School opening speech, October 3

Dear friends,

It is my great honour and pleasure to welcome all of you to the official opening of the school year 2011-12 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts’ Schools of Visual Arts. I am particularly happy to bit our new group of students welcome, 25 of which are enrolled in the new 3 y BFA program and 5 of which will join the 3 y MFA program. We all look very much forward to working with you in the coming years.

I can’t even begin to describe how important it is for us that you take advantage of and exploit the facilities and resources offered by the institution. It takes a while to get acquainted with the possibilities. To a certain extend you could say that learning at this institution is learning to manoeuvre and to define a practice within a field of possibilities. As you’ll soon discover this field is vast. It’s material as well as immaterial. It’s practical as well as discursive and theoretical. It’s to be found in our extremely resourceful faculty group, in the studio spaces, in the labs and workshops, in the auditoriums, in the exhibition spaces, in the exchange with fellow students and with the many invited artists and lecturers. As much as all of this represents endless possibilities and endless series of combination, it only points to a potential, really. What is a potential? A potential is a not yet realised… something that can become real but without being determined to be realised and without having an identity before its incarnation. Does it sound a little abstract? Let me be more down to earth: There are lots of things you can do with this school but the content is to a large degree defined by yourselves. The curriculum is not a pre-given, the program is not programmed. It comes in a certain sense after the fact. Lean back and wait for the staff to tell you what to do, what to learn and what to know, and it’ll soon dry out. Use it, shape it, feed it, and it will live and grow. It’s simple as that. And yet so demanding. Welcome to higher education, welcome to an art academy!

Studying at the Schools of Visual Art is not like ’going to school’ in the ordinary sense of that phrase. You are from now on enrolled in a higher education institution, meaning that you are not any longer ’pupils’ (even though we sometimes say ’elev’ instead of student, but this is actually more related to the French ’eleve’ than to the English ’pupil’, i.e. ’eleve’ is someone who is in a process of growth and development, in a process of elevation). Personally I prefer to say student, because to study more than anything else is an attitude, it is about be inquisitive, curious, interrogative, self-reflexive. So as students you are expected to engage in a long learning process during which you will develop a singular practice, a set of methods, a critical/artistic vision, and during which you will begin to define your own interests and your own learning needs, rather than just joining a program based on a fixed curriculum and standardized knowledge.

This most demanding ‘freedom’ to pursue your own interests will be still more apparent as you delve deeper in your studies. At the same time as you are students in a program you will also have to recognize the fact that you are you are more than that: you are in an academy situation. Studying in a higher education institution and being part of an academy are not synonymous. The first ‘academy’, not an art academy I’m afraid, established by the Greek philosopher Platon, was a place, a framework within which peers could meet as equals in order to debate, argue, exchange, quarrel, and develop ideas, some with loads of experience, others as new-comers and beginners in the field, but all brought together by their love for knowledge, which is what philosophy means. Thus, an art academy is more than just a building, more than just an education. An academy is a place for artistic production, development, research and knowledge production based on a certain collective spirit: in the academy students and faculty alike are participants in an exchange; we all give, we all receive, we all invent. But the outcome is not one collective product; the outcome is unpredictable because we do not produce only one kind of subjectivity.

All this might sound a little old school to some of you. And perhaps a little ‘Summer of Love’ to others. However, while constantly ‘modernizing’ our programs, i.e. adjusting and adapting to the needs of new generations of students, as well as revising study structures after negotiation with the political and ministerial system that we as a state institution are part of, we at the very same time insist on being different; we insist on a certain non-conformity in relation higher education today. And I think this applies to many of our colleagues at the other educational institutions under the Ministry of Culture. This year we have had a quite unique change to thus claim this difference and to formulate a broad foundation, including an educational philosophy, on which our programs can be evolve. During the winter and early spring of 2011 we began working on a new strategy and an action plan for the coming four years in connection with the framework agreement that will be negotiating with our Ministry. This is not the time nor the place to flesh out the details of the strategy, a paper based on months of work and which includes multiple voices – it will be made public very soon – so let me instead for this occasion quote a few points that are particularly important and that emphasise what I’ve been just saying:

The educational philosophy/principles sound as follows:

- students are admitted to the institution as emerging practising artists;

- in the course of their studies students must take still more responsibility for their own learning;

- learning and the development of artistic competencies take the students own artistic work and practice as their departure point;

- the development of artistic consciousness and practice is stimulated by an array of different and often also differing artistic attitudes and discursive frames;

- content, form, theory and practice are intimately intertwined in artistic research and consequently in artistic education.

Worth noticing here is the emphasis on responsibility for own learning, which again relates to one of the major strategic goals, namely to develop the student’s abilities in self-organisation. Self-organisation is a keyword for a contemporary artistic practice that does not and cannot rely on an existing institutional system (e.g. of galleries, museums, biennales, press, e-flux etc.) as the only framework for production and distribution of art and knowledge. Emphasising student responsibility in education involves a trust in the student’s ability to identify his or her own learning needs, tutored of course by a more experienced faculty, and to therefore engage in the design of the program. As such there is no leaning back in a fixed schedule or in a set of artistic methods and knowledge procedures, not even in the comfortable acquisition of pre-defined skills. No doubt this openness puts obligations on you as students, but it is our conviction that we thereby give you the very best preparation for a life as independent artists outside these walls. Commitment, criticality, self-reflection and organisation are keywords in this respect and are among the important entrepreneurial competences that we will be striving to develop in the years to come.

The school year 2010-11 has been a real challenge for The Schools of Visual Art. Hit by quite unexpected financial problems and in order to achieve a more balanced budget situation in the future we have been forced to close down a lot of activities and consequently to reduce real educational possibilities for students. During the last two years almost 20 % of the staff at this institution has been fired so that today we have fewer departments, fewer labs and less administrative power than before. Committed staff members who have been working for the schools for years are now gone, huge and well-equipped labs are empty. This is a sad development. I would like to take this opportunity thank the people who are not with us anymore for their fantastic contributions to the academy – we miss you and your know-how. Also, I would like to thank the staff and the students in particular for being so acute in organising demonstrations and voicing opinions on the cultural policy of the neo-liberal state. Finally, let me welcome our new culture minister Uffe Elbæk to the contested field of contemporary culture production – I am expecting a lot from his collaboration with us and I am confident that he, a former school rector himself, will have an understanding of the importance for our societies of having strong state institutions that are able to accommodate and to develop artistic consciousness and research, this strange and unpredictable thing, at the highest level and beyond strict regulation.

With a total of 170 students The Schools of Visual Art is a small institution, but don’t be mistaken… we can be a strong community.

I wish you all a fantastic and productive school year!