Workshop-Histories-and-Practices

Workshop Histories and Practices

A Conversation Between Heike Roms and Anja Groten

Introduction by Anja Groten

In May 2021 I participated in an online conference about ‘The Workshop as Artistic-Political Format’, organized by Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. I was rather excited about this conference. For a while I felt the urge to reflect on the implications of the workshop as a format, and cultural phenomenon but had not found much written about the workshop as such.

The conference drew together practitioners from various fields of interests: choreographers, dancers, theatre makers, artists, scholars, musicians, police people, and activists, to reflect on ‘workshop' as a format, site, phenomenon, from their own specific perspectives.

The presentation "The Changing Fate of the Workshop and the Emergence of Live Art” by Heike Roms (University of Exeter) particularly resonated with me. I took excessive notes during the talk, and have been recurrently referring to some of the presented insights, propositions and exercises. Unfortunately the talk was not documented and there has not (yet) been any publication following the conference. Thus, one year later, I contacted Heike to asked if we could meet online and have a conversation about workshops that I would publish as part of the upcoming H&D publication.    At the time of the conversation, I am in the final stages of my artistic research PhD at ACPA/PhdArts (Academy for Creative and Performing Arts at Leiden University & Royal Academy of Arts The Hague). As part of the PhD project I am exploring means of publishing (about and through) workshops – as well as (re)activating them, with the question in mind: How can workshop production become discursive, opened up and distributed in ways that is useful for others but also response-able, that is, reflective of the context?  

The following conversation has been edited. At moments that significant portions have been edited out, I added a note. For instance here, at the beginning of the conversation:
 
[Preceding to what you will read as the beginning of a conversation, Heike and I talked about, and compared the fields of artistic research in the UK and in the Netherlands, the different challenges, requirements, and criteria of pursuing an artistic research PhD.]


Anja Groten: I am in the midst of thinking about how to present/publish/exhibit the practical aspects of my PhD research, which is also considered the artistic part and in my case is quite convoluted because there's so many people involved.

Heike Roms: Because your work is very collaborative.


Anja Groten: Yes and my research is about collective practice. How to explicate this collective practice, and it open up for discussion and how to situate material residues of a collective practice such as H&D, in a way that is not read as a product, a final thing, but as part of an ongoing process that also involves many people, perspectives, places, objects and timelines.

00:03:43
Heike Roms: Would you be able to submit your website?

00:03:47
Anja Groten: I guess I could. But even then, it would be a lot of websites I have done, and they are all done in very specific contexts and under specific conditions, which when you are taking them out of that context they seem only half-actualized. One of my chapters is about what I call self-made platforms – digital infrastructures that that cater to online collaboration. In the context of H&D we have been building many of those. There's at least five or six of them. Anyhow, at this point I am considering to open up a publishing cycle. H&D has made it a habit to make a small experimental book every year. Workshop moments often that open up the process of making the book. It could be interesting to have the PhD examination committee as well as my PhDArts peers join these short hands on workshops and implicate them in this open processes of learning and making.

The interesting part about the context of artistic research has been that there are so many different perspectives coming together and commenting on each others work. There are sculptures, dancers, photographers, film makers, designers. This environment meant for me, that I needed to look beyond design vocabularies and the dsign discourse that I had familiarized myself with. This environment opened up other ways of looking at design. I think these contexts in which disciplinary boundaries erode, may be why the workshop became a subject for me. I haven't thought about the ‘workshop' as a subject before I started at PhDArts. But then I noticed its ubiquity of the workshop within all aspects of my practice, – in my work as an educator, a designer and an organiser. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. The workshop plays also a significant role in the context of Hackers & Designers. But also here I felt we took the workshop for granted, as something inherently useful. H&D workshops are a way for us to experiment freely – next to our individual practices in a sort of no pressure situation. We get to try out new things. But at the same time, as it was also discussed in the conference that you spoke at, the workshop is also intertwined in the neo-liberalization of art and education. There seems to be a double bind in workshop-based practice. I am trying to think about how do to deal with that double-bind as a collective – a self-organised, self-determined experimental space? Why are we enjoying these workshops and how can we sustain and awareness of their implications? For me the process of writing about workshops, and practicing to writing in general, drove my attention to workshops, including the awkwardnesses and frictions that sometimes occur in these time-boxed intensive spaces. Why do these moments matter? Also, why am I often disappointed after workshop? The writing has become a really important part of the research process.

