Screenshot taken from youtube video titled STOP THE ELEPHANT DEVELOPMENT protesting at London College of Communication (April 16th 2018)

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“...if an animal is deprived of its natural environment and society, sensorily deprived, made mildly anxious, and restricted to the narrowest possible spontaneous motion, it will emotionally identify with its oppressor and respond - with low-grade grace, energy and intelligence - in the only way allowed to it. The poor beast must do something, just to live on a little. There is no doubt that a beagle can be trained to walk on its hind legs and balance a ball on the tip of its nose. But the dog will show much more intelligence, force and speedy feedback when chasing a rabbit in the field. It is an odd thought that we can increase the efficiency of learning by nullifying a priori most of an animal’s powers to learn and taking it out of its best field.” Paul Goodman, Compulsory Miseducation {00:52}

Art education, no matter how often it espouses the idea of criticality has never managed to rid itself of the insubstantial presumption that, whatever art is, it is wholeheartedly a good thing; that it constitutes, in the absence of anything more substantive or concrete, something that is worth doing. This is problematic for development generally and consequently for art education specifically because it remains protected by an automatic supposed substantive and legitimising quality. But this is determined only by its association with its historical predecessors and not by anything innate within itself. Cut loose from its progenitor, purely on its own terms it fails to justify itself. Its reliance on a retrospective consideration of what constitutes older art means it is limited by its own criterion for justifying what it is. Whereas Turner had to consider the legitimacy of what he was doing in the absence of a criterion of justification for what uncertain decisions he was making; Deller’s decisions are made in the full knowledge that they are legitimate in the terms of whatever it is that constitutes current art. Deller’s practice is dogged by the knowledge that ‘he did decide to do that, but had he done this instead nothing would be much different, save, that he did do that rather than this’ and whatever constitutes this ‘this’ is unknown anyway to the audience of ‘that’, so all that can be said, is that ‘Jeremy decided to do that rather than something else’. Jeremy, why on earth did you do that? {02:30}

Questions of whether the pursuit of an art practice constitutes anything more significant than the maintenance of long established, and long since concluded conventions are not identified within art education for critical scrutiny. Art education does not scrutinise its claims of being worthwhile. Instead it merely reviews its justification for funding and administrative inclusion. It is so immersed in its own bureaucratic reproduction it doesn’t bother to ask if what is being reproduced and funded is worth it. Art education could take the question seriously. It could pursue, for example, the possibility that artistic production has reached the point of its developmental potential, its own limitations; the very categorisation of ‘art’ constituting its limits of permissible potential. It could be argued within art education that these limitations have been reached and become only detrimentally operative ever since the categorisation of art as a distinct category of object and the artist as a distinct category of producer. That whatever takes place between a given Turner and a given Malevich are essentially distinct attempts at dealing with the limitations brought about by identification, naming etc. This distinction between the earlier and later example of artistic production marks a distinction that can be identified, which suggests progress and development occurred. The identification of a comparable distinction between examples of arthood, say between a Gander and a Starling, appears significantly less likely to be established. If these limitations were acknowledged within art education (even if they weren't within the wider art world) it could contend itself with functioning productively within such limitations - for example, with retrospectively picking over the bones. But this suggestion is merely reformist and would inevitably result in further reproducing the institution. {04:28}

Anyone that has attended art school knows instinctively, even if the knowledge has been buried by subsequent experience, that with the benefit of hindsight art education merely reproduces the misguided and insincere values held and perpetrated by the wider institution of art. Deep-down they know also that an effective form of art education, one that is concerned with free artistic production, would need to dispense with artists hired as tutors on the basis of their ability to instruct students that are presumed to know less than them, when in reality their role is more accurately characterised as an automatic and groundless assumption of authority and the reproduction of education as the embryo of the institution, replicating and disseminating  the latter's ideologies. Art tutors as they currently function constitute a direct connection between education and the institution and consequently the corporate state. {05:23}

Two correlative points are enough to dispense with the notion that art tutors are useful to art students and their education: (1) because ‘anything whatever’ can constitute an artwork, justifications of judgements made in relation to artworks are restricted to subjective judgements themselves; on this basis tutors are no more likely to offer significant or useful insights than students themselves: why the distinction between tutors and students? (2) on the logical basis that art students, having been less inculcated into the institution of art, know more about free creative production (whatever that is) than art tutors, the latter having been significantly more inculcated into the system of art and so capable only of touting the institution, substantiated by the fact of having been offered the job: Why tutors? {06:15}

