“LU CH’AI says: Among those who study painting, some strive for an elaborate effect and others prefer the simple. Neither complexity in itself nor simplicity is enough. Some aim to be deft, others to be laboriously careful. Neither dexterity nor conscientiousness is enough. Some set great value on method, while others pride themselves on dispensing with method. To be without method is deplorable, but to depend entirely on method is worse. You must learn first to observe the rules faithfully; afterwards, modify them according to your intelligence and capacity. The end of all method is to seem to have no method.”
The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, 1679-1701.2
“The occasion makes the thief,” a phrase French pedagogue Fernand Deligny (Berges 1913- Monoblet 1996) frequently used to explain the role of an educator, which is to create the circumstances for others to forge a path that did not exist before, for an unseen to happen and then, in that sudden moment, to keep it for a while, sustain its fragility, and then its echoic memory, perhaps through a new disposition of the same gestures aligned (Guerra, 2024a).
The creativity of a thief must, therefore, be instrumentalized to transform our existing relational accepted systems. It is an action upon the world that involves co-instituting something else that was not there before; in fact, it can continue to be inexistent according to the existing rules. The existence of that inexistent now belongs only to the trajectorial fidelity of a body or a set of bodies. Everything has been transformed by it, by its sudden deviation, but perhaps no one will notice it until some moment in the future. That is a memory to come, which will wait till a different present allows its reappearing, when its reverberance finds a stage to relate again.
Deligny worked first at mental institutions in a period of constant change, as it was the Second World War and its aftermath in France (Álvarez de Toledo, 2001, p. 246). He finally left the institutional realm, even those places that were at the avant-garde of mental treatments, as was the case of La Borde Clinique (Deligny, 2007, p. 404). Deligny created an entirely new edifice of epistemic informal practices that allow him and his collaborators to resist and subsist plastically among and through the empire of institutionality. They did drawings, writings, paintings, movies, maps, and puppetry, among others. I have named that thinking created through practices a gestural philosophy (Guerra, 2024a, 2024b). I have also said already in other places that a gestural philosophy is a practice that unfolds through various means, working in provisional senses, jumping and disappearing, and forming echoic and solidary vessels that allow, for a while, the creation of a possibility to be felt, experienced, embodied, and not just seen. This is a philosophy that thinks in the sense of intense care, or as Bernard Stiegler insistently proposed, a thinking that is care: une pensée qui panse. A thinking that cares, or even heals, is a thinking that acts (operates) like a bandage. A technique that cures through practice: a “penser-panser.”
Let us follow Deligny’s definition of the work of an educator as performing circumstances that open cracks and holes into the given. In that case, artist pedagogy should be understood as a practice of elusive formats that enable the search for paths embodied in the students’ artistic research. That practice fosters a thinking that operates within the context created by the intersection of accumulated knowledge in practice and the possibilities enacted through the provisional system co-instituted by a learning community. That emergent, vulnerable knowledge, based on practice, operates with intense care because it is sustained by academic findings and experimental results, as well as the relational bonds formed through it. It is in that sense that I claim now artist pedagogy is a reparatory agency, because it allows the transformative potential of crafting new relational models of learning, thinking and care.
To repair is to acknowledge the fragility of the world/s (Shotwell, 2016, p. 86; Guerra, 2023). You repair when you realize and acknowledge existing damage. To repair is to act. To engage, mend, and restore is to construct relational worlds (Bennet, 2010; Escobar, 2018, 2024) that materialize affective formations (Kosofsky, 2002; Ahmed, 2004; Butler, 2015). Reparatory practices in the arts and design are those that respond, often informally, to existing damage resulting from different reasons: ecological, political, social, and/or economic circumstances, among others. Why, then, could Artist Pedagogy be counted as such? Because of its relational ontology. It is an artistic methodology grounded in practice and based on generative collective memory. This collective memory emerges through the practice, which is exscripted through the experiences of different bodies in the community: “Writing, and reading, is to be exposed, to expose oneself to this not-having (to this not-knowing) and thus to “exscription” (…) Writing is naked because it ‘exscripts,’ existence is naked because it is exscripted. (…) It is the heart of things which is exscripted.” (Nancy, 1990).
Artist pedagogy is composed of minor gestures, inexistent, almost nothing, operating as momentary fragments through which a collective memory can become present and, thus, be subjected and sustained through others. This pedagogy is being crafted and based on a collective memory transmitted throughout embodied practices, parallel to practices of, for example, meditation and skateboarding.
You can teach meditation techniques through a series of actions that will help you achieve a meditative state. However, you are the one who must endure the practice over time. In meditation, transmission must be complemented through the practice itself. Your body must learn through practice, by repetition, and allow that experience to be archived by your senses. Artist and professor Jaana Erkkilä-Hill has used skateboarding in one of her many reflections on Artist Pedagogy (Erkkilä, 2015).1 What interested me about her approach is that the bodily knowledge we acquire in skateboarding belongs to the practice itself and therefore is tied to the material conditions at hand and any potential improvement the practice can unfold through itself. Any learning from it is, at the same time, provisional in that sense, allowing its transformations throughout its practice in different moving bodies. Subjectivity becomes entangled by a relational sphere where human experience becomes a trace through which a memory wanders. The practice thinks through itself by a collective caring composed of the elements in that relational field. It is impossible to skate “theoretically.” You must immerse yourself (body-mind-environment) in it. I will even dare to say that you need to dissolve a learned self, and through that process of the practice, your entire body-mind dual problem becomes non-consciously participant with the environment. It is not a becoming part of something else, but instead becoming included in the iterative “and, and, and…” that Deleuze and Guattari write about (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Kanngieser, 2012).