00:07:54
Heike Roms: That’s how a PhD through practice should work – thinking through the practice and finding those moments of articulation.

I came to the topic of workshops because I'm interested in the history of performance art. I look at the emergence of performance in the sixties and seventies and became interested in the emergence of performance art within art educational contexts, through the conceptualisation of a pedagogy of performance. That's how I hit on the workshop. I've read your chapter, which I really enjoyed. There's lots of interesting avenues there that I might think about in relation to my own work as well. Some of the reading that you've done are helpful because I have found that there's very little actually written about the workshop as a practice. People write about specific workshops so you can find material on the specific workshops of a particular artist. But there is very little reflection on the workshop as a format, as a genre, as a site, as whatever we might call it. That surprised me, given that it's sort of ubiquitous. There have been books on laboratories, for example, and there is a connected history to labs, and the studio space as well, and rehearsals . But there is actually very little on the workshop that I have found, certainly within performance study or artistic discourse. I got intrigued by this really ubiquitous form that nonetheless remains unreflected. It's great that there's this new kind of attention being paid to it through, through the conference, through the work of Kai (Kai van Eikels is one of the conference organizers], and through your work. But I'm at the point where I don't know enough yet about the history of the workshop to understand at what point this flip occurred of the workshop as a site and the workshop as an event. You write about this as well. The two meanings, of course, exist in parallel to one another, particularly in the context of art schools. But at what point did the workshop become an event rather than a site of making – a Werkstatt. I don't know how that occurred and when that occurred. My suspicion is it's somewhere around the fifties and sixties. 00:11:11
Anja Groten: There was a journal published "The Journal of Educational Sociology” in 1951 which refers to a the first "organized professional education activity under the name of a workshop that was conducted at Ohio State University in 1936". There are some brilliant papers in this journal about what makes a good workshop. I only recently saw it. If I would have known about it before! [laughs]. I remember from your talk you were implying in the field of art history that you studied, there was a bit of a resistance involved in organising workshops a resistance towards the steady structures of art schools, a resistance towards legitimized practices and skills. Art students wanted to rid themselves from a certain authority of disciplines or disciplined learning and instead take things into own hands. I'm not sure how much there was a consciousness around using the term workshop for that kind of self-organised educational initiatives?

00:12:27
Heike Roms: In the history that I looked at there is a confluence between the workshop and two emancipatory movements. First is the move towards the workshop that happened through the Bauhaus. That had a huge implications on the art schools in the UK. Before the sixties people were talking not really about workshops as places of making. The workshop was the place of the plumber or the blacksmith. Artists worked in ateliers or studios. The idea of the workshop as a place of making was introduced through the Bauhaus philosophy. The workshop was a vehicle for emancipatory art education. It was underlined by art making being approached as other kinds of making are approached as well. There is no longer the sculpture atelier or the or the drawing room. We now have the ceramics workshop, plastic workshop, materials workshops. That shift was already a move towards understanding and using the workshop as a site of making. This move introduced a different kind of art making and that was very strong in a place like Cardiff, which is what I've been looking at. This change that happened in the UK in the sixties was very much driven by the reception of Bauhaus and Joseph Itten's preliminary course. It was seen as a new, more emancipatory form of art making that also came out of the experiences of Second World War and wanting to give students a different sort of experience – being more connected to the contemporary world and overcoming the differences between art and design. The second shift is then when performance comes in: We don't want all of that material making in the workshop. We want to make something that's ephemeral and that's collective and that's participatory. We don't want to be hammering all day in the workshop. So we do this other thing where we get together and we make something that is not actually producing any objects, and we'll call that a workshop as well. That's the event based rather than space based workshop. In dance, people were talking about workshops as events in the fifties. I don't know what that shift of the workshop site towards the more ephemeral thing was and how that happened, but it's interesting because what motivated the artists that I was looking at in the sixties – and they explicitly say so in their notes – that this move towards the ephemeral was about searching for more equitable kinds of relationships that do away with that teacher student division, all the remains of the Bauhaus philosophy. I think that was one of the shifts of this ephemeral meaning of the workshop. It was going to be a space where there was no longer a master that passes on knowledge to students. It was a collective making. And everybody took collective charge and responsibilities in that making. And the people that I've done research on, they actually say that they wanted to get away from producing objects as well. But, as you say, the workshop can then be very quickly co-opted like so much of the sixties. Was that the last sort of last kind of hurrah of collectivism? Or was that actually what lay the groundwork for neoliberalism, as we know it?

