“Tools for conviviality”: In memory of David Harding, 1937–2026

Prologue1
David Harding is perhaps most associated with his roles as “Town Artist” in Glenrothes, Scotland (1968–78) and as Head of the Environmental Art department at Glasgow School of Art (GSA; 1985–2001). However, after his retirement in 2001, Harding resumed his artistic practice, developing collaborations with former colleagues from GSA such as carrying out a project in a secondary school in Milton Keynes, England with artist Peter McCaughey, and collaborating long-term with Sam Ainsley, the former Head of the school’s MFA program, and Sandy Moffat, former Head of Painting. Collectively known by their initials, AHM, Ainsley, Harding, and Moffat—“Los Tres Grandes” of GSA—focused their work upon cultural action and advocacy via a series of curatorial projects and events.

In 2005, Harding and I also embarked on an artistic collaboration. What followed was a joyous apprenticeship in the art of living. Over the next two decades, we made a series of site-specific films, public recitals, installations, and exhibitions including projects for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel commissioned by Adam Szymczyk, and, most recently, a public artwork situated in the Villa Borghese Gardens in Rome, commissioned by Salvatore Lacagnina. I was never David’s student, but he was my teacher. The text that follows, however, written for e-flux Education—a forum for discourse on art education—is not the place to reflect upon Harding’s collaborations following his retirement from formal education after a teaching career that spanned four decades. Rather, it seeks to outline the development of Harding’s path as artist-teacher and to situate this trajectory within a wider context.

Environmental Art, 1985–2001
When Douglas Gordon was asked what he had been taught during his time as a student in the influential Environmental Art department at Glasgow School of Art, founded in 1985 and led by Harding until his retirement in 2001, his reply was: “To sing. Not how to sing, but simply TO sing.”2 The fledgling department had formerly been the domain of Murals and Stained Glass, but, in its new incarnation, it eschewed the disciplinary focus of GSA’s established Fine Art courses (Painting, Printmaking, Sculpture, and Photography). Such an enigmatic description of the department’s pedagogy—combined with the international reputations of a generation of its graduates, which includes Claire Barclay, Christine Borland, Martin Boyce, Roderick Buchanan, Nathan Coley, Jacqueline Donachie, Jonathan Monk, David Shrigley, and Ross Sinclair—suggests that Environmental Art was not so much a course as a school within a school.

Harding, a committed artist-teacher born in Edinburgh in 1937 who passed away in Glasgow in February, epitomized Wassily Kandinsky’s image of the artist “who cannot see his life’s purpose in an art without aims.”3 But whereas the spiritual effects and dynamic affects of color motivated Kandinsky, the material conditions of context mobilized Harding. His output is characterized not by abstract impressions and improvisations in pictorial form, but by direct interventions in the concrete world of the built environment. Harding’s conviction that artists have the capacity to transform the everyday lived experience of society underpinned the development of Environmental Art at GSA.

Harding shaped the philosophy of the new department on a maxim derived from the manifesto of the Artist Placement Group (APG), conceived by Barbara Steveni in 1965 and founded with John Latham a year later in London: “The context is half the work.” APG envisioned artists undertaking extended placements in industry or public institutions, eschewing the confines of anticipated roles in order to explore new forms of creative interaction between artists and host organizations. In effect, the APG sought to abandon conventional aesthetic forms and evolve new social formations. APG’s pragmatic, experimental, and interdisciplinary program provided the conceptual underpinnings for the course’s pedagogy, which Harding developed alongside colleagues such as artist Sam Ainsley:

We committed ourselves to a policy whereby visiting teachers to the course would not necessarily be artists but could be sociologists, philosophers, poets, novelists, architects and others to broaden our students’ understanding of the world in which we lived. Not only were we educating artists but also people to take their place in society. Ecology, politics, human geography, ethnicity, collaborative practices, among others, were, we believed, suitable topics for the education of artists. Criticism and questioning self-criticism are essential elements in the formation of all artists in all fields.4

There were, of course, other important precursors and critical frames of reference: John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), Herbert Read’s Education Through Art (1943), Joseph Beuys’s “Social Sculpture,” John Baldessari’s “Post-Studio Art” class at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the work of Suzanne Lacy and others, which a decade later became known as “New Genre Public Art” all count among them. But APG’s “the context is half the work” was the central leitmotif through which the department forged and communicated its identity. The mantra functioned as a mandate for successive students of the department as they navigated and negotiated their way through the annual Public Art Project.5

