Primary Forms - Lexicon

Alphabet

The alphabet is one of the most amazing inventions of humankind: several dozen simple signs are enough for us to share virtually every thought and emotion, and what we write may survive for thousands of years. But we know all too well that sometimes the alphabet alone does not suffice – not everything can be expressed with it as intended. Artists frequently seek to extend the available repertoire of signs, search for new uses of the alphabet and construct new languages to express what matters to them. hu hu hu hu krrro krrro

krrro tu tu tu tu tu tu tu hu ha hu

– recited the Serbian poet Katalin Ladik. She considered paper, the traditional medium of poetry, as too static and replaced it with her own body. The artist deprived words of their meanings, returning to the mechanical function of letters as a record of sounds. Her poetic performances transformed the alphabet and the language of written poetry into music and choreography. She prolonged vowels, repeated consonants, called new words into being, which seemed to come directly out of the bowels, throat, mouth.

The alphabet was also deconstructed by the Polish artist Ewa Partum. In her video Active Poetry. Poem by Ewa, agency over language is given to wind and water. Partum scatters letters in the wind and thrusts them onto waves, which form new words. She chose to liberate the alphabet from rigid rules and allow chance to take control over language. When invited to London’s Tate Modern in 2006 for a re-enactment of the piece, she scattered letters from James Joyce’s Ulysses in the gallery’s most famous space, the Turbine Hall. Children who came to the exhibition with their parents immediately began to collect the letters and arrange them as they pleased. When asked not to touch them by the museum staff, they rebelled and cried. Their parents eventually complained to the director of Tate Modern that the artist was disturbing the children. They approached the alphabet as a common good. After all, everyone has the right to use language and form words. Chitty-chat you old chap, you better GTB. Buh-bye!

(Kuba Depczyński)

(Ab)use of Art

Abuse of art – art is commonly seen as something to be looked at, rather than touched; admired, rather than used. Especially in European culture art became an object of celebration that takes place in spaces built specifically for this purpose: museums, contemporary art centres, galleries. Art is to be admired in a specific way, usually in white exhibition halls, where it all too often overawes or overwhelms us with its (alleged) exclusivity. Ritualised forms of reception work in a similar way to a “not for everyone” notice hanging at the entrance. From this perspective, each act of removing art from the confines of the museum is considered sacrilege, and each act of defiance of conventions – an abuse.

At the same time, we realise that art is expanding beyond the narrow limits of art institutions. It always refuses to fit within them. It happens in the countryside, in the open fields, in the wilderness, on the walls of buildings, in city squares, on lagoons and deserts. It is a wealth that expands with the number of its users and ways of using, a snowball that grows with ever more things, practices and ideas added to it. Hence, art can adopt the form of a mural, a self-learning group, a protest of images, a gigantic letter carried to the parliament, a scream in front of an embassy. The Cuban artist Tania Bruguera likens this kind of art to a hammer which can be used to carve out new forms of living together and thinking about what is common. Art is not an ordinary hammer, however, it is rather a strange tool that preserves something of its exceptionality even outside the walls of institutions. It is both itself and something else, a tool and an artwork, a hammer and a stylus of the imagination. Its specificity and penchant for doing strange things allows art to offer us a new perspective on everything that surrounds us, to make use think slightly differently about ourselves and other people who come into contact with art. Art that becomes widely available is a commonly used strange tool that only waits to be taken in someone’s hands and used together with others, as if it carried the label “use it and pass it on”.

(Kuba Szreder)

Autonomy (or independent art)

Art likes to follow its own set of rules. It’s like an independent republic in which the laws of physics and economy have been suspended, and reason may happen to be relegated to the margins. Throughout the centuries, the art world was becoming ever more similar to a well-guarded fortress (museum), in which a circle of the initiated (geniuses), endowed with superpowers (talent), constructed mysterious objects (artworks) that emanated an other-worldly energy (aura). In the 19th century, the view was finally consolidated that the most natural environment for art was the museum, where one could contemplate things that acquired the special status of artworks. Accordingly, what’s inside was art, what’s outside could not be art in any measure. Artworks were therefore liberated from any obligations imposed on other man-made artefacts, be it a hammer, a kick scooter or an egg whisk. Artworks were not meant to be used for fun or labour, they did not make life easier, but they also weren’t supposed to make it much harder. Their function was, well... to have no function at all. Simultaneously, the idea was still holding strong that art was meant to elevate and ennoble humans and enrich them spiritually. One way or another, art became a special area of human activity, unregulated by earthly rules, a magic land where ordinary mortals could only contemplate those magic objects created by the chosen ones in whose ears graceful muses whispered. This is autonomy, the independent kingdom of art!

Admittedly, many artists found this concept of art unbearably archaic. The 20th century was marked by a rebellion against the ivory tower of art. Dadaists, the Fluxus movement and creators of happenings from the 1960s sought to bring art closer to daily life, to strip it of its mythical costume and finally put it to work. In consequence, the art of our times has gained presence in such areas of human life as school education, scientific experiments, gardening and climate protection movements. So long the autonomous land, hail the compost heap!

Yet, the dream of an independent republic of art has not faded completely. Art history knows examples of states called into being by artists. The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, the Republic of Zaqistan, or the NSK State are entities that issue their own passports, postage stamps, IDs, and some of them even have a constitution, an anthem, a flag, mint their own coins, and one even produces perfume with a “national” fragrance. But these artistic states are hard to locate on the map. For example, the Elgaland-Vargaland territory, graciously ruled by the Swedish artists Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren, can only be visited in dreams or when running a high fever.

(Sebastian Cichocki)

Break

Pause, break, slit in time, digestion, fermentation, imagination, listening, immersion, contamination. Interval as room for that which is possible, as the creation of the conditions for something new to happen.

Break – a welcome moment of catching your breath, carefreeness and fun. It is usually understood as a moment of freedom from the rigour of lessons, activities and duties. But perhaps it is exactly the other way round: schools exist only for the sake of breaks and genuine learning doesn’t take place in the classroom, but in the corridor, sports field and schoolyard?

