STRANGE TEACHING - On “Contrasting Virtues”

MESSING WITH THE REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEM OF THE ART WORLD


There is a chapter in Louis Althusser's 1970 book “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” with the very Kantian-Hegelian-Marxian title “On the Reproduction of the Conditions of Production," which culminates with the sentence, “The ultimate condition of production is... the reproduction of the conditions of production.” Althusser identifies the “educational apparatus” as the most important mechanism for society. The teacher, as “professional ideologist,” has the “ability to treat consciousnesses with the respect, i.e. with the contempt, blackmail, and demagogy” necessary to reproduce the system. By propagating state-sanctioned or corporate-university knowledge, teachers also promote “contrasting Virtues," which Althusser defines as “modesty, resignation, submissiveness on the one hand, cynicism, contempt, arrogance, confidence, self-importance, even smooth talk and cunning on the other.”


Does this sound familiar? In the art world, these “contrasting virtues” are not only personality traits, but also competing and contrasting tastes. Even in a widening spectrum of acceptable taste formations, which allows for a certain amount of sexual, gender, and racial diversity, there is an ever growing homogeneity when it comes to economic and class privilege. In the USA, the upper- and upper-middle-class art system feeds on itself: It starts with selective and costly pre-Ks, kindergartens, colleges, and MFA programs, and continues on for the most "talented" into profitable galleries and prestigious museums. Those who drop out along the way often scatter into related professional fields that constitute the art industry's complex distribution, media and financial arms. It is incredible how similar the CVs of the most successful protagonists look, in spite of their "contrasting virtues"--the contrasting and even opposing roles they try to display on the playing field.


The European situation, especially in the Germanic part, is not much different, although the nation-state provides more money and therefore establishes social currency and power. Selective processes start very early through merit based educational divisions which cannot be easily ignored or crossed. Thus they are internalized, essentialized and shared by those who are in and those who are out who do not dare to challenge it. Students who are accepted into the prestigious art academies are invited to study with established international professionals in so-called master-classes, which foster mutual two-way identifications. The student-artists identify with and are identified by the reputations of the teacher-artists, who try to pass on their fabulous talents and careers connections to their young followers via their shared proximity, quasi-intimacy and social access. Soon, doors open and support comes streaming students' way in the form of residencies, prizes, grants, foreign scholarships, exhibitions and acquisitions. This narrow path for students and young graduates is facilitated through mostly state-supported curators who most likely have gone through the same educational ordeal just a decade or so earlier. Even the commercial gallery sector recruits mostly from the same state-provided pipelines and sells or arbitrates their players to the same institutions and collections they already know.


Thus, state-controlled mechanisms regulate the path to successful art careers and reinvigorate the given economic, social and cultural class cohesiveness that result in behaviors, habitus, preferences, tastes, “distinctions” (as Pierre Bourdieu put it) or tout court “contrasting virtues” which often aren’t virtuous at all. While in the US, alumni status satisfies questions concerning individual privilege and social standing, in Europe it is the name of an artist-professor that emanates respect confirming a near feudal interrelated master system. In the USA, it is the interdependent relationship between money and merit, whereas in Europe it’s the decadence of the ego in cohabitation with loyal players to what is often delusionally conceived of as power, success and fame.


I myself have navigated through this educational landscape of “contradicting vitrues” and institutional privileges. In all cases it was paid for by European state institutions, American philanthropy, enabled by the generosity of professors who let me audit, or simply by the absence of any institutional control when I just walked into classes and seminars as I did throughout Europe and New York. The way I did it myself has become a kind of blueprint for the way I share it with others in what I have started to call “Strange teaching.” Teaching inside and outside of various teaching machines – see Gayatri Spivak’s “Outside in the Teaching Machine,” who, like Edward Said, allowed me to audit her classes at Columbia University in the early 1990s – is dependent partly on the institutional flexibility of the German / Austrian / Swiss 19th-century model of mostly unmodulated, non-anglosaxon freie Kunstakademie. It also depends on the spontaneous generosity of people who “just do it” for free, for fun or for curiosity.


