With Bath School of Art, Kingston School of Art & Freelands Foundation.
Following repeated call outs to artists since 2017, the Inventory of Behaviours now comprises over 250 artists’ instructions on how to behave in the physical, digital, or psychological spaces in which their art is made. Join Addison and Kidd on the ‘factory floor’ to investigate 3 recurrent categories of behaviours: Readiness, Regulation, Resistance.
You are invited to enact artist behaviours in dedicated zones. Boiler suit clad assistants will welcome and guide you to respond to the improvised instruction manual as we consider what actual behaviours constitute creativity and what the value of these behaviours might be.
Join daily discussions (Tuesday to Thursday 15:30 - 17:00, and Friday 14:00 -15:30) which will provide a space for reflection and discussion between participants and experts from a variety of educational and creative disciplines. Contributors will include Nicholas Addison, Adisola Akinleye, Kevin Hunt, Benji Jeffrey, Kelly Large, Claire Makhlouf Carter, Harold Offeh, James Saunders and Michelle Williams Gamaker.
In these informal discussions we will consider together whether behaviours like crying, sleeping, staring at the wall or sorting things are strategies, conscious or not, integral to creativity. And can they be considered as work?
Within the context of current educational preoccupations with evidencing and measuring production, we will ask what type of ‘work’ is valued? Can a better understanding of the activities that surround the making process legitimise what is otherwise seen to be non productive activity?
At a time when the economic value of STEM subjects dominates education policy and creative subjects are being devalued and marginalised, there seems no more crucial a time to understand what actual behaviours constitute creativity and what the value of these behaviours might be.
Performances and discussions will be recorded and played back in the space. Twitter and Instagram will transmit daily activities beyond the museum.
Enactment: Instruction no 63. ‘On a cold sunny day, make a hot water bottle and get into bed fully clothed. Set the alarm on your phone for 22 minutes and see if you can go to sleep’. Lucy Clout
Enactment: Instruction no 8. ‘Real Life & How to live it: The Studio. Play the 3 chords G, C and D in any order at any tempo in any style on any musical instrument over and over’. Ross Sinclair
Inventory: Printed
About Inventory of Behaviours
Inventory of Behaviours is developed by artists/senior lecturers Jo Addison (Kingston University) and Natasha Kidd (Bath Spa University) in collaboration with Freelands Foundation.
Jo Addison & Natasha Kidd work collaboratively as No Working Title. The events they curate explore the dialogic relationships between making and learning; they expose learning as form.
Freelands Foundation is a charitable foundation focused on art and education initiatives. They aim to support the broad arts ecosystem, over time affording many artists and organisations greater opportunities to create and to inspire, while advancing education from the ground up, enabling young people to actively engage with this creation and inspiration.