Art as experimental journalism

The present system of artistic education and research is striving to become connected to the political dynamics of the hyper-dramatization of the rhetoric pertaining to the contemporary art scenes. The transition atmosphere characteristic to the academic spaces reflects the experiencing of a transition from the use of one type of knowledge to the inventing of a new one. The status of the teachers and students is questioned according to the redefining of art [and its functioning], of the artists [and their positioning], and of the public [and its involvement].
The critical reflex towards the crisis of social change anesthetized by the neo-liberal regularization of the citizens’ life – a reflex that is conditioned by the response of the “action communities” to political standardization, to economical delocalization, to the ecological impact of global warming, to the moral deadlock of bio-technological research, to the impossible solving of ethnical and religious conflicts, to the rapid neo-imperialist-colonial rising of military occupation, and to the consumerist industrialization of urban culture and of the mass media – requires to be interpreted and mediated from the viewpoint of an artistic behavior motivated by the responsible actions characteristic to the investigation journalism.
Artistic education and research should take into account the contradictory dynamics of the world that we live in and that we represent ourselves, as well as its potential to build and point out situations susceptible of being submitted to public contemplation and decisions. Thus, the opening of the academic [micro-social] space to the public [macro-social] space could create the conditions for an aesthetical fusion in which the interpretative signifying [taking into account the (post)productive use of codes] and the relational communication [taking into account the understanding of the aesthetic experience as the experience of a relationship] would function as an experiment based on turning the school into an alternative press agency.
The journalistic labor is related to the daily presentation of the situations and issues that are affecting our everyday life. The training of attitudes becomes as important as (self)informing and producing a knowledge that is adequate to the context of the actions. Acquiring the investigative behavior favors also a series of meditations on the possible types of message mediation. The producing of information of general community concern and the use of alternative media (from computer processing to issuing publications) could function as a critical, artistically conceived response to the ideological manipulation performed by the mainstream media (from cable television to the newspapers of several trusts) subordinated to political and corporate interests.
Experimenting with a new form of journalism, conceived based on an alternative artistic production and display, generates the conditions for a practical responsibility as consequence of a social awareness. As the dominant system of art does not lead to a higher quality of everyday life, but to a certain improvement of the people’s entertainment, with the “noble” intention of keeping them away from the “daily hardships” whose burden is on the shoulders of the government administrators, the educational system should react informatively and critically in order to rethink the public’s interest towards the practices of present-day art.
This positioning becomes uncomfortable due to the fact that the educational system is still pointed out and perceived by the public as an assault division of the ministry, which ministry is part of a government appointed at the end of several pseudo-political negotiations (and according to an oligarchic interest, of course) based on a doubtful electoral proceeding, which is considered nevertheless democratic. As long as art universities are viewed as ministerial apparatuses meant to ensure the disciplinary exercise of a mass education process, the conditions for an experimental attempt to critically reorient the artistic practice will be impossible to produce in the public’s global perception. More than that, with the increasing of the academic obedience to the different forms of putting into practice the treaties whose goal is to standardize the European “educational systems”, the “artistic education” is in danger of being exercised like a pre-determined automatism that preserves and restores sets of habits, information and practices under the neo-liberal form of doing business with the past for the benefit of the capitalization of the cultural consumption needs.
The rise and development of a “creative class”, supplemented by the “creative subclass” in the underground culture area, could resuscitate the self-reformation of the artistic educational system. Creative ideas do circulate, and it would be irrelevant to try to identify the generating sources in an act of intellectual bureaucracy. Nevertheless, adopting an investigative behavior keen on using and processing artistically the events of everyday life could reconfigure the contemporary cultural artistic practice and production.
Seen as one of the possible methods of mediating knowledge and motivating action, “art turned into an instrument of experimental journalism” could be one of the urgent answers to the question “what is to be done?”.

post-factum contribution to the forum SUMMIT non-aligned initiatives in education culture, Berlin, 2007. SUMMIT is a forum for questioning and changing some of the fundamental terms of the debate around education, knowledge production and the information society.

this intervention was published as a contribution for “What is to be done (in art education)?” dossier of the 4th issue of Vector – art and culture in context publication participating in the “documenta 12 magazines” collective editorial project which is linking worldwide over 70 print and online periodicals, as well as other media (http://magazines.documenta.de).