Whilst taking part in an MFA seminar discussion regarding Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and using it as a model to understand an audience’s reception and production of an art experience – my thoughts became very literal.1 Could I have admitted to my 2002 year eight metal-work class that I lacked oxy-acetylene welding experience and this created an opportunity for the class to engage our mutual ignorance productively? This tangential line of thought continued as the seminar group diligently discussed how art – like the schoolmaster Joseph Jacotot’s use of the Télémaque book – could be understood as a social encounter between two unknowing parties. Regardless of its allegorical use by the art field, I speculated on why this interest in the sociology of pedagogy had arisen now? From my own experience of high-school teaching I was wary of some segments of the art school sector regarding the coal-face of education with a degree of suspicion or well meaning but simplistic platitudes. On the flip side, maybe this use of Rancière in this and many other MFA courses could be regarded as an initial deployment of a productive interdisciplinary dialogue between different dynamics of power. This reflexive approach to teaching and learning would be refreshing if it were being used to look at actual arts school teaching and not just the pedagogical content, methodology and interpretative framework of art in the public realm.
There is currently an educational-turn in contemporary art discourse; a growing formal and material interest in art as lecture, reading-group, whiteboard or awkward show and tell which illustrates that education is a pervasive influence on artistic production, while also often being ignored and under-valued. It’s curious that whilst we’re getting dizzy at the prospect that a gallery might look like a classroom, we’re not stopping to look at our own complicity in the convergence of artistic production and education – not stopping to attend to the specifities of the actual educational environment in which artists are increasingly involved with.2 Apart from the aforementioned education-turned-stylistic-turn, critical networks disengage with actual pedagogical models of art schools as if it were not consequential that most exhibiting artists at some point attended tertiary institutions. There are of course two obvious exceptions where education matters. The first is the graduate show — a debutante rite when notions of pedigree and influence derived from educators acquires a fresh lustre. The ritualistic harvest of young fresh talent at graduate shows is the acceptable face of teaching within contemporary art cultures. The debutantes are embraced for their own precocious promise and for faithfully reflecting and affirming existing constellations of stars. The second example is the increasing emphasis on postgraduate education. This academicisation of art has been colonised relatively recently by the language of the hosting university. Artists now quantify and qualify their experimentation via the notion of academically sanctioned research rather than industry based CVs. The prolonged university stint presents artists with an opportunity to, not only frame their own practice as a rigorous form of knowledge creation, but to also create pathways and publication opportunities in allied creative industries that can financially support (inevitably) loss-making art practices.
The discursive emphasis that grounds tertiary research and coursework is not new or unpredictable. It is not a coincidence that the proliferation of MFA programs occurred in sync with the dematerialisation of the art object and the increase in artist writing in the 1960/70s.3 Artists have also joined the credential inflation that is endemic across all professions where potential candidates outnumber employment opportunities.4 The question that is yet to be fully answered however is how will the artist’s discursive framing be valued against the dominant contextualisation offered by curatorial, historical or commercial institutional voices? What can an artist bring to a public conversation about art that goes beyond the calculus of a commercial imperative, public relations or methodological convenience that privileges cohesion and stability? The amplified place of education within the field of art creates an opportunity to take stock of how as artists we use peer review, collaborate with other fields of knowledge and hopefully question some of the arbitrary markers of industry experience and expertise that are often left unsubstantiated.
