{{en_01 inquiry: undergraduate art programs

{{em_rgencia} staff

With the aim of providing different readings around the place given to art practice and art discourse in academic spaces, and how educational institutions conceive the problem of art in relation with its social environments and social and economic dynamics that affect art (and which are affected by it), we present this answers from different art departments in Bogota, and some in Brazil and US. Please check this page from time to time as it will be updated with new answers are sent to us.


1	Assuming the antagonistic conditions inherent to each context, How can we understand art and under what terms is instructed and / or taught inside art school?
2	In a context unfmiliarized with theories regarding contemporary art practice, which you think is the effect of the academy in the ways of thinking-producing art?
3	Starting from a reflection on the phenomenon that involves being in community How is art thought through the time-space relationships that sustain it?
4	In this regard, which are the risks of institutionalizing certain practices inherent to dissident processes?

Contemporary Dance - Universidade Federal da Bahia
Lúcia Fernandes Lobato**: I believe that art includes the sensible scriptures of the different times and testimonials in the death of civilizing junctures. In this regard, for me art is testimonial of the life of mankind, their ideologies, their stories and collective journeys throughout the world. Until recently, art was hardly considered in academic discussions due to a hierarchy built from science and the primacy of reason over sensitive knowledge. Today, this issue is being overcome, and we are in times of uncertainty and risk, in which even science is no longer considered completely exact. Nor it is risked the thought of a universal truth, and probability substitutes verification! In this contemporary context, art in the academy reached certain status, even in research matters with the creation of the graduate courses in arts, and the large number of undergraduate programs in development.
For me, the Academy enhances different instruments for the systematic thinking on any knowledge, and this is no different for art. So it provides conditions for the artist to develop a more critical and analytical thinking on the artistic work.
Every art practice is deterritorialized in its origin and it comes from local knowledge. Only from there it can become universal. This is, the artist has a territory, an id, digital or printed, ambivalences, cultural heritages, tribal relationships (in the contemporary Meffesolian sense) that can cause the rise of their sensibility and creation abilities.
Every dissenter is dissenter from something. Cannot deny the references that constitute it. The risk isn’t in the institutionalization and in the turning into a model as rigid as its reference. According to Derrida, when the subject has to deattach from logocentrism to recognize its differences. To deconstruct does not mean to destruct. This is, the risk is there with or without institutionalization. You are the risk itself. *: Lúcia fernandes Lobato. Bachelor in Law and Social Sciences (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro), graduated in Dance from Universidade Federal da Bahia, Master in Social Sciences (UFBA-1990) and Doctor in Performing Arts (UFBA-2002). Associate professor in the School of Dance at Universidade Federal da Bahia Lúcia is part of the permanent staff of their Graduate program and member of the collegiate.

