A Selfless Art

The similarities between the work of a teacher and a community artist have been evident to me from my earliest days in the field. There are many differences, most importantly perhaps the intellectual and institutional frameworks within which teachers work, but the human qualities involved share much common ground.

More recently, my reading about medicine and mental health has shown me the parallels with that profession. For example, in The Unfragile Mind, Gavin Francis writes about his training as a medical student:

‘I was reassured that with time, repetition, curiosity, conversation, humility and versatility, my skills would develop.’

Gavin Francis, The Unfragile Mind: Making Sense of Mental Health

If those qualities make a good doctor, they are equally important to the work of a teacher or a community artist. Relationship is central to all these professions, and the unique co-creation that emerges for the specificities of the people involved.

But there is something else these professions have in common, something darker and more dangerous. Central to the role of teacher, doctor and community artist is an inequality of knowledge: it is the very reason that the relationship exists. Gavin Francis includes humility among the qualities he was told to cultivate, and that is an important safeguard, but it is easy, too easy, for the person with the knowledge to start believing that it is a quality in them rather than something they have themselves been given. 

And from there it is a small step to believing that the person in front of you – student, patient or ‘community’ – is essentially different to you and even inferior to you. The unthinking division of the world into us and them, is pervasive and corrosive. It is hard to see, and even harder to prove, but I am convinced of its reality and its effects on us all. It is why community art was necessary and it has scarred its development. The ideas I’m now working on are a response to that, but they won’t be a solution to ancient and deeply held beliefs.