Who is Teaching Whom?

by Andrea Creutz and Lise Skou

 

Welcome to our classroom

From 2005-2007 we were employed at Sociological Institute – Copenhagen University. We were hired to give a course that we had named “The Artist as Sociologist”. In recent years more and more artists have chosen to work at the vibrant intersection between art, activism and socio-political engagement. Sociology has always existed in a field of tension between different political and ideological movements in society.

The study of sociology lies between legitimating and criticizing power structures, which includes an engagement with space. The prioritized areas of research in the construction of cultures are: knowledge and normativity, wealth and marginalisation, work and organisation, politics and social change, identity and body. These are areas that also occupy the socially and politically engaged contemporary artist - however from another position and method.

Our course offered an (experimental) class based on readings, discussions and editorial groups. As well as field trips, meet-ups and interviews with artists. Through this form we wished to break down the dichotomy between “teachers” and “students”. We wished to deconstruct a mandatory learning process in an institutional frame into a collective way of studying a topic. We worked in public spaces. We socialized around discussions. We had meetings about what to do next. The course was organized as a collective learning process. It was organized as an open class not only for sociology students but also for others outside the institute: Anthropologists, journalists, and students from the Fine Arts Academy and The School of Theatre in Copenhagen.

Some of the topics we addressed were:
1) Locally-based social art projects that appear outside the art institution seen in the light of sociological theories about social movements and political participation.
How can local- and social- based art be conceived and read as a social movement? And what characteristics are tied up with this art form in relation to its organization, method and political participation in society?

2) The democratic potential in activist art based on the theory of Jürgen Habermas about deliberating democracy and the theory of Chantal Mouffe about radical-plural democracy.

3) Discussions of dialogue-based works and testing/analysis of contemporary art and its potential to contribute to socio-economic change. We based this study on “Fixerum” a project by Danish artist Kenneth Balfelt, “NB! Lets meet” by Danish artist Berit Nørgaard and the project- and exhibition space RACA in Copenhagen (initiated and run by Pulsk Ravn and Johan Carlsson). A common thread that runs through these projects is a wish to collaborate, create interventions in public spaces that – at some level - has a political and/or social effect. In addition the discussions took place on the basis of the French theorist Henri Lefebvre's ideas about the social production of space.

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Excursion to The Hot Summer of Urban Farming Project

 

Who are we to talk?
The course is a part of our project called Swop Network, an art project we initiated in 2003 as a platform for the production and dissemination of material and ideas surrounding contemporary political, economic and social debates. The project presents models for economic systems that function as counterparts to the dominant monetary economy and investigates the potential for local economic systems to impact the global economy.

We work as a group and our practise is based on long-term investigation and learning processes. The generic aspects of art and the public media become peripheral whereas local references and associated activities become pivotal. The notion of a generalized bourgeois public is superseded by that of a particular decentralized public. This approach entails the project accommodating a raft of dilemmas and potentials combining thoughts about art, politics and social issues: the “arenas” that people put into play, through which they manifest themselves and out of which their articulations come.

In our project Story Space on Gift Economies (Utrecht, NL, 2006) we were looking into anarchy models and met with a number of Utrecht-based self-organized groups that are working with alternative economic systems, such as gift economies and models of free distribution. At Casco we organized a program of collaborative workshops and discussions that lead into the production of a MediaWiki site for the discussion of related topics.
Extracts from the MediaWiki was edited into GRATIS, a free newspaper that was published as a counter public to the existing free newspapers such as Metro and Spits (Dutch) – also freely distributed but driven by advertising revenue and the commercialization of information rather than gift. GRATIS was distributed through the same channels as the existing free newspapers in Utrecht. We also hosted a evening food event after conducting a gleaning tour in which we collected food that would have otherwise gone to waste (www.cascoprojects.org).

We often stage temporary publics that are more flexible than their institutional counterparts. We believe these smaller public spheres influence their greater counterpart, by directing some attention towards questions that arise in smaller networks. Questions which don’t get enough attention by the wider public.

The strategies and tools used in our artistic practice are equal to the strategies and tools used in our “teaching” position.

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Excursion to The Hot Summer of Urban Farming Project

 

What happens next?
The organizational structure of school and continuing education has long been associated with the idea of a curriculum. We however wanted to emphasize a conversational rather than a curricular form. Dialogue, in our understanding, does not involve one person acting on another, but rather people working with each other.

