The Art of Teaching.

And then in steps the doubt…

Why would I do this?

Two separate people have told me I am brave to do this! Why would they say that? Do teachers operate under a culture of repercussion? Am I being foolish?

Consequences matter… don’t they?

Those ping-ponging voices in my head draw me away from what I want to write about again… my pupil like attention span flits from comment, to read article, to thought, searching for the next thread to consider…

Why teach Art?

I’ve never really considered this question! It’s just what I do… I stumbled upon and found I enjoyed. Logic tells me the partner question is “why make Art?” but that’s not for here just yet… or maybe it is? Are they irrevocably connected? For me now though of course, it’s become a critical point.

The one thing that bugs me about this whole debate; that makes me resist this subject, is George Bernard Shaw’s notion; “he who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” How insulting! The best advocate to avoid the teaching profession ever! How many times have my brothers thrown this at me to rile me… the power it gives intelligent, I want to challenge you pupils! How do I answer?

Why do I teach Art?

NSEAD present an, at first glance, excellent examination and argument for the teaching of art, craft and design in their November E update, http://www.mailbloom.com/webmail.aspx?param=Zrz7Z0n@gBQrw/nX/2ouTkWBREB@lstH , but I question the appeal of their summary to the general public, or as a promotional tool for selling my subject to my pupils. I read it as a very eloquent defense of a topic that is increasingly coming under pressure from a government that only endorses results, as presented by Estelle Morris in the Guardian; http://m.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/26/academies-schools-baccalaureate-exams .

(What am I writing here? What am I doing? BCU educated me not to rant. They encouraged me to support my arguments with substantiated evidence. These are my thoughts, I seek not to upset or alienate; yet I fail to believe that I am the only teacher troubled by this. I fear I’m upsetting my sympathizers).

Accessible language has to play a key role in this. I have qualifications; yet envy the academics that paint pictures with beautiful words that I have to decipher in my dictionary. My terminology I hope is honest and understandable, I would like that it makes sense to the man in the street and hides no hidden agendas. To progress this debate further, we need to engage the clients we serve to utilize their support and get their voices heard. I need to keep it simple.

Distraction, distraction…

…come on, focus…

Why do I teach Art?

It is important for me to offer my pupils a broad variety of ideas, stimuli and starting points once they have completed a certain amount of set tasks to help them focus in the initial stages of developing their own ideas.

The notion that I am an artist first, (though ego driven), holds certain advantages when teaching. It enables an alter ego that can perform, demonstrate, create, exhibit, stage, portray, show and express a whole host of ideas that conventional, text/sketchbook teaching prevents. As the artist, I can make work that exists outside of my teaching practice yet stands as exemplar in the classroom. The art comes prior to the teaching…

In a discussion with my part time colleague yesterday, we contemplated the Art we should/would like to be making… Art that satisfied our needs – yet found that we struggled for ideas – for ourselves, we lacked impetus. The view that I make all my Art as a tool for teaching (though new and irritating to me), would suggest that I am a teacher first. And yet…what other work do I construct? Whom do I make the work for?

I find myself writing about stuff I didn’t intend to address. Comments from previous blogs keep filtering into my mind, distracting me from the natural course of my thoughts. At the outset of this latest blog my intention had been to introduce a second exemplar that encompassed the Olympics on from “artist development”. But I got sidetracked. I sent a link of the whole blog to my colleague who read it all over a two hour period – (whilst supposing to study for a math’s exam), and then fed back to me, which started this discussion.

In our own work, we both struggle to set tasks, themes or projects for ourselves. I question where artists come by their ideas? David Minton questions intuition when writing in his blog “It’s a Hiding to Nothing”. The overlaps in our conversations both galvanize and frustrate my notions on making Art.

As a teacher, I have no problem generating ideas and activities for my pupils. Elena Thomas has questioned these concepts in response to my previous blogs also; suggesting that work made for the classroom isn’t “real” Art…

…and yet…

I came away from my Masters feeling like I hadn’t really fulfilled my potential,

simultaneously believing I’d overachieved in certain areas. At the outset, my intention was to have my paintings critiqued in the hope that they would be good enough to enhance my salary. The notion of making Art for money isn’t one that sits comfortably with me – it implies that I have a substantial ego, and even if that were the case, I would always deny it…

…and yet…

I didn’t make a single painting in the two years of my study!

