the TEACHABLE FILE

wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_learning

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 20:15:21 -0500

wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizational_learning

My definition of the Neutral remains structural. By which I mean that, for me, the Neutral doesn’t...

Sat, 21 May 2011 12:48:00 -0400

My definition of the Neutral remains structural. By which I mean that, for me, the Neutral doesn’t refer to “impressions” of grayness, of “neutrality,” of indifference. The Neutral—my Neutral—can refer to intense, strong, unpresidented states. “To out-play the paradigm” is an ardent, burning activity.

Roland Barthes, The Neutral

we have yet to invent satisfying critical-historical alternatives to looking forward or looking back...

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 13:16:34 -0500

we have yet to invent satisfying critical-historical alternatives to looking forward or looking back as we live in the present. A heightened historical, sense of self-reflexivity, in the spirit of the sort found in the work of Mona Vătămanu and Florin Tudor, is indispensable.

[…] Foucault wrote:

“The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world… The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space.”

Vivian Rehberg, Mapping the History of the Present, in Jeu De Paume’s Le Magazine (via Mimi Luse)

Hence, there was a widespread recognition that in future all higher education in art and design...

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 17:08:00 -0400

Hence, there was a widespread recognition that in future all higher education in art and design should incorporate a permanent debate within itself. “Research,” in this sense, came to appear an indispensable element in education:

We regard it as absolutely basic that research should be an organic part of art and design education. No system devoted to the fostering of creativity can function properly unless original work and thought are constantly going on within it, unless it remains on an opening frontier of development. As well as being on general problems of art and design (techniques, aesthetics, history, etc.) such research activity must also deal with the educational process itself … It must be the critical self-consciousness of the system, continuing permanently the work started here in the last weeks [June, July 1968]. Nothing condemns the old regime more radically than the minor, precarious part research played in it. It is intolerable that research should be seen as a luxury, or a rare privilege.

via Tom Holert, e-flux journal

'self-academization'

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:52:37 -0400

[…] a pursuit suggested in a recent workshop with guest-tutor Raimundas Malasauskas. Self-academization means as much as collecting and arranging one’s own material for the future, a form of prospective archiving, perhaps especially needed when a collection is unlikely to be archived by prevailing academic or canonical standards […]

from Wonder Years, on Werkplaats Typografie

the 'signaling' model of education

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 14:51:00 -0400

Many economists claim that education is mostly a means of signaling quality. I view education as a self-commitment to being a more productive kind of person. Education is about self-acculturation. Men are born beasts. But education gives you a peer group, a self-image, and some skills as well. Getting an education is like becoming a Marine. Men need to be made into Marines. By choosing many years of education, you are telling yourself that you stand on one side of the social divide. The education itself drums that truth into you.

Tyler Cowan

Approaching the exhibition as a learning system focuses not only on what can be learned solely...

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 10:13:00 -0400

Approaching the exhibition as a learning system focuses not only on what can be learned solely through the development process but also on consideration of how the exhibition “learns” once the artists have left the building. As Philippe Parreno has observed, “The exhibition should never be a model narrative, rather a stimulant.” […] An important component of the exhibition as a system for generating knowledge, rather than as an object that transmits what is already known, is the incorporation of time itself as an essential constituent of an exhibition structure. […] an exhibition structure that is focused on its “becomingness” rather than one of “aboutness.” This observation suggests that the exhibition need not be regarded as a single event.

Gregory Elgstrand on the “learning exhibition”

Jan Verwoert from “Curating and the Educational...

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 08:23:49 -0400

Jan Verwoert from “Curating and the Educational Turn.” de Appel. 2010

standing the test of time

Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:22:52 -0400

standing the test of time:

[…] the act of preservation is a way to self-reflexively contemplate our own place. If this holds true, this self-reflection provides the “meaning something to someone” that would constitute the reason for an object to continue existing.

excerpts from Ten Theses on the Archive from Pad.ma (via 16beaver) […] This need not imply...

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 16:27:52 -0400

excerpts from Ten Theses on the Archive from Pad.ma (via 16beaver)

[…] This need not imply that every collection or assembly be named an archive, or that all of art’s mnemonic practices be, once again, cast into an archival mould. It suggests instead that the archive can be deployed: as a set of shared curiosities, a local politics, or epistemological adventure. Where the archival impulse could be recast, for example, as the possibility of creating alliances […] The archive that results may not have common terms of measurement or value. […] It will remain radically incomplete, both in content and form. […] As a particular form, state archives do not exhaust the concept of the archive. The task of creating an archive is neither to replicate nor to mimic state archives but to creatively produce a concept of the archive.

