Ground Meets Horizon, Day 5 with Keep It Complex, 2017

Creative Learning; or The Creative Economy Reversed

James Bell

With a grave face, as if he were about to announce the death of a dear comrade, he whispered to me that it did not behoove an agitator to dance. Certainly not with such reckless abandon, anyway.

Emma Goldman¹

Who makes revolution? Isabella Dias, a 17 year old high school student in Rio de Janeiro, frames this question in opening a talk² on student occupations, with feminist and anarchist Emma Goldman’s line: “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”³ The locating of the “I” and “you” before we attend to the “we,” reveals the power relations at play in any struggle, particularly when, for the purposes of this text, I want to consider the relationship between art, activism and different ways of knowing (and by extension, being) in the world. I will draw on a research trip to Rio in autumn 2017, an exchange between artists, arts and care organizations in Brazil and Scotland, and specifically my interest in approaches to learning, in art and beyond, as a means to unlearn behaviors and practices deeply instilled in us through histories of capitalism, colonialism and the patriarchy.

Before continuing, it is perhaps useful to locate myself in these discussions, as in the preceding paragraph it is easy to slip into vernaculars of an ‘us’ and a ‘we’, that serve, particularly when discussing practice in Brazil from a white Northern European perspective, as a potentially colonizing act in language. My twelve days in Rio provided cursory glances of practices and struggles in a country with many of the traits of advanced neoliberal economies – rampant privatization, erosion of public services, great wealth, and extreme poverty – marked by stark lines of racial division embalmed by colonial pasts and presents. I want to stress a writing of this text from a distance, thinking with Isabella and the student struggle to look at more local concerns within learning environments in Scotland, the UK and Europe, as a means of exploring how similar concerns appear in specific contexts differently. I also speak at distance from my former employer, Collective, a contemporary arts organization in Edinburgh, with whom, over a period of four and a half years, I grew and developed in concert with a small team of dedicated staff our⁴ understandings of how we work together, with artists, and different groups. At the time of my research trip to Brazil, my focus was Collective’s learning program, working with two local state primary schools and engaging with the more porous notion of learning throughout the whole organization. This text is, at once a reflection of my time in Brazil and at Collective, and an attempt to critically think through the potentials of “learning” in, against, and beyond art⁵ – a movement from autonomous student protest in Brazil to the political potentials of arts practice in formal education environments in Scotland.

Primavera Secundarista: Student activism in Brazil

A return to Brazil, and Isabella discussing the student occupations of high schools that swept across the country in waves in 2015 and 2016. Set against the backdrop of political turmoil leading from what is seen by many as a coup d’état that saw the impeachment of former President Dilma Rousseff (2014-2016) and assumption of the Presidency by Michel Temer of the centre-right Brazilian Democratic Movement, the students were protesting against a wide-range of educational reforms at both state and federal level. All too familiar tropes of dogmatic cuts to education, creeping privatization of the state school system, and notably the “de-politicization” of education, were markers of the unrest. In 2015, students in São Paulo protested ‘restructuring plans’ which included the closure of 100 state schools, with some 200 demonstrations – that have come to be known as the Primavera Secundarista, the Student Spring – which ultimately led to the plans being suspended. The successes of students in São Paulo spread across the country, creating a national movement that articulated in two further waves of student protests, the most recent in 2016 confronting the ideologically driven reforms of the federal government.⁶ Of note, was the proposed law Escola sem partida (School Without Parties i.e political party) that sought to curtail the teaching of leftist or Marxist ideas in schools, a reminder of the ways in which neoliberalism attempts to hide its ideological foundations in supposedly “neutral” terms that are, in fact, rather aimed at erasing opposing political positions or thought. As Louis Althusser asserts: “[w]hat is represented in ideology is […] not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live.”⁷ The strong arm of the federal government was less compromising in latter waves and oppressed the student protests, but Isabella maintained a hope and joy in these struggles.

In recounting the occupation at her school, Isabella spoke eloquently of the importance of occupying the halls and other ‘informal’ spaces of learning outside of the classroom with its teacher/pupil binary and hierarchy. This returns us to the question of “who makes revolution?” Prioritizing the illegitimate and informal spaces of knowledge production, the corridor, where students socialize, gossip, dance, and play together, is perhaps where they make revolution. And moreover, they make not my revolution, or the teachers’ revolution – aptly pointed out by a history teacher of Isabella’s who was also on the panel discussion – but their revolution. (A dialogue between Isabella and her teacher Luiz Guilherme Barbosa is featured in this publication). A revolution produced by and for the students, located in their cultures and knowledges, discovered and made⁸ in-common, in the halls of the very ideological institutions normally so attuned to shape and mould bodies into subjects of good standing under capital i.e. good workers.⁹ Or, the very same logics that seek to repress the articulation of the ways of being counter to the dominant or normative if you will, reversed and used as a site of struggle – the site of the production of culture and knowledge.

