Socrates famously said to his student, Meno: “I don’t know that I can teach you, and I don’t even know that you can learn! The best I can be is a midwife to ideas.” At first, Socrates is talking about Virtue, but also, Justice, Beauty, Art. Joseph Beuys declared that “To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.” If we do not know that we can learn, and do not know that we can teach, why, then, do we talk so much about Art, as a society spend so much on Art, and go into debt to ”learn” about something that we are not even sure can be learned? What are the implications of making pedagogy – and with it dialogue and a changed relationship between “teacher”and ”student” – the subject of art? Art + Pedagogy from Socrates to Joseph Beuys looks at why teaching / pedagogy (BFA/MFA/PhD; Paulo Freire, Jacques Rancière, Lygia Clark, etc.) along with dialogue / conversation and the meal as a vehicle of self-learning and new strategies of inter-subjectivity (Plato’s The Banquet / Symposium, Dante’s The Banquet, Theaster Gates, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Michael Rakowitz, InCubate, Detroit Soup, etc.) have become such prominent, troubling, and exciting subjects in contemporary art practices precisely at the moment when there is recognition that the democratization of art and its institutions begun in the Twentieth Century is over and the techniques for transmitting / teaching this “art” have become obsolete. Students are invited to conclude the semester with a student-curated meal and conversation or Banquet of friends.
Credits: 3
Prerequisites: Take one 3.0 credit, 200 level course from one of the following subjects: DAH (Art History), DEN (English), DAS (Academic Studies), DVC (Visual Culture).