Camel Collective, The Second World Congress of Free Artists. In Three Acts, Aarhus Kunsthal; 2013
full text
www.camelcollective.org/
With humor and wit the authors invite us to
join in the slow intellectual burn of unreliable knwoledge and the
connundrums of pedagogical promiscuity in an age of transnational
capital. Camel Collective's ripe of radical treat expands our conception
of "education in art" for a democracy on its knees. -- Jennifer A. Gonzalez, University of California, Santa Cruz
An incisive and playful analysis of the interrelated commercial, academic, curatorial and hedonistic forces that shape the global contemporary art world. Camel Collective turns the "pedagogical turn" in contemporary art in its head, taking inspiration from Asger Jorn's International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhauss, which attempted to create a spontaneous creative community resistant to pedagigy. The Second World Congress of Free Artists turns academic debate into an open-ended pwrformance that inspires and angers, suggests and unravels, from the political exclusions of today's threatened meritocracy to a series of imaginary future premises that demand us to reconsider the ways our utopian dreams of a free academy mimic the alienate flows of capitalist mobility. -- Karen Kurczynski, University of Massachusetts Amherts
7MinCompressed from Carla Herrera-Prats on Vimeo.
Texts performed: Camel Collective, Carlos Motta, Andrea Creutz, Sebastian Berthier and Sabathi Shirin; and Sean Docray
Actors: Doug Baron, Adin Lenahan, Corey Tazmania
The book contains the following scripts: Camel Collective (DK/US/MX): Opening Speech; Mirene Arsanios (LB): The Banyan Tree; UKK (DK): Young Art Workers' Speech at the Second World Congress of Free Artists; The YES! Association(SE): We Will Open a New Front II - lecture by Lee H. Jones; Benj Gerdes and Jenn Hayashida (US/SE): Slow People; Colin Lang (US): An Imagined Bauhaus; Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen (DK): Dear Patient Listener; Sande Cohen (US/TH): Best Wishes to Artists and Intellectuals; Zachary Cahill (US): Art, Pedagogy: A Small Compact; Eduardo Abaroa (MX): A Brief Account of Didactic Curiosities; Javier Toscano (MX): On Critical Boredom; Ashley Hunt (US): Dictatorship of an Audience; Johannes Raether (DE): Towards an Academy of the Future: A Few Monstrous Thoughts by Ari Godwin Kollontai-Hartz; Temporary Institute For Witchpower (DE): REFUSE - RE-FUSE - RE-FUSE; Michael Ashkin (US): were it not for the price of desertion; Andrea Creutz with Sebastien Berthier and Shirin Sabahi (SE): The Parties to this Convention: When capitalism and the academy follow the same impetus, only a disruptive silence can stop the machine from running amok; Anthony Davies, Nils Norman, and Howard Slater (UK): Suspended Vocation By Movement of the 20th October 2010; Carlos Motta (CO/US): A Message on Pedagogy and the Liberation of the Spirit; Sean Dockray (Public School) (US): An Escape Act; Mónica Castillo (MX): Volkerball; Rum46 (DK): Just (a) Dictionary of a Few Ordinary Thoughts: Validation and Disruption of the Collective; Mary Walling Blackburn (Anhoek School) (US): Odor is Speech; Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler (AT/IT): Self-Organization and Self-Education in Venezuela; Sarina Basta, Karin Schneider, and Simone Leigh (US/EG): When the Southern Cross the Dog; C. Krydz Ikwuemesi (NG): Art Training in Nigeria and the PhD Syndrome; Miklos Erhardt (HU): Would the Situationists Teach Art?; Eva Egermann and Elka Krasny (AT): To Make Demands Towards Education: The Things We Have Learned...; J. Morgan Puett: Mildred's Lane, Pensylvannia; Eva Diaz (US): Whither Curatorial Studies?; Sam Gould/Red76 (US): Flatlands: Non-Hierarchical Space and Its Uses; Flo Maak (DE): Declaration of Dependence; and Stephan Dillemuth (DE): El Arduo camino hacia el conocimiento.
