Nov 4, 2010

FreeSchool Presents – Steve Kado

Steve Kado (Los Angeles)

Presentation this Saturday
4.30pm - 5.15pm 6 November

Studio 2
Gertrude Contemporary
200 Gertrude Street Fitzroy


This is a Free School event and places are limited - the first 50 people to register by emailing freeschoolmelbourne@gmail.com will be admitted
Please make 'Steve Kado' the subject of your email - each person may book for one or two people

~

This event precedes the nearby opening of Christopher LG Hill's Flowers of Romance
and Sean Peoples + INRI Cristo's '*see image' and Steve Kado's October Jr at Y3K Gallery

'October Jr'

If the success of a model depends on it's resemblance to a source then how much less than the thing itself does a model have to be? If a model is always something like it's source isn't it always also something more, namely a model? The argument, I suppose, is that a model is more in total than anything it could represent: it has to be both an abstraction of another thing (1/2) and it's own thing in it's own right (1). That's the math. A model of a thing is 1 1/2 times more of a thing than the whole original thing. I'd like to show you all this new 3/4 scale model of October 12 that I made.

Aug 31, 2010


FREE SCHOOL PRESENTS:


From October to December 2010 Free School will host 3 one-off events by guest speakers and presenters

Students sign up for individual Presents:

This is not a Semester but a series of separate events and classes










FREE SCHOOL SEMESTER II:


Free School will commence again in January/February of 2011

The duration of the Semester is 3 months. We will begin to accept applications once FREE SCHOOL PRESENTS: has commenced



Anybody who has sent an email inquiry to freeschoolmelbourne@gmail.com will be notified once activity has been confirmed

Jul 5, 2010

Email

Email FreeSchool at freeschoolmelbourne [at] gmail.com


May 24, 2010

Last Class - Dance Class

SAVE THE LAST CLASS/DANCE (3D)

yo Free School

last class tomorrow night, sigh

it will be held in a karate studio at the location: 25 Wilson Ave Brunswick
for PT catch the 19 Tram up Sydney Road and get off at the beginning of SR and its the second street on the left or catch the Upfield Train from Flinders and get off at Jewel Station and its literally next door

WEAR COMFORTABLE CLOTHING! NO SHOES WILL BE ALLOWED IN THE STUDIO SO TRY TO ALSO WEAR ATTRACTIVE SOCKS


hope everyone has read the Evan Holloway text, not because it's homework, just because it's brilliant

as usual class runs from 7-9pm

let's get loose !!!

CIAO

Free School

///



May 7, 2010

Special Event - FreeSchool Debate

Date: 23.05.10
Venue: Meat Market, North Melbourne (C/ Y3K)
Time: tba
Host: Y3K
Debate Topic: tba

Team One
Alex Martinis Roe
Masato Takasaka
Nicki Wynnychuck
Daniel du Bern
Ruby Lowe
Fayen D'evie
Matt Hinkley
Jarrod Rawlins
Ash Kilmartin
Leah Jackson
Liv Barrett
Sylvie Christophe
Kiah GM

Team Two
Amelia Borg
Johan Oevergaard
David Chromewood
Eva Birch
Helen Johnson
Saskia Schut
Lochie Bradfield
Simon Taylor
Ying-lan Dann
Jono Brener
Josh Petherick
Lisa Radford
Nick Mangan
Rohan Bell-Towers

Eleventh Class - Jota Castro

Date: 18.05.10
Venue: Meat Market, North Melbourne (C/ Y3K)
Time: 7.00pm - 9.00pm
Host: Jota Castro
Topic: tba

Jota Castro is a Peruvian-born artist (Yurimaguas, 1965), based in Brussels, Belgium, who worked in the diplomatic service for two decades. In the late 1990s he left his career as a diplomat at the United Nations and the European Union and decided to devote himself totally to the field of art. Through his different professional activities, Castro has gained in-depth knowledge of the world of international politics; moreover, he considers his university studies in Law and Political Science as his real training in art.His works point to certain mechanisms at work in present day Western society, with its imbalances and weaknesses, which are skillfully highlighted by the artist to reveal the incongruities at work in political and social structures.He is consulting editor for Janus magazine in Belgium and Nolens Volens in Spain. He is a lecturer at the European University of Madrid. His work has been extensively shown around the world. He has participated in the Venice, Tirana, Prague and Gwangju Biennales. He won the Gwangju Biennale Prize in 2004 in South Korea.

