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The Artful Dodger: Creative Resistanceto Neoliberalism in EducationJeff AdamsPublished online: 28 Aug 2013.

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The Artful Dodger: Creative Resistance toNeoliberalism in Education

Jeff Adams

This article explores contemporary forms of creative practices and their survivalunder siege from what Stuart Hall (2011) describes as the neoliberal revolution, inthe context of the tightly policed education system in the United Kingdom. Thefragility and importance of the democratic struggle is discussed with reference toChantal Mouffe’s work on democracy (2005), and Carr and Harnett’s (2010) onsimilar lines but with specific reference to education. Using twentieth-centurytheorists John Dewey (1916=1966) and Herbert Read’s (1948) ideas of progressiveeducation, in which democracy and education should be seen as mutually rein-forcing, I argue that the continuing presence and viability of these critical andidiosyncratic creative practices may be an indicator of the health of an equitableeducation system, and perhaps of the democratic polity as a whole. To explainthe kind of creativity that I think is relevant and applicable, here I focus on thetheoretical work of Nicholas Bourriaud (2002) on relational aesthetics and applyhis relational concepts through examples drawn from the contemporary artevents of the Liverpool Biennials, and from the primary school children’s con-temporary artworks of the Room 13 group. In all these cases the site of the work=event is significant for an understanding of their relational and critical features,as well as their collaborative and transient characteristics, which are antitheticalto cultures and systems of neoliberalism, and are instead more commensuratewith democratic resistance.

THE NEOLIBERALIZATION OF CREATIVITY

Creative practices in education are ‘‘neoliberalized’’ in two ways principally:either they are assimilated into a market ethos, or they are driven out of the cur-riculum altogether. In the case of assimilation, creativity is suppressed by perfor-mativity in the form of high-stakes testing and league tables, which makes it fartoo risky for school managers to contemplate, especially when more compliantand easily assessed activities can readily replace creative ones. This does notnecessarily require the removal of arts or creative-designated subjects from the

The Review of Education, Pedagogy,

and Cultural Studies, 35:242–255, 2013

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online

DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2013.819726

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curriculum, rather it entails the extraction of their critical, relational and subjectivefeatures, so that what remains is a husk largely devoid of actual creativity. Thisprocess is clearly evident throughout the United Kingdom (Atkinson 2011;Addison and Burgess 2000; Adams et al. 2008) and operates by reducing creativepractices to passively reproductive activities, usually in the form of replicatingcanonical works, irrespective of their relevance or appropriateness. Suchreductive practices, which may nonetheless be attractive or sumptuously decorat-ive, effectively exclude the learners’ voices, or learners as directors of their ownlearning. A variant on this assimilation, increasingly popular, is rendering cre-ative practices anodyne by harnessing them to the economy, asking young peopleto acquire the ethos of the market. Assimilation is legitimized though the rhetoricof vocation and entrepreneurialism, as a pastiche of commerce (e.g., the advertis-ing of commercial products in art) without questioning the social consequences ofsuch acts. This strategy is particularly effective in the acquisition and embeddingof market values such as competition and acquisitiveness, neatly sidesteppingquestions of social justice. In such circumstances, creativity is diminished andany kind of criticality is strictly ruled out—such as a questioning of the purposeor cultural relevance of the practice—in favor of compliance.

The second mode of the neoliberalization of creative practices is managedextinction. This is an increasingly popular option, as is manifestly evident in theascendancy of the concept STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, andmathematics) originating in the United States (ICE 2012), which has beenembraced by many countries and informs the U.K. government’s university cutsand the proposed English Baccalaureate. The purpose of STEM is ostensibly to pro-mote degree subjects that can readily be harnessed to economic requirements, withthe idea of producing more graduates readymade to service capital. The long list ofSTEM subjects (ICE 2012; tellingly perhaps, the principal use of the list appears tobe a means to control U.S. immigration) is meticulous in its avoidance of anythingthat might contain or even imply any studying that would encompass the humani-ties, culture, creativity, or the arts; and no reason seems to be required for thisneglect—such is the penetration of the neoliberal revolution that centuries of cre-ative and artistic education can be ignored when devising a curriculum which ispurpose-built for the compliant service of capital. To deploy Slavoj Zizek’s favoriterhetorical device here (e.g., as frequently used in Zizek 1999), I would ask what ifthe opposite is true? What if the purpose of STEM and its derivatives is not somuch to promote economic aims but to suppress cultural learning, and in parti-cular, creative practices? What if the covert purpose is to eliminate those areasof the school or university curriculum that may harbor dissent or criticality, andact as a repository for the remnants of the civic ethos that was so fundamentalto the democratic post-war state building—in short, to suppress democracy?

