Community Arts Zone: An international Context
Kate Pahl with Abi Hackett and Steve Pool
I am very grateful for the opportunity to say a few words about CAZ from the
perspective of being one of the international partners. Rather than talk about the
detail of the Rotherham projects, here I will give an overview of how CAZ appears to
us from a UK and international perspective.
A short history of artists and their work in community contexts
The intersection between education and arts practice has a long history in the UK.
Steve Pool, the artist working on CAZ in the UK, has this to say about the experience
of being an artist in community programmes:
Artists work with people in communities in different ways so when they work
with communities they are knowingly or unknowingly situated in this history
and this context and it impacts on the meaning of the work, yet the field is
complex, with conflicting strands and conflicting understanding of what the
history means or what actually happened or how it relates to other histories.
(Steve Pool)
Community arts itself drew inspiration from movements such as the Artists
Placement Group in the 1960’s where artists worked in different organisations,
including schools, to create spaces for alternative ways of knowing and thinking.
Within the world of arts practice, sculptors such as Joseph Beuys used the concept
of ‘social sculpture’ to work in communities to create social change. Many initiatives
within schools encouraged a ‘placement’ approach whereby artists could come and
disrupt or interrupt established ways of working and thinking.
We recognise that there are histories behind what artists do when they work with
schools and communities. The turn to the social was particularly marked in the field
of relational aesthetics, as described by Bourriard (2002). Relational arts offered the
possibility for art to be ‘social’ in a similar turn to the field of literacy (see for example
Street 1993). Bourriard’s work suggested that relational art was a challenge to a
conventional reading of art as gallery based and focused on the production of objectbased work, ‘The possibility of a relational art…points to a radical upheaval of the
aesthetic, cultural and political goals introduced by modern art’ (Bourriaud 2002).
The interesting thing about the turn to the social was that, ‘Social relations that are
usually hidden or subordinate to ‘the work’ become foregrounded, become ‘the work’’
(Martin 2007). The artists’ relationship with people within the field became the
subject of the work and not a side issue when making work. Artists have taken this
perspective out into schools and communities and began to work in a field that in the
UK is being described as ‘socially engaged arts practice’ (Kester 2004). Grant Kester
has described how contemporary artists have moved to a much more dialogic
approach to the production of work, which might not be gallery based at all, or reliant
on an object, but be concerned with facilitation and social change in communities,
outside the institutions that are associated with art such as the gallery and the
museum (Kester 2004).
So when artists work, they might appear to be creating a piece of work, or
developing a workshop, but their work is informed by practice that is sometimes
hidden and not clear to academics or community practitioners. Long established
research traditions, such as ‘practice as research’, whereby artists have developed a
language and a way of articulating their own lens as artist/researchers (see Barrett
and Bolt 2007) are important within this conversation. In one of our other projects,
we are interviewing artists about these traditions and it is clear that these are
important to artists. As one of the artist/researchers on one of the larger projects in
the UK observed,
…So many people we are working with on [name of project] have a tradition
of working with really great community based artists, engagement based
artists, but won’t necessarily have any understanding of practice as research,
let alone some of the situational site specific practice which can look and feel
like a participatory project but its different [for example] where are the cross
overs with socially engaged practice and how can socially engaged practice
be similar to community arts but at the same time those differences are
important. (interview, artists legacy project)
In our artists legacy project we are surfacing these issues, but here, I want to
describe just two initiatives that are informing community arts in schools in the UK
and make sense of these in relation to CAZ. I briefly outline the contributions that
these have made to the thinking we are developing in the UK branch of the CAZ
project.
Creative Partnerships
Creative Partnership in the UK was a multi-million pound initiative that came out of
the New Labour government and was closed down when the Cameron government
took over, with a focus on the arts, funded by Arts Council England and the
Department of Culture, Media and Sport, that ran for over ten years. The programme
worked to create opportunities for learning in innovative ways, drawing broadly on
the arts, and much of the money was used to fund artists working in schools. A
number of key publications came out of this looking at the relationship between the
arts and literacy including ‘Visual Learning in the Community School’ by Shirley
Bryce Heath and Shelby Wolf (2004) and ‘Many Routes to Meaning: Creativity and
Literacy’ by Myra Barrs and Kimberley Safford (2004). Academics such as Pam
Burnard, Bob Jeffery, Anna Craft and Pat Thompson wrote extensively about the
affordances of arts-based methods to open up ‘possibility thinking’ in schools and to
create wider and more complex learning opportunities for children and young people
(e.g.Burnard et al 2006, Craft 2000, 2002, Jeffery and Craft 2004). My own work
engaged with this field, as I followed a group of artists into a school and spent two
years conducting an ethnographic inquiry into the ways in which artists influenced
teaching in schools in relation to literacy and opened up different multimodal
possibilities in that process (Pahl 2011, Grenfell et al 2012). Steve Pool and I spent
another two years in a school in the Dearne valley and explored, with a group of
children, the impact of artists working in the school (Pahl and Pool 2011). We wrote
this up, with the children, as an article, in which we gave up on our clever ideas and
listened to the children. Called ‘Its Just Living Your Life Because It’s the Only Life
You’ve Got’ the article acknowledged that from the children’s perspective, the main
advantages of the artists’ input was a series of small moments when they were free
within the constructed space of the curriculum. It reminded us that ‘the arts’ is not
necessarily the panacea its presented to be in the context of these children’s lives.
