Editorial

What is happening to art school? The cultural climate of the 1970s, particularly in the UK, Europe and the USA, saw a series of radical shifts in approaches to arts education and research that responded to a growing sense of crisis in the purpose of art and design, and performing arts education and, more broadly, in the role of the arts in society. Forty years later in very different cultural, economic and technological circumstances, what has changed for approaches to radical, innovative arts education and research and what does such education and research look like for the future?

The ‘educational turn’ – particularly in the visual arts over the last decade – has seen the development of a wide variety of frameworks and provisions for artist-run and collaborative arts education and research as a reaction (in part) to the increasing neo-liberalization of arts education and research, as well as to the decline in funding and educational provision for embodied, heuristic, hands-on approaches to making, thinking and doing in the arts.

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in the radical models of education and artistic research that emerged in the US and Europe in the post-war period of the mid-to late twentieth century that emphasized the social values of the arts and creativity.

A rhetorical shift away from ‘arts education’ towards a proliferation of ‘creative innovation hubs’ and ‘centres for creativity’, as well as increased screen-based learning and the social and educational impact of digital technologies, arguably finds arts education and arts research once again at a point of transition as creative and experimental modes of education in the performing and visual arts become absorbed into normative, market-driven systems with an increasing emphasis on the value of the arts as instrumental forms of ‘creativity’ at the expense of social values, inclusivity and public engagement.

Artistic practice, artist training and education and artistic research form a closely interrelated triad, and framing them in experimental, radical and open ways is arguably a core quality for their development. Until the late twentieth century, researching artists and artists that advocated a pedagogical approach comprised a small group with utopian goals. Since the 1970s artists have had increasing access to a variety of post-graduate education and research opportunities within the academy.

Sharing an interest in critical pedagogies, artists see graduate education and research not as a restraint, but as a new opportunity.

The focus on experimental forerunners and graduate art education today allows a new perspective on the future possibilities of arts education. As Sam Thorne observed in a survey of artist-led education in Frieze (Issue 149, September 2012) many artists are ‘eager for an art school today to be self-determined, flexible, small-scale and cheap or free to attend’ and goes on to identify a number of shared preoccupations, including the possibilities of and limits to self-organized education; who owns art education in a ‘knowledge-based polis’; and what can be ‘borrowed from traditional academies’ as well as what ‘should be jettisoned’.

In developing the theme for Performance Research that emerges from and responds to the shifts, turns and questions outlined above, a serendipitous meeting between the Issue Editors at a conference proved instrumental.

Michael Hiltbrunner writes: Ric spoke to me after a presentation in Arnhem in 2014 on Serge Stauffer and the founding years of the former F+F School for Experimental Design in Zurich (now the F+F School for Art and Design). Obviously, it had touched him personally and had reminded him of his own experiences as both student and lecturer at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, UK, from 1976 onwards and his commitment to arts education after that. I was surprised about his enthusiasm, as I am someone not coming from education in the first place, but from research. My approach to the F+F School was a way of thinking about artistic research – and he was thinking about radical pedagogies.

My initial impression of artistic research was that this new study avoided the history of artists with a research-based practice, as well as critical pedagogies. To establish research by artists in universities, we need to have solid foundations and to be able to show its historical vitality – artistic research shows connections to the artistic avant-garde and emancipation movements at least since the early twentieth century. So, for this reason, I started to investigate archives by artists with a research-based practice. The projects give more public access to the personal archives of co-founders and actors of the F+F School held in public archives. I uncovered a complete theory of art as research by Serge Stauffer from 1976 to 1977 as well as material on alternative or radical methodologies of teaching art, design and creative practice. Traces of the classes can be found in the archives now– photographs, video, super-8 films, instruction sheets, feedback sheets, papers about the school concept and protocols of school council reunions. They reveal a school that was inspired by alternative school models such as Summerhill School (UK) or Black Mountain College (USA), by radical feminism and other political and social protest movements. And they refer to a surprising set of aesthetic practices and discourses. The beginnings of the school were in a class at the School for Applied Arts (now part of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK)), which had taken its title from the course ‘Design in Form and Colour’ by Johannes Itten, who had developed his pedagogy at the Weimar Bauhaus in the 1920s and continued his work as director of the school in Zurich.

However, the files show that the F+F class and, later, the F+F school were opposed to the Bauhaus pedagogy. The idea of first learning a certain technique to become a craftsperson in it and then at a master level to mix techniques into new styles was not the goal of F+F. The F+F wanted to enable people to be creative without restrictions. Already as a class at the Applied Arts School, the students were encouraged to play music, dance, stage happenings, make sculptures, paintings, photographs and independent art fairs, publish magazines and create pop posters. As Mara Züst and Simone Koller in their article on Doris Stauffer describe in this issue, she ‘didn’t care about whether something was art, politics or simply playing’ [see p. 26]. The inspirations came from Pop Art, Surrealism, Dada, Concept Art, Process Art and so on. There were no technical or social restrictions; a class council including the teaching staff provided a platform for communal decisions. The most radical decision was the secession from the Applied Arts School in 1970 that was supported by the teaching staff from other classes, and resulted in the start of their own school in 1971.

