Posted: April 28th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Art, Story-Telling & the Five Senses / El Arte, El Cuento y los Cinco Sentidos, Events - Pedro Lasch, Exhibitions-Pedro Lasch | No Comments »
Purcell Room
DESCHOOLING SOCIETY
Conference
Thursday 29 April 2010 - Friday 30 April 2010
This two-day conference brings together international artists, curators and writers to discuss and debate the changing relationship between art and education. Please note that a ticket for 29 April includes entry to both days of this conference.
Deschooling Society takes its title from Ivan Illich’s seminal 1971 book, one of the most influential radical critiques of the education system in Western countries. Issues at the heart of that critique have been increasingly debated within the art world in recent years, and the subject of education has attracted renewed attention from artists, curators and collectives. Pedagogical models are currently being explored, re-imagined and deployed by practitioners from around the world in highly diverse projects comprising laboratories, discursive platforms, temporary schools, participatory workshops and libraries. Simultaneously, progressive globalisation has led to a revaluing of the collective knowledge and agency of local communities.
Speakers have been invited to present critical ideas on collective and participatory practice, pedagogical experiments and how such art can be understood and discussed. The conference is a collaborative event marking the start of a Hayward Gallery research project culminating in the transformation of the gallery space into an alternative art school during summer 2012. It also addresses the urgent issues that have arisen from the Centre for Possible Studies, part of an ongoing Serpentine Gallery project in the Edgware Road neighbourhood, and is the second part of the Serpentine’s collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, following the conference Transpedagogy - Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education at MoMA in May 2009.
Programme
Thursday 29 April
10am Greetings and Introduction by Ralph Rugoff and Sally Tallant
10.15am Keynote lecture by Christopher Robbins ‘Escape from Politics - The Challenge of Pedagogy and Democratic Politics in the De/schooled Society’
10.45am Response and Q&A moderated by Sally Tallant
11.15am Panel discussion - ‘From Discursive Practices to the Pedagogical Turn’, with Carmen Moersch and Irit Rogoff, moderated by Sally Tallant.
1pm Break
2pm Dialogues - ‘Insertions, Alterations, and Rearrangements within Existing Institutional Frameworks’, with Tania Bruguera, Harrell Fletcher and Nils Norman. Opening statement and moderation by Claire Bishop.
3.30pm Break
4pm Presentations - ‘Pedagogy of Place - Self-Organized Education’, featuring Artschool UK, London, Free University Warsaw (Janek Sowa), 16 Beaver, New York (Pedro Lasch), The Public School, Brussels (Sonia Dermience), Experimental Drawing Class, London (Terry Smith), introduced by Rafal Niemojewski.
5pm End
Friday 30 April
10am Greetings
10.15am Keynote lecture by Martha Rosler
10.45am Martha Rosler in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
11.15am Panel discussion: Protest in Art School: Rituals of Power and Rebellion since the Sixties, with Dave Beech, Marion von Osten, Adrian Rifkin and Lisa Tickner, moderated by Cliff Lauson
1pm Break
2pm Dialogues - ‘Theatres of Education’, with Hannah Hurtzig, Suzanne Lacy and Pablo Helguera
3.30pm Break
4pm Presentations - ‘Pedagogy of Place - Local Models and Knowledges’, featuring Marcelo Expósito, Barcelona, Janna Graham, London, Jeanne van Heeswijk, Rotterdam, Pablo Helguera, New York, Gediminas Urbanos, Vilnus, introduced by Nicola Lees
5pm Summary by Paul O’Neill, closing statement by Ralph Rugoff, plenary session, questions from the audience
6pm End
Schedule subject to change
Podcasts from the conference will appear on the Hayward Gallery blog.
Posted: April 6th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Actions & Activism, Art, Story-Telling & the Five Senses / El Arte, El Cuento y los Cinco Sentidos | 1 Comment »
Ricardo Dominguez performing in the basement of a Church in Jackson Heights, Queens (2002) for the children and families of the experimental immigrant school ‘Art, Story-Telling, and the Five Senses.’
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Dear friends,
I am passing the note below from Casey Alt and Zach Blas, and I ask as many of you who possibly can to help support Ricardo Dominguez. The letter is going out by tomorrow so please answer today. Just send your name and titles, etc to Casey asap. I have collaborated with Ricardo on various occasions, the first one being through 16 Beaver in NY in 2000, and then in 2002 when he came (completely free of charge) to perform an amazing theater piece for the children and families of the immigrant art school I was running in Queens, NY at the time (see images).
Ricardo is a fantastic artist, a brilliant mind, and one of the most courageous people I know. Please support him, and also help us send a clear message that this chain of politically motivated moves against academics across the US has to stop. Ricardo is clearly being targeted for challenging the powers of his institution at a time when this cannot be allowed to remain unquestioned (if they ever can). We cannot let him be punished for doing a service to us all, and we should know that if we let them keep going they will soon come after many more of us, especially in these ‘times of crisis,’ when so many things become magically justified.
