A PLACE @georgiaclaytonjeeves-blog - Tumblr Blog

#skateboarding #skatergirl #skatehero #dogtown and z boys #documentary

Everyone's a teacher, everyone's a student, everyone's welcome

#collaborative learning #skillshare #arts #education #alternative education

We must put Duchamp’s urinal back in the toilet – where it can again be of use

Tania Bruguera

Suddenly there is this persistent call for an art that is useful, for direct commitment, for artistic activism, for intervention in the political reality of our society and economy. And it is good so. Of course it is a provocation: after hundreds of years of fighting for the autonomy of art, after decades of learning that the essential quality of art is ambiguity, after years of repeating that art poses rather than answers questions, there is suddenly this persistent call for an art that is useful, for direct commitment, for artistic activism, for intervention in the political reality of our society and economy.

Florian Malzacher http://www.cultureandconflict.org.uk/blog/useful-art-what-role-can-art-play-in-politics/

#art #activism #artist's role #cultureandconflict

Social class and status were not found to be strongly correlated with arts participation, though people who made more than £30,000 pounds a year were less likely to spend their free time creating. Those with jobs of high social standing — a CEO, for instance —were also less likely to be artists in their off-hours than people in lower-status positions.

http://hyperallergic.com/237539/education-not-wealth-or-class-matters-most-when-it-comes-to-making-art/

#arts #artsparticipation #class

csmstudiosoup-blog

SOUP (socialising outside university prescriptions)

In a building where the windows won’t open and the only way out is the way you came in; where the floors and the walls aren’t allowed a coat of paint nor even a nail; where wandering is hemmed in by locked doors and keycard access; where ‘dangerous’ kettles mean tea can be bought, but not made; we are surely all healthy and safe but is this the radical hotbed of critical thought? We are asked to be ‘critical’, and certainly assessed on our ‘criticality,’ but in a school where even3rd years speak of never having entered the wood or metal shops for fear of feeling out of place; where a group critique means two students and a tutor speaking while the other 13 sit in silence, three of whom we’ve never seen before. When the cost of all the above is just shy of the downpayment on a Zone 4 house, perhaps we should turn our “criticality” toward our own education. What would it mean to collectively reimagine and reinvent our education and its environment? Might it be possible to think of ourselves in other terms than independent producers or cultural entrepreneurs? What might it look like to erode the distinctions between class years? What might a collective practice look like? What of a collective dissertation? Is unitised, isolated learning the sole option? This project is not an exercise in revolt or opposition, but rather an exploration in parallel— one that rewrites the existing patterns of interactions in spaces, and acts as a mirror in which we examine our assumptions about what it means to be where we are, doing what we’re doing. If we can’t have a ‘dangerous’ kettle, then perhaps we can re-label it as ‘participative sculpture.’

#csm

#open school east #art #arteducation #alternative education #against capitalism

#dirtykids #documentary #dropout #rainbow family #rainbowgathering

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

#isis #politics #understanding politics

My depression was always tied up with the conviction that I was literally good for nothing. I spent most of my life up to the age of thirty believing that I would never work. In my twenties I drifted between postgraduate study, periods of unemployment and temporary jobs. In each of these roles, I felt that I didn’t really belong – in postgraduate study, because I was a dilettante who had somehow faked his way through, not a proper scholar; in unemployment, because I wasn’t really unemployed, like those who were honestly seeking work, but a shirker; and in temporary jobs, because I felt I was performing incompetently, and in any case I didn’t really belong in these office or factory jobs, not because I was ‘too good’ for them, but – very much to the contrary – because I was over-educated and useless, taking the job of someone who needed and deserved it more than I did -

Mark Fisher See more at: http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12841#sthash.jSQOuEPc.dpuf

#depression #society #workethic #capitalist mentality #capitialism