Independent Programmes

Abstract

This chapter explores how artists and curators have tackled the twin drivers of para-academia-access and autonomy-by organising 'independent' learning programmes. The educational turn in art and curating that has emerged since the 1990s frequently presents itself as egalitarian and reformist. To what extent do such artistic and curatorial practices reframe or reproduce dominant rationalisations of academic art education? Do educational art practices seek to establish an effective parergon in relation to art academies? Does the educational turn in the wider artworld share para-academia's commitment to opening access to artistic learning? What impact do diminishing scale and institutional autonomy have on D-I-T education's attempts to re-imagine art school as a democratically accountable 'Third Place' that takes care of cohort relationships? As a means of tackling these questions, this chapter examines two popular educational tropes within art and curating: the residential programme and the virtual school. While residentials and virtual schools are but two examples of the hundreds of purposely structured educational programmes that take curatorial and artistic forms, they show how art education can foreground an ethics of care and facilitate forms of qualification alternative to those reproduced in higher education's prestige economy. D-I-T art programmes, equally, provide another sort of blueprint for re-imagining the art academy, namely, a collaborative andragogics.