Thoughts on graduate studio education

Art Journal, Winter, 2006 by Gareth James

Nearly three years ago, I was asked to participate in a questionnaire for the German art journal Texte zur Kunst. The premise of the invitation was similar to that of Art Journal's--a short thought piece on art education. My response for Texte zur Kunst was published in the March 2004 issue. (1) The editors asked two questions:

  The first part of the question we would like to ask you is simple: How
  do you teach art?--but need not, of course, be answered in an equally
  simple way With this, we want to ask you for a brief outline of your
  "method" (if there is one). The second part is somewhat more detailed:
  If you could change one thing in the education system you're working
  in, which one would it be?

While I need to respond slightly differently to Art Journal, I'll repeat here my answer to the above questions (despite the distance I would like to take on some aspects of the formulation of my answer), since it hasn't been published in English and because it establishes the context for what will be a more specific answer to a new question, posed in a more general fashion, by Art Journal:

  I'd like to answer your questions in reverse order: an answer to the
  second question forms the context of intelligibility within which an
  answer to the first becomes sensible. And here I give my game away
  from the beginning--providing something like a basic ontology of
  education. So-called alternative educational models have always sought
  primarily to change the grounds of intelligibility. Infamously, these
  are rarely permitted to become mainstream practices because of their
  anarchic generativity, and not just because there are almost always
  drugs, delegitimated mysticotheological practices, or chickens
  involved.
    Often enough, thinking on the subject remains embedded at the level
  Of how the teacher should teach, and as such, given that the teacher
  is already inside the institution, always remains circumscribed by
  institutional negotiation. More rarely do we discuss how to be taught.
  In the rare moments that we do so, the relational category of the
  alternative is more often than not supplanted by the category of
  opposition. Or how to not be taught. That we generally don't want to
  hear about this can be seen in a relatively recent example: the much-
  maligned play by David Mamet, Oleanna. Mamet's play is a deeply
  incisive observation of education (and therefore society) in crisis
  and is far more interesting than its initial reception might suggest:
  a vitriolic diatribe against political correctness that had supposedly
  liberal audiences jumping up from their seats, pumping their fists,
  and cheering when the beleaguered professor violently strikes out in
  frustration at the difficult student. Mamet combined the
  contemporaneous pedagogical problem (how to teach society to stop
  being so damn bigoted) with the unfinished question of 1960s student
  radicalism (how to not be taught in order to participate in the
  question of how to teach). Ultimately, Mamet's play won't be included
  next to John Stuart Mill in any reader on the philosophy of education
  because it finally declines to get its hands dirty by proffering any
  program, even provisional, of its own.
    The same could not be said of the Situationists. Putting aside for
  the moment their own problems with authority (both internal and
  external), their "On the Poverty of Student Life" (1966) suggests an
  elision between the problems of education and the problems of
  revolution. Citing Georg Lukacs approvingly on the question of
  revolution, the S.I. together with "the students of Strasbourg" note
  that "If they are to be realized in practice, 'theoretical' tendencies
  and differences must immediately be translated into organizational
  questions." (1) I am certainly not advocating that all distinction
  between student and teacher ought to be abolished, though I'm happy
  to consider it. Neither do I think that the problem of the
  student-consumer, first felt in the United States but rapidly
  proliferating, is enough to advocate a reluctant acceptance of the
  flow of power in that relation (such reactions strike me as an illicit
  fusion of the problems of value under capital in general with the
  specific problems of power relations in education). What must change,
  in my view, is that organizational questions can no longer be
  detotalized to answer the problems of how to teach one day and how to
  be taught the next, as the options above tend to do. The theoretical
  tendencies and differences of students and teachers must be translated
  in the same organizational questioning. Or to put it another way, to
  recognize in this translation that the question of how to not be
  taught differs from the question of how not to be taught, as though
  the student's agency is useful only in assisting teachers to teach
  better rather than a demand, however appalling to the teacher, to
  teach oneself.
    Somewhere above I have already begun an answer to the question of
  how I teach, that is, it might also be marked by thinking how to not
  teach, however appalling to some students. This might seem a little
  abstract for some, but if we are not permitted to deinstrumentalize
  education in art schools, to refuse to enter into the normal circuits
  of the production and reproduction of capital, then where can we? This
  is very different from refraining from exchanging knowledge. Rather,
  it restores to the question of organization as translation the
  capacity to agitate rather than reify. It is to insist that the
  educational situation needs to begin with working on the grounds of
  intelligibility without presuming in advance what the contents of
  education should be, and try to determine whether there is anything to
  teach at all.

  (1) "On the Poverty of Student Life: Considered in its economic,
  political, psychological, sexual and especially intellectual aspects,
  with a modest proposal for its remedy," by members of the Situationist
  International and students of Strasbourg, AFGES, November 1966, in
  Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb
  (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 319.

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Thoughts on graduate studio education

Art Journal, Winter, 2006 by Gareth James

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