Working and living amidst the daily disasters of the neoliberal university, it is tempting to look at the history of artist-led university projects as emancipatory escape routes to the “edu-factory” of academic capitalism. From Joseph Beuys’ iconic Free International University in the 1970s to more recent cases such as Copenhagen Free University (2001-08) or The Silent University (2011-), artists have long experimented with constructing institutional infrastructures for free, collective, and creative education and research. This has been particularly manifest since contemporary art’s so-called “educational turn”. In this talk, I will revisit the history and present of alter-university projects. Why has the university remained a pivotal point of attraction for socially engaged artists? What does the university have that artists and activists want? And not least: to what extent can the artist-led universities be seen as models for a new or future university? Rather than simple utopian “solutions” or a kind of aesthetic Ersatzpolitik, I will discuss how some of the cases can be seen as contradictory “formal” refusals of the “prison house of knowledge”. In an age in which knowledge is primarily seen as a private and financial asset, sanctioned by the authority and infrastructure of the university, the history and present of artistic alter-universities delineate a living archive of practices distributing, propagating, and organizing knowledge otherwise.

Tobias Dias is a postdoctoral researcher in Art History at Aarhus University. He is currently working on the project A Nameless Science: Art, Expertise, and Infrastructure, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. His writings have appeared in journals and magazines like e-flux journal, Art-Agenda, Texte zur Kunst, Periskop, ARKEN Bulletin, and in several anthologies. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the prehistory of “artistic research”. He is also a member of the extra-disciplinary collective Organ of the Autonomous Sciences.

• Aesthetic Seminar F-2023 Program
• Aesthetic Seminar F-2023 Poster

Aesthetic Seminar F-2023 is organised by Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen and Morten Kyndrup on behalf of School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.