MaHKUzine #5

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a c e r ta i n m a- n e s s

o p e n i n g: a c e r ta i n m a- n e s s

w i l l e m d e g r ee f

u n d e r p r e s s u r e

u t e m e ta b au er

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c l e m e n t i n e d e l l i s

p o s i n g s i n g u l a r i t y

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r o o m f o r t h o u g h t

s i m o n s h ei k h

u n c e r ta i n m a- n e s s

m i c k w i l s o n

a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l l a b o r at o r y

b a r t v er s c h a f f e l

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14 – 22 i s i t p o s s i b l e t o m a p…?


23 – 27 p o s i n g s i n g u l a r i t y

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33 – 40 u n c e r ta i n m a- n e s s

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44 – 46 u t r e c h t c o n s o r t i u m

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Moreover, in spite of the obligation to implement the Bologna rules by

2010, many European countries interpret the concrete establishment

of the master’s program in various ways. In some countries, a one-year

program is offered, while other countries concentrate on a two-year

program. Some countries have had master’s programs in Fine Art

for many years, whereas others hardly adhere to the deadline for the

implementation of a master’s program.

These clear-cut urgencies indicate a definite need for an international

symposium addressing the issue of the specificity of the MA Fine Art

programs. In order to explore these questions further the Utrecht

Graduate School of Visual Art and Design ( MaHKU ) started a long-

term collaboration project with the Brussels Sint Lukas Academie,

an academy which, similar to MaHKU, offers a one-year MA program

in Fine Art. A series of meetings last year between lecturers from

the Sint Lukas Academy and the MaHKU generated a number of

additional questions. It turned out that a variety of issues could be

categorized in three sub-categories: the student perspective or the

question of competencies; the lecturer’s perspective or the question of

specific didactic strategies; and last but not least, the perspective of the

institutional environment where the interaction between lecturer and

student takes place. Precisely these three perspectives – addressing the

same issue from different points of view – are departure points for the

symposium A Certain Ma-ness ( Amsterdam, Spring 2008 ) organized

by both academies in collaboration with VCH De Brakke Grond,

Amsterdam.

During the first two presentations ( Jan Verwoert, Clementine Deliss ) the

perspective of MA-competencies is the starting point. The issue pertains

to whether it is possible to map the various skills required for the MA-

program particularly with regard to a reflective and critical attitude, and

a conception of both knowledge production and research. How can we

assess these competencies? Could it be that specific, rhetorical qualities

are decisive? What will happen to traditional skills such as mastery of

technique? Is the artist unskilled despite having followed the graduate

program or are traditional skills reformulated during the course of the

program and its critical studies? What do critical and contextualizing

skills mean for the situation of the academy as such? Is the graduate art

academy eventually nothing more than a bastion of the neo-liberal art

system as is often the case with prominent American MFA program’s,

Too many conferences currently being organized by art

academies draw attention to the recent development of

PhD’s in art trajectories. Yet an even more important issue

today pertains to the specificity of MA Fine Art programs

of art academies. After all, it is the master’s program,

focused on research, that prepares artists for a possible PhD

trajectory; it is the master’s program that offers artists various

perspectives on their professional careers; and it is the

master’s program and its strong emphasis on the specificities

of its curriculum that force the bachelor’s program to reflect

on the particular structure of its own curriculum.

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or is the academy still clearly defined as an outpost for a culture-

critical awareness?

During the next two presentations ( Simon Sheikh, Mick Wilson ) the

perspective shifts to didactic strategies. Can one determine how a MA

curriculum is characterized? What are adequate didactic strategies

and educational models, and how do they differ from a BA program?

What are the differences and similarities between the various

European MA Fine Art programs? How does the Bologna-ruled,

curriculum-based program and its seminars, lectures, and various

methods and bodies of knowledge relate to the still dominant studio-

based paradigm with its rituals of tutorials and studio visits? How

do we prevent a more topical discourse based on critical studies and

artistic research becoming canonized into a novel form of academia?

Finally, how do the current educational strategies and models relate

to the research practice of lecturers? In other words, how could

the lecturer’s own artistic research be strategically deployed in the

curriculum?

The question of the position of one’s own artistic research leads us

also to the theme of the research environment. Is it the task of the

academy to develop a specific artistic research environment? How

should such an experimental research environment be facilitated?

How does such a research environment relate to the artistic field

mostly determined by the free market system? Is it the potential of

the experimental environment as one of the last asylums for deviant

forms of knowledge production ( or thinking ) that made a great

number of curators decide in recent years to proclaim the academy

as the starting point for their exhibition projects? Investigating the

issue of the academy as field of possibilities from the perspective of

the Graduate School appears urgent. In other words, in what way

– political, facilitative, infrastructural – could the Graduate School

contribute to the development of a research climate in art education?

These questions are approached during A Certain Ma-Ness in

two ways. First, artists Tiong Ang and Aglaia Konrad developed a

presentation in the exhibition space of VCH De Brakke Grond parallel

to the themes of the symposium. The exhibition shows the interaction

between the research of the lecturer ( Tiong Ang, MaHKU and Aglaia

Konrad, Sint Lukas ) and of the student ( Filip Gilissen, Sint Lukas,

Joris Lindhout, MaHKU ) as a didactic tool for creating a dynamic

research environment within the current educational system ( The

visual material printed in MaHKUzine 5 is a series of impressions of

this parallel exhibition ) . Secondly, Bart Verschaffel’s talk, Willem de

Greef’s introduction, and the presentation of the Utrecht Consortium

( see Research Reports ) all elaborate further on the conditions and

possibilities of an artistic research environment.

It was Ute Meta Bauer at the Vienna School of Art who was one of the

first people in the art academy field to address these questions and

issues in the context of institutional preconditions. Therefore, she

opens the symposium A Certain Ma-ness with a keynote statement. ( HS )

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5

To make it very clear from the outset, the subject of this symposium

is not PhD’s or doctorates in the arts, or for artists, be they practice-

based or not. First and foremost, this symposium tries to deal with

what we call in Belgium, or at least in Flanders, and believe me even

in Dutch it sounds also quite weird: “academizing”. Especially the

academization of higher arts education. By this we mean that higher-

level art institutes, if they want to provide Master’s degrees, will

necessarily have to present or develop curricula for students which

are clearly “embedded in research”. Art students have to become

academics or develop some basic competencies in research. Is there

really a need for this? And if so, what could it probably mean? This

is what this symposium is about. Let me give you some facts on the

educational system in Belgium.

Fact number one: since 1989, education has not been a national

matter. Instead there has been a complete devolution of competencies

for education to the different linguistic communities, meaning the

Flemish and French groups in Belgium. Since then the Ministry

of Education for the Flemish Community is responsible for higher

education in Flanders, and only in Flanders.

Fact number two: arts education is a regular part of the Flemish

educational system. It has not always been so. Only in 1994, just one

decade ago, art education became a full part of the higher educational

system. Which means that only since then were its structure and its

qualifications aligned with the rest of the system.

At present, and probably as a consequence of this, the Flemish

government started to implement the Bologna declaration some years

ago, and no exception was made for higher arts education. Like all

the other higher education programs and courses, universities and

non-universities alike, higher arts education has undergone and is still

undergoing several reforms, including reform of the Bachelor-Master

degree structure.

Nevertheless, there are some peculiarities in the way the Flemish

government has implemented the Bologna Declaration. As adopted

by the Flemish Parliament in the 2003 Act on the structure of

higher education in Flanders, the largest part of the non-university

higher education programs and courses, those provided by what we

call the “hogescholen” ( higher educational institutes ), are generally

transformed into what are called “professionally oriented” Bachelor’s

degrees. Other programs or courses, provided by both universities and

“hogescholen”, are being transformed into “academically oriented”

Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. In other words, professional

bachelor’s degrees are only provided by the “hogescholen”, while

academic bachelor’s and master’s degrees are provided by universities

and by the “hogescholen.”

Another important aspect is that there is only one kind of Master’s

degree in Flanders. Contrary to the Netherlands, for instance, the

opening: a c ertain ma-n ess

willem de greef

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Flemish government has chosen not to introduce a “professionally

oriented” degree at the Master’s level. One of the major consequences

of this choice is that all Master’s degree programs have to be

“embedded in research”. All Master’s degrees in Flanders are

supposed to be academic.

Moreover, for most of the Flemish politicians it is widely accepted

that the “hogescholen” cannot possibly meet this requirement for

“academization” without a helping hand from the universities.

Therefore, each of the “hogescholen” has been affiliated with a

university. My own institute, the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel,

is associated with the Catholic University of Leuven. All this

undoubtedly poses many questions. Let me just point out some of

them.

Firstly, today nearly all courses in higher arts education in Flanders

are supposed to be leading to a Master’s degree. Some have called it

the academic drift of the arts institutes or departments. Is there really

a need for this ? Do all students in the arts really need to follow this

academic track, or is there still a need for more professionally oriented

programs? Or, to put it differently, does the difference sharply evident

in Flanders between professionally oriented and academic course

programs make any sense in higher arts education?

Secondly, if higher arts institutes want to transform their traditional

programs into academic programs, they will necessarily have to reset

their targets and to rethink the curriculum. How would an academic

curriculum look which still made sense for higher arts education

and for art students? What are the academic competencies they are

supposed to develop? More profoundly, is the identity as such of

higher arts education not at stake here?

Thirdly, how do we make a clear link, if we want to, between arts

education and research? Does it mean, for instance, that in the near

future all staff members of art schools should hold doctorates or a

phd? Or are their artistic or professional qualities more important?

Does it mean that higher arts institutes have to develop their own

research programs? If so, what type of research should they develop?

Importantly, how can one evaluate the quality of the research done by

higher arts institutes or departments?

Fourthly, does all of this not demand a change in the structure

of higher arts education itself? For instance, should higher arts

institutes become fully embedded in the universities and evolve

into a full faculty department at the university? Do universities have

enough experience with performing arts? At least in Flanders it is no

secret that artistic research is an underdeveloped, if not undeveloped,

scientific domain. Even the Flemish minister of education himself

stated recently that the helping hand of the universities in the process

of academization cannot be more than a small finger.

All these issues are not unique to Flanders. Many arts institutes,

all over Europe, are looking for the best way to deliver excellent art

education within an outstanding academic context. I believe this

symposium offers us a wonderful opportunity for discussing these

issues

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7

The art system, especially the art market today has become part of the

educational system. The art schools and universities – previously more

free and open zones for experiments – gradually became incorporated

into a suspiciously commodified system. Art students have more

knowledge of the art market than ever before, and “creating” successful

artists has become a standard promise on the mission statements of

and calls for applications to MA programs. This is not only for programs

in the United States.

What might be more specific within the US American setting is the

very short path from the art school to the gallery into a collection. This

might be the case in London as well. The exorbitant tuition fees in

the US put a certain pressure to “succeed” on both the institution and

the student. The strong market has made art education red hot, and

has become an increasingly, attractive field within education. Culture

and art are significant economic factors leaving their mark on how

art education is shaped. MA courses have expanded both in the field

of artistic education and curatorial studies to serve an ever-growing

market.

Art academies invent new programs ranging from MAs in public art,

to critical studies, critical curatorial studies, and so forth, which is a

indeed a welcome specialization disrupting the dominance of hundreds

of years of European “master schools” established in order to select

and form “the best.” Nevertheless, being a critical scholar myself, one

wonders where will all these students go when they leave the institution

with their degrees in their pockets? If you invest so much into your

education, you want to know what the pay-off might be. In order to

serve these expectations, there is a certain pressure on the art schools

to connect early with the art market and to generate a smooth entry into

the system while the future artist is still in school.

This is a major shift as compared to, say, even ten years ago. Then the

debate centered around what the majority of art students would do who

never entered the golden triangle of the academy–gallery–museum.

Would they instead become more creative web designers, producers of

video clips, and so on? But with the expansion of the market through a

new generation of collectors and the globalization of the market itself

including the biennial boom, the chance of grabbing a seat on the art

carousel has sharply increased.

On the one hand, the desired and demanded accessibility to this

field of distinction” for a larger number of people has finally become

a reality. Today there are more exhibitions taking place, more art

institutions opening their doors and more museums for contemporary

art being established than ever before. More private collections, in

more countries, are opening their doors to the public. But was this

what we meant when we asked for more visibility as young art students

twenty five years ago? Weirdly enough, it feels as if the art market has

replaced the music industry, with its annual top of the pops and one-hit

wonders. Although I appreciate that today almost everyone can be a

producer of some kind, I am not sure this is a positive development.

under pressure

ute meta bauer

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The art market is growing rapidly. Where there is a biennial today,

tomorrow there is an art fair as well, and are we not in need of art

schools too at all these newly emerging locations? Again I am of two

minds. I support the improved access to discourse and modes of

production in many places of the world, as I still believe in artistic

practice as a necessary critical contribution to the formation of

societies. The market embraces all too quickly, however, each new

spot popping up on the global map. Yesterday it was China, today

India, and tomorrow Dubai and the Gulf; art has become a huge

globally operating machine in need of skilled labor.

This brings us back to the art schools. Are they still places to

discuss the meaning of artistic production within the larger field of

culture? Do they negotiate the role art plays in contemporary society?

