SALT & SALTbo

SALT initially became involved with FL∆G to create a publication based on the process of creating and preparing the event, which would be ready for the opening of FL∆G. SALT would then go on to create a second publication based on the FL∆G event proper, that could then be taken forward for other engagements. However, two members of SALT, Hannah and Mario, became generally involved in FL∆G, from the planning stage, to speaking at the FL∆G symposium, to building screens, and to running SALTbox.

The SALT publication is an A4 sheet, cut and folded to A6, which can be read as a ‘book’ or as an A4 sheet. Editorially there is a very open policy regarding contributions to facilitate collaboration and exchange between ine art students at Chelsea. As the SALT project became increasingly ambitious, it also began staging live performative events. Given the decision to concentrate the symposium into two half days, the assignment of SALTbox for the mornings meant that the form of engagements, were very different in the mornings compared to the afternoon. An unplanned but productive aspect of SALTbox was that the irst SALT FL∆G publication was delivered later than planned, unfolded. What might have been viewed as a failure became an occasion for collaborative effort. SALT set up an industry where the constant low of participants were invited to pause, sitting on Jack and Janina’s furniture, to fold SALT FL∆G issues. There was thus a visible and ongoing presence and a constant sense of hands-on collaborative activity within the space.

57 Although not a student, Ricardo Basbaum had his work enabled by a group of TrAIN students at CCW.

SALTbox operated very interestingly in relation to the FL∆G Symposium. For instance, it included more performative elements and occupied the gallery space very differently. SALT made full use of Lucy’s portable screens to both create intimate spaces and also to create a more open space. They centred their activities around a zone near the entrance and thus created a clear relationship with the more public space of the parade ground. James, one of the SALT box participants, prepared and served up a free lunch right outside the door to the gallery, which he regarded as a relational, participatory art event. We can see SALTbox as a relexive element to FL∆G. In this sense SALTbox can be considered as a mise- en- abyme, an event within a event, a relexive response to FL∆G. SALTbox was a ‘symposium within a symposium’, an embedding within the work, often seen as typical for mise-en-abyme. Here SALTbox relexively displayed and enacted the codes of the construction of the whole of the FL∆G event.

Another interesting work relating to both SALTbox and FL∆G was Cookies educational project where Barbara facilitated a pedagogic event in which the audience was encouraged to participate by decorating a cookie and rate their involvement (and the inished cookie) according to a set of criteria based on the Chelsea BA Fine Art learning outcomes. This took place on the irst day, and on the second Barbara exhibited Excel pie-charts evidencing the outcomes of this project which she has designated as a pedagogic research project, thus a work which very explicitly and relexively operated as an art research project within an art research project.

3.9.4 Symposium

The symposium was an ambitious undertaking. We had a diverse number of speakers: artists, artist-educators and pedagogues, and members of the FL∆G group. We wanted all speakers to meet together before the start of the session, so we decided to offer speakers lunch. In addition, we wanted to have tea and homemade cakes, decorated in FL∆G colours, available for participants and audience in the programme breaks. Presenting FL∆G cakes to the public can be seen as a signiicant development of the FL∆G cake methodology, as we began at this point to seriously appreciate the value of this way of working. Then, the cake methodology thus shifted from an emergent method of the group to a publicly visible methodology, with methods that identiied the group to visitors.

We had ‘curated’ the presentations so that speakers of different backgrounds and with different kinds and levels of expertise were mixed together, to undermine contextual hierarchies. The extensive early curatorial discussions were frustrating on one level but ultimately provided an example of a relexive dialogue that helped the group to understand the different concerns and agendas at play, and to articulate

the issues associated with the curation of the symposium within the group. This was facilitated by creating a ‘sheet’ representing each speaker, which we then put up on a wall in two formations. The formation component of each ‘grouping’ shifted as new possibilities were proposed. It became clear to us that each day of the symposium could be quite different to the other, depending on the line up. Through this process individuals were articulating and justifying their desires and hopes for the symposium, to the rest of the group, with acceptance being negotiated. In the end we reached a consensus and appreciated more clearly our respective agendas, which had become both visible and tangible through the discussion. Each day the FL∆G group introduced the speakers, and as part of the opening session, I gave a short talk on the ‘educational turn’ in the art world to provide a background to FL∆G and to ask the speakers and the audience to consider the event as a re-turn of the ‘educational turn’ to the academy, the reapplication of pedagogy as art within the art pedagogic institution. On the last day, Michaela presented a relection on the event as a whole.

