Oh! Snap! A chance meeting with Philly’s own Chris Powell reveals how TDAR is on everyone’s mind. He was spotted sporting the jewelry right there- Flava Flav style.  Indeed, it’s real embroidered bling done by the fine fellows at Obey Your Brain. It’s as if we have hired them.  Or met in our subconscious and created our own line for them to produce, but then forgot about the encounter. Did that happen guys?

The previous postings are a live account of TDAR’s Monday activity. For those coming late to the game: circa autumn a certain local educator approached TDAR after seeing our FLUX exhibit at Historic Yellow Springs. He invited TDAR to consider creating a project that would address the issue of academic integrity at the local high school where he taught. The students there are among the state’s most driven learners, players, artists, and workers. They are primary examples of excellence: they wake up at 4 a.m. to row crew before starting class at 7:20am, then save the world as an extracurricular activity. Think Tracy Flick. Alas, with such great responsibility comes accountability; competition is stiff, and the school has had some difficulty with issues of academic integrity. Having all attended similar such schools, we decided rather than chastising to explore this larger system of grades, AP tests, clubs, and the various pressures to achieve.

So we made a cube. Ok, one step back. Here’s how we arrived at the cube’s construction. TDAR thought: what nuanced ideas could we deliver to the students? Obviously they’re smart. To tell them not to c.h.e.a.t, that’s just cliche. What if we created a temporary stress-free space in which the transmission of knowledge would take place independent of grades or evaluation? One wherein TDAR was not teaching them something, but they in fact were teaching us?

So we made a cube. We put the cube in a high-traffic area. And we invited students to step inside and teach us about ANYTHING–a favorite hobby, a little known fact, an essential high school survival skill. TDAR planned to sit in the space and take record of the lessons students offered in passing. We had no idea that it would become the center of attention that it did: over 250 students met with us.

2:20 p.m. - A dramatic climax! With our greatest crowd of the day (approx. 60 people), the a capella group gave an impromptu singing lesson / concert!

1:09 p.m. - Just learned how to spot a WWII airplane!

12:49 p.m. - Too many updates to mention. We’ve had a few more 3-D submissions, lots of cool origami

11:45 a.m. - A teacher has decided that his class is going to teach us how many students can fit in the cube…here’s hoping the pvc piping holds out…

11:41 a.m. - We just added a 3-D object to our collection. How do we get it in the book??

11:28 a.m.- A student who taught us how to doodle just returned to the box with an awesome drawing for us!

Update - 11:04 a.m. - In the past hour we’ve learned how to spot a vampire, the official date of the apocalypse (12/12/12), and the basics of sign language:

Hello! Here we are live at the high school. It’s 9:42 a.m. and I’ve  (this is Sarah) already learned how to milk a cow, jump a horse, and the difference between classic tap shoes and rhythmic tap shoes. We have  also learned how to spell the school’s name correctly (apologies to the readers of previous misspelling!). I think there’s a volleyball team on the way. James is about to learn how to foxtrot with a teacher. Okay, he has to lead. She is teaching him how to take the right steps and how to hold her correctly. I think the main challenge here is that James has to learn how to be a strong leader while remembering the steps. She is also letting James know that he needs to have a better flow. James is blaming his new shoes. Sure James. Sure.

This is the Padlock video the previous post refers to. It is all well and good viewed here with a nice steady internet connection, but let’s  be clear: this exists on a VHS tape, playing from the purest white television compact set in the Padock Gallery in south philly. Indeed.

TDAR rolled out its video recap remix at Padlock Gallery in South Philadelphia this past Saturday. The show featured a smörgåsbord of PIFAS paraphernalia and performance. Showing artists included the usual suspects–too many to name here, but if you take a gander at the PIFAS faculty page , you can get a good idea of the array of items showcased. We TDARians edited a best-of video of last August’s Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session, wrote it to VHS (obviously.), and played it continuously throughout the eve. Of note: the VHS played from the most perfect apparatus imaginable: a compact white television complete with white headphones. Really, you deserve to see this in its element.

The show continues throughout the month. You must make an appointment to visit the show. Contact markprice1026 (at) gmail (dot) com.