Previously, art academies and art schools were pre-market, a kind

of playground and creative laboratory when the academy was more

innovative. Solid educational foundations were provided by a ”master”

when a school’s focus and reputation rested more upon skills and

techniques. Additionally, the academy provided a somewhat sheltered

“biotope” encouraging experience and wild growth. Yet now the art

schools seem pretty much part of the canon, as today no one can

afford such naiveté. Myriad strategies are incorporated to serve the

system.

Art and its different manifestations have become a powerful

economical factor, a growing industry producing scores of new job

opportunities. Art is now a lifestyle. There is a huge demand for fresh

artists, young curators, new host sites for biennials, galleries and so

on. The questions we need to address are: What is communicated

through this new art, through current exhibitions and their various

formats? What is their content and for whom are they being staged?

The society of spectacle, as Guy Debord presents in his text and film,

is rife everywhere. But what will be left after the glory days have

faded?

A recent debate on New Institutionalism in “Bureaux de Change”

by Alex FarquharsonΩ referred to a number of us freelance curators

joining the “safe haven” of the institutions for higher artistic

education. I don’t necessarily agree with that argument as grounds

to support an opinion and debate. To me there is no outside to the

institution, no outside to the art market and vice versa. The market

is part of the discursive field. The art world is and has always been a

complex system, a field of constellations and interrelations; some are

amicable, some more antagonistic. The critical field defines itself as

distinct from the commercial sector. However, as stated above, it is a

system of interconnected relations, where each “actor” decides where

we position ourselves, and in which direction we move. These are

not fixed configurations and an institution today does not represent

the same thing it did twenty years ago. “Off” spaces nowadays are

not necessarily more political than a museum, as this depends on

how and by whom a space or institution is run. To assume the same

clear divisions exist as did maybe twenty-five years ago would be

overly simplifying, a black-and-white understanding of this complex

system. Therefore, some knowledge of system theory, some reading of

Ω frieze, issue 101 issue 101, balticbabel. ht tp://w w w.frieze.com/feature _ single.asp?back=1&f=1198

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Bourdieu, Rorty and Luhmann never hurts in becoming aware of our

very own entanglements.

To return to Farquharson’s mention of freelance “curators

[re-] entering or flirting with educational art institutions”: today’s

conference topic does indeed raise the question of why curators in

recent times have been accepting leading positions at art schools,

universities etc., specifically those who previously held high-

profile curatorial positions. From my perspective, one reason is the

increasing commodification and instrumentalization of the position

of the curator for all sorts of agendas and desires. A second reason is

that today’s director of a museum or a “Kunsthalle” is more involved

in management and fundraising activities than in working on shows

or directly with artists as was the case in the past. Art schools seem

to offer a kind of temporary refuge for those with a desire to sustain

a more critical and discursive practice. I do not want to criticize

my colleagues in art institutions and do not want to sound all too

negative, but I want to express – and this I share with a number of

my colleagues – a strong feeling of unease about the economic and

political pressures that those who run museums increasingly have to

face today. Furthermore, one should not underestimate the potential

and pleasure of working with students, the inspiration to be found in

other related research fields, and the option of getting away from the

sheer pragmatism of running the day-to-day business of a museum.

To be mainly involved with satisfying trustees and/or local politicians

rather than investing time researching fields that might be not that

popular – this is not everyone’s cup of tea. The wish to renegotiate the

role of art through an expanded notion of artistic education allows

a certain degree of distance, and some independence, from what

the art field represents, at least in the Western hemisphere. I have

been studying art myself, extended by post-graduate studies in art

theory. Therefore, I am quite aware of the influence of teachers and

the impact of innovative institutional leadership in higher artistic

education upon students. In my case, a European male-dominated

art school setting, although a very open and liberal one, affected my

desire to understand not only art theory, but also the social topography

of the art world at large. But what I currently see happening is the

`take - over’ of the, at least so far, more distant locations by the market

and its protagonists – and the pressure attached to the market is

already felt.

The motivation actually causing my shift from working as an

artist and organizer to curator and educator seems outdated. The

exclusion of a younger generation of artists, specifically women,

from mainstream art institutions in those days, was a catalyst for

me and some artist friends to generate something else. We – as an

artists’ group, called “Stille Helden” – were not completely opposed to

art institutions; but there was no space for us available and what we

saw exhibited, did often not address what mattered to us or was not

linked to our discussions about art. Instead of complaining, we simply

created our own formats and spaces and generated our own audiences.

We were students of the visual arts, performance and theater, film,

music, and poetry. Today this all seems so far away.

It was not until later that I understood that art history is not made

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in the garage; the authority on the art historical cannon is to a

certain extent still in the hands of the major museums and based

on their collections. More and more, though, the market dictates

what art is produced and, thus, shown. I can only hope that at one

point the necessity to interfere becomes strong enough to enter the

history-producing apparatus. I still see certain gaps arising within

the dominance of the market, within art history that mattered to my

generation – such as the already mentioned lack of female positions

etc.. We have to demand a review and a correction of public collections

and force a change in outdated focus points.

So, there is a need for crucial debates within universities and other

societal institutions focusing on those issues. For obvious reasons

they should take place as well within an apparatus of representation

such as an art museum, or within opinion-creating blockbusters such

as Documenta, the Venice and Whitney biennials, and the Carnegie

International. One should not forget, they have the budget, the

infrastructure, and also the media power to “correct” and re-write art

history. But are there any shared intentions to do so at present? In that

respect, those “institutions” are indeed highly interesting.

To come back to teaching, I see teaching in art schools as a practice

in line with my curatorial work. I keep in mind the BBC’s founding

mandate: “Educate, Inform, and Entertain” as a healthy mix and a

valid model. I feel the relation between art and exhibitions offers

the option to test situations and combinations. The exploration of

thoughts and work is a necessary focus in art education. An exhibition

is equal to a seminar for me; both formats produce a communicative

space through artistic and intellectual means, so nothing is wrong

with involving students in exhibitions. It must be made clear,

though, what the idea behind such participation is; it is not to create a

showcase for students entering the market.

When I studied art in the early 1980s as part of the group of young

artists called “Stille Helden”, this was my interest. Being part of an

artist group allowed us not to get pigeonholed; being unpredictable

prevented us from being co-opted. I must have internalized this

attitude, and this made me sensitive towards being identified with

an institution rather than with a distinct practice. And last, but

not least, in those days as young artists we were far removed from

having a master plan to develop and to manage a career. Facing

today’s powerful art market with huge cash flow on one hand, and

an inflation of temporary exhibition formats such as the exploding

number of biennials on the other, there is a definite advantage to

“duck and cover” within an educational structure for a while. One

should also not forget that a number of conceptual artists, such as

Hans Haacke at Cooper Union and Michael Asher at CalArts could

only sustain their practice during previous high art markets due to

their teaching positions, offering them some independence.

Yet teaching is also about the possibility and responsibility of

transmitting a specific understanding and notion of a critical artistic

and cultural practice to a younger generation of art students. Even

today I seek to find “company” to explore, to discover, to reflect, and

to analyze, to share what I perceive, in order to be able to implement a

correction through a multitude of voices whenever necessary. As the

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conceptual artist Joseph KosuthΩonce stated so clearly: “...an audience

separate from the participants does not exist.” I consider myself

always to be the primary audience for my projects. As an audience,

you have to engage in what you perceive, you have to participate

to produce a discourse and to understand an art work. One of my

teachers in art theory at the Academy in Hamburg, Michael Lingner

claimed that only the combination of a work of art, its perception, and

the communication about it generates what we consider art. During

the years I directed an artists-run space in StuttgartΩ, I developed

a view of the audience as informal participants over time, i.e., as

an entity sharing and debating experiences. This understanding of

generating an audience to develop a space of communication, a public

space sphere within an institution for education, is still crucial and

important to me, but is more difficult to achieve. Later, while working

as a curator for large-scale exhibitions such as Documenta11 or the 3rd

Berlin Biennial, my self-understanding of my position as a curator did

not differ much from my self-understanding and way of working as a

practicing artist right after finishing art academy.

For me, it remains essential to enter institutional spaces and at

the same time not to become too comfortable within them, to be

challenged, to be committed for a certain time span and then to

move on to new territories. That keeps one alive and very sensitive

to cultural developments. Today, I realize that the art schools are

too involved in the markets, possibly caused to a certain degree by

curators entering the field. At the same time, I view both art and

curating as ephemeral and process-oriented work, work not so easily

absorbed. Therefore, we should maintain a laboratory-type situation

in the academies. Since raising theoretical questions through both

artistic and curatorial practice is one of my driving forces, I regret

that the awareness of colonial, postcolonial, gender, and class debates

that once appeared in the curricula of art education disappear almost

immediately through the back door now that they have a whiff of

“PC” about them. Today, these issues are addressed to pressure artists

into being “do-gooders”, while they should really be “free” thinkers.

But free of what? That question reminds me of Antonio Gramsci

and his notion of the artist as organic intellectual whose role is not

to act, to subordinate or to serve a system, but to be a critical and

independent voice negotiating civil society. Such understanding has

been continued by a number of recent political philosophers such as

Toni Negri.

Surely one should not fall into the trap of considering art, artists,

curators, museums, and art schools as fixed entities. These notions

are in constant flux, and the speed of the transformational process

has been increased alongside the development of high consumption

in general. For example, although the market is strong today, I

recall that in the 1990s it was the curators who were considered

the strong players in the field. Before that, the institutions were the

opinion makers. In other words, art takes part in the economical

and political reconfigurations on this planet as much as everything

else. Globalization as such does not stop when it comes to art. Power

positions are not static or written in stone. As long as we are able

to address that in our educational positions, and communicate that

Ω künstlerhaus stut tgart from 1990 -1994

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Ω kosuth, joseph: art af ter philosophy and af ter – collected writings 1966 -1990. cambridge, massachuset ts/london, engl and: the mit press, 1991.

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constellations are constantly shifting, we are still doing fine.

Let’s return to the topic of curators connected to art schools. The

opening of Documenta11 took place in March 2001 at the Academy of

Fine Arts Vienna with Platform_1. This meant there were eighteen

months before the initial scheduled opening date of Documenta11

in June 2002 ( then called Platform_5 ). Platform_1 was focused

on a series of talks, workshops etc. on “Democracy Unrealized”.

Such topics triggered some highly sensitive reactions amongst my

colleagues on the faculty at the Vienna academy. Some of them

wondered how debates on democracy related to the agenda of an art

school. Several art critics, art dealers, and art collectors asked why

such an important exhibition as Documenta11 was launched in an

art school context and on a topic unrelated to art. Those questions

indicated that antagonism was already on the rise. What I shared

with Okwui Enwezor and my colleagues from Documenta11 – Carlos

Basualdo, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Octavio Zaya, and last but not

least Susanne Ghez – was the view that Documenta is a knowledge

production machine. In other words, we considered Documenta as

an educational tool. An exhibition of that scale reaches many peopleΩ,

many for the first time encountering contemporary art. The so-called

professionals have to re-encounter art each time they experience new

works, too.

So Documenta11 was criticized mostly for resembling a seminar for

higher cultural education. But since the Documenta11 curatorial team

understood this exceptional exhibition format as a form of knowledge

production, why not launch Documenta11 at an art academy, and why

not view it as an expanded series of seminars? Platform_1 - 4 correlated

with the discourses artists invited to Documenta11 were currently

exploring. In order to focus on the specifics of these discourses,

we had to go to the places of origin or of relevance for each of the

platform topics. For example, to debate creolité in Kassel does not

make much sense, but if you debate it in St. Lucia, a place with an

everyday experience of this fairly recent academic discourse, it feels

quite normal. Automatically one is confronted with criticism of people

who share the experience and have deep convictions on the topic.

One needs a “critical mass” to interact with you if you raise such

questions. That is immensely important in order to establish a serious

kind of back-and-forth debate and to delve deeper into a topic.

I see an exhibition as a zone of activity, a space one has to produce; it

is not a given. An exhibition has to clarify the questions raised and

share this process with the audience, rather than educate them from

the position of those “in the know.” Such a “zone of activity” marks

the effort one makes to create discursive art – through a curatorial

decision. What do we generate as curators when we put art works,

artistic views, next to each other, and what do we generate by what is

then written about it?

When it comes to research I consider curatorial practice well-situated

within an art school context, also because museums are withdrawing

more and more from curatorial obligation. Once, museums were the

places for serious historical research. Today they are forced to take

part in a tourist industry and have started to become fundraising

machines in order to survive. Curators are under pressure to

Ω pl atform5 of documenta11, the exhibit ion in k assel in 2002, had around 650,000 visitors.

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continuously produce art shows that create media attention and attract

large audiences. That leaves them with less time for research. No

wonder some curators migrate to educational institutions in order

to do research. Exhibitions are not being created to simply satisfy us.

An exhibition should be able to create a space for critical reflection,

a space for discourse that challenges the way we think and the way

we perceive the world. A “good” exhibition leaves one irritated,

troubled, stimulated. Aren’t those the exhibitions that stick around the

longest?

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clémentine deliss

Is it possible to map the various skills required for the MA - program

particularly with regard to a reflective and critical attitude, and a

conception of both knowledge production and research?

