C110 article

Art / People • Fine Artist - Fine Fishermen¹, or the educational function of art within a public and social context

Thinking about an approach for an essay on art education, I decided to start with the Art rather than the Education. So I began with the artwork itself, and reflecting on the educational core within it, rather than an analysis of the art-educational programmes that run parallel to the work. Access and interpretation programmes, whether within formal education or in a gallery programme, are a necessary and valid way of negotiating a way around the concerns of contemporary art and, in a strong programme, are thoroughly connected to the values of the artwork. However, I wanted to begin with an artistic first principle, that the fundamental nature of art is an educative one where the artist's first intention, before any content or subject matter, is to show this work to other people, to make public the idea and complete the circle with a viewing audience.

To examine these principles of art made public and art as an education leads to a very specific place, a location usually found outwith the gallery or museum - art in a public and social context. It is a form as diverse as the constituencies being addressed, as specific as a post code (mail art), as wide as the web (digital art), a permanent memorial or a fly-posting project - "visual art that uses both traditional and nontraditional media to communicate and interact with a broad and diversified audience about issues directly relevant to their lives, based on engagement"² At its best it is a life-long commitment from the artist to explore meaning with an audience, at worst a parachuted-in project and a sadly ill-fitting artwork.

Certainly many artists work on socially related projects but would not call themselves community or public artists. But while the terms have been discredited, the number of artists working in this field has increased and the scope of projects has diversified. At best such practices explore notions of history and locality in relation to a specific site or local community. In this way the artist breaks away from the trap of being surrogate social workers, and amateur art teachers and actively engages with the creation of the social context.³

Whilst the issues around the creation of socially engaged work are many and varied - not least the terms used to describe it - the issue of the potential educational power within such work is not as widely debated as some others, such as how to define the quality of the work, or assess the artists' intention. This article is an attempt to raise an educational debate in relation to publicly sited work, to demonstrate some of the skills employed by the artists and partners, and to reflect on the range of possible audiences, and what they might gain from engagement with the working processes.

Amanda McKirttrick: Recorded passage, 1994, installation, Harbour Museum, Derry; courtesy the artist

The educational difference made when encountering an artwork made in a public or socially engaged context is that the learning process takes place as a result of an involvement with the artist, and the activity of creating the work, rather than viewing the results in the usual setting of museum and gallery. This learning process is also of direct benefit to the artist as well as the participants, as the structure is less hierarchical than the tutor / student relationship and the flow of information is reciprocal. The fluid nature of this art education, as opposed to more measurable forms, accounts for both its strength and its ability to lie quietly dormant in much of the debate around the function of art in a public context.

The idea that much of the diversity of publicly sited artwork, whilst utterly of its time in terms of locating art beyond the gallery ("We have nearly come to the point where transgression is a given, Site specific works do not necessarily disrupt our notion of context and alternative spaces seem nearly the norm"⁴), yet still capable of demonstrating some of the first principles of art as a communicative and educational tool, is a persuasive argument. As Suzanne Lacy states in her introduction to Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, a mid-nineties American publication which has a definitive collection of writings by critics, artists and curators who have pioneered work in this field, "public art has a history as ancient as cave painting or as recent as the Art in Public Places Program of the National Endowment for the Arts"⁵, or in our case, Percent for Art schemes and Lottery funding.

So lets take it as a given that most forms of artistic activity have at their heart some spirit of generosity, a show-and-tell aspect that propels the artists' intention into public scrutiny, whether this takes place in a gallery or museum or in the alternative spaces of a coyote cage or a sanitation system.⁶ This revelatory core is the educational heart of the work, the potential for development offered to the audience and the community, to participants and passers-by. Another one of the areas that allows the artistic education to be different within this context is the entirely flexible and sometimes unacknowledged nature of this process within the work itself, and the potential to act as a real or symbolic catalyst for other actions within a community or social group.

