From April to August 2018

Between April and July of 2018, Artur Żmijewski conducted a workshop for PhD students from three Zurich universities: the ETH, the UZH, and the ZHdK. «How to Teach Art» attracted participants with an academic background in the humanities, though most – if not all – of them also maintained an artistic practice of their own, either independent of or relating to their academic research. A key component of these practical exercises consisted of operating a Voigtländer plate camera from the early 20th century as well as a Bolex 16mm film camera.

Artur Zmijewski's comments on the workshop «How to Teach Art»

The meetings had usually two parts: a theoretical one and a practical one. After a rational discussion, we jumped into the zone of intuition and making ‹art›. The topic of the workshop was «How to Teach Art» This meant: What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process; a non-artist become an artist? Such questions have no clear answers, and the fact is, different strategies for teaching art tend to coexist. What kinds of strategies? For example, allowing people to accelerate the process by which they grow mentally, or allowing them to build their own mythology – which might establish roots for their artistic practice in the future. Or just to letting students discuss with one another and do whatever they want.
My work follows in a specific tradition. My teachers were focused on teaching a visual language. They wanted the other students and I to speak this language fluently. So, we learned its grammar, its phrasal verbs, and its dialects, even some slang. It was a good method; I know the language now, even if it’s not my mother tongue. I can speak it, and I’m able to communicate via visual messages.
But some problems do exist that aren’t normally part of the educational process in the art field. Such as:

– How to focus artistic intuition – or intuition in general – on a specific field, issue, or problem; how to navigate your intuition; how not to neglect subtle prompts which appear during the creative process, but rather to follow them.

– How to deal with the strong emotions that are a side effect of the creative process. For example, when you get close to human darkness, misery, hate, or evil, it’s possible that certain emotions might overtake you. They have the ability to transform creativity in a depressive way into a lost individual.

– How to live in a society that is focused solely on the bright side of life; how to reveal the weakness and brutality of human nature and not collapse when you are attacked by ‹the protectors of morality› or radical politicians who do not respect freedom of speech; thus, how to use your immune system properly and make sure it remains strong throughout your career.

– How to define what kind of creative creature you are. Maybe you see images in your mind and then simply transform them into material objects – paintings, drawings, photographs, and so on. But maybe you have to meditate for a long time in order to discover the proper image or situation for it.

So in the workshop, we developed a typology of artists, quite ironic but with this specific scientific terminological approach: ‹Samara› might serve as an example of an artist from our typology – the character originally comes from the horror movie «The Ring». She had an unusual ability to ‹print› images; as she said: «I don’t make them, I see them. Then they just are.» Some artists just ‹see› images and then ‹print› them. We could even extend our unfinished typology with an artist called ‹Printer› or ‹Plotter›. We wanted to reflect the ambivalent nature of artistic practice – it’s partly rational, but it’s done at a place called a blind spot, a black hole, or the subconscious. The goal of our workshop was to establish friendly cooperation between the rational (controlled) part of the creative process and all this creation that takes place inside the black hole or (collective) subconsciousness. Our hypothesis was that a mythological daemon named Daimonion (meaning ‹genius›, ‹talent›) dictates what artists should do. If it’s true, let’s try to draw up a contract with Daimonion and make art in a kind of cooperation with this creature.

We were trying to develop some answers – also in a practical way. We undertook both collective and individual exercises. We were trying to develop working conditions that would allow intuition to run freely. As an artist, you should be aware of when you're thinking rationality and when rational thinking is replaced by intuitive work. In my opinion, the results of intuitive work are better. So the practical part of the workshop was focused on creating this stroboscope or flicker effect, in which rationality appears and disappears – giving intuition space to do its job. You might not know what you’re doing, but you can watch yourself from a rational distance.
One of the more interesting collective exercises was a group painting on a huge blackboard. The board represented the collective subconscious or collective mind, and we asked it questions. During collective drawing sessions, the blackboard generated answers – in the form of images. For example, when asked the question, «What is the source of Samara’s images?» the answer was «Time».

At Kunsthalle Zürich, as part of the exhibition and science festival «100 Ways of Thinking», the events of the workshop will be retraced through inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice, which arose from these meetings: drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, «How to Teach Art».

Organized as part of the doctoral programme «Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices» (Collegium Helveticum) in cooperation with the Zentrum Künste und Kulturtheorie (ZKK), the ERC project «Performance Art in Eastern Europe», the SNSF project «Exhibiting Film» (UZH), the Department of Film Studies (UZH), the Slavic Department (UZH), and the Institute for Critical Theory (ZHdK).

see the essay series «How to Teach Art» by Artur Żmijewski (Postmedium)

pdf download of the journal Postmedium 1-2, 2019

28.08.2018, 13.00-19.00, Kunsthalle Zürich

As a practical excerpt from the 3-month workshop «How to Teach Art», Artur Żmijewski and the workshop participants will collectively paint at Kunsthalle. The performance will last up to 3 hours during which visitors are invited to witness the dynamics of a collective mind at work and to join the painters, because the collective mind has no borders. You paint as individual, but together with the others you create a group effect. The painting session will thus serve as a practical point of departure for the subsequent talk in which the workshop, its methods and its results will be presented and discussed.

With Wiktoria Furrer, Carla Gabrí, Ekaterina Kurilova-Markarjan, Nastasia Louveau, María Ordoñez, Dimitrina Sevova, Anja Nora Schulthess, Nika Timashkova, Valentina Zingg and Artur Żmijewski

13.00-16.00
Collective painting in situ

17.00-19.00
Collective talk: How to Teach Art

As a festive conclusion to the collective painting and discussions on «How to Teach Art», a joint artist dinner takes place after the event.

see the programme

see the video by Brigitte Blöchlinger (UZH News)

see the article by Rafał Żwirek (Blok Magazine)

How to Teach Art? (diaphanes, 2022)

In this book, published by diaphanes in 2022, the participants together with Artur Żmijeswki retrace the workshop and its process by means of inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice. They present drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, “How to Teach Art?”

How to teach art? What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process; a non-artist become an artist? Such programmatic questions articulated by the acclaimed Polish artist Artur Żmijewski were at the heart of the workshop “How to Teach Art?” Between April and July 2018, Żmijewski invited a group of graduate and PhD students from three Zurich universities—the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), the UZH (University of Zurich), and the ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts)—to collectively reflect on their artistic practices. Over the course of four months, the group met several times a week for hourlong sessions, following individual and collective exercises devised by Żmijewski himself.