I cannot be thankful enough to everybody who has joined us or allowed us to visit them. It must be a nightmare for any school lawyer when we literally squat for weeks, like we did in Leipzig, in a hazardous building without basic amenities including electricity, clean water or fresh air while we turn it into a campus for lectures, exhibitions, a student-teacher hostel and a symposium. But doing all of this constitutes my teaching philosophy and reflects my own experience of learning, which has crossed many institutional and even legal lines since I couldn't always afford books or train tickets, and depended on “just attending it.” As a former trans-European hitch-hiker I have spent many days and nights on the autobahn learning from strange and not so strange people.


Given the focus of my “educational apparatus” and my “contrasting virtues,” this publication is not meant to showcase the works of students or to imply that it is or isn't accomplished art. Rather, it is to present “Strange teaching” as an undefined open learning toolbox with which all participants - the students, the lecturers, and the public - interact and learn. Like in my “Seminar/Lecture” series, I photograph not only speakers but also the public and the hosting contexts. For me, it is all part of a listening and learning process that allows me to stare at all the people and things present, and to contribute when it's appropriate. The same goes for my various “readings," my "El Mundo" project and other works that involve audience participation. The differences between speakers, presenters, professors, listeners, observers and students is mainly temporal and contextual. I have photographed people as students who are today are stars. I love learning environments and cannot teach in ways that don't interest me or that don't also teach me.


Our gadget-accelerated days condition people against the medium of books. My communal readings, therefore, slow down the pace and allow for line-by-line engagement with immediate discussions. We act as wikipedia, but we also google, wiki, safari, chrome and firefox our way through a quicksand of often incomprehensible texts since we are mostly untrained non-experts. I never ask for preparation or expect any a priori knowledge. I myself don't prepare since I prefer to glide with the group into the learning, watching and listening process. Afterward, I encourage what I call “hermeneutic multiplying”—a way of extracting not only the larger context of a subject during its own time including its genealogy but also looking for various current readings and understandings. The question for me is always whether an idea, a work of art or a historical text offers a relevant perspective for describing the world not only then but also now.


At the art school stage, it is less interesting to see works on display, but to observe students trying out their various paths and learning environments. I would much rather see students engaging with other students or simply with books than seeing them create work that aspires to pseudo-signature styles for market entry. Therefore, I prefer social contexts and productive settings that render me superfluous as a teacher. These hopefully “strange” experiences are crucial to the process of unlearning, of getting lost, of failing and letting go as the main receptacle or vessel for anything interesting to emerge. Hence, I can live with the disappointments and accusations that I get when I don't even feign interest in student artworks that don't capture me. I think it's part of the learning process to be ignored and forced to question one's mode of operation. Finally, as “professional ideologist” under contract by the state and schooled by the "negative dialectics" of Adorno (he was a  government-sponsored ideologist who had barely survived a former German state) I teach against the reproduction of the professional art system, denouncing it as a fig leaf for exclusionary and discriminatory practices. When art changes hands, it often feeds and reinforces economic, racial and other group injustices, enabling wealth accumulation for wealth diversification, if not money laundering and tax evasion, as well as state chauvinism and classism. Art has become the ultimate narcissistic accessory for priceless speculations that guarantee sex appeal and glamour. But it also steals the faux-humanizing touch of a better, even altruistic life which will last into beyond our bloody, physical remains into eternity. For achieving this one fuses one's collection with a museum's. Interestingly enough, this is precisely the sinister, oppressive playground in which we can challenge and most likely all become poisoned by the corruption we call success. Art presents itself, therefore, as a lose-lose situation with no redemption to be gained or even hoped for.


I expect people to see “Strange teaching” as an experiment which neglects art making and demands that people do something productive (beyond making objects). I am not going to be systematically depicting, itemizing, crediting or properly describing student works of art. It is annoying to see people only participate when prominent sites are scouted for exhibition or when a publication is promised. Today's information-driven economies require this unfortunate behavior and, although I am not innocent either, I do try to ignore it and share the spare, rare fruits resulting from not having given up for a quarter century. This book-in-a-book is an opportunity to present “Strange teaching” as part of my art work in conjunction with the events hosted by Armada, Milan. It is yet another example of how “Strange teaching” can work. Since the early 1990s, I have made learning and teaching part of my art work and have done so independent of any institutional context. For this opportunity in Milan, I have extend my invitation – as I have done in the past – to my students to create an international group show. This way they can have a taste of the contemporary art circus that enables and performs tiny segments of our globalized cultural productions.





