Back to school: Reflections on a One (+) Room Exhibition

On September 12th 2015, the Gifts + Occupations Collective opened our exhibition build...build better at Zion Schoolhouse in Toronto. The culmination of over a year's worth of conversations, research trips, and artistic experimentation, the exhibition reframed the space of the one room schoolhouse to allow visitors to experience and reflect on our core concerns and themes: the legacy of Friedrich Froebel's pedagogy, its influence on the development of aesthetic modernism, and the ongoing significance of that legacy for understanding creativity and artistic practice. The timing of the exhibition was significant. For North Americans, September means back to school. Going back to school is an emotionally fraught experience that combines various levels of excitement, fear, relief, hope, and anxiety. There was something deeply satisfying about mounting an exhibition exploring the legacy of Froebel’s pedagogy in an historic, one room schoolhouse in September.

The traditional return to classes in the fall is part of a deep bodily chronology of North American culture. It’s also a moment that’s charged with layers of cultural significance; going back to school can mark new beginnings and possibilities as well as signaling the end of childhood’s freedom and the onset of adulthood. Like most elementary schools in North America in the late 19th and early 20th century, Zion schoolhouse would have taught Froebel-influenced pedagogy as part of its history. (The geometric forms displayed above the front blackboard of the schoolhouse, while not original to the site, are evidence for the influence of Froebel on pedagogies of the time.) Beyond this direct historical link, the schoolhouse as an archetypal site of education is also significant to our project; in many ways, the one room schoolhouse represents the full range of educational possibilities. It is this expanded sense of education that our project centrally addresses.

Working as part of the Gifts + Occupations Collective has offered me (all of us) a meaningful opportunity to reflect on the links between creativity and pedagogy. The group, Yael Brotman, Libby Hague, Penelope Stewart, and myself, took up this project because it spoke to some of the ideas and themes we had been pursuing elsewhere in our practices and gave us a platform to deepen our understanding of them in dialogue with each other. The opportunity to partner with Historic Zion Schoolhouse was key to the realization of the project; the funding made available through the Toronto Arts Council’s Animating Historic Sites and Museums Program made the project feasible. Access to this particular space resonated so strongly with our artistic questions and provided us with a concrete situation to respond to. Two of the collective's members (Yael Brotman and myself) are currently practicing teachers and the overlap between the demands of the exhibition and the onset of the semester was significant and revealing. As someone who teaches museum studies, I was fascinated to see the parallels and important differences between the demands and issues of the project (exploring ideas around education in a school that had become a museum) and the demands and structures of actually going back to school to teach museum practice. Presenting the project as a gift that we wanted visitors to be able to experience and share is a departure from the normal activity of teaching with its heavy emphasis on assessment and evaluation.

Froebel’s legacy, aesthetic modernism, and contemporary art practice

Our project was initially inspired by Norman Brosterman’s Inventing Kindergarten, an important book which argues that Froebel’s hands-on pedagogy is an underappreciated influence on the development of aesthetic modernism. As we discovered during the course of our research, we’re not alone in returning to Froebel’s ideas. There are numerous artists and curators internationally that have been exploring Froebel’s legacy in exhibitions. Notable examples include: Inventing Kindergarten at the Williamson Gallery of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (2007); The Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900–2000 at MOMA in NY (2012); and Eamon O'Kane's Fröbel Studio: The Institute for Creativity at RARE Gallery, NY (2013). Midway through our research we discovered that, here in Toronto, Panya Clark Espinal had produced and exhibited a series of Froebel inspired projects between 2005 and 2008. Based on our appreciation of her work, we invited her to participate in the exhibition as a guest artist.

