Curriculum. Группа авторов
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 specifically in the preparation of outlines, as part of a teaching module I did in a university years ago. Most 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.