.

Extra University may be the title of my lecture and thus a topic and a theme that I want to explore, I did not, however, invent the expression “extra university”.

The expression is used by universities themselves, for

dents or colleagues, the sheer attendance to this lecture too may be some kind of “extra university activity”. As it happens, my lecture is the twenty-first one in a lecture series, jointly organised by St Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, or at least organised by two people working at these venerable institutions, Steve Van den Bosch and Nico Dockx. And therefore, I imagine that there might or even should be students and / or professors here participating in what their institutions would have called “extra university activities”, if they would have been universities.

However, they aren’t universities, maybe we should say, even if we don’t want it or don’t like it or even heavily oppose it, that they aren’t universities yet, with all the polemic that this yet promises to provoke sooner or later, this evening, tomorrow morning, or the day after tomorrow. As these two art academies, who organise this lecture series in close cooperation with Extra City are no universities, or not universities yet, the lecture series in which my lecture is the twenty-first one, is called Extra

instance, to designate a category of professorial activities : their so-called “extra university” activities.

Often the expression “extra university” is also used to designate a category of activities by students : “extra university activities” is often used as synonymous for “extra-muros” or “extra-curricular” activities.

The expression “extra university” is also used, within the context of higher education, to designate a certain type of research institutions which are “extra university institutions”, in German “außer-universitäre Forschungsinstitutionen”, in French “institutions extra-universitaires”.

So there are ways in which universities themselves talk about things that are, from the point of view of the universities themselves, “extra university”, such as certain activities by professors or students, and certain institutions. And there is the “extra university” that I want to talk about, which doesn’t necessarily refer to the same

Academy. Thus we get another ‘extra’, an extra ‘extra’, as it were, to join our extraordinary reflections at Extra City on the Extra University.

Now that you know that Extra University is the title of a lecture in a series called Extra Academy at a place called Extra City, I’m tempted to suggest that the city, the university and the academy, which all three seem to have an extra, are, in truth, each other’s extra. There are cities who like to call themselves university cities, the presence of a university in the city seems to give them something extra. Universities and academies alike pride themselves to be located in certain cities, their location in certain cities seem to give them something extra.

Universities and academies alike try to attract students with the promise of all kinds of extra university activities or, if you wish, extra academic activities, which most likely will take place in the city in which the university or academy is located. The idea is that you come to study

at a particular university or a particular art academy, not only because of its study programme or its teachers, or its infrastructure. No, the choice of a student is also based on the city in which that particular university or that particular art academy is located. When considering a university or an art academy as a place for study, a prospective student also considers its “extras” and the city where this university or this art academy is located is one of its most important extras. The theme of the relationship between the university and the city, or between the art academy and the city, as relationships in which the university and the city, or the art academy and the city, are each other’s extras, could be developed further.

However, when it comes to the analysis of the triangle constituted by the city, the university and the academy, I would like to take this opportunity here, not to say what I think of the mayor of this city and its surveillance cameras, a topic on which the students of this city have their thing to say if only the mayor would listen to them, but to consider the relationship between the university and the academy. I would like to propose to put this

regional implementations has met with a great variety of resistances. 2 Several critiques have addressed the issue of Bologna’s hidden ( or not too hidden ) neoliberal agenda. Indeed, although in postwar Italian political history, Bologna had been notorious as a bastion of communism, in more recent European political history, “Bologna”, rightly or wrongly, became the signifier par excellence of the imposition of a neoliberal agenda in educational matters. Since its meeting in Prague in 2001, the Bologna Follow-Up Group has at least paid lip-service to this criticism both by stressing the social dimensions of Higher Education and acknowledging the responsibility of public authorities for it. At the same time, however, many countries participating in the Bologna Process used “Bologna” as an excuse for reforms in higher education that were not strictly part of the Bologna Declaration. 3 For instance, in many German Länder, university study fees were raised simultaneously with the introduction of the Bologna Process and thus, for German students, “Bologna” became a synonym of elitism. Local authorities did

relationship under heavy institutional surveillance, if we want to avoid that, instead of an extra academy, we get one academy less.

For some years now and particularly since the Bologna Declaration of 1999, the key issue in continental European arts higher education is an obligation to become “academic”. 1 Ironically, since the classic representative institution of arts Higher Education has typically been called an ‘Academy’, a pressing question concerns how Academies should become “academic”.

Distinct from Universities, with the concept of ‘Academies’, I will refer here to all specialist institutions of arts Higher Education, whether they teach visual or fine arts, film, drama or music, and whether or not they are indeed titled ‘Academy’. So, for the purpose of my lecture, both St Lucas University College of Art and Design Antwerp and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp are, obviously, academies, even if we find the term ‘academy’ only in the name of one of both. Particularly confusing for Academies post-Bologna was that many of them had previously been engaged precisely in ped-

not directly challenge this perception, as it was much easier to deal with the criticism of their young voters by telling them it was, as usual, all Europe’s fault, rather than explaining the proper motives for this national or regional political decision.

In educational terms, the academisation process was felt by many arts Higher Education institutions as a verdict, effectively declaring : “Although you call yourself by the name of Academy, you aren’t academic — yet”.

The change required, however, was not to restore the Academy’s original character. Arts academies were neither being requested to engage in critical self-analysis nor to recall the highlights of their histories. The Academies were instead required to listen to their big Other, the Universities, who in some countries and regions in Europe proposed to tell Academies how to become academic. Universities which had no experience of teaching practice-based arts in the many decades or even centuries of their venerable existence, supposed that they could assess whether art Academies had reached an acceptable academic level in teaching art. This is

agogical efforts to ensure that learning and teaching at Academies would become less “academic” than it used to be. Whereas at universities, the adjective “academic” sounds like a generic quality label, at Academies the term had become an insult, a signifier of a lack of artistic quality. Thus, at the very moment that many European Academies had become very anxious not to teach their students to produce academic art, they were required, post-Bologna, to “academicize” in order to get accreditation for their artistic programmes. Though a play on words is involved in this shift — the “Academic” art of which modernism wanted to dispose, is not “academic” as used in universities to indicate “scientifically rigorous” — important issues of differing epistemologies, codes and conventions are at stake.

However, this is not the only reason why the academisation process launched in 1999 by the Bologna Declaration and its various national and

exactly what happened here in the Dutch-speaking community of Belgium which, for political, ideological reasons with which I cannot identify, is all too often sloppily called Flanders, although there is a difference between the Dutch-speaking community of Belgium and Flanders. However, as I don’t want to talk about the mayor of this city, I will not go into this topic either.

Now, though the Universities stressed that the evaluation of teaching and research can only qualify as academic if it is done by ‘peers’, they failed to see that university academics without any experience of practice-based arts education or artistic research could not properly be considered as ‘peers’ of Academies on their own terms. The Universities, though unqualified as peers, were not about to disqualify themselves as the proper institutions to evaluate the academisation of Academies. Indeed, universities were very happy to be able to evaluate Academies, and to play a decisive role

1

This is the text of Lecture #21 in the lecture series Extra Academy, held on May 6, 2014 at Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp, Belgium, at the invitation of Steve Van den Bosch and Nico Dockx.

The lecture is a reworking and recontextualisation of some ideas, which I have already presented in a few publications, such as : Dieter Lesage, ‘PaR in Continental Europe : A Site of Many Contests’, in : Robin Nelson ( ed. ), Practice as Research in the Arts. Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances, Basingstoke / New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 142–151 ; Dieter Lesage, ‘Who’s afraid of artistic research ? On measuring artistic research output’, Art & Research. A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods, 2009, vol. 2, n.

2 : www.artandresearch. org.uk / v2n2 / lesage. html ; Dieter Lesage, ‘The Academy is Back : On Education, the Bologna Process, and the Doctorate in the Arts’, e-flux journal, n°4, March 2009 : www.eflux.com / journal / view / 45 ; Dieter Lesage, ‘On Supplementality’, in : Jan Cools & Henk Slager ( eds. ), Agonistic Academies, Brussels, Sint-Lukas Books, 2011, pp. 75–86.

2

See : Richard Münch, Akademischer Kapitalismus. Über die politische Ökonomie der Hochschulreform, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2011, pp.

328–380 ; Richard Münch, Globale Eliten, lokale Autoritäten. Bildung und Wissenschaft unter dem Regime von PISA, McKinsey & Co, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 2009.

3

Whereas I consider a few aspects of the Bologna Process as strategically interesting, Chris Lorenz is much more severe : Chris Lorenz, ‘If You’re So Smart, Why Are You Under Surveillance. Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management’, Critical Inquiry, 38, Spring 2012, pp. 599–629.

4

In order to be accepted as a participating country in the Bologna Process, nation states don’t have to be a Member state of the European Union. According to the Berlin Communiqué of September 19, 2003, all European countries that signed the European Cultural Convention, accept the basic premises of the Bologna Declaration, and strive to implement the Process at the national level, can become participating countries in the Bologna Process. The current number of countries participating in the Bologna Process is forty-six. San Marino and Monaco, two more countries that signed the European Cultural Convention, are not participating in the Bologna Process for lack of higher education institutions.

in the procedural machine which in time would accredit programmes at Academies as being academic. In some countries, as well as in the Dutch-speaking community of Belgium, Universities also took it upon themselves to deliver the newly created doctor’s degree in the arts.

Whilst UK universities have been delivering practice-based PhD’s in the arts, for three decades, and while Finland has developed a practice-based arts PhD over two decades, it is only since the Berlin Declaration of 2003 that many continental European countries have, at varying speeds and within different institutional and legal frameworks, introduced the PhD or the Doctorate in the Arts. At the meeting of the Bologna Follow-Up Group in Berlin in 2003 the third cycle leading to the doctorate award became a priority of European Higher Education policy and the idea of a doctorate award in the arts emerged. 4 If artistic study programmes had to conform to the structure of Bachelor and Master cycles, it seemed logical to establish a third cycle of artistic study courses leading to a doctorate in the arts, an extra cycle next to the already existing artistic bachelor and

of artistic research is sufficient in order to evaluate its originality and relevance.

Although there are notable exceptions, the demand of a written supplement is most insistently voiced not by peers, but by non-peers, that is by people who are not acquainted with the arts and understandably feel insecure about its evaluation. The different traditions of the Academies and Universities, broadly reflecting a separation between practice and theory, still obtains in continental Europe where, unlike in the UK, an appropriate accommodation between institutions and epistemologies has not yet been developed. Historically, Academy peers have mostly been able competently to assess artistic research without the aid of supplementary writings. The audiovisual literacy of artists enables them to read the artistic research that is to be evaluated, even if in a certain sense there is nothing to read. Under the new requirement for a written supplement, “peer” assessors seem now to be basing their assessments primarily on a reading of the written supplement, as if it were the doctorate itself, considering the artistic portfolio merely

master study courses. The doctorate in the arts became the subject of heated discussions. Let me focus for one moment on one particular aspect, which is the debate about the format of the doctorate in the arts.

Academic curriculum developers and research administrators involved in the establishment of the rules of their respective institutions for the doctorate in the arts paid some attention to the demand that the new doctorate should respect the specificity of an artistic education. They accepted, for example, the idea that artists might present a portfolio of their work in the context of a doctorate. However, many of them fiercely defended — and still do defend — the idea that a doctorate in the arts is inconceivable without a written supplement.

As a result, the format of the doctorate in the arts in many continental European countries mostly requires both an artistic portfolio and something extra, namely a written supplement. Though Robin Nelson’s approach in the 2013 book Practice as Research in the Arts differs in that it allows for the possibility of the submission of practice alone for a PhD, typically it involves what Nel-

as a supplementary illustration to it. In a worst case scenario, academically trained art historians with a hobby as amateur photographers might obtain a doctorate in the arts, merely because they are academically trained enough to produce an academically valid written supplement to a portfolio of doubtful photographic work, whilst world class musicians might get in trouble concerning their doctorate in the arts because the written supplement to the dozens of CD’s of their work as a performer and interpreter constituting their portfolio does not refer in an academically proper way to existing musicological literature.

In the interests of avoiding such apparent absurdity, I propose to make a case that the evaluation of a doctorate in the arts should focus on the capacity of the doctoral student to speak in the medium of his or her choice. If this medium is film, or video, or painting, or sculpture, or sound, or fashion, or even if the doctoral or master student wants to mix media, assessment will require from a peer jury ways of reading, interpretation, and discussion other than those required by a written

son calls “complementary writings”. 5 I propose here to re-visit the role and status of writing in “academic” study, making the case for a “practice alone” model.

The insistence on the obligation to produce a written supplement as an extra to the artistic portfolio which currently dominates continental European universities appears to demonstrate a lack of confidence, either in the capacity of the arts to speak in a meaningful, complex, and critical way in a medium of their choosing, or in their own capacity to make sound judgments on the meaning, complexity and criticality of artistic output as such. In contrast, I hold that the presentation of the results of artistic research in general — of which the doctorate in the arts is only one particular example — does not necessarily require an explanatory text as a supplement.

For an evaluation by peers, the art work itself ( be it a theatre, dance or musical performance, an installation, a film, a video, or a fashion show ) which is the result

5

See Robin Nelson ( ed. ), Practice as Research in the Arts. Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances, Basingstoke / New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

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academic text. To impose an additional medium on the artist is to fail to recognize the artist as an artist. An artist who wants to obtain a doctorate in the arts should be given the academic freedom to choose his or her own medium. It may be that he or she chooses text ( in words as we ordinarily understand it ) as the most appropriate medium for his or her artistic purposes but it must be his or her choice, not an imposition from outside of the domain.

Some of those who advocate that a doctorate in the arts should consist not only of an artistic portfolio but also a textual supplement modified their position when it transpired that artists might be daunted by the requirement to write an academic text. A pluralist attitude towards mode of expression has been adopted towards supplements in some circles. As long as it looks like text, this supplement does not need to take an academic form but might be a literary text, a diary, maybe even

a theatre play or a series of poems. However, in trying to sustain the requirement of the textual supplement by this means, its defenders are perhaps revealing that their requirement has always been nothing but a form of bureaucratic conformism. In the first instance the claim was that it would be impossible to judge an artistic portfolio, not because it is a portfolio, but because it is artistic, not academic. A textual supplement was needed because it would be more articulate and could thus be judged more easily. The idea now seems to be that artistic output can only be adequately judged if there is some form of written text, academic or not, that supplements it. The implication is that some form of extra text remains necessary in order to decipher the artistic work of the artist who wants to become a doctor in the arts.

But if the extra supplement itself also becomes artistic, the question arises of how it might be easier to judge an extra artistic textual supplement than an artistic portfolio.

Defenders of the extra textual supplement model may claim that they take a more intellectual or reflexive approach to the arts. However, this hierarchical claim

writing. In a sense, one can say that Derrida’s doctorate merely consisted of a philosophical portfolio, without an academic supplement. Derrida simply couldn’t accept that a traditional doctorate in philosophy was not supposed to reflect in the way it was written a fundamental thinking on the question of writing.

Derrida’s philosophy of writing, as he developed it in the books that constituted the portfolio which he presented, is insightful in the debate about the format of the doctorate in the arts. The idea that an artistic portfolio should be supplemented with a extra written text in order to obtain a meaning which can be discussed intersubjectively misses the point that the artistic portfolio itself is always already text. This is a consequence of the famous Derridian dictum, ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ ( there is no outside of text, or, if you will, for the purpose of this lecture : there is no extra. ) A firmly established, but quite ridiculous, misinterpretation of Derrida’s philosophy which reads him as saying that there is nothing but text amounts to a supposed claim that there is no outside world. However, Derrida’s idea that there

has been challenged by some major intellectual reflections on the notion of “text”, notably those of Jacques Derrida. Interestingly, Derrida’s philosophy about text was actually born out of a pragmatic reflection on how to write a doctoral thesis and, in the context of the debate about doctoral models it is worth re-visiting some of his thinking.

Derrida’s struggle with this question began in Massachusetts. In 1956–1957, the young French philosopher who just had earned his agrégation at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, went for the first time in his life to the United States with a grant to study for a year at Harvard University. As Geoffrey Bennington wrote in Derridabase, Derrida came to Cambridge, Massachusetts to check the microfilm archives of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, at least that was his ‘pretext’. 6 Derrida was interested in achieving a doctorate, but struggled tremendously with all the philosophical questions that came with the project of writing a doctoral dissertation. The most urgent question for him at that time was how to write a doctoral thesis in philosophy.

is nothing but text means that the outside world is itself text too : not text is everything, but everything is text.

Text as such can’t be an extra, because that which it is supposed to supplement, is itself also already text.

Angry at the way in which some American philosophers had been trying to ridicule his philosophy as an absurd form of scepticism, Derrida remarked :

Through his reading of James Joyce and his study of Edmund Husserl in Massachusetts, Derrida attempted to fix not just the theme, but also the form of the doctoral dissertation he planned to write once back home. For Derrida, the philosopher, it was inconceivable to write a philosophical thesis without ever asking the philosophical question ‘what is writing ?’ The project of writing a doctoral thesis thus led Derrida to an immense intellectual struggle with the question of writing as he resisted traditional academic standards and expectations. 7 Indeed, only in 1980, at the age of fifty, did Derrida obtain the so-called Doctorat d’Etat, a special type of doctorat, which until 1985 it was possible to obtain in France, not on the basis of a conventional doctoral thesis but on the basis of one’s “work”. Indeed, for his doctorat d’état, Derrida presented and defended — through a long oral examination by a jury — three books, which all deal in one way or another with the question of

I wanted to recall that the concept of text I propose is limited neither to the graphic, nor to the book, nor even to discourse, and even less to the semantic, representational, symbolic, ideal, or ideological sphere.

What I call ‘text’ implies all the structures called ‘real’, ‘economic’, ‘ historical’, ‘socio-institutional’, in short : all possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that ‘there is nothing outside the text’ … It does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretive experience. The latter neither yields meaning nor assumes it except in a movement of differential referring”. 8 According to Derrida, then, a portfolio which is a selection of artworks is definitely always already text in itself. As a matter of fact a portfolio will most likely be a presentation and / or a documentation of artworks, rather than the works itself, which means that it is, in its presentation or documentation, already differentially mediating and reflecting the artworks and that text in the narrow sense of the word might even already be part of it. The artistic portfolio as a documenting and representing form already speaks of the work, rather than that it would be the work itself. At the same time it is also work done by the artist, an artistic work that represents and documents other artistic work by the artist. The portfolio itself has to be qualified as text, both in the expanded as in the narrow sense of the term.

Derrida’s expanded concept of “text” implies the need for an expanded notion of “reading” as well as

6

See Geoffrey Bennington & Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, Paris, Seuil, 1991, p. 303.

7

Derrida beautifully described this struggle in the presentation of his doctorate : Jacques Derrida, Ponctuations : le temps de la thèse’ in : Id., Du droit à la philosophie, Paris, Galilée, 1991, pp. 439–459.

8

In an interview at the end of a book in which he discusses among others J.L. Austin’s and John Searle’s philosophy of language, Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 148.

of an expanded notion of “writing”. As Derrida wrote in Of Grammatology, “And thus we say ‘writing’ for all that gives rise to an inscription in general, whether it is literal or not and even if what it distributes in space is alien to the order of the voice : cinematography, choreography, of course, but also pictorial, musical, sculptural ‘writing’ 9. Here, Derrida’s examples of writing are ( still ) all artistic. Later, Derrida would expand the concept of writing even more, but the first and self-evident move in his expansion of the concept of writing was to include all art forms. Film, dance, music, painting, sculpture, all of them are in themselves forms of writing. Art is writing and is therefore to be read. Reading however is not just about decoding the meaning of signs. Reading has to come to terms with the fact that it will never be possible to determine the meaning of artistic work.

The demand for a textual supplement to the artistic portfolio may be explained by a fear for the constitutive abysmal character of meaning. But it also reveals a presentist philosophy of text which, since Derrida, has long proven unsatisfactory. To ask for a textual supplement

9

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, ( translated

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ), Baltimore & London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. 9.

10

Eran Schaerf, ‘Unsubstantiated Investigation’, in : Dieter Lesage & Kathrin Busch ( eds. ), A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher.

The Academy and the Bologna Process, AS#179, Antwerp, MuHKA, 2007, pp. 108–112.

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already a supplement to the painting. The question then becomes from what point exactly a supplement to an artwork, which may be considered by the artist as inherent to the artwork, becomes the kind of supplement that is considered a necessary requirement in order to present in an academic way the results of artistic research.

The “academic” requirement or a textual supplement to the artwork considered as a legitimate presentation of the results of artistic research would appear not to take seriously the artwork itself and all the writing that is involved in the production of the artwork. In other words, the academic requirement of a textual supplement to an artwork seriously lacks seriousness.

Artistic research can involve many different things : avidly reading about a specific subject matter, randomly visiting exhibitions and confronting oneself with other artistic positions, trying out the visual, acoustic, or haptic impressions of different materials, or even ritually going to the flea market in search of nothing in particular, as Eran Schaerf once beautifully and convincingly described one aspect of his practice of

is obviously not going to save us from the problem of interpretation. Instead of asking for an explanatory supplement, juries should confront themselves with their fear and have the courage to try to read what is already written. The argument that I posit against the textual supplement should not be understood as the idea that the artwork in itself is already full of meaning, but rather that there is no way to remedy the abysmal structure of meaning inherent in the artwork itself. The demand for the supplement suggests that there might be a way to fill the gap. What is at work in this demand is one particular logic of supplementarity, which one could define as the fiction that the open meaning of the artwork can and should be revealed by a supplementary explanation.

However, one should stress the difference between the supplement to the artwork as an academic requirement for having the right explanation on the one hand and a certain aesthetics of the supplement which is inherent in the work of many artists on the other hand, where the supplement is not seen as the explanation of

‘artistic research’. 10 What all these different practices have in common, is the need of time, time to think, time to see, time to waste. As time is money, time is never given to anyone for free, and certainly not to the artist.

In consequence, everybody is under extreme pressure to explain why he or she needs so much time for their projects. Accordingly one aspect of the discourse on artistic research is the rhetoric used to convince funding authorities that the artistic practice proposed is in fact also research.

In a few European countries, a part of the research budget is now specifically allocated to artistic research.

This is a great advance for the Academy in these countries, because it allows it to become a major site of artistic research and to establish itself more self-consciously within the arts field, not in the margins. The Academy is thus back as a credible partner in the arts world, as a site of artistic production, as a site of artistic research.

As a theoretician, I am particularly delighted that the Academy proves to be a space where artists and theoreticians might work on common artistic research

the work, but rather as constitutive of the work itself. This artist’s supplement is not what gives us the solution, the answer, the right interpretation, but rather postpones the solution, the answer, the right interpretation even more.

So ‘supplementarity’ can also be defined as an artistic strategy to escape the closure of interpretation, to leave all interpretations open, or to make interpretation even more the complex issue it always already is.

In the discussion on the format of the presentation of the results of artistic research in general and of the doctorate in the arts in particular, one may observe a tendency to appropriate thankfully the artist’s supplement as if it were conforming to the spirit of the required academic supplement, while in fact its logic is quite the opposite. Of course, there are artworks that involve certain kinds of supplements and there are aspects of artworks that could be considered as supplements. One could argue, for instance, that the title of a painting is

projects. However, the nascent comeback of the Academy remains in a precarious position. Great vigilance will be necessary in order to prevent the return of the Academy from becoming a Pyrrhic victory. Wherever the Academy gets funded for its artistic research, there is also talk about the need of a “return on investment”, of “research output” assessment’, or “matching funding”.

An attempt is implicitly made to use the research mission of the Academy as a means capitalistically to discipline the Academy with professors perhaps being expected to establish spin-off firms.

The Bologna Process facilitated the recognition of ‘artistic research’ as a fundamental task of arts Academies, but Universities and Academies have since struggled both with the concept of artistic research itself and the question of how to assess its outputs. But it is not in the arts alone that questions of the means of assessment are contested. Within the scientific community itself the

‘double blind peer review’ norm has been under attack for many years and, motivated by scientific studies, a number of high-profile scientific journals, such as the British Medical Journal, have made the decision to abandon it in favour of open review, where the name of the referee is known to the author of the article under review. 11 Today, it seems a scientifically proven fact that the quality of open review is as good as the quality of blind review. 12 Similarly, when it is proposed that citation analysis provides an objective criterion to measure research output, authorities are, deliberately or not, conceiling the fact that citation analysis is considered by many in the scientific community as a very flawed procedure to measure research output. 13 In discussions between Universities and Academies, however, it has been suggested that Academies should invent ‘analogous’ tools for measuring artistic research output. And thus it happens that some people are beginning to dream of an Art Citation Index while others are talking about the need to classify artistic venues in the same way as academic journals are classified according to

outside of the university. And no doubt spaces like Extra City should remain … extra Academy. The Academy should remain an outside to the University, as much as art institutions, like Extra City, should remain an outside to the Academy. This need for an outside position is, as a matter of fact, also in the interest of those Universities who now seem to believe that it would be great to swallow the Little Others that are the Academies. The production of art cannot be a mission of a University, for art cannot but want to make the University into an artistic project. Or to put it the other way around : if Academies would get swallowed by Universities, their mission will be to subvert the Universities from within. Academies can work with Universities, but they should not work like Universities, and certainly not within Universities. It would be unfair and unprofessional, if Universities who certainly have a mission in the sciences, but who never had a mission in the arts, would suddenly coopt the arts as a mission. Academies therefore should stay outside of the University, extra university.

Unless. Unless one would be willing to accept that

their “impact factor”. It might not take long before somebody invents the new science of “artometrics”.

Tendencies like these in the institutional discussions on artistic research are at once dominant and off the mark, and the discussions themselves therefore are trying. But, whilst many aspects of research and its assessment are in question, the arts have an opportunity to establish their own methodologies and criteria for assessment. Whereas I am convinced that the discourse on artistic research allows people working in Academies to reinvent the Academy as an autonomous site of production, we should refuse a supplementary rhetoric that presents itself as an inevitable corollary to the discourse on artistic research.

For all these reasons, I strongly oppose the idea that the Academies should be integrated into the Universities.

Academies should remain … extra University, meaning :

Academies, as institutions of higher education with a specific mission in the arts, would be granted all the rights that Universities as institutions of higher education with a specific mission in the sciences already have.

Unless, thus, one would be willing to accept that Academies, not Universities, are competent when it comes to awarding doctoral degrees in the arts. And if this means, that Academies should be considered as Universities, if this means that Academies should be legally attributed the status of a University, well, then, let them become … extra Universities. This would be a very smart thing to do. Academies would certainly agree to become Universities of the Arts, next to the already existing Universities of the Sciences. There might even be a few study courses at these Universities of the Sciences that are not too happy too and would be delighted to join the Universities of the Arts. And so we might welcome

11

For a motivation of this change in editorial policy of the British Medical Journal : Richard Smith, ‘Opening up BMJ peer review. A beginning that should lead to complete transparancy’, British Medical Journal, vol. 318, 2 January 1999, pp. 4–5.

12

Sandra GoldbeckWood, ‘Evidence on peer review — scientific quality control or smokescreen ?’, British Medical Journal, vol. 318, 2 January 1999, pp.

44–45. On this issue, see also : Susan Van Rooyen, Fiona Godlee, Stephan Evans, Nick Black, Richard Smith, ‘Effect of open peer review on quality of reviews and on reviewers’ recommendations : a randomised trial’, British Medical Journal, vol. 318, 2 January 1999, pp. 23–27.

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Dieter Lesage ( born 1966 ) studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain ( Leuven ). From 1988 until 1990, he attended the seminars of Jacques Derrida as an ‘étudiant libre’ at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 1993 he obtained his Doctorate in Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy in Louvain on his dissertation Names like Faces. A consolidation theory of proper names [Namen als gezichten. Een consolidatietheorie van de eigennaam]. Dieter Lesage was a research-assistant at the National Scientific Research Foundation of Belgium ( 1989–1993 ), a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Louvain ( 1993–1995 ) and a scientific attaché at the Center of European Culture of the Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and the Arts of Belgium ( 1994 ). In 1998, he became a part-time lecturer at the department RITS of Erasmus University College Brussels, where he was appointed as a full-time professor of arts, politics and culture in 2006. Dieter Lesage was a visiting professor at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem De Kooning Academie ( 2003–2005 ) and at the Institut für Kulturtheorie of the Leuphana Universität Lüneburg ( 2007 ). He is a member of the Editorial Board of Afterall. A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry and member of the International Advisory Board of Art & Research. A Journal of Ideas, Contexts and Methods ( Glasgow ). He is the author of, among others, Peut-on encore jouer Hamlet ?, Paris, Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2002 [Can one still play Hamlet ?] ; Vertoog over verzet. Politiek in tijden van globalisering, Amsterdam / Antwerpen, Meulenhoff / Manteau, 2004 [Discourse on Resistance.

Politics in the times of globalisation]. With Kathrin Busch, he is a co-editor of A Portrait of the Artist as a Researcher : The Academy and the Bologna Process, Antwerp, MuHKA, 2007. With German artist Ina Wudtke, he wrote the essay Black Sound White Cube ( Vienna, Loecker Verlag, 2010 ) and curated the eponynous exhibition at KunstQuartier Bethanien in Berlin in 2011. With Belgian artist Herman Asselberghs, he wrote the script for Asselberghs’ video After Empire, which has been designed and published as an eponymous book by AraMER ( Ghent, 2013 ). As of October 1, 2013, Dieter Lesage took take office as the new Director of RITS | School of Arts ( Erasmus University College Brussels ), one of Belgium’s leading film ( fiction, documentary, animation ), theater, television and radio schools.

Ever since Eugene Garfield published the first Science Citation Index in 1964, it has been a very controversial instrument, the eventual misuses of which being recognized from the very beginning by leading scientists, such as Nobel Prize winner Joshua Lederberg. Lederberg, while promoting it as a tool for research, fiercely rejected it as a tool for measuring research output. Not only are all known citation indexes far from complete, they are also terribly biased in favor of articles and against books. To that one might add that the Science Citation Index and the other citation indexes are products sold by Thomson, a media corporation which also owns a lot of academic journals.

philosophy, cultural studies, gender studies, women studies, literature and all those disciplines that get snubbed because they are not scientific ‌ The only discussion the Academies would have to start among themselves is : how many Universities of the Arts can we reasonably want ? Of course, there will be painful issues to discuss, but would it not be much more worthwile to engage in this type of discussion and to try, for once, a rational rationalisation, than all the irrational rationalisations that Academies have already suffered throughout the last twenty years and will continue to suffer if they get swallowed by their Big Other, the University ?

Having said all this, the lecture series Extra Academy, here at Extra City, seems to me the right place and time for a Call to All Academies that I would like to launch : stay extra University, in order to become an Extra University.

Doesn’t this sound like a most daring Plan ?

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Louwrien Wijers

TEACHING&LEARNING GOES FACE-TO-FACE AND MIND-DIRECT In his Non-School, artist Robert Filliou practised an open dialogue form and formulated such aims as “a carefree exchange of information and experience” ; “no student, no teacher” ; “perfect freedom” ; and “sometimes speaking, sometimes listening”. Play is especially highly valued as an instrument in Filliou’s Non-School.

He feels that every person is a genius. “Genius” and “talent” are the central words for him.

anarchic situation in which people do what they want, not what they are obliged to do.”

The pacifist and Buddhist, Robert Filliou, tried to bring together art and life. Art was for him a spiritual adventure. It was in this particular mind-set that he joined the Fluxus movement in 1962. He wanted to pass on a new “art-of-life”. He hoped that the mental qualities of art and the practice of art would spread to become the most important daily attitude, so we could see everything as art. He himself saw art in terms of the ethics of life.

“We should concentrate on innocence, imagination, integrity and quality”, he strongly encouraged. “When we would all be artists, we would all be free.” He refused to see art as a field in which one can make a career.

All that is mentioned above comes from the book Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, by Robert Filliou, 1970, Verlag Gebr. König, Köln — New York.

Filliou’s series the “Principle of Equivalence” gives points for a permanent creation of continuous freedom.

What he calls the “Principle of Non-Comparison” gives the possibility to get rid of the existing value theory, he promised.

All Robert Filliou wanted was to find a new value theory in order to shape new social models. His way of life was very ethical thanks to his protestant background. One definition he gave about himself was “a one-eyed, good-for-nothing Huguenot”. His “Filliousophy” was : “A happy geniushood that everyone is able to use.” He proposed going from “work as punishment” to “work as play”. “This way a truly harmonious relationship between people and their surrounding will evolve”, he claimed.

In March 1967 Robert Filliou taped a conversation with John Cage, who emphasised : “The entire social structure must change just as the structures in art have changed. There is a need for it to happen, particularly in educational structures. There will be more and more people, so society will be geared, not for employment but for unemployment. We want a flexibility and an 45

In 1968, Robert Filliou talked with Joseph Beuys about : “A citizen’s salary as a way of freeing the creative strength of people. A basic income that every person needs in order to free their own ideas.” Beuys’ main slogan soon became: “Creativity is our Real Capital”.

At the request of Joseph Beuys I brought HH the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet together with Beuys in Bonn, 27 October 1982. During that whole day event, where sixty artists and art lovers were present, Robert Filliou proposed to organise events where the ideas of visual artists could be exchanged instead of just showing their works of art. “What a different Kassel Documenta that would give,” Robert said with a big smile.

September 1983 at a meeting in Austria of scientists with the Dalai Lama nuclear physicist Fritjof Capra asked me to acquaint scientists of today with the leading contemporary artists. “We don’t know the artists,” Capra pointed out. Only days later I woke up with the vision that bringing together the most important thinkers of our time from art, science and spirituality could offer

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an effective contribution to the future of society. My logic was that we now had airplanes to make top people meet, which never before had been the case. Knowing economics occupied an important place in the thinking of Robert Filliou, John Cage, Joseph Beuys and many artists, the point of departure for “Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy” was to make current transformations in the three pillars of culture effective in the world economy.

In his inaugural address for ‘Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy’ in 1990, HH the Dalai Lama said : “Ultimately, if we analyse reality, the essence that we find is that things exist only by means of labelling and convention.”

The Dalai Lama highlighted his personal focus : “I believe that human affection is the most precious thing.

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According to a neuroscientist, who is my friend, for the child’s brain to develop, especially right after birth, the physical touch of the mother is the crucial factor for a healthy development of the brain. It shows that the physical part of us needs the other’s affection. Even plants grow better, if you just use nice words and show a friendly attitude.”

different. Then eventually something new will come.

If we can listen and share the deeper meanings, a coherent consciousness may arise over the whole world, which is capable of peace and the decrease of suffering.”

Theoretical physicist Professor David Bohm memorated at the inauguration that originally art, science and spirituality were not separate and economy was simple.

“This conference is to begin the process of bringing them all together again.”

In Panel 1, 10 September 1990, the artist Robert Rauschenberg stated : “It is one of man’s major fallacies to assume that he is in control. There is very little respect and understanding for other species that share the world with us, and are probably more responsible for sustaining it.”

Professor Bohm agreed with Filliou : “One could compare life itself to art. Many people have done so.

It calls for a creative response moment by moment. So art points directly to the way of life. Therefore art is very significant.”

“Until recently science was mechanistic and reductionistic. Now it is possible to hold another view, namely through quantum mechanics and relativity that has room for the creative.”

“As a matter of fact science as we know it cannot give meaning to life as a whole. Mechanistic science is rather limited. The artist can point to a deeper significance and value, suggesting how life as a whole can cohere like a work of art. It is implicit in this conference that there are three basic components of culture, which are art, science and spirituality. These are in the centre of culture. And culture, I say, is shared meaning.”

“If we separate art, science and spirituality — as they are today — we have a tremendous incoherence.

To start something that might make our culture more coherent, of course, depends on the economic system.

If that does not work, then none of the rest is possible.

Economics is like the soil that nourishes the beautiful plants and flowers.”

“Can we develop the economy and give every person a good life ? The word ‘economics’ has a Greek root meaning ‘household management’. Really, the world is one household. We are all interdependent and all our problems are flowing together. Human relationships must change and flow together accordingly. We cannot continue to give such supreme importance to our divisions, if we want to really be free of suffering.”

“If we really want peace, that requires the coherence of economy with art, science and spirituality. It requires a culture that is coherent, people having values and meaning that are coherent all over the world, that they can share with each other.”

“If we don’t share our values and meaning, it would be very hard to get together and work together. We have to listen, to understand each other, even if we are

Professor Bohm’s speech received a long ovation.

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Russian economist Stanislav Menshikov agreed : “Nature nurtures us and makes our life possible.”

David Bohm claimed : “We cannot understand the manifest by the manifest itself. Behind the visible reality lies a subtly woven web of invisible energy.”

The Dalai Lama pointed out again that the fundamental human value is affection and love : “We are born in love and nurtured by love. And only by love a new society can be achieved.”

“We do not become aware of love and affection through the great religions. It is a level of spirituality that we come to know through our mother and our earliest environment. Love is the ground in our prospects for survival. Love is the basis for progress. Love is the ground for our future.”

Professor Menshikov added : “If we want to develop a society that shows compassion for all living entities, plants and animals included, we will have to search by way of dialogue for various forms of cooperation.

Neither the socialist nor the capitalist system was appropriate to solve these problems. The situation demands new methods of approach for which initiatives are to be taken in this conference.”

In Panel 2, 11 September 1990, Dr. F. Wilhelm Christians, director of the Deutsche Bank, remarked that we have never before been exposed to such intensification of information and communication. “Never before in history have such a large number of people shared common experiences.”

Professor Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner for chemistry for his work in thermodynamics, was in agreement with John Cage in saying : “Due to technological progress we can now build a society that admits more anarchy and more individual liberties. Until now Western society has been based on inequality and exploitation. Science has enabled us to develop a society in which culture and creativity are more evenly distributed. Currently science has abandoned the mechanistic point of view. The transformation that

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takes place in science reveals itself in the changed comprehension of a concept like ‘chaos’. Through this newly transformed science a new relation between man and the universe will emerge.”

“Contemporary science teaches us that it is not a matter of fixed facts anymore, but of dynamical systems, not of eternal truth, but of dialogue. Classical science had placed us outside of nature. Now we should try to counterbalance this alienation by searching for a dialogue with each other. We can now establish a process of communication with the universe. Nature has so many more dimensions than just these we can measure.”

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Professor Huston Smith, affiliated for spirituality with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined in with : “The materialistic view of nature and of manas-machines have caused ‘spiritual molest’. It is essential that we preserve a sense of the mysterious. Everybody senses that there is something greater than we are within our finite selves, that is the basis of our being.”

Artist John Chamberlain agreed : “To me we are just a bunch of gardeners that have gone wrong. Our initial occupation was to take care of the planet, but we made things very complicated. We should be more aware that we are dependent on plant life. When we take care of plants they will feed us and provide us with air to breathe. Meat eating, weaponry and book keeping hasn’t done the world a lot of good.”

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In Panel 3, 12 September 1990, J. M. Pinheiro Neto, a banker from Brazil, pointed out that in the southern hemisphere the greatest number of people live below the subsistence level. “It is important that an awareness of responsibility is emerging in the North.

We become human beings when we think of other people.”

Artist JCJ Vanderheyden raised the perceptive notion by saying : “Perception and reflection are points that art draws from. Each day is unique due to reflection. However, you see what you want to see.” Vanderheyden pleaded : “Art cannot exist without love.”

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Neuroscientist Francisco Varela pointed out : “It is of vital importance to know which mistakes we make in our thinking. What intrigues me in art is that the artist draws the invisible out into the visible. Reality as we see it is created in the process of seeing. Perception is a creative event. There is no clear distinction between the inner and the outer world. The dance between man and the world is very intimate.”

Francisco added : “One of the problems of our time is the addiction to personality, to the self-certainties we build up. It is not new scientific discoveries that should solve our problems, but personal assimilation of the spiritual wisdom mankind acquired in the past.”

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Mother Tessa Bielecki, abbess of Carmelite communities in the US and EU, backed up : “We do not see with our eyes, but with our whole being. We are involved in the world with our entire person. Spirituality is not a specific action. Everybody is a spiritual being.

Spirituality is our natural environment. Love is the potential to broaden our consciousness. In love we try to put ourselves in the position of the other. In that way real change is possible.”

In Panel 4, 13 September 1990, Jean Maxime Léveque of the French Crédit Lyonnais bank outlined the emerging world economy by saying : “This means that people all over the world will give up hostilities towards each other in order to cooperate economically.

Our economy is evolving from a product-industry to a service-industry. Subsequently, economic boundaries are endless. It is impossible to keep adding products to those already existing, but to services man can provide to others there are no limitations.”

Artist Lawrence Weiner recommended : “If we could see the value in the existence of other people, differences in equality and power would disappear. A real transformation would involve changing our value structure. We redecorate already existing structures with good intentions, but nothing really changes, because we do not ask ourselves what it is that we truly want.”

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“Art has nothing to do with changing the world. It can help us discover how we perceive our relationship to objects. Art is capable of destroying dreams and causes us to re-assess our relationship to the world.”

Tibetan Lama Sogyal Rinpoche explains : “The mind has two positions, it looks either inward or outward.

When we study we look outward. Meditation is looking inward. It is the coming home of the mind. In that our mind can come to rest. Through meditation we can redirect the overflow of information into wisdom. In meditation there is no future, past or present. As in art it is in a fourth dimension of time.”

In Panel 5, 14 September 1990, former IMF-director and Dutch Minister of Finance, H.J. Witteveen, called increasing globalisation one of the most striking traits of our economy. “It is of utmost importance that we learn to listen to each other and not just follow our own limited interests.”

Performance artist Marina Abramovic emphasised : “The essence is not what you do, but from which state of mind you are doing what you are doing.” She called for an intensive “cleaning of our house”, physically as well as mentally. “Loss of ego is the most important thing to strive for”, Marina cued.

Fritjof Capra opposed : “Globalisation is not necessarily a positive development. Real democracy needs a

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smaller scale. Western society is forcing its definition of growth, progress and development on the entire world.”

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Priest and scholar Raimon Panikkar from Spain forewarned about the temptation of the Tower of Babel. “We have to have real confidence in the ways of others. The concept of development is still coloured by colonialism. We have to have cultural disarmament alongside military disarmament. The world is characterised by a cultural monologue, but Western culture does not hold the key to all solutions. The concept of ‘development’ should be replaced by ‘awakening and communication’. That was the meaning of the old Christian commandment, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’”

out in his book ‘Visible Learning’ that for teaching, the teacher matters the most. I think for a good learning process you need an affectionate, loving teacher who cares and is interested in your learning process. Hattie is stressing that the teacher also needs knowledge, skill, structure and a plan of how to lead students through the learning process. It all depends on the good quality of the teacher, who should see himself as ‘activator’, having his class under control and always having an eye on everyone individually. ‘Teacher clarity’ is of highest priority, says Hattie. Students should know what the teacher wants of them. A good teacher sees what he teaches with the eyes of his students. ‘What teachers do matters’ is Hattie’s catchphrase.”

All that is mentioned above in connection to Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy 1990 was said during five days of panel meetings at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and can be found in the pre-conference book for AmSSE 1996, published

by Academy Editions, London.

John Hattie’s meta-study Visible Learning is a synthesis of over 800 studies, the result of 15 years’ research covering more than 80 million students and bringing together around 50,000 smaller studies. It is the largest collection of evidence-based research about what works best in education. The Times Educational

Dialogue and valuing others are highly respected by all who spoke in the above historical review. Love and compassion they declared the cornerstone of life, art and the new society. Genius and talent are especially highlighted by Robert Filliou, as his book Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts tells. From my own evidence I profess that “learning” happens best face-toface and I trust “teaching” also works best eye-to-eye and person-to-person. Eastern cultures claim that the transfer of subtle knowledge goes mind-direct.

When I google “face-to-face” on the Internet I find : “Face-to-face contact is an efficient communication technology. It can facilitate learning and provides psychological motivation. Face-to-face is particularly important in many creative activities.”

I also come across the following : “It was found that ‘virtual teams’ using computer-mediated communication systems could not outperform traditional face-to-face teams under comparable circumstances. Face-to-face team members report higher levels of satisfaction.”

“I understand what you mean with Teaching&Learning Goes Face-to-Face”, writes the Venerable Tenzin Peljor, via email. “One learns better through a healthy relation with the teacher. There is research that shows that children learn better if they have a good emotional bond to the teacher, they even learn FOR the teacher because they love her or him and she / he loves them.”

Tenzin Peljor of Lama Tsong Khapa Institute in Pomaia, Italy, adds : “What I say I read some years ago in STERN magazine and they said it is based on academic studies. A monk here recently told me that it was the same with him : he learned for the teachers he liked.”

Tenzin Peljor continues : “John Hattie, Professor of Education at Auckland University, New Zealand, points

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Supplement described Hattie’s meta-study as nothing less than “teaching’s holy grail”. According to Hattie’s findings, Visible Learning occurs when teachers see learning through the eyes of students and help them become their own teachers.

“Education is only possible through initiation”, according to Indian Hindu master Harish Johari. “One needs an example”, he says. “In earlier times the teacher was the example that one followed. He was the catalyst who brought out the inner wisdom of the student. The correct procedure for education is based on helping to realise that which a student already knows”, Harish Johari tells us in his ‘Chakra Intensive’ course in Amsterdam. “The biggest problem of our time is that information is falsely seen as knowledge. We have become more stupid because of the abundance of information. We believe that the illusion created by way of information is reality, but the real knowledge is within us. If one is inspired and lives according to the order of the universe then one can through intuition work with the real knowledge. Intuition has its seat in the third eye, the sixth chakra. Thinking rationally has its seat in the third chakra. Artists, poets and saints live beyond rational consciousness.”

Shri Harish Johari adds : “For the development of one’s wisdom one has to in the first place be aware of the food one eats. Knowledge is directly linked with the chemical balance in our body. In the second place one has to learn how to control the mind, because lower thoughts take much energy away from higher consciousnesses. Only from a controlled mind can one start to develop one’s subtle consciousness by the practice of one-pointed concentration.”

On a sheet of A4 paper it says in my own handwriting : “Solid ways of thinking are always dualistic, whereas spontaneous direct perception goes over the

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heart, our intuitive intelligence, which decides and acts without thinking.” I wrote it in 1992 to explain that my utopia of a Saint Society is actually feasible.

In 2013 Jean Karel Hylkema writes the following in his booklet Buddhist Insights in the Nature of Reality : “Recently it was established that neurons are not only found in the brain, but also form part of the heart, which means that the heart has a prominent role in the consciousness experience of people. The heart has a similar kind of antenna function as our sense organs. The sense organs, in combination with the brain, facilitate the experience of the relative realities, or relative truths.

The heart, also in combination with the brain, facilitates the experience of the absolute reality, or absolute truth.

Thinking is an activity of the brain and leads to an experience of the relative realities. Non-thinking, intuition, leads to actually experiencing the absolute reality.”

“Training in the experience of the absolute reality contributes to a more even-tempered attitude towards life and a heightened experience of happiness and bliss. When we succeed in concentrating one-pointedly on the absolute reality, our life becomes less complicated. This teaches us that we are better off trusting our intuition, than trusting our thinking.”

Jean Karel Hylkema further explains : “In the East research into the way of functioning of the human mind, or consciousness, has led to the view that our sense perception is extremely subjective. On account of this the East makes a difference between one ‘absolute reality’, impossible to interpret, and many self-created reflections on account of our sense perceptions, called the ‘relative realities’. Western science has led to a strongly mechanistic view of reality, seen to be objective and measurable. The Western science claims objectivity by observation through the sense perceptions and through instruments that drastically enlarge sense perception.

In the East this way has led to the understanding that Western perception of reality is totally subjective.”

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“Hinduism and Buddhism have a cyclic notion of time and have the vision of a circular cycle of events and life. Buddhist philosophy sees karma as a possibility to take one’s fate in one’s own hand and realise enlightenment that way”, Jean Karel Hylkema unfolds.

In a lecture by the Tibetan Buddhist Lama Thubten Yeshe, one student in the audience asks : “What is enlightenment ?” Lama Yeshe answers : “Simply put, enlightenment is a state beyond the uncontrolled, agitated, dissatisfied mind ; a state of perfect freedom, everlasting enjoyment and complete understanding of the nature of the mind.” The student then remarks : “People talk about seeing light in the mind. What does that mean ?” Lama Yeshe explains : “In general, when your mind is too narrow, full of grasping ideas, forms, colours and things like that, it tends to be dark and sluggish in nature. When

these things disappear white light arises. Whatever light you see, it comes from your own mind.”

On 29 January 1982 I brought Joseph Beuys together with Lama Sogyal Rinpoche in Paris. Because Beuys wanted to set up a permanent cooperation with HH the Dalai Lama “to make Eurasia happen” — with which the office of the Dalai Lama agreed — Robert Filliou suggested that Beuys should first meet with Lama Sogyal in order for Beuys to better understand the Tibetan Buddhist way of scholarly thinking. An excerpt :

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Joseph Beuys : “I am a friend of the tantric intention.”

Lama Sogyal : “Tantra is very much an art in itself.

Tantra is a spiritual art. I think there is a way of really connecting that approach with the expression of art as it is happening now.”

Joseph Beuys : “I have come to a wider understanding of art, which could be related to every person’s doing. The formula is, ‘Everybody is an artist’. Every human work has to be seen as a kind of art.”

Lama Sogyal : “I feel that with this particular age the real human energy has been unleashed. Art lets you see it is there.”

Joseph Beuys : “That’s right. For me personally it would be interesting to learn how the tantric power is organised and working. Louwrien knows that my actions during the last years have mostly been to speak with people just to solve this paradoxical understanding of how powers work together.”

Lama Sogyal : “In the highest teachings of Buddha, in tantra, it says that transmission is in three ways. First is mind-direct, no signs, no words. That is the kind of communication that the Buddhas have, the mind-direct way.

There is not even any time wasted. It is simultaneous, as it happens.”

Joseph Beuys : “Unity itself.”

Lama Sogyal : “True, unity itself. Then the next level is, how it is translated in terms of a human need, as a compassionate incarnation, or by signs, a syllable or a gesture to people who are able to capture the meaning. The third level is by word of mouth, the oral transmission. And oral transmission is really actually a mind-to-mind contact and then conversing on that basis.

And art definitely is very much that. Art draws a balance between pure mind and the expression.”

Joseph Beuys : “That is really true.”

Lama Sogyal : “I think there is a link between art and the tantric teachings, very much so.”

At an HKA-lecture in Arnhem in 1995, I explain: “Art = Tantra means, that in art, just as in tantra, you dissolve personally in emptiness. From empty space you visualise the artist you want to be and strengthen your motivation to realise the optimum possible.”

I asked the Dalai Lama in 1982 to make a statement on the most beneficial system of education. The Dalai Lama answered : “This is really one of the most important points. In Buddhism we say : ‘Every sentient

fig. 27

being has the Buddha nature’. So, that means, in the innermost place our consciousness is pure, clear. Now, education must keep the mind well. That pureness must develop, not degenerate. It is absolutely necessary and very important to develop the good side of the human mental nature. The teaching system is the basis of the whole human civilisation.”

“What does Buckminster Fuller say that society will do when the people cannot have jobs and are unemployed ? He says they will live their entire lives in the ‘university’, since we won’t be moving out of it into another job life. We must change the universities so that they would be the places we loved, as we now love our unruled, anarchic art-life.”

I also asked the Dalai Lama what is the task that artists can perform in society. He answered : “Hmm, all your questions are complicated. In art, I think, one of the important ways is to express your own feelings, as well as teach, or influence other people. So no doubt a very important role in human society. Generally we are not lacking technology or science. But we are lacking the real human feeling. In other words : kindness or human understanding, or a human sense of brothers and sisters.

An artist can express human feelings. That is, I think, one of the important and effective roles of artists.

Artists can contribute many things. Our human mind is too involved in external ways, in outer aims. But

“We want flexibility and we also want an anarchic situation in which people do what they want, not what they are obliged to do. You breathe better when your feelings are anarchic than you do when governed by a government. I hope that instead of governments we could have intelligence, for the whole world rather than for one nation”, Cage pleads.

still, we have much inner space that has not yet been exploited. And sometimes I feel this human skull is very small, yet it is very complicated and very sophisticated.

So there are many inner spaces, which are not yet used. So in this present time investigate, or think more inward, what is the real nature of the human ‘I’ and the human mind, human consciousness ? Trying to control a country is rather difficult, and equally to control the mind is difficult. Like arms control is very good, but without being able to control anger, how to control these external arms ? Real arms control is to control anger. It is essential to think more inward. Artists can express on this line.

Artists have their own way to bring important messages to the masses, to make a better human being, a better human future. The real peaceful harmony comes through making effort in various ways. The ultimate creator is the mind of sentient beings, not only human beings, but other beings, which have a mind also. The mind is supreme.“

defined as. I have expanded the old term of art to include every human activity.”

The meeting of Joseph Beuys with Lama Sogyal Rinpoche, the interview quotes of the Dalai Lama, and the quotes by Robert Filliou can be found in my book HH the Dalai Lama of Tibet talks to Louwrien Wijers. fig. 28

fig. 29

fig. 30

Robert Filliou evaluates : “Nothing is going to happen in the world until life itself is lived as the spiritual thing that it is. The great lesson of art is freedom. We have to incorporate ‘art as freedom’ into the fabric of everyone’s life. The artist is everybody.”

John Cage says to me in 1989 : “Art gives that experience of general uncertainty. Artists are busy as birds.

They never have enough time. They work night and day and are completely involved in their work. They require no vacations because of their total involvement. I think essentially people are this way. They all know perfectly well what to do with their time if they are left anarchic.

This is what we must move towards.”

Joseph Beuys joins in: “We have to create the world as a living sculpture. Every human action is declared a work of art. Thought is sculpture, action is sculpture, writing is sculpture. Naturally I can also take clay, fat, earth and form it. This is what sculpture is conventionally

Ilya Prigogine explains how current views in science are less conceptual : “Our understanding of the physical world is now quite different. It encompasses all these unstable dynamical systems, which are essential in the understanding of ecology and meteorology. The twentieth century was a turning point to a new type of civilisation. We are living a kind of second Copernican revolution.”

“The metaphor of the view of the world today is art, art in the sense that it is something which contains both laws and events. Like we see now in non-linear systems.

We come to the breaking points and we have new possibilities. Before we come to the breaking points it is more or less deterministic. When we are at the breaking points we have many choices. I have developed a theory in which events are due to the instability of dynamics itself. It has changed the idea about how order and disorder appear. Now we see that non-equilibrium can produce coherence and structure.”

Ilya Prigogine states : “The laws of unstable dynamical systems permit us to develop an economy, which is no longer based on the exploitation of man by man.

There is more chance for culture and individuals to develop than ever before. With this information revolution we may come closer to a society in which creativity can be more evenly spread. It is a multi-actor society. There is no unique chief who determines what everybody should think. Here the functioning creates order. That is the non-mechanistic view.”

“Because of the rapidly increasing population we need a more altruistic attitude. Compassion and our survival are related. Even in economy we are heavily dependent upon one another,” states the Dalai Lama.

fig. 31

“One of my sutras is that we have to demonetise”, says Raimon Panikkar. “We have to strive to demonetise society. We succeeded in monetising everything, now we have to demonetise.”

“I once lived for six months in the country of the Nagas, a small civilisation. I know for certain that there does not exist a single case of mental illness among them. No depression. Among them food is not monetisable. So they are not nervous about how to make ends meet. You don’t need money to eat.”

Robert Rauschenberg : “My theory for economy is : never waste a thing. I think Joseph Beuys and I had the same idea. I never saw anything that was wasted that shouldn’t be used.”

Stanislav Menshikov specifically underlines : “Politicians should remember that there are citizens whose talents are not duly compensated by the market economy.

Artists need a government- provided minimum income to support their daily work, which might render products of great value for society as a whole. The market economy may not be interested, but governments should correct the market. Economics serves the general benefit of people.”

Joseph Beuys holds : “The figuration of a model for the future comes organically. Every human being carries within oneself an organic model of the future. In making your consciousness stronger, more concentrated, more lively and organic your feelings also get a better quality.

This way the figuration of a model for the future comes organically and wipes out the current boring idea of politics.

Robert Filliou : In our time how can we believe that one person is more important than another person ? Our world is filled with more people of intense good will and dazzling competence than ever before.”

Andy Warhol answers my question, “Who are the fig. 32

fig. 33

fig. 34

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important people now in the world ?’ with : “Oh, well …

I like everybody. My favourite people are anybody who works, who really keeps going, because I think the world is … I mean it’s a hard thing to live. And so I think entertainment is the thing. I do it by art. I try to entertain people by art. Just to make a few people laugh.”

Quotations from John Cage, Ilya Prigogine, the Dalai Lama, Raimon Panikkar, Robert Rauschenberg and Stanislav Menshikov can be found in the 1990 pre-conference book Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy : Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy, SDU, The Hague, 1990, ISBN 9012066190, 424 pages.

Quotations from Joseph Beuys are in Writing as Sculpture, as are those from Andy Warhol, Robert Filliou, Harish Johari and others : Writing as Sculpture,

Academy Editions, London, 1996 ISBN 9012066190, 424 pages.

The quotations of Harish Johari that are found in this text were notes that I wrote down during his course.

