Notes to Future Students — Tutor Anna Reutinger in conversation with Public Sandberg

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action. It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane. It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world and between other people and ourselves. It’s a place to build objects or totems, spiritual streams or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings, or galaxies.

The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks however to reject the division between the pure and the applied. Since “god is dead” and “the spectacle” is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.

The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds, including designers, artists, bankers, sceptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious. Please enjoy the trip.

The aim of the Dirty Art Department is to develop singular practices, both individual and collective, and, regardless of medium or subject, to give an insight into how to place these practices into the existing contexts of art, design, performance, writing, pizza making, etc. The final challenge is to create new context, that is, the transformation of reality, or the “revolution” in contemporary terms. The Dirty Art Department promotes a strong theoretical and philosophical agenda and is open to dangerous attempts and spectacular failures. It sees itself as a journey, and wherever it stops off, it remembers that “Any Space is the Place.”