Reverse Pedagogy
Reverse Pedagogy, Winter 2008, pp. 60-61
There’s much talk of pedagogy these days. Everyone is going back to school, it seems. Leading curators like Barbara Fischer, Wayne Baerwaldt and Kitty Scott have all chosen to take positions at schools rather than public institutions because of the freedom and energy they offer, and artists and artist groups like Fritz Haeg and his Sundown Schoolhouse in Los Angeles and the Center for Urban Pedagogy in Brooklyn are starting their own schools. Why this appetite for education now?
Commercial success is the crack cocaine of the art world. The market is stunting the growth of artists. If you have a career in art, it’s all about production— feeding the market. It’s supply and demand, and you are the producer. It’s you who pays the rent and absorbs the costs involved in running a commercial gallery. There is no time to explore new territories when your waiting list demands another dozen works—whether your heart is in producing them or not.
But artists need to grow, and we need space beyond the studio to grow in. How do we reflect and respond to our world if we work in continuous solitude? For our own good, and the good of our audiences, we need to get lost once in a while. We need time to experiment—the freedom to fuck up. This is where growth comes from.
In 2007, I was introduced to the theories of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière during a panel discussion on pedagogy at Plug In ICA’s Art Tomorrow forum in Winnipeg. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Rancière proposes that one can indeed teach what one does not know. Rancière insisted that people could learn without the explication of a teacher as long as they had something in common. Students (children or adults) were taught by their own intelligence and by the impetus to learn and acquire new knowledge, not by a teacher. “One could learn by oneself and without a master explicator when one wanted to, propelled by one’s own desire or by the constraint of the situation,” he wrote—similar to how we all learn our mother tongue through trial and error.
Discovering Rancière (thank you, Barbara Fischer) confirmed something I had been sensing for some time—when given intellectual freedom, space and faith, we are able to naturally grow through sharing and exchange with others.
As of November 15, 2008, 16 artists, myself included, have had the luxury of time and space to fuck up thanks to an experimental residency I am directing at the Banff Centre that is titled Reverse Pedagogy. We’ll focus on the context surrounding the act of making art: the meals, drinks, walks, movies and hikes we share as well as the discussions that result and the education that comes from these spaces in between.
My role is to quietly facilitate the group, organizing a series of events directed by the participants’ needs and their collective guidance. The residency will serve as a sanctuary from the pressures and responsibilities that come with being a professional artist. There will be no teachers. Artists will teach each other through the exchange of techniques, sources and inspirations, free from explication by a teacher. Collaboration will be encouraged but not demanded. Events will be organized but no pressure to participate will be exerted. Participants in the residency are asked to come with no expectations or preconceptions, and just see where we end up.
We share a common space and meet daily. Artists have the option of contributing to a series of collective screenprints, photographs, zines and Internet radio broadcasts. At our disposal is a zine station (photocopier, paper cutter, stapler), a small stage for presentations, a karaoke machine, a dry-erase marker board, access to gallery space for immediate-response exhibitions, an espresso machine and a domestic setting complete with lamps, couches and coffee tables. There’ll be Internet access hooked up to a video projector, a library, a collection of encyclopedic podcasts, a stereo system and of course a bar. We’ll go on field trips to the ski hills, hot springs, restaurants, museums—whatever the Banff Centre and its surrounding area have to offer.
In accordance with Banff National Park regulations, we won’t shoot off fireworks or disturb the endangered Physella johnsoni snails. We will share meals, watch movies and stare at the fire. Participants will have full access to the gym as well as to the sculpture, photography, ceramics, printmaking and computer-lab facilities, plus enjoy the assistance of the staff and facilitators.
What I am proposing is a more balanced art practice—a return to school, where growth never ends. Within these spaces there is the potential for the emergence of new artistic possibilities.
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