Quotations from Jean Karel Hylkema can be found at http://www.business-care.com The words of Lama Thubten Yeshe repeated here were also written down by me during his teaching.

fig. 2 At the request of Joseph Beuys I brought HH the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet together with Beuys in Bonn, 27 October 1982

fig. 1 An exact facsimile of the original is launched in November 2013

fig. 3 Louwrien Wijers, Robert Filliou and Marianne Filliou in Bonn

fig. 4 HH the Dalai Lama during his inaugural address in 1990

fig. 5 Theoretical physicist Professor David Bohm

fig. 6 Stanislav Menshikov, Robert Rauschenberg, moderator, David Bohm, HH the Dalai Lama

fig. 7 John Chamberlain, Ilya Prigogine, moderator, Huston Smith, F. Wilhelm Christians

fig. 8 Prof. Ilya Prigogine

fig. 9 Prof. Huston Smith

fig. 10 JCJ Vanderheyden, Francisco Varela, moderator, Mother Tessa Bielecki, Raimon Pannikar

fig. 11 JCJ Vanderheyden

fig. 12 Francisco Varela

fig. 13 Mother Tessa Bielecki

fig. 14 Lawrence Weiner, A.M. Liquori, moderator, Lama Sogyal Rinpoche, Jean-Maxime LĂŠveque

fig. 15 Lawrence Weiner

fig. 16 Lama Sogyal Rinpoche

fig. 17 Marina Abramovic, Fritjof Capra, moderater, Raimon Panikkar, H.J. Witteveen

fig. 18 Marina Abramovic

fig. 19 Fritjof Capra

fig. 20 Raimon Panikkar fig. 21 'Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy, From Competition to Compassion' 1996. With a word for word report of AmSSE 1990, 240 pages

fig. 22 John Hattie, Visible Learning, Taylor & Francis Ltd, 392 pages fig. 23 Harish Johari venerating his teacher Baba Dwarka Das

fig. 24 Jean Karel Hylkema and Louwrien Wijers in the Dalai Lama's monastery in India

fig. 26 Joseph Beuys, Lama Sogyal Rinpoche and Louwrien Wijers in Paris

fig. 25 Lama Thubten Yeshe

fig. 28 HH the Dalai Lama talks to Louwrien Wijers, Kantoor voor Cultuur Extracten, Velp, 1982

fig. 27 HH the Dalai Lama talks to Louwrien Wijers in Dharamsala, India

fig. 29 Robert Filliou in the Birthday of Art

fig. 30 John Cage and Louwrien Wijers in 1989

fig. 31 Joseph Beuys in 24 Stunden

fig. 32 Andy Warhol talks to Louwrien Wijers, File Megazine, Vol. 5, March 1981

fig. 33 Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy, SDU, The Hague, 424 pages

fig. 34 Writing as Sculpture, Academy Editions, London, 1996, 424 pages

Louwrien Wijers ( born 1941 ), writer and visual artist, her practice revolves specifically around sculpture, both mental and material. From 1968 to 1986, Wijers worked closely to Joseph Beuys when she was trained to look at, write and speak ‘like’ a sculpture.

Wijers most important mental sculpture to date titled Art meets Science and Spirituality in a changing Economy ( 1990 / 1996 ) is a direct result of a meeting of Joseph Beuys and the Dalai Lama she organized in Bonn in 1982. The influence of food in our future is now her main topic.

Olafur Eliasson, Eric Ellingsen & Christina Werner

in conversation with Nico Dockx

PRESENTING WORDS AS SCULPTURES TO CELEBRATE LOVE ND How did the Institut für Raumexperimente came into existence ? Where and when did it start ?

Was it an idea that you already had in the back of your mind for some time, or did it happen by accident, a coincidence ?

OE I think it really came out of an aspiration I had in developing my studio to see creativity as a driving force. As I started to lecture more and more over the years, I slowly began to realise that the lecturing, the communication and the involvement in schools and with students were also an extension of the studio and the art. So, in a sense, the idea for the school came from thinking about different ways of integrating a knowledge-sharing system into the studio. Sometimes this worked better than others, as we had a flow of younger artists working here or working as interns, and they were sometimes very focused and sometimes less so. Sometimes we were simply too busy to allow for the creative space to evolve, and I would have to push the studio to such an extent that the slowness needed for creativity simply wasn’t there. So I’m not trying to mystify the studio by saying this ; I’m just simply saying it was an aspiration.

The next thing was that the art school in Berlin, the Berlin University of the Arts [Universität der Künste ; UdK] repeatedly approached me, offering me a teaching position. I had previously turned down a number of other teaching jobs because the travel distance would have created a huge gap between the life of the studio and teaching. When the Berlin University of the Arts asked me, I did not even want to travel across town. I wanted to connect the art-making, the teaching, and the artworks directly, even though at the time, I did not have pedagogical aims or a curriculum. The idea was that on a very good day, there would be a sort of overall structure in the studio, where teaching, communicating, and making would all just be seen as one thing and also very dependent on one another.

I think we negotiated with the university for two and a half years, as it wasn’t easy to agree, until we finally came up with the solution of being both part of the school and not part of the school, at the same time. This was mainly related to funding, as the institute is supported by a combination of state money and funding from the Einstein Foundation, a scientific research foundation, which had a degree of interdisciplinary ambitions in

ND Nico Dockx OE Olafur Eliasson EE Eric Ellingsen CW Christina Werner

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testing a new school system. This means that the school probably accepted us as an experiment because we were funded by an external body and would not be a financial burden on the university.

It was also clear to me that I would only be able to offer a part of the teaching talent needed to direct the educational trajectory of our participants. I started to look around, and I quickly found Christina and Eric.

They were actually on board before the institute started.

So the course evolved with their co-authorship from the beginning, both in terms of the “how” of knowledge production, and also on the structural level of the institute itself.

ND You are a professor at the UdK, but then you have your class here in your studio. How does that work in relation to the university program ?

OE My job at the UdK is actually a conventional professorship, except that I’m on a five-year limited contract. The UdK, like many institutions, has lifetime positions for tenured professors, who in my view need to be rotated periodically in order to maintain a degree of contemporariness. When I accepted to teach for only five years, it was important to make the point that you can start something ambitious, and you can also close something very ambitious.

ND Were there any aspirations and inspirations aside from the practice of your studio ? When your experimental school project started and when you engaged Christina and Eric, did you do some research on past and present educational structures ?

Or did you just start to improvise and then saw how it could grow and evolve ?

OE I had been interested in different educational systems, but I hadn’t done in-depth research, as I wanted to develop a system that was based on how we could potentially maximise the proximity to the studio.

Of course I looked into places like Black Mountain College and the Bauhaus, and I knew Staedelschule in Frankfurt quite well and the more experimental class at the CCA Kitakyushu, where I also taught, and the fine art department that I co-started with Angela Vettese at the architecture school in Venice, under Marco de Michelis’ tenure.

I had also been interested in educational systems in another way : to what extent does a museum take on an educational component ? The museological tradition in Northern Europe — and in Scandinavia in particular — has a very clear agenda about the universal right to have access to creativity. This interest goes back to the fact that I was educated in the Danish system, which was highly influenced by the values of social democracy, coming out of the post-war era.

So I had a general awareness of more or less utopian school-type projects. It struck me, though, that despite the great legacy of schools such as Black Mountain College, their utopian vision had led, to some extent, to socially normative ideas, to this very restricted idea of what is socially productive and what is socially not productive. And there was this hierarchy immediately involved within the educational system. But if we disregard the relatively conservative cult position of the teachers, what is inspiring is that they actually did it, that it took place and this demanded some stamina.

And I think that type of stamina is always inspiring.

ND How did you — and maybe this is a question that goes to all three of you … How did you create a programme ? Were many things planned ? Or was there / is there a lot of improvisation involved ? Or is it a combination of both planning and improvisation, as well as one of both the short term and long term ?

How did it all get started ? Perhaps it’s a difficult question, because at a certain moment you just have to start … Did you do brainstorming sessions together to get all these young people involved, or … ?

OE It’s a good question.

EE Because I was teaching, I was finishing a teaching position in Chicago. But I had met up with Olafur in the fall. We did video calls. He told me about this school idea. I asked him to teach a studio in Chicago, not realising of course the impossibility of this, because we had some similar ideas that seemed aligned. We saw each other every week, every couple of weeks for the course of a few months ; I was also teaching part-time at the University of Toronto and then came to Berlin for ten days in January. I made a series of syllabuses, which were just imitations of other classes they did. I looked at these … The content was great, but there was no reason to do this in this school.

That’s where I started thinking about … How to come in with a plan whose plan is not to have a prefixed plan ? It’s a lot easier to say than to do. To know you want to experiment, but knowing how to experiment is something different again. You have to learn how to experiment, and you have to learn this inside of doing it. So it is not like something that can be lifted and plugged into some other place. Not like sewing wings to a rat, or something. It’s like we are always carrying handrails around from places we have been in, to try and protect us in places we are going to. And at first I was still bringing classes with a syllabus : “Here’s

a week ; here’s what you eat ; we could do some experiments …” And then the school started. I came as if it was already halfway into the first semester, and the first semester, of course, was nothing like this at all. It was great.

OE Our confidence in why we were doing it was very high, but then there was the reality of actually having to find people who could come by. It was quite clear that we could not spend a lot of money flying a lot of people around the world, so, early on, we simply had to invite people who were passing through Berlin anyway. This meant that the first three guest lecturers were a scientist working with artificial intelligence, Luc Steels, with whom I had worked before ; Ute Meta Bauer, whom Christina knew well and who was at MIT ; and then a dancer from Denmark, Steen Koerner, who has a street dance background and had collaborated with me in the past.

We approached people rather informally. We never told people that they should come because we were important. We always said that we wanted them to come because we felt they were important. This is maybe not the right way to phrase it, but I just want to say that our approach to hospitality was crucial.

When Eric joined, it was very clear that he was coming from an American university background, where, as he just said, he had an entirely different experience.

And Eric actually had much more experience than I did, and maybe more than Christina, too, in terms of actually teaching actual classes. I immediately saw the difference between the educational traditions of America and Europe. We had to sit down and clarify : what does it mean to be informal ? It is still something that has a form. In the beginning, we simply divided the week into roughly three days of teaching and two days off, where the participants could work hard. Interestingly enough, this was already three times as much teaching as any other classes that the university offered. So what we took from the American model was the quantity of teaching. Obviously, we were very ambitious at the beginning.

CW Yes, and we told the participants who applied, before they actually started, about the programme’s involvement …

OE We told them directly that, in principle, the programme was to be driven by the works the participants were interested in doing themselves : the works that they were working on. We made it very clear right from the beginning — and we still do that with every new participant — that they are as much artists now as they will be when they finish school, and in ten or twenty years’ time. There’s not more or less responsibility and seriousness now than there will be later. They might be fumbling more, be less precise and more insecure and so on and so forth, but essentially they are already artists. This is not a school for people who want to become artists ; this is a school for artists.

CW I remember that really from the beginning, at that first meeting when Eric introduced versions of the curriculum, it was clear : “There is no curriculum to follow.” It was clear that the curriculum had to develop and would only be visible in retrospect. We were navigating by detecting fields of interest in the participants’ works and their focus. The content production was oriented towards a co-production where possible.

There were a few ideas we knew we’d be interested in exploring and we started to develop with more depth. We talked about the “Walks” as a repetitive experimental format and a tool for experiencing and connecting to the street. It was more a rough sketch than a theoretical framework for a methodology of getting started. Also very early on, there was a trajectory in motion of inviting a guest to co-invite additional guests.

For instance, Peter Weibel returned to the programme on a somewhat regular basis with a number of different guests, which developed into another form of co-production and co-authorship of content and “curriculum” production. It was also something that evolved. We

institute from the beginning to the end, as student-artists.

As students, on the one hand, getting a degree, and as artists having a practice somehow outside of the University, but within the energy and conversations and critical energy of the institute. And the guests that come over and over again are also our teachers ; the repetition is really amazing.

With me coming from architecture and from landscape architecture, it’s responsible for different things.

The structure, the education, and the discipline. The school is physically in Olafur’s studio, for example …

Yet everyone else in Olafur’s studio works for Olafur, and Olafur works for the school. There were these overlaps … While we were sharing the same spaces, or systems of art practice, there were spatial and social and creative differences between a teaching practice and an art production practice, between the artists in the school and everyone else that moves through the same studio system. Differences that are structural, responsible for different energy, attention, awareness, relations.

The school and the studio share people, and take peo-

invited him to co-invite a guest and we developed our programme around and into those encounters.

ple’s time and attention in different ways, people like Christina and Olafur, people overlapping and trying to assimilate and extract themselves at different times with these different systems, and these overlaps are also the space of the school. The responsibilities and desires squeeze the school — and studio — into different forms, like the way that temperature squeezes water into different forms, or the way in which wind flowing over a hill bumps the pressure systems into crystallising weather into different waters. So the school and the artists in the school each semester, and the studio itself, and let’s say the city, too, all pressure us in different ways that overlap without neatly resolving correspondences.

EE And we could see our changes and what needed to be developed while we were changing, by being with the same people a few times over the course of five years. We could see ourselves better by seeing him and the others he brought.

OE Like Oswald Wiener …

CW … and Otto Rössler …

EE … and he invited Thomas Macho, who eventually came without Weibel. There were even ideas of bringing all of Hans Ulrich Obrist’s interviews and just having a full archive of his interviews as our library …

OE The format became very much about introspective criticism.

EE And about repetition. It allows for an openness, a vulnerability, a trust space. I mean, if you could think of a course, for instance, as the same person coming three times or four times over five years, you could put that together as a kind of model for a non-premeditated syllabus, in a strange way. A non-sloppy syllabus that is inflected by each encounter. I think Olafur did this in Addis Ababa. Olafur visited every few weeks, and would structure his visits around this pulse of thought that turned into a rhythm of talks. And the talks were also open to the entire art school and university in Addis Ababa, so the institute turned itself into a kind of inside-out school.

Like a glove. And then you can fit the glove from the left hand onto the right hand by turning yourself inside out. Things like this. So somehow the relationships …

We’ve grown this school together from our different relationships. With the students being in University for five years to pick up a degree, some of them will be in the 59

OE You know, there is a kind of naïveté that is full of energy. Because when you’re naïve, you can take huge steps in unconsidered, clumsy ways. Although I do think we’ve done a few things very precisely : we insisted that the “making of” must always be seen before the film, or whatever was being made. Christina and Eric led a “making of” film course. I don’t know if you then also watched the actual films.

EE No. It flipped the usual way of looking at what a film means, to look at the relation of how it is made to all the structural considerations, like budgets and tools and emotions and tensions ; how the politics of a place affects the film’s shooting, rather than its story ; tricks to pull things off ; a way of working within sometimes painful and unsupportive realities.

OE And I think it allowed for a different kind of criticality. It was an introspective type of working that was not didactically safe, but opened conversations on how and why you make something and how all the whys and hows meet the world. Inside of how, you have to cultivate enough why, so that when people are involved in a project, a work, a collective endeavour, they both evaluate what they are doing and also maintain the

vibrant feeling of what they’re doing, to let the world intensify the quality of why they are doing it. We did not cultivate a dogmatic criticism, where why is more conventionally taught as a deconstructive notion. Instead, the why has to be in the action itself. It has to be visible.

This kind of class was also created as a way of inviting people. We often invited people to the institute who ask why inside of what they do. People like Steen Koerner, the anti-gravity dancer. He talked about making physicality explicit through your body, showing, for example, that you are working in the tradition of mime, like Marcel Marceau … To show the context is also about insisting upon its existence. Whereas traditional choreographers, like Bruno Vandelli, are always about being weightless, Steen actually performed a kind of critique. Steen explained his dance contextually. The narrative in his performance was the context. That context might be very didactic or theoretical or whatever, but still it created an identification pattern, where you can say : “I identify with what you are doing”.

interests and inspiration. This really evolved out of a situation of mutual trust and interest.

EE For sure. You have to be vulnerable. I mean you can be vulnerable in a way that doesn’t make you defensive, but which opens up an honesty in a way.

Teaching and learning is a trust space. Everyone is exposing themself ; no one can stand outside of it. That outside is a fake peripheral view ; some place on the perimeter of the non-vulnerable is where professors usually profess from. But we didn’t want to put ourselves in the centre or the circumference, we wanted to move and be moved with the experiment we were in and the experiment we were conducting together. This happened with some of Olafur’s teaching, I think. The first two years we talked about demystification of the artist or the artist’s career, and still it took a while for the artists in the institute to become comfortable with talking with Olafur about what they were interested in, in a way they were comfortable discussing it, the questions and inspirations that were driving them. It’s hard to want to impress and

CW It also has to do with informality and the opportunities that are tied to this informality ; the opportunity for uncertainty … We deliberately invite the guests to present and say things in a way that is different from what they would normally do. The way we phrased the invitations aimed to make them comfortable enough to allow for this uncertainty, to try something else, something unexpected. Then trying to extend this feeling of being in a group where you can show vulnerability and trust the communality was important.

The format of the “making ofs”, which alternated with reading practices, a way of starting with a student picking something and then Eric and I responding with another suggestion, was really important for building up this atmosphere for discussion, or rather for an exchange. The “making ofs” helped by virtue of them not having to talk about their own work. There was no need to defend themselves in reaction to criticism. Instead, everyone could exchange thoughts and opinions about the intentions of someone who wanted to say something — by making a film. So through the different media

find approval and to find your own way, and not simply imitate or confirm or repeat, and to be able to disagree with someone where there is a felt difference in structural power, or experience, or practice. To be able to say : I disagree, and I think something different, while still saying that I respect the space of being able to say that I disagree and that I think something different. It’s hard to trust that space and it is something that is built together. It has to be cultivated. So it’s still, I mean, like a dancer, like a ballet, as Jonathan Burrows says, it is that repetition that builds up a kind of patterning of experience and skill, a rhythm of awareness and ability.

In that repetition, little changes can become incredibly significant, kicking a known thing into an unknown orbit and in that unknown you become a something else. You are still the thing you started as, the artist, the school …

Because the uncertainty, which Christina was just talking about, is restructured into the experiment rather than being filtered out of the experiment.

or genres, we could talk indirectly to the artists in the school about making their own art, and about intentions and decisions. And the reading practices were structurally similar : a participant chose something that he or she found inspiring. Something they just read, something they wanted to present and discuss, and our second text is a response, to parallel and accompany their choice, a cross-reading. We could say : “If you’re interested in this, maybe this is something else for you and for the group to encounter.” We contextualised and searched for common grounds and new directions. And we would take this from week to week. It spiralled — with some guidance — but in ways that were unforeseeable at the same time.

Similar dynamics grew out of Otto Rössler’s engagement. He was invited by Peter Weibel the first time he visited the institute, and then the participants invited Rössler over and over again, because it spoke to their

because we have started to develop a known form.

We are on the brink of becoming good at what we are doing, although we’re not quite there yet. And this is maybe also a sign that our naïveté is still alive.

Throughout those ten semesters, the skill-sharing between myself, Christina, and Eric created a very robust frame of reference. Christina’s network — her relationship to people like you, Nico — and the knowledge she brings from a more political and cultural studies background and her communication skills … She has a sensitivity that few people have, and that sensitivity is based on critical thinking and evolves around her network of artists, curators and thinkers. And this is a very interesting combination, which has turned out to be incredibly important for the school, as it is a special talent, one of sharing and reflecting.

And the same goes for Eric ; Eric’s background is both in landscape architecture and architecture, and he

OE That’s why it’s interesting to close the school,

is a person who actively translates what he does into who he is : he is what he does, or how he does what he does. But then on top of that, Eric, you are obsessed with language and the shape of language and words and poetry and the breathing of poetry, the body of words, to the extent of the words being almost physical, and the sculpture as a work of sculpturing, and so on. And there’s the fact of Eric speaking English and Christina speaking German and I have a third language that’s my mother tongue.

But when Sarat Maharaj came in, thanks to Christina’s relationship with him from prior projects, he presented to us the idea of stickiness, which is a longer story, a story whose grains of rice, I think, are already in some of the overlaps we have had together with you, Nico, during your Sticky Rice workshop in the school.

Just to say briefly : the way Peter Weibel brought in Otto Rössler is an example of the principle of Sticky Rice, which is this kind of informal formality. That’s the glue. The stickiness. It’s a system, but it stays informal.

It’s not informal in terms of being anarchic, or in a dis-

I was mistaken. The responsibility I have towards the students does not allow for a master-student relationship.

The reason I did the school was precisely to get away from this traditional hierarchy. Very soon after starting the school, I made a clear statement about the separation between the two. Having worked so hard to get this department of the school, the institute, in the same building as my studio, it was almost a paradox for me to say : “Of course the students cannot work for me.” Instead, we then actively worked to allow for studio / school overlaps, and the kitchen became the meeting place … So the lunch break became important as a social space.

But the truth is that the studio has also been going through a phase of professionalisation, and this means that the studio has become this highly efficient machine, incredibly focused and obsessed with the success of what it’s doing. I’m very happy about this, but I also see the problems this creates with regards to the open-endedness of creativity.

But it has certainly meant that the students who come

ruptive sense. It also creates the possibility for itself to be sticky in a vibrant situation. This is Sarat’s obsession with poetry, for example, where even the pronunciation of a word becomes part of the poetic momentum. There is a politics of pronunciation. So his presence became a very healthy, let’s say, mechanics of knowledge production. And very non-dogmatic.

down to the studio get a shock. Because the brutality of the studio’s efficiency makes the students immediately feel incredibly inefficient themselves. And I did not want this to happen ; I had hoped to create space for the students in my studio in a less clumsy way. I don’t want to ruin their dream about what a big studio is. I want them to come in and believe that one day they too will have a studio — not necessarily one like mine, but their own studio, and it will be full of dreams. But I can be very honest and say : “There are plenty of days in my studio when there’s no dreaming at all.” I have practical problems, but I also have problems with my dreams. And the two are closely related when it comes to demystifying the relation between studio, school and life.

EE I think Sarat was the first person that articulated so clearly that what is unique about the school is that the curriculum comes later. I was trying out a little experiment in the “Sticky Rice” workshop where we would build syllabuses together and he said, no, that’s not so interesting really. And then he said that’s actually where you as a school are interesting, because you do not sit and build things like a syllabus before doing it.

ND How does it get perceived by the UdK, of which you are a part ? Are parts of your programme leaking into their system, or not at all ?

OE No, the informal relationship with the UdK has come through the participants, the students, whose friends visited us and, after the first semesters, came in increasing numbers. They actually started to accept us because we have this open-door policy. We actively tried to present ourselves as not being about inclusion–exclusion. But the university itself has shown little interest in us. Or, to be more clear, it’s not that the Berlin University of the Arts is not interested in us ; it’s just that they are neutral.

ND And the influence towards your studio ?

OE That’s a long chapter. I think there were a number of things that I had not thought through when the school started. It’s important to be very honest about this. I thought that the students would become coproducers of creativity in the studio to a greater extent.

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EE Over the course of this time, you are the scale of your practice. Olafur didn’t know exactly where it would go, but as Olafur’s studio grew in scale. Olafur shifted a lot more into the position of a teaching dean in the school. For example, Olafur comes in and the three of us set up a trajectory for a semester that fills up as we go. I mean we place a few islands in front of us as possibilities to anchor to. I think from the point of view of Christina and myself, we became a bit of a curatorial team as well, curating Olafur back into a dean of the little daily details of school as well. Making sure he stays in on some of the little things. The littleness matters.

Organising the school also started to compete with the school and the studio for Olafur’s time. In reality, Christina ends up taking on a lot of the responsibilities within the institute’s negotiation structure. So on the one hand, Christina is negotiating between the UdK and the institute and, on the other hand, between the institute and the studio. So these are two different systems with different forces and AC / DC currents … I mean, this is more “making of” details now, but these are positions with real forces and needs, which constrain time and attention and energy. They help shape which overlaps are possible ; they help to limit the field of potentials inside

an infinite variety of possible forms the school could take. An hour of teaching is not the same as an hour of making decisions in a meeting, though a lot of professors with practices treat those hours the same. I don’t think attention works that way in teaching. It’s harder to focus than a laser beam efficiency. It’s not like a light switch. Attention has to take the time to get to know the particular ecology of forces in the institute ; it is like a cat clawing its way into position. And the artists in the institute, and these overlaps of interests and needs and ideas, are always shifting. To say that dreams have to be short and happen quickly in a school because there is a lot of non-dream territory in the studio space doesn’t make it work that way. And while Olafur’s studio might be speeding up, this is not the same as in the school, where sometimes we have to slow down a lot, where we have to bring slow-motion dancers like Steen into the school so we can learn how to be slower.

How this all works in the school is really interesting because we don’t talk about it so much, but it shapes a lot of what we are because it shapes a lot of how

In that sense the demystification has always been part of how we have talked about being where we are.

They experience artistic practice as an integral part of everyday live. They are part of an everyday structure of an artist’s studio as much as they are exposed to the university’s structure. They go back and forth, connecting both places through the city, connecting the city and the street itself, since we actively include the street and city and our surrounding reality in programming the “Walks”, events at Tempelhof’s former landing field, or extending part of the marathon events into the city, collaborating with the local theatre, having grantees from diverse backgrounds such as politics, law, dance, choreography, philosophy, etc. Even if we’re not always happy with how we demystify the connection to the studio through all those different phases, it is a very important experience that will stick.

ND It is important not to leave your practice at home when you are teaching.

we can work together … I mean, for Christina to have to negotiate as hard with Olafur’s schedule as with a school budget, and for there to be five or six teams of fifteen people or so, each of whom want and need that hour or two with Olafur, and Christina has to go in and say : “Look, we’ve got to drive into the UdK, and Olafur has got to go and wait forty-five minutes for a review to start, which will of course not start on time, and so we need four hours of a day in a week where Olafur is in Berlin for two days and not again for two weeks …”

That is not an easy, or dream negotiation. Because it’s important to spend time with an artist in the school who thinks folding a paper can change the world, even as Olafur is trying to fold a geometry of the Opera house in Reykjavik. That’s an amazing sort of negotiation, which wasn’t the same five years ago.

And this is also why we had to close after five years.

This is the five years coming at us. We talk like this in the school all the time. Olafur will say something like, stand from a point in the future and look back to where you are now, and change now. Or, there’s a writer like

EE We’re also exposing our participants to Olafur’s practice by merely coming in and out of the school, by walking up the steps.

Charles Bernstein, who says : “You are not going into the train station. The station is coming to you.” So we feel this, and it pressures us, and we have to structure experiments within these backwards times and forward terms, we feel we have to … we are closing but not closing …

the outside world. I’ve insisted upon sharing everything, even the bigger questions, such as : “To what degree does authorship actually enter my space ?”, and “To what degree are the people who work in the studio also given credit for what they’re doing ?” I try to show the successes and the failures.

There have been a number of productive elements in this. People who pass by the studio, great resources of knowledge, also visit the institute, like when Helmut Friedel, who is a specialist in expressionism, just dropped by upstairs and shared his thoughts for ten minutes. SANAA architects Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima were here talking and eating with us, and then Eric asked them if they knew what the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa smells like because we had visited the museum a year before, and also because we had just completed a “Smell walk” in Berlin with Alice Waters, who also came to the school

OE It’s true.

CW What is also interesting in this process of growing both the size of the institute and the studio is that we’ve gone through different phases of demystification. There have been several ways of doing this actively : tours of the studio, presenting works in process in the studio’s workshops to the school, or show-casing the process of exhibition-making — for example, with Daniel Birnbaum — and discussing curatorial questions in front of and with the participants.

CW This even connects into all the institutional collaborations we set into motion. How does a theatre production work ? What are the methods and tools of other areas of expertise, in natural science, in dance ; how do you produce knowledge in cultural institutions, in an art school in Addis Ababa, on excursions and road-trips …

OE And not just in culture — also in science. There are so many more points to this. You’re perfectly right, Christina. Because we’re in it the whole time, we tend to forget. When I go to another school, I realise : My God, there’s a degree of arrogance or hierarchy. They address the professor as “Herr Professor”. Maybe this is a German practice. Essentially, I try to make my studio hospitable to the students. I’ve always had an open studio to a certain extent, made my studio transparent to

because she visits the studio sometimes. SAANA just came up to the school and contributed with a few sentences and then left again in an informal way. So we have a flow of people like this, where the students are exposed to the world and the world exposed to the students in this very productive and very pragmatic way.

EE What I also think is good about this … It’s like what Francisco Varela says ; you can’t separate what you know from what you do to know it. So how do we separate art from an art practice ? How do we feel the politics of public space from walking down a sidewalk ?

This feeling of the systems organising the spaces around us can be an art practice. And it can help shape a way of teaching. It’s the relationships, it’s the bringing the people in, which develops the language of doing and at the same time the language to articulate the doing.

Why do we pick Ethiopia as a place to take a German education experiment ? When we went to Ethiopia with the school for ten weeks, we also chose Ethiopia because Olafur has had a relationship there for

CW Practice and production are important keywords and not just in relation to scale — comparing square metres of a workshop, team size and logistic support, number and budgets. Artistic practice, both in communication and actual production, could be exercised on different scales throughout the semesters.

This also happened while living and working in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. As the context changed, the thinking and doing changed, and the very practice of

eight to ten years. So now we ask how do we represent that trip, not as something we did, but as something we are still doing ? These are sticky relationships. We stick together. How do we still stick together ? What is the practice of stickiness ? In Addis Ababa, we lived together as an institute in a compound, and we learned together in a kind of satellite space, on an empty floor in the Alle School of Fine Art and Design at the University of Addis Ababa. The stickiness of that school and city are different from what holds ours together, but how and where and why ?

So some of these structural reasons are what we expose our participants to, whether it is why we go to Ethiopia together, or walk through Berlin being led in the directions of the smells. Most of the forces of Olafur’s practice are just too far away from the students’ practices to feel. We see the shapes and forms produced, but to see the complexity of the stickiness is for the most part way far away from the forces organising their own art practices. Again, it’s like ha-ha in landscape architecture ; the tiger is standing right by the window ;

the participants’ art had to change at the same time.

We were all confronted with different expectations of what art is, as we always are, whether in Berlin or Ethiopia : how art should be presented, what it means, what it touches, what it may move.

One way to touch upon this is how the institute participated in events like the Addis Ababa Foto Fest and Jan Meda. We were invited to take part in this international photo exhibition, that had a stronger conventional framework and we hosted another exhibition, which was called Jan Meda — Großes Feld. There were installations and performances, and there were also public talks from people like Molly Nesbit, a poetry night and film programmes, a festival out in the open field. The exhibition we hosted was not exactly just an exhibition, but it was our practice of learning and living together ; it was exercising and producing reality at once. It was interesting to listen to the very different ways in which each of the artists in the school talks about their experience and about these two exhibitions — facing expectations of what an exhibition is supposed to be — and to

you see how close it is, but it is actually separated from getting there by a deep depression.

be able to relate to those expectations while the place changes and the work changes and the idea evolves, and how this meets in different ways of expressing themselves, of making art, and of living together. Many of the ideas and experiments that were realised formed the energy of the Jan Meda experience, not from the goal of producing an exhibition format, but from the urge to share a practice, almost like sharing a language. The practice — the Umsetzung — that’s how we communicated, the “hows” of seeing a glimpse of the reality we all share and how we invest ourselves in it. Without the growth of the exhibition formats that we nourished, we would have missed an opportunity to communicate via our practice. We would not have been exposed to the local reactions, options, doubts and excitement to enhance the dialogues. Those exhibition formats were a continuation of everyone’s practice and work, crystallising and catalysing experiences.

OE You think so ?

EE Sure. Well, I can speak from my own practice.

We may align in a space of ideas in the room at any particular time, agree on something’s responsibilities to the world, or maybe why we are inspired by how something is materialised … And then I twist a 100-meter rope into a knot, and you design a 100-meter bridge into a city. I can get the ideas, which organise and generate your bridge, for example, but in order to understand the intricacies of how that bridge forms also requires having a certain amount of bridge-scale work experience. There are artists in our school that have only been in group exhibitions, and sometimes only the exhibitions we have organised. There are others who have 63

been in the better-known biennales. When a Weibel or Maharaj visits the school, the energy of that content has to be able to plug into all the different scales of practice in the room. The same thing has to be relevant in many different ways. I mean, we can all meet in questions and ideas and feelings and philosophies, but any doing increases knowing what to ask. I mean, I think one of your best works is how you practice, allowing these things to meet in a place, today we call it a school, tomorrow, who knows ? The practice also depends on the production …

And for this book, and when making a photo essay of our trip to Addis Ababa, it will be a different story again, every time. A different story from the one I just gave, or what Olafur said, or the story experienced by any of the artists in our school, or any of the artists in Addis Ababa, or Molly, who came back to Berlin after sharing experiences in Addis Ababa, and let us talk about it again …

EE It will be a story that happens, not one that has happened. And so we couple together with these different systems, to also see how we do these ideas and languages, in terms of these other places, not just something on the east coast of Africa.

We’re trying to do this kind of everywhere, this art-practicing. These people are coming in, maybe to see Olafur, maybe because one of us knows them from before, whatever … They come through here and then we go out of our past and these things they all spin together now into a way that starts to become a form one day, something driving another form the next time, an energy changing something from before.

ND For example, the project in Addis Ababa, is that a new step ? Because I felt when I was there, even though I was there for a very short time, it’s a way of experimenting or maybe experiencing how to bring many of the ideas that developed here over the years at the Institut für Raumexperimente, to other places … to implement it elsewhere. I mean, to continue it, but …

OE I would not say it’s a new step. I would say it’s a relatively robust version of the steps that we’ve been taking all along. We did the same thing we did before and will continue to do afterwards. But, interestingly, a lot of the conditions were different. It was also very different when we did something similar in Brazil. It is also very different to do something on a very short trip somewhere else, and so on and so forth.

EE And in Berlin Tempelhof, rather than in Berlin, couched at home in your studio …

OE … and in Zurich, which was also very important.

The project in Addis Ababa was not about going out of where we are, going from the inside to the outside.

We were just going ! We were just continuing on the inside. Another point was very much to make inexplicitly very explicit that we were not going there to “give” something !

EE We’re on an art mission.

OE On the one hand, but to give something to the people there was absolutely not the idea. In fact, we were there to take, to use a line of thought taken from Christoph Schlingensief. We try not to underestimate the

realities of the global north and south and the inequality in the distribution of wealth. It was highly complex, of course, which made it even more robust, because every give or take was robust and strong.

We are seeing, in the times and places in which we now live, a kind of new confidence and creativity in art, but we are also seeing the opposite : there is also a lack of confidence, increasing objectification and marketing, where art and the economy are merging to the extent of taking away the great potential of creativity. That is a big discussion, and I am not necessarily the perfect person to verbalise it. I can see it to some extent, and I can also see that I’m a part of it, because my practice is right there in the middle of that whole complex field.

I think that I try to balance it out, and I feel the responsibility of articulating to a young person how incredibly serious art is when it comes to not making the same mistakes that I made.

You have to encourage the students to believe in their own works of art to such an extent that they can actually change the world with their works of art. That change might not be a very quantifiable one, and it might or might not be a qualitative one. It requires a whole other way of measuring.

And this is where I think we have to become a little more utopian. The utopian aspect here lies in having confidence that our actions have effects. We started out with introspection, but I think we have evolved towards “outrospection”. In our artistic practices, we find the critical components in the relationship to what is outside our practices. The why is not to be seen in the conventional critical approach, but in a more social, scientific approach, where we actually test the works on the street, test them in reality.

So the institute actually ended up becoming more extroverted and spatial than we thought it would in the beginning. We ask ourselves : “Does what we do have a new sensitivity to, or confidence in the potential for art to co-produce reality ?” This might be utopian, but art is a co-producer of reality, and a very vibrant or strong and relevant one at that. It is a currency that is becoming more and more valuable, simply because all the other economies that produce reality are deteriorating. This is something that I am particularly interested in how we are becoming more utopian, not because we are becoming more disconnected or abstract, but because reality is simply deteriorating. Although we are becoming more insular, within that bubble, there is occasionally a vibrating interconnectivity with the world ; there’s something really important going on when it comes to what an art school produces in today’s society, compared to other schools and other systems and other reality production machines.

Interestingly, when we close the school, we will know how to make a school, and not before. This is a beautiful thought because we were students too, and the students were also teachers. Because they are so much more sensitive about what’s going on — in this

case, in Berlin. I learned a lot about myself and about others from the students, and also from their art. They were the teachers or the protagonists, and I became a student.

This is why I love it when Molly Nesbit speaks.

She’s so aware of the unpredictability of the other. Who knows if there’s a revolutionary writer in the audience ?

She does not exclude that. She rather walks in and teaches and takes everything in. This is about confidence, right ? This is really about the idea that there is something and it is worthwhile and let’s just be very careful that we don’t miss it. I think these things seep through to the students, even though they look at her and they might wonder : “What is she talking about ?”

But the confidence is clear.

That’s why the street is important, and public space is important ; architecture is important, landscape architecture is important, social sciences are important, comparative sciences are important … But robotic sciences are also important, artificial intelligence is important …

You know, disregarding the curatorial, the museum and so on … And dancers are important, street dancers, street activists, all these things. It all ties together in this idea of bonding with reality production. Therefore, it’s maybe fair to say, we have not had a very theoretical class. It has been …

EE When you look at … the way Molly was talking about her responsibility as teaching art history, it’s a ‘doing’ theory again. It’s in the doing of …

OE That’s the point, yes : It’s presenting theory as activism.

EE Yes. OE It’s presenting words as sculptures to celebrate love, and it shows that words are active and …

ND Performative.

OE I’m really optimistic when it comes to evaluating the five years. Because, as I said before, I really think that artists are the future. Creativity is going to be the most valuable thing.

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Nico Dockx see page 8.

Olafur Eliasson ( born 1967 ) is an artist living and working in Copenhagen and Berlin. His work spans from installation and sculpture to photography and film and has been exhibited worldwide in institutions such as MoMA, Tate Modern, and the Venice Biennale. Established in 1995, his Berlin studio today numbers about 80 craftsmen, architects, and art historians. In April 2009, as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, Olafur Eliasson founded the Institut für Raumexperimente ( Institute for Spatial Experiments ), a five-year-long arts educational research project, supported by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. The institute was housed in the same building as Studio Olafur Eliasson, so that school and studio would mutually benefit from their respective activities, and the institute expanded the university into the broader city of Berlin. In 2012, together with engineer Frederik Ottesen, Eliasson developed Little Sun, a global project and social business that produces and distributes solar lamps to households where electricity is scarce or unavailable.

Eric Ellingsen ( born 1972 ) uses bio spaces to squat bio poems.

CHANTS OPERATIONS #2 ROUTINES KNOT RITUALS say IN THE END END IN-ENDED GOT over and over again until you start to hear other words and then start saying the other words you hear over and over and keep going until you arrive in a sense where you started.

Christina Werner ( born 1975 ) has been co-directing the Institut für Raumexperimente since its inception in 2009. Her work at the Institut für Raumexperimente emphasized not only an interest in building programmatic links between art and other disciplines but a comprehensive approach to curating the institute’s wide-ranging program of artistic practice and research ; workshops, exhibitions and publications ; food-related formats ; perception experiments ; contemplative exercises ; field trips ; institutional collaborations and collaborative initiatives ; as well as an unobtrusive guidance in choreographing and facilitating an open environment for communication and art and knowledge production.

The Institut für Raumexperimente ( Institute for Spatial Experiments ) was a five-year educational research project led by artist Olafur Eliasson in affiliation with the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts ( UdK ). One of the central tenets in the methodology of the Institut für Raumexperimente was to curate learning situations of uncertain certainty. These teaching experiments allowed unexpected ideas and energies to emerge from within the unique micro-ecologies of collaborations with international guests, practitioners, scientists, and institutions participating across a broad spectrum of different disciplines. By cultivating engagement among divergent fields of theory and practice, the program created an atmosphere of experimentation that challenged the norms by which we learn how to learn and, consequently, unfolded its curriculum in retrospect.

Christina Werner earned a degree in Cultural Studies at the Universities of Hildesheim and Tübingen and completed a postgraduate program in Critical Studies at the Lund University / Malmö Art Academy, Sweden. During 2007–09, she was curator for visual arts at the Cultural Committee of German Industries, and its artist award and exhibition series ‘ars viva’. Previously, she was director of the gallery Wohnmaschine, Berlin and co-curated various exhibition projects at the nGbK, Berlin. She has served as assistant to the artistic director of Documenta11, Kassel, in 2002, worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and freelanced at the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin and ifa, Stuttgart.

Institut für Raumexperimente graphical concept by Jan Mast

JAN MEDA — GROSSES FELD HOSTED BY INSTITUT FÜR RAUMEXPERIMENTE 13.–15. DECEMBER 2012, ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA In April 2009, as a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts ( UdK ), artist Olafur Eliasson founded the Institut für Raumexperimente ( Institute for Spatial Experiments ) together with his team of colleagues Christina Werner and Eric Ellingsen. For five years, the Institut für Raumexperimente affiliated to the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts as been an arts educational research project, supported by the Senate Office of Education, Science and Research of the State of Berlin in the context of its Program of Excellence as well as by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. The institute was housed in the same building as Studio Olafur Eliasson, so that school and studio would mutually benefit from their respective activities, and the institute expanded the university into the broader city of Berlin.

One of the central tenets in the methodology of the Institut für Raumexperimente was to curate learning situations of uncertain certainty. These teaching experiments allow unexpected and surprising ideas and energies to emerge from within the unique micro-ecologies of international guests, practitioners, educators and scientists participating across an expanse of different disciplines. Collaborations with international universities and different institutions were central to these education experiments. Through the past ten semesters, the institute has developed projects in collaboration with university departments from the ETH in Zurich, Harvard University, Sciences Po in Paris and the University of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

Following an introductory phase over the course of three semesters, in the fall of 2012, the Institut für Raumexperimente spent ten weeks in Addis Ababa building relationships, educational collaborations, and art co-productions. Hosted by and in cooperation with the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design at the Addis Ababa University plenty of local collaborations and surprising artistic ventures formed and an art festival emerged out of this collaborative effort.

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Photographs Nico Dockx & Institut für Raumexperimente Archives.

Contributors Addis Taem Band, Frezer Ademasu, AEAEAEAE, Malte Bartsch, Markus Hoffmann, Julius von Bismarck, Rune Bosse, Robel Temesgen, Merlin Carter, Julian Charrière, Leon Eixenberger, Olafur Eliasson, Eric Ellingsen, Tomas Espinosa, Henok Getachew, Tamrat Gezahegne, Andreas Greiner, Rike Horb, Clara Jo, Mihret Kebede, Felix Kiessling, Fabian Knecht, Hans-Henning Korb, Norgard Kröger, Robert Lippok, Abebaw Melaku, Demissew Mersha, Felix Meyer, Simen Museus, Molly Nesbit, Lynn Peemoeller, Vinzenz Reinecke, Nina Schuiki, Misrak Terefe, Tadele Tewodros, Alkistis Thomidou, Raul Walch, Jonas Wendelin, Christina Werner, Euan Williams, Helen Zeru.

Choreography Christina Werner and Eric Ellingsen.

Special Thanks Olafur Eliasson and the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design, Addis Ababa University.

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Thomas Bayrle graphical concept by Thomas Bayrle & Harald Pridgar

YEAST

Urpinsel, 1988, Composition with 6 brushstrokes, Atari / Assistant: Stefan Mueck

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Y E A ST

Teaching is fundamentally linked to the question: “What am I/Who am I?” My own answer to that question goes something like this: I see myself as a kind of leavening, as an “unquiet ferment” that makes dough rise … as a rather unpleasant product, yeast, with no mass of its own, completely enclosed and constantly seeking a way out. This underlying feeling is connected to a hermetic and “claustrophobic” sense of space that has its roots in my own biography. At the age of eighteen, I learned weaving and textile finishing in two southern German firms. The fabric, the way 10,000 weft threads are combined with 10,000 warp threads, and the forms of linkage they can represent—these are aspects that I used to muse on as I daydreamed in front of the looms, applying them in my mind’s eye to cities and urban spaces and even to the entire fabric of society. I saw them as rigid spatial systems in which millions of tiny spaces/apartments were enclosed … (the air pockets in a fabric determine its warmth). From the early 60s onwards, this notion of the social fabric as a woven textile, as I imagined it, had become inextricably linked in my imagination with Chinese culture and I tended to think of them in terms of real social models that were by no means totalitarian, but which enabled “democracy on a tiny scale”. The threads were individual and the textile was collective (a single thread consists of many fibres and can be individually dyed; it can be as complex as a glass fibre carrying millions of data—it is

more than something). The quality of the overall fabric—Heidegger—thus depends on the quality and quantity of the individual parts of which it is made up. This hermetic image (which I admit I find terrifying) is something I have seen looming on the horizons of society for some time now. It is the primitive appropriation of land culminating in an equally primitive notion of freedom. (Considering the price per square yard of real estate in our cities, one either thinks immediately of street riots where every inch is fought for, or is reminded of an English advertisement that illustrates the space between hairs—both are examples of A, the infinity of space—Mandelbrot—and B, that spaces can be sought and found between occupied places).

But to return to what I do: what I do when I am teaching—the spectacles one looks through are tinted by biographical experience that one cannot escape—no matter how much one might wish to. The “street riot” approach to gaining new forms between forms is tough, but worth the effort. In a cramped space there are no “long-term prospects”. Working within such a space is like taking a microbe’s view of the world, trying to get from the liver to the kidney … holes appear and close again immediately … bubbles … hollow volumes that burst again … I see myself, by force of circumstance, as an uncertain artistic existence that is constantly driven and can never ”rest” … In this image, resting is somewhere between breathing in and breathing out. The social consequence of such a situation (as opposed to “anything goes”) is a constant search for form that will make different patterns or keys compatible in o r der to create the next yard…This “need” is the driving force behind my actions.

By externalising that need and projecting it into other existences, I become something like a ”good teacher” … a trainer who tries to continue the tasks he cannot solve himself … in the existence of further satellites—students—just as the liver sometimes has to delegate tasks to the kidney— because it cannot cope with them on its own …

A bunch of grapes … frogspawn … emerge … on equal terms … in a hermetic work situation … as friendship in a real collective.

OK—let’s do it!

(May 2000)

Thomas Bayrle ( born 1937 ) was trained as a weaver ( 1956–58 ) and studied at the Werkkunstschule, Offenbach ( 1958–61 ).

He works with drawings, collages, film, and computer graphics. A pioneer of German Pop Art, Thomas Bayrle is best known for his ‘super-forms’, large images composed of iterations of smaller cell-like images. Humorous, satirical, and often political, his paintings, sculptures, and digital images are commentaries on the systems of control and domination in a rapidly globalizing economy, via allegorical references to traffic patterns, mass production, and the generic designs of popular goods such as wrappers and wallpaper.

Bayrle draws readily on his experience of Cold War Germany as a microcosm of broader power struggles. $ ( 1980 ) is among Bayrle’s most recognizable works : a sculptural wall relief of a dollar sign-shaped cardboard motorway littered with plastic vehicles, meticulously painted and arranged in line with the colored squares on Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie ( 1942–3 ). From 1975 till 2007 he has taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main.

Thomas Bayrle & Nikolaus Hirsch

in conversation with Nico Dockx graphical concept by Thomas Bayrle & Harald Pridgar

BECAUSE OUR INTERVIEW MIGHT BE A YEAR FROM TODAY

Urpinsel, 1988, Composition with 14 brushstrokes, Atari / Assistant: Stefan Mueck

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Thomas Bayrle and Nikolaus Hirsch interviewed by Nico Dockx, Staedelschule 2013 Nico Dockx: You always said that you were giving fifty per cent and that the other fifty per cent was given by the students.

Thomas Bayrle: I took off at the Staedelschule in 1975—my task was to run the foundation course that all students had to take part in for the course of one year. The work there came quite close to a "sweatshop for different purposes”, as we touched on everything … From life drawing to visits to factories. Then, at the end of that year, there was some sort of “picking out” process amongst my teaching colleagues, like: “I want this student and maybe that one too …” and this went on for many years. When Kasper König came in 1988, I got my own class like the rest of my colleagues, and after it started, I said to myself: “I will take all those that are left over.”

Nikolaus Hirsch: It was sort of like a Bauhaus model? Like a Grundkurs?

Students have to decide for themselves, since no pre-decision is taken through the choice of discipline, or simply because of the name of a class.

This seemingly “total” freedom brings more responsibility to the students. Nobody needs to tell the students to work, because there is a kind of competition that occurs within the groups or comes from the outside, from the society, from crits, or whatever.

Nikolaus Hirsch: Yes, and it needs a lot of responsibility skills from the students to cope with this freedom, because they are not controlled by any professor, although he or she still gives something … a certain identity, a particular culture, to think about things, or whether to hang out at the bar at night or not. This feeling is very important, but on the other hand, for about ninety per cent of the time the students are on their own, creating their own terms. I strongly believe that this responsibility can of course be quite exhausting in a way … but it feels as if their professional career starts here and now. When I started here at Staedelschule, I found it very interesting that the students did not talk to me about themselves as “students”, but usually as “artists”. Which is also an indication that maybe the boundary between art education at school and what comes after … like the art market, is changing.

Thomas Bayrle: Yes, all the teachers supported this foundation course through a special offer, of particular facilities, like colour, printing, life drawing, Kunsttheorie, etc. All the classes had separated the disciplines rather strictly. There was not much movement among the students, as the structure of Nico Dockx: That is maybe what Thomas means the different classes was pretty closed. They are when saying it is 50/50, because you saw your still separated today by their labels … students not really as students, but more like colleague artists. Exchanging ideas, rather than them Nikolaus Hirsch: We keep the old names, which simply learning, or you teaching them something. means, for example, that there we still have Tobias Rehberger as the professor of sculpture, Thomas Bayrle: I never really taught—because and Michael Krebber as the professor of painting, when I started here, I did not know how to do this and Wolfgang Tillmans as the professor of pho- … Students felt it immediately and we kind of met tography, and so on … But you might of course in the middle of the conversation. From the very have photographers in Michael Krebber’s painting start, my levels of knowledge were not so very high class, and painters in Tobias Rehberger’s sculp- “above” theirs—I was older—and had experience ture class, and so on. in some social-political and aesthetic areas—such as having worked in a weaving mill—in advertisThomas Bayrle: Today there are almost no ver- ing, and in graphic and printing companies. The tical structures anymore; it all seems horizontal. style of communication in that class was more or

less negotiation “in-between colleagues”, trying out different things … At the beginning it seemed a bit like an emergency program—a way of saving myself. But soon it worked out.

Nikolaus Hirsch: But a class without the cliché of a master/artist personality … For me it is also very important that it is not uniform. Imagine you had an academy with, let‘s say ten teachers, and they would all be doing the same thing. You would wonder: “Why are we doing it?”

A school is not a functionalist machine, as it is based on very different characters and also on many contradictions. It would be terrible for a school to have consensus. You often learn by the fact that people position themselves in a different corner. Maybe that sounds too much like competition, which could become a danger.

Thomas Bayrle: Sure, there is competition. And there is nothing bad about it. As long as it stems from different views—different structures, metaphors, productive realities …

Nico Dockx: And that could be very productive, I guess.

Thomas Bayrle: Metaphors like weaving or the human body seem very rigid. But they may stand for organic new architectures—composed of billions of tiny freedoms on different levels—jumping from scale to scale … amounting to bits and pieces of a bigger freedom … Like islands ...

Nikolaus Hirsch: I am sure that everything will change dramatically, this whole idea of how we talk about art, how we look at art and how we practice

it. Of course, you can describe the Staedelschule as a globally-perceived art institution, since more than seventy per cent of their students are foreign students. 190 students from 42 nationalities. But if you look more closely you somehow see that it is still a strong, northwestern-based geography. In the future I think that other dimensions like the East and hopefully also the South (such as Africa and South-America) will play an important and different role, triggering new discussions. So I think an interesting question would be: “When will there be an art academy in the East or South that really becomes a place of debate, and also has an impact on the West?”

Because, right now, I think there are amazing possibilities through new markets, biennials, etc.

Thomas Bayrle: Seen though the glasses of the West—in which the West is most prominent, but also with China, for example, new possibilities will soon leap in!

Nikolaus Hirsch: Thomas, you have also worked a lot in and about China … and Chinese rock-androll. The political dimension will also change.

Thomas Bayrle: After four hundred years of western colonialism and two world wars, we finally established western democracies. And we are proud and very confident of being able to export our society-model everywhere. But it actually seems hard to export, when you look at Egypt, for example. Or even more dramatically, if one looks at China.

While looking at their— long-distance—history —and the fact that they will compose a new collage … They never had a God, but they had philosophy. And how ignorant—how clichéd we have been—not even forty years ago— perceiving Chinese people as blue ants—and thinking that communism and prosperity could never go together! Till Deng Xiao Ping made it possible …

Nikolaus Hirsch: I think that an important issue for every school is the extent to which there is a sense of community. It is almost like a miracle, that you can create a sense of community and at the same time a totally individualistic practice. Despite all the collaborations, an art practice is somehow based on the idea of a solo career and not a multiplicity. So, an interesting question could be: “How does all of this feed into the space of community?”

Those schools that function well are places where individuals also realise that it is not about just fulfilling the cliché of an artist genius, but somehow to be part of a network. I always loved to work with others. I have always felt that I am nothing without others. I certainly had a couple of ideas, but maybe not enough in order to be just on my own.

be small. It is interesting to note that there is this strong tendency of other institutions to expand.

It can be interesting to engage and expand to new and other fields of research, as it is content-based and it adds complexities. Politicians who tell us that by doing mergers and thereby becoming bigger, it is possible to save money … That is a real danger, because you have to ask, does the quality of work and research become better?

Thomas Bayrle: There are thinkers, like Michel Foucault or Michel Houellebecq—and they bring new grids of reflection into societies—not always welcomed by those providing money for academies. Do we still have anything independent like this in our art schools? Sure, once in a while something is “a little illegal” … Today Europe acts in big bureaucracies—composed from conglomerates of controlled clusters to increase efficiency … There is a direct demand for recipes for creating artists—sort of training camps, of the kind that Goldsmiths College in London has practiced in recent years …

Nico Dockx: This also has to do with scale, no? Because, the Staedelschule is a very small institution if you compare it to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp—as we have Nikolaus Hirsch: Since you also wanted to talk about more than 100 teachers. the future. There is a structural pressure on us.

You cannot take academies for granted, because Thomas Bayrle: The Staedelschule is they are perceived by politicians as the ultimate like a family … luxury. You can’t prove it. Of course you can say: “Staedelschule is a great school”, but how would Nikolaus Hirsch: Here at the Staedelschule we you convince a politician about this? Perhaps by have twelve teachers, and our main privilege is to showing documents of the careers of alumni?

Thomas Bayrle: One wants success.

Nikolaus Hirsch: But how can you show success of the now? It’s impossible!

Thomas Bayrle: You cannot and should not press for success from people that are still learning and who circulate in areas that are not yet established.

Especially not from those minds that go fishing in the “unknown sea of being now …”

Nikolaus Hirsch: I guess Volkswagen or Porsche, they can actually immediately show how their current production and sales interlink, etc. I think they have very accurate models for measuring their success. But, if I, as a director of the Staedelschule, for instance—visit

the school with people that are interested in funding our activities, they always want me to show them the studios of the students in order to see their art works. But if you go into these studios, you don’t see anything!

some works in progress … waiting for the yearly three-day Rundgang. And so therefore, I feel it is a very precarious situation, because you cannot really show it. This is also something to be discussed, about how things become visible. Art schools have a different model and economy of visibility than a museum. A school is not an exhibition, although we know certain temporary models like Anton Vidokle‘s unitednationsplaza, Olafur Eliasson‘s Institute für Raumexperimente, Rirkrit Tiravanija‘s Gasthof, and many other experimental, educational

projects— but these fantastic models were very clearly defined in time and location. They were temporary structures in the form of seminars and installations shown in museums and as part of biennial programmes. And, places like the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp which now celebrates its 350th birthday, and the Staedelschule here in Frankfurt-am-Main which is almost 200 years old, they are big dinosaurs … but, they should not die.

Thomas Bayrle: Yeah, at least not Thomas Bayrle: What we can say about art acadwhat they expect to see. emies is not especially “new”. At their best they still represent a mushroom network—a network Nikolaus Hirsch: You would see an old sofa, a cof- that is hidden, except for a single mushroom popfee machine that doesn’t work properly, some food, ping up here and there.

Nikolaus Hirsch: But potentially speaking, I think it is very important to think of art schools beyond the idea of ranking. Today, our institutions are getting ranked as: best schools, second-best schools, worst schools, etc. That is what you know from …

Nico Dockx: The model that is being used here at the Staedelschule … You do not have the bachelor and master programmes, right? Is that the general situation for education in Germany?

Nikolaus Hirsch: If you look at the art schools in Germany, most of them have not applied to the Thomas Bayrle: Na ja, ranking … You only rank Bologna process. Most of them are free or do not established things. even have any degrees. But in Hamburg, for example, they have fully implemented it. There, for Nico Dockx: That is exactly what is happening instance, as a professor, you have to give grades now within the context of this whole idea of ac- and credits to your students, which I think is a bit... adamisation. Rankings at all levels, not only the institutions, but also the professors, the students, Nico Dockx: So you do not give any credits, and all our competences get ranked. Even research is you do not give any certificates? getting ranked.

