Art-As-A-Thinking-Process-Visual-Forms

rt as a A Thinking Process Edited by Mara Ambrožicˇ & Angela Vettese rt as a A Thinking Process isual VForms of Knowledge Production Table of Contents Angela Vettese Foreword How Do We Teach Art? 8 John Aiken Undermining Orthodoxies 18 Mara Ambrožič Regeneration 30 Ute Meta Bauer Re_ACT: Research-Based Artistic Practice at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture, and Technology 38 Carol Becker Microutopias and Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century 46 Franco Berardi Economic Dogmatism and Poetical Thought in the Coming European Insurrection 54 Jeremiah Day Digging 62 Marco De Michelis Art as a Way of Thinking 68 Paolo Garbolino What the Scientist’s Eye Tells the Artist’s Brain 74 Mika Hannula The Quest for the Common Good and the Participatory Community 88 Mary Jane Jacob Experience as Thinking 100 Jan Kaila Artistic Research Formalized into Doctoral Programs 114 Lev Kreft Teaching Contemporary Art (and Aesthetics) 120 Cornelia Lauf Concrete Concepts 134 Paolo Legrenzi and Alessandra Jacomuzzi Art as a Form of Knowledge and as a Creative Process 138 Hongjohn Lin From Work to Research: Sites of Artistic Research 146 Sarat Maharaj What the Thunder Said: Toward a Scouting Report on “Art as a Thinking Process” 154 Suzana Milevska Feminist Research in Visual Arts 162 Simon Njami Fictional Faculties 176 Hans Ulrich Obrist Curating in the Twenty-First Century 182 John Rajchman Art as a Thinking Process: New Reflections 194 Gertrud Sandqvist Thinking Through 206 Henk Slager The Institutional Conscience of Art 212 Hito Steyerl Art as Occupation: What Happens to Knowledge? 224 Chiara Vecchiarelli A Technical Eforescence 230 Mick Wilson We Are the Board, but What Is an Assemblage? 238 Biographies 248 Bibliography 254 Foreword How Do We Teach Art? This book draws its origins from a conference held at the Iuav University of Venice within the Graduate Degree Program in Visual Arts.1 Since its incep- tion, the degree program has rapidly grown and is now approaching a difficult adolescence, for which the European financial crisis does not provide any support. Should its activities cease, it will nevertheless be remembered as the first program of its kind in an Italian university—that is, centered on a rotating system of master teachers, short-term activity-based workshops 8 led by artists and curators, and a strong emphasis on theory (from sociology to semiotics, from aesthetics to economics, and so forth). From the start, the concept driving this program has been that the visual arts must be considered a field of knowledge and that an artwork should be considered, first and foremost, a thinking process.2 Consequently, those who wish to work within this field deserve an education based on more than solely the achievement of specific skills. As simplistic as such a statement may seem, it is neither obvious nor should it be taken for granted. The following essays—for which I thank all those who kindly contributed— may be considered part of the discussion concerning an unresolved point that rests on the persistent and widespread sense of distance from visual aspects of culture. Until now, and particularly within intellectual circles, images have been suspect: from Plato’s ideas to the iconoclastic attitudes of a specific segment of Christian theology to to much of Jewish and Islamic tradition. Thus, the contempt for the visual arts as a field of study has been breed- ing since the birth of the first universities over one thousand years ago. Across Europe and America, the rise and fall of many Bauhaus-inspired schools—beginning with Walter Gropius’s own model—is just one more piece of evidence of this long-lasting suspicion. The gap between art academies and universities still exists—at least in the European system—and is deeply rooted: it seems as though visual arts instruction is confined to places for educating the homo faber rather than the homo sapiens, according to the tacit premise of a distance between making and thinking. A study of the motives and political implications of such a persistent attitude could prove to be highly interesting. And we could take our Venetian course as a case study, having caused such a variety of unsettling reactions, not just among Italian art academies, but also within the Iuav University itself. It is important to note that the course of architecture, which has always been the main core of the small-scale Iuav University, was itself the fruit of a rebellion led by the architecture profes- sors teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice. Thus, it has been a sort of victory—albeit a difficult one to deal with—also aimed at showing that the production of images and communication is characterized by well structured cultural implications. It will always be difficult to bring philoso- phers, historians, designers, and architects to accept that arts and crafts can 9 blur the borders between disciplines, even when this does not