The Art Student

OPEN CALL for ITA After School

2011-03-16T02:06:00.000+02:00

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Yes, it is starting! All of my friends, tutors and colleagues have already lost their patience waiting for this news. Well, it is time to finally make things happen. So I'm officially launching the OPEN CALL for applying to ITA After School - a learning programme initiated by theartstudent.org.

Be aware that the deadline for applications is March 19th so be fast!

This programme addresses mainly students from the Art History and Theory department and will take place at the University of Arts in Iasi.

For more information visit: http://afterschool.theartstudent.org

I am truly grateful to Liliana Basarab and Costel Chirila who have created the original and ludic font Le Pop Truded which is now showcased as the After School logo.

Now you can also follow theartstudent.org on Facebook. See you there!
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A brief history of the initiation of Romania in the international world of contemporary art

2010-12-14T18:32:00.000+02:00

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If you study art in Romania, and more importantly, if you make art in Romania or you're just curious about how things evolved here, then it is absolutely imperative to be familiar to how things happened before and after the political changes in Eastern Europe. To do this fast and right, I recommend you to read a recent collection of texts published by Cartea Romaneasca: Dan Perjovschi - 20/22 Douazeci de ani de texte. From page 9 to 92 you will read the stories of a honest insider that made his way in the international art world, covering events that happened from 1992 to 1999.

Perjovschi writes about how he traveled to show his work, about how he dealt with the Romanian authorities that weren't ready or capable to incorporate contemporary practices in their policy and other stories that shape a clear image on the Romanian art scene of those times. You will find out how concepts like installation, happening, performance, biennial, curator have been incorporated in the artistic discourse and you'll also read about Romania's first participations with contemporary art projects at Documenta and Venice Biennial as well as alternative initiatives in some major cities of Romania.

To motivate my reason for recommending this collection of texts, I will allow myself to translate and quote a relevant paragraph:

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Market, school, life

After he graduates art school, the student who knows how to draw charcoal portraits will get employed as a salesman, educator, waiter at McDonald's or he'll do advertising. Nothing he studied will be of any use to him. [...] If you're not the assistant of X in the "Academy" or if you're not in the group of Y from UAP, you simply don't exist. There are no private galleries to support you. No magazines either. [...]

(hilariously) on page 89

I recommend this book to be listed on all bibliographies on Romanian art all around the country. To see the complete work of Dan Perjovschi check out his official website.

It happened inside a white cube

2010-12-02T19:29:00.006+02:00

UBU web has recently updated its video collection with the work of a Romanian artist. Mircea Cantor is listed here with his project Deeparture (2005), a 16 mm film that confronts a wolf and a deer inside a white cube. The close-ups and cinematic shooting remind me of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's film Zidane: A portrait of the 21st century, while the subject of direct confrontation between the two rival animals emotionally relates to Joseph Beuys' coyote performance from 1974.

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The player will show in this paragraph

Questioning the white cube is nevertheless the topic of endless positions taken by art theories, but while discussing the relation between white cubes and their participants, as well as the types of confrontations, distances and neutralities invoked between them, it is easy to identify that a certain tension and a certain role-play are to be assumed in such an equation. If Beuys' action of "liking" America and being liked back was dealing with confronting man and beast through the process of shamanic taming of each other, Cantor's film evokes an allegorical view upon keeping the distance towards the rival. It is the white cube that makes such distances possible, by blocking any natural behavior of experiencing, sensing, dominating or engaging with the other.

What we see in Zidane is the individual confronting his role as a player inside the "green cube" of the football game, playing by this system's rules, making the game through his interactions, as if the field and the supporters would be a gallery's white walls, while the coyote and its tamer are two beings neutralized from any contextualization of the outside world, attempting to survive and establish a common code of act inside the given structure. This is the case for almost every aesthetic experience since the advent of museums and galleries, where the structure, the codes, the players and the games are both autonomous and sterile.

Such sterility and neutrality of the white "clynical" space transposes the perception from real life and real experience to a formal value that is sufficient to its own. To understand things better, here's how Brian O'Doherty defines a white cube:

"A gallery is constructed along laws as rigorous as those for building a medieval church. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. The ceiling becomes the source of light. The wooden floor is polished so that you click along clinically, or carpeted so that you pad soundlessly, resting the feet while the eyes have at the wall. The art is free, as the saying used to go, "to take on its own life." The discreet desk may be the only piece of furniture. In this context a standing ashtray becomes almost a sacred object, just as the firehouse in a modern museum looks not like a firehouse but an aesthetic conundrum. Modernism's transposition of perception from life to formal values is complete. This, of course, is one of modernism's fatal diseases."

