Document Actions

THE COMMONS/UNDERCOMMONS in art, education, work...

Edited by Bojana Cvejić, Bojana Kunst, and Stefan Hölscher.

Excerpt from the Introduction of the Volume.

"The fifteen pieces in this issue are the result of a somewhat peculiar endeavor. Between May 29 and June 1, 2014, we held a conference at Frankfurt Lab under the title of The Public Commons and the Undercommons of Art, Education, and Labour. Its title reflected our concerns about diagnosing the current predicament of higher education in the arts and humanities, artistic production, and cultural work. To summarize briefly, two turns have lately merged that characterize the transformation of work, knowledge, and subjectivation processes across the arts field and the Academy: the educational and the curatorial turn. While the educational turn has yielded a new academic (professional) valorization of artistic praxis (in the so-called creative or practice-based PhDs), coupled with a proliferation of degrees and a prolongation of financial - ized, debt-stricken study (also as a temporary deferral or relief from the market and its projective temporality), the curatorial turn has corresponded to a neoliberal style of managing both art and education, reducing time and attention, critical and transformative (poetic) engagements with one’s own art and study.

For three days, a number of independent researchers, scholars, academics, students, cultural workers, activists, and artists convened for intense discussion. Instead of representing their various stances in prepared and rehearsed presentations, as is customary in academic conferences, the speakers spoke and unfolded their views on struggle, resistance, and alternatives to a situation that is more unpromising than merely ambivalent. What made the endeavor of assembling this publication truly engaging is that most of the texts resulted from rewriting the speakers’ initial contributions post hoc , in the aftermath of the conference, with the discussions possibly altering the prospects of the starting diagnosis.

Published by TkH (Walking Theory)

 

THE COMMONS/UNDERCOMMONS in art, education, work...
(c) TkH