Miško Šuvaković Epistemology of Art - TkH

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From the history of art schools it is obvious that their status has been
determined by their function in a specific realm of cultural policies of a
historically and geographically specific society; namely, preparation of
the artist for an active professional participation in the artworld and,
through the artworld, in the respective culture. Art schools usually
appeared as a ‘world’ close to the artworld, but outside of it enough to
allow for ambiguous autonomies of art as art, and school as school, i.e.
education as education. Not uncommon were the cases of differences
and incongruities of interests and preoccupations on the part of art
schools and actual art worlds, predominantly in the XIX and early XX
century. Rare were, however, instances of art schools wherein references
or correspondence between the ‘life of the school’ and ‘life of
the art world’ had been effectively established – as, for example, in the
Soviet avantgarde (VhUTEMKS, UNOVIS, GINHUK) 163 , German proavantgarde
modernist (Bauhaus) 164 , or American early experimental
neo-avantgarde schools (Black Mountain College) 165 . Transformation
of art schools in the postmodern, then the age of globalism, in the
1980s, 1990s and the current decade, has lead to remarkable opening
of art schools towards production- and curatorship-based artistic,
mass media and cultural practices, perceived to have considerable
influence or effects upon the art scene. Production character of art
schools is, most commonly, affected by three demands:
1. demand for efficiency i.e. presence of the school on the global
and local art markets,
2. global-capitalist restructuring of the art world which is no
longer, at all levels and in all regimes of market ‘operations’,
open to output of young artists or artists based in local scenes,
and
163 Aleksandra Shatskikh, „Unovis: Epicenter of a New World“, from The Great Utopia.
The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915-1932, Guggenheim Museum, New
York, 1992, str. 52-64.
164 Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus – Weimar Desau Berlin Chicago, The MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1975.
165 Marry Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, The MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 2002.
3. restructuring of the art world in two basic and determinate
sub-systems of artistic production: market and fundraising sustenance
of art.
Production features of work and effects of a school are determined
by fundraising modes (state, private, or corporate capital). Thus, artistic
production transforms from the realm of creation of art works
into the realm of art projects, whereas the very canon of crafts- and
poetics-based traditional art education becomes refocused into the
realm of projective education, incorporating production/postproduction
media- or performance-based work, in synchrony with curatorial,
managerial, and theoretical discursive output. In other words,
a contemporary art school engaged in liberal-productive or (to the
contrary) critical-emancipatory work, becomes a micro-physical and
micro-political ‘image’, a simulacrum of the art world with particular
regimes of creative/productive, production/postproduction, curatorial/economic,
organizational, and theoretical/interpretative work in
culture. Resistance to this conceptual transformation of art schools
features in dispositions towards recycling or revision of traditional
and, often, ethnically-based and disciplinary oriented art schools
(academies, conservatories) or radical practices of self-organization 166
and self-education 167 in the realm of organizations (in managerial and
economic terms) relatively independent from local governments and
global corporate capital: namely, the market.
Internal structure of the school can be outlined in the following institutional
modes of regulation of the school’s vita activa: platform, curriculum,
study program, class, agency, terminal, access, and paradigm.
Platform of the art school is comparatively regulated series of intentional
and unintentional cohesive standards underlying the power/
authority and judgement on art, perceived as reality of the school
166 „Self-organization issue“, TkH no. 11, Belgrade, 2006.
167 „Self-education – Goat Tracks of Self-education“, TkH no. 15, Belgrade, 2008;
„Self-education – Self-Managed Educational System in Art (s-o-s-project)“, TkH
no. 14, Belgrade, 2007.