In contradistinction, a successful form of art education would aim at its own dissolution. ‘Successful’ as in something like a student emerging into a worthwhile artworld (worthwhile world) maintaining some utopian moment or ends, that education helps determine. The middle-level’s reproduction of existing conditions of production and distribution is indicative of the antithesis of such an artworld, such a world. Causation resides, chicken/egg-like, within education and within the artworld in terms of the cause preceding and increasing the probability of the effect. A successful education would idealistically concentrate on the dissolution of the existing structures and the expropriation of the existing institutions and be guided by positions¹ expounded by the likes of Godwin²,  Tolstoy³,  Neill and Redhead⁴, Russell (Bertrand and Dora)⁵ etc., these theories having been argued by Paul Goodman⁶. The position taken is that curriculums and approaches to education, more widely, constitute an imposition to learning; and instruction by presumed superiors, instructing and reproducing existing conditions of production should be precluded by conditions conducive to autodidacticism and self-determined learning. If anyone is going to perennially fail to distinguish between successful and unsuccessful examples of artistic output (as this is the rudiment of criticism?) it might as well be done by students facing each other, rather than oscillating between the umbilicus and the ceiling, where the ethereal artist-tutor hangs out Holy Spirit-like. {07:45}

A counter-argument directed at the notion of the dissolution of the system of art as it currently exists, through an undermining and expropriation of the institution, could assert that this would counterintuitively result in an ever more unfettered form of pluralistic production, substantiated by an ever more proliferating form of relativism; that without the boundaries imposed by the institution of the middle-level, such as Fine Art departments, a previously curtailed but potentially excessive creative randomness could be unleashed. But it is at least questionable that the system of art, as it currently exists, initiates any identifiable measurable criterion as a means of restricting or circumventing any errant form of production that does nothing to rein in the mythic status of the artist as an especially imbued type of person, and their output as an especially imbued type of stuff - and the inevitable consequent privileged economy it produces, that renders the artist a mere instrument of the institution. It is in fact likely that it is the institution of art itself that sustains the free-for-all of contemporary art practice. Significant historical examples of states and their institutions having been dissolved have, in fact coincided with the introduction or direct replacement of rules, boundaries, checks and balances etc., as a rational result of emerging organisation initiated by the emancipated society itself, determined from within itself as opposed to having been imposed upon it from above. {09:13}

Applied to the notion of the free individual, autonomous artistic producer, the counter-argument described above - of a no holds barred opening of the floodgates - would occur, feeding directly into the idea of the artist as a self-confirming centre of truth. In fact the counter-argument does constitute a likely accurate interpretation of Stirner’s individualist anarchy that Duchamp enthusiastically acknowledged the influence of, that fed straight into that ‘little cut and paste job on reality’; Duchamp’s ready-mades marking the most significant revolution towards the full-blown relativism of today’s artistic cesspit. But considered beyond Stirner’s individualist Libertarianism and applied to a collectivist response to the art system the counter-argument becomes less secure. {09:58}

As stated it seems closer to an approximation of the truth that, on the contrary, the proliferation and domination of institutions in fact encourages the system to reproduce itself excessively in whatever way it wants and to subsume whatever the results. The institution in no way functions as a kind of firebreak or means of restraining and stabilising excessive, unchecked artistic expression to within judgable parameters; all that it stabilises is the ongoing reproduction of the system. Any cultural body to which the middle-level institutions have committed will soon find itself devoted to something other than culture. It becomes devoted only to its own perpetuation by rendering itself indebted and ever more stupid; and consequently more in need of the institution’s tutelage and direction. The dissolution of the institutions of art and a complete abolition of all forms of its top-down authority might in fact result in a reformation of self-imposed and self-determining rules, of an organic construction by artists themselves to throw a critical spanner in the works of their unbridled creative freedom. A brief survey of the history of art does seem to indicate that an increase in institutional domination coheres directly with a decrease of serious attempts at making a criterion of substantive judgments. {11:16}