The Connected Communities programme
More recently the Connected Communities programme in the UK has been funding
innovative research work, with arts and humanities at the core. Over 350 projects
have been funded since 2010 including some large grants spanning up to five years.
Within these projects, academics have asked artists to work in a number of different
ways including as producers of films, to create artistic products to show at exhibitions
and to engage communities. In some cases, these relationships have been
reciprocal and entwined, in other cases the artists was kept at a distance from the
projects. The programme has focused on the potential of the arts and humanities to
address issues within communities, such as disconnection, division and exclusion,
community participation and community involvement in research.
The Connected Communities programme has offered the potential for innovative
models to be developed of artists working in schools. For example, in two of the
projects I was involved in, ‘Writing in the Home and in the Street’ and ‘Language as
Talisman’ artists shaped and directed many of the activities and became partners
with academics in working through questions or provocations. Community groups,
artists, young people and academics created a shared space of practice that we
called a ‘holding form’ from Witkin (1974). This space was jointly constructed and
held by a shared interest in the powerful potential of language as a form of protection
(Pahl et al 2013). We are currently working on a project looking at the role of artists
in the Connected Communities programme. We are thinking about the way in which
artists combined deeply held beliefs and ways of working, which we have called their
‘ego’ together with shaped practice, to create ideas that are innovative and open up
new learning possibilities.
CAZ as a site of potentiality: Creating the conditions for growth to happen
Finally, I will reflect on CAZ as a site of potential practice. What is really interesting
about CAZ is that it is creating the conditions for growth to happen. Drawing on these
potentialities and genealogies of artists working in schools, the project is harnessing
a mode of thinking and working that is exploratory and open. This means that artists
are both shaping projects but also are being agents of change drawing on existing
practices and ways of working. I have reflected on the way artists have worked
across the CAZ projects and they are extraordinarily diverse, from music to theatre,
to visual art, to community art and to experiential and tacit ways of knowing. In each
case, there is a rationale but there is also an open-ness to change and growth. Part
of the challenge I would offer CAZ is to think through bring thinking from artistic
practice into the mainstream of the intellectual project,
Art, in this sense becomes challenging within a culture that defines research
as a systematic, reasoned procedure – the raising of questions that seek out
answers; analysis through creating an objectifying distance between the
researcher and phenomenon that is being researched – even when that
phenomenon is itself a process through time. (Coessens, Crispin and
Douglas 2009)
I would particularly ask us to reflect on this question:
How might artistic creativity and the artistic imagination inform research
differently? (Coessens, Crispin and Douglas 2009)
Working with this question, I suggest we think about the interrelationship between
the genealogies of arts practice and this kind of work within schools and
communities. We could particularly think about the intersections between placebased work and the way artists have levered change to happen within community
contexts. Our question then, could be what are the theories of change that artists
bring with them, and how can these lever better outcomes for children and young
people within learning contexts? CAZ offers the potential to re-think the ways in
which artists have worked with schools and thereby support generative work in the
future that engages with social change but also offers an innovative lens for this
process.
References
Barrett, E. and Bolt, B. (2007) Practice as Research. Chippenham: UK I.B.Tauris and
Co
Bourriard, N. (2002) Relational Aesthetics. Paris: les Presses Du Reel
Burnard, P. Craft, A. & Cremin, T., with Duffy, B, Hanson, R., Keene, R.,
Haynes, L., and Burns, D. (2006) Documenting possibility thinking: a journey
of collaborative inquiry International Journal of Early Years Education,14.3, pp
243-262.
Coessens, K. Crispin, D. and Douglas, A. (2009) The Artistic Turn: A
Manifesto.Leuven: University of Leuven Press.
Craft, A. (2000) Creativity across the primary curriculum: Framing and Developing
Practice. London: Routledge.
Craft, A. (2002) Creativity and early years education. London: Continuum.
Jeffrey, B. ed. (2006) Creative Learning Practices: European Experiences.
London: the Tuffnell Press.
Grenfell, M., Bloome, D., Hardy, C. Pahl, K., Rowsell, J. and Street B. V. (2012)
Language, Ethnography and Education: Bridging New Literacy Studies and
Bourdieu. New York: Routledge
Jeffrey, B. and Craft. A. (2004) Creative teaching and teaching for creativity:
Distinctions and relationships. Educational Studies. 30 (1) 77 – 87.
Kester, G. (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern
Art. London; University of California Press.
Martin, S. (2007) Critique of Relational Aesthetics. Third Text 21 94) 369-80
Pahl, K. (2011) Improvisations and transformations across modes: the case of a
classroom multimodal box project. In J. Swann, R. Pope and R. Carter (Eds)
Creativity in Language and Literature:The State of the Art. Basingstoke: Palgrave
MacMillan pp 156-171.
Pahl, K. and Pool, S. (2011) ‘Living your life because its the only life you’ve got’:
Participatory research as a site for discovery in a creative project in a primary school
in Thurnscoe UK Qualitative Research Journal 2 Vol 11 (2) 17-37.
Pahl, K., Bullivant, D., Escott, H., Hodson, J., Hyatt, D., Hurcombe, M., Pool S. and
SteadmanCommunities Scoping. Available at: <http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/FundingOpportunities/Research-funding/Connected-Communities/Scoping-studies-andreviews/Documents/Language%20as%20Talisman.pdf> Accessed 26 January 2014
Street, B.V., ed. (1993). Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cambridge:
University of Cambridge Press.
Witkin, R. (1974). The Intelligence of Feeling. London: Heinemann.