The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art | The Great Hall | 7 East 7th Street, New York | General Admission | RSVP via Facebook
“For anarchy in arts education,” states the tagline for the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Teach 4 Amerika road trip. Certainly the word anarchy can b... Read more
The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art | The Great Hall | 7 East 7th Street, New York | General Admission | RSVP via Facebook
“For anarchy in arts education,” states the tagline for the Bruce High Quality Foundation’s Teach 4 Amerika road trip. Certainly the word anarchy can bring to mind some sort of food fight in a cafeteria with art students making mashed potatoes sculptures, performing spontaneous Paul McCarthy actions with spaghetti and teachers pulling their hair out in horror. The catchphrase lends a campy punk rock feeling that lingers around much of the work of the Bruce High Quality Foundation. Yet simultaneously this silly provocation also belies a deeper commitment to that non-hierarchal model of organizing known as anarchism.
The point of Teach 4 Amerika is the simple reconsideration of the mission, and structure of art schools. Taking anarchy into the classroom means returning the decision making power back to the students who are paying incredibly large sums for their education. As the Bruce High Quality Foundation has for the last two years been operating their own free ad-hoc self organized art school, their road trip across America is meant to inspire and discuss alternatives, options, restructuring, and possibility. This pedagogic narrative is inextricably linked to a growing interest in contemporary art that theorist Irit Rogoff dubbed, “the pedagogic turn”.
An open-ended series of questions and conversations, the project arrives on the heels of massive education protests in London and California. As the privatization of education crashes head on into a world in recession (with neoliberal advocates at the helm of many governments), the pressure is on to stick the bill to students. More than a series of questions, the discussions are meant as points of conversation. What will it lead to? What will be the outcome? Like the ethos of an open-ended education itself, for the Bruce High Quality Foundation, the open-ended narrative is enough. The project aims to first put the crisis of art education on the table and ask art students, “What do you want?”
