Artist Ofri Cnaani
Art school has its known grammar, constructed from endless micro (lingual, spatial, corporal) gestures that mark out a normative playing field of inclusion and exclusion. While these modes of education don’t (fully) represent a possibility of belonging or determine possibilities of meaning-making, they are seen or heard as ‘proper’ art education, and what is not.
‘The schoooool With Many Holes’ is a proposition for a short-lived school that parasite in a museum setting, constructed by mimicking instructional sessions, and using both museum and school assumed infrastructures. This project aims to diffuse the traditional dichotomy between a training-institution and an exhibiting and collecting institution, the museum’s administrative and liminal spaces become a host for pedagogical sessions (or performances of thereof). The school will be organized by units, which will be located in various spaces of the museum, each reflects on art school terminology: from ‘figure drawing’, ‘art history ‘lecture’ to ‘tutorials’. Camouflaged as instructional sessions, each unit acts as a performative piece that subverts its original convention. Developed collaboratively with other makers and thinkers, the art school becomes both the research subject and the medium, and offers a close look at concepts such ‘professionalisation’, ‘schooling’, ‘useful’ and ‘causal’ knowledge, and the need for ‘final presentation’. I will ask what are the structural and infra-structural realities that being communicated when the (algorithmic-based, experience-led, inclusivity seeking) museum become a host-site for pedagogical processes? And what can possibly happen when a set training methodologies and non-written art school regulation are publicly observed?
Ultimately, such par-siting practice might only serve to deny the necessary negotiation of art-school commonality as a prerequisite for radical practices, welcoming other encounters, that will immerge from the failing attempt to communicate externally with whom that find such grammar incommunicable. Bound to principles of preference and familiarity, the gesture of shifting locale and a mode of knowledge production might urge the need to develop some new punctuations of cohabitation.
In the words of Dr. Nora Sternfeld that her text, “Give Her the Tools, She Will Know What to Do With Them” is available here, the Schoooooool With Many Holes is “para-institutional space, which is taking hold in the midst of institutions in view of another world”.
Nora Sternfeld,
“Give Her the Tools, She Will Know What to Do With Them”
The English text was originally published “The Constituent Museum” (Valiz, 2016).