Nikolaus Hirsch: No, you get a paper, as it is a Nikolaus Hirsch: When you look at academia fully acknowledged study here. Once you leave there is of course very much this evolution to- the school, there is an official accreditation by the wards a model that basically comes from the U.S. state that proves that you have completed your A bachelor-master system, which is much more studies. But, it has not got any degree names. You structured, full of modules, and more teaching, etc. basically get a piece of A4 paper with a symbol of And I feel that this is a danger for our art schools, Mr. Staedel. It says, for example, that student X for our way of thinking. or Y has successfully completed his/her studies in the class of Tobias Rehberger (or another proThomas Bayrle: Control. Control is most fearful fessor), and than there is the director‘s signature and passive—a poison for a centre of the Arts. underneath—that is it. When I try to explain this to colleagues of mine, to friends in the USA … they Nikolaus Hirsch: In some way, we talk about sometimes look at me as if I am from outer space. things that are very basic to continental Europe, I tried once to explain this to Okwui Enwezor when but they are in danger of disappearing. Also in he was still at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Asia, the schools I know there are very author- he said: “This is not possible … this has no value.“ itarian and expensive. They are somehow very It is interesting when you think of values. similar to the schools in the USA, but I am optimistic that our European model of, for exam- Thomas Bayrle: When you look closely into what is ple, inexpensive education can be exported. Be- coming up, it might raise certain fears, but on the cause I think there is a demand for what we are other hand, it is a waste of energy trying to resist doing, otherwise foreign people would not try to it. I was always fighting for this “no-diploma” model come here for their education. So therefore I am along with Kasper König and with Daniel Birnbaum quite optimistic that more and more people want … but almost all areas in our so-called free societo have a working and studying situation that is ty are increasingly controlled and bureaucratised. not controlled.

You kind of have to accept and undermine … Officially fulfilling this certificate-camouflage … I think Thomas Bayrle: To real artists this means stay- one should also dare to pass these things and be ing in the shadow of the shadow zone, and quietly a good artist as well. Drive through and don‘t care moving on … too much … knowing this might be fatalism …

Nikolaus Hirsch: At the end of the game, you have to believe me that basically one of the main reasons why interesting teachers come here is also because the Staedelschule provides some freedom. These people do not define themselves 100% as teachers, as they actually have an artistic career, so they have a focus on their work. You can only convince them to teach in your school if you can also give them that freedom.

At the same time I wanted our relationship to be structured. Like meeting up every Tuesday afternoon, over the course of many years. If it turned into some sort of party, that was not really my thing … I usually just went home. But it was like going into rocks, caves, hollows in order to find “that very small precious metal” one is looking for. It was personal. Sometimes you had to bullshit-communicate!

Since the twenties, this has been part of an artist‘s need. At other times I felt inferior. I felt hurt as a herNico Dockx: A very personal question to you, Tho- metic person … I found all of this out with mas: What made you decide to teach? Personally, students, and in return, they I ended up in the art academy found out new stuff with me …

in Antwerp because I somehow feel a responsibility to share and exchange my knowledge and experiences with a younger generation. You have been teaching for more than thirty years at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt-am-Main; can you tell me more about it?

Thomas Bayrle: Talking to other artists who do not communicate, but talk has always been part of what I was doing. Even if it was with heartbeat, because of apparent contradictions—with Kippenberger for instance—above sympathy, with people that I don‘t like … I tried to find their conversation. Sometimes it‘s a pleasure. It was a wonderful mentality. Someone like Franz West had a wonderful mentality. Conversations with colleagues often bring you to interesting questions. Once in a while they totally confront you. And so I went to teach—not expecting anything smooth—not knowing what to teach. The first thing to tell them was: “I don‘t want to see any copies of myself.”

Nikolaus Hirsch: I started teaching at the AA (Architectural Association) in London, which is also a very special school, although a private one.

It is also small and it has a particular spirit. The centre of this school is a fully licensed bar. And there you encountered amazing opportunities, as you always had the feeling that the whole world was there.

Thomas Bayrle: To me, that style of art school came from England … Like a lot of the experience I had with the Slade School of Arts, our exchange partner in the seventies and eighties, and on the

other side was Joseph Beuys. He opened curtains in German academies and introduced totally free teaching structures. But nowadays, we cannot ride on such models any more. There may still be interest in inspiring examples, to learn from Black Mountain College, or some of the other experimental institutions around the world. Rather early here there was this myth of a very tiny school somewhere in the U.S. secretly growing some artistic giants, as well as the idea of a family …

Like the Staedelschule of the eighties. I am okay with the fact that these times are over. They stand as good examples of very small, rather efficient schools. When we said this to Gerhard Richter during a visit in 1988, he said: “Small is fine, but beware of turning into a dwarf school.”

Nikolaus Hirsch: That’s true.

I think the model as such does not say much about the quality of a school.

Nico Dockx: It is about a specific group of people that comes together.

Nikolaus Hirsch: Yes. Nothing is forever. It is also a relief to say that and to understand that it is about a space and the people. It sounds very nostalgic and naïve, but it’s true.

Thomas Bayrle: It‘s absolutely dependent on the people. And it‘s very rare, when such a group of people comes together ...

Nikolaus Hirsch: And, of course, if such a small school is part of a larger network, then it is also much easier to function as a small unit. Here at the Staedelschule we do at least have very large networks around us. Frankfurt, as you know, is the location of this school. It is also something of which you could say: “Should a school like this be in an art metropolis like Berlin, London or New York? Or can it also be in a city like Frankfurt, which has, for example a very big airport? Or can it be in the

countryside as well? There are these models of education in total isolation. The Black Mountain College was an isolation model and people went there for a very particular time, not throughout a whole year. There are different ways that one can think about schools or school-like models. Perhaps another interesting thing is that many artists that have already graduated from art school are still interested in attending lectures and workshops. So, I strongly believe, it never really stops.

It does not have to stop! That was, for instance, one of the motivations for people like Anton Vidokle to start an experimental educational platform in Berlin (unitednationsplaza), which was basically a kind of post-post-post-graduate school, or something like that. It is also a kind of autonomy that Anton has developed. What I am trying to say is that it is one attempt in how to continue a practice.

And today, it is also interesting to see how many museums try to be like a school—organising seminars and workshops. But, I think it is still very different. I think they have to sell tickets and all these things. I feel that some schools have to operate like museums in a playful way. For instance, at the Staedelschule, one very important element— brought by Kasper König—is the Portikus gallery space. Actually, you cannot separate the success of the Staedelschule from its Portikus gallery. This is something very interesting. The artists who have been working there, who were invited there, they always had very close contact with the students.

The students helped the artists with installing their shows, and then there were always lectures and workshops, etc. The students experience how a professional artist works. And Kasper König was also incredibly smart in not implementing this gallery space in the school building; which was also strategically incredibly intelligent. Because if you look at many other art academies, most of the time their exhibition spaces are inside the school building—where too many people can interfere.

Portikus developed a certain kind of autonomy, but it is still part of the school as all the funding comes from the Staedelschule. It is an amazing gesture! It is very important for the school. Which, again, is difficult to communicate to politicians be-

cause they see the Portikus as the weakest point in the school system. Therefore they’re trying to close it, to shut it down. You know when you go to a large museum—like the MoMa or Guggenheim in New York, or whatever—the artists are always at a distance and almost intangible for young people. Here, at the Staedelschule, these renowned artists can come close to the younger generation.

Look at our aula, for instance, it is not much bigger than my office space—so you sit very close to one another … You can talk together on a human scale and you can ask them whatever question you like. And then afterwards you will have a drink together. I think that this notion of proximity is an amazing experience for many students.

some of them are close to some of the professors here in the school. There are links between some of the artists we show at Portikus and the professors at the Staedelschule. That is also very important. There is a community of learning.

Thomas Bayrle: I think it is rather direct networking. It also refers to the small town of Frankfurt, so one can also see it like: Mr Brown, Mr Brown are you going down to town …? You have a few, excellent institutions, and you have your school and your Portikus, and so study here, with the perfect opportunity for trial and error, and then after that, you go to Berlin, to start your career.

Nikolaus Hirsch: And it is not always Thomas Bayrle: This is really something special. It gentle. But, yes, it is direct. If you was the right thing in the right moment. think of the Mess, which is at the very heart of the school, and Nico Dockx: So, there is a parallel trajectory of which is also not that old. teaching and learning through the exhibition programmes of Portikus? These visiting artists also give lectures, make studio visits, produce workshop sessions, and so on?

Nikolaus Hirsch: That is not always the same for every visiting artist. Often there is an attempt to have these artists return to the school on a more regular basis, which is something really enjoyable. At the end of the day, it is just about this idea of presence. Of course, you don’t have to love every artist. You also have to hate some of these visiting artists that are teaching here. You have to learn to know how to position yourself and you also have to learn how these artists show at the Portikus, how they position themselves, and how they approach you as a student. Of course, some of them are more open to you than others. And

Thomas Bayrle: That‘s what Kasper König said when he came here: “There has to be a Mess, with an excellent cook! And a Portikus.” This was fantastic. He immediately saw what was lacking in the school.

Nikolaus Hirsch: This is great! Daniel Birnbaum is calling me. This is a coincidence. But, as you just mentioned, Thomas, it is maybe these two facilities in the school that are really important to all of us: the Portikus gallery as a place for exhibitions with great autonomy; and the Mess, right at the centre of our academy. And I think that these two aspects are the very core business of what we are trying to do here at the Staedelschule.

Thomas Bayrle: Yes, something really unique!

Nikolaus Hirsch: For me personally, there are at least two ways to talk about the Mess. It is really a place for community. But what is very clear is that being a community does not mean that we all agree on one and the same thing, and that we always smile and give kisses to one another. This is also a place where fights happen. There are sometimes situations where certain people won’t join the table of certain other people and vice versa, because they belong to a sort of clique, or they have a certain thing going on, or a certain position to take as artists. So, this is also a place of debates and fights.

introduced cooking as a main discipline in our school. The school already has a very long tradition in doing new things, you know. In its 180 years of connection with the Staedel Museum, especially during the twenties, it was Swarzenski, the director of the Museum and Fritz Wichelt who ran the school.

Together they created a super modern school. Together with many Jewish institutions, they made Frankfurt an outstanding place in Germany.

As everybody knows, as a Jewish town, the Nazis hated Frankfurt, and destroyed everything.

Nico Dockx: Kubelka installed a combining system …

Thomas Bayrle: Yes, Kubelka saw the structural coexistence of film, architecture, music, and food together. He made great lectures and performances regarding that team. And this was the founding of the kitchen and later on the Mess, which was never a Mess in the same way that every university has one. It has a special history. When Thomas Bayrle: Yes, quiet debate, like yeast Kasper came he developed the Mess further, to to make the school cake rise! make it represent the public centre of the entire school. Peter Cook made the glass roof, Franz Nico Dockx: Do people also come in West made the furniture and Raymond Pettibon from outside to eat there? produced a comic on the Mess wall.

Thomas Bayrle: In the Staedelschule we already knew how necessary a good cook was! Already during the eighties we had some great teachers, like Peter Kubelka (Film, Cookery, and Music).

Far above the Mess, he

Nikolaus Hirsch: This is the last remaining chair … this one here.

Thomas Bayrle: How fragile such institutions are.

It shows a two-week gap, between König leaving and the arrival of Birnbaum. It was a moment, when all of a sudden, a small group of employees felt there was a chance to change everything.

One day I came to the school to find Franz West’s chairs on top of a rubbish truck, that was ready to drive away. Climbing up to get the chairs down, I thought: In five minutes so much opportunity can turn to shame!

Nikolaus Hirsch: That is why, for instance, someone like Douglas Gordon, when we appointed him here at the Staedelschule as professor of the film class … I was showing him around the school as we were looking for a classroom and then suddenly we arrived at what used to be Kubelka’s kitchen, and … he was also a film professor; he was actually Douglas’ pre-pre-predecessor. And so Douglas

was immediately into it, even though he does not teach any cooking at all, but he lives a culture of communality, of eating and drinking … So it became the right place for him. That kitchen became his classroom. And, it also gave him a kind of historical attachment.

Thomas Bayrle: There are various types of furniture and architecture, but the spirit that makes a school is still very important. It is maybe the most important element as it makes the furniture, the relations, it makes … us. As we just described, this kitchen had not fallen from heaven and it had not been given by a generous person of the city.

Nobody had given it. It was a radical necessity in the thinking of the school, in the presentation of a certain point of view of one professor on how to

see teaching and learning. And another professor gave something else and so on ...

Nikolaus Hirsch: It is also absurd but very logical that these two elements, the Portikus gallery and the Mess are the most vulnerable parts of the school with respect to the politicians, since for them, this is a luxury, and not something vital for teaching.

Thomas Bayrle: It is like in a church where the empty space between floor and ceiling is about fifteen meters high, and one might think: “Why don’t we not rent out this unused space?” This void, this unnecessary luxury! Such a void is the sense of the school. It needs to have this space for contemplation, reflection, meditation. And, meditation in a box three-meters high is not the same experience as it is in a fifteen-meter high cathedral.

So this means that the Mess and the Portikus gallery are the Staedelschule‘s luxury. Nikolaus is right! That luxury is the first thing for bureaucrats to wipe out. The politicians will always say: “Is this necessary?”

Nico Dockx: I think it is very important to keep thinking about what a school could be, to permanently re-invent it day by day. Not only this particular school here in Frankfurt-am-Main, or the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, but art education in general.

Nikolaus Hirsch: Like you Nico, I am often in Asia, and sometimes I go to the schools there … And, we are used to meeting fascinating artists and intellectuals there, and you think: “This is really great here, I could work here.” But, then you go into the schools and it is like going to prison. It is incredible! There is something …

Thomas Bayrle: … really missing!

phy of the text. Very beautiful.

Nikolaus Hirsch: Thomas, have you also been to Thomas Bayrle: The typography of this writing is Chiang Mai with Rirkrit? so good because it takes fractions: more important, less important, not so important, etc. And in Thomas Bayrle: Yes! the end the whole text is like a stream of thoughts and ideas. It is like a river. It is so beautiful. It is Nikolaus Hirsch: Ok, since we have all been there, also a very good edition.

I think it is very interesting how Rirkrit also tries to invest in education through the Land Foundation. Nico Dockx: This typography and book design And he also just invites many people to his house could be an interesting model for an art school... in Chiang Mai to have conversations and shares it with young people there. That is how he teaches Thomas Bayrle: Yes, in a way, the layout of the text in a way. could be the possible layout of a school. There is a floating text.

Thomas Bayrle: The Land has density, and spirit.

Nico Dockx: It is a learning system with different Nico Dockx: Yes! velocities and weights.

Thomas Bayrle: A certain spirit drives a certain plant. A plant does not grow for nothing. It‘s based on a plan, in a similar way to a city.

Nikolaus Hirsch: That is it.

Thomas Bayrle: There are always different weights and movements; it is just like a river: everything passes by … passing stones, passing this, passing that. That is wonderful! The sentence … Der Satz. Das ist so ganz gross.

Nico Dockx: That is wonderful, that is so beautiful Nico Dockx: John Cage wrote this book in 1965, Thomas! right? Or 1966?

Nikolaus Hirsch: What is this John Cage thing?

Thomas Bayrle: 1966, I think.

Thomas Bayrle: It was just here.

Nikolaus Hirsch: 1968! “To us and all those who hate us, that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less.”

Nico Dockx: It was just sitting here from Monday.

Thomas Bayrle: Yes, it is really great. But, it is very important to see how romantic it was and what comes out of it now. This so-called reality.

Buckminster Fuller and John Cage always saw the world already in best shape; but nothing came out like they thought it would come out. Socially, for instance, it is a total mess. Their thinking and plans were so wonderful and so we also have to think about how to save some of these ideas, so that they do not fall apart and disappear.

Nikolaus Hirsch: Yes, it is crazy … The typogra-

Thomas Bayrle: Fantastic! You’ll read it again... because our interview might be a year from today.

Nico Dockx: That’s a good title.

Nikolaus Hirsch: Totally!

Thomas Bayrle see page 92.

Nico Dockx see page 8.

Nikolaus Hirsch see page 26.

Louise Osieka

JEF GEYS, BETWEEN TEACHER AND ARTIST JEF GEYS, TUSSEN LERAAR EN KUNSTENAAR Following the wish of Jef Geys, this essay is also provided in the original Dutch version.

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Geys’ predilection for anchoring his work in a specific local and social context manifests itself expressly in Kempens Informatieblad. Geys has been publishing these selfcontextualising newspaper since 1971. They are distributed free of charge or sold at a very democratic price on the occasion of his exhibitions of larger projects. The Kempense Informatiebladen can be read online at the digital library of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library in Antwerp.

Towards the end of the 1950s, the Belgian artist Jef Geys ( born 1934, Leopoldsburg ) embarked on the creation of an unorthodox oeuvre. By doing so, he explored all contemporary movements, without ever completely identifying with any of them. In the second half of the twentieth century, inspired by the longing for all that is new, a lot of artists have sought to overthrow conventions and proclaim their actions to be works of

media notice Geys. They call his works remarkable, modern and innovative. Geys, who is not interested in fame or glory, sees education as a tool to expand the awareness of his students and to stimulate their integration in society as critical human beings. He wants to show young people what goes on in the world and make it possible to anticipate events. Geys gives a voice to young people and forces them to have an

art, but Geys — who is deeply rooted in the Kempen, a rural area in the northeast of Flanders — continues in his own consistent manner to work on a less spectacular, yet profound method. 1 His works are critical of society and attempt to unmask the seemingly obvious nature of life.

The point of departure for Geys’ activism is his personal way of living and experiencing the world.

Art is neither the beginning nor the end of things. It is therefore essential to analyse and interpret Geys’ oeuvre as broadly as possible, and to call attention to his so-called non-artistic activities, his everyday actions, especially his role as a teacher in the secondary school in Balen.

opinion of their own — and to articulate this opinion in their own language. Thus Geys does away with the then common idea that a student is a passive consumer of spoon-fed information, and opens the debate about the democratisation of the school system. 4 An example of this is the newspaper mural in his classroom, which features a clear message to his students. 5

Jef Geys attended a primary and secondary school that was run by the Brothers of Charity. Aged seventeen, he decided to join the military. Geys left the Belgian army four years later and started studying advertising at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Upon graduating he moved to Hasselt and followed a teacher

2 Griet Wynants, ‘Martin Douven — Leopoldsburg — Jef Geys’, in : Kempens Informatieblad. Martin Douven — Leopoldsburg — Jef Geys, MuHKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerpen, 2001.

training programme. In 1958 he made his artistic debut and moved to Balen, a small town near Leopoldsburg, where two years later, he was appointed teacher of Positive Aesthetics at a state-run secondary school. 2

3 Jef Geys, Kempens Informatieblad. Speciale Editie São Paulo, Balen, September 1991.

Now that the hippy movement is disbanded Now that the Dutch put flowers in their hair Now that Scott McKenzie sings San Francisco Now that the new art, the new new art emerges Now that the hippies have entered Paris, Now that John has his Rolls painted Now that the Stones sing about flowers Now that Batman & Co are ready to play a part in a new play by Hugo Claus Now that you know that hippies are the Belgae of America.

It is high time that we realize that maybe we, too, have something to say.

Just be yourself. Draw like you feel and see, tell me about it in the Balen dialect and we’ll talk it over together in Dutch.

We, too, are capable of achieving these things.

Get informed.

COM MUNICATION

4

Anna Harding, ed., Magic Moments. Collaboration between artists and young people, London, ( Black Dog Publishing Limited ), 2005, p. 116–127.

As a teacher, Geys is not interested in traditional ways of teaching. Together with a number of likeminded colleagues, including Jef Sleeckx and Walter van den Broeck, he searches to achieve that which their small group considers the highest good : innovation. 3 Geys' activism as a teacher is based on the principles of self-development, responsibility and authenticity. The commitment that results from this attitude can be viewed as a revolutionary alternative to the prevailing school culture. Before long, the local

5 Anonymous, ‘Nu Jef Geys de nieuwe kunst aan het bord hangt’, in : Het Laatste Nieuws, 13 November 1976 ( Personal archive of Jef Geys ).

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GET TING INVOLVED Geys considers it of great importance how his students are involved with the subject matter of his lessons.

He constantly searches for ways to make art — and implicitly, life — intelligible to his students. In 1975, for example, he decides to conclude his classes in a most peculiar manner. A student with Turkish roots takes his place in the classroom, and has to teach his fellow students the language and culture of his home country.

With magazines and newspapers the students make collages, learn the names of body parts in Turkish and listen to stories about Atatürk and life in Turkey. 6 Geys abandons the idea that the transfer of knowledge is possible only in a superior language. The involvement of “the other” is essential in the learning process.

Involvement is also Geys’ leitmotiv for the decontextualises of a number of gender issues he finds in various newspapers and uses them for the newspaper mural in the classroom. The statements — ’Why are contraceptives not covered by our health insurance ?’, or ‘Do we have to vote for a woman in the national elections ?’ — offe the opportunity to debate. The debate starts only when one of the students questions or comments on the statements. Then Geys stops the lessons and takes time out to critically discuss the statement with his students. The responsibility for starting the debate rests with the young people themselves.

They only engage in a debate when they understand the relevance of a thesis and therefore get involved with the issue. Once more, Geys goes beyond the traditional framework that defines the authority of the teacher. In doing so, he broadens the students’ perspective within their own social environment and in their own language.

In 1972 the Balen branch of the Socialist Women’s Association asks Geys whether they can exhibit some of the artist’s “beautiful” Seed Packets at their annual show. 7 Geys agrees, provided that he can also exhibit his so-called ! Women’s Questions ? This is the first time that this collection of socio-political issues will be on view outside the context of a school. Whereas his students had absolute freedom to participate or not, ! Women’s Questions ? becomes an obligatory trip for middle-class women in Balen — who seem, in fact, to show much more interest in his decorative work.

Through his work, Geys makes a clear statement.

With his so-called “less intelligent” students from his technical secondary school, he engages in a debate about pressing questions, such as abortion, oppression, and capitalism. The issues are literally questioned and give rise to further debate ( ? ). 8 At the 1972 exhibition, this list of questions seems to function like a warning, a process that raises middle-aged women's awareness ( ! ).

Three decades later, he once more exhibits his ! Women’s Questions ? at the Kunsthalle in Loppem. 9 Here Geys experiments with familiar brown wrapping paper as support, but also with graph paper and “kitschy” tablecloth, and the questions have been translated into French, English, Finnish, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, and Arabic. Among the question forms with questions, he also installs a video with archival footage and text excerpts. In short sentences, Geys summarises what this is all about : “Do we not waste a tremendous amount of intelligence by maintaining social injustice ?” On this occasion, Geys once more promotes a type of involvement that tunes in to the subject’s

environments. On one of the pamphlets on the wall, he therefore writes : ‘Rusmet Kandemir speaks better Dutch than Charles Ferdinand Nothomb. The latter is the then Minister for Foreign Affairs, the former a sixteen-year old of Turkish descent, who studies at a technical school in the Kempen.’ 10

PARTICIPATION Geys does not stage a one-man show, but urges the whole school to participate. In 1984 the school celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary with a large exhibition, which is freely accessible to everyone. At Geys’ initiative, and with the help of Jan Hoet, then director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, the school managed to get sixty-one authentic works of art on loan, including works by David Hockney, Panamarenko, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol and Daniel Buren. 11 In his loan request to Hoet, Geys highlights to the particular didactic qualities for his students and the local inhabitants of the town. Hoet’s response is positive and the correspondence between Geys and Hoet features on the poster that announces the event. The entire school community helps to realise the exhibition and the extra activities. Geys’ students from the fourth year social sciences design a free catalogue and guide the visitors through the exhibition. Geys takes responsibility for selecting the works and he considers his choice a large representative sample of the post-1940s visual arts : “It is a framework the students can use as a foundation and from which they may select works, articulating what they do and don’t like.” 12 Geys creates a well-defined space in which the participants — i.e. the students — have the opportunity to become familiar with the concepts provided. The result is an atmosphere that stimulates the creative potential of the students and of everyone who participates. Unlike the initiators of the Fluxus events or happenings of those days, Geys does not step into the limelight — his role is principally that of a mediator-instigator and not so much that of a creator-artist. He starts up a learning process by encouraging his students, then withdraws and leaves it up to the students to continue this process.

Thus the boundaries of the traditional school hierarchy fade — boundaries that interfere with the creativity of the students, or even make any creative act impossible.

6 Jef Geys, Kempens Informatieblad. Speciale Editie Knokke-Duinbergen, Balen, 3 June 1989.

7

Geys started his series of ( large and small ) Seed Packets in 1962. Each year, he paints a replica of the familiar flower of plant seed packets.

8 This has been emphasised by the artist as he decided to leave the last question of the series, nr. 158, unanswered.

9

Nica Broucke, ‘Kunst en feminisme één strijd ?’, De Morgen, 20 September 2003 : 52.

10

Ibidem.

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EXPERIENCE Geys is well aware of the possible failure that may result from presenting his subject matter dryly and duly. He therefore introduces an element of play that becomes the driving force of the learning process.

Even early in his career as a teacher, he brings modern and contemporary art in the classroom. Teens are confronted with authentic work by Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana, Arman, and Andy Warhol, but also with the music of Bob Dylan, Donovan and the

Jack Van Gils, ‘Kunst in de school en dit keer niet op dia’, De Morgen, 12 May 1984 : 26 ( personal archive of Jef Geys ), and ‘Kunst uit Balen’, Cobra.be, last modified 14 July 2013, http://www.cobra.be/cm/ cobra /cobra-mediaplayer.

12 ‘Kunst uit Balen’, Cobra.be, last modified 14 July 2013, http://www. cobra.be/cm/cobra /cobramediaplayer.

Beatles. 13 In 1969, Geys takes his class on a visit to Marcel Broodthaers’ installation, Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles in Antwerp. He even manages to talk Broodthaers into personally showing “his public” around the installation. Asked why he shows his students these works, instead of simply teaching them the theory of colour as a “drawing teacher” is supposed to do, he replies : ‘Because these are precisely the artists who make today’s art and who give today’s world the face of tomorrow. Because Arman happens to be the leading figure when it comes to assemblage art, because Francis Bacon is the painter of the new generation. [ …] In short, because all of these are figures that make something happen.’ 14 The students not only learn about art movements and artists simply by looking at them, but also by interactively discussing them and by familiarising themselves with them. They redraw works by Picasso and rebuild Piero Gilardi’s foam vegetable garden. Geys asks those doubting the relevance of art to draw a series of dollar bills, introducing them indirectly with the visual imagery

13

Roger Jockers, ‘School Balen-Neet is een internationaal erkend kunstwerk’, Het Nieuwsblad, 20 May 1969 ( personal archive of Jef Geys ).

14

Anonymous, ‘Nu Jef Geys de nieuwe kunst aan het bord hangt’, Het Laatste Nieuws, 13 November 1976 ( personal archive of Jef Geys ).

15 Karl van den Broeck, ‘Teken zoals je je voelt en spreek erover in je dialect’, Knack Extra. Kunst en cultuur in het onderwijs, 3, 1, ( 2011 ) : 28.

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Geys’ voorkeur voor de verankering van zijn oeuvre in zeer lokale en sociale context wordt het best verbeeld in de Kempense Informatiebladen. Deze zelfcontextualiserende publicaties in krantvorm, ontwerpt Geys sinds 1971 en worden gratis of tegen zeer democratische prijzen verspreid in het kader van zijn tentoonstellingen of grotere projecten. De Kempense Informatiebladen kunnen online geraadpleegd worden op de digitale bibliotheek van de Hendrik Conscience Erfgoedbibliotheek van Antwerpen.

Griet Wynants, ‘Martin Douven — Leopoldsburg — Jef Geys’, Kempens Informatieblad. Martin Douven — Leopoldsburg — Jef Geys. Muhka Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, 2001.

3

Jef Geys, Kempens Informatieblad. Speciale Editie São Paulo, Balen, september 1991.

109

De Belgische kunstenaar Jef Geys ( Leopoldsburg, 1934 ) start eind jaren vijftig zijn onorthodox oeuvre waarbij hij op kritische wijze alle contemporaine stromingen doorloopt zonder zich er ooit volledig mee te vereenzelvigen. Daar waar veel kunstenaars vanaf de tweede helft van de twintigste eeuw, gestuwd door het verlangen naar vernieuwing, al wat geïnstitutionaliseerd is tegen de schenen schoppen en deze act tot kunstwerk verheffen, werkt Geys — sterk verankerd in de Kempen, een landelijke streek in het noordoosten van Vlaanderen — consequent voort aan een minder specta-

of pop art. 15 These actions are vital for the process of gathering knowledge. Geys does not set standard assignments, but rather assigns personalised activities that focus on the perception of each of his students.

In this case, as in his 1984 exhibition, Geys first liberates the works of art from the institutional context of the museum, storage room or gallery and presents them within the anonymous perception of the school. This bereaves the works of art of their linguistic meaning as imposed on them by the art canon; it causes a rupture in the value scale. In the classroom, the art object can once more be “learned”.

The same process extends to the inhabitants of the town of Balen, as people come into contact with works of art that are otherwise only restricted by the art-loving elite. This way Geys encourages the local community to acquire knowledge in a free and familiar setting, bottom-up and in a one-on-one confrontation with the work of art.

culaire doch diepgaande methodiek. 1 Zijn werken zijn maatschappijkritisch en trachten de schijnbare vanzelfsprekendheid van het leven te ontmaskeren.

Het vertrekpunt van Geys’ activisme is zijn persoonlijke manier van leven en beleven. Kunst is niet het begin, noch het einde. Het is daarom essentieel Geys’ oeuvre op een zo ruim mogelijke manier te analyseren en te interpreteren en ook aandacht te schenken aan zijn zogenaamde niet-artistieke bedrijvigheid, zijn dagelijks doen en laten en in het bijzonder zijn rol als leraar in de middelbare school te Balen.

TO CONCLUDE

aangesteld wordt als leraar Positieve Esthetica aan de Rijksmiddelbare school. 2

In Geys’ oeuvre the dualism artist / teacher manifests itself at a variety of levels. On the one hand, the context of the school enables Geys to flee the art scene, and that gives him the freedom to look upon the art world as such from a critical distance. On the other hand, through the school community, Geys can anchor his artistic formats in everyday reality. The concrete situations, linked to a certain time and place, prevent his praxis from lapsing into a seemingly automated paradigm.

Geys’ artistic constructions aspire to the same goals as the school: communicating, informing and providing insight. Geys is well aware of the fact that the transfer of knowledge is optimised by increasing the extent of involvement, participation and experience. His oeuvre is one big process of raising awareness; it is a question mark and exclamation mark that accompanies

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everything we human beings perceive. His attitude bears witness to a determined faith in the (positive) social impact of art on society. His constructions result in veiled didactic blueprints, initiating and boosting the critical potential of public, participant and student.

Jef Geys doorloopt zijn lager- en middelbaar onderwijs bij de Broeders van Liefde. Op zijn zeventiende besluit hij beroepsmilitair te worden en vervoegt zich bij het Belgisch leger. Na vier jaar verlaat Geys het leger om Publiciteit te studeren aan de Academie van Schone Kunsten te Antwerpen. Hij verhuist nadien naar Hasselt en volgt er een lerarenopleiding. In 1958 maakt hij zijn artistieke debuut en verhuist naar Balen, een kleine stad in de buurt van Leopoldsburg, waar hij twee jaar later

COM MUNICATIE Als leraar is Geys niet geïnteresseerd in de traditionele manier van lesgeven. Samen met enkele gelijkgezinde collegae, waaronder Jef Sleeckx en Walter van den Broeck, zoekt hij naar wat ze beschouwen als hoogste goed : vernieuwing. 3 Aan de basis van Geys’ onderwijsactivisme staan zelfontwikkeling, verantwoordelijkheid en authenticiteit.

Het engagement dat daaruit voortvloeit, kan gezien worden als een revolutionair alternatief voor de heersende onderwijscultuur. Al vlug wordt Geys opgepikt door de lokale media die zijn projecten bestempelen als merkwaardig, modern en vernieuwend. Geys — niet

uit op roem en faam — ziet het onderwijs als een hulpmiddel om het bewustzijn van zijn leerlingen te vergroten en hen vervolgens als kritische individuen in het maatschappelijk leven te integreren. Hij wil jongeren tonen wat er in de wereld gebeurt en hen de mogelijkheid geven om hierop te anticiperen. Geys geeft de jongeren een stem en dwingt hen een opinie te vormen en deze ook uit te spreken in hun eigen taal. Hiermee stapt Geys af van het gangbare idee van de student als passieve consument van voorgekauwde informatie en opent hij het debat omtrent democratisering binnen het pedagogisch systeem. 4 Een voorbeeld hiervan is de muurkrant in zijn klas waarop Geys in klare taal een boodschap schrijft gericht aan zijn leerlingen. 5

Nu de hippie-beweging ontbonden wordt Nu de Nederlanders bloemen in hun haar steken Nu Scott McKenzie San Francisco zingt Nu de nieuwe kunst, de nieuwe nieuwe kunst zich ontpopt Nu de hippies Parijs zijn binnengedrongen Nu John zijn Rolls laat volschilderen Nu de Stones over bloemen zingen Nu Batman & Co klaar staan om op te treden in een nieuw toneelstuk van Hugo Claus Nu jullie weten dat de hippies de oude Belgen van Amerika zijn Is het de hoogste tijd dat wij ook eens gaan beseffen dat we wellicht ook wat te vertellen hebben.

Wees gewoon uzelf. Teken zoals je voelt en ziet, kom het me zeggen in het dialect van Balen en we zullen er samen over praten in het Nederlands.

Wij zijn ook in staat om zulke dingen te verwezenlijken.

Informeer jezelf.

zitten voorbehoedsmiddelen niet in het ziekenfonds ?’ of ‘Moet er in landelijke verkiezingen op een vrouw gestemd worden ?’ — worden zo het mogelijk vertrekpunt van een gesprek dat pas ontstaat als één van zijn leerlingen de stelling bevraagt of becommentarieert. Op dat moment stopt Geys de les en neemt hij de tijd om de stelling op een kritische manier met zijn leerlingen te bespreken. De jongeren hebben zelf de verantwoordelijkheid om de dialoog op gang te brengen nadat ze de relevantie van een stelling inzien en zich dus betrokken voelen bij de aangereikte materie. Geys overstijgt hier weer het traditioneel pedagogische kader waarin elke leerkracht zijn bevoegdheid heeft. Hij verbreedt het draagvlak van de leerlingen binnen hun eigen leefwereld en in hun eigen taal.

In 1972 vraagt de Socialistische Vrouwenkring van Balen Geys enkele van zijn “mooie” Zaadzakjes te mogen exposeren op hun jaarlijkse tentoonstelling. 7 Geys stemt in op voorwaarde dat hij ook zijn zogenaamde ! Vrouwenvragen ? mag tentoonstellen. Dit zal de eerste keer zijn dat de bundeling socio-politieke vragen buiten

Geys hecht zeer veel belang aan de betrokkenheid van zijn leerlingen ten opzichte van de aangereikte leerstof. Hij gaat op zoek naar manieren om kunst en

de schoolse context getoond wordt. Waar de leerlingen nog de absolute vrijheid kregen om al dan niet te anticiperen, worden de ! Vrouwenvragen ? een verplicht nummertje voor de Balense dames uit de middenklasse die eigenlijk alleen geïnteresseerd zijn in Geys’ decoratief werk.

Geys maakt hier een duidelijk statement. Hij voert namelijk met zijn zogenaamd minder intelligente leerlingen uit het technisch onderwijs, gesprekken over prangende thema’s als abortus, onderdrukking en kapitalisme. De aangehaalde problematiek wordt letterlijk in vraag gesteld en roept alleen nog meer vragen op ( ? ). 8 Tijdens de tentoonstelling in 1972 lijkt de lijst met vragen te fungeren als waarschuwing, een bewustmakingsproces voor dames op leeftijd ( ! ).

Drie decennia later stelt Geys de !Vrouwenvragen ? opnieuw tentoon in Kunsthalle Loppem. 9 Naast het gekende bruine inpakpapier experimenteert Geys met millimeterpapier en “kitscherig” tafelzeil als drager en zijn de vragen naar het Frans, Engels, Fins, Italiaans, Japans, Turks, Chinees en Arabisch vertaald. Tussen de

impliciet ook het leven, begrijpbaar te maken. Vanaf 1975 besluit hij bijvoorbeeld om zijn lessen op een heel eigenaardige wijze af te sluiten. Hij laat zich vervangen door een leerling met Turkse roots die hij de opdracht geeft de medeleerlingen de taal en de cultuur van zijn vaderland bij te brengen. Met behulp van tijdschriften en kranten worden collages gemaakt, lichaamsdelen worden in het Turks benoemd en er wordt geluisterd naar verhalen over Atatürk en het leven in Turkije. 6 Geys stapt af van het gangbare idee dat kennisoverdracht enkel in de eigen superieure taal mogelijk is. De betrokkenheid van “de andere” is essentieel in het leerproces.

vragenlijsten plaatst hij een video met archiefbeelden en met tekst. In korte zinsneden declameert Geys waar het in feite allemaal om gaat : ‘Wat gaat er niet verloren aan intelligentie door het in stand houden van maatschappelijke en sociale onrechtvaardigheid ?’ Het is hier dat Geys weer de noodzaak propageert van betrokkenheid die aansluit bij de eigen leefwereld.

Op één van de pamfletten aan de wand schrijft hij dan ook het volgende : ‘Rusmet Kandemir spreekt beter Nederlands dan Charles Ferdinand Nothomb.

De tweede is de Minister van Buitenlandse Zaken, de eerste een Turk van 16 jaar, leerling aan een technische school in de Kempen’. 10

BETROKKENHEID

Betrokkenheid is ook het leitmotiv wanneer Geys uit een uitgebreid aanbod aan kranten en dagbladen een aantal gender issues decontextualiseert en op de muurkrant van de klas bevestigt. De stellingen — ‘Waarom

4 Anna Harding, ed., Magic Moments. Collaboration between artists and young people, Londen ( Black Dog Publishing Limited ), 2005 : 116 — 127.

5 Auteur onbekend, ‘Nu Jef Geys de nieuwe kunst aan het bord hangt’, Het Laatste Nieuws, 13 november 1976 ( persoonlijk archief van Jef Geys ).

6 Jef Geys, Kempens Informatieblad. Speciale Editie Knokke-Duinbergen, Balen, 3 juni 1989.

7 In 1962 start Geys met zijn serie ( grote en kleine ) Zaadzakjes. Zo maakt hij ieder jaar één schilderkunstige replica van de gekende bloemen- en plantenzaadzakjes.

8

Dit benadrukt Geys zelf door de laatste vraag van de reeks, nr. 158, bewust open te laten.

9 Nica Broucke, ‘Kunst en feminisme één strijd ?’, De Morgen ( 20 september 2003 ) : 52.

10

Ibidem.

PARTICIPATIE Jef Geys speelt geen one-man-show maar spoort de hele schoolgemeenschap aan te participeren. In 1984 viert de school zijn vijfentwintigste verjaardag met een grote tentoonstelling, gratis en voor iedereen toegankelijk. Op Geys’ initiatief en met ondersteuning van Jan Hoet, directeur van het Gentse Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, krijgt de school éénenzestig authentieke werken in bruikleen, waaronder David Hockney, Panamarenko, Carl Andre, Andy Warhol en Daniel Buren. 11 Geys wijst in zijn aanvraag aan de conservator op de bijzondere didactische kwaliteiten voor zowel de leerlingen als de mensen uit de omgeving. Hoet reageert positief en de briefwisseling hieromtrent siert vervolgens de affiche van het event. De hele schoolgemeenschap werkt mee om de tentoonstelling en haar nevenactiviteiten op poten te zetten. Geys’ leerlingen van het vierde jaar Menswetenschappen stellen een gratis tentoonstellingscatalogus samen en leiden het publiek rond. Geys stelt zichzelf verantwoordelijk voor de selectie van de werken en beschouwt zijn keuze als een uitgebreide staalkaart van beeldende kunst na 1940 : ‘Het is een referentiekader waarop de leerlingen kunnen verder bouwen en nadien eventueel zelf kunnen selecteren door te zeggen, kijk dat vind ik goed, dat vind ik minder goed.’ 12 Geys creëert een begrenzing, een afgebakende ruimte waarin de participanten — de leerlingen — de mogelijkheid hebben om zich de aangereikte concepten eigen te maken. Er ontstaat een klimaat waar het creatieve vermogen van de leerlingen, maar in feite van iedereen die participeert, gestimuleerd wordt.

In tegenstelling tot eigentijdse Fluxus manifestaties of Happenings stelt Geys zichzelf niet centraal maar fungeert hij meer als bemiddelaar-ontsteker dan als creator-kunstenaar. Hij zet het leerproces in gang door zijn leerlingen te prikkelen, te stimuleren en aan te moedigen, maar zet vervolgens een stap terug om hen de verantwoordelijkheid te geven het proces te continueren. Hierdoor vervagen de grenzen van de conventionele schoolhiërarchie die de creativiteit van

11

Jack Van Gils, ‘Kunst in de school en dit keer niet op dia’, De Morgen, 12 mei 1984 : 26 ( persoonlijk archief van Jef Geys ) en ‘Kunst uit Balen’, Cobra.be, last modified 14 juli 2013, http://www.cobra.be/cm/ cobra/cobra-mediaplayer.

12 ‘Kunst uit Balen’, Cobra.be, last modified 14 juli 2013, http://www. cobra.be/cm/cobra/cobramediaplayer.

Wanneer Geys gevraagd wordt naar de reden waarom hij deze werken toont en de leerlingen niet simpelweg onderricht in kleurenleer zoals het een “leraar tekenen” betaamt, antwoordt hij het volgende : ‘Omdat het precies die namen zijn die de kunst van vandaag maken en die de wereld van vandaag zijn gezicht van morgen geven. Omdat Arman nu eenmaal de leidinggevende figuur is van de assemblage-kunst, omdat Francis Bacon dé schilder is van de nieuwe figuratie, ( … ). Kortom, omdat het precies al deze figuren zijn die ervoor zorgen dat er wat gebeurt.’ 14 De leerlingen leren kunststromingen en kunstenaars niet alleen kennen door er naar te kijken, maar door er over te praten of ze zich eigen te maken door middel van een handeling. Picasso’s worden nagetekend, Piero Gilardi’s schuimrubberen moestuin wordt nagebouwd en diegenen die het belang van kunst niet inzien, vraagt Geys dollarbriefjes meermaals na te tekenen waardoor ze indirect de visuele beeldtaal van Pop Art leren kennen. 15 De handeling is fundamenteel in het proces van kennis vergaren. Geys werkt niet met gestandaardiseerde opdrachten, maar ontwikkelt gepersonaliseerde activiteiten waarbij de beleving van ieder kind centraal staat.

Net zoals tijdens de tentoonstelling in 1984 bevrijdt Geys ook hier de kunstwerken uit de geïnstitutionaliseerde context van het museum, depot of galerie en plaatst ze vervolgens binnen de anonieme perceptie van de school. Hierdoor verliezen deze kunstwerken hun door de canon geconstrueerde talige betekenis en vindt er een breuk op de waardeschaal plaats. In school mogen de kunstobjecten opnieuw “geleerd” worden.

Dit proces komt tevens op gang bij de lokale Balense gemeenschap die in contact komt met kunstwerken die anders enkel bestemd zijn voor de kunstminnende elite. Geys spoort hiermee dus ook de gemeenschap aan om in alle vrijheid en in een vertrouwde omgeving kennis op te bouwen, vanaf de basis, in een één op één confrontatie met het kunstwerk.

BESLUIT

leerlingen mogelijks inhiberen of zelfs blokkeren.

13

Roger Jockers, ‘School Balen-Neet is een internationaal erkend kunstwerk’, Het Nieuwsblad, 20 mei 1969 ( persoonlijk archief van Jef Geys ).

BELEVING Geys is zich bewust van het mogelijk falen van droge materie en zorgt ervoor dat een handeling, een spelelement de motor van het leerproces wordt.

Reeds in het begin van zijn carrière als leraar haalt hij moderne en eigentijdse kunst en cultuur in het klaslokaal.

Tieners worden geconfronteerd met authentiek werk van Picasso, Yves Klein, Fontana, Arman, Warhol maar ook met muziek van Bob Dylan, Donovan en The Beatles. 13 In 1969 bezoekt Geys samen met zijn klas Marcel Broodthaers’ installatie Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles in Antwerpen. Geys kan Broodthaers zelfs overtuigen om “zijn publiek” persoonlijk te begeleiden.

14

Auteur onbekend, ‘Nu Jef Geys de nieuwe kunst aan het bord hangt’, Het Laatste Nieuws, 13 november 1976 ( persoonlijk archief van Jef Geys ).

15 Karl van den Broeck, ‘Teken zoals je je voelt en spreek erover in je dialect’, Knack Extra. Kunst en cultuur in het onderwijs, 3, 1 ( 2011 ) : 28.

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In Geys’ oeuvre manifesteert de relatie tussen het kunstenaarschap en het leraarschap zich op verschillende niveaus. Enerzijds verleent de context van de school Geys de mogelijkheid de kunstscène te ontvluchten waardoor hij de vrijheid krijgt de kunstwereld an sich op een kritische manier te beschouwen. Anderzijds kan Geys via de schoolgemeenschap zijn artistieke vormen verankeren in het alledaagse. De concrete tijd- en plaatsgebonden situaties voorkomen dat zijn praxis verglijdt in een schijnbaar automatisch werkend paradigma.

Geys’ artistieke constructies hebben tevens een met de school gedeelde doelstelling ; communiceren, informeren en het verschaffen van inzicht. Geys is er zich van bewust dat kennisoverdracht geoptimaliseerd wordt door het verhogen van betrokkenheid, participatie en beleving.

Zijn oeuvre is één groot bewustmakingsproces, een vraag- en uitroepteken bij alles wat we als mens gewaarworden. Uit zijn houding blijkt een duidelijk geloof in de ( positieve ) sociale impact van kunst op de maatschappij. Zijn constructies resulteren in verhulde didactische schema’s, ze initiëren en versterken het kritische potentieel van de toeschouwer, de participant en de leerling.

Louise Osieka ( born 1990 ) holds an M.A. in Art History ( 2013, Catholic University Leuven ) and is currently working as assistant curator for the contemporary art collection of the National Bank of Belgium. In addition she is doing research on the oeuvre of contemporary artist Jef Geys. She recently won Art Brussels’ curatorial competition for emerging curators. In the past she worked at Manifesta 9 ( Genk ), STUK ( Leuven ), WIELS ( Brussels ), C-mine ( Genk ) and Het Paviljoen ( Ghent ).

Gustav Metzger

with an introduction by Jan Mast

SOME DRAWINGS, A PAINTING, ANTWERPEN 1948–1949

Gustav Metzger is old, centuries old. He escaped one of Grünewald paintings. A living tree with a face.

He moves at the same pace too. Rooted. Sand ticks time away. Every now and again he comes back to reality, drifts away once more, a strange glimpse in his eyes, dreamland and memories. He fell asleep looking at an early painting. He was facing the woman on the canvas. The woman facing him.

1948 Receives a stateless passport, and begins a three-month study tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and France. While in the Netherlands, he visits the head of the Van Gogh family, an engineer, to propose making a film based on Vincent Van Gogh’s late painting, Crows over a Cornfield.

Begins three terms of fulltime art studies, including drawing and painting, under Gustave de Bruyne at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, with the help of a grant from the Jewish Community of Antwerp.

“Thank you !“, he said and turned to me. Our work was done; we finished photographing the 1948 – 1949 works. I looked him in the eye and answered with a grin “No, thank you“. We shook hands.

“Do you like that painting ?“ I wanted to find a word that contained all the thoughts I gathered surrounding his attitude towards this particular work, the woman, the many studies of her, the face, the position, ...

Everything. He was enchanted by her. “Mmm, well, it is truly enchanting.“ He pauzed — time is on his side — and smiled widely, his eyes shining stars under his grey eyebrows. “Thank you“, he repeated and looked at me with a strange feeling of common memories.

Bridges. Empathic liasons.

1949 Leaves Antwerp and spends three months travelling in France, visiting Colmar to see Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, and the South Coast from Nice to Collioure. Stays in Paris, before returning to England. His Haendler Trust grant is extended for a further year on the recommendation of Jacob Epstein.

This information has been compiled from texts

by Clive Phillpot from Damaged Nature, AutoDestructive Art ( coracle@ worktheeyetodo, London 1996 ), and Anna Artaker from History, History ( Generali Foundation, Vienna 2005 ), and updated

by Gustav Metzger.

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Nico and I looked at each other and nodded.

Dessert animals easily spot each other.

Presenting a selection of 15 works on paper from 1948 – 1949, one work on canvas from 1949, two archival images and the corresponding transcript from a 2013 encounter between Gustav Metzger, Nico Dockx and Jan Mast. Images by Jan Mast.

Gustav Metzger is well-known as a dyed-in-the-wool revolutionary. He is a pioneer of the anti-nuclear arms movement and one of the first ecological activists. In the 1960s, he abandoned painting to experiment with ‘auto-destructive art’ and with environments that blurred the borders between art and science. He also organised symposia, demonstrations and actions.

This exhibition sheds a light on a lesser-known aspect of his career. It contains a selection of the drawings Metzger realised while a student at the Antwerp academy at the end of the 1940s. They reveal a sensible observer already experimenting with strategies of deformation and distortion.

Jan Mast see page 36.

Gustav Metzger ( born 1926 ) is a London-based artist, born in Nuremberg, Germany to Polish-Jewish parents. From 1945 to 1953, Metzger studied at various art schools in Cambridge, London, Antwerp and Oxford. In 1959, he developed the concept of autodestructive art, proposing works that could self-destruct, to reflect the similarly destructive nature of political and social systems.

At the heart of his practice, which has spanned over 65 years, are a series of constantly opposing yet interdependent forces such as destruction and creation.

Beatrice von Bismarck translated by Aileen Derieg

ACADEMY EFFECTS PROJECT WORK AS EMANCIPATORY PRACTICE

1

The demand for creativity has been inseparably linked with the idea of the artist since the early nineteenth century, and its significance and function have become permanently unstable in post-industrial society.

Takeovers on the part of economic production and management models have disrupted the exclusive claim to creativity formulated by art in processes of appropriation that have also integrated autonomy, authenticity and liberation in new enterprise strategies, as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have demonstrated. 2 The requirement profiles of post-Fordist working situations sound like an echo of criteria that were previously reserved primarily to artistic practice and the expectations associated with it, since they include techniques situated in the field of self-realisation, self-management and freedom, as well as the ability, for instance, to make paradoxes productive. 3 Role-model functions are accordingly attributed to artists.

Posing the question of the current social task of educative institutions in the art field necessarily includes taking the conditions of affirmative economic instrumentalisation into consideration. Apart from the issue of whether art — or anything at all — can actually be taught, as raised by James Elkins in his discussion of the task of art academies, 4 the functions of those institutions that go beyond the further dissemination of a “norm of deviation” 5 are also a subject of debate. This is a debate that evolves its profile against the background of an artistic and cultural practice that insists on social

1

This essay is an expanded version of the article entitled “Modellversuch Projektarbeit. Institutioneller Widerstand oder emanzipatorisches Praxis”, published in Kulturrisse, No. 76,1 / 2004, p. 14–16, and the essay “Performative Abweichung. Überlegungen zur Projektarbeit in Ausbildungssituationen”, in : Texte zur Kunst, No. 53, Vol. 14, March 2004, p. 70–74.

2 See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello : “Die Arbeit der Kritik und der normative Wandel”, in : Marion von Osten ( ed. ), Norm der Abweichung, Zürich / New York 2003, p. 67–68. The essay by Boltanski and Chiapello, first published in Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 4 ( 2002 ), summarises the main theses of their investigation “Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme”, Paris 1999.

3

See Thomas Lemke, Ulrich Bröckling, and Susanne Krasmann : “Gouvernementalität, Liberalismus und Selbsttechnologien. Eine Einleitung”, in : Ulrich Bröckling, Susanne Krasmann, Thomas Lemke ( Eds. ), Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart. Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen, Frankfurt am Main 2000, p. 30 ; see Siegfried J. Schmidt : “Kreativität — Innovation –Aufmerksamkeitsökonomie”, unpublished lecture manuscript, p. 4–5. I would like to thank Siegfried J. Schmidt for making the manuscript available.

4 See James Elkins : Why Art Cannot Be Taught. A Handbook for Art Students, Chicago 2001, especially p. 91–110.

5

Explaining the title of her publication, Marion von Osten states : “If dissidence, criticism and subversion become the motor for the modernization of the same circumstances that they were initially intended to undermine, abolish or at least denounce, then the relationship of norm and deviation is reversed.” Marion von Osten ( 2003 ), op. cit., p. 7.

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relevance, and which owes its importance to the special enabling proximity to the production process that is inherent to educational situations.

Expanding on the approaches of “institutional criticism” from the late 1960s and the 1970s, beyond the spatial, social or discursive functions of the institution “academy”, it is primarily its effects that are important.

This applies to a matrix of individualisation with its symbolic and economic utilisations, which are produced and further disseminated in educational situations.

Avoiding and eluding the naturalisations, hierarchisations and processes of inclusion and exclusion that are tied to these situations presupposes — according to the thesis that follows — a structure of agency that refuses institutionalisation, which urges spatial, temporal and social contingency, and which comprehends itself as subject and object in its reflexive disposition.

The present considerations focusing on the critical potential of academy education centre around a specific form of project work, as practiced since 1994 at the KUNSTRAUM ( or Art Space ) of the University of Lüneburg, and since 2000 by the / D / O / C / K Project Area of the College of Graphic Art and Book Art in Leipzig.

In both cases, the project work, intended to be both transdisciplinary and spanning different professions, brings together artists, scholars and scientists of different disciplines ( art history, cultural and visual studies, sociology, philosophy, and media studies ), professionals in the art field, and students from the respective institutions.

The processual working form in the projects allows for varying demarcations between tasks, positions and fields in the different phases, making it possible to topicalise and reflect on them. Beyond the possible processes of approximation, but also of rejection between the disciplines, or between art and science, the roles of all participants are continuously available for disposition and change several times within a project.

demands they impose, especially in their most recent efficiency-oriented, “economicised” manifestations, as produced by modularisation and continuous evaluation processes : the processuality, intersections and overlapping of roles and disciplines, abandoning the semester rhythm, ever new formations of discursive spaces, the transience of the respectively collaborating communities, and the performance character that is always included in the arrangement are some of the potentially resistive dimensions of the project work. 9 In the following, I would like to discuss three of them in particular, specifically those that deal with overlapping roles, with the transitory, and with performativity.

In terms of content, the work of the KUNSTRAUM and the / D / O / C / K Project Area has so far been organised around themes such as the definition, formalisation and acknowledgement of project-oriented art ; the possibilities and situations of self-organised structures in the cultural field ; the significance of “immaterial” labour in the art and cultural field ; the constitutions and transformations of cultural, professional and institutional identities ; the relationship of art, ecology and sustainability ; and opening up archivist practices beyond the discourse of memory. 6 What is determinant for the project work in both locations is a relational understanding of the social field “art”, on the one hand, and a relationship between theoretical and practical activities characterised by a “network of relationships and transfers” on the other. 7 As an experimental educational model with an emancipatory orientation it is intended for testing all contingencies.

Gathering practical experience is not exhausted in recapitulating and rehearsing established skills and circumstances, but is rather focused specifically on their

between institutional responsibility and independent research, between a hierarchical transference of legitimised know-ledge and collective experimental work. Not unlike the position of curators, which also involves transference, 10 teachers generally execute a balancing act seeking to bridge the differences that Pierre Bourdieu notes between priests and prophets in “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field” ( 1971 ).

Priests, in this case, have “a socially acknowledged and institutionalised capital of religious authority” ; their duties consist in establishing order and sometimes maintaining the symbolic power of the institution, here meaning the church. The prophets, on the other hand, are focused on questioning the “conventional order”, producing and disseminating new salvation goods that can serve to discredit the old ones. In other words, they meet orthodoxy with heresy. Here too, there is a possibility of a movement of acceptance that turns from change into affirmation, as the development of the struggle for power between priests and church, on the one hand, and prophets and sects on the

potential for change. 8

The already latent risk that the model experiment could be transformed into an integrated component of the institution, that it could have more of a stabilising effect on the institution’s exercise of power, is increased in both Lüneburg and Leipzig by the fact that the project work being conducted with this conceptual orientation does not involve singular events or processes, but is instead meanwhile able to look back on several years of practice. In order to avoid the trap of an experiment mutating into a permanent establishment reinforcing the process of the institutional appropriation of critical approaches and methods, KUNSTRAUM and / D / O / C / K Project Area concentrate primarily on hybrid, process-oriented, transitory, contingent and performative procedures. These are procedures that, in several respects, forestall institutional rules and the

I. Within the project work described here, the role of the teacher — distributed among several actors — is characterised by a reflective way of dealing with one’s own position within the charged field that opens up

other can result in the sect becoming church, which is simultaneously fated to trigger a new reformation. 11 In the context of the academy, this applies, on the one hand, to the mediating role assumed by teachers, in which they pass onto the students the preconditions for entry into the field that they have fulfilled themselves, while at the same time assuring their position in this field by disregarding these same criteria in their artistic and / or research practice, and questioning the established school of thought. Caught in this quandary between obligations to the institution that appoints them and the autonomy claims of the field, teachers in the art field organise their work in the intersecting areas of administrative or economic and artistic demands. 12 In this way, they largely exemplify the problems of post-industrial working conditions as they are currently treated in the discourse revolving around the concept of

“governmentality” introduced by Foucault. The self-technologies through which an “autonomous” subjectivity that has become a guiding model in society are linked with state economic objectives are deployed here. 13 Based on and simultaneously deviating from Bourdieu’s dichotomous model, a scope of action furnished with critical perspectives can be determined for teachers in attitudes and procedures, with which they place themselves neither on the side of the priests nor of the prophets, but instead integrate the relationship between both roles in activities of researching and experimenting. Alternately assuming tasks, practices and attributions of both positions in a mode of critical reflection means locating oneself in a third — transitory, flexible and hybrid — position, whose characteristics are respectively redefined in carrying out one’s own practice.

