‘The Dirty Art Department offers itself as an open space for all possible thought, creation, and action.
It sees itself as a dynamic paradox, flowing between the pure and the applied, the existential and the deterministic, and the holy and the profane.
It is concerned with individuality, collectivity, and our navigation of the complex relationship between the built world and the natural world, and other people and ourselves.
It’s a place to build objects or totems, religions or websites, revolutions or business models, paintings, or galaxies.
The Dirty Art Department comes from a common background of design and applied art, it seeks however to reject the Kantian division between the pure and the applied.
Since ‘god is dead’ and ‘the spectacle’ is omnipresent, it sees the creation of alternative and new realities as the way to reconsider our life situation on this planet.
The Dirty Art Department is open to students from all backgrounds including designers, artists, bankers, skeptics, optimists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, independent thinkers, poets, urban planners, farmers, anarchists, and the curious.
Please enjoy the trip’
Jerszy Seymour
In 2009, four cowboys, Catherine Geel, Clémence Seilles, Stephane Barbier-Bouvet and Jerszy Seymour, wandering through the deserted plains of meaning, got together with a burning feeling that something needed to happen.
Feeling that the school as a rocket ship blasting through the galaxies was the right place, and appreciating the history of radical school projects from Steiner to Bauhaus, Black Mountain College to Global Tools, and the contemporaries of United Nations Plaza, Bruce High Quality Foundation and Mountain School of Art, they formed themselves as Nuclear Banana ‘a launch pad for things, people and ideas and started to discuss.
Meanwhile in 1924, the merger of three schools in Amsterdam came to form the Instituut voor Kunstnijverheidsonderwijs . From 1939 to 1960, the program was heavily influenced by the functionalist and socio-critical ideas , partly thanks to the role of the socialist architect Mart Stam, who has been the director of the program. In 1968 the name was changed to the Gerrit Rietveld Acadamy . In 1995 the Sandberg Instituut was founded as the masters program of the Rietveld Academy.
In 2010 the Sandberg Instituut made the invitation and The Dirty Art Department was founded in 2011. It received official accreditation as a masters program from the Dutch government in 2012. The rocket ship is ready to blast off and the concept of wandering star and rationalist platform was no accident.
The Dirty Art Department sets out with a focus to develop singular practices positioned with in (or out) of society that are separate to medium or subject, and to give an insight of how to place that practice into the different existing contexts of art, design, performance, writing, pizza making etc. It understands a project as a thesis with a leap. The eventual challenge is how to create new context, that is the transformation of reality. Concerned with our way of inhabiting the planet and therefore also our way of inhabiting the mind, the department promotes a strong theoretical and philosophical agenda and is open to dangerous attempts and spectacular failures in practice. The Dirty Art Department see itself as a trip, and it remembers that where ever it lands, ‘Any Space Is The Place’ and fertile ground to just do it!