Art in the Making

Initially David's plan was for a whole day of AITM events and discussions followed but a panel discussion to be chaired by Ed Krcma. This structure remains however dramatically shortened as we believe a three hour event with entice a larger audience and remove the chance of fatigue and disillusionment. We are shortening it to three hours. Also the initial plan was for the AITM exhibition to take place in another venue somewhere in the city after the conference. Again, this has changed and we feel that the exhibition should grow around the conference space as the talks and events happen. These art objects will be documented and the exhibition then become a virtual one, viewed after the online.

So here are the planned speakers and events in no particular order unless stated (as I do not have documentation right now as to who is speaking when):

First thing to happen is a few AITM people (as in the students of LSAD and CCAD who have been involved during the year) will read out a manifesto on what AITM means to them. Contradictions between these manifestos may spark some interesting dialogue throughout the day.

Eilish Tuite, a student from LSAD will initiate a group creative action so as the group will collaboratively produce an art object. Eilish will discuss in an informal manner the roles of collaboration and participation in the process of art making.

Vicky Langan or Max le Cain of Black Sun Cork will chat about the events and how herself and Paul sustain such a project. There will be a per-formative element to this also, of which I am not clear on, and also vegan cakes and buns will also be available. Niamh Moloughney of Free Gaza Ireland has been asked to do a talk on the work she has been doing.

 

Another performance piece will then happen.

The panel will then come together to discuss the events of the day, the manifestos and what directions the group could go in. The panel currently consists of Ed Krcma, David Brancaleone, and Dobz, though we are trying to get Trish Brennan to be there also as a CCAD representative. David seemed very enthusiastic that Ed chair this for his (I paraphrase) intuitive ability to take something like an AITM event and discuss within a relevant theoretical context. I think this discussion is going to last about a half an hour though I shall double check.




This is still pencilled in, though it seems to work fine. The final performance thing is becoming a bit ambiguous as to who and what, but it shall happen.

Could we do something for nothing and without funding? Could we even opt against funding as a way of being? Be so cheap that we are free? And instead organise Bake 2 make stalls as fund-raisers. We wanted to do something tangible, talk seriously about art in the making; but also, something that was not entirely goal-oriented. Could space be found for real dialogue (Bakhtin), beyond the now neatly institutionalized boundaries of the simulacrum of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud)? Could there be space for the idea that personal identity changes in the collective forum, that individual and collective hard edges don't exist, that, instead, they become.

Even if an "inoperative community" (Nancy) is better than nothing, slightly better than a "community to come" (Agamben), maybe it is more helpful to think in terms of "creative commons" (Negri). This follows from "Art as Operation" (David Brancaleone, recirca.com) which applies Pierre Macherey's ideas on philosophy to art practice, art that never happens in isolation and which begins with dialogue to produce or suggest change.

Could there be an art practice consisting in art theory; theory not divorced from its object (art and the social), but looking at what is the case and trying to understand it? Take the example Deleuze gave Foucault in an interview, in which he recalls that Proust tells the reader that he is just offering her a pair of specs with which to view the world; so if the pair doesn't quite fit, no problem, she can try on another one.

This project eventually began to address and question not only what is involved in art and making inside, but also outside college, thinking of art practice as a practice situated in a social context, our everyday life which is also a site of change, creativity, and rebellion inside and outside the institutional space (Lefebvre), or of resistance (De Certeau). Could we spread out - amoeba fashion - into non-institutional spaces?

In the context of trying to think about directions and even just getting one's bearings about educational institutions today and how marketization affects us, The New spirit of capitalism (2005) is a particularly useful device. The authors argue that society responds to multiple logics in the way it functions and justifies its actions, what they (Boltanski and Chiapello) call "cities". These include: the logic of the industrial city (efficiency, command-based line management, hierarchical, modelled on Fordist industrial processes of manufacturing); the logic of the commercial city (market, exchange value is given absolute priority over use value). This portable skills-based commodification of the human being student is spreading into universities); the logic of the project-centred city (connexionist, network-based, but outcome driven, collaborative but not necessarily ethical let alone aiming for equality); and the logic of the inspirational city (ethical and equal, interrupting clichés, having the courage to expose what the commercial city excludes, to value the knowledge of blind spots, of non-commercial, non-goal-oriented activities.).

Then the questioning shifts to: can the imaginary city ever morph into the real city? Is the real world a combination of these cities which can overlap, be overturned, resisted? The authors argue that this is possible through revived social critique and artistic critique, the one redressing the balance in terms of equality and against exploitation, the other in terms of a sustained attack against commodification in a project-based, mobile, flexible twenty-first-century Western society.

In the face of the institutional status quo as attempted stasis, immobility, Art in the making is also inspired by Alain Badiou's outlook, a philosopher notable for his authoritative rejection of post-modernism and its theoretical consequences, in preference for an architecture of thought which posits human agency and change, the dynamics of radical change, at its core.

