Art & Education presents a new School Watch report on the Maumaus Independent Study Program, a New Artists gallery featuring work from the LungA School ’17 / ’18 session, and the Classroom program “The Physics of Nothing,” curated by James Owen Weatherall.
Maumaus Independent Study Program: Acknowledging Space for “Trembling with the World”
By Margarida Mendes
“Now, when the precarity of educational institutions in Portugal has tightened and the city’s museological infrastructures have been abandoned to administrators more interested in commerce driven by tourism and private investment, Maumaus Independent Study Program has proven to be a resistant temporary autonomous zone. With a persistently sharp program that never wavered in the years that public funding for culture essentially disappeared, Maumaus has served as a welcome supplement to Lisbon’s cultural and educational infrastructures and has encouraged the kind of high-level debate unparalleled by any museum’s public program. The lecture series, open to all Lisboetas intrigued by the school’s projects and elite guest lecturers, complements the Maumaus Independent Study Program, an international English-language pedagogical project presided over by some of the best-regarded contemporary artists and theorists.” [read more]
School Watch presents distilled perspectives on degree programs in the arts, with interviews, critical texts and editorial exposés on MFAs, Masters, Doctorates and certificate programs in fine arts, art history, curatorial, cultural and film studies, and other related areas of specialty.
LungA School ’17 / ‘18
“An entity staging its own existence.
And fall/winter/spring happened and here we are again.
If I had a gong, I would hit it now.
crescendo—diminuendo
Twenty-nine artists have been part of this season.
We can only say thanks.
I’m very enthusiastic about all this.
Too much happened to even begin telling you about it.
And all exhibitions and performances are already done. And they were in Seyðisfjörður anyway, it’s too far for any of you to come by and see it. But if you’re lucky you’ll meet one of these people along the way. They are around.
So, I guess that’s it.
We’ll do it again next year.”
[view the exhibition]
New Artists offers schools a platform to present student work from MFA shows, open-studio presentations, and other annual student exhibitions.
The Physics of Nothing
Curated by James Owen Weatherall
“What is nothing?
One is tempted to say that the question doesn’t make sense—that it is, somehow, incoherent to even pose it. Nothing, after all, is not anything! If it makes you uneasy, you are in good company: this question has been met with skepticism and bewilderment for at least two and a half millennia. The Ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, for instance—a contemporary of Socrates—warned against trying to answer it, for (as he claimed to have been told by a goddess) that which is not and must not be cannot be apprehended or described. Instead, Parmenides urged, the truer way of inquiry seeks that which is and must be.
The physicists and philosophers who have followed Parmenides have tried to take his goddess’s advice. They have spent a great deal of time and effort seeking to understand that which is—namely, stuff, the matter of which the world is composed. And they have been enormously successful. We have, particularly in the last century, come to understand the microscopic building blocks of our universe: the hundred or so kinds of atoms that make up our bodies and all the ordinary objects we see and use every day; the protons, neutrons, and electrons that compose those atoms; and, ultimately, the quarks that form protons and neutrons.
But in trying to understand the material world, physicists have also come to realize that Parmenides’ goddess got things backward. Yes, we wish to understand that with his. But to do so, it has turned out, we have alsoneeded to understand that which is not. The key to developing a successful physics of stuff has been to understand the physics of nothing.” [read more]
Featuring: Carlo Rovelli, panels on the origin of the Universe and the science of emptiness, Fay Dowker, Sir Roger Penrose, Kip Thorne, David Tong, and Renate Loll.
Classroom features thematically organized lectures and conversations chosen by artists and thinkers on issues relevant to their practice and contemporary artistic discourse.