Abstract

By exploring the territory between being within the zone of art practice and the zone of art educational institutions along with their attendant bureaucratic structures, Dutton will engage with the possibility of applying different types of (poetic) sensibilities that emerge out of reflexive art practice onto and into the heart of the controlling rhetoric and processes that function as normative behaviour within many institutions of art education. Thinking of the Art School as a site of an improbable constellation of subjectivities and political and institutional imperatives, Dutton will outline a path through which art and institution might begin to conflate in a zone of possibilities.
 Starting with a propositional ‘Office of Institutional Aesthetics’, which has its roots in real world scenarios, Dutton will characterise the tensions and strains of contemporary institutions of art education as ‘end’ obsessed—after which he will explore forms of practice which concern ‘becomings’ rather than completions. Dutton concludes that those of us who straddle art and art-educational spheres might need to re-think our institutions as networks of behaviours and tactics in much the same way we might encounter and engage in the process of art over the fetish of the artefact.