The E for EVERYDAY as a defining and tuning moment strongly linked to and embedded in an identity-building process. A practice that takes place on the kitchen table, or that can be extended to the rear garden or the nearby woods is maybe better described as a pre-studio practice than one that is beyond the need of a studio.

If C for CURATING is actually understood as not taking care but as selecting artists or works then the artist obviously participates in this as well. Decisions and choices are made from the first moment. These decisions can be enforced or be elective, but they are nevertheless consequential to what is possible or simply not on the plate for the day.  Selection parameters need to articulated in order to decide which idea/intuition/research perspective should be granted further attention and followed up on. A certain level of reflection on your own practice is essential as the future product/object or concept needs to relate to and will be understood in the context of the overall production.  Understanding an existing context can be acknowledged as a contemporary moment, so can reproducing certain historic contexts. Which is relevant at a given moment?

The P for PUBLISHING very often does actually mean widening the audience through a more widely distributable platform or offering.  An idea is in its first moment be overseen by the person having it, but it’s usually through an instigated process of reflection that a thought reaches the level of being such. Picking up a hair band from the ground of a shopping mall is at maximum an impulse or just something you do out of pure curiosity. Only if this impulse is made into a routine— by deciding to pick all hair bands on the ground for years on end— does the initial moment eventually qualify as an idea. The next step strongly depends on a context where such an act can read in as a relevant concept, such as an art context.

In general a concept of COMMUNICATION demands a receiver that witnesses the act itself or who is confronted with a less immediate representation, a documenting image or just a displayed collection of hair bands. To differentiate the materiality as specific, the viewer needs to be able to make certain observations. The viewer needs to be a reader that understands grammatical moves in an aesthetic language. Or at least the impetus to want to get why is crucial for an aesthetic understanding. Agreeing on the encounter is the baseline for considering a work’s relevance. This is a contract between the person who prepares a defined materiality to be experienced, and a wide range of institutional, social, cultural, spatial, and temporal factors.

An artist’s E for ECONOMY 2 asks what are the actual means for production and distribution at a given moment. How much can be invested in and beyond prepared scenarios for supporting the making and presentation of work? How sustainable is a practice, not only financially, but symbolically, and just in terms of life energy? How much money do you really need to spend to create a set when there’s so much material that is ready to hand? Does an artist need to pay for a space or are their other forms of connection and other possibilities for exchange, other forms of valuing art?  Buying into a discourse and making yourself knowledgeable about relevant texts and surrounding positions is less pecuniary but it’s still an investment that needs to be paid in time.

CONSEQUENCE is relatively easy to understand in relation to form. A sculpture out of a toilet paper roll can represent a giraffe, but it will probably still keep some elements of its former fact of being a toilet paper roll (assuming it is not just mashed into pulp). But why would you pulp a toilet paper roll anyway? It is not newspaper!

S for a SELF or THE self: a very complicated term, particularly in reality. Already, finding a place for the self in the company is somehow troubling. Considering that many art students are in the best case just on their way to adulthood might make it difficult for them to understand the self, not only regarding themselves, but also in a more general sense. Simplification helps. They can use the example of artists with strong imaginative personae. They can just invent a character who takes care of their artistic production. Often this character may even replace the self as such. This NON-SELF can very much work as advertisement for the company’s creations. But beyond the storefront or shopping home page, the company’s culture can become smitten and influenced by that NON-SELF. The responsibilities of each floor can be outsourced to such an invention and the possible consequences may be happily applauded.

D for DUBBLE FLOORING: My understanding of this basic parameter of aesthetics goes back to an exhibition I saw in Kassel at the Museum Fridericianum in 1993. The group exhibition Nachtschattengewächse featured a major installation by Franz West. The work was both a studio setting but at the same time a presentation of other artist’s work that had us guessing in this scenario. West marked the studio or interior setting through furniture works. But at no point was he trying to represent actual studio. The couch and table were standing on a  a double floor, which made it remarkably clear where we are not. Art does not need the totalisation of suggested realities, nor does artistic research as one of its fundaments. They sketch out, signify certain elements, that in their addition become a certain sum that can be then read as a “Studio”.

The relative S for STABILITY of these kind of promises can be easily forgotten when a certain success allows the artist and its company to super-realize reality and operate as a theater of conviction. That’s when they forget that the essential point of an aesthetic contract is that the audience is still an elementary partner in the contract.

CONTINUITY is relevant in many ways when building up a body of works over a longer period as for example in a practice led PHD. When you choose a field of interest the continuity is given from the beginning. Most moves will be read in relationship to the topic of research whether you follow different aspects or even moving away from a starting point. It is a relational movement that even can cover up fractures. A practice led PHD or a practice that cannot being described “being about” needs other forms of stability. Very sufficient one is the role of an artist who has through a certain practice build up a ego of capability that reaches beyond the various fields and genres and suggests being the author of a Gesamtkunstwerk. A kind traditional model but that keeps producing again and again contemporary versions and updates. Being beyond questionability is on the other side a restriction towards an audience as it actually is not invited to a judging role. It is more or less confronted with a any output production that strictly trust its own parameters. Not necessarily based on aesthetic concepts but more on the decision to be the artist that produces the art the artist is. This kind of career is often warmly welcomed by a financial but also discoursive market as the stability continues to create reliable parameter. The observations whether critical or celebratorial focus on the shifts and again relational movements inside of an oeuvre. It herby affirms and supports the needed reflection outside of a practice by supervising a one-directional monologue.

