Shift/Work Speculations Cards (2017) designed by Jake Watts
Neil Mulholland ‘Shift/Work: Speculations’, in L. Campbell (ed.), Leap into Action, New York: Peter Lang. 12th December 2019. pages 21-26; 39-40; 59-60 ISBN 9781433166440
Shift/Work is a performative paragogics (Corneli 2011) that supports the active peer production of Open Education Resources (OER) for artists. Shift/Work arose from participatory action research (PAR) into art education’s hidden (anti-)curriculum as a means of intervening in the monadic culture of self-sufficiency performed by its atomising technologies of the self. An iterative practice continually re-performed like a musical score, Shift/Workers compose and play-test intersubjective workshops for one another prompted by a ‘gesture that interrupts’ (Biesta 2017, 36); a MacGuffin that playfully amplifies our different educational expectations in order to draw our collective attention to how learners are subjectivised as artists. Drawing on a paper presented at ISoTL17 in Calgary, this chapter delineates Speculations (Shift/Work 2017), a Shift/Workshop composed and performed in Scotland, India and Norway during 2017 and in Ottawa in 2019, the parameters of which were scaffolded by Dan Brown, Jake Watts and Neil Mulholland.
This book proposes ‘paragogic’ methods to re-imagine the art academy. While art schooling was revolutionised in the early 20th century by the Bauhaus, the author argues that many art schools are unwittingly recycling the same modernist pedagogical fashions. Stagnating in such traditions, today’s art schools are blind to recent advances in the scholarship of teaching and learning. As discipline-based education research in art eternally battles the perceived threat of epistemicide, transformative educational practices are rapidly overcoming the perennialism of the art school. The author develops critical case studies of open source and peer-to-peer methods for re-imagining the art academy (para-academia) and andragogy (paragogy). This innovative book will be of interest and value to students and scholars of the art school, as well as how the art academy can be reimagined and rebuilt.
Re-imagining the Art School assesses the organisational development of the humanist ‘idea of the art school’ from the post-rationalist perspectives of constructivist and connectivist educational learning theory. It examines how recent internal (‘porous’) and external (‘para’) reforms have transformed the production of subjectivity in art schooling and pioneers the application of theories and methods of para-academia and paragogy in art education. It is the first book to be published on the future of the art school to develop an open access paragogy for artistic learning and research.
Reimagining the Art School will be published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan
Location
Bourdon Lecture Theatre , Glasgow School of Art, Bourdon Building
Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ View Map
Artists in the City: SPACE in 1968 and Beyond
Edited by Anna Harding
Designed by Modern Activity
Published by SPACE (Art Services Grants Limited)
ISBN 978-1-9999278-0-6
Distributed by Cornerhouse Publications, HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester M15 4FN. Price £19.95
In celebration of SPACE’s 50th anniversary, a display in the project space presents previously unseen material from SPACE’s archive covering the years 1968-75 as well as photographs of early events and studio sites, capturing the founding years of SPACE and AIR, the Art Information Register which was the sister organization to SPACE. This material forms the basis of the book Artists in the City: SPACE in 1968 and beyond to be published in March.
The book launch event is set for Saturday 17 March, followed by a panel discussion with selected contributors at Whitechapel Art Gallery on Thursday 22 March.
Neil Mulholland – The Unlearning Organisation: Cultural Devolution and Scotland’s Visual Arts 1967-2017
Building on primary research in CCA/GSA’s Third Eye Centre archive and interviews with key stakeholders, this chapter elaborates the ways in which visual artists based in Scotland developed their own civic infrastructure in tandem with the devolution of state arts patronage from London to Edinburgh from 1967 onwards. It demonstrates how the Keynesian arms-length principal inherited by the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) generated a productive tension with nascent Artist Run Initiatives (ARIs) in Scotland. With limited state support, artists successfully developed and ran their own platforms while the Scottish Arts Council founded and led more generously funded (competing) national and civic arts organisations.
Realising Tom Nairn and Bob Tait’s vision of a Scottish International, Scotland’s nascent ARIs bypassed official Scottish and British arts bodies, finding a blueprint and network for their activities in ARIs such as SPACE (London) and PS1 (New York City).