If you replace Boltanski's and Chiapello's cities with 'worlds', you get a sense of Badiou's recent thinking. Some theorists have interpreted Badiou's ideas as messianic, unrealistic and even incoherent. But this is because of his theory of the event which describes radical change in philosophical terms. In Being and event (2006) he built nothing less than an architecture of the event, using mathematical ZF axiomatic set theory; then, in Logics of worlds (2009), he concentrates on the situation, the reality of the status quo, trying to explain, in philosophical terms, change as it appears in situations, in one of a number of worlds, each one governed by its own logic.

While the kind of event Badiou has in mind is rare indeed (major scientific breakthroughs, 1917, 1968), and has little application (other than to think big, to think radical change as a real possibility), Badiou's theory of fidelity can be applied and brings us closer to the event as he sees it. It consists in a fidelity to a principle (or let us call it militancy) as it emerges in a real situation (rather than just as an abstract or platonic idea, outside time and space, so ideas within a material, contingent world); for example, the cultural and political revolution of ideas in the post-1968 West, in which for a while, one logic gave way to another, which could not be explained or understood within the parameters of the preceding logic. Fidelity as finding a route through, not giving up, despite the obstacles, to be active in developing the positive consequences of big breakthroughs in society and culture, what others earlier referred to as "epistemological breaks" (Althusser, Bachelard, Canguillhem).

In the context of education, and specifically art education, Badiou's fidelity to the event could be exemplified with student-centred, emancipated teaching, and the very idea of citizenship as something to be gained, rather than a given. Such a position draws on the legacy of Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the oppressed.

What the forum facilitates among participants is the opportunity in college to debate ideas, a growing confidence to speak up, negated by traditional transmission teaching (chalk and talk). If learning is considered as more than a skills-based and vocational 'activity', there is room for it to also embrace a journey of self-enquiry at any age, and the 'search for meaning' in life that Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel wrote about and a journey that the learner-student and the learner-educator share (Frankel, 1984).

For critical theorists (Marx, Gramsci, Habermas, Zizek) learning in our society tends to replicate, produce and reinforce hegemonic values. In this framework of thought, some kinds of knowledge are singled out as more important in a society still determined by class values (in an expanded definition of class). For them, it does not make sense to ask how learning functions, unless we also take into account the societal context in which it functions, its power bases and values.

Paulo Freire said that learning and schooling are not the same thing and that most learning takes place in an informal setting outside the classroom. In this respect, Art in the making provides a forum for learning as reflective discipline (occurring outside the framework of formal learning, learner types, tasks, curriculum, course design, teaching aims, learning outcomes and formative and summative assessment). Freire's approach was to see learning in terms of emancipation; as a means to have a voice in the world or what Jürgen Habermas calls our "lifeworlds" and improve them; something that becomes possible once we learn to learn. 'Learning to learn' makes it possible to adapt -exciting, because it is only when one of the forms of intelligence is engaged experientially that we realise our potential. Now that's active learning.

 
Students from two Irish art colleges are collaborating on a project which has been developed outside ordinary institutional frameworks. From February to June, Art in the making challenged the theory-practice divide, seeing the two as complementary, on the basis that as soon as we think or talk about work, we are applying theory.

One student saw Art in the making as "a fledgling artistic cooperative, involved in the process of new art, new voice, new ways of making, seeing, speaking, thinking and doing art." Early on, another student said about organising, "this is all new to us, we have never done this before. Where do we start?" Later, Dobz O'Brien asked Limerick students what they thought Art in the making was. One spoke of providing talks as a way to make up for cuts that had affected visiting lecturers; others said we were a collective, working on art as praxis, as intervention in the social.



Art in the making has a presence in this summer's Avant (art festival in Cork organised by Fergal Gaynor from 10 July 2010, see Avant website, Cork). Art in the making will hold a one-day conference ('Thinking outside the box') and exhibit in the Crawford College of Art. The conference itself takes place in a vibrant community arts centre, the Camden Palace Hotel, Cork, with the participation of the new Art in the making collective, the exhibiting artists, Cork Contemporary Projects, Faber Studios, and people working for the Glucksman, the Sculpture Factory, UCC Art History Department and CCS, Limerick School of Art and Design.



Art in the making was originally inspired by: a conference on practice-based research at York St John University (2008); by the Cork Clinic collective -legacy of the Caucus art festival - by research on the mechanisms of commodification of education at third level, and by 'Knowledge', a conference in Art and Design (organised by the UK Higher Education Academy in 2007), which made it clear that what is at stake is to consider the alternatives and the potential of resistance to commodification in education. York articulated the creative potential of research and the difficulties facing artists who are also theorists. It begged the question: could we find a place inside academic institution for the lost (creative) knowledge, bridging the artificial gap between art practice and theory practice in art college? And perhaps Foucault was wrong after all; maybe the carceral nature of all institutions can be challenged in practice as well as in theory.

There was also this vague idea of forging informal links across and outside college, to encourage collaborative research among people who have never worked together; to bring together students and others as people rather than identities or differences, to help make new space inside the colleges, a culture-making space, a social and political space, over and above the strictures of timetables and institutional deadlines.