Goodman points out a watershed in the philosophy of education of an incompatibility between ‘individual development’ and ‘national needs’. Applied to the art school context this means work is produced, not as a by-product or outcome of an individual’s desire to learn, improve, criticise etc., but rather for the prerogative of the institution. This produces conforming individuals hustling to pull the ladder up behind them while trying to lift their foot from a fellow student’s neck in time to get up the ladder before them. Curriculum is an imposition to individual development as it is determined by institutional authority and prerogatives, and the wider corporate state, that impacts on cultural production most fundamentally by normalising societies where it is impossible to maintain a life in ‘decent poverty’, allowing time for productive activity that do not meet pecuniary ends. {12:06}

The dominance of art education as the principle embryo of the institution and of the redescription of the art system itself prevents any new thinking about art education, which has expanded and produced little more than an agrandissement of art-people. The axiomatic mantra that art education, in its current form is innately worthwhile is accepted as if a catechism but is rarely troubled by the imposition of evidence. Nobody troubles themselves with opposing the status quo or seriously proposing alternatives. The ‘alternative’ school of art as it exists constitutes the same model in the form of a threadbare community, it is just separated from the corporate state’s direct funding; the attendant lip service consequently merely confirms the institution. {12:48}

Art education as it currently exists operates squarely within the middle-level. It, like the entire sphere, successfully limits all its operations to output that is inherently affirmative and celebrative of the art system. When minor participatory insurrections do occur and engage in protest or criticism the conditions as manipulated by the institution, curtail such expressions to mere specified reforming tendencies, of attempting to obtain this or that minor amelioration. Art education is held in a state of stagnation or halfness - that reflects the entire middle-level - subjugated as it is between conditions conducive to terminating their education; and innumerable baited opportunities that the middle-level institution dangles from above. This state of halfness secures the higher institution, and consequently the wider system of art, including its inchoate participants piling living expenses on top of course fees, against revolutions aimed at dissolution and securing a future subjugated by debt slavery. {13:45}

As discussed in the previous Crit [Crit 5, On a National Express Backseat Tour de Ordour] the dominant institution - and most unwarranted of being taken seriously, of all the individual middle-level institutions - the commercial gallery sector, more than any other, disseminates and perpetuates a culture of limitations, restrictions and immutable permanency throughout all of the art system’s middle-level. The relations of distribution for the art student are defined in these terms. This ‘taking seriously’ manifests itself as the collective reification of all artworks and subsequently all artists, to the point of functioning beyond any form of critical reproach. For the mid-level practitioner, arthood - although impossible to differentiate from any other money-driven system of commodities - is held to be some inherently progressive, socialist harbour of free cultural production, where meanings are expressed, untainted and unbridled by the fact that the stuff imbued with this secret ingredient is enthusiastically offered up to be bidded on, bought and sold. {14:45}

That sector, that this Crit will soon be ignoring, aggressively, oppressively precludes all necessary contingencies for any genuinely free and unfettered form of art practice, such as time, erring, lack of calculation and uncertainty. Rather it focuses attention on ends in the form of relations of distribution formulated by the institution’s own drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures. This results only in the sensual appearance of complexity and originality as a kind of aesthetics of bureaucratic professionalism. This is disseminated, propelled by its vacant potency, and enthusiastically received by the operators of the middle-level: most conspicuously by university art departments. Output becomes predestined to fill the middle-level’s shape that is moulded primarily by the commercial gallery sector’s intolerance of uncertainty. The ideology of certainty proliferates in art school. The ‘success’ of institutions like CSM and Goldsmiths over the years is down to their ability to obviate uncertainty and engender bureaucratic professionalism. This must constitute a significant determinant for the stagnation of art practices as constituting an agency of maintenance and reproduction. Whereas as everyone privately knows, if any form of dissolution of this agency is to be enacted it will originate from an uncalculating, critical impulse. In the Principle of Our Education, Stirner asks “Where, then, are there signs of a spirit of opposition emerging instead of the submissiveness nurtured thus far? Where is man the creator being molded instead of man the educated? Where is the teacher turning into a collaborator, where the transmutation of knowing into wanting, where, in short, is the aim man the free rather than man the cultivated?” For an unfettered form of production to be enacted within art education it would require the artist to become emancipated from the preordained modes of production that pervade the system of art, where the relations of production may be carried out under the pretext (or pretence) of ‘free productive creativity’ or some such, but is, in actuality ever curtailed, preordained, predetermined and incredibly narrowly matched to the middle-level’s expectations of success, originality, ‘cutting-edge’ meaninglessness etc. {17:06}