RELATIONAL CREATIVITY

There are many types of creativity and the provenance of this ubiquitous andcapacious concept is well chronicled by Anna Craft and Bob Jeffries (Craft 2001;Craft and Jeffries 2008). For example, they describe the increasingly common

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use of the concept to connote commercial enterprise, as a means to engage inimaginative ways to generate profit and extend markets for the purposes ofself-advancement or the expansion of business. The problem is that market-determined notions of creativity are at odds with the democratic educationalideals that were generated in the expansion of democracy in the west in the post-war period, like Herbert Read’s doctrine of educating for democratic citizenshipthrough the arts (1948), which could not have accommodated the idea of edu-cation as a competition for social advantage. Consequently there exists a creativeparadox, where creativity can be conceived from opposing, irreconcilablestandpoints; as Ken Jones explains:

The capacity to be creative ‘‘is recognised and evaluated differently from one discourse toanother: in some cases, it is disparaged, as a symptom of a problematic progressivism; inothers it is regarded as central to identity and social being.’’ (2009, 8)

This dichotomy is not easily resolved, and even in the traditionally creativesubjects such as art and drama, creative practices can be problematic withincontrolled, homogenous, and standardized educational processes.

New forms of creative practice continually emerge, however, some of whichare resistant (albeit temporarily) to ready assimilation and thrive in the margins,dodging the neoliberal bureaucratization. A good example of this is relationalcreative practice, which has emerged globally in the past twenty years. Theserelational forms are fundamentally concerned with collaboration and socialengagement, sharing and exchange, and it may be no coincidence that these haveemerged in parallel with the global expansion of social networking media. Just asvirulent antidemocratic configurations like neoliberalism arise, so too dosignificant prodemocratic forms, which are fundamental to maintain and givemomentum to the larger re-democratization of society. The individualism andcompetitive elitism that underpin neoliberalism are by definition antithetical tocollaboration and mutuality, and the dominance of the latter in these sociallycreative practices can be seen as a response to their closure, restriction, or policingin the mainstream neoliberal polity.

Developing a typology for more recent reincarnations of relational creativepractices is very difficult, especially given their dynamic and transient character.However, an important example is Nicholas Bourriaud’s (2002) relational theoriesof art production and consumption, which give prominence to the social, and tothe event, both of which have a direct correspondence with the educational func-tion of art. He argues that ‘‘each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a sharedworld, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, givingrise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum’’ (2002, 22). Bourriaud’scentral thesis is that relational art, which is the form of contemporary art that mostinterests him, is concerned with ‘‘human interactions in the social sphere’’ (14)and that the corresponding aesthetics is determined by the coherence and valueof the ‘‘reflection’’ of human relations that the artwork makes (2002, 18). He sumsthis up as: ‘‘Art is a state of encounter’’ (2002, 18). A recent example of this is Oslo:Palestinian Embassy (2012) by Goksøyr and Martens, part of the City States exhi-bition at the Liverpool Biennial (2012). In this work an embassy was created inthe basket of a hot air balloon that floated above the city of Liverpool, and within

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which people were invited to discuss Palestinian politics. The event enabledpeople to develop impromptu diplomatic relationships, in recognition of thisembassy’s transience as commensurate with the statelessness of Palestinians—an embassy that cannot be a fixed, stable entity but which can only exist asitinerant. The event also spawned many subsidiary cultural activities, particularlyperformances, which varied according to the location as the event was recreatedseveral times in different places. In keeping with Bourriaud’s notion of relationalaesthetics, a work like this is only ever the sum of its relations with the people whoare experiencing it at any one moment.

It is fitting that the Palestinian Embassy event included the 2012 LiverpoolBiennial as one of its sites, for the fabric and material of the city are testamentto neoliberal simulacra and their subsequent neglect. Walking between thevarious sites of the Biennial one finds oneself wandering through the ruins ofcapitalism: poorly cleared warehouses, abandoned window displays. Mostof the Biennial displays are in such contexts, and the organizers and artistscolonize the city seeking out these empty and abandoned urban spaces(Liverpool Biennial 2012). Yet the works are not simply in these spaces, theyare of them as well. It is a fundamental requirement of the Biennial com-missioned works that the artists respond to the city—that they are site-specificin their meaning.

