Interview in 'School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education'

Date:	2015
Index:	interview study

Context

This interview with Sam Thorne for the book School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education was conducted in 2015.

The Public School - Sean Dockray - Transcript

I know a little about the background to The Public School, which you have described as a 'large-scale collaborative art project', a 'proposal-based learning platform' and a 'school with no curriculum'. But I'm not so clear about its relationship to Telic Arts Exchange, which I understand it grew from. How did one evolve from the other?

Telic Arts Exchange was a non-profit organisation in Chinatown, which I started with my partner Fiona. Our focus was media art. Telic incorporated in 2005, though before that we had an informal programme of exhibitions and installations. At that time the art market was growing, and lots of galleries in Chinatown that were doing quite well.

That was when David Kordansky and others were opening.

It was also a time when the internet was colonising my life and the lives of people around me. Google Maps and YouTube launched in 2005, for example. And yet the art we were seeing in the galleries was painting, sculpture, drawing, because there was a market for it. In Los Angeles, there were tonnes of people working with 'new media' with almost nowhere to show it – anything from video to computers to electronics to performance. Telic was basically trying to fill that gap.

We were trying to respond to the world around us in a way that we thought the art world around us wasn't doing. But eventually the format of putting on six-week exhibitions was burning us out; it started to seem artificial. So we started manipulating the programme in different ways. For example, we'd have more performances or having discussions as a significant element of the programme. One exhibition we did was called 'The Fundraising Show'. We invited in 30 different people or groups over 30 days. Each had 24 hours to try and make as much money as they possibly could. This was also a fundraiser for the gallery, so everything was split 50/50. We were trying to be really upfront about the mercenary aspect, while asking various questions about the relationship between the community and the nonprofit.

How did those activities lead to The Public School?

Around 2007, we had to renew our lease and the landlord was raising the rent quite a lot. We were feeling the pressures of real-estate, but also of the programme. We weren't satisfied with babysitting an empty gallery space, waiting for people to walk in, or for an opening or performance. I never saw myself as a curator, but in running a space you become a kind of gatekeeper. I don't like that position. And I didn't want our space to be somewhere that had 'gates' in that way. Most importantly, we were thinking that our programme was, in theory, responding to the internet – and here I'm using 'the internet' as a shorthand for all of the ways it's reshaping the world in its image – and yet at the same time we were operating our gallery in a fairly traditional way. It seemed like this was something that just needed to be overcome.

For a few years I'd been trying to start up various reading or discussion groups, and nothing ever really worked. But then I remember going to Via Cafe one day and coming up with the idea of a school that would work in the way that The Public School eventually operated: people would propose things that they wanted to learn about; then others could say they were also interested in it; then we as a school would work out how to schedule it as a class. It was a really schematic, procedural idea. I drew a diagram, which proposed a different way for our institution to run.

I also thought up the name at that point. To me, 'public' didn't just mean that proposals came from the public – the name encapsulated the entire process. Which is to say, from proposal to selection to attendance, all of that is public. I also realized that this procedural logic was entirely familiar; I probably just copied it from the way we were already just living on the internet.

One description of The Public School states that, 'It is not accredited, it does not give out degrees, and it has no affiliation with the public school system.' That sounds pointed, a critical take on the failing public-school system in the US.

At that time, I wasn't particularly critical of the public-school system – anymore than anyone might be of an institutionalised or standardised setting. It was more to distinguish The Public School so that people didn't get confused. At the time of writing that statement, the more crucial part of the description was that the school had no curriculum. In a sense, it was empty. It was only that diagram, a process, and nothing more than that.

When you had that diagram in hand, did you have a sense of what might be filling this 'empty' space?

From Telic, we already had a lot of technical people in our programme. Fiona and I both studied architecture, and I was also running Aaaarg.org at the time. We were really interested in reading and theory and these kinds of things. But, if you put all of these things together, it's very difficult to find a programme that houses them all. That's something we were struggling to do with Telic.