My contribution to this discussion is based on ‘Future Academy’,

a curated research initiative set up in 2003 that has been driven

primarily by voluntary and non-paying cells of postgraduate students.

Supported by host institutions from Europe, Africa, India, USA,

Japan, and Australia, Future Academy has effectively spanned five

continents in its attempt to discern the context for independent

research in art in times to come. Currently part of Edinburgh

College of Art, Future Academy does not provide an MA or MFA

and, in fact, has no formal legitimacy in terms of official diplomas

or exam qualifications. However, what it has provided for students

studying at both large-scale institutions as well as smaller protozoan

organisations is a recursive and transitional model for learning how

to conduct focused research as artists, whilst simultaneously coming

to grips with survival, economic models, and responses to fieldwork

in foreign locations. As a self-reflexive investigation that relies on

the free will and engagement of students from different institutions

and faculties it is necessarily heterological: it appears to disturb the

existing coordinates of fine art education by tracing paths across

geopolitical locations that throw up earlier colonial cartographies

and question current affiliations of power and knowledge that are in

the process of being re-negotiated.Ω Over the last five years, Future

Academy students have acted as the diagnosticians of their own art

education, a process, which can only be successful if they view their

current condition as closely aligned to that of a future environment

for research, production, and community. Interestingly, students

who take on Future Academy either leave quickly because they do not

understand its apparent lack of course structure, or became so fully

involved in it that their ownership of it is unrelenting.

As a procedure that involves the elaboration of new proposals and

their execution, Future Academy characterises my activity as a

curator over the last ten years. This has involved generating work

with artists and writers through the independent organ Metronome

and led to a backstage approach to curating for which the art college

has proved to be the most efficient and responsive institutional

setting.Ω In 1999, I published Backwards Translation based on the

ex-curricula of students, setting up a situation of parallel research

and co-production between the Städelschule in Frankfurt ( where I

was a guest professor) and the art academies in Vienna, Bordeaux,

Edinburgh, and finally Biella, with Michelangelo Pistoletto who

was setting up the Cittadellarte and University of Ideas. In 2001, I

transited around Scandinavia for eighteen months, building up an

analysis of the use of rhetoric and the voice in art practice with a

voluntary posse of postgraduate students who were studying at the

various art colleges. This research deepened until we decided to make

voice recordings in a studio in Oslo and develop another Metronome

Ω it is debatable whether the development of metronome would have been achieved in the mid to l ate nineties if i had worked within museums where the emphasis on public visibilit y and access may have run contrary to the focus on ‘conceptual intimacy’ that i chose to work with.

Ω “ the notion of ‘heterology’ refers to the way in which the meaningful fabric of the sensible is disturbed: a spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework defined by a net work of meanings, an expression does not find its pl ace in the system of visible coordinates where it appears.” jacques rancière, the politics of aesthetics, interview with gabriel rockhill, continuum, 2004, p. 71

is it possible to map...?

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publication called The Bastard, co-funded by art academies in Oslo,

Bergen, Malmö, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. In 2002, nine ex-

postgraduates and I set up base for ten months in the derelict, yet

high-security Royal Army Medical College that had just been acquired

by Chelsea College of Art and Design. Navigating through this vast,

sinister site next to Tate Britain with guest artists while imagining its

past and future led to The Stunt and The Queel, a publication and 12-

hour event held in the unconverted Millbank building. At that point, I

developed Future Academy, turning back onto itself the environment

in which I had been given so much conceptual freedom and means

of production. Once again I set up informal research units, and was

able to knit together institutional support, first between the London

Institute ( now University of the Arts), Chelsea College of Art and

Design, Tate Britain, and later Edinburgh College of Art, and Glasgow

School of Art. Finally, in 2006 and 2007, I published the last two

editions of Metronome for documenta 12, collating materials from

Future Academy fieldwork and developing a further constellation of

backing and finance, only this time in the US, Australia, and Japan.

Metronome is neither vanity publishing nor self-publishing, but the

carrier and medium through which I have transported this research in

motion that tends to lie somewhat to the side of recognised curatorial

models, regulated art publishing and academic norms.Ω

Future Academy and Metronome clearly have many points in

common including their unofficial status – you may well ask how

Metronome fits into the UK’s Research Assessment Exercise when

most productions are without ISBN and Future Academy student

cells are not academically accredited? Several convergences exist, for

example, the nurturing of self-appointed communities of artists and

researchers who engage in a joint investigation and debate modes of

survival; the process of moving and working in different cities and

involving local histories and organisations in the project as it evolves;

and the primary focus on translation as a key trope in advanced art

practice.Ω

However, the one convergence I would like to turn to now is the

influence of early ethnographic experiments in research, fieldwork

studies, and their subsequent interpretation. I am interested in

looking back at the controversial discipline of social anthropology,

which I studied alongside contemporary art, but then denied an

affiliation to throughout the 1990s.Ω I want to revisit the maverick

methodologies of twentieth century anthropologists from Margaret

Mead through to Michel Leiris and more recently, Clifford Geertz.

In particular, I’ve come back to Gregory Bateson, the polymathic

academic and cyberneticist who made seminal advances in the

translation of systems of knowing and communicating. Bateson’s

concept of the “metalogue” is relevant here. Using a relational

methodology to understand perception, Bateson refers to recursiveness

as meaning that repeatedly loops back onto itself in a reflexive

dialogue with its representational boundaries, building a form of

ecological epistemology”, a thought-structure that is naturally

interdependent and interactive with other disciplines. Bateson writes,

A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject. This

conversation should be such that not only do the participants discuss

Ωsee metronomepress.com

Ω oscar tua zon, artist and coll aborator in future academy, emphasises the problem of the arbitrary communit y so of ten found in academic structures: “i want to address what i see as an inherent limit to the academy as a paradigm for experimental work. first, the structure of a l arge institution requires coll aboration with people with whom you might not have any real affinit y. there is a horizon on the kind of autonomy possible in this situation. second, within an academic set ting most of the fundamental questions of survival have been addressed and taken care of by the institution. and for an artistic practice where the primary issue is how to get by, this is a real obstacle.” metronome no.11

Ω having studied social anthropology in the early 1980s, i was immersed in a strain of “semantic anthropology” which not only reflected references i had identified earlier as an art student in the work of joseph kosuth, susan hiller, michael buthe, lothar baumgarten and others, but offered a self -critical analysis of the discipline’s narrative tropes (see james clifford, paul rabinow, clifford geert z, marcus and cushman, etc.). my subsequent work with protagonists from the bl ack arts movement in london, coll aborations with artists in several african countries, plus the burgeoning position of cultural studies rendered problematic the ongoing articul ation of social anthropology as an appropriate methodology for an 80s’ understanding of globalisation, race and difference.

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“

“

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Ω gregory bateson, “steps to an ecology of mind”, 1971.

the problem, but the structure of the conversation as a whole is

also revealed to the same subject. Only some of the conversations

achieve this double format.”Ω This perpetual mirroring exemplifies

the liminal dimension located between researching something

and producing a representation of this process, just as it evokes

the distinctions and concordances between academic discourses of

knowledge production and the eccentric vagaries of art practice. To

develop Future Academy as a Batesonian metalogical investigation

means pitching it first to students, and then involving them from day

one when nothing is known, and there are no results, encouraging us

to determine hypotheses together and form the representation of our

findings gradually as they are being pursued, to become interlocutors,

collaborators, and highlighters together. The work of the students has

a bearing on what I produce, where I travel to, and whether I survive

professionally, and yet, at the same time, each of us has the authority

to retain a sense of individual development. One question emerges

here: can both art students and faculty recognise the plurality and

therefore the instability of methodological procedures as part of their

research activities, or is the current conception of competence and

accreditation in art education unnecessarily driving both parties

towards conformism?

Underlying my interests in the art academy environment is

the presupposition that it offers an exceptionally individualist,

deregulated, and heterogeneous location for visioning the future and

forming agents in this process. As well as providing a more or less

thorough training ground for artistic positions, I would argue that the

academy is the site of prelusive knowledge. Its artist-members are able

to deploy the transformational moment in their research of aesthetic

practices in a way that is not possible in any other institution today.

For the art academy specialises in and nurtures the lead-up time to

production through a particular approach to the relation between

ideas and things, places and people. As Martin Prinzhorn stated

in a conversation at the start of Future Academy, “Art academies

should be places where research is done that actually cannot be

done in universities because universities have other limits that art

academies do not need to have.” One might say the same distinction

applies to the art academy in relation to the museum as a site of new

production: art academies necessarily should be places where art is

engaged with and expanded in a manner that cannot be achieved in

museums and galleries. So my personal question, reactivated again

and again over the last ten years, has been to ascertain whether the

art academy remains a location in which its faculty can experience

the flexibility to undertake the prelusive or unknown that defines

independent research and the work associated with it, rather than

becoming reduced to mere providers or teachers?

This brings me to the blurred definitional framework of what we

call the art academy, a fuzzy logic that is perhaps this institution’s

saving grace and ongoing claim to heterodoxy. On an elementary

level, an art academy, like any institution, is the organic result of a

groups’ desire to work together and formalise certain experiences

and resolutions. However, following Jacques Rancière’s notion of the

“aesthetic regime of the arts”, the art academy necessarily embodies

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an antagonism, which functions to reinterpret the past and reinscribe

as well as redistribute values of competence. He writes, “A ‘common’

world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the

sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a

polemical distribution of modes of being and ‘occupations’ in a space

of possibilities. It is from this perspective that it is possible to raise the

question of the relationship between the ‘ordinariness’ of work and

artistic ‘exceptionality’.”Ω

As the name Future Academy indicates, I’ve opted for the heavy

connotations of the historically bound, heritage art academy and

combined it with more self-destruct, artists’ collectives whose scale

is necessarily small and mutable in contrast to the elephantine

magnitude of the major art educational establishments that most

of us work within. However one chooses to define the academy per

se, definitions usually lead at one point to a certain tension between

inclusion and exclusion, formal and informal, organised and

deregulated knowledge. For example, one might focus on the academy

as a protection lodge, run by an elite orthodoxy with a structure

which necessitates it to be non-accessible and non-populist. Highly

ritualised in contrast to more bohemian academies, entry is based on

convocation rituals, on strictly maintained interpersonal networks,

and on notions of adherence. A more innovative analogy might be

the one raised recently by Georg Schöllhammer at documenta 12.

Here the academy is understood as an editorial group. Presenting

this notion at the Metronome Think Tank in Tokyo, Schöllhammer

states, “The idea of the documenta magazines project is to come back

to a form of mobility that is also a form of academy, a very stable form,

namely the editorial group. It has a long tradition in independent

media and involves a group of people working over a long period of

time on issues which they find interesting to translate from one place

to another or to present, because they have the distinct feeling that

they need to speak about these in an audible and visible manner. We

thought, why not use these academies, these editorial groups and

bring them into discussion with one another?”Ω

Schöllhammer’s proposition combines the method of an organ such

as Metronome with that of a collective research project like Future

Academy, and more could be developed on this relationship. However,

here I’d like to focus on the art academy as the tool of cultural

expansion. The geopolitical incentives of this formulation rise and fall

according to demand, and are permanently revised and reactivated

to reflect changing concepts of national and cultural heritage, and by

extension internationalist policy. From the 19th century mercantile

marriage of Empire Education, and Trade, we shift seamlessly into

today’s neo-liberal threesome of Globalisation, Learning, and the

Cultural Industries. Today’s corporate rather than imperial model

of schooling and human resource development places emphasis on

structures we are all too familiar with. Life-long learning, vocational

training, concordant accreditation systems, virtual learning

environments, a powerful, global market in postgraduate education,

and an unhealthy reliance on the fees of foreign, non EU students. It

begs the question as to whether the European MFA is actually a neo-

colonial device ultimately being developed to be implemented beyond

Ω ibid, page 42

Ωsee metronome no. 11, what is to be done?, tok yo, 2007

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the territorial parameters of the Bologna agreement? Meanwhile, the

student body increasingly mutates flooding the once singular character

of a nation’s art academy with an unstoppable flow of new influences,

latent cultural backgrounds, and confused expectations. A college

with a large amount of international students is heterogeneous but

not necessarily able to make use of this condition. Nevertheless, what I

hope characterises today’s globalised art academy is not just the frenzy

of standardisation, but the alternative option of travelling intelligently

through different institutional structures with their contrasting

value systems, in order to perform a deep transfer of knowledge that

can reflect and compliment the newly international character of this

student body.

Within the first six months of Future Academy, I made the decision

to curate this investigation away from a super-structure of European

super-schools and to focus instead on the current ramifications of

colonial art academies established in the 19th and 20th centuries,

thereby questioning today’s renewed forays into educational expansion.

As a result of pitches I made to artists, scholars, and students on the

hypotheses and modus operandi of this research, I was able to set

up experimental student cells and with these, parallel institutional

partnerships. I worked first in Senegal, where the Ecole des Beaux Arts

in Dakar is actually a post-independence phenomenon initiated by the

late president and poet Leopold Sedar Senghor in 1963; and then in

several cities in India, where art colleges were aligned historically with

their British colonial counterparts.