These projects were initiated in response to specific sites, social contexts, or local communities, and were a core aspect of their assessment. This aspect of the course, and the diverse set of academic and creative skills it demanded—a combination of interdisciplinary practice and research, production management, and interpersonal social skills (aka “hustling”)—set Environmental Art apart from more solitary or studio-based practices. Combined with a training in what might be described as social “responsivity,” this multi- or rather anti-disciplinarity laid the foundations for the later manifold achievements of many of its graduates. Yet to fully appreciate Harding’s celebrated fifteen years of leading Environmental Art, it is important to place the course itself in a wider context and consider its evolution from Harding’s previous work as an artist and teacher, including his four years in Lafia, Nigeria (1963–67), decade-long tenure as influential “Town Artist” (1968–78) in the Scottish New Town of Glenrothes, and seven years co-leading the Art and Social Context course at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, England (1978–85).

Left: David Harding. Right: Sam Ainsley. Department of Environmental Art, Glasgow School of Art, 1987. Courtesy of Alan Dunn.

Lafia, Nigeria, 1963–67
After graduating from Edinburgh College of Art in 1959 and completing teacher training college at Moray House School of Education and Sport, Harding got a job teaching at his former high school, Holy Cross. There, he met his future wife, Frances, who was then in her final term before heading to drama school. Later, she became a prominent theatre anthropologist at SOAS University of London. In 1961, Harding obtained a job teaching art in schools in North and South Uist in the Outer Hebrides. While he was working in the predominantly Catholic South Uist, a visiting missionary priest on leave from Nigeria introduced him to the work of Father Donald Murray, advised Harding that the Saint Augustine Teacher Training College in Lafia (founded by Murray) had a flourishing art department. Harding and Frances married in 1962 and moved to Nigeria in 1963. Harding’s emancipatory approach to art education and anticolonial political perspective informed his approach to creative pedagogy from the outset: 

I adopted a policy of not exposing my students to European art forms or history. I did not teach general lessons on proportion, perspective, colour or composition. Instead, I insisted that ideas should be drawn from the students’ own lived experience. My bible at the time was, as may be deduced, Herbert Read’s Education Through Art. Two hundred miles away, not far by Nigerian distances, was the nearest university. I made a visit to the Fine Art sculpture department and was surprised to see that the student works were entirely based on making derivations of Marino Marini sculptures. The students’ tutor was from the UK and I regarded this kind of teaching as cultural colonialism. It could not have been further from my own aims for my students.6

Harding’s combination of aesthetic education with social emancipation was influenced early on by figures such as Read, an art historian and anarchist, and later critically honed by a reading of radical educational thinkers such as Ivan Illich and the Brazilian Marxist philosopher Paolo Freire. For Read, the ultimate destination for a young person’s education was not grammar school, technical college, or university, but “society itself.”7 For Freire, political action was pedagogical action—“the practice of freedom.” His critique of what he called the conventional “banking” concept of education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed was a key reference point for Harding when developing courses that sought to overcome the “dichotomy between human beings and the world” by embedding art in everyday social contexts.8

A similar perspective on the social function of art can be found in Friedrich Schiller’s epistolary treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795). In the book, the German Romantic states: “If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic.”9 In his fourth letter, Schiller introduces his conception of a “pedagogic” or “political artist” as shaper of society, contrasting this figure with the artist or artisan primarily concerned with shaping formless materials: “With the pedagogic or the political artist things are very different indeed. For him Man is at once the material on which he works and the goal towards which he strives.”10 We might draw parallels between the social role of Schiller’s “pedagogic,” “political,” or “statesman” artist and the role of “citizen-artist” and “artist-teacher,” both terms that have been used to describe Harding.

It was not without some regret that, amid rising political tensions across Nigeria, Harding, now aged thirty and with a young family, returned to Scotland in 1967.

