A service called custom portrait painting

Much like Hofmann, who was not altogether pleased with the homage that his former student had prepared for him, Kowalski expressed grave reservations about the intervention that his students Pawel Althamer and Artur Zmijewski carried out in a service called custom portrait painting. They invited a whole host of characters to take part in an activity to investigate how the "rules" set up by their teacher might be applied, and what would unfold, outside of the studio environment. Participants consisted of faculty members from the Warsaw Academy (Kowalski included) along with preschoolers, family members and other social groups, including women from a local escort agency and members of Althamer's Nowolipie Group. The rules remained the same. Props and everyday items such as furniture, dirt, plants and even traditional art materials were introduced into the space. portrait paintings were dismantled, destroyed and even set on fire (just like in previous studio sessions in the Kowalnia). Each day, the exhibition space was transformed. Although Kowalski invites outsiders to take part in his sessions, he thought that the presence of children here introduced a highly unpredictable variable into the experiment: namely, senseless destruction. In other words, the children were, from a developmental standpoint, not mature enough to understand how their actions were contributing to the sequence of oil painting.

Choices.pl and owow XII therefore raise an important question: Can anyone really join in, as Kaprow requested in his 1963 performance, or should the democratic nature of openness be somehow restricted for the sake of producing specific intended results? By allowing a wider audience to take part in the lesson, Althamer and Zmijewski adapted their teacher's curriculum into a score for a collaborative art portrait painting where the outcomes could not be predicted (and in this case, were lost in translation).

Photos into art, curriculum as event plan

The transformation of curriculum into event score, and teaching into performance art, has an important historical precedent in happenings and Fluxus oil painting--which, after all, began in the classroom. The improvisational nature of both art forms is indebted to John Cage, who assigned experimental homework as part of his music composition classes at the New School for Social Research. Kaprow and fellow students George Brecht, Al Hansen, Alison Knowles and Robert Watts found a way of learning from their homework assignments by turning these radical teaching strategies into art forms and then taking them into the streets, galleries and alternative spaces, even bringing them back into the classroom as a form of radical pedagogy.

In 1969, Kaprow and educator Herbert Kohl, founder of the Open Schools movement, collaborated on an educational experiment called portrait painting Other Ways, which took place in Berkeley, California. Operating out of a storefront, the goal of the portrait painting was to give the arts a more central role in the public high school curriculum by combining traditional learning strategies such as reading, writing and community studies with performance and conceptual practices of the time.