Artist pedagogy, broadly speaking, is both the ways in which artists teach artists and research into this. Those artists being taught might be understood as aspiring artists and so most often, but not exclusively, artist pedagogies take place in post compulsory education: in academies, schools, and departments of art in universities, as well as in alternative art schools. But artist pedagogy might also take place in less formal settings in which artists interact including in studios or during residencies, and they have been adapted and adopted for use in other situations. Although there are many exceptions it is often the case in these post compulsory settings that students are more likely to have decided to pursue a life in the arts and dedicated themselves to full time study of a particular area of interest and that meaningful teaching can take place because there is a shared desire between teacher and student: the desire to be an artist1.
In those formalised educational settings, my area of interest is often called fine art, but would perhaps better be thought of as contemporary visual art. This is a term I take to include forms of art which historically appealed to the ocular but also the many practices which inhabit the same galleries, museums, and journals, or are otherwise connected critically, conceptually, or aesthetically, or through modes of distribution and reception that have developed out of or evolved from challenges to those ocular practices. I’m thinking specifically of sound art, writing, and performance practices that are aligned more with the visual arts than they are music, literature, or theatre, although these distinctions are far from rigid. Within each of these practices there are pluralities, and within and beyond those pluralities there are differences, as well as connections, the lines between disciplines are increasingly blurred.
I think it was Terry Eagleton who suggested that not all fields have boundaries, and this is nowhere more the case than in contemporary art. We might think of Rosalind Krauss’ famous statement “categories like sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity, a display of the way a cultural term can be extended to include just about anything.” (1979:31). While neither Eagleton or Krauss were necessarily proposing this as positive, in the post-Duchampian it is largely the artist who defines what is art. I say largely because any redefinition is contingent on breaking a set of cultural or medium specific norms and conventions (as Greenberg described them) and therefore relative to those norms and conventions, but not beholden to them.
This striving for novelty is one reason we still debate whether art can be taught or not. Artist educators Luis Camnitzer (2020) and Al-An DeSouza (2018) reach similar conclusions about this. For both, the purpose of an art education is to enable the student to realise what is yet to be realised, to make anew, to discover. What does not exist cannot be taught, but as Camnitzer explains, “This, however, does not mean that either art, or discovery should remain untouched by education. On the contrary, education in art should enable the process of discovery and creation.” (279). While de Souza concludes that because “some students will […] uncover new material, new insights, and new techniques, but also reuses, revisions, and reconfigurations of the old and already existing,” and their teachers “will not have known any of these future discoveries or revisions […] it is technically accurate to say that they wouldn’t have taught them.” Hence for deSouza “Art, then, strictly speaking, isn’t taught. What are taught instead are the technical, conceptual, and critical methods to pursue art.” (65) But I think there are also moments when we teach the students that they are making art. Moments of pointing the student towards something in the work they have been making, perhaps something they have overlooked and sharing a sense of wonder in the often small, subtle and hitherto unconsidered aspect of a particular work or their emerging practice more generally.
I think this is an aspect of what Gert Biesta (2022) describes as the gesture of redirecting the student’s attention. In the art school this is more complicated than other settings as not only are we seeking to redirect the student’s attention, but the student is also learning to redirect the attention of the viewer through their work. This is a redirecting of the viewers’ attention in ways that might reorder how we see or understand the world. We might conclude that what can be taught are ways in which one might achieve their own forms of creation in relation to what exists; the strategies of thought and material engagement, or to put it another way the conceptual and technical means which can lead to realising not just novelty – but meaningful ways to see and understand the world differently and how to make this manifest through manipulating stuff, language, sound, space, or movement (the list could go on).
Barry Schwabsky (2013: 160) has observed that students emerging from the best art schools graduate with a balance of these conceptual and technical skills, but more commonly schools provide students with in-depth training in one or the other. I think the best artist teachers understand these are not necessarily distinct aspects of the work of art but that they are inherently connected. The question becomes one, not of whether this can be taught, but of how it can be taught, and moreover how one might arrive at being able to teach this.