For those out and about this weekend–TDAR will be screening a “greatest hits” video from our “Academic Aesthetic Breakout Session” project this Saturday, May 2nd, from 8 p.m. - midnight at Padlock Gallery. The video is TDAR’S contribution to Padlock’s “PIFAS at Padlock” show, which features new work from other faculty members from the Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study, and, uh, old archival work from us. Live it again for the very first time. Anyway, if you can’t make it out, the video will be on view at the space for the month. Padlock is located at 1409 Ellsworth St. in South Philadelphia (basically a few doors west of Broad St. on Ellsworth).

When TDAR shows up at the local high school, we likely won’t be wearing our usual professorial garb. That’s because in our effort to explore “academic integrity”, we’ll be trading roles with the students and asking them to teach us something. At the risk of explaining too much, I’ll quickly say that the basic idea is that you can’t cheat when you teach, or at least it’s hard to provide guidance when you haven’t learned the lesson yourself. Throughout the day, we’ll be giving students salt pretzels and honorary TDAR membership cards in exchange for their wisdom in whatever subject area of school or daily life that they like. We’ll be documenting all of our newfound knowledge online throughout the day and in print afterward.

After we came up with this idea, I began to think about how much it echoes previous artistic strategies like the instructions and “music” scores of the Fluxus movement, or the more recent “Do it” series by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The main commonality is that all these things involve giving the viewer a guide to something that he or she can interpret, perform, or simply read. But the more I thought about it, the more I see our project as distinct from these precedents, at least as far as motivations are concerned.

The Fluxus instructions I can think of usually involve some nonsensical element that brings attention to patterns and rhythms of everyday life that are otherwise easy to miss. This George Maciunas video is a nice example:

I would be very happy to see the high schoolers going in this direction, but I don’t think it’s very likely.

The other thing I associate with Fluxus is an interest in breaking the sense that making art is done by an elite group who can profit from the rarified works they produce. Obrist seems quite interested in taking this up in the “Do it” project, where artists submit instructions to go online, into a book, and in traveling exhibitions where audiences can go execute them. Again, I don’t see a parallel with our project here, since undermining the system of art’s production isn’t what we have in mind.

But, I still see our project as a strange cousin of the “Do it” endeavor, partly because I don’t think “Do it” does what it was meant to do…does it? I mean, this whole thing about the production of art becoming shared seems like a bit of a false promise. Dara Birnbaum recently said in Artforum, “I think Hans Ulrich became infatuated with seeing work disperse widely into culture. And who gets eliminated from that system? Well, the artists.” But if you look at many of the “Do it” submissions, most seem to be about extending the identity of the artist into an instruction format, not removing him/her from the equation.

Here’s one from Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

Get 180 lbs. of a local wrapped candy and drop in a corner.

And another from Christian Boltanski:

[1] GET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S PHOTO ALBUM [2] GIVE THE NEIGHBOR YOURS IN EXCHANGE [3] ENLARGE ALL THE PICTURES TO 8 X 10 [4] FRAME THEM IN SOME SIMPLE FASHION AND HANG THEM ON THE WALLS OF YOUR APARTMENT [5] YOUR NEIGHBOR SHOULD DO THE SAME WITH YOUR ALBUM

And here is one of my favorites from Tino Sehgal:

you are already doing all of it

The project has some wonderful little submissions, but I don’t see them as displacing the function of the artist as Birnbaum suggests they might. Instead, I think the best ones define some core element unique to the interests and efforts of the artists who wrote them. And that’s what I hope the students can define for themselves.

Work continues on TDAR’S high school “academic integrity” project.  After discovering that the pvc plumbing joint we really needed didn’t exist, we finally erected our new temporary classroom–an old idea we’ve just now gotten around to trying out in preparation for this event.   The cube is shown here at The Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Study (PIFAS); Oliver looks on with pride.  Not quite as collapsible as we had first imagined, the room eventually broke back down into 24 4′ pipes without too much effort.  It may seem motionless thanks to the wonders of photography, but the room actually looks a bit like a wobbly piece of translucent polygon jello in real life.

Half the fun (for me at least) of TDAR’s white aesthetic has always been in its juxtaposition with the colorful chaos of PIFAS; I wonder how our room will or won’t fit in when installed in the high school’s main lobby?

Last night TDAR convened a special Sunday session to continue work on our “academic integrity” project for a local high school. Although we all seemed to feel pretty sorry for students who turn to cheating, we’ve nevertheless been talking about it almost as some kind of art practice. TDAR friend/hypertext shaman John Muse suggested we youtube “how to cheat on a test” to get the lay of the land. (more…)