In the 2010 Liverpool Biennial there was a series of works by a number of artiststhat appeared under the title Rethinking Trade. Its location was in a site of signifi-cance locally as the former home of a large home improvements store. TheRethinking Trade artists critiqued ideas of exchange, consumption, display, andtransaction in ways commensurate with Bourriaud’s theories of relational art.One conspicuous example of this was Daniel Knorr’s ‘‘The Naked Corner’’(2010), where people were invited to pose nearly naked in one of the formershop windows with slogans painted on them (see Figure 1). The slogans wereall from commercial advertising, and therefore were all copyrighted by powerful

Figure 1. Daniel Knorr’s The Naked Corner, part of the Rethinking Trade exhibition, Liverpool Biennial 2010.

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corporations that prevent their reproduction in commercial media. As critic Lor-enzo Fusi (2011) explains:

The slogans selected by the artist and transcribed on to the bare skin of live models havebeen copyrighted by multinational corporations and by the advertising industry . . .Byplacing these slogans in a former shop window and (symbolically) in a context oftrade, Knorr questions the authority of the business world to appropriate language and,ultimately, meaning.

These social exchanges and transactions between the impromptu models and theiraudience—the chance passersby—were nonetheless real despite their bogus com-mercial status. In fact, the transactions were arguably more real because of thissimulation, occupying as they did the marginal spaces between objectified goodsand the willful performing bodies. In these moments of potential exchange the siteacquires great significance; the original commercial store front lived in the passer-by’s imagination and existed sufficiently recently for the prospect of exchange andtransaction to be retained, and consequently the plausibility of the commercialimperative, its immanence, was palpable and readily invested in the performers.

This relational work has a pedagogical function that is determined througha rapid negotiation: the passerby, transformed into a participant-learner, activelyconstructs meanings of the artwork that go well beyond aesthetics, into the realmsof commerce, politics, the body, and social status. In Knorr’s work the imma-nence and potentiality of transaction and exchange, made strange by the bodiesbearing the slogans and the substitution of the familiar store displays with the artevent, constitute the relational art. This is perhaps the most important pedagogi-cal and political function of the work: to ask questions of the nature of trade itself.This may be momentary and fleeting, but nonetheless we are forced to question,through the strangeness of the event, our familiarity with commerce: what does itmean to be attracted, to find compulsion, to vicariously experience and desirecommodities? These powerful impulses, which are daily and infinitely generatedwithin a society organized around capital, are temporarily unhinged anddestabilized, and so we come to relearn that which is normally obscured byfamiliarity itself.

Bourriaud’s definition of relational art is ‘‘an art taking as its theoreticalhorizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than theassertion of an independent and private symbolic space’’ (2002, 14). Educationis of course already rooted in the ‘‘realm of human interactions,’’ but its manifesta-tions in its reified forms—qualifications, assessment, and policies—have beendominated by neoliberal concerns with individualism and competition, resultingin the ascendancy of the ‘‘private symbolic space’’ over the collaborative, commu-nal, civic, or social. Yet the critically transformative potential of relational creativepractices is striking: the ways in which the works pervade consciousness andpresent us with different perspectives on the familiar. The manipulation of thematerial resources available—whether that be the traditional artists’ materialsof paint or clay, or the use of the body to perform, or the siting of an object, in sucha way that some new insight into the familiar or commonplace emerges—serves todefine one of the most important characteristics of creativity in the context ofsocial democracy (Hughes 1998).

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DEMOCRATIC STRUGGLE AND EDUCATION

