Halle School of Common Property

The choice of this theme for the Halle School coincides with current debates on the training of artists, the alternative production of knowledge, and the current state of cultural studies and art history. The current issue of Texte zur Kunst (March 2004), for example, deals with the theme of 'academy' and thus with models of artistic knowledge production within and outside of institutional structures. In his text 'Corporate Rokoko' published in his much-discussed book The Academy and the Corporate Public (2002), the artist and academy professor Stephan Dillemuth analyses aspects of the history of education and proposes the argument that academic institutions increasingly function as examples of the continuation of absolutistic tendencies and possessive organisational structures within the field of art history and in the production of art. The summer academy will take up this thesis, among others, and, based on different strategies pursued by cultural, artistic, and academic practices, simultaneously deal with the way art and culture production is permeated by information technology. The resulting questions pertaining, on the one hand, to participative educational policies based on technological preconditions and, on the other, to a politics of privatising educational and knowledge-related resources, will constitute the theme and object of the summer academy.

Points of discussion to be specified during the Halle School include:

• Can one draw conclusions from the current debate on “governmentality” in regard to a non-institutional, self-organised way of dealing with knowledge production?
• Do self-organised forms of cultural knowledge production promote the current restructuring in the field of education which is oriented toward privatisation and private-public partnerships?
• Or can alternative models of organising artistic and cultural knowledge, instead, lead to a new form of joint responsibility that can have an effect on universities and academies?

Through the integration and collaboration of national and international participants with international workshop organisers and the festival structure of the 6th Werkleitz Biennale, a temporary critical venue is to be created dedicated, among other things, to the effects that the current, privatisation-oriented “restructuring of education” has on the production of art and culture within and outside of academic structures.

One important aim going beyond the course of the Halle School and the 6th Werkleitz Biennale will consist in a mutual, sustainable exchange between the individual groups and participants. Similarly organised events in the past years, especially within the context of art festivals, have repeatedly proved that such a summer academy can serve as a “condensation point” for continuing projects and structures.