Froebel invented Kindergarten in the mid-19th century. He was influenced by Pestalozzi’s ideas on the need for developmental education and translated them into a practical course of instruction. A core part of his pedagogy was embodied in the gifts and occupations as a structured series of objects and activities given to children as part of his overarching educational program. These early educational toys were meant for both directed interaction and open-ended exploration. Most central to our engagement with Froebel and our discussions of our own educational experiences was his invention of building blocks. Within Froebel's system, block play (Gifts 2-6) demands learners engage with balancing forces to understand relationships between shapes and to develop an understanding of possibilities of representation. Block play allows children to physically explore beauty, form, and mathematical relationships before necessarily being capable of conceptually apprehending them. We build things with blocks that inevitably come down. The blocks are designed to be put away at the end of the class. Yet the forms always invite us to begin again. The modularity of the blocks allows the exploration of rhythms and patterns and encourages an aesthetic based on the articulation of underlying forms.

building and building better.

The title of the exhibition, build…build better emerged from a series of conversations in which we tried to specify our common interest and engagement with Froebel’s thought. It also responded to Samuel Beckett's phrase from the opening of Worstward Ho! "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." This notion captures the frustrations and necessary impetus of creative work.[i] The title crystallized a set of themes that focused around our mutual engagement with creation as an ongoing process. We had been discussing our sense of exploration and development in our practices, the importance of learning through doing, the significance of proprioceptive and kinesthetic engagement to our thinking, and (for some of us) our relationship to play. The title speaks to the importance of working out ideas in material practice. In its foregrounding of repetition the title of the exhibition evokes Camus’ retelling of the Myth of Sisyphus; continual repetition of a task that resists us (and which necessarily fails) can produce a level of happiness. It added to his existential pessimism a dose of modernist optimism – that if we experiment in our building we can get better.

Over the course of our discussions, Brotman, Hague, and Stewart took up the themes of the project in different ways. Their initial responses took the form of the prototypes for the artist multiples we were intending as takeaways for visitors to the project. In refining their ideas through the multiples, the artists began to arrive at the plans for their installations. While there were strong commonalities in the artists’ engagement with the project that are expressed in the title of the show, each of them responded to different parts of Froebel’s work.  Ultimately, their different engagements suggested alternative ways of occupying the space of the schoolhouse and led to them opening up Froebel’s legacy in powerful and distinctive ways. Each artist naturally gravitated to different parts of the building and occupied the space in ways that played off of each other and built a larger dialogue.

Like many one room schoolhouses, Zion is structured by its segregation of genders. The building has two entrances that lead into a pair of foyers: the boys' and girls' cloakrooms. The Boys' cloakroom became the entrance to the exhibition and was the site of Penelope Stewart's intervention. Stewart’s Nucleus infiltrated the schoolhouse and appeared to subvert it from within. Creating a simulate room within the cloakroom, Stewart placed beeswax parquetry tiles in hexagonal forms under its skin before breaking open the newly built walls to reveal the infestation within. Filling the space with its heady aroma, the piece spoke of renovation, repair, unfinished business, and the possibility of conflicting logics and orders of representation.

Responding to stories of bees inhabiting the walls of homes, Stewart’s work created a metaphor for the ways in which the logics of Froebel’s gifts took up residency within children’s minds. The implied violence of the means of exposure contrasted sharply with the beauty of the shapes revealed. The presentation of the room, as if in mid-abatement, layered the possibility of seeing.  The revealed material as infestation or as an underlying logic of beauty and strangeness underwrote the everyday.  In its suggestion of a hidden order, the piece ties in to Froebel’s utopian belief that there was an underlying geometric order to the world that students could be taught to perceive through their engagement with the gifts. Through a strategy of a ruin, Stewart rethinks the inevitability of a “better” that modernism relied on to reopen it as a question and a possibility.

The space of the schoolhouse is complex and alive. With windows on both sides, the sense of the space changes as the sun passes overhead. The room is also activated by the strong arc of the black stovepipe bisecting as it arches over the desks to exit at the front. This height of the room and the changing qualities of the light were particularly important to Yael Brotman's intervention. Inspired in part by the logics of building blocks, Brotman’s towering Campanile (a type of bell tower) is composed of a series of modular cubes made up of foamcore and theatrical gels. Taking compositional cues from Bauhaus era artists, Brotman‘s stack references Froebel’s building blocks. The askew top piece implies the inevitable collapse which begins the cycle of building again. Both monumental in scale and delicate in materials the piece commands the classroom (and occupies the space of the teacher’s desk). It is echoed in its forms by both the “stained glass” window hangings and the stack of modular frames left on the teacher’s desk suggesting both a reservoir of additional forms to be deployed and a body of completed work that needs to be evaluated. In its use of modular forms, the work ties in to Brotman’s on-gong exploration of the boundary between printmaking and sculpture but refocuses her explorations explicitly on a dialogue with modernism.