Brian O'Doherty, Inside the white cube: the ideology of the gallery space

Why I discussed Mircea Cantor together with Beuys and Gordon and Parreno is that they share a common optic through their video works shown here. Of course, the case for Beuys lies more in the action and its performativity itself, but seeing these three different kinds of actors in their similarly staged scenarios brings me to a question you have surely experienced with the Cube movie from 1997: if human (or animal) behavior is so different in isolation as opposed to real life, when is this behavior autonomous?

As for a more detailed view on Beuys and his "I like America and America likes me," I recommend you this short documentary produced and directed by Katrien Jacob:

The colors of today's art student: From coloring to colored

2010-06-08T18:39:00.004+03:00

Before announcing the shift in student practices inside art schools, let's first look at what seems to happen with the art practice that is being taught and promoted in such places. I will not limit to painting, graphics or sculpture as we all know the medium of art practice has become explicitly interdisciplinary. While design studies make their way into visual, advertising and architecture industries, graphics moves to corporatist supported illustration, textile art to fashion industry, painting and all the rest of traditional "fine arts" (which becomes such a vague title by the way) have remained the formats of a sentimental approach to what the "old school" once classified as "artistic manifestation" and "artistic knowledge put into practice." It all sounds like a very "moving" scenario, but let's see where this drive comes from.

From coloring to research ...

Apart from my speculative approach, what is it that makes an art student's daily practice today? Is he working in studios by producing work or is he researching at the library by constructing knowledge? The conclusions stated at "The Future of Art Education" talk organized by ICA London and ArtMonthly in september 2008 made a clear statement on the "turn" that education in art has undertaken. Being pressured by economical imperatives but at the same time being re-conceptualized as a process of research, art has been brought to a kind of re-alignment where teaching in art schools is merely a product and a manifestation of the corporate spirit of making profit out of an investment. Shortly, art education, most seriously in the UK where the fees for attending such academies are considerably high, is based on making more money. A student at Royal College of Art, London coined this idea by saying that "the art school doesn't prepare the student for being an artist, it just trains him for being an art student." So the outcome of the machinery that rules an art school isn't even a "product" ready to serve society, as a programmer would be after graduating an Informatics university, or a doctor after medical school.

... up to the colored book

Despite this macabre view on an eventual uselessness of art schools, which is yet another subject to discuss, back in school, the art student finds himself surrounded by a lot of research material at hand. If quite a while ago a student would be interested in buying and using high quality "drawing" instruments, it is colored books that he now pursues. The "contemporary art book" is what lures him into a world you cannot find in pale, grey, black and white old printed material; a world of big names, expensive artworks, famous museums and galleries which represent the reality to which the student feels like needing to connect to.

Exposed in libraries, bookshops, promoted as a bible for assimilating the doctrines of contemporary art, referred to as an important academic research resource, the colored book gained its high rated place in the values system of art scholars and students. Displaying expensive print, glossy design, hard cover that is not only hard, but heavy, too, funky fonts, content that is more design rather than text, sometimes advertisements also, the colored book is the giant that yells from the shelf: WATCH ME, BROWSE ME, READ ME, WANT ME, BUY ME!

And yet, this is the new medium for research in contemporary art. Students should not be reticent to such a toolkit for their learning process. It is important not to forget to rationally evaluate the relevance of such tools for the individual development of being student as a researcher. After all, it's all bright and colorful, happy and cheerful! We all know it's a false packaging for promoting the corporate monster that has already eaten contemporary art, but why not "playing" with it? Monsters as such are good pals to learn from.

Know UBU!

2010-05-31T17:22:00.003+03:00

As someone once told me, you're no art student if you don't know UbuWeb. It is one of the most resourceful places on the web for avant-garde films and videos that remained key references in the advent of contemporary art, from Vito Acconci to John Cage and from Andy Warhol to Cindy Sherman. You can find there mp3 recordings of key artists, pieces of conceptual writing, a large database of concrete poetry and many many other valuable information for contemporary culture.

If you're an art student and you haven't used this resource already, you should start right away! And don't forget to follow them on twitter!

