ArtSchool 2020

Painting with Mandinga

But capoeira is not only about potency, it is also about grace, rhythm, timing. When we look at this prominent figure in the painting, his eyes closed and his body raised against the sky, we might also think of the aspect of capoeira known as Mandinga. Difficult to translate, this innate quality is a source of power, knowledge and protection, manifested by the best practitioners.

To Learn through Hesitation

One man reads a manuscript to another who, assuming the role of teacher, evaluates what is being read. Although the teacher’s pose seems solid, his body has been formed in gestural brushstrokes that undermine the impression of firmness. As such, the painter who paints this scene with his brush is felt in his presence as a third character, no less important than the other two. The painting, held in the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), is Alexis Reads a Manuscript to Émile Zola. The characters are, respectively, Paul Alexis, Emile Zola, and Paul Cézanne.

Democracy through Intimacy

Cristina Ribas writes on the art collective Ultra-red and ‘Schools of Echoes’, a long-term project designed to activate pedagogical spaces for development and dissemination of theory and practice in Militant Sound Investigation.

Education versus Discipline

Becky Haghpanah-Shirwan on School No 6., a permanent artwork by Russian-born Ilya Kabakov. Installed at Chinati Foundation, it sits within the militarised architecture of the former Fort D. A. Russell in Marfa, Texas embedded in the kind of sprawling desert landscape associated with the image of the great American Cowboy.

Visualising Conflicts of Perspective

Marion von Osten writes on Edumund Collein’s 1928 work ‘Photoplastik, Japanese Student at Bauhaus Holding Circle of Shadows’.

The Café Classroom

In 1968, the French artist Robert Filliou was hard at work on his own contribution to pedagogical thought, notably the collection of texts, letters, interviews and blank spaces for reader comments published in 1970 as Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts. In this work, which sums up the peculiar brand of living poetics that Filliou had been developing since the late 1950s, it is above all the question of the temporality of equality that takes centre stage.

In Defence of Skhole

Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga writes on Adelita Husni-Bey’s Postcards from the Desert Island (2010-11). This project seems rather simple from the outset: a group of schoolchildren at the École Vitruve in Paris, aged seven to eleven, are proposed a three-week undirected workshop in which they have to imagine and organise life from scratch in a desert island.

Addressing Systemic Invisibility

Sylwia Serafinowicz studies a university commission, a bronze, outdoor sculpture – Students Aspire, 1978 by Elizabeth Catlett – as an example of positive reinforcement of equality. Besides reflecting on the role that the work played in the physical space of the Howard University campus, this essay considers what impact Students Aspire can have as a digital being, present in an online teaching environment.

Ethics of Pedagogy and Painting

We are witnessing a reading lesson: the child’s task is to spell out the letters indicated by their teacher. The reading manuals of the period strongly emphasised the lesson’s oral component, enjoining teachers to make sure that their pupils ‘open their mouth rather than speaking through their teeth’ to assure proper pronunciation. But Chardin’s lesson is silent.

Purplewashing: Claiming Ambiguous Space in

Johanna’s Billing’s In Purple (2019) is, on the initial approach, a combined document of a performance and music video, following the pink dance troupe’s actions across the park. The footage itself, however, tells a different story: the young women we’re ostensibly following are only on screen for just over half of its 12-minute duration.

What to Believe?

John Miller’s essay reconsider Mike Kelley’s artwork Educational Complex (1995) vis-à-vis the current global pandemic and its implications for the neoliberal order.

Portrait of a Friendship

In 1785 the French artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (1749–1803) electrified the art world with her Self-Portrait with Two Pupils. An immense (210.8 x 151.1 cm) depiction of the artist seated at her easel, palette in hand, this was a bold and complex assertion of talent.

Afterall ArtSchool Q&A: In Defence of Skhole

Researcher and curator Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga in conversation with Afterall Managing Editor Adeena Mey on the school as a site of transgression, emotion and radical imagination in Adelita Husni-Bey’s experimental project Postcards From the Desert Island (2010–11).

Afterall Art School Q&A: What to Believe?

Artist, critic and Barnard College Professor John Miller discusses the art school in neoliberal crisis and the role of art and the artist in the present, in light of Mike Kelley’s 1995 work of institutional critique, Educational Complex. In conversation Alex Schady, artist and Programme Director for Art at Central Saint Martins.

Afterall ArtSchool Q&A: Portrait of a Friendship with Yuriko Jackall

Yuriko Jackall, Curator of French Paintings at the Wallace Collection, in conversation with artist and CSM Professor of Research Mick Finch on feminism and friendship in Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self Portrait With Two Pupils (1785).

Afterall ArtSchool Q&A: Purplewashing with Chris Fite-Wassilak

Writer and critic Chris Fite-Wassilak in conversation with artist, filmmaker and CSM professor Graham Ellard on identity and the production of space in Johanna Billing’s 2019 video and performance piece In Purple.

Afterall ArtSchool Q&A: Addressing Systemic Invisibility with Sylwia Serafinowicz

A conversation and Q&A with writer and curator Sylwia Serafinowicz on Elizabeth Catlett‘s 1978 work Students Aspire, made for the campus of Howard University. Serafinowicz will discuss the work and her short essay on its themes co-facilitators Alison Green, art historian, critic, curator and CSM Senior Lecturer, and creative and curator Vanessa Spiridellis, whose research covers Pan-African religions, pirate history and intersectional feminist theory.