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Drawing Towards Sculpture [ONE]

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Establishing a repertoire of marks to explore an imagined space. That’s what I imagined myself articulating when I set out to write a blog post about a set of collage-drawings I made in June. These drawings are a transitional stage between sketches made in the garden and an imagined/virtual space. I make sketches and take photographs in the location, make bigger drawings from these in the studio, tear these up and use them as the base for the collage-drawings which are then transferred to virtual spaces as a preliminary to being recreated, and thus further altered in a manufactured physical space.

Drawing is about looking. Looking at the object or scene and looking at the paper or ground (or should that be support?) and looking at both simultaneously. Drawing is translating your feelings in the presence of the object/scene into a surface that communicates. Henri Matisse stated that his ‘…line drawing is the purest and most direct translation of my emotion’ and Picasso that ‘To draw, you must close your eyes and sing’ (Worsdale et al, 2007)1. Something beyond draughtsmanship creates a drawing that makes connections with an audience.

These drawings are a means to an end, or rather a step on a meandering journey, the end is vague like the horizon, affect not effect. The translation of feeling is semi-conscious in that occasionally a further use for the mark you make occurs and in doing so conditions the next mark you make, sometimes to its detriment. Sometimes the things you imagine as you copy become the things you copy and sometimes you don’t want this. This is why I make drawings to destroy or recreate in three dimensions. Even where a drawing is an accurate enough depiction to be recognised, either generally or specifically, this is not the whole of its intention. I note to myself at this point that if this were drawing as a cure for cancer it would be homeopathy.

Cézanne writes to Emile Bernard on the 23rd October 1905 “I owe you the truth in painting and I will tell it to you”.(Derrida, 1978) 2. Derrida uses this as a departure for a series of musings on the nature of truth in painting. Here are four interpretations of the meaning of ‘the truth in painting’ I found in a breakdown online at Kent State University. 3. They address the questions I’m trying to ask, albeit considering painting.

(1) the thing itself (truth as unhiddenness, disclosure, presentation; unveiled with no disguise whatever).
(2) an adequate, accurate representation of the thing itself—Heidegger’s secondary sense of truth.  These two concepts of truth enable one to generate four possibilities: a presentation of a representation (see, look at this photograph, here); a presentation of a presentation (“Behold, the man!”); a representation of the presentation (a painting of the situation in which the presentation just mentioned occurred); and representation of the representation (a slide of the painting).
(3) the truth in the sense proper to a picture (whatever that may be—a play of possibilities opens up here), as opposed to truth in the sense proper to an essay, for example.
(4) the truth about painting.

These potential revelations are always present in an encounter with an artwork, what it presents itself as being, what it copies, the context in which you encounter it, the truth it tells as you interpret it, what is open to you from your contribution and what is closed to you through your ignorance. They apply equally on all occasions to the artist as much as the audience especially if you follow Picasso’s instruction.

So these drawings are made to be a staging post, a base camp, before the assault on a greater challenge. They explore the nature of the spaces between the branches and twigs of the trees, the sky and the ground, the garden and the gardener, the now and the remembered. The space between the intention to make a mark and the making of that mark.

This is one of the drawings the others were made from, in this set there are 41 A1 collage/drawings. They can all be seen in this gallery

NOTES:
1. Worsdale, G et al (2007). DRAW Conversations around the legacy of drawing. England: MIMA. These are quoted by Gordon Burn and Jennifer Higgie in short essays in the catalogue to mima’s (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art) inaugural exhibition. They are unattributed there and I have been unable to find a source so may be apocryphal.
2. Derrida, J (1987). The Truth in Painting. (Translation Bennington G, McLeod I). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
3. The Truth in Painting. 2007. Aesthetics Notes for Students. [Online]. [19 September 2018]. Available from: https://www.personal.kent.edu/~jdrake3/JeffreyWattles/Aesthetics/Aesthetics10.html

Fancy Starting an Art School?

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If you could design your own visual art education what would it look like? Does Art Education start with a notion of pedagogy or does it start with a gathering? How much of it needs an institution to operate? If you were given the opportunity to ‘do it yourself’ would you?

