The Crit Lab: Rethinking Critique

Critique is an encounter. Art is a verb.

Art is a material manifestation of an intimate lived experience. We meet the work as an autonomous entity, a moving body of ideas rather than static objects. We consider its identity and vernacular as a deep specificity, in conversation with art and with the world.

An alternate ecosystem

The Crit Lab is an alternate critical community for working artists outside academia to come together for sustained contact, with radical optimism and rigorous dialogue, in an act of hope over destruction.

The Crit Lab offers graduate-level critique seminars for working artists. We employ a rigorous structure and pedagogy, with critical, supportive, feedback in small ongoing artist groups. We develop a critical language and engage in a dialogue with the work. We support the artist and focus and push the work.

The Lab is for artists at any level in their practice.

The requirements:

Commitment to studio practice
Open to dialogue and input
Radical listening and respect in the group
Attendance at all sessions (barring emergencies etc)

Labs offer the intense dialogue and feedback of an MFA program, without the tuition, agenda, or degree. The Crit Lab is ideal for those for whom career, home life, or cost make an MFA prohibitive, who don’t need the piece of paper yet crave a more critical discourse, and for those wanting a critical ethical community within which to get and give feedback on work.

The Crit Lab was founded by artist, curator and educator Patricia Miranda, with a structured pedagogy designed to focus and deepen discussion beyond common subjective reactions.

Philosophy

Art-making is an often solitary pursuit. The Crit Lab engages in intentional conversation with the work and with one another, and creates structures for individualized, supportive, inclusive dialogue. Attention to language is crucial for brave, safe, discussion that fosters real change. The Crit Lab is a community of artists engaged in serious discussion around their work.

Importantly, The Crit Lab uses an ethical lens through which to engage with the work. We see art as situated in a social space, always in conversation with art and the discourses of culture- past, present, and into the future. This is true whether the work takes on political subjects directly, or stakes a claim for beauty as a necessary force in the world. Art-making is an inherently political act.

We see art is a verb, an action, an autonomous organism with its own internal logic, syntax, and grammar. We meet this "being" on its own terms, in opposition to external or subjective ideas of success/failure, working/not working, like/don't like. The process of "opening up a radical space of uncertainty and vulnerability"* brings us into relationship with the work, tending to its openness and potentiality, rather than judgment and conclusion.

Gathering in a digital or IRL room in dialogue and community is more urgent than ever. We share our work, our vision, our process, and our dreams in an outwardly focused action, and bring an intersectional, ethical stance to our work and to our micro/macro-society.

Artists are a constituency. Together we can envision and create thriving, sustainable, ethical, artistic communities, that can even change the world.

*Leslie Dick

The Crit Lab is a safe brave space where artwork and ideas are shared in vulnerability and full confidence. All people and artworks are welcomed and respected as they are. In The Crit Lab we make space for one another through radical listening. No harmful language or actions of any kind towards people or artwork will be tolerated. The Crit Lab reserves the right to block any participant who does not respect and abide by these rules.

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