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Number 12: (In)efficacy |
| Academic Entrepreneurialism:
Eggheads Outside the Crate |
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I have been having some self-definition issues… milling about under-employed for years in New York, doing academic McJobs – writing, following art, and calling myself an “academic.” “Where do you teach?” Well, I’m not right now. “Oh.” It’s more like my sympathies are academic. “Hmm…” It’s good I have a cheap apartment. I’m interested in artists’ groups. Since the events in Seattle in ’99 exposed the dimensions of the anti-corporate global justice movement, they have been proliferating around the world. Now “collective” is as cool in art as it has been in social action. Among the more recently arising artists’ collectives is the 16 Beaver Group (begun 1999), based in New York’s financial district. For several years 16 Beaver has been running evenings of artists’ presentations and lectures, discussions, and dinners, and I have been hanging out. The tone is friendly but pretty highbrow, with big dollops of theory sauce. The group has exhibited, mostly in Europe, as a kind of nomadic cadre of discussion-provokers. I joined them at Mass MOCA as one of many presenters for the “Interventionists” exhibition in ‘04. They are inclusive and self-consciously collective. What makes it – them – so congenial for me is that 16 Beaver operates as an extramural quasi-academic enterprise, generating discourse around artistic work and fomenting a genial sociality that may lead to further collaborations. It’s a genuinely open-ended pseudo-academic environment, unbound by institutional constraints and, of course, un-watered by institutional rewards. On the level of curation, why exhibitions have recently been put together with 16 Beaver and other artists’ groups has not only to do with the political landscape, but also with the popularity of Nicholas Bourriaud’s “relational aesthetics” within the institutional art world. His instrumental set of ideas issued broad permits for what Joseph Beuys would call “social sculpture” in an increasingly corporatized museum environment. Bourriaud has stood firm with the branded author, nominating Rirkrit Tiravanija and Pierre Huyghe as exemplary artists in this genre, so a notion of social relations as aesthetic form cannot be all that is at work in making collectives cool. Grant Kester’s notion of dialogical aesthetics and Suzanne Lacy’s socially based new genre public art are two other important recent formulations of this question. It seems, however, that these precepts have been widely ignored. As Lucy Lippard would put it, “too political.” Artists’ impulse to play school has deep roots. Beuys’ relentless pedagogy and adamantly progressive position within and against the Düsseldorf Art Academy led him to co-found the Free International University in 1972. This was a period of upheaval in academia. Art schools in England had been occupied by their students only a few years before, and international exhibitions had been shut down. In New York, the University of the Streets was founded in the Lower East Side by neighborhood activists in 1967. Anyone could teach there, in the building on East 7th street donated by a wealthy Dutch industrialist. In this groundswell of autonomous education, people taught what they knew to people who wanted to learn it. The University of the Streets was run by Puerto Rican nationalists. The project coincided with the noisy, difficult birth in this country of academic departments of ethnic studies, for which black and Latino students mobilized nationwide to agitate. We are a long way from this kind of fluid moment today, a time when students felt and acted like a socially committed, even revolutionary force. Today’s schools are factories of minds in which teachers are service providers to student consumers. These institutions are at once open shops and discount stores. In an essay in the catalogue for the above-mentioned “Interventionists” exhibition, Nicholas Mirzoeff imagines today’s university—corporatized, routinized and over-administered—as a ruin. It is haunted by a “ghost” – which we may suspect is ’68-style activism. This academic ruin contains within it a “dream image” of what could be, just as Walter Benjamin saw the future in the obsoleted shells of the Paris arcades. The exhibition Mirzoeff catalogues challenges the academy with “anarchism, experimentation and utopia”; anarchism has brought everyday life into the practice of the experimental university. In his enchanting polemic, Mirzoeff invokes a university in the “expanded field,” recalling Rosalind Krauss’ 1978 essay on sculpture in the expanded field. While Joseph Beuys is the glamour figure in the aesthetic assimilation of pedagogical activity, the systemic work of conceptual artists, particularly the Art & Language group, is a more consistent model. These guys were already art teachers in the U.K. when they brought forth an artistic practice conceived almost wholly in academic terms. The dauntingly, even archly complex discussions, papers and communications, the journals and polemics all bespoke an avant-gardism looking to bunker up in the ivory tower. Conceptualism in general was a new