WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

In Creating Beyond Convention II will pick up where Creating Beyond Convention I left off. We will continue to follow the Trickster’s journey—a rake’s progress through the realms of sabotage, subterfuge, and humor. Each week we will explore a new theme and the corresponding trickster myths associated with it. We’ll take an in-depth look at the work created by artists who engage with these ideas, and consider how these strategies might inform our own projects as well as expand the horizons of our thinking.

Course Structure:

1. Fact and Fiction
Jorge Luis Borges, Marcel Broodthaers, William Kentridge

The blurring of boundaries—especially those separating the world of reality from the world of make-believe—creates a third space: a liminal zone that speaks more eloquently about the nature of both without being either.

2. Failure
William Blake, Samuel Beckett, Gordon Matta-Clark, Félix González-Torres

Mark Twain once said, “Good decisions come from experience; experience comes from bad decisions.” In the second week of the workshop, we will examine failure not as defeat but as a valuable source of knowledge, perspective, and wisdom.

3. Memory
Milan Kundera, Joshua Oppenheimer, Marjan Teeuwen

Memory is not a perfect record—it is fallible and fragile, vulnerable to the forces of trauma and time. In the third week of the workshop, we will look at artists who examine memory as a performative act—one that has the power to reshape reality for both individuals and societies.

4. Practical Jokes
Maurizio Cattelan, Martin Kippenberger, Mika Rottenberg

Babies learn to “tell” jokes before they learn to speak. With this in mind, one could argue that humor is our most primal form of communication. In the final week of the course, we will look at artists who use humor to subvert cultural values and expose the absurdity, contradiction, and hypocrisy behind the many rules that govern our lives.