Subject: BHA: FW: text
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 02:03:06 -0500 


 Dear all,

Since it's been a little quiet on the list of late, I just wrote something
brief about art education which (as one of the lurkers) I thought I would
throw in. It's not so much that there's any developed CR argument in there
despite a couple of concepts you will all recognize, but more that I figure
that almost everyone on this list is probably engaged in teaching one way or
the other, and since I've been on here, our practices as educators (I teach
at art schools) hasn't really been discussed, so it might start something
off. 

I knocked it out just tonight because it's past deadline, so I'm not
desperately emotionally involved with any of it apart from the intent, so
don't hold back!

I'll leave the invitation at the top for context, my reply in below. 

All best, gareth 

-----Original Message-----
From: Texte zur Kunst
To: Gareth James, ISP
Sent: 1/9/2004 8:56 AM
Subject: text

Dear Gareth James, 

at present we are preparing the forthcoming issue of Texte zur Kunst - a
special issue on questions of EDUCATION - mainly in the context of
art-related educational institutions (art academies, universities,
independent teaching programmes), but also in a broader sense, aiming at
education as a more general cultural practice. Not only in Germany, but
in an increasing number of Western societies, there are drastic cutbacks
in funding for education of all sorts to be witnessed, pointing
unmistakably at a prioritization of other social and economic factors -
a set of decisions not necessarily apt to imply more than a simple and
hasty shift of cultural and societal investments.  Art education - and
the mediation of "art knowledge" in general - may or may not have become
a secondary commodity, at least taking into consideration the high value
that is being given to "aesthetics" and "aesthetic practices" inside
corporate industries and an ever-increasing international "image
industry".

All this can hardly be considered news. Nonetheless, we would like to
ask you - together with a number of other teaching persons in the
broader art field - for a short statement that could shed some light on
what is happening right now, what are everyday experiences "inside the
teaching machine" (G. C. Spivak) and what is being thought of as viable
alternatives to the present state of things.

The first part of the question we would like to ask you is simple: HOW
DO YOU TEACH ART? - but need not, of course, be answered in an equally
simple way. With this, we want to ask you for a brief outline of your
"method" (if there is one). The second part is somewhat more detailed:
IF YOU COULD CHANGE ONE THING IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM YOU'RE WORKING IN,
WHICH ONE WOULD IT BE?

We are well aware that the generalizing character of this question calls
for a rather lengthy answer - but still ask you for a SHORT statement
that should not surpass a word count of 600-650. The date on which all
contributions should have arrived here is January 31st, 2004. 

We would feel very honored indeed if you should decide to participate! 

Hoping for your answer

Isabelle Graw 

Clemens Krümmel, eds.

Esther Buss


REPLY:

I'd like to answer your questions in reverse order: an answer to the second
question forms the context of intelligibility within which an answer to the
second becomes sensible. And here I give my game away from the beginning -
providing something like a basic ontology of education. So-called,
alternative educational models have always sought primarily to change the
grounds of intelligibility. Infamously, these are rarely permitted to become
mainstream practices because of their anarchic generativity, and not just
because there is almost always drugs, de-legitimated mystico-theological
practices, or chickens involved. 

Often enough, thinking on the subject tends to remain imbedded at the level
of how the teacher should teach, and as such, given that the teacher is
already inside the institution, always remains circumscribed by
institutional negotiation. More rarely is there discussion of how to be
taught. In the rare moments that we do so, the relational category of the
alternative is more often than not supplanted by the category of opposition.
Or how to not be taught. That we generally don't want to hear about this can
be seen in a relatively recent example: the much maligned play by David
Mamet, Oleanna. Mamet's play is a deeply incisive observation of education
(and therefore society) in crisis, and is far more interesting than its
reception at the time would suggest: a vitriolic diatribe against political
correctness that had supposedly liberal audiences jumping up from their
seats, pumping their fists and cheering when the beleaguered professor
violently strikes out in frustration at the difficult student. Mamet
combined the contemporaneous pedagogical problem (how to teach society to
stop being so damn bigoted) with the unfinished question of 60s student
radicalism (how to not be taught in order to participate in the question of
how to teach). Ultimately, Mamet's play won't be included next to John
Stuart Mill in any reader on the philosophy of education because it finally
declines to get its hands dirty by proffering any program, even provisional,
of its own. 

The same could not be said of the Situationists. Putting aside for the
moment, their own problems with authority (both internal and external),
their "On The Poverty of Student Life" (1966) suggests an elision between
the problems of education and the problems of revolution. Citing Lukás
approvingly on the question of revolution, the S.I. together with "the
students of Strasbourg" note that 'If they are to be realized in practice,
"theoretical" tendencies and differences must immediately be translated into
organizational questions.' (1). I am certainly not advocating that all
distinction between student and teacher ought to be abolished, though I'm
happy to consider it. Neither do I think that the problem of the
student-consumer, first felt in the United States but rapidly proliferating,
is enough to advocate a reluctant acceptance of the flow of power in that
relation (such reactions strike me as an illicit fusion of the problems of
value under capital in general with the specific problems of power relations
in education). What must change, in my view, is that organizational
questions can no longer be detotalized to answer to the problems of how to
teach one day, and of how to be taught the next, as the options above tend
to do. The theoretical tendencies and differences of students and teachers
must be translated in the same organizational questioning. Or to put it
another way, to recognize in this translation, that the question of how to
not be taught, is not the question of how not to be taught, as though the
student's agency is useful only in assisting teachers to teach better rather
than a demand, however appalling to the teacher, to teach oneself.

It seems that I've left no room in the word count for the obligatory answer
to the second question. But it's like this: Darth Vadar is a better model
than Obi-Wan Kenobi. Move from the particular to the general not the
reverse. If you dream of peace in the universe, you'll be constantly
confused and disappointed when things go wrong. If between yourself and the
student, you can make a shift in articulation of the smallest thing, you've
got a chance that the situation you're in will become intelligible, and the
day that educational institutions become intelligible ...

1. "On The Poverty Of Student Life: considered in its economic, political,
psychological, sexual and especially intellectual aspects, with a modest
proposal for its remedy" by members of the Situationist International and
students of Strasbourg, AFGES, November 1966. Situationist International
Anthology, Ken Knabb.

 

 

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