artistic culture assaulting an old; in an exemplary act, the teaching artist John Latham was fired for literally “digesting” a copy of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture checked out from his college’s library. A&L’s adherents have had a strong and steady influence on theoretically-inflected art and art historical instruction, through the subsequent published work of members like Charles Harrison, Michael Corris and Terry Smith. Artists working in the conceptual lineage of institutional critique have set up the academy as an arena of artistic practice. The Friesenwall 120 project, a gallery in Cologne in the 1990s which was a joint work of Stephan Dillemuth and Josef Strau, was clearly indebted to the example of curation as artistic practice set by Group Material in the United States. As a working academic, Dillemuth has continued to take the institutional fabric of art instruction as artistic subject, producing published and web-based books: Akademie (1994), and The Academy and the Corporate Public (2002). The first book includes a poignant letter from Andrea Fraser, a master of the genre of institutional critique, delivered in the teeth of a difficult seminar in Frankfurt. The class is reading Pierre Bourdieu. She confesses, “I don’t know what to say [to the students]…. [A]rt making is a profession of social fantasy in which producers and consumers collude in maintaining a system of belief which supports the value of their competencies and dispositions…Art academies are there to ennoble investments in futures which only exist to the extent that they themselves have brought them into being.” Here you get the clear sense of the immanent contingency of art world structures continually open to change. Sounds like a good outcome for a seminar. In the second book Dillemuth enlists Hans Haacke as polemicist and includes cartoons by Nils Norman (who has also drawn up architectural plans for a speculative autonomous art academy). Beuys was charismatic, a mystic and a top money artist. Still, his pedagogical work answered to the most utopian of ‘70s agendas. He insisted upon the progressive impulse and the co-identity of art, education and activism, expressed unequivocally as a conjunction of creativity and democracy. My first direct encounter with teaching as an explicit mode of art was at Rainer Ganahl’s “Reading Marx” sessions at Apex Art in 2001. This was more a conventional guided reading group, taking place in an art gallery. Ganahl is bright, and knows Marxian historiography intimately. We read short paragraphs, sufficient to set the terms for an open discussion. While the project was interesting, and I gleaned a teaching tactic from it—that “bite-sized” morsels of theory can produce discussion on the spot—this was art and it did not lead beyond the “gallery seminar.” Instead the experience led me back to the academy as such, and I audited David Harvey’s wonderful class in Marx’s Capital (I) at the Graduate Center. With the discussions at 16 Beaver under my belt, I ran a course in the Spring of ’05 at New SPACE, a breakaway from the Brecht Forum. “Art Life” was a look at contemporary art history for strategies that could lead to more imaginative political demonstrations and interventions. Following the enrollees’ lead, however, it turned into a presentation and discussion of recent creative activist (what a Spanish commentator calls “creactivist”) and project artwork. I presented the work by bringing in books and showing the photos in them around the table; for some sessions we had internet. Rarely would such subject matter be offered in an accredited institution where students expect to do academic work. While the meetings worked pretty well, they did not transcend the fairly conventional frame -- as a “class” with a “teacher” -- despite the sophistication of the group and a vague collective desire to move it in some other way. It suffered from the basic expertise-based dynamics of an art history class. I know these things and will show you what I know. Can you learn about some similar things and show us too (i.e., do some readings, research and present your findings)? In this case, the answer was no – the people were there mainly to “watch.” At New SPACE I was wandering outside the precincts of academia as I had been drilled to understand where they lie. Despite having had to pay to prep the class and getting paid nothing to lead it, the trip outside the walls was profoundly rewarding, like paying to be a tourist along on a prison break. In the fall of ’05 I was hired to teach for a year in Georgia. This gig coincided with the “Cram Sessions: Counter Campus” exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, a series of publicly baffling events organized by Chris Gilbert. Gilbert, who has studied British A&L, writes that “Counter Campus considers how artists and artist groups have modeled environments, tools, or self-instituted academies for autonomous and oppositional learning.” Folks presenting and exhibiting in Baltimore included 16 Beaver, Dillemuth and Nils Norman (working together), and Copenhagen Free University. This latter group has inspired other European faux academies, including the punky Manoa Free University and Free Floating Faculty; another