'The art school as a space of conflict'

A school is always a power device, it builds the subjects that the social fabric demands, which means that the school organizes itself to provide confort and effectiveness to the social system that supports it.

School is always a power device, amplifying the hegemonic values of a certain time.

The school organizes itself in that sense, establishing study plans, contents, curriculum goals, evaluation processes, hierarchical relations, bureaucracies, etc.

Of course each school can be more progressive, can look for pedagogical models that promote critical learning and democratic practices that gradate the exercise of power, but a school is inevitably a school, the power device I have referred.

Yet it happens that

Art projects itself as a space of disconfort with its time, it occupies a space of reflection and critical intervention, a field of irreverence about itself and about what is around it.

Art that does not promote reproduction, art adds the possibility of the new, the open

Here resides the main ground of conflict intrinsic to an art school.

Tension between the becoming of a school that sustains the hegemonic system, serves it, and reproduces it, and a field of human activity, art, that seeks irreverence with time and with itself.

School places the present in the preparation of its occupation

art distances itself from the present to place itself in the contemporanean

In a distancing from the present art demands its interpretation, its knowledge

But times are bitter

the optimism of western society, spread to urban centres in the whole world, and to the clouds of globalization, is dead.

the flags of permanent progress, of “freedom, equality, fraternity”, of security, of growing well-being and general possibilities of realising the “social aspirations” are frozen.

and if school promotes knowledge to “better deal with the present”, art promotes irreverence towards it.

and this small difference feeds a second ground of conflict.

another question.

School promotes learning, it allows students to understand what is around them and what they do not know. school works for the students.

An art school provides the learning of the artistical, of citizenship,

but, mainly, the way it allows the construction in each student, from him/her,

of his/her ideals and interests, of the singular sensitivity of each one, the relation that each one has with their own body, how each one manages their anxieties and wishes, how each one deals with their memories,

it is about the construction of authorial identity, which is singular, particular.

because the artistical emerges from authorial identity.

AGAMBEN, Giorgio, (1993), “A comunidade que vem”, Lisboa: Editorial Presença. ATKINSON, Denis (2002), “Art in education. identity and practice”, Nueva York: Kluwer Academic Publishers. BUCKLEY, Brad & CONOMOS, John (eds.) (2009). “Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: the Artist, the PhD and the Academy”, Canada: The Press of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. 2009. GREENE, Maxine (2005), “Liberar la imaginación. Ensayos sobre educación, arte y cambio social”, Barcelona: Graó, Micro–macro referencias. MADOFF, Steven Henry (ed.), “Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)”, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 2009. MATURANA, Humberto, PÖRKSEN, Bernhard (2004), “ Del ser al hacer, los orígenes de la biología del conocer”, Santiago do Chile:JCSÁEZ. MOUFFE, Chantal (2012) [1ª ed.1992] (org), “Dimensiones de democracia radical: pluralismo, ciudadania, comunidad, Prometeo Libros: Buenos Aires.