Glenrothes Town Artist 1968–78
Given the month’s importance in the history of political and cultural revolution, it is perhaps fitting that on Friday, May 3, 1968, an advertisement placed by the Glenrothes Development Corporation appeared in The Scotsman newspaper seeking an artist or industrial designer to join the Department of Architecture and Planning, responsible for developing the housing and infrastructure of the built environment of Glenrothes. Alongside East Kilbride, Cumbernauld, Livingston, and Irvine, Glenrothes was one of five post-war Scottish New Towns designated between 1947 and 1966, intended to alleviate the overcrowding of large cities such as Glasgow. Harding applied and got the job, which came with a pension and accommodation. In a year of revolutions across the globe, an altogether quieter revolution in culture was about to unfold in Glenrothes, where over the next decade the “Town Artist” Harding set about developing a significant body of works embedded in the new community. As he explains: 

The early new towns, of which Glenrothes was one being designated in 1949, were mostly built on greenfield sites with the citizenry imported. Thus new communities were struggling to form with little shared history and tradition and often with broken extended-family relationships. It seemed to me that one of the areas in which an artist could operate was in creating memorable landmarks within the fairly uniform housing areas and the incorporation of ‘marks’, however small, by local people.11

Utilizing the ready-to-hand materials from an environment under construction such as concrete, brick, metal poles, and ceramic tiles, he intervened in and transformed the infrastructure of everyday social experience, including pavements, play parks, and pedestrian underpasses. His projects often involved the participation of local youths and school children or offered work opportunities to a series of graduate apprentices. Although other New Towns also employed artists, the integral nature of Harding’s role in the development of Glenrothes was unique and echoed the aims of the APG. As he later wrote:  

I became a member of the Planning Department and, later, was expected to attend planning meetings for new developments in the town. This meant I had a voice at the inception of planning briefs that were then passed on to the various design groups— housing, factories, offices, engineering and landscape. This was clearly an innovative, and possibly unique, role for an artist in the UK at that time and although I would not claim to have had a major influence at these planning stages, nevertheless the precedent had been set and, in time, a clause was inserted into all planning briefs which stated that, ‘the artist is to be consulted at every stage of development.’12

 Harding made sculptural works that could be climbed up or sat upon, with surfaces used as tables or seating becoming interactive and participatory “tools for conviviality,” in the words of Illich. Harding often left them untitled, to later be given names by locals such as “Rocket,” “Piano Keys,” or “Giant Condor.” Predominantly working in concrete often with an exposed aggregate finish, he embedded references to local history and to the indigenous cultures and prehistoric civilizations of the Americas and Scotland into these participatory works.

One of the most significant and conceptual works produced by Harding is Henge (1976). Now a listed monument, Henge is a spiral of thirteen large, precast concrete stelae forms located in the residential precinct of Pitteuchar. The interior faces of each component contain references to Harding’s passions—popular music, poetry, dissident literature, the Brazilian footballer Pelé, Pictish and Celtic symbols, and radical political and religious figures from Che Guevara to Mahatma Gandhi. Placed at the threshold of a new community, Henge functions as a marker of hope. The monument affords a place of private contemplation and collective solidarity. In this sense, it is akin to an idiosyncratic reference library through which the visitor’s imagination can spiral outward through cultural space-time, from the individual to the universal. Cast in concrete—a material that finds its strength through a graded mix of aggregates (sand and gravel)—Harding’s Henge points towards a combinatory and emancipatory pedagogy that fuses popular culture, literature, religion, and politics through a form of sociocultural syncretism. In its pedagogic imperative, Harding’s Henge acts as a precursor to Thomas Hirschhorn’s temporary monuments dedicated to left-wing philosophers. In the age of the internet and the smartphone, the concrete stelae now also suggest sculpture as pedagogic interface.

Harding regarded Henge as his major work from his time as Town Artist. Significantly, however, at the monument’s threshold, Harding draws upon the words of Gandhi in a characteristic act of artistic humility: “Man’s best monument is not a thing of stone, but consists in living deeds, and in the memory which survives in the minds of those he served.”

