Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
celebrating the centenary of Albert Einstein. Rather than producing a portable
sculpture, Althamer developed Einstein Class, a six- month project to teach
physics to a group of seven juvenile delinquents in Warsaw, most of whom had
been expelled from school. The tutor he selected for this task was a maverick
science teacher who had recently lost his job due to his unconventional teaching
style. The male pupils, who all came from the run- down Praga district of
Warsaw, were taught playful science experiments in a number of locations: in
the teacher’s garden, in a fi eld, on a beach and in Althamer’s studio (also in
Praga). The boys then demonstrated these experiments to their neighbours.
The whole project was documented on video by the Polish fi lmmaker Krzysztof
Visconti (Einstein Class, 2006), who interspersed it with interviews with
Althamer, the children and their parents. As documentation, the video is unremarkable,
and bears no relation to the chaotic intensity of the project; it seems
at pains to normalise Althamer’s initiative and prove its positive effect upon the
students. The dynamic of Einstein Class was, in my experience, far more vivid
and demanding. One evening I accompanied Althamer to the science teacher’s
house, where he wanted to show the fi rst edit of the documentary to the boys.
When we arrived, full-scale mayhem was underway: the boys were playing
gabba music at full blast, surfi ng the internet, smoking, throwing fruit around,
fi ghting and threatening to push each other into the garden pond. In the middle
of this frenzy stood an oasis of calm: the science teacher and Althamer, utterly
oblivious to the chaos around them. Only a handful of the boys watched the
video (which depicted nothing of this bedlam); the rest were more interested in
trying to steal my mobile phone or surf the net. As the evening progressed, it
became clear that Althamer had placed two groups of outsiders together – the
Paweł Althamer, Einstein Class, 2005
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