A struggle to know: Art, activism and education

So, what about art? Isabella’s generosity in sharing the very tangible and articulate gestures of the students’ political struggle offers a means to an end, in which, I’d like to suggest, certain practices of artists and art organizations, are learning and can further learn from, particularly regarding the ways in which we make with others.¹⁰ The aforementioned ‘reversal’ of the logics of an institution, like the school, could align with Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptions of cultural production, and might help us understand what happens when art enters an institutional frame. As the sociologists says “the artistic field is a field of forces, but it is also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces.”¹¹ If the school operates within and as an apparatus (following Althusser) of the dominant field of power (following Bourdieu), art can act as part of the struggle against these frames, as can be seen in the work of artists such as Annette Krauss, who employs strategies of ‘unlearning’ as a means of unpicking or untangling learned practices and behaviors. Krauss’ long term projects Site for Unlearning and Hidden Curriculum engage with various institutional frames, such as the gallery or the school, to uncover or make visible different knowledges, for example, working with high school students to explore or reclaim the physical spaces of their school through performative gestures, notably in one video document, the halls.¹²

Fig 1. Un/Learning Economies workshop with Annette Krauss, Edinburgh, 2017.

A further example of what I’d like to call a struggle in knowledge or knowing, is the collaborative research of teacher Stephanie Cubbin and the artist group Ultra-Red. Their research The School and the Neighbourhood: A Subverted Curriculum, at St Marylebone CE School, London, is part of Serpentine Art Gallery’s former off-site program known as The Edgeware Road Project. Their work sought to make connections between the school and its locale, and subvert “DfE [Department for Education] guidance of individual accumulation of knowledge to be repeated back in a measured test.” A pamphlet was produced that provided alternative lesson plans for teachers, with cross-curricula activities that reveal some of the underlying dogma embedded within the English education system, such as a geography lesson that considers citizenship and the state, asking pupils to answer questions from the British Citizenship Test.¹³ Similar to Krauss, Cubbin and Ultra-Red sought to redress, through working in collaboration with the young people at the schools, the ‘hidden’ or less tangible aspects of the school, and going further by bringing the material together under the guises of a teachers’ lesson pamphlet, allowing the co-produced knowledge to be shared with other teachers and schools.

Taking further the struggle for the wider circulation and dissemination of alternative knowledges, is the network Schooling & Culture, acting in solidarity with, among others, the Radical Education Forum and the contemporary arts organization, The Showroom, London. Their aim is to disrupt secondary education’s “culture of individualism, competition and surveillance by claiming a new collective position within, and outside of, the school context through self-representation and lived experience.”¹⁴ Whilst supported by The Showroom, the group operates with autonomy, as seen in its production of a second volume of the journal Schooling & Culture. Originally published by and for radical left teachers and students in the 1970s, the new volume, at time of writing on issue one, takes on more contemporary concerns within the English education system, with articles, lesson plans, and teaching posters, intended for circulation amongst teachers with a desire to break from the strictures of the official curriculum. Of note in Schooling & Culture is the manner in which it seeks to reframe political discourse within education, as they contest that “sites of education are not neutral places but are situated—constructed by council strategy, government policy, history, migration, austerity, and global trends—and are undergoing political, social and economic restructuring that are constantly redefining those sites’ boundaries.”¹⁵ I am particularly interested in the manner in which the Schooling & Culture group (who produce the journal of the same name) privileges what might be called a relative autonomy – a concept I will elaborate on further a little later. They are not simply an ‘arts project’, but rather embrace a desire towards a common politics and ways of working, including cultural practitioners, sitting somewhere ‘in-between’, reclaiming or making space, similar to Krauss, Cubbin and Ultra-Red.¹⁶

Fig 2. Schooling and Culture research materials, 2018. Courtesy Schooling and Culture and The Showroom.