10 Semiotics of the "Semiotics of the kitchen"

2010-05-17T19:59:00.012+03:00

Today's art students and their re-enacted assignments

inspired by in response to answer to appropriation parody mocking interpretation
re-interpretation
re-enactment reshaping

There is a limited approach to what is to be perceived as art studentship practice. There is also a largely spread common sense among art students to which by making "interpretations" of works of art from the past they are actually defining an artistic style, taste and skill. Indeed, I agree that it is a very knowledgeable exercise to take famous bits of art history and reshape them for a new meaning while also doing your assignment papers for your classes. But students should be already taking one step further and understand that this type of mimetic, "wannabe artist by referencing other famous artists" practice isn't doing them good for very long.

I believe that every art student is by now familiar with all those Warholian colorful replicas overexposed worldwide, from fine art classes student "re-interpretations" to pop-art exhibition stores, t-shirts, mugs, earrings, or even fancy night club wall paintings. That is an example of how extremely popular a work of art can become until it loses its original aura, an aura that you as a student might identify as pretty valuable and close to your personal practice and might want to exploit at some point.

Of course, the more you read as a student, the more you want to be unique and rather grow an individual approach towards your own practice and not just "copy" what has been made already. The challenge is much bigger in this case, since you will develop a refined taste in cultural references which, eventually, will raise the quality of your practice as a student, but which, at the same time, may qualify you as an arty dazzler.

So what happens to all the art students who want their works to be smart, brilliant and of cultural value by positioning themselves in an appropriated historical timeframe? Do they succeed or do they fail in choosing what to get inspired from?

Following is a list of 10 interpretations found on YouTube addressing the one and only Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the kitchen" performance from 1975. Not being a very popular video among the uneducated audience, the choice of "re-enacting" this work of art might turn out quite catchy. But is it?

This is not a critique of this sort of student practice and should by no means be regarded as something pejorative towards art students. It is rather a quick analysis and example of how, chronologically, throughout the past 2 years, students can perform the same type of "homework" practice, based on the FACT of re-interpreting something rather than on the actual essence of interpretation.

1. Semiotics of the Art Student, published on May 22, 2008

This film is a new twist on the classic pice of video art, "Semiotics of the Kitchen" by Martha Rosler. This film pokes fun at life as an art student, and all that is expected from us.

2. Semiotics of the college student, published on May 22, 2008

Inspired by martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen, this film exposes the shallow objects and activities that college students are retrained by, often which they assume actually give them freedom.

3. Semiotics of the Setbuild, published on August 27, 2008

The video was inspired by Martha Rosler's video 'Semiotics of the Kitchen'.

4. Norma - "Semiotics of the Kitchen (Pussycat Dolls Remix)", published on January 26, 2009

Re-interpretation of Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen" / Performance by Norma at the Vancouver Art Gallery, November 28, 2008.

5. Semiotics of the bathroom, published on March 03, 2009

6. Semiotics of Beauty, published on March 29, 2009

Video art for my New Media class - inspiration from Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen" This is the final cut version of the piece. I had some volume issues with the first one and had to re-shoot it.

7. Semiotics of the kitchen, published on July 23, 2009

8. Semiotics of the kitchen, published on October 10, 2009

9. Semiotics of Beauty, published on October 28, 2009

This is an answer to Martha Rosler's "Semiotics of the Kitchen" (1975). Rosler's video is based on the myth of the "Feminine Mystique," proposing that the proper place for a woman is the home and her proper role is "the house wife." Betty Friedan wrote her seminal piece on this theory in 1963. Naomi Wolf wrote the "Beauty Myth" in 1991 to call attention to the fact that while the myth of the separate sphere has almost fallen away in the 20th century, the myth of beauty has arrived to take its place. Where once women were loved if they could cook, clean and have children, now women are loved for their beauty. Thus, women are no longer defined by the language of the kitchen; they are rather defined through the language of the beauty industry. Further, this video is proposing that the beauty industry, beyond having a set of defined rules for aspiring beauties to follow, has a system of language that communicates far more effectively, is far more colorful, and is far more widespread than the myth of the separate sphere. Women are trapped in what Wolf terms "The Iron Maiden." Only by deconstructing such myths and working our way outside the box of the beauty myth can women find true liberation.

