Tag: Becky Coles

new CRACL publications – CIRCUIT

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Circuit, the large art gallery – youth sector programme run through Tate London – has just published a collection of eight commissioned research papers. Two of them come from CRACL members. 

Nicky Sim reports on her PhD research (a collaborative doctorate with Tate, supervised by Pat Thomson and Emily Pringle). Nicky examined the partnerships between galleries and the youth sector. She notes, towards the end of Natural Allies or Uneasy Bedfellows?:

Sections of the youth and community work field can offer insight into more inclusive ways of working and can potentially support gallery practitioners to retune their understanding of their accountabilities (Graham, 2012b). Galleries need to cultivate space for these insights to be listened to and utilised in order to avoid the scenario where (in the language of a youth work practitioner) youth work expertise exists as a “sideshow” to gallery expertise. Youth workers frequently exercise knowledge of young people’s hyperlocal social fields, and cultivate an ability to connect with young people within these fields. These are traits that few art institutions naturally possess, but which are essential for developing meaningful relationships with young people. By working more consistently together, youth and visual art practitioners have the potential to reimagine the parameters of gallery-based informal youth provision and to reassert the position of creative, open-access and democratic youth work in civic space. But any localised, temporary examples of collaboration will only be able to gain traction as replicable and sustainable models of practice if they are supported by a much wider and more integrated collaborative field – at both regional and national levels. (p. 64)

 

Becky Coles and Pat Thomson have been following some of the young artists engaged in Circuit programming, looking to see how Circuit fitted into their lives. They say

Some young people were orientated to being paid artists, curators and creative professionals. Among our participants, they came from the more privileged backgrounds. They could live with their parents and be financially supported; they had better knowledges about how to build experience and networks and how to develop a professional identity suited to roles in the arts and creative industries. They used Circuit to:

  • develop practical knowledge of the arts and their potential place in it
  • gain symbolic capital from their association with a gallery
  • and to find contacts in the art world.

Other young people, feeling themselves far from this competitive professional world, accepted that they would not make money from art and subsidised their lives as artists with other work. Some chose to take work, for example as a teacher, which took them away from their art practice. Others chose time to practice their art over professional work and lived a very frugal life. Neither group could afford to rent studio space. For this group, Circuit was a way to remain in contact with arts organisations and with communities of artists.

 

A third group, those with least family resources, wanted to find less prestigious but stable work in the arts, in marketing or community programming. A few planned their career strategy at university and
joined Circuit while still in formal education, as part of an attempt to gain experience and knowledge. However, others left university without a plan
and joined Circuit as graduates to find out more about the arts jobs market and to find work. They worked in bars, shops and call centres while trying to find stable paid work in the arts and were not always successful in finding it. Eleven interviewees left full-time education before or during the research either because they had graduated or did not complete their course. Only six of these eleven were earning their living doing the kind of work they wanted.

The research raises questions for galleries about what role they ought, or might take to help emerging young artists build careers and lives. (p 5-6)

This research is now in its fifth and final year, so there is more to come about these young artists. 

 

CAMEo conference report

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Becky Coles recently attended the annual CAMEo conference. She reports….
CAMEo is an interdisciplinary research institute, set up in 2016 at the University of Leicester, to explore the dynamic relations between culture, media and economy. I went to their conference to get inspiration while writing up the longitudinal research I’ve been doing, with Pat Thomson, following young people involved in Tate’s ‘Circuit’ programme as they find places for themselves in the arts. Education was a prominent topic of conference discussion in many ways. There was a particular call to ‘re-think talent’.
Dave O’Brien and colleagues presented their growing body of work about class and inequality in the arts and creative industries. They have clearly established that the industries are not the force for social mobility they are sometimes said to be. Their analysis of large scale survey data shows that, overall, workers come from privileged backgrounds – not quite so much as doctors and lawyers but more than scientists and teachers. They also beginning to demonstrate statistically that work in the arts and creative industries has become more exclusive in recent times.
At the conference roundtable, Mark Banks and Kate Oakley started with this finding and turned to themes of pedagogy and assessment. Banks spoke about how mechanisms for selection in the arts could be particularly opaque. They are less formally prescribed, he argued, because of a belief in the importance of innate, unique, individual talent. This leads, he said, citing the work of Pierre Bourdieu, to the increased significance of classed ‘deportment’, ‘homophilic communication’ and ‘the whole capital of experience’ in selection processes. But ‘talent’ is social as well as individual and it is this social dimension of talent that needs more emphasis. Oakley described how the issue of ‘diversity’ is generally framed in terms of the importance of individual talent. A lack of social mobility results in talent being ‘wasted’. But we need to recast the idea of talent altogether, she said, pluralise it, perhaps make it ‘common’ in the language Angela McRobbie used in her plenary talk the following day.
Education had also been the topic of the first plenary session that had explored the disappearance of the art school as independent institution. Matthew Cornford and John Beck presented photographs they had taken of art school buildings across the country – almost always closed, sold off, torn down. They were not nostalgic, they said. But it is difficult not to be nostalgic for the local institutions that, no longer needed by the industrialists for whom they were once built, became, for a period, ‘outposts of the avant garde’ and while producing few great artists allowed moderately qualified local young people to experiment with making art.
Cornford and Beck also photograph the expensive ‘destination’ art galleries showing ‘international’ art (disparagingly termed ‘culture sheds’) that have replaced art schools as the most visible arts institutions of regional towns. It’s not hard to see a link between the different purposes of these two kinds of institution, a contemporary focus on ‘talent’, and increasing inequality of assess to the arts and cultural industries.

presenting at Ethnoarts

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A post from Frances Howard and Becky Coles.