Formal pedagogical training for artist teachers working in higher education was rare until relatively recently and even now specific training for the field is far from common. I have encountered arguments that it is professionalising and therefore in contradiction to the aspects of the modernist project which amplified notions of artistic autonomy and of deskilling. There is (or perhaps was) also the idea that one’s experience as an artist, and of art school should be enough and that training may iron out difference and lead to something more generic. Typically, pedagogical training comes once in post and hence most artist teachers rely in the first instance at least on their own experience of being taught as the basis of their teaching. The interviews that I have conducted with artist teachers suggest that this is as often a reaction to bad experiences as it is good. Either way those experiences are filtered through the unique lived experience of the individual and their development as an artist after graduation. Artists often bring something of themselves and the ways in which they seek to remake the world to their teaching. Perhaps it is also because in learning to become an artist we learn to be an autodidact, and it is in this spirit that development of our pedagogical skills is pursued. Hence even without formal training many artists have sought to reimagine and develop their teaching.
For these reasons (the experience from one’s own studio and the idiosyncrasies and of an autodidactic development) it is possible to imagine that there are as many ways of teaching as there are teachers, and to some extent this is true. On the other hand, there are generic and repeated methods and approaches, which sometimes vary little from one generation to another. Across much of the West and beyond this currently includes a strong focus on discursive or dialogical approaches to teaching delivered most often in tutorials and group critique. These privilege cognitive and critical development over the acquisition of skills and are often framed around the student’s intention for the work above any shared foundation or any attempt to establish common understandings. Such is the prevalence of critical discursive approaches that Camnitzer (2020: 274) has suggested they have become institutionalised and therefore problematic. Also prevalent is the belief that we can teach process, or at least that our teaching can lead the students to developing their own processes through which meaning is arrived at. That one should start with interest and curiosity as the basis of the work rather than illustrating existing meaning. For many this involves processes of unlearning. This is sometimes misapplied to suggest that art education at school has no, or even negative value. It is however better understood as the ways in which learning art might lead to unlearning received and problematic social and political frames and assumptions (Baldacchino 2019).
Commonalities are typically loose, and the approaches thorough which they are delivered can vary radically. In reality artist teachers do not often agree what makes a good work of art, let alone how to teach. Agreement on pedagogical approach within an institution is not necessarily important, indeed the opposite may be true2. Exposing students to different ways critical understandings of what art might can help them to develop their own understanding and practice. While different pedagogies might engage and reach different students. Delivered badly this can lead to confusion, but when done well it can support the students in developing a practice which the territory of which they define themselves and results in a practice which is does not repeat the work or interests their tutors. To put it another way modelling is less likely because it allows the students the space to make the “discoveries and revisions” that de Souza describes.
H Ouramo, the rector of Art School Maa explains that “... art is a space of new forms, no forms, refusal and riot. An art school has to organise around liveable conditions and mutual respect to which to do work with the unfinished, the refusing, the monstrous, the everyday, the serious, the unnecessary.” (2021: 138). Art schools are then many things at once and being in them can often seem as if there is little that unifies the fragmented thinking and pedagogies, and artistic practices one encounters in them. As a result, the research we have conducted at the University of the Arts Helsinki has not aimed at producing punch lines of formulas, or universalities. Over these past few years however, I have encountered artist pedagogues who are rethinking aspects of their work, innovating and researching around this. This is often in response to an understanding of the failures of what exists and that in a changing world art might need to be taught differently.
These are not pedagogies of slippage3, artist educators think carefully about is lost when we decide to do something new. Questions are asked about whether our pedagogy should be changing to reflect society or attempting can change society. It is impossible in a short article to list all these shifts, but they include responses new technology such as students’ experiences of social media and how and if this relates to increased individualism, and more recently generative AI; a shift from thinking about space to one of thinking about place and the attendant relationships between the local, regional and global; how such ideas of place relate to the development of community within art schools as well as the art schools relationship to the communities around it; relationships between discipline, interdisciplinarity, and indisciplinarity4; how students might pursue socially engaged practices within the frames of our curricula; how those curricula might increasingly become the product of codesign or at least more transparent in terms of the ideological positions they engage and challenge; a rethinking of what should constitute “professional practice” or its equivalents; the challenges of reflecting a fragmented and plural art world in our teaching; and a greater foci on decolonising curricula and self-educating in an attempt to re-evaluate what is taught and why5.