I was always told that you need to go to London to become a successful artist and although there are any number of people whose careers disprove the notion, ‘follow the money’ is the kind of capitalist mantra that fits the age, determining both the prospect and the measure of success. I recently took early retirement (I should nail my colours to the mast as a dyed in the wool middle class white man of a certain age) in part because the pressure for financial efficiency that has been a feature of the response to the banking meltdown, has reached the point where the student experience is no longer part of the discussion. In the current educational climate, the measure will be how successfully the qualification is commodified.

Sarah Amsler, writing for ‘the Norwich Radical’ explains that “For more than forty years, academics and students themselves have been documenting the university’s transformation from one type of institution into another; charting its journey in the UK, for example, from being a largely elite self-governing body of learning and research in the 1960s to becoming a largely elite corporation undemocratically managed to maximise competitive knowledge production by the turn of the twenty-first century (the 1963 Robbins Report, 1997 Dearing Report and 2010 Browne Review give some indication of these changes).”1

I’d been thinking about art education and how these financial constraints become a controlling factor limiting your making and your thinking, when the effect of it was articulated for me by Rachel Horne. She told me about speaking to art students at Doncaster College alongside an artist from elsewhere who said that “after you leave College no one is paid to care about your work”. What changes most immediately when you leave your traditional education is that you leave the wider peer group and inevitably isolate yourself amongst likeminded souls, your best friends, who think everything you do is great and who have, for their own sake, a vested interest in bigging you up. You lose the critical appreciation of a group where people are prepared to say you are wrong, that the idea you had is not apparent in the work you made. Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer Prize winning art critic, has a robust approach to art world success. He suggests that you should only make art if you absolutely have to, that you will be poor, and you need to accept this, and that you should… “Work late, stay up late with your peers, and support each other. You’re only as strong as the weakest among you.”2 Higher Education in Fine Art is based on an exchange of experiences to develop new knowledge, the student-centred/learning-oriented conception of teaching defined by Kember (1997)3, specifically concentrating on conceptual change/intellectual development by engineering situations where learning is shared. In fine art education this is teaching through the critique (‘crit’) which addresses both the conceptual underpinning of the ‘proposals’ and the ‘solutions’ presented at deadline as illuminating the concept. Saltz again has a robust way of defining this, “Your number one job as an artist is to embed thought in material. That means your idiot idea has to be there in your idiot art.”4 It is these ‘crits’ that you miss when you leave your degree programme and it used to be a mantra that if you were serious, i.e. you wanted to get work as a lecturer to sustain your practice, you did an MA. These days an MA is going to cost you nine grand and you can’t add it to the 27 grand you already borrowed and of course neither of these amounts include any of your other expenses.

Having had a career trying to manage arts education in FE and HE I have found that the financially driven curriculum makes it difficult to extend teaching into a wider cultural debate. Every year begins with an efficiency drive leading to decisions about which resources should be cut, or limited, and how much of the students’ learning should happen without guidance. What gets lost with the constraints on time are the discussions that develop holistic responses and peer support and resilience and the build-up of cultural capital that leads to aspiration and progress.

There are lots of discussions going on regionally, nationally and internationally about this commodification and how it directly impacts learning. AltMFA, Ragged University, TOMA, Open School East, The syllabus, Islington Mill; the list goes on.5 As Sarah Amsler tells us “These debates are vital, not least because there are millions of people across the UK whose quality of life and possibilities for political engagement are being significantly impacted by the prospect of massive long-term debt (or the decision not to incur it), and by the dominance of commodified and transactional forms of learning in universities.”6

The driving force behind most of these initiatives is the expense incurred in achieving the qualifications and the desire to have more control over how that money is spent. This is not the only driver, Islington Mill, for example, was founded by Foundation course students who didn’t feel a degree was the right route for them. All the initiatives out there offer curricula that are determined by the participants and lead to no accreditation. Some of them charge fees, around £900 per annum that is used to secure visiting lecturers and workshops, others are free and rely on the goodwill of practitioners or engage in a skill/labour share to secure specialist input.

