Include Me Out: Helping Artists to Undo the Art World by Charles Esche Introduction There are many paradoxes in art education. Not the least is that the subject is by many standards unteachable or unlearnable. Modern art, the category we in the West have inherited from the Enlightenment, requires of its makers that they reinvent themselves and their definitions with every new piece of art that is made. Modern art was required to undo itself through its own products, and then stitch itself back together differently—a beautiful circular logic that is still part of its immense satisfaction. At the same time, there have always been aspects of skill and artisanship that have required discipline and study. When contemporary art began sometime in the 1960s, it adopted this desire for reinvention wholesale, though largely decoupled both from the demands for social or political change and from specific skills. Yet contemporary art also built up a canon of exclusively Western European and North American artists to whom it would bow its head—all the while maintaining its rhetorical autonomy. Even after the great political and cultural changes of 1989, contemporary art has continued to build on its Western traditions. Arguably, skills in craft manufacture were then replaced by learned sociability and the comprehension of certain codes of behavior, though this switch was never made explicit in most academic curricula. The logic of teaching contemporary art remains one of making students unlearn their preconceptions and seek the new and the personal, even if the art that results often resembles the work of a particular professor under whom the student was studying. In short, the idea of the art academy is a paradox that can only be reconciled if we keep contrary objectives and ideals in sight. Most of what I know about art schools comes from functioning within them. Each has its own trajectory, and many have stopped at earlier stages along the chronology mapped out above. Some are still locked into nineteenth-century models of life drawing and hand-eye control, while others are still exploring the legacies of 1960s free expression. What they mostly have in common is a high degree of disappointment, populated by too many professors who feel they should be out there participating in the art world rather than teaching students. To be sure, it is very hard to combine careers as artist and teacher without becoming a name on a recruitment poster whom the student 1 never encounters in reality. Again, we can observe a paradox of successful artists often failing to effectively feed their knowledge and experience back into the education system, while the system claims them as justifications for their continuing existence. Students, too, are often distracted or unmotivated, further education since 1989 having become increasingly vocational and output driven. Of course, some academies avoid the worst excesses of this trap and provide a great experience, but in comparison with social sciences or other humanities university-level research units, the status of academic exchange in art is low. Contemporary art production, which again since 1989 has gone global along with the economy, is often more akin to niche marketing than to academic research. The itineraries of leading artists and leading corporate executives regularly match each other flight for flight. If new kinds of academic structures are to emerge in the near future, this issue of what academic knowledge is created and exchanged in the process of teaching and its subsequent influence on students’ artistic production needs to be clearly and outspokenly addressed, not pushed back under the carpet of art as a traditional academic discipline. While an attempt to square the multiple circles that make up the challenge of producing academies fit for the twenty-first century may be quixotic, I can look at some specific historical examples and some evidence from my personal activities that might identify where the potential for academic renewal may lie. In any case, it is probably some form of renewal of reorientation, rather than wholesale invention, that we are looking for. Continuity from either nineteenth- or twentiethcentury models looks hopeless given the changed landscape in which we have to operate. Whatever kind of academy we may want and however it might be realized, it must be based on a certain reading of the past of these same institutions—at least so that we can avoid repeating mistakes and take the most useful lessons from more than two hundred years of art education. We can be confident that in the future, the art schools will in all events produce new ways of reconciling the paradoxes and developing new models and ways of funding, as well as creating radical methodologies for teaching people how to become artists. My personal question in response to this is to ask how to shape these processes in ways that will aid certain tendencies to which I am committed. They are, in précis, a critical way of thinking about art’s relation to society and social change; a skepticism towards doctrines and given truths; a 2 recognition of our cultural specificity and an openness to other cultural specificities; a strong sense that our generation did not reach the end of history in 