Jones (2012) argues that democracy is a dynamic, constant process, rather thanthe fixed, stable, and constitutional ideal, as it is commonly portrayed. Usingthe work of Canfora he outlines the history of democracy as a series of interven-tions into oligarchic or aristocratic rule, a shift of power, ‘‘a project of shifting thebalance of political and social power away from the possessing class and towardsthe demos’’ (Canfora, quoted in Jones 2012, 205). Seen in this way democracy is aconstant never-ending struggle, a history of gains and losses. For Jones thepost-war period in Europe was largely a period of gains, up until the 1980s,and since then we have entered a period of losses, with many powers regainedby oligarchic forces and a corresponding diminution of democratic rights. Jonesalso argues (2012) that this reversal of power acquisition away from the demo-cratic populace has been especially pronounced in England. This theme is similarto Carr and Hartnett’s (2010), who frame democracy in education as a constantstruggle. Moreover, they argue that education in the United Kingdom has beenmuch less successful in the democratic contest than other services such as theNational Health Service. They make a convincing case that, given this prov-enance, education has lagged behind other public services and the forces ofconservative elitism have ensured that the ideal of comprehensive state-fundedpublic education—education for all—was introduced late, and then only par-tially. This half-hearted and deteriorating commitment to a comprehensive andequitable education system is an indicator for Carr and Hartnett, just as it isfor Jones, of the overall malaise that has afflicted democratic progress in recentdecades.

In a similar vein, Chantal Mouffe (2005) has consistently argued that the contestfor democracy is a vital and dynamic contest of global proportions. In this largerarena, the democratic ebb is reinforced by the colorizations of global capitalism,which, in Mouffe’s terms, means that the expansion of global capitalism doesnot equate to the spread of democracy; instead it can only lead to further sitesof conflict as power and control are relocated. Mouffe analyzes the consequentdemocratic crisis as an articulation of liberalism and democracy (2005, 6–7). Sheexplains that liberalism, or the introduction of a liberal market system, does notnecessitate a democratic polity, despite neoliberal arguments to the contrary,and that our current association of the two concepts is a relatively modernphenomenon. The problem that she identifies with this alliance is that liberalism,in its current neoliberal form, dominates democracy. Moreover, it is the egali-tarian aspect of democracy that is the casualty of this unequal relationship. Theconsequence of this is that liberal democracy has come to mean an impoverishedideal of democratic governance, in which social justice and equity are dimin-ished—and diminishing. Mouffe argues that the struggle for equality has largelybeen abandoned under the ideological deception of liberal freedom in this demo-cratic crisis. She insists that the social polity is always a contested space and thatthe political rights of the many have always had to be won, rather than be given,and that this contest endures. Like Jones she perceives that democratic forms areconstantly being eroded by powerful groups staking claims in their own interestsfor the maintenance of their own privileges.

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Education, like the wider society of which it is part, mirrors this struggle anduniversal state provision for education has historically followed the trajectory ofthe wider claims for universal suffrage. As Carr and Harnett (2010) explain, overthe last century and a half the arguments used against the idea of education forall irrespective of class, race and gender, have been much the same as those madeagainst universal suffrage, or democratic rule by all. In both cases the powerfuland privileged fear the gradual erosion of their status and power that democracymust necessarily entail, and this gives rise to socially regressive counterattacks, ofwhich the most recent and pervasive manifestation is neoliberalism.

Creative practices are marginalized or assimilated because they can stand forwhat remains of the transformative democratic potential of education. They canembody the democratic ideal of the director-learner, a fellow participant in, ratherthan the subject of, a learning process. It is this view of education as an interna-lized process based on democratically determined principles which formed thebasis for Dewey’s linkage of education with democracy, and similar structuresare to be found in contemporary forms of relational or socially engaged creativity.The most cogent theories about the intrinsic relationship between education anddemocracy are still to be found in Dewey’s early and mid-twentieth centurywriting, and in the face of the ascendancy of neoliberalism it is enlightening toturn to the way that the principles—and the practice—of democracy may be inte-grated into a system of mass education. Despite the age of Dewey’s texts, and thepragmatist philosophical context in which they were written, they remain perti-nent, not least because they articulate a vision of education in the service of demo-cratic governance rather than in the service of the market. Dewey’s notion ofdemocracy was one of conditioning and socializing young people into democraticcitizenship (1916=1966). It is this long-term view of education as an internalizedprocess based on (contestable) ethical principles, which lay the basis for Dewey’slinkage of education with democracy. His argument for this relationship is basedon representation—that progressive methods of education resemble democraticmethods (1938=1969, 34), and that the political system of democracy and the edu-cational system should share the same features and characteristics.