Installation and workshop at the Hessel Museum, as part of the exhibition Third Idiom curated by Lindsey Berdond
2014
A long-term research project by the artist group Camel Collective that takes the form of a “theater installation” and loose collection of scripts. The scripts, visual works, and “trialectic stage” function as a response to, and in the spirit of, the First World Congress organized in Alba, Italy, in 1956 by the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (Asger Jorn and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio), among others. Over the course of a week in Alba, proto-Situationist members addressed the concepts of free art, collective organizing, the legacy of the Bauhaus’ pedagogical model that was implemented to generate a union of art, architecture, and design as a “total” art.
However, by the 1950s, the results of this method indicated to Asger Jorn and friends that the Bauhaus models had become barriers to critical thought within the arts. Camel Collective’s “trialectic stage” — designed in collaboration with the architecture firm Winter Office — refers to Jorn’s approach to circumvent the oppositional Marxist binary and alludes to his hexagonal design of a three-sided soccer game that would explore the psycho-physicality of trialectic dynamics.
When considered in a 21st century context, the transcribed speeches from Alba bring to light disjunctions between the cloud of art discourse and the material politics of institutional privatization and discursive/ methodological standardization. As a response to this, The Second World Congress of Free Artists reassesses, parodies, and presents the dialectic of the autonomy of art (a valuable tool in speculating on social alternatives) and the counter-institutional pedagogical practice, which, as art, “cannot exist outside of its application in the world.”
The Second World Congress scripts represent a number of speculations on the topics of artistic pedagogy, alternative forms of education, the professionalization of artists, and the stakes for teaching and learning under neoliberal conditions. The scripts were compiled then dramatized through an intensive editorial process, resulting in an experimental and critical look at the “educational turn” in artistic practice, and the capitalist turn in education, along with Brechtian learning-plays and underlying theatrical tensions between performer and spectator. The scenes, divided into three Acts, were written by contributing artists, art collectives, curators, educators, and scholars.
Within the context of the third idiom, Camel Collective conducted a workshop with local in-service teachers, where they read, rehearsed, and discussed selected scenes together. The information gained during the workshop helped collaborating teachers to direct their
high school students in an experimental production of selected Second World Congress scripts.
In an act of distributed authorship, teachers and students rehearsed on the “trialectic stage” sporadically throughout the exhibition period. Between the artists, local teachers, and public school students, pedagogical critique became both
the event of the play and its mediating stage, its very basis in determining the coordinates of the production and distribution of knowledge.
By Lindsey Berfond
Talk at Ten interview by Kate Yoland, Marfa Public Radio 93.5, 2013
Download interview
“The Last Man in Europe” by Camel Collective, New Year Party Publik in Copenhagen, August 17th, 2013
full text
"Discursos suspendidos..." by Graciela E. Kasep, XXXX, Issue XXX, 2013.
Download interview
"Artist Spotlight on Anthony Graves of Camel Collective" by Kathryn Amato, The MASSMoCA Blog, May 2011.
Link to MassMoca Blog
"Industry Standard" by Carol Yinghua Lu Frieze, Issue 137, March 2011.
full article
"The Second World Congress of Free Artists, Aarhus," Art and Education, Nov. 2010.
Link to Art and Education
"En cada instante, ruptura" Sala de Arte Público Siquieros, Dec. 2010.
Link to Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Camel Collective is the name under which Anthony Graves, Carla Herrera-Prats, and Lasse Lau have worked since 2005. The group works through processes of archival research, dramaturgy, printmaking, painting and photography, focusing on the problematics of labor, pedagogy, theater, and collectivity. Camel’s exhibitions and performances include The Second World Congress of Free Artists at Casa del Lago, Mexico City (2013), Una Obra Para Dos Pinturas at the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan (2012), A Facility Based on Change at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MassMoCA (2011), and Howls for Bologna at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst (2010). Camel has also exhibited at Artist's Space, Art in General, Exit Art, and the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City.
Past configurations of Camel Collective have included: Sarina Basta, Michael Bears, Benj Gerdes, Melanie Gilligan, Lasse Lau, Jacqueline Miro, Robert Ochshorn, and Graham Parker.
