problem. She is cognisant of several problems, of course, with the ways in which art is taught and viewed and (more recently) instrumentalised within Irish educational circles. But Art School has never aspired to fix these problems. Its remit has been more modest and more important, ultimately: to explore how artists might operate in a school setting, and to create a space for artists to experiment in this context.
We talked a bit about this, about how artists are trained to think in critical material terms about the world, about how things are made and why, about how to question their surroundings: vital things for young people to learn.
We talked about Guy’s curatorial approach. It is, in part, she says, about generating protective mechanisms, allowing the artist to do what they do. There are always frictions. There are pressures to give answers at the outset, to tell the school or certain parties within a school what it is that the artist is going to do, when in fact artists don’t work like that, beginning with an answer, formal or otherwise. The task is creating a space for uncertainty in an environment in which uncertainty is generally unwelcome. Even within the most welcoming schools, there is a delicate balance to be struck.
In a way, the real challenge is to allow for provisionality. Surveying those forms of art education (and other kinds of education) to which I’ve been attracted over the years, this allowance (for the makeshift, the contingent, the unexpected) strikes me as one notable common feature. Educationally innovative organisations—such as Edward O’Neill’s Prestolee School in Lancashire, Francisco Ferrer’s Escuela Moderna in Barcelona, A.S. Neil’s Summerhill in Suffolk, or (somewhat later) the Scotland Road Free School established in Liverpool in 1966—provide historical precedent for a lineage of scattered educational initiatives.5 Meanwhile, art schools following the example of institutions like Black Mountain College (those intentionally anti-systematic regimes described by Baldessari and Craig-Martin) became sites for non-disciplinarised, radically provisional learning.6 The work of educational theorist Colin Ward (aligned with a network of educational innovators in the 1970s that included Ivan Illich and Everett Reimer) is significant here too; in Streetwork: The Exploding School, he devised a proposition for a decentralised anarchist-inflected programme of devolved education that makes use of children’s environments as instruments of learning.7 One thing that unites these various educational programmes and propositions is the way they make use of their surroundings and the inherent relationships therein, allowing learning opportunities to emerge out of existing conditions rather than imposing upon them some set of pedagogical rules.
[viii]
I have shared outlines with other writers, artists, educators. I have had outlines shared with me. I have cut and pasted parts of other people’s outlines, or used their headers, or selectively appropriated their terminology. Sentences have been patched together from several other people’s outlines, themselves presumably cobbled together in much the same way. In terms of their genesis, outlines are hybrid monstrosities. They are part of an ecology of resource-sharing among those who work in educational environments, the outcomes of a complex genealogy of contingencies: scraps of technocratic language; hurried cut-and-pasting; pieces of strategic bad faith; as well as the sudden unlocking of connections; the sharing of ideas; the unexpected fruit.
1John Baldessari and Michael Craig-Martin, ‘Conversation’, in Art School: Propositions for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 45. This book presents a number of ‘propositions’ by prominent art critics and theorists on the value of art education, alongside a set of ‘profiles’ of significant school buildings, an unusual conjunction of the theoretical and the concrete. This structure occasionally threatens to undermine the rich, provocative set of critical propositions arranged by editor Steven Henry Madoff, containing the radicalism of the book’s more forthrightly anti-institutional contributors within the framework of already-extant building-based educational institutions and projects, however ambitious these may be.
2Mick Wilson and Schelte van Ruiten, eds., SHARE Handbook for Artistic Research Education (Amsterdam: ELIA, 2013), 31.
3Charles Esche, ‘Include Me Out: Preparing Artists to Undo the Art World’, in Art School: Propositions for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 101–13. There is an interesting disparity here between Wilson’s proposition of ‘radical autonomy’ and Esche’s quite distinct sense of the ‘anti-autonomous’ aspect of art education, but both are united in their sense that art education has to work against discipline, against specialisation.
4Nathan O’Donnell, ‘Complementary Studies’, Paper Visual Art Journal 8 (Winter 2017): 13–26.
5On Prestolee, see Catherine Burke, ‘“The school without tears”: E.F. O’Neill of Prestolee’, History of Education: Journal of the History of Education Society 34, no. 3 (2005): 263–75. On the Escuela Moderna, see Geoffrey C. Fidler, ‘The Escuela Moderna Movement of Francisco Ferrer: “Por la Verdad y la Justicia”’, History of Education Quarterly 25, no. 1/2 (Spring–Summer 1985): 103–32. On Summerhill, see A.S. Neil, Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child-Rearing (New York: Harold Hart, 1960). For further information on the Scotland Road School and other anarchist educational projects in Liverpool, see an article originally published in The Blast, and republished on the radical resource-sharing website, libcom.org.
6See Vincent Katz, Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). To trace the influence of the principles of Black Mountain College and the Bauhaus on British art education, see Nigel Llewellyn, The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now (London: Tate, 2015).
7See Anthony Fyson and Colin Ward, Streetwork: The Exploding School (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973).
We want to learn how people exist
Rowan Lear
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