Pre – seminar Tasks:
- Read through the short guide to the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and respond to a quiz which Lindsay had devised.
- Read through and consider Chapter 3 of Understanding Art: The Play of Work and Spectator a chapter from a book by American feminist philosopher Monica Vilhauer which uses the ideas of the 20th Century German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer to discuss how we engage with, understand and play with various artworks/forms.
Warm Up Activity
Lindsay printed off some sentences from the Vilhauer chapter and asked us to critically analyse them as a group. She initially gave us a pack of playing cards and asked us to take a card every time we spoke. Immediately I became conscious of how much I was, or wasn’t, speaking and how much others were speaking. I found it interesting that some of us found it easier to remember to take a card than others, and it became increasingly difficult to remember to take a card as the conversation began to flow.
After a few minutes of this activity, Lindsay gave us a reel of twine (pictured) and asked us to consider a different sentence. The first person to speak held the end of the twine, the next person to speak wrapped it around their fingers and then passed it to the next etc. In this way we were to track the discussion in a different way, and the group was better at remembering to pass the twine around than we were at taking a card each time we spoke.
I think this is definitely an activity I will attempt to incorporate in my teaching on MA Applied imagination, particularly when we ask the students to take part in group projects. It’s an easy way to encourage the more reticent students to speak more, and the verbose students to be more self-aware.
Reflections on the text
A couple of days after the seminar myself an a couple of my colleagues from the course visited the Play Well exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. Below is the blurb for the show.
Why do we play? How important is it for all of us, young or old? What does it mean to play well? We invite you to consider the impact of play in our lives.
‘Play Well’ explores how play transforms both childhood and society. Using displays of historic toys and games, artworks and design, this exhibition investigates how play develops social bonds, emotional resilience and physical wellbeing. The exhibition includes: images of children at play in the street, in playgrounds and beyond; makeshift and commercially produced toys; digital games and a larp (live-action role play) space by artist Adam James.
These questions mirror the points Vilhauer makes in her analysis of Gadamer’s work. Mainly, that play in art does not merely involve the spirit of being playful, but that the interplay between art and viewer is what is necessary to make the former an “artwork”. This reminded me of the old riddle “If a tree falls and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound?” If an artwork is made but there is no one there to view it, is it still an artwork? Do artworks in museums cease to be artworks when the lights turn off at night and then revert back to their former status once the visitors return? If, as Gadamer suggests, artworks necessitate having a viewer to interact with them in order for them to be artworks in the first place, what happens to those pieces once they are no longer being seen?
There are plenty of films and stories about toys and works of art coming to life at night when no one is around to see them move, in fact, they actively hide their “aliveness” from humanity altogether (Toy Story, A Night at the Museum, The Nutcracker). Of course, artworks and toys require humans to create them in the first place, but once they are made they exist as artworks or artefacts regardless of whether there is a viewer there to “play” with them or not. However, Vilhauer points out that “in every artistic presentation there exists an articulation of our reality” (original italics), and goes on to explain that although the concepts of the art itself may have been extant prior to the creation of the art, the art solidifies it in the minds and consciousnesses of the audience/viewer.
I think this is perhaps one of the most important points in this essay relevant to teaching and learning. Namely, it is their very engagement and playfulness with the concepts they explore in their practices or research which creates a new reality. They may not always do this perfectly, in fact this is the point. It is therefore essential that educators feel comfortable to encourage play, which itself involves an element of ‘failure’, in order to facilitate learning. This also involves us playing with concepts we are trying to impart to our students, approaching concepts we may be unfamiliar with in a spirit of curiosity and with a desire to explore and interact rather than shutting it down. It could also involve saying “yes, try that” to a student who is afraid of failure, to open them up to the spirit of play and experimentation. Particularly within the interplay of arts education, there is a tendency towards critique rather than encouragement. Although this is most certainly necessary, I would like to be able to incorporate the playful spirit of improvisation into my teaching, using “yes, and…” more in an effort to facilitate students learning more about their own practice.
Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)
The TEF like the National Student Survey (NSS) seems to be more about allowing universities to charge the maximum for doing the least rather than about actual student satisfaction or what students are learning. This is illustrated by the fact that once an institution is awarded a TEF award at any level (Gold, Silver or Bronze) they are immediately entitled to raise their fees to the maximum amount allowed within that financial year. I would be curious to know the statistics on whether higher fees paid by students directly correlates to higher salaries paid to staff and better resources for students as a whole. My estimation is that it is likely nothing much changes in terms of staff pay.
When I studied Fine Art at Middlesex there was a lot of fuss made about taking part in the NSS. At the time I was part of a collective, The Common, who were actively critiquing the evident trappings of running universities using neoliberal business models and modes of assessment – such as the TEF and the NSS. At the same time we were asked by senior staff to make a film for the ICA symposium Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Art Schools So Different, So Appealing?, a reference to the Richard Hamilton collage. We decided to hold “lab” sessions, where students could drop in and talk to us about how they felt about the NSS. We made a trailer (link below) and asked our fellow students to come and talk to us about why they chose to study at the university, what they thought about higher education, what they thought about arts education and what they thought the NSS was about. The responses were varied and interesting, but what they did reveal was that students were largely dissatisfied with the increased corporatisation of their art schools. This is probably due to the left-leaning anti-establishment reputation the arts have, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
Click below to see the videos mentioned above from The Common:
The Common Lab (trailer): https://vimeo.com/96679743
The Common – Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Art Schools So Different, So Appealing?: https://vimeo.com/96679742
Bibliography
“Understanding Art: The Play of Work and Spectator [PDF]” from Monica Vilhauer, Gadamer’s Ethics of Play: Hermeneutics and the Other, Lexington Books, 2018.
Toy Story. (1995) [Film clip] Lasster, J dir. Pixar Studios, YouTube. n.d. [online] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eePDPtUUG7s&feature=youtu.be> [Accessed 26 November 2020].
Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/media/0c6bd23e-57b8-4f22-a236-fb27346cde6e/tef_short_guide_-june_2019_final.pdf