In both locations, there were different institutional scales at work.

For example, the Media Centre of Dakar, an NGO co-financed by

Norwegian state funding, was working with the Ecole Nationale des

Arts in Dakar and teaching new media to students, and in Mumbai,

the urban research group PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge and

Research), devised by social anthropologist Arjun Appadurai with us

academic funding, was producing documentary films with students

of Shri. J. J. School of Art. Both NGOs could thereby circumvent

entrenched bureaucratic problems within the older structures and

enable students to develop new methods and productions external

of the existing curricula. Likewise Future Academy would negotiate

its way forward with its motherships in London and Scotland, and

encourage students from the different departments or schools to

take ownership of this research. Later, when Future Academy moved

to Japan, this symbiotic relationship was confirmed once more with

the participation of small artists’ collectives in Tokyo that focus on

educational formats, such as CommandN, m-lab, or Arts Initiative

Tokyo ( AIT ), indicating a true mushrooming of short-term working

systems. AIT, for example, runs exceptional evening classes on

curating and contemporary art, open to a wide range of office workers

and people whose education may not have included formal art studies.

With this modest endeavour, AIT has managed to remain financially

self-sufficient and autonomous.

Future Academy’s resolution to be voluntary and non-paying led to a

deep interest on the part of the students in all locations in economic

propositions. In February 2003, a weeklong Future Academy seminar

generated a proposal by MFA students to set up a bank. Their claim

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was straightforward: independent thinking required independent

economies. In the future, the role and value of the artist might lead to

a type of international intelligence for which both a black market and

a barter system might become operational. The senior management

of the UK School in question immediately quashed the proposal and,

as any further development was voluntary, the students continued

with their individual work and this institution’s involvement in

Future Academy pretty much ended there. However, the focus on

economics did not and it was in Dakar that the most coherent and

topical economic model was developed, precisely because the nervous

accountability of the host institution did not interfere with students’

conception of legitimate research.

The model proposed by the Senegalese artists referred back to the

Tontine, a micro-credit scheme originally devised by the Neapolitan

Lorenzo Tonti in 1653. In Dakar, the scheme was activated in the

recession of the 1980s as an alternative to the development banks,

which, whilst apparently run by the Senegalese, were still closely tied

to French finance. Key to the Tontine in Senegal has been the cultural

and social dimension it employs to ensure that a rotating rhythm of

contribution and spending is maintained by each of its members. Trust

and social sanctions encourage a self-selection process with regard to

the group’s membership. Tontines can fall within several categories,

from those that are regulated by religious and commercial interests

in order to cover financial difficulties or pay for pilgrimages to Mecca,

through to smaller cooperatives based on neighbourhood structures,

women’s groups, the organisation of events, or the acquisition of

health and educational infrastructures. The fundamental issue with

the Tontine is that it remains outside of the law, is not monitored by

the police or the state, and constitutes part of the informal economic

chain. Tontines can even have clandestine membership arrangements

such that although the savings will rotate from person to person

these individuals remain unknown within the group. In the context

of Future Academy, the Tontine provided an experiment in alternative

funding systems and actually paid for the Senegalese visas to India

so that they could to take part in the Synchronisations forum set up

by their Indian Future Academy colleagues. Likewise, the Edinburgh

cell also applied the Tontine system to their collective finances, and

managed to raise a considerable amount for their visit to India.

As research on this financial, communal structure developed, so too

did the concept of the individual who might operate it: the student on

the one hand, and the teacher or professor on the other, both defined

as agents in a transactional relationship. If the example of legally

extraneous micro-credit associations had provided the framework, it

was to be the hawker or itinerant salesman who offered the role model.Ω

We realise that there are eminent professors of economics in Senegal

who often receive travel grants to go to Europe or the States in order to

study during the holidays. They come back with theories. In contrast

you have the hawker who has no formal education in economics and

who has only attended traditional and Coranic schools. This hawker

enters the economic system too; the one that we call informal, and

he or she travels worldwide. What have these people done to become

successful in the context of an international system? They receive

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“took part in the first future academy forum held in dakar in january 2003. at this meet-i n g y o u s s o u n’d o u r r a i s e d the issue of the growth in opportunities for young peo-ple and the fast track that t h e y o u t h p e r c e i v e d i n b e-coming a musician today. he recently collaborated with b e n e t t o n a n d e s t a b l i s h e d a local, senegalese micro-c r e d i t a s s o c i a t i o n c a l l e d bir ima t o s u p p o r t s m a l l

Ωthe senegalese musician and producer youssou n’dour

scale entrepreneurial init iatives. one of the icons used in the pr campaign is the portrait of a senegalese hawker. see w w w.birima.org

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Ωumang, <<<<<‘synchronisations’ event in bangalore, 2005

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no support from the government. But if they could enter the future

academy, we could ask them how their system functions without basic

formal economic principles, and how it is that they still manage to

survive (…). The hawker is at the heart of our intellectual debates right

now. But also in terms of media and communications. The formal

and the informal do not only exist in economic terms. They exist in

the artistic domain too and we should open up this debate in Future

Academy.”Ω

Effectively the Senegalese Future Academy team spent lengthy

periods in Dakar analysing informal systems such as the network

of beggars, the stock exchange of second-hand clothing, and illegal

taxi drivers with their speed-driven race against death, looking at

all these phenomena in terms of aesthetic values and vectors, and

deducing complex performative and presentational modalities from

them. Moreover, their final conclusion was that at a certain point

(postgraduate education) student and teacher need to reformulate

the hierarchical relationship of knowledge transfer and enter into a

flat zone in which each party recognises the value of their respective

input and can effectively pitch and barter their way forward. Here

we find the transition from informal to formal, and the shifting of

competence from illegal mini-cabbing to the acquisition of what in

London taxi driver’s parlance is known as the ‘Knowledge’. Indeed,

extensive debates took place between the students in Future Academy

on the relationship between informal and formal economies,

emphasising their interconnectedness: “The informal sector is a

little like a bazaar, like a market. You go out and find your guy and he

offers you a mixed bag of things. You don’t enter a pyramid structure.

It is random. If we look at the informal sector and how this fluid state

of the economy is run, should we look at it in isolation or not? Instead

of having one-day economies, can we find a way to align the informal

to the formal sector? This is the predominant economic paradigm

that we are trying to work with or break out of. If we want to analyse

one-day economies or smaller more chaotic models where things are

done in more fluid ways, then I feel we need to take into account that

this actually works and investigate its relationship to the predominant

paradigm. I do not think we should look at it in isolation.”Ω

In India, the Future Academy team subsequently re-defined this

proposal into the ‘Permeable Academy’, describing the mobile

architecture of the itinerant salesman as that of a moving directory

of comparative studies, analyses, networks, and individual contacts

across the world. In this Permeable Academy, expertise would be

handed over to informal economists, peripheral academics, and

traders and crafts people would meet at the shack studio, a tea shop

outside the walls of the heritage academies.

To resume the argument so far: competence in Future Academy

is the ability for students to make a series of shifts. Firstly, from

prescribed learning structures to voluntary initiatives that do not

feature in their academic assessment, and which they are encouraged

to qualify and take ownership of, and that, if anything, may fast track

them into a professional context. Secondly, from a sole dependency

on grants, loans and student debt towards alternative economic

“

Ω discussion bet ween nalle auro, mane, and awa diouf at future academy’s ‘synchronisations’ event in bangalore, 2005

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approaches with regard to studying, research, production, travel, daily

survival and collective projects. I’d hesitate to call this the seeds of a

micro-institutional development but increasingly I feel it may just be

heading that way. It would confirm the value accorded by artists in

transactions that introduce service environments into their work from

the clinic through to purchases that can be made online.Ω

I would like to end on a related issue that provides the basis for

intellectual competence: the figure of the polymath and the concept

of a roaming faculty. Let’s go back to Gregory Bateson who defines his

stance in opposition to what he sees in the 1970s as the increasingly

materialist ecology of academic departments, something that one

could argue is taking place once again. In 1971 he states that “such

matters as the bilateral symmetry of an animal, the patterned

arrangement of leaves in a plant, the escalation of an armaments

race, the processes of courtship, the nature of play, the grammar of a

sentence, the mystery of biological evolution, and the contemporary

crises in man’s relationship to his environment, can only be

understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas.”Ω

When we investigated future faculties of knowledge in the art

academy, in other words those subjects, contexts, and practices that

might be taught, researched, and developed, it was to both latent

aesthetic processes, and everyday relational activities that attention

was directed, which may be no wonder, given the global importance

of social interventionism in art practice of the 1990s (from N55, to

Superflex, Open Circle, Raks, or Pukar in India, Huit Facettes in

Senegal, to name just a few). Art students, they argued, could benefit

from a lawyer on immigration and identity issues, just as they might

be interested in hearing from economists or scholars whose research

is founded in the cultural idioms and methodologies of non-Western

societies. Heterodox combinations of information and skill would

inform art practice: for example, the exercise of a particular sport as a

model for analysing thought structures (e.g., Senegalese wrestling as

mental and physical dialectical engagement). In this manner, a future

art academy would engage in a polymathic economy; a polymathic

educational model; a polymathic faculty, and finally a polymathic

understanding of place, situating itself between different public

audiences, institutional structures and time frames.

With the introduction of a ‘Roaming Faculty’, the polymath, like our

hawker earlier on, becomes embedded in a structure dedicated to

mobile knowledge transfer and deep exchange. It’s a non-prescriptive

condition of empathic learning, that provides for a parallel extension

in the work of guest, peripatetic researcher, and the transnational

group of students who work with him or her. The Roaming Faculty

model offers selected artists and scholars the chance to develop

new work through a chain of interconnected situations at four to

five different art academies. It’s a consortium of sorts, but it is led

by the value attributed to an individual’s research, to the shaping

of content and the nurturing of transcultural and transdiciplinary

positions, which stand outside of the course curricula. Moreover, for

a participating institution, the Roaming Faculty structure requires

part investment of no more than 20 to 25% of a full professorial

salary. The Tontine system that fuels this moving group of artists and

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Ω i’m thinking of joe scanl an’s coffins, and other proposals for on line sales at thingsfalldown.com

Ωibid.

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scholars guarantees the on-going low-level costs, which are shared,

rotates ownership between the participating institutions, and helps

to broker decision-making. Our Roaming Faculty member is the

itinerant hawker not only of ideas but also of ways of apprehending,

analysing and evaluating their presence within the next generation of

artists and practitioners.

So to conclude, I’d like to propose three areas of articulation for

fine art students: first, the predisposition to embark on voluntary

non-course or examination-led investigations which enhance an

understanding of different methodologies of research; secondly, a

lucid and production-based interest in economic and symbolic value;

and finally a polymathic approach to knowledge production linked

to an enhanced disposition towards translation, understood here

as the flexible act of idiomatic transference between disciplines,

methodologies, and cultural contexts. The value accorded to survival

and self-organisation leads naturally to a further set of skills: the

rhetorical and analytical wherewithal to stake a position as a student

player in the revision of educational structures; and by extension the

ability to engage with a form of research that is non-prescriptive from

the outset. To impart this critical approach to the student seems to be

essential today, and thereby to dissolve the idea that following a course

will make them into an artist

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In the continuous rituals of institutional politics and their related

internal closed-door logic, there is fortunately always someone

trying to keep doors wide open. That is not something to be taken

for granted, since institutions tend to follow strictly the Kafkaesque

dynamics of closing in on themselves, thereby creating hermetic

black boxes which destroy information and burn bridges with the

outside world. In fact, the logic of institutions and the logic of art

education are fundamentally at odds, because institutions are innately

about legitimation and evaluation, while art education is about

inspiration and creation. Those different principles imply that people

who actually believe in art education will always have to fight the logic

of the institution and its continuous institutional ceremonies.

The question is how to talk about fighting institutional rituals in

public, since that fight is a practice filled with clandestine techniques.

I would rather suggest working on a clandestine manual or

instruction book listing all the tricks and all the ways of seduction

required to enable art education within institutions not designed

to facilitate anything remotely linked to that form of education.

However, I am not in the position to talk about clandestine knowledge

in public. So I must find other ways of sharing it.

The second issue that worries me is the current prominence of

the notion of art as a form of knowledge production. In my view,

that notion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what

conceptual art practices meant. Today, though well-meaning and well-

intentioned, we do take works from the 1970s seriously and believe

they have produced knowledge. Yet it might simply be that we did not

understand that conceptual art is about intellectual provocation and

the disruption of thoughts, ideas, and words. That disruption is not

necessarily connected to the production of knowledge, but rather to

the creation of new forms of embodiment, i.e. to discovering whether

there are new ways for art practitioners to embody provocative ideas

and produce novel forms of communication. We lose the spirit of

conceptual art when we actually believe it has produced knowledge.

Benjamin Buchloh has argued that the past is the aesthetization of

bureaucracy. Along those lines of thought, I do believe that education

based on the notion of art as a form of knowledge production creates

artists focused on skills such as self-administration and email

production. Perhaps we should reconsider the legacy of conceptual

art and investment in producing intellectual bodies of art; perhaps

we should understand the intellectual even as something entirely

different from the academic. After all, the academic discourse is about

evaluation and legitimation, while the intellectual is about the public

embodiment of ideas and thoughts, i.e., the libidinal and cerebral

embodiment of an idea. Embodiment goes necessarily beyond the

academic discourse, even if it depends on the academic discourse to

realize its practice.