In 2015, two Brazilian artists, Tainá Azeredo and Cláudio Bueno, founded Intervalo-Escola, which means “school break”. It does not have a permanent location, but rather appears unexpectedly in various places and institutions. Nor does it have a fixed curriculum – this school is all about never-ending breaks, during which every person can suggest the next fun activity. Knowledge produced at Intervalo Escola is generated by all of its participants, who decide themselves what they want to do together and how. The artists emphasise that according to their educational model opportunities for learning together do not arise during lessons, but during relaxation, cooking and eating, naps, casual conversations, walks, games and fun.

Perhaps we also need to take a break from museums and art?

For many artists a break turned out to be the most important lesson. The American artist and poet Peter Nadin decided to take a break from art in 1992.

He stopped exhibiting his works and moved out of the city. He bought a farm from the early 19th century located on the outskirts of New York City and began breeding pigs, chickens, ducks, goats and bees. Although during that time he stayed away from museums, galleries, critics and curators, he soon realised that farmer’s work was also a precious and edifying form of art. Inspired by this discovery, he transformed his farm into the quasi-institution Old Field Farm/Art & Agriculture, which engaged in agricultural and artistic production. Inspired by his farming experience, Nadin’s current works are often made using materials from the farmstead, such as cashmere wool and beeswax. In 2006, he published the book The First Mark: Unlearning How to Make Art. (Bogna Stefańska)

Climate

If we were to leave school familiar with just one topic, it should be climate. Human-induced planetary changes: global warming, rising sea and ocean levels, extinction of species, destruction of ecosystems, disturbed circulation of chemical elements in nature, will determine how life is lived on Planet Earth for hundreds, if not thousands of years to come. The response of our and the next generations of Homo sapiens to the question of climate, natural environment and ecology will decide whether we can adapt to these changes in any measure and reduce their negative consequences or else experience them as a series of disasters beyond control.

The problematics of climate change abounds in contradictions and paradoxes – global warming is a process too vast and massively distributed in time for us to see and grasp it in its entirety. At the same time, however, we experience it directly with every drop of acid rain and PM 2.5 dust particles suspended in the air.

On the one hand, it demonstrates the incredible agency of humans, who, after all, affect the functioning of the entire planet. On the other hand, we all feel helpless in its face and efforts towards reducing it appear pitiful. The complexity of climate crisis compels us to change everything at the same time: politics and lifestyle, economy and values, individual and social behaviour, language and imagination.

We can learn what to do in the face of climate change from the Indian engineer and educator Sonam Wangchuk, who gained renown for his work in the Ladakh region. Inhabitants of this high-altitude and desert region are stricken with ever more severe droughts caused by global warming. In order to tackle the water crisis, Wangchuk and his team began raising ice stupas in Ladakh to store frozen water in the form of conical shaped ice heaps. It does not take complex technology to build them, just a skilful use of the force of gravity and local differences in temperature. Melting slowly, the stupas provide the people of Ladakh with water during long rainless months. What’s more, as more than a dozen metres high ice sculptures set in the middle of the desert, they make beautiful and Surreal artworks.

Wangchuk realises that his efforts are not enough to cope with climate change across the planet. That’s why he has engaged in educational activities for years.

He creates new curricula for schools and universities and sets up his own institutions that place emphasis on sustainable, ecological and environmental education. Who knows, perhaps the construction of ice stupas will soon be embraced in the core curriculum of Polish schools?

(Bogna Stefańska)

Collective Action

Some people take great satisfaction from collective action. It allows for sharing resources, learning from each other and developing competence in group work and self-organisation. Does modern-day school offer opportunities for collective action other than team sports played in PE classes? Could the gym hall host lessons resembling group investigations into movement pursued at the beginning of the 1970s by Steve Paxton, one of the founders of the dance technique called contact improvisation? How would Game on Morel’s Hill unfold on the school pitch – the “visual manoeuvres” initiated by the artist duo KwieKulik between the participants of the Young Creative Workshop in Elbląg in 1971?

In Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s work, community-forming artistic activities happened in a specific place, which for many artists became something of a school.

That place was the Halprin residence designed by the architect, urban planner and ecologist Lawrence Halprin in Kentfield, California. A dance terrace built on a woody slope for the choreographer Anna Halprin became a site of improvisations based on assigned tasks as well as movement rituals. It hosted workshops devoted to art, healing and social change conducted with a multiracial community.

Modern-day school seeks to keep up with trends in education. Teachers ever more often organise classes outside the school building, combining the acquisition of knowledge about the surrounding world with experiments and the use of technology. But there is more to collaboration and collective creative work than simply gaining more knowledge as they foster empathy, develop emotional intelligence, creativity and the sense of agency, which are indispensable at every stage of child’s development.

Group activity can result from a spontaneous and ephemeral initiative, as in some street actions in urban space by the Polish experimental theatre and artistic collective Akademia Ruchu [Academy of Movement]. It can be done without a leader, as in the case of the New York collective of choreographers and dancers that functioned from 1962 to 1964 in a space of interdisciplinary exchange at Judson Memorial Church, from which the collective took its name: Judson Dance Theater.

Artists from the circles of Akademia Ruchu and Judson postulated communality and egalitarian interpersonal relations. They created collaborative improvisations that addressed everyday life and relied on the corporeality of performers’ bodies, and their methods grew directly out of counterculture and participatory forms of social protest: marching, taking over urban space, sit-ins. Nowadays, a similar political sensibility informs the actions of the School Strike for Climate, which began as a group of high school students and developed into a dynamic social movement that taps into the performativity of protest and social media to manifest emotions, express opposition and formulate scenarios for the future.

(Alicja Czyczel)

Colour / Theory of colour

It is not what the eye catches mechanically that matters in the process of seeing, but the consciousness man has of his seeing – claimed the Polish avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński in his Theory of Vision.

Not only people see colours. Dogs and cats can best see yellow and blue. Birds see ultraviolet. Reptiles see infrared, and many mammals are colour blind, unable to make out the difference between green and red. However, as theory of colour posits, colour is just a subjective mental impression generated in the brain of the observer, such as a human being or an animal.

