Workshop-Histories-and-Practices

Workshop Histories and Practices

A Conversation Between Heike Roms and Anja Groten

[to be added: references of the books of scores]

Introduction by Anja Groten

In May 2021 I participated in an online conference titled “The Workshop as Artistic-Political Format,” organized by Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin. In my research on the relationship between design and collective practice I have become interested in the implications of this ambiguous format, as well as the cultural phenomenon of the “workshop,” yet, until this point, I had found little research or writing on the subject.

The conference drew together practitioners from various fields of interests, including choreographers, dancers, theater makers, artists, scholars, musicians, and activists who reflected on “workshop” as a format, site, and phenomenon from their own perspectives.

The presentation "The Changing Fate of the Workshop and the Emergence of Live Art” by Heike Roms (Professor in Theater and Performance at the University of Exeter) particularly resonated with me. The talk was not documented and since the conference, nothing (yet) has been published. One year later, I decided to contact Heike to ask if she would be interested in engaging in a (recorded) conversation with me on the subject of workshops, to which she agreed.   

At the time of the conversation, I was in the final stages of my PhD in Artistic Research. As part of the PhD project I have been exploring means of publishing (about and through) workshop-based practice with the question: 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 and accountable to its respective context?  

Anja Groten, August 2022.

The following conversation has been shortened and edited.

Anja Groten: I hadn't thought about the “workshop” as a topic of study before I started at PhDArts. I started journaling about workshop situations that I was taking part in and noticed its ubiquity as a format across the different layers of my practice—in my work as an educator, designer, researcher, and organizer—and I realized that I couldn’t ignore it anymore. The workshop also plays a significant role in the context of Hackers & Designers. But here too, I felt that 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 zero pressure situation. We get to try out new things. But at the same time, as it was also discussed in the conference you spoke at, the workshop is also intertwined in a certain neo-liberalization of art and education. It seems that there is a double-bind in workshop-based practice. I am trying to think about how to deal with that double-bind as a collective—as a self-organized group that likes to sustain spaces in order to experiment. How can we sustain an awareness of its implications? For me, the process of writing about workshops drove my critical attention to this ambiguous format, including the inherent awkwardness and friction that arises from participating in and facilitating such events. It made me start thinking about how and why workshops matter.

Heike Roms: I came to the topic of workshops because in my work I look at the emergence of performance in the sixties and seventies. I became interested in the emergence of performance art within art educational contexts, through a conceptualization of a pedagogy of performance. I've read your chapter on “Workshop Production,” which I really enjoyed. Some of the research you've done is helpful because I too have found that there's actually very little written about the workshop as a practice. Indeed, people write about specific workshops so you can find material on workshops given by a particular artist. But there is 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 in practice. There are books on laboratories, for example, and there is a connected history to labs, the studio space, and rehearsals. But there is very little on the workshop, certainly within performance study or artistic discourse, so I became intrigued by this ubiquitous form that remains largely unexamined. It's great that through the conference there's a new kind of attention being paid to it, and through the work of Kai van Eikels, one of the organizers of the conference, and yours as well. But I don't know enough about the history of the workshop to understand at what point this flip occurred from the workshop as a site to the workshop as an event. You write about this as well. The two meanings, of course, exist in parallel, particularly in the context of art schools. But at what point did the workshop become an event instead of a site of making—a Werkstatt? I don't know how and when that occurred. My suspicion is that it was sometime around the fifties and sixties.

Visual Footnote

AG: There is the The Journal of Educational Sociology that was published in 1951 and refers to the first organized professional education activity under the name of a workshop. It took place at Ohio State University in 1936. I remember you were talking about the relation between the occurrence of workshops and the emergence of a certain resistance toward the steady structures of art schools in the fifties and sixties in the UK—a resistance to legitimized knowledge practices and skills. Art students wanted to rid themselves of a certain authority of disciplines or disciplined learning and instead wanted to take things into their own hands.

