Marsha Bruinen, Concrete tools (2016), concrete, various sizes (video still)


Education

After months of reflexive research on education many projects and enquiries pointed at the unrealized potentials of (art) education as an investment in the future. Attempts to unpack and foresee the future often appeared in the participants’ proposals and texts, as a direct and directed critique of present pedagogical conditions — of which bleak and worrisome views prevailed. Yet not without self-reflection and an extensive reach into ‘utopian politics’ that, according to Frederic Jameson, ‘aim at imagining, and sometimes even at realizing, a system radically different from this one’. Many works produced in this edition of Art in Context expose problems that are undecidable; which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as we continue to try to decide them. In the case of utopian politics, it seems that the most reliable political test lies not in judgment of the individual action so much as in its capacity to generate new collective strategies.     1 — Installation in the Gerrit Rietveld Academy Concrete tools by Marsha Bruinen, concrete, various sizes, 24 May 2016 2 — Exhibition at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art, Concrete tools, video by Marsha Bruinen, June 2014     3 — Intervention in the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, by SKOKE ('skool of jokes') 4 — Exhibition in the Cobra Museum of Modern Art; Bricks by Urs Moore 5 — Intervention in the Gerrit Rietveld Academy website, by Urs Moore         6-9 — Open Day at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy; poster series, 2016 The ‘Education’ publication includes some results of the assignment to ‘make an object-lecture’. This assignment was an attempt to extend the discussion on education into the realm of making and to objectify at times complex and complicated standpoints. As such it followed closely the main methodology of Art in Context, which attempts to face participants equally and simultaneously with the realm of ideas and the realm of acts, with concept and material and, last but not least, with their personal ambition and social positioning. What came out of this exercise in ‘materializing an attitude’ was a series of works that speak about education in a close and often bodily manner. In these works and projects, education appears as a process that becomes fruitful only when it involves the full confrontation with oneself and with the other and dares to exceed the socially prescribed set of rules and regulations. Most of the works were included in the Art in Context ‘Education’ exhibition at the Cobra Museum of Modern Art. At the annual academy’s Study Days participants announced a day of performative interventions that would have had an unexpected immediate impact on educational routines, as a variety of different modes of participatory knowledge transfer and acquisition were demonstrated.