An incisive and playful analysis of the interrelated commercial, academic, curatorial and hedonistic forces that shape the global contemporary art world. Camel Collective turns the "pedagogical turn" in contemporary art in its head, taking inspiration from Asger Jorn's International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhauss, which attempted to create a spontaneous creative community resistant to pedagigy. The Second World Congress of Free Artists turns academic debate into an open-ended pwrformance that inspires and angers, suggests and unravels, from the political exclusions of today's threatened meritocracy to a series of imaginary future premises that demand us to reconsider the ways our utopian dreams of a free academy mimic the alienate flows of capitalist mobility. -- Karen Kurczynski, University of Massachusetts Amherts
7MinCompressed from Carla Herrera-Prats on Vimeo.
Texts performed: Camel Collective, Carlos Motta, Andrea Creutz, Sebastian Berthier and Sabathi Shirin; and Sean Docray
Actors: Doug Baron, Adin Lenahan, Corey Tazmania
The book contains the following scripts: Camel Collective (DK/US/MX): Opening Speech; Mirene Arsanios (LB): The Banyan Tree; UKK (DK): Young Art Workers' Speech at the Second World Congress of Free Artists; The YES! Association(SE): We Will Open a New Front II - lecture by Lee H. Jones; Benj Gerdes and Jenn Hayashida (US/SE): Slow People; Colin Lang (US): An Imagined Bauhaus; Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen (DK): Dear Patient Listener; Sande Cohen (US/TH): Best Wishes to Artists and Intellectuals; Zachary Cahill (US): Art, Pedagogy: A Small Compact; Eduardo Abaroa (MX): A Brief Account of Didactic Curiosities; Javier Toscano (MX): On Critical Boredom; Ashley Hunt (US): Dictatorship of an Audience; Johannes Raether (DE): Towards an Academy of the Future: A Few Monstrous Thoughts by Ari Godwin Kollontai-Hartz; Temporary Institute For Witchpower (DE): REFUSE - RE-FUSE - RE-FUSE; Michael Ashkin (US): were it not for the price of desertion; Andrea Creutz with Sebastien Berthier and Shirin Sabahi (SE): The Parties to this Convention: When capitalism and the academy follow the same impetus, only a disruptive silence can stop the machine from running amok; Anthony Davies, Nils Norman, and Howard Slater (UK): Suspended Vocation By Movement of the 20th October 2010; Carlos Motta (CO/US): A Message on Pedagogy and the Liberation of the Spirit; Sean Dockray (Public School) (US): An Escape Act; Mónica Castillo (MX): Volkerball; Rum46 (DK): Just (a) Dictionary of a Few Ordinary Thoughts: Validation and Disruption of the Collective; Mary Walling Blackburn (Anhoek School) (US): Odor is Speech; Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler (AT/IT): Self-Organization and Self-Education in Venezuela; Sarina Basta, Karin Schneider, and Simone Leigh (US/EG): When the Southern Cross the Dog; C. Krydz Ikwuemesi (NG): Art Training in Nigeria and the PhD Syndrome; Miklos Erhardt (HU): Would the Situationists Teach Art?; Eva Egermann and Elka Krasny (AT): To Make Demands Towards Education: The Things We Have Learned...; J. Morgan Puett: Mildred's Lane, Pensylvannia; Eva Diaz (US): Whither Curatorial Studies?; Sam Gould/Red76 (US): Flatlands: Non-Hierarchical Space and Its Uses; Flo Maak (DE): Declaration of Dependence; and Stephan Dillemuth (DE): El Arduo camino hacia el conocimiento.
Installation and workshop at the Hessel Museum, as part of the exhibition Third Idiom curated by Lindsey Berdond
2014
A long-term research project by the artist group Camel Collective that takes the form of a “theater installation” and loose collection of scripts. The scripts, visual works, and “trialectic stage” function as a response to, and in the spirit of, the First World Congress organized in Alba, Italy, in 1956 by the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (Asger Jorn and Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio), among others. Over the course of a week in Alba, proto-Situationist members addressed the concepts of free art, collective organizing, the legacy of the Bauhaus’ pedagogical model that was implemented to generate a union of art, architecture, and design as a “total” art.