I’d like to spend a part of my retirement exploring a different model of art education. One where each student contributes to the curriculum with their knowledge and experience, where skills are shared amongst the group, where a safe space is declared that facilitates challenge and helps develop a resilient narrative. If you’d like to explore the possibility of running a similar scheme in Doncaster I’d be happy to facilitate discussions to help to get it off the ground

NOTES:

1. https://thenorwichradical.com/2018/05/12/another-higher-education-is-already-here-beyond-tuition-fees-8 accessed 12/05/18
2. https://news.artnet.com/opinion/jerry-saltz-advice-artists-frieze-1279226 accessed May 4 2018
Saltz is deliberately challenging and has a twitter feed that is well worth following https://twitter.com/jerrysaltz
3. David Kember (1997) A Reconceptualization of the Research into University Academics’ Conceptions of Teaching. Learning and Instruction. Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 255-275,
4. https://news.artnet.com/opinion/jerry-saltz-advice-artists-frieze-1279226 accessed May 4 2018
5. There is an excellent list at https://artandcritique.uk/alt-art-edu/ [ART&CRITIQUE] is an alternative education network dedicated to critical engagement with contemporary art practice and theory
6. https://thenorwichradical.com/2018/05/12/another-higher-education-is-already-here-beyond-tuition-fees-8 accessed 12/05/18

Some thoughts on art education

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The International Society for Education Through Art (InSEA) has just published their 2018 Manifesto

Obviously it lists a set of beliefs, e.g. ‘Education through art inspires knowledge, appreciation and creation of culture’ or ‘Visual art education develops an understanding of creative practice through knowledge, understanding and production of art in contexts’ and some that are couched as instructions ‘All learners, regardless of age, nationality or background, should have entitlement and access to visual art education’ and ‘Educational programmes and curriculum models should prepare citizens with confident flexible intelligences, and creative verbal and non-verbal communication skills’ for example. All are apparently laudable, if open to interpretation, and may be true for some, most or all people but equally they may not. How do you define citizen, or for that matter culture?

In one statement the manifesto defines the nature of visual art education, saying that ‘Visual art education should be systematic and be provided over a number of years, as it is a developmental process. Learners should engage with ‘making’ alongside learning about art’. This statement raises questions for me. Is art a developmental process? Should it be systematic? What’s the system? And what about ‘making’? isn’t ‘making’ learning about art rather than, as is implied, a separate activity?

'Critical Studies?' 2018 WIP - Oil on Paper 120x90

‘Critical Studies?’ 2018 WIP – Oil on Paper 120×90 – underpainting

Further the manifesto suggests that ‘Visual art education opens possibilities and opportunities for learners to discover themselves, their creativity, values, ethics, societies and cultures.’ Isn’t that what education does, if we’re doing it right? The danger is that we identify visual arts as the place where learners develop all the skills linked to creative thinking and by doing so exclude creativity in other subjects. A good read on this is the recent article on the RSA website by Julian Astle which contrasts Sir Ken Robinson’s well known view on schools and creativity with that of Tim Leunig who, when working as Chief Scientific Advisor for the DfE, argued that “True creativity is based on knowledge which in turn is based on literacy”. I don’t think schools necessarily kill creativity, I think Ken Robinson’s argument is that the way we are educated stifles creativity. Tim Leung’s argument seems to be too specific to carry any weight and highlights that experiment means different things to scientists and artists. What schools do increasingly, and along with society as a whole, is hammer the individuality out of children, and only the strongest survive.

The manifesto is listed under ADVOCACY on the InSEA website, and in the UK at the moment, or at least in England, the arts lobby is beginning to gel around objections to successive governments’ marginalisation of creative subjects. In a capitalist society everything has to translate to a financial return, there is therefore no intrinsic value to an activity there is only value in trade, and ‘art’ activities are generally high risk in financial terms. Society (or if you like ‘culture’) therefore struggles to ascribe value to these activities, it is not easy to see where the ability to visually critique the actions of your local council, or paint a forget me not, is going to help you pay for the NHS. What has happened over the course of my career in education is that Visual art, and the arts in general, have become more and more the leisure activities of the well off.

So what? Does art education start with a notion of pedagogy or just with a gathering?

Art ought to be subversive, so the political situation is almost ideal now, and people almost invariably have an urge to transgress. Art should disrupt the status quo to highlight society and culture to itself as art is a mirror. The beauty of art education is that art is about failure. Through learning about art you develop resilience and we could all do with a bit more of that.

I would like to see an approach that isn’t certificated or examined except by portfolio or individual creation. It should be for everyone and take place in a forum where experience is shared, where you bring your knowledge and share it with a peer group who bring theirs. Where you identify what you want to learn and find people who have the skills or knowledge to share. Where you are challenged and can respond to that challenge without rancour.