I DO NOT WANT FOR A FEW ANY MORE THAN I WANT FOR AFEW OR FORA FEW

231 Pages·2014·20.64 MB·English

I DO NOT WANT
FOR AF EW ANY MORE THAN IW ANT
FOR AFEW OR
FORA FEW
William Morris quoted by Jeremy Deller on placard for student protest, London 2010
INTRODUCTION// 012
PRIMER// 022
INDISCIPLINE// 072
ART SCHOOL//128
PEDAGOGY AS MEDIUM// 180
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES// 226
BIBLIOGRAPHY// 230
INDEX//235
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS// 239
- -_I
Documents of Contemporary Art
In recent decades artists have progressively expanded the boundaries of art as
they have sought to engage with an increasingly pluralistic environment.
Teaching, curating and understanding of art and visual culture are likewise no
longer grounded in traditional aesthetics but centred on significant ideas, topics
and themes ranging from the everyday to the uncanny, the psychoanalytical to
the political.
The Documents of Contemporary Art series emerges from this context. Each
volume focuses on a specific subject or body of writing that has been of key
influence in contemporary art internationally. Edited and introduced by a scholar,
artist, critic or curator, each of these source books provides access to a plurality
of voices and perspectives defining a significant theme or tendency.
For over a century the Whitechapel Gallery has offered a public platform for
art and ideas.ln the same spirit, each guest editor represents a distinct yet diverse
approach - rather than one institutional position or school of thought-and has
conceived each volume to address not only a professional audience but all
interested readers.
Series Editor: Iwona Blazwick; Commissioning Editor: Ian Farr; Project Editor: Hannah Holloway;
Editorial Advisory Board: Achim Borchardt-Hume, Roger Conover, Neil Cummings, Marl< Francis,
David jenkins, Kirsty Ogg, Gilane Tawadros
Jacques Ranciere The Ignorant Schoolmaster, 198 711093
Jimmie Durham Amusing Personal Anecdote, 198811097
Elliot W. Eisner Evaluation and Assessment: Conceptions
in Search of Practice, 19961198
Dennis Atkinson Artin Education: Identity and Practice,
2002//99
Dennis Atkinson Pedagogy of the Event, 2009//101
Rebecca Sinker On the Evolution of a Peer-Led
Programme, 200811104
Carmen Morsch Take the Terror out of Error, 200911106
Luis Camnitzer Art and Literacy, 200911108
Henry Ward Opening the Box, 2010//110
Michael Archer Educating Art Away from Life, 2010// Ill
Claire Giibb Room 13 Art Studio, 20101/113
Allan Sekula School is a Factory, 1978-80//115
Pen Dalton The Giendering of Art Education, 2001//118
Henry A. Giroux Youth in a Suspect Society, 200911122
Paul Clements The Rehabilitative Role of Arts Education
in Prison, 20041I 124
Joanna Fiduccia Mike Kelley: Educational Complex
Onwards, 2008//126
ART SCHOOL
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Touching Feeling: Affect,
Pedagogy, Performativity, 2003/I 130
Irit Rogoff Academy as Potentiality, 2006/1132
WEB Consciousness-Raising Rules, 1972/1 134
Miriam Schapiro The Education of Women as Artists:
Project Womanhouse, 19721I 135
Paula Harper The First Feminist Art Programme: A View
from the 1980s, 1985//136
Elma Askham and Harry Thubron The Case for
Polytechnics, 1967//138
Patrick Heron Murder of the Art Schools, 19'll/1139
Lisa Tickner Homsey 1968: The Art School Revolution,
2008//141
Dr Annette Gomperts Thin Air: The Psycho-Vocalic
Discoveries of Alan Smithson, 200911145
Griselda Pollock Art, Art School, Culture, 198711149
Dinah Dossor To Claim an Education, 198211 153
Monica Ross Something Old, Something New,
Something Else, 200111 154
Griselda Pollock Opened, Closed and Opening:
Reflections on Feminist Pedagogy, 201011156
Stuart Bailey (Only an Attitude of Orientation),
201011158
Tom Holert Art in the Knowledge-Based Polis, 200911162
Dieter Lesage The Academy is Back, 200911167
Andrea Phillips Education Aesthetics, 201011168
Radical Philosophy Collective The University and the
