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Moreover, in spite of the obligation to implement the Bologna rules by

2010, many European countries interpret the concrete establishment

of the masters program in various ways. In some countries, a one-year

program is offered, while other countries concentrate on a two-year

program. Some countries have had masters programs in Fine Art

for many years, whereas others hardly adhere to the deadline for the

implementation of a masters program.

These clear-cut urgencies indicate a definite need for an international

symposium addressing the issue of the specificity of the MA Fine Art

programs. In order to explore these questions further the Utrecht

Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (MaHKU) started a long-

term collaboration project with the Brussels Sint Lukas Academie,

an academy which, similar to MaHKU, offers a one-year MA program

in Fine Art. A series of meetings last year between lecturers from

the Sint Lukas Academy and the MaHKU generated a number of

additional questions. It turned out that a variety of issues could be

categorized in three sub-categories: the student perspective or the

question of competencies; the lecturers perspective or the question of

specific didactic strategies; and last but not least, the perspective of the

institutional environment where the interaction between lecturer and

student takes place. Precisely these three perspectives addressing the

same issue from different points of view are departure points for the

symposium A Certain Ma-ness (Amsterdam, Spring 2008) organizedby both academies in collaboration with VCH De Brakke Grond,

Amsterdam.

During the first two presentations (Jan Verwoert, Clementine Deliss) the

perspective ofMA-competencies is the starting point. The issue pertains

to whether it is possible to map the various skills required for the MA-

program particularly with regard to a reflective and critical attitude, and

a conception of both knowledge production and research. How can we

assess these competencies? Could it be that specific, rhetorical qualities

are decisive? What will happen to traditional skills such as mastery of

technique? Is the art ist unskilled despite having followed the graduate

program or are traditional skills reformulated during the course of the

program and its critical studies? What do critical and contextualizing

skills mean for the situation of the academy as such? Is the graduate art

academy eventually nothing more than a bastion of the neo-liberal art

system as is often the case with prominent American MFA programs,

Too many conferences currently being organized by art

academies draw attention to the recent development of

PhDs in art trajectories. Yet an even more important issue

today pertains to the specificity of MAFine Art programs

of art academies. After all, it is the masters program,

focused on research, that prepares artists for a possible PhD

trajectory; it is the masters program that offers artists various

perspectives on their professional careers; and it is the

masters program and its strong emphasis on the specificities

of its curriculum that force the bachelors program to reflect

on the particular structure of its own curriculum.

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or is the academy still clearly defined as an outpost for a culture-

critical awareness?

During the next two presentations (Simon Sheikh, Mick Wilson) the

perspective shifts to didactic strategies. Can one determine how a MA

curriculum is characterized? What are adequate didactic strategies

and educational models, and how do they differ from a BA program?

What are the differences and similarities between the various

European MA Fine Art programs? How does the Bologna-ruled,

curriculum-based program and its seminars, lectures, and var ious

methods and bodies of knowledge relate to the stil l dominant studio-

based paradigm with its rituals of tutorials and studio visits? How

do we prevent a more topical discourse based on critical studies and

artistic research becoming canonized into a novel form of academia?

Finally, how do the current educational strategies and models relate

to the research practice of lecturers? In other words, how could

the lecturers own artistic research be strategically deployed in the

curriculum?

The question of the position of ones own artistic research leads us

also to the theme of the research environment. Is it the task of the

academy to develop a specific artistic research environment? How

should such an experimental research environment be facilitated?

How does such a research environment relate to the artistic field

mostly determined by the free market system? Is it the potential of

the experimental environment as one of the last asylums for deviant

forms of knowledge production (or thinking) that made a great

number of curators decide in recent years to proclaim the academy

as the star ting point for their exhibition projects? Investigating the

issue of the academy as field of possibilities from the perspective of

the Graduate School appears urgent. In other words, in what way

political, facilitative, infrastructural could the Graduate School

contribute to the development of a research climate in art education?

These questions are approached during A Certain Ma-Ness in

two ways. First, ar tists Tiong Ang and Aglaia Konrad developed a

presentation in the exhibition space ofVCH De Brakke Grond parallel

to the themes of the symposium. The exhibition shows the interaction

between the research of the lecturer (Tiong Ang, MaHKU and Aglaia

Konrad, Sint Lukas) and of the student (Filip Gilissen, Sint Lukas,Joris Lindhout, MaHKU) as a didactic tool for creating a dynamic

research environment within the current educational system ( The

visual material printed in MaHKUzine 5 is a series of impressions of

this parallel exhibition ) . Secondly, Bart Verschaffels talk, Wil lem de

Greefs introduction, and the presentation of the Utrecht Consortium

(see Research Reports) all elaborate further on the conditions and

possibilities of an ar tistic research environment.

It was Ute Meta Bauer at the Vienna School of Art who was one of the

first people in the art academy field to address these questions and

issues in the context of institutional preconditions. Therefore, she

opens the symposium A Certain Ma-ness with a keynote statement. (HS)

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5

Tomake it very clear from the outset, the subject of this symposium

is not PhDs or doctorates in the arts, or for artists, be they practice-

based or not. First and foremost, this symposium tries to deal with

what we call in Belgium, or at least in Flanders, and believe me even

in Dutch it sounds also quite weird: academizing. Especially the

academization of higher arts education. By this we mean that higher-

level art institutes, if they want to provide Masters degrees, will

necessarily have to present or develop curricula for students which

are clearly embedded in research. Art students have to become

academics or develop some basic competencies in research. Is there

really a need for this? And if so, what could it probably mean? This

is what this symposium is about. Let me give you some facts on the

educational system in Belgium.

Fact number one: since 1989, education has not been a national

matter. Instead there has been a complete devolution of competencies

for education to the different linguistic communities, meaning the

Flemish and French groups in Belgium. Since then the Ministry

of Education for the Flemish Community is responsible for higher

education in Flanders, and only in Flanders.

Fact number two: arts education is a regular part of the Flemish

educational system. It has not always been so. Only in 1994, just one

decade ago, art education became a full part of the higher educational

system. Which means that only since then were its structure and its

qualifications aligned with the rest of the system.

At present, and probably as a consequence of this, the Flemish

government started to implement the Bologna declaration some years

ago, and no exception was made for higher arts education. Like all

the other higher education programs and courses, universities and

non-universities alike, higher arts education has undergone and is still

undergoing several reforms, including reform of the Bachelor-Master

degree structure.Nevertheless, there are some peculiarities in the way the Flemish

government has implemented the Bologna Declaration. As adopted

by the Flemish Parliament in the 2003 Act on the structure of

higher education in Flanders, the largest part of the non-university

higher education programs and courses, those provided by what we

call the hogescholen (higher educational institutes), are generally

transformed into what are called professionally oriented Bachelors

degrees. Other programs or courses, provided by both universities and

hogescholen, are being transformed into academically oriented

Bachelors and Masters degrees. In other words, professional

bachelors degrees are only provided by the hogescholen, while

academic bachelors and masters degrees are provided by universities

and by the hogescholen.

