Enforced freedoms: Testing art students’ artistic engagements in a folk high school

Abstract

Drawing on convention theory and sociology of critique, this article examines how teachers at a Swedish folk high school coordinate students’ activities through tests. Through ethnographic descriptions of exercises, assignments, presentations, and exhibitions that test students’ engagement, it is shown how the teachers seek to depart from the standardized assessment procedure associated with formalized schooling. More specifically, the teachers’ tests destabilize the prevailing understanding of what art “is,” support the students to collectively explore and experiment with materials and highlight promising dimensions in their art-making. The article highlights “what is at stake” in art education and recognizes certain conventions as central in formatting, confirming, and interrogating the students’ understanding of their artistic practices. Through these tests, students face a contradiction of freedom: the freedom to find their unique voice and follow their inner calling, versus the explicit and imposed expectation to express their freedom in a certain way.

Introduction

Pragmatic sociology and sociology of critique are highly pertinent to the study of art education. One reason for this is that permeance and uncertainty, fundamental concepts to both pragmatism and sociology of critique, are crucial conditions for most activities that play out in the educational realm of the arts. Students within the arts can have somewhat different orientations with their educational pursuits. Some seem to know what they want to achieve, and others do not; some might feel more confident in their art-making while others are more hesitant; yet others might appear talented and gifted, and others do not. But regardless of their orientation, degree of confidence, or “giftedness,” art students’ engagements prove to be surrounded by uncertainties.

The students of art classes stand in this two-way street where they need to handle their own “productive” and “unproductive” uncertainties of making art together and in front of others. On the one hand, uncertainty is something limiting. People cope with the emotional toll of uncertainty and try to bring control and order into their lives (Aspers, 2018, 2024). For example, art students need to handle what is not yet known from evaluations of themselves and their work (as extensions of themselves) (Fürst, 2018; Kris and Kurtz, 1981; Nylander, 2014b). On the other hand, uncertainty enables creative works, an activity that must be based on something unknown beforehand (Corte, 2022; Fine and Corte, 2019; Godart et al., 2020). Innovations, excitement, and creativity thus rely on uncertainty and feed off what is still unknown and undone.

Since the value of art students’ work is uncertain, not inherent to their bodies, nor inscribed as some unquestionable feature of the objects, sounds, and things that they produce, they are often very receptive to feedback and critique provided by peers, teachers, and other kinds of competent judges. The students’ ambitions, activities, and abilities are, in a word, “put to the test” throughout the course, or exercise they engage in. This article takes the condition of uncertainty as the starting point for investigating how the competence and reality claims of students in an ordinary art class are stabilized and deconstructed through various teacher led tests. More specifically, we investigate how situations enacted during artistic training permeated by uncertainty are managed through the deployment of tests that both affirm and challenge the art students in various ways.

Contrary to the everyday use of tests in educational research, often associated with formal assessment instruments that objectively measure a student’s ability in a specific domain, pragmatic sociology teaches us that tests can have more profound and more mundane meanings attached to them (Boltanski, 2011). Drawing on Boltanski’s (2011) distinction of three types of tests (existential, reality, and truth), we seek to make visible how the folk high school teachers’ valorization practices aim for art to become a means to challenge the participants world views and, ultimately, the social order. In short, folk high schools, common institutions in Scandinavian countries, offer non-formal adult education, emphasizing personal growth, creativity, and community engagement. Their weak curriculum and soft evaluation measures are intended to cultivate existential dimensions of becoming. However, the teachers’ ambitious and radical agenda also proves hard to materialize in practice, as there are multiple practical obstacles and contradictions in how the art course is formatted and enacted.

In this article, we draw on the concept of tests to demonstrate that while exercises and teacher assignments are sometimes presented as open-ended, vague, and benign, they are purposefully designed to shape certain engagements in art. In the context of art education within Scandinavian adult education institutions, there are paradoxes pertaining to freedom, such as the tension between art and ethics, the expectation to be unique yet ordinary, and the aim to be egalitarian and inclusive while being eccentric and individualistic. We specifically explore the notion of “enforced freedoms” within art education at Swedish folk high schools. Through these tests, students confront a paradox of freedom: the freedom to find a unique voice and follow an inner calling versus the explicit and imposed requirement to be free in such a manner.

Previous research

A classical theme in the sociology of education is the formation of artistic identities and careers through primary or secondary forms of socialization. Post-compulsory art courses are often conceived as a specific kind of becoming in which links between what is valued in the art world and the identity project of aspiring artists under training are unraveled (Moulin, 2009; Røyseng et al., 2007).

A dominant perspective for explaining careers and identity work within the arts is inspired by the field theory initially formulated by Pierre Bourdieu. This research tradition is usually based on the emergence of “a reversed economy” that highlights the importance of symbolic rewards or doing “art for the sake of art” (Bourdieu, 1985, 1996). According to Bourdieu (1985), the mature artistic field of production is built on forms of symbolic assets, value criteria, and evaluative judgments that only the insiders can fully grapple with, understand, and enforce. From this perspective, attending art education is about amassing such embodied know-how, building contacts, and acquiring symbolic assets that can lead to gradual recognition within the field of artistic production.