Can we find any reason that does not ultimately come down to the belief that democraticsocial arrangements promote a better quality of human experience, one which is morewidely accessible and enjoyed, than do non-democratic and anti-democratic forms ofsocial life? . . . Is not the reason for our preference that we believe that mutual consultationand convictions reached through persuasion, make possible a better quality of experiencethat can otherwise be provide on any wide scale? (Dewey 1938=1969, 34)

Consultation and persuasion are some of the key terms that Dewey employs, andthese have persisted to the present day in models of progressive or democraticeducation, which emphasize the rights and responsibilities of the learner in theeducational situation. One of the reasons for this is that Dewey is preoccupiedwith the outcomes of education—it is insufficient for him to know that the experi-ence of formal education is positive or otherwise; he measures education by thelong-term effect, particularly the recurrence of learning—the learner voluntarilysubjecting themselves to the learning process as an enduring feature of theirlives (1938=1969, 34). The most important principle of his idea of a progressive

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education is that the emphasis is given to the ‘‘importance of the participation ofthe learner in the formation of purposes which direct his activities in the learningprocess’’ (1938=1969, 67). For Dewey traditional education has no greater defectthan coercion, ‘‘its failure to secure the active cooperation of the pupil in the con-struction of the purposes involved in his studying’’ (1938=1969, 67). This ideaoccupies a position that is diametrically opposed to the neoliberal concept of edu-cation as fundamentally instrumental and socially divisive: witness the currentneoliberal penchant for social segregation through testing, and for compliancein preparation for a market-oriented society.

Particularly prescient, given this ideological nexus that binds and constrainseducational principles, is Dewey’s notion of boxed knowledge; in this modelthe knowledge that is generated in the learner only has relevance and meaningin terms of the task in hand—the test, examination, or qualification for whichit is determinate (1938=1969, 49). This resembles Freire’s concept of bankingknowledge, which he articulates as knowledge proscribed in advance and inaccordance with the interests of the ruling class, and consequently is devoid ofthe politically emancipatory pedagogies that he advocates in Pedagogy of theOppressed (1970=2000). In both boxed and banked knowledge pedagogy isreduced to a narrow instrumentalist method and the learning that results isdivorced from the conditions of life and environmental experiences thatDewey and Freire hold in such high regard, with the consequence that theteacher can abrogate responsibility for ensuring that knowledge and experienceare commensurate.

Such were the progressive ideals of education in the 1930s and 1940s. In thenew cultural contexts in which we find ourselves, they nonetheless have pre-science because of their defence of democracy and equality, which Dewey wouldsee as intrinsic to education. As the doyen of Art education, Herbert Read put it:‘‘A democratic educational system is designed for the average, for the multitudeof humble spirits . . . ’’ (1943=1970, 301). Irrespective of the hierarchical toneof Read’s statement, the integration of the spatial, haptic creative experience ofeducation with democratic citizenship is fundamental to his idea of a mass civiceducation, underpinned throughout by creative endeavour.

CREATIVE PRACTICES IN SCHOOL EDUCATION

The youngsters (six- to eleven-year-olds) who make up the contemporary artgroups known as Room 13 make good examples of the Bourriaud-esque colla-borative production of relational creative practices, and also exemplify manyof the progressive educational ideals of Dewey and Read. Room 13s’ pedagogicalapproaches, and their creative practices, can be seen as a kind of relationalcreativity, and one that is the antithesis of the crushing performativity and seg-regation of market-led education, or the brutally individualistic fantasies of theneoliberal imaginary (cf. Barrett 2006; Ball 2012). The very fact of Room 13’smessy, ad hoc existence adds salience to their relational creativity, as indicatedby the spaces that they occupy and their intuitive opposition to the homogeniz-ing, standardizing models of the education systems they resist.

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It’s an important principle that Room 13 operates separately from the schooland its curriculum, although for its participants Room 13 can sometimes seemthe most central part of their school and learning experience (Souness and Fairley2005; Adams 2011). Room 13 describes itself as an ‘‘international community ofcreatives’’ (Room 13 2012) and its local groups are usually in association with pri-mary schools, acting as a drop-in arts centers with artists-in-residence, and arephysically located in the schools of which they are part, but not built into the for-mal curriculum or timetable; as one ten-year-old participant put it: ‘‘It’s kind ofpart of the school and not part of the school.’’ In some cases Room 13 is given sucha priority that children may drop into it by temporarily suspending other studies,as is still the case in the original Room 13s, which are set in two primary schools inFort William in Scotland (see Figure 2). Room 13 practices vary greatly accordingto the specific cultural context in which they are embedded, but the dominance ofyoung people’s voice and direction is a feature common to all its manifestations.Like the Italian Reggio Emilia approach to pedagogy, the students have a greatdeal of autonomy in Room 13, and the adult artists-in-residence consider them-selves co-practitioners rather than teachers.

