BELCHERESQUE : ART CRITICISM

10 years pricking the art voodoo doll 2005-2015

Category: art education (Page 4 of 4)

Moving the furniture around

May 24, 2007 / / 1 Comment

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‘Muller’ IKEA 2007: Shaun Belcher Readymade exhibited at numerous locations around the country see Gallery page.

In an act of humility and contrition Moogee is going to go gently on the next exhibition at Angel Row…’Cutting Edge Flagship’ of the city of  Nottingham the home of the fresh and the brave….yeah right……NOT

The next show is titled ‘Business as Usual’ and never has this been more appropriate. Following on from the Parade …well…brisk walk..of the local luminaries we have an exchange show return from Zagreb…the jury is out on that one but it looks interesting…and this…. To say the ideology and curatorial positioning similar to some of the work in Parade shows is a given ..

I quote from Edward’s Axis page….

Sean Edwards’ sculptures set up situations that lead you into examining your viewing habits. Through a formal analysis of both the real and the fake, search often employing a notion of absurdity in the process, here Edwards aims to expose the machinery of our take on reality and to lay bare an object’s function and use value.

Already a prize winner for such cutting edge ‘interventions’ as painting the Slade School of Art doors orange…woo hold me back that is radical….sorry but sometimes this kind of pretentious and earnest research led ‘work’ just makes old Moogee laugh. Of course that work questioned notions of seeing…..hmmmm of course nothing flamboyantly self-advertising about it was there..no silly me….

We seem to be caught in a decade of furniture removal artists..forget trad materials young artists you want to get ahead these days just get yourself some furniture..it so cliched already it become almost laughable. I know art students are up to their eyeballs in debt but please somebody loan them some pencils, thumb paper, paints and wood and stone for god’s sake or we’ll all be sitting around rubbing our chins at another generation of furniture shifters…in twenty years time….

Funniest of all is the fact that these ‘FURNERS’ are always using slightly ‘retro’ chic furniture it seems poor old IKEA is just no good for a badly thought out readymade these days..maybe it’s the lack of a patina of age…or simply that using new furniture would not mean it looked conveniently distressed. In this show (and no I will not see it or enter the gallery – if they can be so boringly oblique why should I bother walking round what is basically a set of illustrations to a thesis) we also have research student..Professor Pathway Intellectual grade 3 reverse somersault..(extra points for research) in C.V. Maxine Bristow.

Dull theoretical base and her ‘surgery’ located in a ‘Centre for Practice as Research’ at University of Chester…woo more avant-garde fun and frolics I bet …(no Bowery aesthetics here, no Warholian underground no its Chester:-) Seriously the website says it all (in copious amounts) this is art as academic living and good luck to her it pays the mortgage. Portfolio reveals handrails, towels, bags..very post-feminist research etc etc ….to be fair looks a little IKEA so maybe unfair to apply retro tag. Again her own spinning yarn says more than I ever could…very successful she is too but I’d rather watch paint dry..literally…

 …through her own work which establishes a dialectic between the processes, materials, and accompanying discourses of needlework/plain-sewing and the visual and conceptual concerns of minimalism, she provides a model of practice which aims to challenge perceptions and generate new practical and theoretical perspectives and thereby open up a critical space for making which acknowledges textile traditions and conventions.

So there you go …to be honest I found the recent exhibition at Castle Nottingham by Catherine Bertola to be far more interesting take on this area with far more than its own thesis to air…indeed it may have been one of the most locally relevant and crafted shows of the year.

Finally and courtesy of the Seventeen Gallery London a couple of art stars ( U.K. South Conference League division two) of which I far prefer David Ersser’s rather amusing (first time) reconstruction of everyday objects in balsa wood. A kind of little boy’s rebuilding of the adult world instead of just a few gliders that invariably crash back to earth. Similarly the elegance and dare I say it ‘craft’ of his work is charming but once you have scanned through all the variations it does become rather wearing like seeing the same joke told again and again (never harmed Julian Opie or Prince Hirst the First) but that’s it…….he makes things out of balsa.

Check the seventeen gallery at http://www.seventeengallery.com/?p=2&id=4

One thing you can say about the ‘Furner’ Generation is they do look lovely at jpg level on the web and maybe that is what all this is all about. This generation are profferring ideas which only incidently need actual realisation. Lacking the finances to set up in studio spaces (average price in London currently £300 a month) they have opted for a practical but finally dehabilitating irony and distance that is driving them farther and farther away from the tactility of material interaction. We may soon see a reaction to this divorce from materials and technique and a lessening of the intellectual gliding. As grant cut-backs impact heavily on artist’s incomes a lot of the hangers and runways that coddle these flights of the ephemeral will disappear and a good many gliders will simply crash back to earth.

Moogee is getting known for his joking and revisionist approach to the nature of contemporary art but do not dismiss because they are jokes..they are serious jokes. I do not throw these comments out lightly. I believe there has been a lack of rigorous intellectual approaches and a good deal of what we see tagged with the fashionable and flighty word ‘successful artist’ will disappear and quickly. I witnessed this kind of irony and intervention many years back e.g. Richard Wentworth but then he was in the minority. Now every degree show has its ready-mades practitioner and to be honest isn’t it all getting a bit boring. Modern Art, or as it has lovingly been re-branded post-Saatchi, ‘Contemporary Practice’ (as if ashamed that anything to do with an advertising executive could be called ‘modern art’) has drifted down a cul-de-sac of its own intellectual construction. The worst and brightest offenders are the post Polytechnic university cohorts (a word derivitive of their original purpose – to fabricate engineers and crafts-people) who have created a monopoly on what does and not constitute the ‘cutting edge academy’.

However they are no more the inheritors of radical practice than Blair was an inheritor of the Luddites. It is a be-calmed ocean of theoretical limpitude…….I threw that in to show even a barking dog can engage in ‘critical discourse’:-)
A bit more intellectual and theoretical Luddism will be needed to throw off these shackles and enter a genuinely wider debate.

For every Susan Collis (our final participant in Business as Usual – 17 gallery again) whose blurb is almost supremely special….

Collis’ practice involves a subversion of time frame and visual perception through the manipulation of everyday objects. In the piece ‘Paint Job’, what initially seems like a collection of careless splashes and stains upon the fabric of utilitarian worker’s overalls are, on closer inspection, meticulously stitched marks replicating the accidental and spontaneous moment.

It’s almost like Spinal Tap for art when blurb after blurb repeat the same Derridaesque formulas….on and on it goes and where will it all end…..how many interventions in furniture can a small island like ours take?

The ‘fabric of utilitarian worker’s overalls’ sounds like a Virginia Wolfism on being confronted by these dreadful worker types….oh how simply awful ..I mean real workers….indeed perish the thought. Is this 1920 and we all off to Henley after this art larking over???

I am not asking for the Angel Row to fill itself with paintings of victorian children, Jack Vetrianos (who I actually think stronger than the arts elite will allow) and god-forbid …..landscape artists…but for every dull ‘new acadamy’ show like this there an equal show of painters, sculptors using more traditional methods who have been and are continuing to be ignored. I challenge the Angel Row to let Moogee curate a show of the ‘outsiders’ and I bet I can find work as interesting and as founded in literate theoretical positions and ambition as any of this.

I do not blame the Angel Row staff or have any special reason for focussing my criticisms on them in particular they very nice people and they simply doing their job as advertised. They are operating in a wider art world of funding cuts and general indifference to the visual arts which not stuck in a cheap frame at IKEA .

What I am highlighting is the fact that several generations of artists have gone unseen, unheard because of such obvious fashionistas…The reason? Well its all about a production line these days.

Colleges of art are producing more and more able graduates in all fields and one of the most over-subscribed is the arts especially, as Grayson Perry pointed out, it becoming a ‘finishing-school’ for the sons and daughters of the middle-classes. It may or may not be all ‘croissants and the guardian’ as he stated in a Times article but it is becoming a default option for young students who intellectually bright but who do not fancy getting a real job…..yet. For them a decade of moving the furniture does not mean housework (male or female)  it means making art…when not too intellectually or physically heavy.

There is an imbalance that needs redressing but does ideologicaly compliant art necessarily mean good art ? As for art schools reflecting the wider make-up of our society just go to any degree show. At any one time there are more Korean, Japanese overseas students on courses than home-grown minority students….it is not the white middle-class who losing out it is the Asian and Afro-Caribbean youth who missing the gravy trains….

My detractors, and I expect they already many ready to dismiss me as a ‘Peter Fulleresque Ranter’ , miss the point. Our art schools are not in as fine and dandy a state as the PR departments would like us to think. The quality of art-teaching and artworks is not as consistantly high as the same highly glossed advertorials in brochures (sorry Prospecti) would have us believe.The dreaded bottom line and financial implications mean some standards have been eroded, possibly terminally’ by these ‘advances’.