[…] When Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, stated that “the best way to preserve film is to project it”, he hinted at the very opposite philosophy of archiving: to actually use and consume things, to keep them in, or bring them into, circulation, and to literally throw them forth (Latin: proicere), into a shared and distributed process that operates based on diffusion […]

[…] the archive, resisting obsolescence, is constituted through these remnants. […] But there is another place in the contemporary where the role and responsibility of the archive may lie. That is, in addressing the reserve, that which is not yet deployed.

[…] Historians have responded by resorting to a disciplinary defensiveness that relies on a language of ‘the authority of knowledge’ and ‘rigor’ while artists retreat to a zone of blissful aesthetic transcendence. […] how does the archive avoid the confusion, that persists in the exhibition (as Irit Rogoff notes about the Tate), between accessibility as entertainment and marketing strategy, and access as something deeper, as something that is “closer to the question”.

[…] For Johns, the the authority of knowledge is not an inherent quality, but a transitive one. It is a question that cannot be divorced technologies that alter our senses, our perception and our experience of knowledge. […] The preconditions of knowledge cannot easily be made the object of knowledge. It is a matter of making evident or making known the structures of knowledge itself, which emerge in ways that provide definitive proof of the imperfectability of knowledge. […] The archive is therefore an apparatus of time, but its relation to time is not guaranteed or inherent, it is transitive and has to be grafted.

Being Available in Response

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 23:21:00 -0400

“There’s an important distinction to be made here,” [Irwin] continued, “between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest, on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don’t stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you’re going to get a half-hour answer.’” “The ideas I came to be dealing with during this period were getting real obscure, even for me, to the point where I was beginning to wonder what and how I practiced in the world. There were some critics who from a political perspective attacked that obscurity as a kind of elitism. […] To me, the crucial difference between obscurantism and elistism is availability.” via lined & unlined

file thought: tTF is not a proactive pedagogue. But, it is ready and available in response; pre-pedagogical. It should be responsive in all kinds of conditions and demographics.

A thing finds pleasure in itself

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:59:17 -0400

by Aaron Schuster, Metropolis M:

“Jacques Lacan once made the strange comment that Finnegans Wake is a book that reads itself. ‘Read the pages of Finnegans Wake, without trying to understand – it reads itself. It reads itself … because one can sense there the enjoyment of he who wrote it.’ What does this mean? Put bluntly, reading Joyce’s novel is like being in the presence of someone who’s picking his nose or hooked up to his iPod: the novel is so absorbed in its own deeply pleasurable punning that it seems blithely ignorant of the outside world; i.e. the reader. If there is one literary masterpiece that gives the uncanny sense of having no need of a reader whatsoever, it is Finnegans Wake.

“One finds this curious idea of an object that enjoys itself also in the work of Pierre Klossowski. ‘There is nothing more living, I tell you, than the Louvre abandoned to itself at night’,he writes in The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and goes on to extol ‘the supreme pleasure of the work shining its radiance into space and recovering its own radiance therefrom’. In this case the ‘enjoyment of the artwork’ must be understood in the sense of the objective genitive: it’s the work that enjoys, not the spectator, who rather becomes the fascinated witness of its enchanted self-sufficiency. Instead of being thought of in terms of meaning, dialogue, communication, interaction, or any kind of mutual relation, the work of art is first and foremost a presence, a being vowed to its own sovereign joy.A tribute to the sheer autistic inwardness that belongs to every pleasure.”

September 10, 2010, Paris According to SD and JdP, Pickpocket Almanack is “a social encounter with...

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 22:35:12 -0400

September 10, 2010, Paris

According to SD and JdP, Pickpocket Almanack is “a social encounter with (pre-existing) knowledge,” while The Public School is “a social encounter with the production of knowledge (or social encounter as knowledge)”

Autocoscienza

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 15:31:00 -0400

from Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice by The Milan Womens’ Bookstore Collective. Printed in MAY No.4:

The political practice of consciousness-raising was invented in the U.S., we do not know by whom, toward the end of the ’60s. In Italy it was called autocoscienza (self-consciousness), a term adopted by Carlo Lonzi, who organized one of the first Italian groups to adopt that practice. Groups of women net to talk about themselves, or about anything else, as long as it was based on their own personal experience. […] In fact, the liberating effect comes from words exchanged in groups and among women, without the help of interpretation, because what women suffer from, basically, is not speaking for themselves, not saying by themselves what they are and what they want, but saying it instead to themselves, with the words of others. […] Look at yourself and change

file thought: consciousness-raising on a wide plain can be achieved through the practice of self-consciousness

Maria Lind's "Fifth Phase"

Sun, 18 Apr 2010 20:13:40 -0400

from Pieternel Vermoortel’s review in Metropolis M of the conference, Curating as Institutional Critique?

