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A Pedagogical Turn: Brief Notes on Education as Art (Kristina Lee Podesva)

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Let us begin with the simplest proposition that education as a form of art making constitutes a relatively new medium. It is distinct from projects that take education and its institution, the academy, as a subject or facilitator of production and is worth examining in more detail.

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An event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality, it is the creation of a possibility; it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility exists within, that has been ignored. The event is in a certain way, merely a proposition. It proposes something to us. Everything will depend on the way in which the proposition proposed by the event is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world. (Alain Badiou, Philosophy and the Event, 2013)

The recent exhibition of Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art emphasised the Brazilian artist's crucial influence upon the recent development of participatory art. With many contemporary artists finding new resonances in Oiticica's expanded practice it is an important time to reassess his legacy. Indeed, such priorities have been a key feature of Oiticica's reception ever since Catherine David's seminal inclusion of his work in Documenta X (1997), which led to more large-scale surveys, such as Tate Modern's 2007 retrospective, Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour. If Tate's show prioritized the aesthetic intensity of Oiticica's work, and David's presentation foregrounded the political charge of his project, the title of the IMMA show, Propositions, asserted a third way of interpreting Oititica's achievement: one which stressed the relational event and the idea of artist as 'proposer', rather than as 'maker' of objects or direct political statements.

For Oiticica's mentor, Lygia Clark, the 'proposer-artist' mediates the art object and the spectator's engagement with it:

We are the proposers: We are the mould; it is up to you to breathe the meaning of our existence into it. We are the proposers: Our proposition is that of a dialogue. Alone we do not exist. We are at your mercy. We are the proposers: We have buried the work of art as such and we call upon you so that thought may survive through your action. We are the proposers: We do not propose you with either the past, or the future, but the now (Lygia Clark, 'We Are The Proposers', 1968).

In this sense, the idea of 'proposition' as 'form' could be perceived as a conceptual progenitor of contemporary theories of participation, such as relational aesthetics and socially engaged art. However, by focusing on the more open-ended nature of Oiticica's practice, Propositions also drew us back to a consideration of the historic avant-garde, which sought to negate the traditional borders and limitations of artistic practice by extending 'art' into 'life'. Through differing techniques and devices, such as the appropriation of everyday objects, urban intervention, political engagements and acts of conviviality, the historic avant-garde privileged the rupture of the everyday and the norms which frame it. Brian Holmes has usefully described such impulses:

Shedding its external forms, its inherited techniques, its specialized materials, art becomes a living gesture, rippling out across the sensible surface of humanity. It creates an ethos, a mythos, an intensely vibrant presence; it migrates from the pencil, the chisel or the brush into ways of doing and modes of being. From the German Romantics to the Beatnik poets, from the Dadaists to the Living Theatre, this story has been told again and again, each time with a startling twist on the same underlying phrase. At stake is more than the search for stylistic renewal; it's about transforming your everyday existence. (Brian Holmes, Eventwork, 2011)

There are two theoretical events which are of crucial importance to understanding the history of the Brazilian avant-garde. The first and most recent is the arrival of poet and critic Ferreira Gullar's re-interpretation of Brazilian Concretism in 'Theory of the non-object' (1959); the second, more distant but no less significant, is the publication of Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade's 'Anthropophagite Manifesto' (1928). Gullar's influential text re-thought the logic of early abstract art as a 'proposition' that challenges the 'object' through the removal of the pictorial frame. By breaking with the separation between pictorial space and real space, artists such as Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Vladimir Tatlin pushed the art object towards an engagement with its social and institutional contexts. For Gullar, these interventions functioned to open up new sites of experimentation that challenged dominant emphases on representation and contemplation, in favour of the co-production of abstract and participatory forms. He writes,

It's a rediscovery of the world: colours, space, do not belong to this or that artistic language, but to the living and indeterminate experience of man. To deal directly with these elements, outside the institutional frame of art, is to reformulate them as if for the first time. The spectator is solicited to use the 'non-object.' Mere contemplation is not enough to reveal the sense of the work-the spectator goes from contemplation to action. But what his action produces is the work itself, because that use, foreseen in the structure of the work, is absorbed by it, revealed and incorporated into its signification. (Ferreira Gullar, 'Theory of the non-object', 1959)

'Theory of the non-object' concludes that these new sites of experimentation had fostered a particularly Brazilian avant-garde, one which imagines a different future for abstract art than that being developed within American and European narratives.

This point draws us to the second theoretical event, Oswald de Andrade's 'Anthropophagite Manifesto' (1928). Written as an act of war against the colonial influences on Brazil's history, Andrade's manifesto set out to re-signify the Tupi Indian act of cannibalism, which involved the eating of the other to appropriate its power. In Andrade's hands this became a powerful metaphor for cultural appropriation: 'Tupi or not Tupi,' he writes, 'that is the question'. By inverting the master/slave relation, the 'Anthropofagic Manifesto' popularised subversive strategies and inspired artists to reconsider their relation to the dominant narratives of art history. Between these theoretical events, a new generation of Brazilian artists were liberated from the provincial reproduction of second-hand modernist codes, and encouraged to explore an aesthetic language which merged the formal and the social. This complex theoretical dynamic formed the intellectual context from which Hélio Oiticica emerged in the late 1950s.

Born into a prominent anarchist family in Rio, Oiticica channelled the inheritance of his anarchist ideals into an artistic career that expanded the boundaries of abstract painting, interrogated national cultural perspectives, and pointed the way towards a 'participatory environmentalism' that has become a powerful presence in global art in recent years. The intensity and rigour of his intellect was also demonstrated in his many published statements, which challenged any easy separation between the visual and the textual. Similar to that great Brazilian thinker of critical literacy, Paulo Freire, Oiticica was uncompromising in his belief that the discipline(s) he was involved in were a part of a broader emancipatory project. In line with this tradition, Oiticica championed the emancipation of the art object from its institutional limitations; the freeing of the artist from the modes of production supporting these institutions; and the liberation of the viewer from the modes of exchange prescribed by such institutions. Indeed, the dynamics and constraints of the retrospective exhibition form were tested in IMMA's show.