Negating and precluding the institution from the point of view of an art practice in order to operate unfettered is a marginally more realistic proposition for artists in their inchoate stage of development, prior to their fully-formed inculcation into the middle-level. Disentangling themselves from the innumerable instances of authority that permeate and determine their output would require them to negate the relations of their own reproduction, potentially the means of their own future subsistence, their products being contingent currently on the institution’s authority. For the institution to be rendered redundant and irrelevant, initiating its eventual dissolution, would require being held by its practitioners as being redundant and irrelevant. For the dissolution of the institution to be realised would require practitioners at an individual level holding the institution as redundant and irrelevant, to then associate based on these shared intentions in mutual cooperation - the ends in mind being the communal control of the relations of production, and consequently, distribution of their output. The sphere of art education constitutes the obvious place to start. {18:12}

The problem with educational institutions’ alliance with the wider institution and generally the middle-level’s alliance with political manipulation is that the state will ‘naturally’ foster institutions that reproduce its own institution; consequently inchoate artists are processed through art education in the light of the imposition of the institution through its tutorship of entrenched professionals, administrative functionaries and bureaucrats. Art education has the appearance of ‘free’ learning, ostensibly students are left to their own devices, save for the odd lecture, visiting artist, tutorial or crit. But generally they are left alone to adapt as an autonomous agent; to polish themselves to become a self-confirming center of truth to one day resemble their most ‘successful’ tutors, and surround themselves with obsequious satellites. And here apparently the opportunities are endless. {19:04}

Now the decision making process becomes sequestered, as decisions made within the relations of artistic production are likely to constitute a potential breach in the construction of any watertight set of intentions which are required to contrive certainty; the intermittent emergence from autonomy into a crit or tutorial with a visiting ‘successful’ artist requires the art student to construct excuses to justify their decisions. A breach in the form of an inability to justify, or of a too straightforward and prosaic response is likely to further debilitate the predominantly internal characterisation of art as an ineffable, ‘special’, intellectual realm; penetrable only to those participants endowed with the requisite cognitive ability, knowledge and understanding. If such an understanding is spurious then sequestering and obfuscating the content of the relations of production, to keep artistic production wrapped in mysticism is likely to manifest itself as a career expressed in self-aggrandising self-importance. {20:03}

Attempts to justify or explain decisions made within artistic production are clearly then not prioritised or given careful attention, whereas means of obfuscation functioning as justification of output are. Such skills can be obtained through an art school education where the requisite environment is made available.  An example of the relevant requisite environment is described here by Central Saint Martins  without any sense of modesty as far as the endless possibilities go, and a complete lack of treading carefully in hedging one's bets: “a site for constant reinvention, the studio and whatever constitutes the studio or space for production is addressed in a variety of ways. It’s framed as a laboratory, performative site, social space and discursive environment. The studio becomes an ambiguous territory which shifts between production, exhibition and interpretation. Frequently, it takes the form of virtual spaces and online platforms, physical spaces, contextualised sites, thinking tools, and conversational environments.” Students lucky enough to enter this citadel of relativism will “work on outward-facing projects and various forms of collaboration. There will be experimental forms of exhibition-making and public exposure.” Opportunities for critically asking if any of this is really meaningful are lacking. Here ‘exposure’ is associated with exhibition and consequently the relations of distribution. The one unambiguous consistent point of direction contained in this quoted marketing material is ‘exhibition’. Although it proselytizes the configuration of the studio to be as slippery as an eel, it all somewhat bathetically leads to exhibition as the inevitable drip-feed of the wider, higher institution’s contingent opportunity structures. {21:48}

There seems to be nothing this studio cannot do within its remit of reproducing and replicating the authority of the higher level institution through its drip-feed of contingent opportunity structures. What it cannot do is function beyond its remit - boundaries of the art system; challenge or preclude, obviate these strictures. Should it not declare this? {22:08}