The working practices of Room 13 can be thought of as a mode of creative rela-tional practice, like those of the Rethinking Trade artists. The procedures and mate-rials of their artistic production form an interface that invites reciprocal communalactivity, mediated by material aide-memoirs; the latter refers to the fabric of thestudio space that the young people occupy, which are usually lined with displaysof the group’s cultural secretions comprised of the residues of past creative activi-ties: paintings, videos, sculptures, photos, installations. These remnants can bethought of as the visual=material equivalent of linguistic call-ups or call-ins, aslinguistic anthropologists like Shirley Brice Heath (2012) refer to them. In thesemodels she distinguishes types of communication that young people use to estab-lish mutual ways of understanding their experience of the world. Heath describesthese as vocative call-ups and attributional call-ins, which serve to remind thegroup of the contributions that a member has previously made, and open the

Figure 2. Room 13 studio, Fort William, Scotland.

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floor, as she puts it, to share and develop current experiences by establishing theirfoundation in prior contributions of the group (2012, 144–145); in so doing theyprovide the communal glue that socially binds the participants.

In Room 13 studio, Heath’s call ups and call-ins feature most commonly in thereuse of older incomplete work that is deliberately left around in the studio.Either the original author of the work, or a new person, might have an idea forthe development of a piece. The work, perhaps a painting, already has a historythat is evident in multiple visual ways, and each bears the hallmarks of the pre-vious creative endeavors and thinking. For instance, a painting left to one side formany months will have physical characteristics such as its size, ground, texture,and color, as well as the overall composition of the piece, and combined thesecreate its provenance as an idea. All of this may be quickly assimilated by regularRoom 13 participants and will have a special resonance for those who contribu-ted when the work was being created originally. The children in the communityrecognize, and are sometimes intimately familiar with, the marks and gesturesthat went into the original work; they know specifically who contributed andmay even be familiar with the thinking that led to some specific decision-makingin the original piece. The work may also have unresolved questions, to whichthe group will return anew inspired by the agency of the young artist or artistswho are undertaking the new creative adaptations to the piece. The evocationof the previous artists and their creative endeavors acts as a relational language,binding the group socially by reminders and attributions of previous creativeendeavors in order to further current projects.

One such work that might exemplify this is the set of wooden stools uponwhich I was sitting to interview children in a Room 13 in Fort William (seeFigure 3). I asked a group of children to talk about recent work that they had pro-duced, and one pointed out that we were sitting on such piece at that very

Figure 3. Stools-based art event, Room 13, Fort William, Scotland.

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moment. The painted stools had been given captions and labels, hithertounnoticed, which designated the stools as an artwork. The captions were suchthings as ‘‘What is a chair?’’ and ‘‘Think before you sit.’’ The children explainedto me that one young artist had once drawn a clown on the stool as a kind of exor-cism, because she was scared of clowns. They commented, ‘‘Yes that was scary . . .So for a while other people were afraid to sit on a stool too.’’ Within these narra-tives the stools had a moment of prominence in the studio as an artwork, and thenthey had receded back into furniture, but not without leaving a strong residualmemory amongst the group of the event. Attributions—the naming of the parti-cipants in the creative event, with the specificity of their roles—were much in evi-dence in this work and in the discourse they embodied. These residual works andtheir encapsulation of creative memories also contain the potential for new workat any time, unconstrained by any predetermined learning outcome or externalassessment—or indeed any form of assessment other than that which is necessaryto negotiate and enable its production. Like the Palestinian Embassy, the eventand their participation in it constituted the purpose, the meaning, and the materialof the work.

What may be happening in these Room 13 creative practices may be likened toa conversational mode of communication. John Matthews’ (2003) work with veryyoung children is very instructive, in that he deals directly with the contentiousissue of the role of adult support for children’s creative activities. He argues con-vincingly, using extremely detailed and painstaking studies, that learning isalways an internal evolving process facilitated through support and assistance.Moreover, he makes the case for the thorough integration of creative practiceswithin the expressive oeuvre of the young person through language, movement,gesture, expression, idea development and imitation—reminiscent, in fact, of theexpanded field of contemporary art.

