Abstract
This chapter explores how artists and curators have tackled the twin drivers of para-academia—access and autonomy—by organising ‘independent’ learning programmes. The educational turn in art and curating that has emerged since the 1990s frequently presents itself as egalitarian and reformist. To what extent do such artistic and curatorial practices reframe or reproduce dominant rationalisations of academic art education? Do educational art practices seek to establish an effective parergon in relation to art academies? Does the educational turn in the wider artworld share para-academia’s commitment to opening access to artistic learning? What impact do diminishing scale and institutional autonomy have on D-I-T education’s attempts to re-imagine art school as a democratically accountable ‘Third Place’ that takes care of cohort relationships? As a means of tackling these questions, this chapter examines two popular educational tropes within art and curating: the residential programme and the virtual school. While residentials and virtual schools are but two examples of the hundreds of purposely structured educational programmes that take curatorial and artistic forms, they show how art education can foreground an ethics of care and facilitate forms of qualification alternative to those reproduced in higher education’s prestige economy. D-I-T art programmes, equally, provide another sort of blueprint for re-imagining the art academy, namely, a collaborative andragogics.
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Notes
- 1.
This another way of answering Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano and Susan Kelly’s astute question: ‘Why was the Educational Turn both structurally and politically cut off from both the everyday realities and situated imaginaries of art education?’ (Graham 2016: 30).
- 2.
See examples in Thorne (2017).
- 3.
In 2015/2016, OECD countries charging the highest tuition fees were, respectively: England, USA, Chile, Japan, Canada, Australia and South Korea (OECD 2018: 292).
- 4.
Platforms that specialise in crowdfunding masters programmes include Hubbub, Gofundme, Kickstarter, Justgiving, Crowdfunder and Indiegogo. Some crowdfunding platforms also allow prospective students to their raise fees through direct investment, selling Bowie-bonds in the form of futures equity from their degree/thesis show.
- 5.
‘Mainly, the financial aid comes from the artists themselves and from families and friends. Artists transfer non-arts income or arts-related earnings into their art production budgets. This may include savings from previous employment, benefits or an inheritance’ (Abbing 2002: 143).
- 6.
For example, The School of the Damned, ‘operates outside of the officially sanctioned academic institution, but does this out of necessity because the current system increasingly restricts access to such institutions’ (School of the Damned 2014).
- 7.
The ARI gift-economy is based on ‘a succession of rights and duties to consume and reciprocate, corresponding to rights and duties to offer and accept’ (Mauss 2002: 17).
- 8.
For example, Islington Mill Art Academy (Salford, 2007–), AltMFA (London, 2010–) and Open School East (London, 2013–2016; Margate, 2016–).
- 9.
Pooling resources is a form of mutual-aid. ‘A “sharing economy” is different. Of all the possible terms of exchange within a sharing economy, the single term that isn’t appropriate is money’ (Lessig 2008: 118).
- 10.
- 11.
Low-res: low-residency, a distance or correspondence school that establishes seasonal residentials for students to meet as a cohort, nominally in the summer when full-time students are on holiday.
- 12.
Master of Fine Art, a two-year postgraduate degree programme considered to be terminal in North America (see College Art Association 2008).
- 13.
Unaccredited programmes are less appetising to prospective students that have not already gained credit for their learning. Addressing this attainment gap is of crucial importance since arts workers are not representative of the class, gender or ethnicity of their respective societies (see Beagles 2011).
- 14.
Post-2010 tuition-fee hikes have completed the demolition of comprehensive English art education that began in the 1970s. As Dean Kenning summarises: ‘the “trouble” lies with the potential destruction of art school as a critical and heterogeneous space due to the [English] government’s dismantling of the (already battered) welfare state model of free and inclusive public education’ (Kenning 2012).
- 15.
‘Schooling and education take place daily. Usually, they are not so interesting. […] And yet it is precisely this tedious aspect of the educational that seems to reach the place of everyday life, where battles over understanding and hegemony take place just as much as they do in the spectacular’ (Sternfeld 2010).
- 16.
These freedoms were first established when early European universitas gained relative autonomy from their respective city-states, secure revenue from foreign students by protecting them from prosecution. Many universities continue to have a shared understanding of the value of this conflation. The Magna Charta Universitatum (Bologna, 1988–) maintains that autonomy is essential to uphold the principle of academic freedom central to modern universities.
- 17.
For a sample of North American indie programmes (see Radio 2016).
- 18.
‘Our development director, Sophie Oakly, works her ass off to do a benefit dinner that several art collectors and wealthy people of New York very much like to come to’. Bruce High Quality Foundation University Director Sean J. Patrick Carney in Thorne (2017: 177).
- 19.
Transart Institute is an independent school registered in Park Avenue, New York, USA accredited by The University of Plymouth, England. It runs international low-residency Creative Practice MFA and PhD programmes, taught in Berlin and New York City. See www.plymouth.ac.uk/schools/transart and www.transart.org.
- 20.
Coordinated since 2015 by Wysing Arts Centre, Eastside Projects, New Contemporaries, S1 Artspace, Spike Island and Studio Voltaire, England.
- 21.
- 22.
A famous example is the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, a retreat on the Kalamazoo River founded by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Frederick Fursman and Walter Marshall in 1914.
- 23.
‘I wanted to harness the power of experiential learning I saw happening when students apprenticed in my studio, and I wanted to find a way to help students bridge the gap between life in school and life as an artist in the world’ (Mandiberg 2013). See www.artspracticum.org.
- 24.
In the USA, cost/benefit analysis is a consideration for artists considering alt-MFAs. Pro-rata, The Summer Forum is not necessarily a cheaper alternative to paying out-of-state low-res MFA tuition fees.
- 25.
‘I would also love to see a network of Summer Forum type ventures pop up all over’ (Hunter in Satinsky 2012).
- 26.
A well-known example that LTLYM echoes is Alison Knowles’ Proposition #2: Make a Salad (ICA, London 21 October 1962).
- 27.
Schweiker and Bayerdörfer’s book project emerged from their experience as casualised, para-academic art teachers denied the opportunity to witness the development of their tutee’s practices. (Bayerdoerfer and Schweiker 2017: xvi)
- 28.
‘As environments, they model complex relationships between variables, resulting in an experience that is unpredictable and unique each time played’ (Downes 2010: 27).
- 29.
The Everyday is a trope or genre within contemporary art that emerges from Fluxus, Situationism, conceptual art and feminism in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1990s, it became particularly prevalent in forms of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 1998) and social practice (Helguera 2011) that correlated explicitly with Practice Theory, Material and Cultural Studies. See Relyea (2013).
- 30.
Lewis and Kinishi’s multilateral barter system is a popular D-I-T strategy: ‘In order to learn from someone through the Learning Exchange a person does not have to offer to teach something in return. There are many individuals who are registered as both teacher and learner; there are also cases where two have been matched and each person teaches a subject to the other. But a person can register just as a learner, just as a teacher, or just as an interest match’ (Lewis and Kinishi 1977: 6).
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Mulholland, N. (2019). Independent Programmes. In: Re-imagining the Art School. Creativity, Education and the Arts. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20629-1_5
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