However, by the 1950s, the results of this method indicated to Asger Jorn and friends that the Bauhaus models had become barriers to critical thought within the arts. Camel Collective’s “trialectic stage” — designed in collaboration with the architecture firm Winter Office — refers to Jorn’s approach to circumvent the oppositional Marxist binary and alludes to his hexagonal design of a three-sided soccer game that would explore the psycho-physicality of trialectic dynamics.
When considered in a 21st century context, the transcribed speeches from Alba bring to light disjunctions between the cloud of art discourse and the material politics of institutional privatization and discursive/ methodological standardization. As a response to this, The Second World Congress of Free Artists reassesses, parodies, and presents the dialectic of the autonomy of art (a valuable tool in speculating on social alternatives) and the counter-institutional pedagogical practice, which, as art, “cannot exist outside of its application in the world.”
The Second World Congress scripts represent a number of speculations on the topics of artistic pedagogy, alternative forms of education, the professionalization of artists, and the stakes for teaching and learning under neoliberal conditions. The scripts were compiled then dramatized through an intensive editorial process, resulting in an experimental and critical look at the “educational turn” in artistic practice, and the capitalist turn in education, along with Brechtian learning-plays and underlying theatrical tensions between performer and spectator. The scenes, divided into three Acts, were written by contributing artists, art collectives, curators, educators, and scholars.
Within the context of the third idiom, Camel Collective conducted a workshop with local in-service teachers, where they read, rehearsed, and discussed selected scenes together. The information gained during the workshop helped collaborating teachers to direct their
high school students in an experimental production of selected Second World Congress scripts.
In an act of distributed authorship, teachers and students rehearsed on the “trialectic stage” sporadically throughout the exhibition period. Between the artists, local teachers, and public school students, pedagogical critique became both
the event of the play and its mediating stage, its very basis in determining the coordinates of the production and distribution of knowledge.
By Lindsey Berfond
Texts/Archives/Press
Talk at Ten interview by Kate Yoland, Marfa Public Radio 93.5, 2013
Download interview
“The Last Man in Europe” by Camel Collective, New Year Party Publik in Copenhagen, August 17th, 2013
full text
"Discursos suspendidos..." by Graciela E. Kasep, XXXX, Issue XXX, 2013.
Download interview
"Artist Spotlight on Anthony Graves of Camel Collective" by Kathryn Amato, The MASSMoCA Blog, May 2011.
Link to MassMoca Blog
"Industry Standard" by Carol Yinghua Lu Frieze, Issue 137, March 2011.
full article
"The Second World Congress of Free Artists, Aarhus," Art and Education, Nov. 2010.
Link to Art and Education
"En cada instante, ruptura" Sala de Arte Público Siquieros, Dec. 2010.
Link to Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros
Workers
curator Susan Cross provides this introduction to an interview that our
intern Kathryn Amato did with Camel Collectives’ Anthony Graves.
Camel Collective engages in research-based art. For A Facility Based on Change,
the collective used as a starting point the museum’s location in the
former Sprague factory and two archival photographs documenting a
Sprague strike in 1970. The artists employed a screen-printing process
(a technique normally used for mass production) to generate a series of
13 unique paintings. These abstracted images feature fragments of the
historic photographs which the artists cut and recombined.
Images of Herman Miller office partitions of the same era are embedded
in several of the paintings, referencing the transition from assembly
line to office work. The new, yet still incomplete narratives point out
the difficulties and multiple contingencies inherent in re-assembling
history. more
Camel Collective is the name under which Anthony Graves, Carla Herrera-Prats, and Lasse Lau have worked since 2005. The group works through processes of archival research, dramaturgy, printmaking, painting and photography, focusing on the problematics of labor, pedagogy, theater, and collectivity. Camel’s exhibitions and performances include The Second World Congress of Free Artists at Casa del Lago, Mexico City (2013), Una Obra Para Dos Pinturas at the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan (2012), A Facility Based on Change at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MassMoCA (2011), and Howls for Bologna at Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst (2010). Camel has also exhibited at Artist's Space, Art in General, Exit Art, and the Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City.
Past configurations of Camel Collective have included: Sarina Basta, Michael Bears, Benj Gerdes, Melanie Gilligan, Lasse Lau, Jacqueline Miro, Robert Ochshorn, and Graham Parker.
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