The Art of Organising

history of THE TEMPORARY ART SCHOOL

The use of Temporary Art Schools dates probably from ancient times, but the lack of documentation from these periods makes it difficult to scientifically prove their existence. In a wider perspective, the thought of a Temporary Art School can be seen both in ancient Greece and China. Many believe the Temporary Art Schools are the actual precursors of ordinary art schools, and that art schools are a petrified form of a living heritage. Others feel that this is a linguistic misunderstanding due to the use of the words 'art school' and that these are actually wholly different activities. In an art school, a cultural rite is practiced, the point of which is to reinforce old perspectives and traditions by passing them on to coming generations. This differs from a Temporary Art School, whose point is more to deconstruct these rites in order to open the door for new structures, in a continuing process of creation and destruction.

No matter what one feels about the historical connections, there is no doubt that a combination of these two concepts sometimes occurs in our times. The clearest example of this is the incidence of Temporary Art Schools either within the framework of ordinary art schools, such as the Temporary School (1) at the Umeå University College of Art; or in contrast to this framework, as was the case at the Malmö art school, which resulted in the Royal College of Art on the Net (2). The cause of this is probably the quickly changing market for art, which in a short period created an identity crisis at many art schools as well as a willingness to try new forms of teaching. One can consider this is a positive development, but many warn that this can create negative associations with Temporary Art Schools, if the use of these forms becomes too closely associated with ordinary art schools. The primary fear is that the ideologically conservational methods of art schools can infect the use of Temporary Art Schools, thereby stunting their spread to wider groups of the population than to just artists. This would be devastating to societal development over the long run. But most Temporary Art Schools are too strong a meme (3), and their development has already progressed too far to be stopped. The Temporary Art School is here to stay, perhaps not in its purest form, but as a general tendency, which influences more and more fields.

From an art historical perspective, the development of Temporary Art Schools was especially interesting during the past century, when it also gave us a new definition of art itself. One can see clear signs of this in the Fluxus movement, a well-documented art movement which was formed at the start of the 1960s. The foundation was already laid by John Cage's teachings at the New School for Social Research in New York during the 1950s, in which many of the later leading figures of Fluxus participated. Cage's opinion was that 'a definition of art could be 'paying attention'' (4) and the goal of his teaching was to get rid of the presumptions his students had , to un-learn, and in this way approach the subject with greater attention, without relying on traces of recognizance. This ambition is found constantly in the happenings associated with Fluxus, which were most often everyday actions placed in an artistic context, thereby making us focus on the actual event. Not in the sense of objècts trouvés, where reality is turned into meaningless museum pieces; art is instead in the eye of the beholder, like a sort of reading, a way of looking at life in general which appears independent of artworks and artists. The primary goal of George Maciunas (6) with Fluxus was to undermine the role of the artist and of elitist art by showing that anyone could be an artist and that artists were replaceable. These are perhaps not revolutionary thoughts when compared to other contemporary movements such as the Situationists, whose actions were meant to undermine the entire capitalistic system. But indirectly, and over a long period, one can state that the Fluxus strategy was to question the hierarchical structure which made the industrially capitalistic consumption-based society possible. Fluxus propagated an artistic way of looking at things more than for any special form of art, but was still associated with those artists who were part of its network. This caused a conflict due to the art world in which they were active, in which a focus on individual objects, subjects, and elites are a sine qua non. Though the movement was handicapped by this situation, and has even been declared dead by some, the spiritual point of Fluxus has lived beyond both its creators and the art world in general. This is shown not least by the interest in Fluxus today.

The basic conflict between artistic seeing and the fetishization of art was also ultimately detrimental to the free academy of Joseph Beuys (7). Though the basic idea, an art academy for everyone, was wholly compatible with the idea of Temporary Art Schools, it was built along other, centralist structures and ideas about master and student. Rather than encouraging individual thought, something which Beuys' first students still possessed, the free academy contributed instead to the cult of personality around Beuys. The attempt to open up the art school led to a cult of the artist instead of the artistic. Beuys himself was well aware of this, as his formation of the German student party in 1967 shows; this was an attempt to change context, from the art world to the political one, in an attempt to 'bring up all people to possess spiritual reason.. only the ultimate is the measure' (8). The German student party was not a party of students in any formal sense, but was open to all who had the attitude of a student, and of course an artistic way of seeing. Unfortunately, it did not succeed in freeing itself from the large-scale thinking which is typical for the mentality of the 1900s, in contrast to the non-hierarchical, decentralized structure which is typical of the idea of the Temporary Art School.

During the 70s and 80s, the patriarchal structures borne up by the representatives of Fluxus became more problematic, and artists became interested in questions of genus and ethnicity, questioning who they themselves represented. Temporary Art Schools were started by artists such as Martha Rosler (9) and Group Material (10), who put artistic perspectives on newsworthy issues by reconfiguring the artistic room itself to a schoolroom where one could solve seemingly unsolvable societal problems. In a like fashion, WochenKlausur (11) uses art as a laboratory, in which one can identify the problems but also come up with answers.

In contemporary art, there are several examples of the use of Temporary Art Schools, several of which play with the form of the schools itself. In Leif Elggren's and Thomas Liljenberg's Konstskola i Fisksätra (12) it was not only the artistic way of looking at things which was central; so was the choice of students for the school, which was in an immigrant-heavy suburb of Stockholm. These were hand-picked from the absolute top level of society: powerful international politicians, businessmen, celebrities, and film stars. In Mike Bode's 'The Center for Baltic Youth Exchange' in Karlskrona (13), the actual lack of a school or meeting place was the central object of study.

This list of interesting projects can be made long. The author is thankful for reports about other utterances of Temporary Art Schools, both historical and contemporary. There is an important history to describe here.

The French artists Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno opened a Temporary School five days in Umeå 1997.
The Academy of Art on the Net (Konsthögskolan på nätet) is by nature dynamic and undefinable; all who apply are taken on as students. Each student decides for himself when he or she is finished with the studies, and creates his own final test. <http://hem2.passagen.se/gkrantz/ett/arkiv/kpn.html>
Meme A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. (Term coined by Dawkins, by analogy with "gene".) Individual slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions are typical memes. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else.
Fluxus Today and Yesterday, Art & Design Magazine 28, 1993: Ellsworth Snyder, "An Interview with John Cage".
A parallel trend to the Temporary Art School is the Temporary Art Museum, practiced by artists such as Joseph Beuys, Daniel Spoerri, and Claes Oldenburg. See Peter Wolen's chapter in Visual Display, Bay Press Seattle 1995.
In the spirit of Fluxus, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis 1993.
Der Ganze Riemen, a documentation of the events from 1966-72 in connection with Joseph Beuys' pedagogical activities at the art academy in Düsseldorf, published under the auspices of the College for the Educational Arts in Hamburg in 1987.
From the protocol from the first meeting of Brennpunkt Düsseldorf, Malmö Art Museum, 1988
Brian Wallis, If you lived here. The City in Art, Theory, and Social activism. - A Project by Martha Rosler, Bay Press 1991.
Brian Wallis, Democracy - A Project by Group Material, Bay Press 1990.
< http://wochenklausur.t0.or.at/>
Saltsjöbadsdokumentet, a catalogue over an art project organized by Stefan Karlsson, Firework Edition, Stockholm, 1998
Three Public Projects, Blekinge Museum 1999.