Curriculum. Группа авторов
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 School has always been a lean operation. Reliant upon occasional funding through whatever systems are in place—Arts Council, Per Cent for Art, local authority funding, departmental funding—there has never been scope for it to acquire the authority of an institution. Nor has that ever been an intention of Guy’s. She has not set out to propose a solution to a 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