Educational institutions also fulfill a culturally legitimizing function for the art forms themselves, as they tend to decide what type of culture should be conserved and transmitted to future generations. In research based on field theory, the task of the researcher is often directed toward mapping out the relationship (and relative proximity) between these larger spheres of educational provisions that lead up to artistic careers and the much more limited spaces that actually matter in consecrating artworks, music, or literature as field-specific art-forms (cf. Bourdieu, 1985, 1996; Coulangeon, 1999; Sapiro, 2014). To enable individuals to enter among “the selected few,” researchers often find that it is paramount to accumulate both inherited and acquired capital. At the same time, the specific involvement of material resources and inherited assets is seen as profane and thus misrecognized as formative elements in the struggles to achieve success and recognition.

Although the field-analytical model has been used to explore many artistic fields both inside and outside of France (cf. Coulangeon, 1999; Gustavsson et al., 2012; Lahire, 2020; Mangset, 2004; Nylander, 2014a; Røyseng, 2007; Sapiro, 2014) and has proven fruitful to explain the socially skewed recruitment to art education as well as the relationship between educational and artistic institutions, it has also been found to have several shortcomings. Some of the often-repeated criticism relates to Bourdieusian scholarship paying insufficient attention to horizontal dimensions of artistic fields, how ordinary artists navigate the labor market, and that it is an analytical model that underestimates the way practical evaluations bring uncertainty to the valorization of people and things (cf. Bessy, 2016; Boltanski, 1990; Heinich, 2023; Perrenoud and Bois, 2017).

If the hierarchical dimensions of arts education have been prefaced in the tradition of field theory commonly associated with Bourdieu, horizontal dimensions tend to take precedence in different tenets of educational research building on symbolic interactionism and sociology of the Chicago school (Becker, 2008; Becker et al., 1961; Strauss, 1970). The term “student culture” was commonly mobilized among Chicago school sociologists when examining the composition of values, norms, and practices shared among student groups within a specific vocational orientation (Becker et al., 1961). For example, in one of the early contributions specifically targeting arts education, Strauss (1970) drew on 70 interviews of students at the nearby Art Institute of Chicago to derive a typology of five categories of students’ characteristics of the student culture within the arts. Overall, Strauss’ typology of art students highlights the diverse range of leitmotifs and values that students bring to art schools and underscores the importance of considering the internal variation of student culture for developing a comprehensive understanding of art education.

While Strauss (1970) and the work of fellow Chicago school sociologists have been powerful in opening up the black box of art students’ internal variation and different reasons for pursuing arts education, it is a human-centric perspective that largely abstains from addressing problems of how these artistic activities are institutionalized, devised, and evaluated in practice. However, in the cultural sociology on artistic gatekeeping as well as recent research on valuation, the focus of scholarly attention has increasingly been targeting the formative role of intermediary actors such as teachers, art critics, and curators (Foster et al., 2011; Friedman, 2014; Fürst, 2017, 2018; Fürst and Nylander, 2023; Hamann and Beljean, 2021; Karpik, 2010; Mears, 2011; Nylander, 2014b; Velthuis, 2005). For educational research, the uncertainties involved in artistic exercises and assessments have important implications for how art education ought to be studied (Fürst and Nylander, 2023). Contrary to subjects where the quality of a student’s work can be stipulated or clearly defined in advance, artistic practices tend to rely on rather weakly defined evaluation schemes and are institutionalized through more opaque test formats. For instance, within the framework of reducing uncertainty, the concept of a judgment device, employing various heuristics of interpretation, has enabled the assessment of otherwise incommensurable objects (Karpik, 2010). Additionally, a complementary concept proposed by Fürst (2018) suggests using appraisal devices to study how artists mitigate their uncertainty regarding the quality and prospects of their creations. We thus turn to examine the formative role of teachers and how uncertainty is mitigated within the educational context, drawing upon the analytical concept of tests.

Theoretical framework: Being put to the test

In analyzing and discussing our results, we relate to the work of Boltanski and Thévenot (1999, 2006), in which critical moments and the formatting of tests become pivotal to understanding the valorizations and practical evaluations in everyday life. In short, a critical moment occurs when one or more individuals involved in joint activities perceive that something is not working as it should and thereby express questions, dissatisfaction, and critique (Boltanski and Thévenot, 1999: 359–360). In their joint work On Justification, Boltanski and Thévenot (2006: 147–148) introduced the concept of test to help clarify how the alignment of actions, objects, or persons is constituted through various devices, tools, and material arrangements. In the original framework, the deployment of tests can be viewed as a type of critical moment, a situation in which the potential value registers and appropriate forms of engagement are manifested. Tests, therefore, by necessity carry a normative and political dimension for establishing and safeguarding legitimacy, while at the same time being underscored with uncertainty and contingent on the underlaying criteria of valuation (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Boltanski and Thevenot, 2006; Chiapello and Gilbert, 2019). Educational institutions are especially important in this regard, as they format and evaluate tests that can have long-lasting effects on the life trajectories of those individuals subjected to them.

