El artista y arquitecto Miguel Braceli (Venezuela, 1983) ha terminado sus estudios de Maestría en Maryland Institute College of Art. En un gesto de generosidad o más bien de llamado de atención Braceli ha publicado su tesis en diferentes medios digitales. Mediante un completo y acucioso escrito que contó con la tutoría de Mónica Amor, Braceli nos ofrece la oportunidad de conocer y aprender de sus cuestionamientos derivados desde su propia experiencia durante su escolaridad en la maestría. La lectura de este texto nos permite aproximarnos con mayor profundidad al sistema educativo de las universidades estadounidenses, en cuanto a programas de estudios de postgrados en artes en la actualidad. Braceli propone una serie de interrogantes que surgen del cuestionamiento de un modelo educativo que reproduce practicas ensimismas encerradas en un contexto cada vez mas disciplinar, al tiempo que sugiere nuevas propuestas en que el arte pueda emerger y trascienda a la tradición del cubo blanco y el espectáculo del que depende el mercado del arte. Estas son solo algunas de las tantas reflexiones que se planten, ahora con otra variable más, el COVID-19, que se expande cada día más y al parecer está cambiando las reglas del juego en la educación y todas las instancias de nuestras vidas.
Nos permitimos traducir de forma libre la introducción que Braceli realiza de este documento en redes sociales y que puedes descargar AQUÍ.
TRIGGER. SHOOTING US Constitutions. Miguel Braceli. MICA, 2019
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Me complace decir que acabo de terminar mi MFA y presento mi tesis en forma de PDF descargable: #TheNakedSchool.
The Naked School (La Escuela Desnuda) es la propuesta de un edificio sin paredes cuyo objetivo es acercar la producción artística a los contextos sociales y políticos que los rodean; Un enfoque de la realidad que se basa en una estructura de aprendizaje capaz de estimular las prácticas socio-estéticas dentro y fuera del cubo blanco. Este texto se sitúa en contra de la tendencia de las escuelas de arte de replicar las normas institucionales y de mercado del mundo del arte. Podríamos decir, que si bien las escuelas de arte se esfuerzan por convertirse en espacios de exhibición como museos y galerías tradicionales, los museos contemporáneos de hoy en día buscan convertirse en escuelas al involucrar a la audiencia con proyectos educativos que implican un compromiso radical con el espacio público y un público más amplio.
Estas ideas se proponen desde mi perspectiva como estudiante de MFA en los Estados Unidos, pero se articulan con algunas referencias latinoamericanas sobre proyectos pedagógicos experimentales. Estos, a su vez, son contrastados con mi experiencia como estudiante y profesor en la escuela de arquitectura de la Universidad Central de Venezuela. Finalmente, el texto termina en el presente, reflexionando sobre el destino de las escuelas y museos a medida que el mundo es consumido por una pandemia global:
Con la aparición de COVID-19, el atractivo de las Escuelas de Arte podría colapsar junto con la economía global. Esta pandemia ha generado una serie de restricciones sociales que llevaron a las escuelas a una transición inmediata a la educación en línea. Al hacer esto, sus primeros dos pilares colapsaron automáticamente (los recursos técnicos y los espacios de socialización), reduciendo así los pilares robustos de la escuela a uno: las clases. Esto se refiere al limitado intercambio académico entre estudiantes y profesores que tiene lugar en redes virtuales. Ante la pérdida de recursos técnicos, espacios de trabajo y espacios de exhibición, así como la imposibilidad de una educación en persona, estudiantes de YALE, TISCH, RISD, SVA, Columbia y mi propia institución, el Maryland Institute College of Art ( MICA), han solicitado un reembolso parcial de la matrícula que refleje el semestre mutilado de primavera de 2020.
