Sharing with you...thesis work from Miguel Braceli ('20)!

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Hi, my name is Miguel Braceli and I am presenting my thesis in the form of a downloadable PDF: The Naked School. All MFAs end with a thesis. In Art Schools we usually call a final exhibition of art, design, or illustration projects a Thesis Show. However, this event is not truly a thesis, nor is it entirely an exhibition. To complicate matters, I want to present this essay as a “thesis” insofar as it is a proposition, argued and justified even when it has no proof.

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The Naked School is a proposal of a building without walls which aims to bring artistic production closer to the social and political contexts that surround them; an approach to reality that is founded on a learning structure capable of stimulating socio-aesthetic practices inside and outside the white cube of exhibition spaces.

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This text situates itself against the tendency of art schools to replicate the institutional and market-driven norms of the art world. I would argue that while art schools strive to become exhibitionary models for traditional museums and galleries, contemporary museums today seek to become schools themselves by engaging the audience with educational projects that imply a radical engagement with public space and larger audiences.

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Finally, the text ends in the present, pondering on the destiny of schools and museums as the world is consumed by a global pandemic.

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Downloadable PDF

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www.miguelbraceli.com/the-naked-school

“The Naked School” is a text whose ideas I began drafting during my time at the Maryland Institute College of Art, which for me was a surprising new experience. I use the word “surprising” because it is a term that entertains both wonder and disappointment.

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These sentiments have stimulated me to generate a text on art and education that allows me to explore my interest in the synthesis of these two fields, while also probing the relevance of these intersections in the areas of artistic social practices and participatory art. This is the crux of my work, though I don’t pretend to propose this text as a work of art, nor do I intend to inhabit the field of institutional critique.

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The works produced during my two years of schooling have been developed outside of the school walls by dialoguing with its students and with other communities and territories outside the institution. Enterrar las banderas en el mar, Here We Are, Trigger, and Monumentos Horizontales are some of these projects realized between 2018 and 2020.

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They allowed me to bind my concerns with form as education to the premises of the Naked School.

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Downloadable PDF

www.miguelbraceli.com/the-naked-school

Images: Monumentos Horizontales. Miguel Braceli. Guadalajara, 2020.

About his thesis paper “The Naked School”: Schools must be naked, all their walls demolished to keep their structure, leaving only what is essential. They would then be buildings without facades, fully exposed to reality. They would get wet, dirty, and impregnated with their contexts; they would shake without collapsing, they would inhabit experiences that would redefine their meaning.

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The challenge of educational spaces is to get closer to reality without replicating it. This requires the transformation of the internal structures of the academic world and then a break with the structures of the external world. Schools should not emulate the art system and replicate its dynamics for the theoretical exercise of the profession.

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Education must provide the tools to create alternative models of artistic practice; create new forms of legitimation, new spaces for action, and new structures of emancipation. We artists have to work on the construction of our own territories of validation.

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Schools are the perfect place to develop such a program. One of the attributes of art is its ability to transform itself, the transgression of the norm is the basis of a freedom that is intrinsic to it. Learning spaces then need to use this possibility to find in art the ability to create new systems that learn and dialogue with reality.

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Downloadable PDF

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www.miguelbraceli.com/the-naked-school

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Images: Trigger. Mica campus, 2019.

About his thesis paper “The Naked School”: With the appearance of COVID-19, the appeal of Art Schools might collapse alongside the global economy. This pandemic has generated a series of social restrictions that led schools to an immediate transition to online education.

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Faced with the loss of technical resources, workspaces, and exhibition spaces, as well as the impossibility of an in-person education, students from YALE, TISCH, RISSD, SVA, Columbia, and my own institution, MICA, have asked for a partial tuition refund that reflects the mutilated Spring semester of 2020.

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It would be easy to brand art students as blind egoists during a global crisis that demands human solidarity. But their response is consistent with what our school has promoted as the backbone of our education: from the studios and labs to fabricate the works, to the artist dinners and the curated exhibitions—all of which complete the closed circuit of a self-absorbed practice divorced from the miseries of the world out there.

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To wit, this is art education defined as the simulation of a certain exercise of the artistic profession, education that superimposes the idea of ​​success over the construction of knowledge, one that collapses upon itself like a perfect tautology.

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In order to discover what is truly substantial, education must be naked. Its spaces can only be open places, empty spaces that are inhabited and sustained by the possibilities of learning. Art schools must depurate education, to find the autonomy[1] necessary to create new possible systems; and in turn, go outside to approach reality from this transformation. We speak of learning structures that can affect and nurture its contexts without collapsing, as well as generating a contribution to those contexts in return.

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Downloadable PDF

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www.miguelbraceli.com/the-naked-school