Investigating various ways, possibilities and limitations related to colour perception, the Vietnamese collective Art Labor combined art and science in their project The Adventure of Color Wheel at the Pediatrics Department of the Eye Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Art Labor fused their discoveries with artistic imagination in their design of colour solutions for the hospital and a series of murals. On the ceiling of the main entrance hall they installed revolving letters E, which look like abstract paintings while testing the vision of illiterate individuals. In turn, in the halls of the Pediatrics Department, patients’ eyes can follow wall graphic pieces with thousands of colourful wheels and painterly depictions of imagined landscapes. The hospital’s new interiors not only relax and fascinate young patients, but also offer a useful tool for a range of diagnostic tests.

Artists can also find concentration on colours soothing. In the 1970s, the Polish artist Andrzej Szewczyk sought to escape painting and tiresome challenges of creative work in every possible way. In this he resorted to the most radical means: he denied himself the possibility of using artistic imagination and the very idea of creation. Instead, he embarked on covering the pages of children’s colouring books with primary colours, strictly following attached models and instructions. Szewczyk stated: “For the first time I rejected all artistic, aesthetic and non-aesthetic dilemmas, and questions about all these values became groundless for me.”

(Bogna Stefańska)

Conceptualism

In 1971, one of the fathers of conceptualism (a tendency that definitely had more fathers than mothers), John Baldessari, took part in an exhibition at the University in Halifax, Canada. He could not go there in person, so he asked students to write the following sentence on the wall multiple times on his behalf: “I will not make any more boring art”. His work could be considered a joke about conceptual art – devoid of decoration, raw, somewhat big-headed. Conceptual art, which enjoyed its heyday at the turn of the 1970s, developed its own characteristic language. Galleries and museums presented paper sheets with typewritten texts, blackboards covered with notes in chalk, audio and video works addressing linguistics and philosophy, didactic panels. Conceptualism strongly resembles school teaching tools. Assuming that contemporary art mostly attracts people curious about the world and adventure seekers, conceptualism would be an art for nerds and swots.

In the 1990s, the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara presented paintings from his most famous series Today on the walls of kindergartens in Asia, Africa, Europe and Australia. The series was developed without interruption from 1966 until the artist’s death in 2014. The black backdrops of the works feature dates carefully painted in white, marking the day when a given painting came into being. The month name is provided in the language of the country where the piece was created. According to the artist, paintings removed from their natural habitat, i.e. the museum, acquire a different function – they allow children in kindergartens to learn digits, month names, talk about the passage of time, about the fact that things occur one after another, and repeat themselves.

Many works of conceptual art are invisible, devoid of a material form. Rather than in the object, conceptual artists take interest in the idea, the concept itself.

Whether it is executed at all is of secondary importance.

A classic conceptualist, Luis Camnitzer, who is not only an artist, but also a renowned teacher and writer on education, likened the art world to an Aladdin’s lamps storage. We collect and admire the “vessels” themselves, we view them in museums, contemplate their ornaments and forms. But what really interests us is the genie inside the lamp. We believe he is there with his superpowers. From this perspective, conceptual art would mean letting the genie out of the lamp and leaving the lamp in the storage. The genie remains invisible, but no longer contained in the vessel that restricts his movements, and which distracts attention from possibly the most important thing in art… a good idea!

(Sebastian Cichocki)

Deschooling

Deschooling society – how to teach independent and critical thinking? How to educate free people? How can hierarchical institutions prepare them for life in a society of equal individuals? What is the role of games, fun, experimentation, unfettered discovery of the borders of yourself, others and the surrounding world?

These are not only classic questions posed by critical pedagogy, but also the keynote of various experiments conducted on the borderland of art and education.

After all, the foundation of reflection about contemporary art was laid by Friedrich Schiller in Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. In these letters, which emanate the spirit of the French Revolution, the German philosopher and playwright does away with the vision of a barracked society under authoritarian bureaucratic control, in which a narrow group tells others what to think and how to live. Such concepts are usually justified by the necessity to leash the supposed anarchic nightmare, untamed egoistic drives, insubordinate and stupid masses. Perhaps somewhat idealistically, Schiller believes that the only true human being is the one what plays, and the foundations of freedom are laid in an unfettered game of the senses with the canons of classic beauty, in which the impulse of liberty emerges out from under the yoke of necessity and the senses grow sharper in a skirmish with the aesthetic ideal.

Both in Schiller’s times and in our post-truth era the point is not to allow everyone to say whatever pops in their mind, but to say things that make sense, with a critical distance to oneself and a sense of responsibility for others. Games and plays offered by art can be used as a testing ground for exercises in liberty, where differing views incessantly collide, various artistic propositions compete for recognition, and people learn to respect difference and the belief that everything can always be something else. An ordinary urinal can be an artwork, and Mona Lisa can have a moustache drawn on her face.

Throughout the centuries, Schiller’s thoughts became invigorated by freedom-oriented artistic traditions. A popular philosophical parable in the contemporary art world is the story of the ignorant schoolmaster, evoked by the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. The protagonist teaches in a language he does not know, and his ignorance encourages students to build a community of equal people who learn from each other. This anecdotal tale is the starting point for reflection not only about pedagogical models, but above all about life in the society formed by free people and the role of art in bringing about this (so remote) state of affairs.

Contemporary art typically escapes its own schools. After all, art students in training are not supposed to copy the achievements of their professors or repeat the canon, but rather find their own path. The teacher may only show them how to walk the devious paths and gain orientation in the wilderness, whose outlines are constantly shifting and maps quickly become obsolete. Something that is art today can no longer be art tomorrow, and something currently not recognised as art may very soon become the highlight of the season. Teachers-students set forth together on expeditions into the unknown to discover new territories.

Of course, the experience and knowledge of the previous generations comes in useful during such travels as the territory of art is full of looped trails and bumpy roads, on which one can easily get lost. What is more, such journeys into the unknown are never solitary, they are undertaken together, in broader groups, teams.

After all, borderlands may be dangerous places and one should not only learn freedom, but also know how to defend it.