6

Projects realised since 1994 at the Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, directed by Diethelm Stoller, Ulf Wuggenig and myself, include : Andrea Fraser and Helmut Draxler : Services ( 1994 ) ; Clegg and Guttmann : The Transformation of Data into Portraiture ( 1994 ) ; Christian Philipp Müller : Touring Club ( 1994–95 ) ; Fabrice Hybert : Testoo ( 1995–96 ) ; Christian Boltanski : Les Archives des Grandparents ( 1996 ) ; Thomas Locher and Peter Zimmermann : Öffentlich / Privat ( 1996 ) ; Renée Green : The Digital Import / Export Funk Office ( 1996–97 ) ; Christian Philipp Müller : Der Campus als Kunstwerk ( 1997–98 ) ; Hans-Peter Feldmann : Interarchiv ( 1998 ) ; Dan Peterman : Treibhaus ( 1999 ). Projects from the / D / O / C / K / -project area, under the direction of Alexander Koch and myself, dealing with the redefinition of the functions of the gallery at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig : Drei Tage, Herstellen von Öffentlichkeit, Künstlerische Selbstorganisation ( 2000 ) ; Selbstpositionierungsstrategien im Kunstfeld / work in progress. A video production in collaboration with Christian Jankowski ( 2001 ) ; In welcher Haltung arbeiten Sie bevorzugt ?

Kunst im Verhältnis zur Konstruktion von Arbeit, in collaboration with Andreas Siekmann ( 2001 ) ; be creative ! Der kreative Imperativ, in cooperation with Marion von Osten ( 2002 ).

7

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the “field” comes into effect here, a network or a configuration of objective relations between positions. Within this, the individual actors — which, in the art field, means artists, curators, art critics, gallerists, etc. — find themselves in a continuous process of positioning themselves in relation to others, see Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc J. Wacquaint : Reflexive Anthropologie, Frankfurt a. M. 1996, p. 127. On the one hand, this mode of working takes recourse to the relation of theory and practice propagated by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, see “Gespräch zwischen Michel Foucault und Gilles Deleuze. Die Intellektuellen und die Macht”, in : Michel Foucault : Von der Subversion des Wissens, Frankfurt am Main 1993 ( 1974 ), p. 106–108.

8

On the objectives of the work in Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, see Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller, Ulf Wuggenig : Games Fights Collaborations. Das Spiel von Grenze und Überschreitung, Kunst und Cultural Studies in den 90er Jahren, Ostfildern-Ruit 1996, p. 7–9.

9 A more extensive treatment of the political perspectives of the project work would go beyond the scope available here. A publication on the work of the D / O / C / K Project Area will be published in June 2014.

10

For a more detailed discussion of this, see : Beatrice von Bismarck : “Kuratorisches handeln : Immaterielle Arbeit zwischen Kunst und Managementmodellen”, in : Marion von Osten ( 2003 ), op. cit., p. 81–98.

11

See Pierre Bourdieu, “Genese und Struktur des religiösen Feldes”, in : ibid., Das religöse Feld : Texte zur Ökonomie des Heilsgeschehens, Konstanz 2000, p. 77, 79, 81, 86 ( English translation : Bourdieu, Pierre, “Genesis and Structure of the Religious Field”, Comparative Social Research, Vol. 13, 1991, p. 1–44 ) 12 See also Beatrice von Bismarck, “Kuratorisches Handeln. Immaterielle Arbeit zwischen Kunst und Managementmodellen”, in : Marion von Osten, op. cit., p. 81–98.

13

See Thomas Lemke, Susanne Krasmann, and Ulrich Bröckling, “Gouvernementalität, Neoliberalismus und Selbsttechnologien. Eine Einleitung”, in Lemke, Krasmann and Bröckling ( eds. ) : Gouvernementalität der Gegenwart. Studien zur Ökonomisierung des Sozialen, Frankfurt am Main, 2000, p. 29–30.

14

On the projective character of collective work, see Miwon Kwon’s reflections on community formation in community-based art in reference to Linda Singer and Miwon Kwon : Ortungen und Entortungen der Community, in : Christian Meyer and Mathias Poledna ( eds. ), Sharawadgi, Köln 1999, p. 214, and ibid. : One Place After Another. Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, Mass. / London 2002, p. 154–155

15

See Michel Foucault : “Andere Räume” ( 1967 ), in : Michael Wentz ( ed. ) : Stadt-Räume, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1991, p. 68. [For the English translation, see : http : / / foucault. info / documents / heteroTopia / foucault.heteroTopia.en.html]

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II. This teachers’ third position is supported by being embedded in collective working processes that are founded on the formation of temporary communities.

Instead of forming fixed groups for working on one or even several projects, the association and cooperation takes place respectively because of changed questions and corresponding interests. Situations and discourses both internal and external to the academy can be the starting point for project-specific participation, for which formats, methods and goals first develop in the course of working together. Here, the temporary character of the association guarantees both the continuation of an individual practice of the single participants and the projective “proposal” character that Miwon Kwon posits as a criterion for a successful “community-based art” — a projective “proposal” character, through which the collective work develops its potential to shape existing social, economic, or institutional relationships and thus also its critical potential. 14 With these characteristics, both KUNSTRAUM and the / D / O / C / K Project Area see themselves as socially and discursively constituted spaces without a necessarily fixed location. These are spaces, for which Foucault’s — in several respects relatively unspecific — definition of “heterotopia” has a certain relevance, although it is a relevance that is expanded by the strategy of the performative : by means of a shifting re-performance of circumstances and conditions in the cultural field, both spaces develop their potential as counter-placement and counterbalance, “in which the real places of culture are simultaneously represented, contested and turned”. 15

III. Beyond the characteristics already mentioned, the performative qualities of the project work are ultimately rooted in the inclusion of a link to practicing and performing procedures. When themes such as self-organisation, networking, self-positioning, or a concept of artistic work were the focal point of this kind of project work, they were not only the subject matter of historical or theoretical investigation and treatment, but also developed into a part of the respectively individual practice as the work was conducted. In the course of the collaborative work, all the participants — students, teachers and invited guests — were equally integrated in processes such as that of networking, as well as in procedures and strategies of a self-positioning in the field. On the basis of a critical analysis of the conditions and circumstances of these kinds of activities, they were staged using exhibitions, conferences, or video in such a way that they were actuated and shifted in repetition, in Judith Butler’s sense, 16 by the participants themselves.

The fact that they were capable of being performed demonstrated that the conditions and circumstances were not given, but contingent and capable of being shaped ; the performance carried out the shaping. The political potential of the project work described is inherent in this interplay of imitative proximity and theatrical distance, which is an integral component of it. Not least of all, this political potential spotlights the quandary of teaching, in order to break with its naturalisations.

Beatrice von Bismarck ( born 1959 ) teaches art history, visual culture and cultures of the curatorial at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig. From 1989 — 1993 she worked as a curator of the department of 20 th Century art Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt / Main and until 1999 she taught at Lüneburg University. There she was co-founder and -director of the project-space “Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg”. In Leipzig she is also co-founder of the project-space “ / D / O / C / K-Projektbereich” and initiator of the M.A. Program “Cultures of the Curatorial” which started in autumn 2009. Current research areas : Modes of cultural production connecting theory and practice ; curatorial practice ; effects of neo-liberalism and globalization on the cultural field ; postmodern concepts of the “artist”.

16 See Judith Butler : Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter, Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 202–208 [Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, Routledge, 1990].

Joseph Grigely

MACLEAN 705 AND NOMADIC STUDIES

THE ROOM MacLean 705 is a small office atrium located on the seventh floor of a limestone building situated at 112 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago. 112 South Michigan was built in 1908 for the Illinois Athletic Club, whose members included Johnny Weissmuller ( Tarzan ) and Clayton Moore ( The Lone Ranger ). The Beaux Arts building was designed by the architecture firm Barnett, Haynes & Barnett of St. Louis, which is best known for classical mid-western hotels, like the Adolphus in Dallas, and the Jefferson in St. Louis, both of which — like 112 South Michigan Avenue — are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

112 South Michigan Avenue was purchased by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, and houses classrooms, offices, and studios. It was renamed the MacLean Center in 2005, when Barry MacLean of the MacLean-Fogg company — which makes industrial fasteners with names like Duck Bill Anchors, Collar Locks, and Sting Ray Anchors — donated a substantial sum to the school’s endowment. The MacLean Center now has eighteen floors, and from the top floor one can see for miles eastward across Lake Michigan, the view disappearing into a horizon line of sky and water.

Across the street from the MacLean Center is a small sculpture park that belongs to and abuts the Art Institute of Chicago. The park is home to a work by Calder, a David Smith, a Henry Moore, and an Ulrich Ruckriem.

Like Michigan Avenue itself — whose median strip in the summertime is planted with a rich array of flowers including tulips, asters, and delphiniums — the park whispers with genteel refinement.

fig. 1

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MacLean 705 does not share these sensibilities. The room has two windows — two clerestory windows to be precise — but the windows do not look out across Lake Michigan, they open instead into the space of adjoining offices of SAIC’s Department of Visual and Critical Studies. The Department of Visual & Critical Studies is a hybrid programme that combines critical and creative practices without necessarily distinguishing between the two. Many of the students in the programme are theorists who are also active as artists. Their backgrounds typically consist of an array of disciplinary practices — they are photographers, cultural historians,

anthropologists, musicians, and designers, for example.

They generally have little in common and it is this sense of difference, ironically, that engages and unites them.

Everything about MacLean 705 would seem to make it unsuitable as an exhibition venue. In addition to the clerestory windows, it has four doors, speckled taupe and blue carpeting, and fluorescent lights. Three of the doors open to faculty offices so that the room also functions as a passageway to those offices. The room is furnished with institutional tools : it contains a computer printer, two bookshelves, and a round table for meetings, tutorials, and thesis review sessions. There is also a rectangular table used by the Department’s resident sign language interpreter. What distinguishes the room is the colour of the walls : it is a pale sort of yellow that is somewhere between the yellow of summer squash and the yellow of a Golden Delicious apple. It is a waxy, washed-out yellow. Paint colour chips from a True Value Hardware store describe the yellow as “Yarrow”.

In the year between November 2011 and December 2012, I organised a series of projects within MacLean 705 that might be described as an exhibition in twelve parts. They were not conceived as a unified exhibition. The first one started almost by accident : the Belgian artist Nico Dockx was visiting Chicago for a week to discuss collaborations and projects that we were working on, and I invited him to give a talk to students and visit their studios — and perhaps, I suggested to him, to install some sort of project in the atrium outside my office ? The atrium was devoid of any embellishment ; the Yarrow yellow walls were empty, and the bookshelves and the table tops were bare. Perhaps, I said to Nico, you could put something in the otherwise awkward space, and leave it long enough so we can live with it for a while ? Nico replied : let me think.

TEMPORALITY An exhibition is, by definition, a temporal occasion — a day, a week, a month ; it exists materially only for so long — at which point it folds back into itself and exists thereafter through a series of representations — photographs, critical essays, and catalogues.

While we visit, and sometimes revisit, exhibitions, we

fig. 2

rarely live with them over a sustained period of time.

There are notable exceptions : Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty could be described as longitudinal exhibitions, with very different premises : The New York Earth Room aspires to be stable and unchanging, while Spiral Jetty changes with the ebb and flow of its environmental conditions.

The ability to live with an exhibition over a sustained period of time is an uncommon experience. The Roger Brown house and studio in New Buffalo, Michigan, is a good example of what could be termed a living, or even live-in museum. New Buffalo is a one-hour drive from Chicago, and when Roger bought the land in the late 1970s, New Buffalo was a quiet, idyllic town on the shore of Lake Michigan. The house and studio, which were designed by Roger’s partner George Veronda, sit low among the dunes beneath a canopy of trees, branches, and leaves. Most modernist houses have gotten a bad rap for being uncomfortable or difficult to live in. But not this one. When Roger died in 1997, he left the house, and all the furniture and art inside to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of the art consists of Roger’s imagist paintings and his collection of folk art ( Howard Finster, duck decoys, and West African carvings ).

The house and studio are now used for retreats by faculty members of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For two weeks, individuals have the house, the studio, and the art to themselves. In a museum you might look at a painting for a minute, maybe two minutes, but in Roger’s house, you have all morning with his paintings, all afternoon, all night. And there’s just the art — no wall labels — and the effect ambiguates the art by removing it from art history and placing it in everyday life. Behind the dining-room table, there’s a painting of three fish. Are they trout ? Are they salmon ? It isn’t clear. In the kitchen there is another painting of marshes, grass and clouds, painted with Brown’s idiosyncratically contrived imagery. Years ago, the paintings didn’t do much for me. But after weeks of living with them, they grew on me and revealed a practice that is imbricated with the landscape outside the door. Some artists have left a secondary historical legacy in the form of their journals ( e.g. Gauguin ), their letters ( e.g. Keats ), or their essays ( e.g. Tarkovsky ) — but for Brown, his archive is the landscape surrounding the house, and the clouds that move above it. It is always good for an artist to get to know the work of another artist intimately, over a period of years or even decades, and to do so from unusual angles — not just the “public” side of the practice, but the private side as well. It is not often we have such an opportunity to experience art slowly like this.

PROXIMITY & PROCESS In response to our invitation to place a work within MacLean 705, Nico Dockx decided to install an

audio project that was made in collaboration with Rirkrit Tiravanija : Tiravanija’s Demonstration Drawing, and Dockx’s Erased Rirkrit Tiravanija Demonstration Drawing. Both recordings were on an LP and required a turntable — something that neither we nor the SAIC Media Center had at hand. Fortunately, we were able to purchase a decent turntable locally and bypassed the need for an amplifier by using self-amped speakers.

MacLean 705 had no budget, initially, although in time the reality of necessary expenses — printing announcements, shipping work via Federal Express, and commissioning the manufacture of a vitrine for one project — was covered by the Department of Visual & Critical Studies. None of the work was insured. The operating principle was that MacLean 705 would be open when the door of 705 was open, and by appointment. People could come and go, and the atrium space continued to be used for meetings and tutorials as the exhibitions and projects took place over the course of the year. In this way, the art projects in MacLean 705 were alternately foregrounded and

fig. 3

backgrounded in relation to the activities taking place within the room.

The installation of Dockx’s audio project initiated a series of modest operations that would come into play for each project over the course of the year. These operations included the production of an announcement card, a press release, and a checklist. While these are normal exhibition conventions, they were produced under the assumption that few people who received the announcement cards and press releases would see the actual exhibition — so they were designed with the intention of being independent narrative forms. The announcement cards followed the same design over the course of the year : they stated the name of the artist, the date the project was initiated, “from ….” and “MacLean 705”. There was no address on the cards.

Similarly, the cards did not state a closing date because we wanted the work to slowly accumulate in the room.

It was not until the last project was decided — when Tara Lane turned MacLean 705 into a small kitchen and made Yogurt Sponge Cakes for guests — that a closing date and all of the artists’ names were printed together on a single announcement card.

The exhibitions at MacLean 705 were not designed around a theme, and the artists and designers who participated in the show had little in common as far as their media and subject matter are concerned. Instead, the exhibitions were organised incrementally. Each successive exhibition consisted of one work, added to existing work, thereby unfolding a set of intertextual relations with each new installation. In literary criticism, the term “intertextuality” is used to described two or more disparate texts that are brought together for the purpose of comparative analysis. The effect is like that of a roll-fold publication : each time a page is turned outwards, a new set of relations unfolds. For MacLean, we did not have a preconceived notion of how the

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relationships between the works would manifest themselves, or how they might inform each other, as well as the space of MacLean 705 — for art both conditions, and is conditioned by, the space in which it is shown, as well as the work it is shown with. This premise has a history in curatorial practice, such as Jens Hoffmann’s show Exhibitions of An Exhibition at Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York, in 2003. In this show, Hoffmann wasn’t sure how the work would go together — it was a deliberate attempt to have the art draw out from the installation a kind of dialogic relationship between the individual works. As he wrote in the Press Release, “The exhibition is not trying to ‘resolve’ how the work might fit together, but rather bring it together in a way that leads one to consider the relations that manifest themselves in the configuration of the works.” Dialogic relations, especially as discussed and developed by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin in The Dialogic Imagination ( written in the 1930s, published in 1975, and translated to English in 1981 ), privileges contextual relations among works. Another exhibition that explored this

only made use of them, but they also gave a wonderful talk about giving talks that ended when twenty-one cell phones owned by members of the audience simultaneously rang on a table in the front of the room. The way that Åbäke became part of MacLean 705 reflects on how contemporary exhibitions are often not about art alone, but about how art moves and is sustained by a network of human relations. And human relations constitute the centre of Åbäke’s design practice, as they often work in a way that relocates design from institutional centres to social sprawl. In recent projects, they have for example designed a facade for a second-hand shop for saving cats, origami seed packets for Hollyhock seeds, and an exhibition that conveniently fits into a Marlboro-patterned cigarette box. For MacLean 705, they shared another pocket-sized project, a dialogue about business cards from the movie American Psycho, printed on — what else ? — a business card.

premise was a show that Peter Nadin and Christopher D’Arcangelo organised in Nadin’s loft in 1979, where each successive artist responded to the work of the artist who showed beforehand, the work accumulating in the space. So Daniel Buren was followed by Sean Scully who was followed by Jane Reynolds who was followed by others — Peter Fend, Rhys Chatham, Dan Graham, Louise Lawler, Lawrence Weiner. Only in retrospect did it become clear that the premise of MacLean 705 lay somewhere between these two shows : the uncertainty about the individual artists, and their contributions, and how the works would relate was entirely unknown at the beginning of the project ; and only with time did our understanding of the individual works, and their relationship with each other, unfold.

his collaborator Jean-Baptiste Decavèle in May 2012 in Antwerp at a conference on archives that had been organised by Nico Dockx. Later, when I was in Paris in the fall of 2012, I visited Friedman and Decavèle at Friedman’s apartment on Boulevard Garibaldi, where Friedman had models for his Iconostases — what he called “Space Chains” — in the apartment. Decavèle worked with Friedman to generate large-scale installations of the Iconostases, and Decavèle and I later drove to Middelburg together to see the Iconostase that had been installed at De Vleeshal, entitled Architecture Without Building. Friedman’s idea for the Iconostases is that they constitute an architectural infrastructure for the display of art — people could insert within the rings of the Iconostase images, photos, sculptures, objects, and so on. For MacLean 705 we installed a Space Chain on top of a rectangular wooden desk in the room, and it went through various stages of modification and change. At the beginning it was unembellished, and after Tara Lane’s pastry project with Yogurt Sponge Cakes, we placed some of the cakes in the Space

THE PEOPLE The choice of certain artists and designers was not entirely arbitrary, although the final grouping might seem that way : the programme included living artists and dead ones, artists from Chicago and artists from Europe, designers, an architect and two filmmakers, a book editor, a publisher and rare book dealer, who is also a conceptual artist, a trout fly tyer, and a pastry chef. To a certain extent, the choices were largely based on personal associations ( people I knew and people who were recommended to me ), but these opportunities were tempered by a deliberate will to pose and juxtapose various creative trajectories regardless of their media or their canonical status. Some opportunities simply fell into my lap. Before I began the project, I did not know the work of the design group Åbäke ; I had seen some of their work in Paris, without knowing who had made it — and one day, I received an e-mail from Ryan Gander that said : “I have some friends who are going to be in Chicago in November, maybe you or someone can make use of them ?” In the end, we not 129

While I had known the architectural work and writings of Yona Friedman for many years, I only met

Chain. A little while later, Decavèle emailed to say that Yona wanted us to do an installation related to guns and the killing of twenty children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, and the Space Chain was reshaped as a memorial with images of the many spontaneous memorials that emerged following the shooting.

For his part, Jean-Baptiste Decavèle also makes films that document the processes by which art is made and remade — the making of Iconostase 185 in Bargino, Italy, and the renovation of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, for example — the narratives working in a way to unfold these processes without a didactic commentary on them. The films are composed from sequenced still images in black and white, and then projected at a very small scale on a cardboard box using a pocket video projector. They are so understated when installed,

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they are easy to overlook, and this reflects Decavèle’s predisposition to look at the overlooked — a sort of filmic still life operation.

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Ryan Gander, Zak Kyes, João Penalva, and Ben Kinmont are people I have known for many years ; their work is distinguished by an individual imperative that has made them all niche artists. Gander is an artist of the everyday — he often takes as his subject the mundane, and turns it into a meaningful kind of meaninglessness. For MacLean 705 he had us place on reserve in the Flaxman Library of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago a copy of his book, Mostly English ; not too English, and then write with a magic marker on the wall of MacLean 705 the Flaxman call number for the book.

It was an installation that occupied two spaces simultaneously. But the book was not merely a book, it was a contrivance — the author, the publisher, and the text are all made up, and for 686 pages, the same two pages are repeated. But in those two pages, the characters and their story are real.

Kyes is a graphic designer whose projects and collaborations invert exhibition conventions in a way that makes them extensions of exhibitions, rather than mere ephemera. He does not so much create designs “for” a project or exhibition, but creates projects and exhibitions with the people who make them — not just the curators and artists and editors who constitute the public side of exhibition making, but the installers and fabricators and printers who make up the less visible side of exhibition production. He specifically likes to problematise the task of the designer, who he sees more as someone who negotiates between various entities that might stake a claim on the authorship of physical space, and the designs that fill it. For his project for MacLean 705, Kyes focused on the public spaces of London’s Golden Lane Estate — playgrounds and walkways, for example — and how these public spaces are defined by the signs and regulations that dictate the usage of these spaces, and how this authority is inevitably contested.

Penalva is a Portuguese artist who has lived in London for over 30 years. He is a narrative artist in the best sense of the word. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, he likes to narrate stories within the space of domestic life. Like Christian Boltanski, it’s never quite clear in his stories where truth ends and fiction begins. Like Daniil Kharms, he is wry and judicious and careful not to say too much — his stories have a way of beginning their trajectory of intrigue just at the point where his words stop.

His work tends to mine the best and worst of the human condition, and the unique forces that contribute to differentiating individual people from each other — even to the point of delineating degrees of human oddness.

His generosity with words and images is in his modesty about them — he needs — and uses — few.

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Kinmont is bookish, in every sense of the word, and his bibliographical practice ranges from studying and

reselling incunabula related to the domestic economy, to the production of Xerox publications based on everyday communication. Kinmont’s art tends to reflect on the conventions of transactions in the art world — contracts, agreements, and social exchanges. His aesthetic practice picks up where 60s conceptualism, as exemplified in the work of Seth Siegelaub and the art of Douglas Heubler and Stanley Brouwn, left off. Many of Kinmont’s projects have a way of moving inside and outside the art world, and at times he has created his own sort of institutional space, as he did when he founded the Antinomian Press in 1996, not just as a press ( of books, catalogues, and broadsheets ), but as a form of post-Beuys social sculpture. For his project at MacLean 705, Kinmont reproduced an edition of one of his Xerox publications about the little-known American artist, Christopher D’Arcangelo, who died in 1979 at the age of 24.

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Two individuals deserve a lengthy and detailed explanation for their inclusion : Benjamin Robert Haydon and Fran Betters. Haydon was an early nineteenth-century history painter who counted among his friends the poets John Keats, William Wordsworth, and Leigh Hunt.

Haydon often drew from the model, and convinced both Keats and Wordsworth to let him make plaster life masks of their visages. In the mid-1970s, when I was an undergraduate student in England, I met Keats’s biographer, Robert Gittings, who had mounted on the wall of his study in Sussex a copy of Keats’s life mask, which he had obtained from a mould made from Haydon’s original in the Keats House Museum in Hampstead, London. Gittings had mounted the mask so that the top edge was 5’ 1” from the floor — Keats’s height. It was a moving arrangement and the unusually sharp details of the mask brought Keats into fine relief for me. I shortly thereafter obtained from the Keats House Museum a copy of the mask made from the same mould. Eventually, Keats became for me a sort of artistic touchstone : in his letters, his scattered but penetrating observations on writing poetry and ideas like “Negative Capability” became for me a textbook on making art. Keats’s letters stand out with Gauguin’s Journals, Tarkovsky’s Essays, and Ned Rorem’s Diaries as one of the great meditations on the artistic consciousness. Haydon himself never became the great artist he imagined himself to be — his reputation has continuously declined over time — but his journals reveal a prescient ability to recognise and nurture talent in others, and for this he is perhaps better remembered than his own art. Haydon’s contribution to the MacLean installation is the copy of his life mask of Keats that I obtained in 1976 — mounted, as Gittings mounted his copy, 5’ 1” above the floor.

Oddly enough, Fran Betters — a fly tyer who lived on the banks of the Ausable River in Wilmington, New York through the last half of the twentieth century — was interested in the same thing that Haydon was interested in : how a static material form can represent a living object.

In this respect, Haydon’s life mask of Keats and Betters’

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trout flies have much in common. Most trout flies are tied to represent insects that are a part of the food chain for trout : may flies, caddis flies, stoneflies, and terrestrial insects. The art of the fly tyer consists in using various materials such as deer hair and fur from rabbit, woodchuck, and opossum to create a representation that simulates the colouring, shape, proportion — and movement — of a living form. Fran, who died in 2009 and is one of the very few fly tyers to get his obituary printed in the New York Times ( Walt Dette and Megan Boyd are two others ), had a reputation for being an iconoclast with his materials and tying techniques. Fran ran a fly shop in Wilmington, New York, for almost 50 years, and was inside the shop every day during the fishing season, tying and talking. You could pick through boxes of flies he had tied, and then pick his mind about the patterns and the tying techniques — something I would do every summer when I visited the Adirondacks. Over a period of fifteen years I accumulated many of Fran’s flies, and as both archive and a collection, they constitute an oeuvre that addresses many of the same issues

who can get excited about a smelt fry, for example, and turn a discussion about smelt into a discussion about the interior spaces of restaurants in Chicago’s Chinatown.

Much of their work involves the design of a physical element that mediates our relationship with space, and thereby complicates our relationship with the things that occupy that space, either art or people.

every artist faces over a period of decades — especially the matter of sustaining innovation while also maintaining a stylistic identity. When I decided to exhibit Fran’s flies in MacLean 705, there was a question of how to exhibit them, as they defy many of the usual conventions related to the display of art. The only exhibition of flies in a mainstream museum I have seen was a show of Lee Wulff’s flies at the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale in 2010 — and the flies were mounted on, and behind, Plexiglas. Other museums devoted to fly fishing, such as the American Museum of Fly Fishing in Manchester, Vermont, likewise mount flies behind UV-resistant Plexiglas, ostensibly to protect them from being damaged from handling, insects, and UV light. But because flies beg to be touched, and to be looked at from different angles, I decided to tie the flies to 5x monofilament tippet material with improved clinch knots — just as they would be tied to a leader when fishing — and suspend them from small wood dowels extending from the wall.

While this meant the flies were unprotected, and could easily be removed should one wish to do so, it also

Public Library in 1944, Lawrence Thompson observed “Tallemant des Réaux stated categorically in his Historiettes that book theft is not true theft if the books are not resold”, and then goes on to explain — “The criminal steals either from greed or need. Bibliomaniacs may either be private individuals acquiring the books of others for their own collections, or they may be politicians seeking to aggrandize national or university libraries through presenting them with the fruits of conquest or confiscation.” 1 For MacLean 705 Bielstein asked several artists if they had any stolen books, and if so, she asked if she could borrow them for the exhibition, in order to construct a taxonomy of the various motives that had precipitated the thefts. Bielstein’s project is important, in part, because of how it shows multiple ways of representing theft at a time when cultural theft is a defining element of twenty-first century culture. The theft of images, words, and ideas is one of the most debated issues in contemporary culture, and Bielstein’s modest project recentres this activity around a fundamental impetus of human desire.

enabled visitors to hold the flies in their hands, and look at them from different angles and profiles, much as a trout would do.

The other projects that comprised the exhibition, including a collaboration between Sam Davis and Benjamin Chaffee, an installation of stolen books by Susan Bielstein, and a closing cake party by Tara Lane, were all by people who both reside and resided in Chicago.

Davis and Chaffee were both students of mine at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which isn’t truly reflective of the situation, because I probably learned more from them than they learned from me. Both have intellectually eclectic minds preoccupied with a range of theoretical and practical considerations : Spinoza, Gertrude Stein, picaresque novels, olfactory art, plywood, and various notions of prepositional space ( corners, edges, voids ). Sam and Ben are the kind of people

1 Lawrence S. Thompson, “Bibliokleptomania,” The Bulletin of the New York Public Library ( September 1944 ) : 4, 5.

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Susan Bielstein is not an artist in the usual sense of the word : she’s an editor of books on art and architecture for the University of Chicago Press. She is also a collector of stolen books, and, even more importantly, a collector of stories about stolen books. Her collection began when she obtained various books from the Walter Hopps estate that the Menil Collection chose not to acquire — what Bielstein calls “The Walter Hopps Nobody Wants”. Among those books was a copy of the Misfortunes of the Immortals, by Max Ernst and Paul Eluard, which Hopps stole from the UCLA library in the 1950s. In a wonderful little essay titled “Notes on Bibliokleptomania”, which was published by the New York

Tara Lane is a pastry chef and food historian, with an interest in molecular gastronomy. She studied sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but over time her studio became a kitchen. For the closing of MacLean 705, I wanted a cake — but the American tradition of celebration cakes — wedding cakes, graduation cakes, and holiday cakes — is a lavish overindulgence in the possibilities of whipped sugar frosting.

My search for someone who might imagine a cake otherwise took us to Tara, whose specialty when she worked at Chicago’s Blackbird and Avec restaurants was savoury desserts. For the closing, she asked if we could turn MacLean 705 into a kitchen, because she wanted to make Yogurt Sponge Cakes — a recipe she learned from Albert Adrià, the younger brother of Ferran Adrià, both of whom worked at the famous El Bulli restaurant in Catalonia.

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NOM ADIC AND POST-DISCIPLINARY STUDIES In Ben Kinmont’s modest and understated publication on Chris D’Arcangelo, he quotes D’Arcangelo’s philosophical approach underlying his radical interventions and guerrilla actions at museums, saying : “We all do things in our own little way.” It is an exquisite phrase, and it serves well as a rationale behind MacLean 705’s existence. The basic premise of MacLean 705 was to present a series of projects as a daily experience within a space designated for a purpose other than exhibitions. Like Hans Ulrich Obrist once said about his first show, the Kitchen Show that took place in his apartment kitchen in St. Gallen in 1991 : “[The] starting point is to present an exhibition in an unspectacular place.” 2 For both shows, the original function of the space is maintained : the kitchen remains a kitchen, the meeting room remains a meeting room.

The work that comprised MacLean 705 was part of

uses various forms of ethnographic research — primarily the interview — to contextualise the ways that certain contemporary studios ( like that of Olafur Eliasson and Åbäke ) constitute a form of making that also involves a form of media mobility — being not just about design and fabrication, but also about dissemination, public relations, and education.

Disciplinary knowledge is perhaps undervalued as a form of intellectual grounding in arts education today.

Instead, various notions of recombinant disciplinary study constitute the leading edge of many of the newer programmes, including my own Department of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In programmes like this, methodological approaches that involve hybrid practices, heuretics, and interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study are common. Neither exclusively studio nor post-studio, neither conceptual nor post-conceptual, these programmes typically encourage and support disciplinary migration within a framework of intellectual responsibility. The

a shifting disciplinary ground : much of it is anchored in a very specific disciplinary practice, and from this practice moves beyond the parameters of existing conventions. It is not “interdisciplinary” in the usual sense in which we use that term ; rather, it is nomadic or post-disciplinary, as it takes certain skilled practices in publishing, bibliography, design, culinary art, and fishing — and from these practices relocates and reshapes disciplinary knowledge. They do this primarily by occupying disciplinary margins, fringes, and verges — what are fundamentally areas of uncertainty.

These transition areas have always had great relevance to biology, where they are called “ecotones”. But the ecotone by definition occupies a space between two known ecosystems ; post-disciplinarity involves moving from a known ecosystem to a new and evolving one that is in a state of becoming. We just don’t know what it is or what it will look like or how it will function. There have been important precedents for this in the arts : in the 1970s, Gregory Battcock remade art criticism from the perspective of underground reporting in his

work that emerges from such programmes can be said to problematise, rather than resolve, the ways that disciplines come together in a relatively tight space of human relations — among the faculty, or among the students, or within a specific course or institution. There will be friction and irresolution and contradiction and loose ends, because this is the nature of this kind of study. It does not seek the sort of “closure” that comes from new knowledge ; rather, it seeks to pose and juxtapose questions as a way of showing that the means by which we produce and consume culture cannot be easily mapped out, or anthologised, or indexed.

essays that were published in the New York Review of Sex and Gay. Similarly, Harald Szeemann might be regarded an example of a post-disciplinary curator : after his exhibition When Attitudes Become Form in Bern in 1969, his trajectory as an “independent” curator meant that he could engage in more disciplinary nomadism — which for Szeemann was best exemplified in Documenta 5 in 1972. More recently, Denis Wood’s book Home Rules ( which takes maps, mapping, and topography, and applies it to interior residential space, like living rooms ), and Gregg Bordowitz’s book The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous ( which takes a scientific and political unknown, as AIDS was in the 1980s, and turns it into a topic of daily domestic discourse ) both work in a way to rediscipline their subjects. This is the only way to move forward where the subjects have neither precedent nor antecedent. Another relevant work is Alex Coles’ book The Transdisciplinary Studio, which

economics or entomology or urban planning, they all have viable potential in the ways they might contribute to culture. As an undergraduate student, I initially studied engineering, and then, for various reasons, turned to English literature. This was in the early 1970s, a time when those studying literature did not study theory as we know it today — but rather, first learned fundamental tools of literary study : how to scan poetry, how to map action in Elizabethan revenge tragedies, and how to read a serialised Victorian novel against the same novel as a collected text. We read broadly too — from Beowulf to Marlowe to Donne to Peacock to Thackeray to Anglo-American modernists like Pound and Williams.

We also had qualifying examinations based on these readings — we were expected to internalise this knowledge. And we read in depth too : as undergraduates we had to write a fifty-page thesis, and mine was on Keats and his letters. We also read theory, but it was

But I think there is a place for — even a need for — disciplinary grounding. This is another way of saying that it is good for young people to learn a particular discipline, and to do so in a way that combines a history of the discipline, its canonical and non-canonical work, and the evolution of its critical methodologies. The particular discipline doesn’t matter, except in relation to an individual’s predisposition — whether it is sculpture or

2 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Introduction to World Soup Küchenausstellung 1991, in : Hans Ulrich Obrist ( ed. ) München and Stuttgart : Oktagon Verlag, 1993, np.

theory that we exercised as an interpretative practice, like Wimsatt on the Intentional Fallacy, and Wellek and Warren on New Criticism. A few years later, in the postgraduate programme at Oxford, we studied textual criticism and palaeography — giving us a means by which we could study texts and manuscripts and variant versions of a literary work. This was, collectively, an intense experience in disciplinary grounding, and one that continues to inform my work as an artist and theorist after thirty years. If I was to do it all over again, I probably wouldn’t do it any differently.

At the postgraduate level, this sort of historical knowledge and methodological skill becomes a means by which one can take a discipline elsewhere. This is the point at which a discipline “dies”, not by being redundant — as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggests in her book Death of a Discipline — but by way of being redisciplined, of taking this experience and knowledge to places where no discipline exists. Cole’s book on The Transdisciplinary Studio is a good example in this re-

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But innovation is still possible within the confines of conventional institutions — it is largely a matter of creating within the curriculum opportunities that could be described as self-reflexive experiments — where a

gard. While there have been many books exploring the “studio” as a site of production, no one has articulated the methodology of studio research and criticism quite as Coles has done. For Coles the studio is not merely a physical site of production, but an unstable if not also unstudied methodological field. His approach does not involve the usual approach to research — proposing a hypothesis, testing it, and substantiating a conclusion through evidence. Instead, his approach involves constructing a narrative of existing practices, something similar to what Marc Augé, in his book Non-Places, calls “an anthropology of the near”. Coles’s main medium is the interview — which has increasingly, since the 1970s, become particularly ubiquitous as a form of critical rhetoric. From Warhol’s Interview magazine to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s vast archive of interviews with people from inside and outside the art world, the interview has become a form of criticism that involves a turn back towards hermeneutics and authorial intention, where the artist and the work are read together. What is different now is that the interviewer is an involved participant in

certain question is studied not solely as history or as theory, but as a project to be performed, and where the outcome is unknown. Many artists who engage in various kinds of social practice already do this as part of their teaching — Harrell Fletcher, for example, and Ben Kinmont. And Florence Derieux, working with students at the Ecole du Magasin in Grenoble, initiated a ten-month long research project on Harold Szeemann’s archive that resulted in an encyclopaedic publication, Harald Szeemann : Individual Methodology ( 2007 ). The book, part bibliography, part archive, part discussion, was part of a larger project that also included an exhibition and website.

his narrative, which is increasingly part of art history’s shift to a more pragmatic notion of authorship. As Keith Moxey explained in a discussion about this turn, “the narratives we construct are the products of our own values as these have been shaped by, and in reaction to, social forces responsible for the construction of our own subjectivity”. 3

that address public safety and the School’s educational mission. The restrictions can be onerous at times — just to use a ladder or hammer in the galleries, an installer is obligated to sign a liability waiver. Additionally, when work is exhibited in the School’s sanctioned spaces, the School claims the right to reproduce the work, and not just to reproduce it, but also to “modify, distribute, transmit, and publicly perform or exhibit the Content, in whole or in part, without restrictions or limitations, in any media now known or not yet invented, and for any purpose that SAIC deems appropriate and consistent with its charitable, artistic and educational mission”.

A curriculum of disciplinary nomadism would be a challenge to articulate within an American educational institution — because the institution would want to map the trajectory of the course and its outcomes as part of the process of approving and vetting the course.

This involves not just a pedagogical rationale for the course — but also a sense of its place in global cultural studies, and how it can sustain itself in the future. It is, in this regard, not just about “ideas” but also about the people and institutional resources needed to implement

3 Keith Moxey, The Practice of Theory ( Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1994 ), 18.

them. This is the practical and prudent side of curriculum development. A curriculum in post-disciplinary studies would not be practical, nor prudent, which is what makes such a programme so compelling : it would operate somewhat like the Future Academy did, as a curriculum in a constant state of flux and change and mobility.

The defining theme would be nomadism : changing locations, changing participants, changing questions, changing disciplinary approaches. Ideally, the syllabus for such a course would write itself, day-by-day, weekby-week, each discussion and each project building towards a self-reflective process that draws and draws out its path. If the syllabus — and the larger curriculum of which it is part — were resolved and self-conscious of what it contributes to history and knowledge, it would, by definition, be redundant.

MacLean 705 was, like these efforts, an experimental project contained within the framework of a larger institution, and by extension a reflection on the institution’s practices. The process was not an easy one, since the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has many designated exhibition spaces overseen by an Exhibitions and Events Committee, and regulated by specific conditions

Restrictive conditions like these are increasingly a part of the administrative process that defines many American art institutions. MacLean 705 did not begin with the specific intention to counter these processes, but they became manifest, even unavoidable, as the exhibi-

tion programme unfolded over the course of the year. In one instance, when we attempted to borrow from the School’s Sullivan Galleries a vitrine for Susan Bielstein’s installation of stolen books, our request was declined in part out of concern for potential damage to the vitrine. As a result, we designed and commissioned the construction of a vitrine for the exhibition. On another occasion, our request to the Media Center to borrow a small digital projector for Jean-Baptiste Decavèle’s installation was declined because, as the Director of the Media Center stated, “MacLean 705 is not an exhibition space”. When the Vice Provost visited MacLean 705, he was curious to know if the exhibition programme was a deliberate attempt to counterpoint the School’s official exhibition spaces. The short answer was no. The long answer was that in terms of making something happen, and to do it in a way that is fluid and spontaneous, it is necessary to operate in a way that might appear contrarian. Perhaps unselfconsciously, the contemporary tendency for over-determined exhibitions was a subtext to MacLean 705’s operating principle. There was no thematic justification for the exhibition at the point when we began. Only later did we realise that a driving force was a curiosity to see how certain artists, ideas, and works could play out against each other within a context best described as a form of lingering. Tutorials were conducted against a backdrop of Zak Kyes’s sign that said : “Quiet Please”. One could read with a soft audio playing in the background, the sound of a drawing being erased. Architecture — a model of a museum on the one hand, and as a piece of furniture on the other — became a part of the room. It was a case of the exhibition becoming an anthology of transitional early twenty-first century creative practices : work that could be described as post-studio, or project-based, or social sculpture ; work that had no previous place in the art world ( like Fran Betters’ flies and Susan Bielstein’s stolen books ), or work that was made as an academic and social practice — like Haydon’s life mask of Keats ; and work, like Tara Lane’s sponge cake party, that was hard to place, both as visual art and culinary art : little delicate coloured fragrant spongy blobs, they were at once the furthest extreme from a Richard Serra sculpture, while also leading us on to the next question : how to make art that has nothing whatsoever to do with what we know as art. It is a question MacLean 705 lingered over for a year.

Wilmington, New York, June 2013

fig. 1 Door at MacLean 705

fig. 2 MacLean 705 ( empty )

fig. 3 MacLean 705 ( door open )

fig. 4 Nico Dockx & press cards

fig. 5 Press cards

fig. 7 MacLean 705, installation view ( Susan Bielstein, Fran Betters, Ryan Gander, Nico Dockx )

fig. 6 Yona Friedman & Tara Lane

fig. 8 Ben Kinmont and ASL interpreter Shelly Liuzza in discussion with students from the Department of Visual & Critical Studies, 2013

fig. 9 Ben Kinmont, publications from the Antinomian Press

fig. 10 Ben Kinmont, sample page of bibliography accompanying an installation of publications from the Antinomian Press

fig. 11 Zak Kyes & Benjamin Robert Haydon

fig. 12 Meeting in MacLean 705

fig. 13 Fran Betters tying, mid-1970s. Photo courtesy of Jan Betters

fig. 14 Fran Betters, Mini-muddler, tied in mid 1990s.

fig. 15 Tara Lane

fig. 16 Tara Lane

Joseph Grigely ( born 1965 ) is an artist and critical theorist. His exhibitions include solo shows at the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris ; The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin ; The Whitney Museum of American Art ; and the MCA, Chicago. His group shows include the Whitney, Venice, Berlin, Istanbul and Sydney Biennials. He is represented by Gallery Air de Paris, Paris. In 2007 the Baltimore Contemporary and Tang Museum published a monograph on his work, Joseph Grigely : St. Cecilia. Grigely’s books include Textualterity : Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism ( 1995 ), Conversation Pieces ( 1998 ), Blueberry Surprise ( 2006 ), and Exhibition Prosthetics ( 2010 ), as well as essays on disability theory and body criticism. He has a D.Phil. from Oxford University and is Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual & Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Vivian Sky Rehberg

DESKILLING / DESCHOOLING

The past two decades have seen the emergence of a so-called “pedagogical” or “educational” trend in contemporary art, in which educational models, including models for art education, have been continuously tried, tested and critiqued from the outskirts or from completely outside of traditional academic structures.

While artists and educators have long been inventing and implementing counter-proposals to institutionalised

within exhibitions, and the popular-with-artists format of the slide-lecture performance ( which set standards that produce considerable anxiety in academically trained non-performers, like me, who do that old-fashioned thing of “giving papers” ). In 2010, the Hayward Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery held the conference “Deschooling Society”, 2 titled after Ivan Illich’s eponymous book from 1973, which tackled the nefarious effects of

artistic training, what is remarkable about the recent consolidation of this “turn” — we no longer traffic in “movements” — is its fluid infiltration of contemporary art on the levels of production, distribution and reception, institutionally and discursively, through educationally geared artistic and curatorial practices, display strategies, and exhibitions, as well as through institutional programming and publishing.

centralised educational systems on individual learning and societal development. This past summer, the Hayward’s Wide Open School project brought together a large and diverse pool of artist-pedagogues who taught courses like Jochen Dehn’s “Animal Technologies, Soap Films, and Miracles”, Dora Garcia’s “Write and Perform a Monologue”, and a “Forensics Workshop”

by Jane and Louise Wilson. And of course, educational forums have found their niche in art fairs, where series of topical lectures and special outreach programmes for children and adults, or budding connoisseurs and collectors of contemporary art, are now commonplace.

Examples of these endeavours abound, but the most visible include : the failed attempt to turn the sixth episode of the European Biennial, Manifesta, into a school in 2006 ; artist Joseph Del Pesco’s Pickpocket Almanack, a school without walls and a temporary faculty in which participants volunteer their knowledge to each other ; Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant International project in Queens, NY, where teaching and learning play a considerable role ; Eric Wesley’s Mountain School of Arts ; the Denmark-based group Learning Site ; the Bruce High Quality Foundation ; Machine Project in Los Angeles ; and the Public School in London, Brussels and Berlin. In addition to independent, self-organised projects, there are those that receive institutional support : for several years, Clementine Deliss’s Future Academy roamed the world, loosely tethered to the Edinburgh College of Art, while the Tate and Tensta Konsthall host Ahmet Öhgüt’s The Silent University, “an autonomous knowledge exchange platform by and for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants”, 1 which aims to “reactivate” the knowledge of participants who are no longer able to practice their original professions, due to their immigrant status, language barriers, or economic discrimination. These are collective projects that exist within the frame of art as social practice, but one could also cite artist documentaries that treat the history of education, like Phil Collins’s Marxism Today ( 2010 ), instruction art, or representational modes associated with education, staged-readings, displays of archives and ephemera, the integration of classroom-like settings

1 http://thesilentuniversity. org 2

http://www. southbankcentre.co.uk/ find/hayward-gallery-andvisual-arts/visual-artstalks-and-events/tickets/ deschooling-society-52395 3 Irit Rogoff, “Turning”, e-flux journal 0 ( November 2008 ) accessible on http:// www.e-flux.com/journal/ turning/ 4 Irit Rogoff, “Turning”, e-flux journal 0 ( November 2008 ) : 8.

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So it seems that education is on a lot of minds.

Scholar Irit Rogoff, in her climactic and still influential text “Turning”, which appeared in an e-flux journal special issue on education in 2008, outlines the contours of this “educational turn” as well as her own commitment to projects foregrounding the relationship between art and education, such as the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y. initiative of exhibitions and projects that five European institutions undertook together in 2004, and the 2007 Summit of Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture, held in Berlin. 3 Both were driven by a desire to respond to a crisis in education, to reflect upon and assert political resistance to the instrumentalisation of education by governments and markets, and to clarify the increasingly fuzzy line between private investments and interests and the public good. While Rogoff wonders why art is “turning into education”, she also expresses healthy scepticism about claims that an educational turn in curating and art practice is as substantive a shift as the linguistic turn in philosophy during the late 1960s and 1970s. She suggests that bending into the motion of turning rather than stabilising motion as a turn is worthwhile and could be accomplished by investigating “on the one hand the capacity for artistic and curatorial practices to capture the dynamics of a turn, and on the other, the kind of drive being released in the process”. 4

It comes as no surprise that educational dynamics and drives can and do flourish in informal settings and outside of schools. Many of today’s pedagogical experiments are socially and politically motivated, and come with an implicit or explicit critique of the expansion of a “neo-liberal market” for education, supported in Europe by continental policy and university administrations alike. As a response, alternative educational structures and platforms stress more open access, and appeal to broader audiences via the reduction or absence of fees, voluntary teaching and learning, and the freedom that comes with the rejection of a pre-determined curriculum, learning outcomes, criteria for assessment, and the need for quality assurances, all of which are necessary features of accreditation requirements for degree-granting programmes worldwide.

Although I have participated in informal or non-traditional educational projects, since I started and finished graduate school the bulk of my experience in education, teaching art history, and writing and working as

students should acquire and accumulate as they move through these levels and how, on a daily basis, as we muck around in the fields of teaching and learning, we can cope with all these demands for accountability, which prove in many instances to be more restrictive than inspiring.

Instead of synthesising or rehashing or even commenting at length on these debates, which are amply documented, I want to think about and contextualise their emergence, and the emergence of this pedagogical turn, in somewhat formal terms and parallel to a broader history of art education and artistic production, as well as the production of knowledge related to both realms. This means the story I will recount is necessarily partial. And I want to proceed in this way, because alongside all of the very real, limiting and lamentable pressures described above, coupled with serious crises in cultural and educational funding, I hope to show that in art education we must also confront two fundamental and fundamentally incompatible ideas that have been generated from the very educational, artistic and art

an educator / administrator has been in the belly of the beast — in public and private institutes for higher education, mainly art schools, but also at universities, in the United States and France, and now in the Netherlands.

Whereas critiques of the commodification of education in the free-market system and the massive financial indebtedness that accompanies education, especially in North America, are directed against the destruction of the university as a potential public sphere, in the European context discussions around viable alternatives to the status quo have been driven in large part by resistance to the educational standardisation of the Bologna reforms, which seek to harmonise — so as not to say homogenise — higher education. The stated incentives of the Bologna reforms were intended to create a higher education “qualifications framework”, achieve greater transparency with respect to academic standards and the inputs and outputs ( criteria for assessment and learning outcomes ) that validate diplomas, as well as to enhance dialogues between different educational structures, increase possibilities for collaboration, and

historical models we’ve inherited, from the way institutional artistic training has developed over time, and our historical and critical narratives about artistic production since modernism.

The first idea, in W.J.T Mitchell’s words, is that “the arts are themselves disciplines, that there are skills, methods, tools, and a whole array of problems to be solved, along with a genealogy of master-apprentice relations that involve long training before one can become an artist” 6 ( which of course begs the question as to whether or not one can “teach art”, or if one even needs an academy, beyond its limited symbolic value, to really become an artist ). The second is the notion that art now is not at all determined by any sort of specificity, that in our post-medium condition, diagnosed by Rosalind Krauss as one where artists forsake the retention and use of specific mediums, like painting, sculpture and photography, and instead pursue the interaction between them, artists have become multi-disciplinary generalists working in a post-material and post-studio age ; in short, contemporary art has become “generic”,

facilitate student and staff mobility across institutions and cultures.

The specific challenges of the Bologna reforms for art education in Europe have been written about at length, debated, and protested against by students, faculty and staff since the first whispers of change. A 2004 “milestone” document 5 produced by a working group of art school representatives gathered by the European League of Institutes of the Arts aimed to identify shared core values in fine art education across Europe, while recognising the inherent social, cultural, and political diversity of individual institutions, as well as the legitimacy of their individual agendas. The BA level was defined there as involving “acquisition and exploration”, the MA level encourages “developing and reflecting”, and the PhD level focuses on “artistic research”. Concern was expressed about defining the skills and attributes

to quote Camiel van Winkel and Pascal Gielen. 7

It is fair to say that Rogoff described a symptom of this generic state of affairs when she stated that “the omnipresence of conversation in contemporary art is the most significant shift of the past decade”. On this point, it’s worth quoting her at length.

Rogoff writes : In the wake of Documenta X and Documenta 11, it became clear that one of the most significant contributions that the art world had made to the culture at large has been the emergence of a conversational mode hosted by it. In part, this has had to do with the fact that there already exists a certain amount of infrastructure within the art world, where there are available spaces, small budgets, existing publicity machines, recognisable formats such as exhibitions, gatherings, lecture series, interviews, as well as a

5 Unpublished document accessed as hard copy in the Piet Zwart Institute Master of Fine Art archive.

For more information on this document see http : / / www.labforculture. org / en / resources-forresearch / contents / researchin-focus / european-culturalcooperation / milestonedocument-2004-fouryears-elia-on-the-way-to-aeuropean-higher-educationarea-in-the-arts.

6 W.J.T Mitchell, “Art, Fate, and the Disciplines : Some Indicators”, Critical Inquiry 35 ( Summer 2009 ) : 1023.

7

See Rosalind E. Krauss “A Voyage on the North Sea” : Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition ( London and New York : Thames & Hudson, 1999 ) and Under Blue Cup ( Cambridge : M.I.T. Press, 2011 ) ; and Camiel van Winkel, Pascal Gielen and Koos Zwaan “De hybride kunstenaar : De organisatie van de artistieke praktijk in het postindustriële tijdperk”, unpublished report Expertisecentrum Kunst en Vormgeving, AKVISt. Jost ( Avans Hogeschool, 2012 ) accessible on http : / / www. camielvanwinkel.nl

constant interested audience made up of art students, cultural activists, etc. As a result, a new set of conversations between artists, scientists, philosophers, critics, economists, architects, planners, and so on, came into being and engaged the issues of the day through a set of highly attenuated prisms. By not being subject to the twin authorities of governing institutions or authoritative academic knowledge, these conversations could in effect be opened up to a speculative mode, and to the invention of subjects as they emerged and were recognised. And so the art world became the site of extensive talking — talking emerged as a practice, as a mode of gathering, as a way of getting access to some knowledge and to networking and organising and articulating some necessary questions. But did we put any value on what was actually being said ? Or, did we privilege the coming-together of people in space and trust that formats and substances would emerge from these ? 8

8

Rogoff, 9.

9 Ernesto Pujol, “On the Ground : Practical Observations for Regenerating Art Education”, in Steven Henry Madoff, ed., Art School ( Propositions for the 21st Century ) ( Cambridge : M.I.T. Press, 2009 ), 5.

For a comprehensive overview, see Arthur D. Efland, A History of Art Education : Intellectual and Social Currents in Teaching the Visual Arts ( New York : Teacher’s College Press, 1990 ).

Efland, Chapter 2, “Western Origins of Art Education”, especially pages 26–46.

13

conflated with “art”, rather that there is a potential for speculation in the artistic that is undermined in formalised education. Still, even if we are not in a position to determine the value of the content produced by all these conversations, they have undeniably become one of the most prevalent modes of expression and explanation in the contemporary art world, including in the art school, where the pedagogical importance of the conversational exchanges that take place in individual studio visit and group critiques are rarely called into question.

Somewhat polemically, artist and teacher Ernesto Pujol goes so far as to claim that “Students need to learn how to justify creation intellectually, beyond the subjective, in our visually dense and materially cluttered world.

If they don’t want to do this, they have no business being professional contemporary artists.” 9 Standing behind these “twin authorities of governing institutions or authoritative academic knowledge”, we are faced with the age-old conundrum : if everyone and anyone can become an artist and everything and anything can become art, then it takes the deployment of an entire

the top. Lest we forget, the point of all of this was not to produce more accomplished artists, but to promote the ideals of the state, and shore up its political, ideological and economic power. 12 The French Academy was also responsible for overseeing the royal manufacturies, academicians provided designs for the craftsmen working in them, and France became the leader in the market for luxury goods at that time.

There was no talk of “talent”, innate creativity, or the cultivation of an individual artist’s “singularity”, but a focus on the acquisition of aesthetic capabilities that would ensure the continuity of artistic traditions.

Tradition was the absolute standard and art students were expected to measure up to it. With the rise of Romanticism in the nineteenth century and challenges from German academies, the conception of the artist in Europe shifted away from one where the artist was a purveyor of traditional standards, and art instruction began to emphasise artistic freedom, subjectivity, imagination, and experience, all of which could only be expressed and represented in highly individual ways.

Artists and art students are strongly encouraged by developments in the art world to traverse disciplinary, spatial, and cultural boundaries unhindered, to be aesthetic and material Jacks and Jacquelines-of-all-trades, capable in all media, conversant in a variety of styles while adhering to none in particular, but this, of course, was not always the case. The history of art instruction, at least since the establishment of the French Academy in the seventeenth century, which served as the model for hundreds of European academies up to the industrial revolution, is one of a progressive move away from imitation — imitation of previous masters, assiduous

11

12

Although we all accept there is an “art” to conversation, Rogoff is not asserting that conversation should be

At the time of its creation, which required a petition to King Louis XIII, and was inspired by a rebellion against the stronghold that craft guilds had over the mobility of artists and artefacts throughout the realm, the artists of the French Academy established a curriculum based in drawing, which was complemented by lectures on geometry, perspective, anatomy, history, astronomy and visual analysis. 11 These theory lectures were meant to introduce students to principles of art making like composition, colour, and expression.

Drawing from the live-model was forbidden outside the Academy, which helped maintain its position of power with respect to the transmission of the very traditions it was in the process of establishing, such as the strict hierarchy of genres, with still-life on the lowest rung of the aesthetic ladder and history painting triumphant at

arsenal of supporting and legitimating structures and resources — institutions, markets, discourses, and public assent, the access to which is in no way obvious when transiting through an art school — for someone to be finally designated a “true” artist.

10

Ibid., 40.

Ibid., 214–19.

