Art & Education presents new School Watch reports on Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design and the New Centre for Research & Practice, and ”Democratix,” a new Classroom program curated by Becket Mingwen.
Season Zero: Making Time at Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design
By Vanessa Thill
“Jo-ey Tang: This kind of programming allows for different convergences of artistic and social practices. I hope it’s a kind of aperture into ways in which artists are more visible in their processes. This is really connected to the art and design school gallery and the role that institution plays in allowing those processes to be more visible. This is not an exhibition that comes in and the artists come to talk, maybe do some visits, and leave. To me that model can only serve so much. The goal is to allow other ways of engagement. We are not completely getting rid of that trajectory of someone who might only be able to come in for a day to do a talk and some studio visits, but more and more I find that approach unproductive for the visiting artists or the students. Being an artist myself, a visitor gets a lot out of their engagement with the students as well as the other way around. It’s mutually co-productive.” [read more]
Accelerating Academia: The New Centre for Research & Practice
By Owen Duffy
“A spectrum of students turn to the New Centre for Research & Practice for educational growth, and Mohammad Salemy categorizes the New Centre’s demographics into three different professional groups. A third of the students are completing MFAs and feel that art school is not providing the level of intellectual engagement they require. Another third consists of MA/PhD students in the humanities who are looking to supplement their studies and research with the New Centre’s seminars, attracted by the access to yet-to-be published thinking by philosophers like Ray Brassier, Reza Negarestani, and Katerina Kolozova. The final third includes what Salemy calls ‘para-academics,’ individuals just beyond academia’s walls—lifelong, self-driven learners with a deep interest in philosophy. Regardless, horizontality underpins the New Centre’s pedagogical relationships. ‘One is often surrounded by students that leave you no choice but to treat them as academically equal,’ explained Kolozova. No matter if they hold a PhD or are ‘exquisite autodidacts,’ to quote Kolozova, the New Centre’s instructors and administrators encourage an intellectual environment without hierarchy.” [read more]
School Watch presents distilled perspectives on degree programs in the arts, with interviews, critical texts and editorial exposés on MFAs, Masters, Doctorates and certificate programs in fine arts, art history, curatorial, cultural and film studies, and other related areas of specialty.
Democratix
Curated by Becket Mingwen
“As a conceptual tool, democracy seems overly familiar, hardly explanatory—epiphenomenal. Still, it has on recent occasions surprised us, as if it now needed explanation itself. With the rise of right-wing populism and dramatic electoral outcomes in the United States and Europe, one wonders what’s going on with democracy. A forgotten aunt lost in senility suddenly stands up and smashes all the china.
Democracy is a bit banal. It has the blandness of a metonym, as in the headline ‘How democracies perish,’ or the phrase ‘advanced democracies.’ It comes to stand for an entire social, economic, and political structure, rather than a form of popular empowerment; as such, its emancipatory and egalitarian potential seems dimmed. It stands for so much more than democratic ideals and so falls far short of them. But it is in this very metonymic quality that we find its efficiency. It totalizes disparate technical apparatuses, like a trope or figure—a ‘device.’ It is a device constituted by devices, from technological networks to the ‘technologies of the self.” [read more]
Featuring: Darius Rejali; Tony Cokes; Jodi Dean; Stefano Harney; Chantal Mouffe and Jean-Luc Mélenchon; Eric Santner; and Achille Mbembe.
Classroom features thematically organized lectures and conversations chosen by artists and thinkers on issues relevant to their practice and contemporary artistic discourse.