(Kuba Szreder)

Do it yourself / Let’s do it together

Do it yourself. Isn’t everyone who creates an artist? According to the conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, each of us is a creative individual, and therefore “everyone is an artist”. An artwork is not only an object on display at the museum, but also every thought, conversation, action. Art may adopt the form of a simple instruction to follow on your own, as the Fluxus international group believed, which in the 1950s began to prepare sets of artistic instructions for everyone to put into practice.

Let’s do it together. Is the artist always alone? According to the theorist Stephen Wright, there is something mutual and contagious in doing things: “Here’s a chord. Here’s another. Now let’s start a band.” Art is where people gather to create something together, while the technique and effect depend only on the imagination and available materials.

Exactly fifty years ago, in 1971, the curator Frederico Morais organised six editions of “Creative Sundays” at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio De Janeiro.

Morais wanted to confront the very idea of the weekend, associated with conventional and solitary ways of spending free time, an almost bureaucratic obligation, boredom. Guided by the belief that all people were creative by nature, he wanted to let them make a creative use of their spare time. He thought that we failed to embrace the possibility to create only when prevented from doing so by political repressions or parental discipline and the rigid order of education. He believed art should be an experimental collective exercise in liberty. Each Sunday, the gathered audience – artists, parents with children, teenagers, passers-by – were given a different set of materials: paper, threads, fabric, soil and sand, musical instruments and participants’ bodies, as the only available “material” for the day.

In the blink of an eye, the creative impulse and collective effort transformed the gathered objects into spontaneous exhibitions packed with sculptures, poems buried underground, choreography, hastily written songs and invented physical exercises. The creative force awakened on Sunday afternoons gave rise to something created together.

If each of us holds a creative spark, perhaps next Sunday we can take art in our own hands again and meet at the playground or schoolyard to spend the day doing things together?

(Bogna Stefańska)

Education

Can education be art? Artistic practice and pedagogy have always gone hand in hand. Joseph Beuys used to say: “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art”.

There are countless examples of artists-pedagogues, who created their own work while teaching the future generations of artists and not only. The Belgian conceptual artist Jef Geys taught at the junior high school in the town of Balen for more than twenty years since 1960. During the “Positive Aesthetics” course, which he designed himself, he created and learnt together with his students, blurring the border between art, education, and everyday life. Geys’ classes were based on reading newspapers and picking out key concepts and issues. Research and discussion preceded creative and educational processes, and the role of educational props was played by works of artist friends, such as Lucio Fontana, Gilbert and George, Jan Vercruysse, on loan for the lessons. Geys also collaborated with teachers of other subjects, such as geography and foreign languages.

Divisions between activities in the fields of art and education were increasingly abandoned in the 1990s. The tendency for education, pedagogical systems and alternative ways of learning to occur in artistic circulation in the form of curatorial or artistic practice was publicised by the art scholar and theorist Irit Rogoff in her text Turning, published in e-flux in 2008. Known as the educational turn, this phenomenon manifests itself through attempts to answer the question: what can be learnt in the museum aside from objects on display and educational programmes around them. Education is seen here as something with the potential for acting together on the basis of experience and process, and as a platform of interdisciplinary exchange. A good example of such approach is the Aneducation programme, accompanying documenta 14 in 2017, which aimed to question the understanding of the process of cognition as an institutional practice entangled in the relations of power. Activities within Aneducation included group listening, walking, gesticulating, performing, doing, reading and holding a dialogue with others as forms of learning.

Art may become an educational model. The experimental pedagogue and conceptual artist Luis Camnitzer proposed to draw an analogy between the development of literacy skills and artistic education. Working around the widespread conviction that learning to read must precede learning to write, the artist sought liberation from this hierarchy. He followed the model of art, in which since the beginning of the last century artists abandoned the format of learning by copying existing works – “reading” – in favour of “writing”, that is developing one’s own language independently from widespread models. Camnitzer argues that art has an emancipatory educational potential, and asks a different question: is it possible to teach art at all?

(Helena Czernecka)

Experiment

1. A scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact.

2. A course of action tentatively adopted without being sure of the outcome.

– Oxford English Dictionary Experimenting is one of the most enjoyable and attractive methods of learning.

When we experiment, something finally happens, and dull exercises from school textbooks materialise in front of our very eyes: cress does really grow on cotton wool, reagents in phials and beakers change their colour, and a beam of life passing through a slit behaves like a wave. It is such experiments that allow for investigating the phenomena around us.

Experimenting is also one of the most pleasurable and interesting ways of making art. Artists who experiment do not focus on the pursuit of a specific premeditated effect, but on the very process of putting their idea into practice. They specify initial conditions, set creative machinery in motion and observe what happens.

What will happen if they hang canvasses in the forest, exposing them to rain, mudslides and encounters with animals? What will happen if they write a score of a musical piece by throwing a dice? What will a film look like that consists of nothing but sunset scenes?

We could try to fuse biology, physics and chemistry lessons with art and art history classes into a single experimental subject. This is how many artists work, for example the Cooking Sections duo, who experimented with using artworks as innovative tools to tackle drought in Sicily. In collaboration with agronomists from the local university, they built three scientific-artistic installations resembling minimalist sculptures to water citrus trees in Palermo, a city engulfed by water crisis. Built of clay water pipes and bricks and colourful mesh made of a material designed specifically for this purpose, the structures generated a unique microclimate that enabled plants to absorb water directly from cool humid air. The installations and trees were connected to sensors measuring the parameters of the microclimate and its influence on plants. The gathered data was published both on site and online, which allowed the audience to monitor the course of the experiment in real time. The experiment conducted by Cooking Sections ultimately turned out successful both as a watering device and as an artwork devoted to water crisis.

(Bogna Stefańska & Kuba Depczyński)

Fooling around

Laughter is contagious. When caused by positive feelings, it can release superfluous tension from our bodies, offer a sense of relief and uplifting joy (endorphins!).

As in Antonia Baehr’s performance Laugh, in which the artist performs laughter outside its usual context in an aural form, like a musical score, and the audience cannot help but spontaneously burst out laughing.

