Our rights as students at the Art Academy in Trondheim, Norway (http://www.kit.ntnu.no/), has been violated. Therefore we want to go away from this dying school before its too late and find inspiration in Berlin for our last year of bachelor. We are looking for a studio/flat/warehouse were we can live and work. We have approximately 1500-1800 euro a month to spend on rent. We want to go to Berlin in august/september. Any help, tips, info would be appreciated.

It is with a somewhat different framework that the Master Seminar 2014 was held on 21 May. The week before the students – spearheaded by Master Coordinator Tommy Olsson – went to Adresseavisen and expressed their dissatisfaction towards much of the art-city of Trondheim’s infrastructure and despair regarding the circumstances at the Art Academy in Trondheim. The seminar room is also added to the room where this year's masters’ exhibition takes place, namely Munkholmen and the old caretaker residence there. Visjonen om et striglet og streit møtelokale med fruktfat og kaffekanne ved inngangsdøren, må altså vike for noe i retning av en unntakstilstandens ramme, hvori det angjeldende masterkull (masterkoordinatoren inkludert) befinner seg et sted mellom opposisjonstrang og oppråddhet. 


But despite the raggedness, it is solid at the core: The three - and externally hired - guest lecturers Frans Jacobi, professor of performance and time-based art at the Academy of PhD from the Academy in Malmo, Merete Janowksi, former Rector of the Fynske Art Academy and current Artistic Director of Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art in Copenhagen, and Katrine Hjelde, who teaches at Chelsea Collage of Art with a PhD on art and pedagogy in higher education from the same place. 

The theme of the seminar is simply the many-sided and obviously relevant "Art Education", a theme on which guest lecturers were in advance openly invited to speak from the starting point of the question "What characterizes a good art education?" After the round of presentations by the three guest lecturers, all with their artistic merits, Master Coordinator Olsson postulates that there is an urgent need, in plenary, to specifically discuss the exhibition space the master seminar is held in, and in which the masters’ exhibition is also to be presented.
 
Frans Jacobi's post is to a great extent that an art academy - despite the differences that (thankfully) appear at the various north-European art academies - is part of a larger and increasingly uniform system of education that is subject to societal and political laws and rules. He supplements this with various citations where the main idea seems to be that an art academy, despite this association to the current regulations, is a portal between society and "the other world". That public funds are used in an art academy represents thus a hope, but the students are anyway forced to make a difficult balancing act, as they just have to deal with the dichotomous relationship between the overlying neo-capitalist requirements and ways of thinking and a critical an independent artistic practice. According to Jacobi there is the hope of autonomy finding "in the unrest." Underliggende presenteres altså studentene for en tanke om muligheten som ligger i et kunstakademis miljø, and precisely the challenge, bordering on uncomfortable, the intermediate position in which the students at the academy are located, a situation, in essence, with which one must constantly deal with cunning. 

Katrine Hjelde tar utgangspunkt i sin PhD Constructing a Reflective Site: Practice between art and pedagogy in the art school (2012), og også hun behandler forholdet mellom et kunstakademi og samfunnet. Hun begynner med en konsis presentasjon av hvor forskjellig kunstutdannelsene (tross alt) er europeiske byer seg imellom. This is concretised through a description of her encounter with the idea-based art scene in London when she moved there, and how big the difference is between studying at an academy versus teaching at an academy. 

Hjelde uses the familiar and well-known and well-used panoptic prison, designed by utilitarianism founder Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century, in order to thereby point to a way of thinking (and also a concentration of power) that characterizes many of the British art academies: Very few control very many from one central location. Emphasis is also placed on several historical factors - including how the coinciding Bauhaus school’s origins are with the similar thoughts that exist in the contemporary Rudolf Steiner - which overall illustrates how art education is shaped by preferences that change with time. It all ends up in the present and the difficult (and almost contradictory) requirements a society sets to an art academy: What do you get back? What is the product? According to Hjelde, the challenge lies - which Frans Jacobi also agreed with - in finding precisely the conversations between teaching and curriculum, constructing and facilitating places between cut-curriculum education requirements and free experimentation. Students at an art academy are not just a product of what the art academy can teach them, but how they manage to make use of the art academy determines the extent to which they are "successful students". Students should thus not even make use of the saying "what do I get for the money?" -mindset (this remark frequent of British art academies where students pay exorbitantly), but instead see the possibilities of limiting, rather than to see the limitation of the possibilities. 

Merete Janowski focusing in particular on the Danish art academies and points out how over a number of years the current statement "We do not educate to unemployment" is problematic given that a graduated artist who works in a non-artistic profession, is not counted as unemployed, and thus not included in the actual much less favourable statistics of artists trained at the Danish art academies who do not earn a living in the field they are trained to work in. 

Like speakers before her, uses Janowski her own experiences. She rattles off how she as an Artistic Leader has had to grasp some crucial factors to strengthen their own art academy’s offerings and character. These are presented as follows: 

To hire teachers who can actually teach. (Being an outstanding artist need in no way be associated with one being an outstanding teacher.) 

To internationalize the art academy. (Facilitate studies abroad, do not have the students dependent on a small and local environment, teaching not in Danish, but in English etc.)