In a way, the schematic nature of The Public School solved that. All interests can potentially be a part of the school, but the school wasn't only limited to my or Fiona's interests. The curriculum can expand beyond anything we cared about, or thought we cared about. And this was important to me. That flexibility was built into it from the beginning.

What response was there when you launched the website?

When you set up an anything-goes situation online, sometimes you get everything, which actually isn't all that interesting. Because we had a history of working with artists, and our programme had already branched out into a lot of pedagogical things, I just reached out to all of those people. I invited them to propose something that they would be interested in learning about. Within a few days, we had something around 70 proposals, which set a certain tone when we launched it, a week later, with a big email.

Do you recall what some of the earliest classes were?

The first one was grant-writing. Because it was so quick and we had someone on hand who could teach it straight away. Then there was an Arcades Project reading group. A popular class early on was called Sadism & Masochism, Theory & Practice. That was probably the one that really opened up what the school could be.

I love that in the opening months you could move from grant-writing to De Sade. So who decides how many classes there are per semester or course or whatever?

Before we even had any proposals, I invited six people onto a committee. The committee was called 'DAN', which was a really bad joke – it was meant to be 'DNA' but misspelled, you know, as if you could actually misspell an acronym... Those people are the informational-logic-labour, who produce and reproduce the school, who turn information into something real. They give it form.

It's not that there's no curriculum at The Public School, it's that the curriculum is developed over time. That curriculum is the shape of the school, and that shape is given, in large part, by the committee. So the committee is both a very important part, and something that's continuously rethought. One way of insisting on that was with a rule where someone would leave every few months, so the committee was always refreshing itself. By virtue of the committee mutating, the school would also mutate.

In some ways, the idea of a committee is a very traditional part of the project. But you can't do the work of transforming a class proposal into a class with a computer programme...

Did you try?

Yeah! But a lot of the time you're relying on not only organisational but creative capabilities, which is a lot of what the committee is doing. Because if the school was only really a diagram, that didn't give you many answers to questions like, say, 'Does the school charge money?'

So there's no director, but then the committee is a filter that shapes and enables the classes?

Exactly. And the committee then chooses new people to join the committee, and might even change the rules about how that might happen. The important thing is that there's nothing about the school that's taken as a given. For example, the idea of a semester makes no sense unless the committee or class presents it as a necessary structure. But then that isn't permanently necessary. So while there might be semesters, there doesn't have to be, and in actual fact there haven't been any to date.

Did you find that you settled on certain numbers of classes, like six...? Or that some, like, say volume one of Das Kapital, you needed longer than a couple of weeks?

Well, of course we did that class... [laughter] We made use of David Harvey's CUNY lectures on YouTube. So it was a screening series followed by discussions. Some sense of the structure might be integrated into the proposal. Not only the what, but the how. Then people are essentially proposing how the school itself works. And then those making proposals might end up on the committee. One of the most important dimensions to the ethic of The Public School is not to take these questions for granted, so they can then become a matter of public concern.

I would describe The Public School's structure as quite radical. But in what ways does this extend to the structure of the classes themselves? Because to screen David Harvey lectures is basically conventional, however the proposal for those classes was shaped. Has that been something you've considered?

Insisting on the structure of classes themselves to be radical or democratic, or always insisting that there'd be no experts in the room, risks lapsing into certain habits. We looked at every proposal and asked how it should be, without some preconceived idea of what makes for radical education. For example, a few years ago I remember someone had proposed a class called 'The Egyptian Revolution and its Historical Context'. It was only a couple of days after Mubarak had been taken down. For a class like that, it's important for us to have someone who has some level of expertise. So the idea of having everyone be equal wasn't that relevant there. The important thing was that we were able to put it from proposal to class in a week. Within a week, we had the class on. A successful class always poses a 'What's next?'