1989; and that emancipation and justice remain ideals to be realized, not facts on the ground. These opinions are my own, but I believe that they must be at the core of an educational encounter with contemporary art if that encounter is to have meaning beyond satisfying the latest market trend. In terms of the actual development of programs, the important issues are the extent to which all the participants in the process—the students, the young artists, the teachers, the academy’s workers in all fields—can influence and direct the changes that will occur and how an institution can set up the mechanisms to ensure that this is done. Modern art remains a protected enclosure to some extent. It is one of the few fields in which even global corporations and national governments encourage us to “think things otherwise.” While this space can often seem more disciplinary than permissive, in that that the idea of art is controlled, overseen, and channelled, we are in no state as a society to abandon our few public institutions for forlorn revolutionary hopes. We should therefore take our merry gaolers at their word and seek to create institutions that take full advantage of the space that we have available to cultivate art at this moment in our history. A partial history My current, rather peripatetic existence allows me the privilege of seeing a number of art academies. I find that wherever I am, I am usually attracted to one particular aspect of an art school—one formal structure or group of students who have organized themselves or come together around an individual teacher or opportunity. Bearing in mind this experience, it seems to me that almost any art situation has the potential to generate something that could be understood as interesting because it resists what it is supposed to be or do. The simple confluence of a number of hands and minds investigating art in a particular place throws up, of necessity, a challenge. Art schools have, up to now, consistently attracted young people who are not so satisfied with the conditions that they have inherited, though it remains to be seen if this can remain true under art market conditions in which being an artist is a relatively sensible career choice financially. Nevertheless, if the engagement of non-conformist individuals in art remains a possibility, we might imagine that those responsible for the development of academies can rest easy, work within the existing structures, and follow 3 the paths of least resistance as determined by the ever-present bureaucracies of funding. This could be quite a seductive model for the institution and it is perhaps not too far from the truth, at least partly. Oftentimes, the possibilities that students are given for working against the system that can be the most productive aspect of any school curriculum. In some cases and for some individuals, the most significant thing that can be said is, “No, that isn’t what we do here”—a denial that can then act as a most suggestive and powerful provocation to action. In any thought about the situation that might encourage the construction of the “ideal art school,” we should not forget this need to be imperfect, precisely in order to inspire resistance and the search for alternatives among the collegiate body. Despite my opening plea for what might be seen as inaction in art academies, I do think that we can try to create the most energetic and interesting situations that would achieve the conditions of learning that I’ve outlined above. A school that is selfaware, responsive to its participants, and willing to consider the virtues of its own demise can contribute more to its overall goals, however it wants to describe them, than one that is controlling, repetitive, and nervous for its future. And, most importantly perhaps, what academies do does make a difference. Creativity can indeed emerge in any context, but we only have to look at specific moments in art-school history to see that there have been pivotal academies in the renewal of our artistic heritage in Europe and North America. Consider Kazimir Malevich’s art group UNOVIS in Vitebsk and the Institute of Artistic Culture, called INKhUK, in Moscow; the Bauhaus in Weimar; the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax and CalArts in Los Angeles in the 1970s; the Free International Universities of the ’70s and ’80s under the initiatives of Joseph Beuys and Caroline Tisdall, among others; and more recently Goldsmiths in London and Jaroslaw Kozlowski’s class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In all of these places, something occurred between the energy of the students, the commitment and courage of the staff, and the external political and social circumstances that defined a new way of working with art and its education that benefited all parties enormously. Unfortunately, none of these exemplars developed sufficiently similar structures for us to simply institute them in a programmatic way. Each was brought about by a confluence of individuals who shared certain ideals and were allowed to put them into effect by the intellectual and political climate (or simply weren’t 4 stopped from being carried forward). In fact, many of these “great moments” in art-school history only lasted a few years before