Joke has a special place at school, it may be glued to a colleague’s backs, noted down in notebook margins, drawn on benches and the blackboard, posted on TikTok and shared as a meme. It is accompanied by choreographies of furtive gestures, winks and data flows.

Laughter can also carry subversive content – it may become a commentary that ridicules and denounces undesired attitudes, phenomena and actions, as well as a tool of critique of the value system and authorities. This happened in dance and cabaret performances by the avant-garde dancer, pantomimist and actress Valeska Gert, which relied on the mimical expression of emotions and expressiveness of the body to challenge bourgeois morality and mores of the era.

Discerning comic qualities in people and situations may foster community formation. Fooling around at school integrates the group and may offer a moment of liberation from disciplining the bodies of pupils, who sit in rows of benches from an early age and silently carry out tasks assigned by their teachers. Loud untamed laughter engages the whole body and oxygenates the organism.

Experimental pedagogy and alternative education pay considerable attention to pupils’ individual interests, talent, needs, and to developing their social competences without excessive supervision, grading and textbooks. Learning is accompanied by physical activities, games, trips, conversations, rest and fun, which help absorb knowledge. Sitting on the floor, murmuring, walking around the classroom, fidgeting on a chair – this is exactly what some of us need to learn better and enjoy it.

(Alicja Czyczel)

Foreign languages

Do we really learn foreign languages at school? It would seem so at first glance; after all, school timetables are full of Spanish, French, German and even Latin classes. In reality, we learn a certain “language” on every lesson: body language in PE classes, language of literature in English classes, language of art in art classes, language of science in biology and chemistry classes. Although we don’t always understand them, these languages can hardly be recognised as genuinely “foreign”. After all, each was created and is used by representatives of the Homo sapiens species.

The Korean artist Kim Beom has been thinking for many years about ways to include the non-human world into the education process. In his works, the roles of students are played by various objects: the artist lectures a stone on the beauty of poetry, explains to a ship in a bottle what the sea is, and clarifies the difference between a human being and an object to a plastic watering can. Despite the efforts, the disciples remain completely indifferent and insensitive to the languages of literature, biology, physics and history. Beom shows that although we learn a lot at school about humans and the reality they have created, we unlearn contact with the non-human world at the same time. Paradoxically, the more human we become, the more difficult we find it to communicate with what surrounds us.

The world abounds in non-human languages. Water and air, flowers and rocks, cats and dogs, mushrooms and trees hold an ongoing conversation, and we don’t understand a thing! Nobody taught us at school how to communicate with a boulder or an amphibian, or even how to derive joy from mutual incomprehension. Can we imagine what learning a “foreign language” could look like? Beom dropped us some hints in his book The Art of Transforming, published in 1997: How to Become a Rock Choose an appropriate spot.

A spot with more stones around is recommended. Assume a low position – sitting or lying, but in harmony with the surroundings.

Freeze still and stop breathing.

Don’t think about anything, care neither about the season nor the weather. Don’t allow anything to grab your attention, not even a storm or another cataclysm.

Don’t pay attention even if you’re about to fall down from your spot. Don’t worry and keep your position.

Even if moss has grown on a patch of soil near you or worms are building their nests, don’t destroy them, leave them alone.

(Kuba Depczyński)

Imagination

We learn a lot at school about facts from the past: what happened, where and when, who conquered whom, where borders ran, which year a given poem or book was penned. We find out a bit about how it is: what an animal cell consists of, how modern-day English grammar works, where copper deposits are located in our country, the difference between the European Parliament and the Council of Europe. However, we are told less about how it will be: about what is approaching, about the world we will inhabit in ten or twenty years. But does school teach us at all about how it could be?

According to many contemporary thinkers, the greatest crisis we’re facing today is the crisis of imagination. Philosophers, scientists and artists warn us that we’ve lost the crucial ability to imagine reality anew. To create new worlds. To formulate previously unknown narratives and visions. Today, even the boldest and most radical proposals for change seem rather down-to-earth and not far-removed from what we already know. The only solution we’re able to come up with when faced with such problems as climate change, rampant social inequalities or the crisis of democracy is “business as usual”. In order to really tackle them head-on, we need to go beyond how it used to be, how it is and how it will be. We need to imagine how it could be.

Using your imagination is something that can be learnt and developed through art. Active in the 1960s, artists, activists and theorists affiliated with the Situationist International believed that we could begin training our imagination simply by walking around the city. They developed their own method of casual urban strolling, which they called drift (la dérive). It’s simple: when drifting one should avoid familiar paths, beaten tracks and conventional routes, allowing oneself instead to be attracted by the ambiances of individual districts and places, to follow surprising hints and embrace unexpected encounters and plot twists.

Situationists perceived drifting, which set imagination free, as the first step towards changing the world. What would a city look like if it wasn’t organised around efficient thoroughfares, shopping malls and tourist landmarks? A city that would act as a source of joy of aimless strolls, enable the experience of a variety of ambiances and constantly surprise and stimulate the imagination of its dwellers? What would their daily life look like? And their culture? How would their society be organised?

(Kuba Depczyński)

Instruction

Many activities in our lives and things that we possess involve instructions. Flatpack furniture, white goods manuals, table and workplace etiquette, team sport rules, religious commandments, even cooking recipes. All of them are based on texts that tell us how to do something or how to behave.

The art world model stands in stark contrast, for example, to the circulation of recipes, which can be accessed at any moment, multiple times, and modified as you see fit. Meanwhile, museums show almost nothing but ready objects that are unique, material, ascribed to a specific author. But it turns out that art is also no stranger to instructions, and they even gained popularity in this field in the mid20th century. The first artwork known in art history based on an instruction was the wedding present given in 1919 by Marcel Duchamp to his sister Suzanne, who was two years younger than him. The artist was afraid that his parcel from the USA might not arrive in France on time, so he sent a telegram describing how his work should be executed. It was a geometry book hanging on the porch, whose pages were meant to be turned by wind and rain.