Much of this involved is part of a reimagining of the pedagogical relationship between student and tutor and this has a long history. There are aspects of this in the modernist belief that creativity exists in everyone rather than genius that resided in the few, and the approach of the Bauhaus and the colleges it influenced of bringing this creativity out. Or the shift toward discursive pedagogies which, in focusing on the student’s intent, was a step towards challenging the authority of the teacher and the master narrative of formalism. The success of this is questionable, within a generation of the introduction of discursive pedagogies at St Martins Bruce Nauman had described the group crit by explaining that “twelve adult men would walk for hours around a sculpture and mumble.” (Crippa, 2016: 141) This points both the difficulty in removing the authority from the student teacher dynamic because as Elena Crippa points out there is a performative aspect in this behaviour: one which involved modelling the tutor; and the fact that acknowledging and challenging that authority is generational work. What was once radical can easily become institutionalised.
This leads me to the question of whether or not what we do is pedagogy at all. On the one hand we are dealing with adults and not children. The Bauhaus was influenced by the reform pedagogy of Pestalozzi, Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, and Steiner (Forgács, 2020: 208) whose theories were predominantly aimed at the education of children. In turn the influence of the Bauhaus can still be found in many art schools, and so there are pedagogical routes to aspects of our teaching. But through its etymology pedagogy contains notions of leading a child, even if in ancient Greece the pedagogos was as likely to be following an adolescent male carrying their sports equipment, who may on occasion also be called upon to also teach some etiquette (Young. 2011: 22-25). To return to the conclusion of Camnitzer and de Souza, we are not leading our students to a specific destination but attempting to help them find the means through which they might reach own. Although the metaphor of a journey is a common one, we do not lead our students on that journey but help them find their own path through the complexities of becoming and to being an artist. To extend the metaphor this is not about providing a map but helping the students to plot their own. We can help the students understands those norms and conventions with the aim of them finding their own way beyond or around them. This is important if we want the students to become autodidacts, because the journey does not stop with graduation.
I am pointing to the value of the practicing artist as teacher and it is possible to see a contradiction in the claim that there is great value in this, but at the same time suggesting that it is not the authority they draw from their (authorial) experience that is valued. I believe it is the cartographic knowledge rather, the experience of having travelled rather than a specific journey that matters. Here it is not the authority that counts but what we share in our desire to be artists and our understanding of how one can realise this on their own terms. As such our teaching has to be adapted to reflect the developing practice of each student. As Phyllida Barlow explained:
“… every day is a new day. You feel you have no history as a teacher, you almost feel you have no history as an artist. You enter the studio and the tutorial starts from scratch each time and therefore you are in a process of constant renewal.” (Rearden, 2009: 36)
This is not an easy task, as Barlow continues “Unfortunately every teacher has their predictable emotional, passionate luggage, and the students are the first to recognise this.” (36/7). Daniel Birnbaum his former Tobias Rehberger colleague from the Städleschule teaching who he explains encourages the students to surprise him, “You have to go beyond what I’m telling you. Otherwise you can only reach my level and that’s not very interesting because you’re already there.” He explains that “If you’re able to get rid of the kitsch you’re carrying around, then you almost automatically get there.”(online) We might also reflect that part of the work we have to do as teachers is to move beyond our own pedagogical kitsch. All of this takes time and space to achieve (things the institution must provide), and the process is in my experience rarely one of revelation (although these moments are important) and more often a question of incremental change rather than constant surprise.