00:17:55
Anja Groten: That's a painful thought, especially for someone who enjoys organising workshops. But I'm wondering myself can organising workshops be considered an emancipatory practice at all? Perhaps there cannot, or should not be a general answer to this question. It's about context and where you organise these sort of ephemeral learning situations. In the school where I work as an educator, some argue the educational system builds upon rather precarious labour conditions, where everyone works as a freelancer. There seem to be also more and more workshops organized, that may clutter the education to some degree. Students are supposed to self-initiate and self-organize. In my view, such a condition can also show the limits to what can be accomplished with workshops. I think it's therefore important to have more discussions about the workshop as a format and it's implications in the learning economy. How to speak about and practice workshops in a way that still allows us to do the things we want to do, but on the other hand, also pays critical attention to the conditions it is intermingled with.

How was it for you? Did the invitation to the conference lead you to look more into the workshop phenomenon? Or where you already busy with it?

00:19:48
Heike Roms: That would be fair to say that, yes. I had been working on this material before and I've written about it before, but actually sort of never really considered the frequency of the word workshop popping. But I never paid attention to it until the invitation came and then I realized, actually, it's a really productive thing to be talking about.

I had done a paper on this before where I talked about the idea that artists and performance educators in the sixties and seventies in the UK were creating events as a kind of parallel institution. These events would sort of serve the kind of the function of an art school without replicating its structures. That was the case in Cardiff, but also in other places. I had written about that before, but never really focused on the workshop as a format before. I was grateful that the conference invited me to to think more about it. I looked at my examples and it is really specifically the workshop as events that became kind of the parallel institution. It wasn't really the performances they made, it was the workshop itself as a learning format that I think they really clustered all their ideas around. 00:21:45
Anja Groten: I stumbled upon the conference last minute and wasn't aware of this whole community of performance artists and of the live arts who consider the workshop an artistic medium. It's also interesting that the workshop, because of its ambiguity manages to brings together these different worlds and unveils commonality. A policeman speaking about their conflict resolution workshops, and the activist who learns in a workshop about tying themselves to a tree and how to negotiate the police while doing so. Both speaking about the same thing from an entirely different vantage point. I also remember you were emphasising the the fact that a lot of the artists you researched were also educators. I thought it was great to hear that really explicitly. I don’t often hear about how artists and designers practices continue to evolve within particular educational environments also after they completed their studies. Many artists and designers are also teachers and sometimes I personally don’t draw a harsh distinction between being an educator and being a designer. It goes hand in hand. But there is not often much record of the teaching practices of artists and designers. What also really stayed with me from your talk was the re-enactment of a workshop you did. I think you showed some pictures and I found them so interesting and also funny. They showed how you reenacted a workshop, imagining through physical exercises what the workshop might have looked like. You were referring to one specific artist educator, but I couldn't really find their name anywhere.

00:23:48
Heike Roms: He is not well known at all, which is also interesting. His name was John Gingle. I never met him in person. He had already passed away by the time I became interested in his work. He had an artistic practice. There's are a few public artworks of his scattered around. He did a little bit of work exhibited in London – but he was really an educator. That's what he was. He formed and shaped generations of art students. He's also not one of those people who left manifestos or has written a lot. It's really just kind of notes that I have looked through and I've been very lucky in that his family has allowed me to look at all of his materials, which are all in the attic of one of his daughters. It's just mainly been a process of looking through lots and lots of random notes. He didn't leave a philosophy of teaching or anything like that. It's just really random notes or little things that he might have put together for the art school in order to justify what he was doing or a little note on yeah, kind of a presentation or presentation notes and things like that.