Plan, 201011173
Andrea Fraser From the Critique of Institutions to an
Institution of Critique, 200511174
Bruce Ferguson Art Education, 200911175
Ernesto Pujol On the Ground, 201011176
Caroline Tisdall The Free University, 197511178
PEDAGOGY AS MEDIUM
Alex Farquharson The Avant-Garde, Again, 200211182
Frances Stark Professional Me, 1999I I 184
David Elliott Darcy Lange: Work Studies in Schools
(1976-77), 200811186
Darcy Lange Work Studies in Schools, 1976-77I I 18 7
Lawrence McDonald Exacting Reproduction, 200811 188
Janna Graham Between a Pedagogical Turn and
a Hard Place, 201011191
Emily Pethick Resisting Institutionalization, 200811 193
Claire Bishop The New Masters of Liberal Arts: Artists
Rewrite the Rules of Pedagogy, 200711197
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Multitude, 200411202
Lars Bang Larsen Luca Frei, 200611203
Felicity Allen Border Crossing, 200911205
Pablo Helguera Mapping the Republic of
Contemporary Art, 2007I 1207
Julie Brook and Johnny Gailey In Conversation,
201011210
Jan Verwoert The Boss: On the Unresolved Question of
Authority in Joseph Beuys' Oeuvre and Public Image,
200811211
Jorella Andrews Critical Materialities, 200611216
Grant H. Kester Another Turn, 200611219
Claire Bishop Response to Grant Kester, 200611221
Lars Bang Larsen and Suely Rolnik On Lygia Clark's
Structuring the Self (1976-81), 2007I 1222
Harrell Fletcher Some Thoughts on Art and Education,
200911225
Felicity Allen
Introduction/1 A rt: Education
The subject of art's relation to education could hardly be more contested: since tbe
turn of the century numerous significant projects and publications concerned
with art and education have emerged from museums, galleries, educational
institutions, international biennials and conferences. Each of these sources
contributes to the production of education about art which, within modernizing
cultures, implicitly contributes to revisions in the production and reception of art.
Art education is therefore generated, to a greater or lesser extent, in all Western
educational institutions, from playgroup through school and youth club to art
school and university. And in the name of reform or punishment it is withheld or
instrumentalized, most overtly in prisons. lt is keenly identified, therefore, with
developing an individual's sense of personal and social identity: it is cultural. So it
is taught and learned not just in institutions but in the home, out on the street, or
online. Educational strategies are employed equally by ad hoc artist collectives and
by established cultural institutions whose central purpose is to buy, sell, collect
and disseminate art. Since an ideal of universal education was endorsed within the
democratic movement that built nation states, education has been promoted and
experienced as both emancipatory and regulatory. Art education has hovered at its
edges, poised as dormant, rumbling or actively counter-cultural.lt is not surprising
that as democracies are internally tested by the shift against the state towards the
market, art education comes into focus.
This anthology divides into four interrelated sections which aim to provide
an overview of the multiple ways that art and art education produce each other:
Primer aims to set out some key ideas, while playing with the concept of a
unifying primacy by including the incidental as well some essentials. Indiscipline
mostly centres on school and on teaching students who are considered to be
school age. The texts here frequently explore the tensions between school and
life outside, the personal and the social, the boundaries to be regulated and
crossed. Together they suggest the challenges to 'schooling' that art commonly
presents, reflecting art's critical and potentially destabilizing social roles. Art
School speaks for itself: re-reading the historical material aims to help map how
we arrived here and what those involved in teaching artists imagine for a future.