Experiences and Outcomes: The arts and state schools in Scotland

To bring this a little closer to my own experience, I want to think now of Collective’s relationship with state primary schools in Scotland working with children aged 7 to 11 years old, and the complexities of navigating a deeply engrained set of neoliberal educational practices. I’d like to consider the specificity of teaching in state schools in Scotland as structured around, and the manner in which the aforementioned practices, are articulated through “Curriculum for Excellence,” a framework that allows a “subject” to be taught through a multitude of curricula areas (e.g. learning maths using “creative” methods or the so called, “Expressive Arts”)¹⁷ to learn “differently.” Whilst this system differs from the troubling academy system¹⁸ or privileging of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)¹⁹ subjects in the English education system, and at first glance may appear a more open means of learning, the foundations are still inherently neoliberal. While simply more diffuse, the purpose is still equally intent on producing “future” workers, with pupils taught to be “resilient” in preparation for the precarity of their unimaginable futures.²⁰ “Creative” approaches to learning (read: working) are inherent to contemporary teaching, and therefore contemporary art in education (be that in the gallery or the school), can all too easily be complicit and indeed lead the charge in advancing government policy that, by extension, is driven by economics.²¹

Collective are, of course, complicit in this system, through the manner in which our learning program with artists and young people adeptly fits into the language of the Curriculum for Excellence. But I would like to argue, this complicity, can be a means to an end, an attempt to create or make space for other things to happen. In the two or so years I worked in the two state primary schools, we worked with artists, teachers, and young people, to connect with Collective’s location in an observatory on Calton Hill. The histories of Enlightenment and Empire are celebrated in monuments scattered across the Hill. Working with artists’ Tessa Lynch and Catherine Payton, we began to unpick the histories of the Hill, considering more tacit encounters with the landscape through drawing, and subsequently alternative oral histories made by and for the young people. These were all tentative steps towards unraveling and untangling the questions of: who makes culture (art) and history? The practical workshops with artists and young people were coupled with on-going discussions with artists, teachers, and young people about our respective understandings of learning and looking at language, like the use of ‘creative’ in education policy and related cultural theory. Again, these were tentative steps towards the production of teacher resource materials that would allow for an articulation, formed in common with the two schools, of a different approach to learning.

Art, and particularly contemporary art, neatly aligns with strategies of “creative learning,” with schools and teachers more open to trying “different” things, which in turn gives art a relative autonomy within the curriculum. It is what art does in these relatively autonomous spaces, as in the work of Krauss, Cubbin and Ultra-Red, and Schooling & Culture, that was a driving concern during my time at Collective; a redirecting of the privileged notion of the avant garde, or “art for arts sake,” into material and political concerns heavily indebted to black, feminist, and queer struggles.

In conclusion: Think different.™²²

To conclude this reflection, I’d like to revisit some terms that have emerged in this text as important but equally contested both within the retelling of Isabella and the students struggle and the various art practices discussed. The first, is autonomy, or the relative autonomies these political actions and art practices illicit and the importance of emphasizing the constant (often dizzying) oscillation between the dominant and the dominated under forces of power, be that capital or colonialism. I use relative, or following Harry Weeks, permitted autonomy,²³ to acknowledge what Bourdieu sketches as a co-dependency between given autonomous and heteronomous positions, the latter more connected to the broader field of power, say market forces.²⁴ This feels useful to me in conceptualizing how we might move from the political activism of Isabella to the more opaque nature of contemporary art production works within institutional spaces such as the school. As I have outlined, critical art practices engaged with activist politics may offer – in their ability to create relatively autonomous spaces within the tightly regulated space of formal education – new political discourses and imaginaries to be made, in-common.

This leads on to my use of the word “different” throughout the text (specifically in relation to knowledge), and a reminder that learning “differently” can be at once for the breaking apart of logics of certain forces of power, such as capitalism and for reproducing the very same logics, say, for example, training “creative” thinking and entrepreneurial learners. In this space of difference, it is likely, in the art practices discussed and certainly in my experience at Collective, that both happen continually, and we must constantly push against the former, always seeking to move beyond it. I think here specifically of my understanding of unlearning, that comes from queer theorists, such as Jack Halberstam, who (in thinking of failure) says: “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well…”²⁵ I have used this quote in a professional development training sessions, for example with primary school teachers in outlining Collective’s approach to learning in formal education, but I am always troubled by the potential de-coupling from or recuperation of lived-experiences of struggle, being a queer, or Isabella’s experience, that informs such statements, when you introduce them into spaces so defined by logics of neoliberalism (a formal teacher training environment, referencing the Curriculum for Excellence, etc.)