The altruism associated with pedagogy does not make it immune to an economic dynamic. Whilst art schools might once have held some distance from the university industry – funding, research and recognition is now tied into bridging some of the incongruent teaching, learning and research practices once found in art schools. This standardisation makes certain social and economic barriers more apparent while also enabling artists to work and exhibit in a site context that invariably shifts the discursive potential of a practice. The shift in the structural identity of the art school is only the continuation of art’s place in a secondary school context, where individual expression is framed within a neo-liberal economy of discipline, community well being and student testing that is linked to teacher performance and teacher pay. This is only made more complex when you consider the art school’s role in training autonomous entrepreneurial practitioners who must negotiate their own fraught exchanges of cultural and social capital.5 It is no surprise that when the art-market is down that the art industry transits smoothly to the relative security of the university. The aspirant in me would claim fair game but the undisputable statistics in regards to the socio-economic backgrounds of art school students leans to various types of privilege dominating. This access to arts education is in the process of becoming more inequitable in Victoria as the Liberal state government slashes TAFE funding. The role that Visual Art TAFE courses play in compensating for some of the inequitable distribution of access and recourses in the secondary sector can’t be overstated.6
The ‘educational turn’ is not sited within educational institutions so much as made reference to within curatorial programs, social art projects, stylistic tropes, community pedagogical projects and the outreach agendas of cultural institutions.7 Another perspective on education as art project identifies how private enterprise covers up (perhaps inadvertently) the shortcomings of a public education system. Museums and galleries acquire government funding that is tied to agendas much broader than aesthetic enterprise. While the artist’s role has always had a relation to sociability – is this social process a pedagogical stop-gap for inadequate social policy? This allows and reinforces the continuation of the inadequate funding faced by the higher education sector. In the last fifteen years art schools’ studio programs have been under pressure to reduce the contact hours held by teaching staff. Projects that incorporate pedagogy as an artistic enterprise boost the reputations of host institutions – accomodating ruthless budgetary cuts with a progressive artistic veneer of volunteer-ism.8 This is occurring in the aftermath of the debates surrounding the cooption of social enterprise by art contexts and the subsequent questioning of their critical quality and the challenge they pose to autonomous aesthetic paradigms. The various threads of this discourse interrogated the social role the artist played within the community-context-turned-art-project and looked carefully at the power dynamic between the artist and participants/collaborators.9 What emerged was the inadequacy of the aesthetic lenses used to judge and produce socially driven art projects. This is where reflexive sociology, pedagogical theory and political assessment of what constitutes the aesthetic seemed more useful than naïve obfuscation of the potential for power play between artists and participants.10 This reflexive methodology is the core competency of both education theory and actual practice in the field –classroom teaching.
The question then might be who gains when the ‘classroom’ is coveted by the artistic frame? This question is at the heart of the conventional journalised narrative of Tim Rollins and KOS’ practice. It is testament to the fickle nature of the art industry’s cooption of education within its process and presentation. In this case an artistic intervention to help disenfranchised kids rode a critical wave in the 1980s, was acquired by Saatchi, dumped by Saatchi and then persisted as a type of laudable artist-in-schools measure, that went unregarded by any arts community until very recently when truffle nosed connoisseurs salvaged it as a link to art’s pedagogical past.11 Rollin’s dripping wet (Kids Of Survival), paternalistic literacy program via over-determined facilitation of young teenagers’ collaborative artwork, has little to do with a progressive educational ethos, as it privileges a singular visual response to the group’s collective understanding of a canonical text. The project by its very name frames the pedagogue/artist in relation to his assistance (or rescue) of unnamed students who are doing it tough. Now literacy, creative expression and collaborative communities are important – educationalists know this – pedagogues working with cultural production have known this. The Bauhaus school and Soviet Constructivism are obvious historical precedents that challenged many disciplinary boundaries – integrating experimental pedagogical and social contexts to the production of art objects. While the work of Joseph Beuys offered a precedent for not only shifting the ideological centre of pedagogy into an artwork but of his work’s potential for non-object based outcomes.12 What I’m barracking for here is not a particular modality or site context of art teaching but an open attitude to the proliferation of creative conceptual art education. These programmes don’t need to be thrown into the fray of gallery presentation; their worth lies in their educational value to students. Grappling with the power relations that emerge out of teacher-student collaboration and the sanctimony of the facilitator are issues that should be addressed within the projects. This is the ethical realm of pedagogy. The question is not whether there is an inequitable distribution of power between teacher and student; the more pertinent question is how this dynamic will help foster a type of growth? The rhetorical claim that creativity in all fields is equally valuable is not always accepted by the arts community. We can too easily presume that if it’s not presented on a wall or trestle table then it’s not worth doing.
