AASF: Re-Incorporating Art In Everyday Life
Moderated by Grizedale Arts, School of Apocalypse, NERTM, and The Sunview Luncheonette discuss the framework of instituting communal practices and aesthetics in everyday life.
Grizedale Arts
Coniston, Lake District, UK
Grizedale Arts operates a unique cross disciplinary programme from a small holding in the Lake District of England. The programme is driven by an emphasis on art’s use value in wider society, promoting a functional role for artists and using creativity to enhance and enrich the everyday. The aim is to place art back into common usage.
Everything at Grizedale is seen as a project, and this includes the farmhouse, the garden and the washing up. Operating a recruitment system which starts with an unselected open call to volunteers, be they artists or otherwise, skills and labour are exchanged for a learning experience and the potential for involvement in the ever-expanding Grizedale collection of collectives – groups with interests and skills from administrative to practical, cooking to art theory. These groups deliver a full programme in an organisation with only two full time members of staff.
Grizedale works locally and internationally. Artists work alongside the local community to develop projects that aim to enhance everyday life. From a former Mechanics Institute in Coniston – the local village – Grizedale runs a youth club, an amateur catering company, an honest shop, and a programme of workshops and talks. The village itself is a learning resource, and projects tend to challenge artists just as much as the local (participatory) audience. Invitations from international institutions to create exhibition content begin their development here. It is this constant crossover between small and large, local and international, professionalised and non, theoretical and anti, which creates much of the energy and inventiveness that drives the programme.
School of Apocalypse
Brooklyn, New York, USA
The SoA examines connections between creative practice and notions of survival. In light of growing cultural, ecological and technological phenomena that challenge basic assumptions about human existence, the SoA offers courses and programming that seek to develop new modes of inquiry and apply broader levels of experience to intellectual investigation.
The SoA has no fixed definition of apocalypse or survival, but engages with the fundamental questions that the themes provoke. We understand the creative potential of a school to be a space in which shared experience generates deeper insights and can lead to alternative cultural systems.
The school invites a range of thinkers, artists and scientists to present programming on related themes. Subjects of study are theoretical as well as hands on, and emphasize the integration of observational and material practices found in mystical traditions, creative modalities and scientific field work.
We hope that people see the SoA as more than a program of study, but as a school of thought that exists already, albeit in disparate form, throughout culture at large.
New Earth Resiliency Training Module [NERTM]
Staten Island, NY, USA
New Earth is finding the extraordinary within the ordinary
New Earth is good for figuring out life
New Earth: Art is something humans do on purpose
New Earth objects, tools and games serve a pedagogical function helping us to be conscious
New Earth: Thought itself is a form of energy, thought influences energy and energy influences thought
New Earth is learning from history in order to move forward into the future
New Earth Resiliency Training Module is a program that teaches an ethos of self reliance and of living closer to the earth, especially within an urban environment. Drawing upon its surrounding resources, it treats the city as a catalyst for building relations with various neighborhoods and communities. The program strengthens the resiliency of the neighborhood by activating young people and equipping them with skills, knowledge, and an adaptive world view. It also empowers youth by treating them as authorities of their own environment. Studying folk craft and tracing the genesis of ideas, objects and beliefs is an effort to re-wilding ourselves.
Sunview Luncheonette
Brooklyn, New York, USA
The Sunview Luncheonette is a storefront on pause; a member-based social club; a lived pedagogy for art, poetics, regionalism, mutual aid, and commoning. The Luncheonette performs semi-public dinners, talks, work-shops, lectures, plays, reading groups, and musical interludes in a semi-private setting. It is above all, an “approach,” and least of all, an “outcome.” It is unknown. It is hopeful. It saves you a seat at the counter.
RELATED PROGRAMS
The Alternative Art School Fair Radio
RADIO SERIES
The Alternative Art School Fair at Pioneer Works presents an introduction to alternative art schools from around the US and the world, November 19-20, 2016.
more 
Art Unfiltered
RADIO CHANNEL
Art conversations with working curators, artists, and musicians on topical issues.
more 