Common Projects...invites teachers, alongside artists, curators and

educators, to form a collaborative community of

shared conversations and develop an ongoing

dialogue around art and education throughout a

series of workshops held in 2015-2016.

1P R O J E C T S

“But...I’m schools and teachers team. Apparently I don’t get one...”“Yes you do!”

“There’s no point. There does not have to be a point. I think as adults we need to learn that there is no right or wrong way to play.” —Charlie Todd, at TED: ‘The Shared Experience of Absurdity’

2 C O M M O N

“Mine’s an activity we need to do. It was recommended to me by course.

Follow me! Come up on the steps. Make sure you’re opposite someone. It’s a good introduction one if people have never met each other. Draw the person opposite you while asking how their day was. But I will only let you do it for a minute. So, off you go.

Now, move to your left.

“Oh, it’s so much nicer having a pencil!”

“Hello, how are you? Like a dance performance?”

“Did you practice it?”

‘No!”

3P R O J E C T S

Now, have a look at the character the next person’s made.

“Did you practice it?”

‘No!”

I feel mean stopping you...”

(It’s almost like an exquisite corpse. The next person continues the previous person’s drawing...)

4 C O M M O N

Amy McKelvie: film from Adam James, ‘Project Visible’, Tate

A video of a workshop with artist Adam James who uses artworks to inspire further artworks. He starts out by responding to gestural painting with movement and choreography. He then leads a student workshop asking each student to select a painting that best represents them… “A lot of what we do really reates to what happens in the playground.” His aim is to introduce play into collective activity and a state of improvisation in our response to artwork. “Art can be play. There is a value in play. There is a value in making mistakes… There is a value in working together, collectively and collaboratively.”

5P R O J E C T S

Rebecca Lindsay-Addy: Artsnight episode on ‘Black Culture’.

‘The Black Atlantic’What is black music? What is black culture? It is a 20th century invention, before that there was Negro culture. And before that there was African culture.

Racism doesn’t see culture in a fluid way. Racism seeks to pickle you in a particular aspect of a culture. There is a commercialisation and commodification of Black Culture into a global identity.

What is the function of a cultural commodity? Is it intellectual property? Can individuals adopt it or does it overwhelm the individual.

Rapping

Rapping is one form of writing. The environment rap comes out of it is not seeing as an intellectual endeavour. Every convention that they say makes rap not poetry is a convention that Shakespeare used. His sonnets have an individual flow, every one of them is different. By the time he gets to his last play, The Tempest, the lines are doubly short, it is like double time.

“Of course he was an intelligent guy, but so was Tupac.”

6 C O M M O N

Esther Tyler-Ward:

I started at a news school. We have a new cohort of students. I’ve got these ridiculous outstanding targets to hit with no resources. We’ve been talking about play. It’s not a time effective process; opposite from how we are expected to teach. We give students these sketchbooks but if they don’t look good they won’t get good grades, so...we started

creating these little failure books. They’re failure spaces. I want you to fold yours like a booklet. This film is Nils Frahm. He’s just like...amazing. Focused on what he does. You can hear all the ‘pssssst’ in the back. He’s much better live. I want you to play with the sketchbook. We’ve only got pencils, pens....that’s pretty much all I’ve got in the art department at the moment. What I was going to do was to get you to draw a target on the front page...

Ralph Dorey: Benjamin Damage, ‘Against The Clock’

Ralph has chosen a segment from reality music series ‘Against The Clock’.

“I like watching these types of things because I am really interested in people’s workflow, how they go from nothing to create a piece of work. What is interesting is… bits of being present, bits of using different part of the brain, bits appearing and disappearing.”

7P R O J E C T S

Anna Baker: Charlie Todd TED Talk

ww

w.im

prov

ever

ywhe

re.c

om

“He gave 2500 high-fives that day.”

8 C O M M O N

“The piece is called ‘Phase’. It’s based on the London riots. They start off together, they go out of sync. It makes me think of how we work with artists, young poeple...but we come together in this common ground in working together.

I’ve only actually seen it on youtube but I’m going to see it next month...”

Nicky Field during his presentation. Above is his submission

9P R O J E C T S

Anna-Marie Gray: Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker to Steve Reich’s Come Out

10 C O M M O N

Emily Limna: Word Workshops

“We swapped play books, and we both ended up reading a photographer’s play book by coincidence. I had to write for all year groups. Taking the shapes of letters to inspire what you were photographing. Initially I was going to call it art circuit training, but it sounded a bit intense...(group laughs)

Playing with Alphabetti Spaghetti. You know Dulux samples have ridiculous names. Using the colour and the cheesy name for the colour as inspiration. The third is to use pages from old books. Finding words and changing meaning.