This ‘review’ did not need to attend the show which in fact not even open yet to address these fundamentals. The quotes above depending on your point of view corroborate or deny your own entrenched views on where that art world (international or otherwise) truly is. I am simply trying to prise some of the debating ground open so that the other side of the coin can be seen and allowed to shine a little. I and many artists like me have been sidelined because of it and in many cases quite unfairly. Balance may not be possible but surely every artist should be allowed to fly their kite/model aeroplane.

Remember the academy thought they were right in France in 1899 and look what happened there…nobody has an exclusive handle on the truth. Nobody is immune from being crap too…….whatever they may say….
As a beautiful postscript to these thoughts I suggest a singularly wonderful track by The Handsome Family an americana duo from Chicago now resident in the Mojave Desert. Their song ‘Moving Furniture Around’ says more than all the above ‘artistes’ with dare I say it more compassion, craft and genuine talent…but then they just travelling musicians…not academics or professional artists. Artists studios used to resemble workshops full of rebels..these days they operate more like architects practices…

p.s. amusing footnote – this show also uses the previously hidden and obviously fascinating space of the Angel Row store-room……just like Mr. Russell did in Parade….bit like babies and cardboard boxes at Xmas that one then…I wonder if it so rivetting why they don’t just open a storeroom up as a gallery and save on building CCAN for £15 Million it would be a hell of a lot cheaper…….

The New Profs: Parade 3 – Stuff Happens

April 25, 2007 / / 7 Comments

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“we would have known and surely would have predicted that the General Motors of the art world – the museums and universities – would ultimately seek to alleviate their post-market status and control the means of production … Within 10 years, stuff the art world was on its way to becoming a transnational bureaucracy. Everybody had a job description and a résumé … I was face to face with a generation of well-educated and expensively trained young artists whose extended tenure in art schools appended to the art world had totally divorced them from any social reality beyond it.”

David Hickey quoted in Gordon Burn try ,1921975, buy 00.html” title=”Make it new”>’Make it New’ Guardian October 14th 2006

Hickey is talking about the 1970’s in America but just as we have lagged behind our unweildly offspring in so many things since WWII – armaments, planning, social movements, music so too we have lagged in Art Education. Hickey’s words are echoed by sculptor Richard Serra who called it ‘Floor and drawer art’ – referring to the fashion for conceptual, documentary and installation work. ‘Plus ca change’. Here we are in the late naughties playing catch-up again but this time the implications for an art-world on brink of overload are severe. What has this to do with the offspring of our munificent academies toting their ‘cutting-edge’ wares before us on a sunny evening at Angel Row? Well everything and nothing…..

To explain I have to tell you a little story……

Once upon a time there was an Irishman and an Englishman and they both  dreamt of America….one ended up there studying at Yale with the same Richard Serra and one made it across from the hinterland of Birmingham on a Fullbright. What both of them ingested as well as a respect and understanding of American academic practices and art-scene was an understanding of the new world that was emerging. No more cosy provincial art-schools with their tired old life-drawing rooms and quaint practices. No they saw a golden vision of a big brash new world and they weren’t going to let the old feudalism dent their dreams. The history of post WWII propagandist use of art movements such as Pop and Abstract Expressionism as examples of ‘democratic American freedom’ is well written. Far more subtle and really only apparent now years later is the influence of the free-market on the art schools of Britain. In an unholy alliance academics with left-wing sympathies who were able to earn right-wing lifestyles found that the ‘freedoms’ of a free-market in education gave them prestige and their bosses higher turnover and profits. Locked together ‘Art Education’ and ‘Commerce’ factors danced like there was no tomorrow.

The Irishman was Michael Craig Martin and in his pivitol role at Goldsmiths he ushered in the YBA (Young British Artists) phenomenon. The other character in my story is John Newling of Trent University ( formerly Polytechnic). At Trent Newling has overseen a similar if less glamorous drive towards both improving standards and building the new University’s reputation in the arts. It is the nature of what that built upon that I am interested in..those words of Hickey and Serra came back to haunt me as I moved around the Angel Row in the evening sunlight……are we witnessing the evening shadows lengthening on the day in the sun promised by the YBA circus…I think we are…..

As a student Trent had already a growing reputation, Goldmiths too but nobody could have predicted the sea-change in the arts that they have overseen. At Hornsey College in 1980’s I witnessed a full scale attack on the bourgeoise notions of craftsmanship, artistic talent and skill as ‘new arts’ performance, installation and digital swept all before them ..this a full 5 years before YBA’s. The students of the 1970’s had prospered and brought their own practice to the art school corridors..out with the old and in with the new. In the art critical wilderness voices opposed to this turn around were berated as hopelessly conservative..Peter Fuller who had started his published life on a left-wing press was berated as a closet fascist. The art-war was over…progress had won and as the numbers of students swelled ( fuelled partly by a government which had become a dab-hand at closing down all else especially manufacturing) and the money flowed in and the old ‘Polys’ blossomed into cathedrals of light and regenerated beauty who could argue? In Nottingham’s case the University actually built a new business school on the site of the old Raleigh factory. There was never a better time to be an artist and the YBA cash cows were the icing on the cake……..things could only get better and better…couldn’t they?

20 years on and the cracks in the facade have started to appear. The new Unis have been very succesful for those lucky enough to be within their privileged walls..and increasingly the proportion of ‘overseas’ students is climbing in direct relation to the falling numbers of U.K. students unable to navigate the fees fiasco or convince their parents that the art lottery worth playing. Meanwhile the Further Education colleges take up the old boring mundane training duties for ‘real work’ the hairdressers and bricklayers who would have trained on the job in the old days. It not only the working class feeling the pinch as Grayson Perry noted even the middle-classes beloved of Blair are examining the fine print carefully these days before committing their hard earned cash. The art-world today has been transformed and here the nub of my story……what we seeing is a generation of ‘Floor and Drawer’ artists….our clean, bright lovely ‘New Professionals’ who could have easily gone into medicine, architecture or been vets…the art-world has been ‘scrubbed up’ for the naughties..it had to be to carry on…anarchists, hairies, yippes of old need not apply…..solid artworks and intellectual rigour only…if it is weird it is safe ‘weird’. Which brings me back to my reverie in the late sun in the soon to be ‘upgraded and cleansed’ Angel Row. Where has all the fun gone..the anarchy, the dare I say it ‘revolution’ and as for ‘social reality..you ‘avin a larf guv’nor?………..

Oh dear am I being too old-fashioned for you dear reader?

Parade 3: Curated by Leo Fitzmaurice (who incidently has some fairly slight squibs on supermarket posters in the entrance) is the final act in the three-ring circus that was Parade – an attempt to showcase the brightest and most ‘urgent’ art from the sunny East Midlands.

In concept it draws on a large amount of networking events and in-house collaboration between artists chosen because they already ‘performing’ across the ‘Critical Network’ i.e. a post degree infrastructure that effectively promotes more of the same and excludes just about everybody else from the show. Imagine a Circus tent that pitched up in town and when you arrived 90% of the acts were clowns and when asked ‘where are the horses and elephants and even the jugglers’ you were told sorry by official decree only the clowns can take part the rest have been deemed too ‘reactionary, conservative or just too old’. The factors causing this state of affairs are tedious and would take a book to explain but art as instrument of social policy, art as regeneration symbol, art as education and most importantly artists under 30 as keys to unlocking European Funding have all played their part. Factor-in a developing network of self-promoting across the land and you have a virtual ‘alternative art scene’ but is it ? What is mind-numbing about this series of shows is how ‘safe’ it really is and how old-fashioned it all looks. The new underground drinks lattes, shops at Muji and uses their arts council grants as deposits on houses…capitalism must be quaking in its boots. One artist ( the oldest in show of course) actually has a thread of the real rebel in him and it shows.

Another reviewer noted the air of ‘inconsequantiality’ about this third show and he nailed it. This is Sunday supplement wannabe art. It affects an air of defiant rebelliousness but it no more real than a Peter Docherty ‘poem’ or Tracy Emin Sunday column. Art has been divorced from its social setting and artists starved for years of funds and attention are more than happy to dance to the piper’s tune. In an area like the East Midlands where there virtually no private sales system that means Academia and Subsidy…….they are all on A&S (the medical overtone there correct) without it most would have withered on the vine years ago or got proper jobs. So what is ‘Joe Public’ (conspicuous by his absence of course) to make of this Parade in his name?

