the ’sham

Last night I went to speak with a very cool group of artists in Erskineville. This group graduated from art school a few years back, and wanted to continue an engaged collaborative self-learning thingy. So they meet once a month and have an invited guest speaker as their stimulus who they can interrogate and badger (in a friendly constructive way, of course). I liked their format - they have established a pedagogical structure in which they are simultaneously teachers and students, those who learn, and those who set the curriculum. (Paulo Friere would be pleased).

The group wanted me to talk a bit about Relational Aesthetics. This is a subject I’ve been invited to discuss regularly in the last few years, most recently at a guest lecture at COFA.

The Erskineville group had been to see the Craigie Horsfield show at the MCA, and, rightly, wanted to unpick some of the rhetoric surrounding this (too often over-marketed) term.

I really enjoyed speaking with them. The event itself - small discussion in a loungeroom over wine and hommous - was not dissimilar to a paradigmatic Relational Aesthetics piece - one of Tiravanija’s food servings, for instance. Certainly it was interesting to observe the differences between the lecture format at COFA (one speaker with a microphone monologuing to a lecture hall of patient docile listeners, and only enough time for 2-3 questions afterwards) and the livingroom format (ten feisty “teacher-students” constantly interjecting, demanding clarification, pointing out inconsistencies…in short, directing the “learning” towards where it will have most meaning in their own lives.)

I spoke about my Petersham project (of course, they wanted to know what my “relational” projects were like). There was much discussion about the nature of the work - the way that writing about events changes the way you live those events, possibly even changes the kinds of things you do… My favourite comment was that Bilateral Petersham sounded a bit like an “intellectual version of big brother”.