This exhibition aims to explore the connections between art, education and everyday life through the artistic practice. This would take us through a parcours where research and production processes, together with different approaches to the understanding of pedagogy and knowledge transmission –very much connected with their performative and collective potential become subjects and tools of contemporary artistic production.
The Live Creature takes its title from the first chapter of John Dewey’s book “Art as Experience”. This was published in 1934 and, even though at the time, it was received with different enthusiasms, time and renewed approaches to its reading have placed it as a central contribution to art education and the connection of art and everyday life. For Dewey the autonomy of the artistic experience is grounded on the social function of art, promoting a practice that increases our capacity of doing and, understanding the agency of the relations we establish within the conditions of production.
Dewey’s theory could be seen as an attempt to shift the understanding of what is important and characteristic about the art process from its physical manifestations in the “expressive object” to the process in its entirety, a process whose fundamental element is no longer the material “work of art” but rather the development of an “experience”.
This understanding of experience was later very influential to artists such as Allan Kaprow who pushes Dewey’s philosophy into the experimental context of social and psychological interaction, where outcomes become less predictable. Therein, the given natural and social forms of experience provide the intellectual, linguistic, material, temporal, habitual, performative, ethical, moral and aesthetic framework within which meaning maybe made .
A more contemporary reading: Maria Puig de la Bellacasa states in one of her latest published articles that knowledge production, which we would freely associate to the artistic practice, is situated and therefore could not be understood without the multitude of relations that make it possible.
This exhibition aims to explore the connections between art, education and everyday life through the artistic practice. This would take us through a parcours where research and production processes together with different approaches to the understanding of pedagogy and knowledge transmission –very much connected with their performative and collective potential become subjects and tools for contemporary artistic production.
These principles would give us the frame to explore the connections between art education and art practice, craftsmanship as a way of relating to the world, the body as a subject of transmission but also, the relevance of the urban and natural process that surround us as a departure point for the artistic production and as a tool for generating a better understanding on the way we live.
Participant artist are Anna Craycroft (USA), Esther Ferrer (ESP), Adelita Husni-Bey (IT), Allan Kaprow (USA), Teresa Lanceta (ESP), Nicolas Malevé (BE), Aimée Zito Lema (NL). Curator: Soledad Gutiérrez. (AC/E press-release)