Here’s some excerpts of a text that some of has have been reading here at Slade. For anyone interested, there will be a chance to discuss it at the “Surplus to requirements?” exhibition-symposium at Woburn Square on wednesday.
The extract is taken from “Education by Infection”, Boris Groys, in “Art school : (propositions for the 21st century)”, edited by Steven Henry Madoff.
“Life understood as a permanent source of infection that endangers the health of students’ nervous systems was articulated early in the twentieth century by Kazimir Malevich in “An Introduction to the Theory of the Additional Element in Painting,” which concerned itself with the problems of art education. Malevich describes a range of art styles—“Cézannism,” Cubism, and Suprematism, among them—as effects of different aesthetic infections metabolized in the artist by bacilli of one aesthetic kind or another. That is to say, they were triggered by new visual forms and impressions produced by modern life…
“Malevich’s model for artists and for the teaching of art follows the trope of biological evolution: Artists need to modify the immune system of their art in order to incorporate new aesthetic bacilli, to survive them and find a new inner balance, a new definition of health…
“If artists try to resist, the effects are obviously disastrous. They fall to the side, prematurely aged; the quality of their works suffers; the works become irrelevant for the world they are living in. Malevich sees the art school as the best defense against this artistic degradation. The closed world of the art school keeps bacilli permanently circulating and students permanently infected and sick. And most important: precisely because the art school is closed and isolated, the individual bacilli can be identified, analyzed, and bred—as is also the case with isolated, sterile medical laboratories. The isolation of the art school can be an attack on the health of students, but it offers the best conditions for breeding the bacilli of art…
“Students now are well informed about critical theory, and they are infected by it just as students were infected by modern technique in Malevich’s time. So the question arises, how should students deal with new infections? Two immediate solutions offer themselves. The first is to overcome them, suppress them, ignore them, especially by turning to teachers who do the same; the second is, by logical extension, to leave art and go out into communities to heal the world. Both solutions betray the initial modernist project to live through one’s infections without sanitizing either oneself or the world. And just as obvious, neither has led to the advancement of artistic practice or of its teaching.”
Slade Occupation 