Miško Šuvaković Epistemology of Art - TkH

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and ethics of the schools’s interior and exterior relations). Horizontal
and non-authoritarian organization of the school demands, above all,
a partner relationship of collaborators in the teaching process, who
carry out all ‘functions’ and organization of the school. If in such a
school, hierarchical structures of teaching and life do occur, they are
commonly perceived as temporary and provisional, and thus subject
to critique and auto-critique on the part of the partners concerned.
Activism refers to entirely different strategies and tactics of behavior,
articulating the teaching, as well as the inner- and outer-reaching
life of the school – namely, the interventionist role of the school
and its ‘teams’ on the immediate or mediated, real or virtual cultural
and social environment. Activism emerges in two modes: as a political
strategy of intervention in the art, culture and society; and as a
‘value’, a ‘target content’ of contemporary art practices at the turn of
the millennium. Self-organization and activism share a long history in
the modernist art education. It can be traced from the mysticist, political,
and artistic communes of the XIX century (Monte Verita) 211 , or
certain departments of the Bauhaus 212 and certain phases of the Soviet
art schools (UNOVIS) 213 , to the self-organized structure of Black
Mountain College 214 , the first explicit instance of an ‘anti-school’. Activist
ideas, most commonly, render art as a life-shaping practice, or
as a political practice manipulating interventionist contingencies of
art. Auto-critique appears as one of the regulatory practices of selforganization
and attempts at developing direct democracy through
permanent auto-analysis and evaluation of interpersonal, structural,
and educational relationships. Self-organization and activism are often
seen as opposing, theoretical and anti-theoretical practices. They are
established as anti-theoretical when primacy of action, practice, or
life is conceived as ‘empiro-centric’, while theoretical practices are
given primacy when self-organization and activism become projec-
211 Harold Szeemann, Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk. Europäische Utopien seit 1800,
Aarau/KH, Zürich, 1983.
212 Hans M. Wingler, The Bauhaus – Weimar Desau Berlin Chicago, The MIT Press,
Cambridge MA, 1975.
213 The Great Utopia. The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915-1932, Guggenheim Museum,
New York, 1992.
214 Marry Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College, The MIT Press, Cambridge
MA, 2002.
tions of theory-derived concrete utopias, and (also) when practice
is understood as a mode of theoretical work which needs to be subjected
to theoretical analysis. These three paradigms are often confronted.
Self-organizing schools are subject to conflicts and mutual
differentiation and, therefore, often short-lived.