Anotherimportant aspect is that there is only one kind of Masters

degree in Flanders. Contrary to the Netherlands, for instance, the

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Flemish government has chosen not to introduce a professionally

oriented degree at the Masters level. One of the major consequences

of this choice is that all Masters degree programs have to be

embedded in research. All Masters degrees in Flanders are

supposed to be academic.

Moreover, for most of the Flemish politicians it is widely accepted

that the hogescholen cannot possibly meet this requirement for

academization without a helping hand from the universities.

Therefore, each of the hogescholen has been affiliated with a

university. My own institute, the Hogeschool Sint-Lukas Brussel,

is associated with the Catholic University of Leuven. All this

undoubtedly poses many questions. Let me just point out some of

them.

Firstly, today nearly all courses in higher arts education in Flanders

are supposed to be leading to a Masters degree. Some have called it

the academic drift of the ar ts institutes or departments. Is there really

a need for this ? Do all students in the arts really need to follow this

academic track, or is there still a need for more professionally oriented

programs? Or, to put it differently, does the difference sharply evident

in Flanders between professionally oriented and academic course

programs make any sense in higher arts education?

Secondly, if higher arts institutes want to transform their traditional

programs into academic programs, they will necessarily have to reset

their targets and to rethink the curriculum. How would an academic

curriculum look which still made sense for higher arts education

and for art students? What are the academic competencies they are

supposed to develop? More profoundly, is the identity as such of

higher arts education not at stake here?

Thirdly, how do we make a clear link, if we want to, between arts

education and research? Does it mean, for instance, that in the near

future all staff members of art schools should hold doctorates or a

PhD? Or are their artistic or professional qualities more important?

Does it mean that higher arts institutes have to develop their own

research programs? If so, what type of research should they develop?

Importantly, how can one evaluate the quality of the research done by

higher arts institutes or departments?

Fourthly, does all of this not demand a change in the structureof higher arts education itself? For instance, should higher arts

institutes become fully embedded in the universities and evolve

into a full faculty department at the university? Do universities have

enough experience with performing arts? At least in Flanders it is no

secret that artistic research is an underdeveloped, if not undeveloped,

scientific domain. Even the Flemish minister of education himself

stated recently that the helping hand of the universities in the process

of academization cannot be more than a small finger.

All these issues are not unique to Flanders. Many arts institutes,

all over Europe, are looking for the best way to deliver excellent art

education within an outstanding academic context. I believe this

symposium offers us a wonderful opportunity for discussing these

issues

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7

The art system, especially the art market today has become part of the

educational system. The art schools and universities previously more

free and open zones for experiments gradually became incorporated

into a suspiciously commodified system. Art students have more

knowledge of the art market than ever before, and creating successful

artists has become a standard promise on the mission statements of

and calls for applications to MA programs. This is not only for programs

in the United States.

Whatmight be more specific within the US American setting is the

very short path from the art school to the gallery into a collection. This

might be the case in London as well. The exorbitant tuition fees in

the US put a certain pressure to succeed on both the institution and

the student. The strong market has made art education red hot, and

has become an increasingly, attract ive field within education. Culture

and art are significant economic factors leaving their mark on how

art education is shaped. MA courses have expanded both in the field

of artistic education and curatorial studies to serve an ever-growing

market.

Art academies invent new programs ranging from MAs in public art,

to critical studies, critical curatorial studies, and so forth, which is a

indeed a welcome specialization disrupting the dominance of hundreds

of years of European master schools established in order to select

and form the best. Nevertheless, being a critical scholar myself, one

wonders where will all these students go when they leave the institution

with their degrees in their pockets? If you invest so much into your

education, you want to know what the pay-off might be. In order to

serve these expectations, there is a certain pressure on the art schools

to connect early with the art market and to generate a smooth entry into

the system while the future artist is st ill in school.

This is a major shift as compared to, say, even ten years ago. Then the

debate centered around what the majority of art students would do who

never entered the golden triangle of the academygallerymuseum.

Would they instead become more creative web designers, producers ofvideo clips, and so on? But with the expansion of the market through a

new generation of collectors and the globalization of the market itself

including the biennial boom, the chance of grabbing a seat on the art

carousel has sharply increased.

On the one hand, the desired and demanded accessibility to this

field of distinction for a larger number of people has finally become

a reality. Today there are more exhibitions taking place, more art

institutions opening their doors and more museums for contemporary

art being established than ever before. More private collections, in

more countries, are opening their doors to the public. But was this

what we meant when we asked for more visibility as young art students

twenty five years ago? Weirdly enough, it feels as if the art market has

replaced the music industry, with its annual top of the pops and one-hit

wonders. Although I appreciate that today almost everyone can be a

producer of some kind, I am not sure this is a positive development.

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The art market is growing rapidly. Where there is a biennial today,

tomorrow there is an art fair as well, and are we not in need of art

schools too at all these newly emerging locations? Again I am of two

minds. I support the improved access to discourse and modes of

production in many places of the world, as I still believe in artistic

practice as a necessary critical contribution to the formation of

societies. The market embraces all too quickly, however, each new

spot popping up on the global map. Yesterday it was China, today

India, and tomorrow Dubai and the Gulf; art has become a huge

globally operating machine in need of skilled labor.

This brings us back to the art schools. Are they still places to

discuss the meaning of art istic production within the larger field of

culture? Do they negotiate the role art plays in contemporary society?

Previously, art academies and art schools were pre-market, a kind

of playground and creative laboratory when the academy was more

innovative. Solid educational foundations were provided by a master

when a schools focus and reputation rested more upon skills and

techniques. Additionally, the academy provided a somewhat sheltered

biotope encouraging experience and wild growth. Yet now the art

schools seem pretty much part of the canon, as today no one can

afford such naivet. Myriad strategies are incorporated to serve the

system.

Art and its different manifestations have become a powerful

economical factor, a growing industry producing scores of new job

opportunities. Art is now a lifestyle. There is a huge demand for fresh

artists, young curators, new host sites for biennials, galleries and so

on. The questions we need to address are: What is communicated

through this new art, through current exhibitions and their various

formats? What is their content and for whom are they being staged?

The society of spectacle, as Guy Debord presents in his text and film,

is rife everywhere. But what will be left after the glory days have

faded?

A recent debate on New Institutionalism in Bureaux de Change

by Alex Farquharson referred to a number of us freelance curators

joining the safe haven of the institutions for higher artistic

education. I dont necessarily agree with that argument as grounds

to support an opinion and debate. To me there is no outside to theinstitution, no outside to the art market and vice versa. The market

is part of the discursive field. The art world is and has always been a

complex system, a field of constellations and interrelations; some are

amicable, some more antagonistic. The critical field defines itself as

distinct from the commercial sector. However, as stated above, it is a

system of interconnected relations, where each actor decides where

we position ourselves, and in which direction we move. These are

not fixed configurations and an institution today does not represent

the same thing it did twenty years ago. Off spaces nowadays are

not necessarily more political than a museum, as this depends on

how and by whom a space or institution is run. To assume the same

clear divisions exist as did maybe twenty-five years ago would be

overly simplifying, a black-and-white understanding of this complex

system. Therefore, some knowledge of system theory, some reading of

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Bourdieu, Rorty and Luhmann never hurts in becoming aware of our

very own entanglements.