I could list every artist’s name but for a fuller overview please read Mark Patterson’s incisive account in the Nottingham Evening Post (which incidently in response to public clamour for art coverage recently reduced said coverage by half in order to print more dating ads…). I am just going to give my honest appreciation of the work as it shown. I know only one participant and that is Paul Matosic whose floor piece of dismembered computer parts got a a thumbs up from Mark Patterson and which I agree is a highlight of the show. Another piece which caught my eye immediately was Hessing’s assemblage of multiplugs…concise and a formally inventive and clever piece that had real ‘sculptural’ precsence. In the same room Godfrey’s magazine excerpts were Foundation level smartypants, ( ditto  Davis …so you took these symbols of capitalism and contemporanity…and you ‘broke them down” …..how exciting……..) Jamieson’s envelopes were a good joke…Sol Lewitt for the poor? Ayling and Conroy I leave to an anonymous comment I ‘overheard’ …” art for the front page of Frieze only it will never make it’…..it looked like Jeff Koons on a bedsit budget… if they’d aimed lower like the neatly formulated ’96 tears and 96 eyes’ they could have got frontpage of A.R. publicity literature instead. One thing I cannot fault though is the premise of lo-fi, reusing objects as defined by the overall curation….it is stuff and sometimes it is happening but mostly it isn’t.

Stuff that could have enjoyed development included Stevenson’s signage…nicely done and could progress, Hessing’s ‘re-modulations’ and maybe Fisher’s other work although HAL was a bit too pop culture referential to have any real bite but full marks for a laddy reinvestigation of traditional laddette materials. Kirshnir’s morse code was a good idea badly presented.

Stuff that emphatically, ‘oh god why bother’ didn’t happen for me and quite a few others, included Gubb’s amplifier…yawn….and Danica Maier’s soft (literally lace..but from abroad…not Nottingham you understand…) pornographic cartoon. Nothing trembling there. By coincidence the two most lethargic entrants have the academic seal of approval….and if Norman and Mayer continue like this they will soon join them.

Stuff Happens..was sort of Ok in a five out of ten way….to return to the vegetable metaphors then this was more like a street barrow at 5pm on a Saturday and whilst most of it was well past sell-by date intellectually ( pace 1970’s and 1980’s conceptualism and assemblage) there were some still fresh bargains to be had and at least the curator/barrow boy tried to showcase as much as possible…i.e. throw enough against wall some sticks ….rest flog it cheap mate..

So what does any of that have to do with the first part of this extended ‘rant’ or ‘diagnosis’ depending on your age/social background and access to those barrow boys and girls of benevolence….A.C.E.?

Well members of the jury my prognosis is simple. What has happened with our art education system is directly reflected in the quality and the depth of the work these artists display. Too many older artists in the East Midlands have tried to reinvent themselves in recent years to gain access to these charmed circles and in doing so have jettisoned any credibility and development for a handful of silver. Amongst the younger artists the ‘wow factor teaching’ has left them polishing old ideas in ever decreasing circles and now ever decreasing funding. The golden eggs are no longer going to be dished out for fourth rate art and I’m afraid the only gold will be hanging around athletes necks. The system of professionalisation has left us with a glut of pretentious semi-curators with more and more artists of variable talents to ‘curate’. Academia is the ‘safe-house’ where the avant-garde can sleep safely and all the while the ‘social reality’ remains a late-night bus ride away. There was not one reference in any of this work to the actual area of the East Midlands. That ‘social reality’ simply didn’t exist. The ivory towers have not got any taller ..they have just got thicker walls.

Once upon a time there was an Irishman,an Englishman and a Scotsman and they dreamt of America…they dreamt of revolution. of turning the world upside down…where is Tom Paine or Burns when you need him most?

To quote a singer in a band..Jefferson I think we’re lost…..

All we have now after the Parade has passed are a handful of beans and a golden goose….oh and a lovely, lovely square…

Editor’s note: Apologies to Alexander Stevenson for an honest mistake re. his and Kirshnir’s work. In the speed of writing I mistakenly assigned his (positive) mention with Kirshnir. This has now been rectified and a heartfelt apology to both. My only defence is it a genuine mistake and my incredible age. Even with proof-reading sometimes things slip through. Amended version now online.

The Real Art World: 1980 – London’s Burning

April 23, 2007 / / 0 Comments

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Hornsey Art College burns…a great start..

I am going to describe the 1980’s artworld as it really was for the majority of art-students. Not the cosy new money YBA’s and their cohorts or the city-slickers with loft-spaces and pockets to fill. No this is one lowly art student’s coming of age in the brutal underbelly of North London in the years when Lady Thatcher was in charge and you could get round London all day for £2.50!

I will start with the photo above. Hornsey College of Art burning well in summer 1980 just after the previous year’s final show. Alexandra Palace had sat safely on the hill above North London through over a century but in June 1980 a considerate workman was deemed to have inadvertantly set fire to a roof. Most at the time didn’t believe it and it sad to say that both the council and developers gained much from the resulting fire. An art college burns very well by the way what with all the paint and combustibles contained therein. My favourite story from the conflagration was the one about etching tutor Dick ‘Sleepy’ Fozzard who having worked a plate to the final stages was sleeping throughout most of the fire and only an alert staff member prised him away from the presses before they melted. I watched the whole thing from my parent’s council house in Oxfordshire after my mother kindly pointed out that my college appeared to be on fire on the T.V. Hot enough to make the BBC news! I sat in an armchair with my pork chop and two veg and watched two years paintings burst into some spectacular flames and then it was gone…next day I pointed out where my space had been in The Sun’s coverage …now empty sky….

I sometimes try to recall not only my artwork but that of those around me…ironically Bell & Langlands (later Saatchi chosen ones) had just left and had probably removed their ‘burnt-books installation’ before the real fire got a hold…life imitating art? I can’t say I was that impressed with Bell & Langlands then it seemed mediocre conceptualism and I can’t say my opinion shifted much since. I did see them sucking up to someone form the Tate years later and evidently they played their networking hand well..but art??..hmm not in my book. Ironically looking at the archive photos it just as well that most of us actually more intent on learning our craft and developing theories..if the same occurred now half the students would be ‘documenting’ the ruins and the other half either rolling in the ashes for a site-specific performance or claiming they had burnt the whole thing down as a protest against neo-stalinism in the Hackney gulags…

As it was we suffered in silence watched the building collapse and got on with drinking ourselves stupid and occasionally making splendid art at the original college which still contained the Foundation Course about two miles down the hill. We were all shipped back in there come September 1980 and told to get on with it..three years work to be done in one..oh yes we were a hardy lot….no digital archives then just new paint. canvas and stone..oh and cameras…

My first memories of the new building were that it had changed little from the grainy footage of the Hornsey ‘Riots’ which was religiously shown to all new students ( along with a healthy helping of art history tutor Peter Webb’s porn collection rebranded as art history). Now although some real Situationists did make it over to sleep on the floor and smoke dope with the Hornsey crew in 1968 it was hardly Paris ’68. Indeed the footage confirmed our suspicions that most were spliffed out hippies having a damn good time and sandals and kaftans aside there was no real riot just a bunch of students carrying coffins and  getting bitten occasionally by friendly police dogs. Kent State it wasn’t in fact it wasn’t even Guildford. The College had been purpose built at turn of century and had some fantastic north-facing studios, illness perfect for painters and if truth be told was better equipped than the now crumbling Palace with the exception of the much-missed Panorama Bar which had been the handiest bar to an art college ever devised. Situated directly below the college one short stairwell down and half the college had written off another afternoon in fierce debate or shallow drinking depending on your viewpoint. The view was lovely….I remember listening to the Iranian Embassy siege on a tinny radio and watching the smoke rise across the London skyline to the south. Dearest Margaret was untroubled by our Leninist revisionism and Barthes semiotic signifiers she was too busy deploying the S.A.S. and getting ready for the real enemy within ‘Oop North’.

As we struggled to unload the batches of new easels and paint stocks from the lorries ( the technicians as ever too busy to help as they rebuilt yet another american car engine) little could we guess that the 1980’s were going to be as troubled a decade as any of us would ever see. I managed to set myself down in a bunker below ground with my welsh compadre and stone sculpting house-mate Ken Absalom who defined hippy chic in a way many of us had never known. Five years after punk he still wore a kaftan embalmed in pitchouli and owned more tie-dye and crocheted shirts than any man should. A miner’s son from Blaeanavon on a cold welsh mountaintop he’d ended up in India discovering large amounts of hashish and women in about equal measure. A return to his village was precluded by a fierce isolationism that was to affect us both sooner rather than later. For now I tried to rationalise the fact that I’d chosen to occupy a space about ten feet square next to a mad welshman who was power-drilling his way in true miner style through a ton of portland stone. Each time he started up a piece of stone would hit me in the ear or back and the dust….It was only when my ‘personal tutor’ (they could afford to be called that in those days) almost lost an eye and choked her way out of the plastic tent I was trying to protect myself in that I realised that a painter could do better in the purpose built studios upstairs.

