Project Visible

• It makes visible and communicates our programme to the institution and a wider audience
• It creates an opportunities for participation, contribution, dialogue and exchange with our audience as learning activity is directed through Project Visible and colleagues from other galleries, teachers, artists’ networks and artists are invited to attend/participate
•  It allows the Schools and Teachers team to publically investigate what might be afforded to school groups working with artists
• It is an opportunity for the Schools and Teachers team to reflect on our curatorial practice, Project Visible forms an important part of our evaluative process for the workshop programme
• Project Visible provides a wider public platform for gallery education and the possibility of shifting expectations about what gallery education is
• As a sector leader, Project Visible allows Tate the opportunity to develop and support the sector by sharing the programme with artists on a public platform and recruiting new artists to gallery education who then move on to other institutions.

In 2012 Project Visible captured and collated key moments and gathered accumulative data from the workshops alongside direct creative involvement from young people.1 There was a collaborative fanzine, a large scale re-creation of students’ drawings, an appropriation of children’s collage as a collective installation and an animation recording student responses to the collection. The display of the artists’ and students’ learning was shared with the groups who attended the workshops, students and teachers on self-led visits during those two weeks, together with a wider public and the institution. The project provided a space for the artist to re-present their own and the students’ learning; the unexpected outcomes, the knotty issues or evolving questions that the programme brought out for them and their groups.

The pieces on display were not necessarily described as art work by the artists, or works by the young people (although some were), but were depicted as shared incidents that occurred in the context of the Workshop programme. The works were deliberately left unlabelled, being attributed to neither artist, nor visiting student. This reveals something of the discussion the project provoked with the artists and team around agency, the ethics of participation and the role of the artist working in gallery education which has continued to unravel, challenge and inform Project Visible as an investigation into Schools and Teachers’ practice.

A key premise of the workshops programme is that it remains live and responsive to the three key constituent parts of the workshops; the ideas and approach of artists, the dynamic and interests of the different school groups and the changing collection of art. We recruit ten new artists every year to ensure that the programme is always moving and adapting in relation to contemporary culture as it evolves through artists’ practice. We don’t ask artists to submit plans or follow a particular methodology; the workshop programme is continually shaped, informed and undone by the artists and young people attending sessions. Project Visible reflects and continues this flexibility and responsiveness; what Project Visible is and how it operates for our audience, comes from our conversations with the artists and reflects what is important or interesting for us as curators to share at a particular point.

In 2013 Project Visible developed out of an invitation to the artists, as part of an artist development day, to present a point of intersection between their practice and the workshops.2 This became the curatorial invitation framing Project Visible. The artists’ initial proposals for the project and our subsequent conversations with them challenged us to reconsider the format and definition of Project Visible. The artists suggested that as practicing artists, recruited to the programme on the strength of their practice and their interest in a schools and teachers audience, they would express their learning and respond to our invitation through making and showing art. Therefore in 2013 Project Visible emerged as an exhibition of artworks. This initially felt exciting but also uncomfortable, what would it mean to produce a series of artworks to share and respond to a programme that foregrounds the process of learning and the transitory encounter between artist, young person and the collection? What do these works do and who are they for? These questions are at the heart of Project Visible and we are interested in opening out the discussion to our audience, the institution and public.

The exhibits on display spanned video, sculpture, installation and performance and drew on the various concerns and interests the artists had pursued with the young people in their workshops around ideas of value and object-hood, institutional critique, the productivity of failure, affect and conversation as creative act. The exhibition demonstrated the breadth and depth of the artists’ thinking in relation to their practice and the workshop programme. Project Visible invited those visiting the exhibition to consider what the very particular and yet diverse approaches to thinking about and making art might offer a young person coming to the gallery.

We recruit artists who are interested in working with schools and teachers to start a dialogue around their own practice in relation to the collection. Project Visible 2013 posed the question, ‘what might working with a practicing artist who is experimenting with their own processes of thinking and learning in the gallery afford young people?’ Rather than attempting to represent, account for or track young people’s learning on behalf of them, we hoped to open up questions around how we learn with art and others. The exhibition did not assume to know what the multiple and on-going impact of working with these ten artists could have meant for those young people. This is not to say that we’re are not interested in evaluating the programme to find out what young people might learn; we are currently embarking on an in-depth evaluation to establish what learning takes place for young people on the workshops. However, Project Visible offers a different kind of reflection, alongside formal evaluation, which opens out the question to young people and the wider public.