To return to Farquharsons mention of freelance curators

[re-] entering or flirting with educational art institutions: todays

conference topic does indeed raise the question of why curators in

recent times have been accepting leading positions at art schools,

universities etc., specifically those who previously held high-

profile curatorial positions. From my perspective, one reason is the

increasing commodification and instrumentalization of the position

of the curator for all sorts of agendas and desires. A second reason is

that todays director of a museum or a Kunsthalle is more involved

in management and fundraising activities than in working on shows

or directly with ar tists as was the case in the past. Art schools seem

to offer a kind of temporary refuge for those with a desire to sustain

a more critical and discursive practice. I do not want to criticize

my colleagues in art institutions and do not want to sound all too

negative, but I want to express and this I share with a number of

my colleagues a strong feeling of unease about the economic and

political pressures that those who run museums increasingly have to

face today. Furthermore, one should not underestimate the potential

and pleasure of working with students, the inspiration to be found in

other related research fields, and the option of getting away from the

sheer pragmatism of running the day-to-day business of a museum.

To be mainly involved with satisfying trustees and/or local politicians

rather than investing time researching fields that might be not that

popular this is not everyones cup of tea. The wish to renegotiate the

role of art through an expanded notion of art istic education allows

a certain degree of distance, and some independence, from what

the art field represents, at least in the Western hemisphere. I have

been studying art myself, extended by post-graduate studies in art

theory. Therefore, I am quite aware of the influence of teachers and

the impact of innovative institutional leadership in higher ar tistic

education upon students. In my case, a European male-dominated

art school setting, although a very open and liberal one, affected my

desire to understand not only art theory, but also the social topography

of the art world at large. But what I currently see happening is the

`take - over of the, at least so far, more distant locations by the marketand its protagonists and the pressure attached to the market is

already felt.

The motivation actually causing my shift from working as an

artist and organizer to curator and educator seems outdated. The

exclusion of a younger generation of artists, specifically women,

from mainstream art institutions in those days, was a catalyst for

me and some artist friends to generate something else. We as an

artists group, called Stille Helden were not completely opposed to

art institutions; but there was no space for us available and what we

saw exhibited, did often not address what mattered to us or was not

linked to our discussions about art. Instead of complaining, we simply

created our own formats and spaces and generated our own audiences.

We were students of the visual arts, performance and theater, film,

music, and poetry. Today this all seems so far away.

It was not until later that I understood that ar t history is not made

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in the garage; the authority on the art historical cannon is to a

certain extent stil l in the hands of the major museums and based

on their collections. More and more, though, the market dictates

what art is produced and, thus, shown. I can only hope that at one

point the necessity to interfere becomes strong enough to enter the

history-producing apparatus. I still see certain gaps arising within

the dominance of the market, within art history that mattered to my

generation such as the already mentioned lack of female positions

etc.. We have to demand a review and a correction of public collections

and force a change in outdated focus points.

So, there is a need for crucial debates within universities and other

societal institutions focusing on those issues. For obvious reasons

they should take place as well within an apparatus of representation

such as an ar t museum, or within opinion-creating blockbusters such

as Documenta, the Venice and Whitney biennials, and the Carnegie

International. One should not forget, they have the budget, the

infrastructure, and also the media power to correct and re-write art

history. But are there any shared intentions to do so at present? In that

respect, those institutions are indeed highly interesting.

To come back to teaching, I see teaching in art schools as a practice

in line with my curatorial work. I keep in mind the BBCs founding

mandate: Educate, Inform, and Entertain as a healthy mix and a

valid model. I feel the relation between art and exhibitions offers

the option to test situations and combinations. The exploration of

thoughts and work is a necessary focus in art education. An exhibition

is equal to a seminar for me; both formats produce a communicative

space through artistic and intellectual means, so nothing is wrong

with involving students in exhibitions. It must be made clear,

though, what the idea behind such participation is; it is not to create a

showcase for students entering the market.

When I studied art in the early 1980s as part of the group of young

artists called Stille Helden, this was my interest. Being part of an

artist group allowed us not to get pigeonholed; being unpredictable

prevented us from being co-opted. I must have internalized this

attitude, and this made me sensitive towards being identified with

an institution rather than with a distinct practice. And last, but

not least, in those days as young artists we were far removed fromhaving a master plan to develop and to manage a career. Facing

todays powerful art market with huge cash flow on one hand, and

an inflation of temporary exhibition formats such as the exploding

number of biennials on the other, there is a definite advantage to

duck and cover within an educational structure for a while. One

should also not forget that a number of conceptual artists, such as

Hans Haacke at Cooper Union and Michael Asher at CalArts could

only sustain their practice during previous high ar t markets due to

their teaching positions, offering them some independence.

Yet teaching is also about the possibility and responsibility of

transmitting a specific understanding and notion of a critical art istic

and cultural practice to a younger generation of art students. Even

today I seek to find company to explore, to discover, to reflect, and

to analyze, to share what I perceive, in order to be able to implement a

correction through a multitude of voices whenever necessary. As the

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conceptual artist Joseph Kosuthonce stated so clearly: ...an audience

separate from the participants does not exist. I consider myself

always to be the primary audience for my projects. As an audience,

you have to engage in what you perceive, you have to participate

to produce a discourse and to understand an art work. One of my

teachers in art theory at the Academy in Hamburg, Michael Lingner

claimed that only the combination of a work of art, its perception, and

the communication about it generates what we consider art. During

the years I directed an art ists-run space in Stuttgart, I developed

a view of the audience as informal participants over time, i.e., as

an entity sharing and debating experiences. This understanding of

generating an audience to develop a space of communication, a public

space sphere within an institution for education, is still crucial and

important to me, but is more difficult to achieve. Later, while working

as a curator for large-scale exhibitions such as Documenta11 or the 3rd

Berlin Biennial, my self-understanding of my position as a curator did

not differ much from my self-understanding and way of working as a

practicing artist right after finishing art academy.

Forme, it remains essential to enter institutional spaces and at

the same time not to become too comfortable within them, to be

challenged, to be committed for a certain time span and then to

move on to new territories. That keeps one alive and very sensitive

to cultural developments. Today, I realize that the art schools are

too involved in the markets, possibly caused to a certain degree by

curators entering the field. At the same time, I view both art and

curating as ephemeral and process-oriented work, work not so easily

absorbed. Therefore, we should maintain a laboratory-type situation

in the academies. Since raising theoretical questions through both

artistic and curatorial practice is one of my driving forces, I regret

that the awareness of colonial, postcolonial, gender, and class debates

that once appeared in the curricula of art education disappear almost

immediately through the back door now that they have a whiff of

PC about them. Today, these issues are addressed to pressure artists

into being do-gooders, while they should really be free thinkers.

