This monograph from Slovenian collective Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. discursively documents artist Tadej Pogačar’s series Konec šole/School’s Out. The series began in 1997 in response to a post-Soviet education system hinged upon order, discipline, control, and competition, as eight works of collage on paper, expanding over the next decade into twenty-five works and an interventionist exhibition at Sentvid Secondary School.
School’s Out sought to create productive disorder derived from the instruments of the institution. “It wanted among other things to expose a skeptical distance to the methods, learning aids and learning tools that were available to us,” says Pogačar in an interview with Dejan Habicht on pages 58 to 64. On conceiving and exhibiting the series the artist had this to say:
“In the Slovenian School Museum I collected documentary photographs from the 1940s, ‘60s and ‘70s with the motifs of physical education and classroom lessons … There I added a collage with fragments of illustrations from textbooks, visual structures (for example, stencils for drawing shapes on a ruler, a triangle with a stencil for Yugoslavia), color and geometric systems, labeling, classifications. The visual structures and systems copy models of suprematism, De Stijl, constructivism, and conceptual art … In the hallway we installed the textual part, which included fragments of phraseology taken from the school curriculum. Torn from their context, they seemed odd and strange.”
Included in this book are full-color reproductions of the collages, photographic documentation of four exhibitions, an interview with the artist, and the essay “Beyond Schooling: Learning, unlearning, and learning again in Tadej Pogačar’s project School’s Out” by Suzana Milevska (all text is translated in Slovene and English). Each book comes signed by the artist.