The Second World Congress of Free Artists

devised theater performances, stages, actors, photographs, with scripts and texts

installation dimensions variable; total runtime: 360-minutes

2010–present

The Second World Congress of Free Artists is a research project that culminated in six-hours of theatrical performances that proceed from the First World Congress organized in Alba, Italy, in 1956 by the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (Asger Jorn & Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio). The project is a collaboration with 38 artists, collectives, curators, and historians, that offers perspectives on collectivity, emancipation from artistic education models, classroom power relations, performance, witchcraft and other liberatory (or not) exit strategies from capitalist edu-factory.

The first manifestations of The Second Congress took place in 2010 in the Århus Kunstbygning, Århus, Denmark, and have been performed at ICI, NY (2013); Casa del Lago, Mexico City (2013); The Hessel Museum, Bard CCS, NY (2014); and Trienal de Artes Frestas, Sesc, Sorocaba, Brazil (2015).

Asger Jorn’s address to the First Congress in 1956 rang true to us when we began this project in 2010, as did his provocative question as to the role of artists in a democratic-capitalist society: “We have organized a Congress here. Why? What reason can there be for artists, the freest, most independent people in society; people who live like ‘the lily of the field,’ to come together, organize themselves, and undertake theoretical discussions?” The Second World Congress is an attempt to answer him.

The book contains the following scripts: Camel Collective (DK/US/MX): Opening Speech; Mirene Arsanios (LB): The Banyan Tree; UKK (DK): Young Art Workers' Speech at the Second World Congress of Free Artists; The YES! Association(SE): We Will Open a New Front II - lecture by Lee H. Jones; Benj Gerdes and Jenn Hayashida (US/SE): Slow People; Colin Lang (US): An Imagined Bauhaus; Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen (DK): Dear Patient Listener; Sande Cohen (US/TH): Best Wishes to Artists and Intellectuals; Zachary Cahill (US): Art, Pedagogy: A Small Compact; Eduardo Abaroa (MX): A Brief Account of Didactic Curiosities; Javier Toscano (MX): On Critical Boredom; Ashley Hunt (US): Dictatorship of an Audience; Johannes Raether (DE): Towards an Academy of the Future: A Few Monstrous Thoughts by Ari Godwin Kollontai-Hartz; Temporary Institute For Witchpower (DE): REFUSE - RE-FUSE - RE-FUSE; Michael Ashkin (US): were it not for the price of desertion; Andrea Creutz with Sebastien Berthier and Shirin Sabahi (SE): The Parties to this Convention: When capitalism and the academy follow the same impetus, only a disruptive silence can stop the machine from running amok; Anthony Davies, Nils Norman, and Howard Slater (UK): Suspended Vocation By Movement of the 20th October 2010; Carlos Motta (CO/US): A Message on Pedagogy and the Liberation of the Spirit; Sean Dockray (Public School) (US): An Escape Act; Mónica Castillo (MX): Volkerball; Rum46 (DK): Just (a) Dictionary of a Few Ordinary Thoughts: Validation and Disruption of the Collective; Mary Walling Blackburn (Anhoek School) (US): Odor is Speech; Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler (AT/IT): Self-Organization and Self-Education in Venezuela; Sarina Basta, Karin Schneider, and Simone Leigh (US/EG): When the Southern Cross the Dog; C. Krydz Ikwuemesi (NG): Art Training in Nigeria and the PhD Syndrome; Miklos Erhardt (HU): Would the Situationists Teach Art?; Eva Egermann and Elka Krasny (AT): To Make Demands Towards Education: The Things We Have Learned...; J. Morgan Puett: Mildred's Lane, Pensylvannia; Eva Diaz (US): Whither Curatorial Studies?; Sam Gould/Red76 (US): Flatlands: Non-Hierarchical Space and Its Uses; Flo Maak (DE): Declaration of Dependence; and Stephan Dillemuth (DE): El Arduo camino hacia el conocimiento.