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observation and manual copying — copying from drawings, from casts, from the live model and from nature, which remained the core method of artistic training until the late nineteenth century. 10

In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus cemented this opposition between imitation and invention, while collapsing distinctions between fine art and craft, and placing intellectual and theoretical pursuits on the same level as the acquisition of manual skills. Workshop instruction and theoretical instruction were unified in the aim to produce work whose form expressed its function, life-drawing was replaced by the foundation course, in which students would learn the fundamentals of art and design so as to unleash “their creative power” and to acquaint them with an aesthetic grammar, understood as “the basic materials which underlie all creative activity in the visual arts”. 13 After six months in the foundation course, accepted students would enter into a specific workshop, where they would be encouraged to liberate their creativity using those tools. Johannes Itten, who developed the Bauhaus foundation course

explained : “My teaching was designed to guide the student in acquiring the means of artistic expression by appealing to his individual talents and to develop an atmosphere of creativity in which original work became possible. Each student was expected to realize ‘himself’, his original works had to be ‘genuine’”. 14 In this kind of pedagogical project, talents are individual, creativity is universal, originality is possible, everyone has the potential to become an artist, if introduced properly by a teacher to a general set of guiding principles.

According to the art historical record, the shifts in art education that occur throughout modernity echo developments in the contemporary art worlds of the times.

So with the arrival of the historic avant-gardes on the scene, there is a shift in emphasis from the transmission of techniques and traditions to the promotion of an absolute rupture with tradition and a radical critique of art’s social and political function. Education assimilated this desire for artists to constantly invent new forms, based on their intimate understanding of the parameters and properties of the mediums with which they choose

technologies, practical workshops that provide technical training in old and new media, a master-apprentice relationship between teachers and students, and some form of a liberal arts component that includes an introduction to art history and theory, which is tailored to boost a student’s conceptual abilities and sharpen their faculties of perception, as well as to encourage their awareness of art’s relationship to society, politics, the culture at large.

to work, as well as a medium’s relationship to and difference from other media. In Thierry de Duve’s words, we move from a model based on historical identification with a métier, to one based on identification with the transhistorical conditions of possibility offered by a medium. 15

to be a challenge. In my experience, for example, students can frequently prove to be more fluent than their instructors, myself included, in digital media, and the methodologies, patterns of creativity, modes of perception, imagination, and interpretation they have ushered into our learning environments. The best-case scenario is that we learn from each other.

De Duve writes : The Academy classified the fine arts according to métier and everything the notion entails : specialized skills, artisan habits, sleights of hand, rules of composition, canons of beauty, in short, a specific tradition. Modernism classifies the arts according to the medium and everything this notion entails : particular materials, supports, tools, gestures, technical procedures, and conventions of specificity. That an artist practiced the métier of painter meant that he belonged to the guild of painters and had a place in a given affiliation.

His definition of painting would have been, simply : what painters do. That an artist works in the medium of painting means that he questions painting for what it has to say about itself and hasn’t said yet. His definition of painting might be : what no painter has done, yet.

The métier gets practiced, the medium gets questioned, the métier gets transmitted, the medium communicates or gets communicated, the métier gets learnt, the medium gets discovered, the métier is tradition, the medium is a language, the métier rests on experience, the medium relies on experimentation. 16 Fine art academies today, by which I mean those degree-granting institutions occupied with the task of educating undergraduate and graduate students, are not bound by any consensus on how to teach art, but most still rely on at least some combination of methods for instruction that are based firmly in the past, such as first-year foundation-style courses, tweaked from the Bauhaus model, in some cases to misrecognition, the incorporation of manual reproduction, from lifedrawing to model making, alongside the use of digital

On the graduate level, naturally, this basic knowledge is assumed, increased autonomy is expected and encouraged, and self-directed research and production is complemented by encounters with peers, established artists, curators and other cultural producers, scholars from a variety of fields, and professionals, in order to foster interdisciplinarity, which is taken as a given and has become obligatory. It goes without saying that the sheer variety of disciplines, practices, and media available to artists has serious implications for teaching ; keeping apace with technological developments proves

One result of the history I’ve just sketched in broad brushstrokes is that art has come to be thought of as a form of thinking, as a mode of knowledge production, and dissociated with material traditions and modes of making. Richard Sennett dates this shift back to the eighteenth century, when French philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot “likened craftsmanship more to the pleasures of marital sex than the excitement of an affair”. 17 Sennett tries to recuperate the figure of the craftsman in our present day as one who is deeply invested in and motivated by the “skill of making things well”. He argues for craftwork’s social relevance : “the craft of making physical things provides insight into the techniques of experience that can shape our dealings with others”. 18 Sennett’s proposal sits at serious odds with this history because it honours a particular kind of specificity — specific modes of attention, production and interaction — that are increasingly unlearned and undervalued, but also because the hand-fabricated art object is no longer at the centre of our preoccupations, and has not been since Marcel Duchamp’s readymades irrevocably shattered the art historical link between skill, sensuous hand-craft, the artist’s studio, artistic authorship and reception. As De Duve puts it, and one can argue that the merging of educational and artistic practices today supports this, “the only art considered authentically contemporary in the eyes of the art world are practices that identify with art in general — a category of art created by Duchamp’s readymades that consummated

14

Johannes Itten, “The Foundation Course at the Bauhaus”, ( 1965 ) cited in Eland, p. 214.

15 Thierry De Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude — And Beyond”, in The Artist and the Academy : Issues in Fine Art Education and the Wider Cultural Context, eds.

Stephen Foster and Nicolas De Vile ( Southampton, UK : John Hansard Gallery, 1994 ), 23–40, and “An Ethics : Putting Aesthetic Transmission in its Proper Place in the Art World”, in Madoff, ed., 16–24.

16

De Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude — And Beyond”, 25.

17

Richard Sennett, The Craftsman ( 2008 ), 94.

18

Ibid., 289.

the divorce of art and the traditional artist’s métier, with its specialized skills and artisan habits”, 19 and whose death knell was sounded by the emergence and institutionalisation of conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s, as well as in the teaching of it.

In the current knowledge-based economy, which favours the development of so-called cultural entrepreneurship in so-called creative industries in order to produce widespread financial benefits, Sennett recognises that the craftsman’s method of “practice, repetition, revision”, of “doing one thing well, understanding it in depth, is a recipe for a worker or company to be left behind”. 20 One can see the appeal, then, of doing art-in-general.

Since artistic skills have been reconfigured as conceptual prowess, artists are fully released from the grip of traditional hierarchies, and the author re-fashioned as a multi-tasking executive, who delegates artisanal work, manages projects, takes care of her own publicity, and markets her own product. Contrary to deskilling in the labour force, the “deskilling” of artistic production does not leave the artist bereft of capabilities, but increases them exponentially.

19

This is a point John Roberts makes in his study of deskilling and artistic labour since Duchamp. 21 Deskilling the labour process involves the incorporation of science and technology to the detriment of human labour, the loss of workers’ control over the labour process, replacement of skilled labourers with machines, the widening gap between workers and executives, the managerial re-organisation of workers into jobs for which they are not necessarily trained, and the fragmentation of production into specialised tasks that strip workers of their autonomy. Benjamin H.D. Buchloch explained that Australian conceptual artist Ian Burn first used the term with reference to contemporary art in the 1980s, defining it as the elimination of the notion of manual virtuosity and technical competence from artistic production and reception. For Buchloch, pointillist painting, cubist collage, the readymade, found and technically reproduced objects are examples of artistic innovations born out of

De Duve, “An Ethics”,

20.

20

Sennett, 280.

21

John Roberts, “Art After Deskilling”, Historical Materialism 18 ( 2010 ) : 77– 96 and The Intangibilities of Form : Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade ( London : Verso, 2007 ).

22 See Benjamin H.D. Buchloch, “Hans Haacke : Memory and Instrumental Reason”, in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry : Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 ( Cambridge : M.I.T. Press, 2003 ).

“deskilling”. 22

This term has reappeared in the work of art historians and theorists, artists and thinkers who are currently grappling with the effects of the rise of immaterial modes of production and immaterial labour in cognitive capitalism, which creates value by adding cognitive labour and the production of knowledge to material production. For John Roberts, the era of deskilling has redefined artistic skill one step further : “artistic skill is no longer confined to the manipulation of a given medium within a tradition of discretely crafted works, but is the cross-disciplinary outcome of an ensemble of technical or intellectual skills embedded in the general division of labor.” 23

23 Roberts, “Art After Deskilling”, 90.

24

Rosalind E. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory ( Cambridge : M.I.T, Press, 2010 ), xiii.

25

Ibid., xiv.

26 Krauss, “Reinventing the Medium : Introduction to Photograph”, in George Baker, ed. James Coleman ( Cambridge : M.I.T. Press, 2003 ), 207.

Paradoxically, based on this accepted account of the development of artistic production and education in 145

the West, we find ourselves caught in a position, not where artistic skills and competences have been tossed aside, but where one set has been replaced by another, where the extension of the artistic skills and competences into conceptualisation processes and intellectual activity has merged with the expansion of the forms and formats for art’s symbolic presentation and explication, where the sorts of distinctions between métier and medium, between contemporary and traditional forms, traced by De Duve, if not universally obsolete, are no longer a relevant part of our conversations.

But despite their considerable differences, the métier and the medium share one thing in common : specificity.

Recall that the métier was linked to specific traditions and that mediums involve the recognition of “conventions” of specificity — conventions that are proper to the material conditions of a given technical support ( painting and the modernist artists’ pursuit of flatness is the most well-known example ). These conventions allow an artist to develop a form of expressiveness that can be simultaneously forward-looking and aware of the past.

I’m paraphrasing Rosalind Krauss here, who recently proclaimed her “conviction that the abandonment of the specific medium spells the death of serious art” 24 and has called the post-medium condition, which she characterises as a jettisoning of aesthetic coherence and specificity, a “monstrous myth”. 25 Krauss advocates a reinvention of the medium in order to reclaim “the specific from the deadening embrace of the general”. 26 In doing so, the artist, and the art object, would be able to recuperate a kind of autonomy that grows from an intimate understanding, and a mining, of a specific medium’s own potential for self-differentiation, its own plurality, which is located, according to her, in its internal logic.

I wouldn’t go so far as aligning myself with Krauss’s position, but I will admit that I admire her faith in specificity, the glimpse of promise it might hold for artists who want to resist the siren call to become “creative, cultural entrepreneurs”. We are still deeply indebted to the historically and culturally ingrained notion that in art there are not supposed to be any rules. But, I genuinely wonder who is served, in the end, by the dissolution of specific criteria for making, thinking, presenting and talking about art, or rather who is served by the refusal to rethink specificity, to speculate about its potential, within the general flow of knowledge and artistic forms ? Just as I wonder, on a daily basis, how to establish and integrate specific criteria for art education, and worry about who those specific criteria will serve.

Despite the banishment of tradition, transmission is still a main priority for education, which evolves over time as a process that is as rife with failures as it is with glimmers of success. Without being prescriptive — my goal has been to merely describe a situation rather than propose solutions — it seems to me that, of the many things we’ve inherited generally from the past century of

artistic production, it could be that thinking specifically, “valuing what is actually being said�, reflecting upon the form, content, and meanings of the art of our time, over time, still matters. There is certainly room in the art world for all sorts of boundary-busting, interdisciplinary, educational-artistic-curatorial projects. I am not interested in sorting out whether one mode is superior to another, but I am interested in how we might start to differentiate between them. Because in the face of all this generality, the risk we run is that soon the only thing that will distinguish what happens in art academies from what happens in the increasingly pluralistic pool of educational platforms is our bureaucracies.

Rotterdam, 2012–2013

Notes from Vivian Sky Rehberg's personal archives

Notes from Vivian Sky Rehberg's personal archives

Vivian Sky Rehberg ( born 1965 ) is an art historian and critic and Course Director of the Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute. She obtained her PhD in art history in 2000 from Northwestern University ( Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A. ). Based in Paris since the late 1990s, Rehberg worked as a curator, writer, translator and educator in France before moving to Rotterdam in February 2012.

Rehberg is a contributing editor of Frieze magazine and publishes widely on contemporary art and artists.

Michelangelo Pistoletto

in conversation with Nico Dockx

RESPONSIBILITY IS NOT ONLY DREAMING OF SOMETHING DURING THE NIGHT, IT IS ALSO DOING SOMETHING DURING THE DAY

fig. 1

Reviewed by Archivio Cittadellarte 16, 3, 2014 ND Nico Dockx MP Michelangelo Pistoletto

149

ND I would like to discuss three different subject matters with you. One part would be to talk with you about art education and your studio practice in the early sixties. Another part is more related to Cittadellarte, which is an interesting example of how art education

elimination of any landscape around myself. And, so this zero ground was no different from a mirror, because with the mirror I am still keeping the basic concept of visual arts, the representation, the image. I am an image and the mirror is nothing without an image. And this is

can happen nowadays, and the way in which it is very different from what we see in art academies all over the world. And the last part — which is the one that interests me the most — is this idea of one and many, and your personal exploration in many other fields, like science, literature, architecture, performance, and theatre, etc., that I experienced when collaborating with you for the Big Torino Biennial in 2002. And today, you talk a lot about spirituality and your Third Paradise ideas.

So, these elements might serve as a sort of “spine of starting points” for our conversation, if that is ok for you ? A first question is about your solo show at Gallery Sperone in Torino in 1967, where you presented a manifesto inviting the audience to come to your studio. You opened up your studio. I’m curious to know more about the how, what, and why of this event. It was a very radical statement — as an artist — not to present any art works in the gallery space, but instead just publishing and communicating an invitation to come to your studio, and opening up the personal studio space to various audiences and creating a place for people to meet,

why the image in the mirror became multiple, and in this nothing, everything appeared. But all this was based on painting and art. This basic tradition of art being representative. And it was virtual, because painting is virtual. It is more virtual than sculpture. [Laughs.]

What you see can be three-dimensional, but also four-dimensional, as is the case with the mirror paintings, which include time. But, virtually … Because it is just the mind that goes inside this virtual world and then comes back to the mind, which brings it to the body.

For me, after the experience of going into the nothing with everything in the mirror, it was necessary for me to come out from nothing back into life as everything. This is what happened when I felt the necessity to move from “virtuality” to “reality”, and to transfer it into the totality of our reality. Because to reorganise myself, to organise myself in the world, I had to move in a physical way, and so I started to develop this concept of meeting people and exchanging thoughts. To understand myself in relation to others. To create a possible network so that we could really organise our social life in a certain

talk, share, exchange and let things happen in a more collaborative way.

way. I couldn’t be alone anymore, when in my painting, everybody came in. From that moment on I was never alone again. Never. I had to move from virtuality in order to encounter people in real life. And this is why I said : “Now I am going to open up my studio”. And it is, of course, a question of precise timing, because I didn’t put any artwork produced by myself in the gallery, just a milestone. A milestone that was engraved with the date “1967”, as I wanted to say : “Ok, this is an historical moment. Each moment is historical.” And in this historical moment we go out of the mirror and we enter the world. In order to open up to real life not only the painting, but also the space where the painting has been produced. And, that was the studio. [Laughs.] And so, the people came.

MP For me, that was a very important moment in the progress of my artistic activities, and it came from something very basic, that is to say : the mirror. The use of a mirror. And, of course, when I arrived at the mirror paintings, I was able to discover the possible solution for an existential condition : myself in the world.

[Laughs.] And in these mirror paintings, the image of me, or of any other person, was so concentrated that it lost all possible individualistic expressions : just the existence of a person. The only thing that you cannot deny is that you exist. That is the only thing that is more or less sure.

You exist, but where and why ? You exist in the world.

But what is the world ? I had this feeling for a moment of being totally excluded from the world, and yet, at the same time, included. The exclusion brings me to the

ND And, aside from opening up your studio, were there any instructions from you towards the audience ?

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Did you guide them, or did you plan something to happen, or … ?

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MP No, I didn’t plan anything. I just made a manifesto, which functioned as the invitation card of the show. And that was the milestone. I said : “With this milestone I open my studio to everybody who wants to meet and do something together. And immediately, poets came. They said : “We want to show our poetry because we don’t have other places to do it. [Laughs.]

Nobody wants us to present it.” And because they were very young artists, I said : “Ok, let’s make a presentation together.”. Immediately after this action another group arrived and they said : “We are filmmakers, no other place wants to show our films.” So, I said : “Ok, let’s do it.” Another presentation. Then different language groups came. [Laughs.] Different groups, not just individuals, and then actors, from the theatre …

theatre people. But then after a while, we said : “What shall we do here and now, in the studio ? The studio is open, but what can we do ? We probably have to go into the street, there where the studio is for everybody.”

And there we tried to mix all those different languages.

We started to mix various individuals and their different languages. That was the purpose ; that was the experiment. All of a sudden, The Zoo was born. A group that included musicians, theatre people, some poets, some filmmakers. We went outside together and we started to make some strange, performative things in the streets of Torino. But, that was an experiment, of course, the concept of The Zoo was that in a zoo you have all these different animals, and they all want to get out of the zoo, to escape from the cage. That was the meaning of the title.

ND So, opening your studio was also somehow about leaving the studio ?

ND Did you also have some visual artists coming to your studio, or not ?

MP Yes, I was leaving the studio. I opened it up and

MP There were no visual artists coming to the studio, because I already knew them. We were very close to the young generation. It was also the time when Arte Povera was being introduced. So, in a way, the artists were already present, because Arte Povera was starting to get presented everywhere. What was interesting to me was that it wasn’t only for artists, when I said : “I am opening my studio space”. And, so everybody would say : “Ok, we’re coming, let’s go, this is a space for us.” It was immediately like an open institution in a certain way. [Laughs.] At some point I said : “Ok, now we are here : cinema, theatre, poetry … and so I can do something myself collaborating with all of you. The first idea was to collaborate together in making films.

With these filmmakers, I made ten films in one month.

I said : “I’ll make a proposition, what I would really like to do, and then you react — individually — with whatever it is you would like to do. So, we joined forces and combined our abilities to work together. We made ten films that were presented at the end of the month

it all happened together. We had to decide whether to stay or to go. And our choice was to go. I think that the name The Zoo was perfect. This notion of opening the cage and freeing all the different animals. Because in the zoo, you have all kinds of languages. [Makes animal sounds.] We went into the streets. We started to activate things. And, it wasn’t a closed group. We did activities in Rome — for example — with ‘Musica Electronica Viva’. It was a group of both Italian and mainly American artists and musicians. Very high-quality minds. Afterwards, some musicians joined The Zoo. They became part of our group. We travelled together.

It was a mixture of very different groups of people and everything was open. People were freely coming and going. Then around the end of 1967 — the year that I opened the studio — I went to Rome with Pascali and there I met Maria and came back with her, and so … she joined us in this big scheme of things. In 1970 we did the last show, the last activity under the name The Zoo. We ended with the presentation Bello e Basta at the Teatro l’Uomo in Milano. And, we got a

at the Galleria l’Attico in Rome. Ten films. Two hours.

Ten, twelve, fifteen minutes each. It was somehow a two-hour film. It was a fantastic film. Very, very good.

Today there are only five of these films left, because we didn’t make copies at the time. We just made them and that was it. We were caught in the moment. We were not fixing anything. It’s a pity because some of us have died in the meantime. Some others have lost their films.

But five of them are still being presented in one of my current exhibitions.

ND Was this the first time you worked collaboratively, or did it happen before ?

MP This was the very first time. But, we also started to work with some theatre people. And, at the Piper in Torino we did a big show that was called ‘Cocapicco e Vestitorito‘. [Laughs.] It was done with a group of

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little contract from the theatre to present the piece more than once. At that point we realised that that was not what we really wanted to do as we didn’t want to move from painting to theatre. We realised that theatre is something that can label a working system. If you put together different languages, you make theatre. If you combine all these different forms of expression : the body, the voice, sound, movement, colour, light, you make theatre. But it’s not the traditional theatre that comes from literature. Our theatre incorporated rhythm, void, fullness, tension, emotions … many things that were not normally conceived to be in theatre. And finding ourselves there, we asked ourselves : “Do we want to go on with theatre, or have we done what was necessary to do ?” And, so, we said : “Ok, now basta !

Bello e Basta.” [Laughs.] It was nice, but it was also time to go.

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ND How influential were your experiences with The Zoo in starting and developing ‘Cittadellarte’ almost thirty years later ? Was it the same energy once again ?

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MP It’s definitely the same spirit, yes. But many things happened after 1971, because the world situation was not evolving in that same direction. Because politics were very aggressive. It was like putting everything back into the cage again. The revolutionary politics were combined with normal politics. At some point you couldn’t understand anymore who was really revolutionary and who used it as an excuse to put people aside that they didn’t like and to create opposition. The dream of possible change turned into a nightmare, and I saw it as a consequence of this dream. So, it made me very unhappy and I went away from all this. I went back to the mirror, to the idea of the mirror. I came back to art as a concept. I went back into the mirror to reconsider its starting point and to examine the philosophical reasons behind what we have been doing. But my philosophy was related to the phenomenology. Not an

been many passages from Impressionism to Conceptual Art. “What can be there after the notion of art as concept ?” I really thought that the next passage could be spirituality. Because I also recognised that religion has the same principle of conceptuality. Religion has a conceptual base. Christians baptised the people.

Before you are baptised, you are nothing, you are like the wall. The moment you are baptised, you are like the plexiglass. We are back to the plexiglass. [Laughs.] You see ? Exactly. And this can be applied to all different religions. People think that religion is an evaporation.

Religion is not just something practical, it is a social organisation. There is a very basic element bringing together the mind and the practical. That is spirituality.

All religions have an initiation, like everything else in the tradition of our social life system. This moment of initiation means changing your position. From nothing to something. Nothing is outside the society. Something is inside the society. You are not just a physical element anymore — like an animal. You are now what they call “the soul”. You take a soul. You gain the consciousness

imposition of myself, or of a situation, but a research of the phenomenology. Which means that I wanted to see what this phenomenon of the mirror could give me more. And, so, I did the Division and Multiplication of the Mirror. I also did Art Assumes Religion in the gallery.

Why ? I said : “Ok, the division of the mirror is a principle, a mathematical principle.” You divide one, and you have two. But it is more complex than that. Because my division is the division of zero, because the mirror is nothing. [Laughs.] Division of nothing brings the multiplication of this nothing, and becomes an event of two mirrors reflecting one another. They make four, ten, millions, until you have infinity ! It was a kind of research on the phenomenology of existence coming back to the notion of the mirror. It relates to a very important passage for me in my work that we haven’t talked about yet. Before the mirror, in 1964, I made a group of works that were called Plexiglass. That was a precise indication of what is art and what is not art. I placed a rectangular piece of plexiglass on the wall and I called this work Wall.

The plexiglass brings forward the idea of the wall.

and the knowledge that you are part of something. For me personally this was very important, because it made me understand the system of passage from a situation of “void” to a situation of “fullness” — from the empty mirror to this complete representation of the mirror. And, this passage remained at the basis of my thinking and acting. You said at the beginning of our conversation that you wanted to talk with me about spirituality ; well, I just gave you the root. Of course, there has never been such a thing as a world that was already totally and perfectly organised. The world was ( and still is ) a disaster. Where is the society that we would like to live in, and where is it not ? This is the issue. I have to work however and with whomever I can, in order to create a society that is probably different from the one that has been created. The criminal society that we have arrived at today is not art for me. The criminal is not spiritual.

We live in a criminal society and criminality is a human feature, because an animal is not criminal at all. An animal kills in order to survive, that is part of its nature, part of a natural recycling eco-system. It’s not something

So, where there is an idea, there is art. Outside of this plexiglass, there is no idea, meaning that the wall is not art. It was all about the origin of conceptual art.

Concept as a basic knowledge of what it is or could be : something. Because at the time, you know, in art there was a neo-realist system that took everything from life following Duchamp’s urinal, Fontaine. Everything became art. What do you have to do in order to understand what it is, or what it is not ? I asked myself if it was something totally different from the activities with The Zoo, this open approach, this relationship with other people. It was perhaps more a kind of research laboratory, a laboratory of art. It was not an expression of myself. And in this laboratory I discovered the idea of the concept. Art as a concept. I understood it as a radical possibility of modern research. But, what is the concept ? I said : “What can I do after the concept ?

What can be the next passage ?” Because there have

conceptually organised against the possibility of a real civilisation. What is a civilisation ? Until now, we have been given a great opportunity to create a civilisation but it has always been destroyed by criminality.

ND Is ‘Cittadellarte’ a way for you to …

MP Cittadellarte is an anti-criminal institution.

[Laughs.]

It means that we have to reconsider all the components of society, not only the different languages, but all the languages. The language of politics, the language of economy, the language of education, the language of architecture, the language of fashion, the language of everything ! We have to reconsider all these languages.

I think the most difficult point in all this is the economy and at the same time it is the most necessary because we have to exchange. We have to keep everything

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moving. We are not alone. I work, you work, he works, she works, we work. But, we have to exchange what we do with one another. Today we have all the means and tools to be well connected, to see when something is good for somebody here, and bad for somebody there. We have to create a balance. We have to have a congruenza [congruence] At the moment, we have the possibility to put everything in connection and relation with one another. We have new technologies, new sciences, new things. I thought that it was going in the direction I was moving towards, but it is now possible to use technology in a criminal way. At some point, for example, we decided that the division of the atom was a great discovery. But then somebody decided to use it to make a bomb. Today we are not in the time of the bomb anymore. Today, with the new technologies, we can create and destroy without generating an explosion. Technology itself can be used in a way that it totally immobilises and destroys a country. Everything is computerised. A city, a country cannot survive if there is somebody that interrupts the possibility of using

ND So, could I say that you did not only divide the mirror in order to have a multiplication, but perhaps also yourself as an artist, and to go from one to many ?

MP Cittadellarte has given people the possibility of no longer only saying “Me, me, me …”, but instead saying ‘We’.

ND Do you see Cittadellarte as a sort of educational zone ?

MP Yes. Earlier today, you said to me that you did not want to become an official teacher and to become part of the bureaucratic system of education. And you are totally right. In 1989 / 1990, when I was invited to become a professor at the art academy in Vienna, I immediately said : “No. I am not interested.” But both the director and the vice-director came to me and told me that it would be a democratic election and that everybody in the academy was able to vote for it, that is to say that the professors, the teachers, and even the

technology. You, me … we die much quicker than other material on this planet.

So today we have an enormous responsibility. The criminality is there. The criminals are just a few, but they use the majority of us to commit the crime, that is what we have to understand if we want to have a real democracy. But what is a democracy ? In order to have a democracy, you need to have a multiplication of individual people with knowledge and responsibility.

If there is no responsibility to stop the criminality, things will get worse. We have known each other for more than ten years now. You know what I tried to do in the Torino Bienniale in 2002 and what we did very recently in the Bordeaux Bienniale ; it has always been about bringing together people to take responsibility, with art.

Art is a marvellous thing. Because it’s not mechanical. In art you have the possibility to use your imagination and your emotion. You put emotion in the technicality of the solutions. The fantastic thing is that you enjoy yourself. It is much better to enjoy oneself than to suffer. [Laughs.]

Of course you can be sick, but you are sick because

school concierges had the right to vote. It was very funny because the answers that I gave to them were all negative : “Do you like to teach ?” I said : “No.” “Do you know German ?” I said : “No.” “Do you want to learn ?” I said : “I don’t know.” “Do you live here ?” I said : ‘No.” I said “No” to everything. They said : “Ok, at least he is honest.” [Laughs.] The rector even spoke to the whole school, explaining what my thinking and working processes were all about and why he thought that I could be the right person to become a new professor at the art academy. The idea was to change everything there. They were celebrating 300 years of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, like you are now celebrating 350 years of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. It was one of those very few academies in Europe that was still in the same place after so many years. Other academies, like some of the Italian academies were much older, but the academy in Vienna never moved to another location. They said : “Now it is time to really change, develop, and move on. And, that is why we think that Michelangelo Pistoletto is the

this is in your nature. It is useful for you to be able to feel your mind, being something more than just a part of your body. Because it is spiritual. We own a mind that is a responsible mind. Being responsible also means responding to our mind with happiness. Your life can last ten days, ten years, one hundred years …

It is still just a very short period. But in this time, you have to enjoy yourself. [Laughs.] And this is ‘paradise’.

This is the idea of ‘paradise’. Paradise means a protected garden. There is food … and flowers. [Laughs.] It is protected by a system of thinking, a system of living. It is protecting a place. But the garden today has to be the world, not just a place. When I made the division and multiplication of the mirror, I understood that division is the principle, not multiplication. The multiplication is just an effect, a secondary effect of the division. The more you divide, the more you multiply.

right person.” And, so the rector publicly said : “If he accepts our offer to teach here in the academy, I will support him, even if I don’t understand what he is actually doing.” Which is fantastic. So I said : “In this case I accept this teaching position, because this is a kind of freedom and I want to be free from any bureaucratic rules and systems.” It became a great success, I told the students that you can always create something fantastic and develop it into something incredibly interesting. You can have an art career with galleries, collectors, museum shows, good press releases and so on ; but this is just one of the many possibilities. Nobody can prevent you from using your creativity in such a way that it can somehow play a part in society.

ND You taught at the art academy in Vienna for about ten years. How did you structure and organise your teaching activities over there ? Did your students

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organise things together with you, and were there any other teachers taking part in your class ?

MP No, it was just me and five assistants. One assistant was from Poland — a very smart boy. Another one was an artist from Vienna. One was a philosopher, and then another one was a psychologist. And, another one was an Italian from the Altoatesino. It was in the years after the Berlin wall came down and all the people from Eastern Europe were coming to study here, and we therefore had this chance of again having a big combination of different languages and traditions. That was important to me. It was also around the time that I started to buy a place in Biella and, so I could rely on help from the students from Vienna to start things up at the very beginning of Cittadellarte. Little by little … with theatre, actions, performances, and presentations, as it was a mixture of things connecting Vienna and Biella.

ND So, what do you think an art academy should do or be today ?

MP I don’t know what is going on in the art academies today. I know that what I brought to them was not just paint, pencil, brush, hammer, marble, or gesso, but the media itself. At that time, the Internet didn’t exist yet, but we explored all these things and tried to develop new media. But now, new media are so fashionable.

From the nineties on, everything went very fast. There was a big change in society and in everything else. So, I don’t know what the academy is today, and I really don’t know what would be the best way to teach in an art academy. What I think is nice and interesting — as it is for music for example, and for anything else I believe — is to know the tradition. To know how to do things. How to draw. How to do something with your hands, with your eyes, with your interactions, and with the world as we find it today. Because, we don’t have to discover the mirror anymore, we have to teach what existed before the mirror and then we arrive at both the antique and the modern arts. You have to know that.

I am starting to have some doubts and problems with technology. Because, as I told you, technology can cut the string that allows you to survive — practically. We have to be practical again. To know how to cultivate the earth, how to exchange things directly, how to use money in a simple and modest way. To go back to simplicity and practicality. I think it is a necessity. And, in academies, to have this cultivation of what has been done as a process, a practical knowledge. This is very important to me, not so much to make a modern academy, but to make a school of the knowledge of the past, which is something I learned through the restoration work I did with my father. My father was an old-school painter and restorer. So, I know the history. Not only the idea of history from books, but also through a practice.

I know how to manage, how to manipulate something.

At this very moment I don’t use my hands, but I did use them a lot and I would be able to use them again at any moment. I think we have to respect this idea of 153

being able to manipulate and also to do something personal. That can also be a way of expressing one’s self and helping others to be able to express themselves.

This is very important, I feel. Because you just don’t have to be the hero of art, you have to be conscious of the tool. Today it’s very complex. You have so many things, you can do whatever you want and like, you can make performances, you can make anything … But at some point, you also have to know that not everything starts and finishes with the ability to draw or to make something with your hands ; you have a society to reconstruct, to activate. This you have to put into the academies. This capacity of making on many levels … and the material ! As material … is the communication ; that is the responsibility. How to do it ? You have many tools, you have many possibilities, but what do you do with all these tools ? Responsibility is the new tool. Not only the technicality of it, but as an idea that can become very practical. Responsibility is not only dreaming of something during the night, it’s also doing something during the day. You know ? [Laughs.] We have to know the past, but we also have to work in the present to connect the past with future propositions. And artists have an incredible freedom in doing this work. But the more you are free, the more you are responsible.

ND Do you consider Cittadellarte as a sort of academy ?

MP No. I think it’s more a school of democracy.

What I am trying to develop in Cittadellarte is a relationship between spirituality and democracy. These days, with the participants, I try to discuss … and they are very interested in talking about these things, such as : “What is democracy ?” They come from different countries, they have different educations, different religious backgrounds. Because — whether you like it or not — their parents, their families come from a certain religion, and so everybody has their own spiritual and social question. Here we deal with social questions.

I try to communicate this idea to them. Did you read my book The Third Paradise ? I have the English version now, which I can give to you after our conversation.

The last chapter of this book is about morality. There, I explain that for me it’s not possible to think in a monotheistic way, so instead of monotheistic I use the word “omnitheistic”. Because omnitheistic implies the idea of going from being a passive ‘nothing’ to ‘being part’ of our society. Human beings — from each tribe in the world — have always used the concept of elevation. This ritual of elevation, of transformation. But it cannot be addressed towards one single point, one person, one entity that is vertically very high up and keeps you below.

It is based on decision, on judgement. This is what has been used until today in order to keep people together, but within one structure of power. And this is absolutistic. The absolute and the democratic don’t go together.

What I discovered with the mirror is that what you see in the mirror cannot be absolute. Nature is always different. It is an ever-changing combination of things. So,

it means that there is nothing. Everything is relative and the relativity is absolute. It seems strange, but the absolute is something that doesn’t have the possibility of a relation. Relation is everything in relativity. So, absolute and relative are the same thing, there is no contrast. But relativity is the real component. That is why the mirror is democratic ! So, I started to use the word “omnitheistic”. Not theistic. What does omnitheistic mean ? That everybody is God, and the responsibility that we give to God is us. It’s our responsibility. The responsibility of each of us. This is democracy. We need a philosophy that allows democracy to develop with the brain, not only with some form of political arrangement. That is what I try to discuss with our collaborators here at Cittadellarte and with the University of Ideas. It should be a university to me, little by little, a university of democracy including and implementing a new spirituality. It’s quite a work to do. The whole economic system is based on principles of the absolute. When we enter society, we enter into this climate of verticality and this is why democracy can’t and doesn’t develop itself. It always comes back to this notion of verticality. Now, for example, since the Arab Spring has started. “Do you know what it is about ? It’s a revolt in the Maghreb. And, what is it for ? It’s because they want democracy, don’t they ? And, what is the next step to enter democracy ?

It’s the election. And, what happened in the elections ?

The religious party came into power. You see ?” But this cannot be democracy. They had a change, which is a first step but it’s not enough, as you have to make progress. Because we know that if you don’t participate as a population — as human individuals that have become a population — if you don’t participate in this knowledge of what economy and politics are, then the religious systems — which are vertical systems — will gain power again. Ok, if you can accept that, va bene. But after that you have to start tearing down this monument … this God on top of everything, you see ? And, this is a big job ; it is not easy, because it interferes with strong economical and religious powers. Think of the Vatican, for example, it’s a world economical power. There are so many people that live on this commerce of souls. It’s difficult to change it. Luckily we are not talking about religions, we are talking about artists. We are not in the world of religion, we are in the world of art, and art is much stronger and more powerful than any religion.

It goes much further. It’s a bridge on top of religions.

Art connects with the human being’s basic ability to be creative. Using creativity has created religion. But creativity is produced by the concept that developed it, which is art. Creativity is the ability to create … which afterwards became religion. So, creativity came before religion, art came before religion. When religious people say to me : “Christianity has existed for more than 2000 years”, I say : “Art has already existed for millions of years.” [Laughs.] We have the right to think philosophically and spiritually. But spirituality doesn’t just mean creating a pyramid. It’s all about using the brain and also seeing what is not yet there. To see further, to see around, to walk, to move, to create, to imagine.

Spirituality is also seeing the world of tomorrow. This is spirituality. And the artist always creates something that is not here now. [Laughs.] This is why art has such a big responsibility.

ND Has Cittadelarte perhaps started because it was difficult to implement all these ideas into a traditional academy ?

MP No, because here we don’t want to teach you how to make a sculpture, how to make a film. We can do it, but there are so many other possibilities. We want to develop the connection between art and society, between art and the problematics of the world. And develop the interaction of art in an open way. This is our speciality.

ND Cittadellarte sometimes travelled from Biella to other venues, didn’t it ? It came — for example — to the M HKA museum of contemporary art in Antwerp, to communicate your ideas on art and society. Ideas that were also used within the exhibition structures of both the Torino and Bordeaux Biennales. But have you ever made Cittadellarte travel to an art academy ? To implement all its ideas within the setting of a traditional art academy ?

MP No, I haven’t. It is something that nobody has ever asked me to do, but it would be very good.

ND And that’s why I also want to invite you to this M HKADEMY project that I am organising together with art historian Johan Pas and students from both art academies in Antwerp bringing the academy to the museum for a period of three months, to experiment with teaching and learning processes — because I feel that today, since Bologna reforms, there is a very strong “academisation” and “instrumentalisation” of education.

It is getting more and more professionalised and thereby also narrow-minded.

MP Yes, it would be a good idea, to introduce our activities with Cittadellarte and the University of Ideas ( UNIDEE ) into existing academies. But we don’t have a fixed description of what we do, so that makes it very difficult. It is based on the development of individuals.

It’s very difficult for a teacher, even an art teacher, not to be limited by the art scene, by artistic tradition. What I would like to do is to go on with this idea of the school and to make another step in the University of Ideas.

To specifically interact with spirituality and society, as I told you before at the beginning of our conversation.

That is why I’m talking a lot with this year’s participants, because I would like to have some feedback on that idea from them. They are very interested. We have a good group. What is interesting this year is that we have more mature people in the program. They are more or less your age. Before they were about twenty, twenty-three, twenty-four … Now we have participants from twenty-nine to thirty-seven years old. It’s fantastic.

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They come here and want to take possession of something with more consciousness. This means that there is no immediate solution for the students. You have to do something in order to change the world. This is why people said : “Okay, we’ve studied and we know, but we’re not so happy with the possibilities we have. We have to create new possibilities. And, you don’t enter society when you’re twenty or twenty-one, but when you’re thirty, thirty-five, or forty. Also, we live longer thanks to medical science, less physical use of the body, and more use of the mind and so on. It’s totally changing. And this is of course fantastic. But I’m very scared of the criminal minds … and I’m scared of education too : newspapers, comic books for children, toys, television, internet … You only see aggression and violence. There’s a sort of criminal school, a public criminal school. It’s not that you only have to see beautiful fairytales, but you have to see and realise that the divine is not everywhere and does not always win. That’s why religions are gaining power again, because instead of ‘Jesus’ you have ‘Superman’. It doesn’t work, it’s the

but there is also the human being, which is something different. You cannot say : “From today on, humanity will be different”, as we have to make a new development.

And, so we don’t need to kill the gorilla ; the gorilla can survive, but we have to humanise. We have to stop the possibilities of making criminal acts. We have to create a kind of society that is strong enough to defend itself against criminality. This is paradise. This is the passage to move onto the next, which is the idea of connecting nature and the artificial world. Negative and positive.

To create a new energy. Personally, I tried to make symbols, I tried to create different activities, but I can’t make anything better. I think it has to be a personal effort.

There needs to be participation. I don’t think anybody can do anything just by himself / herself. If I put myself in the condition of being just one person in a population, I will never have the power to respond. In a population, each one needs to be more than one. We have to be together, and to multiply ourselves. I have to give all my power to the other, to offer my power to others.

The multiplication of powers is not the traditional way

same principle ! Education is a big problem, but you have to teach those people who are teaching. It’s a lot of work. I’m very happy to have been able to escape this awful constriction. But at the same time, I feel there is a lot to do in order to have something different. And so I am sure that what we have done at Cittadellarte is good. In a sense it’s putting together art, economy, philosophy, science, politics, food and many other things.

As everything in society gets over-simplified, we have to urgently define a spiritual philosophy and practical politics. To me, this philosophy is omnitheistic, and the politics are democratic. Omnitheistic is not a religious position form where you admire nature, you pray to nature, and you see God in everything. Each one has his / her responsibility as an individual, as we created God ourselves. We have to consider that we need the other. An individual is not alone. I have to depend on you and you have to depend on me. God is not to be relied on. You and me. I am your God, and you are mine. This is a responsibility. So, this means that society starts with two people. And, this duality is something

in which things are happening. This is the responsibility of every single artist, of every single person towards society. Because one single element of the population doesn’t have any power, unless it seizes the power.

[Laughs.] The population is zero. I made a work using photography to explain what power actually is — I don’t know if you know this work. I will show you the work.

It will show you what power means, what power is. It’s really clear.

MP I cannot say much about all this because I’m not really participating in it. For me it is necessary, as you say, to have a research place that you can share with researchers from other fields. But, I think that we have to understand very precisely what we mean by “research”.

If I look at the school of politics, for example, or of

that is also inside of us, because we have two parts of the brain, we have two arms, two legs, and two eyes.

We double ourselves. We have to connect these two parts of ourselves and take responsibility. But, our first act of reflection is with the other. We all are ‘second’ person, but ‘first person’ for the other. This is a very basic, omnitheistic concept. And, this is democracy. It is very simple, it is an easy exercise to do. If you think that this is a good principle we can work on that together. I say one more thing, but the way I act may be wrong, because, of course, I act in a traditional way.

“I have to change my DNA.” And DNA is not only there as created, it changes. We don’t have the DNA of a gorilla. [Laughs.] It changed. We have to take into consideration the human being as it has existed until today, together with another. Of course, we will always have the old system of thinking and acting, but we have to move away from it. The gorilla still exists,

economics : “What do they teach there and what is the research that they make ?” It all depends, because the research that they try to make is probably to make the function of speculation more intense, for example. But, if you don’t have a critical point as a base of reflection, you can’t have real research, but only a reconstruction of the same system. The artist can help to develop a critical point of view. A few years ago, we did a show in Cittadellarte ( and also in Switzerland ) that was called Critique Is Not Enough. That was the proposition. But in this proposition the critique is implicit. You cannot make any interesting proposition if you don’t have a critique beside of it. Not just to criticise, but to implement a strong possibility of transformation. I think that art can have the freedom to be critical. That is why I say that what we are doing here at Cittadellarte is a kind of ‘friction’ that we have to develop. I told you : “We don’t really have a method, we have a dynamic.” When we

ND Let’s go back to when you were teaching in Vienna. Today, for example, in the art academy in Antwerp there is still a big gap between theory, research, philosophy — and practice.

fig. 14

fig. 15

speak about using this freedom for transformation, this is already a kind of method if you want. [Laughs.]

ND I feel that the danger of this ongoing academisation nowadays in the art schools and universities is that one starts to professionalise and instrumentalise research which relates to this ever growing creative industry. To me, this limits our possibilities of creativity.

MP Of course, the school that we are trying to develop here in Cittadellarte is not so much in the world. It would be fantastic if somebody like you or others could understand what we are trying to do and produce this friction in reality. In your proposition you open a kind of dynamic that can become very constructive. And if you think that we can help and participate in some way, that would be fantastic. I really think more and more about the importance of education. Education is everything.

Because, if you’re a child you learn things, and you become what you’ve been learning. Teaching and learning is a very delicate thing. But, I think it’s important

fig. 16

fig. 17

to bring spirituality into education : spirituality that needs an omnitheistic conception and democracy. And what do we do with the economy in relation to all this ? It can be a basic point to open up a path to research.

That is why I sometimes like to put things into symbols, some symbolic names and then play with it. You need to make tools that function. Thinking of a conference … the speaker is there and this here is the public. Everyone has a photographic camera and together they take photos at the same time. So, this means that the speaker becomes twenty. And the audience becomes one. This is what power is. Because this person takes the place of everybody and this person loses all his power through the multiplication of the other persons. This is something to think about. It is research. I used photography for that. This is not ‘one’ anymore ; it is everybody and everybody is zero … I made many works with photography in that sense. Democratic photography. [Laughs.] I am not interested in beautiful photography.

ND One more thing, Michelangelo … within the context of the book on ‘art education’ that I’m trying to make, and which will include the conversation we are having now … are there any other, let’s say, bits of interviews, or statements, or images, or things that could be added to our conversation ? Anything you can think of that you would like to share with young artists ? At this moment, you’re writing a manifest that came out of your Third Paradise book, right ?

fig. 18

MP Yes, a manifest that came out of the last page.

[Laughs.] The morality. “Does God exist ?” I’m writing it now. It’s here. It is only a few pages. It’s a manifesto for today. I’ll send it to you. And, what we are doing now … I don’t know if you know about it : Rebirth-day.

21–12-2012 … these basic numbers ; it’s incredible. It is also the end because it’s the shortest day of the year : the 21st. It’s also very simple ; it’s a very simple date.

But for me, the idea is to give everybody the possibility

to start to understand more about it, to participate, to know … as I believe that the idea of having a celebration is very important. It’s putting together something that existed before with something that will happen after.

Celebration is always a connection. The participants, the people are put in the position to enjoy and understand what they’re doing. This is ‘celebration’. La festa.

And so, for us, this idea of celebrating the rebirth … In time, Rebirth-Day can become a kind of reconsideration of what we have been doing. You’re either going to paradise or back to the dark. For me personally, it is about this idea of defining a day and seeing what’s going on each day — as that is very important. So you see, I work on all these different things. It’s not necessary to make a big work of art. It’s also good to get to the point of saying : “Ok, we probably understand each other.” So making a performance together could be a very interesting way to implement creativity in our society. Is the recorder still working ? It’s been a long conversation …

fig. 19

ND Two hours and ten minutes.

MP Yesterday, I did an eight-hour interview and the day before another eight hours … because I’m making a book with a writer that asks me many questions starting from the very beginning of my life and so on.

ND So, more like a sort of biography ?

MP Yes, but the title of the book is The voice of history. It’s not only the visual, but also the word. The word as a meaningful medium. That’s what we’re doing here as well. To talk with one another is very important. Because, sometimes you use a visual work to communicate to people and they don’t understand immediately. For example, when I made the sign of the Third Paradise, I had to explain to others what it means. So, talking is very important. From symbol to reality, it is important to talk, to dialogue. And, I also think that in the school, in the academy, it is very important to create time and space for conversations. Discussing our situations. What do we do with our art ?

ND That is a very good question to end this conversation. Thanks Michelangelo !

fig. 20

fig. 21

fig. 1 Uomo seduto (Seated Man), 1962

fig. 2 Figura umana (Human Figure), 1962

fig. 3 Pietra miliare (Milestone), 1967

fig. 4 Open Studio — Manifesto, 1967

fig. 5 Installation “Arte Povera + Azioni Povere”, Arsenali dell’Antica Repubblica, Amalfi, October 4, 1968 Small Monument, 1968 — Capital and Rags, 1968 — Sarcophagus and Rags, 1968

fig. 6 L'uomo ammaestrato (The Trained Man), 1968 Action by "The Zoo", Vernazza's square, August 17, 1968

fig. 7 Bello e basta (Just Beautiful) , 1970 Show by "The Zoo", Teatro Uomo, Milano, October 21–28, 1970

fig. 8 Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, 1975–1978

fig. 9 Is there God? Yes, I am, 1978 Action by Michelangelo Pistoletto during the exhibition “Division and Multiplication of the Mirror — Art Takes On Religion”, Galleria Persano, Torino 1978

fig. 10 Il muro (I Plexiglass) / The Wall (The Plexiglass), 1964

fig. 11 Cittadellarte — Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella

fig. 12 Michelangelo Pistoletto in conversation with artists in residence of the Unidee Programm at Cittadellarte, Biella, 2002

fig. 13 Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cittadellarte and c a l c Uffizi Porte, 2003

fig. 14 La conferenza (The Conference), 1975

fig. 15 La conferenza (The Conference), 1975

fig. 16 Raggi di persone (Rays of persons), 1975

fig. 17 La conferenza (The Conference), 1975

fig. 18 Michelangelo Pistoletto, Omnithéisme et Démocratie, © Cittadellarte Edizioni, Biella 2012, © Actes Sud, 2013 pour la traduction française, traduit de l'italien par Matthieu Bameule.

fig. 19 Rebirth Day at Musée du Louvre, Paris Cour Napoléon, 21/12/2012

fig. 20 The Symbol of the Third Paradise on the Louvre Pyramid, installation view, Michelangelo Pistoletto's exhibition Année un — Le paradise sur terre (Year One — The Paradise on Earth), Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2013

fig. 21 The Symbol of the Third Paradise realized with archaeological finds from the site itself selected by the artist among marbles and mosaics. On the occasion of the exhibition "Caracalla Contemporary Paradise", Terme di Caracalla, Rome, 2012

Nico Dockx see page 8.

Michelangelo Pistoletto ( born 1933 ) began to exhibit his work in 1955 and in 1960 he had his first solo show at Galleria Galatea in Turin. An inquiry into self-portraiture characterizes his early work. In the two-year period 1961–1962 made the first Mirror Paintings, which directly include the viewer and real time in the work, and open up perspective, reversing the Renaissance perspective that had been closed by the twentieth-century avant-gardes. These works quickly brought Pistoletto international acclaim, leading, in the sixties, to one-man shows in important galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The Mirror Paintings are the foundation of his subsequent artistic output and theoretical thought. In 1965 and 1966 he produced a set of works entitled Minus Objects, considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement of which Pistoletto was an animating force and a protagonist. In 1967 he began to work outside traditional exhibition spaces, with the first instances of that “creative collaboration” he developed over the following decades by bringing together artists from different disciplines and diverse sectors of society. In 1975–76 he presented a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions, Le Stanze, at the same gallery in Turin. This was the first of a series of complex, year-long works called “time continents”. Others are White Year ( 1989 ) and Happy Turtle ( 1992 ). In 1978, in a show in Turin, Pistoletto defined two main directions his future artwork would take : Division and Multiplication of the Mirror and Art Takes On Religion. In the early eighties he made a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, translated into marble for his solo show in 1984 at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created the series of “dark” volumes called Art of Squalor.

During the nineties, with Project Art and with the creation in Biella of Cittadellarte — Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas, he brought art into active relation with diverse spheres of society with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. In 2003 he won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement. In 2004 the University of Turin awarded him a laurea honoris causa in Political Science. On that occasion the artist announced what has become the most recent phase of his work, Third Paradise. In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world.” He was Artistic Director of Evento 2011 — L’art pour une ré-évolution urbaine in Bordeaux. In 2012 he launched Rebirth-day, the First Worldwide Day of Rebirth, an initiative which generated over a hundred events all over the world on 21st December. In 2013, from April to September, his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un — le paradis sur terre took place at the Louvre Museum in Paris. In the same year, in Tokyo, he received the Praemium Imperiale award for painting.

Pistoletto has participated twelve times in the Venice Biennale and four times in Documenta, Kassel. His works are present in the collections of leading museums of modern and contemporary art.

Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office

with an introduction by Johan Pas

MOBILE MEDIUM UNIVERSITY PROGRAM ACADEMICAL TOUR 2015–2016 MOBILE MEDIUM UNIVERSITY ( REVISITED ) 1972–2012

fig.

1–2

1

Luc Deleu, from the project text to Mobile Medium University, 1972, quoted in Felicity D. Scott, Turn on Planning.

Dreams of a New Mobility in : Wouter Davidts, Guy Châtel, Stefaan Vervoort ( eds. ), Luc Deleu — T.O.P. office. Orban Space, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2012, 178. See also Deleu’s comments on mobility and architecture in the film Tribune. Diary 1971–1978, featuring his seventies scrapbook ( Roma Publications, Amsterdam, 2013 ).

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In his ‘Orban Planning Manifesto’, first published in 1980, the Belgian architect-‘orbanist’-artist Luc Deleu ( born 1944 ) sketched the ecological challenges that the fast-growing global population would face in the course of the late twentieth and the twenty-first century.

With recycling being a main theme in Deleu’s discourse of the seventies, and as a response to the hijacking of the ship by its own crew, Deleu also considered the idea of transforming the cruise ship SS. France into “an ideas transport ship”. Around the same time, he was exploring the possibilities of “mobile medium architecture”, an example of this being a drawing of a lorry with a greenhouse mounted on it. Mobile architecture

“Luckily, oceans and seas still form special reserves, twice as big as the available space on land”, he stated ; “Thus the complete population could be housed on 1,000,000 passenger ships ( 40,000 tons ). On 2,000,000 ships they would even enjoy a certain degree of comfort. The total Belgian population could perfectly live on 5,000 passenger ships ( 40,000 tons ).” A few years before, in 1972, Deleu had launched his very first “proposal”, the “Proposal for a mobile university ( in Antwerp )”. In response to an architecture competition, organised for the development of a new campus for the Antwerp University, through drawings and a scale model, he suggested housing the staff and the students on three aircraft carriers. Brightly painted for maximum visual impact and fully equipped with communication technology and helicopters, the three nuclear- powered vessels, named after famous Flemish sportsmen, would travel around the world, stopping at harbour cities.

After the trip, instead of having explored the student life of a local city, the student would, he said, be a real “world citizen”. “It seems to me, that a university that

provided the freedom and flexibility of the nomad, and in Deleu’s opinion, it also offered ecological solutions regarding the decreasing amount of space available for the growing world population. Photographs of his own Opel Blitz ambulance van, transformed into a mobile sleeper, functioned as a vehicle for “Mobile Medium Architecture Promotion”. In his scrapbook, compiled during the seventies, many images of ships ( and some ship wrecks ) are included. In his filmed commentary on the book, Deleu recently stated that by making extensive trips on the seas with a sailing ship, he has turned himself into a real sailor in recent years. The vast horizon, the feeling of space and the absolute autonomy one enjoys on a ship make it the perfect environment and, as such, perfect architecture. This experience probably sparked the idea to reconsider the Mobile Medium University proposal by adjusting its travel route. The drawing recently featured in Deleu’s retrospective Orban Space ( 2013 ) and is published here in its original form ( 2012 ). After four decades, the Mobile Medium University finally has an effective curriculum. So, what

sails around the world with its pupils, connected via electronic media, ‘diplomatizes’ real world citizens, with an expanded view of the world”. 1

are we waiting for ?

fig. 3

fig. 4

fig. 5

fig. 1 Mobile Medium University, as published in Artworker Star III, Antwerp, 1972

fig. 2 Mobile Medium University, painted plastic model, 1972

fig. 3 Mobile Medium University, as published in Aspecten van de actuele kunst in BelgiĂŤ, International Cultural Center, Antwerp, 1974

fig. 4 Proposition for recycling of the SS France, print, 1974

fig. 5 Mobile Medium University Revisited 1972-1989, painted plastic model and print, 1989

Luc Deleu ( born 1944 ) 1969

Degree of architecture

1970

Foundation of T.O.P. office : www.topoffice.to

1973

Start of development of the concept Orbanism ( Orban Manifesto & Proposals )

1980

Start of development of the concept Scale & Perspective

1988

Start of a series of designs for infrastructures

1991

Start of study Journey around the world in 80 days

1995

Start of study The Unadapted City, design by research

2006

Start of Orban Space, design by research

Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office also realized container installations in various cities : Basle, Neuchâtel, Switzerland ; Barcelona, Spain ; Tielt, Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Belgium ; Hamburg, Germany ; Alkmaar, Gorinchem, Hoorn, Middelburg, Nauerna, The Netherlands ; Paris, Nîmes, France ; Limerick, Ireland ; Minamata, Tokyo, Yokohama, Japan. He gave lectures or was guest lecturer in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, The Netherlands, U.K., U.S.A., U.S.S.R., Switzerland.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

TEACHING NARRATIVE

Excerpt from an application file written by Rirkrit Tiravanija regarding a solicitation for a teaching position at the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, New York, … , selected by Nico Dockx and Jörn Schafaff from the Rirkrit Tiravanija Archive (RTA), Berlin, 2013.

181

Rirkrit Tiravanija ( born 1961 ) is widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. His work defies mediabased description, as his practice combines traditional object making, public and private performances, teaching, and other forms of public service and social action. Winner of the 2010 Absolut Art Award and the 2005 Hugo Boss Prize awarded by the Guggenheim Museum, Tiravanija was also awarded the Benesse by the Naoshima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan and the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Lucelia Artist Award. He recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld along with previous retrospective exhibitions at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, MAM in Paris and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of Visual Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. Tiravanija is also President of an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and is part of a collective alternative space called VER located in Bangkok — where he maintains his primary residence and studio.

Raqs Media Collective

in collaboration with Nico Dockx

THE WORK OF ART IS A VERB

In September 2013, at the invitation of Nico Dockx, one of the members of Raqs Media Collective spent a few days at MuHKA’s “Lonely at the Top” space with students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and St Lucas University College of Art and Design Antwerp. The time spent together featured a detailed, annotated reading of “How to Be an Artist

by Night” 1 — a text written by Raqs Media Collective.

As the reading progressed, Nico Dockx kept detailed notes in pencil on the margins of the text. The two days of conversation around the act of reading this text led to the collective participation ( accompanied by the drinking of generous amounts of wine brought by all present ) in a symposium on time developed by Raqs Media Collective.

In what follows we present a selection of images of fragments from the notes pencilled by Nico Dockx, together with their transcriptions ( made by Raqs Media Collective ). 2 In this passage that leads from the text of a conversation to notes, and then to images of notes and transcription back to the printed page — we seek to leave a trace of the fact that the work of art is a verb.

