Editor: Jennie Guy
Assistant editor: Fiona Gannon
Copy-editor: Neil Burkey
Book design: Peter Maybury
Proofreader: Pamela Smith
Printed by Gomer
Paper: Munken Lynx and Munken Pure
Typefaces: Century Old Style and Foundry Monoline
Copyright © 2020 Jennie Guy All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Print ISBN: 978-1-78938-226-6
Art School gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Arts Council of Ireland and the Arts Office of Wicklow County Council, Ireland.
First published in the UK in 2020 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2020 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Cover image: Magnetic Fields; Workshop series with artist Sven Anderson and Second through Fifth Year students; Scoil Chonglais, Baltinglass, Co. Wicklow; October 2015.
For my daughter Molly Kay
CONTENTS
Gerard Byrne
Jennie Guy
Nathan O’Donnell
We Want to Learn How People Exist
Rowan Lear
Image of the Self With and Amongst Others
Andrew Hunt
Helen Carey
Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed
Juan Canela
Sofía Olascoaga and Priscila Fernandes
A Suspended Focus: Art School 2014–2020
Jennie Guy, Peter Maybury, Fiona Gannon
How Many Elsewheres? (For Four Voices)
Daniela Cascella
38th EVA International: I Sing the Body Electric
Matt Packer
Alissa Kleist
Sjoerd Westbroek
Art, the Body and Time Perspective(s) in the Classroom
Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Preparatory Gestures for a Future Curriculum
Clare Butcher
Gerard Byrne
It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.
—Donald Judd, Specific Objects.1
As an adolescent my own thinking on art and education amounted to this: Art, the only thing I was interested in being good at, wasn’t included in the school curriculum in my school, so art ≠ school. Clear. That hypothesis went fairly untested throughout most of my college education too. But now, as I read through this collection of texts I’m reminded of an occasion while I was an art student in New York in the mid-90s when I chanced my way into an opening at the old Metro Pictures Gallery on Greene St. in Soho. A complimentary beer successfully secured, I elbowed my way towards the art itself—a solo show of Mike Kelley. The show included the first ever exhibition of what would become a favourite work of Kelley’s —Educational Complex.2 The work is a large table-top architectural model combining every school the artist had attended, adjoined in a chronological order. This complex begins with his childhood home and ends with CalArts. The model, which Kelley’s studio built solely based on his recollection, is in fact highly inaccurate. Somewhat ironically, I now see that this point of the model’s inaccuracy has anxiously defined interpretations of the work ever since. Indeed, the dominant readings, which by informed accounts Kelley
