The Sequence We Inherited

A Musing on art as inquiry, on what the word situate is really asking for, and on the sequence most of us were trained in.

As always with these, the writing does not start with an idea. It starts when two unrelated things line up, usually a conversation and then something I read a few hours later, and I recognise the pattern between them before I could tell you what the pattern is. The recognition comes all at once and I know immediately that I have to write it. It is the same experience every time, which is the only reason I trust it. Everything that follows is me catching up with something I already knew about an hour before I had any words for it.

The sequence

Many teachers are finding it difficult to work in a way that does not begin with knowing where they are going, and it is not only their students who are struggling with it. Most of us can feel the pull of the sequence we were trained in. You have an idea. You gather things to support the idea, photographs, drawings, a page of collected imagery. You find artists whose work resembles what you are already intending to do. You combine all of it into compositional studies. You test some colours and some materials. Then, when everything has been decided, you make the final piece.

Said aloud, it sounds like rigour. It looks organised on a wall. It is easy to assess, easy to moderate, easy to defend to a parent or a head of department. It is also, once you see it, a production line.

Predictable input, defined process, predictable output. Decide first, execute after. That is the architecture of the industrial era, and somehow it found its way into the one room in the school that might have escaped it.

The thing I read afterwards

The second thing was a piece by Michael Meyer on neuro-complexity, which has nothing to do with art education and had no business being as useful as it was. He makes the point that we built our institutions around consistency and repeatability, and then, across a long enough stretch of time, stopped noticing that these were inventions and started reading them as human nature. What that gave me was a frame considerably larger than the art room.

What the sequence was actually built for

The sequence is not a description of how anybody makes anything. It is a description of how work can be planned, supervised and evidenced. The idea comes first not because ideas arrive first, they very rarely do, but because an idea stated in advance can be checked. The artist research sits where it sits not because that is the moment a student needs another artist, it is because it demonstrates that research occurred. The material testing happens before the final piece because testing afterwards would look like indecision rather than intention.

We built a process that produces reliable evidence of learning. Whether it produces the learning is a different question, and I did not ask it for a very long time.

Two things are being asked of us now that the sequence cannot carry, and I think they are the same thing arriving from two directions.

Art as inquiry sits above the work

The first is inquiry, which I am not convinced has been fully understood yet, including by me for longer than I would like. Inquiry is not a theme. It is not a title given to a body of work in September and then honoured dutifully until May. Inquiry sits above the work rather than inside it. It is a question you are actually in, one you cannot answer at the point you begin asking it, and the work is what you do in order to find out.

There is a practical test in this. If the inquiry really sits above the work, any single piece can be abandoned without the inquiry being damaged, and a body of work can look nothing like itself from one month to the next while remaining entirely coherent. Where abandoning one piece brings the whole thing down, what you had was not an inquiry. It was a plan with a question written on the front of it. That has consequences most schemes of work are not built for. The work is allowed to fail informatively. It is allowed to change the question. It is allowed to reveal that the question you started with was a decoy for a better one you could not have reached any other way. Problems are not obstacles to be designed out in advance, they are the material of the thing. A student who encounters no difficulty has probably not asked anything of themselves.

Situating is not finding a space

The second is the word situate, which looks like a small word and is carrying an enormous amount. What I keep seeing is students, and teachers alongside them, looking for a space to make an artwork for. This is not the same thing at all. A space is a container. You measure it, you consider the wall or the stairwell or the corner by the library, you make something appropriately scaled, and you install it. That entire process can be run through the sequence without altering a single step, which is precisely why it feels so available.

Situating a work brings in the person who comes across it, and that is a different order of problem. Not an audience in the sense of people who have assembled, decided to attend and arrived prepared to look. Somebody on their way to somewhere else, mid-conversation, carrying a bag, thinking about something entirely unrelated, who is interrupted. The route they took to get there, what they had to walk past, whether they meet the work at eye level or have to look up, whether the light is still on it at four in the afternoon when everyone is going home, all of that is the work. What the encounter then does belongs to the person having it rather than to the maker, and it will be different for every one of them. You cannot plan your way into this from a desk. You have to go and stand in the place, stay long enough to watch other people move through it, notice what your own body does while you are there, and let something come out of that rather than out of your intentions.

Two shapes, side by side

It is easier to see the difference drawn than described.

The same sentences, doing different work

It is important to underline that inquiry is not less rigorous: both of these columns are analytical, and both are evaluative. What changes is the thing being evaluated against.

Every sentence in the middle column is reasoned, and every one of them is closed. There are only two available verdicts, which are that the intention was achieved or that it fell short. The right-hand column is doing something harder, because the criterion itself is under examination rather than being protected. Only one of these columns can be surprised by anything.