In ensuring that young people had the opportunity to engage with the exhibition, by inviting participating school groups and our self led audience to see the show and re-directing the Workshop programme through the project spaces, we continue a dialogue with them. Through a re-presentation and re-consideration of the ideas and questions embedded in the workshop programme through the artist’s practice, the learning is drawn back into the programme as an evolving discussion with our audience.

In her talk at the 2013 Project Visible private View, Emily Pringle, Head of Learning Practice and Research at Tate, spoke about the ‘curatorial hunch’ in relation to Schools and Teachers practice, suggesting that Project Visible can usefully be understood as a ‘hunch’, a ‘risk based on an intuitive feeling’. Project Visible poses a question and seeks to think through the possibilities; what could working with a practicing artist mean and do for a young person? We don’t set learning objectives in the Workshop programme because we want to allow for unexpected outcomes, for experimentation and challenge, for ideas to move elsewhere, shift or change over time. The Workshop programme is offering a set of values and principles, rather than goals or standards that may be taken up in various and multiple ways. Our hunch is that working with a practicing artist creates a unique and diverse learning context which encourages students to engage with art by looking, asking questions and sharing opinions. Project Visible explores the possibilities of our offer through the practice from which it has developed.

In order to explore the potential of bringing artists and school groups together, I want to look at two examples of art work in the exhibition. What do these works posit about the learning experience? In very different ways both Chloe Cooper’s video and Shaun Doyle’s sculpture (made in collaboration with Mally Mallinson) point to the relationality of learning. Both works investigate the learning process as a reconsideration of who we are in relation to each other. Chloe and Shaun’s work suggest that when we learn we inevitably question our own identity; who are we and how are we changed by the learning process? Learning is a transformational experience that opens us up to other positions and viewpoints and helps us to acknowledge the ways in which our own perspectives and opinions are always informed by and developed in negotiations with others. These works do not account for or explain the young people’s learning as the artists perceived it; they speak of the learning process as a collaborative, transformative movement between artist and young person.

Chloe Cooper: Bronzin’ (Totally Bronze) 

Bronzin’ (Totally Bronze), Chloe Cooper, 2013, commissioned by Tate London Schools and Teachers team.

Artist Chloe Cooper ran schools workshops at Tate Britain and Tate Modern in 2012 – 13. She appears simultaneously as the absent narrating subject and embodied performing object in her video work, Bronzin’ (Totally Bronze) for Project Visible. She films, instructs and cajoles her own hand to imitate the bronze hands of sculptures on display at Tate Britain. The highly subjective interpretation of artworks throughout the film plays with our expectations of the role of the artist working in gallery education ­­­– as interpreter, facilitator, expert, coach, learner, teacher and performer. Chloe is interested in the fluidity between roles within a learning context in museums and galleries. Who is everyone being in the workshop? What is being learnt by whom and how?

The film speaks of the pedagogical experience as an embodied relational process, driven by play and mimicry. When we learn we try things out, put on and discard identities, postures, perspectives, opinions to see how they feel, to move towards an understanding of the position and viewpoint of others. Exploring the nature of the workshop as performative spectacle, Chloe examines the tensions between the scripted and improvised, learner and teacher, artist and art object.

Shaun Doyle: A Longer No than I Expected

 A Longer No than I Expected reflects, responds to, and continues conversations Shaun had with school groups in front of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Candelabra with Heads. Hirschorn’s work became an unexpected subject of the workshops. Shaun hadn’t planned to include the work in the activity, but the sometimes strong and very different reactions of the young people – from disgust to boredom – drew Shaun back to it on a weekly basis. In exploring Hirschhorn’s work in dialogue with the students, and reconsidering and reliving those conversations with Mallinson (with whom Shaun has worked collaboratively since 2004), A Longer No than I Expected becomes a testament to the importance of conversation as creative act.

