Category Archives: Theory

Akadēmeia, Confraternity of Neoflagellants, Criticism, Paper, Theory, Writing

in medias res : nonmodern art

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2019)

Scheihing Edgardo Flickr: Meteorito El Chaco Meteorito_El_Chaco_100_2422 8 September 2011, 17:28:25 This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

As contemporary artistic practice has become ever more polymorphous and multispatial, large scale exhibitions have accommodated a wider array of emerging nonmodern epistemologies, materialities, and temporalities ‘in the middle’ (Latour, 1993, 47). As a critical means of considering contemporary art’s homologous non-modern, this paper refracts two influential global exhibitions of contemporary art – dOCUMENTA (13) and Il Palazzo Encyclopedia – through the lens of Medievalisms Studies. Medievalisms Studies’ challenge to the ‘simplified binarization of premodernacts and modern identities’ (Fradenburg, 1997, 213) invites deeper scrutiny of contemporary art’s knowledges, materialities, and chronopolitics. Developing the medievalist analogies of the compendium and the relic, I focus on specific exempla presented within the curatorial frameworks of two key biennale that offer a macro-cosmic discourse on contemporary art’s developing relations with knowledges, materials, and time. In unfolding anachronic materialist narratives, a nonmodern sensibility promised to liberate emerging art from the social constructivist paradigms that still dominate contemporary art. As a corollary of their nonmodern materialist epistemologies, the biennale that form my exempla also attempted to (dis)place the practices they curated through a polytemporality in which now-and-then and here-and-there areintertwined.

Link to article in postmedieval

Books, Education, Shift/Work, Theory

Re-imagining the art school: paragogy and artistic learning

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.

Available from Palgrave’s Website

Akadēmeia, Art, Books, Education, Events, Shift/Work, Talks, Theory, Writing

Re-imagining the Art School | Glasgow School of Art

 

Flourish: Johnny Rodger & Irene McAra McWilliams
Memory, Will and Understanding II

present:

Re-imagining the Art School

Professor Neil Mulholland
(The University of Edinburgh) www.neilmulholland.co.uk shift-work.org.uk

Thursday 24th January 2019 5.30-7pm
Bourdon Lecture Theatre
Glasgow School of Art
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/reimagining-the-art-school-prof-neil-mulholland-tickets-55017781666

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

Akadēmeia, Education, Events, Theory

Atelier, Skye

Atelier, Skye 2016

The Atelier takes place in Trotternish, Waternish and Duirinish, Isle of Skye 9th-13th MAY 2016 with Atlas Arts http://atlasarts.org.uk

What is ‘Atelier, Skye’?
 
A charrette is an intensive participatory group that engages a common enquiry. Atelier, Skye is a three-day charrette wherein a group of artists, curators, academic researchers and members of Atlas Arts will work with a series of common research ‘objects’ located in the north of the Isle of Skye (Trotternish, Waternish and Duirinish). 
 
Working with the charrette curators, ATLAS Arts have identified a series of sites and objects that will facilitate and contrast different methods of visual and material enquiry. These objects range from artefacts in local museums, to areas of outstanding natural beauty. By engaging with ‘things’ in the custodianship of Atlas Arts, our charrette will enable us to map and improve conditions for cross-disciplinary collaboration, shifting the emphasis away from doing research towards the creation of research objects.
 
We aim to assist Atlas Arts in meeting their aims and obligations as the primary arts organisation for Skye and Lochalsh and thus to the local populace. We will enable this by enlisting Atlas Arts to collaborate directly with artists, arts professionals and academics in the creation of common research objects. The charrette will  transform participants’ understanding of what material research is, what it can be and of who/what might participate in it.  We also hope to use our visit to establish an open access online archive of the project, proxy distributed by Atlas Arts, that will ensure Atelier’s methods are available to artists, researchers and educators working with comparable community-based and site-sensitive organisations.
 
What is ‘Skye’?
 
For the purposes of this project, Skye functions as host environment for engaging a broader community of academics and non-academics in contemporary art and materialist research. It is both a slowly changing land mass and a more rapidly transforming series of agents, things and discourses. ‘Skye’ is a contingent object, one in an ongoing process of flow and growth. Following the material-turn, it is appropriate that we do not presuppose a singular thematic or disciplinary approach towards ‘Skye’. This is why participants will work only from  things hosted by the island, discovering a varied flow of entanglements over the duration of the charrette. Our initial meetings with Atlas Arts Director Emma Nicholson established our objects of enquiry, the journeys our research group will make around the island, the iterative structure of the charrette research process and the ways in which we will document this.
 
What is ‘Atlas Arts’?
 
Based in Portree, ATLAS Arts seeks to be a pioneering producer and commissioner of contemporary art that will create connections between artists and audiences, and respond to the unique qualities of this region, its landscapes, its culture and its people. http://atlasarts.org.uk

Akadēmeia, Education, Events, Talks, Theory

Atelier: Richard Sennett ‘The Craftsman’

 

original-2

Atelier Present:

Richard Sennett The Craftsman

THIS EVENT HAS SOLD OUT

Richard Sennett

Atelier warmly welcome Professor Richard Sennett, who will be discussing his seminal work The Craftsman at The University of Edinburgh. In this book, he shows how history has drawn fault-lines between craftsman and artist, maker and user, technique and expression, practice and theory, and that individuals’ pride in their work, as well as modern society in general, suffers from these historical divisions.

Sennett’s research has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of material facts – about the cities in which they live and about the labour they do. He focuses on how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His research entails ethnography, history, and social theory. As a social analyst, Professor Sennett continues the pragmatist tradition begun by William James and John Dewey.

Akadēmeia, Education, Paper, Shift/Work, Talks, Theory

„DER FACHIDIOT?” The Paratechnic in the Monotechnic

„DER FACHIDIOT?” : The Paratechnic in the Monotechnic
13:30 Provocation Paper for CHEAD, ‘Agents of Change: Art School & Universities’ http://chead.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/CHEAD-Annual-Conference-2016-programme.pdf

Wandergesellen
Wandergesellen: Alexander Kiefer (center) with his journeymen in his last travel section of Niederwinden

 

Since the early ’60s, increasingly integrated paratechnical curricula have been (begrudgingly) hosted by monotechnical art and design schools. I outline the key characteristics and limitations of the (modernist) monotechnical art and design curriculum and give some examples of different integrated paratechnical tactics and strategies. From this, I suggest that the paratechnic attempts to pursue the following qualities:

Diversification of methods and communities of practice

Externally-networked dissensus (Bill Reading’s ‘University of Dissensus’)

1:1 scale immediation (non-representational)

Ludic, adaptive flow

Paragogical cooperation and collegiality

An opportunity lies in admitting that the monoculture of art and design education – its internal ethics – still nurtures modernist assimilation and bias, and that, in preventing art and design from realising its educational potential, fachidiots place their own field at risk of redundancy. From this we may begin a productive transformation of the art school’s communities of practice (its variety of staff and students) and their relations with international communities of purpose.

Mask Project, St. Martins Sculpture DipAD Course 'A', June 1972
Mask Project, St. Martins Sculpture DipAD Course ‘A’, June 1972