POST STUDENT ART SCHOOL (PSAS)


With the intention of questioning the current state of Art Schools, especially with universities behaving like corporations that make limited promises and deliver even less, Now You Have Authority (NYHA) will conduct a series of workshops at TATE Exchange. The workshops begin with a computer interface playing the role of a tutor/workshop leader directing the participants towards performing a range of activities with various corporate produced, consumerist objects placed in the space (e.g. - Coffee Cups, chips boxes etc.).

The interface is intended to encourage adults as well as children to take part in the activities with the specific intention of breaking down the barriers of age regulated art education. Set within the context of a reputable Art Institution (TATE) and using icons of everyday consumerist objects, the participants are encouraged to re-appropriate them and then perform the ubiquitous act of sharing their creation on social media. These creations then serve as the new set of raw materials for the next group of participants to repeat the actions albeit with their own creative take on the objects.

This act of recycling the objects and the notion of repetition highlight the excesses of the art school environment when it behaves like a corporation. Students are now considered consumers of a product (the product being “art education”) and are encouraged to swallow the rhetoric whilst being promised a ‘free environment’ to make their art. The works created by the participants remain “complete” only as a digital artefact within the realm of Instagram thereby indulging them in the act of instant gratification in the era of doing things explicitly for the sake of sharing them on social media.