Schools are also essential for confirming and validating the social order. Boltanski (2011: 103–104) further distinguishes between different types of tests and their role in instituting or calling into question “the state of reality.” Following Wittgenstein, Boltanski (2011) elaborates on the distinction between reality and the world, where the world is “all that is the case,” that is, no one has direct and unmediated access to its totality, while this world is stabilized, ordered, and made sense of through reality. The relationship between the world and reality is, therefore, always fragile and can be put into question. The foundational task of institutions, such as schools, is to deploy what Boltanski calls truth tests. Truth tests can be described as the fundamental task of educational institutions when they affirm and validate the social order through confirmation acts. However, schools also differ from one another. In the case of art courses at Swedish folk high schools, the tests students are subjected to are not merely meant to confirm an established and dominating perception of reality but also to open up for questioning or critiquing the state of affairs.

Since art education consists of many moments when the fragility of learning an artistic craft is put to the test, it provides ample empirical evidence of certain delimitations between what “is” and what “ought” to be (Boltanski, 2011). Just as with many art schools, the art courses at the folk high school are much less formalistic than what is typically the case in other educational settings. As such, the folk high schools often deploy didactical instruments that test students in softer ways, for example, by aiming to open up, puzzle, modify, or alter prevailing definitions of social reality. On these occasions, Boltanski (2011: 103ff) distinguishes between reality tests and existential tests, where the multitude of experiences and alternative visions of the world are mobilized to direct various kinds of critical reflection and intervention. The prevailing social order is therefore not immune to interventions that test reality to modify it (reality test) or, more radically, to reject or seek to alter social order by bringing alternative elements of “the world” from personal experience back into reality (existential test).

In our following presentation, the fragility of becoming subjected to educational assignments and exercises at the Swedish folk high school will be understood as tests meant to coordinate action and spur artistic engagements (Thévenot, 2019). One way to understand what matters most during artistic training is to look for these testing situations where tensions occur in practice. These moments typically involve presenting or performing some artistic test before significant others. Each test consists of being subject to the judgment and evaluation of competent peers and “informed” critics. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 31) point out, institutionalized tests tend to be conceived as fully legitimate and sound. Students subjected to tests in school settings might object to the test’s outcome and feel unease in conforming to its normative underpinnings but rarely question the very existence of tests or even the forms in which these tests are deployed.

In the subsequent analysis, we want to understand how the folk high school teachers seek to coordinate the students’ activities in time and space through locally situated tests. Drawing on the convention theory and “sociology of testing” (cf. Potthast, 2017; Stark, 2020) outlined above, we use situations and educational practices where tests are used. As we shall see, the design and deployment of these testing moments are typically centered on the work of teachers, either by them designing collaborative tasks or delivering formative assessments and appraisals that involve rivaling sometimes conflicting value schemes.

Methodological considerations: Context, data, and analytical procedure

The context of our study is a Swedish folk high school. Originating from pre-industrial 19th-century social movements, the folk high school began in 1868, marking the start of post-compulsory education initiatives in Sweden beyond the elementary levels. The term “folk” was adopted by the Swedish popular education movement to emphasize the goal of providing mass education in the vernacular language for the “popular classes,” initially focusing on landowning farmers. The Swedish notion of “folkbildning” thus contrasts with the elite connotation of the older Germanic concept of Bildung (Larsson, 2013). Today, folk high schools are an integral part of the educational landscape across Europe, particularly in Scandinavia and the Germanic countries (Korsgaard, 2019; Pastuhov et al., 2019).

Historically, folk high schools carry a legacy of humanistic and existential ideas about learning, viewing education as a holistic process involving the enculturation of individuals and cultural revival (Korsgaard, 2019; Millenberg, 2023). Rooted in the classical German concept of Bildung, education at folk high schools emphasizes self-formation, where individuals and groups are actively supposed to educate themselves, develop, and transform into something new and previously non-existent (Gustavsson, 1991). This process of becoming involves relating to others and the world, often depicted as an existential journey or interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar, following the hermeneutical metaphor (Gadamer, 2013).

Formally speaking, as a voluntary educational form aimed at deepening knowledge and expertise within the arts, the folk high schools in Sweden are grade-free and typically situated at an intermediary level. They target a wide range of adult students above 18 who have already completed mandatory and upper-secondary schooling, but most have yet to attend tertiary education (Fürst and Nylander, 2023; Nylander, 2014a). Arts education at folk high schools occurs at the intersection of the educational sphere, social welfare policy, and the professional art world, characterized by a great variation in student engagement and a strong emphasis on social interactions (Fürst and Nylander, 2023; Millenberg, 2023). While primarily state-funded, folk high schools are not governed by standardized national curricula, allowing them to maintain a high degree of institutional autonomy (Larsson, 2013). This enables teachers, particularly in art courses, to exercise professional discretion in selecting, designing, and implementing educational exercises based on their own judgments and objectives.

