Burnt-Out Muses, Healed Monsters, Mediation Notes

1. The exhibition’s title, the result of a vote by the graduates, graphic designers, and curator, relates loosely to a discussion of the Seven Wonders of the World (as explained later in the text). The curator understands it as describing the process at art schools in which a loss of faith in artistic and anti-artistic values (old and new muses) is combined with the self-healing of symptoms of madness that characterize our relationship to the living and non-living world (collective monsters, personal monsters).

→ In planning the graduate exhibition, the curator chose a mediational approach, one of the possibilities offered by our profession, over a taxonomic approach.[2] Surveys of works made at art schools, 19th- and 20th-century salons, and popular exhibitions on the subjects of painting, sculpture, object art, photography, or “AVU Now” entice curators to take the second approach. It is difficult to resist the temptation to identify commonalities and differences, to categorize into isms on the basis of certain characteristics, or to ascribe a content-based identity to what we see. But this approach contains further dangers. It subordinates the viewer’s perception of and movement around the work of art to this labeling; it identifies rather than liberates; it promotes the appearance that art is an individualist thing.

2. Taxonomy is the science of describing, classifying, and naming organisms/cultural objects. In biology, it uses morphological, behavioral, genetic, and chemical observations and findings.

→ In exchange for staging “stylistic and discursive heterogeneity,” the art world gives the curator-taxonomist access to an elite space of social visibility inhabited by influencers and other personalities where they defend their own originality. But the taxonomy of group exhibitions is constructed primarily from the middle of the mainstream, meaning that minority voices that often elude taxonomization are either marginalized or entirely absent. The curator-mediator (conversational authority) passes a microphone around the room to everyone regardless of their ease of access to it. He knows that in doing so he is meeting requirements for institutional diversity. He knows that the viewpoints thus expressed mix individuals’ situated interests with the interests of the groups they represent. The curator-mediator is something like a prompt in the theater who spends most of his time silent but who must be there to ensure that the words will flow. He remains in the shadows, transparent, so that his monologue will not disturb the performance. The curator-mediator seeks to flood the audience’s senses; he tries to arouse within them a speculative empathy. In line with the depersonalization of the silent prompt, he has asked the graduating students to write short texts about themselves in the third person.

→ The curator-mediator has focused his efforts on the seemingly most self-evident aspects of a group exhibition that nevertheless, during the phase of getting to know the graduates, proved to be momentarily out of date or missing. Whether for reasons of the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 epidemic or the autonomous nature of studio instruction at AVU (or very possibly a combination of the two), he felt a clear lack of commonality, one that emerges across the established boundaries between studios and communities and that could be shared inclusively and jointly with viewers. Not even the physical placement of artworks next to one another, nor the artists’ affiliation with one and the same school automatically generate an exchange of positive or uncomfortable viewpoints and emotions. The curator would have been satisfied if this commonality did not have to produce a tangible result but could have remained like a word that disappears the moment it has been uttered. And yet, in agreement with the members of the community of graduates, it was decided to engage in a mediational attempt that recognizes the desire to formulate something.

→ Ever since the time of Strabo, who described them meticulously, every period in history has sought out its own wonders when constructing its collective spirit, wonders that are exceptional in their scope, size, and complicated effect. The curator-mediator began by suggesting the Seven Wonders of the World as an accessible way of opening up conversations[3] about what the exhibition might produce. This somewhat naive proposal was neither rejected nor replaced by a more suitable one – either out of lack of interest or because the amazement felt at the magic of the rebus attracted childlike curiosity along with an adult knowledge yearning to get to the bottom of things. Sifting through the present day in the search for contemporary wonders, we come across phenomena (muses or monsters) that represent physical incarnations of explanations hidden to our era, that hint at the present’s connection with the future and with unanswered challenges of the past. It is clearly a process of panning for gold during which one is up to one’s thighs or waist in layers of past futures, many of them subject to erosion and collective forgetting. Despite its Eurocentric roots, since ancient times the search for the Seven Wonders has been accompanied by a desire to explore the diversity of the world all the way to its furthest limits. It has been inherently associated with the migration of people, information, and ideas. It presents us with old models of the world (their complexity, multilaterality, limits, and discriminating superiority) and thus stimulates contemporary provincialist and yet planetary horizons of the imagination.

3. Because of the cancellation of in-person instruction, these conversations were held online via MS Teams.

→ Healing; DIY; Illusion; Oasis, the Atmosphere of Sleep; Identity; Burnout and Metabolism; Implicitness.

