ASAP: The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present is an international, nonprofit association dedicated to discovering and articulating the aesthetic, cultural, ethical, and political identities of the contemporary arts.
This talk was presented at the 2018 ASAP Symposium in Amsterdam, NL. The theme was As Slowly As Possible. This was the abstract for the talk I prepared:
Instituent practices, a term first proposed by Gerald Raunig to describe critical efforts to “transform the arts of governing” and participate in the processes of instituting, have been gaining relevance in recent years. Stepping beyond critique as such, practitioners are rehearsing institutional paradigms with legal, financial, and facilitative frameworks that make space for new relations to emerge. Since practitioners choose to engage directly in the structures of power and to wield them, instituent practices are collaborative and unfold over long periods of time. They draw upon business, law, and political science, as well as performance, sculpture, and curatorial practice to reanimate institutions as legitimate arenas for speculative engagements. While art schools seek to incorporate this new development, the hybridity and duration inherent to the practice present a unique set of institutional and pedagogical challenges. The semester, the studio, the critique, notions of individual authorship, evaluation metrics, the pace of study, the expected pace of production, and disciplinary silos make it exceedingly difficult for students to engage in this emerging field.
Continuing where Raunig left off, and complicated by Pascal Gielen’s recent work on verticality within the art academy, this paper considers how art schools might adjust to accommodate those artists undertaking new instituent practices. It distills principles for the slow multidisciplinary pedagogy required for these practices to thrive in the academy by drawing on frameworks developed by Nomad9 MFA, Beespace, and School of Apocalypse.