Strange Teaching

Editors note:

We invited Rainer Ganahl to contribute a text to the first number of PARSE based on his practice as an artist and educator. Having been long aware of Ganahl’s critical work on education, ¹ and on celebrity intellectual culture, ² we were especially interested to invite a contribution that could mark the intersection of questions of judgement with questions of contemporary art education. In making our invitation, we cited a recent text by Ganahl, that was published in Brooklyn Rail, where he asserted that:

Education as well as any other form of cultural work – including art making – should open up possibilities for everybody to develop their own criteria of success and create their own flexible, multi-dimensional, alternative grids as frame works of viable and sustainable references in which to operate and communicate. ³

We are very pleased that our invitation was accepted, but also that the artist subsequently entered into a dialogue with us in respect of the positions rehearsed in his provocative and challenging text. We present here Ganahl’s original text which has the sub-title – “the artist as excellent and miserable teacher” – written in response to our invitation, which is then followed by a series of questions exchanged between the author and the editorial team.