1

“How To Be An Artist

By Night”, by Raqs Media Collective is published in Art School : Propositions for the 21st Century, edited

by Steven Henry Madoff, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009. http://www. aaronvandyke.net/summer_ readings/Raqs_How_to_ be_txt.pdf 2

The next section should feature the images of the notes ( words and occasional arrows ) selected and sent

by Monica to you — laid out with the transcriptions below. The layout of the images can be done freely, without anchoring them to the matching transcription fragments. The fragmentary, incomplete nature of the notes could be maintained in the layout design.

Pointing to the tentativeness and fragility of the recall of an intense conversation.

183

Bohemian Lifestyle of 50s–60s is gone, today we become artists and many other multidisciplinary professionals

the double life of the praxis of artistic autonomy — day — worker, night — artist ( the time away from work ) the anxiety produced by the market of this notion of ‘out datedness’

some people may know a lot, but everyone is equally ignorant

---> finding people to have conversations with !

plasticity ---> negotiation instead of

|

trajectory as well as destination <-------

flexibility ---> adaptation

how to change this ?

intimacy instead of distance -----> beauty

mobile university | studio | xxx part of practice | portable own decision-making

we make our own time to get beyond the given time.

artists ( art ), women ( children ), shoemakers ( shoes ) â&#x20AC;&#x201D; can never go to school, because they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have time, so they can never become citizens Platonic dialogues are like crime scenes

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Radical Incompleteness — contexts gather people — process — collaboration — exchange

Re-inventing yourself everyday, but who you are is the same as the different, changed person -----> consciously being shaped

a space of continuous exchange ------ responsibility, integrity, enjoyment

non-media ?

Incremental record : Building an archive of works incrementally teaching = discovering yourself artists that become very successful slowly and suddenly lose the capacity to do little things — due to their success

Skhole | — an etymological digression timeout — chronos ( time that eats what it makes ) kairos ( time that you make ) skhole ( free time )

Education presumes a retreat, or a period of waiting …

– artists should always do different things, to do something aside / outside of your work – it is the location and person that looks backward that changes, but work goes on and never ends that is the nature of ? connectivity --> temporal rhythm --> time reflections

the artist by night, in dreams, recovers what the no-collar worker lost by day TIMELINESS (how to be in / with time, how to be touched by time ---> Jacques Rancière “The Proletarian Night” ----> The Distribution of the Sensible through very basic questions — Who am I ? Who are We ? What is Now ? What is Here ?

With art we know how to be with time and that is why art is political and ethical ---> Strikes at Time

We make our own time to get beyond the given time

What is a School ? without | is just ( ? ) students what ( should be ) a school ? is

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the work of art | | | V verb

Nico Dockx see page 8.

Raqs Media Collective ( founded 1992 ) is Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles, often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs.

They make contemporary art, have made films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. Raqs ( pron. rux ) follows its self declared imperative of 'kinetic contemplation' to produce a trajectory that is restless in terms of the forms and methods that it deploys even as it achieves a consistency of speculative procedures. Raqs Media Collective remains closely involved with the Sarai program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies ( www.sarai.net ), an initiative they co-founded in 2000.

Roger D'Hondt

ART FOR ALL, ALL FOR ART EXPERIMENTING WITH ART AT THE UNIVERSITY CAMPUS

In a letter dated 26 August 1972, Gilbert Goos, who in his capacity of student at the Catholic University Leuven heads the “study group modern art”, asks me whether I am willing to realise an avant-garde art project ( “Art at the university” ) at the campus in Leuven. His letter is a response to the experiment, “Art in the village”, that I had just realised in the centre of Nieuwerkerken. With a core of New Reform 1

The only signals I had received about a relationship between the academic world and the visual arts were a result of my contacts with American and Canadian artists. Most of them had studied at university and it was rare that their CV mentioned an institution that called itself an “art academy”. Sometimes an “art school” was mentioned, but in fact those were related to a university.

A lot of artist-students were even temporarily employed

enthusiasts and inhabitants of this rural community, we had performed the happening Shadows, which was created by Fluxus artist Mieko Shiomi ( born 1938 in Okayama, Japan ), as well as other works. The script for Shadows was simple : we painted our own shadows on the street surface.

at the universities as managers of the art centres, libraries, or archives, and charged with organising artistic activities. I have noticed that the archives of some of these universities still store documents from my art centre New Reform, which ended up there through my correspondence with artists. I am not sure whether the Flemish art academies, who received free copies of my publications, have kept these, let alone stored them in a retrievable form in their archives. Actually, I am rather afraid they have not, and I have to conclude that the universities have done so in their role as institutions for scientific and comparative research.

For some reason or other, the project in Leuven is cancelled. A few weeks after Goos’ letter, Luc Steels and Mark A.M. Verreckt — who study Germanic philology at the Antwerp University and are responsible for the culture department of the student union — also contact me. They were referred to me by Gilbert Goos ! Steels and Verreckt ask me to work with them on an art project at the campus of the University Department in Wilrijk, which had only recently been founded ( in 1971 ). They want to found a Cultural and Creative Centre, which will be named Kakasentrum, or KKS. In their view, the cultural situation at the campus is ludicrous. I have worked with art academies before, but I have never had an offer from a university, so I ask whether there is any sort of art course there ? Isn’t a university a place for scientific research ? A place without art historical context ? Furthermore, the request is an initiative from the students themselves. Steels and Verreckt assure me that lots of students are interested in culture in a “progressive sense” and that they are in fact already involved in this sort of culture. But the interest in culture should go beyond staging Bob Dylan’s protest songs — an activity that countless students engage in at the time. Then again, the intention is not to exclude anyone who takes a course in arts, music, or theatre as a leisure activity.

When asked if the university has a budget for experimenting with art, the answer is not really satisfactory.

But the challenge to reach a new public through the university is so tempting, that I readily accept the offer.

Furthermore, this will allow me to lay the foundations of a broader definition of the term “art” with respect for the spirit of the age.

1 New Reform was an art centre for performance, concrete poetry, experimental music, theatre, film, visual arts, video, and conceptual art in Aalst ; it existed from 1970 to 1978.

2 Alan Kaprow, “The Education of the Un-Artist”, in : Art News, February 1971.

3

Dutton Paperback, 1973.

189

ARTISTS OF THE WORLD, DROP-OUT 2 In the US, the task of the academies has been assumed by the universities and by colleges of the same higher level. These art schools have various tasks. In the first instance, the curriculum comprises history of art ( an obligatory course that is part of our subsidised “obligatory curriculum” ), but their main duty involves organising guest lectures, for which they invite artists and art critics.

Most of these guest lecturers are in fact artists that are in the post-experimental stage of their career. For them, the lectures are a way to earn a basic income ; for the students they are an experience that brings them closer to the practice and reality of being an artist.

In his book New Ideas in Art Education, A Critical Anthology, 3 the critic Gregory Battcock claims that as a result of the new developments in art, “other criteria” have emerged for teaching art. Patricia Sloam, who teaches history of art, asserts for her part that a two-year course in the history of art cannot be comprehensive and obliges her to make choices. As far as I am concerned, that has a “positive” result : the artist is not overburdened with a history that, no matter its importance, has no future. It also leads to more freedom

for the fledgling artist — a freedom the artist can use to find his / her creative path. In the same book the artist Les Levine ( born 1935, Dublin ) argues that we should ignore the aesthetic values that are the result of history.

Happening artist Alan Kaprow ( 1927–2006 ) adds that art cannot be studied like Latin. These are just a few examples to illustrate the fact that in the United States in 1972, the approach to art education was entirely different from the one in Europe.

in order to do so, they have to use devious ways ).

Confronted with the structured training that results in a degree, they have to found societies such as PROKA 5 in Ghent, that make it possible for non-staff members to break into the academies, without affecting the factual task of the school or the curriculum. These societies are presented as a means to promote the school and they thus remain unmonitored by the inspectors and the subsidising authorities.

It is at that time, 4 furthermore, that the artist, selftaught educationalist, and teacher at the Düsseldorf Academy, Joseph Beuys ( 1921–1986, ) and the writer Heinrich Böll together found the Free International University. This is, in fact, the decisive element in my critique of the academic curriculum. The project addresses future artists ; it situates itself outside the art academies and does not award a degree or certificate. In that sense it relates to the ideas of the Austrian educationalist Rudolf Steiner ( 1861–1925 ). In practice, the project is part of Beuys’ view on art : “Art does not originate in acade-

With New Reform, I am able to organise a number of manifestations, exhibitions and performances, which attract a large audience. But some of the teachers deliberately stay away, because they feel threatened in their capacity as a teacher ; others engage in a debate.

Of course the academies are tied by the system that compels them to deliver a degree, and that makes the debate more difficult. In 1979, at a meeting in a crowded lecture hall in PROKA, I find it hard to convince some of the teachers — who are also artists ! — to ban the degree culture from their minds. In fact, their

mies, but as an interaction with society.” Beuys wanted the creativity that is more or less part of every human being to reveal itself by leaving the beaten track of the academic curriculum and its prevailing model. In Beuys’ view, the academy should not be a means to serve the interests of consumer society — Beuys commissions it to discover the creative potential that is present in every human being and transform it into a positive energy that benefits society. “Social sculpture” is a lyrical term he uses for this aspect of his oeuvre. Still, according to Beuys, the function of education has to do with penetrating the human consciousness.

attitude is quite understandable, for a lot of them need to teach in order to have a steady income and they therefore fear for their job. Most of the teachers react to the challenges as if they were simply bureaucrats — I had expected some more anarchism to abolish the old creeds. But the result of this adherence to traditions is that contemporary evolutions in the art world take place outside the Flemish academies. A lot of the academies have missed the trends that started under the influence of Beuys and other artists. As an intermediate step, I advocate specialist courses at the academies, instead of the general curriculum. That would be the first step towards a broadening of the concept of the academy.

What appeals to me is the Dutch model, which questions the traditional academic curriculum. In the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, for example, students can study video ; in Eindhoven, there is a department of industrial design ; and in Amsterdam, the Rietveld Academy provides architecture courses. Apart from these specialised curricula, there is time to experiment.

The best example is the Jan van Eyck Academy, which

This new view of education catches on with thousands of beginner artists, who in the wake of Fluxus, happenings and performance art, embark on an autonomous career as a visual artist, with or without an academic background. Even some political parties, such as the German Greens, adopt this model of education.

For them, Beuys became a real guru in 1982, when he decided at Documenta that is was more important to plant 7,000 oak trees in the town of Kassel than to create art in a commercial environment, thus turning his view of education into practice. I considered the influence of Beuys’ manifesto so essential, that I decided that should I have the opportunity, I would break into the academies, which for many years — sometimes even ages — had made no progress at all, and thus in fact had little to do with social reality.

evolves into an open academy with workshops for the artists. That model was later adopted in Flanders with the founding of the Higher Institute of Fine Arts, 6 which for some incomprehensible reason held on to the obsolete term “Fine Arts”. Marcel Boon, who had a lot of influence at the Ministry of Education and in political circles, made a lot of effort to rewrite the pedagogical project in terms of the Dutch model, but he received little help from his colleagues.

THE GUARDIANS OF THE DEGREE

From 1977 to 1989 I was a member of the Supervisory Board of the — once more — age-old Aalst Academy of “Fine Arts”, the origin of which can be traced back to 1777. A detail worth mentioning in the context of the 350th anniversary of the Antwerp Academy : the founder was a certain Gilles Jan-Baptiste, who was born in Antwerp and came to Aalst to found a private drawing school.

Fortunately, there are a few progressive directors in 1975, such as Marcel Boon of the School for Higher Art Education in Brussels, and Pierre Vlerick of the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, who will make it possible to organise extramural activities that fall outside the scope of the legal tasks of art schools ( though

4

In 1972.

5 Promoters of the Ghent Academy of Fine Arts.

6

In 1997.

Once again, it’s all in the name : “Fine Arts”. The criterion for evaluating the students is “Fine Arts”, not ideas. One of the students is Patrick Van Caeckenbergh ( born 1960, Aalst ). In 1980, Van Caeckenbergh competes for the Prize Valerius De Saedeleer, 7 which is awarded to one of the students of the local academy.

After a turbulent meeting of the jury — of which I am a member — Van Caeckenbergh is awarded the prize for one of his works : a floor cloth hanging from a clothesline, with the Belgian tricolour woven into one of the sides.

I take up my seat on the Supervisory Board as a self-taught specialist in ( art ) education, with a record in the avant-garde ; there are eight more members of the board, as well as one director and one secretary.

The other board members are ( retired or otherwise ) architects, and directors or inspectors of schools that have nothing to do with art, but promote themselves as “guardians of the degree”. I frequently urge the Board to “modernise” and — in a metaphorical sense — to leave the beaten path of the “Fine Arts”. Eventually I manage to found a class of photography and video. It does take some time before the subsidising authorities agree. The Ministry of Education, which has to approve of the plan, is also tied by the pedagogical profile of the type of school. I manage to convince them by presenting a file that refers to models of “artist-run spaces” in Canada.

There, artists are attracted to creating a visual culture for the local cable television networks. I claim that in the long run, the same will happen here. The concept of regional television is still unknown in Flanders, but the example of Calgary fills my fellow board members with enthusiasm ; an unsolicited result is that within the Board, I am considered an expert in the matter. I secretly consider starting a television network in Aalst and with New Reform I organise a temporary studio. 8 Only Johan Dehollander and Eric De Volder ( 1946–2010 ) turn up. But of course, in the first instance, I believe that it is the artist of the future who will work with these media, and that he / she will no longer be limited to using paint or a chisel.

The first teacher we appoint for this new course is Hugo Roelandt, who will later start working at the Antwerp Academy. Right from the start, Roelandt’s approach is unconventional, as he allows the students free rein in their creativity. Though he gives instructions of sorts, he does not seek to create multiple artistic clones of himself, which is often the case in painting or sculpting classes in which the teacher / artist gets across his views, which are then adopted by the students. That is of course traditional practice in the history of art. A typical example at the time is the artist Octave Landuyt ( born 1922, Ghent ). Landuyt taught at the Ghent Academy and was frequently copied by his former students, a fact of which he was proud.

7 Valerius De Saedeleer ( 1867–1941 ) was a famous Flemish landscape painter, who was born in Aalst.

8 Video Weekend, 6–8 December 1974.

9

The collaboration with various academies bears fruit. Several artists get the message and start a small

No. 1, November 1973.

191

revolution in their own school, making it impossible from now on to only look back at the past.

K AK ASENTRUM We had hardly any contacts with the Antwerp Academy and it therefore came as a liberation when the request arrived from the University of Antwerp for us to do something in the region with art and education.

Indeed, it was quite remarkable in a town such as Antwerp, which had in the 1960s been host to artists at the front of a number of artistic developments, that the Academy had such a poor reputation compared to the extramural activities that were possible in Ghent and Brussels. The developments at the Antwerp Academy were such that its policy was never questioned. After the turbulent 1960s the school had withdrawn into its traditional pose. But the University that had invited me was not an academy, and there I met with passionate students who would enter the art world as self-educated men and women. Beuys’ Free International University at Antwerp University ? That was not exactly what we aspired to, but we did want to “confront” the students with experimental art forms and challenge them to do things themselves. And with regard to the latter, we doubtlessly succeeded.

In September 1972 I meet Steels and Verreckt and we make the first plans. But it will be some time before the KKS has a place of its own at the University. The foundation of the Kakasentrum is mentioned in Berichten van het Cultureel en Creatief Konsistorie ( Tidings of the Cultural and Creative Council ) : 9 “Before the academic year has commenced, talks with the relevant authorities have led to the spiritual foundation of the Kakasentrum … Unfortunately, the birth of the Kakasentrum takes longer than anyone had thought.”

The team that carries the proverbial load consists of Luc Steels ( general head of culture ), Ivan de Mol ( who studies law and becomes responsible for film ), Paul Geladi ( who studies chemistry and later takes charge of music ), and Mark A.M. Verreckt ( in charge of visual arts ). The announcements of activities — usually the product of Verreckt’s talented pen, are punctuated by typical student puns, but that keeps the fire burning and reduces the distance between the promoters of art and the other students. An overly serious campus is inappropriate.

The first event at the University is a double exhibition.

Paul De Vree, a good friend of mine, curates an exhibition with visual poetry, which the council renames the International Kermesse of Concrete Poetry. I organise the exhibition Tendencies in Contemporary Art, with works

by Jean-Marie Schwind, Bernd Löbach, Klaus Groh, Hans Werner Kalkman, Endré Tôt, Petr Stembera, Geza Perneczky, Janos Urban, Gabor Attalai, Hugo Heyrman, Jochen Gerz, and Gilbert Goos. The twenty-seven

fig.

1–4

works are hung in the halls around the cafeteria. No one can avoid seeing them, and thus everyone knows about the initiative “art at the University”.

fig.

5–11

fig. 12

For the official opening of the KKS on 27 November 1973, I curate an exhibition with Mail Art from 130 artists. At the exhibition, anyone can become an artist by sending a “creative” postcard. Thus, the status of the academically trained artist is also questioned ! At Antwerp University, everyone can be an artist !

A number of exhibitions follow in quick succession. 10 In February of 1975 there is a performance and installation by Coum Transmissions, with Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti ( United Kingdom ), but the focus is mainly on screening videos, films, and slide shows, as well as staging performances and providing information about contemporary art. The latter fills a gap that is also noticeable at the art academies.

In the course of time, these activities of the KKS result in new collaborators, including Nicky Snelders and Luc Mishalle. The latter will succeed Steels as the person in charge of culture. Later still, Mishalle will work with the groundbreaking London theatre company Welfare State International, which mainly uses public spaces as a stage. At Antwerp University, we also consider ourselves to be within a public space, for there are no rules, no teachers, no supervisors, no one interfering and deciding what the limits are. Everything is possible : “Art for All, All for Art” is the motto of the Council.

fig.

13–15

In the meantime, within the walls of the University independent initiatives have been introduced — impulses that go beyond the University itself. A silk-screen studio is set up, where everyone is free to do as one pleases.

Steels Fringe Productions is an artists’ collective that presents One Happening in Ten Parts at Ercola 11 in the Wolstraat in Antwerp. 12 Steels leads the event ; he is assisted by Win Van den Abeele, Joris De Laet, Mark A.M. Verreckt, Paul de Meulder and some last-minute collaborators that were recruited on site and will later be involved in other feats at the KKS. Within the context of Steels Fringe Productions, films are screened that were made by Luc Deleu ( TOP Office ), and an exhibition is on view with photographs by Tony Langley. Later, other students from Antwerp University will participate in festivals organised by Ercola.

Mishalle ( sax ), Geladi ( tape ), and Steels ( guitar ) create an avant-garde music band that is involved with electronic and computer music. The music is partially inspired by developments in the European avant-garde music scene that explore the manipulation of sound by electronic means. Because of their involvement with theatre, the members want to associate themselves with Fluxus. One of the venues at which they perform is the Antwerp Academy. The choir of the University sings at a concert in the International Cultural Centre ( ICC ).

On 9 November 1974 the members of Steels Fringe

Productions gather under the name Dr. Buttock’s Players Pool for an explosive happening / performance in New Reform, featuring Luc Mishalle, Steels himself, Paul Geladi, Ria Pacquée, Marc Holthof, Mark A.M. Verreckt and William Filips.

SCIENCE Within the context of the visual arts in Flanders, the concept of a “performance” is still insufficiently familiar among artists, and thus several acts by Steels Fringe Productions are announced as theatrical acts, whereas in fact they are pure and simple performances and artistic happenings with an outcome that cannot be predicted.

On the other hand, there are theatre companies and later the Wooster Group ( New York ) that explore the domain of performance art.

The scientific context in which these events take place is always obvious. The trio consisting of Geladi, Steels and Mishalle works with scores that are produced by their own computer programmes, which are based on linguistic and mathematical formulas. Provided that one has the necessary skills, most of these programmes could run on any computer at home. 13

10

In New Reform, June 1973, Steels realised the conceptual instructional happening Event Structures, which involved all those present carrying out simple instructions — such as shaking hands, embracing each other, introducing oneself. The creative impulses or the experiences that resulted are written down with a felt-tip pen on the whitewashed walls of New Reform.

In an interview with Knack Magazine, 14 Steels explains that he situates his activities on the interface of science, technology and art. He constructs installations that explore the musical qualities of materials using physical forces such as electromagnetism and through techniques that belong to the realm of artificial intelligence.

On Monday, 10 December Steels and Verreckt announce at the campus that they will “attempt to fly”, a mission that will be “The first test of the Dymaxion I ( because we love Buckminster Fuller ), which moves upward and forward through the actions of the occupants — a leap in the depths of emptiness that aims to practise a new type of wingbeat. ( … ) The courageous daredevils Verreckt and Steels will take off at 1.45 p.m. and land at 1.45 p.m. under the watchful eye of science.”

As to the question of whether or not this is art ? In New Reform I presented a series of eighty suggestions for “Fluxus events” — “to be performed by whoever wishes to do so” — by Fluxus-West artist Ken Friedman ( born 1949, New London ). In one of these, Friedman suggests going to a restaurant with a pot plant and ordering a dinner for two — one meal for himself and

fig.

16–17

Events early in 1974 include, in January — Creative Postcards ; February — Klaus Groh ( Germany ) + Art from Eastern Europe ; 11 February — Equipo Movimiento ( The Netherlands ) film, video and happening ; April — Petr Stembera ( Czechoslovakia ) ; May — Gabor Attalai ( Hungary ) + Felipe Ehrenbergh ( Mexico ), Endré Tôt ( Hungary ), Hervé Fischer ( France ) and Lex Wechelaar ( The Netherlands ). New Reform also organises a festival of art films, with Mike Parr ( Australia ), Niels Lomholt ( Finland ), Actual Art Group ( Poland ), and other artists.

One of the few artists with a university background is Hervé Fischer ( who studied at the Sorbonne ).

On 20 May he presents a happening at which he cuts up one of his own paintings, as well as some works by Filip Francis, and then packs them hygienically.

11

Ercola was a non-profit organisation that frequently programmed multimedia events.

12 On 29 October 1973 ; the happening was partially restaged on 1 November.

13 14

Edition, New Reform.

In 1979.

one for the plant. This was one example of a daft sort of culture that also characterised the KKS. Apart from visual arts, other art disciplines are well represented. Verreckt — like Steels, a brilliant student — created an “Aggressive Array of Potential Events” at regular intervals. On one occasion they streaked naked 15 between the university buildings, holding up the text “Up, up for a spiritual cultural climate”. According to the media, only three labourers witness this happening, of which a photograph is published all the same in these media. Verreckt, the author of various literary publications, 16 questioned the concept of art by confronting us with the fact that the work of art is a fetish.

For him the idea prevailed over formal originality. In a later stage of his life he became a salesman of freezers in the desert.

On 10 September 1973, Steels and Verreckt publish the first issue of the magazine Orgaan voor Konseptuele dichtkunst ( Medium for Conceptual Poetry ). It contains word compositions by Steels, which are linked by lines.

In this instance Steels adopts Joseph Kosuth’s Art after Philosophy, in which the artist claims that art is what the artist claims to be art, whereas Verreckt claims that the public consumes that which the artist produces. The publication in fact states the basic principles of both artists.

INFLUENCE The aura and influence of the KKS continue to increase. That results in the foundation of the Centre for Experimental Theatre ( CET ), which is led by Luc Mishalle and Bart Patoor. The CET helped to introduce pioneering theatre in Belgium, for example, by inviting the now legendary Wooster Group. Two students of the Antwerp University, Bart Patoor and Mark Goossens, team up for the performance duo GNOOM. In 1973, Joris de Laet, who is responsible at the KKS for concerts of concrete and experimental music, founds the Studio

15

Streaking had originated among students at Berkeley, California.

Verreckt was the first Flemish streaker.

for Experimental Music ( SEM ), which has its headquarters in Wilrijk ( Antwerp ). The SEM ensemble consists of Paul Adriaenssens, Joris De Laet, Paul Geladi, Kris Sannon, and André Stordeur ; most of them are former students at the Antwerp University.

16

Walter A.P. Soethoudt, Uitgevers komen in de hemel ( Publishers End Up in Heaven ), Meulenhof / Manteau 2008.

17

PROKA, January 1976

18

New Reform, Aalst, 2 April 1977.

19

Including a concert by Mishalle-Steels-Geladi.

20

In 1972.

21 Data was a quarterly magazine published by the Centre Experimental Theatre ( CET ) at the Antwerp University.

fig. 18

fig. 19

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Performance artist Hugo Roelandt, a student at the Antwerp Academy, and his fellow student Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven, belong to the few students who study at an art academy that come to join us. With Van Kerckhoven and the trio Geladi-Steels-Mishalle, Roelandt presents a series of multimedia performances.

Roelandt is strongly influenced by the scientific knowledge of his friends and supporters at the university. At the exhibition Kunst Informatie Praktijk ( Art Information Practice ) 17 — curated by myself — he conducts an inquiry concerning the “aesthetic human ideal” with a poll that is based on life-size nude photographs of people.

Visitors have to match the ideal limbs with a character, in order to find the ideal image ; the poll will be scientifically analysed at the university.

The Antwerp University promised to conduct scientific research in the context of various projects, but it never reported on this research, though it did record videos of a number of performances, events and exhibitions.

When I recently wanted to borrow them, I was told they had suffered water damage when the basement in which they had been stored, was flooded !

At the performance entitled The Four Seasons 18 ( featuring the groups mentioned above, as well as Jan Janssen and Narcisse Tordoir ), Roelandt imitates the four seasons with artificial means. In 1974 Roelandt and Van Kerckhoven ( then in their last year at the Academy ) manage to introduce some of the activities of the KKS at the Academy. 19 Rudolf Rommens, a conceptual artist from Wilrijk, participates in the contest organised by the University that involves constructing buildings and

infrastructures. 20 His approach departs from environmental aspects and the mental space ; it is turned into an architectural plan by architect Lieven Langhor. Apart from Rommens, more artists regularly turn up in the KKS.

In later stages, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven remains actively involved. She designs four issues of the magazine Data 21 ( the first one in 1979 ), which was published by the spin-off to the KKS, the CET. Essentially, however, her collaboration with Luc Steels, which continues to date, is an incestuous artistic spin-off from the university project. In 1977–1978, Steels asks her to visualise his PhD thesis Computer Simulation of Parser by means of an animation film, to the tunes of Walking on the Moon, a piece by Mishalle-Geladi-Steels. Van Kerckhoven makes her first digital animation film on a SUN computer at the Antwerp University. This initiates an interaction between his work and hers that continues to date.

Between 1972 and 1975, the university is one large laboratory for art in the most open and creative sense imaginable. The main advantage of working within a university context is the absence of prejudice when it comes to ideas and the realisation of projects. One can do one’s thing without obstacles. The question is, whether universities can assume the role of art academies ?

On the occasion of this essay, I contacted some American friends to inquire about the current situation of art education in the United States. In the view of Charles Giuliano, former Director of exhibitions for the New England School of Art & Design at Suffolk University, and former critic for Art News, the art school at the University of Boston is the closest to the “conservative academic model” ( Giuliano’s words ) that is familiar to us in Europe. He also points to the many changes in the art schools over the years : the curriculum now focuses on the use of computers, video, technology, installation

art and conceptual art. A lot of attention is paid to art theory in the art schools, with a particular focus on French philosophers. But many consider the art schools a waste of time and money. Apparently, the points of view of Levine and Kaprow, which date back to 1970 and which we mentioned earlier, have not fallen on deaf ears.

In fact, a traditional academy can be considered a vocational school for higher art education. History of art and a scientific approach are the domain of universities. But today’s artists certainly do not have to do a practical exam to prove that they are indeed artists. The exam is their work. A lot of artists are not capable of handling materials in a technically perfect manner. But that should not be an obstacle to being an artist. In today’s technological world, human creativity is inversely proportional to the technical means at our disposal. Artists with training at an art academy are often self-made in the real art world.

fig. 1 Luc Steels and Paul Geladi, open air concert, Park Wilrijk

fig. 2–4 Luc Steels and Paul Geladi, open air concert, Park Wilrijk

All documents, except fig.18, are retrieved from the New Reform Archive which belongs to the collection Roger D’Hondt and MarieHélène Van Audenhove, Aalst ; fig.18 has been made available to me by AMVK.

fig. 6 Marc Verreckt, Luc Steels and Roger D’Hondt at KKS

fig. 5 Views on KKS exhibition rooms

fig. 7 Images exhibition Mail Art

fig. 8 Images exhibition Mail Art

fig. 9 Hervé Fischer: l'art sociologique

fig. 10 Marie-Hélène Van Audenhove, Luc Steels and Roger D’Hondt at Ercola

fig. 11 Exhibitions at KKS with Petr Stembera, Hervé Fischer, Endre Tôt and Jean-Marie Schwind

fig. 12 Genesis P.Orridge, project assistant KKS, Roger D’Hondt en Marie-Hélène Van Audenhove

fig. 13 Telex announcement Ten Parts at Ercola

fig. 14 Article GvA ( Gazet van Antwerpen )

fig. 15 Announcement Ten Parts in stencil print

fig. 16 Announcement Vliegpogingen by Luc Steels and Marc Verreckt at UIA ( University Antwerpen )

fig. 17 Pseudoscientific scenario Vliegpogingen

fig. 18 Drawing by AMVK (Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven) for animation film illustrating Luc Steels' PhD dissertation

fig. 19 Invitation stencil KKS

Roger D Hondt ( born 1948 ) is a freelance curator and founder of the avantgarde art centre New Reform ( Aalst 1970–1978 ).

Laureate silver medal Robert Schuman ( 1978 ), price distributed by the `Association of the Amis the Robert Schuman’ , Metz, France.

From 1973 to 1975 employee to the art centre of the university of Antwerp. Curator of the `Performance Art festival’ Beursschouwburg Brussels ( 1978 ). Art Critic daily journal De Morgen. Publicist in Flash Art ( Milaan ) +-o ( Genval ), book and other art illustrated magazines. Organises for Proka : ‘Theory / information / practice’ ( exhibition, performances and video art ) in the urban academy in Ghent ( 1976 ). Organisis, on invitation of Karl Fritz Heinze, the exhibition ‘Performance Art’ in the Stadsarchiv Kassel ( Germany ) during Documenta 6 ( 1977 ) and for the Kaaitheater Brussels the conference `Performance in Flanders 1969 — 1979’. Archivist New Reform files. New project WelKunst ( 2005 ) with its epouse Marie-Hélène Van Audenhove. Curator ‘Van Provo to now’, art in a socially political context’ urban museum city of Aalst ( 2008 ). Curator `in situ project `Facades et Interieurs’ Paraza France ( 2010 ). Curator of “Between Worlds”, actual arts in crematoria Sint-Niklaas and Lochristi ( 2014 ).

Clémentine Deliss

in conversation with Nico Dockx

FROM FUTURE ACADEMY TO FUTURE MUSEUM

ND How do we want to do this ? I think we just start from the beginning, no ?

CD How it started ?

ND Some people know Future Academy through reading a few texts written on the subject, but many others don’t know anything about it as there hasn’t been a great deal of writing published on Future Academy. Maybe you should start from the very beginning. Why, where and how did you come up with the idea of a Future Academy ? Because, before that, you were publishing various projects through Metronome, but perhaps it is wrong to say that Metronome is a “school” in itself. I always experienced this publication series you made as something that was not just a magazine ; it was a group of people, a collaboration, and it sometimes took years to realise. It was also often closely related to universities or art academies. So, I wonder how did you — as a publisher, but also as a curator — move to this idea of Future Academy ? Was it somehow related to all this work you did before, or was it a new turn in your practice ?

CD Clémentine Deliss ND Nico Dockx

201

this research out in different art colleges and locations in Scandinavia. From the start of my curatorial practice, I have been interested in the way you can combine conceptual thinking and inquiries in art practice with economic experiments. For example, whether I could create a roaming professorship based on the Scandinavian constellation of different art schools in different countries.

I wanted to get them to cooperate with one another by

CD I think it must have begun around 1998–99, when Kasper König offered me a guest professorship at the Städelschule in Frankfurt-am-Main. At that time, I was publishing a writers’ and artists’ organ called Met-

putting fifteen or twenty per cent of a full salary into a common pool, thereby enabling a whole new form of roaming guest professorship that would connect students as well. I worked in many different art colleges at the time … In Bergen, Malmö, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo, where I managed to get a part-time professorship. It was in 2001, following the production of The Bastard issue of Metronome, that I came back to London for family reasons and began working with the Chelsea College of Art and Design. The London Institute ( known today as the University of the Arts ) had just bought the former Royal Army Medical College ( RAMC ) in order to rehouse the Chelsea College of Art and Design. It was located on Millbank, next to Tate Britain. Colin was the outgoing dean of this college and he offered me the chance to run the RAMC before the architects came in. He said, “Go and pitch your project to former postgraduate students in fine arts, and see if they want to work with you. If they do, you can have the whole building for nine months for developing a project there.” They did, and having set up our head-

ronome. I produced No. 4–5-6 “Backwards Translation” around the time. It took six months to make and this publication was produced in collaboration with art academies in Frankfurt, Vienna, Bordeaux, and Edinburgh, as well as Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Cittadellarte.

Although I had worked in art schools giving lectures, it was the first time that I had a guest professorship. This was very influential on me because Kasper König didn’t want any curriculum from me. He trusted me somehow and gave me Martin Kippenberger’s former studio at the Städelschule as a working base. As a result, I spent a lot of time there, and I realised that it was one of the few locations where I could produce research together with students, develop with them and engage them in something for which I didn’t yet have an answer. The following Metronome was produced in Scandinavia and was called the The Bastard. I was interested in how you might curate voice, spoken phenomena. I carried

quarters in the RAMC, we produced Metronome 8A and 8B, which were called “The Stunt” and “The Queel”, as well as holding a 24-hour launch at the RAMC, with guest speakers including John Latham, Cerith Wyn Evans, Michael Archer, and Catherine David, but also with film screenings, concerts, a goulash bistro, and many other activities. At the time, I began to think more and more about the potentials and possibilities of an art school. Today, I’m much more negative about it, but at the time I had this hypothesis : if museums were pre-empting the creative development of new works by needing to know too much in advance of exhibitions for the purpose of securing sponsorship and generally playing safe, then perhaps art schools were locations where work could be tested out that couldn’t be done in any other institution. The university “without conditions”, as Jacques Derrida wrote about at the time, was not taking place. But in the art school, you could practically build

a bomb and nobody would question it, right ? And, that loophole in the process of standardisation interested me a lot. I had this idealist vision that artists would return to the art school. Not in order to teach in a banal way, but because they needed an institution and a space where they might be able to test things out and still be in contact with other people. So, a social space where production happens or could happen. I didn’t feel that museums were enabling production in the same kind of way. It was 2002 and I recognised a crisis beginning to take place within the art schools in general. First, the older generation was beginning to retire, but the younger generation wasn’t quite ready to take up the task. So, there was my generation and people slightly younger than me, who were the facilitators in-between. I reckoned that if professors were beginning to leave then there might be scope for a new kind of knowledge base within the art college. For example, if art practice had moved in the nineties towards a kind of social interventionism, then it might make sense to employ an ecologist, a lawyer or an economist rather than an

Cina ( at the Chelsea College of Art and Design ) felt that we should bring in other partners from Glasgow, Edinburgh and Vienna. We wanted to create a kind of pool of like-minded institutions that were ready to organise a conference with us and experiment in what Colin at the time called “parallel actions”. These parallel actions would generate student-led investigations — not faculty-centred — but student-led inquiries into the future parameters of a college. As such, propositions for a future academy might be tested out in one location and likewise in many other parallel locations. We said : “Let’s think of a future academy in fifty years from now, because by then we will be dead and it will be in the hands of the younger generation.” That would give students the incentive to think about what they believed to be important for a future institution. Edinburgh came on board, and Glasgow for a while. It quickly became clear to me that I wanted to do Future Academy in West Africa, and in India, in other words, in locations that had inherited a colonial structure for an art school. Here one can find the relics of the French system or the relics

art-historian to teach in order to transform the modernist epistemology of the past into a future independent research institution. The question of epistemology was one of the issues that interested me the most. Another one was buildings. Encouraged by the prospect of the cultural industries and money streams through the government, many colleges were planning new buildings.

People were asking : what is a classroom, what is a studio ? In some of the art schools I had worked in — that claimed to be very progressive — there were no longer any studios. It wasn’t a kind of post-studio situation à la Pasadena. It was much more old-fashioned and based on this assumption that if an artist works too long in an art school, then they might influence students in a bad way. In some ways, I think this was a reaction to the German model of the professor who has a studio in the academy. However, the outcome of not having studios was to create a kind of service station system and atmosphere. You would have guest critics and lecturers coming in every week, doing loads of ‘crits’ with students and never really settling down to do work of their

of the British system.

own. The symbiotic potential was therefore radically foreshortened. European colleges such as Malmö are a case in point. As a visiting lecturer or curator you had no space other than a computer room to work in. This model was considered extremely advanced. So, I was interested in what kind of building one would need for a future art institution. The final area of crisis that I focused on was the changing nature of the student body in the art college, which was no longer a reflection of nationalism. You could no longer study at Edinburgh College of Art and come out as a “Scottish” artist. Between forty to eighty per cent of the students wouldn’t be from the country in which the art school was based.

How would one deal structurally and economically with this movement of students ? How would one fund a future institution based on this fragmentation ? These were questions which I put together very early on and which formed the base for my Future Academy ideas. Colin

ND So, the main idea of Future Academy would be that it was somehow roaming itself, happening at different places and without a fixed building. It was actually more like an idea or an energy that could easily travel elsewhere.

CD From the very beginning we tried to hold back from thinking exactly what Future Academy would be in the end. We began with the three areas of investigation I just described to you and started by looking at the structural, economic, and global issues first. In Edinburgh and India, we started working on the architecture of Future Academy. At “Synchronisations”, the think-tank in Bangalore, the students claimed that we didn’t really need a school building at all. They felt that a building would bring in a lot of bureaucracy. So, we tried as far as we could not to reify Future Academy, to keep it unstable.

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ND Did it happen simultaneously in all these different locations ?

CD Up to a certain point. I was animating and engaging various clusters of participants. This is what happened in Dakar. Some of the Future Academy participants came to India. And, after India the project moved back to Edinburgh. So, it wasn’t fixed. And, I wasn’t paid a salary as a tutor or a lecturer, but I just received a fee as a consultant. Following the India thinktank “Synchronisations”, which took place in Bangalore in 2003, we began to work with informatics, robotics and architecture, and focused on the question of mobility. This would take the possibility of a fluid institution one step further. For this phase of Future Academy, I got Edinburgh College of Art to collaborate with the University of Edinburgh and its schools of Engineering, Informatics, and Humanities. To work on mobility in

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this interdisciplinary way, we began to research what a studio might become. In many ways this brought us right back to the nuts and bolts of engaging in research itself. The Informatics PhD students who worked with us didn’t have the same kind of recursive understanding of research that is found in art practice. They set out by knowing the results of what they were researching and were engaged in defining or proving these results, whereas in art practice you don’t know the outcome until the very end, if at all.

research. They were spending so much money on their studies. Foreign students were even the bread and butter of British art schools and paying very high fees. This made it very difficult when you had to pitch a voluntary project. Students might ask, “Do I go with her ? Or do I stick to the curriculum that I’ve paid for ?” In the end, Edinburgh College of Art put me on the books and I got a position as reader. Actually, I think that development signified the end of Future Academy.

ND By becoming formally a part of this college ?

ND Future Academy was outside of the curriculum of both the College of Art and the University.

CD Yes. Always. It was never part of a curriculum.

Instead, it was dependent on whether students would pick it up and run with it. I had a team who would pitch with me, so the group grew and was kind of organic.

They were people who wanted to take it further, because it was interesting for them and they could also see that it was connected to their own professional development.

ND Did Future Academy, working outside of the curriculum of the existing college, influence or change that curriculum ?

CD The work I did provided the College with extra research credibility, because I was publishing, collaborating with other institutions, and setting up global networks. But often, the employed lecturers were not keen to give me a proper position in the school. I had come in through the back door and wasn’t really teaching in the same way as they were. I was developing a kind of applied art theory, an interdisciplinary curatorial practice that wasn’t just about exhibiting diploma work. It may certainly have had a big effect on the people who worked with me on Future Academy, on those people who were involved, but I fear that it didn’t really have a permanent effect on Edinburgh College of Art. ND Was it a continuation somehow of Charles Esche’s Protoacademy project — or not at all ?

CD I had worked with Protoacademy students for Metronome 4–5–6, but Protoacademy had a different objective to Future Academy. Charles Esche wanted it to culminate in a new Masters course at Edinburgh College of Art. I think Charles Esche wasn’t happy about the fact that this MA never came off. Future Academy didn’t have this goal — it had to remain in a state of permanent inquiry ; it was a kind of incubator. Similar to Protoacademy, it sought to develop what students do after they finish studying at an art college. The way we worked was sort of post-post-graduate. I was providing information that a lot of the professors didn’t have, such as international contacts and invitations to Documenta or other projects. Towards the end of Future Academy, I began to realise that students were acquiring a new and sometimes problematic status within the economy of 203

CD Yes, being paid as a normal teacher and not having the edge as an outsider.

ND Back then you were very positive about the art school as a potential place from which to operate and create many different projects. Now you feel quite negative about it. How come ?

CD I don’t think the art school is a productive location in the same way that it was at the turn of the new millennium. I don’t think I feel negative about it ; that would be pushing it too far. But, I’m interested in moments or situations when research can usurp a condition or an institution. I am interested in the dynamic concept of an institution. What does it take to build a new institution ? How do you go beyond a group of people who want to formalise their experiences ? What is the foundation stone of a new kind of institution ? Is it a curriculum ? Obviously not. Is it a building ? No, a building is necessary, but you don’t begin with it. So what do you begin with ? To answer this, I came back to late nineteenth and early twentieth century research collections. I went to the States and spoke to Robert Storr at Yale School of Art, to Saskia Bos at Cooper Union, and went to the Grey Art Gallery at NYU, and to Chicago, and tried to find out how people were reinvesting into former research collections. These are institutions that had been built around collections, which had formed a capital, an energy source, a basis for the constitution of sites of learning. I wondered why, in the late nineties and the 2000s, these same institutions hadn’t had their research collections updated by precisely those artists who had become so famous on the international market. Why hadn’t an Alex Katz been gifted to Cooper Union at the time ? Why hadn’t artists generously provided more collection material to their alma maters ? Why wasn’t that happening ? And that brought me back to anthropology and to other kinds of research collections. They are inevitably anachronistic and fall between two stools. They don’t have a market value, which is fascinating. This step in Future Academy brought me back to the ethnographic museum, and in 2010 I took on the direction of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. In 1999, when I had been a guest professor at the Städelschule, Kasper König had tried to get me to take this job, but I had refused : I would never have taken the job of a museum direction of an ethnographic museum in 1999. But to rethink it in 2010

and reactivate a dormant collection seemed to provide the solution, or rather, the next institutional location in need of a methodological transformation.

ND So you went back to the museum …

CD I went for the first time to the museum ! I had never directed a museum in my life. But now I could bring all those crazy ideas that had been developed through Future Academy to the Weltkulturen Museum. In addition, I had gathered knowledge from eleven years of producing Metronome. By focusing on the idea of a new research collection, I could create a location of production that emphasises the starting points of new research, rather than the final outcomes. So this kind of prototyping of ideas, forms and knowledge is what we do at the Weltkulturen Museum at the moment.

ND Do you encounter similar questions in the museum as those you raised when you were doing Future Academy ? Is it still about how to learn to self-organise ? Within your notion of research, you have pedagogy and practice both running at the same time.

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CD The situation here at the Weltkulturen Museum allows me to draw together knowledge developed between Metronome and Future Academy. There is definitely an aspect that I would call “curating neighbourhoods”. This is about bringing people together who normally wouldn’t be connected, people from different generations and different locations. The heterogeneity of the guests we invite to research and produce here at the museum is very important. I can’t work with a vision of an ethnographic museum that invites only people from the source community. Another area that connects to both Metronome and Future Academy is this way of modelling an inquiry step by step in an additive, recursive, and progressive way, not defining something in advance, but allowing it to gradually define itself through a relationship to external impulses.

This is the curatorial method that I try to engineer. The question of self-organisation is also present here. I took on a museum with twenty-three staff members but I was also able to bring in some new people. We work a lot with groups of students from the Städelschule and the Curatorial and Critical Practice MA of the Frankfurt University. They ask to work with us. The museum is more formalised than Future Academy ever was. It places the collection at the centre of all inquiries and searches for a new paradigm. It’s about working with objects that don’t come from a European source, but say everything about a European source. I believe you could take the system we have developed here and apply it to another museum. In that way it is like Future Academy. It’s not dependent on being here in Frankfurt-am-Main ; it could be transferred just as well to any other art museum, or even a museum of industrial design. It’s just a question of how you could transform the way in which people act, work and produce knowledge within a museum.

ND The notion of the laboratory is an important aspect in your practice. It comes up all the time in the work you have done over the years, both in Metronome and Future Academy. What is the concept of the laboratory for you ? It’s not the idea of a classical science lab, but it is more experimental …

CD My seminal experience with the concept of a laboratory came from the life I led in Dakar and my work with El Hadji Sy and Issa Samb and other members of the Laboratoire Agit’Art in Dakar. Agit’Art was not represented by one person, but by a group of people who knew implicitly that each person carried a competence and a certain, specific responsibility. Roles weren’t defined and drawn up like in a charter. It was a very interesting way of working with ideas, very intellectual, and very political as well. We never gave away the keys to the system. So, it had a kind of initiatory structure to it. I think that the combination of having studied high-conceptualism and performance art in Vienna together with semantic, reflexive anthropology means that I’m always going to be interested in the problem of interpretation. And so the Weltkulturen Museum’s Labor is a laboratory of renewed interpretation.

ND So, it is a very performative, and responsive space.

CD Yes. It is also about the limits of an investigation.

Take Metronome, for example : it is useless today, but it served its purpose at the time, between 1996 and 2009. One can still read it of course, but it’s no longer an effective organ. An organ has to be active at a particular moment in time and space, as an agent, a voice for a particular movement or situation. Metronome was never about self-publishing ; it was a curatorial organ. In 1996, when I started it in Dakar, I wanted to create a system that would ignite professional curiosity amongst artists living in different cities around the world. I realised that exhibitions were too hermetic to act as bridging mechanisms between artistic discourses.

I thought that it might be easier to create professional curiosity between artists if I mediated work that was in an unfinished state. These were materials that an artist might not exhibit in an official sense, because they were clouded by moments of depression and doubt at the time they produced them, or they were simply unsure about them. With Metronome, I could offer a kind of promiscuity to their main line of production. And, that is exactly what we are doing here in the museum. We are also offering the artists a chance to work in a very different way. There is a brief here, which is to work with the ethnographic collection. But, what we don’t want is for artists to attempt to produce finished artworks here, because we can’t afford to make them and we don’t really want them. But what we do want — and that is pretty demanding in itself — is for artists to develop something in the museum. If this process fails, so be it. But if it is successful, then each guest leaves a prototype with us.

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The laboratory in the museum allows us to remediate material memories from the past.

ND That’s also what the Open Lab is about.

CD The Open Lab extends this process onto a digital dimension.

ND It’s an exercise in new ways of editing certain information streams, in translating and interpreting objects, and adding different versions of the same information to the collection.

CD Yes. Every artist who worked with us until now has left a prototype of their work for the museum. This is what constitutes our new research collection. These unfinished works have been produced here in the Weltkulturen Museum’s laboratory and refer directly to our collection. You cannot buy them on the market. They have a distinct, quasi-liminal value.

ND They remain out of the market ?

CD It’s complicated to talk about artistic research.

If I were a student today, and not in the late seventies and early eighties, then for sure I would have defined

tistic research” by four guests who lived and worked in the museum. The reason that we have called it artistic research stems from the fact that one or two of these artists come out of that discourse, in particular, Peggy Buth.

Her contribution to the catalogue, for example, is an academic text. She describes her difficulty engaging with the objects in the collection of the museum. So, she turns towards a current form of post-institutional critique that merges today with the methodology of artistic research.

In a way, it’s easier for me to say that this is “artistic research”, because other people will recognise what we’re doing. If I just say that artists work in the museum, ( which I do anyway ), then I run the danger of being stamped with the model of “artistic inspiration”, the model of primitivism with its formal affinities. By referencing artistic research I can deal with the dumbing-down of the artist in relation to the high-grade enquiries, which we are carrying out here in the museum. I admit, it’s not really satisfactory, but at least it points to the revival of investigations and laboratories of renewed interpretation within a post-ethnographic museum. As for the dangers

myself as an artist. I would probably have done artistic research. But when I studied art practice in 1977, as a seventeen year old, I didn’t have the guts to take on the identity of an artist. You have to remember that Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman, or Sherrie Levine weren’t super visible in ‘78. They were coming up, but they hadn’t yet made their major mark on the art world ; that took place in the early eighties. There were women artists such as Mary Kelly, Susan Hiller, and Valie Export, and they were important, but they were few and far between, and somehow felt part of the older generation. I hung out with actionists and conceptual artists in Vienna and in relation to them it was difficult to know how to position oneself as a woman.

On top of that, I was the only foreign art student at the art academy in Vienna. At school in London, I had been taught to paint still-lifes and to do decorative stuff, but not to bring together intellect and information. When I

of marketing artistic research, I agree with you completely. That’s how Future Academy ended, when Edinburgh College of Art formalised my position and put me on the books. My work became a marketable entity. I see what we’re doing here at the Weltkulturen Museum as a fantastic opportunity to put into practice all that I have learned over the years in terms of working with people from different disciplines and cultural scenes. It’s about systems of self-organisation and a kind of internal, unspoken pedagogy. There is a younger team of people working here at the museum and they are learning super fast. Ask them how much they have learnt and they will tell you ! So, I’m a kind of camouflaged professor in a certain way. I speak of “domestic research”, which is very different from a corporate university structure. With the Weltkulturen Museum’s Labor, we have a cycle of living, sleeping and working with the objects, which are worth millions. Guest artists and researchers have

CD Yes. They are preserved in an interesting way and cannot be sold, because, in a parallel sense, I am not allowed to sell an ethnographic object. So, I can’t solve the budgetary problems of an ethnographic museum by circulating goods on the free market !

ND This approach is very different to how research is taking place today, both in universities and art schools. I have the impression that research is very often managed and made marketable. There is not so much space left anymore to do independent research. The university and the art school try to package and consume the notion of research so that it becomes part of the ( art ) market. How do you experience artistic research today ?

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think back to that time, I recall very well that galleries were about information not selling. So, I felt as if I had no other choice but to study anthropology because it was a discipline that had been connected to high-conceptualism and the formative studies of artists like Joseph Kosuth. If I am cynical about today’s situation, I wouldn’t study anthropology now, but probably art history. Art history is becoming the most dominant and authoritarian academic discipline in relation to art practice. I find this quite unsettling and the “academisation” of art practice as artistic research is connected, in my opinion, to the power of legitimisation that comes from art history departments. So, the question of doing research, of being partly involved in intellectual and critical inquiries as a curator or an artist, was normal to me in the late seventies. To have spoken about artistic research at that time would have been slightly peculiar. Our recent exhibition at the museum right now is called Foreign Exchange ( or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger ). It’s an inquiry into the relationship between anthropology and trade and includes new exploratory works produced as “ar-

24-hour access to them in the laboratory. I feel that the experience of this laboratory is productive enough to build the seed of a new museum university, a new kind of museological platform. I’m interested in the professional development of all those students who have done museum studies, curatorial studies, post-colonial studies, cultural studies and related disciplines, including art practice, which are based in South Africa, Senegal, and Brazil, as well as in Europe and North America.

Where do they work after they have completed their studies ? Which museum will take them ? They can’t all apply to work in a museum of modern art. There are not enough of them. And that’s not the solution. So, why not come back to museums, which have outdated research collections and make them into locations for a new radical interpellation of the relics of world histories ? It requires finding new methods of interpretation, a new kind of paradigm for research, new metaphors and ways of writing, and new legal structures. I find that a fascinating idea ! And that is what I would like to do, to make a museum as a university. Not a gallery within the university, not a university gallery, but a new kind of higher educational system that works within the museum.

ND In the long term, that would create a future museum, a new way of thinking about how to make exhibitions, how to exhibit ?

CD For sure. If you think about it, how many patrons and private people have been building collections in the last few years and the physical buildings that go with them. At the same time, they don’t know what to do with these new museums. If they merely show their collections, they are caught between a mausoleum and yet another location of cultural consumerism.

ND Perhaps it is time to develop this idea of a museum for and by its users. As Yona Friedman would say. You spoke about the notion of self-organisation, and so, perhaps it is about bringing together some people who can do it themselves.

CD I don’t know. “Self-organisation” is a word that you have introduced. I’m not sure … I think more about other crises at the moment. For example, custodians — who know so much about the thousands of objects in a collection — that have worked for thirty to thirty-five years in the museum as keepers of these artefacts and need to transfer their ideas today to the younger generation. Until recently these custodians had the opportunity to make ethnographic exhibitions.

But this genre is no longer up-to-date. It carries within it too many models from the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. To deal with this problem, designers — who are usually very expensive — are brought in, and also new technologies are introduced. But it doesn’t really produce new knowledge. The colonial subtext remains.

So, how does one make sure that their specialist knowledge is mediated before they leave ? This is a very serious question. How are you going to know about the

oceanic collection in this museum in the future unless a teaching structure is built into it today ? To do that, you have to find other ways of working with the collections, beyond exhibitions. You have to try to work with and also against the ideology of conservation. And you need architectural spaces in which you can select objects and bring them out to look at for longer periods of time. Because you can’t work in a depot. Storage facilities are not intended to encourage any kind of heterogeneity or mixing between objects from different locations. There should be no miscegenation of ideas and things.

ND How is the dialogue going when you bring in people from outside ? I could imagine there is tension when you bring an artist or a designer into the depot of an ethnographic museum like the Weltkulturen Museum.

CD Luckily it has worked out very well until now.

People come for two or three days at first and we test out whether we can work together. And then they are re-invited for a working period of four weeks. But they have already seen the depots ; they have already met the custodians. It’s a different dialogue each time. Some people know exactly what they are looking for, and others are completely confused. When they come back for the residency, they select objects with the help of the custodians and the restorers. These objects are brought into the laboratory and then ideas and prototypes of new work develop out of this research situation. We also have writers in residence — we have had four to date — and a lawyer. Each guest brings life to the collection. And what is very important is that people often select objects that are not established masterpieces.

That is crucial.

ND Because they don’t know a masterpiece …

CD It is not that. It’s that they are looking for something else. They’re looking for another point of innovation, or another stored code. Some of them may have a lot of knowledge of so-called tribal art and will recognise an important piece immediately. Sometimes they are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of artefacts, photographs and films. Every collection is idiosyncratic.

So, we have a lot of baskets. But you might pick up on fish traps and suddenly realise that today this means a lot in terms of food security and the construction of conflict. Perhaps more than weapons. It is curious to work with anachronism and reverse this condition in a constructive sense.

ND When you began Future Academy, did you find some inspiration in educational models from the past ? Or was it something that grew organically ?

Yesterday you were talking to me about Beuys.

CD I think what was very important to me was the way information affected art practice in the late seven-

ties in Vienna. I lived through this interdisciplinary situation. It was the fact of having to walk to the university and look at ethnographic films and then in the evening to watch the works of Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas and to try to make connections between what these two artists were doing at that time. The galleries were exciting and I lived through the crisis moment when the Transavantgardia in painting started to change the way that students and artists were working. I also believe that the experience here at the Städelschule in Frankfurtam-Main was really formative for me. I very much thank Kasper König, who gave me complete freedom and who treated me like an artist and gave me a studio to work in, rather than ask me for a curriculum. He didn’t define me in advance as a curator or a publisher. I think that was really special. He made me believe in the conceptual freedom within an art college. I can’t even tell you right now whether there’s another museum that works like the way we do at the Weltkulturen Museum.

I don’t think there is. There’s certainly no other ethnographic museum that works in the ways we do. But, I’m convinced that the same model could be implemented elsewhere. It just has to do with priorities. It depends a lot on existing levels of bureaucracy and on the interests of the younger generation.

ND Most of the time, these kinds of projects remain on micro-scales and I wonder why ?

ND And why did you choose “museum university” and not “museum academy” ? Is there a difference for you between university and academy ?

CD The Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz has a museum academy. I guess I come back to Jacques Derrida’s “Université sans conditions” that has been quite important to me. If you think about universities today, they have become incredibly virtual. If you think of art schools, they have become very discursive …

ND …without being discursive at the same time.

CD Yes, but where is the engagement with materiality, with objects, with stuff, with making ? This must not sound in any way conservative. So, that’s why I like the term museum university. It mobilises the collection and brings it to the centre of new knowledge production.

Perhaps academy isn’t such a good word at the moment ?