Excuses, excuses. I didn’t have enough time… I wanted to incorporate technology that I was using into my classroom – it enabled me to make work quickly and nobody else was doing it… my partner became poorly… the dog ate my work…

Pathetic…

I just didn’t know what to do… I relied on my tutors to move my work forward and then blamed them when I didn’t get the marks I wanted. I flapped about with my iPad altering others work, experimented with miniature cameras, got drawn into ethical issues that really didn’t interest me and eventually produced a final installation that was so far removed from my starting intentions, it felt like I’d wasted my time!

Nevertheless, I hadn’t.

I produced a huge amount of work. My tutors moved my work and my thinking forward. I came away wanting to teach the way I had been taught. I was inspired… wanting to study further… I came away as a far better what?

Oh!

Disappointment with the answer I know I should write there – “I came away as a far better teacher!” Yes, my reasoning and theory proficiency has increased, but my art practice did to. Is it conceivable that I dismiss reality for fantasy? That I know what I want, but fear the consequences of that decision? That I know what I am? Is that why I fail to find starting points for my own practice? Preservation of the life that really isn’t bad and keeps my family in comfort?

Can of worms…

Do I really want to publish this?

Continued…

The majority of my work these days is made on an iPad. I have several of these in my art room that the pupils are permitted to use along with a suite of Apple Macs.

Art Apps produce an instant, surrogate image and enable pupils to see alternatives for their work, options that generally they wouldn’t usually consider. There are also a whole set of Apps that will randomize work and produce completely unexpected results that again open new dimensions and possibilities.

Apple TV and a whiteboard allow me to project my images on a large scale for pupil’s to engage with, I can also demonstrate the process to whole groups.

Initially, I only ran the image through one App – PhotoStudioHD – to play with the colours of the image. What would it look like in yellow or red, black and white? I then flipped and mirrored the image to produce new faces, then played with the colour of these, (image 2). But the image didn’t relate to futurism, as I wanted it to.

I have no problem with work veering away from themes… I positively encourage my pupils to see themes as starting points only, stressing that it’s the journey that’s important… the route and progression that their ideas take – if the final piece has no association to Olympic Futurism, that’s fine by me.

I wanted my images to look more like Marcel Duchamp’s “Sad Young Man in a Train” painting, to enable my pupils to see fragmentation and movement. I ran several of my new images through a second randomizer App – Decim8 – to show this, before framing, lighting and adding noise in PictureShow – a third App. (Images 3 and 4). One of the surprises of the first images that I produced was the backgrounds. Because the original image was produced on card, when I projected the images onto my whiteboard it appeared as though they had really been sprayed onto a wall – where the card had creased it appeared as bricks. With this notion in mind, I want to present my exemplar…

For my iPad, I have a laser projector that enables me to project my images onto any surface…The Futurist’s had a great interest in cities… combine the two and it means that I can light-tag/graffiti anywhere I chose, to a fairly large scale… churches, shops, buildings, vehicles; they all become my canvas, yet I cause no damage or harm to property.

When I demonstrate this to pupils in my classroom I also project onto my hands (image 5), walls (image 6), floor, ceiling etc.

As an educational tool then, where does this work sit in a contemporary art world? Can it be classified as Art or does the educational context prevent this? My audience is ready made both with pupils and passing footfall in the city, yet because the work was constructed particularly as an educational medium, does that imply it has no alternative ambition.

For now, the pupils haven’t yet started making their own work from this. For me the interest, the joy in my job, is to see if it has ignited their imaginations and inspired them to make work that challenges my own… I will of course keep you posted…

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Lets put some of these notions to the test then. Lets question an exemplar and debate it’s values, let’s see if it leads to pastiche and mimicry. Let’s give it to the pupils and see what results.

I have recently started teaching my Year 9 cohort a module entitled “Olympic Futurism,” where the focus of the learning has been to try and create some empathy with disability in light of the success of this summers Paralympics in London, and develop that learning into Futurism influenced, contemporary art.

Through a series of starting points, I instructed my pupils to complete a set of timed exercises that in one way or another removed them from their daily comfort zones. Using wooden mannequins, pupils positioned them into athletic poses and

Completed a;

Left handed drawing unless they were left handed, then they used their right hand instead,

then they; –

Drew with their pencil pushed through a piece of paper so they couldn’t see what they were doing,

Drew with a continuous line,

Drew holding their pencil with their feet or mouth,

and finally

Drew with charcoal attached to a long stick, paper on the floor, standing up.

