If you understand me, then I haven’t been clear.
–Jean-Luc Godard
Trade School
Audit is a seminar shaped, eat-what-you-kill, symposia where theory and practice become indistinguishable. It is designed for applicants +22 years and up. It is designed with younger artists in mind looking for something a bit more asymmetrical, engaged in the world as it is and has always been (out of balance). Also, we’re in the middle of an AI arms race, so you could argue that the stakes are pretty high. Whatcha gonna do, Etsy? Hide out in a grad program with a degree in magical thinking underwritten by the state?
The decay in visual education is so pervasive and bland, complexity and contradiction are the only antidotes. What does that mean? The premise here is that collapse has already occurred—so you can stop bracing for impact. Visual arts literacy, not taught anywhere in any rigorous, applicable, sense can develop into a formidable instinct. Discerning at a glance, this from that, will be your certificate of achievement. And yet, there is still a future to deal with. The collective concern here addresses what this will look like.
You'd be surprised how much humanity, thoughtfulness, and inventiveness percolate up if the restraint of credentialed applause is removed. Our product, nuance, is generally found through oblique perspectives, yielding surprisingly less distortion. And while we will not be polishing future world leaders, we will be fostering historically informed durability. And no, we are not a cult. Yet.
Structure
Visiting Lecturers participating with Audit have been cultivated for years and include contemporary artists, historians, and garbage men. This pool of contributors reflects an appetite out there to work apart from standard channels. We know them. You will meet some. Studio advising and seminars will involve directed group readings, tailored individual readings, group projects and individually focused and directed critique. Each Seminar will be reliant on enrollment to some extent. And, some themes or texts require more bodies than others. We also anticipate building the plane while flying, thematically on message. All meetings are remote.
A Taste
If there were a textbook for the sorts of things we have been outlining, we would send it to you. There are a whole panoply of hot takes on contemporary art and artists, but one continues to deliver.
Walter Benjamin (b. 1892, Berlin) looked at the 19th Century Parisian Arcade as “the hollow mold from which the image of modernity is cast”. His ‘Arcades Project (Passagenwerk)’ is a peculiar image-based history regarding the dawning of industrialization that continues to throw a long shadow over image production, distribution, and consumption. Of principal concern is how dross is spindled into the stuff of higher contemplation. He was, to use his own word, a ‘ragpicker’. Benjamin never finished this massive materialist history. He left Paris abruptly in 1940 fleeing the Nazi’s. He took his own life in Catalonia later that year fearing capture. He was trying to reach Portugal to get to America (perhaps to teach at the New School). He left his Talmudic collection of obsessively cross-referenced notes, citations, observations, and illuminating comparisons with his friend George Bataille (an entirely other story), a then librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale. The fragmented chapters would be collected and published decades later.
The wide-ranging subjects covered within include: Fourier, Architecture, Photography, Automatons, Advertising, Prostitution, The Paris Commune, Surrealism, Poe, Fashion, Dolls, Baudelaire, Conspiracy, The Stock Exchange, Mirrors, Boredom, The Collector, and Idleness. You would think in 2025 we are done with Benjamin. We are not. Instead, Audit continues to refine our expertise of the inconclusive and unresolved, and share it.
Advanced Registration is available here. No tuition is required for Advanced Registration. A questionaire will be delivered at a specified time based on this information.