Working as a researcher with these historical materials, and especially meeting people involved at the time reveals many parallels with current issues in arts education. The F+F focused on critical thinking, emancipation, self-organization, justice and developing a theory of art as research, and at the same time worked very practically towards job-oriented and socially oriented outcomes while facing the same combination of unsolvable contractions.

They made attempts to bring artistic research (called ‘art as research’) into universities, and at the same time instructed students to avoid the art market and create alternative platforms for art instead. The F+F School claimed to be inclusive, without discrimination and without hierarchies – a claim that worked well because hierarchy only became visible when all the co-founders but one had left, and because the notion of a design school was embedded in the normal structures of discrimination operative at the time in Switzerland. As Janna Graham, Valeria Graziano and Susan Kelly state in their article for this issue: ‘the most wide-reaching theories of radical pedagogy were invented not as themes, but as tools to further the aims of popular education and respond to specific forms of inequality and coercion’ [see p. 34].

The didactics that the F+F School described, the new paths taken and the interest in the social, political and aesthetical questions of art and design are still close to questions currently being discussed in arts universities. The discussion has had to move away from a focus on formal structures and ask for the content. What do research, practice and pedagogies look like today, if they claim to be radical? A crucial step seems to show the interdependency of research, practice and education. This triangle seems to be even more important when artists selling their works, artists teaching and artists researching are working in completely different fields. To continue the exchange is difficult, but highly important.

This issue of Performance Research tries to bring together contributions on arts education that bridge artistic practice and research.

A symposium in January 2016 at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich discussed this topic in preparation for this issue and also to look for possible initiatives in Zurich and Switzerland for the near future. Switzerland took the lead in promoting the Bologna education reforms but now hesitates to create academic opportunities for artists. This could be an opportunity for new F+F approaches. This is in no way a romanticization of institutions, but a means to bring the different branches of art together at one table to discuss what kind of education is required for the next generation of artists.

Universities and academic publishing are also a site of ‘the reproduction of repressive ideologies’ as the Committee (now defunct) of the Free University of Liverpool states in a letter to us for this issue – and so the work in any institution is always flawed. We want both to focus on the problematic site of the institution, to stay within the institution and show possible alternatives and new paths within this global machinery. We want to see artists with intellectual and artistic power as researchers in doctoral and postgraduate programmes who also commit to work on and change institutional and normative structures.

Ric Allsopp writes: The ‘call for proposals’ that we circulated in late 2015 produced an almost unprecedented number of responses and supported our sense that the state of arts education is a topic of current and future concern not just locally but internationally.

As Issue Editors, we have attempted to reflect the wide range of proposals as well as the international distribution of contributors – from Chile to Korea, from Turkey to Portugal.

Selecting contributions and structuring them into a meaningful ‘conversation’ out of the wealth of potential material that was proposed suggested that the contents fall into four interrelated areas – histories of radical education in the arts, politics and theories of education, new schools, pedagogies and poetics – each interwoven with a series of letters to her students from the artist Hayley Newman.

Arts education both underpins and is underpinned by culture and, in this sense, responds to and is shaped by the particular environments that it is embedded in. A current tendency in institutional education (especially in the UK) to seek – for primarily economic reasons – uniform ‘one-size-fits-all’ educational programmes as a response to perceived consumer pressures is perhaps echoed in the ‘ecological boredom’ produced by monocultures that the environmentalist and journalist George Monbiot describes:

The drive towards monoculture causes a dewilding, of both places and people. … It creates a dull world, a world lacking in colour and variety, which enhances ecological boredom, narrows the scope of our lives, limits the range of our engagement with nature, pushes us towards a monoculture of the spirit. (Monbiot 2014: 154)

In contrast to the reductionism of ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches to education, and invoking the necessity of time and openness in education, Óscar Andrade Castro and Jaime Reyes Gil in their contribution to this issue [see p. 16] observe that ‘formation [education] … is revealed as a time whose duration cannot be measured by the conventional temporal units of academic progression’ but that ‘unfolds from work to work’ through ‘being-at-work’ – that is, like dance, through the time and space that the work in itself demands. In his discussion of Plato’s Academy in Gardens: An essay on the human condition, a book that provides many insights into historical and contemporary affinities between gardens, time, education and responsibility, Robert Pogue Harrison notes that the university in our time

continues to serve as a site where the ongoing, interactive dialogue of education can take place in real time and physical space. The main justification for a university campus in an age of telecommunications and multimedia technology is the occasion it provides for conversation, personalization, and shared commitment, for the exchange of words among a community of learners and the free flow of love between teacher and student – a flow that passes through their bodies as much as through their minds. (Harrison 2009: 69)

Arts education, artistic research and the place of the artist as cultural generator proceeds from the proposition that arts enable and open potentially radical and diverse ways of perceiving and thus acting in and on the environments and contexts that shape us.

We would like to extend our thanks to all our contributors and all those who have contributed to the wider conversations, symposia and practices that have informed this issue. We hope that the following can provide some radical, unusual and generative perspectives on arts education and its potential to shape and determine the future of arts and performance.