Formless beginnings by Sjoerd Westbroek

What does it mean to begin something as an artist, to embark on a new project? How does a beginning materialise your beliefs, intentions, hopes for the future, as well as your indebtedness to what is there and what has happened before? What rituals do you design to prepare beginning? As an educator, to what extent can each class be seen as a new beginning, in a sense that the outcome can never be predicted? And, how do you support others in beginning? These are some of the questions that guide me while exploring the practices at WdKA and PZI that I am involved in. Working for the Teacher Training Programme and the Master Education in Arts, I am interested in the question if there are specific pedagogical practices that prepare working artistically. The complexity of beginning serves as a focal point that allows me to map how a nexus of art and pedagogy could materialise. An understanding of beginning as something that needs a preparation already shows its paradoxical nature, as beginning is also always continuing what is already there. My work on the topic involves theoretical study and writing, as well as developing a more practical approach, collecting stories and creating exercises around pedagogy and art as beginning.

A First Day

It's 8:45 a.m. as I exit the train station of the city I left 16 years ago, turn right and head down what used to be my Wednesday Morning Street, which leads up the hill where the Building-That-Saw-War-Crimes has its entrance. Once a week I sweated my way up this street to attend morning class there, all other days we'd be in a building Underneath, as the street below, along the river, was literally called. Today it's Thursday, and I’ve come back to teach at my alma mater.

Wednesday Morning Street is lined with large buildings, many of which have changed function several times, reflecting changing economic realities over the past 150 years. I notice that the 70s office block that used to house a bank is now a premium-mediocre apartment building, the facade, which used to be closed to express security, now dotted with windows, to create river views that cash in on the heap of ice-age debris the building is standing on.

Alma mater, mother of the soul, is mostly used to refer to universities. Do art schools mother souls too? What do I remember of these Wednesday morning classes? We did lots of painting exercises, energy and visual playfulness being more important than conceptual rigour. Most strongly I remember not being able to perform what I thought was expected of me. Did these classes teach or merely assume the playfulness that was needed to receive confirmation from the teacher? I felt stuck again in high-school mediocrity, despite this being the second time I started at an art school, after having left, the year before, an academy whose pedagogy could be summarised as 'students figure things out for themselves'. One of my students once told me she could not get closer to herself in her work without confronting her most deep-rooted assumptions about what it means to make art. Is this astute observation something I couldn't articulate myself as a student? How many times have I been told to “just start”, how many times have I myself repeated this refrain of art school pedagogy? Is there a method for preparing someone for freedom?

I stop to look at the townhouse with an alleyway running through it, which gives the impression of leaving a hole at its centre. Was it really derelict, as I thought at the time? When I left this city for Rotterdam, two years after graduating, I quickly learned that maintenance is a highly contested concept and I adjusted my expectations accordingly, so I could deal with the festival of neglect that was the Rotterdam housing market at the time. When I proudly showed my parents my new apartment, ready to start anew in a new city, they expressed their concern about the state of the house and my judgement. Clearly, I had already fallen victim to a slipping sense of middle-class standards.

The reception is still behind a glass wall, I find upon entering the Building-That-Saw-War-Crimes. I nod at my own reflection and decide to not make myself known to the janitor as I walk straight into a long corridor with tiled walls and one door after another, not revealing anything of what goes on behind them. Weren't these rehearsal rooms for the students of the conservatory? Before my faded recollection sharpens, before fragments condense into a mental map of these spaces, I automatically turn right, down the stairs into the Nondescript-In-Between-Building, along the long row of vertical, slightly tilted pigeonholes. I find an orientation in the rhythms of architectural details that feel familiar, but I try to brush aside the thought that 20 years ago those paintings were already there. Too much overlap between memory and experience is uncanny. How long do you need to be gone to be able to return somewhere? I descend the hill not through Wednesday Morning Street but through these linked buildings, further down another flight of stairs, past the library, along the window providing a view into an office where people do stuff, through the narrow corridor with the ultramarine blue linoleum floor. I realise I don't need to think as I walk through the passageway leading into the metal-framed glass curtain wall of the Building-Named-After-Famous-Architect.

As I open class by greeting the students and introducing myself, I realise that for the upcoming hours and weeks this is my classroom, even as a guest I have a role to perform. If I don't begin, if I don't issue the call to order, there might be study, but no class. I explain my expectations, tell them that they know their bodies best, so if they feel they need to walk around for a bit or eat something they should do so. The students listen generously, helping me to be a good teacher. Normally I begin every class by listening together to some music or sounds brought by a student. A moment of collective attention, tuning in to a thing in between those who are present, which reconfigures the classroom as a shared space. I wonder why I didn't think of this today. In her book ‘Touching Feeling’ Eve Sedgwick talks about the difference between knowing and realising something, between on the one hand being able to interpret and articulate what a situation means, and, on the other hand, feeling all the implications of what you already knew. What I realise today is a most basic principle: as a teacher, each small gesture contains the entirety of your pedagogy, including its blind spots.

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