De kunstschool als ecosysteem

Een schrijfhandleiding in drie stappen voor Fluxus-formules

Natalie Loveless, Assia Bert

“What might a progressive and responsible research environment for artistic research and artistic researchers on all education and career levels look like?” This was one of the key questions during the Society for Artistic Research (SAR) International Forum on Artistic Research 2024, hosted by Fontys Academy of the Arts in Tilburg, The Netherlands.¹ This contribution shares the method of one of the workshops inspired by this question - since its significance extends beyond the SAR Forum to the broader ecosystem of artistic research. Artists and researchers committed to (re)new(ed) ecosystems of care should continually revisit this question.

The workshop, initiated by Natalie Loveless and facilitated by Assia Bert, aimed to explore and challenge research environments. Participants were introduced to Fluxus instruction scores as an interventional method for how to inhabit these spaces. According to Loveless, Fluxus scores, which generally take the form of imperative texts, offer instructions for possible ways of recalibrating the world. Through the Fluxus score, any moment of life may be rendered as art. The ‘frame’ of art is mobilized to challenge or reorient our habits, to invite unexpected encounters, and, in its feminist mode, to highlight the maintenance labour that sustains the everyday life at all layers of existence. Linked to Fluxus, she argues, the Art/Life form of daily practice furthers the conceptual form of the instruction piece by insisting that an instruction can be performed daily and for an extended period of time. At the core of the Art/Life movement in contemporary art is the assertion that aesthetic orientations matter – that bringing the insights of artistic thinking and training into everyday life reroutes the flows of how we engage with each other and the world.²

Illustrative is the project Chair as Performance Art, a year-long daily-practice art project by Loveless that reimagined her role as Department Chair as a form of performance art. The process went as follows: each week Loveless would choose one guide – a friend, an author, an artist – to inspire her, and, each day, wrote a score on her hand to carry with her throughout the day. This score, inspired by teachings provided by each of these guides, took the form of an answer to “What Would X Do?”

Guiding this was a ‘meta score’ designed to organize the entire year of daily-practice recalibrations:

Recognize the department as a responsive ecological unit.
Work to nurture this.
Recognize the university as a cis-hetero-patriarchal, settler-colonial, ableist-extractive structure.
Work to challenge this.

Taking this project as example, the workshop invited participants to consider how such perspectives might inform not only artistic practice, but also their labour within institutional research environments.

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Natalie Loveless

is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory in the Department of Art and Design, and Associate Dean, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of Alberta (ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ /Amiskwacîwâskahikan, Treaty Six territory and Métis Region 4), where she directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory.

www.loveless.ca

Assia Bert

Assia Bert is assistant research coordination at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and editorial coordinator of FORUM+.

assia.bert@ap.be

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