I was asked to speak at this event, unusually not about the knowledge of children, but of the knowledge of the artists who work with them. This is a transcript of my 10 minute talk.
Putting the knowledge of artists to work.
By Charlotte Arculus
I am an immersive environment maker, performance director and doctoral scholar at Manchester Met. I specialise in work with children under 3
I am exploring how temporal arts are forms of emergent knowledge and what young children can teach us about this. I am interested in improvisation and pedagogies of improvisation within the increasing tyranny of curriculum.
My main concern has been around the knowledge of Children and raising the controversial idea that young children may have vital, knowledge about childhood to bring to their own educations and to shape educational policy generally so that education is done with children rather than to children.
It seems to be an equally controversial idea that artist knowledge really ought to be involved in shaping arts policy, arts funding, and how arts-education projects that involve artists, projects that succeed or fail on the strength of artists, operate.
However, in my 30 plus years as a freelance artist, I have seldom seen this actually happen because artists are never in the rooms where these things are decided. It has been a consistent feature of the field I work in that artist-educators and animateurs, those who work creatively with people - the bag ladies, the transversal thinkers and the improvisation pedagogues, are hardly ever part of the conversations which shape policy, strategy or the arts project.
Generally speaking, artist-educators wait upon project dates and briefs to be handed down to them from above. They juggle their diaries in order to make ends meet. They are hired and fired like plumbers and therefore like plumbers they focus on the task on hand until the next job comes along. The ubiquitous short-term funded project model prohibits both communities of artistic practice where artists learn from each other, and the long-term relationships which build trans-disciplinary thinking between arts, education, community and culture. Because it is somehow incredibly difficult for cultural professionals on salaries, to understand that freelance artists cannot attend endless meetings without being paid, the situations and budgets where artists are able to shape policy and envision education are incredibly rare & fragile.
Furthermore, for these reasons artist knowledge and expertise built during a project is dispersed and scattered when it ends. Artists become valued only to the extent that they contribute to the project outcome. They are reduced to a colourful portfolio photo on a website to show what great work the cultural organisation is doing. This means that artist’s crucial understanding of aesthetic process and relation becomes effaced and unseen and wasted.
Working creatively with young children involves not knowing where things are heading. It involves pedagogical strategy that does not rely on words and does not have an end point. It does not involve directing children, telling them what to do or describing what they are doing. It involves, to quote musician David Lines “a responsibility within the unfolding ensemble to stay sensitive and also keep exploring. Itrequires openness, alertness and attentiveness to sustain creatively”.
I have noticed that as early childhood becomes an increasing focus for cultural organisations and everyone jumps upon the band waggon, the same fundamental pieces of learning (such as toddlers don’t sit still and follow directions), basic knowledge, is being over and over again. And this is because the knowledge of artists who have been doing this work a long time has either not been valued or can’t be found. Either way that is a problem.
This then is a call to put the knowledge of experienced artists to work. Stop wasting it. Because I think we may be running out of expertise. I think there is a critical lack of creative knowledge because it has not been invested in for a very long time.
Extraordinary work and relationships do exist, but it is a rare set of circumstances that can circumnavigate the short term funded project model and it takes visionaries in powerful positions to bring artists to the table. And this extraordinary work exists in silos, artists doing great work know littleabout the existence of each other’s work; it is usually just the headlines, not the journey and there is no time or space within budget restrictions to cross pollinate the artists knowledge of process.
The challenge is not to try to reproduce extraordinary practice because each extraordinary practice is a unique set of relationships and cannot everbe reduced to a template or pie chart. The challenge is rather to make visible and value the ongoing processesof relational aesthetic work from which extraordinary practice arises.
My own journey is through community music. I was a 20-year-old young punk, not in education employment or training, with a baby, from a working-class background who had been kicked out of school at 16. I got onto a community programme with Community Music East in Norwich, and I have not looked back since. I was intensively mentored for a year in improvisation, group work, and disability awareness. I was placed in a wide variety of settings with a wide variety of more experienced artists. There were regular master classes with inspirational, world class practitioners. The pedagogy I learned set me up for life and runs through my practices like a stick of rock.
A few months ago, my 24 year old lodger asked me ‘Charlotte how do you get into the sort of work you do’ and I didn’t know how to answer her. CME is long gone like many other organisations who championed artistic process and relationships.
This made me ask – How are we producing the artists who can do this highly nuanced, sensitive work? Where do the people like me go to get the grounding I got? The academies don’t provide that kind of creative mentoring. They, like the rest of education, are compelled to focus on outcome rather than process. And anyway, someone like me would have never made it into an academy in the first place. We are neither nurturing nor producing artist educators and animateurs.
So, to finish, my questions and concerns are: How do we start to build a workforce of artist-educators who can do this highly skilled and nuanced work? Who do we need to convince that this urgently needs to be done? How do we make the knowledge of artists visible and how do we do it without expecting artists to behave and speak like salaried arts professionals, academics or policy makers? How do we stop the knowledges of artist from leaking out of the arts project plumbing so that we can put it to work to build creative futures?