Pedagogy as Medium explores the type of practice artists make across art and
education with exhibitionary intention, its values and its critical reception.
Although the writers are international, most texts tend to focus on education
situated in North America and Europe, and mostly in anglophone culture. Why?
12// INTRODUCTION
Because they share a common language through which to discuss similarities in
educational systems, which are, above all, cultural. While the social position of
mainstream art may be similar enough across Western countries, attitudes
underpinning formal education reflect national cultures and political boundaries,
as a comparison between France and neighbouring Britain demonstrates. An
attempt to translate the different educational codes which are commonly
understood by schoolchildren and their teachers in these respective countries
denoting age, progression and examination readily demonstrates the disparities.
In Horn:;ey 1968: The Art School Revolution; Lisa Tickner assesses the impact of
developments in the late 1960s and early 1970s that were pivotal for much of what
is traced and discussed here: the embrace of new technologies; the emergence of
conceptualism; the rise of theory; shifts in managerial and political structures;
demands for participation to replace the failures of representation.' And although
second-wave feminism registered mostiy in later narratives, ideas central to the
women's movement have frequently been intrinsic to the subject of art and
education. The feminist texts selected here offer potential theoretical models for
critique of the meetings of art and education but also reflect the highly significant
roles women have played in art teaching and as artist educators.'
Among the most significant insights handed down from that period is that
authority is always contingent-and this is reflected in the structure of this book.
Its impulse, at times, is to tell, but at others to try something out, to pursue a
thought, to compose, to lay bare, or to suggest. Sometimes a sequence of texts
might form a kind of run, creating a collective pace. It could be visualized as an
arabesque of texts whose lines and runs spiral with and against each other, across
the different sections - reflecting the way one learns, usually in more or less
anything other than straight lines. It incorporates texts that implicitly interpret
others or address issues around le'arning in ways that weave in and out of
experience and knowledge. It aims thus to demonstrate the mutable nature of
teaching and learning, the different types of relationship a learner has to a
teacher; a teacher to a student; an artist to a potential viewer or audience. This
might include applying theory to practice (as Tickner demonstrates in applying
Thierry de Duve's triad of 'attitude, practice and deconstruction' to her historical
analysis); building practice into theory Uacques Ranciere on the schoolmaster
jacot6t); exploring not only intentional but unintended reflexive learning (Stuart
Bailey); teaching and learning through argument (Griselda Pollock challenging
Phillip King); homage (Henry Giroux on Stuart Hall); or practice-sharing (Harrell
Fletcher). One can always know more: one text leads to another, as the process of
producing this book has demonstrated. We publish for the first time in English
the conclusion of Thierry de Duve's paper whose first section has already had
significant influence. Many additional but invisible texts inform this book: some
Allen/I Art: Education/I 13
them. They school them to confuse process and substance.' His de-regularized
proposals for 'skill exchanges', 'peer-matching' and 'reference services to
educators-at-large' anticipate many of the networl<ed and informal artists'
pedagogical programmes and events that now populate virtual, international
and local art co-operatives. These often connect artists across
geographical and cultural boundaries; some go in and out of activity but even if
dormant they are usually retrievable online, from the US-originated Center for
Urban Pedagogy, the Public School or the Mountain School of Arts, to the
European-originated Independent Art School and the Parallel School of Art. The
New International School's Map 2 expresses the potential that the Internet has
generated in realizing some of lllich's utopian proposals, through its 'collective
intelligence', 'networked decision-making' and 'distributed collaboration'. The
idea, though, of a hidden curriculum seems to have been subsumed in the
managerial mapping conventions that new technologies have made ubiquitous.
Turning away from the virtual, the artist Annette Krauss has developed pedagogic
art projects such as Hidden Curriculum to work with school students investigating
the underlying material aspects of their corporeal and social experience of
school. It focuses on 'unidentified, unintended and unrecognized forms of
knowledge, values and beliefs'. Accessibly documented via the Internet, art
magazines and books, the project was developed with and exhibited at Utrecht's
Casco - Office for Art, Design and Theory, registering the current role of art
venues as agents for experimental pedagogy as much as for exhibitions.
