Our entry into the format of artistic assignments was facilitated through Wicked Arts Assignments (2021), a collection of arts assignments edited by Emiel Heijnen and Melissa Bremmer.1 The book presents the assignments along with several essays and interviews, authored by arts-based educators who employ this format in their teaching and researching practices. While we refer in this section mostly to the first three texts, written by Heijnen and Bremmer, the interviews provide valuable insights into situated practices designed around the collaborative, process-oriented artistic-educational activity. In one of them, for instance, Nina Paim points to Paulo Freire and bell hooks as the underlying theoretical references for thinking of the arts assignment format as unlocking the “emancipatory” potential of education.2 Heijnen and Bremmer points out that arts assignments are present in educational curricula as if liminally, as “scores, instructions, prompts, and briefs”; in this form, they are “informally passed on to other arts teachers or artists,” while “liv[ing] on in the form of memories and creative artefacts of students and participants.”3 Arts assignments play, therefore, the role of didascaliae, a backbone to “a living curriculum that is personal, dynamic, and embodied.”4 With their open-endedness, process-based orientation, and outcome unpredictability, they add an element of intellectual and structural surprise, balancing the focus on summative feedback, i.e. the curricular design where all activities lead toward the end-of-term grade, conceived as the key (or even only) element of student assessment. Through their focus on language-based description, arts assignments provide pedagogic balance to disciplines, such as performing arts, which employ embodied teaching practices, where communication, “directions, prompts, and coaching strategies” are physical, and therefore not written or verbal.5

Reading Heijnen and Bremmer’s essays gave us a prompt impression that the authors’ primary concern revolves around their core question through which they aim to establish whether “a set of instructions or prompts [can] be seen as a work of art.”6 For this purpose, the authors advertise the arts assignments presented in their publication (as well as the very format) as “bold, unusual, contrary, funny, poetical, and socially committed,”“encourag[ing] cross-disciplinary working and thinking” and “represent[ing] themes and ways of working recognized in contemporary arts and popular culture, from remix to engagement, from artistic intervention to hacking.”7 But through this focus, they nevertheless point to the rich history of practices from which the contemporary examples of artistic assignments derive.8 Interestingly, these practices demonstrate the opposite vector to the one that the authors express in the above question: instead of wondering whether a piece of instruction can constitute a work of art, the interest of these earlier practices seems to lie in the prospect of departing art. A key reference point for Heijnen and Bremmer is Hans Ulrich Obrist, the leading figure behind Do It: The Compendium, which documents a couple of decades of his curatorial-artistic activity around the arts-assignment-based premise.9 In the introductory essay, the curator points to Marcel Duchamp as the originator of an idea that a piece of instructions can be thought of as an artwork.10 He cites the latter’s 1919 instruction, sent “from Argentina for the work on the balcony,” which presents ideas expressed in the form of infinitive verb phrases: “To make a painting or a sculpture the way one unreels a film” or “To buy a dictionary and cross out the words that are to be crossed out.”11 The infinitive form is a key gesture, an opening in the grammar of thinking of doing art, which encourages its recipients to eliminate “all notion of the artist’s taste” and therefore to avoid fixing an artwork (or, more broadly, any form of outcome) in a specific temporal moment. Such infinitive forms, as can be deduced on the basis of Obrist’s proposition, tend to the present, not the past, therefore dissolving any notion of authorship or originality.12