Artist Pedagogy seems parallel to these examples of meditation and skateboarding. You cannot practice or learn how to practice art without involving your “self” in it, becoming with the practice, and letting your (that learned) “self” become something else, to be transformed by it, to displace or even dislocate your certainties over and over again. Regular and functionally learned thinking is then interrupted, plastically intervened by the practice. Another form of thinking becomes a participant in your daily experience, affecting the relational spheres of your experiences.
Today’s practice of art faces profound changes ahead that are already shaping a complex world, which does not mean abandoning the existing practices recognized as art in the modern European sense. However, it seems evident that there is an urgent necessity to open the fixed references to new, different forms of experience that are being lived.
As the main pedagogic aim of the art school is to train students in discovering their own art, the possibilities are open. Of course, I am talking here without the context of the labor market in mind. It is here that I establish the main difference that I see between Education and Pedagogy. Education is a system that is already agreed upon, aimed at regulating knowledge. At art schools, you will be educated to become an “agent” in the “ecosystem” of the “art world.” You will learn to behave institutionally, to talk in managerial ways, and even write in highly academic despair. Culturally, we are educated in terms of what seems to have been defined as necessary, generally, without dissent.
Contrary to it, I understand pedagogy as a practice that can change the educational environment, extending it, adapting it to the circumstances of a place or subject. Following Deligny, what defines the practice of the teacher, in general terms, is the possibility of allowing the appearance of deviating, bifurcating, or following an unseen path. In the case of Artist Pedagogy, I understand it as a practice that happens at the moment of a theft: a minor gesture that will allow a change that does not necessarily break with the material conditions but operates a situation that disrupts the agreed.
Art, most broadly, is something that, in its appearing, which is multiple, dismantles what seems to be fixed and evolves without necessarily being noticed. Even when art has been domesticated, as it is today in the so-called art system, artistic practices cannot be instrumentalized by market values because they are inscribed in a libidinal economy that exceeds even those systemic producers. So, art as such will happen sometimes, and its recognition does not belong to any specific language, place, time, or nation. Within that phenomenological occurrence, art is also taught. Someone, some-body, taught others (bodies) how to do art as it was made before, and the bodies participating in that process not only shelter the given forms but could appropriate them and, through their experiences, transform them afterward. The transmission of specific knowledge is performed within a tissue of gestures that can improve the given, change the given, or even consider the given a starting or breaking point for another possibility.
Artist pedagogy must be aware of the changes ahead. To consider the necessity of reparation within the Artist Pedagogy practices supposes the necessity of acknowledging the existing harms being enacted. Teaching art today requires a political decision to believe and embrace the circumstances around us, thereby repairing the artistic field. Repairing does not mean returning to a state before the harm. To repair means to acknowledge the given, to look for the possibility of amending the harm, and to think about the building of potential new relational paths. Repairing the practices seems necessary when a new wave of institutional functionalism uses the arts to re-invisibilize the systemic injustices under a veil of the banality of the good.
So, what is artist pedagogy? It is a practice created between bodies. There, it lays its place within that field of gestures and solidarities, mostly unperceived during the practice itself. How should artist pedagogy be developed? It is impossible to claim a program. However, it is possible to share experiences and, through them, create concepts that can be useful to engage in critical discussions. Why would that be important? Because there is a responsibility within the practice of art today that cannot be ignored anymore.
1 For the last five years I worked at the University of the Arts Helsinki. In 2024 I was conducting research on Gestural Philosophy at the Research Institute, which was a continuation of my previous work on Artist Pedagogy. Since January 2025 I hold a position as a Senior Researcher Ramón y Cajal at the Institute of Philosophy, Spanish National Research Council, CSIC with research on Reparatory Art and Design Practices.
2 The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting Chieh Tzu Yuan Hua Chuan, 1679-1701. A facsimile of the 1887-1888 Shanghai edition with the text translated from the Chinese and edited by MAI-MAI SZE. Princeton University Press 1978, p. 17. I have used this quote in other texts. It was used by one of my teachers at the Art School at the University of Chile, Eugenio Dittborn. For more about his teaching practice, you can read my piece at Brümmel, F. (2024). Applied non-didactics. University of the Arts Helsinki Press, https://taju.uniarts.fi/items/822dbae8-c3ae-4602-838c-1d4ee96da6f2.
3 “The movement creates itself using your body as a tool. I have experienced the same in making art: in rare and precious moments when you just work and work and still work, the work starts doing itself and an image comes visible and you look at wonder and quietly ask, who did this.” Erkkilä, J. H. M. (2015). Skateboarding as a metaphor for making art and conducting arts-based research. In A. Göthlund, H. Illeris, & K. W. Thrane (Eds.), EDGE: 20 Essays on Contemporary Art Education (pp. 250 – 259). Multivers.