Me in a Single Sentence
Jota, that's me, the son of a woman who is the daughter of a son of a bitch and a gentleman of the Third World, I suffered from neglect when I was little and I stopped talking for a year when I was five years old, I was a soldier, I played sports, I studied, I traveled a lot, I wrote a book-no good-I met my wife in Madrid, I married her in Belfast, I almost lost her, I almost lost me, I came back to my dreams, it makes me laugh knowing that Freud loved cocaine as much as me, I've got kidney problems but I'm taking care of myself, I dreamed of a destiny whereas I already had one, I love sex like I love life, I was tortured and I still feel guilty, I have been rich and I didn't like, I have been poor and I didn't like, I don't know where I'm gonna die, I have no children, I haven't got a mother tongue any more, I picked up art because I couldn't stand lying, I've always liked writing poetry, I lost a woman I loved, my father died without me ever seeing him again, I haven't seen my mother in 20 years, I feel lonely sometimes, I'm crazy about soccer, when I was little my motto was die rather than sin, sometimes certain friends call me el hijo del sol, I've traveled more than my imagination, I was in Berlin when the wall came down, I was in Moscow during Perestroika, mathematics calms me down, I once dreamed of a star that walked, I read the sports newspaper Equipe every day, I love the rain when I'm at home, I have a retarded little brother called Fidel, I love Cy Twombly, I feel right at home in Scotland, I feel right at home in Italy, I've seen Pelé and Maradona play, I painted the stairs in my house orange, I'm fascinated by Morrison's "low pad" armchair, I'm not white, I feel guilty, I was born in the Amazonia.





Tenth Class - gone fishing

Class scheduled for 11.05.10 has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances.
We apologies for any distress this may cause.
FreeSchool

Apr 30, 2010

Ninth Class - Intellectual Property and Copyright

Date: 04.05.10
Venue: see your email
Time: 7.00pm - 9.00pm
Host: Paul Noonan & James Konidaris
Topic: Intellectual Property and Copyright

Paul Noonan (Partner) and James Konidaris (Lawyer) are members of the Intellectual Property practice group at law firm Herbert Geer. The firm has one of Australia's leading practice groups in this area and is currently acting for the internet service provider iiNet in relation to groundbreaking copyright litigation brought against the company by a consortium of large film studios.
Paul and James act for publishers, recording companies and musicians as well as technology and communications companies and a range of other 'content' creators, owners and users. Paul has been a lawyer in these fields for 14 years and is also a professional musician who has played on numerous recordings (mostly in the days before digital downloading was possible!). Among the projects has has been working on recently is a contract for delivery of IPTV content by an ISP to its subscribers via the ISP's broadband network. James has been working on the iiNet copyright matter and also practices in the area of telecommunications law.



Apr 25, 2010

Eighth Class - Film Screening and Discussion

Date: 27.04.10
Time: Class and film will start at 7.30.
location: TBA
(BYO drinks and snacks)

The Good Women of Bangkok
Directed by Dennis O'Rourke 1991

pre reading for class see attached pdf "Afterward"
Afterword by Dennis O'Rourke, for book to be edited by
Chris Berry, Annette Hamilton & Layleen Jayamanne,
concerning The Good Woman of Bangkok

Notes by the Filmaker

"Like the Brecht play which inspired the title, this film is an ironic parable about the impossibility of living a good life in an imperfect world. It is also an attempt to describe in this form, and to conflate, what is so banal about sex with a measure of what is profound. It is a film about prositution as a metaphor for capitalism, here played out across the borders of race and culture, and about prostitution as a metaphor for all relations between women and men."

"It is also about voyeuristic tendencies which are inherent in all film making and film viewing. It is my hope that, as with Brecht, we are confronted with a vision of ourselves, thus forcing the consideration of how personal sexuality affects political and philosophical beliefs. In this film I have exposed myself in order to force the audience to reconsider the whole nature of documentary film practice. Under the thrall of our separate desires, we are all implicated in some way."