they also needed external challenges and renewal or imploded under internal or political pressures. This pattern of development is probably the best we can expect from any new projects or pedagogical ideas that might be implemented in the near future. In looking in more detail at various historical academies, I wanted to discover if, despite their differences, there were certain points of consensus about structural and pedagogical issues that could be significant for contemporary art and for art schools in this new century. Much of the research that has fed my writing here is based on work that I did in the late ’90s, at the time of my protoacademy project at the Edinburgh College of Art (of which more later). There are numbers of remarkable documents about the founding of the various vanguard art programs I’ve already mentioned, along with other texts mostly written by artists from the late 1960s on, that share an interesting degree of agreement about certain educational fundamentals—almost regardless of their schools’ structures and philosophies. I’ve tried to corral these under three headings that define what seems like an almost consensual opposition across time to certain pre-existing assumptions: antispecialization, anti-isolation/anti-autonomy, and anti-hierarchy. The first of these points is that artists shouldn’t be viewed as specialists or limited to activities defined by certain areas of specialty. In fact, they should oppose the philosophy of specialization that is foisted onto art education either by scientific models or economic criteria of assessment. For instance, when Walter Gropius wrote the original pamphlet/manifesto in 1919 that articulated his vision for the Bauhaus, he saw the “complete building” as the project around which to unite different art disciplines, handcrafts, and manual skills. While Beuys wrote in the founding statement for his Free International University in 1982: “The specialist’s insulated point of view places the arts and other kinds of work in sharp opposition, whereas it is crucial that the structural, formal, and thematic problems of the various work processes should be constantly compared to one another.” Further on, he argued: “The division of the disciplines for the training of experts, with no substantial comparative method, reinforces the idea that only specialists can contribute to the basic structures of society: economics, politics, law structure, etc.” 5 A recent CalArts prospectus picks up on this conviction in a typically more pragmatic, utilitarian style: “The faculty has long questioned the traditional categories of art production, and encourages a cross-disciplinary approach. This means that painters can work with photographers, or designers with videomakers; it can also mean that, using the resources available throughout CalArts, a sculptor can work with a musician, a performance artist with a filmmaker, or a photographer with a writer…. All the resources of the School are thus available to every student with an openness that also, paradoxically, leads to a kind of institutionalized friction that causes a constant questioning of boundaries, assumptions, and aims.” These ideas relate to a connected concern that art education should be directed to the whole human and that the significance of art’s role in the academy, university or broader society is as a synthesizing agent crossing and combining mutually ignorant fields of specialization. A second point of consensus is a real commitment to opening dialogue with specific non-art constituencies, either with the “community” (vague word) or with certain industrial or intellectual environments—what I’ve called “anti-isolation,” or perhaps more poignantly “anti-autonomy.” In Vitebsk, UNOVIS organized urban decorations for the three anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution, including Suprematist designs by Malevich, protoConstructivist banners and billboards by El Lissitzky, and images of Chagallian people flying through the air. These decorations were usually produced collectively without a single authorial voice, and the artists appear to have been genuinely concerned about how the working class of Vibetsk perceived their works and whether they increased revolutionary consciousness or were rejected for being nonrepresentational. The new initiatives after 1945 emphasized even more the need for contact with other academic disciplines, with commerce, and with the immediate community. For example, Kasper König was responsible for an extraordinarily rich series of publications that came out of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design in the 1970s—a program that attracted the best artists of the period to a relatively isolated spot in Canada. There is a wonderful bureaucratic document for the Free International University written by Caroline Tisdall in 1975 as an application to the former European Economic Community for the proposed establishment of the FIU in Dublin (which never came to pass 6 for lack of funding). It is the clearest possible statement of the aims of these programs, many of which speak directly to our current situation. She described the ambitions of the project and its difference from traditional universities, including the cross-fertilization of