I didn't re-enact any of his workshops because a lot of his workshops are just very, very sketchily documented. He was not somebody who kept a very developed kind of scoring practice and if I think about my own teaching. I don't either actually. I mean a lot of times when I go to a classroom, I have just have some notes on the exercises I want to do and I know them. So they're just little aid memoirs to me. I don't really explain them in my notes. If somebody in years to come will look at my teaching notes, they might also not really make sense of what it is that I was doing in the classroom. I don't think that's unusual. But I have quite a bit of contact with one of his students who also taught at the art school for a number of years and who is still around actually and now lives in Exeter . He was very influenced by John Cage so his own artistic practice was very score based already. When he became a teacher, all of his teaching practice was very well documented. He does has exercises alongside photos of the students that did the exercises. He has got quite substantive documentation of the courses that he taught. Interestingly, one of the classes he taught was a word course – about sounds and words, which was unusual for an art school context. I invited him. So we did the re-enactment together. So it wasn't just me taking the notes, but actually he was sort of revisiting his own practice. So I invited him to do this with me and we publicise it, actually. Anybody could attend, but it was mainly my friends who came [laughs]. A lot of the people who attended were theatre people. It was really interesting because actually working through these exercises because the approach that he took was very much speaking from a visual arts kind of sensibility. Even though he was working on words and sounds, which kind of have also a very theatrical kind of dimension, there was much less of what theatre workshops tend to focus on. Which often are about the interpretation of words or the meaning making, whereas this one was much more about the almost visual qualities of it, how they would appear in the space for instance. The theatre people who took part were actually actually saying afterwards some of the exercises were familiar to us, but we felt that they were framed very differently to how we are used to framing them. There was much more concern about space and spatiality of words and sculptural qualities of words. I've done a couple more of these reenactments and if COVID hadn't happened, we had a plan for him to also work with my students. But because he's now a bit older, I don't want to put him at risk to invite him in. He's he's a brilliant person to do that with. He approached his teaching practice very much as a conceptual practice and so it was much easier to reconstruct what it is that he did. I've always been intrigued by this sort of hidden history of of pedagogy within the emergence of experimental art. You read a lot about John Cage and his teaching at the New School in New York. I often think, what did he do with the students? What did they actually do? I mean, there's some accounts of the students about stuff that they would improvise on in class. But I've been often intrigued to learn more and it is actually only a little bit written about about that. What did he actually do with these students in class? Beuys has also been a very much a kind of teacher figure as well as an artist. But there were others, too, Suzanne Lacy and Allan Kaprow at CalArts. A lot of the kind of canonical artists were also teachers. Some of them for instance Kaprow wrote about education. Beuys considered education as part of his key part of his practice. Others may be less pronounced.

00:30:44
Anja Groten: I was also wondering about documentation. Within the collective, I work with there is an implicit agreement that we want to share what is happening in a workshop with others, who may not partake. But the question of documentation has never really been resolved. What's a good way to do it? As you say as well, while you come up with a class or a workshop, you work towards that moment. The workshop is shaped also in the actual encounter with people and materials and space. But then it's also a pity we don't have more documentations of these situations. They travel through time as stories of witnesses maybe but it would be so great to practice and experiment with more ways of documenting that are meaningful. Obviously not just taking pictures of happy people having a great time, but to find ways of documenting that afford continuation and also discussion and reflection of these workshop practices and makes sure workshop scripts, however share or form, are preserved, taken care of. The way I do it is also usually very messy and also very ephemeral. We have a wiki where we keep a lot of workshop outlines, but also code is important to H&D workshops which often lives somewhere else. Our archive is scattered, at different place online and also offline. It's a bit overwhelming which also seems to lower the chance that someone else will pick it up some time and carry it on. We sometimes compare workshop scripts with protocols and sometimes work with reenactments of what a computer would do – translating something that happens in your machine into physical space. Is there a parallel with scores? I am not very familiar with scores it makes me think of protocols or algorithms. It's it's not a recording or a replica of a situation, but it's sort of anticipating on it. It’s a great way of thinking about documentation, as something that is not only about looking back, but really towards continuation and activation in the future. But scores I have seen look rather abstracts. Is there a practice within the field you're familiar with Of annotating scores in a way that makes them more contextual?

