Suddenly the Future.

“Professional qualifcations are worth nothing - an arts degree is like a diploma in origami. As for
security, is nonexistent. Some computer at the Treasury decides interest rates should go up a point
and I owe the bank manager another year’s hard work”
J.G. Ballard1

Starting.

In 2013, I started teaching Artistic Research at the Royal Academy of Art in The
Hague. The Academy was fguring out how to implement this increasingly trending
subject in the Bachelors curriculum so I was hired a bit as an experiment. I have
always felt a slight discomfort when in academia and being a teacher is so new for
me that I sometimes feel closer to the issues troubling my students than those that
concern the colleagues in my department. However, having taught here for two years
and coming from a different organization of social life like in Spain has given me
distance for analysis and specially for hope. I have witnessed a number of situations
that are turning the last piece of my Rubik’s cube, positioning myself both as an artist
and a (starting) teacher. Agreeing with Luis Camnitzer, I am starting to suspect they
are actually the same thing.

Luckily, my superiors never questioned my skepticism towards Artistic Research

actually becoming a discipline or a fxed set of methodologies prone to produce
some kind of quantifable knowledge, so I was given carte blanche. As an artist, I
always found important to work through, not an anti-structure, but a structure that
promotes fuidity, followed by a consistent reconsideration of where I stand within a
particular critical landscape. Just like what Heraclitus said about the river: The water
is in constant fuctuation, it is never the same and yet, we can claim it is in fact the
same river.

That is why I chose to maintain a transparent program at all costs, addressing the
broader socio-economical context and the array of political interests that are
arguably responsible for the recent and biased interest around Artistic Research and
its role in academia. I believe that it is largely intertwined with the ideological agenda
behind the cuts in culture and education.

1 J.G. Ballard, 'Super-Cannes' (2000)

Power games and disagreement.

As Stephan Dillemuth2 says, among this fast-paced, career-building schemes we are

dealing with, we do not have a chance for self-defnition. It is often easier to know
what we do not want than to know what we want. Unaware of the existing power
relations between myself and the students, I slowly realised how any reference I was
bringing to class would never be contested, being automatically assumed as part of
my own beliefs.

That made me want the students to strongly disagree with me. I gave them a text by
Anton Vidokle titled Art Without Work? 3 in which he claims that the only way for
artists to gain real autonomy from both the market and the state is by taking on a
side job that would allow them to fund their own work. What the students did not
know is that my views are quite the opposite of Vidokle's.

The reactions were diverse. First they struggled to comply, then they were equally
shocked and relieved to know they could just think differently. My students are so
concerned on how they are gonna make a living (or sell their art) that it is almost
frightening. However, they lack the guidance to see beyond this threat of
precariousness, and they regard any reference to politics or any critique to the
neoliberal turn in their academy as too much of a fuss.

I don’t care about politics.

I just want to be free in my studio and do whatever I want.

Sorry, but no. In the current context of cultural industries and knowledge economies
we must stop and reconsider which kind of institution we want to work and study in,
and we have to do it now. The Bologna process and the rampant privatization of
higher education, of which The Netherlands is not an exception, are at a point of no
return. These de-politicized art academies are just a mirror of the competitive regime
we live in. A false meritocracy. Budget cuts mean more students going in debt as the
government aid decreases, while academies are still asked to excel in order to
preserve their (already reduced) funding. That translates into art schools not
teaching artists how to make art, but how to behave around it. This entrepreneurial
tendency provokes a shift in the way the general public perceives art production.

2 Stephan Dillemuth, 'A Hard Way to Enlightenment', 2010. Downloadable at:

http://www.societyofcontrol.com/index.htm

3 Anton Vidokle, 'Art Without Work?' e-fux journal #29, November 2011.
http://www.e-fux.com/journal/art-without-work/
People expect entertainment. Any mind-blowing experiment or wink to political
contestation is often regarded as an elitist intellectual move of a paling left.

Thanks Wilders.4

Is there still a space for art apart from the state or the market? Given the actual
paradigm, we should not give for granted that art academies will consitute a safe
haven for research and experimentation. Nevertheless, academia is not only a
hierarchical structure but also a community of peers, where at times solidarity and
affect can play a stronger role than populism and competitiveness.

Professionalism.

The professionalization of artists promoted by neoliberal art academies is just

another understated euphemism for the businessifcation of the art world. To whom
does it beneft that artists professionalize? The answer to this undoubtedly cynical.

If there is such thing as art's autonomy, it should certainly be a space of embodiment

radically separate from the total administration of everyday life. Academies should be
autonomous zones where professionalism can be redefned, preparing the ground
for development of new policies stemming from an ethics of engagement. It all
comes down to how we measure success and, most importantly, who sets the
standards. In order to participate in the political sphere and to contest the current
economic situation, artists do not need to use the ideological banners of others. We
can make the banners ourselves.

Suddenly the Future.

“Our responsibility as artists is to act as if art actually determined policy”

Luis Camnitzer5

During the Franco regime, the Diagonal University Campus in Barcelona was
erected far away from the city center, avoiding meeting points by placing the

4 Geert Wilders is a Dutch politician and the founder and leader of the Party for Freedom (Partij
voor de Vrijheid – PVV) which currently is the fourth-largest party in the Dutch parliament. During
the polemics around the budget cuts in culture in 2011, he claimed “art is a left-wing hobby”.

For a detailed article on the Dutch cuts in culture, please read:

http://merijnoudenampsen.org/2013/02/21/dutch-culture-wars-on-the-politics-of-gutting-the-arts/

5 Luis Camnitzer, The Detweeting of Academia. e-fux journal #62, February 2015
http://www.e-fux.com/journal/the-detweeting-of-academia/
buildings giving their backs to each other. Ideological urban planing at its best. In
2002 I started my Fine Arts degree there. The school became one of the leading
students organizations in the protests against the war in Iraq, ending with the
occupation of Sant Jaume square in Barcelona. We missed entire subjects that year,
and some of them where even taught from the occupied square.

Foundations do not last forever.

A few days ago, the 8th of March, Jerome Roos was writing about the rebellion now
taking place in Amsterdam against the neoliberal university and the subsequent
occupation of the Maagdenhuis: “Suddenly, the critique of fnancialization,
bureaucratization, top-down managerialism and the lack of democratic decision-
making has made its way onto the eight o’clock news and onto the front-pages of all
the leading newspapers — no mean feat in a country as thoroughly neoliberalized
and depoliticized as the Netherlands. A handful of rebellious students have
effectively jolted their teachers into action, and the academic community, once
atomized and apathetic, has quickly sprung into a state of collective self-
organization. Suddenly, there is resistance.”6

Suddenly. Boom.

6 Please read: http://roarmag.org/2015/03/occupation-maagdenhuis-university-amsterdam/