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[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. 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 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 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).