00:33:51
Heike Roms: That's a good question. I mean, there's lots of scoring practices in visual arts, you know, through happenings and Fluxus through the sixties. From the sixties onwards, it's become a really common practice. In performance art and dance, they have really extensive scoring practices. The indeterminacy of the score is part of what the art practice is about. You give somebody a score and it could be interpreted in a hundred different ways. That's why it becomes interesting to consider where is the artwork located? Is it the score? Is it the realization of the score? To the point where a Fluxus score wouldn't even tell you how many people have to do it or whether they know who they should be or so it's the very indeterminacy of the action. That's the interesting thing about the Fluxus score. Different is maybe the musical score, which is maybe more prescriptive. There's again, a bit of leeway of interpretation, but there's probably more prescription in the musical score than there is in a in a Fluxus score, which makes the question of authorship, maybe in the musical score also complicated. Traditionally, we think of the author of the score as the author of the work, and because the level of interpretation and indeterminacy is sort of restricted. But there's been lots of experimentations done since, in scoring practices and people have used scores and the relationship between the score and the event that it might anticipate or the event that it might generate. There's lots of really interesting artists who play with scoring practices. I'm not sure about annotation, but there was this project that Hans Ulrich Obrist did a few years ago. It was called "Do It" and invited artists to write scores. He invited artists who don't normally have a scoring practice. One of the ideas of the project was to invite people to enact the score and then to place documentation of that enactment online so that you could see you could see the score and also have a multitude of different kinds of documentation of the different kind of possibilities of the enactment of that score.

00:36:41
Anja Groten: I am now working on this publication trying to think through this question: How to publish something like a workshop or a workshop script, which is an interesting graphic design object because it's very unresolved and it's very spontaneous and it's actually not a precious object and never up to date. And that's how it functions. But how to publish something like this in a meaningful way? For instance, pictures of workshop situations can help to contextualize something like the score or workshop script. It helps to see people being committed to the score. You cannot just give the score to someone and then expect them to know what they have to do and how to be excited about it. You need that activation moment and how to, how to generate that I think gets a whole own practice in a way. But these snapshots of people is nothing necessarily you want to print in a book.

00:38:13
Heike Roms: It brings us back to the differences – that there are different kinds of workshops. There are also different kinds of scores. There's those that are meant to be indeterminate and meant to generating lots of different kinds of responses, and every response is justified and equally valid. Sometimes having visual documentation can also prescribe someone. If you see a score and you already see somebody enacting it, you think, well, that's the way to do it. It takes a little bit of your agency away. Unless you do it like I think the DIY do it project, try to do it, just give me multiple enactments so that you can encourage people to say, actually, look, these are already five different versions, so go and do your own. But then there are workshops where the knowledge that is passed on is much more prescribed. So there are scores where what is being described as much more prescribed and people want them to be enacted in a particular kind of way, particularly often in pedagogical contexts. Do you want the exercise to be landing in a particular kind of way? Because you want the students to have a particular kind of learning experience. I'll have to kind of identify the learning outcomes. There are different scoring practices and so there are different kind of documentation practices that might be kind of suitable for different kinds of scoring practices. I would always say it's always the doing that's interesting. So we will never probably reach a point where we can say, this is a, this is the documentation practices, this is the skill in practice. It's all about the the kind of the finding process and the kind of rationalization and reflexivity that you go through in this process that I find exciting and interesting. Trying to find one and failing maybe, but, you know, try to try to address it in some sort of a way.

And this is always what I feel in practice-based PhD projects in particular. It’s just as often interesting to say, look at this person and how they struggled through these issues and the kind of solutions that they came up with, even if they're only temporary or insufficient or whatever. [And then we went on sharing references, Heike showed me some books in the camera] :
[add bibliographies]

—— New subject ——

00:52:30
Anja Groten: You also teach workshops for children? What are they about?

