Week 12 Studio: The method of no method

The final crit — exhibition pieces shown together, and the semester's throughline named out loud for the first time

10 May 2027

Before the studio#

Have Exhibition Piece running and staged per last week’s work, ready to leave unattended for the full studio rather than demoed piece by piece.

In the studio#

Every instrument runs at once, in the same room, for anyone to walk between. Shitao’s treatise ends where it began: 无法而法，乃为至法 — the method of no method is the perfect method. Read badly, that sounds like an excuse to skip technique. Read the way twelve weeks of constraints, decay and failed attempts should have taught you to read it, it means the opposite: method worth having is the kind you can no longer see, because it’s become how you make a mark rather than a rule you consult before making one. Say, out loud, what your semester’s worth of constraints turned out to actually be about — not what you were told to build, but what you now think an instrument for mark-making is for.

Afterwards#

Exhibition Piece is marked against what ran in this room, and Critique Practice is marked against how you used every studio before it, this one included.