In 1973, while Harding was Town Artist, a collection of essays on Art and Society by the Spanish-born Mexican Marxist philosopher Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez appeared in English. Vázquez’s words articulate much of the essence of Harding’s ambitions for his work in Glenrothes. They also resonate with the innovative Art and Social Context course, which Harding codeveloped in Dartington in 1978:

The relationship between art and society cannot be ignored, for art is itself a social phenomenon: First, because the artist, however unique his primary experience might be, is a social being; second, because his work, however deeply marked by his primary experience and however unique and unrepeatable its objectification or form might be, is always a bridge, a connecting link between the artists and other members of society; third, because a work of art affects other people—it contributes to the reaffirmation or devaluation of their ideas, goals, or values—and is a social force which, with its emotional or ideological weight, shakes or moves people. Nobody remains the same after having been deeply moved by a true work of art.13

David Harding, Henge, 1976. Permanent installation and listed monument, Glenrothes, Scotland.

Art and Social Context, Dartington, 1978–1985
After a decade in Glenrothes, Harding moved with his family to take up the role of Senior Lecturer at Dartington College of Arts, a now-closed campus based at Dartington Hall on the outskirts of Totnes, in Devon. Over the next seven years at Dartington, Harding worked alongside Chris Crickmay to develop a newly validated degree course Art and Social Context. According to Crickmay, the course— unique at that time in the UK—aimed “to produce a generalist artist-designer, capable of responding to the unpredictable creative challenges that arise in a community setting.” Crickmay reflects: 

In describing the course to others, the most inspiring aspect of it and the one that excited most curiosity was always the amazing variety of settings different students managed to engage with. Whatever you cared to name, our students had been there and done it. Student residencies included: a public laundry, a terrace house, a fish shop, Water Board offices, shopping malls, bus stops, a Macdonald’s restaurant, youth groups, weight watcher’s groups, adventure playgrounds, streets, centres for people with disability, orphanages, an industrial museum, a gymnasium, pubs, a church, railway stations, schools, a foundry, a biological research centre…the list could go on and on.14 

Drawing upon APG’s extended placements, the “residency” model developed as part of “Art and Social Context” was designed to take place over a full academic year. When Harding arrived in Glasgow in early 1986 to commence his position as head of the new department, this model became the basis for the annual Public Art Project (modified to a more manageable individual term), later synonymous with the teaching of Environmental Art. 

Coda—On Singing
What does any of this have to do with singing? Harding provides the answer:

I have been asked on many occasions what we actually taught the students in the Environmental Art department at Glasgow School of Art. I usually replied, half in jest and tongue in cheek, ‘singing,’ and proceeded to quote a short three-line poem by Adrian Mitchell in which I’d changed only one word—‘singing’ instead of ‘poetry’—but the meaning remains the same: 

Letter to a politician.
I have read your manifesto with great interest
But it says nothing about singing.15

Harding was fond of a cappella singing; of the sensitivity, fragility and power of the unaccompanied voice. However, as he explains, encouraging his students to sing together was never about assessing an individual’s vocal ability or musical competence: 

Not everyone of course can, or feels inclined, to actually sing publicly in company, but I learned from my family upbringing, and in successive other situations, the value of a few drinks and a ‘sing-song’ in forging a close and friendly social setting. Where there is mutual and supporting respect for the efforts of the individual, a confidence is bred in which people do perform whether it be a song, a poem, a story, whatever takes their fancy. That for me is singing. As the poet Shelley said, ‘social enjoyment in one form or another is the alpha and omega of existence’.16

To assume that the focus was on the proficiency of the voice when inviting someone to sing would ultimately be akin to seeing only the lifted finger of Saint Augustine and not the distant star to which it points.17

It is interesting that the word “orchestrate” appears in a discussion about Harding’s approach to making art in the context of Glenrothes.18 To orchestrate is not simply to arrange or to shape but to listen, to be open to others, to celebrate the potential harmony and dissonance of cultural difference, to adopt the “listening” model of art practice fostered at Dartington. This musical term recalls us to the importance of singing for Harding, the keynote that resounds throughout the social, political, and pedagogical dimensions of his practice. At its most vital level, the singing voice testifies to the resilience of the human heart and spirit. And it is singing that resonates throughout Harding’s approach to art, teaching, and life. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Sonnets to Orpheus: “Gesang ist Dasein.”

Singing is being.

Ross Birrell (left) and David Harding (right) outside Kunsthalle Basel during their exhibition Winter Line, 2014. Photo: Sandy Moffat.