Curated by Cristina Ricupero and Will Bradley

'Manufacturing Today' is conceived as a five year research project and exhibition based in Norway but created, in collaboration between art academies in Norway, Finland, Lithuania and the UK. This research is publicly manifested in formal workshop sessions, a symposium, a publication, an exhibition and a series of commissions, all in an effort to address the question of how art and art education might resist instrumentalisation by the art market on one hand and the streamlining efforts of the state on the other. To resist this instrumentalisation means to support the idea of a potential within the institution of art for the imagination of an alternative social order. To focus on education is to engage with real political questions about how institutions shape society.

The title 'Manufacturing Today' is appropriated from a US and European industry journal. In choosing this title, we wanted both to point to the coming industrialisation of European art education, and to the role of culture in making the social superstructure, in manufacturing society.

In shaping our concept one of our main worries was that it could run the risk of simply contributing to the current tendency to see art schools as places that produce students as a product for the market. But is there an alternative to this situation? Is there a social role for art students, for young artists, other than to succeed or fail as producers/products in the culture industry?

At Goldsmiths, staff members and artists Susan Kelly and Jesse Ash have form a working group of eleven current and former students of the Joint BA Degree in Fine Art and History of Art taught across the Departments of Art and Visual Cultures. We began discussions about art education as a form of training for the contemporary economy and the particular dilemmas and possibilities that face art students and recent graduates in London today. Students and former students created new work, video documentary, a sound installation, a text installation, a public artwork and a book documenting conversations across 5 Art Academies in Europe. These works were on show at 'Manufacturing Today' exhibition in Trondheim and will continue to inform the future work of the project.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/3086