analogue of what was remembered and what was ‘effaced’ or blocked out in Kelley’s memory of his institutional education: an architectural map of trauma in absentia it would seem.
For me that reading, intriguing though it is, instrumentalises the work in a literal way that undervalues some specific physical qualities of the work. Educational Complex isn’t significant because it tracks Kelley’s biography. Rather, its significance lies in its capacity as an artwork-cum-model to wilfully reconfigure relationships with educational institutions. Most interpretations agree the model is carceral in character, an amalgam of different institutions which have been conjoined in such a manner as to prevent the subject’s escape. There are no gaps in this educational complex, whose form reminds me of a digestive tract. But Educational Complex is not actually a bona fide (i.e. accurate) model of something, nor is it a building. It is in fact a sculpture, and we as viewers are already positioned outside, and apart from it. We are liberated from the complex in question through our new roles as art viewers. The grace of Kelley’s gesture in Educational Complex, which was made only months after his acclaimed Whitney museum show at the height of his career,3 is his instrumentalisation of the moment of his canonisation to renegotiate his relationship with formal education through his own terms—through making a ‘Mike Kelley’ from all these troubling institutions. Like any art, in any gallery, anywhere, Educational Complex can be stood away from, interpreted, misinterpreted, laughed at, dwarfed and ultimately walked away from.
If after Yve-Alain Bois,4 we see that to be an artwork is to already be a model for other artworks, we can see Educational Complex as one among many artworks as models for art and educational emancipation. In a different place, at a different time, Jennie Guy’s Art School exceeds the rather stilted relations projected through Educational Complex, by calling upon a diverse set of progressive precedents from Artist Placement Group5 to Paolo Freire6 and Maria Montessori.7 Guy’s project relocates the emancipatory process to the school itself, and specifically public schools. As this publication evidences, the project that Guy has developed over recent years, is provocative in its low-key complexity. By purposely conflating and equating institutional languages of education to short-circuit certain institutional constraints, Guy signals her interest in engaging institutional education on a structural level. Just as the ‘Art School’ title conflates schools and art schools in a manner that provokes thinking around their differences, this book’s title Curriculum is tested, challenged and often dismissed throughout the essays within. Nathan O’Donnell quotes John Baldessari on the untenability of art school curricula: ‘There are no basic things. What’s basic for one artist is not basic for another artist. And so you can’t have basics; you can’t build it in the normal curriculum way.’8 Combining the standardised protocols and statutory regulations around public schools in all of their complexity with the highly individuated practices of established artists produces inherent contradictions. Negotiating these contradictions through delicate processes of identifying affinities and affirming commonalities for the diversity of stakeholders lies at the core of Guy’s own work.
And yet Guy’s practice is refreshingly comfortable in its own invisibility. Her labour is not displayed but is executed largely sotto voce. It’s discreet, empathetic and aware. Through integrating, through negotiating, through the durability of relationships, and hard-earned judgement, and through an openness to risk, Art School is informed by the cumulative experience of each project but is focused on a different interest—change at an institutional level. As such, Guy’s work engages its context in a different manner to that of most art, belying a practice that has equally been fed by her experience of parenting a child passing through the school system while witnessing the limitations of schools close up over an extended period. This dual insight of artist and parent underscores and informs much of what is in play throughout the project. For Guy’s project involves openly testing the potential of combining both of these complex practices, school by school. Each situation is a controlled experiment, dispersing contemporary artists amongst groups of public-school kids and teachers, with lots at stake but little in the way of prescribed ‘learning outcomes’. Convincing public schools to trust young people and artists’ processes alike is not a given. As Educational Complex evidences, there isn’t a deep well of trust to draw upon between contemporary art and public schools. Through staging this encounter between the two, Guy believes school kids are encouraged to renegotiate their relationships to (art-) school, allowing them scope to reposition themselves vis-à-vis the educational complexes to which they are tied. At the same time, Art School also provides progressive educators with unique arguments that can in turn feed into their future thinking.
The practices compiled in Curriculum are artistically diverse, but in drawing them together this book reveals a shared engagement in the historical legacies of progressive education through art. The material aggregated in these pages begins to reveal a sense of pattern, of tendency, of correspondence, which is largely obscured in the details of each project but which starts to shimmer rhythmically across the projects as a whole. These patterns are defined neither by shared aesthetics nor artistic ambitions. Rather, these patterns are circumstantial, perspectival, attitudinal and somewhat generational. Through gathering shared affinities and a common sense of the value of (re-)connecting public education with lessons learned through artistic practices, Curriculum provides a platform to finally see Guy’s inconspicuously ambitious project Art School as a whole—a singular thing.
1Donald Judd, ‘Specific Objects’, in Arts Yearbook 8 (New York: The Art Digest 1965).
2Educational Complex (1995) was displayed as part of the exhibition Toward a Utopian Art Complex in the Metro Pictures Gallery, Soho, New York, from 21 October to 25 November 1995.
3Catholic Tastes, The Whitney Museum, New York, 1994.
4Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
5The Artist Placement Group (APG) was an artist-led organisation initiated in the late 1960s by Barbara Steveni and John Latham. APG worked to emphasise the potential role of the artist in society, shifting the focus of artistic production from within the gallery and the museum to alternative sites such as within governmental, corporate and industrial infrastructures. Artists and movements who engaged with APG include Joseph Beuys, Barry Flanagan, the Fluxus group and Yoko Ono.
6Paolo Freire (1921–1997) was a radical educator focused on critical pedagogies, whose work emphasised learning as a collaborative exchange between student and teacher. Freire is the author of the foundational text Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968).
7Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was an influential educator whose innovative methods and focus on child-centred learning gave rise to an educational philosophy and system of schooling that bears her name.
8Nathan O’Donnell’s The Outline as Weapon can be read on page 32.
Jennie Guy
Art School is a framework that brings established artists to work with students in both primary and secondary school settings through the organisation of workshops and artist-in-school residencies. I initiated the project in 2014 to explore the interfaces between schools and contemporary art by inviting students and artists to work collaboratively. This book, Curriculum, is a means of encountering Art School obliquely; texts intersect with projects along shoots and tendrils in a topical thicket formed around art and education. The texts contained within do not set out to accomplish
