Making Art Schools
Design by Sonia Malpeso
A Reader by Dorothée King, edited by Bernhard Garnicnig, 2020/2021
Some say that art can be neither taught nor learned. If this is true, then perhaps the institutions, places and communities we know as art schools exist to learn and teach the art of making (art) schools? What kind of histories would inform such programs, and what styles and practices serve as orientation for those eager to learn such an art? This reader assembles histories of the development of systems and nomenclatures of art and design schools and schooling around the globe, collecting texts on the formation and transformation of educational institutions in Europe, the US, South America, and China.
The reader was assembled with the intention to support awareness of the context in which art education takes place, and which stakeholders influence the making of the artist subject and the subject of art, today. The reader is based on research on the transmutation of pedagogical realities and utopias and their idyllization and simplification through academic and colonialistic circulation, demystifying some idealisations of the art school, be it the 18th century French Academy or 20th century Bauhaus. These critical readings of history are expanded through additions critical for an understanding of contemporary practices, which take up parasitic strategies and inhabit the cracks of academic infrastructures.
Together, this proposes a reading of the histories of schooling as a political and creative practice, a practice that wields the particular power that is calling something a school, academy or class.
Here, we find the affirmation that teaching is the best way to learn, and that perhaps, by situating oneself within a political history of the art school, students and teachers, directors and evaluators, might better understand their role among the political moment and history that is going to school or making a school.
If indeed the point of going to art school might be to learn the art of coming together as a school, it is necessary to understand them as institutions that developed through waves of political transformation and irrational undercurrents. In between these two forces, we find the interstitial spaces that can be inhabited by art practices that seek for school to be a political, social and artistic experiment and experience in which we can together unlearn the unteachable. (bg)
We would like to thank Sarrita Hunn, James McAnally; Susannah Haslam, Tom Clarke (both adpe); Jamie Allen, Lucie Kolb and Jennifer Scherler for their comments and contributions.
http://annotating.institutions.life/#ma
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1snY0CbizAJxrQ4yBXBe0gnHnrL6Q6W2Q/view