Dwelling as an approach to creative pedagogy

This research article looks to provide an alternate account of creative pedagogy to the predominant view that maintaining change and the generation of options is the bastion of creative teaching. A tenet of modern art is that it eschews continuity of form in favour of ideological disjuncture. The zenith of this paralogical development being the dematerialization of the art object and the conceptual turn in art making. From 1968 onwards, free from material certainties, and aiming itself beyond the commodity address of historic modernism, contemporary art has proved to be an uncomfortable relative of education. Artistic practice has developed a problematic relationship to knowledge. A contested and unshackled pursuit, it possesses no consistent method and its teaching is cloaked in the overtly mythological outline of tacit-knowledge. The resurgence in popularity of Donald Barthelme’s 1987 essay Not-Knowing is symptomatic of the hiatus that is now at the centre of the expansion of artistic pedagogy. This article sees the known and accepted view of the development of art pedagogy subjugating a parallel account of creative development that has stasis, dwelling and the maintaining of a fixed position at its core. This research suggests that an alternate account of artistic creativity can be developed from a number of artists who emerged during early and late 1960s whose artistic contribution was to establish a fixed and defined position that has remained unchanged for over 40 years. This article will look at the artistic work of two British Artists who have long-standing relationships to British and European Art education (Alan Charlton, Roger Ackling) to present a counterpoint to ‘not knowing’.