Art School in the Art School
I was really lucky to get to do a residency here at the ASitAS, Syracuse USA. It was a brilliant opportunity and I got to learn some super great stuff from incredible artist, activist, professor: Joanna Spitzner.
The Art School in The Art School (The AS in The AS) seeks to generate a creative and intellectual community through an open school / open source structure.Through activities such as classes, discussions, forming groups of interest, reading groups, critique groups, workshops, eating and drinking, publishing, and making, The AS in the AS seeks to create an experimental environment for shared inquiry. All events are FREE and open to the public.
The school exists in relation (opposition, subversion, supplement, mimicry) to Syracuse University’s School of Art and Design, which embodies typical US art school and university educational practices.
The AS in The AS is a platform for self-organization: its activities are generated through suggestions, proposals, conversations, and finding ways to make things happen.
In her essay “A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art,” Kristina Lee Podesva describes some aspects I would like to explore with The AS in the AS. I will simply quote her here:
1. A school structure that operates as a social medium.
2. A dependence on collaborative production.
3. A tendency toward process (versus object) based production.
4. An aleatory or open nature.
5. An ongoing and potentially endless temporality.
6. A free space for learning.
7. A post-hierarchical learning environment where there are no teachers, just co-participants.
8. A preference for exploratory, experimental, and multi-disciplinary approaches to knowledge production.
9. An awareness of the instrumentalization of the academy.
10. A virtual space for the communication and distribution of ideas.
