This book presents a wide range of artistic working processes that Peter Radelfinger developed and implemented together with students in various disciplines during the many years he taught at Zurich University of the Arts: several series of elementary (to begin with, drawing and performing) exercises, strategies and techniques of working with images, researching, artistic actions and complex artistic projects.
Radelfinger tries to lay down precise coordinates that will serve to broaden his students' perceptions and understanding of art, routinely setting parameters that establish a “minimal order” within which they'll have maximum room for maneuver. Radelfinger combines his idiosyncratic artistic approach with his pedagogical and didactic know-how. Not for nothing does he insist his teaching is part and parcel of his artistic practice.
This book, in turn, sets about creating a “minimal order” for the next playful round of artistic consciousness expansion. Serving neither as documentation of Radelfinger's courses nor as conventional teaching material designed to put across a specific method, this is an exciting handbook that provides plenty of food for further reflection – and action.
This book comprises multiple pictorial and textual levels: it's a montage of (outside) texts and pictures with cross-references and background information about everyday life as well as (contemporary) art and art history. The texts and pictures are interlinked with a view to opening up new avenues of thought. The images do not show completed works, they document working processes and designs for the most part produced in class.<
Peter Radelfinger (born 1953 in Bern, lives and works in Zurich) is an artist and professor at ZHDK – Zurich University of the Arts.