Here are the colour charts. I did get some strange looks in the shop, though, taking everything...”

11P R O J E C T S

12 C O M M O N

13P R O J E C T S

14 C O M M O N

15P R O J E C T S

Sarah Jarvis: “I want to read something from the ‘Support Structures’ book. This is Ryan Gander’s ‘How to Work Better’.”

“Back to the manifesto on my studio wall. I read it daily, but I have often forgotten that this photocopy is their work. It has sort of moved beyond being something that I can put their name to, and has gone full circle and come back to being just one of countless other amazing things that exist in the world.” —Ryan Gander

16 C O M M O N

Anne- Marie Juniper: Werner Herzog’s cave art documentary (top) and Brassi’s Graffiti

(bottom two images)

Eimear McClean:“What I’m about to show you is...I worked as an Illustrator in a print workshop. I’ve written down words. We’re so subjected to stuff that we have to do. When we get older we forget that we should be having fun, that we should be keeping the Peter Pan syndrome. And while you do it (watch this), I have a present.”

The video is from a Montessouri school.

Even we got some jelly beans!

17P R O J E C T S

Cyrus Iravani: Video by Hilde Krohn Huse, ‘Hanging in the Woods’

Anne-Marie Juniper’s presentation created a contemplative space within the auditorium. She showed a film set to atmospheric music accompanied images of cave paintings, one of the themes of her presentation. The other being a French language black and white interview with sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Alas, we don’t speak French so could not translate and transcribe the film. Nevertheless the visual resemblance between the two parts of her presentation spoke the same language. We tried to Shazam the piece of triumphant music that accompanied the second film, but Shazam could not pick up the tune. :(

“I’m going to say a few words while it’s running. My recommendation is by Hilde Krohn Huse, a former student of mine in High School. She just completed her BFA at Slade and it’s been nominated for the Bloomberg New Contemporaries. In actual fact as part of her show, she tried to make some still images finding things from an archive and finding a narrative. The narrative is staged. She created a schema in her show, like in an interview room. She set the camera up knowing she will take a few still. She knew she was going to get some rope in a branch, and get out of it. Problem was, it kind of went a bit wrong. She didn’t quite have the strength to release herself. She then thought the value of this as an artwork was the fine line between what is staged by the artist and what is real.”

Adam!!!!

18 C O M M O N

“They used to say that print kills the ballad. I think that there was some truth in that.

Civilization is about six thousand years old, just a little crawling infant. Print is just yesterday. We people love print, and we think we know it all. So we call all those people that have a non-print culture, quaint. We’re the ones that are quaint!”

—Alan Lomax, Musical AnthropologistHannah Preedy: Recording ephemerality

‘Illuminate Me’: Nicky Field

19P R O J E C T S

Deborah Britton: BBC Shipping Forecast

1725 on Monday 9 November. The general synopsis at midday: low, .......

Oh Britain, your weather sucks.

“Occasionally good...”

Hannah Preedy: “I’m going to start off with a song. Robert Wilkins; he’s a blues musician famously covered by the Rolling Stones, but he wasn’t credited, the Rolling Stones claimed they wrote it, which they eventually got sued for.”

While we were making jokes about the bad weather, the shipping forecast turned to current affairs and to the very topical, very desperate refugee situation at the Clais detention camp where thousands of people are hungry and cold yet still hoping to enter Britain…

Then, the shipping forecast returns...about Tony Blair’s former chief of staff. We all laugh.

“I listen to this song a lot. I started thinking about recording ephemerality, which is interesting because we have the press ladies...”

“He (Lomax) found this website called Associations of Equity. Loads of amazing things from around the world.”

20 C O M M O N

Special thanks to:

Sarah Jarvis, Anna-Marie Gray, Amy McKelvie

for inviting us and helping us procure the

perfect clipboards. Thanks to Gerry for the comically

big lights, Rebecca for your help, and the lady who

brought our plug sockets. And lastly, a shout out to

Tom Barton, our emergency studio assistant!

Nicky Field: “I’m not going to tell you how to make this. I’d like you to try to make it. This can be made by a pair of scissors and the piece of paper you’ve got now. There’s plenty more paper.”

(...we’re still trying to figure it out!)

“I chose it because it’s weird and random, like me” —Child, Tate film on Adam James

There is strong evidence to suggest that students with the closed mindset plateau early and achieve less than their full potential. The exact opposite can be said of students with the most open of mindsets.

“We think that’s everyone.

Is that correct?”

one last submission!

This zine was brought to you by Ladies of the Press* www.ladiesofthepress.org #LivePress