entail artists simply playing with terracotta or colored glass. Incidentally, soon after the full acceptance of the course, Venice witnessed the birth of more than one structure for art education, often linked to the world of production—once again insisting on the technical aspect of the discipline, returning the focus to “making” as opposed to “planning” and “thinking.” However, the difficult reception we have faced in Venice is neither solely an Italian nor a European phenomenon, but rather a political one with a strong basis in the history of ideas. Predictable were our hard times, as we were ngela A Vettese simply following suit of those art academies that had tried to provide a kind of education in which different disciplines overlap and lead to the construc- Foreword tion of sense rather than to decoration or mere expression of the self. But let us begin from another point of view. Is an art education program really worthwhile? And, if so, how should it be articulated? Perhaps a school for artists serves no purpose at all. Many of the most interesting painters and sculptors, such as Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, did not want to or manage to attend one. Training can be based on assumptions so rigid as to not be of help to those who intend to intro- duce new worlds. On the other hand, innovation rarely occurs without a rebellion against rules, and there is no better place to learn rules than school. Perhaps we need art schools precisely so that what is learned there will be betrayed by the best students. Some of the most significant moments that changed the course of twentieth-century art history, from the Munich Art Academy to the Bauhaus, from Black Mountain College in North Caro- lina to the Ulm School of Design, and not to mention the New School for Social Research in New York, sprang from educational settings in which 10 a number of pupils surpassed their teachers. The younger generations of artists have been trained at centers such as the Düsseldorf Art Academy, the Städelschule in Frankfurt, UCLA, CalArts, the Art Institute of Chicago, Goldsmiths College, and other art schools. The Academy of Fine Arts was once the obvious place for studying sculpture, painting, decoration, and other techniques sanctioned by time, such as illustration and engraving. Re- search was not part of the background required of graduates. Nonetheless, since Leonardo da Vinci’s time, artists have zealously sustained their work as “a mental matter.” Despite the fact that their places of training have always been relegated to the worlds of decoration, beauty, and manual skills, they have argued against the enduring belief that their deity is only Mercury, the god of making, feeling and communicating, claiming instead that it also is Saturn, the god of thought and knowledge.3 Current practices now mani- fest a multimedia character so that the value of a work is not tied to the type of medium used, but to the conceptual device with which it is deployed. Any insistence on teaching technical skills is thus inappropriate, regardless of whether it concerns drawing or computer competence. Nevertheless, this does not mean that artistic activity does not require capabilities. Paradoxi- cally, it needs so many that a school is unable to teach them all. And it is high time we seriously reconsider the overwhelming attention paid to the readymade and to the dematerialization of the work of art. No matter how relevant Arthur Danto’s contribution to art theory has been, we must recognize that Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes are not readymades, as the critic has stated each time he has touched upon the argument. And we must Angela Vettese acknowledge that even those Conceptual artists who fervently advocated detachment from the execution of the work—from Art and Language to Lawrence Weiner and so on—never truly gave up making and/or controlling the objects they were showing as art. Rather, what seems to hold true is a continuous movement from practice to thinking and back again. An art project often requires the ability to paint, photograph, film, edit, or set up an environmental piece oriented toward the field of architecture or even to the history of landscape. At times, an artist must be able to influence the spectators’ moods, requiring notions of psychology and a smattering of sociology. One must be familiar with what has already been done—that is, with what has been implemented, according to Harold Rosenberg’s defini- tion, as the “tradition of the new.” As we have already noted, an art school should teach both the rule and the way to overturn it. And it should also 11 teach how to fail and how to overcome the ensuing damage to self-esteem: “Fail Again, Fail Better” is the title of Roland Jones’s enlightening essay on the methods of artistic teaching.4 Nonetheless, the questions of which methods to teach and which methods to use in teaching art are still striking.

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