Notes on the Art Alchemy Studio
Hello!
I’m excited to introduce Tyson Lewis, professor of art education at the University of North Texas. Tyson is a brilliant scholar (he’s also my husband), who writes about the intersection of aesthetic philosophy and art education.
Tyson and his co-author, the poet Peter Hyland, have just published Studious Drift with the University of Minnesota Press.
I hope you enjoy these thoughts from Tyson! If you are interested in learning more about art alchemy, check out my offerings here. —Anne
Guest Post
Greetings!
First, I’d like to thank Anne for inviting me to post on Painting with the Moon and to introduce my new book, co-authored by Peter Hyland, titled Studious Drift: Movements and Protocols for a Postdigital Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022).
In this book, Peter and I trace the long history of the studio through its many historical manifestations, pinpointing several important features that support the studio's endlessly pliable openness.
A NEW THEORY OF THE STUDIO
Studious Drift revives the relationship between studying and the studio in service of advancing educational experimentation for a world where digital tools have become a permanent part of education.
The studio’s openness includes:
the suspension of power relations defining social roles (such as gender relations in the household)
a space of indistinction between inside & outside, self & other, nature & culture
a radical embrace of experimentation that does not abide by rules of any given scientific or humanistic discipline.
As it turns out, depictions and descriptions of alchemist studios are the paradigmatic cases for these three dimensions of the studio! Historically, alchemist studios where meant to act as lessons in what NOT to do in a studio, but in our work, Peter and I rehabilitate the messy and emergent qualities of alchemist studios for promoting interdisciplinary, arts-based research & creation.
Studio_D
In our own experimental art practices, Peter and I created a digital studio space in the Studio D website. Studio D is an attempt to make the alchemical practices of the studio open and free to a wide public, inviting others to participate in the experimentation, often using arts-based processes. Studio D offers up protocols (perhaps one can think of these as spell work) for injecting wonder, surprise, and study into everyday technologies and practices. We find kinship here with Anne's art alchemy in the studio at Wild Moon Craft. Both Studio D and Wild Moon Craft suggest the need to re-envision nature-culture, art-science, and digital-analogue spaces capable of queering normative constructions of self and world.
