RADICAL PEDAGOGICAL WORKING GROUP

BHQFU 33 34th Street Brooklyn, 6th Floor

Spring 2016 Wednesdays 7-9pm
https://radicalpedagogy.wordpress.com
Jarrett Earnest

The one thing that an art school never tells you is that they cannot teach you how to be an artist.
Robert Gober
Teaching art is difficult because making art is so personal. Over many years of being a teacher, I
tried to discover ways of addressing this crucial problem. I was always determined to teach in a
way that would not encourage anyone to make work that looked like or deliberately emulated
mine. What interests me was in influencing how students thought about their work, how they
approached it, not what it looked like nor what its contents might be. I wanted to be as nonprescriptive as possible, to acknowledge the infinite diversity of art. Michael Craig-Martin
RPWG is an open seminar for re-envisioning art education, addressing the basic question: Is it
possible to teach artists at all? The fact that artists write lectures, compile reading lists,
assemble programs and found schools, proposes an array of possible answers. Every week we
will focus on texts created as pedagogical tools by artist-teachers, discussing content while
analyzing the strategies and underlying philosophical program. We will also be joined by guest
speakers to discuss their experiments and experiences in the classroom.

WEEK 1 March 2nd Hans Hoffmann

READING: Hans Hoffmann: The Search for the Real; Painting and Culture; Terms.
Harold Rosenberg: Hans Hoffmanns life class
GUEST: Josephine Halvorson
WEEK 2 March 9th Johannes Itten & Josef Albers
READING: Johannes Itten: excerpts from Design and Form; Josef Albers: introduction,
1-2 and Interaction of Color iPad App.
GUEST: Anna Betbeze
WEEK 3 March 16th Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
READING: Lazlo Moholy-Nagy: preliminariesa new vision; new educationorganic
approach.
WEEK 4 March 23rd Joseph Beuys
READING: Joseph Beuys: Introduction (1979); Manifesto on the creation of a Free
International School for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (1973); I am
searching for field character (1973); Speech upon receiving an honorary doctorate
degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax (1976); I put me on this
train!interview with Art Papier (1979).
GUEST: Joan Waltemath

WEEK 5 March 30th John Cage

READING: John Cage: Composition as Process: I. Changes / II. Indeterminacy / III.
Communication.
WEEK 6 April 6th William Kentridge
READING: William Kentridge: Drawing Lesson OneIn Praise of Shadows; Drawing
Lesson ThreeVertical Thinking: A Johannesburg Biography.
GUEST: Nancy Goldring
WEEK 7 April 13th Adrian Piper
READING: Adrian Piper: My Art Education; Notes on Funk I-IV; Food for the Spirit;
Some Reflective Surfaces I & II.
WEEK 8 April 20th Yvonne Rainer / Anna Helprin
READING: Yvonne Rainer: Looking Myself in the Mouth; Yvonne Rainer interviews
Anna Halprin.
WEEK 9 April 27th Simone Forti
READING: Simone Forti: Handbook in Motion.

WEEK 10 May 4th Pablo Helguera

READING: Pablo Helguera: Education for Socially Engaged Art.
GUEST: Christy Gast
BIBLIOGRAPHY
All readings will be available as PDFs via the class website:
https://radicalpedagogy.wordpress.com
Albers, Josef. Interaction of Colors (Yale, 1963).
Beuys, Joseph. Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America (Four Walls Eight
Windows, 1993).
Cage, John. SILENCE (Wesleyan, 1961).
Forti, Simone. Handbook in Motion. (NSCAD,1974).
Itten, Johannes. Design and Form. (Thames and Hudson, 1975).
Halprin, Anna. Yvonne Rainer interviews Anna Halprin Moving Toward Life: Five Decades of
Transformational Dance (Wesleyan, 1995).
Helguera, Pablo. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook
(Jorge Pinto, 2011).
Hoffmann, Hans. Search for the Real (MIT, 1967).
Kentridge, William. Six Drawing Lessons (Harvard, 2014).
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist (Wittenborn, Schultz, Inc. 1947).
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. Vision in Motion (Institute of Design, 1947).
Piper, Adrian. Out of Order, Out Of Sight: Volume I: Selected Writing in Meta-Art 1968-1992
(MIT, 1996)
Rainer, Yvonne. Looking Myself in the Mouth October Vol. 17 (Summer, 1981).
Rosenberg, Harold. Hans Hoffmanns life class Portfolio and ARTnews Annual (1962).