These are the wonders suggested by the members of the community of graduates, divided into seven groups and ordered according to number of votes. They are here interpreted neither by the graduates nor by the curator-mediator, but are presented for the exhibition viewers to use as they wish. It has not been ruled out that they could serve anyone.

→ Over the course of their final year, the graduates cross a bridge connecting the shore of art education[4] with the mainland of free artistic practice looming on the horizon. On their path between these two shores, they are assaulted by various opposing forces. Their excellent fulfilment of their “final task” (assignment, consultation, exams) is assessed by a school committee with the purpose of awarding or not awarding them a title. At the same time, the artistic aspects of their work – aspects in which the reformed, critical Academy prides itself – are consummate freedom, autonomy, and criticality. In the past, the clash between the school’s dispositive and freedom has always led more to conflict and grating of teeth than harmonic arrangements.[5] We shall here briefly recall the recent history of a paradox. The recognition of readymades, the replacement of the classical definition of artistic talent by social urgency, playfulness, or simple activity (Joseph Beuys, Robert Filliou, Tamás St. Auby), and the introduction of explicitly political curricula, feminist programs, post- and interdisciplinary programs with direct ties to social change, or other reforms incorporated into university education the radical changes that took place in society in culture after 1945. With just a few short-term experiments, the antiart or counterculture movements had little hope of more profoundly altering the established hierarchy of the university environment and merely succeeded in effecting an alternative “softening.”[6] But reforms of educational curricula increasingly hampered the ability to measure students’ progress in mastering the craft aspects (skill, training, bravura) of their artistic medium or to gauge their level of immanent talent as a fruit of their artisanal training. The assessment of students’ artistic/ educational progress was transferred onto the question of “concepts,” meaning anti-artistic gestures or positions that for the most part are founded on the alternation or negation of existing values and authorities. Schools now entered a period of academic anti-academism that repeatedly forced teachers to face a complicated situation in which mentor-teachers[7] must co-exist in one and the same body with their antithetical counterpart, the fine artist.[8] It is a modern version of the ancient struggle between body and soul, in which teachers must stand trial before their other half, the artist, in order to answer for their sins against artistic freedom. During the final year of art education, this historical institutional conflict is transferred onto the graduating students with all its weight, and their acceptance of this unrequested burden is in actuality a neo-avant-garde ritual of transition from the anti-academic academy into the complicated existence of a “free professional” upon completing their education.

4. Which, as Pavel Buchler has aptly noted, is populated by a public stimulated by the school.

5. It should be noted that the curator-mediator is not an external consultant but, as a vice-rector, is a member of AVU’s management.

6. Art schools have sought university status ever since the Renaissance, something that in some places they were denied for several centuries because of their scientifically unconvincing theoretical curriculum. See Nikolaus Pevsner, Academies of Art, Past and Present, 1940.

7. Among other things, the mentor-teacher contributes to or compiles the curricula for study programs and plans, defines educational time demands, and determines the criteria for student evaluations.

8. A fine artist knows why art cannot be taught. See James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught, 2001.

→ In order for the concept of anti-academic practice in which the sovereign artist is freely inspired by anti-disciplinary models to be more than just an empty phrase, and in order for the strategy of anti-art to not become a calculated artistic tactic, students following this path are guided towards the need to critically assess all imparted knowledge as well as the assessments and community and individual empathy provided to them by the institution. Among some graduates, the negation of negation (anti anti-) leads to its abandonment and the (non-)implicit adoption of the canon. But such neo-academism (or, if you like, academic academism) can have two faces: The adoption of older academic canons that take a negative stance to anti-academism (traditionalism) or the uncritical adoption of institutionally domesticated antiacademism (normcore). Both approaches are indifferent to the project of an at least partial autonomy,[9] but they present different and conflictual stories of the past whose narrators (teachers or other models) held truly different positions in a past tragedy that might strike some people today as a farce. There exists a whole range of further positions worth describing, but any exhibition of future artists is associated primarily with the expectation that it will offer a way out of this stalemate. And here we run into the boundaries of the field staked out for the curator-mediator, who happily invites everyone to first and foremost be a fully engaged viewer while not forgetting to also be a curious reader. Perhaps they will encounter a portrait of a saint – a healed zombie neo-romantically lumbering through a grove of burnt-out muses.

9. Numerous authors believe that autonomy exists only as a late-capitalist illusion that is no longer attainable under the current state of interconnectedness between economy, spectacle, and contemporary art.