10. Semiotics of the kitchen, published on May 11, 2010

The Art Student

2009-10-29T00:59:00.008+02:00

This blog is and was a tribute to graduation impossibility. Like DeLillo's characters fear death in his book "White Noise", I am at the verge of finally ending something that defined my existence throughout a quarter of my life: studentship. And my fear is: graduation.

Being a student has been a comfortable outfit for the last years, but now I'm celebrating over a year of idleness within this not yet ended situation of studentship.

Why graduate? As I've been previously posting on this blog, art studentship is just a phase of crisis, a détournement, away from the commonly accepted and classically practiced life styles.

I do not wish to graduate, so I do not wish to put an end. Is this the actual contract I've been blindly signing for over 5 years? Why wanting to change from "undergraduate" to "postgraduate"? Is that because "graduate" alone seems not self-sufficient?

Things must move on then, so either I graduate or not in a few months, the studentship continues. This is why I'll be soon closing this blog, and start something to better position my on-going debatable status: The Art Student.

Taunting museums

2009-03-24T03:27:00.000+02:00

No text at the moment, as this is fresh meat.

Post posting and the aesthetics of online behavior

2009-01-25T17:09:00.004+02:00

Online addiction stopped scarring me that much at this point. But there's a realm one cannot ignore. What I seemingly find at ease is just adopting the imminent need of ultimately accepting and merging within this societal behavior. Indeed, the official 'representational' cause that Baudrillard identified for this contemporary discourse reaches at hand an allusive explanation and succeeds in superficially clarifying the common and unanimous concept of online dependency. I do not attempt a pathological approach on this matter, rather I tend to think of online-ness as the addiction that resurrects your every day life and gives it a relevant value, that perfectly fits along the postmodern existential criteria of the USER. As seen throughout the development of Internet, and the status shift that re-defined the individual from 'consumer' to 'user,' being online is no longer an option, but a primary need. Of course, there's the self aware addiction and the uncontrolled one, but since your vision and knowledge expands to unlimited access points, at the same time it narrows to the inches of your display monitor, and that becomes the only relevant window to the world.

Doh, crappy post! That's why it's a post post. And its aesthetics is shitty. :D

ART EDUCATION IS BULLSHIT

2008-08-11T08:31:00.001+03:00

No Critical Attitude Allowed Regarding This Piece of Work

2008-05-15T15:08:00.009+03:00

NO CRITICAL ATTITUDE ALLOWED REGARDING THIS PIECE OF WORK

is a critical attitude in itself. Apart from restricting a basic act of art
appreciation, the Aluminium and PVC custom-made road sign,
deliberately installed outside an art gallery, stands for paradoxical
promoting of critical thinking. The resistance of this likely intangible
work, both physical and rational, counterpoints the efficiency of
questionable long lasting and non-critical processes of making work in
the art students' environment. Bringing continuity to previous
approaches to art education, the installation defines a defensive
strategy against a supposed 'art student wannabe artist' symptom.

A p a r a d o x o f a r t s c h o o l a t t e n d a n c e :
wasting time while claiming sufficiency
My first ideas for a project at Dartington College of Arts were connected to the art audience interests that I am currently considering. Starting from hypothetical proposals of audience interventions and performances and from repeated observations regarding audience attitude, I have developed a neutral position towards attending art events and shows. By trying to personally experience instances of a viewer, the London gallery chasing unofficial performance (details in a previous post) that I had undertaken as part of an experimental research process was an unexpected turn towards a critical position regarding the agencies of art worlds.

One of the ideas that inspired NO CRITICAL ATTITUDE ALLOWED REGARDING THIS PIECE OF WORK was the concern of producing an excessive amount of work. Aiming at identifying symptoms that question the sustainability of art schools and their products (students and works produced by students), the issue of contextualization appeared: “Locating and evaluating our own practice: a necessary process, particularly in an era where the in art has been replaced by consumer capitalism and a state of excess and intensification of the production of the art object.” 1

This is why, keeping this in mind, I have figured out a way to represent this process by proposing a simple iconic image of a road sign.

1. Is a statement of restriction - as a form of personal resistance to the laissez faire, laissez passer structure that empowers art students to produce excessive amounts of work under an easy to get label of 'artistical practice.'

2. Is an attempt to release the significance / nature / value of the work from as many contextual limits as possible. (English still remains a context). Despite the geographical and institutional circumstances involved, it tends to be a 'context free' work.

3. Exemplifies in a relevant manner my personal preoccupation regarding the issues of investing time in research as a key component in approaching a project deadline.