Artists pioneering this type of approach in the forties and fifties were such as Joseph Beuys, who was ideologically connected to the earlier Dadaists and practically to the Fluxus movement in the sixties. His work in the public arena moved between performance, installation, sculpture and politics, all of which he believed were linked to the transformative experience of art. Education was a fundamental principle of his philosophy and a part of his public interventions, quite apart from his tenure as a teacher at the Düsseldorf Art Academy for twenty years. Allan Kaprow's influential work as a teacher and artist began with 'happenings' in the late fifties, and he committed himself to turning his life into "living art."

Artlike art holds that art is separate from life and everything else, whilst lifelike art holds that art is connected to life and everything else. In other words there is art at the service of art, and art at the service of life.⁷)

There is a circuitous, organic learning path that can be followed by those who become involved with the creation of artwork in context, often beginning with the artists themselves. Describing the set of skills invariably acquired by artists working as active catalysts for change within their communities, Suzanne Lacy stated:

The artist must act in collaboration with people, and with an understanding of social systems and institutions. Entirely new strategies must be learned: how to collaborate, how to develop multilayered and specific audiences, how to cross over with other disciplines, how to choose sites that resonate with public meaning, and how to clarify visual and process symbolism for people who are not educated in art.⁸

For artists in this field the educational journey can be immense, far exceeding their original set of aesthetic and studio-based skills in practice and theory, expression of the individual artistic idea, and distanced conception of audience. Within the life of the project the artist may share and demonstrate their artistic skills and concerns to participants and partners, but equally the partners may contribute their particular skills and life experiences to the artist and this relationship and the work will benefit from the pooling of all the available skills and resources.

Image from drawing workshop held during D - n an Grianán, Sliabh Sneachta Public Art Commission, Buncrana, Co. Donegal, 2004; courtesy the author / Artlink

The skills in the work of Martha Rosler and her complex, layered projects using photography, installation, critical writing and performance address issues of marginalisation and displacement, and the manipulation of social spaces. The strong desire to educate is evident in this activist-feminist practice, through the wide range of audiences being addressed, from the art literate in galleries through exhibitions and publications to the public arena via performances and installations. Projects such as If You Lived Here...⁹, a series of panel discussions and exhibitions organised by Rosler for the Dia Art Foundation; this was an exploration of 'the production of space' with themes and sections on housing, homelessness, real estate and urban planning.

For the audience that is directly engaged by the work, including participants, collaborators and non-art partners, volunteers and assistants, the experience can involve research into specific issues of social concern, local and environmental impacts, marginalised and forgotten histories. A key area of education identified by participants in socially engaged projects is often the gaining of artistic and other skills within the framework of a project, giving both a sense of personal satisfaction and communal achievement.

The traditional audience, defined as those who attend the viewing of the completed installation or exhibition, in this case may also have a connection to the aims of the work, through the specificity of issue, site or community, and they fulfill a supportive role in disseminating information about the activity throughout the wider community.

In turn this audience can extend beyond direct experience of the artwork to a media audience that encounters the artwork via a review, an installation shot in an arts journal, an inclusion in a website, and this also contributes to the 'myth and memory'¹⁰ of the work, which can potentially occupy a powerful symbolic space far beyond the initial context. This process is as true for Van Gogh's Sunflowers as it is for Rachel Whiteread's House or Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where an awareness and knowledge about the particular artwork has been disseminated through media and documentary showings of the work over a period of time.

The nature of the skills shared with the participants is often very specific to the project being undertaken, and may also be focused on the expertise of the individuals within the group - Recorded Passage was an exhibition created by artist Amanda McKittrick in Glasgow and Derry, with women from Castlemilk in Glasgow, Carndonagh in Donegal, and Newbuildings in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. The resulting exhibition was shown in related venues in Glasgow and the Harbour Offices (now the Harbour Museum) in Derry. Working together and individually the women collected archive photographs, text from original documents and oral histories, all representative of patterns and stories of emigration from their home areas. The skills of the artist and of the participants were both factors in shaping the work:

Recorded Passage...used the mechanical processes of sewing, photography, photocopying, all technological and learned or developed skills rather than instinctive or elemental. This suggests a sophistication, a technical knowledge or skill, a command or control, experience, maturity, design, planning... in Recorded Passage the use of a developed skill sought to reinforce equality not simply in terms of basic creative instincts, but an equality of consciousness and control over the work of art being produced. The women in Recorded Passage have to be in agreement with me in relation to the overall plan for the finished work...¹¹

The meaning of the work is often a result of this process of negotiation between the intention of the artist and the relationship established with the audience, and it is this level of flexible participation that forms and informs the work - how it functions as integral to the work's structure' that provides the strongest model for an art education with real connectedness, one that may gradually increase its influence in the teaching of art in the institutions of schools, galleries, museums.

Artlink is a visual-arts organisation based in Inishowen, Donegal, and it exists to promote access to high-quality visual arts and to create opportunities for participation in collaborative and community contexts. Studio-based programmes and developmental outreach activities are undertaken with a wide and varied participatory audience, and the value of educational principles is central to all aspects of the programme including curated projects, exhibitions and art in public places:

Artlink recognises the distinct educational value inherent in the visual arts in terms of its potential to enhance critical thinking skills, develop specific workforce skills and its ability to connect individuals to their own culture and to society...learning communities and lifelong learning are encouraged through work that engages people from all ages and educational backgrounds.¹²

Art in a public context has always been an element of Artlink's activities and this focus will be increased in the future. This will be in terms of permanent works under the Percent for Art scheme, but equally importantly the social and public context will be addressed by artists' responses in temporary and site-specific projects, in partnership and collaboration with a range of partners.

Mhairi Sutherland is an artist and curator based in Derry and Donegal and the Director of Artlink, Inishowen.

¹The title comes from an incident during my time at art college in Donegal, when a group of young men approached us - a small group of female art students on a night out - for a dance. On enquiring about we did for a living, one of our number informed them that we were studying to be fine artists. Equally serious came the reply that he and his friends were fine fishermen. It seemed like a good example of equitable skills.
²Suzanne Lacy, in Suzanne Lacy (ed.), Mapping the terrain, New Genre Public Art, Bay Press, Seattle, 1995
³Ewan Morrison, Why put art in a house?, Muster exhibition catalogue, 1998; Muster was a site-specific project in MOD housing in Helensburgh, Scotland by visual-art group Not in Kansas.
⁴Ewan Morrison (quoting Hal Foster, Decodings. Against Pluralism, 1986, pp. 25-26) Muster exhibition catalogue, 1998
⁵Suzanne Lacey, op. cit., p. 21
⁶Refers to Joseph Beuys' 1974 work Coyote: I like America and America likes me and the life work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles as the unsalaried artist in residence for New York City's Sanitation Department since 1970 to the present day.
⁷Susan Leibovitz Steinman (quoting Allan Kaprow, in section 5, p247 Mapping the terrain, New Genre Public Art. )
⁸Suzanne Lacey, op. cit., p. 177
⁹If You Lived Here...The City in Art, Theory and Social Activism, Discussions in Contemporary Culture no.6 ed. Martha Rosler and Brian Wallis pub. Seattle Bay Press 1991.
¹⁰Suzanne Lacey, op. cit., p. 180
¹¹From Conversations with the artist, Recorded Passage, 1993
¹²Drawing the Balance - A journey in Art, Education and Community, published by Artlink ltd. 2000

Article reproduced from CIRCA 110, Winter 2004, pp.38–41
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Comment 1

So refreshing to see creative people actually involved with ideas and idea generation. There is so much emphasis on technique and so little on ideas in fine art education. I don't think most people know what an idea is. Here's my attempt to define it: an amalgam between what you are trying to say and the technique you are using to say it. Regards, Lynn Smith I am doing a Master of Documentary Photography degree with Sydney College of the Arts, Australia. lynndarylsmith@yahoo.com.au see my images at... www.flickr.com/photos/lensmith/