An artist’s autonomy was a much-vaunted quality of Modernism. It is not surprising that our art schools once played by their own rules regarding assessment, industrial relations, learning and teaching methodologies. We are now in a period where these same institutions are fitting (or having difficulty fitting) into university contexts.13 This reform process has benefits and pitfalls, and it has been met with some resistance. Some of this resistance is worth maintaining but the claim that art schools will be robbed of their inherent experimental and progressive qualities can not be substantiated by the evidence on the ground. Across all universities art schools, medium specific silos are preserved for no clear conceptual or methodological purpose apart from convenience and location of equipment and resources; assessment procedures do not adequately address the arbitrariness of taste and are maintained due to University policy and progression into postgraduate study; and some employment relations (on both sides of the worker-manager divide) would make the high school industrial relations environment seem contentious – which it isn’t . There are certainly marked differences between governmental policy and its implementation in the secondary school classroom context. However, on paper at least – there is a capacity for reflexivity in relation to both education and broader social and aesthetic terrains. This is a space where inter-disciplinary relations between departments are not only expected but required; collaborative methodologies are always a work in progress; transparent and detailed assessment criteria are used to substantiate the contentious judgment of cultural production; and surprisingly complex theoretical frameworks are being used to read art.14
While I am flinging mud at art schools, it is important to note that within a local Australian context pedagogical art environments are fostering a number of interesting projects . These projects kick goals in regards to experimental teaching and consider it within a critical dimension of an art practice. This exchange is a familiar recurrence in artist-in-schools programs too. Their publication to a broader audience, like the activities conducted by Joseph Beuys and Tim Rollins & KOS occurs in exceptional circumstances. DAMP, the Pedagogical Vehicle Project, Evergreen Terrace, Sandra Bridie’s composite projects, MADA’s interdisciplinary Murrumbeena Exchange, Melbourne Free School and Lucas Ihlein’s Tending: a Garden Experiment are relevant examples.15 While some like DAMP cut the chord tying the pedagogue (Geoff Lowe) to the students-now-established-artists many years ago––many remain a testament to intervening in the status quo of arts education. What makes these projects interesting is that they resist the atelier system of tuition that still dominates art schools in Melbourne. They represent an open and experimental attitude to creative conceptual art education. These programs do not need to be thrown into the fray of gallery presentation as their worth lies in their educational value to students as students. They involve a new and challenging understanding of what a class could be.
Spiros Panigirakis is an artist and lecturer in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University.
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Gregory Elliott (Verso: London, 2009) ↩
At the same time as Irit Rogoff pertinently asks “what extent the hardening of a ‘turn’ into a series of generic or stylistic tropes can be seen as capable of resolving the urgencies that underwrote it in the first place?” she also advocates the space of the museum and curatorial practice to “actualize” the challenges faced by education. Irit Rogoff, “Turning,” e-flux, journal #0, 11/2008, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/turning/ (accessed October 26 2012) ↩
Kosuth notes that “conceptual art annexes the function of the critic…[it] makes the middle- man unnecessary,” in Joseph Kosuth, “Introductory Note to Art-Language by the American Editor,” in Art After Philosophy and After: Collected Writings, 1966– 1990, by Joseph Kosuth. (Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1993), 39. Stimson echoes this position regarding the relationship between conceptualism and writing practices. He notes “in favour of academic philosophical, literary, and scientific associations, was to aggressively usurp the authority to interpret and evaluate art assumed to be the privileged domain of scholarly critics and historians,” in Stimson, “The Promise of Conceptual Art,” xli. Buren dogmatically notes “so I felt the need to take the floor, trying to reclaim it from the critics who had been shamelessly usurping it for ages, knowing in advance what possible havoc their prose could provoke, especially for new work, and a havoc from which some work never recovers, especially if the prose that swamps it is eulogy. So, the necessity of trying, by means of my own texts, to escape that discourse so as not to be its object and consequently the victim of its rhetoric,” in Daniel Buren, “Why Write?,” Art Journal 42, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 109 ↩