HR: In the history I looked at, I found there is a confluence between the workshop and two emancipatory movements. First was the move toward the workshop through the impetus of the Bauhaus, which had a huge impact on art schools across the UK. Before the sixties people weren’t really talking about workshops as sites of making; the workshop was the place of the plumber or the blacksmith, while artists worked in ateliers or studios. The idea of the workshop as a place of making was introduced through the Bauhaus philosophy, which was a vehicle for the emancipation of art education. All of a sudden art was being approached as other practices of making were being approached. No longer did we have the sculpture atelier or the drawing room. Now there were ceramics workshops, metal workshops, printmaking workshops. This move introduced a different kind of art making and that was very powerful in a place like Cardiff, which is where I've been looking. This change that occurred in the UK in the sixties was very much driven by the reception of Bauhaus and Joseph Itten's preliminary course. Workshop production was seen as a new, more emancipatory form of art making that also came out of the experiences of the Second World War and the desire to give students a different sort of experience—one that connected them to the contemporary world as well as overcoming the differences between art and design.

The second shift is where 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. Instead we do this other thing where we get together and we make something that’s not actually about 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 the shift of the workshop site toward 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—was that this move toward the ephemeral was about searching for more equitable relationships that do away with that teacher-student division, the remains of the Bauhaus philosophy. I think that was one of the key shifts toward this more ephemeral meaning of the workshop. It was no longer about a master passing on knowledge to their students. It was about collective making. And everybody took collective charge and responsibility for that making. The people who I've done research on, actually say that they wanted to get away from producing objects as well. But, as you say, the workshop can very easily be co-opted like so much of the sixties was. Was that the last hurrah of collectivism? Or was it actually what lay the groundwork for neoliberalism, as we know it?

AG: I myself am wondering whether organizing workshops can generally be considered an emancipatory practice at all? Perhaps there cannot or should not be a general answer to this question. At the school where I work as an educator, some argue the educational system builds upon rather precarious labor conditions, where everyone works as a self-employed freelancer. Simultaneously, more and more workshops are being organized, which at times can clutter the education. Students are supposed to self-initiate and self-organize as well. They often resort to organizing workshops for each other. In my view, such conditions sometimes also show the limits of what can be accomplished with workshops. I think it's important to have more discussions about the workshop as a format and its implications for 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, whilst also paying critical attention to the undesirable conditions it is intermingled with.

How was it for you? Did the invitation to the conference lead you to take a deeper look at the phenomenon of the workshop? Or were you already busy with it?

HR: Yes, that would be fair to say. I had been working on this material before and I've written about it too. But actually, I had never really paid attention to the frequency of the word workshop until the invitation came. It was then that I realized that it's a really productive thing to be talking about.

I wrote 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 serve the kind of function of an art school without replicating its structures. This was the case in Cardiff, but also in other places. I was grateful that I was invited to to think more about it by the conference. I looked at my examples and it is specifically “the workshop as event” that became a kind of parallel institution. It wasn't really the performances they made, but the workshop itself as a learning format that I think they clustered all their ideas around.

AG: I stumbled upon the conference last minute and wasn't aware of this whole community of performance artists and live arts who consider the workshop as an artistic medium. It's also interesting that the workshop, because of its ambiguity, manages to converge all these different worlds and unveil commonalities between them. For instance a policeman speaking about their conflict resolution workshops, and the activist who learns about tying themselves to a tree and how to negotiate with the police while doing so. Both speaking about the same sort of thing at the same conference from an entirely different vantage point.

You emphasized that a lot of the artists you researched were also educators. It was great to hear that engaged with in such an explicit manner. I don’t often hear about how the practices of artists and designers continue to evolve within particular educational environments, after they have completed their studies too. I find that many great artists and designers are also teachers and I personally don’t draw a harsh distinction between being an educator and being a designer. The practices go hand in hand. But I found that there are not many records of the teaching practices of artists and designers. Another thing from your talk that really stayed with me was your re-enactment of a workshop. You showed some pictures and I found them so interesting and also very funny. In your re-enactment, you imagined through physical exercises what the workshop might have looked like. You referred to one specific artist educator, whose name I don’t recall.