00:52:41
Heike Roms:. I do performance work with children. I've also started writing about the work that Kaprow and Fluxus did with children in the sixties. I work closely with an artist in Hamburg, Sybilla Peters, who runs a theatre for children. She calls it a theater of research. [1]

The philosophy of the place is that research is something that artists do and it's something that children do and it's something that scholars do. So we all are involved in research and we all work on research together. She brings these projects together around a particular theme that is often of particular interest to the children you research together with. I did several projects with her where I get often invited as somebody who has knowledge of some art historical stuff. The last workshop we did was on on destruction, which is a really big thing for children. Because they're often told they have destructive behavior or are destructive.

We worked with children who were diagnosed with behavioral issues who show destructive behavior in class or also kids are often really interested in kind of watching cartoons where things get destroyed. They have a real interest in destruction. They see and hear about environmental destruction .When we were doing the project in London, this big high rise building had just burnt down and lots of people had died. It was a part of the community where these children came from. There's no real outlet for children to explore their destructive fantasies, their interest and the fears about destruction. We worked with the children on this notion of destruction for a week. But we were all experts together and we all shared our expertise. So the kids would do talks about destruction and comic books, and I would do a talk about destruction and art.

00:55:14
Anja Groten: That sounds amazing.

00:55:16
Heike Roms: They've also done projects around piracy. There was a big case a few years ago when some Somali pirates were being tried on trial in Hamburg because the main marine kind of court is in Hamburg. And and, of course, pirates are something that kids are really interested in. And so Sybille did a project around what is a pirate? I worked with a couple of Somali pirates. The kids decided on the questions for the interview, and then they interviewed the Somali pirates. For instance: Have you ever killed somebody? It was pretty extraordinary.

They did a project on money, what is money and it is money produced. They found a children's bank that produced money that they could then use in the neighborhood. It was all about what is money. What does money mean? Why do we have money or no money? What can money buy? And so they actually managed to persuade a number of businesses in the neighborhood of the theater to buy into this local currency. Lots of projects that she does and I get invited occasionally to come and work on kind of issues that also overlap with histories of art.

00:56:49
Anja Groten: Fantastic. We recently started thinking about how can we develop workshops that have different sort of levels of participation? Last weekend we hosted an, intergenerational workshop with kids also and their parents about how the Internet works. And we made a sort of a little – a mini Internet, consisting of a wifi module that is powered with a little solar panel. We could put little hints and clues this module. We used it to create a scavenger hunt, which we designed together with the kids. It was a shared effort between kids and grownups. We were designing the scavenger hunt together. Everyone would contribute on different levels.

00:58:15
Heike Roms: That's really important to Sybille as well. And again, it comes back to this idea of the workshop as a space of kind of potential equitable wholeness. She always kind of tries to take seriously what the kids bring to this. And it's always about adult-kid relationships. We are doing something together in September that looks at child activism – children as political activists. I started looking into the history of activism in the sixties and children's activism and how that intersected with children's participation in experimental art projects.

[now about references again]

01:07:29
Heike Roms: Previously and so where that shift happened to the kind of marketisation and yeah. So that's a project that we are developing.

01:07:37
Anja Groten: Together at the moment.

01:07:39
Heike Roms: I will.

01:07:39
Anja Groten: Keep a lookout for that as well and Jan a few any time do something again.

01:07:46
Heike Roms: In Hamburg.

01:07:48
Anja Groten: Or closer by and also curious and maybe there's doing.

01:07:53
Heike Roms: Something in Hamburg in September children.

01:07:57
Anja Groten: I add so I'm not invited.

01:08:00
Heike Roms: That's that's going to be kind of a workshop. It's a workshop actually for for people who run theatres for children.

Heike Roms is Professor in Theatre and Performance at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research is interested in the history and historiography of performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the context of the UK. She is currently working on a project on performance art´s pedagogical histories and the development of performance in the context of British art schools.