When are you a ‘professional’ artist? Is it when you graduate from an art academy? Is it when you have enough exhibitions, sell your work to important people, or gain status in one way or another? During the end of our study at AKV St. Joost ‘s-Hertogenbosch, we asked ourselves an existential question: who the fuck decides we can graduate?
The involved teachers we had at that moment were awesome, but didn’t have a substantive connection with our way of working, which was way more engaged and in connection with the people around us. That’s why we decided to build our own ideal committee with people we admire for their work.
At the same time, we published a vacancy at culturele-vacatures.nl for a ‘representative from everybody and nobody’. The reason for the vacancy was to look for somebody to lead the alternative committee. It is an important decision: do we give Malou van Doormaal an artist degree? We couldn’t be involved ourselves and needed an impartial person.
After that the reactions came. The professionals declined politely or didn’t react at all. This in great contrast on the vacancy. We received more than 17 emails!
At this point we had to choose a different direction. That is why we expanded the amount of committees to four.
1. The Committee of Representatives 1 (Patrick van Berkel, Anja Sijben, Sandra Weijman, Zjkln)
2. The Committee of Representatives 2 (Margreet van der Hoeven, Saskia de Kroes, Ettie Nijlungsing, Marieke Vriend, André van de Wijdeven)
3. The Alternative Committee (Klaas Burger, Frans van Lent, Gijs Velsink, Rieneke de Vries and representative Marjon Velsink)
4. The Ideal Committee (Rutger Bregman (A), Hanne Hagenaars (A), Renzo Martens (A), Navid Nuur (A), Ahmet Ögüt (A), Anna Tilroe (A) and representative Robert-Jan Gruijthuijzen)
Next to that we added a public poll at our website. In that way the public could co-decide.
Because our graduation process became a public action, we had the wish to make our final exam public as well. This is not a normal procedure, so we had to write an official request to the examination committee. Luckily the request was granted with the condition that there is no interaction with the public.
During the final exam Malou read the complete reports from the committees out loud. All committees requested to AKV St. Joost to give Malou van Doormaal their diploma. Luckily the official examination committee followed this advice and Malou got their degree!
The university press wrote an article about it.
