of us who work in an education environment—as teachers, artists, lecturers, facilitators—use outlines.
That said, outlines are rarely considered as anything other than functional documents. They serve a valuable purpose, but they are also strangely throwaway. To be honest, before the invitation to write this essay, I’d never given them a second thought.
[iii]
I have had several conversations with Jennie Guy over the past few years about Art School; it has been interesting to have this discussion against a backdrop of increasing receptivity, in Ireland at any rate, of the value of art in education. For example the Arts in Education Charter was signed in 2012, and the subsequent ‘Portal’ launched in 2015; likewise the educational imperatives of Creative Ireland (initiated in 2017, under one of its five ‘pillars’) represent another official formulation for administering certain kinds of creative pedagogy and engagement. Art School differs from such initiatives, however, in the way it configures the exchange. The priority of Art School has always been the protection of the artist’s freedoms. Guy describes a working principle that is radical in its simplicity: the idea is to let artists practise, in their own way, within an educational setting.
What this entails is a refusal to participate in a system that sometimes sees artistic practice reduced to a supporting role, a means of illustrating or serving some other pedagogical or curricular function. Such slippages are unfortunately common in a highly systematised formal education structure, particularly at secondary level.
This presents a number of challenges to a curatorial framework like Art School. Safeguarding the artist’s autonomy requires ongoing vigilance and care on Guy’s part. This is not to suggest that schools or educators are necessarily hostile to the artist; in fact, many of the schools who have engaged with Guy’s project have been welcoming, enlightened environments for artists to work within. In a more general way, however, the methods of the contemporary artist can often appear alien to the educational landscape. It is part of the training of the artist, after all, to query the boundaries of what is and can be known, what is and can be taught. It is part of the training of the artist to query the raison d’être of ‘school’ as we understand it. So naturally there are moments of friction. In the case of Art School, these frictions have in some instances come to fuel the projects themselves. In Sarah Pierce’s project, The Square, for instance, the strictures of the school timetable led to a very tight timeframe for the realisation of the project, which involved students generating a piece of collaboratively scripted theatre in response to a black square on the wall of the school gymnasium. In this case, the restrictions imbued the work with a sense of urgency and force.
As I see it (and I say this as someone who has taught, and continues to teach, in the disciplinary environment of the university), such moments of friction might be—at least in part—attributed to a mismatch in disciplinarity. Several theorists of art education make use of this term or some variant thereof in their speculations. Mick Wilson, for instance, describes the work of the contemporary artist as an ‘undisciplined, adisciplinary, radically autonomous’ field founded upon ‘radical alterity’.2 Similarly Charles Esche has described art education as anti-specialisation, anti-hierarchy and anti-autonomy.3 This question of ‘discipline’ is something I have looked at elsewhere in connection to the disciplinary structure of the university.4 In that essay, I was interested in the relationship of contemporary art to the boundaries by which knowledge is organised. A related question is under scrutiny here however, i.e. the relationship between art and curriculum, the means, that is, by which such disciplinary knowledge is disseminated and reproduced. For, if contemporary artists work against discipline—against customary demarcations of knowledge—then the idea of the curriculum surely presents a problem. A curriculum is a way of systematising and imparting knowledge according to some agreed disciplinary boundaries: knowledge is classified according to subjects that come to seem like a priori divisions in the way the world is ordered—Geography, Physics, Classics, Maths. If we are to look at things sceptically—the way radical educationalists and theorists do—we could view school as an engine for the dissemination of this stratified world view, while an artist’s job, or a certain kind of artist’s job, or a part of a certain kind of artist’s job, is to query such stratifications. Naturally there are going to be these moments of friction. In this respect, the outline becomes something like a buffer, a means of negotiating this hazardous exchange.
[iv]
Three years ago, long before I’d received the brief for this essay, I remember meeting Hannah Fitz at the side door of Temple Bar Gallery and Studios. Fitz had a studio there at that time. She was on her way back from a day-long session as part of an Art School project taking place at two schools in Roscommon (Brideswell and Feevagh National Schools), for which Fitz was one of three commissioned artists, alongside Jane Fogarty and Kevin Gaffney, working on drama and visual art exercises— creating short plays and tableaux vivants—with students.
She was stepping in as I was stepping out the side door of the studio complex. She was carting boxes of materials. I wedged the door open and helped her lug things inside. She was, she told me, exhausted. It’s funny, she said. We are just there to make work, that’s the brief, to go and practise as we normally would, as artists, but in a school. You’d think that would be straightforward, she said, but I am absolutely wrecked. She didn’t mean that as a negative thing. She was just surprised, I think, at having been able to spend a whole day, with a group of children, simply making.
[v]
An artist’s outline is not the same thing as a teacher’s outline, of course. Teachers—and this seems to me the fundamental difference— work within a curriculum. They have a body of knowledge or a set of imperatives that it is their job to impart or enact. I have worked as an artist-in-residence at a school where it was hoped that I might engage with the curriculum, and I guess this is probably not unusual, but it is certainly not a hugely useful way to engage an artist in a classroom.
As the plan for this essay developed, I asked Guy to send me along some sample outlines. Viewing them together I was struck by their sheer variety. Some artists stay very close to the facts, listing simply the physical actions and exercises they will carry out. Others embrace the language of methodology and objective, finding ways to link their ideas with the familiar structures of the classroom, quantifying the educational benefits of their work, ‘problem-solving’, ‘collaborative learning’, ‘lateral thinking’. (Some artists find this kind of structure helpful; others—I must count myself among the others—less so.) They are, in either case, rigorous and carefully constructed documents. The outline, whatever shape it takes, is an imperative part of the process.
[vi]
It seems to me you could look at the outline as the trace of a specific exchange between an individual educator (or in this case an artist) and an educational system. Every outline is the mark of a single interface between the particular and the general.
Of course the outline doesn’t necessarily correlate to the reality of what took place in the classroom or workshop. It’s not a record in that sense, or rather it’s a record of a set of aspirations, or actually—in many cases—not even aspirations, but defences against contingency. It is a way of buttressing against disorder. It is in some senses a weapon.
[vii]
I met with Guy and Sven Anderson on a bright evening at Anderson’s studio, to talk about this essay and about the project overall. The sun was going down over the eighteenth-century square outside.
We talked again about the premise of Art School. It has always been an artist-centred programme, Guy said. The idea is not that the artist serves the school in some way, but that on the contrary the school becomes a site of artistic production. This is the project’s fundamental premise.
Art
