“Teaching is a way to lose interest in what you thought you were interested in,” wrote Philip Guston in 1966. In the following decade, his work as an educator was highly influential on a generation of painters, but is often overlooked in discussion of his practice.
This conversation examines Guston’s often ambivalent relationship with pedagogy and practice in the last decade of his life. Programmed to coincide with the Tate Modern retrospective 'Philip Guston' (October 2023-February 2024), and organised in collaboration with the School of Visual Arts at Boston University – where Guston was a visiting professor from 1973 until 1978 – 'The Unteacher' considers how teaching and artistic practice inform each other in the context of other examples of artist-educators from both Guston’s time and ours.