Sería fácil calificar a los estudiantes de arte de un egoísmo ciego durante una crisis global que exige solidaridad humana. Pero su respuesta es consistente con lo que nuestra escuela ha promovido como la columna vertebral de nuestra educación: desde los estudios y laboratorios para fabricar las obras, hasta las cenas con artistas y las exposiciones curadas, – todo lo cual completa el circuito cerrado de una práctica ensimismada, divorciada de las miserias del mundo allá afuera-. A saber, esta es la educación artística definida como la simulación de un cierto ejercicio de la profesión artística, educación que superpone la idea del éxito sobre la construcción del conocimiento, una idea que se derrumba sobre sí misma como una tautología perfecta.
Gracias a Mónica Amor por haberme acompañado en este texto, y a todos los profesores, artistas, curadores y compañeros de clase por estos increíbles dos años.
Monumentos Horizontales. Miguel Braceli. Espacios Revelados. Guadalajara, 2020.
I Introduction
All MFAs end with a thesis. In Art Schools we usually call a final exhibition of art, design, or illustration projects a Thesis Show. However, this event is not truly a thesis, nor is it entirely an exhibition. To complicate matters, I want to present this essay as a “thesis” insofar as it is a proposition, argued and justified even when it has no proof. The Naked School is thus a proposal, put forth by the architectural metaphor of a divested building, for an imagined learning space that aims to bring education closer to the aesthetic politics of contemporary practice and the public sphere. It is a text whose ideas I began drafting during my time at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which for me was a surprising new experience. I use the word “surprising” because it is a term that entertains both wonder and disappointment. These sentiments have stimulated me to generate a text on art and education that allows me to explore my interest in the synthesis of these two fields, while also probing the relevance of these intersections in the areas of artistic social practices and participatory art. This is the crux of my work, though I don’t pretend to propose this text as a work of art, nor do I intend to inhabit the field of institutional critique. The works produced during my two years of schooling have been developed outside of the school walls by dialoguing with its students and with other communities and territories outside the institution. Enterrar las banderas en el mar, Here We Are, Trigger, and Monumentos Horizontales are some of these projects realized between 2018 and 2020. They allowed me to bind my concerns with form as education to the premises of the Naked School. This School is the proposal of a building without walls which aims to bring artistic production closer to the social and political contexts that surround them; an approach to reality that is founded on a learning structure capable of stimulating socio-aesthetic practices inside and outside the white cube of exhibition spaces. This text situates itself against the tendency of art schools to replicate the institutional and market-driven norms of the art world. I would argue that while art schools strive to become exhibitionary models for traditional museums and galleries, contemporary museums today seek to become schools themselves by engaging the audience with educational projects that imply a radical engagement with public space and larger audiences. From within this logic, my aim is to explore the contradiction of a self-absorbed educational system and an increasingly expansive “exhibitionary complex.” These ideas are proposed from my perspective as an MFA student in the US but they are articulated vis-à-vis certain Latin American references on experimental pedagogical projects. These, in turn, are contrasted to my experience as a student and professor at the architecture school of the Central University of Venezuela. Finally, the text ends in the present, pondering on the destiny of schools and museums as the world is consumed by a global pandemic.
V Conclusions Pandemic
Art schools are institutions supported by three unique pillars. The first pillar is that of technical resources and includes equipment such as workshops, studios, and exhibition spaces. Secondly, the school provides social spaces through events such as talks, gallery openings, and dinners with acclaimed artists and curators. Lastly, the school includes a staff of educators and classes whose academic content is in turn articulated through the first two pillars of technical resources and the social atmosphere of the university. All of this is an accumulation of assets that make schools attractive despite the high financial investment in the face of low recovery expectations. With the appearance of COVID-19, the appeal of Art Schools might collapse alongside the global economy. This pandemic has generated a series of social restrictions that led schools to an immediate transition to online education. In doing this, its first two pillars automatically collapsed, thus reducing the school’s robust pillars to one. This concerns the limited academic exchange between students and professors taking place on virtual networks. Faced with the loss of technical resources, workspaces, and exhibition spaces, as well as the impossibility of an in-person education, students from YALE, TISCH, RISSD, SVA, Columbia, and my own institution, the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), have asked for a partial tuition refund that reflects the mutilated Spring semester of 2020. This was not a situation seen in medical or engineering schools -which equally require direct education- it happened predominantly in art schools. We could understand this as a symptom of a preexisting crisis that this virus has brutally exposed. After a long career teaching in the United States, Luis Camnitzer provides “Art Teaching as Fraud” (2012), a text that highlights in numbers the high investment in tuition and the low statistics of graduates who manage to eventually develop an artistic career. He also demonstrates the complexity and challenge of art education beyond the teaching of technique and trades. Camnitzer suggests a solution through paths in interdisciplinarity and in a social reconfiguration, which would be capable of recognizing and financing art education. Now, in the context of a pandemic, education is also one of the social structures to be confronted and questioned.