Visual Arts- Universidad Javeriana
Carlos García: This us a program oriented towards the education of artists in three filds: graphic expression, plastic expression and audiovisual expression...When the program began, the question was, which is the education or the relevance of education in contemporary terms in art schools? And what we found was a big empty, a lack of dialogue between new technologies, and what we considered to be the traditional work of an artist. Thus, our proposal is oriented there, but having in mind the three approaches which I pointed before, and that in our program become emphasis. We think that the term "art" varies accoring to the context, therefore, if we think of the field of education, arts education has to be quite fleible and quite changing, regarding a specific context, that's why we talk about an undergraduate program of Visual Arts and not a traditional carreer. {{em: How and through which tools you take part in the transformation of such concept in a context like ours...? CG: Staying close to art practice, to the context and the place of emergence of art practices themselves with different orientations. ie, the program has to be capable of evolving based on priciples of real, and that reality is changing.
CG: Consider this approach. Universidad Javeriana is increasingly interested in the issue of the interdisciplinary, this is a way to assume the practical part. I could point out concrete examples in Visual Arts, in the Social Work in Arts course, which aims precisely to create a relationship between the art practice and the social context. Let's say, this is a new ground that wasn't been treated, or was treated in a way kindof romantic, the artist comes as a King Midas and turns into gold everything that touches, we're not interested in that, our interest lies in the artist's ability to blend and be a part of a context, and who resolves a practice succesfully involving, in this case, the social. {{em: In this regard, which role does the aforementioned specificity plays in, for example, an interdisciplinary field? CG: This is an open course, a 4 credit elective, which means, it has a considerable intensity, open to different disciplines. So, to put an arts students along with a music student, a literature student, an architecture student, a psychology student among others...what this facilitates is precisely is to break those disciplinary directives, and rather favors the issue of practice. And I insist again over a flexible arts program, this is, to lay a kind of practice that involves the social, which isn't always among the interests of the students. but this is just an example, this university has many programs of social impact, in which students of art participate oftenly, along with other disciplines. I'm pointing out just a single example of an elective course, but i could say that the courses that are oriented to practical issues like workshops, also allow these glances, because the student is free in some courses to propose their own topics.
CG: I think it relates to how art is thought, not from a definition, or a traditional appelation, but the opposite, it would be thought from breaking this conditions, now traditional for defining the term. This can be achieved when the artist is no longer the artist, but just another individual in particular, an individual who is capable of activating dialogue processes. When this processes are activated, i think the artist is no more what whe call "Art". The field of art would have to be expanded, this that we call a contemporary art practice isn't just a field, but something that has more grounds for an artist to be interested in, which doesn't necessary implies social processes or practices, so an artist may be only interested in being a traditional painter who could be interested in social phenomena, or not... The same could apply to other disciplines, ou could ask yourself nowdays if a lawyer is just a lawyer in traditional terms, if we think that what prevails more and more is the loss of borders, the fact that disciplines don't constitute specific disciplines but continuous dialogues, to that extent perhaps it's time to ask ourselves if the doctor is the traditional doctor
CG: Universities also have to begin questioning their role in this type of context, the los of limits and how this limits are blurred, we can consider that university makes part of this, i think there are no risks in institutionalizing certain practices, because programs respond to interests and movements raised by the context, and programs have to guarantee somehow these spaces. We have experiences that are very close to this particular glance in projects and thesis, which imply a practice, a loss of definition of what we traditionally call an artist, and the process itself allows this, that is to say, if they wouln't allow such conditions, it would mean the program is outdated...i think there is indeed a responsability regarding how to guide this kind of works. We, for example, are surrounded by a good team, a faculty with experience in this cases, i was just thinking in a project called Cultus, from one of our graduates, which took place in Ciudad Bolivar presenting exactly such situation, from a break of the traditional definitions of art and the role the artist has to fulfill... I'm going to read a little about this, "This project seeked to generate creation and resistance processes through artistic exercise in spaces usually left behind by centrality of art and power, the tools for such resistance weren't mere walls or barricades, the strategy does not concieve trenches or uniforms, nor uses guns or grenades. The elements of ths resistance are fragile and go unnoticed, they have the subtleness of stitches and the ease of the works that germinate, but keeping the strength of networks, tissues, and the large shell of seeds". The title is an art practice in a crack, periferical joints of resistance, a cultural project in Ciudad Bolivar. So she, Luzmila, works with a displaced population who live there in Ciudad Bolivar, and who arrived to those spaces where there's no dialogue with nature at all, that is to say, countrymen come, arrive to the city, where there's only a single tree nearby, and she (Luzmila) and proposes a work with that community, this interest was already manifested by her here at university, so she began working with jesuits proposals of social inclusion, with nursing students, psychology students, and began a whole series of workshops with these people. For example Social Action agency has very similar experiences, but in this case, clearly the artist plays a different role. Project Cultus made itself in Ciudad Bolivar, and I think that's where the respect for this comes from, and I insist yet again, the social sometimes is blurred when we think of the artist as a King Midas, who touches, and then goes to a gallery and exhibits his/her "work", ¡no! This is a project that takes place in Ciudad Bolivar and only there, in fact, when the public presentation took place, because a public presentation of thesis is required, the Tunal library was chosen to do so, because it was the closest to the whole context, you don't speak of curatorship in this sense. I think in this case es key to see how the concern arises, but it's also key how to drive that concern, in this case, Fernando Escobar was her advisor for more than a year of hard work.