This in turn brings to another important issue: the issue of the

academy as institution. If we want to maintain a critical discourse,

jan verwoert

posing singul arit y

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we can never speak in the name of the institution even when we

are speaking about the institution. Many times, contemporary

discussions suddenly create an uncanny moment of closure when

we speak of the institution in the name of the institution. That

perpetuates the false assumption that we are all just institutional

people and that is the only reason we are entitled to speak on its

behalf. There must be a way of speaking about the institution not in

its name but in the name of something else. Something pointing to

the possibility of a different world; something implying a utopian

principle. Perhaps a utopian world is a world without any need for

institutions.

Currently, the most pressing question is in what name or in whose

name we want to talk about institutions. I would suggest that it might

be necessary to speak about institutions in the name of the good

life. When you read Negri and Hardt’s Empire, the question of the

good life is actually the most pressing issue they raise. They argue

that today’s means of production are the means of communication,

the means of social existence. In the new forms of immaterial

labor, the biggest growth industry is communication. As producers

of artistic subjectivities, we are producers in the new industry of

communication. We sacrifice our very lives in that new economy,

as we put our life skills at its disposal. Therefore, teaching artistic

subjectivities is teaching people how to put themselves at the mercy of

the communication industry. That is what you must do as an artist or

an intellectual.

How can we avoid becoming public commodities, docile bodies and

willing contributors to a new form of immaterial labor? Negri and

Hardt explore how we may regain control over our intellectual lives.

Reappropriating today’s means of production no longer implies

invading the factories, but essentially to wrest back the means of

social communication. At heart this concerns resuming control over

our social lives. I believe one of the most urgent questions facing

the art academy is: How do we want to live together? How can we

renegotiate the forms of communication that will determine the

conditions of our life together?

I would like to raise three issues related to that question. One

concerns the ethical-political question of the good life connected to

the question of subjectivity or singularity. The second is the matter

of temporality or the organization of time. The last question concerns

debt or indebtness.

Let me start with the question of subjectivity. We are works in

progress, constantly producing subjectivity. One of the major

contradictions in a society dedicated to the production of subjectivities

is the issue of singularity. This issue pervades art schools and is

almost everywhere in highly individualized societies; the one hope we

all share is that we are the chosen, the singular ones. Immediately,

that puts us at odds with everybody else. What do you do when there

is more than one of the chosen on a panel or in a room? That is the

first experience you have when entering an art school; officially you

are the chosen, since you have been accepted, but suddenly with

horror you realize that you are surrounded by chosen ones.

The issue of the chosen is part of a larger discourse in society.

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Books such as the Harry Potter series or films such as the Matrix or

the Lord of the Rings are all about the chosen. Usually the chosen

becomes approved or legitimized through violence and competition.

The chosen has to fight within a constellation or competition among

others to prove that there can only be one.

One could consider the promise of singularity not to be a problem

as it is a deeply existential experience. However, the actual problem

is that competition is the sole mode or experience of the promise of

singularity society offers today. There is no other alternative, except

violence, to realize that deeply existential feeling of singularity.

So the pressing question is whether we can really propose an

alternative model to competition to realize that collective experience

of singularity. I think we have an unique opportunity to do that in

the art academy, because the question of singularity is the most

pressing issue every student experiences when entering art school.

How can we be singular, together? In that context, Derrida’s Politics

of Friendship is fascinating, since he writes about the community of

jealous lovers of solitude who have nothing to bring to the community

save their love of solitude. Those bonds, without constitutions and

manifestos, are forms of conviviality not pointing to the need for

another church or another constitution, but to the need for forms of

antagonistic friendship, allowing the sharing of solitude.

The antagonistic community of jealous lovers of solitude might

prove provocative. In that sense, I would like to make the distinction

between a community of provocation and a community of

convocation. Often communities are about coexistence, union,

assembling people together to eradicate differences among them. I

dream of a provocative community that might exist in an art school

as an antagonistic community of provocateurs. The art of posing as

a form of provocation is one of the competencies you gain as an art

student. You learn to present singularity as a form of provocation.

There are bad and good ways of posing. Bad ways of posing are just

imposing; imposing your subjectivity on others. Good ways of posing

are exposing; exposing yourself to provoke someone else into reacting

to what you are saying. That is what you do as a student, but it is also

what you do as a teacher. In a literal sense you provoke; you call upon

somebody to articulate his or her position. How do you effect the

calling, though? I think it should be provocative, not convocative. Let’s

provoke a provocative community of poses. One of my ideal models

of an academy as a provocative community would be The Muppet

Show. A strange assembly of creatures finding a way to coexist that is

impossible to explain.

So, the first issue deals with the exercise of singularity within

the different ethics of a community building. The second issue I

mentioned above pertains to temporality or the organization of time.

Today, temporality is the regime determining institutional life and

also the market. Temporality is related to the urgency to answer

emails immediately, with always staying on the beat, in the loop. That

is a temporality of absolute presentism. When you always live in the

present, it becomes difficult to imagine disrupting that regime of a

particular temporality. I like to think that the academy is a good place

to do just that.

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Ideally, the academy is a place of many temporalities, where various

generations meet. The artist embodies both the experience of the

past and performs the experience of the present, while art students

embody the promise of the future. Thus, the art academy is a place

where various pasts, presents, and futures exist in one building. That

is a big challenge, though at the same time conflictual, when one

temporality starts dominating others.

There are traditional academies, like Düsseldorf, where the past

squashes all presences. But there are also high-performance

academies, where people embody the present and erase any memory

of the past. I was once in a place that was so presentish that the

person running the print workshop was fired because of his links

to past knowledge. This indicates things seriously have gone wrong.

People embodying the past also embody a particular form of

potentiality, since one never knows what the art of the future will be.

To generate the art of the future, you need some non-contemporary

past potential. I think the more temporalities an academy has, the

better it is. Staying in the Muppet Show model, you could say that

we should have many overlapping, completely antagonistic and

incongruent temporalities, embodied by people who might never

be able to properly talk to each other, since they all speak different

languages.

Yet there should be a way for different temporalities to coexist in one

building. In a Nietzschean sense, the potential of the art academy

lies in a radical non-contemporary quality, or in a multiple sense

of temporalities. That has to do with characters and generations,

with artists and texts brought in, and with the oblique angles of

talking and choosing the subject of teaching. The goal should be to

multiply and diversify the inherent temporalities of the academy, and

to produce a different form of co-existence and conviviality, where

people, ideas, and practices embodying different forms of temporality

may exist under one roof.

Finally, we need to talk about the third issue mentioned: debt. Very

often, especially in market-driven societies, debt is at the heart of

education. People become involved in serious debt problems when

financing education. While teaching in academies in countries where

the social welfare state still exists, as well as in academies in Britain

and the United States, I realized that different institutional structures

produce different forms of debt. After three years in Sweden, I found

that students left school with a debt to the community. To redeem

themselves from that debt they immediately start doing a socially

engaged project in order to give back to the community and to do

good. While teaching in L.A. and talking with students there, I found

of course that debt is market-related. Not surprisingly, L.A. students

have to pay back what they were given. Thus, artists must have

financially viable products ready and out in a gallery, because they

have to pay back their student loans. On a basic material level, one

can only wish and hope that all people will get enough money to pay

their loans back.

However, beyond material debt, there is also a spiritual and a

symbolic debt. I think students all become indebted to certain ideas

and to certain principles through forms of education. In a welfare

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state, they become indebted to the idea of the social or society; in a

market-driven environment, they become indebted to the market.

On that symbolic level, teaching can make a difference in helping

students to determine to whom or to what principles they chose to

become indebted. I believe we have to communicate that a certain

indebtedness will always linger with both students and teachers

at the end of the year. When the graduates go out into the world,

teachers feel enormously indebted to them, because they have received

affirmation of the validity of producing art. That is a promise one

can never guarantee. Teachers are always tricksters because they

bear witness to the fact that art is not just a product, but will make a

difference. How could one ever make that guarantee, while art could

equally be a highway straight to hell? As a teacher, you will remain

completely indebted to people whose lives you would have to assure,

while you cannot actually do that. So there is a mutual sense of

indebtedness, and perhaps we can never redeem or absolve ourselves

completely from this debt. All we can do is shift the debt into a mode

of dedication by asking to what do we spiritually want to be indebted,

beyond the material?

This leads to considerations of how one might go beyond the

institution. What other horizon could we open up? What would it

mean to be indebted to the good life? There is a beautiful book by

Gayatri Spivak called Death of a Discipline, where she raises that

question of debt and dedication. In the end, she asks to what spirit do

we dedicate our teaching. Especially when teaching traditional skills,

to whom do we want to dedicate that practice? Then she refers to

Virginia Woolf and that fantastic passage at the conclusion of Room of

One’s Own where Woolf speaks to the feminist writers of the future,

by saying you should write for the ghost of Shakespeare’s sister, for

the sake of her return to the future. That is a perfect example of

shifting debt to dedication. Let’s go for another form of art, another

form of embodiment. I would like to propose dedication as the

principle to which we devote our practices of embodiment

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How could one use ideas from critical art practices within an

educational model also connected with accreditation, evaluation,

and course plans? This question relates to didactic strategies and

to what the discipline called teaching means today - and what its

object of study entails. However, in the postmodern and postcolonial

era, disciplines are no longer fixed, as Spivak states in Death of the

Discipline. One might argue that the death of disciplines has been

occasioned by interdisciplinarity. Yet the lack of an overall ideological

goal in terms of utopias could also be blamed for that. Currently we

have a specific political horizon, which is both anti-utopian and anti-

revolutionary. Disciplines once involved in utopian and revolutionary

goals also find themselves in a crisis. What then would be our object

of study today? Is it the art world, the artist, or is it art? These objects

overlap and seem hopelessly entangled. One of the goals of art

education could be to try and unravel the triad art world, artist,

and art.

In spite of the problems with defining the object of study, the art

academy has never been so successful as it is today. Even though the

academy may have lost its aura and its disciplinary modus operandus,

all major exhibitions in commercial shows and galleries demonstrate

that exhibiting artists are products of art schools. That is a historical

shift compared to fifty years ago. Presently, the only way to become

an artist is through the art school. So we can at least say with some

certainty that art schools produce artists. But what kind of system are

we using? And what is the system we are educating people for?

I believe that a MA curriculum should never be entirely

predetermined; it should also imply a certain lack of rigidity.

The curriculum should not only be involved in the production

of knowledge, but also in creating a space for thinking. Where

knowledge could be inhibiting, thinking could break down

pre-determined knowledge. In that sense, Spivak talks about

“unlearning”. I am teaching in Malmö’s Critical Studies Program

with students from all over the world. They all have different pre-

conceptions about art, so we are continuously involved in deskilling,

in trying to let them unlearn what they have learned; not only in

terms of their education, but also in terms of their socialization and

cultural context in general.

We consider artistic production as being outside the contradiction

between theory and practice, as a reaction to academicism at art

schools today. Both theory and practice need a specific mode of

address and a specific mode of representation. We focus on available

modes and how we can deconstruct and reconstruct, configure and

reconfigure them. In our view, artistic practice is always based on a

theory, and vice versa. There is no hierarchical relationship between

theory and practice. In addition, our program is interdisciplinary

with a focus on what could be called the role of the cultural producer

( artist, curator, writer ) within the art context. We specifically try to

mix artists, curators, writers and theorists in one master’s program

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room for thought

simon sheikh

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in order for them to develop a single vocabulary of representation.

Unlike theory courses at the university, we offer insight into how

art is produced. In art history courses, you learn how art is received,

but you do not learn how ( contemporary ) art is produced. Even in

curatorial programs, there is rarely a discussion about how art works

are produced. Artworks still seem to come to us as almost ready-

made, as building blocks that can be used in the articulations of the

exhibition.

In the context of an expanded idea of the notion of representation,

we could state that in critical theory, it usually means that someone

stands for someone else, so that there is a certain absence both spatial

and temporal. However, in art we could argue that representation

is an act whereby something comes to represent something else. By

mirroring those two conceptions, we can create different kinds of

understanding and disentanglement. Another question cropping

up is what the relationship is between representation and de-

presentation. I understand de-presentation as the disappearance of

ideas and imaginations actively or passively de-presented from the

world. An obvious example of de-presentation would be the so-called

post-communist condition which is now impossible to discuss or

imagine. What does that mean? What is that act of de-presentation?

Those questions play an important role in understanding how any

representation of the world has certain exclusions rendering things

possible or impossible.

In our program, we also try to discuss how one as a cultural producer

one would define work vis-à-vis the apparatus surrounding production

and presentation. What is the public role of the artist, historically,

presently, and potentially? These discussions must revolve around

various truths and methods of representation. In other words, how

can we, through various modes of address, construct new narratives,

new counter-narratives and perhaps even new subjectivities? To

and for whom does one speak as a cultural producer? What is the

difference in conceptions and locations of various notions among

institutions, audiences, constituencies, and communities? Sometimes

these notions are considered synonymous, but obviously there is a

immense difference between production related to art institutions

or production related to the audience. What happens if we try to

transform audiences – as many artists currently try to do – into a

constituency or a community? What does that mean?

