Art School Alternatives

Extract from Adam Phillips ‘Side Effects’: Talking Nonsense and Knowing When to Stop.

This is a quick addition to the Alternative Art Schools Discussion board, we are CIRCA Contemporary Art Projects, or Adam Phillips and Sam Watson as we are also known. We are really looking forward to taking part and hearing about the rich range of things going on as well as getting to experience the Liverpool Biennial for the first time.

Adam Phillips: I am fortunate enough to work in both an independent context through my work as CIRCA and within an educational institution as a tutor at the University of Sunderland. This balance helps to ground the work I do through dialogues with a diverse range of interesting and talented people. I wanted to share something that I was given recently by a friend, a really thoughtful teacher and artist, who handed me a copy of my namesake Adam Phillips’ fascinating book Side Effects. In particular I was intrigued to discover within the gift - a photocopied section of the essay entitled ‘Talking Nonsense and Knowing When to Stop’, which had been altered through scribblings which shifted the theme of the essay towards education. Through changing the context of Phillips’ essay to consider the side effects of arts education, I found it a thought provoking introduction to some of the peculiarities of trying to be involved with ‘schools’ (whether alternative or traditional). Most significantly perhaps the balance between control and a lack of it is very interesting; knowing how to create experiences which are memorable and surprising and how you might draw conclusions from projects that are in essence ‘never finished’.