Easy to say in retrospect but as I spent most mornings developing tinnitus by ‘drumming’ ( loose description) on old dustbins in a freeform jazz orchestra/ punk supergroup that later became the ‘Fuck Pigs’ most aspects of reality had probably already passed me by. None of this was drug induced the major drug was the ale sold at the new ‘Art School Pub’ The Railway conveniently situated downhill from the College in pre-yuppified Crouch End. Hard to believe that what has become the land of lattes and expensive three whelled buggies was then a pretty rundown suburb with a few pubs……and not a wine bar in sight….most of us then would have guessed a Pinot Grigio was an Italian dancer…maybe we were right…

My Proustian moment #1

In a vain attempt to prove my solid postmodernist hypertextual qualities I will occasionally sidetrack by digressing on a particular piece of artwork and see what hidden depths it may reveal or shallow inexcusable art pretensions it unravels before me after all these years. Starting in September 1980 is as good a point as any as everything pre June 1980 had just disappeared in smoke with the exception of a Foundation and school folder which remained tucked in my parent’s loft. Whereas my memory of the sculptors ‘Neffertiti at the waterhole’ remains strong….he was still hacking away at it six months later..my own work has slipped from my mind. I do however have the sketchbook from September 1980 here and it reveals a strange concoction. I had started drawing house plants whilst still at my parents. To save money most students (especially those unemcumbered by rich parents and trust funds) would go home for the summer to save paying rent which in my case set at a fiendishly expensive £9 a week thanks to the wonderfully eccentric yet generous Jewish Hashidic family the mad sculptor and I roomed with in Stamford Hill…The Gordons..of them more later….

The sketchbook reveals the influence of solid painters like John Walker, Alan Green and John Hoyland. Everything was very ‘mark-making’ in those far off days. We are talking pre Zeitgeist, pre R.A. New Painting Show. Recently there has been a spate of re-assessment shows in USA and Australia looking again at the supposedly ‘dead’ area of painting during those minimalist and conceptual 1970’s. ‘To the victor’s the spoils’! The art history has been rewritten from the more recent perspective as once again we are reminded that painting is ‘dead’. This memoir is in part a redress to this manipulation of history.

I remember distinctly taking Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland books from the newly restocked College Library and the drawings show their influence. I was encouraged in my focusing on ‘British’ art by my tutor a wonderful printmaker called Tricia Stainton who unbeknowns to me also taught part-time at the Royal College. I was the world’s worst ‘networker’ and so focussed on my own concerns things like that just went straight by me….others were less naive.

The sketchbook contains a print by Fragonard which came from a cheap artbook my Auntie Sue had bought me one Christmas from our local W.H.Smith….It wasn’t until my early twenties that I could afford more than a few large art books. The sketchbook stays in its dark foliage, slightly gothic mood throughout until the following March when Picassoesque forms take control. Maybe a subconscious reaction to the fire ..who knows..I know many of us struggled in those early months after the fire and the staff (in most cases) were very helpful. Needless to say the technicians helped the most attractive girls and the owners of american cars the most…

As my mood (and circumstances lightened) the drawings took on more Matisse and Picasso touches and a trip to see the Picasso bequest in Paris certainly helped..although my strongest memory of my fellow student’s reaction to first plate of snails must wait another day…Jackson Pollock comes to mind but not in a good way…..

Here is one of my very few prints that survived from the printroom then and Tricia’s influence. Samuel Palmer and Sutherland put through a blender certainly…

(picture to come)

Quality Control or Me-Owism?

March 26, 2007 / / 0 Comments

 A reply to Nick Seddon in Guardian who I insisted on calling Heddon throughout..oh well…apologies for that but you cannot edit once posted…so keep your Heddon:-)

debate here..

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/art/2007/03/quality_not_social_value_shoul.html

I see Mr. Seddon has revived that old hoary chestnut ‘quality’ again. It may come as a surprise to some (but not those involved in the business of filling in application forms at which many are now Olympic standard) that The Arts Council may do some things but evaluating submissions on basis of ‘quality’ of the actual art is not one of them. In fact it is written into its ‘democratic’ remit that submissions are assessed on everything BUT the actual artwork. This is to be as democratic as possible. Mr.Seddon sounds rather quaint in his assessment of the Arts Council as if he’d walked out of a Festival of Britain poster. In the good old days the ‘grandees’ of British Culture would have decided on ‘merit’ what good and bad but those days are hopefully long gone and its Oxbridge-centred ‘sifting’ of what good and bad too. I stand firmly on the fence when ‘quality’ is used as a marker..whose quality, click whose agendas? For all its mistakes (they are legion) the present Arts Council is trying to divide Lottery spoils equally.

Mr. Seddon is right there will be no revolution in regards to the ‘spoilt’ arts i.e. theatre, recipe opera and ballet. They were at core of original Arts Council and remain ‘spoilt’ as long as their ‘quality and prestige ‘ factor remains high and important to both sides of Parliament. What the debate has highlighted is the lack of some universal notion of quality down at the ‘lower levels’. Implementing a satisfactory ‘quality control’ there opens a can of worms we may never close…Until then we get the hit and miss system we have now. Better that than direct ‘Art Tsars’ or heaven forbid ‘Departments of Culture’. I note Mr.Seddon involved in ‘Civitas’ and that august body is well known for leaning to the right and damning ‘pc’ culture. I may not like the present system any more than Mr. Seddon but I am not going to be fooled into promoting a return to the class-based elitism and notions of quality that it would also mean. I have argued elsewhere that a fully democratic asessment of funding and ‘quality control’ which builds on the Arts Council’s laudable move toward ‘accountability’ (this debate for instance) is needed not a return to the days when the ‘arts’ in the hands of a small and wealthy elite.

‘Art for Art’s sake’ smacks of that elitism and I refute it for those reasons. I’m sure that Mr. Seddon’s notion of ‘quality’ different to mine and very different to a single parent on a Nottingham Estate. Who is to say any of ours is the right notion? Indeed those cats with their heads in the bowls of cream are never the most aware of the poor kittens with no cream and in some cases no bowls.Me-owism I would call it.

P.S. re: …”so perhaps the Arts Council could focus not on commissioning art works but instead on creating spaces – auditoria, drugstore theatres, galleries.”I not sure if London is in need of more and if you take a look around the country, Liverpool, Middlesborough, Nottingham we are awash with new ones and West Bromwich an extreme example. It is not buildings (beloved as they are of ‘regenerationists’) but what we put in them that the problem…the ‘creative industries’ (maybe the only industries left) are on an upward curve that will mean non-artists may be in the minority soon. Maybe then the newly formed ‘Non-Arts Council’ will ‘remove art’ on their behalf rather than promote it??

Disappearing Labour and the triumph of ‘practice’.

March 23, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Raleigh Plant Nottingham

Raleigh Plant Nottingham : Now redeveloped into University Buildings.

How ‘professional practice’ removed the working-class from the picture.

One of the most striking aspects of the development of the fine art world in the last 25 years since I was at art-college has been the rapid and total de-skilling of artistic ‘practice’. Indeed that word ‘practice’ sums up the qualitative change in the environment that artistic ‘practitioners’ and students operate in. I am focussing on that word because it seems to me to be symptomatic of the larger changes. Trends begin in language and ‘practice’ supplanting ‘art work’ or ‘oeuvre’ is one of the most significant.As an art student we had ‘complementary studies’ which ranged across critical studies and other art forms but nowhere was I introduced to notions of ‘critical practice’, unhealthy ‘networking’ or ‘research procedures’. Instead there was a healthy insistence on the ‘materiality’ of the process down to the actual grinding of pigment for paint (how quaint that seems in our cyber paint age) and the physical act of creation as a significant and in some cases all-encompassing feature of creating ‘art-works’. That word ‘work’ there is important. Tutors not only theorised in the abstract but also commented on constructive principles, prostate materials and assembly.To read back through the statements of artists such as Henry Moore, Anthony Caro, David Hockney even was to be introduced not only to intellectual concepts of ‘making art’ (again note word ‘making’) but also to physical notions of ‘craftsmanship’. For artists from working-class backgrounds such as Moore and Hockney there was a seamless affirmation of the quality of making that their communities whether in Bradford Mills or Leeds Foundries would have understood. The general public may have baulked at the physical embodiment of those ideas but a welder or sign-painter would have understood the technical ability involved in its construction. Without ‘labouring’ the point there is a direct correlation with this activity and the philosophy of craftsmanship stretching back through Morris to the old guilds. Even as a lowly labourer (working on middle-class tutor’s house for cash be it painting and decorating or building work with my fellow working-class students) I and my ‘labouring’ friends were acutely aware of the instilled belief in ‘a job done properly or not at all’. Coming from a background of low incomes that mantra was a source of pride to ‘working-class’ students that maintained dignity and purpose when treated badly.