Heijnen and Bremmer present Obrist as a key representative of the rise of participatory artistic practices in the 1990s and the so-called social turn in the arts, i.e. the “(re)turn to socially engaged arts forms, involving people as ‘material’ to develop collaborative, often participatory work.”13 Its participatory aspect meant that artistic activity focused on processes and their “hu­man interpretation,” shifting away from being concerned with “copies, images, or reproduc­tions of artworks.”14 Artworks were to be created and recreated locally, in each exhibiting venue, on the basis of language-based prompts or instructions, turning an exhibition into a “performance site.”15 This is the underlying premise of Obrist’s curatorial project, started in the mid-1990s, which eventually became a few-decade-running series of ephemeral “exhibitions, events, and publications,” built around the format of instructions, issued by artists and extended through the participation of “local people and materials.”16 The authors of the “Foreword” to Do It: The Compendium, Kate Fowle and Frances Wu Giarratano (2012) observe that Obrist’s concept derives from “a simple proposition: [to c]reate an instruction that some­one else can use to make an art­work”; Its original iteration involved twelve instructions within “a publication produced by AFAA (Association Française d’Action Artistique)” and one place where it was enacted (Kunsthalle Ritter in Klagenfurt, Austria)].17 There, Obrist used prompts to initiate artistic situations that were neither to involve the artist behind the instructions nor to generate any sustainable forms of artistic production: all the outcomes of the process of following the instructions were to be destroyed. As Obrist himself writes, “No two versions of Do It instructions are ever identi­cal when carried out. Via the list of instructions, the specific pro­fane daily environment flows into the exhibition space rendering porous the limits dividing interior and exterior space. Like a film, Do it can be shown and seen simultaneously in different places. At the same time, each version of Do it is an activity in space. The exhibition takes place in the inter-spaces between inter­pretation and negotiation.”18

Conceptually, Obrist’s project derives from the Fluxus group, whose activity dates back to the 1960s. Their artworks consisted in prompts, scores, and other types of instructions, requiring the participation of other people, without whom the performance and completion of an artwork would not be possible.19 For the Fluxus artists, art was supposed to be “radically participatory” and inclusive to the extent that the validity of one’s educational artistic background was questioned as unnecessary: Fluxus scores consisted of “ordinary routines that required no special skills or artistic training.”20 This format heavily relied on its open-ended and processual character. Generated in this way, artistic activity would start at the moment of a score being conceived, be activated and sustained through the response of those reacting to the score’s interpellation. What entails is that an artwork is, at the same time, never and always complete, while remaining in the perpetual process of “becoming.” An example of a Fluxus score, cited by Heijnen and Bremmer, is “Ice Trick” (1966), an assignment formulated in a Fluxkit, a box “with scores, newspapers, games, and interactive objects from Fluxus members,” which was part of a mail order service launched by the Fluxus founder, George Maciunas.21 The assignment’s instruction read: “Pass one pound piece of ice among audience until it melts while playing a recording of fire sounds or actually a fire on stage.”22 Another example from that context comes courtesy of Yoko Ono, whose Grapefruit (1964) was an artbook conceived as a ‘do-it-yourself kit.”23 While Heijnen and Bremmer quote “Painting to Hammer a Nail,” i.e. a painting that asks its viewers to hammer a nail into its canvas, Ono’s artbook reveals more abstractly framed artistic assignments, such as “A Piece for Orchestra,” which asks its readers, through its poem-like instruction, to do the following:

“Count all the stars of that night / by heart. / The piece ends when all the orchestra / members finish counting the stars, or / when it dawns. / This can be done with windows instead / of stars.”24

Similarly concise and abstract are Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” (1975), also referenced in Wicked Arts Assignments, which constitute another example of the Fluxus influence on artistic disciplines peripherally related to post-conceptual art. The author of a few chapters in Eno’s biography, David Pattie describes the “strategies” as initially a set of “(maybe) sixty-four cards,” co-authored by Eno and artist Peter Schmidt, which offered prompts, such as: “Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action” or “Change nothing and continue with immaculate consistency.”25 Eno’s use of “oblique strategies” demonstrates the use of instruction-based artwork-making methods in a more popular context, outside of “the world of avant-garde composition,” and demonstrates an agenda of including into the creative process “random juxtapositions and abrupt reframings” as intentional, not incidental, creative choices.26