In a process orientated practice the continuity is suggested being natural present. Individual artworks may be produced under certain circumstances by using particular parameters in form, color and material, but also social components may trigger a reaction by an artistic character. As soon such an approach becomes a regularity the singular process is embedded in a general working attitude and guarantees solid stability.

Relational aesthetics have pushed the variability of a practice to a maximum, when each project, exhibition or otherwise formed commission let the artist react in relation ship to given or even self instigated circumstances. The unforseeability seems maybe daring for a institution but the outcome can even be pured in concrete when it finds it a relevant response. Funnily has in this field a counter productive branding culture taken place where artist like Liam Gimmick and his French colleagues seem to guarantee quality without the relevance of relation. As relational would also want an audience be a relating body, success seems contra productive. Beneath the level of internationally celebrated art celebraties these methods are still valuable. First of all the they need to stand up to all other parallel present and possible practices. They will always find an unprepared audience that is being not been introduced to such a method. This is of course relevant for all former avantgards as they only for educated are relatively over.. Classic format of painting, sculpture but also later avantgards that have become canonized and are possible strategies to work with and in.

AVANTGARDE is relative in educating each generation again who is not on the standard art history. So visiting an art school could be reliving the development art history at least in certain parts. You may not start with drawing class but understanding form in relation to reality might be unavoidable. Further developments of abstractions are naturally experienced. Some might be just understood through practicing peers. And each generation of a BA course somehow represents a catalogue of former avantegards, movements or just forms of expressions and methods. During such processes of learning steps ahead on a latter might seem non-reciprocal for the individual as avantegards did for their provider (?). Even the proclamatic tune is a ingredients of any educational landscape where the ruling and formulation of values makes a strong part in vocal claims of relevance and identity. Art schools are and can be close to a contemporary understanding of the arts in its actual participation of discussing new ways of approaching reality. Schools and universities try to be and stay in contact by inviting relevant positions as part of their curriculum and staff. But students have an automatical drive to a field of practice that seems to or promises moving beyond boundaries.

CARE is not a discourse or DON’T CARE IF YOU’RE NOT THERE! There is white range of publications, texts and conferences where people talk about what they care and how. Not seldom there is no reality to it as a suggestion per se is already a aesthetic reality and does not need to be proven real. In the case of CARE and EDUCATION this means someone or something does not get an actual attention in form of CARE or being educated. Absolutely are things in science developed on the fore front thinking without being forced to tested in a full scenario reality. A test, a set up remodeling the relevant reality can be enough to understand certain movements and relations between cause and action. Even at an artschool this happens in all the testing and learning experiments under and without guidance. The art school can be understood as a permanent laboratory of the science of art even if it is often mildly smiled on by members of a professional community, students have not yet qualified for. Besides enormous number of university employees that never even once meet a student as part of their job description the act of educating has pushed to the minimal means at institutions of learning. This is the case despite huge discourses on the educational in a lot of areas where nobody wants or expects to learn, but the strategic politics make the claim a part of their tactics of relevance internal but also towards a outside society. Meanwhile art schools have started the same by pretending education with similar methods of public advertisement and other forms of strategic positioning in the urge for legimitation and money. As university politics since a very long are not defined by content provider but bureaucrats and administrator this cannot come as a surprise. It is the pure logic when the content professor is happily left to focus on an expertise but loosing all keys to moderating and structuring the schools set up. Therefore education is organized by an elite bureaucracy that in most cases not once had something to do with a student or education. They claim to be the provider of possibilities, but actually fail more and more by giving in to threats and wanting above or beneath them. As they don’t understand the flow of the currency they claim to house they of course cant not protect it. But they do pretend.

EUROPEAN acts of assimilating education has led to the end of century long models and euphorias of humanism. Humbold’s University is dead. Interfering for the sake of evaluating and guaranteeing standards that can be compared are the treat in the trick game. The promise of interchangeable content and permeable borders of educating humans is a bureaucratic utopie without any interest in an actual act of educating. It is strictly formular and so its interest and its execution. If you don’t have to change your money into another currency the individual might save 15 minutes on the way to holidays. Taking away boarder controls was an act of ease. But when you change school and country and you expect being the same you need to nivelate any difference of knowledge. But difference is the most valuable coin in exchanging knowledge as a currency of particular value. The specificity of not knowing allows to know something else. A Europe of regions is only a Europe of manies if they are based on identities that are rooted, related, but also understood in the difference and not the assimilatated citizen.