all things archaeological
“Artereality: rethinking art as craft in a knowledge economy” – a manifesto for arts and humanities pedagogy, and indeed research, was published today in a collection of essays about the future of arts education in the US, edited by Steven Madoff for MIT Press.
I wrote it with Jeffrey Schnapp, drawing on our experience of running, enabling, and encouraging interdisciplinary, indeed transdisciplinary projects through Stanford Humanities Lab. For me also it continues a line of argument I started in my book “Experiencing the Past”, back in 1992, that we need to look to the practices, the infrastructures and instruments, the cultures of our disciplines, looking to the craft and industry, the making of knowledge: what is now a well-established focus on the culture of science and the academy.
Artereality – the management of distributions, the devising of junctions, making flows, impeding others, promoting and demoting links or conduit in socio-cultural networks across and through currently separate and diverse social and institutional spaces. Artereality re-engages the act of cultural production (as opposed to detached “research” or “art”) with social, economic, and political processes, as well as technological innovation.
Artereality also connects with Aristotle’s phronesis: knowledge integrated with practical reasoning, an intertwining of reflection upon practice and the practice of reflection in the service of the social good.
Key points, backed by a good range of examples from Stanford and beyond
The reviews of the collection have already been encouraging:
an indispensable source of experienced voices … an amazing cross-section of art world contributors providing as complete a picture as is imaginable on the needs and possibilities of the art school in the 21st century
Garry Kennedy – President and Professor Emeritus, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design
For anyone concerned with art school education – and the broader issues surrounding it – this book is essential reading
John Miller, Barnard College
For entrenched entropic faculty and bureaucratic administrative hacks this book is a brick through their window
Mark Dion, artist
Here is the text, unedited – the “directors’ cut”, as it were – [Link]
[...] [Link] – Artereality – on the arts in the University – from Steven Madoff’s collection. [...]
[...] What makes this such a fascinating and powerful prospect is that INCIPIT is making a claim to be object-oriented, to stretch somewhat that term as it applies to software design. What I mean is that the research methodology is not taken directly from a disciplinary field such as sociology or economics, investigating, foe example, the relationship of heritage to class and demography, or analyzing the economic value of heritage sites in tourism. Instead, INCIPIT is setting out to bring together researchers, students and communities in collaborative application to actual cases of the (co-)construction of heritage “objects” – knowledges, experiences, sites, artifacts. Instead of research tasks and procedures that have their immediate origin in disciplinary methodology, INCIPIT is focused on heritage objects – practices, relationships, artifacts, representations – that collectively structure this transdisciplinary field. Practice as research [Link]. [...]