We are happy to open our new space avenue Van Volxemlaan 295, Brussels on 11 of September at the occasion of the Brussels Art Days.

[…] is one of the latest classes of The Public School Brussels. It is a project that looks at alternative possibilities for the dissemination and distribution of ideas.

[…] works through a process of commissioning new editioned artworks which are then set in motion within a variety of modes of circulation. The duration of the works is never determined, leaving room for an uncertainty in who, how and when a viewer will experience the work.

[…] explores the legacies of conceptualism and mail art with emphasis on the mutability and variability in which ideas exist and evolve in the world, changing their meaning and significance as a result of their modes of distribution, transference and performance.

[…] works as a continuous ‘port’ for the production of artworks and ideas, […] is not anchored to any particular location, medium or network and aims to create new formulations of distribution for every artwork it presents, to find the artwork’s own topology of exchange and movement.

[…] The sharing of ideas through different modes and networks.

[…] Provoking an awareness of the journeys an idea undertakes.

NOTE>
• […] in Brussels from April 20 to 26th is curated by Sepake Angiama, Oliver Martinez Kandt, Thom O’Nions and Adam Thomas who will be responsible for sorting the editioned artworks by Ben Cain, Ruth Ewan and Shahin Afrassiabi.

The Public School was founded in Los Angeles by Telic Arts Exchanges. The project is now spreading in US and Europe... Komplot started The Public School Brussels

in November as a permanent and nomadic project.

What is now theorized in the book 'Curating And The Educational Turn'  editied by Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson or in this article by Iritt Rogoff can be relevant for the contemporary art new practices.

Komplot will be in conversation with Paul O'Neill for The Bristol School, on 22nd May at 6.30-8pm at Spike Island in Bristol.

www.situations.org.uk

In a recent e-mail, Sean Dockray, the founder of The Public School describes the project as such:

How to describe The Public School in 10 minutes? The premise is a school with no curriculum.  Instead of degrees, tests, disciplines, accreditation, goals, and so on, there is an open space for people to propose classes that they want to take or that they want to teach.  These class proposals range from the extremely practical to the impossible and strange.  A majority of the proposals will not happen – they amount to a catalog of possibilities, a compendium of need, desire, and imagination. The school is both real and virtual. Classes actually happen, while proposals for new classes continue to emerge. Always a tension between what is and what might be.

The point is not to have a pre-defined agenda that is expressed through a curriculum; nor is it to avoid having any agenda. Rather, the point is to produce that agenda in the process of the activity of the school and to allow that agenda to be open to contestation and constant revision. A school as a sort of public sphere, not a walled, proprietary institution.

A few notes on its trajectory, without addressing my motives for starting it. We at Telic have worked with various individuals and groups in different places to circulate the project.  Through the normal systems of exhibitions, residencies, fellowships, but also through friendship, shared sensibilities, and resonance, The Public School has multiplied to locations in Philadelphia, New York, San Juan, Brussels, Paris, and Helsinki.  Each school is autonomous and local, yet working in parallel, in sympathy, like coconspirators.

The Public School is open in several ways – there is a sort of musical chairs between teacher, student, and administrator; it does not exclude based on what discipline you come from; people project their expectations onto it and really try to make it their own. At the same time, the classes are usually, somehow, things that can’t happen anywhere and in a sense are minor, marginal, or critical. The classes don’t really “add up”, any more than a group of people with real difference does.

A large part of the project is its use of the internet. Unlike the university, which uses online learning to explode the classroom out into private spaces, The Public School uses the internet as a tool for writing (class proposals) and organizing, and bringing people together into a classroom.  What happens there depends on the people who are present – there’s no real frame, there’s a very real possibility of things not going well, for long, awkward pauses, for questions about what is supposed to take place. Very often, the class discussion bleeds into a discussion of what The Public School should be.

And The Public School continuously remakes itself.  There is a class called The Public School, which is as much an explanation as it is a workshop for operating on the school.  Conversations from classes, generate new classes, and again.  Each school copies classes from other schools.  And eventually, things slow down, the school comes to a halt. Maybe to be re-animated in a couple years, or maybe just left as a set of possible schools.

Michelle Naismith and David Evrard in workshop at La Cambre for The Public School.