On entering the exhibition, the visitor was enveloped by orange coloured walls, which functioned as backdrops to wall texts providing biographical information and timelines, as well as to some early works entitled Metaesquema (1957-1958). The Metaesquema are a long series of abstract paintings which shimmer restlessly, as if the frame itself was plugged into a wall socket. They represent Oiticica's early concerns with line and form over colour, and together with a similar series of abstract paintings titled Grupo Frente (1955-56), they dominated the entrance and first moments in the show. Consistent with this focus on the early abstractions, the first three rooms off the main corridor functioned to highlight Oiticica's slow explosion of the pictorial frame, and his obsession with colour as sculptural form. This obsession pulls geometric shapes off the picture plane into real space in the Bilaterals (1959-60); suspended from the ceiling, these folded wooden constructions release the intensity of monochromatic yellows and oranges from the limitations of two-dimensional pictorial space. Alongside these works were the Relevo Espacial (1959-1960), which glow in the space as if lit from inside. In response to these dynamics of light, hue and weight, the next room features the Bólides (1963-1969), a series of glass bottles filled with coloured pigment. Reducing chromatic experimentation to the materiality of pure ground pigment, these works offer up containerised invitations to engage the tactile dimensions of colour.

Through the second half of the exhibition these explorations were framed with consistency and clarity, each work illustrating a logical progression towards the next, and all pushing at the possibility of a greater sensorial immersion. The work becomes progressively more sculptural and more fragmented, increasingly assimilating the viewer's physical body into the artworks. Through this process the language of abstract forms begins to shed its art historical reference points, merging instead with the everyday dialect of informal architecture, such as that of the favelas and the costumes of the samba. From this phase emerge two of Oiticica's most significant works, the Parangolés (1964-1979) and Tropicália/Suprasensorial (1966-1967).

Located in the middle room, off the main corridor, the Parangolés are a series of coloured cloths, blankets and bits of plastic sewn together in such a way that they may be used as makeshift costumes. Putting on one of these capes produces an uncomfortable and awkward experience of both containment and exposure: although you are sure you are supposed to be wearing the capes, you are never sure what to do once they are on, especially in the self-conscious environment of the art museum. It makes sense, then, that the English translation of the Portuguese word parangolé means a state of confusion or agitation. For Oiticica these confusions were born out of Brazilian traditions of flexible architecture, he wrote,

The 'discovery' of Parangolé elements in the landscape of the urban or rural world is also part of 'establishing perceptive structural relations' between what grows in the structural grid of the Parangolé (representing here the general character of colour structure in environmental space), and what is 'found' in the spatial environmental world. In the architecture of the 'favela', for example, there is implicitly a Parangolé character. (Hélio Oiticica, 'Fundamental Bases for the Definition of the Parangolé', 1964)

Similarly, in Tropicália the dynamics of body/architecture/disorientation play out in a favela-esque installation. As with the Parangolé the spectator is expected to be mobilised, moved through a series of small labyrinthine spaces, over sand and water, against felt and wood, towards an end point at which a television plays static in a dark room. In both works the body is absorbed into the architecture, consumed by it, and subsequently offered an escape through its open-ended nature. Finally, towards the end of the show, we were confronted with Cosmococa CC2 ONO-object, 1973. Subtitled 'program in progress,' the Cosmococa series represented Oiticica's final engagements with 'suprasensorial environments' that focused on cinematic spaces as sites of immersion. Given the title of the exhibition it is unfortunate that more of the Cosmococa proposals were not presented (this felt like a missed opportunity, especially given the suggestions made online that Cosmococa CC9 would be realised in the show).
It was in these final moments of the exhibition that the struggle between the multi-disciplinary nature of the work and IMMA's institutional framework begin to emerge most powerfully. Although organised as a retrospective, it becomes clear that there was a tension between the open-ended nature of the exhibition title 'Propositions', and the austere atmosphere of retrospective commodification. Such tensions were further exacerbated by institutional spectacles, such as an Oiticica fashion shoot for the Irish Times; framing Oiticica's work as a backdrop to the clean Sex and the City lines of 'designer capitalism' is one way to contain and domesticate the very messy reality of the themes which drove his work. These themes negotiate questions of colonial violence, symbolic cannibalism, sexual anarchism and narcotic excess.

Such problematic emphases could have been avoided by the provision of a deeper historical, cultural and theoretical context for understanding the work. This could have been established by a greater understanding of the specific developments which contributed to the emergence of the Brazilian avant-garde, including but not limited to Andrade's and Gullar's crucial texts, and how these developments influenced the alternative trajectory of Brazilian art. Gaining these theoretical tools would have enabled both a broader and a more specific understanding of the nexus of cultural forces manifested in Oiticica's work. This in turn might have provided a more subtle link to our own colonial history, and a more interesting narrative. As it stood, the opening rooms of the show distracted the viewer from such specific concerns by highlighting more generic art historical references, such as the retinal abstract works of Josef Albers and Jesus Rafael Soto.

