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The Site-Specific Art School

Translation from Maarav's latest issue in Hebrew, "Reeducation"

In 1920, moved to action by the ideas of Suprematism, a group of students at the People’s Art School in Vitebsk joined forces to change the world. Just a few months after founding the revolutionary art school, Marc Chagall was already passe and Kasimir Malevich was the students’ new messiah. Calling themselves “UNOVIS” - Champions of the New Art - they wore Malevich’s Black Square on their coat-sleeves and set out to spread the word:

“ ON OUR WAY TO A UNITED PICTORIAL AUDIENCE!
 …LET THE OVERTHROW OF THE OLD WORLD OF THE ARTS BE MARKED OUT ON THE PALMS OF YOUR HANDS!
…WE ARE THE SUPREMACY OF THE NEW…we are young and clean, the new art will develop through us…we do not want to be like our fathers and scrape their likeness from our faces.
…At present, we are scattered in college workshops which are divided and fenced off. We are split up into cells and work at art independently…We must gather together like a strong hurricane to destroy the old and create the new…and so let us form a universal army for a new creativity in the arts.
…Comrades, shed your prejudices, open the doors of your workshops and let us form a united audience for our common task…Comrades, set up the flags of UNOVIS. They will be the first signposts in the desert where we shall create the new world.” (1)

Today, eighty years later, nothing seems further from reality than UNOVIS' utopian fervor. But while failing heroically to "create the new world" - in fact within a few years they were branded bourgeois formalists and disbanded along with the entire Russian avant-garde - these idealistic young art students did succeed in completely transforming at least one social institution central to their (and our) lives, an institution never to be the same again: The art school.
The old art academy, once the bastion of tradition and the systematic preserver of professional, social and national order, was gone for ever. In its stead came the modern art school, the laboratory of innovation and the hothouse of creativity. Thierry de Duve (2) has shown how the academic paradigm, based on the triad of talent-metier-imitation, was replaced by the avant-garde paradigm (which he calls the “Bauhaus model”), based on creativity-medium-invention. But de Duve also highlights a reality only too familiar to those
who teach in art schools today: 

“Both models (academic and "Bauhaus". L.A.) are obsolete. The academic model entered a deep crisis as soon as it began to deserve the derogative label of academism…The Bauhaus model also entered an open crisis. That phenomenon is more recent but it isn't new, dating from the Sixties, I would say. It, too, goes hand in hand with the art of its time, and it is contemporaneous with the deep loss of confidence that modernism has undergone since those years. Now, it is dramatic to have to teach according to postulates one doesn't believe in anymore.” (3)

As avant-garde passion wore away and modernist ideologies were perceived as redundant, art schools became institutional zombies, soulless bodies mechanically going through the motions of education. Profitable cynicism and comfortable decadence have kept the production-line going, but it only perpetuates a phantom image of significant learning, knowledge or creativity. In fact, art education has been abstracted, converted into an empty sign, yet another convention to be deconstructed, quoted and appropriated ad nauseam. The modernist experiment has succeeded but the patient is dying. We have "scraped the likeness of our fathers from our faces" only to find nothing underneath. Our "united pictorial audience" is not the ideologically motivated community envisioned by UNOVIS, but an indifferent, generalized and standardized global market. "New Art" has joined the "old world of the arts" on the garbage heap, and the void left in their aftermath is amplified by the seduction of total virtual absence. We have abstracted ourselves to oblivion.

Of course, the last thing we need is a nostalgic and manipulative return to any one of the lost purist paradigms, be they academic, modernist or national. What we do need is what I would call the “Site-Specific Art School”, an organization that clearly recognizes the contemporary challenges to art and art education, represents them in its structure, thematizes them in its programme, and, most importantly, locates them in a specific time and place. History is not background “noise” to be ignored in the pursuit of perfect form or professional status, it is the essential context without which there is no art. To be universal art must be grounded in the particular. Theoretical and formal questions of language and meaning should be asked in the context of real cultural, social and personal situations. The Site-Specific Art School should be inclusive; rather than attempting to predetermine a hierarchy of significance, its academic programme and technical facilities should strive to represent all forces relevant to the culture at large, while making a wide range of media - old, new and in between - accessible to the students. While the 19th century academy expected its students to put their talent at the service of tradition, and the 20th century art school expected its students to put their creativity at the service of transgression, the Site-Specific Art School should trust its students to define their own agenda as critical agents capable of working with conflict, contradiction and difference. It is not the art teacher’s role to concoct a magical solution to the contemporary conundrum, only to present the dilemmas to his or her students with utmost accuracy, honesty and passion.

To work, the Site-Specific Art School needs real people, teachers and students alike, with real bodies, real memories and real desires. It should be structured, physically and conceptually, as a flexible and dynamic space in which people with different life experiences can find both their private space as individuals and their shared public space, as a critical community of discourse which determines its issues of debate and the wider cultural context of its activity. The critical community is the heart of the Site-Specific Art School and its very raison d’etre (4). Without it, one may well ask, why go to art school at all? Technical instruction went out with the old academies, spontaneous self-expression has been deconstructed as yet another “modernist myth”, and digital media now enable distant learning without the distracting smell of turpentine and bustle of the cafeteria. But distractions are of the essence, as art only happens in the encounter between individual expression and public reception. The only good reason to prefer art school over auto-didactic self-training is to be with other people, to show and tell, to develop a point of view in the problematic presence of other points of view.

Today, of course, we have no use for the flags of UNOVIS and their “universal army for a new creativity”; they are as dehumanizing and oppressive as all other flags and armies we have known. Resistance to the tyranny of globalization should lead us away from the charisma of over-simplified blanket promises, technological or theoretical, and towards the respectful and attentive complexity of real worlds and the dynamic critical interplay between them. The Site-Specific Art School is founded on improvisation rather than dogma, modernist or post-modernist; it is an open-ended process which changes from day to day, and acquires its overall form from the specific moves of each and every of its participants and their particular cultural context. Most importantly, no two Site-Specific Art Schools can be alike.

Vive la difference.

Notes:
1.  Propaganda handbill, From UNOVIS-We Want!, signed by the Creative Committee of UNOVIS, Vitebsk, 1920(?), published in Larissa A. Zhadova, Malevich-Suprematism and Revolution in Russian Art, 1910-1930
 2.  Thierry de Duve, When Form has become Attitude-and Beyond, in Nicholas de Ville and Stephen Foster, eds., The Artist and the Academy (John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, England 1994), pp. 23-40
3.  Ibid, p.27
4.  For a wider discussion of criticality vis-a-vis cultural specificity see Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, Why Critical Regionalism Today?, in Nicholas de Ville and Stephen Foster, eds., op. cit., pp. 63-76, and K. Frampton, Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture (Bay Press, Seattle, U.S.A 1983), pp. 16-30

Presented at the Fine Art seminar, Rain, Steam and Speed, ELIA conference, “A bounty, boundless as the sea”: Arts’ Generosity, Barcelona, 3-7 October 2000