disciplines toward the goal of exploring the “contribution that cultural and intellectual life can make to society”; its total independence from government bureaucracies of education; its transparency to the public; its freedom from age restrictions; its openness to cultural and political dialogue “as a basis for dialogue [without imposing] standardised opinion”; and its intention to “regard learning as a process not an end.” In the Unites States, Allan Kaprow had already proposed an even more radical admixture of art and society in his February1971 essay published in ARTnews, “The Education of the Un-artist, Part 1.” After describing the morbidity of “art-art,” as he put it, he writes: “Seeing the situation as low comedy is a way out of the bind. I would propose that the first practical step towards laughter is to un-art ourselves, avoid all aesthetic roles, give up all references to being artists of any kind whatever. An un-artist is one who is engaged in changing jobs, in modernizing. It is quite possible to shift the whole un-artistic operation slyly away from where the arts customarily congregate. To become, for instance, an account executive, an ecologist, a stunt rider, a politician, a beach bum. In these different capacities, the several kinds of art discussed would operate indirectly as a stored code, which, instead of programming a specific course of behavior, would facilitate an attitude of deliberate playfulness toward all professionalizing activities well beyond art.” Kaprow is the classic example of the artist who tries to undo art. But his engagement throughout his life with teaching shows that the idea of undoing was also connected to a subsequent reconstruction. The artist is as much a syntheszsing figure as a destructive one, taking art out into the world as a way to keep it alive and purposeful. A third point of consensus for most academic models in the 1960s and afterwards is the desire to flatten or eradicate hierarchies between artist-teacher and artist-student. The FIU initiated this model to some extent with its appeal for “reciprocity between staff and students [where] there will be no director and all major policy decisions will be reached through student-staff discussion since the University itself must function as a model of democracy.” The Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts followed this idea, too, in requiring the students to perform and take an 7 active role in their immediate educational environment. From this basis, artists such as Artur Żmijewski and Pavel Althamer have been able to develop radically new participatory practices that resemble a social studio, making use of society as a material in itself. i The protoacademy There is always a great danger in self-historicization and I have been somewhat hesitant in writing about the experiment that was the protoacademy, feeling it would be better left to others. However, it was a four-year project that is now more than six years gone and, as it remains under-recorded, I think it is worth looking at some of its statements and propositions. The protoacademy was established in 1998 in Edinburgh with a very simple metaphor: the idea of an empty table or tabula rasa. Whoever came to the table was a member of the protoacademy, whether it was a teacher or a student or somebody from the outside. They demonstrated their qualifications to be part of the group by the information, the intelligence, the ideas, the questions or the confrontation they brought to that table. Toward the end of the project in 2002, we produced a short collective textii that in many ways summed up the progress and paradoxes that emerged in the intervening years. It needs to be read as a plural text in which each text format forms its own continuity. PROTOACADEMYPROTOTYPEPROTOTEXT Proto academy thinks on its feet, not on its seat. Situated just off Edinburgh’s Royal Mile in the Flag that up. But girls don’t write manifestos - except for that Russian Futurist Valentina – what’s her name… shadow of The Crags and the Scottish Parliament, it is housed in a former Social Security we should just record this and run it through the text - in fact we should get a minidisc and record everything… portacabin called Weirsland. The proto academy is not a tapestry department. In this secluded A dole office, really?…. yeah, we like that pedigree - and reminding people of it. What was that reference to the pastoral? Well it’s to do with this mythical understanding of the proto academy that other people have… spot, gentle herdspersons convene to exchange gifts and elevated thoughts in the noonday sun. …but it’s just us, exchanging work and ideas between 8 ourselves - and the people in Malmo, Stuttgart, Seoul, Trondheim Berlin, London…. and it does work - like, say the Malmo show in May…. But community comes at a price. The proto academy is not its history. The facilities at Weirsland include 24 hr multiple access, a landscaped garden with a historic fountain, and a roof terrace with bar. Proto academy consumes bureaucracy and produces community. Parking is free. Proto academy is not a research….. and we could do with a course in feminist theory, maybe someone from the university could be pulled assessment exercise. (Contributions to this space invited). It is