Primarily I was exploring the loss of vision and disorientation of the tactile senses, hoping my pupils would appreciate that for those who took part in the games, this was the norm and irreversible. Surprisingly it was my lower ability pupils who grasped this concept most and it was only hindsight that pointed out the logic of this. In the resulting conversations with groups discussing the work it was evident that the lower ability pupils identified better with disability… a remarkable telling and learning for me… but how could that be used to further inform my high ability pupils and progress the whole cohorts ideas?

I ended up with a set of childlike, fragmented images steeped with movement and motion. It was the decomposition and activity that I wanted to explore further.

Beatrice Coron, as a paper cutter storyteller, gives me access to a very different way of working. The idea of stencils really appeals and gives my pupils a way in to a whole host of new techniques and skills. But I never use an artist alone as this tends to encourage pupils to emulate and clone their work, so a logical second choice artist seemed for me to be a street artist such as Adam Neate, who is steadily building a growing reputation in the art world. Two things appeal to me about his work. Firstly, up until this point my pupils had only really focused on the body form. They had also made some conventional studies of the human figure and detailed investigations of medal winners. But all these drawings were featureless. Adam Neate mainly makes images of faces. Secondly, I always try and find a good story to entice my pupils in. Neate built his career by leaving his images in city centers on piles of rubbish. Anyone who found his work was entitled to keep it, and with the work now selling for thousands of pounds, that gave me an idea.

I cut Beatrice Coron’s face as a stencil in my own style and then spray-painted it onto a sheet of cardboard with a background (image 1) in the style of Adam Neate. Having made the piece I was able to tell my pupils that it was now a “fake” Neate and I would be leaving it in a city to see what might happen! But I recognize that certainly ticks the boxes for pastiche, so the question became; what else could I do with the image?

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Despite having given it over a week, I have failed to illicit a single comment on the work I submitted in my previous blog. The irony of this hasn’t passed me by – and maybe within this there lies a solution to something that has been bothering me; – pupils make work from it, yet an adult audience appears to ignore it.

There is a duality in the title I write under. I suggest that there is an art in teaching that if done with passion and consideration produces outstanding results that need no assessment or evaluation – (a process that ultimately devalues the art and deflates the student – perhaps the reason that my work hasn’t received opine), as well as the art teachers produce to inspire and start new trains of thought, being worthy of contemplation in contemporary galleries.

So todays task is very simple; – draw me a shoe!

Maybe I have approached this from the wrong angle? Maybe to start with I’m asking the wrong question? Perhaps the starting point isn’t how we teach Art. Instead, maybe we should be asking; why teach Art? What do we want our students to learn?

But why teach Art?

I have been reading two texts – Jan Jagodzinski’s chapter ‘Badiou’s Challenge to Art and its Education’ in Kent Den Heyer’s Thinking Education Through Alain Badiou , and “The Impossibility of Art Education”edited by Geoff Cox, Howard Hollands and Victoria de Rijke, for a post MA reading group I was invited to join back at BCU. Both texts when read together, throw up some intriguing propositions.

The group met for the first time last night – (the joy of stimulating debate again, how I’ve missed it face to face), and one of the topics that arose from the readings was the potential that art education was at the point of collapse – failure, yet lacking any viable solution at present.

Nicholas Addison writes in his essay “Rub Out? Appropriation and Pastiche in the Art & Design Curriculum”; – “The National Curriculum has validated, indeed valorized, the potential for mimicry in Art and Design in schools… …Pupils and students learn to copy, transcribe, pastiche, parody, exemplary sources…”

I don’t for a minute believe this is true of my practice… yet… what if it is? Is this what I’m required to do? Is this the purpose of Art education?

I need some help here.

The other worry issue that the two readings left me considering was the idea of instruction; – “A communicative relation is established between teacher and student, performer and audience, in which the first part, as the purveyor of official ‘truths,’ exerts an institutional authority over the second. Students and audience are reduced to the status of passive listeners, rather than active subjects of knowledge… when the wholly dominated listener turns to speak, it is with the internalized voice of the master…” Allan Sekula. “Extract: School is a Factory.”

Does my instruction determine outcome? If so, then pupils are only transcribing my ideas for me. It isn’t their work, their ideas…

I’m aware that I’m fleetingly suggesting at things here. This is new and raw for me. I’m not totally sure what I’m thinking.

Why teach art?