So what does this have to do with artistic ‘practice’? Well, as the artistic climate began to metamorphose in dealing with the destruction of traditional class divisions such as the breaking up of the Miner’s Strike and the new opportunities of money from selling state assets to the people that owned it the hard left suddenly found it could no longer ‘believe’ or support those hackneyed themes and looked to wider academic philosophies for support…Derrida, Foucault..whatever suited was used. Language invaded the academies and process became mental rather than physical. Life-rooms were ‘disappeared’ as were the craft technicians and their areas..wet photography, etching, printmaking in general and sculpture. Advances in digital equipment and the internet made costing art education cheaper and also opened up the floodgates of language which washed over the huddling masses in spectacular fashion. The result two decades later is that ‘practice’ has replaced ‘work’. Painters and their messy procedures have been sidelined in favour of more streamlined and cost-effective ‘streaming’ per unit (a unit=one student by the way). Result has been a complete implosion of not only those more gruelling and supposedly less intellectually taxing pursuits as painting, etching, bronze casting but also a radical denial that those forms were anything but an old-fashioned aspect of bourgeoisie and right-wing ‘control’.

Unfettered from their working-class shackles of mind these warriors of the new left/right could dance around the world as ambassadors of Thatcherite ‘entrepreunership’ or New Labour ‘Cool Brittania’ with not a moment of doubt or guilt that they had thrown any babies out with the bath water. This process was so swift and its impact so total that even before I left art college in 1981 the process had started. This process found its moment of triumph in ‘Sensation’ and its attendant ‘Brit-Art’ boom. Gone were the toiling working class and the effete bourgeoisie world of watercolours and oil-painting. Swept aside in the revolution of two strange-bedfellows – new money a la Saatchi ( gained from political propaganda lest it be forgot in the fog of time) and the hard-left apparachiks of ‘new’ Polytechnic/Unis and ‘new’ art. These were heady times and so what if half the philosophy and theorising did not stand up it had that elusive ‘Wow’ factor and it sold. Yes these partners in the dance had found each other and would never let go.

Twenty years later and like the ‘little’ man who sweeps up after the art-school ball the effects are everywhere. Art-schools and Polytechnics (Rebranded New Universities to give them ‘professional status’) are no longer under local authority control but are multi-million pound businesses siphoning off cash from those who can best pay i.e. the middle-class and the ubiquitous and much loved ‘overseas student’. That process of removing the original meaning and philosophy of the ‘Technical Schools’ and the Victorian notion of ‘training for ornament’ to decorate the ‘Empire’ are gone and with them Morris and Co’s belief in progress through labour.

Here ‘practice’ has come into its own. It is a fact that the recent changes in grants will remove the few working-class students foolhardy and resistant to parental pressure able to make into the newly ‘professional’ class of the ‘contemporary artist’. A few will always slip through because of inate ability as Grayson Perry recently noted. For the majority though a ‘second-stream and second-rate’ mountain to climb through school, further education and maybe an HND if they are lucky awaits. The good aspects of ‘craftsmanship’ (abilty, hand and eye co-ordination and pride) have been jettisoned along with the bad (subservience, minion status, ‘little-man syndrome’) and we are left with a system that is as ruthlessly middle-class in its deportment, salary expectations and class awareness as any yet seen. Blairism is not the triumph of the ‘old working class’ it is the triumph of the new ‘middle-class and it’s most recent converts…those lucky enough to slip their working class shackles and join the ‘parade’.

How does this affect the Arts Council? In the past the Arts Council from its post-war origins onward has been largely a middle-class/upper-class dominated project despite its Welfare State status. As pointed out to me recently by someone in the Arts Council the post-war remit was heavily towards supporting the noble performing arts…Opera, Dance, Theatre. These were in need of rebuilding and supporting post-war at a time of rationing and scant resources and the Arts Council did its job well within that remit. Indeed some positive extras even appeared such as Larkin’s idea for a Poetry Library. Despite boom and bust several times over these arts are sacrosanct and let us not forget that they will retain their core funding unless some real revolution happens soon. The reality is the support of individual artists and community arts projects etc has been largely funded out of the lottery funds which are now on the wane. Forget Olympic slight of hand the real downward trend in that area of ‘smoke and mirrors taxation’ will continue as the public grow tired of losing their few quid every week.

My argument is that the Arts Council recently has become a partner in the ‘professionalisation’ of the arts. Individual grants have mostly gone to those most able to tick the boxes which is not the same as the most deserving or the most able. A middle-class practitioner of whatever background with a good grasp of language and how to network is always able to jump through the hoops required and draw down funding more easily than an ordinary member of the public .

The Arts Council actually funds A-N the artist’s newsletter which has come to represent one area of ‘practice’ as defined by the new universities. Artistic finishing schools like the Slade, Chelsea and Royal College continue to process artists through to the major galleries as they have done since time immemorial. When I received an offer of a place at the Royal College in 1981 I was a working-class exception not the rule and was swiftly replaced by ‘overseas student’ when I could not afford the fees. From comments by a current RC student on a Grayson Perry article nothing much has changed there. Outside that alumni network the practicing artist from the New University flowerbed has pretty much taken over the ‘alternative’ network of regional arts centres, art galleries and a-n itself.

Nothing wrong with that in principle but because this new class also sees itself as ‘professionalised’ and newly minted ‘middle-class’ it keeps a distance from anything that reminds it of its non-professional background….paint, stone, non-literate visual communication…..the values of its parents if working class and the manners and dirty hands of ‘that lot from the estate’ if it is middle class. Result, the Arts Council unwittingly because it speaks only in the ‘new language’ is part of a process that divorces the working class student from its background and makes it feel ashamed. I may be regarded as being sensationalist here but Jeremy Seabrook identified a similar process in regards to community thirty years back as the ‘magic-carpet’ ride in regards to working class students going to university and never returning to their ‘sink estates’.

Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin are like Ali Baba riding that carpet for all it is worth but they have never touched down in their original communities since unless as ‘researchers’ or for the occasional family get together. They have done the trick their families expected of them of converting all that ‘arty stuff’ into cash and that brings a grudging admiration from their peers but do they give anything back?

Where the Arts Council has failed in my opinion and where it could make a great leap forward is in increasing the ‘scope’ of its funding to include more of what regarded as ‘amateur’ by the new professionals which as I stated can and does include a great deal of painters and crafts people ‘removed’ from the bigger picture who do not apply for Arts Council funding (including serious for want of better term artists disenfranchised by the new elitism) because the gatekeepers – are generally the young professional middle-class – the ‘mujistas’.

If they could reintroduce the ‘floating’ and disenfranchised practitioners back into their communities or the communities they now live in we’d have a start. Paul Oliver argued for a nodal system of arts centres based on BBC buildings around the country and it still an area for possible development.

The key concept here is the A.C.E. remit of supporting the ‘cutting-edge’ – -whose edge and whose cutting? . Paring down the amazing variety of art and culture created in this country by narrow ‘professionalist’ concepts of right and wrong means many are left out by default. Narrow face-saving attempts to promote inclusion by parachuting white middle-class artists into ‘problem areas’ to facilitate do more harm than good if not conducted with local knowledge and understanding.

Another £30 K sculpture of a giant egg on the roundabout on the edge of town reinforces that lack of communication. The ‘disappeared’ labourers……the ones on night shift cleaning, herded into lump labour vans at dawn, sitting in kiosks on garage forecourts, cleaning cars.. etc etc have as much of a right to seeing the arts too but are their notions of what art is …craftsmanship and effort maybe? ….to be ignored because not cutting edge?

Can that always be dismissed as dumbing down?

Clean bright empty offices and clean bright empty shows and no workers…….unless serving canapés at shows…

Will the elite they serve be our doctors ..their practice our medicine?

Shaun Belcher

23 March 2007

References:

Grayson Perry: You can lead a chav to culture but can you make him think?

Grayson Perry: Stop art schools from turning into posh white ghettos.