Admirably, the show did give proper weight to Oiticica's writings, which were presented in the form of large printed quotations beside key works. These helped to contextualise certain concepts and highlight the relation between text/object, voice and work. Towards the end of the exhibition an entire room was given over to the presentation of photocopies made from Oiticica's notebooks. The quality of the photocopies and their representation as serialised pictorial images seemed to undermine the intimacy and immediacy of the texts, however. This is not entirely the fault of the exhibition or its organization but rather a realisation of the limitations of re-presentation, which Oiticica struggled with his entire life, and which he ultimately realized was beyond his control. Indeed, of all the quotations supporting the work, there is one omission which could have better reflected this particular problem. On return from his first and only European show, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, he penned the following reflection to his friend and champion Guy Brett,

I am not a career artist - I am going to make an experience with this London show...not an 'art exhibition' as all artists do...but something that will have a new form of seeing, of behaviour, not an artificial prestige as an 'artist of the world', although this cannot be easily controlled...' (Oiticica in Guy Brett, Oiticica in London, 2007).

Such statements remind us of the historical context from which Oiticica emerged. This was a sensibility which was fully grounded in the radical praxis of the avant-garde, a praxis which artist and critic Marc Léger defines as, 'the willingness to sacrifice art, in the artistic gesture itself, rather than give up on the real' (Léger, Brave New Avant-Garde, 2012). Today, the potency of such a position is frequently contested within the dominant critical frameworks associated with relational aesthetics and socially engaged practice. In this context, these discourses suggest that building relations with our neighbours is 'a matter of much greater urgency than "making tomorrows sing"' (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 1998). However, for Léger, such humble aims may need to be re-assessed at a time when socially engaged practices are becoming increasingly institutionalised. Proposing a return the priorities of the historic avant-garde he asks, 'Must the avant-garde hypothesis be abandoned? What does the idea of the avant-garde have to offer us in the present moment?'

It is within the context of this question that the IMMA exhibition could have been used to negotiate a different understanding of the link between contemporary participatory practices and their historical predecessors. Oiticica's work could have been brought to bear more explicitly on understandings of the avant-garde, one that might have helped articulate and negotiate the present tension between autonomy and heteronomy, where 'extra-institutional socially engaged art has become, for good and bad, the order of the day' (Leger, Brave New Avant-Garde). Instead of looking for a way out of these dialectical tensions, the 'formal-social' dimension of Oiticica's work points towards a 'disjunctive synthesis' which challenges any easy understanding of these terms today.

It is fair to say that this overdue retrospective of one of the major figures in the post-war avant-garde succeeded in 'grasping' the 'evental' significance of Oiticica's work within the framework of participatory art. However, the real question is whether it incorporated the potential of that 'event', to use Badiou's term, and set it out into the world to challenge the present.

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An event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality, it is the creation of a possibility; it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility exists within, that has been ignored.

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panoramic view of phibsboro from deskellys

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Thomas Hirschhorn is currently in the process of constructing The Gramsci Monument in the Forest Houses in the Bronx, which is scheduled to open on July 1st. He responds to questions about it in anticipation of the opening.
Sarah Lookofsky I know that you were searching for a long time for an ideal location for your Gramsci Monument in New York. What made you finally decide on the Forest Houses
in the Bronx?

Thomas Hirschhorn The decision to do the Gramsci Monument at Forest Houses was made together with Erik Farmer. I'm not the one who selected a site. It's thanks to ERIK FARMER-a long term resident and President of the Forest Houses tenants-that the Gramsci Monument is where it is. Erik Farmer is the 'Key figure' for the Gramsci Monument in this specific neighborhood. It was him who invited me to do my work of art, with him in his neighborhood, and with the help of the local neighbors. This is why such a long time was needed for the phase of "Fieldwork:" the "Fieldwork" consisted in trying to meet the residents of NYCHA-Projects and explaining my project to them. The idea guiding me during the "Fieldwork" was always: I need to encounter a person who will help me, it's not me who brings help-it's me who needs help! Therefore I am so happy that I could establish a contact with residents like Erik Farmer-to meet him is a real Encounter.

SL You are choosing a public housing project in the US, a country in which there are not many public services left and where many are still being dismantled. Was
that part of your calculation for the Gramsci Monument?

TH I wanted to do the Gramsci Monument where people of NYC are living. This is one of my ambitions for the new kind of monument I want to do: assert a location which engages everyday Life and everyday Reality. As an artist doing a work in Public Space, I can decide upon the location for the work, and I think that this issue is indeed an important one. This is why I want a location which is part of the Form of the work. Why should I put my work on the High Line, on Park Avenue or in City Hall Park when I can decide-myself-about Location? Since New York City has more than 400,000 persons living in NYCHA-Housing Projects (the US' largest Public-housing), it seemed obvious to me, that the Gramsci Monument should take place in one of them. As one of the 300 Public Housing Projects of New York City, Forest Houses is also an Universal Place. And my Monument wants to be an artwork that reaches Universality.

SL Some would argue that the High Line and City Hall Park are indeed also public spaces in New York. You very deliberately describe this project as an artwork in public space. There has been much debate about what constitutes a public space (its ownership, the people that occupy it, the forms this occupation takes, certain spatial parameters...) How do you define it for yourself?

TH Of course the High Line, City Hall Park or Rockefeller Center Plaza are public spaces. But-as an artist-with a project for an artwork in public space, the decision for a location of such a work is essential. It is essential because the artist can-unlike in a museum, a gallery or even in an alternative art space-decide where to build the work. The possibilities are-not as in an institution-almost unlimited and when the artist himself or herself decides for a location there is a chance to do and to assert something new, throughout- as well-the new location. Besides-if the point is about doing art in public space-why just use a location already dedicated to art? Why not use the incredible range of possibilities offered the artist, to redefine-in deciding for a specific location-what public space should be today? Because definitively, exhibiting in the sculpture garden of a museum is not public space-it's only "outside." And defining or redefining public space-throughout the location of an artwork-is as such already a chance, because it means already giving form to a position. It's certainly what I want to do with the Gramsci Monument and with the location in which it is situated.