© Camerawork Pty Ltd
http://www.cameraworklimited.com/films/good-woman-of-bangkok.html




Apr 8, 2010

Seventh Class - There is not only what there is: Beyond the University Discourse

Date: 20.04.10

Venue: Y3K

Host: Elizabeth Newman

Question: How can art be taught in the University? What follows from this situation, for art and artists?


In the seminar of 1968 called The Other Side of Psychoanalysis Lacan nominated four discourses that structure social relations and thereby produce particular effects: these discourses are that of the Master, the University, the Hysteric and the Analyst. In our current era it could be said that the discourse that dominates is the University Discourse, a discourse fuelled by the conjunction of science and capital to produce a certain kind of knowledge, and certain types of gadgets and technologies. Now that art education is firmly located within this universalizing discourse, where can we find room for singularity, the essential component of creativity and subjectivity? Speaking from the point of view of psychoanalysis, I want to look at the effect of the University discourse upon subjectivity, art education and art practice. Certainly a ‘free school’ is a response to the deadening and alienating effects of this discourse.


The reading I have selected is a paper ‘On Shame’ by Jacques-Alain Miller in which he analyses a comment made by Lacan in the last session of the Seminar, that ‘there is no longer any shame’. Lacan’s comments throughout the seminar - designed to produce a particular effect upon the students - are prescient in their forecasting of current conditions, conditions in which we are compelled to enjoy without limits and to renounce the dignity of our singularity in favour of shamelessness and obscenity.


Lizzy Newman


Reading

Jacques-Alain Miller ‘On Shame’, in Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII, (ed.s) Justin Clemens and Russell Grigg, Duke University Press, 2006.


Elizabeth Newman is an artist and psychoanalyst. After attending art school in the early 1980s, and making art throughout the 80s, she took a detour into psychoanalysis during the 1990s, training as an analyst and developing a psychoanalytic practice. Newman lives and works in Melbourne and is currently represented by Neon Parc.




Apr 6, 2010

Mar 30, 2010

Sixth Class - In Defense of Genocide: Radovan Karadžić

Date: Tuesday 6 April, 7.00 - 9.00pm
Venue: see your email for details

Below is a website published by Kevin Heller, this week's Free School presenter. Please feel free to look over these short legal/political opinion pieces and if any are of particular interest an email conversation before class could be good.



Apropos to our conversation last night, you may use Wikipedia to research Radovan Karadžić. Kevin Heller has been involved in the defense of Karadžić at the International Criminal Tribunal, where he is currently being held. The overall project of international law and what this could possibly encompass is a huge question and here we have an opportunity to field questions to somebody who has been directly involved in some of its most complex cases.








Mar 25, 2010

Fifth Class – Free Discussion

Date: Tuesday 30 March, 7.00 pm

Venue: Nick's house, see email for details

Prescribed readings (found in your reader)
Impromptu at Vincennes. Jacques Lacan
The Nietzschean Audience. Geoff Lowe (with Jacqueline Riva)

To paraphrase Geoff Lowe, I meant to read all about Lacan in preparation for this question but I didn't have time. "Lacan was born in Paris, the eldest of Emilie and Alfred Lacan's three children. His father was a successful soap and oils salesman. His mother was ardently Catholic." Read the two readings prescribed for this week thinking about how and where knowledge is formed and articulated, after last week's class it may be good to think about knowledge and the University. Identify the key points / argument from each reading with the view to a class discussion.

Reference to: Paola Pivi, Aphasia, the University








Mar 16, 2010

Fourth Class– The End of Beauty, Taste and Judgement

Tuesday 23.03.10

John Medley Building, University of Melbourne, Parkville, 7.00 pm
please meet at 6.55 as we will enter building as one group.

class will be taken by Justin Clemens

The End of Beauty, Taste and Judgement
These days, it seems that nobody really knows what they’re doing in the realm of philosophical aesthetics. As a result, we get automatic repetitions that don’t realise they’re repetitions: a ‘back to basics’ approach (‘it just has to be beautiful/skilful/ethical’); pseudo-scientific approaches that allegedly support a new ‘world art history’ (‘we all know from evolutionary biology that all humans share a creative instinct’); interpretative marginalia (‘what does that small yucky mark at the lower right of the canvas really mean?’); etc. I want to discuss how these pseudo-solutions emerge as the consequence of a failure of modern philosophical aesthetics — particularly as bequeathed European modernity in the form of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement — and return to Kant’s positions to see what else they might have to tell us today. This means talking again about ‘beauty,’ ‘taste,’ ‘form,’ ‘pleasure,’ and ‘the sublime.’ Seriously.

