THE PUBLIC COMMONS AND THE UNDERCOMMONS OF ART, EDUCATION, AND LABOR, Giessen, Germany

[Marlon Barrios Solano]

29.05.2014-01.06.2014
international conference hosted by the MA program Choreography and Performance

One of the global tendencies that describes the current situation of the arts under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism is privatization and financialization, in which both the arts and education lose the meaning and the status of a public good. Using the pretext of austerity and strategies of neoliberal policy, the state is dismantled in its public sector, disowning the arts and education as common concerns. While, on the one hand, it goes hand in hand with the transformation of labor in post-Fordism, de-skilling and re-skilling which trains flexible subjects, and, on the other hand, it reflects the temporality and affective modes of project-based, intermittent and precarious work, this tendency plays out as a merge between art and education, leaning on art as research, or art as practice, to name a few concepts in recent debate.

The past few years have witnessed a paradox in the development of higher education in the arts and university. On the one side, MA and doctoral programs in the arts are proliferating, thus registering an increased influx of artists into the academy. “Creative-art” and “practice-based” doctorates offer institutional support to artistic research, in other words, a refuge for many young artists who are struggling in precarious conditions of freelance production. To continue one’s studies by going back to school doesn’t just present a temporary relief from the art market, it responds to a relentless feeling of various kinds of structural lack: of knowledge, an incurable “unlearnedless” that artists express in the wake of knowledge economy; of consistency in work, which is compensated or covered by conflating one’s art with a project of lifelong learning and subject-formation; of public space that can be hijacked into a platform of artistic, theoretical, social or political gathering and activity; of time that is punctuated and fragmentarized by projects, nomadic lifestyle, and other forms of job opportunity that thwart the experience of duration in which things may go astray, in which one may hesitate, delve into something that doesn’t seem useful yet, drastically change or simply research. In sum, there are many positive aspects of higher education in the arts that empower artists today and, thereby, explain the mass exodus of artists from the artistic scene toward the university. But there are equally many problems associated with, what was uncritically appraised as the “educational turn” in the arts, which prompt us to organize this conference.

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