Making the Creation of Art All Fun and Games : Art: An exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art documents how a group helped redefine arts education for some schoolchildren.

When asked about their early experiences making art at school, eyes roll and a collective groan rises from a group of graduate art students sitting on a gallery floor at the San Diego Museum of Art.

“I remember a bunch of materials thrown on the table--macaroni, yarn and glue--and we were told to make something.”

“I felt intimidated that what I was drawing didn’t look correct.”

“I can’t remember anything that we worked on as a class.”

The memories are vivid, and for every incident that sparked the imagination, many more are recalled that left subtle but enduring scars on the creative psyche--uninspiring projects made only to be taken home and hung dutifully on the family fridge.

The nine members of Collaborative Experiments in Art--eight current Master of Fine Arts students at UC San Diego and one recent graduate--have transcended those stifling experiences in their own work and studies. For the last two years, they have tried to stretch those boundaries for the next generation.

“The Games They Do With Art,” an exhibition now at the San Diego Museum of Art, documents their efforts. The group recently gathered at the museum for an interview among the photographs, videos, audiotapes and assorted installations that form a record of the collaborative’s activities in three San Diego elementary schools, including a downtown facility for homeless children.

Working with advisers Allan Kaprow, a recently retired UCSD professor and acclaimed patriarch of performance art, and Jeanne Cartabiano, executive director of the educational and arts organization Social Movements in Art, the graduate students overturned many standard practices of early arts education during their short tenure in the schools. Rather than assign the children to make static, take-home objects, they collaborated with them, loosening the definition of art to include experience and process, not just finished products. But the projects never got weighed down by didactics, the graduate students said.

“We weren’t out to teach the kids. We wanted to create some kind of framework that they could work within and develop alternative ways of seeing,” group member Brian Dick said.

Instead of expanding on traditional models of classroom instruction, the collaborative opted for a more unfettered approach.

“A more important precedent for this is playing games and making treehouses,” added Olav Westphalen.

For the project, “Classroom Exercise,” graduate student Dietmar Walther had a fifth-grade class hold its regular lessons for one day in a gallery of 19th-Century American paintings at the art museum. A photograph of the children sitting at their desks in the museum as well as an audiotape of the school day are included in the show. Transplanted from classroom to gallery, the children grew more conscious of the dynamics of both their old and new settings. Their own awareness of displacement became the work of art.

In another project, Westphalen invited a group of fourth- and fifth-graders to raise items of their own clothing on a school flagpole, forging with them an unusual alliance between personal vanity and national glory.

Val Valgardson installed a long steel pole horizontally across the front of a classroom, between the students and their teacher. At 66 inches above the floor, the pole was high enough for all of the students to pass under freely, while the teacher had to bend down to enter the children’s section of the room. Like an exclamation point dividing the space, the pole introduced a new dimension to the power relationships in effect in the classroom.

Other collaborative members Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson, C’Love, Tom Brumley and Shay Poskey, all in their 20s and 30s, devised activities that ranged from narrating a mini-tour of modern art at the museum to gathering details of favorite, private places. While several of the projects--a collaborative quilt, for instance--feel familiar enough in structure or intent, most involved a radical shift in approach for children more accustomed to going through the motions of making art than to seeing aesthetic or experiential value in the motions themselves.

The subversive spirit of Marcel Duchamp is an undercurrent of the collaborative’s work in the schools, giving its members permission to be witty, playful and defiant. More concrete influence can be traced back to adviser Kaprow, who outlined for the graduate students four principles that have shaped his work since the early 1960s, when he invented the “Happening.”

“One, that art isn’t necessarily a product of individual talent but can be a collaborative social process,” Kaprow said by telephone. “Two, that art doesn’t necessarily take a traditional form like painting, music, sculpture, dance or a mix of these, but can be lifelike activities such as washing the dishes or following your shadow down the street.

“Three, that art needn’t last forever, but can pass into different forms like a good meal, sudden thought or the weather. Four, art needn’t even be known as art, but can exist as insightful attention to what is ordinarily ignored.”

Although these principles were implicit in the collaborative’s work in the schools, they were never made explicit.

“They needn’t be spelled out in big capital letters because they frighten people,” Kaprow said.

Indeed, the graduate students confirmed that the schoolchildren were quite willing to play games and not worry about the art aspects of it, but some of the teachers and other facilitators involved needed a bit more persuasion, more of an “informational framework.” Mentioning that the projects would be documented in a museum exhibition helped break through the barriers. The museum affiliation gave the collaborative’s efforts a boost of legitimacy, although, ironically, the group’s activities challenge the museum’s tradition-bound authority to determine what is and is not art.

“We all hate the museum aura, the fact that works are showcased there for eternity, but we need it, too,” Westphalen said.

“The contrast between what we’re pushing against, what the kids think of as art and what we want to help them see as art works well here (in the general art museum) better than in a contemporary art museum,” Dick added.

It was exactly that notion of juxtaposition that appealed to Ellen Willenbecher, an education coordinator at the museum, who sees the current show as an extension of the museum’s interest in contemporary art. She was also enthusiastic about the equal accessibility of the activities conceived by the members of Collaborative Experiments in Art.

“Too often I hear parents say that kids get turned off to art because they were judged poor at it,” Willenbecher said. “What I love about each of these experiences is that the kids can all participate equally and not be judged.”

Nor feel used.

“We didn’t want to use the kids as our medium,” group member Brumley said. “We had brainstorming sessions, and we made sure that what each kid did was as valid as the rest. No one was excluded because of capability.”

Encouraged to reflect, however, all of the graduate students admit that they probably got more out of their experience in the schools than did the children.

Poskey, a painter, had wanted to introduce text into her work, but always tended to over-analyze.

“Kids just do it,” she said. “I was interested in watching how they do it. That kind of freedom is incredibly interesting.”

For Brumley too, the involvement with young, uninhibited minds was liberating.

“I was very locked up, between theory on one side and what was politically correct on the other. Anytime I thought of something, I thought myself out of it. Interacting with the kids opened up a lot for me. I didn’t have to justify it--the human interaction that was happening was valuable in itself, and I was thinking, why couldn’t I bring this freedom into my own work, which was locking me up?”

The exhibition continues at the San Diego Museum of Art, Balboa Park, (619) 232-7931, through Feb. 21.