HR: His name is John Gingle, he is not well known. I never met him in person, as he had already passed away by the time I became interested in his work. He had an artistic practice, a few of his public artworks are scattered around and some of this work has been exhibited in London, but really he was an educator. He formed and shaped generations of art students. He was not the type of person to write manifestos or write a lot in general, but I've been very fortunate because his family has allowed me to look at all of his materials, which are in the attic of one of his daughters. He didn't leave a written philosophy of teaching or anything like that, just really random notes or little things that he put together for the art school in order to justify what he was doing, or presentation notes and things like that. I didn't re-enact any of his workshops because they were very sketchily documented. He was not somebody who kept a particularly developed kind of scoring practice, and if I think about my own teaching, I don't either. Often when I enter a classroom, I just take some notes on the exercises I want to do. They're just little prompts, which aren’t accompanied with much explanation. In years to come, if somebody were to look at my teaching notes, they too wouldn’t be able to make much sense of what I was doing in the classroom. I don't think that's unusual. Anyway, I have contact with one of Gingle’s students who also taught at the art school for a number of years and who now lives in Exeter. He was very influenced by John Cage so his own artistic practice was already very score-based. When he became a teacher his teaching practice was very well documented. He has exercises alongside photos of the students doing the exercises. He has quite substantive documentation on the courses he taught. Interestingly, one of his classes was a word course about sounds and words, which was unusual for an art school context. I invited him and we re-enacted it together. Rather than me taking just notes, we actually revisited his own practice. I invited him to do this with me and make it public—anybody could attend, but it was mainly my friends who came [laughs]. A lot of the people who attended were theatre people. These exercises and the approach that he took spoke very much from a visual arts kind of sensibility. Even though he was working with words and sounds—which have a kind of a theatrical dimension—it was much less about what theater workshops tend to focus on, such as the interpretation of words or meaning making. This was much more about the visual qualities of words and sounds, how they would appear in the space, for instance. The theatre people who took part said afterwards that some of the exercises were familiar to them, but felt that they were framed very differently from how they were used to framing them. There was much more concern about spatiality and the sculptural qualities of words. I've done a couple more of these re-enactments. He’s a brilliant person to do it with. He approached his teaching practice very much as a conceptual practice and so it was much easier to reconstruct what he did. I've always been intrigued by this hidden history of pedagogy within the emergence of experimental art. We read a lot about John Cage and his teaching at the New School in New York, but I often think, what did they actually do in class? I mean, there are some accounts of the students about stuff that they would improvise. I'm intrigued to learn more but there is not much written about it. Beuys is also a kind of teacher figure as well as an artist. He considered education as a key part of his practice. There are others, too, like Suzanne Lacy and Allan Kaprow at CalArts; a lot of the canonical artists were teachers. Some of them, Kaprow, for instance, wrote about education. Others may be less pronounced.

AG: I was also wondering about how you document workshops. As you said yourself, even though you come up with the initial class or workshop, it is to a large extent shaped in the actual encounter with the people, materials, and space itself. It is obviously not so interesting nor meaningful to just take pictures of people having a great time. So what are ways of documenting that afford a continuation of whatever is happening in these short workshop encounters, and which allow for retrospective discussion and reflection of these workshop practices? The way I document workshops is usually very messy. Our workshop archive is scattered in different places, online and as well as offline.

I was wondering, sometimes we compare workshop scripts with protocols and orchestrate physical re-enactments of what a computer would do, translating something that happens in your machine into a physical space. I am not very familiar with scoring practice but what I do know makes me think of protocols or algorithms. It's not a recording or a replica of a situation, but it sort of anticipates it, sets conditions. I wonder if it could help us think about documentation as something that is not only about looking back, but in fact geared toward continuation and activation in the future. HR: From the sixties onwards, through happenings and Fluxus scoring practices—which have become a common practice in visual arts—and in performance art and dance, very extensive scoring practices have emerged. The indeterminacy of the score is partly what it is about. You give somebody a score and it could be interpreted in a hundred different ways. That's why it is interesting to consider where the artwork is located. Is it the score? Is it the realization of the score? A Fluxus score for instance wouldn't even tell you how many people have to do it. Such a score could be about the very indeterminacy of an action.

Traditionally, we think of the author of the score as the author of the work, because the level of interpretation and indeterminacy after the fact is somewhat restricted. But more recently, we are seeing much more experimentation in scoring practices, and the relationship between the score and the event that it might anticipate or the event that it might generate. A few years ago Hans Ulrich Obrist did this project called "do it,” which invited artists who don't have a scoring practice to write their own scores. People were invited to enact their score and then upload documentation of the enactment online so that you could see the score, as well as a multitude of different kinds of documentation of the different kinds of outcomes produced by the enactment.