The sessions ran simultaneously in Cork and Limerick every Tuesday and every week, February to May for only half an hour at lunchtime. Once Art in the making was launched in Limerick, the Student Union got involved. While in Cork, the students took turns to organise sessions, either by inviting an outside person, or triggering a discussion with an art action.

We worked inside and outside the forum to develop the project, using video, photography and sound-recording and documented what we did. Both student collectives set up Art in the making Facebook pages, with large numbers of members and now there's also a weebly and an e-mail address (http://artinthemaking.weebly.com; [email protected]).

What was just a name materialised into a steady following, sometimes up to 40 - 50 participants and organisers. This is how some Crawford students described it: "freshness"; "informality, exchange / pushing of ideas." "The idea of process coming into play. Getting to talk to other artists and curators with similar interests and views" and: "especially passionate about the curation of the final exhibition." "How the boundaries of art can be pushed and changed according to people's different interests and how different practices can combine in different contexts"; a Second Year: "pushing the meaning of art and questioning the public as to what art is and how it is practised."

Art in the making has opened a different kind of dialogue with practising artists, bringing together practitioners from across college, as equals, to talk about their work, finding out what is in common, seeking to overcome the theory / practice divide, seeing instead the two as closely related and even complementary. (As soon as we think or talk about work, we are using theory, it is inevitable).

At a time when a post-meltdown pessimism pervades Irish society, individuals inside and outside college gave their time (some even travelled far to be involved). Art in the making engaged with Max Le Cain, Cork Film Centre's film-maker and editor of online Experimental conversations; Glucksman Gallery curator Matt Packer; Sculpture Factory artist and curator, David Dobz O'Brien; Cork Contemporary Projects' Edel O'Reilly; Wickham Studios' Alan Crowley, Faber Studios' Chris Boland, artist and academic Justin McKeown who came down from Belfast.

Limerick questioned traditional presentations, slowly freeing up the dynamic of participation and sometimes holding open discussions. Elaine Reardon explained how she managed to establish an Irish Pavilion of ceramics in China and suggested how to make the most of unexpected opportunities. Justin organised artists' residencies in his Belfast home, where the domestic space has been the place for culture since the 1960s; Matt Packer broke the boundaries between curating and making, Alan Crowley displayed a pile of sketchbooks produced during his years in college and explained that the mountains of non-assessed work was more important than work specifically made for college; Evelyn Glynn exposed the need for remembering the Magadalen Laundry through oral history and art interventions, and Dobz invited students to choose between being art students or artists who are students.

In the Crawford, Art in the making blossomed into eight weeks of sheer creativity, staging discussions with artists' collectives (Cork-based The Space and Limerick-based Faber). It found out how they became collectives, and what difficulties are involved in balancing curatorial duties and their own art practice, discussed everyday objects in the corridors (Banister exhibition), it gave humorous talks around the topic of puns (Punny), came together to create chalk drawings on the pavement and walls of college to experience a free and uninhibited creative moment (Chalk), interacted with a performance artist's poetry, music and street theatre (Tom Campbell), gave a talk about painting's influence on cinema (Kevin Mullany), played 'Flicktionary', a variation on the game Pictionary, using film titles as the clues with Max Le Cain who also screened a number of his own video works which were then discussed in detail. (Video footage for some of the sessions is viewable on facebook, Art in the Making-CCAD).

At a poetry reading group in Cork, one of the Art in the making collective read the contents of his wallet as a poem. In Limerick, a river clean-up took place in April, organised by other members. Then in May, the collectives joined up to participate in Kevin Flannagan's 'Copyleft' talk at Faber Studios, in one of a number of ev+a events. All actions to think outside the institutional box.

Imagine 40 to 50 art students meeting in earnest out of class in two art colleges, to discuss making, process, the reasons why, the bigger picture, inviting outsiders, wanting more than just a mark. This is art in the Making. The weekly workshops on the theory of practice are now breaking out of the institutional box into the streets, into the city. In Cork City on  10th July, all welcome to our first Art in the Making conference, taking place at Camden Palace Hotel, Cork, 10-6, followed by the opening of our Exhibition at the Crawford College of Art.

Kilmainham Arts Club are  looking for artists and performers etc to get involved with their one day arts festival on  Saturday September 4th. They will be using the Hilton, IMMA, and the patriots inn for the exhibition. Contact:  [email protected]

Saturday 10th July

10 – 1pm: Art in the Making – conference with students from Limerick and Cork Schools of Art (Camden Palace Hotel)

2-4pm: continuation of Art in the Making conference

4-6pm: opening of public Art in the Making exhibition (Crawford College of Art)

Art in the Making Exhibition Meetin Start Time: Wednesday, 23 June 2010 at 02:30 End Time: Friday, 25 June 2010 at 05:30 Location: Cork City

Patience peeps. Still trying to find feet with this.