I was most fulfilled when people would propose things, and then afterwards that class would formalise even further into a new group, collective or collaborative project. The school then became an intermediate stage in an incubation process.

I wanted to talk about the context of Los Angeles. In the cliched idea of what LA is, it's this atomised city. From that angle, you might see a project like The Public School as trying to offer a small-scale support structure. On the other hand, you have a density of art schools and universities there too, so you have a superabundance number of people from very good MFA programmes wondering about how they continue some of those dialogues or encounters... It's certainly striking that it's just around the corner in Chinatown from The Mountain School of Arts. How did the city shape your thinking?

There's no doubt at all that the density of these institutions within Los Angeles, pushing thousands of graduates out each year, is something that some of these alternative schools are responding to. Where does all of that surplus creative energy go? The gap between the critical practices encouraged in schools and the more commercial gallery system outside also drives self-organization to make that gap more inhabitable. And there are people who are working at the schools but are frustrated by what they have to teach or the way they have to teach.  It was good to move out to Los Angeles, because it has this mythology that you're able to anything you want, there's space to do stuff, and all that. It may not be entirely true, but a persuasive mythology can make itself true, simply by existing. At a certain level it becomes self-fulfilling. So, in adding to this already vibrant ecosystem, it becomes important to ask what this project is going to contribute.

Were there other initiatives you were connecting with, in LA or beyond?

Fiona and I, with our friend Tom Pilla, used to do an architecture radio show on Kill Radio called Building Sound and we interviewed a lot of people about how they ran their institutions: Mark Allen at Machine Project; Fritz Haeg, who was doing Sundown Salons; and Matt Coolidge from Center for Land Use Interpretation, who was really important to me when we moved out to LA in 2002. And before Mark started Machine Project, he was involved in another place in Chinatown called c-level (which later became Beta Level) and they did all sorts of wild things with video games and live performance.

To go back to your diagram, did you have a sense early on that this was a project that could happen pretty much anywhere?

Yes.

So how long did it take for the next one to start? And was it a 'branch', or something else?

We're careful about which metaphor it would be, because 'branches' give a certain impression of hierarchy. There was an attempt to think about how these schools could be parallel, and branches are never parallel. I wanted to avoid the sense of others having to answer to LA.

By 2009, I was working with people in Chicago and Philadelphia to open things there, but those two didn't work, for various reasons. Chicago was started for a festival, but then after that some of the more motivated people maybe ran out of energy or moved away. Not long after, I received the New York Prize Fellowship for public architecture with architects in New York, called Common Room. We started The Public School (for Architecture) as part of the fellowship, building furniture, using public spaces – lobbies, and so on – in different institutions around the city.

At the start of the fellowship, I met with various people to discuss the possible continuation of the project afterwards. And a few months later, a big meeting was organized, as a class proposed by the committee, called 'The Future of The Public School', to determine whether it would end with the fellowship, or continue on its own. There, people made a new committee and entered into a space-sharing agreement with Triple Canopy of Light Industry in Brooklyn, at 155 Freeman Street. Paris and Brussels came later.

So it gradually spread from North American cities?

Mostly in Europe, but also in San Juan and Buenos Aires.

They seem to be a mixture of major cities, like New York or San Francisco, or smaller university towns, like Durham.

Each of the different schools is a different story. There have been some engagements with small towns, but they've never really worked. For example, there was one school that wasn't listed on the website. Jan Ritsema, who runs PAF (Performing Arts Forum), started a Public School in St Erme, the small town outside of Paris where PAF is, but he struggled with it. The Public School is a project that seems to require a certain density of people and access to resources. When people get in touch, that's something that comes up.

What was the process? Would people get in touch?

Yeah, basically.

Were you always happy for that to happen?