With regard to constituencies, we see a move into the educational

space of curators, since art institutions ( museums ) have a problem

with constituencies. The current composition of the museum’s

constituency is very difficult to define. Fifty years ago, it was the

nation-state, the bourgeoisie, i.e. the education of the populace into

a national, unified body. That was the goal of the museum. In those

days, its constituency could be easily defined based on the interests of

the ruling classes. Today, though, most art institutions are part of the

so-called entertainment industry. So there is a profound shift in how

to define a constituency. Perhaps that is starting to permeate

art education.

There are certain historical models of the art academy that have been

handed down to us that could easily be deconstructed. One model

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pertains to the idea of the masterclass, one professor talking to

multiple students and deciding just what art education is. In terms

of mode of address, this is of course a pre-democratic model, a non-

dialogical model of address, based on the sovereign reigning over the

subject. The subjects are all listening to their master’s voice. That is

an inherently hierarchical and masculine subject position. However,

now that artists engage with the world, and not just with themselves,

we must question the relevance of this model and perhaps look more

closely at the university model now replacing the masterclass. That is

the very issue of a certain ma-ness.

To paraphrase Spivak, “If the art school is a teaching machine, we

must ask what kinds of subjects, i.e. students, and what kind of

knowledge, i.e. teaching, are being produced.” That is an urgent

issue, since the results of institutional critique, originally an

artistic practice, but now moving to a curatorial practice, loose

their effectiveness in terms of transforming the art environment.

The critique and the transformation from managerialism, and its

administrative model, have been much more profound. That very

model lies behind the implementation of the Bologna process and its

type of top-down political dictating on how all art education should

be structured. That has very little to do with institutional critique as

such. Rather, it is a critique of how institutions work, how they are

inadequately historical, and how they fail to be equipped for dealing

with the current situation of lifelong education and re-education.

Therefore, I believe it would be unrealistic to think that the

implementation of the Bologna model or system would solve the

problems most of us have – I hope – with the historical master

classes. That model would merely substitute the system of discipline

for the system of control. Where traditional educational systems were

part of a disciplinary society, the new model of examination, modules

and internalization can only be seen as part of a society of control.

The cultural producers we try to create in the Malmö program can

also be seen as a counter shift towards these developments within art

administration and politics. Artists are a sort of social avant garde,

on the forefront of our current society and its notion of immaterial

laborers.

As producers of knowledge, universities are often teaching machines,

replicators rather than producers of knowledge. For this reason, one

should not uncritically adopt the university structure. Rather one

should learn from them as spheres of experience, as places through

which subjectivity has been formed, and as discursive spaces.

Simultaneously, one should examine the implementation of its

productive features, while omitting a certain notion of unproductive

time and space, potentially hidden in the academy model. One should

then try and maintain the open-space freedom of the laboratory.

This is why, I believe, it is important to shift the notion of knowledge

production into what we at the Malmö art school call room for

thought. Thought has boundaries different entirely from knowledge.

Hopefully it is too difficult to transform thinking into a commodity, a

phenomenon, as happens with knowledge in the knowledge industry.

However, there have also been didactic historical models that could

prove inspirational. One model I have been interested in is based

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on Paul Veyne’s ideas. Rather than seeing knowledge as something

uncontested, as something transmitted solely from the authority

of the teachers to the students, Veyne tried to begin from spaces of

experience, while giving equal value to the experiences and pre-

conceived notions of the student and the teacher. One way to do

this is to have a group of participants in a course with very different

background. In that sense, I am not only talking about disciplines, I

am also talking about location and culture, about different parts of

the world and different languages. In this model, all students will be

forced to immediately translate what they view as their knowledge of

both themselves and the world.

Another inspiration for teaching theory I discovered was on a more

pedagogical level in Veyne’s work. He found that teaching adults

using children’s books caused them to learn very simple things they

could not move past. So he would replace the children’s books with

complicated books which then immediately initiated a sphere of

production. I always give students the most difficult text first as an

introduction to theory.

In terms of adequate, didactic strategies and educational models,

one could argue that teaching Critical Studies has a dual function.

On the one hand, we are studying a genealogy of critique, and on the

other hand we are studying critically. Secondly, socialization seems

to be the most important way art schools produce their subject of

knowledge, i.e. the artist. However, within that socialization it is hard

not to see that students socialized for the art world are influenced

by the market – as Ute Meta Bauer argued. Already in the mid

1990s, a book published by Stephan Dillemuth was called Academy

( cf. MaHKUzine 2, 14-21 ); this was one of the first re-evaluations

of the critical artistic potentials of education while considering

the educational space as an artistic space. In Academy, there is an

interesting text by Andrea Fraser, who states that she is not capable

of writing a text on teaching. All one can offer are contacts with

gallery owners and the art world – perhaps that is the real teaching,

the real socialization, she claims. If one cannot offer that form of

socialization, what else is there to offer?

Fraser’s interesting statement alludes to a possible scenario one

must be aware of in a Master’s program. Currently we are seeing a

wild expansion of the market, and probably several people engaged

in teaching have had the experience that even second-year students

are already showing in private galleries and selling work. So why

do they still need an art institution? Even though the institution

gives a degree similar to the university system, it is actually a degree

worthless in the real world. One can talk about the program’s content,

the room for thought, and the production of knowledge, but that only

seems to result in an unprotected title. So, what exactly is the MA-

level? There is an idea that one could study anything all over Europe

connected to mobility – which is something completely different

from fluidity – a notion popping up in the Bologna process. You

could have a Bachelor’s in Fine Art and then a Master in Biology. In

principle, of course. One could say, a bachelor course is a foundation,

an introduction into basic skills and disciplines, an introduction

into the art market. Why would you ever need a master’s degree

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in art if you are already an artist with your bachelor’s degree? Why

should you spend two more years in school? You could want to go for

a phd; in fact, that would be the only reason to get a master’s degree.

Of course, I am over dramatizing the situation in order to point out

what could become the problem with master’s degrees vis-à-vis the

market, and vis-à-vis the marketing of education. If the MA program

does not provide socialization, it has to provide some kind of critical

understanding of what art means, of art’s placement in the world in

addition to its place in the art world.

Finally, I would like to explore the topic of the relationship between

educational strategies and the research practices of the lecturers. At

the Malmö school we ask seminar leaders, who come from a variety of

backgrounds such as theory, art production, and curating, to present

their research rather than work toward fulfillment of a curriculum.

This means that we need a certain fluidity and looseness in our course

descriptions and certain keywords which can actually change the

program’s content. That is more inspirational and interesting then

listening to an analysis of Foucault’s Order of Things one more time.

That is also how art schools can differ from university humanities

departments such as art history or philosophy. At our school, research

and the practice of the lecturers are reflected in the teaching, but –

the other way around – is the teaching also reflected in the practice

of the lecturers? In other words, is pedagogy part of the artistic

and theoretical practice? Or are these separate things? How could

pedagogy influence your work and your thinking? Could one actually

analyze artistic or theoretical work in the light of teaching at a specific

institution? Does one’s work have an institutional color?

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unc ertain `ma-n ess´

mick wilson

Is it possible to determine how a MA art curriculum is characterized?

What are its appropriate didactic strategies and educational models?

I am going to respond to these two questions by working through

the general problem of the MA in art education and how the issue

occurs within the Bologna process. Next, I will turn to the question of

how the academy has emerged as a paradigm and a recurrent theme

within the field of contemporary art practice. That third question is

connected with the conditions of the university at large. At present,

universities defend the rhetorics of the 19th century. However, that

rhetoric is exhausted, since it has failed to withstand a neo-liberal

paradigm. So, we have to invent new ways to speak the university. In

fact, in fine art and in the contemporary art practice, we are facing

problems not significantly different from the ones our colleagues

in literary criticism, philosophy, and sociology have. Our common

problem is that the demands of a technocratic discourse have become

the norm. All the other discourses face its effect and consequence. So,

we are all forced to review, reassess, rethink, and rediscover what it is

that we believe we are doing.

I just want to begin by noting that the ‘Master’s’ degree – across

all subjects – has always been one of the least understood and least

defined academic degrees. For decades, there have been calls from

different positions to try to achieve some equality about what it is

exactly what the Master’s entails as distinct from a degree at a doctoral

level. ‘The Bologna Conference’ is such an attempt to achieve a

common, independent definition, through various instruments. The

related Dublin Descriptors are actually the core statements from the

European Union as to what constitutes the specific Bologna outcomes.

This is what the Dublin Descriptors state. Master’s degrees are

awarded to students who:

have demonstrated knowledge and understanding that is founded

upon and extends and/or enhances that which is typically associated

with Bachelor’s levels and that provides a basis or opportunity for

originality in developing and/or applying ideas, often within a

research context;

can apply their knowledge and understanding, and problem-solving

abilities in new or unfamiliar environments within broader

( or multidisciplinary ) contexts related to their field of study;

have the ability to integrate knowledge and handle complexity, and

formulate judgements with incomplete or limited information, but

that include reflecting on social and ethical responsibilities linked to

the application of their knowledge and judgements;

can communicate their conclusions, and the knowledge and rational

underpinning these, to specialist and non-specialist audiences clearly

and unambiguously;

have the learning skills to allow them to continue to study in a

manner that may be largely self-directed or autonomous.

Within the Dublin Descriptors is the core of the competencies and

outcomes required of an MA graduate. A series of distinctions is

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made between Bachelor, Master and Doctorate. For example, under

the heading Making Judgements:

Bachelor’s level: [involves] gathering and interpreting relevant data.

Master’s level: [demonstrates] the ability to integrate knowledge and

handle complexity.

Doctorate level: [requires being] capable of critical analysis, evaluation

and synthesis of new and complex ideas.

So ’Bologna’ is consistent with making distinctions of ‘kind’ at

the same Master’s level. We can make distinctions – between a

‘professional’ and employment – focused Master’s, and a research-

oriented Master’s;

between structured or unstructured Master’s;

between specialist or generalist Master’s;

between discipline-specific or multi-disciplinary or even

interdisciplinary Master’s;

between one or two-year Master’s programs.

Is it possible to determine how a Master’s curriculum is

characterized? Within the ‘Bologna process’ the focus has been on

outcomes, not on the curriculum. The advocates of Bologna propose

that:

curricula can retain their diversity.

the Master’s award can be described without reference to one specific

discipline.

Then one must ask whether it is possible to determine how a Master’s

curriculum for contemporary art practice is characterized. Do we not

already address some of the generic MA level descriptors in the first

two to three years of undergraduate study? For example, a Master

student [demonstrates] the ability to integrate knowledge and handle

complexity, and formulate judgements with incomplete data. But

wouldn’t we also expect that from a third-year undergraduate student?

A primary issue, then, is the question of how the generic descriptors

match what we already do within contemporary art education. There

are other more important risks at stake here. Even accepting that

‘Bologna’ does not prescribe curriculum content, however, there

are other risks within the ‘learning outcomes’ ( or competencies )

model. In the competencies, the transformative and critical potential

within pedagogy is underrepresented or even absent within the

descriptors. The educators within the descriptors appear as secondary

‘resources’ for the realization of the outcomes. The students appear

to be constructed as pre-autonomous actors – they are in search of

an agency; they do not begin with an agency. This is an important

component related to our fear of overspecialization in the outcomes or

competencies model.

There are other risks in the ‘learning outcomes’ model. The support

for curriculum diversity, which on the surface may appear welcome

and beneficial, also correlates to marketization; we are required

to differentiate our educational products and compete in the new

market place of higher education. This move to establish the market

economy everywhere is of course the primary agenda of neo-liberal

dispensation. More dangers may be identified. The introduction of

the Anglo-American system of Bachelor and Master degree programs

into the European art school system ( as part of the so-called Bologna

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process ) seems to point towards the creation of open academies with

an unstable sense of identity rather than towards the consolidation

of art schools as educational institutions with regimented schedules.

Part of the problem here is that this move is effectively shuttering

the openness we have come to understand as being the potential – not

always delivered – of the art academy model. I believe that the open

academy rhetoric is somewhat problematic. The essential germ of the

open academy model is that in an educational setting, where the work

of the student-artists is unhooked from the immediate productive

demands of the market, the open academy will offer more space for

risking new and unwarranted forms of art production and more

space for thought. Confronting this view, we have the sense that the

market is making inroads into education, since the annual student

presentations and the graduate shows have become hunting grounds

for gallerists and curators who are tripping over each other in their

insatiable craving for talent.

The question is whether the transformation from a place of creative

freedom to marketplace is good for the quality of the art academy.

So we have two kinds of market threats:

Higher education as such has become a more intensely marketized

system in general;

The art market colonizes the imagination and orientation of the

student-artist within the academy.

It is not necessarily the case that the art market appears on the

doorstep; it is merely that the student imagines the possibility and

already starts playing a different game.