SL I am emailing these questions during the construction of the Monument, but before its opening. What have the initial responses to the structure been? And what are your expectations and hopes for the Gramsci Monument given your experiences with similar installations that are not within art institutions?

TH The responses during the construction of the Gramsci Monument-with the construction-team of 15 residents-have been positive so far. But the real question, my hope, my ambition and also my problem-as the artist-is and will be: Are the residents coming to the Gramsci Monument? Are the residents having fun? Are the residents establishing a dialog or a confrontation with what the Gramsci Monument will produce? Are the residents hanging out there? Are the residents feeling implicated? Are the residents making encounters? Are the residents exchanging with other residents they did not know before? Are the residents seeing something of interest to them in the Gramsci Monument output? Are the residents thinking of Gramsci's contribution to the thinking of today? Are the residents enjoying the artwork? Are the residents contributing to the achievement of an event?

SL You adamantly insist that your are an artist, not a social worker and that this is an artwork. You have also stated that you work differently than many socially engaged artists in that you produce an artwork for others to respond to-unlike creating a work together with a given audience. In light of these opinions, how did you decide on creating an internet corner, the workshop space, the lounge, the bar and the radio station, among other components, for this particular site?

TH Yes, I want to establish a new term of art, as-I think-every artist wants to! My guidelines for the Gramsci Monument are 'Presence and Production'. These guidelines for which I am competent come from what I have experienced so far with Art in Public Space. "Presence and Production" were not developed in regard to a specific site, nor exclusively for my work in Public Space, but I developed them as such-over the years. "Presence and Production" means: I want to be present-all the time-and I want to produce something. Beyond my presence and my production, I want, through 'Presence' and 'Production' to create precarious moments of grace. Gracious moments when someone needs to be there and someone needs to be awake. In order to create the conditions for such moments, beside the condition 'Presence', I want to use, as a tool, the different 'Production' components-those you mention-and furthermore, in organizing also Daily- and Weekly events. I understand all this as output-which can be simultaneously a beam of meaning and a beam of sense. Because a monument-today-must be a beam of meaning and sense. I hope the Gramsci Monument will give form to this.

SL I wonder about how you view pedagogy in relationship to your work. You are presenting a philosopher to an audience that does not necessarily have much of a background in philosophy and philosophical history. Is this a pedagogical project and, if not, why?

TH The Gramsci Monument is an Artwork because it believes in the Autonomy, the Universality, the Assertion and the Form of itself. When Gramsci says that every human being is in Intellectual, I believe it as I believed Joseph Beuys who declared that every human being is an Artist. Such declarations are what make breakthroughs into our every day reality. And this kind of belief deserves to be lived for or to be dying for. In my work I want to give Form to this belief-that's why at "Forest Houses"-as everywhere else-the dialogue must be a dialogue or a confrontation from one to one-at the level from one human being to another human being. I want to be truthful to Gramsci's affirmation, it's as simple as that, there is no place for pedagogy, for disappointment or for cynicism. Only the passion of Equality counts and the only mission is to give Form to this belief in Equality-in doing a work of Art.

SL The question of universality that you bring up is important, I think. I understand the rationale for insisting on universality as a means of critiquing the tremendous inequality that exists in the world today. However, it is also clear that people live under very different conditions, which problematizes the idea of universality. To take New York as an example like you do, this is the city with some of the most dramatic stratification of wealth in the world; where people live in drastically different housing conditions; receive very different education, incommensurate health care, etc. Your monument must therefore also take this difference into account, no? In other words, that someone living in a townhouse on the Upper East Side of New York would approach Gramsci and your monument devoted to him differently from someone living in the Bronx?

TH Absolutely not. Universality is not negating differences nor ignoring differences. But before anything else Universality is an affirmation! A powerful, dreamful, beautiful, passionate, concentrated affirmation. Universality is the affirmation of equality, of justice, of aesthetics, of the other-with all its differences, of the real, of the one world-we all are living in, and Universality is affirmation of truth. To constantly point out the differences of context, brings us nowhere. Because in doing this you are getting neutralized-and by saying that Gramsci can be understood differently according to where you are living, is precisely an example of a powerless and neutralized thinking of the circumstances. I am not afraid to use the term of Universality, because it is what I want to do as an artist: I want to take Position, I want to give Form to this Position, I want this Form to create-beyond the cultural and political habits-a truth, I want to create an universal truth.

SL Among other reasons for selecting Gramsci, you write "Because his texts are a toolbox for everybody willing to confront today's' reality." Can you explain in more detail what "tools" you think this 20th century intellectual offers to our current world situation?

TH I do not think of Gramsci as a 20th century intellectual as I did not think of Spinoza as a 17th century philosopher. They are just both important to me! In their lives and in their work, and this is the reason why, beside Bataille and Deleuze, I made a monument dedicated to them. They are my personal heroes-beyond centuries. Therefore I see the importance of Gramsci in all he did and lived for-to name some examples: his Philosophy of Praxis, his definition of an Intellectual, his interest in the Common Sense, his Theory of a War of Position. In our times of 'I-pad', 'I-phone', 'twitter', 'facebook', 'google', 'wikipedia' and 'wikileak' I think that Gramsci's work makes explosive sense today.

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Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, Nick Scholl, David Toro

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Thomas Hirschhorn | Project in the Projects

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Thomas Hirschhorn is currently in the process of constructing The Gramsci Monument in the Forest Houses in the Bronx, which is scheduled to open on July 1st. He responds to questions about it in anticipation of the opening. Sarah Lookofsky I know that you were searching for a long time for an ideal location for your Gramsci Monument in New York.

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Using the metal sheets, this one had spent 55mins in the acid bath, therefore its surface breakdown is obvious and amazing to watch. Literally it breaks down into particles of dust and becomes so soft. YOU FEEL SAFE is something Joe said to us on one of our visits to Phibsboro. This will go  back into the bath for one more etch.

