Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes is a book of interviews with artists who teach. I don't mean a definitive collection of interviews or anything, more something that's okay for now, that's adequate.

When I began this book I had an idea that teaching was the thing for me. That was about two years ago or about the same time as I asked Michael Craig-Martin whether he'd agree to do an interview with me. I was interested to talk to him because when you teach art the assumption is often made that you know how to teach art and if you don't then you kind of pick it up. Thomas Bayrle, who taught at the Städelschule for close to 30 years, says: '... when I started teaching I quickly found out that I'm not the guy who knows it. All my colleagues were using another method - they knew something - and it was as though they stood there and gave this out to students and I was the only one who was in the wind. The result of this was that the students decided, "OK if he doesn't do it then we have to do it ourselves". But then I discovered that this was actually wonderful because while other professors deliberately tried to make them take such a position, in my class it happened because they thought, "OK he's a kind of yeastlike thing that doesn't have a lot of mass".'

The interview with Craig-Martin went really well and things kind of went on from there; 32 interviews followed one another over the next two years - and while this left me less sure about the value of things like teaching art, fine art departments and art education, it left me more sure that a lot of good work is done by people not so convinced by things.

The interviews took place mostly with artists teaching in the UK and Germany, or with a small number of artists teaching elsewhere in Europe in a system of education based on one of these two models. The interviews are about human endeavour and human folly as much as they're about education or art. They provide a glimpse into the world of teaching as well as the individual character and anxieties of the teacher and his or her attempts to survive within the world of art education or merely survive the world of art education, perhaps survive what Jon Thompson calls the 'mechanisms of surveillance and control' which made him so unhappy at Middlesex.

Thompson says '... I know how to operate as a teacher, I don't need to be told. I've been doing it for God knows how many years - 40 years or so I think - and then there are all these rules and regulations: you have tosee students whether it's useful to them or not. You can say the right thing to a student 50 times but if it's not the right time you might as well forget about it, it's no use.'

Walter Dahn, who teaches at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, takes up Thompson's concerns and talks about how he approaches teaching in a way that allows for the out-of-hours tutorial and says something about the German Klassen system. Dahn talks about his students as a collective and says 'we try to be as autonomous as possible and I try to find the niches where things are still possible beyond rules and regulations. Work that I have to do in the school is only what is absolutely necessary in this context. Most of the time, or the whole time, I try to be with the students.'

Karin Sander, who teaches at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), Zürich, supports Dahn when she talks about the mobility of the Klassen system: 'In the academy - in any kind of institution - whatever you do every day has certain rules or rhythms to it, and to break these rhythms is very important to your art practice.' Sander would regularly teach from her studio and says: 'All the conversations and discussions I have had with the students here around this table have a totally different concentration than up at the academy.'

One of a number of conversations that cut across these interviews seems to be about what I would describe as a kind of intensity, and how this is present or not in an art school, how it is recognised, named, nurtured or destroyed. The implication seems to be that an over-administered space is a space of less intensity and less creativity. Liam Gillick and Michael Corris are, I think, among someof the voices who come and go in this conversation. Gillick, for example, talks about when he was a student at art school and says: 'there was clearly still the legacy of trying to retain the feeling that it was a student-centred enterprise [...] though what's happened over time is that as one gets further and further away from the political dynamic that changed those hierarchies, and changed those power structures, the staff themselves have become less proactive and offer less. So you have a system that still exists which is student-centred and student-orientated yet strangely the structuring of the way it's done doesn't put enough obligation - and I'm not talking about this in terms of administration and so on - on the people teaching or being involved on that side of it.'

Gillick, for example, would have staff present work alongside students 'in order to create a true debate and shift the potential hierarchical nature of the students to critique'. This shift of focus and intensity is also maybe related to what Corris talks about as 'an antidote to the kind of pluralism that [...] most people feel is their lot'.

When talking about working with graduate students who 'come out with the idea that they have their own voice', Corris says it is his job to 'thrust them back into a situation which is much more collective'. As an example he refers to a project based on the Annotations project he did in New York in the early 70s as a way of tackling 'what it is we have to know about theory, [or] history, for any kind of methodology to reflect on one's practice critically. And all of a sudden we have this kind of self-organising group and students feel a lot more autonomy in terms of their intellectual interests. They're taking a very active role in shaping the discussion so it's not about me imparting what I know, it's about me learning things from them and also engaging with them and becoming a co-participant.'

Here I think Corris also speaks directly to Dahn and Sander, and to the kind of collectivity and focus which forms such a vital part of how they work, while Gillick's desire to expose staff to the same scrutiny as students has echoes of Bayrle and the courage he demonstrates in putting himself before students in a condition of not knowing. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the kind of 'not showing' and 'not telling' still so prevalent among artists teaching today, which seems to be as much about preserving a certain kind of authority as anything else.

Gillick agrees that this is indeed the case, and for good reason, because as he says: 'You could have a breakdown of authority. I mean just moral authority or just authority in the loosest, weakest sense you know.'

While there may be a tendency to see these interviews as dividing along cultural lines, the underlying themes and interests are not so easily divided out and, as is probably evident by now, nor are the individual voices which speak to one another, irrespective of cultural differences. For now they belong together and say a number of things about teaching, the places where people teach, who they teach with, how they teach, and what helps or gets in the way of this.

John Reardon is an artist living and working in London and an AHRC fellow at Goldsmiths. Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes will be published by Ridinghouse, London in November.

This extract was reproduced in Art Monthly's special issue on art education, October 2008/ Issue 320, p7-8.