4. Leads to a discursive conclusion (at least partial) of a long, questionable, dispersed and provocative process of adaptation within a context. (Dartington)

5. Is a critical attitude in itself. (paradox)

6. Suggests critical thinking.

7. Resumes clearly my concern of wasting time as it doesn't involve long term working for its final form.

8. Brings continuity to my previous approaches to art education.

9. Is a defensive strategy against a supposed 'art student wannabe artist' symptom.

Feedback: OK Rob, so now that I finally have something CLEAR and SIMPLE and STRONG to think about, haven't I just stepped on the other side of the threshold and joined the group of art students that are confident and relaxed about their work without too much questioning? With no anticipated intention, I have gradually become a patient for the psycho-therapy sessions that are provided in art 'counseling.' As long as the patient goes home happy after the session, everything is fine. And so was I.
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So please critique this project! Tell me that it's crap and tell me what's wrong with it! Tell me that it doesn't work, that it is mis-conceived, that it has no objective value or that it undergoes any previous expectations..tell me that! and explain me why!

(Post - inspiration or maybe just a Celebration of the idea)
Erosie, Germany, 2004

Community Practices Facing Practical Communities

2008-04-17T20:35:00.011+03:00

Approaching COMMUNITY [disambiguation]
(this text is part of my documentation made for the Skills, Issues, Planning in Community Practices module at Dartington College of Arts)

Understanding the concept of community appears to be a more difficult task than operating through and managing it. Its definitions are, whatsoever, unlikely to be precise and they tend to remain stuck in an open process of tracing frames across a social system. What I wish to underline in this documentation is not the idea of community as a structural entity, but the community as a medium for an art practice.

Contextualizing the study of community practices through institutional frameworks seems questionable and unstable. This can be described in the terms of a common issue that endangers the taxonomy of current academic studies. There is an ongoing process of cultural dazzling within the naming of courses and departments, and most frequently, this happens a lot inside the universities of art, as a primary effect of a so-called strategical freedom of curricula.

Due to this habitual creativity in naming spectacular fields of study, the choice of learning something that is called Skills, Issues and Planning in Community Practices utters the actual existence of any clear path for the student and involves an additional and unofficial task of knowing in advance some information about the course that is supposed to be provided by default.

Assuming that 'community' constitutes the object of this module, what I find curious and at the same time susceptible is the narrowing of tangible possibilities, as a consequence to the premature revealing of the actual translation of 'community practice', where 'community' equals 'group of people' and 'practice' means 'workshop'. Everything else is left outside, or maybe just mentioned as an introductory detail. That is why, despite the initial collective attempt of finding a satisfactory definition for 'community', the purpose of this course massively gravitates around importing skills from a workshop leader and recycling them through a process of theatrical reproduction.

Before I start speaking about the way I see communities and their status as an object of study, I must first make clear my position towards the type of practice that this module encourages: the workshop. I am not personally interested in working with children, with disabled people or with prisoners. I do not care about the safety of the group. I do not care about other practitioners and I am not interested in leading workshops.

A primary reference that I would like to make regards the notion of collectiveness, in the same ideological frame as 'community', and draws from Marshall McLuhan's term of 'global village', which he finds as “the new age when human kind moves from individualism and fragmentation to a collective identity, with a 'tribal base'.”Collectiveness translated as an everyday life structure would apply to any form of social gathering, be it online or offline, physical or virtual. Collective identity thus, is obviously reflected on phenomena like YouTube, MySpace, Hi5, Flickr or World of Warcraft, where sharing and associating are basic behaviors. These structures are not randomly organized, as they emerge from a complex genealogy. Yet, this is one way of looking at a community, by describing it through the internal patterns of relations that develop inside of it.

On the other hand, taking it as an homogeneous assemblage, a community can constitute a medium for the work of an artist. And when I say 'the work of an artist' I do not refer to workshops at all. The disambiguation which I have mentioned in the title and which seems to alter the status of any community related activity traces its routes in a wider opacity, which is the one that makes totally unclear the frames and conditions of 'art'. Not planning to get too deep into this, I only wish to make a clear distinction between the different meanings of the attributes “artistic” and “of art”, which, from my perspective, have been either misused or misinterpreted along the entire module of Community Practices. This is mostly because of a certain lack of language clarity and indetermination in approaching the notion of 'art' itself. I have tried to integrate terms like “professional artist”, “community arts”, “arts worker”, “community based practitioner”or “performing artist” into what I may call a general vocabulary of art activity, and yet, I must maintain my reticent and skeptical position towards accepting these keywords. So I classify them as being part of the “artistic”producers that have full functionality across the field of popular/low/mass culture: they manifest themselves through the production of an “artistic” object or event for the purpose of a social benefit of cultural growth and creative development of groups. This analysis clearly configures the outline of a community practice.