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Similar to the other sheet but on the negative, this will go into the acid bath tomorrow and i will leave it for an hour, the words will be etched and the rest will remain untouched by the acid. Both concepts of this action relate to temporality of a surface, structure, place- home.

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Unitednationsplaza (UNP) was a temporary exhibition-as-school initiated by Anton Vidokle in 2006, following the cancellation of Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus. Taking place over a one-year period in a nondescript building in East Berlin, UNP was structured as a series of public seminars and an informal residency programme, and involved collaborations with more than 100 artists, writers and theorists, as well as a wide range of audience members. In the tradition of Free Universities, its events were open to anyone who was interested in participating. The core programme was developed over a two-year research period for Manifesta 6, in collaboration with Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Nikolaus Hirsch, Walid Raad, Martha Rosler, Jalal Toufic and Tirdad Zolghadr.

Following UNP's conclusion in 2007, Julieta Aranda, Magdalena Magiera and Vidokle reopened the venue that had housed UNP as 'The Building', which then hosted several overlapping projects including the e-flux video rental with its accompanying screening programme (e-flux is the online information network co-founded by Vidokle in 1999), a monthly lecture series by ( frieze contributing editor) Jan Verwoert entitled 'Why Are Conceptual Artists Painting Again? Because They Think It's a Good Idea!', a public reading room comprising thousands of publications provided by art institutions from around the world, and bar nights in the basement. In contrast to UNP, The Building's programming was somewhat chaotic - it functioned as an open space for artists, writers and curators living in or passing through Berlin to present time-based works and hold talks and discussions. For its closing event in August 2009, Aranda, Magiera and Vidokle turned The Building over to the public for a final, two-day series of presentations, screenings, shows, parties, lectures, performances and drawing classes.

Maria Ling  To what degree was UNP 'educational'?

Anton Vidokle  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.

Dieter Roelstraete  UNP worked best when it was single-mindedly dedicated to 'educating', however informally. Its success revealed the extent to which people are thirsting for the Athenian model you describe. Obviously everybody wants to be informed, but who would have thought so many people also want to be taught?

ML  I understand UNP, like all of your initiatives, Anton, to be an art project - although at first glance it might look like any other institution, whether public or private. Can you elaborate on where or when the 'artistic' occurs in a project like UNP? Does it even matter?

AV  One of the qualities that defines our contemporary notion of art is a certain claim to artistic sovereignty that historically became possible with the emergence of a public and of institutions of art, around the time of the French Revolution. An artist today can aspire to such sovereignty, which implies that, in addition to producing art, one also has to produce the conditions that enable such production and its channels of circulation. The production of these conditions can become so critical to the production of work that it assumes the shape of the work itself - such is the case with UNP.

ML  This is one reason why I like to think about UNP - as well as e-flux - as partaking in a new fifth wave of institutional critique; one in which building new 'institutions', often separate from existing infrastructure, is the decisive factor. It's about self-determination and involves strategic separatism.

AV  UNP is by no means a unique example of such an approach: I have been very much inspired by Martha Rosler's seminal work 'If You Lived Here...' (1989), which took place at a Dia Art Foundation building in Soho in New York. Due to the lack of support Rosler received from Dia (who commissioned the project), she felt that the only way to do something was by positioning herself as a curator/organizer - as a kind of one-person institution rather than as an individual artist. Another good example of such a complex approach to art production is Akram Zaatari's extraordinary work archiving Hashem el Madani's photographs and co-founding the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, which as much as it is a bona fide institution, may simultaneously be a work of art. What passed largely unnoticed in Paul Chan's 2007 production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in New Orleans was his peculiar positioning of the artist in relation to the work: he did not write the play, direct or act in it. The set was essentially a city street. Chan's artistic involvement consisted largely of spending months working as a volunteer teacher in a local college, building close relationships with community groups and grass-roots organizations, making sure that part of the money raised for the project would go to urgent local needs - in other words, creating conditions for the production and reception of the play.

DR  For me, UNP and The Building were 'discursive' projects first and foremost: places where talking about art often eclipsed its actual presentation - provided that one clings to the notion of separating both practices. Sometimes it's okay to insist on this division, even though it's often considered antiquated, for it can also mean that the talking and thinking prompted by art works can be more interesting and important than the art itself, and this was often the case at UNP.

ML  I would argue that art was intrinsic to both UNP and The Building, but not in terms of presentation of discrete art objects: the paradigm of display was largely ignored in favour of art in many other shapes and forms. The proliferation of discursive projects does carry the risk of what Simon Sheikh has called 'talk value' - that it can turn into discussion for the sake of discussion, like any other formalism.

DR  I am very wary of the all-too-self-conscious 'excesses' of discussion, where every utterance is too quickly and lazily fetishized into an art project, whether discrete or not; what I appreciated about much of the discourse at UNP was that it was so healthily aware of the dangers of calling any form of art-talk 'performative', and therefore 'art', while nonetheless remaining close to that grey zone of fruitful confusion.

AV  UNP was a collaboration with a large number of people. While I thought of it specifically as an art project, I cannot say for sure that it meant the same to other contributors, such as Groys for example, who don't define themselves as artists. On the other hand, the talks were often quite different from regular university seminars or lectures: some of them were marathon-like in duration - meeting every night, including weekends, for several weeks; others were structured in unusual ways: for example one of the events Zolghadr organized placed the speakers in the kitchen, while the audience was supposed to listen in remotely, from the main room. Because the sound equipment was not working well, people got so angry that they barricaded the speakers in the kitchen and organized their own discussion that night.

ML  What was the significance of opening UNP in Berlin, as opposed to any other city?