Our starting point was to establish a learning process based on knowledge production outside of a confined context. Our approach was based on collaborative interviews, notions about deconstruction and un-learning.

An important element to fulfil this was to bring the course literally outside and away from the institutional frame. We sat in the park instead of the classroom, and we met at each other’s houses. When we had to stay inside the classroom because of practical reasons. We removed the lectern and sat in the middle of the room. Often we tried to find other spaces than the rooms used for teaching.

Thematically, we based the course on a distinct tendency in the art scene in recent years towards societal and political involvement/commitment; a desire to work in an interdisciplinary way and locally organize platforms, think-tanks, project spaces –far outside conventional galleries and museums: in a parking garage, on a boat, at public markets etc.

Artists working in such places have developed new forms of collaboration with diverse audiences and communities. We feel that today we have a very limited vocabulary for
discussion of dialogical art.

Why is contemporary art taking this direction? Analysis of this movement would provide a broader understanding of it and a fruitful dialogue on the contemporary art that surrounds us.

We were therefore curious to investigate the vocabulary that surrounds these projects and decided to make a case study of the exhibition project “Hot Summer of Urban Farming” curated by Publik , which took place in the Outer Nørrebro neighborhood in Copenhagen at the same time as our course was running.

Over the summer of 2006, eight artists from Denmark and abroad made temporary works, gardens and plantations in Outer Nørrebro. The artists were dealing with issues of inclusion and exclusion, the use of public space, the origin and history of plant life and the relation between the city and it’s surrounding. For each project a poster was made expanding on the project or concepts of Utopia aspects. Among the projects were an Oxygen Greenhouse at a traffic hot spot; a vacant space transformed with plantings in the shape of a royal monogram; a garden of dandelions; a project about what could be grown if an interstitial area was to be used for urban farming; an ongoing process about the largest open space in Nørrebro. Nance Klehm from Chicago foraged crops from the city and served meals from a mobile kitchen. Hot Summer expanded on the social and cultural issues around gardening and farming in the city and suggested a closer connection between agriculture and the city.

We chose to make a series of interviews. An important strategy was to ask all partners in and around the Hot Summer of Urban Farming project: what are the advantages and disadvantages of the methods and theories that the artists utilize in their projects? How are the projects anchored in sociology and what comes out of this relationship? What (new) strategies and methods have been generated and how can they be used? How do people talk about the project(s) taking place in your community? Is there any discussion about them at all?

We chose the form of an interview chain, where one interviewee determined the subject of the next interview. We thought that such selection process is more democratic, than if the selection would have been based on our own taste.

The beginning of the chain was an interview with Nis Rømer, one of the initiators of the overall project. This led to an interview with Finn Thybo Andersen/YNKB behind the project “The Freighthalls Speaks.” In collaboration with local residents, YNKB worked on a political and practical level to be able to rebuild an old train depot into a cultural centre within the community-- where international artists would be invited to provoke meetings not only across ethnic lines but also across the split between the concepts of local and global. From here we were recommended to interview some groups of residents, and the chain continued. In the end we talked to organizers, artists, residents, general audiences and critics.

This chain of interviews shed light on the different perceptions of dialogical art. In many ways the interviews confirmed our postulate, that there is a gap between the intentions of dialogical projects and their manifestations and results. This includes the way the projects are discussed in the wider public and their lack of sustainability in the local community.

The course ended – or that is, our employment at the university - in January 2007.
However, we continue to work with the research and the editorial group is busy trying to bring together the knowledge we produced into a number of booklets to be published fall 2007. Knowledge is a process of production in which we share and listen. What do we know, who told us and who do we tell? Every process of production is collective. We meet, talk, listen, read, see and exchange.

 

Visual artists Andrea Creutz and Lise Skou graduated from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (2000) and The Funen Academy of Fine Arts, Odense, Denmark (2004) respectively. In 2003, when participating in The Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York, USA, they started collaborating on a series of sound-, video-, and text-based installations. As their starting point, they used their own as well as other people's experiences of being exposed to increasing control and surveillance. Since then, they have produced several projects which deal with authorities' and media's construction of: paranoia, Otherness, and myths of cultural superiority and inferiority. In their interdisciplinary practice, they address economical, political, social, and cultural questions, acknowledging that contemporary art and critical reflection
make up a coherent area of meaning.

More info:
www.rum46.dk
www.women2003.dk
www.sparwasserhq.de
www.unitednet-works.org
www.swopnetwork.dk
www.cascoprojects.org
www.liseskou.net