However, there is even a third type of ‘market’ beginning to emerge:

the reputation-based economy of art education. We all participate in

the reputation-based economy in the form of e-flux, the advertising

pages in Art Forum, constructing one’s curriculum vitae, and so on.

The reputation-based economy within art education also blurs into

its larger counterpart within the contemporary art world. We have

institutional reputations, program reputations, artist-teachers as

’chosen ones’ jostling for status. Until recently, we had a labor market

governed by reputation. A labor market is partly regulated by the

guild process of artist-teachers themselves. So, within the network of

fellow competitors for reputational standing, the cultural capital and

the ascription of reputational standing was something endemic to a

community of discourse. People got together and spoke about art.

Today, the reputation-based economy of art education has been

displaced by the emergence of managerialism. Now the criteria

for recruitment and promotion are no longer primarily based on

reputation, but driven by the discursive community around the

extended field of contemporary practice. Similar to all other areas of

cultural policy, a certain bureaucratic disclosure moves in. Within our

working practice, we are suddenly required to disclose what it is that

we do as art educators. When and why we give awards, and how we do

our jobs within the scenario of handing out awards.

Is it then possible to determine how a Master’s curriculum is

characterized? Yes, of course! But the really important question

relates to purpose. What is our purpose? What do we need to disclose?

What is it that we do? To what end and with what purpose are we

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describing and [discursively] constructing the Master’s program or

indeed any program?

The possibilities are:

that we are doing it simply to mimic an alien system;

that we are doing it because there is some impulse to regiment and

shutter the openness;

that we are trying to establish credibility with our funders;

that we are trying to bring an offering to the market place;

that we wish to provide a robust and critical learning environment.

‘We’ art educators. What is it that our work does? What is it for?

It is as if the curator conversation died, and the art education

conversation leapfrogged over it. Everywhere in the journals, the

fairs, the biennials, the question of art education is being asked

and rehashed again and again. It is also being answered and tested

in many different ways - but not so visibly, I would suggest, in the

academies themselves. ‘Pedagogy’ was one of the three leitmotifs

of documenta12; Manifesta’s Notes for an Art School, Cyprus and

unitednationsplaza theme; Frieze’s ‘Art schools then and now’;

ArteContexto’s recent dossier on ‘teaching visual arts’; ‘proto-

academy’; Cork Caucus; and Frieze Art Fair’s recent round-table

discussion on art education ( October 2007 ). The future model of the

art school is clearly something engaging the imagination and energies

of the international contemporary art scene.

There are three observations I would like to make in light of these

developments in the larger field.

The meditations on and experiments in alternative academies

consistently return to the quandary of ‘emancipatory practice’, to

questions of ‘autonomy’ and ‘agency’. How do you work within

institutional structures, hierarchies, different dispensations of

power? How do you work within this and still address questions of

emancipation? These are standard, troubling questions of education

in general, but they really recur strongly throughout all these different

experiments. The tension that might be painted as a showdown

between Ranciere’s ignorant schoolmaster and Bourdieu’s sociologist

king.

The ‘academy’ debates are troubled by the possibility of the educator’s

‘bad faith.’

The ‘academy’ projects and debates too often fail to address the

general state of higher education in favor of a narrow focus on the

specificity of art education.

These are three generally recurrent features. I want to expand a bit on

what I believe is significant.

The quandary of ‘emancipatory practice’ – how to enable ‘autonomy’

and ‘agency’.

Possibly the best articulation we have of our aspiration as teachers

is not to dictate, not to determine, not to describe, not to control,

but rather to facilitate, to enable the flow of other discourses, and

practices, and autonomous agencies. Here the question of art practice

and the notion of autonomy come together. We want to create

structures which do not themselves exhaustively prespecify what

will happen, but which in some way enable. Then part of what that

structure must be able to do is to entirely dismantle and change.

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But we should still be troubled by this. Consider the petty cruelties

and rivalries of teachers for the affections of their students. The first

thing you learn as a student in the academic environment is the flow

of influences in the room when teachers and students meet. Consider

the classic power struggles of academics for their tiny territories.

Consider Bourdieu’s early lesson on the cultural indoctrination

of students not by what is spoken, but by what goes unspoken,

undisclosed, un-interrogated in the ‘disciplinary’ conversation.

Consider also the desire for ‘pure’ conviviality, the pure flow of

uninterrupted, dialogical exchange. I am worried when people seek

pure positions. The American cultural studies practitioner George

Lipsitz says, ‘Living with contradictions is difficult, and, especially

for intellectuals and artists employed in academic institutions,

the inability to speak honestly and openly about contradictory

consciousness can lead to a destructive desire for “pure” political

positions, to militant posturing and internecine battles with one

another that ultimately have more to do with individual subjectivities

and self-images than with disciplined collective struggle for resources

and power.’

This is why we might be a little bit cautious of our claims to realize

moments of pure conviviality. If we cannot do it with our colleagues,

why do we think we can do it with our students? Teachers, even artist

teachers should perhaps not seek purity and an attempted disavowal

or refusal of authority. We should perhaps rather seek to cope with

-and reflect upon this ‘coping with’ – the impure, the mucky – the

muddy wet ground, the brackish ground upon which our agency is

based.

Let ‘us’ not disavow authority. Let us accept our authority and our

considerable agency and open it to accountability. Authority is not in

and of itself ‘bad’. It is authority not subject to challenge and critique

– when it is not answerable to others – which is most troubling. Of

course, someone who says they have shed their authority is not so

easily challenged for their exercise of that authority. The disavowal

of authority is a classic strategy of authority. Think about what the

national governments are doing in the domain of higher education.

They say, you know what you’re doing, you’re the experts, we’ll just

sit back, and say go on, as long as you do it within this framework.

The problem with this particular mode of accountability we are

being asked to adopt is precisely the technocratic mode which is

determined at a central governmental and European level. What we

need to do is to revisit the possibility of resisting this, of another type

of accountability. Accountability to each other – to our peer networks

and our colleagues less fully embedded in the art academies – or those

who are not there at all.

Part of that accountability is mutual disclosure: what we ( believe we)

do; how we ( believe we ) do it; and why ( we believe ) we do it. The other

part is listening to others when they suggest to us that we might be

mistaken –that we mis-recognize ourselves as the ‘subject presumed

to know (themselves ).’ Part of this is to reflect upon our desire to

be loved by our students and to be respected by our peers. This will

bring us not to pure positions but to messy human situations with

complex agendas; with conflict and competition for resources; with

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troubled workplaces where institutionalized behaviors already cause

many ‘closures’ of dialogue. Why is it that the art world – the market, the

magazines, the festivals– opened the question of the academy?

Were ‘we’ a little reluctant to do so?

The ‘academy’ debates are troubled by the possibility of the educator’s

‘bad faith.’

Consider Luis Camnitzer’s ‘Fraud and Education’ in the recent issue

of ArteContexto. “The [...] mistake is promising by implication that

a degree in art will lead to economic survival after graduation. [...]

Basically, what we have here is a pyramid scheme.” Camnitzer presents

an extreme position on this question of ‘bad faith’ – that we already

know that what we actually do as artist educators is not what we say

we do. Remember the general suspicion of art school teachers: Those

who can, do. Those who cannot, teach. Those who cannot teach, write

criticism. The question of ‘bad faith’ was referenced earlier in the

discussion. Jan Verwoert said that ‘we’ promise ‘it makes sense to make

art’; but it is a promise that we may not fully be able to redeem or honor.

The question of ‘bad faith’ is, I would suggest, the inevitable corollary of

seeking ‘pure’ positions for ourselves.

The ‘academy’ projects and debates too often fail to address the

general condition of higher education in favor of a narrow focus on the

specificity of art education.

This is perhaps the trickiest issue to tackle. There are some general

points to adduce first. The ‘university’ and the entire field of ‘higher

education’ – post, secondary, tertiary etc. – have undergone a series of

profound transformations in the last two centuries. The latest of these

transformations is the reconditioning of the university as a fully and

explicitly instrumentalized space of economic, cultural, and social

reproduction attuned to the flows of global capital. In the face of these

instrumental and technocratic imperatives, the rhetoric of the university

– the ‘idea’ of the university – simply fails to be persuasive. It will not

work. For some time now, ‘we’ have recognized a need for a new way to

speak of the university which can challenge the un-challenged authority

of the neo-liberal specification of the university as factor of industry and

nothing more.

Calhoun says about these challenges, ‘Without a dramatic change in

institutional and sectoral size, it is unlikely that some of the other

changes would have taken place. The issues, in a nutshell, are ( a ) the

universities got much larger; ( b ) that more or less full-time scientific

and engineering research components of universities got much larger;

(c ) that the higher education sector got much larger; and ( d ) that partly

as a consequence, the relationship of higher education to elite formation

changed.” ( Calhoun 2006:3 ). The serious elite will no longer look to the

university as the primary space to construct and to reproduce their elite

status. They will find some other means.

The independent art academies have a different history. Those

academies arising outside the university setting came into being

because of imperial, nationalist, mercantilist and other vested interest

arguments. So these institutions were founded on instrumental logics,

on means-ends rationale. They generated spaces of experimentation

and openness AFTER the market outside had enabled a non-state-

mandated private/public-cultural sphere. It is the market that emerged

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on the fringes of entrepreneurial capitalism that generated the

spaces for avant-garde experiments which later became the paradigm

for the open academies. That is where it originated, not within the

academies. For these academies, the rhetoric of the ‘open’ – just as

the universities’ rhetoric of the ‘idea’ – has now exhausted itself. We

need some new rhetorics of becoming to negotiate and challenge the

dominance of the technocratic way of speaking in the world. Where is

this rhetoric to be found?

Contemporary art practice – as it has emerged in the post-conceptual,

post-pop, post-minimalist era – has the characteristic of wishing

– or at least appearing to be willing – to thematize everything given

in experience. All aspects of the life-world are taken as its legitimate

concerns, focus, and areas of action: a standing reserve of metaphors,

materials, and discourses.

It would be unfortunate for us under these circumstances to then

shout hands off while we take every other discipline, profession and

occupation as grist for our mill. We’re pure, we’re different. You can’t

include us in your conversation about BA’s and MA’s and PHDS. We

could not possibly be comprehended – even partially – within someone

else’s discourse of means-ends or ‘learning outcomes’ or `the sociology

of professions or ‘knowledge’, and so on.

We seem to have come along way off track on our question of the ma

curriculum and appropriate teaching practices. My presentation may

seem far too generalized to be of any real value in helping to frame

a particular MA program or deal with ‘urgencies’. I would argue,

though, we should not be incensed simply by the fact that there is

a bureaucratic imperative to adhere to a framework of BA, MA, and

PHD. I think here is a lot more. We should examine how it is that we

came to this, that we were not already in a position to be the bearers

of the public disclosure of what art educators do. How we were not the

bearers of that conversation into the public domain. How it has been

left to the policy-makers and ceded to practitioners on the margins of

the academy or outside the academy altogether, to actually bring that

into the public domain. I think this is a very urgent matter for us. So

not Bologna, not 2010, but what we are already doing.

What I have presented is precisely the kind of presentation that I

would make to ma students in the first few weeks of their studies.

I would say “Welcome to ‘our’ uncertain world – the world of art

educators. It’s a little bit yours now if you want to join...maybe change

it a little, maybe not...or find a better, more interesting problem or

pre-occupation and tell us about it, show it to us, let us to see it...my

[institutional] horizon is not yours...”.

If we are really asking today whether we can we make a clear

distinction in the education of artists among these levels, and still

retain some unsquandered potential. The answer, I suggest, is a

conditional ‘yes’. But ‘we’ are always negotiating some kind of balance

between the requirements of ‘regulatory’ ‘instruments’ and the

embedded human situation of our contingent practices

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r e f e r e n c e s

Camnitzer, Luis ( 2007 )

Fraud and Educat ion, Ar teContex to16

Madr id: Ar tehoy, pp.15-20.

Garber, Mar jor ie ( 2001 )

Academic Ins t inc ts , Pr inceton

NJ: Pr inceton Universit y Press.

Glazer, Judith S. ( 1988 )

T he Master’s Deg ree . ERIC Digest

Washington: ERIC Clear inghouse on Higher Educat ion

Spurr, Stephen H. ( 1970 )

Academic Deg ree Struc tures: Innovat ive Approaches .

Pr inciples of Reform in Degree Struc tures in the United States.

Berkeley : Carnegie Foundat ion for Advancement of Teaching.

Ver woer t , Jan ( 2006 )

Lessons in Modes t y: T he Open Academy as Model ,

in Metropol is M: Expanding Academy, N. 4 ., pp. 94-96.

L ipsitz , George( 2000 )

“Academic Pol it ics and Socia l Change”,

in Jodi Dean ( ed . ) Cultural Studies / Polit i cal T heor y, pp. 80 -94 .

Ithaca: Cornel l Universit y Press.

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an thropological labor atory

bart verschaffel

In thinking about art, education and the research environment,

the two polarities of creativity and reflection need to be involved.

I understand creativity as the pleasure of invention, the sense of

possibility per se, and the desire for the new as inherent components

of art and artistic production. Reflection, then, is connected to the

phenomenon of art as research and the project of transforming

institutions of art education into research institutions.