AV  When Manifesta 6 was cancelled three months before the opening, numerous lawsuits ensued and any possibility of realizing our project under the auspices of the Manifesta Foundation, or another existing institution, dissolved into thin air. All of the funding institutions and sponsors, with the exception of the Ford Foundation, withdrew. For the project to be realized, it had to be done completely independently and at a location ouside of Cyprus. Fortunately, e-flux was able to provide modest yet sufficient funding. After half a century of isolation and division, Berlin was a particularly interesting city for our school-in-exile. Following the fall of the Wall, many artists from Germany and Europe settled in the Eastern part of the city. This huge migration of cultural producers took place much faster than the development of any official art institutions. The result has been an incredible proliferation of self-organized exhibition spaces, collective venues and small independent institutions that have dominated the cultural landscape of Berlin for nearly two decades. These experimental projects enjoyed the same - and sometimes an even greater - degree of cultural legitimacy than the official institutional culture of the city.

DR  UNP was relatively strange to Berlin's cultural landscape, which is probably the reason for its ultimate success. I was often surprised by the huge number of people who turned up - not just the sheer number, but also their readiness to participate actively. That said, more generally speaking, I have often felt there is a relative lack of discursive sophistication in Berlin which UNP partly responded to.

ML  I disagree. I think there is an amazing level of theoretical sophistication, higher than in most other cities that I know, but those people tend to stick to themselves. The issue is more the 'internal' tensions and struggles - a bit like the leftist groups in the 1960s and '70s. Some of them, to my surprise, turned up at UNP, which was an achievement.

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Unitednationsplaza (UNP) was a temporary exhibition-as-school initiated by Anton Vidokle in 2006, following the cancellation of Manifesta 6 in Nicosia, Cyprus. Taking place over a one-year period in a nondescript building in East Berlin, UNP was structured as a series of public seminars and an informal residency programme, and involved collaborations with more than 100 artists, writers and theorists, as well as a wide range of audience members.

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Mary McCarthy pg30.
pg10-building trust and relationship Fred Lazarus iv

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Chinese chillout music from the complete album "Buddha And Bonsai Vol.2" & two songs from Gandalf´s, from the album "Healing Light-Reiki" Link to download full Chinese Relax song: http://www.ivoox.com/japanese-relax_m... 06/10/2012 Thank you all for your comments, likes and subscriptions. This video already has above 1,1millions of visits.

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n 21 May 1974, a man arrived at John F Kennedy airport on a flight from Germany. He was dressed in a fedora and fishing vest, and had his hand over his eyes. At Immigration he was subject to the usual barrage of questions. "What is your profession?" "Sculptor." "What kind of sculptor?" "Social sculptor." Allowed at last to enter the US, he was approached by two men, who wrapped him from head to toe in felt, placed his swaddled body on a stretcher and lifted it into an ambulance. Lights flashing, siren wailing, he was driven to the René Block Gallery in Manhattan, where he was wheeled like a parcel through the doors.

Inside, the gallery had been transformed into a corral, a holding bay. Among the items it contained were a bale of straw, a felt blanket, a shepherd's crook, a stack of 50 copies of the Wall Street Journal and a live coyote. For three days, the man and animal were penned together, while an audience observed their charged, ritualised interactions from behind a mesh fence - the coyote playing with a discarded glove; the man entwining himself in a blanket tent, the crook protruding above his head.

These are the bare bones of I Like America and America Likes Me, one of the most evocative and mysterious performances by the German artist Joseph Beuys, who died of heart failure while at work in his studio 30 years ago this month. A sculptor, teacher, political activist, pioneering environmentalist, self-styled shaman, alleged charlatan and proven liar, Beuys was among the greatest postwar artists; artists, that is, who grapple with the world that follows war.

His central interest was transformation, the alchemy of one thing turning into another. As a boy in Cleves, northwest Germany, he had dreamed of becoming a doctor, and though art soon superseded medicine, he continued to strive in all his varying mediums to propose magical strategies of healing, to translate sickness into health. "Yes," he told an interviewer in 1979, "perhaps I have a mission ... to change the social order." It was this gargantuan intention that unified his divergent activities, from lecture tours to sculpture.

In matters of seeing, Joseph Beuys was the great prophet of the second half of our century

John Berger

Beuys's drawings are formally exquisite, possessing the same impossible liveliness as the cave paintings in Lascaux. But much of his other work pushed the boundaries of what could be considered art, bringing unprecedented items into the gallery. Composed of humble, even abject materials, his sculptures and installations were designed to kindle raw emotional responses in the viewer (fury particularly pleased him). In The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger wrote: "In matters of seeing, Joseph Beuys was the great prophet of the second half of our century. Believing that everybody is potentially an artist, he took objects and arranged them in such a way that they beg the spectator to collaborate with them ... by listening to what their eyes tell them and remembering."

Remembering is an oddly apposite word. Some of the things Beuys made resemble the ritual debris of a primitive culture: a block of fat, a kneecap, a queen bee cast from wax. Others look like post-apocalyptic wreckage: vast, industrial-scale steel girders and basalt columns scattered like ninepins; 24 sledges neatly packed with torches and blankets slewing from the opened doors of a battered VW van.

He built inscrutable machines from milk bottles and copper wire, made sculptures out of newspapers, sausages and old records. And then there were the interminable public lectures and baffling performances, such as 1965's "How to explain pictures to a dead hare", in which Beuys roamed a locked gallery, his head completely covered in honey and gold leaf, painstakingly explaining each painting to the dead hare he cradled to his chest. Frustrating and compelling, his weirdly beautiful body of work radiates meaning, even as it absolutely resists logical explanation.