Laura Pappano, “The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s,” New York Times, July 22, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/education/edlife/edl-24masters-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, (accessed October 26 2012) ↩
Pierre Bourdieu understands a field as a site of struggle for (cultural, social, symbolic and economic) capital between agents (or players). For Bourdieu a cultural field reproduces it values via the notion of habitus. Habitus is the ‘embodied’ values agents possess that make the struggle for the distribution of capital on the field worth playing. Therefore within both of these sociological contexts we might consider the institution of art as a cultural field represented by artist, curators, dealers, collectors, theorists and historians that‘create the creator.’ A detailed account of Bourdieu’s account of capital can be found in Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 229-231; Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 37. ↩
The National Association for the Visual Arts reported “the NSW Government announced today that it would no longer continue to fund fine arts courses in TAFE from January 1, 2013 as there are no job prospects for art students and there are skill shortages in other areas.” This is certainly the predicament many are predicting for the Victorian TAFE sector. NAVA, “NSW Government to no longer fund TAFE fine arts courses,” http://www.visualarts.net.au/newsdesk/2012/09/tafe-fine-arts-courses-defunded (accessed October 26 2012) ↩
Locally these enterprises range from: Christopher L G Hill’s Self governed Thesis, all art is problematic, Never werk. Clouds/ Evergreen publication(2009);
Emily Floyd, How to Make a Manifesto Grow (2008) in Optimism: Children’s Arts Centre Project, GoMA, Brisbane; Olafur Elliason, The cubic structural evolution project (2004) National Gallery of Victoria; Free University, http://melbournefreeuniversity.org; and with an aesthetic inflection the Melbourne Free School and 2010 initiative of Liv Barrett, Nick Mangan and Jarrod Rawlins, http://melbournefreeschool.blogspot.com.au ↩
Claire Bishop notes that governments “use a rhetoric almost identical to that of social engaged art to steer culture towards policies of social inclusion. Reducing art to statistical information about target audiences and ‘performance indicators,’ the government prioritises social effect over the consideration of artistic quality.” Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn:Collaboration and its Discontents,” Artforum (February 2006): 181. ↩
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les press du reel, 2002); Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110 (Fall 2004): 51-79; Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004) ↩
Stewart Martin, “Critique of Relational Aesthetics,” Third Text 21, no. 4 (July 2007) ↩
Tim Rollins and KOS have recently gained commercial representation from Maureen Paley, London. ↩
Joseph Beuys notes, “to be a teacher is my greatest work of art. The rest is the waste product, a demonstration… Objects are not very important for me any more… I am trying to reaffirm the concept of art and creativity in the face of Marxist doctrine… For me the formation of the thought is already sculpture.” Beuys quoted in Lucy Lippard, “Escape Attempts.” in Six years : The Dematerialization of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972 …, ed. Lucy Lippard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), xvii. ↩
Boris Groys maintains that the primacy of expression and its resistance to professionalisation that is held as a virtue by some gallery contexts and is at odds with the administrating of university pedagogy is derived by “the conviction that the artist rejects schools to become sincere” and to “manifest… an authentic creation in opposition” is based on traces (or myths) left behind by the historical avant-garde. Boris Groys, “Education by Infection,” in Art school : (propositions for the 21st century), ed. Steven Henry Madoff (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 29 ↩
Assessment criteria in VCE Art unit 3 and 4 engage students explicitly in reading artworks within feminist, psychoanalytic, post-colonial and political frameworks. http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/exams/art/art_assessrep_07.pdf; http://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/Documents/exams/art/art_writ_ex.pdf (accessed October 26 2012) ↩
Stuart Koop explores both DAMP and the Pedagogical Vehicle Project (facilitated by Callum Morton and Danius Kesminas) in Stuart Koop, “The Importance of Failing,” Broadsheet 2 (Vol. 32, 2003); Stuart Koop, “Concern,” Broadsheet 3 (Vol. 33, 2003); Sandra Bridie, The Artist as Composite, VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery, 2009; Evergreen Terrace in Unsheltered Workshops, VCA Margartet Lawrence Gallery, 2008, curator Jeff Khan. Lucas Ihlein & Diego Bonetto, Tending: a Garden Experiment, Sydney College of the Arts, http://www.tending.net.au/; Alana Hunt, A Garden Experiment, Real Time, 103, June-July 2011 ↩