But free of what? That question reminds me of Antonio Gramsci

and his notion of the artist as organic intellectual whose role is not

to act, to subordinate or to serve a system, but to be a critical andindependent voice negotiating civil society. Such understanding has

been continued by a number of recent political philosophers such as

Toni Negri.

Surely one should not fall into the trap of considering art, artists,

curators, museums, and art schools as fixed entities. These notions

are in constant flux, and the speed of the transformational process

has been increased alongside the development of high consumption

in general. For example, although the market is strong today, I

recall that in the 1990s it was the curators who were considered

the strong players in the field. Before that, the institutions were the

opinion makers. In other words, art takes part in the economical

and political reconfigurations on this planet as much as everything

else. Globalization as such does not stop when it comes to art. Power

positions are not static or written in stone. As long as we are able

to address that in our educational positions, and communicate that

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constellations are constantly shifting, we are still doing fine.

Lets return to the topic of curators connected to art schools. The

opening of Documenta11 took place in March 2001 at the Academy of

Fine Arts Vienna with Platform_1. This meant there were eighteen

months before the initial scheduled opening date of Documenta11

in June 2002 (then called Platform_5). Platform_1 was focused

on a series of talks, workshops etc. on Democracy Unrealized.

Such topics triggered some highly sensitive reactions amongst my

colleagues on the faculty at the Vienna academy. Some of them

wondered how debates on democracy related to the agenda of an art

school. Several art critics, ar t dealers, and art collectors asked why

such an important exhibition as Documenta11 was launched in an

art school context and on a topic unrelated to art. Those questions

indicated that antagonism was already on the rise. What I shared

with Okwui Enwezor and my colleagues from Documenta11 Carlos

Basualdo, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, Octavio Zaya, and last but not

least Susanne Ghez was the view that Documenta is a knowledge

production machine. In other words, we considered Documenta as

an educational tool. An exhibition of that scale reaches many people,

many for the first time encountering contemporary art. The so-called

professionals have to re-encounter art each time they experience new

works, too.

So Documenta11 was crit icized mostly for resembling a seminar for

higher cultural education. But since the Documenta11 curatorial team

understood this exceptional exhibition format as a form of knowledge

production, why not launch Documenta11 at an art academy, and why

not view it as an expanded series of seminars? Platform_1 - 4 correlated

with the discourses artists invited to Documenta11 were currently

exploring. In order to focus on the specifics of these discourses,

we had to go to the places of origin or of relevance for each of the

platform topics. For example, to debate creolit in Kassel does not

make much sense, but if you debate it in St. Lucia, a place with an

everyday experience of this fairly recent academic discourse, it feels

quite normal. Automatically one is confronted with criticism of people

who share the experience and have deep convictions on the topic.

One needs a critical mass to interact with you if you raise such

questions. That is immensely important in order to establish a seriouskind of back-and-forth debate and to delve deeper into a topic.

I see an exhibition as a zone of activity, a space one has to produce; it

is not a given. An exhibition has to clarify the questions raised and

share this process with the audience, rather than educate them from

the position of those in the know. Such a zone of activity marks

the effort one makes to create discursive art through a curatorial

decision. What do we generate as curators when we put art works,

artistic views, next to each other, and what do we generate by what is

then written about it?

When it comes to research I consider curatorial practice well-situated

within an art school context, also because museums are withdrawing

more and more from curatorial obligation. Once, museums were the

places for serious historical research. Today they are forced to take

part in a tourist industry and have started to become fundraising

machines in order to survive. Curators are under pressure to

PLATFORM5OF DOCUMENTA11,TH EEXHIBITION IN KASSEL IN2002, HA DAROUND650,000VISITORS .

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13

continuously produce art shows that create media attention and attract

large audiences. That leaves them with less time for research. No

wonder some curators migrate to educational institutions in order

to do research. Exhibitions are not being created to simply satisfy us.

An exhibition should be able to create a space for critical reflection,

a space for discourse that challenges the way we think and the way

we perceive the world. A good exhibition leaves one irritated,

troubled, stimulated. Arent those the exhibitions that stick around the

longest?

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14

CLMENTINE DELISS

Is it possible to map the various skills required for the MA - program

particularly with regard to a reflective and critical at titude, and a

conception of both knowledge production and research?

My contribution to this discussion is based on Future Academy,

a curated research initiative set up in 2003 that has been driven

primarily by voluntary and non-paying cells of postgraduate students.

Supported by host institutions from Europe, Africa, India, USA,

Japan, and Australia, Future Academy has effectively spanned five

continents in its attempt to discern the context for independent

research in ar t in t imes to come. Currently part of Edinburgh

College of Art, Future Academy does not provide an MA or MFA

and, in fact, has no formal legitimacy in terms of official diplomas

or exam qualifications. However, what it has provided for students

studying at both large-scale institutions as well as smaller protozoan

organisations is a recursive and transitional model for learning how

to conduct focused research as artists, whilst simultaneously coming

to grips with survival, economic models, and responses to fieldwork

in foreign locations. As a self-reflexive investigation that relies on

the free will and engagement of students from different institutions

and faculties it is necessarily heterological: it appears to disturb the

existing coordinates of fine art education by tracing paths across

geopolitical locations that throw up earlier colonial cartographies

and question current affiliations of power and knowledge that are in

the process of being re-negotiated. Over the last five years, Future

Academy students have acted as the diagnosticians of their own art

education, a process, which can only be successful if they view their

current condition as closely aligned to that of a future environment

for research, production, and community. Interestingly, students

who take on Future Academy either leave quickly because they do not

understand its apparent lack of course structure, or became so fully

involved in it that their ownership of it is unrelenting.

As a procedure that involves the elaboration of new proposals and

their execution, Future Academy characterises my activity as acurator over the last ten years. This has involved generating work

with artists and writers through the independent organ Metronome

and led to a backstage approach to curating for which the art college

has proved to be the most efficient and responsive institutional

setting. In 1999, I published Backwards Translation based on the

ex-curricula of students, setting up a situation of parallel research

and co-production between the Stdelschule in Frankfurt (where I

was a guest professor) and the art academies in Vienna, Bordeaux,

Edinburgh, and finally Biella, with Michelangelo Pistoletto who

was setting up the Cittadellarte and University of Ideas. In 2001, I

transited around Scandinavia for eighteen months, building up an

analysis of the use of rhetoric and the voice in art practice with a

voluntary posse of postgraduate students who were studying at the

various art colleges. This research deepened until we decided to make

voice recordings in a studio in Oslo and develop another Metronome

IT IS DEBATABLEWHETHERTH EDEVELOPMENTOF METRONOMEWOULDHAVEBEENACHIEVEDIN TH EMID TO LATENINETIES IF IHA DWORKEDWITHINMUSEUMSWHERETH EEMPHASISON PUBLICVISIBILITY AN DACCESSMAY HAVERU NCONTRARYTO TH EFOCUSON CONCEPTUALINTIMACY THATICHOSETOWORKWITH.