Yes, and especially at first. I saw the potential for it to work in other places. It was exciting that an idea could capture people's imaginations. I have to admit that, at the time, I'd sometimes feel isolated in Los Angeles – nowadays that almost sounds silly, with so many people having moved there, or traveling there, it's become a destination. But, I was excited that all of the sudden this started to define a global network. I didn't know what was possible with it, but to me that remains the most exciting, latent dimension to it.

Do you record classes?

We would actively not document things. At the time we thought of that as a radical thing to do, in a culture of over-documenting things. And I still think that there’s something ti the idea of refusing to document for the reason that you don't want it to take the place of other people having that experience. But when that position becomes habitual it can become precious, or even blind to some of the opportunities that the internet provides or to the reasons that people might want to access documentation. There were certain things we did that became habitual that I wanted to question.  

When you start a big project, it's a common fantasy to want it to take on a life of its own. The nature of The Public School means that it shouldn't have to depend upon me as an initiator to give it shape. From a very early point, something I wanted was to step away from the project. That happened to a degree by moving away from LA, to Melbourne, and by letting Telic close.

For so many of these projects, the only guarantee of sustainability is to become nested within a biennial, a museum, a university. They become a para-department, quasi-autonomous, and that can give them another few years. But, while The Public School is sometimes based in university towns, there isn't a formal alignment.

I think you're right. And where there has been that formal alignment, there's only a brittle form of stability. In Brussels, The Public School was with Komplot, and in Paris it was with Bétonsalon. Both were curatorial projects, really, and The Public School became a temporary part of their institutions. Of course, that seems stable – you have space and staff – but it only lasts as long as it works for those curatorial agendas. A shared sense of ownership seems to happen more readily when it's not embedded in that way.

I remember the first time that I visited The Public School in LA, which was around 2010, there was a large blackboard full of completely inscrutable diagrams left over from a class in Lacanian knot-tying. To what degree did classes leave traces on a classroom? Were there more physical reconstitutions of the space by activities, or was the room a more neutral container?

There's a balance to strike, because you don't want people to feel imprisoned by someone's design decisions. But one of the things I hated about running a gallery was the erasure of the history of the place between shows. I'd always be interested in curatorial experiments that would try to retain a trace of the exhibition histories, instead of this commercial imperative to whitewash everything, to return it to a tablua rasa for the next artist. Artists are obviously complicit in that, so I'd be more interested in artists who didn't necessarily need a tabula rasa, who could respond to the history – people who had exhibited before, and in conversation with people who came afterwards. In a school, it's much easier to make that argument than in a gallery, because paraphernalia, furniture, wear and life are all expected.

We had a big table that was originally a stage in a Jordan Crandall exhibition at Telic. We started the school in the basement of the gallery space soon after, so I added some legs and it became an eight foot by eight foot table. With a table that size, it's almost impossible to use the middle and, by being square, there's no hierarchy to it. But what's more important is that you don't quite know how to engage with it, because you don't know where to sit. So I found the beginning of classes quite awkward. In the same way that you couldn't take anything for granted with a proposal, we couldn't take anything for granted with the space.

What's the connection between The Public School and Aaaarg.org? You've described that project as 'a collective library comprised of scans, excerpts and exports that members of the public have found important enough to share'.

That started as a shared library around 2005. I'd moved from New York to Los Angeles, and continued to work on projects with people back in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. I'm one of those people who wishes that all of the people I'm friends with could be friends with each other. So I set up a shared library that was used by each of these overlapping projects, and it expanded from there. It wasn't really conceived, it just was. It kept growing. At this point, I think there are 120,000 people on it.

An early statement proposed that it was not just a library – sometimes it performed as a reading group or a journal. While that statement was actually written before The Public School started, it carries with it the sense that it could perform a more social function.

I was intrigued to see that Aaaarg.org was even the subject of a Public School class in New York.

That's true, though I don't even know that much about what happened. I'm not sure if I even participated? But when The Public School happened, it started to take on some of the activation of the archive. Things I wanted to happen with the library started to happen more through the school.

