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SPECIALISSUE > experience of teaching art have been invited to analyse some of the main problems with the status quo and, where possible, to propose alternative models for art education. The results make for some fascinating reading and will, it is hoped, move the debate along. The contributions begin with an extract from a longer conversation between Seth Siegelaub and Pavel Büüchler (the full text is available at www.artmonthly.co.uk). The conversation, chaired by Ian Hunt, was an Art Monthly event that took place at Spike Island in Bristol last October, during which Büüchler and Siegelaub touched on a number of topics including art education and the changing perception of art and artists since the 60s. In the section quoted, Siegelaub regretted that art had become absorbed entirely into the capitalist system, while Büüchler went further, describing art as a ‘ruthless business’ and as possibly ‘the last remaining unregulated sector of capitalist enterprise’. And this was before Damien Hirst made headlines last month with his sale of the century at Sotheby’s, a story that was only driven off the front pages by the news of the collapse of Lehman Brothers – chillingly a bank that survived the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Michael Corris’s contribution was also written before Hirst’s market killing, but who is to say whether in the long term he is not right when he says that the art market ‘is holding its breath to see whether art is indeed recession-proof’, and whether it will really ‘outperform the stock market, property, precious metals, oil and commodities’. His point is still valid, that art, and artists, are now as vulnerable to the economic downturn as any other sector and this has a direct impact on art education at a time when in any case recruitment in fine art, as in the whole university sector, is falling as a result of funding cuts and demographic changes: ‘art education’, he points out starkly, ‘is in danger of becoming extinct in the context of liberal education’, which could be said to render this whole discussion academic. As all three are aware, one effect of the influence of the private sector on all things formerly publicly funded has been the growing instrumentalisation of art and the professionalisation of artists, with the result that, in Siegelaub words, the role of art schools is increasingly to ‘legitimatise, authorise and support the production of a certain type of artist’. A number of the contributors argue for a less ‘administered’ education system and a reduced role for ‘educational handlers’, to use Corris’s expression, and a greater role for students. In ‘The Fourth Way’, Liam Gillick offers the alternative, supplementary, model of a free school formed along the lines of the unitednationsplaza project in Berlin, organised by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with others. Welcoming ‘theorists, curators and artists’, as well as non-artists, it proposed an open space between standard art education and professional practice where artists and theorists could present their ideas ‘to a set of participants unrestricted by the pragmatism of the university or academy structure’. Gillick is one of the ‘artists who teach’ interviewed by John Reardon for his forthcoming book, Ch-ch-ch-chchanges. He began by thinking that teaching art was for him, but 32 interviews later he was less sure, though he became convinced that, despite his own doubts, ‘a lot of good work is done by people not so convinced by things’. The project includes artists who teach elsewhere in Europe who have not perhaps experienced the degree of change that we in Britain have in recent years, changes that have, in the words of Jaki Irvine, dragged those who teach further and further away ‘from the difficult inspirational thing we worked so hard to build up’. For Terry Smith, the constant round of wholly inappropriate assessment procedures has been one of the factors dragging art education down, a result of the merger mania that led to the absorption of previously autonomous art schools into the new university system. Like professionalisation, constant assessment is, according to Smith, inimical to experimentation and risk-taking: ‘Joseph Beuys destroyed all his college work, calling it his training work [...] maybe instead of a degree show at the end, we should have a huge bonfire.’ Gareth Jones, with experience of teaching art on both sides of the Atlantic, focuses on the curriculum and argues against both instrumentalism in art education and student-centred learning and for some shared educational unitednationsplaza 2006-07 project 2 320 / ARTMONTHLY /10.08
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unitednationsplaza free school Berlin 2006-07 > SPECIALISSUE principles: ‘The responsibility of education’ he argues, ‘is to illuminate not reflect’. While highly critical of management structures within the new universities, Maria Walsh is almost alone in finding much to celebrate in contemporary art education when compared with the ‘not-so-good old days’. Not least among these is the goal of ‘widening participation’, despite the fact that, as she points out, ‘increasingly high fees make the latter catchword risible and actually encourage the kind of bourgeois romantic individualism traditionally – and still – associated with studying art’. And whereas Smith would like to propose dropping the dissertation from the curriculum altogether, Walsh argues that theory, far from being ‘an unnecessary burden’ on students, actually empowers them. Finally, she even puts in a good word for the dreaded the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), making the important point that the process generates a sense of belonging to a wider educational community and, cycnicism aside, makes for a more ‘dynamic’ academic environment, though one can’t help wondering about the quality of that environment if it has to be stimulated by an external, government directed agency. Paul Wood’s contribution to the debate is taken from his introduction to a chapter he has written for the forthcoming bookHistory of British Art, in which he admirably summarises the situation in which we now find ourselves: ‘They say you should be wary of desire lest you are granted that which you wish for. The elevation of modular over linear teaching programmes, the educational incorporation of theory, the breakdown of modernist medium-specificity, the critique of the (mostly male) expressive author, perhaps even a questioning of the authority of the western canon, were all songs in our radical repertoire. Yet the fact that these have come to pass, and now count if not as the norm, then as significant components of a contemporary education in art and design, has counted in the end for less than the fact that the underlying structure (and of course, the wider structure-beyond-the-structure) has remained intact.’ And yet, as Walsh maintains, these achievements are not nothing, so why does such success feel like ashes? As Wood suggests, one reason is that the underlying structure remains intact, but another may be that in addressing these issues we have all been dragged away ‘from the difficult inspirational thing we worked so hard to build up’ in the first place. Let’s hope it is not too late. ❚ PATRICIABICKERS is editor of Art Monthlyand is principal lecturer in history and theory of art, department of mixed media fine art, school of media art & design, University of Westminster. Heather & Ivan Morison The opposite of all those things 27 September - 8 November 2008 GRUNDY ART GALLERY Queen Street, Blackpool, FY1 1PX. t: 01253 478170 e: grundyartgallery@blackpool.gov.uk w: www.blackpool.gov.uk/grundyartgallery Admission is free. Open Monday to Saturday, including Bank Holidays, 10am to 5pm. Closed Sundays. 10.08/ ARTMONTHLY /320 3