TH ENOTIONOF HETEROLOGY REFERSTO TH EWAY IN WHICHTH EMEANINGFULFABRICOF TH ESENSIBLEIS DISTURBED: ASPECTACLEDOESNO TFI TWITHINTH ESENSIBLEFRAMEWORKDEFINEDBY ANETWORKOF MEANINGS , AN EXPRESSIONDOESNO TFINDIT SPLACEIN TH ESYSTEMOF VISIBLECOORDINATESWHEREITAPPEARS . JACQUESRANCIRE, TH EPOLITICS OF AESTHETICS , INTERVIEWWITHGABRIELROCKHILL , CONTINUUM , 2004, P. 71

IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAP...?

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publication called The Bastard, co-funded by art academies in Oslo,

Bergen, Malm, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. In 2002, nine ex-

postgraduates and I set up base for ten months in the derelict, yet

high-security Royal Army Medical College that had just been acquired

by Chelsea College of Art and Design. Navigating through this vast,

sinister site next to Tate Britain with guest artists while imagining its

past and future led to The Stunt and The Queel, a publication and 12-

hour event held in the unconverted Millbank building. At that point, I

developed Future Academy, turning back onto itself the environment

in which I had been given so much conceptual freedom and means

of production. Once again I set up informal research units, and was

able to knit together institutional support, first between the London

Institute (now University of the Arts), Chelsea College of Art and

Design, Tate Britain, and later Edinburgh College of Art, and Glasgow

School of Art. Finally, in 2006 and 2007, I published the last two

editions of Metronome for documenta 12, collating materials from

Future Academy fieldwork and developing a further constellation of

backing and finance, only this t ime in the US, Australia, and Japan.

Metronome is neither vanity publishing nor self-publishing, but the

carrier and medium through which I have transported this research in

motion that tends to lie somewhat to the side of recognised curatorial

models, regulated art publishing and academic norms.

Future Academy and Metronome clearly have many points in

common including their unofficial status you may well ask how

Metronome fits into the UKs Research Assessment Exercise when

most productions are without ISBN and Future Academy student

cells are not academically accredited? Several convergences exist, for

example, the nurturing of self-appointed communities of artists and

researchers who engage in a joint investigation and debate modes of

survival; the process of moving and working in different cities and

involving local histories and organisations in the project as it evolves;

and the primary focus on translation as a key trope in advanced art

practice.

However, the one convergence I would like to turn to now is the

influence of early ethnographic experiments in research, fieldwork

studies, and their subsequent interpretation. I am interested in

looking back at the controversial discipline of social anthropology,which I studied alongside contemporary art, but then denied an

affiliation to throughout the 1990s.I want to revisit the maverick

methodologies of twentieth century anthropologists from Margaret

Mead through to Michel Leiris and more recently, Clifford Geertz.

In particular, Ive come back to Gregory Bateson, the polymathic

academic and cyberneticist who made seminal advances in the

translation of systems of knowing and communicating. Batesons

concept of the metalogue is relevant here. Using a relational

methodology to understand perception, Bateson refers to recursiveness

as meaning that repeatedly loops back onto itself in a reflexive

dialogue with its representational boundaries, building a form of

ecological epistemology, a thought-structure that is naturally

interdependent and interactive with other disciplines. Bateson writes,

A metalogue is a conversation about some problematic subject. This

conversation should be such that not only do the participants discuss

SEE METRONOMEPRESS.CO M

OSCARTUAZON , ARTISTAN DCOLLABORATORIN FUTUREACADEMY,EMPHASISESTH EPROBLEMOF TH EARBITRARYCOMMUNITY SO OFTENFOUNDIN ACADEMICSTRUCTURES : IWANTTO ADDRESSWHATISEE AS AN INHERENTLIMITTO TH EACADEMYAS APARADIGMFO REXPERIMENTALWORK. FIRST, TH ESTRUCTURE OF ALARGEINSTITUTION REQUIRESCOLLABORATIONWITHPEOPLEWITHWHOMYOU MIGHTNO THAVEAN YREALAFFINITY . THEREIS AHORIZONON TH EKINDOF AUTONOMYPOSSIBLEIN THISSITUATION. SECOND, WITHINAN ACADEMICSETTINGMOSTOF TH EFUNDAMENTALQUESTIONS OF SURVIVALHAVEBEENADDRESSEDAN DTAKENCAREOF BY TH EINSTITUTION. AN DFO RANARTISTIC PRACTICEWHERETH EPRIMARYISSUEIS HO WTO GE TBY, THISIS AREALOBSTACLE. METRONOMENO .11

HAVINGSTUDIEDSOCIALANTHROPOLOGY IN TH EEARLY1980S, IWA SIMMERSEDIN ASTRAINOF SEMANTICANTHROPOLOGY WHICHNO TONLYREFLECTEDREFERENCESIHA DIDENTIFIEDEARLIERAS AN AR TSTUDENT INTH EWORKOF JOSEPHKOSUTH, SUSANHILLER, MICHAELBUTHE, LOTHARBAUMGARTENAN DOTHERS, BU TOFFEREDASELF -CRITICALANALYSISOF TH EDISCIPLINE SNARRATIVETROPES (SEE JAMESCLIFFORD, PAULRABINOW,CLIFFORDGEERTZ , MARCUSAN DCUSHMAN, ET C.). MY SUBSEQUENTWORKWITHPROTAGONISTSFROMTH EBLACKARTSMOVEMENTIN LONDON , COLLABORATIONSWITHARTISTSIN SEVERALAFRICANCOUNTRIES , PLUSTH EBURGEONINGPOSITIONOF CULTURALSTUDIESRENDEREDPROBLEMATICTH EONGOINGARTICULATIONOF SOCIALANTHROPOLOGYAS AN APPROPRIATEMETHODOLOGY FO RAN 80 SUNDERSTANDINGOF GLOBALISATION, RACEAN DDIFFERENCE.

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GREGORYBATESON, STEPSTOAN ECOLOGYOF MIND, 1971.

the problem, but the structure of the conversation as a whole is

also revealed to the same subject. Only some of the conversations

achieve this double format. This perpetual mirroring exemplifies

the liminal dimension located between researching something

and producing a representation of this process, just as it evokes

the distinctions and concordances between academic discourses of

knowledge production and the eccentric vagaries of art practice. To

develop Future Academy as a Batesonian metalogical investigation

means pitching it first to students, and then involving them from day

one when nothing is known, and there are no results, encouraging us

to determine hypotheses together and form the representation of our

findings gradually as they are being pursued, to become interlocutors,

collaborators, and highlighters together. The work of the students has

a bearing on what I produce, where I travel to, and whether I survive

professionally, and yet, at the same time, each of us has the authority

to retain a sense of individual development. One question emerges

here: can both art students and faculty recognise the plurality and

therefore the instability of methodological procedures as part of their

research activities, or is the current conception of competence and

accreditation in art education unnecessarily driving both part ies

towards conformism?

