ambivalent ruins: anniversaries in art education

 

first speaking matters event: friday 26/9/08 14:00 - 17:30

 

Dr. Maeve Connolly (IADT) speaking the roundtable 'ambivalent ruins: anniversaries in art education' [26/9/08]

 

This round-table event taking place at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media on the afternoon of Friday September 26th provides an opportunity to reflect on the current practices and debates in art education. Questions proposed to the participants include:

  • What should we expect from contemporary art education?
  • What relationship should art teaching have to art practice?
  • Are there different - perhaps better? - ways to study contemporary art than through formal art education as currently constituted?
  • Where is the important critical thinking and experiment in art education taking place now?
  • For whom is art education produced?
  • What should art education's response be to the changing landscape of higher education?
  • How might art education respond to broader developments within contemporary art beyond the teaching and research institutions?

Confirmed speakers include: Dr. Maeve Connolly (IADT) Dr. Andrea Phillips (Goldsmiths) Declan Long (NCAD) Glenn Loughran (NCAD/GradCAM). (Other invited guests will be announced shortly.)

 

To book your place email: speaking_matters@gradcam.ie
There is no charge for attendance, however, places are restricted to 30 approx.

 

2008 sees the fortieth anniversary of 1968 and various forms of high profile student agitation, including the major art-education show-downs at Hornsey College in Middlesex in the UK (as recently described in Lisa Tickner's new book). Other anniversaries are suggested also in that seventy-five years ago - in 1933 - the bauhaus in Germany was closed-down by the Nazis; meanwhile, an ocean away in the US, Black Mountain College was being established by Dewey-eyed educational reformers - also in 1933. Now, three-quarters of a century later, it seems reasonable to say that we are experiencing an ambivalent moment in art education.

 

On the one hand we have the turn to pedagogical models across a range of contemporary curatorial projects and art practices: 'Pedagogy' was one of the three leitmotifs of documenta12; Manifesta's 'Notes for an Artschool'; unitednationsplaza; Frieze's 'Art schools then and now'; ArteContexto's recent dossier on 'teaching visual arts'; 'proto-academy'; Cork Caucus; and Frieze Art Fair's recent roundtable on art education (13/10/07). Both the future of the art school, and art practice as cultural pedagogy in its own right, exercise the imagination and energies of the international contemporary art scene.

 

On the other hand we have the ongoing sense of art education as under threat from a rampant economic and managerial instrumentalism re-ordering higher education in general. Art Monthly will hold a public debate in London (27/9/08) and also in Birmingham later this autumn to consider the question - "is further privatization, corporatisation and instrumentalism inevitable or are there alternatives?" While last year the Irish Art & Design Research Network staged an event - '2020 visions' - which asked participants to "imagine the art and design college of the future." (22/3/07) See “Art School and the Old Grey Cardigan Test”, VARIANT (2007). See also ' You Talkin' to me? Why art is turning to education' ICA roundtable (14/7/08).

 

possible readings

 

Irit Rogoff (2007) Academy as potentiality

Jan Verwoert (2007) Lessons in Modesty

 

This event is part of the 'speaking matters' programme of research events, seminars and conferences, co-organised by the Graduate School network of collaborators. Find out about other events here.