In a short essay you wrote for frieze back in 2012, you asked: 'Where is the online educational space for learning for its own sake? For the development of critical thought? For the articulation and circulation of new concepts, languages and political possibilities?' What are your thoughts now?

It's still an open question. There's the New Centre for Research & Practice, which has super interesting courses. It started in the last year and is mostly happening online, on Google Hangout. It's run by three people – Jason Adams, Mohammad Salemy and Tony Yanick – and is quite linked to the accelerationism discourse. As an institution that happens on the internet, it's closer to what I meant than anything else I've seen.

Even in the time since I wrote that frieze piece, MOOCs have failed to live up to their business potential. I don't think they're a thing of the past yet, but certainly around 2013 they seemed so ascendant, while in the last couple of months, a string of articles have been evaluating their failure. At the start there was a huge amount of rhetoric and marketing, but in practice people started to see that MOOCs had a very low number of active students and the ones who did well were already successful – there were very few of the Cinderella stories that were initially promised. But the biggest problem was that only about 4% of students actually complete an average course. They are just failing to hold attention.

The frieze piece was sketching out a plan for a project called the External Program – a name that was taken from UCL's External Programme, the earliest correspondence learning institution in the world, which Dickens once called the 'People's University'. Did this initiative ever transpire?

I feel like it maybe worked out as the article. The article served as a provocation for almost interrogating the foundations of The Public School, challenging it not to be so comfortable with its own workings. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's the way forward for it.

FURTHER QUESTIONS

- I wondered whether you had any thoughts about the events at USC Roski, given that we touched upon the Los Angeles context?

I’ve only followed the situation from afar, so I don’t have any particular insight, only personal opinions, which are completely supportive of those seven students who collectively withdrew. It is such a strong statement that stands out within the normally individualizing MFA atmosphere. I suppose that my thoughts tend toward the “what next” and how might these seven heighten things, how might they organize their education in exile, bringing other outcasts (voluntary or involuntary) into their orbit.

- Do you think that any of the so-called alternative schools that have started this past decade will get to a point of providing actual alternatives to conventional BAs, MFAs or even PhDs? My sense is that they're often more supplementary or are suggestive of alternative / critical models.

What does an alternative mean, though? The same degree but performed in a different way? Or propositions for other kinds of “degree”? If any of them are successful in this way then we’ll probably understand them at that point more as part of the system than an alternative to it. Instead of speculating about the mutations in accreditation from disciplinary pressure, alternative imaginaries, and financial discipline, what about mutating our understanding of what education could be, divorced from the value conferred on it via degrees. I think I’m less interested in seeing these schools as different ways of doing the same thing than a different way of doing the thing.

- Are there any writers on education who have been particularly informative for your thinking about Telic and The Public School?

The longer the project has gone on, the more I’ve read and it’s all been useful and informative in different ways, whether it is recent examples, philosophers of pedagogy, or interviews like the ones you’re conducting. I suppose memorable sparks for me came from Jan Verwoert’s “Lessons in Modesty” essay, Astra Taylor’s lecture on unschooling, and the conversation between Myles Horton and Paolo Friere, published as We Make the Road by Walking.

- A recent report by the collective BFAMFAPhD asked 'What is a work of art in the age of $120,000 art degrees?'. Do you have any thoughts? Or, looking ahead, what is the future of the art school in this context? Online, dispersed, small-scale or elsewhere entirely...?

Maybe the more art is oriented towards servicing the shrinking minority who controls a growing proportion of the total wealth, the more likely it is that more and more art schools will collapse. Amidst that wreckage, perhaps emerging out of it, could be a new understanding of the art school and with it a new understanding of art’s function, connected to some of the experiments taking place today. I don’t think there’s some ideal form that the future will reveal to us, only contingent forms developed within concrete situations.

Published

• Dockray, Sean, and Sam Thorne. “Sean Dockray.” In School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education, edited by Sam Thorne. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017.