He was a dedicated and inspired educator. Once while teaching an entry-level class he left the room in the middle of the lecture, he simply vanished… slipping from the class mid-sentence. The students, unaccustomed to his style, remained seated until the period had officially ended and then in bemusement made their way outside. On hearing a noise they looked up; overhead was a small single-engine aircraft circling the classroom. In that moment they understood - this is their teacher - professor, poet, mathematician, philosopher now aviator in the sky. He was just arriving, from nowhere he came, an aeroplane at 3,000 ft. dancing above the classroom.
How do truly inspired programmes happen? I don’t want to fly I’m not considering pilot training. So how does it happen?
Bring together the thing under study and its horizon, be both the classroom and 3,000 ft. Be practical, experiential, grounded in object, material and process and, at the same time describe, in detail, the unbounded vista each new object reveals. Be in the classroom and beyond.
If I were asked to describe the class, I wouldn’t say more than this. The pilot of course already knows it; he knows it through direct experience, through his hands.
(the program is in English, for details please see https://pavilion27.com)
Pavillon 27 – Prof. Michael Stevenson is a practical art course with an emphasis on making and understanding objects and our relations with them. The class foregrounds a research based and materially dedicated approach to the practice of art across a broad range of sculptural mediums; wood, metal, plastic, ceramic, fabric, film, performance etc.
Material and process are the basis of artistic production; when they come together in ways that are fresh and strange in an artwork something intrinsically new is produced, and this in turn creates space for new comment and understanding.
The class also functions as a think tank, we most recently have concentrated our discussions and activities on automation, human-machine communication and learning in practice.
Our program of guest artists, curators etc. to date includes; Sofia Hultén, Anthea Hamilton, Simon Starling, Tacita Dean, Annika Eriksson, Gabriel Kuri, Morgan Fisher, Simon Denny, Chris Evans, Sam Durant, Will Holder, Michael Taussig, Raimundas Malašauskas, Maria José De Abreu, Rhea Dall, Joel Mu, Maria Loboda. Some of the activities we have done together include, exhibition making, workshops, film screenings, performance along with individual and group discussion of student work.
The class also travels to exhibitions as well as sites of industry and technological process and production. Regular exhibitions are made by the class at the Akademie Galerie and artworks in both their finished and progressing states are discussed in the pavillon each week.