It would be easy to brand art students as blind egoists during a global crisis that demands human solidarity. But their response is consistent with what our school has promoted as the backbone of our education: from the studios and labs to fabricate the works, to the artist dinners and the curated exhibitions—all of which complete the closed circuit of a self-absorbed practice divorced from the miseries of the world out there. To wit, this is art education defined as the simulation of a certain exercise of the artistic profession, education that superimposes the idea of success over the construction of knowledge, one that collapses upon itself like a perfect tautology. Currently, the reality of my school is different, just as the position of the students would be different if the school had privileged learning over everything else. As a consequence of the pandemic social distancing, the studios were abandoned, the laboratories closed, and all the exhibitions canceled. We only have our classes left, thus we’ve been forced to reinvent ourselves through online platforms while exploring different formats as we adapted to the circumstances. The pandemic took away all of the accessories and left us only with education, ripped of its desirable wardrobe the school has been left naked. Where do we move next, once deprived of abundance, and the only resource and space is knowledge? How is this knowledge constructed without the resources and props of simulation? What does it mean to produce knowledge in art schools? And above all, for what, and for whom, are we here? Finally, from the point of view of this argument we could also ask ourselves: is this truly a Naked School?
No, the school is not naked but instead vacant. The walls are still there and the students have moved their studios to the edges of their bedrooms back at home — confining themselves to yet another place, now a more intense space of isolation. The complexity of this reality was not fully assumed as a challenge to develop new proposals, but rather as a shortfall due to the impossibility of making use of these spaces; especially the white box where our thesis shows will no longer be exhibited. The cancellation of the Grad Show was indeed one of the losses that generated the most frustration in our Class of 2020; a defeat that could be valuably repurposed if we turn this void into an object of reflection. Until now, we have focused on the potentialities of the Naked School as a possibility of learning from encounters with reality, but it is reality that has forced the undressing of new perspectives. Beyond opportunities outside of the exhibition space, both artistically and pedagogically, this crisis put on display another fact pregnant with opportunities: the museums closed but the schools did not. Education has continued; albeit tentatively, as it transforms into online systems — emerging while aspiring to foreground experimental conditions to design new pedagogical structures. Regardless of their success or failure, in this moment, schools have ceased being museums so that they could return to being schools. Relations between students and professors have been sustained, while the works in the museums are left without an audience. Education within the art world is once again placed in another interstice, this time between its dependence on the art world of which it is part, and the autonomy of the academic world to create its own models.