I would like to distinguish between two different reflective practices.

One is criticism, implying an overview of a range of positions while

identifying conflicts, problems, and questions. Reflection as criticism

is a tool for discovering how one can make a move in an artistic or

creative project, similar to playing chess. Artists need to understand

the artistic field, assess the positions, and then decide what is relevant

to make. The other form of reflection is connected with art working

on meanings and images. That form of reflection could be called

reflection in the mode of an anthropological laboratory, since it is

connected with meanings and images as phenomena guiding people

to an understanding of what it means to be here and now.

Clearly, over the last fifty years, the major accent has been on

reflective art practice as criticism. Both the social function and the

cultural function of art have been identified with being critical where

being critical refers both to the institutional and the traditional. In

this context, art should to be free, independent, critical, autonomous,

and also radically new. Stating criticism is the first move, whereupon

artists then evaluate what is needed to build on their position.

The critical mode of reflection is different from reflection linked

to formulation, articulation, and description, i.e., reflection in the

mode of an anthropological laboratory. In this mode, art is working

on all aspects of life, implying a continuous reservoir of metaphors,

thoughts, meanings, and images. Rather than being merely critical,

reflection is now connected with curiosity and the sense of finding the

gesture, the statement, the metaphor, the work, and the image that

captures life. In this sense, reflection is a form of applied thought.

Art as artistic research seems to be the major cultural value and the

major relevance of art today. However, art as reflective criticism or

art as an avant-garde logic of negativity has ended in a free-floating

game. Conversely, art as a reflective research practice, connected

with working on meanings and images capturing life, is very much

alive. In fact, current art is relevant and important only because it is

connected to the anthropological laboratory as a space for reflection.

Let me elaborate on the concept of anthropological laboratory. Art

asks for a certain environment in which to establish an artistic

production and to organize that production. From this perspective,

the process is very important, since isolating works of art is rather

unproductive. Conversely, it is interesting for most artworks to

demonstrate the stages, the variations, and how the final form has

been chosen. During the process of production, feedback, i.e. a

critical confrontation with other voices, is crucial so that making art

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itself becomes part of a complex process. Therefore, communication is

immensely important. The work of art has to be addressed somehow

in the community of people working on meanings, belonging to

the culture in an anthropological sense. As a criterium for this,

there is what I would call the degree of condensation in the work

of art. The miracle of an art work is precisely that the artist spends

a year creating it, whereas the spectator can experience it in just a

few minutes. The great gift of cultural production is that the entire

process of creation is condensed in a transmittable form. Thus, in a

few minutes you can understand what the artist intends from a year of

concentration and production.

When art is research in the sense of working on meanings and

images as a form of reflection in an anthropological laboratory, art

is of course a public matter. Here art addresses both art production

and an audience interested in working on meanings and images a

society could adopt. That is the importance of topical art. However,

it is disturbing that this type of artistic research fails institutional

frameworks. Indeed, the universities are transformed into industries

of knowledge, so they do not assume the responsibility of organizing

work on the visual culture. In fact, during the 20th century, the

universities worked with a 19th century cultural map. That led to

ignorance of film and photography. Therefore, universities are guilty

of neglecting both cultural production at large and focusing on a

living culture, be it visual or not.

Of course, there is interest in cultural production in commercial,

private, and ideological realms. Fortunately, there are places that

do not belong to academia and, therefore, seem to be free of its

constraints. However, the problem is that reflection in the mode of

the anthropological laboratory seems to be hidden in the art world,

since the discourse produced for the outside world and the image the

art world creates of itself are not about reflection. Currently, the art

world’s favorite discourse is about trends and the art market. The need

for reflection, the need for a laboratory, is shunted onto art education.

Yet instead of developing into an institution where art could be

deployed as an instrument to reflect upon culture, academic research

in the universities fails to transform and, thus, makes reflection a goal

of art education.

The question arises as to how one could introduce the idea of

reflection in the mode of an anthropological laboratory into art

education. Derrida once claimed during one of the famous Any

Conferences on Architecture, that what we need is more preparation

and more improvisation. I indeed think we need more preparation

and more improvisation not just in art education, but even more so

in university education. In other words, we need an organization and

an academic management of freedom. In Belgium, universities are at

least 90 percent self-governed. Thus, all the management positions

and decisions involve people with an academic background rather

than professional managers. It is the responsibility of the academic

staff to include more preparation and more improvisation while

creating a managed freedom and liberated space for artistic research.

What is the danger of introducing a research curriculum into art

school environments? That danger is connected to the issue of

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unresolved art-related research problems. Those problems mainly

emerge in the beginning and at the end of an artistic process

considered research. At the start of research trajectories, one should

be able to manage a variety of issues. What will be the focus? What

will be the subject of reflection? What is relevant? How does one

define research programs? How does one formulate decision and

evaluation procedures? What will be the goal of the outcome of the

research process?

In an academic structure, research areas are defined. In the academic

realm, it is clearly understood how to articulate, document, evaluate,

and discuss the end product and how to connect it to the academic

discourse. However, a research program in an art institution – let’s

say about Lacan’s gaze – will result in two interventions, a statement

and an exhibition called Lacan’s Gaze. Then what? The research

might be a document to be sent out into the world. But how many

responses will there be? How many people really read that type of

research report?

I believe that continuity in artistic research is a problem, since artistic

research fails to connect with institutional frameworks. In addition,

content-wise, the only topic for artistic research to work on is art itself.

That is the only context, and content, artistic research could possibly

have. Thus, art as reflection in the mode of the anthropological

laboratory clearly necessitates new forms of collaboration with various

disciplines and institutions outside the art world and outside art

education

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utrecht consortium

Today, the situation of art institutions is rapidly changing all over the

world. Institutions participate in international discussions on the

repositioning of academies and cultural institutions as started by the

exhibition Academy in the Museum for Contemporary Art ( MuHKA ) in

Antwerp and the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven; by Manifesta 5’s

focus on the academy in 2006; and by Documenta 12’s educational

program in 2007. In these international discussions, one talks in a

rather abstract way about art as a form of knowledge production. Yet the

institutional consequences of this debate have been subject to extensive

reflection. What does it mean for an exhibition space in 2008 to

develop a policy directed towards knowledge production? After all, the

exhibition models are still based on “alternative” ( non-museological)

models from the 1980s. This was a period where reflection and theory

did not play a major role in the world of visual art. Conversely, today’s

artistic research attitudes have brought reflection and theory to the

center of attention. This novel situation has immense consequences for

how one approaches competencies in the profession of art. Until now,

the paradigm of art education has been rooted in the artistic situation

of the 1980s.

That situation made the Utrecht Consortium ( a research collaboration

as of January 2008 with MaHKU/Professorship Artistic Research

and Utrecht art institutions ) decide to map out the current practical

and theoretical issues and developments in further detail. One of the

significant problems the Utrecht Consortium has found is that today

artists are expected to be able to ( theoretically ) contextualize and

present their work in addition to expanding their artistic profession.

That expectation seems to relate to the most recent debate in the

world of visual art, i.e., the debate on artistic knowledge production

mentioned above. In this debate, the artistic practice is considered

a researching activity whose outcome, similar to that of scientific

research, is able to contribute to our knowledge about the world.

However, in contrast to scientific knowledge production, artistic

knowledge production does not have a ready methodological model.

In principle, such a model would be impossible to create. Each

artistic research project, one argues, requires its own methodology; a

methodology manifesting itself in artists’ texts and exhibition forms

focused on knowledge production.

These two activities used to be considered part of professional domains

such as art criticism and curating. Today, however, in light of the

emancipation of artistic research, artists are expected to fulfill the role

of art critic and curator themselves. In order to deal adequately with

this novel situation, the Utrecht organizations intend to establish an

enduring network comprising the art institutions and the Utrecht

School of Art while focusing on dynamic exchanges of views and

expertise in the context of knowledge production, i.e., the Utrecht

Consortium as a network of research activities mapping out the

outcome of presentations based on the production of artistic knowledge.

The establishment of the Utrecht Consortium is inspired by the

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research repor t

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so-called London Consortium, a collaboration among four institutions

for education and art – the University of London, ICA, the Science

Museum, and the TATE – offering joint artistic research programs.

Unique to the London Consortium is the establishment of a “virtual”

organization depending on the knowledge and ( limited ) input of the

Consortium partners. With that, a platform has been created without

the need for offices and staff with minimum overhead costs.

Additionally, the Utrecht Consortium intends to be flexible, but still

a structural collaboration exploring issues in the context of artistic

knowledge production from the exhibition programs and their young

artists at the art institutions. Those issues could easily be expanded to

local, regional, and international levels while sharing networks.

At the core of the Utrecht Consortium is practice-based research; i.e.

exploration of methods of presentation specific to today’s visual art

as a form of knowledge production. The results of this research will

be published as a series of “best practices”, models of presentation

enabling both artists and exhibition spaces to adequately deal with

topical situations regarding the position of visual art while clearly

communicating with the audience.

In addition to the Consortium partners and professionals in the field,

Fine Art graduate students and young artists in the area will also

be able to distill tools for critical reflection from the research and

its results. The Consortium activities will offer them possibilities to

develop reflective capacities ( competencies ) crucial for presenting

their own practice. In developing adequate presentation models in

the form of both exhibitions and texts, young artists will be able to

enhance their communication with a variety of audiences.

Another core issue of the Utrecht Consortium implies the issue

of the significance and position of an art academy in the context

of the topical knowledge debate and its implications for didactic

perspectives. The professorship in Artistic Research seeks to employ

the Utrecht Consortium project and its outcome to spark an urgently

required discussion in the Netherlands on how art academies could

prepare students for a knowledge-based practice. The professorship

will also hopefully be able to contribute to an international debate

about the specificity of artistic knowledge production and its

relationship with more traditional forms in the academic distinction

of alpha, beta, and gamma sciences. That research will also focus on

creating a more natural collaboration of the Utrecht School of Arts

and various departments at Utrecht University.

An initial example of such collaboration is artist Irene Kopelman’s phd

research study within the context of the Utrecht Consortium. Using

the historical collection of the Utrecht University Museum, Kopelman

explores whether the University Museum might be presented as

the optimum location for exchange of knowledge between art and

science. (More about that research will be reported in greater depth in

MaHKUzine 6 ). Through this first case study, occurring in a location

alien to visual art, the Utrecht Consortium intends to expand its views

on the strategy of artistic presentations and exchange of knowledge as

such.

Thus, the production of artistic knowledge is the theme of various

programs and projects to be initiated in 2008 and 2009 through the

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unique collaboration of the Consortium partners. The survey of “best

practices” and its relevant models of presentation will be realized

and published. These models and their context of artistic knowledge

production will be discussed in professional master classes and

workshops producing a broad spectrum of knowledge and insight.

The professorship Artistic Research will also organize a yearly cycle

of Utrecht Research Lectures. Internationally known artists will give

lectures in the context of the theme of Artistic Knowledge Production

based on their own research-based practice. Topics will deal with

reflective methodologies and presentation strategies. Each invited

speaker will also give a master class at the Utrecht School of Arts for

MA Fine Art students and/or be involved in an expert meeting with

lecturers the day following the public lecture. ( HS )

The Utrecht Consortium is also made possible by the financial support of

the Ministry of Education and Culture ( Sia-Raak )

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m a h k uzine 5

j o u r n a l o f a r t i s t i c r e s e a r c h

s u m m e r 20 0 8

m a h k uzine

j o u r n a l o f a r t i s t i c r e s e a r c h

h o s t e d b y t h e u t r e c h t g r a d u at e s c h o o l o f v i s u a l a r t a n d d e s i g n

( m ah k u )

i s s n: 18 8 2- 4728

c o n tac t

m a h k u z i n e

u t r e c h t g r a d u at e s c h o o l o f v i s u a l a r t a n d d e s i g n

i n a b o u d i e r - b a k k e r l a a n 5 0

3 5 8 2 va u t r e c ht

t h e n e t h e r l a n d s

m a h k u z i n e @ m a h k u.n l

w e b s i t e

w w w.m a h k u.n l

e d i t o r i a l b oa r d

h e n k s l a g e r (g e n e r a l e d i t o r )

a n n e t t e w. b a l k e m a

a r j e n m u l d e r

b i b i s t r a at m a n

f i n a l e d i t i n g

a n n e t t e w. b a l k e m a

l a n g u a g e e d i t i n g

j e n n i f e r n o l a n

t r a n s l at i o n s

g l o b a l v e r n u n f t

d e s i g n

c h r i s t i a a n va n d o k k u m, m ah k u /m a e d i t o r i a l d e s i g n

e a r n

mahku is part of the european artistic research network,

together with the helsinki school of art, malmo school of art,

gradcam ( dublin ), slade school of art, london and vienna

school of art.

pa r t i c i pa n t s

ute meta bauer, director visual arts program, mit, cambridge ma

willem de greef, director sint-lukas academy, brussels

clementine deliss, director future academy, edinburgh

simon sheikh, lecturer critical studies, malmo school of art

bart verschaffel, professor of philosopy, university ghent

jan verwoert, professor piet zwart institute, rotterdam

mick wilson, dean gradcam, dublin

Documents

MaHKUzine #5