The Schoolhouse, which was conceived by Fritz Haeg as an with ‘How to Eat Austin’, a seven-week series of workshops relating
outgrowth of a series of salons he hosted in the dome (where he also to ecology and gardening, presented in conjunction with Haeg’s solo
lived until recently) from 2001 to 2006, is a continually morphing entity. show ‘Attack on the Front Lawn’, in a local space called Arthouse.
In its first season – autumn 2006 – it took the form of an intensive “My biggest problem with MFA programmes is how insular
college-like course, with a preselected group of nine students meeting they are”, Haeg says, “and how focused they are on contemporary fine
every Sunday, 12 hours a day, for 12 weeks, to participate in discussions, art. If you want to be a really thoughtful, challenging, innovative artist,
workshops and projects led by a rotating assortment of teachers, I think that the last thing you should be looking at is contemporary art.
on subjects ranging from yoga to poetry to magic to community You should be looking at science and reading history and looking at
organisation. This autumn it was a book club, meeting every Thursday the newspaper and looking at everything but art – you know? To just
for nine weeks and open to anyone who wanted to stop by (Alan be stuck in a building with other artists your own age, and then only
Weisman’s The World Without Us, 2007, was the featured book on meeting with other artists that are maybe 10 or 20 years older than you
the evening I visited). The school’s functions, however, aren’t limited – it’s just such a small, narrow world to be living in. It’s so limiting.”
to the vicinity of the dome. Last winter, it travelled to Manhattan for He points to the work of Buckminster Fuller, whose biography
‘Dancing 9 to 5’, a day of movement workshops in a Whitney Museum he presented in the book club’s final session. “Basically his theory is that
sculpture court, and to the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary the powers that be want us to be specialists”, Haeg says, “because they
Art for ‘The Philadelphia Training Camp for Expression Skills’, a two- don’t want us to see the big picture, because the more you see the
month ‘clinic’ devoted to communication, with topics such as ‘The Fine big picture, the more apt you are to question things. He’s saying that
Art of Writing Bad Poetry’, ‘How to Be an Unorthodox Tourguide of decades ago, but I think it’s even more true today.”
Your Own Terrains’ and ‘Make an Instrument Out of Everyday Shit’. A similar concern underscores the philosophy of the Mountain
Because Haeg no longer lives in the dome – he is on the road almost School of Arts, which was founded in 2005 by artists Eric Wesley
continuously with other projects – the Schoolhouse will now become and Piero Golia, though the approach is very different. Whereas the
almost entirely nomadic. This spring will find the project in Texas Schoolhouse functions, to some degree, as an extension of Haeg’s
LA SCHOOLS.indd 72 5/2/08 15:41:27
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