AG: I am trying to think through the question of how to publish something like a workshop or a workshop script. In my view it can be an interesting graphic design object because it's very unresolved, very spontaneous, it's actually not a precious object, and it’s never up to date. These criteria are significant for it to function. But how do we publish something like that in a meaningful way? For instance, pictures of workshop situations can help to contextualize something like a score or workshop script. You cannot just give the score to someone and expect them to know what they have to do and how to be excited about it. You need that activation moment and know-how too. But including snapshots of people doing things is not necessarily interesting to print in a book.

HR: It brings us back to the fact that there are different kinds of workshops and different kinds of scores. There are those that are meant to be indeterminate and generate lots of different kinds of responses. Every response is justified and equally valid. Sometimes visual documentation can be too prescriptive. If you see a score and somebody enacting it, you might think, well, that's the only way to do it. It takes a little bit of your agency away. Unless you do it like the DIY “Do It”project, where you just provide multiple enactments so you encourage people to try by showing them five different versions. But then there are scores where which are much more prescriptive and people want them to be enacted in a particular kind of way, particularly often in pedagogical contexts. Do you want the exercise to land in a particular way, because you want the students to have a particular kind of learning experience? There are different scoring practices and so there are different kinds of documentation practices that might be suitable. Yet, I would say that it's the “doing,” the activation and interpretation of a score, that's interesting. It's all about the finding process and the kind of rationalization and reflexivity that you go through in this process that I find exciting. It’s often just as interesting to look at a person and how they struggled through issues.

[add reference we talked about as visual footnotes with captions]

AG: You also teach workshops for children. What are they about?

HR: I do performance work with children, and I've started writing about the work that Kaprow and Fluxus did with children in the sixties. I work closely with an artist in Hamburg, Sibylle Peters, who runs a theater for children. She calls it a theater of research. The philosophy is that research is something that artists do, 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 devises these projects around different themes, which are of particular interest to the children you research with. I did several projects where I was invited for my knowledge on art history. The last workshop we did was on destruction, which is a really big subject for children, because they're often told they are destructive or have destructive behavior.

We worked with children who were diagnosed with behavioral issues, who show destructive behavior in class, or who are really interested in watching cartoons where things get destroyed. Kids see and hear about environmental destruction all the time. When we were doing the project in London, Grenfell Tower had just burnt down and many people had died. It was close to where these children came from. But there's no real outlet for children to explore their destructive fantasies, their interests and fears about destruction. We worked with the children on the notion of destruction for a week. We were all experts together and we all shared our expertise. The kids did talks about destruction and made comic books, and I did a talk on destruction and art.They've also done projects on piracy. There was a big case a few years ago where some Somali pirates were on trial in Hamburg. Of course, kids are really interested in pirates. Sibylle did a project on what pirates are and actually worked with a couple of Somali pirates. The kids prepared some questions and interviewed the pirates themselves, asking, for instance, have you ever killed somebody? It was pretty extraordinary.

They also did a project on money, which thought about what money is and how it is produced. They founded a children's bank that produced money and could be used as currency in their neighborhood. Why do we have money, or no money? What can money buy? They actually managed to persuade a number of businesses in the neighborhood of the theater to buy into this newly founded local currency. Sybille has done lots of these kinds of projects which I occasionally get invited to participate in and work on issues that overlap with histories of art.

AG: Fantastic. We recently started thinking about how to develop workshops that offer different levels of participation. Last weekend we hosted an intergenerational workshop with kids and grown-ups about how the Internet works. We made a sort of a mini Internet, consisting of a wifi module that is powered by a little solar panel. We put little hints and clues into the module and we used it to make a scavenger hunt, which we designed together with the kids. It was a shared effort between the kids and grown-ups. We designed the scavenger hunt together, and everyone could contribute. HR: That's really important to Sibylle as well. And again, it comes back to this idea of the workshop as a space for equitable wholeness. She takes seriously what the kids bring to the discussion. 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.

[adding visual footnotes of reference as intermission with captions]

Heike Roms is Professor in Theater 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.