Matthews resists the binary division amongst theorists who argue on the onehand that children must be left alone to find their own way, and on the otherthose that insist upon a dominant instructional or didactic approach that ruleout chance happenings and play. His resultant bridging theory he terms conver-sational (2003, 21–20), which is a model that can be applied to Room 13’s relation-ships between artists-in-residence and their participants. This conversationalform insists on reciprocity and attention, firstly between the young person andthe work, and then with the concurrent engagement between the adult and thechild. The conversation is neither didactic nor authoritative, existing instead inan expansive relational epistemology, the goal of which is nothing other thanparticipation in the event itself. The learning outcome, so beloved of the auditor,may or may not be of any consequence, and even the completion of the work orperformance may be suspended or thought superfluous. Production in Room 13continues erratically, and its ebb and flow leaves many works in abeyance, as akind of rich creative residual detritus that lines the edges of many of their stu-dios. Because of the infinite permutations of authors and an enduring incomple-teness, both the process and the resulting production are inherently resistant toclassification and auditing.

The Room 13 environment is itself typical of many creative spaces, seeminglychaotic at first glance, an ‘‘arty’’ mess, but the remnants of past works create an

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environment that is conducive to relational creativity in the same way that theresidues of commerce in Liverpool provide a productive environment for theBiennials; the anarchic messiness of these creative environments may in fact befundamental to democratic education. It is not that the creative spaces are simplyan alternative way of working; rather they exist in opposition, antithetical, to thestandardizing pedagogies that are designed to enhance individual socialadvantage at the expense of others. In particular, creative practices like theseare in direct opposition to the notion of the so-called core subjects, where conform-ity, compliance, and homogeneity are hegemonic. The studio space, so importantfor the functioning of the social and relational space, is also a representation of thedemocratic space. Pedagogically this presents a great challenge for the teacher, for,as Dewey and Read agree, managing the environment democratically can be com-plicated and difficult but is always preferable to the forced conformity of prede-termined outcomes and conditions, as in more conservative forms of education.

CONCLUSION

The restrictions that an education system places upon creative practices may onlyserve to highlight the restrictive and socially regressive grounding of the systemitself. Relational creativity has played, and continues to play, I would argue, afundamental role in conceptions of progressive and democratic education, andthat if creative learning is impoverished, then education—as a civic, emancipatoryproject—is also demeaned, and with it our aspirations for a democratic society.

The civic ethic that underpins democratic education theories are maintained incontemporary education by creative practices such as those of Room 13, inspiredand informed by relational and socially engaged art of the contemporary artworld, such as we have seen in the Liverpool Biennials. The struggle for democ-racy in education and in the wider polity continues in these seemingly innocu-ous, marginal events. The production of a creative work for its own sake isnonetheless a critical act, and the obstacles these events throw up to prevent theircommodification or classification is testimony to their resilience to neoliberal con-formity and homogenisation. As Stevenson (2009) argues:

The capacity of modern societies to offer its young people equal forms of educationalprovision and critical forms of inquiry beyond the narrow confines of ‘vocationalism’are necessary requirements for democracy . . . to foster genuinely critical forms ofinquiry demanded in a society that is able to hold in check the colonizing logic ofcapitalism. (51)

As Knorr’s and Room 13 work demonstrates, the criticality of the event is a pro-duct of the relations that it creates. Its collaborative form and its transience arefeatures of its resistance to the authoritarian structuring that are features of neo-liberal hegemony. Creative acts, especially those that are relational, collaborative,and, above all, critical and questioning, maintain a practice vital to the mainte-nance of a more just and democratic society. Such creative educational configura-tions that we see in Room 13 may serve as ideal models rather than anomalies atthe margins.

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At first sight there is nothing particularly special about Room 13. It’s friendlybut messy, untidy, and slightly anarchic. On the other hand, looked at throughthe lens of the stultifying, pervasive effects of market-domination, and the effectsof neoliberal educational regimes stuffed to the gunnels with regulated, predeter-mined outcomes primarily designed for the reproduction of social class, maxi-mizing advantage for the few rather than the many, Room 13 may well be arare but nonetheless powerful example of a more democratic education and aresistance to neoliberalism. Many Room 13 participants, like many artists inthe Biennial, resist the transformation of their work into an individualizedmaterial outcome, necessary for the auditing, competitive segregation, andcommodification that is the bedrock of neoliberal assimilation; artfully dodged,perhaps?

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