The End of the Twentieth Century 1983-5 (foreground) and The Pack, 1969 (background), by Beuys. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

The refusal to be understood in ordinary terms also extends to Beuys's life. Any attempt to assemble the usual biographical data quickly runs into trouble. Accounts contradict each other; events are repeatedly minimised or transfigured into myth. He was born in 1921, the only child of bourgeois, strictly Catholic parents. He was 12 when the Nazi party took power, which is to say he came of age under its toxic tutelage. Later, he freely admitted he had been a member of the Hitler Youth, shortly before it became compulsory, but he also testified to small, mitigating acts of resistance, such as the time he rescued a copy of Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus from a Nazi book-burning rally in the courtyard of his school.

This story may have been fabular rather than actual. Like the novelist Günter Grass, his near-contemporary, Beuys was not always an entirely reliable witness to his own war record. The cardinal scene of his fantastical biography, the Beuysian Ur-myth, took place in 1944, when he was involved in a near-fatal plane crash. Knowing he would be drafted, he had volunteered for the Luftwaffe four years earlier, working first as a radio operator and then as a rear gunner stationed in the Crimea. On 16 March he was shot down in the mountains, where, he claimed, he was saved by Tartar tribesmen, who wrapped him in insulating layers of felt and fat to keep him from freezing to death.

This narrative, which was still repeated as fact in Beuys's New York Times obituary, has by now been conclusively disproved. Beuys was in a plane crash, which killed his pilot and badly injured him, but there were no tribesmen, no fat nor felt. It's not clear why he invented the Tartar rescue, particularly since in later life he was irritated by how frequently it was used as a Rosetta stone for decoding his idiosyncratic and remarkable artistic language. It may be that he was deliberately evading responsibility for his part in Germany's programme of total war, though it's also possible that he was, like many artists, simply engaging in an act of bombastic self‑creation.

Joseph Beuys. Photograph: U Baumgarten via Getty Images

All the same, by turning his injury into a fable, Beuys did make a clear statement of intent. War, fascism, nationhood, trauma and repair: these would be his subjects, but his approach would not be that of a historian or social scientist. What he was interested in was discovering and communicating in mythic terms how damage might be transfigured or transformed. Myth had been poisoned by the Nazis, and now he would undertake a grand project of reclamation and decontamination, conducted in a purely psychic realm.

This is not to say that he was unfamiliar with the realities of war. He recovered from the crash, fought on, was taken prisoner and held in a British internment camp after Germany's surrender in 1945. After he got out, he studied art in Düsseldorf, learning his craft in a bombed-out college in the desolate ruins of the city. (Years later, visiting art colleges in the US, he commented on the abundance of resources and corresponding paucity of the students' creativity, observing that he would supply them with nothing more than a knife and a potato.)

All through the 1950s he was dogged by serious depression. It was during this black period that he began to work with so-called "poor" materials such as fat and bandages - things, as the critic Alain Borer points out in The Essential Joseph Beuys (Thames & Hudson) "that hitherto had been unworthy of art". Things began to shift for him emotionally when he came across the work of Rudolf Steiner, the influential Austrian who had invented at the beginning of the 20th century a form of esoteric philosophy called anthroposophy. Steiner believed in spiritual uplift and social transformation, particularly by encouraging the intrinsic creativity of every human being. From the 1950s on, these became the central tenets of Beuys's work.

Beuys was in a plane crash, which badly injured him, but it's not clear why he invented the Tartar rescue

Though he liked to present himself as an outlier, a sui generis shaman, Beuys was clearly influenced by the currents of his times. In the 1960s he was briefly part of the Fluxus group of artists, and it was from this association that he began the performances he called actions. Later, he collaborated with Warhol, another self-created star with a knack for alchemising ordinary objects into art. But Warhol was far more ironic and playful than Beuys, whose earnest desire to improve the world pushed his art-making activities in the direction of education and politics.

Teaching in particular was central to his self-described mission. In 1961, he was appointed professor of monumental sculpture at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art. Controversially, he abolished entrance requirements and curriculums, focusing instead on individually directed study (the painter Blinky Palermo was among his students). In 1971, he began to protest against selective admission, declaring education a universal right and insisting rejected candidates could join his classes. The issue became so heated that in 1972 he occupied the university offices with a group of students. After a standoff, the police were called and he was escorted laughing from the building, a scene documented in a famous photograph entitled Democracy Is Funny. Shortly after, he was dismissed from his post.

The dismissal in no way dissipated his appetite for change. As critic Jan Verwoert once wryly observed: "In his life, Beuys dreamed up as many political and educational institutions as, say, Aleister Crowley inaugurated occult places of worship." These include the German student party, the organisation for direct democracy by referendum and the free international university for creativity and international research. In 1980 he was also one of the 500 original founders of the German Green Party. Didactic and impassioned, Beuys refused to see art and politics as separate spheres. A lecture, complete with blackboards, could be an art performance; a slab of fat on a chair could inculcate democracy. That's what he meant by social sculpture: that his canvas was the active world.

FOND VII/2 (1967-84), felt and copper. Photograph: Dan Chung for the Guardian

It's this sort of prodigal hopefulness that led the art historian Benjamin Buchloh to accuse Beuys of "simple‑minded utopian drivel lacking elementary political and educational practicality". It's true that much of what he had to say about his own work is absurdly convoluted and self‑aggrandising. And yet the things he made retain their weird energy, their dogged hope in human capacity. You can change the world, that's what Beuys believed, and furthermore you can change it for the better. Daft as the shaman-garb can seem, he was possessed of remarkable foresight. From free education to the environment, many of the apparently wacky ideas he championed have become increasingly central in the intervening years. As for his faith in the political capacities of art, it lives on in artists such as the Turner prizewinning collective Assemble, who build community housing in derelict areas.