Going further from the community practice to the practical community, a first remark would be a major shift in how this medium (the community) is being handled. The way community practice is actually facing practical community is by changing the destination and the roles of the people involved. The equation is quite simple: when you are doing something for a community (involving yourself in a collective activity within that community) and the outcome of your intervention is a result or a product in its benefit, then this is community practice. When you are doing something with a community, in the purpose of exemplifying or displaying an idea, you are collaborating with the community as with your working material, and the community becomes your medium of work. Then the community does something practical for you and that is why it is a practical community.

One good example of this kind of collaborative practical community is the work of Spencer Tunick, which involves himself traveling around the world and taking photographs of nude individuals or groups. The process of doing this is a brilliant example of handling collaboration between him, as an artist and the communities in which he enters. Every place is new for him, the time of convincing people to pose for his photos is quite limited, the same strategies of photo shooting are applied each time, the same issues arise from the local authorities. He collects thousands of individual signatures from people who voluntarily agree to get naked just to participate in a famous artist’s work. This, I think, makes a very clear distinction between the two kinds of community related practices that I have tried to underline.

Even if the community still remains a physical group of people that are unified at least geographically, the purpose of an art work that recalls collaboration from a community is way too different than the goals of a workshop. The input is collective, in both cases, but while the output is practically individual in a workshop situation, in a practical community there is always this curious stability of the collective act, materialized in a collective experience and ended through a collective response.

Issues of language may often blur the meaning of things, but for the case of ‘community’ I am hoping that dissociating the two aspects is to be a solution for disambiguation.

Chasing Galleries in London

2008-04-12T01:44:00.010+03:00

[May not be the best idea for an art student]

Apart from being an exciting quest of finding specific locations on printed google maps, the journey brings to you the complete experience of a tourist. Same employees in each gallery, same walls, same fonts on the press releases, same projectors, same sound systems, same timetable. I managed to see only 6 from a list of 22 selected galleries that I had planned to see in one single day. What have I missed? What have I seen?

I have collected 0.4 kg of recycling paper.
Is there any clear position that an art student should take towards an art gallery? Is the fact that I've seen Mario Garcia Torres right after Jorge Pardo of any relevance at all?

Considering accessibility in the frames of art platforms, who's the one that gets accessed and who's the one that lowers his standards? Am I, as an art student, the one that lowers the standards and goes to any art gallery just because it is an art gallery and I'm just passing by and it is for my own benefit to see as much examples of art as possible, be it relevant or irrelevant? Or is the gallery the one that gains attention by becoming accessible to 10 more art students, different than me, just by lowering its standards? Yet, the gallery is a well structured organism that manages to comply with high and low level offers and demands of an audience. And maybe 'standard' is not the most appropriate unit for measuring accessibility, but still, the existence of a mutual relation between these two is clear.

Art Studentship in Crisis

2008-04-06T21:05:00.001+03:00

Under pretentious denominations you start building yourself a hierarchy of aspirations that are more unstable and more compromising than you could ever think. Going further with your documentation, importing and plagiarizing inspiration, improving your social behavior skills in intelligent pub discussions contributes to what I call student evolutionary fatality. Art studentship is an aura of an elitist practice that tries to re-enforce the basic social incapacities and the lack of community integration abilities of a young person. By not fitting in a classical category of social everyday activity and by not being integrated by default in a typical membership status, you find uniqueness and celebration of thoughts as a means of doing a relevant activity. You construct membership, you fool yourself by appropriating the imaginary structure of an imaginary organization, you establish key words, key names and key questions which guide you through your hypothetical practice. You construct reasons of coherence, you develop strategies of navigating along this extraordinary and tremendous cultural field that has so much to offer and yet very few to clarify. You develop self-awareness and self-apprenticeship and as far as an institution can transcribe itself through the language of a corporatist ensemble, you start being part of an undeniable process of prostitution.

