metropolis m

Under catchy names such as the School of Echoes and Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU), many artists are setting up their own schools. While regular educational institutions are burdened by an excess of bureaucracy and the increasing influence of the market, these initiatives are popping up as the independent alternative, one that is critical and free of neoliberal interests.In recent years, there has been a distinct renewal of interest in education as a means of experimentation and as a mode of organization. Artists have engaged in a broad range of self-initiated projects, varying from informal reading groups and seminars to alternative schools, community-based pedagogical experiments and online learning platforms. Some of these projects might at first glance appear to merely carry over the general interest in education and the art school that we have become familiar with in the artistic production of the past decade. However, in their emphasis on autonomy and self-organization, recent artists’ experiments in education seem better understood as political strategies: as creative responses to the general social and economic conditions of today or as alternatives to established art schools and university programmes.The distinct premise of the projects that take this approach to education is that the process and space of learning becomes a political experiment in and of itself. The organization of schools, seminars, and workshops are seen as a way to build discourses, to identify and cultivate communities, to develop a critical awareness of contemporary problems and possibilities and to learn how to respond to them. While sharing an understanding of education as a political question calling for creative and critical involvement, the form of such practices varies depending on context – as does their specific agenda.Some of these practices specifically employ experimental modes of learning in order to raise consciousness and facilitate self-organization. Ultra-red, a group of international artists and activists, experiments with such strategies through collective listening workshops they have been calling the ‘School of Echoes’. The London-based Carrot Workers Collective develops workshops and guidebooks for interns in the art world, informing current and future interns of their rights and pointing out common ways in which institutions exploit their labour. Jakob Jakobsen, initiator of the former Copenhagen Free University, is now involved in a year-long research project re-examining the materials of the counter-cultural Anti-University of 1968, organizing workshops, publications, and teach-ins as part of dOCUMENTA (13). In this and many of the other projects, there is a distinct interest in experimental forms of education that have the potential to shape politics and empower local communities, building on ideas about radical pedagogy first popularized in such books as Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971). Other experiments assume the form of relatively autonomous spaces where it becomes possible to experiment with forms of learning and knowledge exchange. The New York-based 16 Beaver Group has hosted independent reading groups, presentations, discussions and other events from their space at 16 Beaver Street. Their weekly programme reads as an ongoing attempt to grasp the urgent and complex questions of today, to imagine possibilities for intervention and response and to learn about strategies of organization. In contrast to academic institutions and established art spaces, the curriculum of the self-organized schools and seminars often appears able to respond swiftly to current issues and can be uncompromised in its political commitment. In these cases, self-organized programmes manage to create a platform for the discussion of issues that remain outside of the scope of existing institutions.Given their potential political effectiveness, it is not surprising that the protests of the last years have triggered a new proliferation of autonomous education initiatives, some supported by pre-existing networks. Indeed, the 16 Beaver reading groups assumed an active role in the Occupy Wall Street protests alongside other self-run seminars, workshops and free schools, in New York and abroad, critically reflecting on and informing the protests. These projects have allowed artists to harness their creativity for political ends: they function as platforms for developing and disseminating alternative forms of resistance, re-imagining how meetings can be organized, how decisions can be made collectively, or how publics can be mobilized. Besides functioning as a direct political strategy, many of the recent critical experiments in education have responded in some way as alternatives to the existing educational institutions, both inside and outside of the art world. On the one hand, some of the self-organized educational programmes can be understood as a pragmatic response to economic factors: funding withdrawal, increasing costs and a contracting job market. On the other hand, today’s artists-run experiments are also genuine attempts to provide an alternative to the universities and academies, which are considered to be increasingly instrumentals by governments and corporations.The Public School, set up by Telic Arts Exchange founders Sean Dockray and Fiona Whitton, is an example of a project that should be understood in this context, addressing both economic and institutional questions. Conceived as a ‘school