Each day, at midday, we conigured Jack and Janina’s sculptural furniture modules so that they could be used to serve lunch and facilitate informal ‘meets and greets’. Then we set up a larger arena for the speakers and the audience to inhabit. The modules helped to latten a sense of hierarchy between the speakers who were all sitting together, as well as between the speakers and the audience. We also had to borrow some additional folding chairs for the symposium because it was unexpectedly oversubscribed.

In the programme for the irst day Hannah and Mario represented FL∆G and gave a well-received presentation in the form of a scripted dialogue. They were followed by two pedagogues: Dennis Atkinson, Professor of Art in Education and Head of the Research Centre for the Arts and Learning in the Department of Educational Studies at Goldsmiths College, and Professor Linda Drew, the Director of the CCW Graduate School. We then had two artists. The irst Ana Laura López de la Torre, is an artist and writer based in London with a collaborative practice. She is also a PhD candidate at Chelsea. The second, Rebecca Fortnum is a CCW Reader and MA Visual Arts (Fine Art) Pathway Leader at Camberwell. She is a painter and a researcher whose interests include documenting ine artists’ processes, visual intelligence and ine art pedagogic research. Finally we had Emily Pethick, the Director of The Showroom, previously the Director of Casco, who has signiicantly contributed to the development of modes of engagement in the art-world, labelled as the educational turn.

institutions and even genders. The speakers included Chloe Briggs, an artist and Head of Foundation at Parsons Paris School of Design, Professor Neil Cummings an artist and professor at Chelsea College of Art and Design, and a key member of Critical Practice Research Group. FL∆G was represented by Harry, half of Major

Claxton collective, who talked about the work of their collective and spoke of the students’ perspective, on the question of what the student wants to know and how he or she wants to learn it? Later we heard from Dr Malcolm Quinn, a Reader in Critical Practice at Wimbledon and Course Director of the MRes in Art Practice, who has undertaken research on the publicly funded art school in the UK. Terry Smith is an artist working across a range of mediums and has been instrumental in setting up the Experimental Art School: “The school is simply a way of focusing ideas and projects whose main intention is to look at the making and breaking

of art”.58 Rehana Zaman, an artist who worked as a project coordinator for the

Communal Knowledge project at the Showroom Gallery, was the last speaker of the day.

One group decision that FL∆G made was not to produce sound recordings or in particular not to video the Symposium. I wanted to record the event, as I was thinking about its value for the thesis and also as I thought it would be a rich source of data for us all after the event. However, the majority did not support this idea. They felt it was too problematic, in that it raised questions as to the location

of the work of FL∆G. They wanted the event to be the work and that this work

should involve participation within the site of the Triangle Gallery. There was also a concern that video and sound recording would appear as capturing the totality of the event and not be transparent about itself as being a selective representation, skewered by the subjectivity of the those undertaking it.

58 http://www.experimentalartschool.com (accessed 11.05.10). Image 40. Curating the speakers. Photo: Katrine Hjelde

Image 41-43. FL∆G Symposium speakers and listeners. Photo: Billy Tang.

FL∆G was however extensively documented photographically. This was undertaken by two students, as an extension of their own practice. Billy and Alex made the

images available on lickr for us all to use (under a copy left agreement).59 _{As a}

set of data, we saw it as operating very differently than a sound or video recording since it, arguably, makes less claims of objectivity and as a material it lends itself also to more clearly art-based forms of interpretation. The documentation could thus also potentially operate as art in a different context. The artist Rainer Ganahl

has made a series of works called Seminars/Lectures, since 1995 (ongoing) which

the FL∆G photo documentation could be seen to echo.60

At the end of FL∆G week, some of the exhibiting artists agreed to invigilate while the rest of us attended the Deschooling conference. The speakers here included Carmen Moerch, Mick Wilson, Sally Tallant, Irit Rogoff, and Martha Rossler, all of whom have been instrumental towards forming and interpreting the work that is seen as constitutive of the educational turn. The conference took place in a large auditorium in the South Bank centre. Speakers were located on a stage, with the audience seated in the dark, tiered in the auditorium: a distinctly hierarchical, one- way set up. There were plenaries between clusters of individual presenters, but little time for audience Q and A, and no time for dialogue across the room. It was, in many ways, a highly conventional conference. This was in marked contrast to the FL∆G symposium where we tried to apply the principles of the educational turn, as far as possible, by emphasising the social, process, and avoiding hierarchical structures. This made for a very different experience. Comparing FL∆G to ‘Deschooling’ society is on some levels futile as they relate to different kinds of events within different institutions, with different remits. However, when as a group we relected on FL∆G after the event, the ‘Deschooling’ symposium became an important point of comparison.