And so I’d like to return, in conclusion, to Emma Goldman, and the quote “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”, and think of mis/translation and mis/understanding. Emma Goldman never actually said these words. Indeed they are a paraphrase of the quote which opens this text, which, as explained by feminist activist Alix Shulman, was created by a printer to be a slogan with political efficacy, subsequently emblazoned on pins, t-shirts, and bags ²⁶ I was instantly drawn to Isabella when she opened her talk with Goldman – or a printer’s translation of Goldman – given I was wearing a tote bag with the words “IF I CAN’T DANCE…” written across the front, leading me to assume a common politics. That’s an incredibly prophetic experience, particularly when carefully recounted in this reflection, but I travel away from Isabella’s story to the other art practices and arrive at Collective in this text to perhaps chart the potentials for translation or mistranslation in the politics of attempting to work differently. It feels like there is an irreconcilable tension in contemporary art’s relationship to political activism; and I must emphasize the intention is not to flatten Isabella’s struggle with Collective’s tentative thinking around these areas; but there are things to be learned, like the moves to more autonomous positions, as seen in the work of Schooling & Culture, to continually question in these tensions and struggles, the ways in which we make movements towards and away from art in the work that we do.

 

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James Bell
James Bell is an artist and former Producer (Learning) at Collective, Edinburgh. James’ is interested in understanding and articulating how identities are constituted or denied within a given space, and how this can be authored or co-authored in language. Selected projects include: Aye, and Gomorrah…, Rhubaba, Edinburgh, 2017; The Sphere, part of Of Other Spaces, Cooper Gallery, Dundee, 2016; Moloch! part of The Arbroath Template, Hospitalfield Arts, 2015; The Sunday Driver, Collective, Edinburgh, 2013; and 24 Spaces, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, 2013. James is currently doing a PhD focusing on questions of Studentship and Archiving Feminist Cultural Activism, at Northumbria University, Newcastle, from October 2017.

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¹ Goldman, Emma, Living My Life (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

² The talk was part of a ten day program Cuidado Como Método #2 (Care as Method #2), 26 September to 6 October 2017, organized as part of An Exchange of Method, a program of dialogue and exchange between Brazil and Scotland, 2015—present. I’d like to take an opportunity to thank our generous hosts and organizers, Jessica Gogan and Izabela Pucu, for bringing together such a thoughtful and generous program; to Cristina Riba and Rafael Zacca, for facilitating and holding us through the ten days of discussions, talks and visits; Alison Stirling, Creative Director, ArtLink, Edinburgh for all the preparatory work and planning leading up to the trip; and a special thanks to Kate Gray, Director, Collective, Edinburgh, who has cared and supported me over my four and a half years at Collective to develop and push my understandings of art and practice as an artist/curator/producer/researcher/person.

³ Alix Kates Shulman, “Women of the PEN: Dances with Feminists” in: The Women’s Review of Books 9 (3): 13, 1991 https://doi.org/10.2307/4021093. [accessed 06/03/18]

⁴ I use “our” not to flatten the breadth of experience and knowledges that make-up Collective’s staff, but more to acknowledge attempts to reach towards one another, find common understanding in the various projects and research everyone undertakes. An opportunity here also to say thank you to Siobhan Carroll, Head of Programme, and Frances Stacey, Producer, for the many years of care, conversation, debate and mutual support, that in one way or another has informed the way I think and work, and is layered through the words in this text.

⁵“In, against and beyond…” is a phrase often attributed to Marxist sociologist John Holloway, and one I’ve always found useful to think through the multiple ways in which we might act within dominant forces and logics like capitalism. See: Asher, Gordon, Leigh French, Neil Gray, and John Holloway, “In, against and beyond labour,” Variant 41 (Spring 2011): 28—31. http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue41/jholloway41.pdf
[accessed 06/03/18]

⁶ Alegria, Paula and Marcielly Moresco, ‘Occupy and resist! School occupations in Brazil,’ Open Democracy. https://www.opendemocracy.net/protest/brazil-school-occupations [accessed 06/03/18]

⁷ Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in: Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970).

⁸ Isabella Dias and Luiz Guilherme Barbosa.”Corridor-School: Towards a Poetics of Occupation (in Two Voices)” in this issue: [http://institutomesa.org/revistamesa/edicoes/5/portfolio/isabella-dias-e-luiz-guilherme-barbosa-en/?lang=en]

⁹ Louis Althusser outlines Ideological State “Apparatus” that act to produce or reproduce the means of production under capitalism, this includes culture and education: “… an ideology always exits in an apparatus, and its practices. This existence is material.” Op cit. 166.

¹⁰ I invoke a fairly universal “we” here, but I am generally referring to artists, curators and practitioners in contemporary art with a particular interest in alternative pedagogical approaches to learning and working.

¹¹ Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed,” In: The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) 29—73. [original emphasis]

¹² Annette Krauss, Hidden Curriculum. Artwork and archive, 2007—13. http://hiddencurriculum.info/hc.html [accessed 06/03/18]

¹³ I would like to thank Amal Khalaf, Curator, Projects, Serpentine, for the generosity in sharing their experiences of the Edgeware Project of which The School and The Neighbourhood formed part of from 2008—16.