In the 1960s, the art of instructions was popularised by conceptual artists. Paintings were sometimes made by gallery technical staff members following instructions sent by artists, as with Sol LeWitt’s abstract canvasses. Instructions, scores and guides were commonly used during that period. They served to organise happenings, send conceptual works to exhibitions (this format was popularised by the curator Lucy Lippard) and distribute musical pieces (La Monte Young wrote them in the form of short poetic descriptions to be executed, for example, by releasing a swarm of butterflies in a concert hall or making a fruit salad by the orchestra members). An advantage of an artwork based on an instruction over a single unique object is its universal accessibility, as it is usually free of charge, unburdened by conservation duties, the art market, and other constraints.

This tradition was addressed by the artist and filmmaker Miranda July, who collaborated with Harrell Fletcher from 2002 to 2009 on the Learning to Love You More project. July regularly published simple instructions online: “Grow a garden in an unexpected spot”, “Take a picture of your parents kissing”, “Make a field guide to your yard”, etc. More than eight thousand people participated in her action by sending in photos and texts documenting the execution of the tasks. The effects of those art exercises were later widely exhibited in American museums and galleries.

In 2013, the Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist published an anthology of more than three hundred instructions formulated by contemporary artists, gathered under the simple title Do It. One of the iterations of this project, created under the auspices of the UNICEF, featured contemporary art instructions for children.

(Sebastian Cichocki)

Library

The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the school library is a nostalgic atmosphere and volumes giving out a dusty smell, arranged in orderly rows, in alphabetical order. Is this the only use of library resources? What else can be done with books?

When asked if he read books, the British artist John Latham might have replied: I devour them. In 1966, Latham and a group of his students subjected to a literal and metaphorical “test of taste” their much-loathed book by the renowned American art critic Clement Greenberg. The group tore it into tiny pieces, which they later chewed and spat out. The chewed remnants were carefully collected and left to ferment. When Latham received his overdue notice from the library at Saint Martin’s School of Art, he returned a phial with the chewed content. That gesture cost him his teaching post. That was how the piece Still and Chew. Art and Culture 1966–1967 came into being, which currently belongs to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Latham frequently used books in his work – he cut out their fragments, glued them together, covered them with plaster and paint or burnt them. He created cycles of “skoob” works, that is “books” written backwards. In 1991, he worked with the most significant books in the history of humankind in God is Great, a conceptual piece comprising copies of the Bible, the Quran and a volume of the Talmud, each cut in half and bonded to a glass panel. But Latham was not a butcher of the printed word. A recurring motif in his art is the power of books, which takes the viewer away from the physical world and into the spiritual sphere or imagined universes.

A similar use for books was found by Marcel Broodthaers. After twenty years of attempts to become a successful poet, in 1963 he chose to become an artist and began creating objects. He commemorated that moment of symbolical passage by squeezing fifty unsold copies of his volume of poetry into plaster. Thus, he created his first art object. Broodthaers described the difference between poetry and art with irony: “Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway. At the end of three months I showed what I had produced to Philippe Edouard Toussaint, the owner of the Galerie St Laurent. ‘But it is art’, he said, ‘and I will willingly exhibit all of it.’ What is it? In fact, objects.”

(Kuba Depczyński)

The Passage and Measurement of time

Time at public schools is measured in precise units marked by a sound signal – the school bell. Each lesson lasts 45 minutes, each break – 15 minutes. One must not be late and confuse time for learning with time for rest, eating, fun.

Meticulous measurement of time spent in the school bench is accompanied by reflection that learning takes considerable time, including free time, which needs to be devoted to doing your homework and preparing for tests. What attitude to being in time, its passing and transience does school shape in us? How do we think about spending time together and how about our individual sense of time?

Do we talk about the fact that some people need more time for certain tasks and activities than others? Are we able to accept it and do we find a language to describe it? Instead of “competing”, “outdoing each other in progress at school”, “winning” and replicating the CPF cycle (“cram, pass, forget”), can we, as the school community, create time and space for slowing down, learning from our own mistakes, getting bored, losing ourselves in something and building interpersonal relations?

Contemporary art offers inspiration and tools for experiencing and making use of time in more creative and emancipatory ways. Even at the museum, where discipline is maintained, where we behave according to mastered rules and remain under supervision, an encounter with a work of art can become an opening intellectual and sensual experience. In the 1970s, Tehching Hsieh, an artist of Taiwanese origin, began a series of performances in New York that lasted for a year.

During one of them, Time Clock Piece (One Year Performance 1980–1981), he punched a time clock every hour on the hour, engaging himself physically and mentally in this demanding and exhausting performative action, which left a trace in the form of video documentation.

In 1977, the artist duo Marina Abramović and Ulay spent sixteen hours in the gallery. They sat with their backs against each other, their hair tied together, surrounded only by gallery employees, who documented the process. After a dozen or so hours, when the duo was very close to exhaustion, the audience was allowed into the gallery, which compelled Abramović and Ulay to treat the viewers’ presence as an energy boost and extend the performance by one hour.

A totally different approach, focussed less on expressing intensity and liminal experience and more on details and the impression of time becoming denser, is used in her performances by the choreographer Maria Hassabi. Staging from 2017 is a piece presented at museums and galleries which combines choreography for a group of performers, light and sound installation, and an enormous pink carpet. Movement composed in a loop develops extremely slowly and lasts as long as the opening times of the institutions that hosts it. We may therefore leave the museum in the morning and come back in the evening to find out that the performers, akin to snails, have only moved to the other end of the room, renouncing the spectacular for the sake of change, mindfulness and continuity.

Never pressed for time.

(Alicja Czyczel)

Practice/ Excercise

The acquiring of knowledge and skills – the education system as a whole – is based on constant practice. We practise by repeating, copying texts, drawing, completing tasks and doing homework. Children at school practise in order to absorb the core curriculum. Artists at the academy practise to master a given medium.

Classes held at the experimental Black Mountain College in the 1930s under the supervision of Josef Albers consisted in famous exercises in interaction of colour.

