Teaching Statement

2006

Teaching was an activity I arrived to as an extension of my work.

Education is about the ethic of knowledge, is the creation of a thinking structure and the modeling of sensibility that will prevail on someone’s life for a long time, my approach to it is to create a process where the student takes full control of it.

I work on learning as the visible expression of an experience. I do not belief in the process of learning as a passing of general concepts of knowledge or references but as a result of a reflexive experience, through the creation of artworks that generated those discussions.

In my teaching I try to bring thinking and not taking for granted the role of art and artists, so each student can bring their own proposals and then during the course develop and try out their vision of it.

I’m interested to explore the ways in which things become artistic. I’m interested on seeing what makes a moment art, to provide a process by which the students learn how to create a context for their work and the set of rules by which they can be experienced.

There is a fundamental difference between education and art. Education transmitting elements of consensus; art disrupting them. Education is the transmission and memorization of elements that makes us a collective based in a sense of truth that has being agreed previously and before the actual delivering of the data. Art is a space leading into new organization of meanings and that some times is done through chaos or through confronting an established sense of truth. The difference is that even when both are ideological activities, educationhas a clear goal toward constructing a defined identity that is related to its function in society and to the expectations of the role of the individual and the collective. Somehow the only thing I can see as similar between art and education is the fact that there are both procedures to convince people about something we believe in (that being data or ideas). In education the demand for creativity and the demand for confrontation towards a norm seems to be more like a training process where students learn how to behave and how to create a structure to deal with it and hopefully how to create a system to introduce (and share) their point of view. Education provides a common ground of understanding, a common world of references that makes us fundamentally equal (at a very basic level), in art you are demanded to get inside the artist’s world and it is “your” responsibility as an audience to find a common ground with the artist (and become an equal). My goal as an art professor is the interaction and the appreciation of the dynamic of both views.

The excitement about the “new” is different in education and in art. In education, what is new is related to the excitement of when one found something that is understood, that we have understood. In art what is new is discovering what we do not know, what we do not understand (and some times discovering that we are not sure we want to). Therefore in my class I try to provide a safe environment so the students can try and experiment their relationship with knowledge, technology, society and their community.

I highly believe in the model of the artist as intellectual for that reason I bring them the model where the artistic practice and the development of writing and critical skills are combined.

Schools can be isolated laboratories where the safety of its structure can provide disengagement with the real challenges the professional world brings. I strongly believe on the role of the extracurricular and interdisciplinary activities and on bringing to the students part of that professional world to be looked at.