Prescribed reading: Kant's Critique of Judgement – First Part. Critique of Aesthetic Judgement.





Mar 13, 2010

Third Class - Determinism

The class this week has been moved to Thursday 18 March in order to accommodate our guest speaker Fiona Connor.
Fiona is was born in New Zealand and is a founding member of Gambia Castle, Auckland. She is currently participating in the renowned Masters program at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Los Angeles.
Fiona is in melbourne to exhibit in the New010 at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). This exhibition has an opening reception this Wednesday, the night before the class. All Free School students are invited and encouraged to come as the content of the class will be touching on aspects of Fiona's practice.


The location for Thursday's class will be
RMIT
visiting artist studio
Building 95
24-26 Earl Street
Carlton Victoria

We will meet out the front of the building at 7pm.
It would great if you could RSVP for this class so we know who is able to attend.

Best,

Free School




Mar 2, 2010

Free School Presents


Simon Denny*
Vaudeo in context
screening of recent videos and artist talk
8.30pm
Friday 5 March 2010
Studio 2
200 Gertrude Street
Fitzroy

*this is a Free School Presents public event, all welcome.

Second Class

Free School Second class will be held at


Uplands Gallery, 247 High Street, Prahran

(tram 6 from Swanston street, first stop past Chapel, Train to Prahran Station, 10 min walk up High Street)

class will begin at 7.00pm


Second class will be presented by


Michael Taussig

Class of 1933 Professor of Anthropology

Columbia University

Anthropology


Biography

I began fieldwork in 1969. I have returned every year. My writing has spanned different things in roughly the following order; two books in Spanish for local people on the history of slavery and its aftermath, and books and articles in academic journals on the: 1) commercialization of peasant agriculture, 2) slavery, 3) hunger, 4) the popular manifestations of the working of commodity fetishism, 5) the impact of colonialism (historical and contemporary) on "shamanism" and folk healing, 6) the relevance of modernism and post-modernist aesthetics for the understanding of ritual, 7) the making, talking, and writing of terror, 8) mimesis in relation to sympathetic magic, state fetishism, and secrecy, 9) defacement (meaning iconoclasm), 10) a two week diary detailing paramilitary violence, 11)a study of exciting substance loaded with seduction and evil, gold and cocaine, in a montage-ethnography of the Pacific Coast of Colombia, 11) currently writing a book entitled "What Color is the Sacred?".


Representative Publications:


1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.

1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing.

1992. The Nervous System.

1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses.

1997. The Magic of the State.

1999. Defacement.

2003. Law in a Lawless Land.

2004. My Cocaine Museum.

2006. Walter Benjamin's Grave.








Feb 3, 2010

First Class























Free School introductory first class is on St. Kilda Rd, Melbourne Tuesday 3 March 7.00 - 9.00 pm

*the theme for this class is centered around the notion of 'Free'.


"That government is best which governs least" Henry David Thoreau.
Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government)
first published in 1849

the reading for this class is "100 Ways to disappear and life free", 1972 (revised 1985) Eden Press - reading in full will be emailed to students

"Anyone who uses an alternate identity needs to know all the "side effects" as well as ways of using it safely. This book covers many of the problem areas of establishing a new identity. Included are many tips on achieving privacy, keeping kids out of public schools, avoiding fingerprinting, using P.O. boxes and checks, finding employment-all in a new name. Lots of sound advice for greater privacy with mail and phone, avoiding potential hassles with cops and neighbors, and much more. Absolutely "must" reading for privacy seekers."

see also 
*Vanishing Point: How to disappear in America without a trace
http://www.skeptictank.org/hs/vanish.htm







































"The formal rules provide a way for strangers to take on a simple task together."