project worth noting is the London-based University of Openess. Some if not all of these, it should be noted, have links to existing academies. Their principals are academics, moving quickly and flexibly into investigations and work that settled institutions cannot allow. Exemplary among these is certainly the influential Bureau d’études and Université Tangente, bases for the critic Brian Holmes. While he is not an academic, Holmes has led intensive seminars for two years at 16 Beaver. In a chat I had with Gilbert as he was installing Cram Sessions, he said he hoped “the show would have a capacity to organize people.” To this end he had earlier been working to make a radical information center, and meeting with a parallel group outside the museum he called “the cadres.” “The random audience won’t work,” he said. Museum walk-ins just won’t build something that will outlast the exhibition. Following this show, Gilbert moved to Berkeley to run the University of California’s Matrix Gallery. The show he produced there in early 2006, on the Venezuela worker’s movement, led to his resignation and expatriation. But this is another story (or maybe part of this one which I cannot now tell). Gilbert made his exhibitions explicit opportunities of education and study and organization. This is an objective that succeeds the idealized contemplation of isolated autonomous objects—installations, videos, what have you—that the museum inherits from modernism (the modernist education regimen is largely contemplation training). Most museums and galleries are usually empty. Heated in winter and cooled in summer, they are luxurious public spaces not put to much public use. At Cram Sessions, visitors might wander among the “ruins” Mirzoeff describes, holding a picnic in the cemetery. This movement of artists forming academies augurs, as Mirzoeff writes, an “expanded field” of use for the public spaces of art. “Academy” is, etymologically, a grove, so it’s a kind of return to the woods. This mode of exhibitionary repurposing in the U.S. can be tracked back to the Group Material series of exhibitions at Dia in New York in the 1990s, continued by Martha Rosler in her democracy series there. All of this took place in the charged and urgent moment of AIDS activism, however, where normative institutional usages were routinely transgressed. In the U.S. this expansion of practice seems to have snapped back into place. During my year of work inside an institution I adopted “entrepreneurial” strategies rather than thinking how a counter-institution might be constructed outside it. I tried to stand outside the prescribed roles which architecture dictates, curricula enjoin, and administrations enforce—to sneak between the machines on the floor of the academic factory. I tried not to over-invest in the protocols and routines of academia, but to be nomadic, fluid, constantly in motion from one point to another, refiguring the enterprise, trying to broaden and expand it within the institution itself, and to inveigle others into the project—to find partners and co-conspirators. What is academic entrepreneurialism? For art historians, I think it has to do with realizing our basic community with artists, and asking, as they do, what is this thing that I am supposed to be doing, sharing my knowledge of art and my way of experiencing it with others? This is academic discipline as a continuous de- and re-centering. Academic entrepreneurialism is about other people before it is about oneself. And that is the really hard part – to find people who are open, who share this special delusion. With them perhaps one reconstitute a simulacrum of the café environment or the circle as it functioned in the modernist city, on vanished dream terrain. As regards the theme of this PART—I don’t believe that this kind of work now is “inefficacious.” Or, if it is, I esteem it. Art’s business after all is affect not effect. Even if the meaning is in the use, useless is not meaningless. I think the key to sustaining meaningful generalizable extra-institutional artistic work today is, as it has probably always been, to keep one’s eye on the ball and make the political trajectory of the work explicit. I desire autonomous institutions that make inquiries into the prospective bases for a new society. As historians and servants of art, it is our job to enlarge the public role for artists. This will better their position in society, enabling their visions to be articulated autonomously and in service of social ideals rather than channelled into the commodity. That this objective may seem impossible makes it all the more necessary to pursue it. After all, it’s academic.
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Alan Moore worked with Colab and ABC No Rio in NYC in the 1980s. He edited ABC No Rio with Marc Miller in 1985. He wrote on NYC artists' organizations for his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he was one of the PART's founding editors. Recent articles include "Political Economy as Subject and Form in Modern Art" (Review of Radical Political Economics, 2004) and a chapter on New York and U.S. groups in Blake Stimson and Greg Sholette, eds., Collectivism After Modernism (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). |