Responding to the logic of the desks (which are articulated together in rows), Libby Hague’s permanent prototype builds upon the classroom furniture. The work uses the desks as a support and incorporates their rhythms before ultimately exceeding their logics. The piece progresses from the back row which is built around her first prototype for the multiple, through an expanding set of papier-mâché structures, to an intricate set of scaffolding that expands off the desks into the front of the room. The structures on top of the desks are elaborately tied together by an architecture of strings and forms a bridge between the desks. The piece suggested growth in the progressively higher and more complex constructions as we move to the front of the room. The piece contains a suggestion of musical rhythm in its rhyming structures and points of accent throughout. Highlighted are a set of “lollypops” that also suggest marimba mallets and the repeated use of pink plasticene in a manner suggesting chewing gum. Beyond its bright pink cheerfulness, the plasticene also brings up visceral responses that speak to its proliferation underneath desks and indicates that the piece’s potential to invoke anti-rhythms and anti-agendas to the organized pedagogy of a class. Hague brings forward the anarchic potential that cuts across modernism’s repetitions and undermines its desire to be all encompassing.

Panya Clark Espinal created a series of Froebel inspired works between 2005 and 2008. Inspired as well by the Brosterman book, Clark Espinal began working through Froebel's Gifts and Occupations and developing her experiments into artworks that reflected on her own educational experiences in light of her children's encounters with the contemporary educational system.  She was particularly interested in the implicit spirituality that she found in Froebel's insistence on an underlying formal unity to the universe. Focusing largely on Froebel's first and second Occupations (Perforation and Sewing Out) Clark Espinal's works have an intimate and personal scale. This aspect of her work can be seen in her 2007 piece Occupational Travel Kit which is both a piece in its own right and the tool set she used to create many of the other works in the exhibition. Working on found objects, Clark Espinal repurposed them through the repetitive patterning of Froebel's process to comment on the modernist legacy she saw around her in daily life. Through their insertion in the space of the schoolhouse and their entering into dialogue with the other works in the exhibition, Clark Espinal's more intimate pieces come to resonate with the more monumental scale of the installations. Similarly to Hague, her works used the desks as plinths but her staging invited visitors to sit with the works and contemplate them, as if they were their own exercises or schoolwork.

Taken together, the works allowed visitors to encounter the historic schoolhouse in new ways and offered multiple points of entry for thought and discussion. As we sat in the space during the exhibition, we had a series of interesting conversations with visitors and museum staff. Some visitors discussed their past experiences of the site with us; some found that it spoke to their personal experiences of education; and others were intrigued by the project’s relation to contemporary art practice. Encountering the project anew through their experiences was an energizing and rewarding part of the process. We are grateful to all of them for their participation which helped us to understand what it was we had built together.

Better building

For me, one of the key insights offered by exploring issues around pedagogy outside of a formal structure was that it encouraged thinking about evaluation for learning rather than judgment. This project was in part individually determined and negotiated with the group through ongoing dialogue and experimentation. The “better” that we strove towards was not an imposed eternal standard but was part of our personal engagement with the process of thinking and creating. The project emphasized open-ended learning and exploration rather than attempting to conform to pre-existing ideas and structures of what counts as good. Upon reflection, I want to do it all over again, and better – which means different – this time.

Bibliography

Samuel Beckett, “Worstward Ho!” in Nohow On, New York: Grove Press, 1984

Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten, New York: Abrams, 1997.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Stories, New York: Vintage, 1991.

[i] Mark O’Connell points out the irony of Beckett’s pessimistic vision being translated in to a free floating slogan for contemporary perseverance in “The Stunning Success of “Fail Better”: How Samuel Beckett became Silicon Valley’s life coach.” Slate, January 29, 204. [www.slate.com]