Claire Bishop

All artists are alike. They dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art.
Dan Graham

Beuys’s commitment to free education was for the most part dependent on his own charismatic leadership, rendering unclear the line between education and one-man performance; today’s artists, by contrast, are less likely to present themselves as the central pedagogic figure.

What does it mean to do education (and programming) as art? How do we judge these experiences? What kind of efficacy do they seek? Do we need to experience them first hand in order to comment on them?

A more dynamic solution was found to mark the end of the school during the 2009 Havana Biennial. Entitled Estado de Excepción, it comprised nine group shows over as many days, open to the public between 5 and 9 p.m., de-installed every night and re-installed every morning, thereby aiming to capture the urgency and intensity of the school as a whole. Each day was organised around themes such as ‘Jurisdiction’, ‘Useful Art’, and ‘Trafficking Information’, and presented a selection of work from the school alongside work by visiting lecturers (often sent as instructions), including Thomas Hirschhorn and Elmgreen & Dragset. Each night the space looked completely different, while the students’ short, sharp interventions often outstripped everything else in the biennial in terms of their subversive wit and direct engagement with the Cuban situation. Many works dealt with issues of censorship, internet restrictions and social taboos; Alejandro Ulloa, for example, simply placed the most expensive piece of computer equipment in Cuba on a plinth – an anonymous grey cable for connecting a data projector.

The question remains, however, as to why Arte de Conducta needs to be called a work of art, rather than simply an educational project that Bruguera undertook in her home city. One possible answer invokes her authorial identity as an artist. The school, like many of the student projects it produced, can be described as a variation on what Bruguera has designated as ‘useful art’ (arte util) – in other words, art that is both symbolic and useful, refuting the traditional Western assumption that art is useless or without function.

Bruguera views the project as a work of art, she does not address what might be artistic in Arte de Conducta. Her criterion is the production of a new generation of socially and politically engaged artists in Cuba, but also the exposure of visiting lecturers to new ways of thinking about teaching in context

Both of these goals are long-term and unrepresentable. Rhetorically, Bruguera always privileges the social over the artistic, but I would argue that her entire shaping of Arte de Conducta is reliant on an artistic imagination (an ability to deal with form, experience and meaning).

Both art and education can have long-term goals, and they can be equally dematerialised, but imagination and daring are crucial to both.

The more common tendency for socially engaged artists is to adopt a paradoxical position in which art as a category is both rejected and reclaimed: they object to their project being called art because it is also a real social process, while at the same time claiming that this whole process is art.

Chan an unusual figure among artists today: rather than using art to bring about social change, he uses activist strategies to realise a work of art.