Start date:
Jan-23
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
Politics of Production in Art School
David Lane is an artist and lecturer based in Beijing, China, and London, UK. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Art at the University of Edinburgh.
My recent work involves me as an artist-teacher hosting pedagogical projects with student participants within higher education contexts in the UK and China. These projects aim to explore questions and phenomena related to the politics of production in art schools. By enacting participatory projects within the authoritative mechanism of 'school,' I seek to complicate imaginary narratives of 'educational empowerment' and 'creative freedom.' The intention is to reveal the ways in which artistic labor is delegated, incentivized, and quantified within institutional contexts.
Taking a social science approach to facilitating workshops, I employ a range of approaches, from experimental and absurdist to disorienting, as methods of provocation and condensed reflections of real-world phenomena. The 'work' goes beyond being distilled as an obscure and personalized artistic product or statement; instead, it becomes social, explicit in its function as a set of pedagogical techniques.
Implicating the schooling system and the status of the teacher in participatory projects, the following phenomena related to participation in cultural and academic contexts are addressed: product-oriented participation, participation as alienated labor, non-voluntary participation, participation as conformity, participation as formality, and participation as mass spectacle.
Research interests
Currently residing in China, he conducts anthropological fieldwork, immersing himself within Chinese art educational systems, both as a student and a teacher. The historical and contemporary pedagogical formations and dynamics within Chinese art education influence and direct his artistic practice and research, leading to the development of unique pedagogical approaches and critical reflections on the agencies of teachers and students within the diglossia of disparate systems of qualification and subjectification that make up the art educational landscape in China.
As a former Ph.D. student within China Central Academy of Fine Arts' Experimental Department under the supervision of renowned artist Qiu Zhi Jie, David's research is rooted in autoethnography. Alongside this is an action research approach, enacted within transformative workshops designed to prompt critical reflection and metacognitive awareness of art educational techniques, frameworks, and limitations. This combination of methods, coupled with his identity as a foreigner, places his research on rocky ground, a challenge he addresses directly in projects such as '1920s Art Teacher in China.' This project involves hosting a contemporary art workshop with participants dressing in 1920s attire in a living museum in Shandong, China. (Images can be found on davidlaneartist.com.) Here, the absurdity of the foreign art teacher's role, filling a significant demand for Western education in China, is discussed in terms of the insider/outsider dichotomy.
The role of foreign teachers, responsible for imparting a foreign curriculum and 'helping' students align their artistic positions with Western art school values, is questioned. Are they building bridges, or can their role be understood as a form of cultural coercion or outsider interference? These dynamics, especially pronounced in workshops explicitly framed as having a 'transformative' function, are presented and explored in a purposefully self-critical fashion. In addition to issues of agency based on identity criteria, more general themes from the field of critical pedagogy concerning the student-teacher relationship and modes of production are important. In action-research projects, methods of explicitly product-oriented education are developed and enacted within workshops, where the absurdity of their alienating dynamics is laid bare and embodied by participants as a route to instigating critical consciousness.
A more recent aspect of his research involves developing AI models and tools from biased datasets sourced from contemporary art workbooks and anthologies. Here, he is interested in using AI tools to satirically mirror the ways in which art education attempts to quantify artistic labor and production.