The ethnographic data utilized in this article formed an integral part of Millenberg’s dissertation, which relied on 104 days of fieldwork from the spring term of 2019 into 2020. The context was four different plastic and visual arts courses at a folk high school in southern Sweden. The courses were characterized by a heterogeneous intake of students regarding social backgrounds and artistic ambitions and a rather modest application ratio regarding selectivity. While Millenberg participant observations were conducted in a phenomenological tradition, zooming in on the social encounters and intersubjective meaning-making taking place at the school as a whole, we have centered our analysis on ethnographic fieldnotes in which the valuation of artistic practice is at stake, and the practical competences of art students or their teachers are being “put to the test.”

Participant observation is a well-known tradition in ethnography and life-world phenomenology and lends itself well to an exploratory approach (Denzin, 1978; van Manen, 1990). A fundamental part of ethnographic fieldwork is that it allows the researcher to be involved in and experience contexts and concrete situations among the people the researcher wants to describe and gain knowledge about (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995). In this study, the observations were directed toward what ethnographers refer to as “experience near” (Geertz, 1976) or “close observations” (Van Manen, 1990). We specifically focused on moments when pedagogical and artistic interactions among students and teachers faced challenges in coordination or when friction and arguments arose during the interpretation of ongoing events.

The applied analysis was guided by Boltanski and Thévenot’s work, particularly the concept of tests and how the trials and tribulations of common actors’ coordination reveal how the students relate to themselves and their artistic practices at the school. In the first step, the ethnographic material was read through to gain an overview of its contents. Then, in a second step, the material was coded. Once we knew more about test situations and critical moments the teachers and students enacted, we drew from theoretical concepts within pragmatic sociology by linking specific situations to more generalizable concepts. This was an iterative procedure that eventually enabled us to uncover what was worthy and deemed appropriate to test in the art courses.

In what follows, we draw on Millenberg’s ethnographic material to depict how a group of novel art students is made to do, discuss, and understand potential contributions to land art and abstract painting. Specifically, we present three everyday teaching situations involving the same group of students in an art course at a folk high school. Overall, the result shows when and how reality is tested in an introductory-level art course in the context of Scandinavian popular education. The results also demonstrate how individuals’ diverse realities contribute to complexity in educational settings. Constructed realities can hinder the learning intended by teachers, but by being tested, they can simultaneously be brought to awareness and transformed and open up new understandings of the world outside us.

Learning to let go: Exploring artistic practices in visual arts education

Doing land art

In one of the first classes of the course, the students receive a group assignment to do land art. The students are directed to walk out of the classroom into the school environment for this exercise. As the school has a facility in the countryside, close to nature with a lake surrounded by a forest, the teachers have used the opportunities for outdoor education by designing a land art exercise. Land art often involves creating art in places far from populated areas and using materials from the earth, such as soil, rocks, vegetation, and water, which resonates well with this particular folk high school’s scenic placement.

Land art is introduced to the students through the work of Andy Goldsworthy, one of the teacher’s favorite artists. Working with ideas and concepts relating to “what art is” and how one shapes nature to create art is intended to allow the students to (re)address fundamental questions thoroughly discussed and debated in the history of art and art criticism. The empirical example also conveys that the art courses uphold test formats that seek to go beyond validating and confirming art as it is commonly understood (truth test) to emphasize a more exploratory and experimental approach to artistic creation. However, many students experiencing the uncertainty of the openness of making art seem to believe there must be some right and wrong ways to practice art, leading to performance anxieties and collective fears of making mistakes.

In the introduction, the teacher starts by contrasting land art to the conventional art in studios and exhibition halls, which is claimed to be more static, and the material object is seen as less bound to change. As a source of inspiration for their upcoming exercise, she shows a selection of pictures of Goldsworthy’s work on a PowerPoint slide. When this presentation seems to be finished, she says:

- Then you understand exactly what to do? (chuckles and sweeps with her eyes across the classroom). Time is limited, and you should not make such grand works of art as depicted in those pictures. It need not be so complicated with land art (she then shows a picture of a 4-year-old boy who has created an “artwork”). This art is changeable and evolving, so you must document your artwork. We will walk around the venue next week and see what is left, but we will also look at the pictures you have taken of each work and during your process. . .

- Then, we will divide you into groups. Do you want teachers to help? How many are we? (counts) 34. How many groups will there be then?

All participants are given a number for the different classes to become randomly mixed. The teachers now stand and count people into groups: 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4. . .

- Has everyone received a number? (no one protests, and the teachers show that this is the case by nodding). Yes, then it’s time to find the right group. . .

Compared to how clear the instructions for forming groups were, the collective task of creating land art appeared vague and rather mammoth for the newly formed groups. The grandiose work from the celebrated land artist Goldsworthy seems to echo in their bodies and minds, and none of them is very familiar with the artistic subgenre from before. Conscious of this reception and to lower their expectations and the seriousness of the task, the teacher had included an image of a young child making something akin to land art.