Accessed 22.3.2007

The Fake Gallery – revisited

March 22, 2007 / / 1 Comment

fake gallery logo

FAKING IT

It seems to me that artists have two choices…travel to Rome and adopt the clothes of the conquerer’s and become ‘curators’ or walk to the furthest edges and break down fences that border the still wild and unexplored possibly with multiple personas….Pessoa comes to mind and in his spirit I have invented any number of ‘Fake’ musicians and artists recently….indeed to the point where I declared myself a ‘Fake Gallery‘and declared my various ‘styles’ separate personas…

Only in fakery did I become real…

Fake Gallery

full original article HERE from January 2006

The Arts Debate: Reply to Nairne

March 21, 2007 / / 0 Comments

I find Mr. Nairne’s comments interesting. He was responsible for turning around the M.O.M.A. Oxford after some fairly lacklustre years and I remember the cries of outrage when he suggested a revolutionary ‘coffee bar’ to attract punters. Anybody who can shake the Oxford ‘snooze’ even briefly is obviously serious in his ‘inclusive’ policies. However there a key flaw in the Creative Partnerships approach which is that it can also become a self-referential project more interested in creating jobs for those involved and ‘research’ than being the outward looking ‘ambassadors for the arts’ he suggests. I work here in Nottingham in a variety of ‘Community Arts’ roles which thankfully pay me enough to continue with my ‘practice’ a word I abhor ..’art work’ is much more down to earth.

Indeed the development of an exclusive ‘art language’ and the fracturing of the art-world into cliques has done as much damage in public perception terms as any funding gripes. Press coverage and flamboyant media art stars have helped to give impression that all artists in some way ‘spoilt’ and indeed in these brief lottery-funded years of ‘plenty'(for a few) they have been. I think the coming clampdown on funding may be a good thing in that funders will be more careful where and for what purpose they fund and the beneficiaries may respond with more gratitude and less jargon and help close that artworld/public divide that in most cases is a simple lack of communication.

On the Arts Council remit question……yes international intervention a la British Council has been a well-oiled but cantankerous wagon that upsets as many as it helped. The real ambassadors for arts in the international sense are artists themselves and the links they increasingly building for themselves above and below the ‘radar’. As for ‘Own Art’ it obviously looked good on paper but it absolutely meaningless to population at large. Something like ‘Pictures on Walls’ that took over shop on Oxford Street far more successful.

Finally ‘embed the arts more powerfully in the social and political life of  England’.
Hmm jury out there….a great deal of artwork has already been channelled into fulfilling just that kind of criteria. Artists as social workers? Indeed a social worker here complained artists paid better. This brings me back to core of this whole approach. Does one change society for the better through art or does society improve because artists free and unrestricted in their opinions and development and as a part of improved education enable ‘the people’ to enjoy and partake of their wonderful ‘difference’? It’s not quite dumbing down or up but who is it that needs to dumb down and who needs to look up? That is the question….

let the debate continue….

Fine arts in the curriculum: Reinventing the colour wheel?

December 16, 2005 / / 0 Comments

Part A : The Foundation Art Curriculum at New College Nottingham

With an increasingly skills-based educational system, the case for knowledge and the kinds of creative values that do not simply reflect measurable aims and outcomes has to be made even more strongly.

(Watts, The Guardian Review 27.04.04)

A series of planned events that are intended to have educational consequences for students

(Eisner, 1979)

This first part of the essay will explore the Foundation Fine Art syllabus as delivered over a term at Nottingham New College in 2004. Appendix A consists of project handouts given out to students and should be referred to alongside the following analysis. I previously considered the nature of contemporary fine art teaching in the delivery module essay and investigated the current ‘crisis’ in fine arts delivery within the curriculum (Belcher, 2004).

This essay acts in some ways as a further development of that enquiry. I shall be commenting on the project-based syllabus and whilst not designing a complete replacement for it will offer comments on how I think it could be extended or improved. The notion of ‘creativity’ and its place in the National Curriculum has already gained national press with no less a commentator than Prince Charles becoming involved.

A basic knowledge of art is still too readily dismissed by too many as a luxury
that has little to do with the business of life, of course it has everything to do with the business of life.
( H.R.H. Prince Charles quoted in The Guardian, 31.10.2001)

These comments were supported and built upon by John Steers (General Secretary National Society for Education in Art and Design) a year later who feared that the National Curriculum had forced the arts off the agenda by allowing opt-out at 14 and that art teaching was becomingly increasingly ‘prescribed’ which..

..produces ‘safe’ work of a kind on which teachers can rely for the award of good examination grades (Steers, 2004: 31)

The following analysis draws upon Curzon (1997) for an interpretive framework. Using his 6 categories I will examine the syllabus as presented in appendix B. The pressures of filling H.E. places meant the foundation courses were in danger of being circumvented by zealous university departments keen to fill places. Foundation Courses remain in a dangerous position in the present funding and outcome ‘driven’ educational climate. The certification is useful in fulfilling H.E. sector entrance requirements at least and most students opt for a route B approach to H.E. thus keeping the Foundation Courses alive.

1. Content: What is being taught? (nature of the course).
Fine Art probably has the widest interpretative remit of any subject. The wide potential of the subject is however not reflected in general National Curriculum practice. Steers and Hughes have both highlighted that it is informed by ‘procedures and practices that reach back to the nineteenth century’ (Hughes, 1998: 41). In light of this ‘conservatism’ the Foundation Art ontology is predicated upon the ability of the school art rooms to ‘develop’ the students before entry to the course. The New College online prospectus defined the course content as…

To decide which HE course right for them, to get a portfolio that will get them on to a course of their choice, have an experience that will support the transition to HE. (New College Nottingham website. accessed 19/02/2004)

Thus nineteenth century values inform the targeting of the student group as this process has been an established part of the art-school ‘system’. The process can be traced back to the ‘Kensington System’ of ‘art learning for empire’ which ensured a ‘steady stream of artisans for manufacturing industry’ (Steers, 2004: 32). The contemporary assumption is that our modern ‘artisans’ will engage in meaningful art-related work once graduated despite statistical evidence to the contrary. A collapse of some of these assumptions in relation to the arts post National Curriculum 2000 and an increasingly ‘vocational’ climate has questioned the Foundation Course’s very existence.

2. Shape: The presentation of the syllabus.
The online prospectus further defines the course content as including ‘gallery visits, overseas trips and a stimulating environment’ these all designed to appeal to a middle-class student base in an area where South Nottingham College is main competitor. These are useful advertising features. The actual course is subdivided by the three terms into separate ‘phases’. When one peels away the rather pretentious ‘exploratory’ ‘pathway’ and ‘confirmatory’ labels one finds a traditional three term foundation course ethos of introduction, portfolio preparation and final show with life drawing, printmaking and photography all on menu.

3. Objectives: What is taught to ensure the syllabus is covered?
The course is driven by the over-riding objective of achieving ‘placement’ of students on to HE courses, preferably their first choice college if possible. To this end the syllabus engineers as smooth a certification as possible. ‘League-tables’ of previous year performance and a staff-room photo checklist confirming placements was in evidence rather like a bingo card. The students were made very aware of this from day one and it appeared to have an overbearing relevance to all that was taught. In student terms it produced a ‘competitive’ environment and in staff terms it was a ‘funding’ imperative as a higher number of high-ranking placements meant job safety in the face of regulatory Ofsted/ college funding initiatives. Nowhere was there talk of objectives in terms of skills gained.

4. Instruction: What do the objectives necessitate is taught?
There appear to be no requirement to complete or be assessed in a particular areas. The syllabus itself defines a nebulous ‘variety of art & design skills and techniques’ as ‘skills learned’. This comment has disappeared altogether from the prospectus for 2004-5. The overall programme consists of the following:
Textiles
Fashion
Fine art
Photography
Print making
Life drawing
Product design
Graphic design
Contextual Studies
Ceramics
Computer design.
Movement is possible across areas and is part of the foundation process in selecting suitable area for student.

5. Assessment: How is this instruction to be assessed?
The syllabus as defined online states

Assessment method Continuous formal assessments. Final assessment at end of year.

This included self, peer and tutor review thus the actual one-to-one assessment was proportionally smaller than that I experienced as a foundation student in the late seventies. A measurable cost saving is apparent. The fine art department contained many part-time staff and was about three full-time posts lower in terms of staffing than my comparable course in 1977. There is a great deal of focus on ‘process’ and attendance not just finished work.

Qualification Awarding Body Consortium Certificate

This certificate is awarded at the end of the course and acceptance on to HE courses is virtually conditional upon its being awarded and its grade. The H.E. sector regards Route A admissions (direct from school) as more problematic as the student would be accepted before going through the foundation ‘sorting-room’ and may have chosen the wrong course and drop-outs later at university incur financial penalties.

