ARTIFICIAL HELLS

pedagogic projects
Chan identifies two types of social and political work that took place in
relation to realising the project: before the event (which was ‘painfully
conventional – like any politics’) and during the event (‘which makes
possible a place where these things [i.e. politics] don’t matter any more’). 32
In other words, Chan sustains simultaneously two different registers of
the political: as instrumentalised diplomacy, and as the suspension of this
instrumentalisation in the autonomy of the work of art. This Adornian
inclination towards art as a sanctuary where means- ends rationality is set
aside makes Chan an unusual figure among artists today: rather than
using art to bring about social change, he uses activist strategies to realise
a work of art. The more common tendency for socially engaged artists is
to adopt a paradoxical position in which art as a category is both rejected
and reclaimed: they object to their project being called art because it is
also a real social process, while at the same time claiming that this whole
process is art.
III. Common Tasks
Chan’s articulate understanding of the dual nature of art’s politics could
not be further from the intuitive operations of Polish artist Paweł Althamer
(b.1967), who also works across sculpture (invariably a form of self- portraiture)
and collaborative projects, but who views all parts of this process as
an artistic adventure. His longest- running collaboration is with the Nowolipie
Group, an organisation in Warsaw for adults with mental or physical
disabilities, to whom he has been teaching a Friday night ceramics class
since the early 1990s. Although these began in a conventional pedagogic
mode – each week he sets the group an assignment; when I visited, they
were building castles – increasingly, the class leads Althamer: the experience
of teaching provides a rich source of ideas for him, for whom the
educational process cuts two ways (‘They teach me to be more mad’). 33 For
example, one of the group, Rafal Kalinowski, always builds clay biplanes
regardless of the week’s set theme. In 2008 Althamer arranged for the
group to wear matching overalls and take a trip on a biplane, which became
the subject of a short film by Althamer’s frequent collaborator, Artur
Żmijewski (Winged, 2008). This long- term collaboration recently led to a
series of works called Common Task (2009), a ‘science fiction film in real
time’, in which Althamer took the Nowolipie Group and his neighbours in
the Bródno district of Warsaw (residents of a socialist- era housing estate),
all dressed in gold jumpsuits, to visit the Atomium in Brussels. Subsequent
voyages, with a smaller team of travellers, were then made to Niemeyer’s
architecture in Brasília, and to the Dogon people in Mali. 34
Since 2000, Althamer’s work has moved in an increasingly unexhibitable
direction, a shift that has coincided with an extension of his interest in education.
In 2005 he was commissioned by a German institution to make a work
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