Engaging in exploration, discovery, and curiosity that comes more naturally for a 4-year-old child is meant to encourage this mode of playfulness. The assignment is thus purposefully designed to be vague and ambiguous for the students to consider art in new ways, aligning the students in groups by trying to evoke their sense of puzzlement and curiosity. As they are all new to land art and equal to nature, the basic idea is that the students should draw on their experiences and could do almost “anything” in the surrounding terrains and then justify it as art. It is not explicitly an exercise meant to distinguish artistic know-how in a hierarchical order or affirm a distinction between right and wrong, as the kind of truth test the students are accustomed to from other schools. While the student may interpret it that way, the explicit test (at least what is said), as designed by the teacher, is not to test if the students have managed to do the exercise correctly. Rather, the exercise is meant as a reality test that opens reality to critique and the fundamental question of what art is by reimagining reality through the material recombination of nature. Rather than a closed, rigid, and rule-based understanding of art-making, an open-ended and explorative mode of artistic engagement is encouraged wherein reality can be reformed and seen anew.

The most crucial element of this reality test is that students engage in experimental collective learning of their own volition. Rhetorical questions like “Do you want teachers to help?” or “Do you understand exactly what to do?” signal that students are expected to take responsibility for the exercise once their groups are formed. In one group, the teacher felt the need to intervene after noticing some aimlessness in the experimentations. She then gave explicit suggestions on their art-making but soon stopped herself in the tracks, saying, “No, I will not get involved in what you do; now I am silent.” She then moved into the background, noting her difficulty remaining silent once engaged. After this brief intervention, the group was left to their own devices, with teachers mostly providing instruments and materials for artistic modeling and transforming the surrounding nature. This teacher’s challenge was to strike a balance. The teacher needed to guide the students in the exercise enough to get them going but also encourage them to gain a greater degree of artistic autonomy. Additionally, the interventions of the teacher were pivotal to whether the exercise was seen as a reality test or a truth test.

The assignment is intended as a reality test aimed at challenging the conventional view of art as static and rule-bound through collective experimentation in art-making. This approach encourages students to reshape their perception of reality by actively engaging with and transforming their environment. However, it also requires a collective effervescence to fully function as a pedagogical exercise. Initially, one group exhibited a general reluctance and hesitancy, which the teacher attributed to ingrained anxieties about performance and the potential risk of doing something “wrong.” The teacher suggested that this mindset is fostered by the regular school system, which deploys truth tests through a long series of standardized assessments—an approach particularly ill-suited for the open-ended nature of artistic exploration.

According to the teacher, embracing apparent failures as integral elements to the artistic process is crucial. The ethos of “Oh, what a thrill, what happened to this thing?” underscores the importance of heuristic trial-and-error in artistic development. The test deployed here also aims to shift students’ focus from measurable performance skills to collaborative exploration and communal bonding, characterized by playfulness and curiosity among the group. Arguably, the unspoken criteria of evaluating the art teacher are rooted in a rather romantic understanding of unleashing the inherent inspiration of these students (Fine, 2019; Kris and Kurz, 1981; Røyseng et al., 2007; Wohl, 2021). Interestingly, instead of interpreting the difficulties in establishing the creative flow as a rejection of the teacher’s alternative vision of art (material, earthbound, fluid, etc.), reflections focused on the students’ previous experiences of formal schooling where there was no room for the type of cultivation of heightened sensations and enchanted visions she had hoped for.

Presenting and narrating art: Saying too much or too little

Although the folk high school teachers had devised a plan to introduce uncertainty and encourage students to challenge the conventional notions of art as something fixed and institutionally entrenched, not all groups had assumed the responsibility for the creative exercise in the way it was intended. However, by Monday morning, the teachers had received all the groups’ pictures representing their dabbling with land art. Everyone is gathered in the big hall, and the blackout curtains cover every window to keep the late summer sun out.

The teacher presents pictures documenting each group’s work and invites each group to narrate what kind of artwork they came up with. The teacher then asks them questions on how it emerged and evolved. Each presentation is referred to with the Swedish term “redovisning,” a colloquial term used for project-based school presentations. Incidentally, the same Swedish word also signifies accounting, for example, regarding economic entities in financial accounting. Hence, “redovisning” is a test where you are expected to account for something you have done while being held “accountable” for it.

“Redovisning” is thus a form of ritualistic confirmation of the social order within the educational institution, with the teacher acting as a spokesperson for this institution. It is a truth test where students are expected to prove they completed the assignment. However, within this assignment lies the potential for a critique of reality, both of the educational institution and the assignment itself, as well as the potential for reform and reconceptualization of the world around them and what art can be.

As the teacher shows the first picture, she asks the group struggling to get going with the land-based exercise, “What did you think in the group? How did you do this?” The students mumble among themselves, and no one approaches the full class with a detailed answer. The teacher then prompts the group again: “How come you did it this way?” Finally, a student softly responds that it was one of the other teachers who came up with the idea. The teacher posing the questions laughs a bit when acknowledging this ritualistic failure. She then repeats what the student just said so that everyone can hear about this (unfortunate) genealogy of the artwork. However, the teacher is not discouraged by this new information and still looks at the land art as if it contains a deeper meaning to be deciphered. As the students do not respond to the challenge of elaborating much on the piece, she tries to interpret the artwork herself. The teacher draws on its similarity to an animal and its placement in a nearby roundabout. Parallels are made to “roundabout dogs” (Swedish: “rondellhund”), a form of street installation and folk art that originally appeared throughout Sweden in roundabouts during the autumn of 2006. After some additional queries, the test is over, and the other students produce a warm round of applause.

