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14 posts tagged education
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Eleven Cooper Union students have barricaded themselves within the school’s Foundation Building clock tower since noon on December 3rd in protest of the administration’s plan to begin charging tuition for graduate studies for the first time in 110 years. Read our coverage of the protests so far here, here, and here.
Posted by bespangled
Source hyperallergic.com
Allan Rohan Crite, “School’s Out” (1936)
It’s interesting to consider this painting with Winslow Homer’s “Snap the Whip” (1872), as both depict very active social environments right outside of school settings. While so many of us associate the end of the school year with a kind of joyous freedom (not dissimilar to the tone of the movie “Dazed and Confused”), these paintings make me think of the other kinds of education we receive from schools that go beyond books and chalkboards — educations of social and physical behavior, games and attitudes that will be played out again and again for years, if not whole lives. There are just so many different relationships going on in this painting, so much activity, that remind me of all the other things we’re constantly being taught, school or no school. Click through for a larger version of the painting.
Posted by bespangled
Source americanart.si.edu
Anton Vidokle, “Night School” (2008-9)
Vidokle’s “Night School,” a series of seminars commissioned by the New Museum, was born of a previous project, “United Nations Plaza,” which he discusses in Frieze:
UNP was structured around an informal educational model: it was not a school in the conventional sense of teaching a specific skill, requiring attendance, giving exams or assigning grades. Perhaps it was closer to an older model, like Aristotle’s Lyceum in Athens, which involved a bunch of people meeting under a tree to listen to and discuss ideas. Similarly, groups of people would assemble at a rather ugly building in Berlin to listen to lectures, take part in discussions, attend performances. Like an art exhibition, anyone could come and engage as much or as little as they wanted to.UNP and Night School were similar to other free schools/universities in methodology, as well as other discursive or socially based art practices that utilize open-ended platforms. Although Vidokle is most often given credit for these projects, they are fundamentally collaborative, as many people took part in hosting, giving and participating in the seminars. Vidokle’s practice often involves art’s relationship to experimental education system, often in a fairly meta way, having co-founded the art world message circuit e-flux as well as put together “Exhibition as School,” an archive of his past projects. On the whole, his work produces opportunities for critical thinking about art and the way the art world functions. The end product of his work may be intangible and somewhat nebulous, but the documents of the workshops and discussion (as seen through the links at the top of this post) provide ample food for theoretical thought.
Posted by bespangled
Source blog.selfportrait.net
Judith Joy Ross, “Jackie Cieniawa, A.D. Thomas Elementary School, Hazleton, Pennsylvania” (1993)
I really appreciate this photo for capturing that particular awkwardness of childhood, those instances when school may introduce a kid to self-consciousness, and the kid (you! me! or her!) can absorb or deny that self-awareness. I also feel a sense nostalgia for the details of elementary school — the uniformity of the desks betrayed by unique scratches, intentional or otherwise, the cartoony banners and posters, the heavy readers in editions as old as myself. The immediacy of that world and the skin you inhabit as a child is very present for me in this photo.
In 2006, Ross spoke about this photo and the series it’s from in the New York Times:
That’s me when I was little,” said the photographer Judith Joy Ross, pointing to a picture of a small girl, with blond hair and large plastic-framed glasses, standing next to a scuffed metal desk in a second-grade classroom. Dressed in a homemade skirt and top, the girl appears grave and guileless, her thin lips pressed into a straight line across her face.Read the whole article for more on Ross’s photos, both the subjects and the intricate printing process she uses.
In fact, this is not a picture of Ms. Ross — at least not literally. The portrait that so reminds her of herself belongs to a series of photographs she made between 1992 and 1994 in the public schools of her hometown, Hazleton, Pa., a small city in a former coal-mining region….
The Hazleton schools series arose out of her concerns about children’s welfare, and by extension, the welfare of the adults they become.
“It’s so silly, but I basically thought people would be willing to pay more taxes if they could just remember what it was like to be a kid,” she said. “And I thought if they could remember that, they’d also treat each other better.”
Posted by bespangled
Source moma.org
The Copenhagen Free University, which ran from 2001 to 2007, is one of many free schools. Set up by artists Henriette Heise and Jakob Jakobsen, they describe CFU thusly:
“The Free University is an artist run institution dedicated to the production of critical consciousness and poetic language. We do not accept the so-called new knowledge economy as the framing understanding of knowledge. We work with forms of knowledge that are fleeting, fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising, subjective, uneconomic, acapitalist, produced in the kitchen, produced when asleep or arisen on a social excursion - collectively.”In the US (among other places), there are and have been a number of similarly minded free schools/skools (including the Bloomington Free Skool and Santa Cruz Free Skool). The aim of this broadly ranging model of education is often to provide an alternative and more democratic system, one critical of traditional institutions, that gives each participating individual a voice in their education. The focus is usually on communality, a free and open exchange of ideas and/or skills. Classes may range from any number or combination of artistic practices, writing workshops, or specific skill sets, from crafting to carpentry, as well as discussion groups for a variety of topics.
Posted by bespangled
