EOYS Planning

okey doke, ##EOYS IDEAS! What is your vision for this year’s End of the Year show? We need to plan it now. How can we have a show as interesting as last year without doing a repeat In a meeting, faculty suggested that one structure, perhaps, could be ‘teams’ of students with faculty advisors setting up different parts of the building(s).

This is our opportunity to show the community outside of Cooper what we do at Cooper: teach, make art, build community….?

What do you want to see? What do you want to do?

This will all be condensed into a more legible format later, but for now we’ll just add everything

• I’d like to see a room (possibly the new gallery) on which student work is hung next to alumni work.
• What about giving a floor to each year and having students curate individual booths?
• We need something that keeps people coming back ever day/week like performances or happenings or something like can we get Bruce to do animal farm?
• the spaces should to be divided and then offered to student organizers who can register for a space and then organize their own mini exhibition. This process should be placed on some kind of timeline which the faculty can help enforce. Each year should select a body of students who would over the day to day operations of the installation process and deal with the administration so that there are not a million people trying to do too many things

• Free school

• How can we get freshmen and sophomores super involved?

• Alum involvement? What kind?
• Alum studio visits? Alum/student hang-out events!
• how can we use this as an opportunity to build a community around the school? Is that an appropriate use of the EOYS? If not, why not?
• how do we deal with the issue of interdisciplinarity? Why are drawings and prints always only in the 6th floor?
• How do graphic design students want to be involved in EOYS? Does everyone just want to “show their work?” Or do we want to make something new for this? Whatever that means.
• reading room?

• spaces organized/ works picked based on an abstract theme (tranparency,

• Duration– how do we get people to come throughout the month?

• Let’s think about the future and the past of Cooper Union, in the present.

STRUCTURE:

• Perhaps the idea from the faculty that faculty ‘advisors’ each have a group of students and a space for which they must get, organize, and install work is good. But a concern that we have about that idea is it becomes so easy for the different spaces to not know what the others are doing.
• We don’t really want to have the freshmen in a room by themselves, their work should be installed with the work of other students.
• Fac shouldn’t worry about a repeat of last year, this year we want to show art. Use the EOYS to address school politics in a different way.
• On the idea of restaging parts of senior shows: Not interesting, not interested.

ASC is going to have a meeting this week (hopefully) w/ student body to talk about these things.

logistical Qs:

• what (if anything) can we pay students for? ‘Guarding’ the art when it’s up?
• Can we get a map of the spaces now? Maybe we put a call for proposals out that’s different than ones in past?

FREE SCHOOL INSIDE THE SCHOOL///PUBLIC

• this is something we talked about some last year, but how can we do it this year? Should the lecture content be related, in some way, to Cooper? Topics around Cooper? or should we offer a class on doing your taxes? How would it, then, be different from trade school or BHQFU?
• we have a club that’s just started this semester called freeschool.at (ex: freeschool.at/cooper) thats a directory of all the free shools in the sity and starting march we’re putting out a monthly city-wide broad side
• involve BHQFU
• i think we can differentiate from trade school/BHQFU by not curating content and by making them all public- no bartering, just free!
• maybe a “recruiting” event to all of the so-called “free schools”?
• I think we could have a really interesting conversation about this. There are so many ‘free’ independent schools popping up everywhere, why should people care about this one?
• it might be nice to have like the opening day/ closing day have classes/workshops/lectures about examining pedagogy and educational models-maybe bringing in all those groups to speak. but the rest of the time it should just be OPEN already have a list of 30ish groups that do free classes and 70 people that want to teach free classes AT COOPER!
• I also think we need to consider how many people, realistically, will show up for these things. And then decide what classes and when they would be offered. Would these classes produce anything?
• well, they all are different projects in the form of schools – it could be dressed up as a for-profit college’s respond to alumni-relations/job recruiting… idk?
• I want a class on fundraising in the arts.
• Pack dat house
• We could do alum studio visits? or something?
• they don’t need to compete/ people don’t need to care about this one MORE than they care about other projects like FreeU thats held in parks, its just another part of the constellation. What is missing in those other models is a hard-line critique of higher edu institutions, that we can offer by repurposing the space we have and making it publicly available for people to teach classes. this is a simple radical gesture and even though it’s not a new thought it’s something that isn’t being done yet! many people interested in teaching these things come with their own communities and are just in need of space, i don’t think we need to worry about #’s attending i think we would just need a good way of letting OUR communities know when things are happening
• lmcc can be a resource for that
• Jenny: “Would these classes produce anything?” Read this sappy wonderful speech about classroom teaching and weep!

“Classroom teaching is a physical, breath-based, eye-to-eye event. It is not built on equipment or the past. It is not concerned about the future. It is in existence to go out of existence. It happens and then it vanishes. Classroom teaching is our gift. It’s us; it’s this.

We bring nothing into the classroom — perhaps a text or a specimen. We carry ourselves, and whatever we have to offer you is stored within our bodies. You bring nothing into the classroom — some gum, maybe a piece of paper and a pencil: nothing but yourselves, your breath, your bodies.

Classroom teaching produces nothing. At the end of a class, we all get up and walk out. It’s as if we were never there. There’s nothing to point to, no monument, no document of our existence together.

Classroom teaching expects nothing. There is no pecuniary relationship between teachers and students. Money changes hands, and people work very hard to keep it in circulation, but we have all agreed that it should not happen in the classroom. And there is no financial incentive structure built into classroom teaching because we get paid the same whether you learn anything or not.

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, “I know how to add two numbers, but I’m not going to tell you.” And they laugh and shout, “No!” That’s so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?”

Margaret Edson is doooope: http://www.smith.edu/events/commencement_speech2008.php