CD I recently wrote a concept for a museum university, for a specific location in Europe. And this location consists of a complex of three ethnographic museums in three different parts of a state. One of them is a location in a 1920s Bauhaus-style building of 4000 square metres with a permanent exhibition of ethnographic objects installed in such a way that it was practically criminal, as it was so contentious. It still represented people and tribes. The second location is a huge rococo palace that is completely run-down. And, the third location is a kind of a small city museum. I had worked out how I would develop these three spaces into a symbiotic museum university. I would shift the very important eth-

ND The social element was always very important for you, no ?

nographic works — which can compete with everything that Europe has produced — to the palace and stake the claim to art historical heritage. In the location where you had the Bauhaus building and the problematic display, I would break up the 4000 square metres by installing laboratory rooms in which these displays would be re-thought and people from different disciplines and communities could work. So, you leave it in a state of crisis. And finally, out of the small manor house I would set up a residency program. I can see this kind of transformation taking place, but for the moment I don’t exactly know where.

still an informal structure, but sometimes I wish I could give her a contract and name her formally, stake the claim. But perhaps it works best if this remains organic and non-formalised ?

ND In the example you just gave, it is also about a way to stay outside the curriculum of both the university and the museum.

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CD For me the idea of the backstage is very important. With the Weltkulturen Museum, it is the first time that I am really front of stage, even though I am still doing a backstage activity. I don’t really like the politics of being front of stage. I’m not a political person who gains pleasure from fighting their patch. I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in production.

CD It still is. At the Weltkulturen Museum, we look after our guests. Which museum has residencies ?

Which museum cooks food ? But recently, I was accused of running a hotel, not a museum ! It’s difficult, and yet I’m very proud of what we do here. It has a visible impact on artists and writers who work with us.

People want to come back. They want an association within the museum. That’s very important. They become associate custodians of our collections. An artist like Otobong Nkanga comes back several times a year. It’s

ND It is very similar in the art school today : if you take students on a field trip, they say you are going on holidays. But, sometimes a field trip is a retreat to have a different concentration going on …

CD That is why I call it “domestic research”. It is this very fact that you can walk down to the laboratory in your pyjamas. You have 24-hour access to the laboratory. It’s a cycle that runs 24-hours a day, working and thinking, eating and sleeping and … Production wouldn’t be as powerful if we put people up in a hotel and brought them to the depots to work with over 70,000 objects. They would then take photographs or make

films and would go back to their studios in Berlin or elsewhere. I’m not a museum anthropologist. I’m not an academic. I come from a background in art so I’m more interested in a complex experimentation on many levels.

ND Future Academy did not give a diploma at the end. How did the University and the Edinburgh College of Art deal with the fact that you were producing something with students that had no link to their curriculum, had no credits, no fixed courses, no diploma ? Did they just let it happen and support it in one way or another ?

CD Yes. They could see that it was constructive for the students and thereby also the school in itself. But they didn’t know how to integrate me into the structure other than as a consultant. If they couldn’t integrate my work, then they had no way of capitalising on the results of the students in terms of their curriculum.

ND So they left some space in their curriculum for you to do Future Academy ? Or did everything happen outside of the school hours and programmes ?

CD Although there was a programme, I would be invited by the college to do something extra with the students. So, it wasn’t as if I was undesirable ; on the contrary. It was just that I had to negotiate times with the other lecturers. In Melbourne, together with a group of art students, we stole lectures from the university.

RMIT School of Art is right next to RMIT University.

I was curious to know whether the University and the Art School were connected and whether students from the Art School attended lectures in the University and whether they had to pay for them ? It turned out that it was actually quite difficult to do both. So, I dressed down, put on an anorak and jeans and tried to look as young as possible. And then we just had to walk into lectures and sit down. It was very exciting ; it was a real test. Once we walked into this amazing lecture and it took us about twenty minutes until we realised it was all about Java Script. With our art-school training we were so sensitive to lateral thinking that we didn’t realise what it was about for ages ! Sometimes we were caught and we would leave. It was a very interesting idea to “steal knowledge”, to run against this economy of education and to make the fact that you want to learn into criminal activity.

ND For example, in the Antwerp Academy, there are some collaborations with the university, but most of these classes get programmed within the existing curriculum of the art academy. How can you add new things to a curriculum that is already full ; it is very difficult for students to find time and space for attending additional programmes of education.

CD That’s right. They have no more time. One of the things that I would like to mention is the work of Future Academy that I did with Oscar Tuazon. I think

that was really special. Tuazon was a contributor to Metronome number 9. He had written a piece of porn for “Le Teaser”. I found out that he was working on geodesic domes and structures and had an architectural connection to art practice. I invited him to work with us in Edinburgh on the mobility research we were doing with students from Informatics, Architecture, and Art. The Edinburgh College of Art gave us money to fly to Oregon, hire a residential vehicle, and cross a huge stretch of Oregon in the hope of finding people who lived underground. We took a neuroscientist from the university and a painter from the art college. We were four investigators. In the end, we didn’t find these people, but drove back to Portland. Thanks to Portland College of Art and funds from Reed College, we were able to produce a Metronome ( Dwelling Portably, number 10 ) — a “magazine” that contains 20,000 words on Future Academy and which was based on the local organ Dwelling Portably. It contains all the results of at least five years of work on Future Academy, distilled right down to the basics. How to survive ?

What to study ? What kind of structure ? What kind of building ? What kind of contact points ? What kind of economy ? Normally, you would never get a university allowing you to go off with two students and an artist to cross the wilds of Oregon like that. To actually test out what it means to work with a condition of mobility.

There was one moment when we were in our RV, driving through a location, quite desolate with just a few houses. We stopped and reflected about the fact that we could set up a Future Academy straight away right there. That would be the Mobile Academy. And we tried to gather together everything that we could teach.

Guy Billings could teach Computer Programming, Engineering and Neuroscience ; Oscar Tuazon could teach Curating, Art, and Architecture. Marjorie Harlick could do Painting and Performance, and I could teach Curating, Publishing, Art, and Anthropology. It’s curious to think of what would and could happen if one followed and participated in a project like this. I sometimes compare it to that moment in the sixties when you had an anti-psychiatry movement, with R.D. Laing and Dennis Cooper and forms of resistance in West Africa, for example, in Senegal. At the time these talking cures were necessary, because there was an excessive pharmaceutical drive with electroshock treatments. And Future Academy has a touch of that subversion to it ; it’s a form of anti-education that can provide an antidote to the standardisation of knowledge.

ND Did you ever experience conflicts ? I could imagine that Future Academy disturbed the existing school structure a lot, or was it so external to it that the disturbances of new and altered points of view did not resonate ?

CD Oh, there were always people in the college who didn’t like us and who would try to destabilise and / or sabotage what we were doing. It was all very cloak and dagger. I think the fact that you couldn’t really

fig. 13

fig. 14

tell what we were up to annoyed many people. We were an emergent academy with emergent inquiries. If you read Paul Rabinow’s new book, Demands of the Day, it’s about "exiting the field". Rabinow worked for a long time in biosciences conducting a co-laboratory with other scientists. In his new book, he talks about the breakdown and the issue of exiting the field, leaving a research point. This is very interesting. Rabinow’s keywords are adjacency, as in adjacent research, and emergent research. Remediation. For me these are really important terms that I can use in rethinking the Weltkulturen Museum.

ND The notion of exiting …

CD Exiting the field is about problematising how you leave a situation. We don’t often do that.

ND I agree, we get stuck, or just decide to keep on going, again and again. There’s maybe one more thing that we haven’t been talking about, but which I know is very important to you. Can you tell me something about the library and … the archive.

CD I don’t really like the word “archive”. We have a library of 50,000 books at the Weltkulturen Museum.

When I arrived here, the library looked quite different.

The books on the shelves were encyclopaedias, dictionaries, yearbooks … and they were totally out of date. Eventually we got all these reference books replaced with a rubric called general anthropology.

General anthropology is mad ! It’s Warburgian, Battaillesque ! It moves from a monograph on a particular group of people to post-colonialism and from sports to architecture, to law and to novels. I can’t work out the classification system that underlies it. And, as a result, it’s a fantastic group of books. This library is very important for people who work with us here. Just like our image and film archive.

ND For me, a library, an archive and a collection all produce a sort of movement. You go to a library to take out books, which is perhaps very similar when visiting archives, when leafing through and shuffling various stacks of paper to scan and translate some data. But, also with objects, it feels like moving things, because when you’re in a ( museum ) depot consulting a collection, you start to edit … it generates a kind of editing process, a movement. If you consider the library, the archive, or the collection as an object, it’s just there, very static, but as soon as you interact with it, it starts to move ; it is alive. Not keeping things, but moving things.

CD Maybe that’s the idea behind the research collection too. In the interview with Antje Majewski, Issa Samb talks about this process ( see the catalogue for Object Atlas ). He says that each time one moves something, everything in the world moves too.

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ND It’s beautiful. It is very important to have an holistic point of view.

CD Just like he would say to me, “How do you know that the leaf that falls from the tree isn’t your sister ?” It’s disturbing, but at the same time very productive to ask yourself all these questions. It’s already becoming hard for me to talk about the Weltkulturen Museum and that’s after only three years. Because within these three years there has been so much knowledge produced here.

Each time an artist comes and visits us here to work, they change the way we see things. I recently wrote a manifesto for a post-ethnographic museum, which is basically about the domestic research structure and about curating neighbourhoods. So, it’s about inviting people who are from the source together with people who are not, and allowing them to rub shoulders. It’s about daring to break the classification of anthropology.

fig. 1 Newspaper clipping, local newspaper from Bangalore, 2004

fig. 2 Synchronisations posters at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. Poster designed by local graphic designer in Bangalore

fig. 3 Gathering of Future Academy in park in Bangalore. Photo by Future Academy team, 2004

fig. 4 First Future Academy meeting in Dakar, January 2003, in the house of architect Abib Diène. From left to right: Youssou N’dour, Abdou Ba, Issa Samb, Clémentine Deliss. Photo by Mamadou Touré dit Béhan

fig. 5 Drawings by Future Academy member

fig. 6 Synchronisations, Ashram near Bangalore, SYNCHRONISATIONS was an international think tank probing the future of art and design academies and hosted by Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology from March 21–April 4, 2004 at Vishtar, an artists’ village on the outskirts of Bangalore.

“Synchronisations” was the first major event of Future Academy, an international research collective that includes art colleges in the United Kingdom and experimental studio labs and architectural foundations in Bangalore, Mumbai and Dakar, Senegal. Photo by Clémentine Deliss

fig. 7 Portable strctures. Edinbourgh College of Arts, 2006.

Photo by Jan Mast

fig. 8 Workshop moments. Edinbourgh College of Arts, 2006.

Photo by Jan Mast

fig. 9 Excerpt from Curating Neighbourhoods: Manifesto for the Post-Ethnographic Museum, written by Dr. Clémentine Deliss for the 'Curating the Curatorial' event, School of Visual Arts, New York, November 2013

fig. 10 Above: Seminar at Forut Média Centre de Dakar with Future Academy team. Below: Seminar in the courtyard of Issa Samb, Dakar. Photos by Clémentine Deliss

fig. 11 Above: Seminar in the courtyard of Issa Samb, Dakar, August 2003. Below: Seminar at Forut Média Centre de Dakar with Future Academy team. Photos by Clémentine Deliss

fig. 12 Future Academy seminar in the courtyard of Issa Samb, Dakar, August 2003. Photos by Clémentine Deliss

fig. 14 Future Academy in Oregon with Oscar Tuazon, Marjorie Harlick, Guy Billings, and Clémentine Deliss. Photo by Clémentine Deliss, Oregon, March 2006

fig. 13 FRONT COVER Metronome No.10: Future Academy.

Shared, Mobile, Improvised, Underground, Hidden, Floating, Oregon 2006, Edited by Clémentine Deliss in collaboration with Oscar Tuazon for documenta 12

Nico Dockx see page 8.

Clémentine Deliss ( born 1960 ) is a curator, publisher and researcher and director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main. She studied contemporary art and social anthropology in Vienna, London and Paris and holds a PhD from the University of London ( 1988, SOAS ). From 1992 to 1995 she was the artistic director of africa95, an artist-led festival of new work in all media from Africa and the diaspora spearheaded by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Selected exhibitions curated by Deliss include : „Foreign Exchange ( or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger“ 2014 (together with Yvette Mutumba ), Weltkulturen Museum ; “Object Atlas — Fieldwork in the Museum”, Weltkulturen Museum, 2012 ; “Dragged down into Lower Case”, 2008 ( with Oscar Tuazon ) ; “Future Academy” 2007, at Kandada / Command N Project Collective, Tokyo ( together with Masato Nakamura ) ; “Think with Your Feet” : Solo Exhibition, Command N Gallery, Tokyo 2007 ; “An Open Operation”, 2006, University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh College of Art ; „Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa” ( Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1995 and Konsthalle Malmö, 1996 ) ; “Lotte or the Transformation of the Object” ( Styrian Autumn Festival, Graz, and Akademie der bildende Künste Wien, 1990 ) ; “Exotic Europeans” ( National Touring Exhibitions, Hayward Gallery, London, 1990–91 ). In 1996, she developed and produced eleven issues of the international writers’ and artists’ organ Metronome presented at documenta X and documenta 12, and at numerous galleries and events. Deliss has acted as a consultant for the European Union and held guest professorships at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo. Between 2002 and 2009 she directed the international research lab „Future Academy“, which investigated the global future of independent artistic research and production. She is on the advisory committee of Theatrum Mundi / Global Street, the long-term research project initiated by Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

TRAIN SCHOOLS / SCHOOL TRAINS CEDRIC’S PRICE’S POTTERIES THINKBELT REVISITED

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As a student, I took night trains all around Europe.

Spending many nights on the train became my thinktank. It was also, of course, an economical way to travel : like many European students, I had an InterRail pass. I could leave one city late at night, and arrive in another city early the next morning. These trains became my hotel and my school. On my travels, during those years, I visited an ever-expanding group of artists,

urban development have made a huge impact, and his influence on architecture today is immeasurable. Today, I often give lectures in architecture schools, and I find it extraordinary how his influence has actually grown even more over the last couple of years. Many architects have attested that Cedric Price was their greatest influence.

Along with time and movement, which are central to his thinking and his whole work, one of the major themes

through a developing chain of journeys by train — during which I could reflect at night on what I had seen during the day — making notes and having more conversations.

I spent each day soaking up ideas like a sponge in the studios of those artists I admired, and later I would process all their work in my mind in the quiet of these trains.

Some years later, in 1996 — while Hou Hanru and myself were researching Cities on the Move — the artists Rita Donagh and Richard Hamilton — with whom I often discussed architecture and exhibition-making — told me that it would not be possible to do a show about the mutations of cities without first talking to Cedric Price. So they rang him, saying that we were all very keen to hear what he had to say about it, and we met very soon afterwards — which was the beginning of many years of ongoing conversations, sometimes weekly, sometimes twice a month. It demonstrates how simply introducing and bringing together two people one thinks should know each other can have a major effect on future artistic practices, whether through the impact they can have on each other’s work, or through entirely new collabora-

in his work is his opposition to permanence and his discussion on the notion of change. His ideas continually push against the physical limits of architectural space and the trajectories of time. Cedric Price’s conviction that buildings should be flexible enough to allow their use to serve the needs of the moment reflects his belief that time — alongside breadth, depth and height — is the fourth dimension. He was resolutely opposed to this idea of a top-down vision of architecture’s place in society, as a way of prescribing people’s way of living and of dictating change. In a very revealing statement, he once said to me : “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, dialogue might be the only excuse for architecture.” Cybernetic thinking played such a crucial role in the development of his own architectural thinking, especially with respect to ideas such as transience, evolution, change, chance, flânerie, and movement, which leads us back to trains …. Trains were also the subject of many of my conversations with Cedric Price. In the mid-1960s, he had devised an ambitious plan that he called the “Potteries Thinkbelt”, which intended to use industrial

tions. It is another form of curatorial practice and I have continued it ever since. Cedric Price participated in our Cities on the Move exhibition project, and we often talked about the concept of the exhibition as a learning system with a potentially complex and dynamic series of feedback loops that can be brought into other contexts and can eventually have an impact in political circles.

Cedric developed most of these ideas in the 1960s, at a time when cybernetic thinking was very much on people’s minds. This particular intellectual influence can be discerned in many of his projects and statements, for instance, with respect to the idea that algorithms and computer programmes would facilitate architectural design — something that we take for granted nowadays.

From the time he opened his own practice in London in 1960, Cedric Price has been one of architecture’s most influential figures. Although very few of his structures were actually built, his visionary ideas and proposals for

railway lines to renew Staffordshire — an industrial area in the Midlands, south of Manchester. Because of the many ceramics factories that had operated there since the 1700s, the region accrued the name “The Potteries”. Josiah Wedgwood, Josiah Spode and the Mason family had all started out in that region. By the time of Cedric Price’s project, this area had begun to decay.

It still had an extensive train network from those days in which trains were the main way to get freight from factory to market. The centrepiece of his architectural plan was to rehabilitate this network of railway lines, and in this process he designed a mobile university system — one of movable classrooms, laboratories and research centres that could move along these rails.

Because the ceramics industry no longer used these railroad lines and / or train stations, Cedric Price proposed to establish a university research facility which would be belt-shaped and would go through the whole area

fig. 1

using this reactivated railroad infrastructure. His plan was for a university of about 20,000 students to be built on a network of existing railways and motorways, where the different stations would become places of knowledge production and where “permanent” places could move. His system was highly suited to the study of the area’s factories. Railways transformed this area into a network of nodes and Cedric Price simply planned to utilise this transformation. Drawing not only upon the hardware system, but also an entire programme, this project had a lot to do with his discussions with the cybernetician Gordon Pask. This idea of a “classroom on the move” where you would have all sorts of housing for professors, researchers, and students : crates, sprawls, capsules … and when the existing infrastructure was no longer enough, there would also be inflatable architectures designed by Cedric Price that could be added easily and swiftly. Unfortunately, his great “Potteries Thinkbelt” project never saw the light of the day. But when I eventually began to learn about architecture and discovered this plan, it made perfect sense to me from my early days of constant train travel. Europe, for me, was a kind of “Thinkbelt”, all of it linked by rails.

fig. 1 Excerpt from chapter 1: Action and inaction (p. 17 — 34), from Potteries Thinkbelt: p.20-25, Cedric Price, The Square Book, © Cedric Price 1984, Published in Great Britain in 2003 by Wiley-Academy, a division of John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Many of Cedric Price's visionary ideas deal with the potential of mobility. The Potteries Thinkbelt was an unrealized university, a model school, a sort of mobile educational unit which was developed in the 60's and negated the need for permanent buildings. Seminars would instead take place in railway carriages running on abandoned Staffordshire railway lines as he explained: "Once it has been proven that the thing can be on a railway, then in fact people adopt the university because of its ability to be on the move. Predictability and unpredictability come close together: the predictability is that there is another train coming along even if we missed this one, while the unpredictability is in where the first train is going to. We never called it an university, we called it a thinkbelt -a belt you need to keep your trousers up. But it is a continuous thing, not a single line." 1

Hans Ulrich Obrist ( born 1968 ) is co-director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. Since his first show “World Soup” ( The Kitchen Show ) in 1991 he has curated more than 250 shows.

In 2013, he co-curated the following exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries : Sturtevant : Leaps Jumps and Bumps, Adrian Villar Rojas : Today We Reboot the Planet, Marisa Merz, Wael Shawky and Jake and Dinos Chapman : Come and See. In addition, he cocurated 13 Rooms with Klaus Biesenbach and Kaldor Public Art Projects, Do It 20 th Anniversary Show at ICI New York, along with the ongoing “Art of Handwriting” project taking place on Instagram and Twitter. In addition, Obrist is co-founder of 89+, a long-term, international, multi-platform research project, conceived as a mapping of the generation born in or after 1989. In 2009 Obrist was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects ( RIBA ), and in 2011 received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence. Obrist has lectured internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals. Obrist’s recent publications include A Brief History of Curating, Project Japan : Metabolism Talks with Rem Koolhaas, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask, Do It : The Compendium, Think Like Clouds, Ai Weiwei Speaks, Ways of Curating, along with new volumes of his Conversation Series.

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Sharp Tongues, Loose Lips, Open Eyes, Ears to the Ground, a book by Hans Ulrich Obrist, edited by April Lamm, introduction

by Paul Chan, afterword

by Etel Adnan, and ode by Olafur Eliasson, design by Zak Group, Sternberg Press 2014.

Yona Friedman

in conversation with Nico Dockx

NOBODY CAN TEACH YOU, BUT YOURSELF

ND Nico Dockx YF Yona Friedman

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YF About the Angers project : I started to make cartoons on the notion of autoplanification, or self-planning ; explanations about how the user could design for and by himself, following his own preferences and how he could control this planification, that it becomes what he or she really wants. These cartoons I was making for the Ministry of Culture in Paris, which, as you know, were immediately put into some drawer. They paid me

the same techniques of self-planning from my previous experience with Dubonnet Cinzano. We had many meetings in which I explained how to use the method : “You will do all the planning yourself. I will only come in if there are budget and / or technical problems.” Now here there was a technical problem where I wasn’t able to intervene : the ministry didn’t permit some of the techniques we proposed as they did not follow the

and then it was put into a drawer. That is where it has stayed until now. But luckily UNESCO published it in different languages : Spanish, Arabic … and, UNESCO also distributes. And then I started to get some responses. A few years later I got a commission from the firm Dubonnet Cinzano. Because of a particular problem, they wanted to transfer their headquarters away from the city centre of Paris to a suburban area, and obviously, all the staff was against this idea of moving. So, they said : “Okay then, you can design the new headquarters”. This was the bonus they were proposing to keep the staff happy. It was the first time that I tried to develop a project with real people, using these cartoons as a starting point for discussing ideas of self-planning. I immediately told the directors that it would take some time, as people have to be able to discuss it amongst themselves. I was asking for the directors not to be present during the consultation. And me neither, because I didn’t want to be an arbiter. They should decide for themselves. I was only supposed to come in if they were going to go over the production budget. Or if

homologised procedures of the enterprises that were commissioned by the Ministry of Education to construct this new school building. It doesn’t matter, I was able to do the same thing, but I preferred to do it with light, changeable structures. They wanted their homologised procedures. I accepted that we were going to do it their way. And actually, it came out quite well, and the planning also permitted later changes. Because this was one of the things the Ministry asked me to do, to create changeable conditions for the future. “It is the teachers of today who are making decisions about the planning of the school building, but in fifteen years time, it won’t be the same teachers. So the planning should be adaptable.” It was a period of time in the spirit of ’68 and the teachers decided that they would like to break the Lycée down into four mini-lycées, with each of them being independent of one another, and having similar, shared communal services. So the planning was done, which means they were using the same method.

They started with the graphs and with the dual graphs to further explain. And so this was decided upon and then

they started to propose something that was technically impossible. And that’s how the project was done. But actually the building was never completed, because the company was suddenly bought by Ricard. And many problems arose out of that … because they were putting everyone together into the existing building of Ricard.

It was perhaps four years later that similar problems arrived with a public building in Angers. There was the old Lycée David d’Angers in the centre of the town. And for reasons I don’t know about, the Ministry of Education and the city decided to make a new extension of this school in the suburbs of Angers. To transfer it. And it was the same game again, a political game that upset the public, which means to say, the teachers and the parents of the students. And, again, there was the same idea : “You can design this new building and make it your own.” So, I was appointed for the design process of this new school building in Angers, where I was using

translated into the grid of the homologised procedures of the enterprise. But I had to guarantee that the project could always be changed : it does not always have to be the four mini-lycées, but it can instead become two lycées, or whatever … The attitude changes.

ND And the idea of the four little lycées was because of …

YF This idea came from the teachers.

ND But was it because of different disciplines, or because of different departments that existed in the main lycée ?

YF No. They had specialised rooms for the different disciplines, laboratories and so on. These were shared rooms. So it was only the classrooms and the annexes.

Obviously, with the Physics room, for example, they don’t need one each. And then, when the plan was done, the city government, the municipality refused it.

They simply refused the permission to build, telling us that the walking distances between the classrooms were too long. The teachers said : “That’s exactly what we want. We don’t want to come out of one classroom and go straight into the room opposite.” And another thing they objected to was that there were too many corners. And again, the teachers said : “That’s exactly what we want.” And so they made an appeal to the minister. The parents and the teachers went to the Ministry of Education and that was how the plan got accepted. It’s very typical, these kinds of local intrigues, where a colleague who was directing the school building was trying to skip this project and he didn’t think that people would go to the minister. But in the end the councillor agreed and the project was built. And several interesting observations came out after the building was realised. There were less fights between the students, for example, precisely because there were so many corners in the building. Corners were appropriated by groups.

So, they had a kind of address. It was more peaceful than in other places in the city of Angers, and teachers were also asking the students to explain how they experienced the building. And they explained that they were able to feel more free than would have been the case in the counter project : a three-storey building with some central corridors. I gave the idea for them to create an interior courtyard for each mini lycée ; in other words, four courtyards. And the courtyards between these four mini-lycées were covered with glass roofs. That was really the way it was back then. Now, a few years ago … it must have been in 2006, the art critic Manuel Orazi was visiting the Henri Bergson Lycée in Angers where he noticed that some changes had been made.

They made changes. It is possible. They added some new rules. It is possible. So, there you can find the initial plan, which has been changed by various additions.

There’s no problem. Because there is space everywhere that could be occupied in another way over time. In that respect I consider this project to have been a very positive experience, but I was so often told by colleagues, “It’s impossible for a layman to design a building”. And I would tell them : “Perhaps it’s impossible, but we did it”. It has been built. I also used the argument that this doesn’t take away from the work of the architect. There is some technical work, then, to manage the budget and also the aesthetics. There is also the private part of the building for its users. But what the passer-by sees …

It wasn’t possible for the passer-by to be able to design it. And so for this, I proposed a certain decoration of the outer walls of the building, which was in the end refused. You know, it was this idea of making some mural paintings. So, it is very, very difficult, this thing in the end, because of a different mentality and a different perception of things. It’s not simply a technique. It’s a technique that depends on people. It was working well, because the public — the parents of the students and

the teachers — agreed from the very beginning about how to work together on the design of their own school building. So they wanted to do it and changed the mentality of the existing school … I could only give certain remarks : “This or that is a technical impossibility”, and so on …

ND So it very much depends on the openness of the people, to say : “Yes, we’ll do it”, or “No, we won’t do it”.

YF Yes. We don’t have democracy, not anywhere in the world. Not because it’s impossible, but because people don’t have the mentality for it. People are pushed towards being assistants of all sorts. And their assistance is probably very good. But they have to make their own decisions, that is really important. It was interesting as a social problem. Later on, it was publicised in Japan and in the Soviet Union. It worked as a demonstration to render visible that it is possible.

It is not to justify the result. I’m just trying to make things possible. In various architectural structures that I’m using today, there’s nothing imposed ; you can do it, everyone can do it … You can also have your own aesthetics. For example, the Iconostases that were built in Middelburg, Antwerp, Como, and many other places … everywhere they are different, depending on the people who made the building and the people using it. So, it is possible.

I was doing this booklet, Architecture Without Building, and I added a sort of introduction : This doesn’t take away the work of the architect, but the architect is not the mason. He has to conceive spaces.

ND In Angers, the teachers and parents of the students were both involved in the design of the architecture ?

YF Yes. ND And also the students ?

YF No. The parents had the political power. The teachers had some, but the parents, you know, they were the electorate, which means a political authority.

I think that without the parents, I’m not sure if we would have got it realised. It was the teachers and the parents of the students who were doing it together. The students didn’t have the weight for this kind of political decision.

I think that there was a difficulty with the kind of architecture I was proposing in Angers in the sense that it is political. Not in the way of party politics, but simply by the fact that people are thinking in a different way : we can decide. Why is it, for example, that people are never asked to partake and make decisions by themselves in questions of town planning ? And yet here, in the case of our school building project in Angers, they were clearly able to make their own decisions, of which there is no doubt.

ND What was the working method ? How did you work with the teachers and the parents of the students ? Did you had regular meetings with them ?

YF I gave a sort of interactive, technical course on the notion of self-planning. That means : the method of representing things through graphs, of what you want, and then to discuss these graphs, and translate them into the dual graphs. And obviously a small group of the teaching staff had mathematical backgrounds. But it was not only the mathematicians. They explained things amongst themselves. And then they made the final arrangement, the final choice, which is not just simply a question of mathematical graphs ; there is also the psychological consideration. So I proposed to them that they should have as many courtyards as possible. They had ideas about how to have the courtyards relating to the functioning of the school building. So, it was really a very positive experience for all of us involved in the process.

ND Did the working method and the experience of designing this building also change the programme and curriculum of the school ? Did it change the teaching process ? Because, I could imagine that, if you make such a project together, it also changes the thinking process of the people working there.

YF I don’t know. I didn’t follow up. But there was something else, a phenomenon that shows exactly what the problem is : it is democracy. The teachers together agreed upon the idea of planning their own school building, a rather large and expensive building. But they also wanted, for example, for the blackboard to be situated differently in the classrooms. This was not permitted. They also wanted to decide themselves where to place the light switches, the electrical switches. Again, this was not permitted. The teachers told me : “This is absurd”. The government has paid so much for this school building project for which we were able to make decisions about its planning, but we are not allowed to decide where we would like to have the electrical switches. It is really an absurdity. The building department and the equipment department are two very different things. The equipment department didn’t accept our method of self-planning … The teachers also wanted to decide the colours that would be used inside the building. But that was also not possible. There is a long sequence of bureaucracy that you can fight against, and we got the head of the dragon, but it carried on fighting. I think this is exactly the difficulty with democracy in general. That it tries to solve a problem on the spot, but not the entire set of processes involved. And, it is the process that is important. For example : you have to use building techniques which you decide on the site.

The first time I made this was the Madras Museum of Simple Technology. The people I worked with were illiterate workers. I couldn’t use drawings ; everything had to be decided on location while building the museum.

And it was very well done. Because they knew how 225

to do the details, they knew how to do the techniques.

And if you want, with the Iconostase, you have the same construction methods, the same experiences. It is a lot of improvisation. If I would give a drawing, it would be illegible. I know from my own drawings ; you cannot read it. It gives an impression. A model is not right either, because it’s too small. You see it completely differently when you’re constructing on-site at scale 1 :1. So, that is really the point : architecture should be decided by the users and they can decide on the spot how to build it while building it. So the techniques have to be done in such a way that it is possible for the user to do it by himself or herself. To choose one example, this is what happens with furniture : people buy furniture, they push it this way or that way and they say, “Okay, that’s fine.” And that’s all there is to it. Because if they don’t like it, they will change the position. It is as simple as that.

ND It could have been an option to not only engage the users of this school building in Angers in its design process, but perhaps in another situation, to also involve them in its construction process ?

YF Yes, that could be an option. Of course. It was really a very good and productive result that we were finally able to do it and that it was done and that it still stands here and now. It is an example that it can be done. And if it can be done once, it can be done a second time, and a third time. But the difficulty is that architects don’t like to leave some decisions for others ( apart from when the other party is very rich ). If you’re teaching in a school of architecture, you meet students there who make and develop plans of how they think architecture should be. But then along comes the teacher : “What is this ? What is that ?” It is idiotic. A teacher can do some small, personal remarks, but when a teacher only looks for ten minutes at a project that a student has been working on for several weeks, then there is something wrong within the educational system.

The student can make errors, for sure, but architecture is too complex to be judged in one single moment. I find the teaching and learning methods in architecture schools to be really sad and problematic, through some personal experiences of what I saw all around the globe.

ND Have you taught in architecture schools ?

How did you work with students ? Can you give me an example of how you taught architecture ?

YF I let them do. And I told them : “Okay, you were doing this. Explain it. Explain it to me. You prefer it this way. You prefer it that way”. That’s it. When I was teaching in Israel, I arranged something with the Ministry, as I was doing some buildings for them as an architect. The planning of a small building was proposed to the students, they could decide amongst themselves how to plan it. And then the Ministry chose whatever suited them and that was then built. This is

very important : it means, that it’s not the paper that is the reality. I also had this possibility several times in the United States. Here they also made it possible for students to do, for example, what you are doing now with the Iconostase 150 in Middelburg, Antwerp and Como. I was doing it at the Pratt Institute. And they were able to do it ; they were doing it at the Pratt Institute. I was only showing them how to do it, I provided them with some building techniques. And that’s what is necessary. Not to tell them : “Ok, how is your drawing”, and so on, but, “Express yourself in what you would like to do”. They can do it on a computer screen. That’s a possibility. But, this has the difficulty that it is somehow like a plan on paper. The best thing is to do it with your hands. With the Iconostase, for example, it is typical.

You cannot do it in any other way. The techniques impose a first step, then a second step ; you cannot do it otherwise. You are free, but the techniques have a certain schedule of work and this you can only learn in reality, doing it without any particular order. You have to improvise.

ND In Angers, the making of the architecture of that school — using the method of autoplanification, of self-planning — was it also for you a way to think through how a school could be, as an educational programme ? Or was it more about the architecture itself ? I am wondering how influential architecture can be within the context of building a school.

YF It was the opposite way to that. The teachers had a revolutionary programme. That’s exactly what happened.

ND Could you also see it happening the other way around ? For example, that the architecture could be used as a generator for changing an existing, educational programme ?

YF Architecture, in any case, simply produces a system of obstacles. A labyrinth of walls and openings.

And so you can manage the obstacles. Once, I was trying to explain to computer people that architecture is based on the biggest and oldest invention of human kind : a door. Which means : an opening in the wall.

I told them : “That’s what you are working with.” It is exactly this network of obstacles and doors that can have a very high complexity in an integrated circuit. The potentiality is very high and so it takes time for people to get used to it. It means that these openings and obstacles, they are systems that can go to an incredible complexity. And that’s what architecture is about. And this is why we need less definite techniques. Because if you can make such a complexity you can also reprogramme it, you can change the programme, you can change its programme all the time.

ND So, if the school building in Angers would have been constructed with lighter materials it could have been portable, movable, changing all the time.

YF Yes, because then the users of this school building ( meaning the teachers and the students ) could make all kinds of changes to the building, for example, they could change the shapes of a room. It seems like nothing, but it can be important for the people working there. All this is possible with the lightest structures then you can push the architecture in many directions. You can create a balcony ; you can create many different things. Again, it’s not an infinite set of possibilities, but a very high complexity. Far higher than … all these enormous, monumental buildings, which are completely massive, static and not variable at all and that have such a strong impact on the ground, meaning the street network. There are fixed buildings everywhere. It is really absurd. In our twenty-first century we have computer technologies, which show us what the variations are, what the possibilities are for … shifting streets, etc. For me, the technology of our twenty-first century is simply this idea of skeletons of containers stacked and piled on top of one another in whatever way you want.

That’s what you do. The Iconostase is essentially a city programme, which means that you can easily change the architecture of a city. In the slide show, “Architecture without building” … you can see that you need a crane in certain spots that can place, displace, and replace these containers or Iconostase structures … And it is not a very high investment to make.

ND Yona, are there any Angers files in your personal archives ? Is there an ensemble of publications, architecture magazines, photographs, and archival documents related to your Angers project that I could further study and explore ?

YF There were many publications, but as happens with architecture press, all the magazines used the same images. When the school building in Angers was finished, I prepared a book on the whole process of this architectural experiment. The Ministry of Education was planning to publish this book, but then it never happened. I must have it somewhere in my archives, probably in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

ND Did you keep the template of this unrealised book ?

YF Yes, it was about eighty pages or something like that. Not only my method of self-planning, but also the various drawings of the planning commission, meaning our planning organism. Last time we met, I was showing you this small booklet that was published by the students’ union in Angers.

ND It could be wonderful to search and find this unrealised book in your archives and publish it. Why make something new if it’s already there, if it was already made in the early 80s as part of the building process of the school in Angers ?

fig. 1

YF I am afraid it’s at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, because my old archives are there.

ND So then it’s just a matter of knowing the box in which we have to look.

YF I will tell you something. Take a group of students and give them an imaginary topic and try to do it. That’s really the way to do it, and I was doing it before at MIT in Boston. They wanted to do it with computers, but it didn’t work, as a computer is too fast. People need a certain amount of time, to think, to make changes, etc.

So then, I tried to make the graphs with buttons and strings instead of computers … so that you could play around with it. This worked much better, because it was a slower process. People are too confident about the computer and the computer will then say : “Ok, this is the best solution”, but that isn’t true. It may perhaps be the best answer for the computer, but not for the people, because they cannot formulate their preferences. It’s impossible. Even for literary people.

ND How long did the planning in Angers take ?

YF About six months. In Dubonnet, I was asking in advance for six months of preparation time to discuss the idea of self-planning with the workers. And that was really necessary. You have to negotiate this … That is what parliaments are invented for. If it is discussed for a certain time, it comes out as a compromise. If many people plan something for themselves, it is always a compromise. And it takes time ; psychologically you cannot do anything against it. So, the computer is an excellent tool for making some decisions that are not that important anyway. Important things, you have to do yourself, it’s evident. So, I think that the project in Angers could mean that the students make I don’t know what …

Following their own imagination, and not judging it.

They should discuss everything amongst themselves, and accept the result.They should learn to respect the decisions of others. I’m telling you, it’s a school for direct democracy and that’s a dangerous programme.

ND A dangerous programme ?

YF Yes, people use the word “democracy” very simply. It doesn’t mean too much ; it’s an empty word.

The practice is very different from the word. If you’re voting, you don’t know exactly what you’re voting for.

For example, look at the political situation in Italy today.

ND How do you see the art academy or university of the future ?

YF Universities are made for self-made people. The university is an instrument. Three or four weeks ago I was interviewed about the architecture of universities.

So, I told the interviewer : “The architecture, that is not so important.” The architecture of a university could be residency facilities for the students, dwellings for the

1

See page 269. JeanBaptiste Decavèle & Nico Dockx, Lycée David D’Angers, 2013.

227

students, and they will work there with their computers.

The conferences, seminars and lectures they can have through computer networks. The conversations with teachers, they can also have it through the Internet.

You don’t need classrooms. You need laboratories, for sure, technical facilities. But, you don’t need a big university building. You need very comfortable hostels for the students where they feel completely independent.

And then they will go to their computer for a lecture whenever it suits them. They don’t even need to have an imposed learning and working schedule.

ND So, your way of seeing the relationship between an architect and his / her client is very similar to how you see the relation between a teacher and a student ?

YF I am for freedom, anyway, but I don’t think that freedom is a romantic idea. Practically, I strongly believe that you can do whatever you want, within the limitations you accept in advance. Because you cannot do otherwise. That’s perhaps not directly related to the topics we are discussing now, but when I wrote “Mobile Architecture”, I wrote about how animals are submitted to the laws of nature, and besides that, they are free.

But we humans are trying to bypass the laws of nature.

This is to say that I found the attitude of animals much better than ours. I was heavily attacked by sociologists : “How can you say such a thing ?” I think that animals have an equilibrated behaviour. They don’t need to change the world ; they change themselves. We want to change the world. I am now getting to the general principle involved, which means that a small, technical experiment has some interesting prolongations. You have to be there to see it happen. For example, the project in Angers, you had the experience of going to the next step and then you want to do another step.

That’s it. And I don’t know when this process of interaction will end. I would be very interested in seeing some photographs of this school building in Angers in its present condition in 2013 — more than thirty years after its realisation. 1 ND Yesterday, I told Jean-Baptiste ( Decavèle ) that the students from the art academies in Antwerp that came with me to De Vleeshal in Middelburg, to help us in building the Iconostase, they are more or less the same people that are building it now at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. And they have already made some adaptations to this architectural structure. It’s really interesting … a learning process.

YF Before, when I was travelling myself, it was very easy. I would go there and take photographs myself.

But now I cannot do it anymore, it is too difficult. Now, Jean-Baptiste is going to many places to take images of the various building processes we are initiating together. This process of how people do it by themselves is really interesting to me. How they make it this way,

or that way. That’s really interesting ; the way people think. This is a very long discussion. I’m very glad that I often meet very young architects who plagiarise my work and I’m telling them : “That’s good, that is very good !” And they should do it. My work is not a patented thing. They even might go one step further and invent new altered versions of it. Of course, my idea of plagiarism is absolutely the opposite of the architect’s attitude. Le Corbusier, for example, made quite a fuss about it, because somebody in Japan made a building that resembled one of his buildings. It’s not sure if this Japanese man ever saw that Le Corbusier building. He most likely arrived at the shape of this building from his personal mind. But architects, they think in terms of monuments. Everything they’re doing is a monument. Their monuments. Forever.

ND It’s very similar with artists. They sometimes do the same thing, I feel.

YF But with artists it’s somewhat less dangerous.

Art works you can pass by, but architecture surrounds you. Politics … I am not really involved in politics, but we have now a president of whom people say: “He is very undecided”. But as for me, I will tell you, “That’s why I voted for him”. I don’t want a president to decide everything for me.

ND Yes, it leaves space for people to make decisions themselves.

YF Sure ! And this is also very important in our education structures. I know that in the teaching programmes at various architecture schools, they teach only a trade, and so they never look at all the other possible aspects and disciplines involved. A medical doctor learns medicine, which is wonderful, but when he / she can see nothing beyond his / her own discipline, then that it is a catastrophe. I’m sorry, I’m not really criticising this or that school …

ND I totally agree, we need a more holistic view,

not describe an artwork … You have to try to do it. You need some technical explanation and then you need to do it in your own way, like cooking a meal.

ND But, that’s something that you did from the very beginning of your practice as an architect ?

YF Yes. I started even before finishing my architectural studies. My first idea : I was making what I’m now calling “panel chains”. Why should rooms have predetermined forms ? Why couldn’t a room be moveable ?

Why does a room need to have corners ? You can do anything ! Back then, I was twenty-two years old, after the war in Bucharest. When I was in the Technion in Haifa, I made another project : “shifting boxes” — today we would call them “containers” … Make all the elements of a dwelling like furniture and push them wherever you want to. Technically it’s possible. But when I was commissioned to build, they didn’t agree to do it.

Obviously, from a bureaucratic point of view, it’s not comfortable. If you have to live the bureaucratic way, you have so many examples of where that leads. So with dogs — as we both like dogs — I have to tell you : “I learned quite a lot from my late dog, Balkis”, by which I mean that she simply made an open decision process of how to sit. There is no discussion. And, when you pushed her, she immediately sat herself down again very comfortably. It means that we have lost the part of our nature that allows us to adapt, to process adaptation. And I don’t know how many generations it will take us to get it back.

ND Which means that dogs are actually very good architects …

YF Dogs ? Yes, absolutely. They are perfect architects as they don’t need architecture. They need bones.

It is really a programme. I was preparing a slide show that we will not be showing today, but I will give you just the first image : “Nobody can heal you, but yourself.

Doctors might help”. That’s the situation. The doctor cannot heal you. And so it goes.

connecting everything.

ND You can do it for any profession, I imagine ?

YF Yes, it’s an approach. Problems are never isolated. This was my starting point for the project of the school building in Angers and this is realism … People cannot explain what they want ; it’s impossible. You can-

YF Yes, nobody can eat for you, but cooks can help … and so on. We have to rely on ourselves.

fig. 1 photographs/ scans from an unrealized book Yona Friedman, L’Autoplanification du Lycée David D’Angers à Angers ( Ministère de l’éducation, 1980 ) found in the archives of Yona Friedman and photographed by Jean-Baptiste Decavèle at Yona's apartment in Paris in 2013.

Nico Dockx see page 8.

Yona Friedman ( born 1923 ) has had his work exhibited at many leading international art venues ( the Moscow Biennale 2013, the Lyon Biennale, the Yokohama Triennale and the FIAC in Paris in 2011, the Venice Biennale in 2009 and 2003, The Drawing Center in New York in 2007 and Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002 ). He is a unique figure who ignores the boundaries between disciplines.

Friedman has written and provided drawings for more than fifty books on his research into architecture, ecology and language. In the past ten years, France’s Centre national de l’Edition et de l’Art imprimé ( CNEAI ) has built up a close and fruitful relationship with him, resulting in a number of exhibitions : Dare to make your exhibition ( 2007, Chatou ), Gribouillis, models scale 1 / 1 ( 2007, Chatou ), Tu ferais ta ville ( 2008, with the CNEAI and Arc en rêve / CAPC, Bordeaux ) and Yona Friedman, Improvisations : films d’animation ( 1960–1963 ) et oeuvres sans planification ( improvisations : animated films and unplanned works, 2009, in partnership with the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the CNEAI ).

Jean-Baptiste Decavèle & Nico Dockx graphical concept by Jan Mast

LYCÉE DAVID D’ANGERS, 2013

"Within this structured mess, this abyss that can be a book, I turn your two visual documentaries into a stereopoem." Jan Mast

269

Nico Dockx see page 8.

Jean-Baptiste Decavèle ( born 1923 ) has had his work exhibited in Istanbul, Toronto, Munich, Vancouver, Rome, New York, Ile de Vassiviere, Antrewpen, Lyon Biennale, Cape Town, Moscow Biennale, Chatou, Paris, Winnipeg, Ivry-sur-Seine, Berlin, Ostend, Como… and has also taken part in video and films festivals. He received the Villa Médicis Hors les Murs award in 1999 for his project Entre Ciel et Mer, Voyage Aide-Mémoire and again in 2001 for Nostalgie, la Demeurance et l’Icône, with south-african poet Tatamkulu Afrika. Since many years now he ‘s been sharing time, ideas, projects and process with architect Yona Friedman, artist Nico Dockx and A Dog Republic. A very close exchange based on improvisation, architecture, museums, films, archives, photography, spaces, landscape, books, food and wine.

Johan Pas

THE ARTIST IN SEARCH OF AN ACADEMY RADICAL PEDAGOGIES OF THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration.” Joseph Beuys 1 1 Joseph Beuys in conversation with Willoughby Sharp in Artforum, November 1969, excerpt taken from Lucy Lippard, Six Years : The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972 ( Berkeley-Los AngelesLondon 1973 ), 121–122. I would like to thank Michael Laird for his critical reading of my essay.

The artist as a writer, the artist as a researcher, the artist as a curator … Interest in the extra-artistic roles of the visual artist, for his / her imprint on matters that really affect society, seems to be growing. This most likely has to do with the artistic evolutions that took place in the nineties. Labelled as practitioners of “relational aesthetics” by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, artists involved in this movement tended to see their work as process-oriented, interdisciplinary and interactive. 2 This both reflected a growing dissatisfaction with a market-driven and object-obsessed art world, and a revival of late-sixties conceptualist practices. Just as happened in the years following the breakthrough of conceptualism around 1970, the relational projects of the nineties forced exhibition makers to adjust their strategies.

2

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics ( Dijon 2002, 1998 ).

3 Paul O’ Neill, Mick Wilson ( eds. ), Curating and the educational turn ( London 2010 )

So, the recent turn of the century heralded an “educational turn” in curating. 3 Triggered by the now fashionable methodology and discourse of relational artists, curators started to consider exhibitions as factories of knowledge and platforms of experience.

The visitor should become mentally ( and physically ) involved with and engaged in the artists’ proposals and projects. This exhibition format was expanded with discursive methods as lectures, presentations and discussions. Eventually exhibitions became “schools” and

4

Documenta X, Short Guide ( Kassel, 1997 ), 258.

5

For a survey, see : O’ Neill, Wilson 2010, 13.

Some of the recent ( and relevant ) publications on art education demonstrating the topicality of the subject include : Howard Singerman ( ed. ), Public Offerings ( Los Angeles 2001 ), Steven Henry Madoff ( ed. ), Art School / Propositions for the 21st century ( Cambridge, London 2009 ) ; Felicity Allen ( ed. ), Education ( London 2011 ).

biennials were conceived as “academies”. Documenta X ( 1997 ), curated by Catherine David, seems to be one of the first examples of this. It was intended not only as a 100-day museum, but also as a 100-day “cultural event”. Therefore it hosted an extensive programme with one hundred speakers, “somewhat in the manner of an interdisciplinary research project”. 4

6

Bart De Baere, Charles Essche et al. ( eds. ), A.C.A.D.E.M.Y ( Frankfurt am Main 2006 ).

In more ways than one, this curatorial approach referred to the strategies used by advanced artists of the sixties and seventies. As early as 1972, artist Joseph Beuys had used Documenta 5 as a continuous platform for discourse and discussion. Catherine David picked up this neo-avant-garde methodology and turned it into a trend. Documenta X was to be followed by many projects in which the process, the interaction and the discursive gained importance. 5 This “academisation” of the art world more or less culminated in the A.C.A.D.E.M.Y.

7

Carel Blotkamp et al. ( eds. ), Museum in Motion ?

The modern art museum at issue ( The Hague 1979 ).

8

Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience ( Berkeley Los Angeles London 2002 ), 198.

9

Higgins 2002, 207.

279

project that took place in Eindhoven, Antwerp, Hamburg and London in 2006. 6 So, the art school proved to be a fashionable topic for curators and critics, almost in the same way that the traditional museum was picked up as a conceptual strategy by the advanced artists of the late sixties. 7 The academy as an alternative ? It is strange to hear this, when one realises that — until quite recently — art schools and academies were often ( and sometimes rightly ) the target of critique from art world people who considered them to be outmoded and even useless.

Academies were seen as anachronistic aliens in an advancing art world. The same academies are today confronted with questions regarding their position in a quickly changing and expanding art market. The growing demands of society and the stress generated by the need to become fully “academicised” puts the academies in an awkward position. Should they stay or should they go ? Should they stand strong and rely on their tradition and expertise or should they adopt the new paradigms of the art world and follow a completely different approach ? In other words : does the value of the art school lie in its history or in its future ? This is not merely a rhetorical question. Acting and being in the present, for an art school probably more than for any other institution, means a constant reflection upon past premises and future projections.

In her inspiring study of Fluxus, art historian ( and teacher ) Hannah Higgins discusses Robert Filliou’s book Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts. She states that teaching today can still benefit from the artistic ideas and strategies of the neo-avant-gardes : “It therefore becomes possible to extrapolate from performance art in general, and the Fluxus Event and intermedia concepts in particular, a performative model for all levels of education, in which schools become “learning societies” that encourage emotional and social engagement, thereby promoting knowledge acquisition and understanding.” 8 Her conclusion is as remarkable as it is radical : “Educators are like artists insofar as it is the teacher-facilitator’s job to make experiences available to students that give them a stake in the world as it is coming to be. All art and all education have this potential.” 9

fig. 1

ALTERNATIVES FOR THE ACADEMY Thinking about the art education of the future is, however, also a thing of the past. Exactly forty years ago, New Ideas in Art Education was launched in the form of a 290-page Dutton Paperback. 10 In the book, critic and teacher Gregory Battcock, who had already demonstrated his authority with several anthologies about the advanced art movements, sheds new light on American art education. Informed by the artistic developments since the mid-sixties, Battcock rather bluntly states that “today’s artist, art educator, and critic will find aesthetic stimulation not in art but outside of it. The subject of art will be to cease to be art”. 11 With his collection of writings by artists, art critics, art historians and art educators, he called for “the introduction of a radically new theoretical and practical approach for art education”. 12 With most of the contributions in the anthology limiting themselves to critiquing the existing system, real proposals or alternatives were rare. Actually, “sowing the seed of suspicion” was the compiler’s main goal.

Contributions by visual artists are in the minority, but there are inspiring texts by conceptual artist Les Levine and the “inventor” of the happening, Allan Kaprow. In his essay, Levine stressed the fact that art is primarily about transmitting information, and that the aesthetics of former times have lost their relevance in the light of this evolution towards mediation, technology and conceptualisation. 13 Notwithstanding the fact that in his text he does not explicitly refer to art education, his privately funded “Museum of Mott Art” provided “services for the after art period”.

Most of Levine’s ironic services seem to mock real art school courses, such as a “reader service for conceptual artists”, “language services for painters”, “after art services for earth artists”, and “after art education for teachers”. Levine also offered the course “how to survive being an art student after art”, the contents of which read as follows : “A list of universities and art schools which will put the least pressure upon you to produce art. A list of college professors who are confused about art, and therefore, will accept anything you do. How to get the most fun out of your 4 years and avoid any art problem. Learn to enjoy wasting your time until you realise what you really want to do with your life.” 14 Art teacher and happening theorist Allan Kaprow showed himself to be less cynical. In his essay “The education of the un-artist”, he pointed out that, due to new technologies and new media, “non-art is more art than Art-art”. 15 The only way to escape from this paradox is to become an un-artist : “we may only exist as fleetingly as the non-artist, for when the profession of art is discarded, the art category is meaningless, or at least antique”. 16 He referred to Fluxus artist and publisher Dick Higgins who coined the word “intermedia” to describe the new crossover practices of painters,

poets, dancers and composers. However, it is not only the former technical and aesthetical means to make art that have become redundant, Kaprow stated, but the concept of art in itself : “It follows that the conventions of painting, music, architecture, dance, poetry, theatre and so on, may survive in a marginal capacity as academic researches.” 17 The rather technophile assumptions of Levine and Kaprow ( who both predict the Internet in their essays ) rendered the orthodox art school obsolete.

As a diagnosis of a quickly changing ( art ) world these contributions certainly did make sense. But were there any alternatives for traditional art education ?

Which artists effectively reacted to the situation by proposing such educational alternatives, or by giving their art practice an educational or pedagogical turn ? Questioning traditional art education was not so new after all. Exactly twenty years before Battcock’s provocative anthology, the American abstract painter Ad Reinhardt already addressed the need for a new art education.

In an article and a lecture from the mid-fifties, titled The Artist in Search of an Academy, Reinhardt questioned the position and the definition of both the “modern artist” and “modern art” in post-war America, and defended the right of the artist to be autonomous and independent. 18 Reinhardt’s apology for a new education in tune with the new art echoes the manifestos of the first avant-gardes. In the early years of the century, European Futurists and Dadaists already pointed out the deficit of the nineteenth-century academies. Marinetti’s description of the art academies as “graveyards of lost efforts and calvaries of crucified dreams” has become famous. 19 The Futurist manifesto “Bombardons les Académies” [“Let’s bomb the academies”] went even further by calling for a physical destruction of the art schools, including their teachers and students, “those enemies of art”. 20 The Futurist hardliner Enrico Prampolini did not even consider the transformation of art education a valid alternative : “Education, what system it is, only canalizes the mass of idiots and deforms the ones that are capable.” 21 In the same year of Prampolini’s call to destruction, Tristan Tzara’s released his Dada Manifesto. With the art academies as an integral part of the art system that Dada sought to overthrow, Tzara did not even bother to mention them. 22 One year later, however, a completely “new” art school saw the light : the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar. The legendary Bauhaus would herald a new paradigm in art education. In his Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919, architect Walter Gropius nevertheless agreed with the avant-garde claim that art essentially cannot be taught, and this was exactly the reason for his direction towards the pre-modernist methods of craftsmanship and the models of the workshop. 23 Only the unity of the arts through building would save the future, both for arts and crafts. The Bauhaus Manifesto was illustrated with a cubo-expressionist woodcut by Lyonel Feininger

10

Gregory Battcock, New Ideas in Art Education. A Critical Anthology ( New York 1973 ).

11 12

Battcock 1973, x.

Battcock 1973, x-xi.

13

Les Levine, The Great American Art Machine, in : Battcock 1973, 11–28.

14

Les Levine, Museum of Mott Art Inc. Catalogue of After Art Services 1974 ( New York 1974 ), 11.

15

Allan Kaprow, The Education of the Un-Artist, Part I ( 1971 ), in : Battcock 1973, 76.

16 17

Kaprow 1971, 83.

Kaprow 1971, 86.

18

Ad Reinhardt, The Artist in Search of an Academy Part I ( 1953 ), Part II ( 1954 ), in : Barbara Rose ( ed. ), Art as Art : The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt ( New York 1975 ), 197–202. See also Reinhardt’s essays “Twelve Rules for a New Academy” ( 1957 ) and “Is There a New Academy ?” ( 1959 ) in the same anthology.

19

Filippo T. Marinetti, “Fondation et Manifeste du Futurisme” ( Paris 1909 ), in : Giovanni Lista ( ed. ), Futurisme. Manifestes, documents, proclamations ( Lausanne 1973 ), 88.

20

Enrico Prampolini, Bombardons les Académies, dernier residu pacifiste ( 1913 ), ( Rome 1918 ) in : Lista 1973, 125.

21

Idem.

22 Tristan Tzara, “Manifest Dada” 1918 ( Zürich 1918 ), in : Richard Huelsenbeck ( ed. ), Dada Almanach ( Berlin 1920 ), 116–130.

23

Walter Gropius, “Bauhaus manifesto” ( Weimar 1919 ), quoted in Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus ( OstfildernRuit 2000 ), 31–32.

24

See Wick 2000.

25 Hendrik T. Wijdeveld, Naar een internationale werkgemeenschap. Een plan met 16 illustraties ( Santpoort 1931 ).

26 Asger Jorn, Contre le fonctionalisme ( Paris 1957 ), n.p.

27 Manifeste, Internationale Situationniste 4, ( Paris 1960 ), 37–38.

28

Yves Klein, “Création d’un centre de la sensibilité”, in : Yves Klein, Le dépassement de la problématique de l’art ( La Louvière 1959 ), 29. In 1960, the German Zero artist Otto Piene described how Klein explained these ideas to him and Heinz Mack during a car trip from Antwerp, where they attended the opening of the Vision in Motion exhibition at the Hessenhuis, to Düsseldorf.

