Gifting an Artistic Licence: Printing, Radicalism and Pedagogy

Spurred by an observation that ‘student art teachers don't want to be radical teachers’, this paper explores how the gift by a lecturer of a tongue-in-cheek hand-printed ‘Artistic Licence’ to a new cohort of pre-service teachers, gives permission to imagine new futures. Through a dialogic image-exchange two educators bring their radical manifesto for art teachers/teaching as a performative autoethnography where they imagine new forms of teaching through small acts: printing, walking and talking, and being parents and artists. Similar to performative autoethnography, the act of giving projects materiality into the future and is transformative both for the giver and the gifted. The object (an artistic licence, an artwork, a poem) is an autonomous vessel that has its own agency and affect as it moves from one person to another, shifts and accrues meaning. When times are hard, art teaching can run the risk of becoming too outcome-led, working backwards from a preconceived notion of what art should be, not what art could be. This paper draws on the imagination to counteract the internalised negative pull of art as part of a neoliberal system. It offers new art teachers, through the act of giving, the potential to give themselves permission to imagine their art practice and their artist identity as integral to situating themselves within the exchange of value and meaning in the human and post-human world.