As a means of mapping means of production and systems of distribution over the past half century, the chapter presents snapshots of organisational change at pivotal moments in the devolution of the arts in Scotland: 1971, 1979, 1992 and 1999.
These case studies provide a basis for critical analysis of the devolution of the visual arts since the reconvening of the Scottish Parliament. Following political devolution in 1999, Scotland’s Governments have revoked JM Keynes’ arm’s length Patron State model in favour of the New Labour experiment with Structuration and creative economics that is Creative Scotland. Throwing SAC on the arms-length-bodies bonfire that has raged across R-UK, a centrist ‘creative economy’ model has been accelerated by the SNP.
In some respects, post-devolution Scotland is less devolved than it was in 1994 and, also, less democratically accountable. The chapter proposes that the Scottish Government may best unlearn the existing Union State apparatus by adapting the distinctive model of collaborative advantage that artists have developed to successfully govern their activities over the past 50 years.
Ten Years in an Open Necked Shirt (p111-119) is my contribution to:
GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland Guide and Reader
Edited by Moira Jeffrey
National Galleries of Scotland and Glasgow Life
Over the last twenty-five years Scotland has had a growing reputation as an international centre of artistic innovation and experiment for the visual arts. These books accompanyGENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art, a major nationwide exhibition programme showcasing some of the best and most significant art to have emerged from Scotland over the last twenty-five years.
The GENERATION Guide provides a fully illustrated guide to the programme with entries on the work of more than eighty artists being exhibited in over sixty venues throughout Scotland and information about group exhibitions and other projects. It forms the first comprehensive overview of the art of the period. It includes Turner prize winners Douglas Gordon, Simon Starling and Martin Boyce and 2014 nominees Duncan Campbell and Ciara Phillips.
The GENERATION Reader, edited by writer Moira Jeffrey, provides the first collection of key documents from the period including essays, critical writing and artists’ own texts, and offers a guide to the ideas, events and debates that shaped a generation. In it, a selection of archive texts from the period sit alongside newly-commissioned writing which includes an introduction by novelist Louise Welsh and specially commissioned essays by Juliana Engberg, Nicola White, Dr Sarah Lowndes, Professor Andrew Patrizio, Professor Francis McKee and Jenny Richards.
GENERATION Guide and Reader books come in slipcase.
Extent 240pp/128pp. Paperback. 95 colour illustrations, guide and reader in slipcase.
Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen is an audio zine, a collection if vagrant sonic fictions.
It will be available to purchase for £30 as a USB device designed by Plastique Fantastique, or as a free digital download from the Collective and Punctum Records websites, as well as exploitzzxjoanwgen.tumblr.com
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The rubbled architecture of the semantic apocalypse is a jambient meshwork of infectious crypto-fictions, arche-hymns, cargo-cult objectiles and the untethered futurities of permanent collapse. A tentacular-empire-machine.
Swarming visions, speculations and transmissions are hereby retro-clothed in vaporware, to be neurocast for further maladaptation by the following memechanics of the salvaged future:
AAS, The Confraternity of Neoflagellants, Plastique Fantastique, Head Gallery, Jillian Mayer, WE, English Heretic, Michelle Hannah, Benedict Drew, POLLYFIBRE, The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, Xempeer and Kornelia Remø Klokk.
Dane Sutherland has worked in partnership with Punctum Records to publish and distribute this project.
Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen | Launch Event
Friday 30 May 2014 | 7-10pm
Bongo Club
Exploit.zzxjoanw.Gen is a project by Satellites Programme Intern and curator, Dane Sutherland. He has worked with a number of leading artists to create new music, sound artworks and texts which will be available to purchase as a limited edition USB stick designed by Plastique Fantastique for £30. It will also be available from 31 May as a free digital download from the Collective and Punctum Records websites.
Performances on the night by: Plastique Fantastique, The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ and Kornelia Remø Klokk. Doors open at 7pm, performances from 8pm.
Collective Gallery
City Observatory |
38 Calton Hill, Edinburgh
EH7 5AA @1984_collective