While thinking about a possible curriculum for the institute, Piene proposed parachute jumping and gliding. Klein agreed that to fly by his own power would be an essential skill for men. See : Otto Piene, 10 texte ( Frankfurt 1961 ), 26. In 1965, Piene was invited by György Kepes ( the former director of the New Bauhaus ) to become a fellow at the newly conceived Center for Advanced Visual Studies ( CAVS ) at the MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

CAVS was to integrate art, science and technology. In 1974, Piene would follow Kepes as the director of the CAVS. See : Elizabeth Goldring, “Otto Piene and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies”, in : Ante Glibota ( ed. ), Otto Piene ( Villorba, 2011 ), 308–311, and Otto Piene, More Sky ( Cambridge, Massachusetts 1973 ).

29

showing a brilliantly radiating cathedral — not exactly the image the Futurists had in mind when they proposed to abolish every kind of art education. At the Bauhaus, artists with an expressionist background ( Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee ) would translate their advanced artistic visions into concrete courses.

These would gradually evolve towards a more radical constructivist / functionalist practice. 24

Jorn even questioned the doctrine of the old Bauhaus and called for an international movement towards an alternative “Imaginist Bauhaus”. Instead of trying to find an alternative pedagogy, Jorn stated, artists should strive for “pure experimental activity”. Jorn defined the “free” artist as “a professional amateur”. Not ( theoretical ) artistic doctrine, but real and raw experience should be the main principle guiding the artist in his development. 26

Around the same time, in the wake of the revolution, Russian art education was completely reformed. In 1920, the two Moscow Free State Workshops were fused into a single art institute, the Vkhutemas, for which radical and innovative artists such as Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova and Wladimir Tatlin were engaged. For years to come, the school would prove to be a laboratory for a new society. Some Bauhaus-inspired schools, however, were determined to stay paper projects. An interesting example is the International Work Community. The Dutch architect Hendrik Wijdeveld, conceived this more or less forgotten project in

Here, the two sides of the modernist coin, the alternative, reformist art school tendency and the anarchist, anti-art school position, collided. Only one year after the publication of his manifesto “against functionalism”, Jorn would join the French “lettrist” Guy Debord in order to launch the Situationist International. In their ( unsigned ) manifesto of May 17 1960, the Situationists declared that, since in the end everyone would become an artist, the historical role of the Situationist in this process should be that of a “professional amateur” and an “anti-specialist”. 27 The revolutionary actions and writings of the Situationists would leave their mark on

the mid-twenties as a modernist utopia. In a rationalist campus in the Dutch countryside, artists, architects and scientists from all over the world would collaborate on a new future. 25 Later on, in 1933, together with the German architect Erich Mendelsohn, Wijdeveld planned the AEM ( Académie Européenne Méditerrannée ) in the south of France, with more or less the same programme.

Due to the economic crisis, none of these projects was to materialise, but the seeds of renewal were planted, as was the seed of suspicion.

the Paris university occupations and students revolts of May 1968, the effects of which I will touch upon later.

BEYOND THE BAUHAUS Bauhaus / Vhkutemas and Futurism / Dada represent both sides of the early avant-garde’s attitude towards teaching the arts : the quest for the alternative art school, on the one hand, and the anti-art school position on the other. Both positions, the one focusing on changing formal art education, the other on abolishing it completely, would determine the ways artists would reflect or act on behalf of teaching art in the twentieth century. The artist as an “uneducator” would contest the artist-educator, an example of this being the post-war “Imaginist Bauhaus”. After being closed down by the Nazis in 1933, the German Bauhaus would lead directly to famous experimental art schools in the USA, such as Joseph Albers’ Black Mountain College ( 1933 ) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus in Chicago ( 1937 ).

In post-war Europe, Max Bill’s Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm would position itself from the mid-fifties as the direct heir of the legendary Bauhaus. But Bill’s positivist and functionalist ideology would soon become the target for radical critique. In 1954, at the Tenth Triennial for Industrial and Decorative Arts in Milan, the Danish artist Asger Jorn, a former member of the Cobra-group, pointed his poisoned arrows at Bill’s project for lacking a curriculum for free arts. At the same time,

Klein 1959, 30.

281

Around the same time, the French monochrome painter Yves Klein and the German architect Werner Ruhnau were developing ideas about an immaterial architecture, made of circulating air. They were also considering the theoretical possibility of a “perfected Bauhaus”, a “School of Sensibility”. The name referring to Klein’s famous installation in the Iris Clert gallery in 1958, its ambitious mission would be to “reawaken the potential of the creative imagination as forces of personal responsibility”. Klein envisioned the centre as follows : “Immaterial architecture will be the face of this school.

It will be flooded with light. Twenty masters and three hundred students will work there with neither programme of instruction nor examination jury.” 28 Teachers and students would be involved in the construction of the school. In his prospective list of professors, Klein foresaw, amongst others, Jean Tinguely for sculpture, Lucio Fontana, Otto Piene and himself for painting, Werner Ruhnau for architecture, and Claude Pascal for theatre.

The photographer Charles Wilp and the art critic Pierre Restany would also be engaged.

The curriculum would offer additional courses in criticism, history, economics, religion, film, television, politics, philosophy, physics, biochemistry, and even martial arts. Klein went as far as calculating the budget for the building and the annual working costs. However, Klein’s school was not conceived as a permanent institution. Defining the original Bauhaus as “an action” and “a concentration of ideas”, Klein declared that his school could easily be dissolved after ten years. No fixed structures or curricula would interfere with the openness of the concept : “The School of Sensibility desires imagination and immaterialization. The school desires freedom for the heart and for the mind.” 29 The parallels with Jorn’s “Bauhaus Imaginiste” are striking.

As in Jorn’s proposal, Klein’s school was primarily an ( intentionally rhetorical ? ) reaction against the post-war paradigms of rationalism and materialism. Both schools stayed in the arena of radical ideas, but functioned as provocative alternatives.

Around 1960, radical academies were in the air.

In 1963, the Scottish Situationist Alexander Trocchi referred to Situationist experiments with an “action university”, which he described as a “spontaneous university”.

This pilot project, unfortunately only described in very vague terms, would encompass an experimental, economically independent art school, hosted in several cities. The students and the teachers would travel between the different venues. Hence, its organisation would have to be “endlessly elastic”, all the decisions to be taken collectively and “in situ”. The university would conduct pure research, but also produce objects, services, films and theatrical productions that would offer the means to stay economically independent. There would be a “living museum”, a restaurant and exhibition rooms. Trocchi compared the project with Black Mountain College and regretted the fact that this famous American “action-university” had to close for financial reasons. 30 Indeed, of the American heirs to the Bauhaus only Black Mountain College, which was neither a school of architecture nor design, would really be of importance for the course of the neo-avant-gardes of the sixties. Its idyllic setting in South-Western North Carolina symbolised its eccentric position. Free experimentation and artistic interdisciplinarity were the elements that made this school stand out. However, with an average enrolment of about fifty students per year, it remained small scale. This compact community of students and teachers changed from year to year. Some of them came directly from the Bauhaus : Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger and, most importantly, Josef and Anni Albers, who taught at Black Mountain for more than fifteen years.

The fundamental principles of the Bauhaus were adopted, but there were no separate studios or disciplines.

Albers declared that he was more interested in a “peda-

gogy of learning” than one of teaching. 31 The personal path of individual experience and free experimentation was central to his methodology. This approach, in tune with the advanced abstract art of that day, would have a huge effect on the art and education of the sixties.

One of the most influenced — and influential — residents of Black Mountain College was John Cage.

Cage’s presence and teaching at Black Mountain College mark the evolution from an abstract-expressionist paradigm to a more linguistic-conceptualist one. Back in 1942, the musician had proposed a “Center for Experimental Music” at Black Mountain College. 32 Early in 1948, he and the dancer Merce Cunningham visited the school to give a music and dance performance and to talk to the students. Because of the positive response, the two were invited for the Summer Session of the same year. In 1952, Cage and Cunningham were

again to spend the summer at Black Mountain College.

There, Cage — already moving towards his chance compositions — became involved with the work of the then-student Robert Rauschenberg, who was experimenting with series of white paintings and black paintings.

That summer of 1952, Cage composed his landmark “silence” piano piece 4’ 33”. But the fertile context of Black Mountain College also led to his collaborative Theater Piece No. 1, which is often referred to as the very first “happening”.

THE ARTIST AS ( UN- )EDUCATOR White paintings, a silent piano piece and the first happening were all the results of one hot summer at Black Mountain College. This incredible output was to change the face of art history. The unique crossover between painting, music and performance would probably never have been possible in a traditional art school. Once again, the avant-garde was to happen outside the classical academy. A few years after his Black Mountain College experiences, from 1956 to 1960, Cage started giving classes in “experimental composition” at the New School for Social Research in New York. Cage’s class was announced as follows : “A course in musical composition with technical, musicological and philosophical aspects, open to those with or without previous training. Whereas conventional theories of harmony, counterpoint and musical form are based on the pitch or frequency component of sound, this course offers problems and solutions in the field of composition based on other components of sound : duration, timbre, amplitude and morphology ; the course also encourages inventiveness.” 33 Cage’s summer class of 1958 has become legendary. The list of those attending that summer of 1958 today reads like a who’s who of the American neoavant-garde : Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Al Hansen and Jackson Mac Low amongst others.

The painters Jim Dine and Larry Poons and the sculptor George Segal joined in. Almost none of the students had a musical background. Some of them were not even officially enrolled ; they were just invited by Cage or his students. Al Hansen remembers how the unconventional class became “a little version of Black Mountain College”. 34 Cage lectured about his own ideas and music, often referring to European avant-garde composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen. To this day, George Brecht’s published notebooks of the Cage classes from 1958 and 1959 bear witness to that immensely fertile moment.

Every week the students were asked to present — and perform — a short music piece that would be discussed afterwards. Cage gave precise instructions for these assignments, like the duration, the media used ( e.g. a radio ), or the score to be used ( such as random numbers, for example, or the composition of

fig. 2 30

Alexander Trocchi, Technique du Coup de Monde, Internationale Situationniste 8, ( Paris 1963 ), 63–55.

31 Gabriele Diana Grawe, “Continuity and Transformation : Bauhaus Pedagogy in North America”, in : Wick 2000, 351. See also : Vincent Katz ( ed. ), Black Mountain College. Experiment in Art ( Cambridge, London, 2002 / 2013 ).

32

Katz 2002, 133.

33

Dieter Daniels ( ed. ), George Brecht — Notebooks I June-September 1958 ( Köln 1991 ), footnotes, n.p.

34

Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings & Time / Space Art ( New York 1965 ), 95.

a classmate’s painting ). After class, the students would meet in a nearby restaurant to discuss and continue the work being done. So, Cage’s exercises can be considered the direct inspiration for the Fluxus events that Dick Higgins, Georges Brecht and Al Hansen were about to organise soon afterwards. 35 A teacher at Rutgers University ( New Jersey ) in an art department that echoed the experiments of Black Mountain College, Allan Kaprow would implement his experiences there. On the Rutgers campus, Kaprow would organise his first public happening in 1958. 36 Cage’s influence is also evidently clear in the ambitious book project that Fluxus artist and poet Robert Filliou undertook in the late sixties : Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts. Filliou embarked on his “study about permanent creation and audience participation” early in 1967. Since the early sixties, Filliou had been using the graphic edition, the multiple and the book as tools to present his provocative ideas to a broader audience. Together with Cage’s former student George Brecht, he had founded the “studio-shop” La Cédille Qui Sourit in Villefranche-sur-mer, as “an international center for permanent creation”, in 1965. This evolved into the “Non-School of Ville-Franche” that took place “on the beaches, in cafés, at home, in the street” and that would do “without any pre-established programme”. 37 These and other projects paved the way for his research on advanced art as an alternative pedagogy.

fig. 1

35 Joseph Jacobs, “Crashing New York à la John Cage”, in Joan Marter ( ed. ), Off Limits. Rutgers University and the AvantGarde, 1957–1963 ( New Jersey 1999 ), 68–69.

36

environments, visual poetry, films, street performances, non-instrumental music, games, correspondences, etc. [ …] I understand there are some.” 38 Many artists of the neo-avant-garde had been experimenting with methods that could be implemented in a pedagogical situation : “Like the artist, teacher and students face the problem of audience participation. Unlike the artist, they have not made great strides toward solving this problem. In the kind of research projects I have in mind, experiments might be tempted, experience accumulated.” 39

Idem.

37

Robert Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts ( Köln 1970 ), 198–200.

38 39 40

After three years of work, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts was published by König Verlag in the form of a 230-page, spiral-bound textbook in English and German. In his introduction, Filliou presented it as “a multi-book : the writing-space provided for the reader’s use is [ …] exactly the same as that taken by the author”. In his mission statement Filliou continued : “The purpose of this study is to show how some of the problems inherent to teaching and learning can be solved — or let’s say eased — through an application of the participation techniques developed by artists in such fields as : happenings, events, action poetry,

Filliou 1970, 12.

Filliou 1970, 14.

Filliou 1970, 19.

In Filliou’s opinion, personal experience, freedom, self-expression, leisure and creativity are the weapons to fight alienation. Art is a form of “organized leisure”, he stated. Following this track, Filliou advised the reader to welcome any “lack of discipline, ‘laziness’, spontaneity, fantasy and improvisation”. 40 In the third chapter ( “the artistic proposition” ), Filliou’s anarchist and anti-

41

Robert Filliou, Research at the Stedelijk Nov / 5-Dec.5 1971 ( Amsterdam 1971 ).

42

Jan Juffermans, Kunstonderwijs op losse schroeven ( The Hague 1971 ), 12.

283

authoritarian position was shared by his fellow authors.

Here, Filliou went into conversation with the artists John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Benjamin Patterson, Dieter Roth, and Joseph Beuys. The last chapter, entitled “Doing it Our Selves”, offered suggestions for pedagogical projects and discussed a few of Filliou’s own initiatives in detail. The back cover of the book mentioned further editions that would contain modifications suggested by the “readers-co-authors”. These never materialised, but one year later, Filliou would demonstrate this form of coauthorship in his one-man show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which he temporarily transformed into a République Géniale.

There, the visitors could mentally and physically participate in Filliou’s research. 41 For a while, the art museum became a site for experimentation and exploration, enhancing the visitor’s awareness of art as experience ( and vice versa ), in short : an academy. The quick changes that were taking place in advanced art practice, and the conviction that art could no longer be taught in a traditional manner, led some artists to the foundation of the first alternative art schools. In 1963, the Dutch artists Mari Andriessen, Wessel Couzijn, Ger Lataster, Nic Jonk and Theo Mulder founded the Ateliers 63 in Haarlem. Without any programme or strict hierarchical structure, the forty participating art students, housed in derelict military quarters, were free to discover and implement new ideas and techniques at their own pace. Discussing one’s work with ( more experienced ) peers was the core of the pedagogy. That is why Ateliers 63 never considered itself to be providing real “art education”, but offering a complementary approach. 42

FROM ACADÉMIE DES BEAUX-ARTS TO ATELIER POPUL AIRE Critical thinking about art education always implies a critique and a deconstruction of dominating ideologies. Conversely, the crisis that society went through at the end of the sixties would affect art and art education fundamentally. Shortly before art schools and other official institutions became the target of protests in 1968, a few artists’ proposals already pointed the way. They reflected the quick changes that were taking place in post-painterly artistic practice. Being directed at high modernism, some of the contestation literally came from within modern art education. In 1966, British artist and teacher John Latham, together with student Barry Flanagan, undertook an action to question the one-sided modernist ideology that was infecting British art practice and art education. Latham borrowed a copy of the American critic Clement Greenberg’s bestseller Art and Culture ( 1961 ) from the London St. Martin’s School of Art library and — together with students and other visitors — chewed some of the pages from the book. The resulting matter was bottled, mixed with additives, and left to ferment. When asked to return the book to the library, the solution was handed in. Latham was fired the next

day. Soon after, Latham would found his “NOIT chair of nonentity” as an alternative axiom “to the conception of all things making up the ‘real’ world”. 43 Latham’s violent reaction against American high-modernism had its reasons. From the mid- sixties on, American avant-garde art gradually became more influential in Western Europe. Newly imported trends such as pop art and minimal art seemed a threat to the more traditionally trained artist. As a response to this, in 1967, the Dutch artists Jan Dibbets, Ger Van Elk and Reinier Lucassen published a commercial-looking pamphlet with an advertisement for their “International Institute for the Reeducation of Artists”. Postal courses would help the doubting artist to find new ways of adopting his practice for the new avant-garde art market. Lucassen provided a “pop art course”, with Dibbets offering one in hardedge painting and “new installation art”, and Van Elk responsible for “new” sculpture in plastics and polyester. 44 Obviously, the announcement was a prank, but it reflected the rupture that was being perceived between the American wave and the old European scene that, for the very first time, seemed to lag behind.

fig. 3

Also in 1967, as an announcement of his solo-show at the Galleria Sperone, Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto sent out a text poster on which he declared to be releasing his studio, “which opens to welcome young people to present their work, do things, and meet.”

Meanwhile in the Sperone gallery, the only thing to be seen was a milestone inscribed with the year 1967.

Curious visitors could obtain Pistoletto’s booklet Famous Last Words, in which he explained his artistic position.

At the crossroads of ( manual ) painting and ( intellectual ) action, he called for a new art of being : “The intellect is a single thing, but it has only one possibility. If the intellect raises the questions, we must outflank it, step to one side, and use another mechanism for the answers.

The intellect now is frustrated since it has continuously failed to do two tasks, and the other mechanisms have atrophied.” 45 Emptying his studio, Pistoletto was liberating himself from his own fixed artistic persona.

Pistoletto’s open invitation was not only a tabula rasa and the call for a new start. It also expressed the new function that the artist’s studio was attaining at the time : that of a laboratory, a research centre, even a school. In some ways Andy Warhol’s Factory had paved the way for this evolution. With individualism being associated with romantic abstract-expressionist practice, collectivity became the paradigm. Interaction, collaboration and communication would be the tactics of the new avant-garde. Pistoletto’s democratised open studio did become a meeting place for young artists and performers. Films were projected, discussions took place, and young people met and made plans.

Amongst other projects, this resulted in the performance group The Zoo, which was founded by Pistoletto the following year. That same year, in 1968, Pistoletto published a new poster-manifesto. Upon being invited

to a group exhibition at the Venice Biennial, he in turn invited people to collaborate with him on the show. 46 Notwithstanding Pistoletto’s heroic attempt to open it up, the 1968 Biennale was heavily contested, as was the fourteenth Triennale in Milan and the fourth Documenta in Kassel. Manifestos, boycotts, sit-ins and other demonstrations created an atmosphere of revolt and revolution. With the police omnipresent, the art scene seemed to be ruled by pure anger. The actual cultural contestation of the big institutions ( museums, art schools, art events ) was triggered by the events of May 1968 in Paris. Until today, the most iconic images of the May ’68 strikes and occupations are the posters that appeared daily in the streets and the occupied buildings. On May 8, the students of the Académie des Beaux-Arts went on strike. After mass demonstrations in the streets of Paris, they took over the premises of the academy on May 13. The following day, the General Assembly adopted a platform that called for a complete transformation of the educational system. Social discrimination and intellectual competition were the main targets. The obsolete “bourgeois” content and the traditional methods of education were heavily criticised, as was the hierarchical structure of the educational system. The students called for the abolishment of entrance exams and for close collaboration with the protesting workers.

That same day, the first poster was printed in the “Atelier Populaire”, the name given to the academy’s occupied print studio. Academy students and artists from abroad assembled to produce a vast amount of posters that found their way onto the streets and into the factories. The young artists wanted to break out of their “artistic autonomy”. The whole concept of “art” being a bourgeois construction, the artist had to liberate himself from his so-called artistic freedom : “Culture makes the artist live in the illusion of freedom. [ …] He is not a worker at grips with historical reality. [ …] In giving him this privileged status, culture puts the artist in a position where he can do no harm and in which he functions as the safety valve in the mechanism of bourgeois society. [ …] That is why we write ( that ) Atelier Populaire cannot be a question of improvement, but of a radical change of direction. It means that we are determined to transform what we are in society.” 47 Art education had to come to terms with the historical reality of society : “No teacher could help us to become more familiar with that reality. We must all teach ourselves. This does not mean that there does not exist objective, therefore admissible, knowledge, nor that older artists and teachers cannot be very useful. But this is on condition that they themselves have decided to transform what they are in society and to take part in this work of self-education. The educative power of the bourgeoisie thus challenged, the way will be open to the educative power of the people.” 48 With all the artists, students and workers being allowed to suggest

43

fig. 4

John Latham, “ART & CULTURE evidence 1966 / 7”, in Lucy Lippard ( ed. ), 557,087 ( Seattle 1969 ), loose card. See also Lippard 1973, 15–16 and 22–23.

44

Jan Dibbets, Ger Van Elk, Reinier Lucassen, “Internationaal Instituut voor Herscholing van Kunstenaars” ( Amsterdam 1967 ), as reproduced in Ad De Visser, De Tweede Helft Gedocumenteerd.

130 teksten en documenten aangaande de beeldende kunst na 1945 ( Nijmegen 2002 ), 214.

45 Michelangelo Pistoletto, Le Ultime Parole Famose ( Turin 1967 ). The poster is reproduced in : Michelangelo Pistoletto, Azioni Materiali ( Köln 1999 ), 12.

46

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Con questo manifesto invito le persone che lo desiderano a collaborare con me alla XXXIV Biennale di Venezia ( Turin 1968 ), as reproduced in : Michael Lailach ( ed. ), Printed Matter. The Marzona Collection ( Berlin 2005 ), 47.

47

Atelier Populaire, Posters from the revolution Paris, May 1968 ( London 1969 ), no pages.

slogans or to collaborate in the printing, the workshop itself would turn into a democratic laboratory. The Atelier Populaire would bring people into contact with this new transformative educative power.

Defining culture as the direct manifestation of class struggle, the posters supporting that struggle would be followed by a wall newspaper, a puppet theatre, and later on, by “painting, sculpture, films, songs, etc.”

Instead of the officially installed “houses of culture” with which the government had intended to bring culture to the people, the revolutionaries strived for the creation of many more Ateliers Populaires “in opposition to the oppression of bourgeois culture”. However, the moment the Gaullist government repressed the 1968 revolts, the utopian plans of the Atelier Populaire were destined to remain utopian. Most of the art academies went on teaching the arts in a more or less traditional way.

But they were infected with the seeds of suspicion and reformation.

48

Idem.

Of course, all of this collided with the rigid structures of the Düsseldorf Academy. With the conventional hierarchies put into question by his initiatives, Beuys went as far as opening his studio to anybody interested, even those students that had been kicked out of other classes. In 1968, nine professors launched a petition against Beuys’ activities at the school. This festering core of contestation temporarily came to a halt in May 1969, when the school was closed for ten days. But Beuys persisted ; in 1971, he not only accepted another 142 rejected students into his class and occupied the offices of the school, he even installed a committee for a new “Free School”. In Beuys’ opinion, only a “Freie Hochschule”, a “free university for creativity”, could liberate art education from its bureaucratic confinement.

position of the artist in the art world and, last but not least, the authoritarian position of the teachers. 49

solidarity from around the world, including one from Allan Kaprow. The next year the court declared his dismissal illegitimate, and a long procedure ensued.

Only in 1978 would Beuys be officially restituted his rights, but he did not return to his former academy.

Instead, he transformed his studio at the Düsseldorf Academy into an office for the German Green Party. In the meantime, he cleverly used the international platform of Documenta 5 to install his “Office for Information” of the “Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung”, where he could be found every day, ready for discussion.

FROM STA ATLICHE KUNSTAK ADEMIE TO FREE INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

50

Akties 1962–1980. Een overzicht van de akties van Joseph Beuys in Beuys in Boymans ( Rotterdam 1980 ), 8–9. See also : Johannes Stüttgen, FIU, Organ des erweiterten Kunstbegriffs für die soziale Skulptur ( Düsseldorf 1984 ) and Ekkehard Mai, “Kunst lehren, mit der Kunst leben.

Kunsthochschulen in NRWUmrissse”, in : Zeitzeichen.

Stationen Bildender Kunst in Nordrhein-Westfalen ( Köln 1989 ), 191–203.

Around the time of the occupation of the Paris Academy and the contestation of Dutch art education, the Staatliche Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf in Germany would turn out to be a testing ground for new ideas.

Joseph Beuys had been a teacher in the sculpture department since 1961. Involved with the activities of Fluxus, Beuys would soon after become interested in the performative and intermedia aspects of visual art.

In 1963, he organised a Fluxus-concert on the premises of the academy. Not all the students seemed to be amused. When Beuys performed a piece during an 285

In his own sculpture classes, Beuys would organise discussions that were also to be attended by people not enrolled at the academy. In the course of 1966 and 1967, these “Beuys-classes” would evolve into a platform for the growing leftist students’ movement and for Marxist activists. In 1967, on the lawn in front of the Düsseldorf Academy, Beuys officially founded the DSP, or Deutsche Studentenpartei ( German Students Party ), which situated itself beyond the traditional left-right axis and considered itself an “anti-party” and “meta-party”.

Beuys was to be the president, assisted by Johannes Stüttgen and Bazon Brock. When the new semester started at the end of that year, Beuys kicked off the festivities with one of his “actions” : an axe clenched in his fist, he barked, whistled and hissed into a microphone for ten minutes. 50

In Holland, for instance, the government reacted quickly with the installation of a committee charged with proposals for the reformation of art education. The progressive art critic Jan Juffermans conducted interviews with artists, art teachers and officials that he published in the 1971 book Kunstonderwijs op losse schroeven ( Art Education in Question ). The title refers to the 1969 exhibition Op losse schroeven ( Square Pegs in Round Holes ) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, a show that heralded new post-minimalist practices such as anti-form, Arte Povera and conceptual art. In the book, the artists Wessel Couzijn, Peter Struycken and Carel Visser, together with critic Cor Blok, expressed their criticism of the preliminary report by the committee and its functionalist approach, which did not cope with the real problems in official art education. These problems included the rigid curriculum, not adapted to the individual needs of the students ; the vague and old-fashioned contents of the courses ; a complete lack of information on contemporary art ; a lack of intellectual training and theoretical courses ; a lack of information on the social

49

Juffermans 1971, 106–107.

avant-garde festival at the Technische Hochschule in Aachen, irritated students interrupted the action, one of them kicking the artist in the face.

The conflict with the school’s administration and the minister for education escalated. After another occupation of the schools offices, Beuys was summarily dismissed in 1972. The press covered the event extensively, and Beuys received many expressions of

However, the desperate fight against the educational system and governmental bureaucracy prompted Beuys to organise an alternative. In 1974, together with the writer Heinrich Böll, Beuys established the “Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary

Research”. In countless interviews, lectures and writings, Beuys explained the ideas behind the initiative, which he considered “a social organism as a work of art”. In his 1974 FIU Manifesto, Beuys declared : “Each one of us has a creative potential, which is hidden by competiveness and success-aggression. To recognize, explore and develop this potential is the task of the school. [ …]

The school is based on the principle of interaction, whereby no institutional distinction is drawn between the teachers and the taught. The school’s activity will be accessible to the public, and it will conduct its work in the public eye. Its open and international character will be constantly reinforced by exhibitions and events in keeping with the concept of creativity.” 51 He provided a detailed curriculum with classes in drawing, painting, sculpture, colour theory, graphic techniques, metalwork and electronics, besides more discursive and theoretical courses, such as theory of knowledge, social behaviour, solidarity, criticism of critical behaviour, pedagogy, methodology, didactics, phenomenology of history, phenomenology of art, manifestation of history in art, criticism of art, verbal articulation, theory of information, sensory theory, and pictorial representation. But Beuys’ ambitions proved to be on a bigger scale than his pedagogical intentions.

In 1978, he published the extensive manifesto Aufruf zur Alternative ( A Call to Alternatives ) in the Frankfurter Rundschau. The growing threat of a nuclear war and the ecological and economic crises prompted him to the conclusion that the major post-war systems, Capitalism and Communism, had failed. In order to solve this ideological impasse, Beuys proposed an alternative “third way”. Individual freedom, social equality and interpersonal solidarity being the fundamentals, Beuys called for “a post-capitalist and post-communist new society of real socialism”. 52 So the FIU evolved from a concrete pedagogical proposal into an international research community.

However, the new social movement had to obtain a political dimension in order to have any real effect.

fig. 5

Beuys knew very well how to use his exhibitions, including his participation in the Documenta exhibitions of 1977 and 1982 for the dissemination of the FIUconcept and his pedagogical and political ideas. In the course of the late seventies and the early eighties, the FIU became an “international workers collective” with a German core ( the official address of the FIU still being Beuys sculpture studio in “Raum 3” at the Düsseldorf Academy ) and small groups active in several European countries. Mainly a discursive network preparing a political reality, the FIU also collaborated on physical projects, such as the legendary 7000 Oaks at the seventh Documenta in 1982. But Beuys’ initiative would not survive its founder. In 1988, two years after his untimely death, the FIU was dissolved.

ACADEMIES ON THE MOVE Beuys was not the only artist contesting German art education. In 1964, the young painter Jörg Immendorff had joined Beuys’ class. Hoping that Beuys could help him to come to terms with the cynical gallery system, he became disappointed with the competition between the students and the commercial attitude of his teachers ( including Beuys ). However, Beuys’ manifestations proved to be a source of inspiration. From 1966 on, Immendorff started to organise his own actions at the Düsseldorf Academy. Calling them “LIDL-actions” ( with the word “LIDL” being inspired by baby gibberish ) they were intended to change the artistic climate and influence the educational system : “I was thinking of a domino-effect ; LIDL indoctrinates the future art-teachers at the academy and the art-teachers indoctrinate their pupils at school. In the art academy ‘free classes’ could develop and replace the old professors. I was dreaming of an autonomous academy and its name should be : LIDL academy.” 53 In November 1968, Immendorff’s LIDL “took over” the academy of Karlsruhe. An improvised information post ( “LIDL-class” ) would provide ideas and statements concerning art and education. Twenty students participated in Immendorff’s project, but the officials forced him to abandon his activities. Soon afterwards, in December 1968, the first “LIDL-class” was installed at the Düsseldorf Academy. A very fragile paper construction, it represented the “mobility” of the LIDL-concept.

Immendorff’s action received a good deal of attention from the press, which of course prompted the directors to prohibit any further LIDL-manifestations. With teachers and even students reacting aggressively to his initiatives, Immendorff, together with some fellow students, rented a room to elaborate on the concept of an autonomous LIDL-academy. But the efforts were in vain, Immendorff remembers : “I did not see at all that ‘LIDL’ could not really offer anything concrete to the students. ‘LIDL’ just offered phrases about ‘liberating through art’. But practically, ‘LIDL’ always only pointed at the artist Immendorff and his problems.” 54

From 1969 on, Immendorff would organise several LIDL-manifestations in Germany and abroad ( at some sporting events, for example ). At the end of 1969, he and Chris Reinecke organised a private art school in Düsseldorf. That gave them the opportunity of trying out some of their educational and artistic ideas in a real pedagogical context. Instead of pure painting, Immendorff experimented with discussions and enquiries about the status and the goals of the artwork that should in its own right reflect the critical ideas ( e.g. about the school ) of the group of pupils. The exhibited work would be discussed and eventually adapted according to the wishes of the group : “We definitely do want to activate the critiques of the pupils ! We do not only want them to develop the faculty of critical thinking, but based on the close link of theory and practice, we

fig. 6

51

Joseph Beuys, “Manifesto on the foundation of a ‘Free International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research’”, in : Art into Society into Art ( London 1974 ), 49–50.

52

Joseph Beuys, Aufruf zur Alternative, in Frankfürter Rundschau 23.12.1978. Also produced as a poster ( Düsseldorf 1979 ).

53

Jörg Immendorff, Hier und Jetzt : Das Tun, was zu Tun ist ( Köln 1973 ), 85.

54

Immendorff 1973, 108.

also want them to start critical activity !” 55 Immendorff’s pedagogical attitude towards art as a liberating and emancipating force seems to resemble Belgian artist Jef Geys’ teaching activities and school projects of the sixties.

Immendorff 1973, 116–118.

56

Wolf Vostell, “Die ideale Akademie. Ein Autobahn und Dzug Happening Jan. 1969”, in Wolf Vostell, Fluxus Zug ( Eine Mobile Kunstakademie ) ( Hamburg 1981 ), 151–152.

57

Wolf Vostell, another former student of the Düsseldorf Academy, briefly affiliated with the international Happenings- and Fluxus movements in order to create his own brand, which he coined “Dé-coll / age”. Early in 1969, in an interview with Friedrich Heubach, editor of the experimental artists’ magazine Interfunktionen, Vostell expressed his opinions on “the ideal academy”. Relating his ideas explicitly to happenings, Vostell imagined the ideal art school as a mobile “avant-garde laboratory”. It could take the form of an “auto-happening convoy”, or even a special train equipped with a radio and television studio, a doctor, a psychologist, an electro-technician, a sociologist and so on. It would travel from city to city in order to provide learning experiences in big halls and in factories, offering free education for everyone in-

Teaching by ships, trains, racing cars, airplanes …

After 1968, the days of the classic, static art academy seemed to be numbered. Artistic contestation even invaded the universities. In October 1970, the Belgian artists’ collective Mass Moving transformed part of the Louvain university campus into a “72-hour construction yard”. A huge tubular construction with five big projection screens covered the parking lot of the students’ restaurant, connected to a nearby house by big rubber pipes, constantly emitting electronic sounds. At regular intervals, foam and perfume were dispersed from the structure. A take-away “action-newspaper” with the title Treaty on Cultural Methodology to be used by the New Generation, was distributed amongst the participants and passers-by. 59 The newspaper contained a call for a democratic art and for a free and creative university.

terested : “Teaching and learning through action. Every student, worker, etc. could have himself informed. There would be no taboos. Every question should be asked and would be dealt with in a seminar.” 56

Mass Moving’s chaotic occupation of the campus was intended to visualise the possibilities of a close interaction between art and science, a tendency Anglo-Saxon conceptual art was to embody around the same time.

Topics would be discussed by twenty advisors, forcing the students to cope with the complexity of the issues. Vostell’s dream team would include Jörg Immendorff’s LIDL, Fluxus-leader George Maciunas, rock musician Frank Zappa, happening pioneer Allan Kaprow, poet / publisher Dick Higgins, Fluxus artist Ben Vautier, and many others. Technical aspects of the training would be offered not by specific artificial art classes, but by society itself : “I imagine the academy of the future as a flexible, mobile consulting unit ; for the art of the seventies a legal advisor and a psychologist will be necessary. My opinion is that the art of the last decennia of this century will become immaterial, and at the beginning of the seventies I will definitively stop working with objects and actions in order to deal only with ideas.” 57 At the beginning of the eighties Vostell

55

Idem.

58

Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office, “Mobile Medium University project for U.I.A.”, in Aspecten van de actuele kunst in België ( Antwerpen 1974 ), no pages. Marinus Boezem, “The Porsche Academy, 1976”, in : Edna Van Duyn, Fransjozef Witteveen ( eds. ), Boezem. Catalogue Raisonné ( Bussum 1999 ), 134.

would take up the idea for a mobile academy, when he created a travelling exhibition on a train, which he labelled “Fluxus Zug” ( Fluxus Train ) and subtitled “a mobile art academy”.

Mobility of the school seemed to become the equivalent of the mobility of the mind. In 1972, Belgian architect and artist Luc Deleu proposed a “mobile medium university” for Antwerp on three brightly coloured aircraft carriers, fully equipped with helicopters and communication media. The world itself would become the university and therefore every student a world citizen. But things could be sped up further. In 1976, Dutch conceptual artist Marinus Boezem sketched out a “Porsche Academy”. Without directors or a building, this academy would provide seven famous artists with superfast Porsche cars and a communication system in order to visit the students individually. Each instructor

59

Mass Moving, Traité de méthodologie culturelle à l’usage de la jeune génération ( Brussels 1972 ), no pages ( project 18 ).

60

Daniel Buren, Is teaching art necessary ?, excerpt in : Lippard 1973, 52.

287

would guide between thirty and fifty students. Because of the small number of students, high performance would be possible. Foreign students should be visited by using small airplanes. 58

EDUCATION AS DESKILLING From 1967 on, conceptual art ( aka “idea art” ) was gaining momentum in New York and London. It would radically affect ideas on art and art education. With the concept of “art” itself coming under scrupulous reconsideration, the teaching of art was seriously questioned. In 1968 French conceptual artist Daniel Buren was already putting the question straightforwardly : “Is teaching art necessary ?” Art itself being a conservative, bourgeois concept, why should we bother to keep on teaching it ? Buren stated : “The artist, if he wants to work for another society, must begin by fundamentally contesting art and assuming his total rupture with it. If not, the next revolution will take over his responsibil-

ity.” 60 The deconstruction of both the concept and the context of the artwork led to a radical shift in the processes of conceiving and presenting it. With art primarily being seen as information about research and the communication of ideas, conceptual artists integrated “non-artistic” strategies into their practice, such as theoretical texts, philosophical statements, scientific calculations and photographic documentation.

Anglo-Saxon conceptual art was fundamentally language-based and research-oriented. Since the tools of the new art were basically intellectual, the traditional studio system of education ( drawing, painting, graphic and sculpture classes ) was considered a thing of the past. The methods and objects of painting and sculpture had become outmoded and even suspect. Some of the “new” artists, such as land artist Richard Long and the performance duo Gilbert & George were actually

trained in a sculpture department ( e.g. the London St. Martin’s School of Art, under the guidance of the minimalist sculptor Anthony Caro ). So Long’s walks and the “singing sculpture” acts of Gilbert & George only could take place after a “deskilling” ; a getting rid of the reductive, modernist-minimalist sculptural techniques they had acquired through education. Around the same time, the group Art & Language was formed in 1968

by Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell, the first two being art teachers at the Coventry College of Art, where they initiated the influential Art Theory Course. 61. In Coventry, they started the conceptual art magazine Art-Language, which fused in 1971 with the magazine Analytical Art, published by the art students Philip Pilkington and David Rushton.

relevant, it had to focus upon the ideas that had challenged the art world and which had begun to change not only the content of the visual arts but their very definition. We saw a need to acknowledge that we were heirs to the groundbreaking art of the Dadaists, the Futurists, the Surrealists, and the Constructivists — to ideas and innovations that were being built upon by our contemporaries in major art centers around the world. These developments included Pop Art, Fluxus, happenings and performance art, as well as the work of dancers, filmmakers and musicians. The art world was being reshaped and we were determined that our mission as artists and as educators was to be part of that reshaping.” 63

By contrast, most of the American so-called conceptualists already had their background in art departments at universities. For conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson and Adrian Piper, writing was a crucial aspect of their artis-

The college’s isolated geographic position, far away from any well-known art centre, in a town without a museum or a university, was considered an extra value.

Instead of looking at other art schools, Kennedy bluntly decided to look “at the art world itself as a guide to what the College would become”. 64 “The ideas would

tic practice. As a consequence, the reading of theory would offer the artist a much better tool for the new artistic situation than traditional technical skills. After all, pop art and minimalism had already proven that the artist could have his work realised by assistants or technicians. On top of this, it had become clear that these “deskilled” artists were able to invade the galleries and the museums at an astonishingly young age. So, at the end of the sixties, theory started to infiltrate art education, especially in the USA. As was also the case in Europe, American university and art school campuses were subject to uprisings and occupations in 1968 and 1969. The breakthrough of new artistic ideas around the same period did the rest.

come first and the structure would follow”, Kennedy remembers. The key tactic would be the facilitation of encounters between students and “the most interesting artists possible”. In 1972, when invited by the British art magazine Studio International to come up with a contribution about the college, Kennedy composed a densely printed, one-page inventory of all the school’s data : the names of the students, faculty members, visiting artists and administration members, the exhibition programmes, the staff and publications of the print workshop, the courses, and last but not least, the finances.

Made up in the style of hardcore conceptual art, the page perfectly reflected the experimental and radical approach of the NSCAD.

Some of the most radical exhibitions of the late sixties even took place at the campuses of American universities or colleges. 62 Gradually, the new ideas slipped in at the level of curriculum and methodology.

Both the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in New York and the Nova Scotia College of Art and

In the late sixties and seventies, the NSCAD invited an impressive number of visiting artists to stay and lead project classes, including Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Gerhard Richter, James Lee Byars, Dan Graham, Mel Bochner, John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Vito Acconci, Dennis Oppenheim, Yvonne Rainer, Jenny Holzer, and

Design kicked off with a new programme in 1968, soon to be followed by the California Institute of Arts ( Cal Arts ) in Valencia, Los Angeles ( 1970 ). In these “schools”, theory ( mainly based upon the ideas of the Frankfurter Schule and the French Post-structuralists ) was considered crucial in the formation of the artist. A big part of the teaching staff consisted of ( post- ) minimalist, conceptual and conceptualist artists ( such as Michael Asher and John Baldessari at Cal Arts ).

Robert Morris. The idea was to confront the students with a first-hand account of the most advanced art being made at the time. 65 Some of the project classes, coordinated by the artist David Askevold, were carried out through mail or telephone, which added to the conceptual atmosphere of the projects. In the fall of 1969, a project class consisted entirely of written propositions by conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Barry, Robert Smithson, Dan Graham and Lawrence Weiner.

The project submitted by LeWitt read as follows :

The most radical art school integrating the new practices of ( post- ) minimal and conceptual art was the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design ( NSCAD ) in the small town of Halifax, Canada. In 1968, the artist Garry Kennedy transformed the slightly old-fashioned school — eighty years old at the time — into a dynamic artistic laboratory. Kennedy embarked upon an ambitious modernist mission : “If the college was to be truly

1. A work that uses the idea of error.

2. A work that uses the idea of incompleteness.

3. A work that uses the idea of infinity.

4. A work that uses the idea of completeness.

5. A work that uses the idea of stupidness.

6. A work that is subversive.

7. A work that is not original.

61 For a detailed description of the Art & Language Theory Course, see Lynda Morris, “Beuys, Art & Language, NSCAD art education and contemporary art ( extracts from Royal College of Art Thesis 1971–73 )”, in Lynda Morris, Genuine Conceptualism ( Ghent 2014 ), 45–51.

Morris also discusses the Beuys classes in Düsseldorf and the program of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

fig. 7

62 A few examples from the USA : Art in Series at Finch College Museum of Art, New York ( 1967 ), Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Lawrence Weiner at Bradford Junior College, Massachusetts and Windham College, Vermont ( 1968 ) ; Electric Art at University of California, Los Angeles ( 1969 ), Earth Art at Cornell University, New York ( 1969 ). In the summer of 1969 students organised an untitled exhibition in the garden of Christ Church College at Oxford University with works by Michael Harvey, Barry Flanagan, Bruce McLean, David Lamelas, Richard Long, Roelof Louw, Keith Arnatt and John Latham. See Lippard 1973, 109.

63 Gary Neill Kennedy, The Last Art College.

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968–1978 ( Cambridge, Massachusetts, London 2012 ), xiii. See also NSCAD. The Novia Scotia College of Art & Design, The Press of the Novia Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, 1982.

64

Kennedy 2012, xv.

65 Liberal art university experiences : “David Askevold in conversation with Paul McMahon”, in Studio International, 183 / 943, April 1972, 156.

These can be done in any form chosen by the student. Please ask your students not to do more than two of the above works. 66 In April 1970, American artist James Lee Byars was invited to the NSCAD. In his lecture to the students he addressed the philosophical and scientific questions that inspired him in his projects, such as the World Question Center, for which he had gathered hundreds of questions from people all over the world. This led him to a fundamental pedagogical conclusion that touches the core of any education, be it in the world of art, or outside : “Why is it so hard to make questions ? I started wondering about the prejudice against question in schools. What does a question mean ? We’re discouraged generally by schools. I mean, there are questions where you’re taught the answer before the question, and then you’re asked the question and you raise your hand and the teacher thinks that’s a big deal. That kind of questioning is defeating. And so I wondered — Is all speech interrogative ?” 67 But the school did not only provide in terms of encounters and education. The lithography workshop produced experimental prints, while the NSCAD press published radical artists’ books by Lawrence Weiner, Daniel Buren, Claes Oldenburg, Michael Asher, Martha Rosler, Simone Forti and Michael Snow. So the school, which was also equipped with a video studio, facilitated projects and publications by artists, helping them advance in their early careers. The exhibition programme in the school’s gallery was closely related to the visiting artists, offering state-of-the art presentations and performances of the most important avant-garde artists of the era. The programme proved that serious art education and advanced art practices could go hand in hand, and that an art school could have a direct impact on the art world. Students in their turn would learn from real encounters with inspiring artists and by participating in their projects.

With its roots in the studio pedagogies of pre-academic times, this method has since been applied in many art schools. In the course of the seventies and the eighties, art schools would indeed gradually adopt some of the innovations proposed by radical artists in the sixties. At the end of the twentieth century, even the more conservative academies had finally liberated themselves from their historical burden. With postmodernism knocking at the door, art education was finally becoming modern. This would give the advanced artists and curators the opportunity to discover its potential as an alternative for the art market. After having been attacked and transformed by the avant-gardes in the course of the twentieth century, the academy of the twenty-first century could finally provide an alternative.

66

Sol LeWitt, A project admitted to Projects Class, NSCAD, Fall 1969, reproduced in : Kennedy 2012, 11.

67

James Lee Byars speaks at the NSCAD, April 21, 1970, excerpt in : Lippard 1973, 164–165.

289

fig. 1 Robert Filliou, Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Kรถnig Verlag, Cologne, 1970. Bookcover

fig. 2 John Cage's composition classes of 1958 as documented in Al Hansen, A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art, Something Else Press, New York, 1965

fig. 3 Michelangelo Pistoletto, Con questa mostra io ho liberato il mio studio, ..., invitation/poster, Galleria Sperone, Turin, 1967

fig. 4 The Atelier Populaire of May 1968 as documented in Atelier Populaire. Posters from the Revolution Paris May 1968, Dobson Books, London, 1969

fig. 5 Free International University, Kunst = Kapital. Der erweiterte Kunstbegriff als wesensgemasser Kapitalbegriff (Joseph Beuys), FIU-Koordinationsb端ro 7000 Eichen/Orangerie, Kassel, 1982.

Bookcover

fig. 6 Jรถrg Immendorffs LIDL-academy of 1968 as documented in Jรถrg Immendorff, Hier und jetzt: Das tun, was zu tun ist, Kรถnig Verlag, Cologne, 1973

fig. 7 Gary Neill Kennedy, Page 141, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design advertisement in Studio International 184, n째 984, , October 1972 (Theme issue Aspects of Art Education)

Johan Pas see page 8.

Gustave Courbet

OPEN LETTER TO STUDENTS OF THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS, 25 DECEMBER 1861 Gentlemen and dear friends, Paris, December 25, 1861 You want to open a painting studio in which you can freely continue your artistic education and you have been kind enough to offer to place it under my direction. Before I give any answer, we must be clear on the meaning of that word DIRECTION. I cannot lend myself to there being a question of professor and student in our relationship. I should explain to you what I recently said to the Congress at Anvers : I do not have, and I cannot have, students. I who believe that every artist should be his own master, can not think of making myself into a professor. I cannot teach my art, nor the art of any school, because I deny that art can be taught and because, in other terms, I maintain that art is completely individual, and the talent of each artist is only the result of his own inspiration and his own study of tradition.

In addition I say that to an artist, art or talent can only be ( in my opinion ) the means of applying his personal faculties to the ideas and the objects of the time in which he lives. Art in painting, especially, can only consist of the representation of objects that are visible and tangible to the artist.

No age can be depicted except by its own artists. I mean to say, by the artists that have lived during it. I believe that the artists of one century are completely incompetent when it comes to depicting the objects of a preceding or future century, in other words, to paint either the past or the future. It is in this sense that I deny the term historical art as applied to the past. Historical art is, by its very essence, contemporary. Every age should have its artists, who will express it and depict it for the future. An age that has not been able to express itself through its own artists does not have the right to be expressed by outside artists. This would be falsifying history. The history of an age finishes with the age itself and with those of its representatives who have expressed it. It is not given to new ages to add something to the expression of past ages, to aggrandise or to embellish the past. That which has been has been. It is the duty of the human spirit to always start anew, always in the present, taking as its point of departure that which has already been accomplished. We must never start something over again, but always march from synthesis to synthesis, from conclusion to conclusion. The true artists are those who take up their epoch at exactly the point to which it has been carried by preceding ages. To retreat is to do nothing, is to work without result, is to have neither understood nor profited from the lessons of the past.

This explains why all archaic schools have always ended by reducing themselves to the most useless compilations. I also believe that painting is an essentially CONCRETE art and can only consist of the representation of REAL AND EXISTING objects. It is a completely physical language that has as words all visible objects, and an ABSTRACT object, invisible and non-existent, is not part of

295

paintingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s domain. Imagination in art consists in knowing how to find the most complete expression of an existing object, but never in imagining, or in creating the object itself. Beauty is in nature, and in reality is encountered under the most diverse forms. As soon as it is found, it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who is able to perceive it. As soon as beauty is real and visible, it has its own artistic expression. But artificiality has no business amplifying this expression. It cannot enter into it without risking its distortion, and consequent weakening. The beauty based on nature is superior to all artistic conventions. Here is the basis of my ideas in art. With such ideas, to think of opening a school in which conventional principles would be taught would be to return to the incomplete and banal premises, which have until now everywhere directed modern art.

There can be no school, there are only painters. Schools only serve in the research on the analytical proceedings of art. No school can lead to synthesis in isolation. Painting cannot, without falling into abstraction, allow one particular aspect of the art to dominate, whether it be drawing, colour, composition, or any of the other multiple aspects whose total constitutes this art. Therefore I cannot pretend to open a school in which to mould students, to teach this or that partial tradition of art. I can only explain to artists, who will be my collaborators and not my students, the method according to which, in my opinion, one becomes a painter, which I have myself followed from my beginnings, leaving to each one the complete direction of his own individuality, the full liberty of his personal expression in the application of this method. The founding of a common studio, bringing to mind the fruitful collaborations of the studios of the Renaissance, can certainly be useful in attaining this end and contribute to opening the phase of modern painting. To attain it, I will lend myself with eagerness to all that you wish of me.

Yours with all my heart.

GUSTAVE COURBET

COLOPHON

Pro-Positions. Art and / as Education 2363–2013 is published on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. This book appears together with its accompanying volume Contradictions. Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp 2013-1663.

Both volumes also appear in a limited edition of 150 copies with silkscreened box.

Concept and general editing : Els De bruyn, Nico Dockx & Johan Pas Image processing : LIGHTMACHINE agency, www.lightmachine.Info Text editing : Duncan Brown & Nico Dockx

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Every effort has been made to determine and acknowledge the copyright ownership of individual works. If any proper acknowledgment has not been made, or permission not received, we invite copyright holders to inform us of the oversight.

Transcriptions of the interviews : Nico Dockx & Nicolien Kipp Design and typography : Jan Mast, Antwerp, 2014 Silkscreen printing of limited edition : Nico Dockx & Jan Mast, Antwerp, 2014 Printing and binding : GuidoMaes.printingdeluxe, Ghent, 2014. This book is printed on FSC certified paper The editors would like to thank Nikolaus Hirsch, Superflex, Sina Najafi, Douglas Gordon, Michel Müller, Holger Wüst, Olaf Hackl, Julika Rudelius, Joseph Grima, Tomas Saraceno, Matthias Görlich, Jan Mast, Lieve Laporte & LIGHTMACHINE agency, Dieter Lesage, Steve van den Bosch, everyone at Extra Academy — especially Mihnea Mircan and Caroline Van Eccelpoel, Louwrien Wijers, Egon Hanfstingl, Olafur Eliasson, Christina Werner, Eric Ellingsen, everyone at Institut für Raumexperimente — especially Asako Iwama, Jonas Wendelin and Marese Finge, Thomas Bayrle, Harald Pridgar, Jef Geys, Louise Osieka, Gustav Metzger, Leanne Dmyterko, Beatrice von Bismarck, Joseph Grigely and everyone who was involved in MacLean 705, Vivian Sky Rehberg, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Maria Pioppi, Alejandro Vásquez, Luisa Ungar, Mark Luyten, Erik Hagoort, Albert van Westing, Pascal Gielen, Paolo Naldini, Nicola Setari, Anna Fyrsten, Yara Jumelet, Kylian Vanderhave, Ariane Mol, Edric Ureel, Gert Verschraegen, Arthur Cools, Barbara Segaert, Bram Callaerts, Baldvin Einarsson, Noémi Tünde Angi Laczko, Dimitrios Rentoumis, Alexandros, Yukari Matsumoto, Paulina Mellado, Laleh Firoozi, Luc Deleu & T.O.P. office, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jörn Schafaff, Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), Evert Van der Jonckheyd, Borbala Kormos, Jolien Siaens, Hye In Seo, Pieter Jennes, Filip Van Dingenen, Nele Ooms, Pauline Debrichy, Bhagwati Prasad, Roger D'Hondt, Annemie van Kerckhoven, Clémentine Deliss, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Yona Friedman, Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, everyone at MuHKADEMY/ M HKA — especially Liliane De Wachter and Christine Clinckx, Lorenzo Bruni, Charles Esche, Bart De Baere, Tine Melzer, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Veroniek van Samang, Isa Tez, Sterkneus, Mima Schwahn, Willem Sarah, Ina Leys, Saori Kuno, Thomas Crombez, Thomas Grødal, Mathias Goyvaerts, Sarah De Wilde, Yiannis Papadopoulos, Nel Bonte, Kasper Bosmans, Tine Colen, Valerie de Ghellinck and all others who contributed with words, images or ideas to the realization of this publication.

Edition of 600 copies : AsaMER, an imprint of MER. Paper Kunsthalle vzw / Geldmunt 36 B-9000 Ghent / www.merpaperkunsthalle.org Limited edition of 150 copies : Curious031 / Curious vzw / Bredastraat 24 bus 4 B-2060 Antwerpen / nicodockx@yahoo.com ISBN 978 94 9177 547 5 D/2014/7852/199 © 2014 the authors / © 2014 AsaMER & Curious / All rights reserved

LIG H T M ACHINE

AGENCY

Happy Birthday Dear Academy is an initiative of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and Antwerpen Open vzw, with the support of Artesis Plantijn College Antwerp and the town of Antwerp. Happy Birthday Dear Academy is a joint project of Antwerpen Open vzw, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, MoMu – Modemuseum Province of Antwerp, MAS | Museum aan de Stroom, M HKA, University Antwerp, NICC and Antwerp Toerisme & Congres. Steering committee and art working group : Kaat Debo, Dré Demet, Gabina De Paepe, Alain De Waele, David Flamee, Paul Huvenne, Stella Lohaus, Johan Pas, Mia Prce, Sonja Spee, Eric Ubben, Walter Van Beirendonck, Katharina Van Cauteren, Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven and Johan Vansteenkiste. With thanks to the entire staff of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp, MoMu – Modemuseum Province of Antwerp, MAS | Museum aan de Stroom and M HKA. With thanks to our “presenting partners” Toerisme Vlaanderen and the National Lottery, our media partners De Standaard, Canvas, Klara, Cobra.be, HART and ATV, and our sponsors Farrow & Ball, Thalys, NMBS and HP.

MUHKADEMY 26.09.2013 – 05.01.2014 The Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp celebrates its 350th anniversary ! That is why the exhibition rooms of the upper floors of the M HKA are temporarily turned into a dépendance of the Academy. This fusion generates an artistic no-mans land in which the possibilities and the borders of both the museum and the art school will be explored. Architect Yona Friedman ( °1923 ) designed a flexible exhibition structure Iconostase en gribouilli that functions as an obstinate framework for a selection of works of the M HKA collection which reflects the relationships between art practice, art education and artistic research. On Thursday evenings, artists and other experts will express there opinion on these relationships. The master classes and seminars of MUHKADEMY are open to the public. With new work, fifteen recent alumni of the Academy will dialogue with the M HKA collection, the Iconostase en gribouilli structure and their own 'academic' background.

Concept and curating MUHKADEMY : Nico Dockx and Johan Pas MUHKADEMY contains works and/ or interventions by, amongst others : Joseph Beuys, Nel Bonte, Kasper Bosmans, Marcel Broodthaers, Lorenzo Bruni, James Lee Byars, Jacques Charlier, Tine Colen, Bart De Baere, Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, Valerie de Ghellinck, Luc Deleu & TOP-office, Sarah De Wilde, Roger D'Hondt, Nico Dockx, Olafur Eliasson & Institut für Raumexperimente, Charles Esche, Extra Academy, Robert Filliou, Yona Friedman, Jef Geys & Louise Osieka, Pascal Gielen, Mathias Goyvaerts, Thomas Grødal, Erik Hagoort, Saori Kuno, Ina Leys, Lea Lublin, Mark Luyten, Tine Melzer, Gustav Metzger & Leanne Dmyterko, Paolo Naldini, Nele Ooms, Panamarenko, Johan Pas, Michelangelo Pistoletto & Cittadellarte, Bhagwati Prasad, Raqs Media Collective, Willem Sarah, Mima Schwahn, Sterkneus, Isa Tez, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Luisa Ungar, Steve van den Bosch, Annemie van Kerckhoven, Veroniek van Samang, Alejandro Vásquez, Beatrice von Bismarck, Louwrien Wijers, ...

Photographs by Jurgen Addiers, Christine Clinckx, Jean-Baptiste Decavèle, Nico Dockx, and Stephan Peleman

PRO-POSITIONS ART AND / AS EDUCATION

2363 – 2013

Els De bruyn , Nico Dockx & Johan Pas ( eds. )

2013