Fine Arts - Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano
Victor Laignenet: The Plastic Arts program at Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano aims to approach to the paradoxical dimension of art and it's teaching, recognizing the complexity and importance of the historical and cultural process of arts education, and seeks to assimilate and understand critically it's historical deployment. Starting from a wide historical frame in a diverse context, the reform that will be applied to the program (to become Plastic Arts) understands contemporary arts pedagogy through different and contradictory historical and contemporary positions, and quote them simultaneously. In this regard, it embraces the tension between rule and asystematization that has gone along dialectically with art education throughout history. Likewise, it contrasts different historical approaches with the notion of poetic pedagogy, from which pedagogy is a form of creative "agencement" for making visible the invisible dimensions or dimensions excluded form a sensitive regime. Finally it proposes diverse models and pedagogical alternatives, with the aim of seeking an active participation of students in taking positions.
VL: The contemporary art theories and practices may pose a threat in contexts unfamiliarized with contemporary practice, however it depends on the context and which set of theory or practices we are considering, therefore, we can't generalize. Contemporary theory can generate expectations of action that may be away from the possibilities of certain context, nevertheless, they can also contribute a frame of liberation and empowering, but then again, it depends on which theories and/or practices we are talking about. Ultimately, the concept "contemporary" hardly means something, for it includes a huge amount of dissensual and heterogeneous approaches. Regarding the second part of the question, the art academy has an important influence in the ways of doing-thinking art, as shown by an analysis of the history on art education, from the greco-roman schools, the monastic workshops, guild workshops in the Middle Ages, Renaissance humanism, art schools during absolutism and enlighment, the romantic counter-culture, the private ateliers of nineteenth century, the Bauhaus in the dawn of modern art, the disciplinar and professionalizing concept of university, sixties counterculture and their proposal of education, not only in the arts but for the art, the meaningful influence of Beuys en Dusseldorf academy, finally, the rule of scientific paradigm in universities and their modes of generating knowledge according to research models, to quote just some relevant moments. There is an unbreakable realtionship between ways of doing-thinking in the art practice and the cultural context in which the models of art education are placed, either from a rationalist or idealist, fundamentalist or liberal, dogmatic or emancipatory, individualist or collective perspective. The influence can be positive or negative, in the sense of its capacity to persuade, manipulate or control, or in the contrary, creatively "agence" educational and potential-releasing processes. Today different approaches to arts education coexist, the issue is: of which particular academy are we talking about?
VL: Art can be supported in spatiotemporal contexts, and in fact is conditioned (but not necessarily determined) by them. Art practices can be set within a great cultural mass, or a singular community, however, simultaneously they can defend their right to propose a margin of exception to cultural and temporal rules.
VL: Academy, in relation to arts, must be able to embrace the tension between ways of expression and artistic production, and the academic assessment, in the context of the free acceptance from both student and professor of their participation in the institution. Arts education implies to assume paradoxes: train to set free and also construct and deconstruct the subject simultaneously. In this regard, arts education in regard to the practice mantains higher tension with the methods of education from other discilpines. Risk can have a negative effect, in the sense of "formalizing" dissidence, but can also be possitive in the sense of mobilizing the institution transformationally , depending on wheter the dissidence seeks to preserve its "pureness", which could be just another face of institutionalization, or if it chooses to act in the political regime, and tries to affect the institution, in the sens of modifying it. Institutions aren't negative themselves, nor dissidence positive by itself, in both cases it depends of what is institutionalized or in regard to what is the dissent, and whatever the answer there is a risk of dissent, because the dichotomy institution-dissent feeds back. It's clear that educational institutions in our context are ruled by paradigms very distant from art, and peraps that's why art practice, including dissent, can act as a factor for institutional transformation, this constitutes "the political", for in terms of Rancière, to raise a dispute to cause a redistribution of the sensible, which eventually be institutionalized and will become a form of "police", following Rancière again, the "police" is nor good or bad itself, it depends of what it seeks to preserve and manage, anyway, others will raise new disputes and new redistributions of the sensitive, in an endless process known long time ago as "solve et coagula", nonetheless there's a much more subtle power than political dispute, and this is the power of poetical thinking, since due to its polisemy, it's uncatchable, legally speaking.