Underlyingmy interests in the art academy environment is

the presupposition that it offers an exceptionally individualist,

deregulated, and heterogeneous location for visioning the future and

forming agents in this process. As well as providing a more or less

thorough training ground for artistic positions, I would argue that the

academy is the site ofprelusive knowledge. Its artist-members are able

to deploy the transformational moment in their research of aesthetic

practices in a way that is not possible in any other institution today.

For the art academy specialises in and nurtures the lead-up time to

production through a particular approach to the relation between

ideas and things, places and people. As Martin Prinzhorn stated

in a conversation at the start of Future Academy, Art academies

should be places where research is done that actually cannot be

done in universities because universities have other limits that art

academies do not need to have. One might say the same distinction

applies to the art academy in relation to the museum as a site of newproduction: art academies necessarily should be places where art is

engaged with and expanded in a manner that cannot be achieved in

museums and galleries. So my personal question, reactivated again

and again over the last ten years, has been to ascertain whether the

art academy remains a location in which its faculty can experience

the flexibility to undertake the prelusive or unknown that defines

independent research and the work associated with it, rather than

becoming reduced to mere providers or teachers?

This brings me to the blurred definitional framework of what we

call the art academy, a fuzzy logic that is perhaps this institutions

saving grace and ongoing claim to heterodoxy. On an elementary

level, an art academy, like any institution, is the organic result of a

groups desire to work together and formalise certain experiences

and resolutions. However, following Jacques Rancires notion of the

aesthetic regime of the arts, the art academy necessarily embodies

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an antagonism, which functions to reinterpret the past and reinscribe

as well as redistribute values of competence. He writes, A common

world is never simply an ethos, a shared abode, that results from the

sedimentation of a certain number of intertwined acts. It is always a

polemical distribution of modes of being and occupations in a space

of possibilities. It is from this perspective that it is possible to raise the

question of the relationship between the ordinariness of work and

artistic exceptionality.

As the name Future Academy indicates, Ive opted for the heavy

connotations of the historically bound, heritage art academy and

combined it with more self-destruct, ar tists collectives whose scale

is necessarily small and mutable in contrast to the elephantine

magnitude of the major art educational establishments that most

of us work within. However one chooses to define the academy per

se, definitions usually lead at one point to a certain tension between

inclusion and exclusion, formal and informal, organised and

deregulated knowledge. For example, one might focus on the academy

as a protection lodge, run by an elite orthodoxy with a structure

which necessitates it to be non-accessible and non-populist. Highly

ritualised in contrast to more bohemian academies, entry is based on

convocation rituals, on strictly maintained interpersonal networks,

and on notions of adherence. A more innovative analogy might be

the one raised recently by Georg Schllhammer at documenta 12.

Here the academy is understood as an editorial group. Presenting

this notion at the Metronome Think Tank in Tokyo, Schllhammer

states, The idea of the documenta magazines project is to come back

to a form of mobility that is also a form of academy, a very stable form,

namely the editorial group. It has a long tradition in independent

media and involves a group of people working over a long period of

time on issues which they find interesting to translate from one place

to another or to present, because they have the distinct feeling that

they need to speak about these in an audible and visible manner. We

thought, why not use these academies, these editorial groups and

bring them into discussion with one another?

Schllhammers proposition combines the method of an organ such

as Metronome with that of a collective research project like Future

Academy, and more could be developed on this relationship. However,here Id like to focus on the art academy as the tool of cultural

expansion. The geopolitical incentives of this formulation rise and fall

according to demand, and are permanently revised and reactivated

to reflect changing concepts of national and cultural heritage, and by

extension internationalist policy. From the 19th century mercantile

marriage of Empire Education, and Trade, we shift seamlessly into

todays neo-liberal threesome of Globalisation, Learning, and the

Cultural Industries. Todays corporate rather than imperial model

of schooling and human resource development places emphasis on

structures we are all too famil iar with. Life-long learning, vocational

training, concordant accreditation systems, vir tual learning

environments, a powerful, global market in postgraduate education,

and an unhealthy reliance on the fees of foreign, non EU students. It

begs the question as to whether the European MFA is actually a neo-

colonial device ultimately being developed to be implemented beyond

IBID, PAGE42

SEE METRONOMENO . 11, WHATIS TO BE DONE?, TOKYO, 2007

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the territorial parameters of the Bologna agreement? Meanwhile, the

student body increasingly mutates flooding the once singular character

of a nations art academy with an unstoppable flow of new influences,

latent cultural backgrounds, and confused expectations. A college

with a large amount of international students is heterogeneous but

not necessarily able to make use of this condition. Nevertheless, what I

hope characterises todays globalised art academy is not just the frenzy

of standardisation, but the alternative option of travelling intelligently

through different institutional structures with their contrasting

value systems, in order to perform a deep transfer of knowledge that

can reflect and compliment the newly international character of this

student body.

Within the first six months of Future Academy, I made the decision

to curate this investigation away from a super-structure of European

super-schools and to focus instead on the current ramifications of

colonial art academies established in the 19th and 20th centuries,

thereby questioning todays renewed forays into educational expansion.

As a result of pitches I made to artists, scholars, and students on the

hypotheses and modus operandi of this research, I was able to set

up experimental student cells and with these, parallel institutional

partnerships. I worked first in Senegal, where the Ecole des Beaux Arts

in Dakar is actually a post-independence phenomenon initiated by the

late president and poet Leopold Sedar Senghor in 1963; and then in

several cities in India, where art colleges were aligned historically with

their British colonial counterparts.

In both locations, there were different institutional scales at work.

For example, the Media Centre of Dakar, an NGO co-financed by

Norwegian state funding, was working with the Ecole Nationale des

Arts in Dakar and teaching new media to students, and in Mumbai,

the urban research group PUKAR (Partners for Urban Knowledge and

Research), devised by social anthropologist Ar jun Appadurai with US

academic funding, was producing documentary films with students

of Shri. J. J. School of Art. Both NGOs could thereby circumvent

entrenched bureaucratic problems within the older structures and

enable students to develop new methods and productions external

of the existing curricula. Likewise Future Academy would negotiate

its way forward with its motherships in London and Scotland, andencourage students from the different departments or schools to

take ownership of this research. Later, when Future Academy moved

to Japan, this symbiotic relationship was confirmed once more with

the participation of small ar tists collectives in Tokyo that focus on

educational formats, such as CommandN, m-lab, or Arts Initiative

Tokyo (AIT ), indicating a true mushrooming of short-term working

systems. AIT, for example, runs exceptional evening classes on

curating and contemporary art, open to a wide range of office workers

and people whose education may not have included formal art studies.

