neil cummings

the enthusiast has the same relationship to capital as the gift to the commodity

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Exhibition Experiments (working title)

Exhibition Experiments is a collaborative practice-based research project into histories of exhibition. Students, staff, experts and others will together research the idea of exhibition as a bundle of technologies for display and exchange. There are an increasing number of academic publications and conferences in curatorial and exhibition history, although the premise of this project is research through practice; we will make things, and make things happen.

The project might construct key exhibitionary moments; for example architect Frederick Kiesler’s 1924 L+T System for museum displays; a fragment of El Lissitsky's Abstract Cabinet (destroyed by the Nazis in 1937) we may also re-enact projects such as op losse schroeven (Stadelijk Museum, 1969) the entrepreneurial Freeze exhibition of 1988, or maybe one of Rirkrit Tiravanija's convivial cooking exhibitions.

These are mere suggestions - the plan would be to develop an exhibition of key exhibitionary experiments, collectively. This will unfold through seminars and workshops before the Triangle ‘exhibitionary’ period, and during the physical construction of the exhibition itself.

Exhibition: Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art & Design

When: Monday 21st May – Wednesday 30th May 2012

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See the project blog or #ExhibitionExperiments

Pain in the Arts

In Britain, the coalition governments destruction of public funding for university education, and the decimation of financial support for arts and their institutions, has indeed induced pain in the arts.

This is how members of parliament were protected while they voted to triple tuition fees.

What is to be done?

With other leading academics, artists, curators and writers I contributed to a symposium coorganised by Lanchester Gallery Projects and the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry. What is to be Done? explored events at Coventry School of Art and Design 1968-72 and the wider counter culture context of the 70s. It examined radical regional art education and its legacy, particularly in relation to contemporary experimental institutional and pedagogical practice. The event coincides with a retrospective of the work of David Rushton, founder editor of Coventry-based Analytical Art in the 1960s and Art & Language member from 1972 to 1975.

I talked about the work I do as part of Critical Practice, and especially the Parade project.

Chalk & Talk

As part of Critical Practice I participated in a discussion organised by Department 21 at the Royal College of Art. Six independent, bottom-up educational initiatives shared their experiences of experimenting with different systems of teaching and learning, through radically reassessing accepted modes of knowledge distribution. For the future, we aim to compile a manual of good practice to explore horizontal, transparent educational models within institutions.

Interview

Peter Maloney is a researcher working on the impact of technology within learning environments. This is an edited text of a conversation from Thursday 3rd June 2010, the full research will be published soon.

Peter Maloney: Neil, I’m interested in the origins of the Chelseawiki, and the benefits of FLOSS software development as a model for creative practice,………… among other things. So, in 2004 students you had been working with started up a wiki, can you say a little about how that came about?

N: Yes, I think it was 2004, it’s all still archived on the Chelseawiki if you need to check! It grew out of two things – a group of undergraduate students began to collaborate together, Ian Drysdale, Tom Neill, Trevor Giles, Daryl Stadlen and Wei Ho Ng, and I gave a series of lectures and seminars – called something like Free Culture. The seminars introduced ideas from Free Libre or Open Source Software [FLOSS], and explored how these might impact on art’s practice and organization.

the educational turn

I will take part in a three day event FL∆G: re-turning the educational turn at Chelsea College of Art and Design

Education is increasingly a key concern for contemporary art practice and its exhibitionary institutions; recent events include PARADE, Documenta 12 and United Nations Plaza, or Transpedagogy: Contemporary Art and the Vehicles of Education at MOMA, and events covened by the Serpentine and Hayward Gallery like de-schooling society, could all be defined as art turning educational.

On the one hand, claiming pedagogic practices as a form of art for exhibition could be seen as a way of idealising art education, or as an attempt to aestheticise education for exhibition. On the other hand, it could be seen as a form of engaged, dematerialised and participatory art practice. Regardless of the hand we choose, the proliferation of interest in the educational turn, demonstrates a new and widespread interest within exhibitionary institutions, art practice itself and sites of art education for self-reflexion.