When TDAR shows up at the local high school, we likely won’t be wearing our usual professorial garb. That’s because in our effort to explore “academic integrity”, we’ll be trading roles with the students and asking them to teach us something. At the risk of explaining too much, I’ll quickly say that the basic idea is that you can’t cheat when you teach, or at least it’s hard to provide guidance when you haven’t learned the lesson yourself. Throughout the day, we’ll be giving students salt pretzels and honorary TDAR membership cards in exchange for their wisdom in whatever subject area of school or daily life that they like. We’ll be documenting all of our newfound knowledge online throughout the day and in print afterward.

After we came up with this idea, I began to think about how much it echoes previous artistic strategies like the instructions and “music” scores of the Fluxus movement, or the more recent “Do it” series by Hans Ulrich Obrist. The main commonality is that all these things involve giving the viewer a guide to something that he or she can interpret, perform, or simply read. But the more I thought about it, the more I see our project as distinct from these precedents, at least as far as motivations are concerned.

The Fluxus instructions I can think of usually involve some nonsensical element that brings attention to patterns and rhythms of everyday life that are otherwise easy to miss. This George Maciunas video is a nice example:

I would be very happy to see the high schoolers going in this direction, but I don’t think it’s very likely.

The other thing I associate with Fluxus is an interest in breaking the sense that making art is done by an elite group who can profit from the rarified works they produce. Obrist seems quite interested in taking this up in the “Do it” project, where artists submit instructions to go online, into a book, and in traveling exhibitions where audiences can go execute them. Again, I don’t see a parallel with our project here, since undermining the system of art’s production isn’t what we have in mind.

But, I still see our project as a strange cousin of the “Do it” endeavor, partly because I don’t think “Do it” does what it was meant to do…does it? I mean, this whole thing about the production of art becoming shared seems like a bit of a false promise. Dara Birnbaum recently said in Artforum, “I think Hans Ulrich became infatuated with seeing work disperse widely into culture. And who gets eliminated from that system? Well, the artists.” But if you look at many of the “Do it” submissions, most seem to be about extending the identity of the artist into an instruction format, not removing him/her from the equation.

Here’s one from Felix Gonzalez-Torres:

Get 180 lbs. of a local wrapped candy and drop in a corner.

And another from Christian Boltanski:

[1] GET YOUR NEIGHBOR’S PHOTO ALBUM [2] GIVE THE NEIGHBOR YOURS IN EXCHANGE [3] ENLARGE ALL THE PICTURES TO 8 X 10 [4] FRAME THEM IN SOME SIMPLE FASHION AND HANG THEM ON THE WALLS OF YOUR APARTMENT [5] YOUR NEIGHBOR SHOULD DO THE SAME WITH YOUR ALBUM

And here is one of my favorites from Tino Sehgal:

you are already doing all of it

The project has some wonderful little submissions, but I don’t see them as displacing the function of the artist as Birnbaum suggests they might. Instead, I think the best ones define some core element unique to the interests and efforts of the artists who wrote them. And that’s what I hope the students can define for themselves.