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When attending conferences – the Journal of Youth Studies conference, the BERA conference, the Oxford Ethnography conference, for example – a usual starting point is to trawl through the programme looking for the ‘Arts’ presentations. A second reading looks out for research projects with creative and engaging methods, whilst putting a ring around both. Usually there are not many. Seeing them fills a quarter of the time at best.

However, at the ETHNOARTS conference – University of Porto, 22-23 June 2017 – every presentation could have been highlighted. Ethnographic Explorations of the Arts and Education was the full conference title and it’s programme included presentations of ethnographic research into theatre, urban art, dance, music, museum education and community engagement. It also included methodological presentations such as those that blended ethnography and learning, visual ethnography and ethnography using mobile technologies.

The keynote speech, Critical Arts-based Research: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Due, was given by Carl Bagley and considered together contemporary arts based research with undocumented students in the US and the work of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943). It stimulated discussion about ‘ethnoarts’ as a hybrid space between ethnography and art practice and as a space that must be politicised and activist. ‘Ethnoarts can resonate with audiences beyond the Academy’, Bagley argued.

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Frances and Becky present

Pat Thomson, alongside Alice Walton from Tate, gave a presentation about the Teacher’s Summer School programme titled Learning with the Art Museum: Experiments in talking/writing ethnography. We considered how teachers access artist experience as we moulded the playdough given out. This was followed by a presentation about the Serpentine Gallery’s ‘Changing Play?’ work to reconsider play and early years education.

We presented a paper on informal film-making education which explored the effects of austerity. We argued that filmmaking education survives in ever lesser funding streams by being innovative and flexible and drawing on the resources of young people’s ‘bedroom’ practices and artists’ workplaces. In doing so it enacts an ‘enterprising’ way of being and imports ‘enterprising’ ways of thinking and doing from these other domains.

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Pat and Alice (centre) 

These were only a few of the arts and ethnographic presentations given at the ETHNOARTS conference. If you are interested in reading more, watch out for the special issue of the Ethnography & Education Journal Ethnographic Explorations of the Arts and Education, which will be published in 2018.

Circuit longitudinal research – some emerging results

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Becky Coles and Pat Thomson report some emerging research results.

What did Circuit mean to the young people who engaged with it most deeply? We set out to answer this question by following twenty-one young people from Circuit’s ‘core’ or ‘peer’ groups in four galleries. We asked about their everyday lives and their experiences of work, education the gallery and art practice, through five ‘waves’ of interviews over two years.

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One of the exhibitions some of our participants were involved in at First Site.

As might be expected, our participants came from relatively well educated and well-off backgrounds: seventeen had a parent who was doing at least skilled manual work, administrative work or running a family business and seven of these had a parent doing highly paid work; thirteen had a parent with a degree and four had a parent with an Art degree; seventeen participants were themselves studying or had studied an arts subject at college or university. Yet there was considerable variation in how privileged these young people were.

It is generally agreed among those who research employment in the cultural and creative industries that getting jobs is hard, so it is not surprising that six of the young people in our study had been unsuccessful in getting the work they aspired to on graduating from University. For those who had families they could live with, this was less of a problem than for those who did not and who became reliant on gruelling regimes of badly paid work and insecure housing.

A majority (16) participants wanted careers in the creative and cultural industries and nine wanted them specifically in the art world. But while three were doing vocationally oriented degrees and six were planning how to negotiate career paths while still in education, others had been blocked from doing so by a lack of financial resources or a lack of awareness or knowledge. An equal number – six – were not following a plan but working their way up into paid positions, starting with voluntary work. Achieving financial security in the future was a significant concern for some participants (six), all of whom came from less well-off backgrounds or lacked a family they could live with. While four expected professional work in the arts to provide security, two hesitated to fully commit to the precarious and competitive work structures of the art world.

Participants who did not aspire to careers in the arts or creative industries either felt no need to plan because of the family support they could rely on – two, for example, felt free to become totally absorbed in their art degree for its own sake – or they saw professional roles as incompatible with their independent art practice or entrepreneurial ambition. Two quit education, favouring the informal support structures of the art world and creative industries. While twelve participants had their own ongoing art practice, two also said they could not call themselves artists because they did not make a living from their work. Although four had used their art practice in paid work at the gallery, no participants expected to make a living from making art.

It was a pleasure and a thrill for participants to do something for other people and to feel part of large and powerful institution. Circuit made up for the lack of professional work available to them. Eight found Circuit a comfortable place to socialise, particularly when they were going through difficult social experiences elsewhere. All but one however, had also felt obliged to do some Circuit voluntary work they didn’t enjoy or weren’t sure about because they felt committed or indebted to Circuit.

Circuit also helped our participants find out about career pathways, learn workplace skills and integrate into art-world sub-cultures. Seven had made decisions about their education based at least in part on discussions with people at the gallery. Circuit also helped participants work their way into jobs. Five went on to get professionally paid work in a gallery on the basis of their work with Circuit. Two, however, had tried to do this and failed. And six others had found regular non-professional paid work at the gallery, or occasional work as they were needed, which provided them with income and a continued connection with the art world.

 We are following up the participants in a few months to see what they are doing ‘post Circuit’.