6.Allocation: How does time/resource planning affect outcomes?
Provided in full and part/time format the course is lucky in being housed in brand new purpose built venue. New College’s financial mismanagement will impact heavily if cuts are made in this area. If anything the arts building was a case of over-resourcing in that many rooms/facilities were under-used. The Foundation room however suffered from some cramping due to housing three separate groups (fine art/ applied/ graphics) in one large space. Materials budgets seemed light and a great deal of reliance on the ability of students to self-resource was in evidence. One-to-one tutor time allocation was in shorter supply. Timetabling appeared to rely on block booking and student-led demand. These approaches fit neatly into the pattern of peer/self review/ unmonitored practice. Theoretical components of the timetable seemed marginal and ‘contextual studies’ is a noticeable addition to the prospectus since last year. I encountered tutor revision of written work suggesting a basic/key skills component was needed especially with overseas students and apparently was partly in place.

Part B : A Foundation Art Course Curriculum for the 21st century?

Following an analysis of the foundation art syllabus I will now consider the current debate surrounding the subject and consider two solutions. The following comment in a newspaper article highlights a survey in ‘Curriculum for The Arts’ (Bonaventura,P & Farthing,S: 2004)

..colleges and university arts departments in Britain agree on very little when it comes to the curriculum for future artists, except, bizarrely, black and white photography and silkscreen printing. (Macleod, Education Guardian: 2004)

Previewing this year’s Royal Academy summer show ..

Someone must have had an idea that the art curriculum should be modernised and so they abolished as examinable subjects at art school, all objective forms of study : life drawing, perspective, anatomy.
(Allan Jones interviewed in Education Guardian 26.05.04)

It appears that we have moved in the F.E/H.E. sector to a progressive and student-centred system that has all but de-skilled the practice of fine art. At the same time the influence of National Curriculum 2000 has not only allowed the opt-out from the arts at KS4 but also meant that the delivery of the school curriculum has become progressively more conservative by the need to produce ‘assessable’ student work. This complete contradiction is now tearing the art and design education world slowly apart. On one side are the ‘conservatives’ like Jones and on the other progressives and ‘post-modernists’ aflame with their new ideology arguing for a student-centred and self-assessed not terminally assessed curriculum. Portfolio assessment and ‘projects’ are the important ‘buzz’ words here…

..in the context of our rich and varied post-modern, post-colonial, multi-ethnic and multi-faith society ..(Steers, 2004 :41)

Assessment in this area is a matter of informed judgement rather than the application of fallible, standardised criteria based on knowledge of the assessors connoisseurship not prescription..(Steers, 2004: 42)

Steers is at the sane end of this postmodern utopia. Others are so bamboozled by their own floridity there appears no limit to their ambition nor the ability of the pupils save a healthy dose of reality.
‘A Manifesto for Art in Schools’ (Swift & Steers 1999) was an excellent analysis of the progressive ‘dumbing-down’ of the National Curriculum and the arts. Its analysis showed that from the Art Working Group in 1992 onwards a focus on attainment targets had meant that the 2000 curriculum was bound to come up with a four stranded set of targets which can be summarised as

1. Investigating and making art and design.
2. Exploring and developing ideas.
3. Evaluating and developing work and
4. Knowledge and understanding that inform the other three categories.

Steers states that a ‘traditional modernist’ approach is embedded in this curriculum if that is not a contradiction in terms. Domain based models developed in sixties America informed curriculum development in the U.K. In the actual classroom an increasing workload and target driven agendas meant that objective drawing, visual analysis and ‘art history’ held sway despite post-modern rhetoric. Whilst not arguing with the Steers & Swift analysis it does seem that art teachers at the ‘chalk-face’ had very little room for manoeuvre. League tables, inspection, appraisal and threshold payments all added to the ‘quasi-vocational’ nature of art teaching and the deathly cliche of the still life and the sliced pepper to be drawn! However the idea of a suite of new computers and a teacher working exclusively with postmodernist digitisation seems to throw the baby out with the bath water too. Steers continues to argue that diversity and creativity have been squeezed out of the art curriculum by the National Curriculum process. Some commentators like Ross go so far as to declare the outcomes regime as nothing more than a sham that ‘ claims the authority of a financial spreadsheet’ (Ross: 1995). U.S. idealism in the form of Eisner and Wilson seems to have crashed into U.K. pragmatism/ conservatism.

teachers need materials that stimulate their ingenuity rather than materials to which they are subservient ..(Eisner 1985 :37 quoted in Steers 2004:38)

From 1852 onwards and the ‘Department of Practical Art’ British Art Education has worked to a definable set of assessable outcomes be it GCSE or postgraduate degree level. These may have become more flexible, depending on the awarding institution, and the criteria for awarding a degree in 2004 may be very different to that of 1904 but the awards ‘regime’ has survived. From Ruskin onwards the philosophical division of the ‘craft’ worker from the ‘fine artist’ has ensured that the assessing and awarding of ‘fine art’ qualifications has been a contested area anyway but all art education has worked to these ‘outcomes’. The Foundation area is possibly the best place to observe the playing out of the two contesting theoretical directions. On the one side are technically gifted well-off students from ‘good schools’ who have received a ‘classic’ domain-centred education. On the other side at foundation level they experience a teaching by M.A. educated printmakers and ‘practicing artists’ in the manner of their more recent progressive education. In 1981 the life-room was a contested space at Middlesex University’s fine department. Within a few years it was replaced by video/digital arts. Not because of a lack of demand but because the change in fashion and a need to be seen to be ‘contemporary’ in an increasingly cutthroat art school market condemned it. The Foundation course does to a degree work in terms of ‘competencies, processes and skills’ and a quick look at the project handouts show how closely any project work is mapped to rigid ‘outcomes’. To some degree this is also a fudge as no rigid assessable outcomes apply at any point. This means no qualitative judgements are forthcoming either. Peer and self-review and a tutor reliance on a ‘postmodernist’ remit of shifting criteria, viewpoint and analysis of process not result means no value judgements are ever made. Far from Steers notion of ‘connoisseurship’ one is faced by an inability to judge quality at all.

But does any of this matter? Do we need fine artists at all and if we train them what are we training them for? A curriculum may be conservative or post-modern in nature but if there no ’employment’ outcome does it matter? A liberal humanist perspective shouts foul immediately. Of course we need artists. They represent the finest flowering of our cultural life etc. etc. Brit-art and the accompanying furore and Sunday magazine feeding frenzy demonstrate our art schools and our artists the best in the world. Or so the argument of the Department of Enjoyment would have it.
In reality the quality of art school graduates has probably fallen in the past twenty years as fashionable alternatives web design, popular music and the boom in art related administration….curator, critic, etc has risen. Indeed one of the students on foundation course this year had set her sights on a curatorial role and a course which combined curator-ship and fine art developing trend and an area of study unheard of 25 years ago in art schools. The students coming out of fine art courses are more business orientated, more network savvy, more informed thanks to the growth in the media but are they technically better?

From Chris Smith’s manifesto ‘Creative Britain’ (1998) onwards New Labour cross-marketed the notion of a limitless fount of creativity washing around these shores. In our brave new world of a highly skilled, creative workforce the ‘Creative Apparatchiks’ will lead us into a glorious future. This trend has now assumed the force of a mantra as a solution to our social ills. But are present day artists qualitatively better than those who graduated in 1965, 1975 or 1985. The answer is no.


So if after all these remedial actions, these curriculum and social initiatives these glorious new artists are still produced in about the same quantities and with the same abilities is the entire art-school system necessary? Or is it a sham, a way of laying golden eggs that actually remainders the working majority of students to a life of dashed expectations and dismal progress? The art-school dance that in all reality teaches transferable skills, social skills but not academic skills? Are we intent on continually reinventing the colour wheel?

In this final section I will explore two more radical solutions to these problems. One from the early seventies and one from the present and compare these to the National Curriculum approach. I will also add my own ideas for possible future directions for curriculum development.
I have briefly touched upon the historical framework for art education. Fine Art as a University subject hardly existed in the early sixties and only two institutions offered it at degree level, Newcastle and Reading.

Since the amalgamation of Fine Art Colleges into Polytechnics and their subsequent re-branding as Universities it is clear that Fine Art has taken root as a growth area replacing the original ‘technical’ and ‘trade’ subjects that fell away as Britain ‘de-industrialized’. Where once there were plumbers and builders these days there are more likely to be Live Artists and Video Artists. The number of these ‘artists’ who subsist as professionals after training remains pitifully low though. A vocational remit has been supplanted by a liberal humanist agenda and a college sector whose survival is based on student numbers. As these numbers decline demographically and institutions spend more money trying to attract less ‘customers’ what will colleges be offering in ten years time? A curriculum can only operate with a ‘customer-base’. To this end the quality and the vocational relevance of training is once again becoming critical. New solutions will be needed to provide that quality and the ‘new creative jobs’ scenario New Labour clings to as a panacea of all ills.