While being spontaneously endorsed by fellow students, it is apparent to everyone that the group carried out a presentation that did not fully fulfill all the ideals of the land art assignment: enforced freedom. This paternalistic influence promoting the freedom to elaborate on reality is not fully in line with the romantic legacy of the artistic figure or inspirational artist, as the process should ideally have been born within the group. In a way, the students have been too perceptive and docile in the test, which makes them appear to be curating their teachers’ creative vision rather than exhibiting themselves as independent artists-in-the-making (Moulin, 1994; Røyseng et al., 2007; Wohl, 2021).

At the same time, the situation in which the presentation occurs can be seen as a test that results in a compromise where no one “loses their face.” The teachers know it’s a tall order for any artist, especially at an early stage of one’s artistic endeavors, to drive and narrate a creative project. Falling back on the teacher’s engagements and responses to their roundabout dog art meant that they received some aid in overcoming the initial sense of disengagement and gained examples of storytelling that could potentially add interest, mystery, and meaning to their work. The material object could thereby stand out against the backdrop of a dull roundabout and be placed in an artistic convention, in relation to which it should ultimately qualify as a work of art (Boltanski and Esquerre 2020). Hence, the teacher took the artwork back into the context of a reality test, where pieces of art expanded and altered the understanding of the world.

Even if this arts course encourages an open-ended process of discovery and exploration, it still contains other normative expectations for engaging with and narrating the creative process. Egalitarian values related to equality and sameness are key. While students are challenged to discover and explore artistic practice, with the underlying goal of broadening their perceptions of what art might be by a critique of reality, they are also simultaneously expected to enact and confirm a workflow in accordance with democratic and participatory ideals. In the final group being put to the test in this land art exercise, another transgression to the moral underpinnings of art education at the folk high school might be discernible.

“How did you do your work?” asks the teacher. Someone answers that she probably became “a dictator” and began to control how they would do it.

“Was it nice to have someone in charge? Or is it difficult to work in a group?” the teacher asks.

“There are many strong wills,” says the same girl who said she probably became a dictator. “I usually do not decide, but now I did, and I may have done it too much. . .”

“When working with art, you often have to be quite determined,” says the headteacher.

“Maybe we should have been in smaller groups because then there would not have been as many strong wills,” says one of the other group members.

The teachers seem to recognize the limitations and possibilities of having many different wills to negotiate instead of one person in charge. These joint deliberations conclude that it is “good” to have different perspectives and ideas voiced, and if someone ultimately decides “for the group,” that person needs to consider “the will” of all the others. The artistic group under scrutiny agrees with these democratic virtues but raises some critiques of the formatting of the exercise on their own. They claim they had a short time frame to act within and too many strong wills involved to enact that inclusive, democratic, and collective team spirit that the teacher envisioned. The criticism shows the limitations of the assignment and seems to suggest a reformist critique of the educational setting and the design of the assignment, a form of reality test. The lack of time prevents students from connecting their various experiences to create a unified understanding of, for example, an alternative vision of art. Hence, this group had moved forward in a committed and dedicated way that complied with the ideals of a self-propelling inner creative drive but had not fully engaged in the gist of collective exploration, endorsing democratic values pertaining to the common good of civil society (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006).

In the example above, the student acknowledges being a bit of “a dictator,” which contradicts the strong egalitarian ethos of working in a group assignment at a Swedish folk high school. The group was expected to freely explore land art and they organized themselves in a way where this freedom was exercised in a less-than-optimal way. Taking up the role of the spokesperson for the other, in this case, potentially marginalized voices, the participant recognizes that such a critique of the lack of egalitarian ethos might be valid for their work processes. Their deviation from the test as a truth test put the reality of the situation into question, making the deviation into a “test of the test.” The leader of the group thereby displays reflexivity and accountability in her role, where she seems aware of having transgressed the ethos of collaboration of a shared artistic vision. This situation follows from tensions central to art education in welfare societies, namely between the worth of communitarianism and inspiration, extrinsic and intrinsic modes of motivation, ethics and aesthetics (Fürst and Nylander, 2023; Heinrich, 1993; Karpik, 2010).

The abstract painting exercise: Enforcing creative freedoms

In the next test situation, the students are subjected to an individual abstract painting exercise. They are told that the paintings are to be displayed somewhere in the school’s common area. The students are also restricted to working only with four colors: blue, white, red, and brown. Since the paintings are meant to be abstract, they are also asked to indicate what is up and down on the back of each of their paintings.

As the students get going with their canvases, their teacher says:

What you should not do now, but which is very easy to do, is to compare yourself with others and think that you do not know anything and that everyone else can do more and thereby put yourself down. Feel free to walk around, look at each other, and learn from each other. You are at a folk high school. But do not compare yourself with each other!