Art schools are places of wonder but also places of mundanity. They incubate revelation but often this emerges from boredom. This is a privilege. To slow down in an accelerating world, to look, and think, and look again. To make, and think, and look, and talk, and make again. To find commonality, and space for one’s individuality, and for this to converge in communities of thought and communities of practice which evolve with the flow of students, with their shifting worldviews and lived experiences. Being in art school as an educator is hence always in flux. It seems almost too obvious to say that the art world, indeed the world more generally the academy is changing, and our pedagogies have to position themselves in relation to this whether as islands of consistency or in a more responsive manner. This is not necessarily a question of reflecting the world nor of opposing it. But one of being able to allow our students to develop agency in relation to it and to understand the potential of their artistic voices both collectively and individually.
My opening claim for artist pedagogy (whether we continue with the term pedagogy or settle upon something better) that it “broadly speaking, is both the ways in which artists teach artists (or students of art) and research into this” is not quite adequate. Artist pedagogy is the combination of both. Pedagogy is not just an action, nor is it only an understanding of that action. It is, much like the development of the students’ practice that I am advocating for, which emerge from a process and exist in relation to the critical understanding and the act of making, a combination of the two. Just as one can write about art without being an artist so one can research pedagogy without being a pedagogue. Pedagogy is an embodied practice informed by critical reflection and the development of a responsive theoretical position. I argue that in case of artist pedagogy because of the complexities of engaging in the act of making and developing an understanding of the making, and this necessitates being an artist.
1 Jon Thompson (2011: 313-319) the former head of art at Goldsmiths claims this shared desire is the most important factor of a successful art school.
2 Reflecting on his time as rector of the Städelschule Daniel Birnbaum argued the artists who teach in art schools ”[…] do not have to agree on anything and should only represent themselves.” (online).
3 In a paper delivered at the conference Teaching Painting: Painting the New, which took place at the Royal Academy of Art, London in 2018, Julia Morrisroe, professor of painting and drawing at the University of Florida college of the Arts described the pedagogies of slippage as the tendency develop pedagogies and curricula without paying full attention to what is lost in the process.
4 Alistair Payne (2017:27) borrows from Jacques Ranciere to suggest that “Indisciplinarity […] constitutes a ‘productive’ form of re-establishing the grounds for disciplinarity stretched in order to extend the position of painting […]”
5 deSouza’s How Art Can Be Thought includes a ”Glossary of Contested Terms.” (2018: 85-364) that includes many more of the issues we address in art schools.
References:
Baldacchino, J. 2019. Art as Unlearning: Towards a Mannerist Pedagogy. Routledge.
Biesta, G. 2022. World Centred Education: A View for the Present. Routledge.
Birnbaum, D. Online. The Art of Education. Art Forum. Retrieved from: https://www.artforum.com/features/the-art-of-education-180324/ March 2025
Camnitzer, L. 2020. One Word is Worth One Number. Sternberg Press.
Crippa, E. 2016. From Crit to Lecture Performance. In Llewellyn, N. and Williams, B. eds. 2016.
deSouza, A. 2018. How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change. Duke University Press.
Forgács, E. 2020. The Bauhaus Paradox. In Hegyi, László, and Zólym. eds. 2020.
Kraus, R. Hartshorne, Moloney, and Quaife eds. 2017. Teaching Painting: How Can Painting be Taught in Art Schools? Blackdog
Hegyi, László, and Zólym. eds. 2020. Creativity Exercises: Emancipatory Pedagogies in Art and Beyond. Sternberg Press.
Llewellyn, N. and Williams, B. Eds. 2016. The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now. Tate Publishing
Ouramo, H. 2021. Maan Uumen: Taidekoulu Maa – Art School Maa, 1986-2021. Taidekoulu Maa.
Payne, A. 2017. On Painting, The Discipline, interdisciplinarity, and indisciplinarity. In Hartshorne, Moloney, and Quaife eds. 2017.
Rearden, J. 2008. Ch-ch-ch-changes: Aritsts Talk About Teaching. Ridinghouse.
Schwabsky, B. 2013. Words for Art: Criticism, Theory, Practice. Sternberg Press.
Thompson, J. 2011. The Collected Writings of Jon Thompson. Riding House.
Young, N. H. 2011. Pedagogy: A Lexical Oddity. Avondale University. DOI: 10.55254/1835-1492.1039