Recent criticism of shifts in education policy for the arts and humanities has
focused on what has been called 'cultural apartheid': purchasing higher education
individually at source rather than socially through tax reinforces the social
'distinction' (and exclusions) of those studying-and, by extension, producing-art,
exponentially segregating class through cultural divisions.' However, at least as
significant is the fact that technology and the sciences are privileged not to be cut,
that is, unhinged from educational integration. While Michael Hardt and Antonio
NEgri maintain that we are in a state of perpetual war, it is worth recalling that one
of the First World War's causes was the escalation of technological 'advances' such
as armaments, in the preceding years. John Dewey's Democracy and Education
(1916) implicitly repudiates these values, and Virginia Woolf made an explicit
connection in Three Guineas (1938), arguing that the education system of the time
ineluctably produced a warrior culture, and proposing a system founded on the
arts that would build a culture of peace. In Education through Art {1943) Herbert
Read wrote in the same spirit of a remoMlling of society and its values through an
education system with art at its centre, collapsing the disciplinary divides.
Progressive educational models such as these often focus on the understanding
of individual socializing experiences. The transcripts from Mary Kelly's artwork
Allen/j Art: Education/j 15
___I
Post-Partum Document (1973-79) which open this collection-diary texts about
the moment a mother prepares to relinquish her child to the first experience of
nursery school - reveal the primal anxieties typically expressed by parents,
wishing 'the best' for their children. Kelly's work also marks a highly influential
moment in art, where education and the culture of everyday life came together
in the programmed event of discussing an artwork with the artist in the gallery.'
Two significant areas related to this lie beyond the scope of this book:
developments in neuroscience which have important implications for our
understanding of early learning processes, and advances in digital technologies,
often associated in themselves with interactivity but here discussed only in so
far as they support projects that include interaction or dialogue - participatory
practices having been intrinsic to this area long before the digital revolution.
Over the post-1960s decades that are the focus here, we have seen political
authorities ensure that state schools relinquish any attempt at a 'progressive'
educational model (i.e. a modernist pedagogy built on ideas of discovery and
volition-sometimes elided with what is now termed child-centredness-in which
good teachers could encourage students to root out their own learning in their
own time) in favour of reinforcing, through corporate accounting values, an
'industrial model'.' Meanwhile art schools have built on the challenges of the late
1960s to develop not just new curricula and teaching models, but new identities as
institutions, as discussed by de Duve, Ernesto Pujol and lrit Rogoff.
It is hoped that these texts might further this endeavour of challenging
divisions and hierarchies. Art education seems to provide an alternative career
path for many artists who either cannot or choose not to enter the art world's
more prestigious but precarious route of exhibition career-building. Class (e.g. the
need for a stable salaried income) might be one factor in this; others touch on
aesthetic, cultural, professional and political allegiances, as well as temperament.
Political challenges, from both left and right, to the idea of a single professional
identity, together with theoretical challenges to notions of artists' social purpose
(see Suzanne Lacy and Allan Kaprow)-and, indeed, to concepts of what constitutes
art and where it is situated - raise concomitant questions about identification in
teaching. If we use Bourdieu's term 'cultural production' to include the
performance-based practices documented by artists such as Kaprow, Lacy or
Fletcher, the self-identifying 'attitude' described by de Duve (it's art because I say
so; I'm an artist because I say so) and the practical pedagogy of the schoolteacher
Henry Ward, it is difficult to maintain any consistent distinction between teaching
activities and art practice. It is understandable, though, that those with nominally
distinct professional identities can often fail to understand each other's terms and
standards. Thus there are artists and artist educators who think teachers sell art
short; teachers and artists who think artist educators are weak artists or poor
16// INTRODUCTION