I want you to develop and find your imagery. I want you [student’s name] to find your imagery, your way of expressing yourself, and what you develop. And in such case, you have to try and test [what your imagery is].

The teacher continues to foster an explorative mode, but the emphasis is no longer on the group but on the individual student. “Nothing is considered right or wrong,” she declares to let them at least explicitly avoid viewing the exercise as a truth test. As in the previous assignment, the students are to be open to the uncertainty of the world and may attempt to reform what art is, but this assignment may also lead to a more radical change from their personal experience of making art, which makes it more akin to an existential test. As the teacher is aware that the art students easily develop a culture of informal ranking of each other’s ability, the teacher wants to put a halt to any such comparing efforts. Rather than thinking about the perceived “quality” of their work in relation to others or mimicking those that seem to master the modeling of these four colors the best, they should acknowledge the incommensurability of artworks (Karpik, 2010).

Encouraging students to find their unique artistic expression through abstract experimentation while advising them not to compare themselves with others illustrates how the institution again incorporates a test situation with some inherent contradictions (Boltanski, 2011: 83ff). The inherent contradictions here are that students must explore the freedom of art and simultaneously express their opinions and find their expression. Through this, the teacher conveys the value in artistic worlds of being grounded in one’s inner true self, not falling into the temptation of comparing oneself with another, etc. Internalizing these values can be seen as a vital step in allowing each student to develop their own artistic identity to explore the world and carve out their artistic reality within it. Paradoxically, though, this individualistic ethos of uniqueness is pushed onto the students from the outside by one authoritative spokesperson representing the institution rather than sprung from their creativity. Being free thus emerges as an enforced doctrine preaching to the student collective. Taken to its extreme, it is as if the students should have an innate and collective ambition to be unique. However, since the students are seen to need constant prompts and reminders to find their own “voice” as autonomous artistic subjects, the work of finding an expression grounded in one’s creative “cause” is not assumed to develop organically.

Throughout the creative processes carried out under the constraints of four colors, the teacher also offers certain insights, providing positive feedback on the student’s ongoing work. These feedback mechanisms of recognizing and affirming each student’s work typically take subtle forms, such as facial work, gazes, or lifting aspects of the ongoing sketches that look particularly promising. Interestingly, issuing praise intended to unleash the students’ artistic creativity is still a voice from the authoritative position of teachers now acting as a kind of spiritual coach and competent judge. All in all, several tests are taking place simultaneously in this situation. As a form of test, the situation moves between students reflecting upon their existence in the world (existential test), affirming, confirming, and validating their achievements from the viewpoints of peers and the teacher (truth test), and, above all, critiquing the prevailing order of reality and reforming what can be conceptualized as art (reality test).

Concluding discussion: Artistic valorization and evaluation from a pragmatic perspective

In this article, we have investigated how being put to the test in art courses at a Swedish folk high school conveys different rivaling conventions as to the worth of post-compulsory art education. The focus on tests derived from pragmatic sociology helps envision what is at stake in art education. Even among seemingly egalitarian and progressive educational providers like the Swedish folk high schools, everyday classroom practice contains numerous challenges and tribulations devised for students to be tested for “what they are made of” and “what they are capable of” (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005: 31; Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). We have shown how truth tests, existential tests, and reality tests are enacted through the design of assignments and how these assignments can end up containing fundamental paradoxes or contradictions. The findings thus reveal the potential for reflection and autonomy among students within teaching situations, but also the complexity and fragility of teaching assignments whose intentions might run counter to the assignment given.

The challenges and tribulations arising when “ordinary actors” are subjected to tests also expose shortcomings in the analytical models commonly mobilized for understanding engagements in art education. For example, mainstream economic models on decision-making, competition, imperfect information, supply, and demand can hardly account for the complexities of everyday motivations, valorization, evaluation, and situated judgment in cultural work and education (cf. Boltanski and Esquerre, 2020; Karpik, 2010). As Karpik (2010) has already pointed out in his work on “singularities,” the market for cultural goods, and to some extent the educational institutions supporting it, need to deal with both objects and subjects (see also Fürst, 2018). These must be treated as multidimensional, with a high degree of uncertainty regarding quality assessment and appraisal. Both students and teachers have to deal with the limiting and expanding sides of these uncertainties. While uncertainty can be perplexing, it is a necessary condition for making art. Hence, the ordered way assignments are given contrasts with the students’ need to be open to the world and critical of the reality presented to them.