Maria Lind (Director, Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY) briefly situated the historical context of Institutional Critique. She identified it as a fundamental subject in 16th century institutions where it was a vehicle to communicate the wish to govern ‘otherwise’. This historical trace makes us wonder if the recent discussion on the binary inside – outside position from which one operates in order to be critical is at all relevant. According to her, institutional critique is going through four or even five phases. Exemplified by the practice of artists such as Carey Young, Lind characterises this fourth phase as a vague critique on the whole apparatus of the art-system from an inside position. The fifth phase then draws on the position taken by ‘institution builders’ often referring to the ‘educational turn’ where cultural producers set up their own institutions such as Anton Vidokle and e-flux. To conclude her talk Maria Lind shared her opinion on the overstated believe in the role of an individual exhibition and states that the joint venture between institutional critique and curatorial practice is volatile.

Brian Sholis recently posted about Nathaniel Peffer book on adult education, New Schools for Older...

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 20:26:03 -0400

Brian Sholis recently posted about Nathaniel Peffer book on adult education, New Schools for Older Students (1926), and Albert C. Barnes’s experiments in education.

Sholis also moderated a great panel in November with Paul Ramirez Jonas, Matthew Higgs, Shirin Neshat, Dana Schutz; part of Cooper Union’s series, Questioning the Academy,

Hayward Gallery and Serpentine Gallery presents Conference: Deschooling Society

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 23:10:14 -0400

(via art&education)

Rainer Ganahl, Seminar/Lecture, Linda Nochlin, Glory and Misery of Pornography, colloquium “fémininmasculin”, Les Revues Parlées
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 2/2/96 1996, 51 x 61 cm
Courtesy the artist

Southbank Centre 29 - 30 April 2010

Southbank Centre
Purcell Room
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX

This two-day conference brings together international artists, curators, and writers to discuss and debate the changing relationship between art and education. Speakers have been invited to present critical ideas on collective and participatory practice, pedagogical experiments and how such art can be understood and discussed.

Deschooling Society takes its title from Ivan Illich’s seminal 1971 book, one of the most influential radical critiques of the education system in Western countries. Issues at the heart of that critique have been increasingly debated within the art world in recent years, and the subject of education has attracted renewed attention from artists, curators, and collectives. Pedagogical models are currently being explored, re-imagined, and deployed by practitioners from around the world in highly diverse projects comprising laboratories, discursive platforms, temporary schools, participatory workshops, and libraries. Simultaneously, progressive globalization has led to a revaluing of the collective knowledge and agency of local communities.

The conference is a collaborative event marking the start of a Hayward Gallery research project culminating in the transformation of the gallery space into an alternative art school during Summer 2012. It also addresses the urgent issues that have arisen from the Centre for Possible Studies, part of an ongoing Serpentine Gallery project in the Edgware Road neighbourhood, and is the second part of the Serpentine’s collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, following the conference Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education at MoMA in May 2009.

Speakers include: Christopher Robbins (keynote), Martha Rosler (keynote), ARTSCHOOL/UK, Lars Bang Larsen, Dave Beech, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Marcelo Expósito, Harrell Fletcher, Jeanne Van Heeswijk, Pablo Helguera, Hannah Hurtzig, Suzanne Lacy, Carmen Moersch, Nils Norman, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Paul O’Neill, Marion von Osten, Irit Rogoff, Ralph Rugoff, Terry Smith, Lisa Tickner, Gediminas Urbonas, Mick Wilson.

29 - 30 April 2010, 10am - 6pm
Purcell Room
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
London SE1 8XX

Click here for further information

Full conference programme details will be available shortly on the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine Gallery websites

The teachable file is a working catalog of alternative art schools intended as a pre-pedagogical...

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 22:54:21 -0400

The teachable file is a working catalog of alternative art schools intended as a pre-pedagogical reference on experimental education. It is available to researchers by request, and invites contributions of practical information and critical discourse in all forms. It is what it is; it will be what it will be. The file is currently kept in a manila folder at China Art Objects Gallery, Los Angeles.