Undressing the school is a proposal that arises in the face of the impossibility of dismantling the art world. Andrea Fraser, in her text “There’s No Place Like Home”(2012) , recognizes both the problems of the art world and our implicit participation in it. The text exposes the contradictions between the discourses of art and its social practices in the midst of contexts of great inequality; as well as the gaps between the objectives and the real impact of these proposals. A cadre of artists, intellectuals, and cultural producers marked by leftist politics is sponsored by the same vicious capitalist system that supports the art market and the abysmal inequalities of society, thus leaving us with no more than our ephemeral utopias. This is a discursive gap that affects the materialism of art and reality at large while placing us all (museums and schools, as well as patrons, curators, and artists) in a shared reverie. Fraser’s compelling essay was published as her contribution and critical questioning of her participation in the Whitney Biennial of 2012. It followed an intentional distancing on the part of the artist from the museums and galleries that has supported but also marginalized her work. The text also begins by stating that her research of recent years has occurred alongside work with students and within the academy—she is professor and chair in the department of Interdisciplinary Studio at UCLA. Through her projects in the form of tours, audio guides and talks in museums, the artist has developed an artistic practice in institutional spaces that thrives on a meticulous analysis of their operations. Her work also explores the contradiction at the heart of institutional critique: as she explains in this and other texts, art cannot exist outside the field of art. Fraser argues that similar to the architecture of museums, we are institutional bodies, we dress in columns, capitals, and ornaments to the extent that we inhabit it. Art schools – as other cultural institutions – are full of contradictions, but also full of possibilities if we reconfigure their role within this system. Schools, in particular, are well positioned to propose new ways of living within this inalienable field, producing spaces where knowledge may find some freedom.
Although schools may become schools again, museums have partially lost their educational role. For the purposes of this text, which has highlighted the emphasis on professional development and simulation in the development of art education, it is important to mention that the temporary closure of museums and galleries in response to COVID-19 has directly affected the education departments of cultural institutions. The closure of programs such as guided tours, talks, or performances, that serve to engage large audiences, has left many independent contractors without jobs. In March MoMA sent a statement by email to its contracted educators where, in the wake of the crisis, it explained that, “it will be months, if not years, before we anticipate returning to budget and operations levels to require education services.” The cancellation of the educated contracts generated noise in the press and social media similar to that generated by art school students requesting the partial refund of their tuition. Clearly, both situations are different: one could argue that education was sustained because students paid their tuition, while museums lost their income and audience; and without the possibility of charging entry, they did not have the ability to redirect to new online platforms. The examination of these separate spaces is relevant for studying both approaches to education. It should also be clarified that what I am providing here are volatile readings, in the midst of an emergency, of evolving situations. The actual outcome of these dynamics will take months and even years to manifest. For now, the reality of these institutions is firmly tethered to the ruthless dynamics of the economy. But it is interesting to note that somehow museums mostly safeguarded their coffers by relegating education to the margins; thus highlighting the economic inequality mentioned by Fraser by showing the inability to transform, and finally becoming entrenched in their canonical structures.
While museums are adorned with classic ornaments on the facades or designed by star architects, we have to free art schools by bringing them closer to their contexts. In order to discover what is truly substantial, education must be naked. Its spaces can only be open places, empty spaces that are inhabited and sustained by the possibilities of learning. Art schools must depurate education, to find the autonomy necessary to create new possible systems; and in turn, go outside to approach reality from this transformation. We speak of learning structures that can affect and nurture its contexts without collapsing, as well as generating a contribution to those contexts in return. If Schools require physical buildings and walls, academics must be reduced to their structural support—a structural support predicated on experimentation, transformation and in constant exchange with its milieu. The Naked School, more than a metaphor, is a prototype, an architectural proposal to question the way in which we learn and teach today and hopefully help us map new possibilities and learning models. Currently there is an abundance of art schools, and therefore, a wealth of artists. If artists today are born from these schools, and if art schools themselves can become works of art; then there would be nothing more impactful in the art world than a rethinking of education. By tearing down the walls of our schools the art world would be able to transcend from its pre-existing confines and be introduced to the world at large.
Thanks to Monica Amor for tutoring this research and a being a great encouragement for me to be here today; to Jennie Hirsh for having accompanied me during these two years; To all the professors, artists in residence, visiting artists and visiting curators of Mount Royal School of Art; To departments such as Leslie King Hammond Fellowship, Strategic Initiatives, Center for Student Engagement who supported me in the first projects outside of school, especially Nicolás Rodríguez. To my classmates who also did school. To Fulbright and particularly to Laspau – affiliated with Harvard University, a program to strengthen higher education in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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