Paul Oliver (now an expert in Blues Musicology and Vernacular Architecture) started out in the arts field and wrote interestingly about the future of the arts in the curriculum over 30 years ago (Oliver,P 1973). He identified an unconnected art education process that lurched from remit to remit as students progressed from school to H.E. Following a period of student unrest and the Hornsey Art School Riot commentators looked toward utopian solutions to the apathy and ‘static systems in a society committed to dynamic change’ (Oliver 1973: 127).

With the wider perspective of a keen ecological interest he produced some surprising scenarios for the future of the arts in ‘a leisure-based society’ that he saw consuming ever more resources and leading to ‘environmental crisis’. He identified the art system as it then stood as contributing to this malaise and

described it as art policy geared to a view of the future as ‘more of the present’. His visionary solution was an arts education based locally in a ecologically sound community setting. Radical indeed and 30 years later still radical. He called for the exam system to be scrapped and age differences to be ignored. He cited the then growing BBC centres in the regions to act as nodes of this new development. He suggested the BBC could build eco-art centres that would stimulate artistic growth under its remit of serving the ‘people’. Ironically 30 years later the BBC is crawling towards just such a ‘regional’ remit but in a haphazard and lacklustre way. He himself commented on the opposition this would produce especially in traditional art circles ‘but what of the dearly loved curriculum?'(Oliver, 1973: 138). His clarion call went unheeded so much for idealism..

We might devise an educational system which is responsive to change, which is truly life-enhancing, and which makes art and design not specialist activities but meaningful in the lives of members of the whole community.
(Oliver, 1973: 138 in Piper,ed. 1973)

My second example examines a solution drawn up by David Jones in his article ‘Adult, Aesthetics and Lifelong Learning (Jones, D 2000). Jones was educated to teach art following a Fine Art degree in the sixties and once he found himself teaching felt that the aesthetic value system which he professed to have expertise in no longer held firm as a valid system whereby to judge art…his doubts led him to believe that such an aesthetic value system and its criteria were in fact based on opinion and preference. He sought a permanent value system that wouldn’t suffer from this relativity. His opinions were mirrored by other commentators such as Sandy Nairne who stated..

The teaching institutions, art schools and colleges, local and state subsidies to the arts, artist run galleries and art centres, art history books, international public exhibitions, Documenta and biennales, all affect the current assessment of qualities and ideas about art. (Nairne,1987)

He then explains how this realisation and subsequent opening up of the arts to multiculturalism and participatory community arts lead to a ‘paradigm shift’ in art education.

This paradigm shift was seen as empowering ordinary people to participate in this activity called the arts (Jones, 2000: 33)

‘Everyone is an artist now well not quite. Yes a shift did occur but that opening up to the Sunday supplements and Brit-Artists as ‘personalities’ was hardly an empowerment of the nation. Indeed Damien Hirst whom Jones mentions as symbolic of this shift was as cunning an old-stager and purveyor of elitism with gallery owner Jay Joplin as any ‘aesthetes’ that came before. Old guard rims on some new art specs do not a breakthrough make. Whereas I’d like to believe the fable of a ‘new inclusivity’ the fact remains that those factors that Nairne identified remain the true arbiters of taste in art education. The foundation students at New College were in thrall not only to the expanding ‘market-forces’ but the potential to emulate heroes such as Hirst and Emin to the point of fandom. I saw scant acknowledgement of ‘community’ in play. Jones advocates a four-strand set of domains (pace the National Curriculum) only his place more emphasis on societal, multicultural and contextual factors.
1. Levels of perception
2. Exploiting a medium of expression
3. An ability to become involved in the creative process
4. A supportive knowledge base (contextual studies).
These seem not that far removed from the N.C. categories we started with. However there an important thrust to his model that he explains best himself..

The focus of attention has shifted from product to work produced, to the process of creation. (Jones, 2000: 38)

Here we are again in postmodernist territory! Indeed he goes on to state that ‘Grand Narratives’ have given way to ‘Little Narratives’ rooted in the local community. This fine if one accepts that postmodernism is a dominant mode of thought and we cannot judge artists by a canon as the canon is destroyed.

Here I find the argument untenable because a great body of work does accept certain artists as being of more note than others over time in a variety of the arts. If we proceed down this road I would have to accept that Hirst is as good in his time and place as Goya in his. This is patently not true.

Even factoring in social and contextual perspectives one is a lesser artist than the other. This dichotomy in art education is pulling the rug from beneath the feet of a coherent arts policy in all sectors. Even the arts minister Tessa Jowell has pulled back from the implications of an arts policy that defines no values. Her most recent essay and its response by David Edgar in The Guardian reveal an almost modernist attitude to the provision of the arts. Jowell in her essay reverses the predominate trend of the last twenty years towards an arts that required both customer satisfaction and social rejuvenation as a reason for patronage. She cites both social capital and the artists role in almost ‘pre-modern’ terminolog we seem to have gone full circle back to the kind of arts patronage envisaged over three or five decades ago. The roots of aesthetic value systems obviously run deep. Are we seeing the wheel being reinvented yet again? It seems that artists may be again ‘special’ and not just market driven ‘providers’ or ‘community workers’? If this new realism could be harnessed to some real radicalism in provision in terms of the eco-centres that Oliver imagined we may truly be on the verge of a creative ‘breakthrough’ in this ‘country’ whatever its imagined borders. Until then Jerusalem will still be running late and considerably over budget.

By accepting culture is an important investment in personal social capital we begin to justify that investment on culture’s own terms. (Jowell, 2004 )
the exploration of “the internal world we all inhabit – the world of individual birth, life and death, of love or pain, joy or misery, fear and relief, success and disappointment”, revealed to us by artists “who can show us things we could not see for ourselves”.
(Jowell, 2004 : quoted in Edgar, The Guardian 22.05.04)

some knew this all along
the present massive and barbaric retreat into ‘basics’ and the mechanical demand for standardized testing avoid all the primary educational questions (Abbs,1989:32)

References

Abbs, P. (1989) A is for Aesthetic: Essays on Creative and Aesthetic Education. Lewes: Falmer.

Curzon, L.B. (1997) Teaching in Further Education: An outline of principles and practice. 5th ed. London: Cassell.

Department for Education and Employment.(1999) All our futures: Creativity, Culture and Education. Sudbury: DfEE Publications.

Eisner, E. (1985) The educational imagination. New York: MacMillan.

Hughes, A. (1998) ‘Reconceptualising the art curriculum’, Journal of Art and Design Education Volume 17, No. 1, pp. 41-49, Oxford: Blackwell.

Jones, D.J. (2000) Adults, Aesthetics and Lifelong Learning in The Adult Curriculum. Nottingham: Continuing Education Press, School of Continuing Education, University of Nottingham.

Nairne, S. (1987) The State of the Art, Ideas and Images in the 1980’s. London: Chatto & Windus in collaboration with Channel Four Television Company Ltd

Oliver, P. (1973) Art Education for What Future? in Piper, D.W. ed. (1973) Readings in Art and Design Education 1: After Hornsey. London: Davis-Poynter.

Steers, J. (2004) Art and Design in White, J. ed. (2004) Rethinking the Curriculum: Values, aims and purposes. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Internet Sources

Edgar, D.
22.05.2004
“Where’s the challenge?”
The Guardian Online
[online]
The Guardian Newspaper
Available at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1221322,00.html
[Accessed 28.07.2004]

Jones, A.
26.05.2004
“Top Drawers”
The Guardian Online
[online]
The Guardian Newspaper
Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,,1224625,00.html
[Accessed 28.07.2004]

Macleod, D.
27.04.2004
“The sum of its arts”
The Guardian Online
[online]
The Guardian Newspaper
Available at: http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,1203591,00.html
[Accessed 28.07.2004]

Watts, C.
22.05.2004
“The common reader and other myths”
The Guardian Online
[online]
The Guardian Newspaper
Available at: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1267252,00.html
[Accessed 28.07.2004]

31.10.2001
“Prince criticises art education
BBC News online
[online]
The BBC
Available at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/1630301.stm
[Accessed 22.07.2004]

Jowell, T
2004
“Government and the value of culture”
[online]
www.culture.gov.uk
Available at : http://www.culture.gov.uk/global/publications/archive_2004/Government_Value_of_Culture.htm
[Accessed 28.07.2004]

New College Prospectus online
2004
Foundation Studies in Art and Design Full-Time
[online]
http://www.ncn.ac.uk
Available at : http://www.ncn.ac.uk/courses/coursedetail.asp?courseid=253
[Accessed 28.07.2004]

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