His conversations with young people about Hirschhorn’s work continually undid and transformed Shaun’s own relationship to the work. A Longer No than I Expected is a re-appropriation of Hirschorn’s work through the responses of the young people, re-told to another artist. It is made in and from the gaps and slippages between interpretation, as conversations are re-lived and meaning is re-interpreted. The work asks questions about authorship and originality. The ‘I’ of the title begins to dissolve as it is constituted by the multiple voices embedded in the work.

Alongside the workshop programme Shaun devised and developed a learning resource, Now That You’re Gone, for students to use in the classroom. The resource invites young people to record their responses to visiting the galley and collectively make an object in relation to their thinking. The grammatical ambiguity of ‘you’re’ here could address the individual singular ‘you’ or a collective ‘you’. The resource echoes Shaun’s making process for his work in Project Visible. Both the resource and artwork acknowledge a merging of self and other in the learning process. Art making is a process of exchange, a learning from and with others.

The title, A longer No than I Expected is also interesting in that is says something about expectations more generally on the workshop programme. Shaun hadn’t expected to focus on Hirschorns’s work, he hadn’t anticipated the often negative reaction of the young people to the work. Expectation was a frequent topic of discussion with the artists, what did the Schools and Teachers Team at Tate expect of the programme and artists? What did the teachers expect of a workshop at Tate? What were the artists’ expectations of themselves? How might we hold all these expectations and allow the space for something unexpected or different to happen?

Chloe and Shaun’s artworks don’t provide any concrete answers to our question, what might working with a practicing artist who is experimenting with their own processes of thinking and learning in the gallery afford young people? Instead they communicate a series of questions around learning. They suggest the impossibility of coherently describing or foreclosing any question of what we might learn through working with an artist but opens up a set of possibilities or potentials for thinking about learning with art and others in the gallery.

Frank Wasser: A good example of a bad idea

A good example of a bad idea, Frank Wasser, 2013, commissioned by Tate London Schools and Teachers team.

Frank Wasser ran artist-led workshops at Tate Britain and Tate Modern in 2012 – 13. Frank’s original proposal for Project Visible involved installing a working urinal in the women’s toilets. In putting forward this seemingly impossible proposition, Frank was interested in the concept of failure, in beginning a conversation with the Schools and Teachers team around what might constitute a bad idea for him as the artist, for Tate, the team and the young people.

In this second iteration of A good example of a bad idea Frank discusses the anxiety around failure in schools and his desire to move the focus on from a singular end point to a conversation which might open up multiple perspectives and possibilities for looking at the world. 

Following their involvement in a free artist-led workshop at Tate Britain or Tate Modern during 2013 – 14 each school was given the gift of ten posters, one from every artist on the team. These posters extend the ideas, conversations and activities encountered on the workshops back in the classroom. The form of the project refers to a previous Tate initiative Schools Prints which ran from 1946 – 7. This was an ambitious scheme launched at the close of the Second World War by Brenda Rawnsley, a British arts campaigner and education activist. Aiming to find ‘a means of giving schoolchildren access to contemporary art’, she produced prints by artists including Picasso, Lowry and Matisse for the classroom wall.

This historical precedent is the foundation for this year’s Project Visible. In commissioning the posters the artists were invited to consider ideas around learning to be with art and others, focusing on how you might look at art and relate to one another in the gallery. This has been interpreted in a variety of ways resulting in subjects that range from hope, representation, the joy of free-ranging associations and the value of forgetting as much as remembering.

In 2013 – 14 the Schools Workshops were led by Katriona Beales, Harald den Breejen, Evan Ifekoya, Lucy Joyce, Emma McGarry, Rosanna Mclaughlin, Joseph Noonan-Ganley, Elaine Reynolds, Eoghan Ryan and Katharine Tolladay.

Project Visible teachers poster pack PDF

Project Visible will change and develop again in response to the new cohort of artists coming through the programme. We want to continue to create the space for the artists and team to respond to a particular moment within the museum as a presentation of thinking and learning. How Project Visible exists and what it is will inevitably change; it may manifest itself in an entirely different format, as a text, a question and series of lectures, or emerge in connection to another strand of programme as a space for presentation. We want to continue to respond to the challenge this unknown space poses to the team and allow the diversity of practice to inform and shape the project.