Defacement, dematerialisation and erasure: The Artist Learner

and Contemporary Art Practices

Jeff Adams
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual
Conference, University of Manchester, 2-5 September 2009

This paper explores teachers and learners creative activity in the

context of their exposure to contemporary art practices. The starting
point is the findings of a recent research project in the UK, Teaching
through Contemporary Art, (TCA) in which teachers developed
experimental classroom practices brought about by their direct
engagement with contemporary artists. This often resulted in the
instigation of socially engaged collaborative learning practices,
involving unorthodox methods such as dematerialisation,
defacement and erasure, making a striking contrast with the
formulaic art curriculum commonly found in state schools. When
contemporary creative events occurred it was frequently under the
reductive constraints of regulated institutional curricular and
prescribed teaching methods, and this paper explores the alternative
conditions necessary for sustained, dynamic models of creative
practice.
The imperative for research into new pedagogies based on
contemporary art arises from their conspicuous difference to the
equivalent art practices that normally occur in schools. These are
characterised by a hierarchical concept of art driven by concepts of
individualistic talent and genius, and the adherence to a well
established and largely unquestioned canon of great artists who

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work within a narrow range of aesthetic codes, normally those
associated with mimetic depiction. Pedagogically these regimes rely
upon an expert specialist for delivery of skills and appropriate
sensibilities to a largely passive set of recipients the learners. The
ability to utilise representational systems through a specific kind of
naturalistic realism is often of importance when childrens work is
assessed, even if this is not explicitly stated; the progression toward
this particular system is often assumed to be acquired through the
natural developmental of the child.
Many TCA encounters, on the other hand, were much closer to
the sharing of ideas in an arts or science community, where the
motivation is centred on the pleasure of articulating and sharing the
idea or event-residue of the creative act, and the perils of failure or
mistakes appears to recede. As a TCA teacher explained:
One of the things which struck me was the significant
difference between the realities of making art myself, how I
go through processes and create things, I was particularly
depressed at the emphasis placed on the idea of producing
final pieces. As though anything was ever final [] I
decided that this would be the focus of the project: no more
preparatory studies, no final pieces. This new approach
could be summed up as: make something, talk about it,
make it again or make something else.

An important reason for TCA was the frequently debated idea that
contemporary art practices often engage directly with social identity
issues that affect children profoundly, such as gender, sexuality,
race and media culture.

There has been considerable research and academic speculation on

the conditions that facilitate (or prevent) such contemporary creative
production in education: Arthur Hughes for instance, argues that the

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concept of a planned learner response governed by predetermined
learning outcomes will primarily present the learner with obstacles;
Efland, Freedman and Stuhr, and Tara Page el al similarly refute
many orthodox practices and instead emphasise the importance of
responding to the social and political context within which learners
find themselves, and bel hooks argues that acknowledging learner
voice is crucial. Even the fundamental principle of the institutional
constructs of learner and teacher are cast into doubt by identity
theorists such as Judith Butler whose concept of performing
identity cannot help but force a critical review of what we mean by
such positioning, and Dennis Atkinson explores the contradictions
inherent in assumptions of fixed, predetermined classroom
identities.

Learner choice of content and procedure was much in evidence in

the TCA project, but the concept of learner agency needs to be
carefully distinguished from the ideologically appropriated rhetoric
of choice. This has had a good airing in recent years through
neoliberal discourse, which has found its way into educational
theory and policy. Slovoj Zizeks (2009) theories of choice seem
relevant here: as he argues, We are forced to live as if we were
free (quoting John Gray); in constructing this oxymoron he is
making a critique of reactionary approaches to politics in the guise
of freedom of choice. This ideology of choice is manifest in
contradictory educational methods, a poignant example of which
occurs in the common classroom practice where learners are made
to choose a best design or text from an assemblage of samples
that they have, in theory, prepared beforehand. In reality the
samples have been produced by coercion, often retrospectively, and

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usually impelled by the authority of the qualification system,
encouraged by a teacher who is under pressure to achieve good
results as a measure of their performance. Such pedagogic fictions
were rejected by TCA teachers in favour of strategies that
sometimes critiqued the idea of choice itself and the underlying
power relations it expressed.

Risk
Examples of risky strategies using contemporary practices were
evident in several of the TCA projects, in particular when teacher
Marisa created the conditions that enabled children to make choices
about the method and content of their work, even where this resulted
in unpalatable consequences for the institution. The pupils opted for
a graffiti type project in the mode of the artist Banksy. Banksys
work comprises political commentary through clandestine
interventions into public spaces and institutions such as museums,
and he employs methods such as graffiti, cartoon murals and bogus
exhibits. This artists celebrity status in the UK, in combination with
his critical posturing, has considerable allure for the students.
Usually he is studied in reductive and sanitised ways, through drawn
illustrations or photo reproductions in students sketches and design
journals.

