Restless Knowledge

By Dr Fiona Lee

“What is to be done?” is a provocative demand employed by a number of diverse actors to call for change. Vladimir Lenin’s political pamphlet (1901), Barry Jones, our own former politician on the state of modernity (1982), and the Russian art collective Chto Delat, with a mission to combine political theory, art and activism are a small smattering of manifestos calling for change. This question also motivated Documenta 12’s 2007 magazine on education. “What is to be done?” which even then sounded wearisome, courtesy of its “throw-your-hands-in-the-air” call for radical change. Open-ended in intent, the phrase doesn’t answer anything, nor does it offer ideas for future change. Instead, in the case of Documenta,  it asks actors to come together in a call for “emancipatory alternatives” to an ever-proliferating standardised education caught between unyielding academic instruction and society’s obsession with consumption.1

Again, this is not new. Joseph Beuys’ Free International University in Germany (1972), Black Mountain College (1933-37) and the Mountain School of Arts in LA (2005-), fill gaps in traditional systems of education and, more importantly, appeal for autonomy.  Art schools seeking to professionalise the field entered the university system in the 1980s, and had reached a “what is to be done?” moment by the mid 90s that defined an “Educational Turn”, prompted by the Bologna Process, a series of reforms throughout Europe seeking to standardise higher education. Talkfests, protests, publications, conferences, and alternative art schools popped up everywhere, placing emphasis on process, discourse, new pedagogical methods, and democratising access to knowledge.⁠2  But are these models and motives any different to those that exist today? 

The elephant in the room is perhaps best shaped by the question – is academic university art research and teaching in 2021 unravelling? Those caught up in University rationalisations would most likely say yes, with root causes ranging across a number of urgencies, but almost all to do with pecuniary anxieties; loss of government funding to the arts, lack of interest in creative departments across universities, and a student class that doesn’t want, afford, or can’t commit to a 3-5-year undergraduate/postgraduate degree that will more likely than not, keep them below the poverty line. For students in particular, timetabling doesn’t fit in with work, raising children or COVID restrictions. Rent exceeds student allowances, spending hours in a studio, buying materials or flights (if we could) to international residencies and exhibitions is likewise prohibitive on low incomes. Amidst this milieu, the Government decides to raise fees for the humanities – making it more precarious to undertake a degree in anything other than STEM subjects offering “real” job prospects. One could legitimately ask if the loss of support for the arts is underpinned by neo-liberal social engineering, ignorance over the value arts and culture bring to society, or a misguided attempt to prop up a lagging workforce economy. 

Most alternative art schools work because they don’t seek to replace traditional arts education, rather they supplement, and address serious gaps often lost amongst academic unit changes, course regulations and ULOs and GLOs. The subversive alternative art school Our Day Will Come (ODWC) (2011), by international curator Paul O’Neill, PhD researcher at the time, Fiona Lee, and academic and writer Mick Wilson, is a case in point. The carnivalesque para-school responded to a brief for David Cross’ Iteration:Again program of public art projects, that simply pitched a single repetition each week for four weeks; a perfect structure for a school curriculum that didn’t want to be a curriculum.4 ODWC’s four iterations addressed pressing situations such as what is a school, autonomy, usefulness and remoteness and was delivered in film screenings, school dinners, discos, radio programs, a weekly zine publication as well as a range of projects from international contingent of artists and curators.  In a 1950s Hydro-electric worker’s caravan, the ensemble landed in Tasmania to take up a parasitic relationship within the forecourt of its host, the University of Tasmania’s School of Art, well known at the time for its stoic modernist context. It attended to the idiom, “what is to be done?”

The ODWC project addressed the urgency in practice sought by emerging artists, which is often lost in translation and subsumed within standardised university rhetoric. By the time the internal course structuring has caught up with the happenings of the world – it is all over. 4 The teaching staff that continue to practice in the field and drive exigent matters into the classroom through their critical practices, prevent this being a disaster. Now, with massive job cuts throughout the university sector, the critical educators who fill the gaps are being sent out on redundancies, challenged to reapply for lesser positions or competitively against their friends and colleagues.

Alternative pedagogy is still around but perhaps different. Instead of being run by artists, they are run by NFP art organisations, national arts advocacy groups, ARIs, local government art development programs, art fairs, museums and galleries. They deliver art labs, public programming, symposiums, testing sites, intensives, bootcamps, creative engines, workshops, art fairs, festivals, and residencies. They service the intellectually elite and time poor, those seeking alternatives to standardised education outside work hours; night schools, MOOCS, international online courses common, not just in the arts. Business, health, and technology are all being offered in short, sharp intensives delivering large quantities of knowledge over a condensed time frame. Sometimes there are certificates and rewards, but often the experience of intensive forms of pedagogy, that value add to existing skills, far out ways the desire to slog through a 3-year degree and get a framed certificate and a few letters after your name. 

So, we might ask, “What is to be done?”:

• dust off the old alternative art school model,

• channel Lenin, Beuys, and Jones

• find a super-rich benefactor

• employ all the redundant creative geniuses let go from the strangles of university bureaucracy

• promote criticality, relevance, caring and urgency 

• start a free alternative art school.

It is a call to arms – this is what is to be done.

References

1 Documenta Magazine N0 3, 2007 editorial Schöllhammer, G (ed) ‘Education’ Taschen Cologne

2 Lázá E ‘Educational Turn’ Transit.hu http://tranzit.org/curatorialdictionary/index.php/about/

3 Cross D (ed) ‘Our Day Will Come’ 2011  Iteration Again; 13 Public Art Projects across Tasmania. Punctum Books NY pp. 131-141

4. Lee F (2016)  Rogue Academy: Conversational Art Events as a means of Institutional Critique. PhD thesis, University of Tasmania https://eprints.utas.edu.au/23042/

Fiona Lee is a Geelong based artist-researcher, curator and founder of the art-education collective, The Rogue Academy. She lectures in public art, social practice and art history and theory at Deakin. With an interest in conversation and education as art practice, she also works across architecture, installation, and community participation. She co-produced the international project Our Day Will Come, an alternative art school with Paul O’Neill, developed, with artist Amanda Shone, Conversations at the Mission to Seafarers (2017), and Rabbits and Numbats at the MPavilion (2018). She has given talks, lectures and undertaken international residencies in Paris, Scotland and Canada.