The fourth way

In exhibitions and biennales in recent years there has been a move towards including quasi-educational projects - not as add-ons but as an integral part of artistic production.

By default this has exposed even more clearly the fact that today we encounter an art school system that generally does not reflect the potential of cultural practice. There are exceptions, but these remain locked into certain standard models and remain frustrating at a structural level. Education in relation to artistic practice is a parallel zone of obligations, structures and projections. Things have shifted beyond the notion that every major exhibition should have its own developed parallel programme towards a situation where educational structure has been developed as a semi-autonomous project in its own right. For at least 15 years the notion that artists need to have an individual space, to be taught by older artists and to produce degree exhibitions as a necessary step into a broader community of singular practitioners has been insufficient to describe the increasing complexity and non-resolvability of the art context.

The unitednationsplaza project that originated in Berlin as a corollary to the abandoned Manifesta 6 is a specific example. Instigated and organised by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with Boris Groys, Martha Rosler, Walid Raad, Jalal Toufic, Nikolaus Hirsch, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Tirdad Zolghadr and myself, the project functioned as a free school in the centre of Berlin for one year. This was followed by a version in Mexico City and a mutant form known as thenightschool at the New Museum in New York which, because it was subject to certain institutional tensions and requirements, was less successful. Unitednationsplaza, when it worked well, produced discussions and disagreement with an open door policy. The structure was not intended to be a place for all activities. It welcomed theorists, curators and artists. The project occupied the open space that has emerged between traditional models of art education and the supposedly smooth transition into operating as a fully functional artistic persona. Many of those involved were not artists.

The project is not over: it had some potential in its commitment to the notion of a free school with no formal obligations on any side. It had no concrete moment of summation but a great deal of presentation. The key to this, as with other projects like it, was the sense that it is necessary for artists and theorists now to present their ideas to a set of participants unrestricted by the pragmatism of the university or academy structure; a situation where a group of people could come together and explicate various positions rather than always providing a commentary alongside an obligation to produce.

In the past, revised models of education were often predicated upon the notion of the takeover or the creation of new departmental rigour and direction. The Vidokle model has binned the idea of integration and accommodation in favour of shifting a sense of engagement with educational structures - rapidly and completely - via the creation of new layers of interaction. This does not replace what exists; it supplements and problematises the way developed art education is organised and expressed. Whether we are operating in a period where the alternative education structure begins to take over the dynamic terrain of educational 'production', in the same way that autonomous independent art initiatives have done in relation to established exhibiting institutions, remains to be seen. Whatever happens, we know that some have already opted to skip the standard trajectory of art education in favour of a contingent, implicated model where modes of assessment and potential are freely negotiated within a new quaternary level of activity.

Liam Gillick is an artist and adjunct assistant professor, Columbia University, New York.

This extract was reproduced in Art Monthly's special issue on art education, October 2008/ Issue 320, p6-7.