Rottenberg and Jon Kessler presented Seven, a live artwork incorporating seven participants and a video installation, at the Nicole Klagsbrun Project Space in New York as part of Performa 11, 2011.
4The Eighth Amendment to the Irish Constitution, giving an equal right to life to both the unborn and the mother, was repealed following a referendum held on 26 May 2018 allowing abortion services to be made available in Ireland. In terms of the homelessness crisis, it is not unusual for the children who have taken part in Art School projects to be living in temporary emergency accommodation.
5The Arts in Education Charter was launched in 2012 as a collaborative initiative of the Department of Education and Skills (DES) and the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht (DAHG). For more information see education.ie, Publications, Policy Reports, Arts in Education Charter (PDF).
6The Arts in Education Portal was launched in 2014, extending from the Arts in Education Charter and providing an online resource showcasing arts-in-education projects in Ireland. To access the portal, see artsineducation.ie.
7Creative Ireland is an integrated cultural programme launched in 2016, promoting participation in cultural activity on a variety of scales. For more information see creativeireland.gov.ie.
8The Arts Council in partnership with the Department of Education and Skills and the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht launched the Creative Schools initiative in 2019, as a flagship initiative integrated in the Creative Ireland programme. For more information see artscouncil.ie, Arts in Ireland, Young People, Children & Education, Creative Schools.
9The Thinking Visual programme initiated by arts officer Jenny Sherwin supported Art School residencies and workshops at multiple schools in Co. Wicklow between 2014 and 2018. For more information see wicklow.ie, Arts, Heritage & Archives, Arts, Programmes & Initiatives, Thinking Visual.
10Cristín Leach, ‘Lessons for Us All’, The Sunday Times, 19 March 2017.
11An infant simulator is an electric doll that teenagers are given in school to look after for a number of days. This is intended to give a sense of the responsibility of being a parent, though their efficacy in deterring pregnancy has been questioned.
12Many of the videos from which the still images used in this book were extracted can be viewed online at artschool.ie.
13Projects that appear in the visual material but do not feature in the essays include Bead Game (realised in collaboration with Fiona Hallinan) and the permanent artwork Your Seedling Language (by Adam Gibney for St Catherine’s National School in Rush, Co. Dublin).
14Transition Year is a one-year school programme that can be taken in the fourth year of secondary school in Ireland and in which multiple extracurricular subjects and projects are introduced to students. It is optional in most schools and compulsory in others, while in some schools it isn’t feasible, and is skipped.
15Big Rock Candy Mountain is a public artwork by Hannah Jickling and Helen Reed sited in an East Vancouver elementary school, produced by Other Sights for Artists’ Projects.
16This piece for the exhibition It’s Very New School at Rua Red Arts Centre consisted of a sound installation and a floating shelf which held a series of custom-made books. The books’ spines were imprinted with a selection of students’ poetic answers to the questions ‘What is school for?’, ‘What was school for?’ and ‘What will school be for?’, creating an overlap between the universal and the individual, and reminding the spectator that any one question can have a universe of answers.
Nathan O’Donnell
[i]
The 2009 MIT publication on art education, Art School (Propositions for the Twenty-First Century), features—among a series of interviews, essays and architectural surveys—the transcript of a conversation between two artists who had been involved in teaching at important art schools during flourishing periods in the 1970s and 1980s: Michael Craig-Martin, who taught at Goldsmiths, and John Baldessari, who taught at CalArts. Their conversation hinges upon the question of what precisely makes such moments of flourish possible; what it is that makes an art school work.
Both seem to be in agreement that it is not about ‘teaching’, per se. Baldessari observes that in its early years there was no curriculum at CalArts. Instead they resort to discussions of atmosphere and relationship. They talk about creating a ‘sympathetic ambience’. They admit this is a tentative formulation, but even the most successful art schools have highs and lows, cycles of success and inertia. Neither of them seem to be willing to endorse any kind of programmatic solution to the question. Instead, they claim, for an art school to function, it must simply assemble artists who are working actively and energetically in their own right and allow an environment to develop around them.
What Craig-Martin and Baldessari seem to be saying is that the sheer fact of an artist’s proximity can have educational value—that the art school is more of a complex ecology than a logical system determined by ordinance and efficiency. This can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that contemporary artists’ practices have no common universal basis, no grounding in a particular skill, say, no agreement on what Baldessari refers to as ‘basic things’:
Which is why you can’t have a proper curriculum. 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. The amazing thing about young people is they can jump in at a very sophisticated level without actually understanding what they’re doing. Somehow that innocence allows them access to something. And so a part of teaching is helping them realize what it is that they’ve stumbled on.
Craig-Martin responds with the somewhat separate but nonetheless pertinent observation that ‘[a]rt schools are unlikely bedmates with universities… It’s a very uneasy alliance.’1
Their conversation is enlightening, but there is little auto-criticism in evidence. Instead a tone of self-satisfied bemusement pervades the discussion—as if they’re both just a bit baffled by the success of the schools they’ve been involved with. This is a performance, of course, but it is nonetheless striking that even those who have been key participants in what are acknowledged to be important institutions for art education have no real sense of what art education is—beyond the fact that it is not like other kinds of education. That it is in some way anti-systematic is agreed; this is a point that comes across in most commentaries on art education. Other than that, however, no one seems to know why art schools work. No one seems to know what art education actually is.
[ii]
When I got the invitation to contribute to this collection, I thought I would develop something about this idea of proximity. I didn’t at all anticipate writing an essay about outlines.
To clarify: when I talk about an outline here, I mean a class plan or schedule, a document laying out a teacher’s or facilitator’s intentions for a workshop or educational session. I have so many outlines on my laptop, spread across so many folders, it would be difficult for me to count them. I’ve been trained