The same problem from two directions

So, the two problems turn out to be one problem. Both ask a person to proceed without the outcome settled. Both hand a decisive part of the result to something outside your control, the material in one case and the stranger in the other. Both require you to keep going through a stretch where nothing is resolved and there is no evidence yet that anything will be. That stretch is not a design fault in the process. It is the process.

Awareness running alongside

Something else is being asked of us that the sequence never required, which is a second attention running alongside the making. You are working, and at the same time you are noticing what you are doing, what it is doing to you, where you flinched, what you avoided, which decision you made for the sake of the work and which one you made to end the discomfort. That noticing is the inquiry every bit as much as the object is.

Reflection has become a deadened word in schools, largely because we turned it into a task and then put it near the end, exactly where the first diagram has it. A paragraph underneath a photograph, written afterwards, explaining what you already knew you had done. That is documentation.

The real thing happens while your hands are busy, it is unfinished, and it usually arrives as a physical recognition some way before you have any language for it.

There is a surrender in this that we do not name often enough. You give up being the person who decides and become the person who notices, which is a real loss of authority over your own work. Patience belongs to it too, since the work says almost nothing useful in the first hour. It takes time and will only speak to the young artist who has stayed present, patient, and close enough to hear it.

So when students reach for the sequence, and when we let them, it is not laziness. The sequence protects everybody from all of this. If it has all been settled at the top, there is nothing to notice, only steps to complete, and a person can move through an entire year of art without once being asked to be present to what is happening in front of them.

Where art as inquiry gets difficult

The real difficulty sits there, and it is not where people usually go looking for it. It is not that students lack technical skill. It is that not knowing is uncomfortable to be inside, physically uncomfortable, in a way that skill does not touch.

You can watch it happen in a studio. Somebody in the middle of something unresolved will tidy the desk, reorganise the sketchbook, ask a procedural question they already know the answer to, go and fill a water pot that is not empty. The body is looking for something to do that has a known outcome, because the thing in front of it does not have one. Understanding this conceptually changes almost nothing. You can explain the value of uncertainty to a class extremely well and watch them reach for the sequence the moment you stop talking, because the sequence resolves the feeling and your explanation does not.

Long straight roads

I understand this better through running than through anything pedagogical. Put me on a long straight road and I am hopeless. I can see the whole of it, I know exactly what is coming, and something in me gives up somewhere in the first kilometre. Give me hills, bends, uneven ground, a route I have not done before and cannot see the end of, and I will keep going for as long as you like. The unknown is not what stops me, it is what keeps me moving. Books are the same. I have never been able to read one from cover to cover in the way you are supposed to, and I can spend weeks inside one when I am researching, going backwards and forwards through it, following something. That is a different relationship with the book, and it is the relationship I recognise from the studio.

The sequence is the long straight road. Flat, visible, entirely predictable, and almost nothing happens to you on it.

What I mean by Creative Intelligence

This is the ground my Creative Intelligence work keeps returning to. I do not mean by that a talent some people have, or a set of divergent thinking exercises bolted onto an existing scheme of work. I mean the capacity to stay inside unresolved territory long enough for something to arrive that you had not decided in advance, and to recognise it when it does. That capacity is trainable, though not through instruction. It is trained by making, repeatedly, in conditions where the outcome has not been agreed beforehand and where the discomfort is allowed to be present rather than designed out. Which is why I keep saying that embodiment is not a method I use. It is the floor the whole thing stands on.

Why this has stopped being optional

The reason this has become urgent rather than merely interesting is what is happening outside the studio. If a piece of work can be fully described before it is made, it can be produced without a person. The sequence, followed properly, generates exactly that; a stated intention, a defined process, an outcome matching the intention. A student who can articulate the finished piece at the start has, without meaning to, written a prompt. What survives all this is precisely what the sequence was built to eliminate, the not knowing, the wrong turn that turns out not to be wrong, the material doing something unasked, the judgement that cannot be checked against anything because nobody has made this thing before.

So process over product is not a gentler way of teaching. It is the part that is load bearing. The making does something to the person making, and no description of the finished object carries any of it.

Nobody is doing this wrong

None of this is a failing on anybody’s part. We are asking teachers to teach in a way most of us were never taught, whilst being assessed, moderated and observed by systems still largely built around the sequence. I taught it for years, and I taught it well. I have written the schemes of work that walk a student neatly from idea to outcome across eleven weeks, and I have felt the relief of a wall of coursework that shows its workings. The undoing of that in my own practice started around five years ago and is still going on, so when I sit with teachers who can feel the pull of it, I am not observing from anywhere outside.

What I would say is that the discomfort is not the price of the new approach. It is the approach. If nobody is uneasy, including the teacher, something has probably been decided too early.

If any of this is useful for your department, the Creative Intelligence workshops go into it properly, with teachers making rather than listening. Do get in touch.