Intermedia department
Paralel-course/Training Ground II. 1991-92.-1992-93
Anatomic Immortality
With respect to the history of ideas and from pedagogical, jurisdictional and economic standpoint the International Parallel Union of Telecommunications sets a high value on the fact (after the time when lurking, nevertheless prohibited tendencies could appear - although behind the times - at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Art, where exclusively representative art had been taught, following the expansion of the art from the media toward the intermedia in the 1950's), that from 1991 on an experimental basi s and from 1993 in an autonomous Intermedia Department the investigation became possible in which art is not limited to the regroupables of given, conventional media only, and where art could realize itself by "ad hoc" media, or even without medial devices at all.*
* These changes lift the problem of art instruction, as such° out from underneath the ruins of apparent evidence °° and actualize it.
° Remembering Socrates's theory of "recollection", the "master" is only capable of directing attention to that which is hir or hir pupil's own, or which is part of the collective memory. Considering this together with Beuys's "everybody is an artist"- t heory, it becomes obvious that the given establishment for the instruction of art, even if expanded by an intermedia department - or perhaps because of it - , functions^ essentially as a self-contradiction if it is based on the last century's, or better to say never existing, social interest. The relationship between the master and hir pupil became unqualifiable in the structure where it functions, because the subject of the "recollection" cannot be transported from the individual gene-memory into an establishment that has forgotten to define its own social role.
°° The social role of the student-artist is not different from that of any other student regarding tuition: short-sighted, contra-selective and vile is the legal-economic-cultural education-law which obliges the financing of the self-renewal of society by the student-population, and is especially brutal when it spends huge sums on its army, recruited from the same youth.
^ The entrance-exam - grading - diploma reminds us of the operating method of such an educational establishment, where the memory of the pupil is directed toward conventions. With the passing of these conventions the pupil becomes defunct, but the diplo ma, being still valid, continues to confer the right to remind others of the outdated conventions, while at the same time it does not remind the society that hse has the right, if unemployed, to recieve the subsistence minimum.
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