with) animals, passing through considerations of genetics and breeding before linking back to issues of children’s taste as explored in their own work Big Rock Candy Mountain.15
Juan Canela’s contribution considers The Masterplan, a two-stage project featuring John Beattie and Ella de Búrca’s work with primary school students in the Dublin 7 Educate Together National School, and Karl Burke and Naomi Sex’s introduction of Transition Year students from St Paul’s CBS Secondary School to the facilities and teaching in Dublin School of Creative Arts, TU Dublin. Embedded in a neighbourhood that is currently undergoing rapid redevelopment, the project speculates on how (and even if) individuals from different communities might become more aware of each other, looking particularly at the affinities between younger school students and the resources of a nearby university. Canela uses the project as a lens to scrutinise methods that might empower neighbours to explore the strengths that arise through proximity. The essay questions compliance and non-compliance, considering how local residents might have an active voice within the process of urban regeneration.
‘Dear Revolutionary Teacher…’ emerges from a dialogue between curator Sofía Olascoaga and artist Priscila Fernandes. Initiated via Fernandes’ work A friend in common, commissioned for the Art School exhibition It’s Very New School in 2017, the text delves into the history of Francisco Ferrer i Guàrdia’s Modern School (Escuela Moderna), a primary school for children and their parents that existed between 1901 and 1909 in Barcelona. Linking back to Fernandes’ ongoing research into this subject, the text invites the reader to reflect on the continued currency of Ferrer’s ideas by reading a series of fictitious letters that the educationalist could have written and received from artists of the day, including Van Gogh and Matisse.
Daniela Cascella’s ‘How Many Elsewheres? (For Four Voices)’ proposes a labyrinthine exploration of sound and listening as a new means of coming to know what it is to be in school. Cascella’s four voices follow auditory traces that transform the potential of the classroom and the relationships that it seeks to contain, drawing inspiration from two series of workshops led by the artist Sven Anderson in Co. Wicklow. The text recalls the spatial deviations, divisions and cuts of Gordon Matta-Clark as it considers a semi-permanent outdoor sound installation developed by Anderson with Transition Year students in Blessington Community College, which prompted the exclamation: ‘WE MADE A HOLE IN THE SCHOOL!’
Matt Packer writes about I Sing the Body Electric, a series of workshops developed in collaboration with curators Clare Breen, Orlaith Treacy and Maeve Mulrennan with students from three West Limerick National Schools as part of the 38th EVA International festival in 2018. This Art School project explored the possibility of integrating workshops focused on curatorial practice (as opposed to artistic practice) within a primary school setting. Packer considers how the project coincided with EVA’s own historical approach to integrating educational initiatives, alongside education and outreach programmes developed by other art institutions and biennales abroad.
Alissa Kleist investigates the potentially subversive role of artists within sites of education, sensing their freedom to move beyond ‘an exchange that ends in a form of closure’ towards one of ‘inconclusive interaction that does not necessarily seek resolution’. Kleist’s text discovers a series of workshops led by artists Hannah Fitz, Jane Fogarty and Kevin Gaffney, with primary school students in Tisrara, Brideswell and Feevagh National Schools in Co. Roscommon. Kleist trains her focus on the prominent role played by animals within Gaffney’s workshops and broader practice, discovering that the artist can literally ‘Play Like Coyote’, as the essay’s title suggests.
Sjoerd Westbroek takes the writers’ brief to its logical conclusion, positioning himself within the experiential framework explored in this book. ‘Exercising Study’ develops through Westbroek’s engagement with a series of cues sent to him by artist Rhona Byrne, developed in an exchange related to Art School workshops led by Byrne with Transition Year secondary students in Blessington Community College in Co. Wicklow and primary school students in Gaelscoil de hÍde and Scoil Mhuire National Schools in Co. Roscommon. Branching off to intersect with workshops led by Elaine Leader with Transition Year secondary students in Blessington Community College, the text weaves these two artists’ works around the experience and conditioning of physical space. The text probes the differences between learning and studying, thoughts that were triggered when accidentally overhearing a fellow train passenger declare ‘I want to study, I do not want to learn’ while rereading Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s book The Undercommons.
By drawing attention to the temporal dynamics of the classroom, Annemarie Ní Churreáin considers both the potential and the responsibility encountered by artists working in schools. ‘Art, the Body and Time Perspective(s) in the Classroom’ advances through Art School residencies and workshops developed by Vanessa Donoso López, Jane Fogarty, John Beattie and Ella de Búrca, considering how these artists approach time in their work with younger audiences. The essay draws from Lopez’s work with primary school students in Gaelscoil de hÍde and Scoil Mhuire National Schools in Co. Roscommon, Fogarty’s anthro-geological project with primary school students in Feevagh and Tisrara National Schools in Co. Roscommon, Beattie and de Búrca’s compositional and performance studies with primary school students in the Dublin 7 Educate Together National School, and a collaborative production by Beattie, de Búrca and myself for the exhibition It’s Very New School (2017) in Rua Red.16 The essay integrates experiences gained through Ní Churreáin’s practice as a poet working in schools, questioning the outsider’s role in researching the mechanics of time as they influence education.
Curriculum draws to a close with Clare Butcher’s ‘Preparatory Gestures for a Future Curriculum’. Butcher’s text contemplates an artist residency in Blessington Community College led by artist Sarah Pierce. Pierce’s workshops evolved through an exploration of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, a form of experimental theatre that dissolves the boundaries between actors and audience to explore the revolutionary potential of the medium. Butcher’s text engages with Pierce’s instincts to embed a type of performative pedagogy within the group of students themselves, questioning whether it is possible to measure or evaluate a work of art that is registered in the bodies and the lived experience of those who were both its producers and its primary audience. The work converges on resolutions but not on a final product. Butcher’s rumination on The Square—the central black square at the heart of Pierce’s residency—serves as an apt parallel to the trajectory of Art School itself. Being situated in a mode of continuous rehearsal provides a powerful sense of freedom and agency.
I hope that this book’s title—Curriculum—helps to ensure that it will find its way to a variety of readers who might encounter these essays as a means of seeing how contemporary art can be brought to a school context in order to question the structures through which we choose to teach and to learn. To me, these essays suggest ideas that extend beyond the classroom—and outside of the realm of formal education—and towards different situations in which contemporary art can instigate change. As it builds through these texts, the curriculum that the book encounters (if indeed it does discover such a structure) is transitory, and always in flux. It emerges not from a universal enquiry, but through the specificity of individual practices that converged within real spaces, led by the instincts and interests of students who were only encountering these ways of working and thinking for the first time.
This book owes immense gratitude to all of the students, artists, teachers, principals, school staff and other supporters who contributed to Art School projects as they formed; to the writers and other contributors who have put so much energy into this book; and to the Arts Council of Ireland and the Arts Office of Wicklow County Council for generously funding this book’s production.
1Following a constitutional referendum in Ireland, the legal right for same-sex couples to marry was introduced in November 2015.
2Grangegorman is a new urban quarter being created in Dublin’s north inner
