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

DIRTY ART DEPARTMENT

Course

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 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 Kantian 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 contexts, 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.”

Milestones: Following the tenet of a non-pedagogic pedagogy, the department see its role as being to create situations for things to happen in: from buying one way tickets “on the road to nowhere,” initiating the occupation of Papaverweg and the creation of the autonomous living and project space Post-Norma, to the long term collaboration with the Macao Collective—including the Wandering School in 2016, a collective living and social sculpture which was nominated for the inaugural Milan Design Prize in 2017; followed by the Wandering School Part 2: Revolution or Bust! in 2018, a dérive that included meeting Franco “Bifo” Berardi as the oracle of Delphi, walking through the wilderness to Athens, clashes with Titans, a peace offering to the gods, helping to rebuild a refugee centre, regular encounters with tear gas, and just simply being there. The collective film Revolution or Bust! was presented at the third Youth Biennale of Bolzano in 2018, curated by Christian Jankowski.

Students

The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds with an active desire to act as an agent for the creation of the new world.

Website: www.dirtyartdepartment.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/dirtyartdepartment
Instagram: @dirtyartdepartment