With this modest endeavour, AIT has managed to remain financially

self-sufficient and autonomous.

Future Academys resolution to be voluntary and non-paying led to a

deep interest on the part of the students in all locations in economic

propositions. In February 2003, a weeklong Future Academy seminar

generated a proposal by MFA students to set up a bank. Their claim

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was straightforward: independent thinking required independent

economies. In the future, the role and value of the artist might lead to

a type of international intelligence for which both a black market and

a barter system might become operational. The senior management

of the UKSchool in question immediately quashed the proposal and,

as any further development was voluntary, the students continued

with their individual work and this institutions involvement in

Future Academy pretty much ended there. However, the focus on

economics did not and it was in Dakar that the most coherent and

topical economic model was developed, precisely because the nervous

accountability of the host institution did not interfere with students

conception of legitimate research.

The model proposed by the Senegalese artists referred back to the

Tontine, a micro-credit scheme originally devised by the Neapolitan

Lorenzo Tonti in 1653. In Dakar, the scheme was activated in the

recession of the 1980s as an alternative to the development banks,

which, whilst apparently run by the Senegalese, were still closely tied

to French finance. Key to the Tontine in Senegal has been the cultural

and social dimension it employs to ensure that a rotating rhythm of

contribution and spending is maintained by each of its members. Trust

and social sanctions encourage a self-selection process with regard to

the groups membership. Tontines can fall within several categories,

from those that are regulated by religious and commercial interests

in order to cover financial difficulties or pay for pilgrimages to Mecca,

through to smaller cooperatives based on neighbourhood structures,

womens groups, the organisation of events, or the acquisition of

health and educational infrastructures. The fundamental issue with

the Tontine is that it remains outside of the law, is not monitored by

the police or the state, and constitutes part of the informal economic

chain. Tontines can even have clandestine membership arrangements

such that although the savings will rotate from person to person

these individuals remain unknown within the group. In the context

of Future Academy, the Tontine provided an experiment in alternative

funding systems and actually paid for the Senegalese visas to India

so that they could to take part in the Synchronisations forum set up

by their Indian Future Academy colleagues. Likewise, the Edinburgh

cell also applied the Tontine system to their collective finances, andmanaged to raise a considerable amount for their visit to India.

As research on this financial, communal structure developed, so too

did the concept of the individual who might operate it: the student on

the one hand, and the teacher or professor on the other, both defined

as agents in a transactional relationship. If the example of legally

extraneous micro-credit associations had provided the framework, it

was to be the hawker or itinerant salesman who offered the role model.

We realise that there are eminent professors of economics in Senegal

who often receive travel grants to go to Europe or the States in order to

study during the holidays. They come back with theories. In contrast

you have the hawker who has no formal education in economics and

who has only attended traditional and Coranic schools. This hawker

enters the economic system too; the one that we call informal, and

he or she travels worldwide. What have these people done to become

successful in the context of an international system? They receive

19

TOOKPART INTHE FIRSTFUTUREACADEMYFORUMHELD INDAKARINJANUARY2003. AT THISMEET-IN G YOUSSOU N DOUR RAISEDTH E ISSUE OF TH E GROWTH INOPPORTUNITIESFOR YOUNGPEO -PLE AND TH E FAST TRACK THAT

TH E YOUTH PERCEIVED IN BE -COMING A MUSICIAN TODAY. HERECENTLY COLLABORATED WITHB E N E T T O N AN D E S T A B L I S H E DA LOCAL, SENEGALESE MICRO -C R E D I T A S S O C I A T I O N C A L L E DBIRIMA TO S U P P O R T S M A L L

TH ESENEGALESEMUSICIANAN DPRODUCERYOUSSOUNDOUR

SCALEENTREPRENEURIALINITIATIVES . ON EOF TH EICONSUSEDIN TH EPRCAMPAIGNIS TH EPORTRAIT OF ASENEGALESEHAWKER. SEE WW W.BIRIMA.OR G

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approaches with regard to studying, research, production, travel, daily

survival and collective projects. Id hesitate to call this the seeds of a

micro-institutional development but increasingly I feel it may just be

heading that way. It would confirm the value accorded by artists in

transactions that introduce service environments into their work from

the clinic through to purchases that can be made online.

I would like to end on a related issue that provides the basis for

intellectual competence: the figure of the polymath and the concept

of a roaming faculty. Lets go back to Gregory Bateson who defines his

stance in opposition to what he sees in the 1970s as the increasingly

materialist ecology of academic departments, something that one

could argue is taking place once again. In 1971 he states that such

matters as the bilateral symmetry of an animal, the patterned

arrangement of leaves in a plant, the escalation of an armaments

race, the processes of courtship, the nature of play, the grammar of a

sentence, the mystery of biological evolution, and the contemporary

crises in mans relationship to his environment, can only be

understood in terms of such an ecology of ideas.

When we investigated future faculties of knowledge in the art

academy, in other words those subjects, contexts, and practices that

might be taught, researched, and developed, it was to both latent

aesthetic processes, and everyday relational activit ies that attention

was directed, which may be no wonder, given the global importance

of social interventionism in art practice of the 1990s (from N55, to

Superflex, Open Circle, Raks, or Pukar in India, Huit Facettes in

Senegal, to name just a few). Art students, they argued, could benefit

from a lawyer on immigration and identity issues, just as they might

be interested in hearing from economists or scholars whose research

is founded in the cultural idioms and methodologies of non-Western

societies. Heterodox combinations of information and skill would

inform art practice: for example, the exercise of a particular sport as a

model for analysing thought structures (e.g., Senegalese wrestling as

mental and physical dialectical engagement). In this manner, a future

art academy would engage in a polymathic economy; a polymathic

educational model; a polymathic faculty, and finally a polymathic

understanding of place, situating itself between different public

audiences, institutional structures and time frames.With the introduction of a Roaming Faculty, the polymath, like our

hawker earlier on, becomes embedded in a structure dedicated to

mobile knowledge transfer and deep exchange. Its a non-prescriptive

condition of empathic learning, that provides for a parallel extension

in the work of guest, peripatetic researcher, and the transnational

group of students who work with him or her. The Roaming Faculty

model offers selected artists and scholars the chance to develop

new work through a chain of interconnected situations at four to

five different art academies. Its a consortium of sorts, but it is led

by the value attributed to an individuals research, to the shaping

of content and the nurturing of transcultural and transdiciplinary

positions, which stand outside of the course curricula. Moreover, for

a participating institution, the Roaming Faculty structure requires

part investment of no more than 20 to 25% of a full professorial

salary. The Tontine system that fuels this moving group of artists and

21

IMTHINKING OF JO ESCANLANSCOFFINS ,AN DOTHERPROPOSALSFO RON LINESALESATTHINGSFALLDOWN .CO M

IBID.

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scholars guarantees the on-going low-level costs, which are shared,

rotates ownership between the participating institutions, and helps

to broker decision-making. Our Roaming Faculty member is the

itinerant hawker not only of ideas but also of ways of apprehending,

analysing and evaluating their presence within the next generation of

artists and practitioners.

