FLINT PUBLIC ART PROJECT
The Education Meme in Artistic Practice
It started for me with last summer's less-than-anticipated University of Trash exhibition at the Sculpture Center and blossomed into a 2010 mini-trend. Fake educational institutions are springing up in New York City, probably as a cash-poor free content-producing strategy. There's a theory that it's related to the fact that about half the city's artists and designers subsist on paltry stipends from schools like Parsons, Pratt, SVA and Columbia. No matter, I'm a greedy consumer of art and architecture events and these ones are not bad at all.
There are about a half-dozen of these crypto-schools happening at the moment, among them the Public School for Architecture, organized in New York at the Van Alen Institute by the nice guys and a girl at Common Room. (Their recent project for the NY Foundation for the Arts got no press despite its potential recession-friendly cost-slashing story line. Are editors tired of this angle after only 16 months or are a few things happening in the world for other reasons?) I'm hoping to make it to their sliding-scale benefit at 177 Livingston next Saturday (Feb. 20) and would love to teach the proposed course on how to write a predictable Nicolai Ouroussoff architecture review (but preparing a decent class takes so much time and pays nothing, kind of like reporting). A lot of what's happening in "courses" is that they are being used to publicize work already underway or air justified professional grievances. This used to just be called a lecture or a talk, but fine, call it a school if you want.
My favorite crypto-school at the moment is the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, sponsored by Creative Time and organized by the semi-anonymous art collective that seems to be absolutely everywhere right now. They have a series of attractive but forgettable art-historical-ish installations in the 1969 show at PS1, and I went to their pretty funny douchebag art history lecture at the X-Initiative during last fall's Performa festival. I used to harbor a slight resentment against them for being immediately puffed up by professional art critics - they take the fun out of everything - but anyway I went to the "registration" event at their West Broadway meeting space. Conversations with artists in front of boards displaying their proposed courses devolved into a hilarious YouTube karaoke party. I signed up for Philosophy of Motion Pictures on Wednesdays, and so far the discussions of continental philosophy and film screenings have been a better-than-expected chance to revisit ideas I used to think were important (but now mostly don't) after the seduction of those great book covers has faded, in a group way more motivated than your average college class.
The latest one I heard about recently is Trade School, based on the idea of bartering goods and services in exchange for acquiring skills, which I guess gives you a good chance to consider the actual value of the course compared to your time in relative terms. Adam Kleinman, who organizes the great Access Restricted lecture series for LMCC, this time on the theme of Law and Representation at extraordinary courtroom sites in lower Manhattan, even proposed a good "course" on the subject. -STEPHEN ZACKS
Posted by Stephen Zacks
Crass Promotions: Editorial Perp Walk
After the Bauhaus Exhibition: Dutiful Critics, For...
Discussions on Networked Publics: Thoughts on the ...
Forthcoming: David Wojnarowicz biography
Jim Carroll Memorial Reading
Downtown Flint (photo: Lisa Zacks) Purpose Flint Public Art Project seeks to produce new image...
Discussions on Networked Publics: Thoughts on the Archipocalypse
A panel of youngish architects and writers were invited to Columbia's "Studio X" space in the architecture ghetto at 180 Va...
From the Armory Show, # 2: Let It Not Be Said I Was Against Sexy
Pool Art Fair Holly Gaboriault Holly Gaboriault Jeannine Calvaire Aiva Jabbour Serge Strossberg Independ...
Notes on N.O.: On representational architecture, political design, the importance of ideas, social and economic processes, and aesthetic judgment
Several years ago I wrote a slightly unfair article making fun of a vacation house for a Serbian expatriate who emigrated to...
Nuit Blanche NY: Illuminating the Greenpoint Waterfront
You might have noticed that this year a huge new park has opened in Brooklyn, designed by the renowned landscape architect Michael Van Va...
From the Armory Show, #1
Kunst=Kapital [Art=Capital], Joseph Beuys Jacob Lawrence Joseph Albers Helmut Newton Jean-Michel Basquiat Bernd ...
Flint Public Art Project: Flint Meetings
This March, during a week-long visit to Flint, Michigan, the idea of a wide-ranging experimental public art and urbanism project that had...
Greenpoint Community Meeting
The Greenpoint Community Meeting is a conversation between community advocates who have spent most of their lives fighting for North Brook...
After the Bauhaus Exhibition: Dutiful Critics, Forgotten History
BAUHAUS APARTMENTS IN BERLIN/ STEPHEN ZACKS The 90th anniversary exhibition of the Bauhaus has come and gone. The MoMA has paid homage to o...
And Now For a Word about Sewage, er Biosolids
On a recent Saturday afternoon (yesterday), the excellent Radical Cartographer (and friend) Lize Mogel was up in Harlem...
HEADER BY INSTANCE.
Stephen Zacks
Speculative Twists: Studio Gang's MIRA Tower in Abitare - *Speculative Twists: Studio Gang's MIRA Tower in San Francisco, Abitare, Dec. 2020.* "It's necessary to ask, however: why are 60 percent of the homes...
FIRE IN THE BELLY: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. Cynthia Carr. Bloomsbury, 2012.
Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act. Armin Linke and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss. Codax Publisher, 2012.
Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City. Autonomedia, 2011.
Know Your Lines: Redistricting and Why it Matters. Erika Wood. Center for Urban Pedagogy Pamphlet Series, 2011.
Insidious Urbanism: Tarp Architecture Manual. Edited by Alpna Gupta and James Williams. Pratt Institute School of Architecture, 2011.
Writing the City into Being: Essays on Johannesburg, 1998-2008. Lindsay Bremner. Fourthwall Books, 2010.
KoCA INN: An urban experiment at the Kiosk of Contemporary Art Weimar. Daniela Brasil, Theresa Dietl, Catherine Grau, Bernhard Koenig. Revolver Publishing, 2010.
Dubai Amplified: The Engineering of a Port Geography. Stephen J. Ramos. Ashgate Press, 2010.
Ecological Urbanism. Edited by Mohsen Mostafavi with Gareth Doherty. Lars Muller Publishers, 2010.
Al Manakh 2: Volume 23. Edited by Todd Reisz. Archis, 2010.
Solid States: Concrete in Transition. Edited by Michael Bell and Craig Buckley. Princeton Architectural Press, 2010.
African American History Reconsidered. Pero Dagbovie. University of Illinois Press, 2010.
The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Roberta Brandes Gratz. Nation Books, 2010.
Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age. Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters, and Jennifer Holdaway. Harvard University Press, 2009.
New Geographies 02: Landscapes of Energy. Rania Ghosn, editor. Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2009.
Agenda: Can We Sustain Our Ability to [Manage?] Crisis?Editors Jesse Seegers, Benedict Clouette, Ryan Neiheiser, and Julien de Smedt. Actar, 2009.
Peter Gluck and Partners: The Modern Impulse. Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda. ORO, 2008.
Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation. Eyal Weizman. Verso, 2007.
On the Town: One Hundred Years of Spectacle in Times Square. Marshall Berman. Random House, 2006.
Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition. Jeff Byles. Harmony Books, 2005.
Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art. Sven Lutticken. NAi Publishers, 2005.