In this TCA project the students agreed through debate with their
teacher Marisa (despite the reservations she expressed) to emulate
Banksys work by authentic methods: creating critical public works
by similarly clandestine means, including performances and
interventions into institutional and orthodox practices, such as
filmed performances such as spraying stencilled graffiti on nearby

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underpass walls, and text statements on ceilings and windows. The
works were rendered in such a way that they were all able to be
easily removed later by their author/artists, although this would not
have not apparent to the spectators the passing public and school
teachers; a competitively playful and perhaps mischievous mode of
practice chosen by the pupils, given the well publicised and
controversial practices of the artist. The characteristics of this
project, which is more properly described as a series of
interventions, illustrate the uneasy relationship between institutions,
concepts of professionalism, and art.

Risk is a commonly used word in institutional policies describing

practices that are thought to foster creative or imaginative thinking,
and it often appears in the assessment criteria of arts subjects. Yet
social and political risk, generated through the same processes of
new thinking, are usually avoided; rather creative risk is often used
a synonym for experimenting with unfamiliar techniques or subject
matter, or at its most extreme for the declaration of mistakes. In the
Banksy project, however, it meant pupils operating through methods
likely to be construed as vandalism, defacement or social dissent,
criticism that has been levelled at Banksys work itself. Challenging
institutional practices to the extent that the teachers professionalism
may be compromised, and the children might elicit institutional or
public distain, is certainly very risky. However, these practices
Banksy-type interventions and performance in the contemporary
art milieu in which they are ordinarily located, might be seen as
quite orthodox, and the collaboration, planning and execution of
such clandestine art manoeuvres celebrated. The students were
making their creative production an accurate parallel of the well-

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established social interventionist art practice, but in institutional
terms they were troubling the concept of creativity and artistic
practice.

The Banksy projects pedagogically unorthodox interventionist

approach resonates with the artist Richard Serras recent remarks:
Everyone who makes art has to invent their own
procedures Every generation will invent their own
procedures and processes for their own needs.

This is because much contemporary art is dynamically integrated

into society, as socially engaged practices. In order for artists and
learners to make an intelligible social response they must by
necessity be current and contemporary in their thinking, which
brings with it social dilemmas such as teacher Marisa experienced
with the Banksy-style interventions.

Erasure
During the TCA project teachers frequently had to contend with
unexpected practices. The extent to which teachers may have to
accommodate the unfamiliar through their engagement with
contemporary modes of creativity may be extreme, given that the
extent that the work as object, and with it the proposed learning
outcome in its material form, may disappear entirely.

A literal example of this occurred through an iconoclastic learning

event precipitated by an artistic encounter between myself with two-
year-old grandson Sonny, which makes an interesting corollary to
the projects discoveries. Sonny, drawing on a blackboard, asked for

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assistance but deferred when I begin to contribute. Even at two
years old he recognised my status in a number of social hierarchies,
not least that of the artist. Rather than contribute to the drawing,
Sonny decided to command, offering imperatives such as draw a
ship or draw a dog. The situation, took an unexpected turn when
Sonny commandeered the board rubber and started to erase the
drawings. Sonny then quickened the pace and rubbed out images
during the act of drawing. We were playing, in Bruners sense of the
word: societal mimesis was occurring and the consequences for
error were downplayed. The reduction of social risk, however,
increased the aesthetic risk taking, and therefore the value or
significance of the artistic engagement.

In this respect Sonnys play is reminiscent of the encounter between

the American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning,
which resulted in the work Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953, San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In this artistic, rather Dadaist
engagement, Rauschenberg made a request to erase one of de
Koonings drawings. De Kooning, at the time a much more famous
and established artist, participated by selecting a drawing that was
hard to rub out (a paint and ink drawing). Rauschenberg duly spent
three months making his erasure, presenting the finished piece as a
new work. Sonnys two-year-old practice of erasure, and the demise
of my image making, took the form of such contemporary aesthetic
play. Once completed, little discernable material trace was left of
either participants work, making the temporal visual exchanges the
most significant component of the encounter.

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In many TCA instances subjectivities were exchanged: the role of
the teacher emerged in the learner, reinforcing the idea of the artist-
learner as well as the artist learner. This constant shifting of the role
of the generator of ideas oscillated from teacher to learner in the
same way that it oscillated between Rauschenberg and de Kooning.
Rauschenberg was attributed the final artwork, but this only serves
to raise the question: was this work and is any work ever truly
attributable to any single agency? Yet in a contemporary artistic
sense this dichotomy is already anachronistic, since communal
agency has many precedents (viz. Gilbert and George, Guerrilla
girls, Singh sisters, Chapman Brothers) and the vanishing,
dematerialised object has been commonplace for decades. Can art
production ever escape being in some fundamental sense
collaborative and experimental, and if so, is that also the condition
of all institutionally produced knowledge, irrespective of the author?

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