not run in accordance with in to handle that, or someone like Griselda Pollack. But what are we going to do with this, it sounds like conventional standards of success or failure. The interior includes floors by Jim Lambie, a skylight a bunch of guys sitting in an old man’s bar off the Royal Mile?! We need to pep it up a bit for christ’s sake. by James Turrell, filing systems by Donald Judd and a canteen by Jorge Pardo. Proto academy Yeah, why don’t we use this space to hire out proto academy’s services to other flagging art colleges? generates a vast number of research points. These are currently available for institutional What about this ‘tabula rasa’ thing? Let’s get this over with. What does it mean? Blank slate, empty page. assignation. Waste disposal and security systems by Gustav Metzger and Phil Niblock. Why does it sound like ‘table’? No, it’s to do with proto academy being anything anyone wants to make out of it. Proto academy is not a cult, a massage parlour or a postgraduate nursing home. It is not you mean like that issue of Metronome with our five blank pages in? Yeah, something like that… circumscribed by affirmative statements or disclaimers. The proto academy's structure Can we think of ‘use value here? I think use value lies exactly between those two terms, I mean changes in accordance with the activities of its members. We welcome and encourage… affirmation and negation. There’s a lot of contradiction inside that. There should be more contradiction. intermittent acts of artistic practice and research, and can accommodate overnight visitors. 9 In writing this text, some of the competing, plural voices of different members can be heard. The strength of protoacademy was in allowing that agonistic kind of existence to flourish. It sometimes produced stasis, but this was always temporary until the final removal of funding by the college in 2002, by which time many of the original participants had moved on. To some extent, protoacademy was a process that led some to disillusionment with the priorities of a product-orientated system. There was a shared commitment to collective activity and communal reading that probably influenced some too strongly to continue with an individual art practice, but such a result is to be expected, even admired. It is likely that in all events, a project such as protoacademy could only have had a short lifespan. It is important to note that not all the participants built major careers in the existing art world. It required enormous commitment from its members to generate discussion and maintain activity without a formal administration. Such assistance and the consequent bureaucracy would have been necessary in the longer term. Yet having contributed to biennials and academies across Europe and in Asia, and having organized reading groups that established critical theory as a purposeful field at Edinburgh College, it did manage to administer itself fairly well on no time and no pay. In terms of its longer-term effects, they will be seen in the individuals who participated and perhaps reflected in such independent initiatives as Clémentine Deliss’s subsequent Future Academy project that occupied part of its intellectual space at the College. Blueprints for the next experiment The protoacademy was of its time and place. It responded to particular realities in Edinburgh at the time—the lack of international connections, absence of theory, and the need for a broader definition of art and its relation to student activities. These issues were not unique to Edinburgh but were expressed in specific forms. A second protoacademy initiative would need to be configured differently for its environment. Nevertheless, what we can learn from the negative definitions of anti-specialization, anti-autonomy, and anti-hierarchy is that a rejection of what has gone before and a desire to undo the coordinates that locate art at any given moment must be key to any propositional plan for an art school now. Learning how not to take part, often through collective agency, can be the basis for the reconstruction 10 of the priorities of the art world. At this stage, for instance, an explicit rejection of the art market and an attempt to produce thinking without the production of objects would seem to be a way of rejecting the contemporary status quo. Such a move would also call on the research that has been done in the last ten years around the production of knowledge and could reshape the link between artistic works and the acquisition or presentation of experimental results in universities. This construction could perhaps only be anticipated within a state subsidized European system, though the challenge to the academic marketplace to deliver such an outcome would be fascinating to observe. At the very least, it would ask gallery owners to once again get creative and figure out how to commodify such works and once again renew their contract with collectors. i This section is a substantially rewritten and updated version of my original text entitled “The Proto Academy” in Education, Information, Entertainment, ed. Ute Meta Bauer (Vienna: Edition Selene, 2001), pp. 216-224. ii Written by Brian Davies, Steve Duval, Luca Frei, Lyn Löwenstein, Shepherd Steiner, and Lesley Young, among others. 11