Pedro
—————————————————
Pedro Lasch
Board Member, N.C. Arts Council (2007-2010)
Visual Artist & Assistant Research Professor
Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
& Latino/a Studies in the Global South, Duke University
======================================
We are writing to gather support for the current academic persecution of Professor Ricardo Dominguez, Visual Arts Department, UCSD. Ricardo is an original co-founder of the art and activist group Critical Art Ensemble, a member of the Electronic Disturbance Theater, and a Principal Investigator at CALIT2, where he runs the bang.lab for bits, atoms, neurons, and genes.
Ricardo and his collaborators in the CALIT2 bang.lab, including Duke University Program in Literature PhD alum Amy Sara Carroll (2004), are fighting against criminal charges for the virutal sit-in the group led against the University of California Office of the President in solidarity with the UC-wide March 4 protests.
These actions have led to university and criminal investigations of Ricardo’s research as well as the threat of tenure loss.
In solidarity with Ricardo and his colleagues at the bang.lab, we will submit the attached letter to the President and Senior Vice Chancellor of the University of California to challenge these actions. We invite you to join in our support. To add your name to this letter, please send your name, academic titles, and institutional affiliations to either Casey Alt (
caseyalt@duke.edu) or Zach Blas (
zachblas@gmail.com). Additionally, if you are a graduate of the University of California, we encourage you to identify yourself by further indicating your UC campus and class year in your response.
More information about the recent events can be found here:
Ricardo’s UCSD biography:
On April 6th, our letter will be emailed to the University of California Office of the President and the Senior Vice Chancellor and will be copied to several people at UCSD who are involved in the investigation. All signees will also be blind carbon copied on the letter.
Sincerely,
Casey Alt
Visiting Professor of the Practice
Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Duke University
Zach Blas
Graduate student
Program in Literature
Duke University
——————————————-
email title: Letter of Support for Ricardo Dominguez, bang.lab, and Electronic Disturbance Theater
To the Presidents and Trustees of the University of California:
We are writing as an international group of concerned students and faculty in regard to the series of investigations currently directed against Professor Ricardo Dominguez and his collaborators in the CALIT2 bang.lab. More specifically, we wish to address the following events:
1) On March 21, 2010, a bang.lab colleague at the University of California, Riverside, received notice that he is under investigation in relation to the establishment of the website http://MarkYudof.com, an art protest piece in which the artist expressed an alternate version of the future in which University of California President Mark Yudof publicly resigned his position by acknowledging that his “service as president is detrimental to the future of public education in the state of California.” Despite its obviously unrealistic message on behalf of President Yudof and the multiple links on the site indicating its connection to various student protest groups, both of which clearly identify the site’s political intent and its desire not to defraud its visitors, this artist action has directly resulted in the ensuing investigation.
2) On March 4th, the bang.lab website hosted a virtual sit-in against the website of the University of California Office of the President as part of the system-wide student and faculty protests against the policies of the University of California administration. The virtual sit-in action provided a means for anyone sympathetic to the cause to remotely join the protesters in solidarity. As a direct result of the sit-in action, the University of California, San Diego’s Office of Information Technology Security shut down the bang.lab server’s access to the Internet for eight consecutive days.
3) Following the virtual sit-in, the bang.lab was informed that they were under investigation by the University of California at San Diego Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Paul Drake, who was also attempting to determine the legal grounds necessary to file criminal charges against Professor Dominguez. If successful, these university and criminal charges would directly threaten the revocation of Professor Dominguez’s tenure at UCSD. Despite already established international legal precedents that virtual sit-ins are considered electronic civil disobedience (ECD) and are therefore not illegal denial-of-service (DoS) or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks (most recently in the First Penal Senate of the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt ruling 1 Ss 319/05 in 2005), these publicly unjustified investigations and charges continue.
As academic colleagues of both Professor Dominguez and his collaborators at the bang.lab, we ask that you cease these seemingly politically motivated investigations. Since initiating his digital protests over ten years ago, Professor Dominguez’s activities with the Electronic Disturbance Theater and the bang.lab have served as unflinchingly courageous examples of intellectual integrity and academic engagement within their wider sociopolitical communities. Professor Dominguez’s tireless efforts to bring awareness to underserved and underrepresented causes through the artful mastery of technologies that so often seek to marginalize such groups has inspired multiple generations of artists, activists, and critical thinkers. His recent bang.lab projects have received numerous international humanitarian awards and funding support in both the U.S. and Mexico. We believe these recent actions against him and the bang.lab threaten the academic freedoms and rights to free speech of all artists and academics everywhere. We recommend that rather than criminalizing legitimate protest activity by members of its own community the University of California would be better served by opening up substantive public dialogues with protesters regarding their concerns. For these reasons, we firmly but respectfully call for increased accountability of this process and an end to the bureaucratic and legal harassment of Professor Dominguez and his colleagues.
Sincerely,
lots of people