What is the purpose of an art school in the terms of corporatist practices and cultural industries and media consumption ideology? What is the purpose of me asking this and why refer to such concepts? How should I deal with graduating an art school that throws me into this critical crisis awareness?

The easiness of adopting cultural trends, the pleasure of defining and criticizing openness, participation, collaboration or authorship as mediators for your limited artistic and aesthetic purposes of 'exploring human boundaries' is what you actually produce. It is a platform for art related activities within which you emerge and in which you progressively cultivate accessibility. Which I find as the scariest promoter of crisis in art studentship.

the day TATE died

2008-04-03T12:10:00.010+03:00

I never thought it would happen so soon. Not only TATE, but my enthusiasm as well. It just went down together with the London Underground. "There's a fake rebellion in London galleries" he said. And I assume he's right. Rebellions always start without me and I must always catch-up the updates. But yes, there is one!

Duchamp, my friend, you used to be a place in time... but now, you are a place in TATE, you're hidden from the world and shown to the crowd. I've shared my ticket between you and Munoz, and please..don't get upset, but his curator was much much better than yours. I truly appreciate the fact that you gave me the guts to fill in the visitor's book for the first time in my life. I was against this practice. But maybe because I had nothing to say. This time, instead..[This exhibition is a total crap. How can you put Fountain in such a context?] Was it my own huge disappointment or was it this guy's rage? I think they were both, and they came simultaneously. TATE SUCKS! It isn't for me anymore! It is the supermarket that brings commodities to customers, and I've been there already.

I don't want to let myself infected with this virus of 'contemporary art' anymore. Its effects are spreading everywhere and they affect everyone. The illness of 'contemporary art' is imminent and incurable. I would fight against this art! Although I know this would make me totally ill. But this illness would help me save the others. The University of Arts ain't a safe place. Students are in danger. Someone needs to come to the rescue!

P.S. Crying babies and mothers who complain to the security staff about losing their daughters at level 3..pretty ladies pretending to read statements on the walls in the urge of fulfilling the museum standard protocol..lovely purple bags even when you buy the cheapest 60p postcard with a Barbara Krueger text..membership subscription flyers everywhere...Welcome, dear customer! Hope you've enjoyed your time!

taking position at the Table Talking?

2008-02-06T15:15:00.006+02:00

TABLE TALK, galeria apARTe, Iasi, februarie 2008

press release

TABLE TALK describes the counter-scenario of an intellectual discourse regarding art education. An archive of interviews, video recordings and speeches from conferences simulates an alternative place for discussion, in which philosophers and art theorists overlap their ideas onto a polyphonic narration. Proposing a creative type of participation, the table talk requests the personal intervention of the audience into this form of discourse, with the purpose of inserting notes and artistic interventions for the editing of a collective art manual.

My position in this project is not questionable. I am aware of the incoming results. I am aware of the other existent positions. Sometimes people are simply unpositionable. Well, this time, the unpositionable ain't me! And I'm pleased. At least for this position. Positioning oneself in the right spot at the right place in front of the right audience is not always the best thing to do, though it may be the only one possible.

Is it compulsory to take position in this spot, in this place, in front of this audience? What do you say, Carrie?

I think I'd rather be a microphone. That would be a secure position!

But still, a project is still a project and it should be treated like one.

Current practices - December clicking / linking

2007-12-16T21:21:00.000+02:00

While losing myself between wiki, ubu and tate tabs, I try to imagine a set of rules that I could actually follow in order to practice a more efficient navigation. It's been like 3 days already since I started searching information about Lyotard. It was the only subject I was interested in at the moment. But I soon started to get further and further, and as I reached to postmodernism and continental philosophy I got stuck. Why is there so much different information displayed on a single page? I'm seriously thinking about the possibility of an ethical code regarding internet surfing and there's one simple question running through my head: how can I control my eyes and my right hand so that I don't click every link that catches my attention? Why can't I simply finish reading the main subject and then go next? Is there any chance that I could actually perform an intelligent and self-controlled navigation process? Click me! click me! See this for yourself!

Bill Viola - Venice Biennial 2007

2007-08-08T01:26:00.000+03:00

Archive Item No 2 (t Asks)

2007-08-08T00:53:00.001+03:00

t Asks

The Genius of The Crowd

2007-08-07T22:16:00.000+03:00

The Genius of The Crowd

Charles Bukowski

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art