Even if I get credit for “Strange teaching” now, successful students will harvest it later regardless of whether they are featured prominently here or not. This should be read by those who accuse me of “exploiting” my students and see the relative absence of student works and dialogue in this publication as a confirmation of that. Yes, I see each of these educational photographs as my own art work, so long as they are made with my camera and show me or another participant in a learning situation. In developing “educational photography” whereby the students/listeners and lecturers serve also as indexical markers, I am deeply indebted to the generation of so-called postmodernist artists: Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Clegg & Guttmann and those others who capture representational systems of soft and elegant power. Soft, elegant and sustainable power is embedded in art collections, in motion-picture industries, in corporate boardrooms as well as in educational settings. These artists also taught me about systematicity, repetition, archive, focus and endurance--all qualities that are necessary in the art of learning, unlearning, relearning and teaching. Thus, I hope that my contribution to the world of art and education will eventually pass as art and not as education, and that it will tacitly leave a legacy to anybody interested in an art that delivers spectacle as “contrasting viruses"--oh, sorry, “contracting virtues.”






Even if I get credit for “Strange teaching” now, successful students will harvest it later regardless of whether they are featured prominently here or not. This should be read by those who accuse me of “exploiting” my students and see the relative absence of student works and dialogue in this publication as a confirmation of that. Yes, I see each of these educational photographs as my own art work, so long as they are made with my camera and show me or another participant in a learning situation. In developing “educational photography” whereby the students/listeners and lecturers serve also as indexical markers, I am deeply indebted to the generation of so-called postmodernist artists: Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Clegg & Guttmann and those others who capture representational systems of soft and elegant power. Soft, elegant and sustainable power is embedded in art collections, in motion-picture industries, in corporate boardrooms as well as in educational settings. These artists also taught me about systematicity, repetition, archive, focus and endurance--all qualities that are necessary in the art of learning, unlearning, relearning and teaching. Thus, I hope that my contribution to the world of art and education will eventually pass as art and not as education, and that it will tacitly leave a legacy to anybody interested in an art that delivers spectacle as “contrasting viruses"--oh, sorry, “contracting virtues.”



Rainer Ganahl

New York, June 2015


SHANGHAI, 2013

collaborations: Paul Devautour and students, Ecole Offshore, Shanghai; ENSA Nancy; Hu Jieming and students, SIVA, Fudan University,

exhibition: Bazaar – A site compatible project @ BCP, Xinhua Market Shanghai

fashion show: Made in China @ BANK, MAB Society, Shanghai

exhibition and Talk Show: I wish, I knew @ China Art Academy, Honghzou

publication: http://strangeteaching.info/strange/Fashionshow_DS.pdf



LEIPZIG, 2014

collaborations: Florian Reither (Gelitin member) and student; AbK, Vienna; Manfred Pernice and students, UdK Berlin; Cristina Gomez Barrio and Wolfgang Mayer (discoteca flaming star) and students, AbK, Stuttgart

exhibition: Monads with windows @ Künstlerhaus Held, Leipzig 2

publication: Strange Teaching – Monads with windows, ISBN:


VIENNA, October 2014

collaboration: Heimo Zobernig and students, AbK, Vienna;

exhibition: Soft Nepotism @ Bar du bois, Vienna


BERLIN, January, February 2015

collaboration: Ché Zara Blomfield, The Composing Rooms; Manfred Pernice and students, Udk, Berlin

exhibiton: Expectations @ The Composing Rooms with additional students from Josephine Pryde, Manfred Pernice



VENICE, May, 2015

collaboration: Rob Pruitt, New York; School for Curatorial Studies, Venice

exhibition: Rob Pruitt Flea Market, @ A plus A Gallery, Venice


MILAN, May 2015

collaboration: Amy Lien, New York, Berlin; Enzo Camacho, Manila Berlin; gluck50, Milan; Tan Cheng, Armada, Milan

exhibition: Wave upon Wave of Invaders @ Armada, Milan with guest artists Laurence Wiener and Nasan Tur

publication: Mousse


coming up:

NEW YORK, November 2015

collaboration: Craig Kalpakjian, New York; the students of Heimo Zobernig, AbK Vienna; of Olav Nicolai and Gregor Schneider,(both AbK Munich) and those of Jutta Koether (HK Hamburg) and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, HvK Bremen

exhibitions, performances and projects @ The Auditorium, but no matter, Ridgewood ,Brooklyn as well as @ Kai Matsumiya, Lower East Side