The appearance of freedom, or more specifically the assumption of 'acting-out’ free cultural production, is encouraged in art schools, at least to the students, while erstwhile anti-capitalists-cum-managers attempt to justify the benefits to capitalists as they concentrate on managing themselves upwards. But all this apparent freedom is restricted to mimicking the institution’s relations of distribution. No matter how free the ‘discursive environment’ described by Central Saint Martins, earnestly believes in the effectiveness of these conditions they are in actual fact completely determined and conditioned to be conducive to the institution and the reproduction of bureaucratic, capitalistic ideology, and therefore in no reasonably considered way ‘free’. Here’s a quote by Bertrand Russell intended to substantiate the point: “The first thing to realize - though it is difficult in a commercial age - is that what is best in creative mental activity cannot be produced by any system of monetary rewards.” All minds operative within the middle-level institution of Central Saint Martins et al are turned in supplicated unison towards the brand, the sponsor, the funding agency, the donor, the final show, the publication, the gallerist, the sale etc., and inevitably the institution up-above. No minds are turned towards exploring alternative relations of production and consumption, of fostering better conditions of production, of criticising the general system in question. {23:37}

Artists in their inchoate state as art students are processed towards ‘exhibitionism’ in the form of exhibition, publication, public discourse, peer teaching etc., ‘exhibitionism’, that is, as it is prescribed and sanctioned from above. {23:52}

Economic stimulus constitutes the prevailing rationale of artistic production. Although it may be considered to be an imposition by producers themselves, and its manifestation may be a secondary result of a primary motive of a distant, economically privileged entity, in the sense that it is sequestered behind a veneer of baited contingent opportunities, prerogatives such as cultural mobility or career aspirations. Artistic production as it currently operates, reproduces the institution’s relations of production. If the economic stimulus of art production were removed; and if art production were to continue, the form of that continuation would need to be initiated from other, alternative motives. The existing idealistic secondary motives, something along the lines of Humboldt’s “human development in its richest diversity” that are, in arthood’s current conditions used to obscure the actual current primary motives for artistic production of maintaining economic privileges, would no doubt prove adequate for artists; they would be less likely to prove adequate for the institution or the middle-level. Some administrative functionaries of the institution, if not all, have at some point arrived where they are, within the stability and relative comfort of the institution, after having shifted from once pursuing or at least paying lip service to the primary motive to now pursuing the secondary motive. {25:11}

They all come to believe, by necessity of being able to look themselves in the eye, it an essential part of their professionalism to consider what are called the interests of the wider community as a whole, rather than those of some underprivileged or discontented group; but the ‘interests’ of the community as a whole are sufficiently vague to be easily seen to, all too conveniently, coincide with self-interest and unbridled careerism. {25:40}

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Image Description: CSM radical credentials architect turned compliant conflicted bureaucrat, a veneer of radicalism ...he undoubtedly gains in politeness, in utilitarian and practical wisdom, what is lost in power of thought. In a word, privilege becomes inevitably corrupted.

1
Luminaries of the Free School movement in the 1960s and 1970s included A. S. Neill, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol and Ivan Illich. On the movement in Britain, see David Gribble, Real Education: Varieties of Freedom, 1998. Also Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, 1973.

2
“...modern education not only corrupts the heart of our youth, by the rigid slavery to which it condems them, it also undermines their reason, by the unintellibable jargon with which they are overwhelmed in the first instance, and the little attention that is given to accommodating their capacities in the second.” William Godwin, An Account of the Seminary that will be Opened on Monday the Fourth Day of August, at Epsom in Surrey, for the instruction of Twelve Pupils, 1783

3
In my opinion this external disorder is useful and indispensable, strange as it may seem and inconvenient to the teacher. I shall frequently have occasion to speak of the advantages of this condition of things; of the imaginary inconveniences I will say this : In the first place, this disorder or free order is trying to us, simply because we are accustomed to something entirely different, in which we were educated. In the second place, in this, as in many similar circumstances, the employment of force is due to haste and lack of reverence for human nature. It seems to us that disorder is increasing, becoming more and more violent each instant, that there are no limits to it; it seems to us that there is no other way of putting an end to it than by employing main force, but really all it requires is to wait a little, and the disorder, or flow of animal spirits, would naturally diminish of itself, and would grow into a far better and more stable order than that which we imagine.” Tolstoy, The Yasnaya Polyana School, 1862

4

Youtube clip of old summerhill doc...


5
The Russells explained in their 1927 Beacon Hill School prospectus their school was founded on three principles: “That no knowledge of any sort or kind should be withheld from children and young people; Respect for the individual preferences and peculiarities of the child, both in work and in behaviour; Morality and reasoning to arise from the children’s actual experience in a democratic group and never of necessity from authority or convenience of adults.”

6

Paul Goodman, Compulsory Miseducation, 1964