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Audit is a seminar shaped visual arts symposia where theory and practice become indistinguishable. We teach discernment and nuance. That's it. We have initiated this program for younger artists looking for something a bit more rogue, engaged in the world as it is, and has always been, out of balance. Information on your primary instructor can be found here.

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Advanced Studio

 

For the Advanced Studio, a core part of Audit, we follow a multi-pronged approach. Visiting lecturers include contemporary artists, historians, and waste management specialists. This pool of contributors reflects an appetite out there to work apart from standard channels. Studio advising and seminars will involve directed four collective readings, tailored individual readings, group projects and individually focused and directed critique. Each class 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. All meetings are remote.

 

Advanced Seminar

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If there were a textbook for the sorts of things we have been outlining, we would send it to you. The Seminar changes from season to season, below is an outline of our first. There are a whole panoply of hot takes on contemporary art and artists, but one continues to set the stage most effectively.

 

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.

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If you are interested in this section, here is something just for fun.

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Advanced Registration is available here. There is no fee for Advanced Registration. An application is available now and is required ONLY for the Advanced Studio.

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