Students used paint to combine colours in different configurations and thereby to understand their specificity and the way they influenced each other. Exercises adopted a much more spontaneous and polyphonic form in Creativity Exercises created in 1975 by Miklós Erdély and Dóra Maurer, an amateur art course held at Budapest’s Ganz-MAVAG factory. Combining various disciplines and introducing movement, music, acting, film and photography in their exercises, Erdély and Maurer founded them on participation, group action and the practice of imitation.

An exemplary exercise: one person covers themselves with a piece of fabric and assumes a most complicated pose. The other participants try to guess and assume the same pose. The concealed person may be additionally represented in a visual form. The idea behind the exercise was to develop creativity and a collective creative process.

However, practice does not always necessarily mean progress. What if an exercise led to unlearning instead of learning? Unlearning Exercises is a research project run by the artist Annette Krauss in collaboration with the Casco Art Institute. It is based on exercises devised for art institutions with the goal of unlearning conventional ways of thinking. A fixation with immediacy and growth is replaced by a process of gradual change oriented to the culture of equality and community. One of the exercises consists in achieving balance together in a group by holding each other’s arms while sitting in a circle on chairs and balancing on two legs; another is based on cooking and tidying together. Krauss’ exercises challenge the normative mode of learning and the institutionalisation of knowledge. Regardless of the goal it serves, practice is said to make perfect.

(Helena Czernecka)

School / building

The most typical image of the school building largely depends on the local history of education. The representation of the school in toy sets and simplified icons that serve visual information depends on the cultural circle from which they originate; it may feature a facade with a clock or a bell tower. In Poland, the school building is a relatively new architectural invention, since universal education is also a quite recent social achievement here.

The idea of a school building recognisable to every person familiar with European culture originated during the most intensive period of developing educational infrastructure, when the architectural milieu learned the lesson of modernity given

by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe, and began to use prefab components as the result of newly-gained knowledge.

The school building is detached and horizontal, which means that its width is greater than its height. It is characterised by sparse architectural detail, which turns the shapes and rhythms of windows into the most prominent and recognisable element of its architecture.

Even in the era before Modernism, when school buildings were raised in the form of Gothic castles or Baroque palaces, architects invested efforts in designing possibly the largest windows in order to allow plenty of sunlight into the classrooms.

Modernity removed the historical guise from such buildings, shifting emphasis to its functional characteristics.

The greatest number of schools were built in Poland from the second half of the 1950s to the first half of the 1970s. During that era, the development of the construction industry was mainly based on seeking typicality, motivated by a double search: for ideal models on the one hand, and savings on the other hand. The most recognisable school building prototypes were designed in Zofia Fafiusowa and Tadeusz Węglarski’s studio as part of the initiative “One Thousand Schools for the Millenary of the Polish State”.

The landscape of the country and the imagination of its people became filled to the greatest extent with buildings designed during the final phase of that project, those which entered serial production, with seven-partite windows as their characteristic feature.

(Paweł Brylski)

Playground

“Is fun an exhibition?

The exhibition is a work of children.

There is no exhibition.

It’s an exhibition just because children are playing art museum.

It’s an exhibition just for those who are not playing”.

Play and art have a lot in common. Both playgrounds and art projects are something of models of reality. Playing seems an incredibly universal activity, which brings to mind pleasure, freedom, happiness, and childhood days. Not only children have fun, but also adults, and even animals. It is a tool that can be used to animate space, integrate the society and even deal with your problems.

Artists have observed the proximity of art and play for decades. In 1968, the Danish artist and activist Palle Nielsen created the exhibition titled The Model at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in the form of a gigantic playground for children.

It was supposed to become a model of a quality society, devised as a zone of carefree fun, where children could jump from bridges, swing on tyres, engage in DIY, bathe in a pool filled with foam rubber pieces, paint, and play music from gramophones. In a similar spirit, Playscapes, the playground created by the designer and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, resulted from his reflection on how to develop the best possible environment for children to discover the world. Playscapes consists of a set of colourful metal and concrete architectural elements installed in a clearing in Atlanta, USA, in 1976. Instead of telling children what to do (here you swing, here you climb), Noguchi created a space of endless exploration. At the 16th Istanbul Biennial in 2019, the artist Monster Chetwynd decided to allow children into a disturbing, or even terrifying, environment: in one of the local parks she built an interactive sculpture / playground (Gorgon’s Head Playground), inspired by the head of Medusa discovered in the city’s Basilica Cistern from the 6th century.

Works such as those by Nielsen, Noguchi, and Chetwynd are situated halfway between an educational project, an art installation and a protest. They develop a space in which play becomes a means to enjoy the freedom of creation and speech, a place where creativity and imagination come back to life. Artistic playgrounds are experimental educational facilities, new schools, in which the existing order is questioned and reversed: fun plays a key role, made possible by resources available for unrestrained creative use. If schools and museums were permanently transformed into playgrounds, we could perhaps fulfil artists’ dreams of spaces where economic rules, the order of labour as well as parental and state power are no longer in force.

(Bogna Stefańska)

School collection

Does a school need a collection of artworks? Educational institutions do collect many interesting objects that can easily be mistaken for art, such as wooden compasses and rulers, portraits of national bards, and stuffed badgers. However, they do not store art objects that have a title, an author and a year date. After all, what could they be used for at school?

The British painter and educator Nan Youngman believed that every school should have an art collection. Born in 1906, the artist devoted almost her entire adult life to promoting education through art. She believed that propagating knowledge about artists and their work as well as direct contact with artworks offered the best method to develop creative imagination, sensitivity, and learn to live together in the society. Her views were hugely influenced by the traumatic experience of World War II – she often emphasised that artistic work was the best tool to build a new pacifistic world without violence and hatred.

In 1947, Youngman initiated the pioneering programme Pictures for Schools, whose goal was to supply British schools with contemporary art collections.

During the action that lasted until 1969, every year a prestigious London museum or gallery hosted a special exhibition of artworks created with the intention of being presented and used in schools. Such exhibitions were visited by school groups from across the country. Teachers and pupils viewed the shows, voted for their favourite pieces and selected those to be purchased by their schools.

The artworks were sent to schools along with instructions on how to use them as educational props, lesson scenarios and texts written by artists.