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experience of teaching art have been invited to analyse some of the main problems with the status quo and, where possible, to propose alternative models for art education. The results make for some fascinating reading and will, it is hoped, move the debate along. The contributions begin with an extract from a longer conversation between Seth Siegelaub and Pavel Büüchler (the full text is available at www.artmonthly.co.uk). The conversation, chaired by Ian Hunt, was an Art Monthly event that took place at Spike Island in Bristol last October, during which Büüchler and Siegelaub touched on a number of topics including art education and the changing perception of art and artists since the 60s. In the section quoted, Siegelaub regretted that art had become absorbed entirely into the capitalist system, while Büüchler went further, describing art as a ‘ruthless business’ and as possibly ‘the last remaining unregulated sector of capitalist enterprise’. And this was before Damien Hirst made headlines last month with his sale of the century at Sotheby’s, a story that was only driven off the front pages by the news of the collapse of Lehman Brothers – chillingly a bank that survived the 1929 Wall Street Crash. Michael Corris’s contribution was also written before Hirst’s market killing, but who is to say whether in the long term he is not right when he says that the art market ‘is holding its breath to see whether art is indeed recession-proof’, and whether it will really ‘outperform the stock market, property, precious metals, oil and commodities’. His point is still valid, that art, and artists, are now as vulnerable to the economic downturn as any other sector and this has a direct impact on art education at a time when in any case recruitment in fine art, as in the whole university sector, is falling as a result of funding cuts and demographic changes: ‘art education’, he points out starkly, ‘is in danger of becoming extinct in the context of liberal education’, which could be said to render this whole discussion academic. As all three are aware, one effect of the influence of the private sector on all things formerly publicly funded has been the growing instrumentalisation of art and the professionalisation of artists, with the result that, in Siegelaub

words, the role of art schools is increasingly to ‘legitimatise, authorise and support the production of a certain type of artist’. A number of the contributors argue for a less ‘administered’ education system and a reduced role for ‘educational handlers’, to use Corris’s expression, and a greater role for students. In ‘The Fourth Way’, Liam Gillick offers the alternative, supplementary, model of a free school formed along the lines of the unitednationsplaza project in Berlin, organised by Anton Vidokle in collaboration with others. Welcoming ‘theorists, curators and artists’, as well as non-artists, it proposed an open space between standard art education and professional practice where artists and theorists could present their ideas ‘to a set of participants unrestricted by the pragmatism of the university or academy structure’. Gillick is one of the ‘artists who teach’ interviewed by John Reardon for his forthcoming book, Ch-ch-ch-chchanges. He began by thinking that teaching art was for him, but 32 interviews later he was less sure, though he became convinced that, despite his own doubts, ‘a lot of good work is done by people not so convinced by things’. The project includes artists who teach elsewhere in Europe who have not perhaps experienced the degree of change that we in Britain have in recent years, changes that have, in the words of Jaki Irvine, dragged those who teach further and further away ‘from the difficult inspirational thing we worked so hard to build up’. For Terry Smith, the constant round of wholly inappropriate assessment procedures has been one of the factors dragging art education down, a result of the merger mania that led to the absorption of previously autonomous art schools into the new university system. Like professionalisation, constant assessment is, according to Smith, inimical to experimentation and risk-taking: ‘Joseph Beuys destroyed all his college work, calling it his training work [...] maybe instead of a degree show at the end, we should have a huge bonfire.’ Gareth Jones, with experience of teaching art on both sides of the Atlantic, focuses on the curriculum and argues against both instrumentalism in art education and student-centred learning and for some shared educational

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