So to conclude, Id like to propose three areas of articulation for

fine art students: first, the predisposition to embark on voluntary

non-course or examination-led investigations which enhance an

understanding of different methodologies of research; secondly, a

lucid and production-based interest in economic and symbolic value;

and finally a polymathic approach to knowledge production linked

to an enhanced disposition towards translation, understood here

as the flexible act of idiomatic transference between disciplines,

methodologies, and cultural contexts. The value accorded to survival

and self-organisation leads naturally to a further set of skills: the

rhetorical and analytical wherewithal to stake a position as a student

player in the revision of educational structures; and by extension the

ability to engage with a form of research that is non-prescriptive from

the outset. To impart this critical approach to the student seems to be

essential today, and thereby to dissolve the idea that following a course

will make them into an artist

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In the continuous rituals of institutional politics and their related

internal closed-door logic, there is fortunately always someone

trying to keep doors wide open. That is not something to be taken

for granted, since institutions tend to follow strictly the Kafkaesque

dynamics of closing in on themselves, thereby creating hermetic

black boxes which destroy information and burn bridges with the

outside world. In fact, the logic of institutions and the logic of art

education are fundamentally at odds, because institutions are innately

about legitimation and evaluation, while art education is about

inspiration and creation. Those different principles imply that people

who actually believe in art education will a lways have to fight the logic

of the institution and its continuous institutional ceremonies.

The question is how to talk about fighting institutional rituals in

public, since that fight is a practice fil led with clandestine techniques.

I would rather suggest working on a clandestine manual or

instruction book listing all the tricks and all the ways of seduction

required to enable art education within institutions not designed

to facilitate anything remotely linked to that form of education.

However, I am not in the position to talk about clandestine knowledge

in public. So I must find other ways of sharing it.

The second issue that worries me is the current prominence of

the notion of art as a form of knowledge production. In my view,

that notion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what

conceptual art practices meant. Today, though well-meaning and well-

intentioned, we do take works from the 1970s seriously and believe

they have produced knowledge. Yet it might simply be that we did not

understand that conceptual art is about intellectual provocation and

the disruption of thoughts, ideas, and words. That disruption is not

necessarily connected to the production of knowledge, but rather to

the creation of new forms of embodiment, i.e. to discovering whether

there are new ways for art practitioners to embody provocative ideas

and produce novel forms of communication. We lose the spirit of

conceptual art when we actually believe it has produced knowledge.Benjamin Buchloh has argued that the past is the aesthetization of

bureaucracy. Along those lines of thought, I do believe that education

based on the notion of art as a form of knowledge production creates

artists focused on skills such as self-administration and email

production. Perhaps we should reconsider the legacy of conceptual

art and investment in producing intellectual bodies of art; perhaps

we should understand the intellectual even as something entirely

different from the academic. After all, the academic discourse is about

evaluation and legitimation, while the intellectual is about the public

embodiment of ideas and thoughts, i.e., the libidinal and cerebral

embodiment of an idea. Embodiment goes necessarily beyond the

academic discourse, even if it depends on the academic discourse to

realize its practice.

This in turn brings to another important issue: the issue of the

academy as institution. If we want to maintain a crit ical discourse,

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we can never speak in the name of the institution even when we

are speaking about the institution. Many times, contemporary

discussions suddenly create an uncanny moment of closure when

we speak of the institution in the name of the institution. That

perpetuates the false assumption that we are all just institutional

people and that is the only reason we are entitled to speak on its

behalf. There must be a way of speaking about the institution not in

its name but in the name of something else. Something pointing to

the possibility of a different world; something implying a utopian

principle. Perhaps a utopian world is a world without any need for

institutions.

Currently, the most pressing question is in what name or in whose

name we want to ta lk about institutions. I would suggest that it might

be necessary to speak about institutions in the name of the good

life. When you read Negri and Hardts Empire, the question of the

good life is actually the most pressing issue they raise. They argue

that todays means of production are the means of communication,

the means of social existence. In the new forms of immaterial

labor, the biggest growth industry is communication. As producers

of artistic subjectivities, we are producers in the new industry of

communication. We sacrifice our very lives in that new economy,

as we put our life skills at its disposal. Therefore, teaching art istic

subjectivities is teaching people how to put themselves at the mercy of

the communication industry. That is what you must do as an artist or

an intellectual.

How can we avoid becoming public commodities, docile bodies and

willing contributors to a new form of immaterial labor? Negri and

Hardt explore how we may regain control over our intellectual lives.

Reappropriating todays means of production no longer implies

invading the factories, but essentially to wrest back the means of

social communication. At heart this concerns resuming control over

our social lives. I believe one of the most urgent questions facing

the art academy is: How do we want to live together? How can we

renegotiate the forms of communication that will determine the

conditions of our life together?

I would like to raise three issues related to that question. One

concerns the ethical-political question of the good life connected tothe question of subjectivity or singularity. The second is the matter

of temporality or the organization of time. The last question concerns

debt or indebtness.

Let me start with the question of subjectivity. We are works in

progress, constantly producing subjectivity. One of the major

contradictions in a society dedicated to the production of subjectivities

is the issue of singularity. This issue pervades art schools and is

almost everywhere in highly individualized societies; the one hope we

all share is that we are the chosen, the singular ones. Immediately,

that puts us at odds with everybody else. What do you do when there

is more than one of the chosen on a panel or in a room? That is the

first experience you have when entering an art school; officially you

are the chosen, since you have been accepted, but suddenly with

horror you realize that you are surrounded by chosen ones.

The issue of the chosen is part of a larger discourse in society.

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Books such as the Harry Potter series or films such as the Matrix or

the Lord of the Rings are all about the chosen. Usually the chosen

becomes approved or legitimized through violence and competition.

The chosen has to fight within a constellation or competition among

others to prove that there can only be one.

One could consider the promise of singularity not to be a problem

as it is a deeply existential experience. However, the actual problem

is that competition is the sole mode or experience of the promise of

singularity society offers today. There is no other alternative, except

violence, to realize that deeply existential feeling of singularity.

So the pressing question is whether we can really propose an

alternative model to competition to realize that collective experience

of singularity. I think we have an unique opportunity to do that in

the art academy, because the question of singularity is the most

pressing issue every student experiences when entering art school.

How can we be singular, together? In that context, Derridas Politics

of Friendship is fascinating, since he writes about the community of

jealous lovers of solitude who have nothing to bring to the community

save their love of solitude. Those bonds, without constitutions and

manifestos, are forms of conviviality not pointing to the need for

another church or another constitution, but to the need for forms of

antagonistic friendship, allowing the sharing of solitude.

The antagonistic community of jealous lovers of solitude might

prove provocative. In that sense, I would like to make the distinction

between a community of provocation and a community of

convocation. Often communities are about coexistence, union,

assembling people together to eradicate differences among them. I

dr

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