¹⁴ Schooling & Culture. 2018. ‘About’. http://schoolingandculture.org/about/ [accessed 06/03/18]

¹⁵‘Editorial – The State We’re In. Schooling & Culture 2, 1 (Spring 2017): 5.

¹⁶ I must say a special thank you to Louise Shelley, Collaborative Projects Curator, The Showroom for sharing practice on a research visit to London in 2016. Louise spoke of the complexities of navigating the Academy system in London, and put me in touch with allies and friends at the Radical Education Forum and Schooling & Culture. I attended a launch of School & Culture in June 2017, and would like to thank the group of artists, cultural practitioners and teachers for a stimulating conversation, much of which has pushed my thinking around radical education and my own ways of working with young people.

¹⁷ Education Scotland defines the “outcomes” of learning through the expressive arts as:
“My learning in, through and about the expressive arts:
• enables me to experience the inspiration and power of the arts
• recognizes and nurtures my creative and aesthetic talents
• allows me to develop skills and techniques that are relevant to specific art forms and across the four capacities
• provides opportunities for me to deepen my understanding of culture in Scotland and the wider world
• is enhanced and enriched through partnerships with professional arts companies, creative adults and cultural organizations.” See: Education Scotland. Curriculum for Excellence: Expressive Arts – Experiences and Outcomes. Livingston, 2009. https://education.gov.scot/Documents/expressive-arts-eo.pdf [accessed 06/03/18]

¹⁸ In the UK, academies are independent schools funded directly by central government, run by a trust, and often sponsored by a business, faith group or similar. This breaks with the state school system, historically under the purview and in receipt of funding from local authorities (municipal governments).
UK Government. Types of school. https://www.gov.uk/types-of-school/academies [accessed 06/03/18]

¹⁹ STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, with governments across the UK, including Scotland, having various strategies to promote and improve attainment in STEM subjects, seen (in the words of the UK Government) as key “to grow a dynamic, innovative economy.” Department of Education, UK Government. STEM strategy. https://www.education-ni.gov.uk/articles/stem-strategy [accessed 06/03/18]

²⁰ As Education Scotland put it in an impact report on the importance of ‘creativity’: “It is anticipated that young people leaving school today will have many different careers in their lives. This means they will have to be imaginative, flexible, adaptable, able to identify quickly their next steps and be able to implement them – all skills which sit within the realm of creativity.” Education Scotland. Creativity Across Learning 3-18. Livingston, 2013. https://education.gov.scot/parentzone/Documents/Creativity3to18ImpactReport.pdf [accessed 06/03/18]

²¹ For an account of the pervasiveness of ‘creative economies’ that emerged under successive governments in the United Kingdom, notably under Tony Blair and the New (Neoliberal) Labour Party from the mid-nineteen nineties, see the work of Angela McRobbie (whilst often addressing the role of further and higher education in producing neoliberal workers, I think it holds true for all levels of education, particularly when the arts or creative industries introduce their working practices through state school outreach and education programs):  Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge; Malden: Polity Press, 2015). See also: McRobbie, Angela. “Re-Thinking Creative Economy as Radical Social Enterprise,” Variant 41 (Spring 2011): 32—33. http://www.variant.org.uk/pdfs/issue41/amcrobbie41.pdf [accessed 06/03/18]

²² I reference here Apple’s advertising slogan, “Think different”, used from 1997 until 2002, to demonstrate the slippery use of language and ambiguity of term like “different”; like the term “creative learning”, it can all too easily capitulate to the most explicit aims of relations under capital – i.e. the use of knowledge and culture in the reproduction of said relations.

²³ Harry Weeks, “The Permitted Autonomy of Contemporary Art”. Presentation, The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, the University of Edinburgh, 2016.

²⁴ Within a given field, agents, be them artists, critics, or objects (an art work), occupy various positions and are defined in relation to one another, which in turn constitutes ‘the field’, as Bourdieu explains: “the space of positions, is nothing other than the structure of the distribution of the capital of specific properties which governs success in the field”. The interdependency between the field of art and the field of power, weighted to the more dominant, latter field, creates a double hierarchy within the artistic field, consisting of two poles: one heteronomous, more connected with the field of power, marked by success in the form of economic profit (e.g. sales of artworks); and one autonomous, marked by “degree specific consecration (literary or artistic prestige)”. Bourdieu, Pierre. ‘The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed’. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) 3—4.

²⁵ Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press. 2011) 2—3.

²⁶ Alix Kates Shulman,,“Women of the PEN: Dances with Feminists,” in: The Women’s Review of Books, 1991, 9 (3): 13. https://doi.org/10.2307/4021093. [accessed 06/03/18]