The revolution is us: that's what Beuys believed. Perhaps he remains so controversial and misunderstood because the scale of his hope for humanity is too vast, too lacking in irony to be comfortable. He thought we could touch each other; he genuinely believed that we could live better than we do. One of his last works was 7000 Oaks, an ambitious planting project in Kassel, Germany. Yes, he might have talked utopian drivel, but all the same, he conjured a whole forest out of nothing.

"I think nowadays," he once told an interviewer, "there's a deep misunderstanding amongst people that art should be understood through logical sentences." His own theory was that it was an intimate collaboration, that a work of art was the result of work and artistry on the part of both the creator and the viewer. "The work of art enters into the person and the person internalises the work of art as well, it has to be possible that these two completely sink into each other ... Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art, no?"

The Essential Joseph Beuys by Alain Borer (Thames & Hudson) has been reissued to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Beuys's death. Olivia Laing's The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is published by Canongate in March.

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Fat, felt and a fall to Earth: the making and myths of Joseph Beuys

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Was Beuys's art - moulded out of everyday objects from VW vans to sausages - utopian drivel or full of remarkable foresight? Thirty years after his death, it's time to reassesses the reputation of a sculptor, teacher, activist and shaman

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Black Church Print Studio, Dublin, artistic collective, supporting the development of contemporary artistic practice through the medium of printmaking.

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Black Church Print Studio Dublin , Ireland is an artistic collective, supporting and promoting the development of contemporary artistic practice through the medium of printmaking.

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Black Church Print Studio, Dublin, artistic collective, supporting the development of contemporary artistic practice through the medium of printmaking.

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Black Church Print Studio Dublin , Ireland is an artistic collective, supporting and promoting the development of contemporary artistic practice through the medium of printmaking.

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Keaton Henson – La Naissance (feat. Ren Ford)

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Previously only available on CD and download, The Vinyl Factory are excited to release Keaton Henson's Romantic Works as a limited edition vinyl featuring the original album plus bonus track 'La Naissance' and a remix by Ulrich Schnauss.

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elevator lift in the phibsboro tower

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elevator lift in the phibsboro tower

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the every day objects

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Richard Wentworth | Artists | Lisson Gallery

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Founded in 1967, Lisson Gallery is one of the most influential contemporary art galleries in the world, showing 45 innovative and international artists

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working along the sheet

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thinner and much becoming so delicate

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considering the images of from one of our days spent in phibsboro, where people drew sketches of 'home' i scratched an image into the metal. then placed it into the acid bath, to remove it, slowly, over time.

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a corner tested in the acid bath,5minsx4 times, (bath strength 12:1)

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Galvanized sheet from Christys- reusing the everyday

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Galvanized sheet from Christys- reusing the everyday

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Cut up the sheet into four. placed this piece in after stop out painted onto surface.It is breaking down fast.

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http://www.publicart.ie/main/directory/directory/view/hotel-ballymun/3ad342f6b008fb90fdf9e597ebf55abc/

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http://www.elevatorhistory.net/elevator-history/elevator-music/

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https://youtu.be/4CVXQq230Hg
considering this piece of music as part of the project....

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Artist and activist for the environment

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Jstor community art and architecture of ireland voliii

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drawings from a morning in phibsboro, building on 'what is home?'

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A drawing from a person who responded to our conversation on home. He drew on two pages, giving a life long view of his journey to where he is today.

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Best relaxing arabic music instrumental slow romantic relax beautiful without word

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Best relaxing arabic music instrumental relax slow mix traditional soft slow romantic relaxing arabic lounge music. ● Follow Facebook https://www.facebook.com/bestmusicompilation Google + https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/106446036630933312013/106446036630933312013/posts/p/pub ● Compilation 1. https://youtu.be/tjqo24k8Tms 2. https://youtu.be/WRTGYciU1-8 3. https://youtu.be/qm9cos_e81Q ● Arabic music Arabic music or Arab music (Arabic: الموسيقى العربية - ALA-LC: al-mūsīqá al-'Arabīyah) is the music of the Arab world.

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Bossa Nova Music and Songs | Restaurant Music, Dinner Music, Elevator Music, Background Music

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► Get your music from iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/bossa-nova-2014/id870849058?l=it&ls=1 ► Join my website http://meditationrelaxclub.com Instrumental Lounge Music and Chillout Music. To create the magical atmosphere of Relaxation choose this Luxury Lounge Music video with southamerican Relaxing Sounds of Brazilian Party.

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heres my first song its really shit quality but you can give it a listen and let me know what ya think

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Thinking about that elevator.. in the Phibsboro tower

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Thinking about that elevator.. in the Phibsboro tower

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A place where people suspend together in a transitional space for a number of seconds.

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Original plans for Phibsboro.Got this from the library- letting agent details.

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in between the wall space. layers of breakdown

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On the roof top of des kellys, on yet again another adventure! Pretty risky stuff but loved this old flag pole which was there. Was....it came off in christies hand....

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Galvanized sheet, which I will use in print. in someway. Christy kindly gave me from the back of des kelly

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back of des kellys, a great space. high walls and enclosed with trees.

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The excess water came through a pipe here where christy is pointing to and ran through into the tank in previous image

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Back of deskellys. When this building was an ice-rink, the excess water would pool into this tank. Here is remains, stained with past water residue.

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Loved the surfaces found in the back of deskelly, shown around by christy again. so attracted to any form of breakdown on surfaces in particular, metal.

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Back of Des Kellys,our tour guide christy was only too happy to show us around.

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We got to speak with Andreas Mokake, so willing to give us his time, even though we came unannounced, look forward to more interaction with this group.

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Spray painted roof tops, with the names of telecommunication co.s.

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Another of our conversations gave us more. roof top views

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Sending out and receiving signals from the towers top.

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There she blows.....the bone of contention with the older generation...the ruination of Phibsboro...

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There she blows.....the bone of contention with the older generation...the ruination of Phibsboro...

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Ticket time!