Mapping the participatory artistic practices in Europe and North America, Heijnen and Bremmer attribute the spurs of their popularity to the socio-politically pertinent moments and the movements that they spawned.27 For instance, they connect Fluxus’s activity to the late-1960s student-protest movements and, more broadly, to the emergence of conceptual art, informed by Joseph Kosuth’s 1969 essay “Art after Philosophy” (the version published in 1991). Among a few examples of conceptual artists, Kosuth mentions Christine Kozlov, who worked “along conceptual lines … since late 1966.”28 He describes her Compositions for Audio Structures as “a coding system for sound; a stack of several hundred blank sheets of paper–one for each day on which a concept is rejected.”29 Susanne Neuburger describes the premise of the work, which she perceives as “one of the earliest programmatic writings of conceptual art”: “Kozlov notates – using a photo-mechanical method, with white writing on a brown background on several sheets of paper – the structure and duration of various constant or overlapping notes that, as a logical statement, represent an experimental set-up.”30 The work is therefore a representation of a concept. For Kosuth, who collaborated with Kozlov on this piece, “works of art are analytic propositions,” as they do not “provide … information … about any matter of fact,” when “viewed within their context as art.”31 “A work of art is a tautology in that it is a presentation of the artist’s intention”; the act of declaring a work of art as “art” becomes its definition, which proves that art is, a priori, “true.”32 The philosopher claims that art is not an empirical or aesthetic proposition; the artist is “concerned only with the way [1] in which art is capable of conceptual growth and [2] how his propositions are capable of logically following that growth”; this makes art not “factual” but “linguistic in ‘character.’”33

What you need: a photo camera or a mobile phone with a camera

Instructions: Consider the following two quotes from “The Body Archive,” a chapter in Julietta Singh’s No Archive Will Restore You. 

“How, then, to undertake this desired body archive? There are, of course, those obvious places that are marked on the body, places where the body has been cut, or burned, or broken.”

and

“Suddenly I am aware of the body as both an archive and archivist – in a crucial sense, it gathers its own materials. Control over the assemblage that I am turns out to be pure fantasy.”34

This assignment focuses on the body as an archive and on the idea of cataloguing  the visible marked places of your “body archive” through the close description of the traces that they left behind.

Step 1: Take a photo (digital, analog) of a part of your body where there lies an invisible body archive for you.

Step 2: Combine the photo and the catalogue in any way you think it could fit. OR write a poetic text about your invisible body archive. What knowledge is written inside your body archive? What materials is it composed of?

What you need: access to Internet, ability to use online machine translator services (or command of at least two languages)

Instruction: Use Google or another search engine to search for and collect image-based information about one calendar day. Choose a day randomly or on the basis of its importance.

Feel free to search for the day in different languages, since results may vary. This is, for example, Google Search result list in Portuguese, while this is its English equivalent. Use the images to create a collage. Feel inspired by your day of choices but also give it also room to experiment and improvise. The collage may be done digitally (with a graphic program), by hand (paper and scissors), or using mixed techniques.

When you have finished, go to Wikipedia and search for the same day. Use the content of the day’s page to create a caption for your image. Again, feel free to use the content from different languages: this is the German version and its Portuguese counterpart, since they might vary.

What you need: at least two people (three and more will make it more exciting)

Instruction: This assignment consists in exchanging and reacting to sound- and text-based messages.

Step 1: Record a voice/audio message with the description of your memory of a sound: the sound may relate somehow to the object you brought along during our meeting, but it doesn’t have to. It can be a sound or a sequence of sounds, pertaining to a place, a specific situation, a specific time of the year, or a person, i.e. anything or anyone that brings up some affective memory in you.

Step 2: The next step is send your message to someone and receive one message from someone.

[Note: We tried out this assignment as a group of five people, and we set a specific exchange order, so that each person would give and receive one message.]

Here, your task is to react to the sound that you have received, and to produce a text-based description of the sound that you will then send it to the author of the sound.

Step 3: Here, you are back to working on your sound. You have received a description of the sound from the person that you had sent it. On the basis of this description, try to recreate the sound. Record it, and send it in a group message to everyone; your recording should be at least 20 seconds long; include a short text (100-200 words) describing elements of your recreation process, such as: how you did it, why you chose the specific tools, space, or material, what obstacles you have encountered.