How to teach art? What kind of knowledge should artists absorb? How might an ordinary person become a creature addicted to the creative process; a non-artist become an artist? Such programmatic questions articulated by the acclaimed Polish artist Artur Żmijewski were at the heart of the workshop “How to Teach Art?” Between April and July 2018, Żmijewski invited a group of graduate and PhD students from three Zurich universities—the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), the UZH (University of Zurich), and the ZHdK (Zurich University of the Arts)—to collectively reflect on their artistic practices. Over the course of four months, the group met several times a week for hourlong sessions, following individual and collective exercises devised by Żmijewski himself.
This book retraces the workshop and its process by means of inconclusive, fragmentary results between theory and practice:. It presents drawings, videos, photographs, 16mm films, and accompanying reflections on the central premise, “How to Teach Art?”