with no curriculum’, its classes are collectively proposed and administered by the public via the organization’s website, thereby doing away with the superstructure of institutions, degrees, and the fixed distinction between teachers and students. Although emerging directly from the interests and concerns of a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles, the potential platform for The Public School is relatively open. A project like this shows an emphasis on providing access to learning and facilitating a general form of engagement independent from institutional concerns. If the Public School responds to a general academic context, other initiatives amongst artists have responded specifically (and critically) to the state of art schools and postgraduate programmes, which have become increasingly institutionalized, expensive, and integrated in the art market – a tendency exemplified by the growing amount of classes focusing on networking and marketing skills. Artists are increasingly foregoing or postponing their postgraduate educations in favour of residencies and summer schools, self-institutions and non-degree, alternative programmes. At one register, this includes highly regarded programmes such as the Whitney Independent Study Programme, Skowhegan Summer School and the Rijksakademie – programmes that have always been popular but perhaps supplemental to the normal postgraduate path. At another register, however, there have been a number of semi-institutional and semi-casual educational projects run by artists that take an implicit political stance against the conventional programmes, articulating a particular irreverence for formal education that perhaps better captures the current tendency towards self-organization. This group would certainly include the Mountain School of Arts, a programme run from the Mountain Bar in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. Co-founded by artists Piero Golia and Eric Wesley, the tuition-free school offers a curriculum that includes lectures on philosophy, law, dance, and art, but also hosts live music and interviews with an eclectic array of art and non-art personalities. In this context, discussing theoretical essays and arguing over politics are found to be on a horizontal plane with the straightforward process of meeting well-known artists and having a barbeque. Even more recently, Bruce High Quality Foundation University began offering courses through their website in ‘Extreme Performance Art’, ‘Cobraclass’, and “The Language of Love: Intro Italian’, for artists seeking to escape what they refer to as an ‘untenable’ art school model. Their solution is simple: to get the art school they always wanted by making it up for themselves. As they say in their manifesto, ‘This is the premise of BHQFU: that artists can figure this thing out.’Such art programmes become an increasingly viable substitute for expensive academic postgraduate programmes. However, even though their strategies offer potential deviations from the debt-laden norm, it remains unclear whether these projects can actually manage to provide a genuine critical alternative to the established system of art education. While undermining the traditions of the art school, one might wonder if these groups potentially create yet another kind of accreditation and exclusion – a re-tribalization around different forms of value. In this case it is possible that, rather than avoiding the influence of the market on education programmes, they provide a direct line to it.The critique of art schools and the projects emerging from sub-cultural and activist circles have not remained unnoticed and now coincide with a number of larger institutional projects. Initiatives like the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Wide Open School’, a temporary ‘summer school’ taught by a variety of international contemporary artists, or the ‘Maybe Education and Public Programs’ platform at dOCUMENTA (13), which involves a collaboration with the Art Academies Network, signal a conscious recognition of the issue of education by international art organizations. The question will be whether these large-scale events manage to put forward a coherent agenda beyond the conventions of eclectic public programming. Both as forms of organizing political engagement and as specific responses to the condition of universities and art schools, self-organized experiments in education acquire a specific relevance in turbulent times. The economic crisis, the Occupy protests, and the ongoing cuts to education and social programming have given a specific goal – or an edge – to an involvement by artists in education that would otherwise have taken place at a distance from current social and political questions. If earlier experiments with education worked around the idea of education as artistic medium or of the exhibition as a school, current experiments show the pressing need to make specific demands. As the austerity measures and the political decisions that underlie them deeply affect societies at large and the art world in particular, self-organized spaces of learning might allow us to address a specific set of urgent questions: How can we organize ourselves; what are the relevant strategies of dissemination and discussion; and how to articulate a common project?Tim Ivison and Tom Vandeputte are researchers at the London Consortium. They are working on a book about critical experiments in education, which will be published by Bedford Press in the fall.