To establish contacts outside the academy and, more broadly get students establish contacts in the study period, contacts that after graduation can be beneficial in facilitation of their own practice and own work as a graduated artist. 

Professionalize the way we communicate. (Avoid 'internal tone', better websites and other communication form and facade etc.) 

To focus on art education and art mediation as a profession. (Learning to write about their own and others' art, how to present own work, etc.)

Janowski’s final input thus makes a clear point, which - like Jacobi and Hjelde - points out the importance of the notion of first and foremost focusing on each individual academy’s strengths, and that as a student at an art academy, one must constantly deal with the contradictions an art academy contains (cf. Jacobi posts), and managing to use the situation as it is for their own enrichment (cf. Hjelde post). 

Dette definerer en svært solid kjerne for et masterseminars påfølgende debatt. Seminarets andre og mer diskursive del innledes av masterkoordinator Olsson med noen velvalgte ord om at utstillingsrommet – lokaler som mildt sagt ikke egner seg til annet enn enkeltstående bilder av lokalhistorisk verdi, om de i det hele tatt egner seg til kunst – er en stille protest, eller ’silent protest’, since one, after having determined that everyone in the room after all speaks or understands Norwegian, Swedish or Danish, shall nevertheless continue the subsequent discussion in English. (The whole debate similarly has a touch of strained professionalism about it.) Olsson further describes the city's art academy as an institution that works "in spite of the situation" before he retreats slightly and says he refuses to designate the art academy as dysfunctional. 

After a brief dispute regarding whether the discussion should be filmed (some students oppose, at which point the camera is turned off, in order for one to "safely" be able to contribute his/her honest opinion), åpner panelet med å uttrykke sin sympati for studentene og den underadministrerte situasjon studentene øyensynlig har forklart de fremmøtte gjesteforelesere at de har måttet fullføre sine studier under. 
 "It should not ask the students who run the academy," concludes Merete Janowski after having called the state KiT is in "horrible". 

Naturlig nok vies overgangen fra å være et fritt og uavhengig akademi ved overgangen mellom 1980¬ og 90¬tallet, til å bli en del av NTNU i 1996, mye plass. 
 The merging with the university - as a separate department under the newly-established NTNU, which in itself is probably a merger (between UiT and NTH) - gather more strength, and the first discussion wave ends with a bachelor student threatening to sue the art academy for in different ways violating the mutually signed bachelor contract between him and KiT when economic reasons have determined that the premises will be leased to external tenants, a threat that reaps the Master Coordinator’s blessing. 

As the discussion continued with such refreshing terminology, the debate shifts direction and addresses the Academy's administration. After a short and constructive initiative from Frans Jacobi (and at this stage relatively quiet panel of guest speakers) about administration workers' impunity of Danish academies, stating that "no one is doing anything" at KiT, and that none of the students know anything about how the administration works. (The claim is then supplemented with the example that there were not people who could book guest lecturers flights to Trondheim, so that the visitors had to do this yourself, or that very few of the employees at KiT see the difference between constructive and personal criticism.) 

Besides some meek effort, including showing the benefits of KiTs NTNU-affiliation using arguments that credits can be used in the second and later study situations (which in itself does not exactly testify to a belief that the education one about to finish will result in paid work), is not judged mercifully among the active students. (Interest to accommodate this kind of criticism must have been absent in the staff at KiT because none of them saw the need to meet up at this year's Masters’ Seminar.) NTNU’s rush for more support (money-per-head thinking), apparent as totally incompatible with any art academy’s professional needs, some of the students going so far as to argue that it is not just the much-criticized interdisciplinary NTNU-commitment "Experter i Team" that underlies all the objectionable quality, but that any so-called "obligations" are a plague and a nuisance.

At this point in the discussion an important point comes forward, namely that an almost ‘dethroned’ Frans Jacobi respond to the latter input. He reminds the circle of debate that the title 'artist' is not protected, but though you are wanting to train as an artist in an education system, one must however (and quite in keeping with his own and the other guest lecturers injunctions about creative cunning) actually operate the applicable system. 

And exactly here the injunctions from the first half of the seminar are noticeably potent: The double morals that some of the students at KiT claim prevails at the academy, should, following Hjelde, be a catalyst that works "double as good" into a (hopefully societal-) critical akademikull within education, even though she admits that the described specific conditions at KiT seems to be entirely under par. 

This creates a kind of gap between lecturers and academy students. I lys av denne sympatien later forelesernes ideelle tilhørere å være kunststudenter under utdanning ved et fungerende akademi som er ute etter et ekstra boost, snarere enn et avtroppende masterkull som ønsker forståelse for de siste månedenes studentdrevne dugnad, som har resultert i en masterutstilling på sparebluss. 


And after such initiatives, the tone changes towards the end. Janowksi continues to encourage coming up with alternatives in such a time, rather than starving in front of the fridge, an initiative that finds resonance in Olsson ascertainable end and final request: "Crisis is good because then something needs to change. We're way past the point of crisis".


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Øyvind Sørfjordmo, Mikael Jacobsson, Sjur Aas.