I do not believe we can go on posing a change of institutions and a change of attitudes as alternatives. From each polarity follows a rigid programme: in the first case, destruction and then innovation of institutions, imagined at some finite point in time; in the second case, a rejection of politics and social activity, with criticism becoming an activity in itself only by an acceptance, however sullen, of all other existing social habits and structures. Each position shares a negative character: an instransigent group against the whole social structure; an intransigent group against the whole intellectual structure. As such each corresponds to the positive needs of many intellectuals in our society; each attitude, I may say, forms almost every day in my mind. Basically, they are the last, and of course serious, positions of our pre-democratic politics; change, there, is essentially against others; to change with others is seen as compromise. Each group, similarly, accepts the liberal separation between individuals and societies, and the related separation between cultural content and cultural institutions; the divergence comes only when one or the other separate entity is seen as decisive.
… The individuals and the institutions will have, essentially, to change together, or they will not change at all. And my reason for going on working on these lines is that I know, from observing myself and others in very different institutions, that this is a continuing process, in which the moments of choice and of direction are often subtle and delicate, though the comitments they lead to are often profound. What I have tried to envisage is a radical change which yet includes a human continuity and i believe the pressure for this, in our actual society, is the most intense and valuable pressure we have. The job of any of us working in this field is articulation, for it is when it is articulate that the pressure becomes a discipline and a programme.
Raymond Williams
Still re-reading Kosuth’s writings, that’s cited by him in “Comments on the Second Frame”
“Don’t, for heavens sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
it seems we begin with two points: an institution and a conversation. An art school, simply put, is a representative of the institutionalization of art. It represents the world as a collection of rules, practices, traditions, habits -about art- that are organised within a social order. The presumptions and prescriptions that are taught there are a de facto description of what art is. When you describe art, you are also describing how meaning is produced, and subjectivity is formed. In other words you are describing reality. By teaching a description of reality you are engaged in constructing it, and in this sense an art school is a political institution as much as a cultural one (insofar as one can separate them to begin with).”
from “Teaching to learn (a conversation about ‘how’ and ‘why’)”, Joseph Kosuth.
Ok so that’s probably a bit more on the theory side of the equation. and I have to admit I haven’t had much of a chance to work on the practical aspects of establishing something a little more functional than this blog when it comes to the OSAS. but I guess I felt it necessary to post and represent the much maligned theoretical aspects of this endeavour and renew what for me is the power of theory and words to drive practical developments. In this case theory might be another word for “doing what you can” with the recognition of the place of reading and digesting through writing, in inspiring action.
I think theory and discussion are also useful at this early stage because they provide a space to be totally idealistic about what an OSAS might become. In the spirit of that sort of idealism there is the chance for an OSAS to shift Kosuth’s description of the art institution. If we accept that “By teaching a description of reality you are engaged in constructing it” then by engaging all, (not just the “teachers”), in constructing the teaching process, it might be possible to arrive at a kind of “meta-point-of-view” from which it becomes possible to see not only the way we construct reality through the knowledge we engage with, but also how we construct that knowledge.
to complete the loop we might return to the Wittgenstein quote. In this instance non-sense might be what emerges in terms of teaching, but if we pay attention to the function and functioning of the non-sense then important insights can emerge. To follow that one step further one way of paying attention to the non-sense might be to ask why Kosuth started his article with that quote and why am I reiterating it. for me it is for the sake of the second of the two points that Kosuth starts with. The conversation. Without the institution the conversation is all the OSAS has. So at this stage I would heartily encourage all dialogue, whether sense or non-sense and when the heap of shit gets too big then let the moderators move in.