Few people remember today about Nan Youngman, her pioneering programme and noble pacifistic ideas. The Pictures for Schools project ultimately came to an end at the beginning of the 1970s, and a vast majority of the school collections were sold. Dusty cardboard boxes in the basements of some British educational institutions still hide forgotten prints of Picasso’s graphic works and sketches by Henry Moore, awaiting someone who will once again put them to educational use.

Can we imagine a school nowadays where the periodic table and images of kings neighbour abstract paintings and conceptual scores? Could today’s students reminisce in the future about meetings with artists and their pride in a sculpture they chose for their school’s collection?

(Jakub Depczyński)

School desk

We spend hundreds of hours at them. We know their every detail. Just as we stare at traces left by those before us, we also like to leave something behind.

A cut? A drawing? A signature? The school desk is a collective amassment of signs and traces left by pupils. It is a testimony to time spent on learning, but also on dreaming and fantasising. Boredom and moments of oblivion, to which scribbles on the desk testify, appear to be part and parcel of knowledge acquisition.

The sociological potential of the analysis of drawings made on school desktops by absent-minded children during classes became an inspiration for the artist Petrit Halilaj. In his series Abetare he made use of drawings on desktops in his own primary school in the town of Runik in Kosovo, which he preserved on an enlarged scale by means of steel rods. Having chosen those spontaneous drawings, featuring such motifs as hearts, houses, birds, flowers, cars, airplanes, rockets and weapons, Halilaj examined the relation between the personal and the universal, documenting the desires, hopes and anxieties of several generations of children and teenagers.

The escapist power of a drawing made on the school desktop, which allows a child’s imagination to liberate itself from the rigid frames of school classes and the institutional surroundings, also inspired the project Frequencies by the Colombian artist Oscar Murillo. Since 2013, he archived more than 40,000 thousand canvasses that had previously been installed on desktops at schools worldwide.

Scribbles and drawings, signatures, football team logos, images of famous people, hearts, skulls and dozens of other motifs bear testimony to the widespread need to oppose the school’s normative surroundings; they speak to the desire for freedom and liberty in making youthful fantasies come true.

(Helena Czernecka)

Something in the box

In January 2021, The New York Times published the article Got a Box? Make a Museum, highlighting the tendency for mini-museums created at home during the pandemic lockdown. This phenomenon testifies to art lovers’ interest not only in the very act of creation, but also in curating exhibitions, the selection process, their willingness to set up their own collections. Mini-museums mostly take the form of shoeboxes and other types of cardboard packaging filled with postcards, newspaper clippings, or miniature plasticine sculptures. The box becomes an architectural model, an archetypal white cube exhibition space. This analogy works both ways; Lawrence Weiner placed the following inscription on the facade of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw: “Far too many things to fit into so small a box”.

One of the most famous predecessors of today’s DIY museums is Marcel Duchamp’s series of portable exhibitions in boxes, Box in a Suitcase, initiated in 1935. The artist sought a solution to gather all his previously created works in one place and have them at hand, but not in the form of a book or an album. Questioning the meaning of the “original” in art, each box contained several dozen reproductions of Duchamp’s famous pieces in the form of photographs, lithographs, and miniature plastic versions of his ready-mades. Duchamp’s boxes were available on the market for years at affordable prices on a subscription basis. A total of several hundred such boxes came into being.

The mobility and reach of art in a box also appealed to the Fluxus group in the 1960s. Fluxkits or Fluxboxes created by George Maciunas were widely available editions in boxes, which reflected the group’s principles: chance, fun, humour and absurdity. Similarly to boxed board games played at home, Fluxboxes comprised instructions and broadly understood tools to carry them out in the domestic space: audio recordings, jigsaw puzzles, documentation of the group’s actions and performances, toy blocks, films, toys, and many more. As opposed to Box in a Suitcase, a miniature museum of a single artist, Fluxkits were designed to use and have fun together.

Art in a box gained a new dimension with the rush of the 21st century globalised civilisation. It brings to mind shipping crates in which artworks travel the world or online shopping delivery, as in the case of the conceptual artist Walead Beshty.

He ships his works using FedEx courier services, and the company’s boxes are shown in exhibitions alongside the laminated glass sculptures delivered in them.

Beshty’s pastiche approach reflects the state of the art world with its insatiable hunger for novelty and uninterrupted circulation of works.

(Helena Czernecka)

Strange tools

Schools are full of tools. Educational tools! Accessories, handbooks, educational props, graphic prints, maps, timelines, portraits, illustrations and blackboards fill the walls of classrooms and corridors, pile up on the shelves and spill from numerous cabinets. The Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara believed that artworks could also be treated as educational tools. In 1998, he initiated the project of a touring exhibition shown in kindergartens. It comprises seven paintings from his famous series Date Paintings – inconspicuous rectangular canvasses in various shades of black and grey, with dates from 1 to 7 January 1997 written on them in white paint. Set in a kindergarten hall, these pieces blend perfectly into the surroundings – among drawings, maps, cut-outs and illustrations they look like yet another standard educational prop. Children can learn a lot from On Kawara’s paintings: digits, counting to seven, days of the week, the calendar, names of the months, colour shades, date representations.

Although the Japanese artist’s paintings perfectly imitate a teaching prop, they certainly represent a rather strange educational tool. The American philosopher Alva Noë argues that artworks are precisely such “strange tools” – utilitarian objects that allow us to learn and understand a lot, but in a slightly different way than a handbook or an abacus. According to Noë, the essence of the utilitarian aspect of art is that it makes us see the usually obvious and normal as something extraordinary. In this context, On Kawara’s inconspicuous paintings may serve not only as props that help learn digits and date representations, but also as a strange tool that serves to broaden our imagination and explain such complex concepts as time and its constant counting, which determines our lives.

What would a school look like full of artworks used both as props in learning a language, colours, numbers or history, and as strange tools that stimulate the imagination and broaden the perception of reality? Or perhaps such a school already exists – good old compasses and rulers, cell schemes, geological maps and frogs in formalin can also teach us something more than geometry, biology, geography, and anatomy. It is enough to notice their strangeness.

(Jakub Depczyński)