In the field-analytical model developed by Bourdieu and his colleagues, the inherent value of art education is studied from the hierarchical vantage point emanating from those that hold the most power to determine what is valuable in the professional sphere of cultural production (Bourdieu, 1996; Sapiro, 2014). The sacredness and profanity of art education and its symbolic value can, in the last instance, only be a matter of those occupying symbolic positions of power as cultural aristocrats, connoisseurs, or gatekeepers. Given that cultural fields are seen as relatively autonomous universes with their own idiosyncratic, yet somewhat rule-based, means of assessing quality, the economy adopted here can, in its extreme form, be reversed or inverted from the standard market logic as described by mainstream economists (Bourdieu, 1996; Gustavsson et al., 2012; Sapiro, 2014). While this perspective turns neoclassical economics “on its head” and can help unveil the few links that tend to be viable pathways between the educational sphere and the mature fields of cultural production, it is a heuristic toolbox that appears too detached from the messy multidimensionality of what is valorized as important among ordinary actors “on the ground.” This is particularly true among the rather modest or mundane art courses and practices we studied in this article which corroborates previous findings on “ordinary artists” elsewhere (Perrenoud and Bois, 2017). The kind of testing that the folk high school students are subjected to shows that valuation is not limited to consecration by powerful agents in a field; it can also occur in mundane situations at school through unassuming assignments given by teachers, as well as through interactions between students, teachers, and the structured teaching environment.

The concrete modes of being subjected to tests and the plurality of motives for engaging with the arts at a novice stage might be seen as more attuned to scholarship exploring art worlds from a symbolic interactionist perspective that accounts for a plurality of actors that together make art in relation to conventions (Becker, 2008; Strauss, 1970). However, by introducing the concept of test, we can go deeper into the dynamics of how one learns conventions of reality and becomes an artist with a certain attitude to the world and reality. We have shown throughout our ethnographic depictions of test situations that variations in modes of engaging with the arts remain grounded in formative arrangements where institutional power relations play a key role in mitigating or absorbing uncertainty (Fürst and Nylander, 2020, 2023). These relations either stabilize common actors’ sense of reality or throw them into doubt and puzzlement. When beings are assessed by uncertain standards, horizontal relationships, and institutional power dynamics must be examined to understand concrete coordination problems and their outcomes. Pragmatic sociology reveals the roles of material arrangements, judgment devices, appraisal devices, institutional power, and actors’ reflexive agency in using conventions and evaluation standards in artistic realms.

In situating how these conventions and tests are used, the historical legacy of institutions is of particular importance. The Swedish folk high schools might constitute a rather extreme case of northern European art education, but compared to American art schools or some Chinese counterparts (Fang, 2020; Fine, 2019), it seems that the folk high school distinguishes itself by having a very practical and existential orientation to artistic practice. For example, Fine (2019) shows, in a study of MFA courses in the US, that art courses have shifted from creating art as an end-product to fostering an ability to talk and theorize art. Fang (2020), by contrast, illustrates how Chinese “art prep schools” have historically put a very high demand on students’ technical skills and only very gradually introduced more individual expression as forms of differentiation. The kind of enforced freedom pivotal to the model of art promoted at the Swedish folk high school is devoid of the theoretical discourses found at universities (Fine, 2019) and the emphasis on technical abilities seen in the Chinese case (Fang, 2020). While this situation may be attributed to the folk high school students being novices, it is arguably also related to the folk high school as a particular kind of alternative education in a Nordic European context.

One way to interpret the differences in policies and valuation, particularly the endorsement of egalitarianism, pluralism, and inclusivity among Swedish folk high school teachers, is the universalistic legacy of civil society, social movements, and the welfare state that lingers in these schools. According to Verdier’s (2018) cross-comparative work on lifelong-learning regimes, Sweden aligns closely with what he calls a “universal regime,” where adult education institutions extensively compensate for inequalities and promote inclusivity and active citizenship. The strong emphasis on mutuality, collective bonding, and democratic deliberations in art courses of folk high schools might seem opaque when compared to other institutions focused on cultivating artistic engagements and the kind of conventions found at other art educations around the world. However, this emphasis does reflect the folk high schools’ integral role in the welfare regime historically developed in the Nordic countries. While largely publicly funded by the state, these schools are often managed by organizational custodians within Swedish civil society, such as free churches or the labor movement (Fürst and Nylander, 2023; Millenberg, 2023). Hence, it is unsurprising to find paradoxes and contradictions of enforced freedoms at these schools, as the civil society organizations bring about another type of legacy then what is commonplace in artistic universes.

The folk high school teachers greatly emphasize encouraging the students’ playfulness and experimentation. Through the framework of tests, we have shown the material arrangements and assessments as more open-ended and less defined than in many other school settings. However, when existential inquiries, explorations, and experimental art-making are institutionalized, a contradiction arises, preventing both students and teachers from “closing their eyes” (Thévenot, 2019). Despite the openness to various cultural pursuits, students are still shaped by formats that model them in different ways. Beyond validating certain perceptions of social reality or assessing the abilities of their students, folk high school teachers also aim to provide exercises that create doubt and puzzlement, opening up existential and critical interrogations of the world (Boltanski, 2011). Yet, as the ethnographic scenes help us illustrate, novice artists are meant to “awaken” their sense of wonder toward artistic practice while simultaneously listening to calls to find their “unique voice” and true artistic self. Somewhat paradoxically, these calls to “find one’s voice” is still a precept that reaches the students from an authoritative position of exteriority, like a standard prompt enforcing creative freedoms.