Teaching Beyond the Curriculum

Abstract

This project examines the potential of creating new models of distance studio education (ex-studio delivery) by returning to, and revising, the defunct model of correspondence courses. The paper builds upon initial research done in 2022 and presents a strategy of curriculum delivery via the postal network by blending mail art methods with correspondence teaching methods. This is proffered as a superior alternative to drawing curricula delivered via digital networks. The paper asks a fairly simple question: did we, as artists and educators, replace a good teaching network with a bad one? In the mid-twentieth century, private correspondence courses such as the Famous Artists School (US) boasted tens of thousands of students. Open University (UK) and Sydney Technical College (AU) offered correspondence courses in drawing and, only thirty years ago, University of Southern Queensland and Flying Arts School built upon survey work done by the Brisbane College of Art (now Queensland College of Art) to propose a suite of correspondence courses including painting, drawing, print, textiles and ceramics that was never fully delivered. Exemplars of mail art practices — using the postal network as a means of creation, dissemination and exchange — can be found in Black Mountain College alumnus Ray Johnson’s New York Correspondence School; international Fluxus groups; Toronto’s FILE magazine; and the four-decade exchange of Robert MacPherson and Peter Tyndall (comprising almost 13,000 objects). An innovative, if somewhat anachronistic, synthesis of correspondence models and mail art will illuminate and potentially mitigate many of the inherent problems in digitally networked distance models of studio teaching.