A Philosophy of the Art School

Michael Newall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781032094342
• eBook ISBN: 9780429869976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

*Winner of the American Society for Aesthetics 2019 Outstanding Monograph Prize*

Until now, research on art schools has been largely occupied with the facts of particular schools and teachers. This book presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. It analyses two models that, hidden beneath the diversity of contemporary artist training, have come to dominate art schools. The first of these is essentially an old approach: a training guided by the artistic values of a single artist-teacher. The second dates from the 1960s, and is based around the group crit, in which diverse voices contribute to an artist's development. Understanding the underlying principles and possibilities of these two models, which sit together in an uneasy tension, gives new insights into the character of contemporary art school teaching, demonstrating how art schools shape art and artists, how they can be a potent engine of creativity in contemporary culture and how they contribute to artistic research. A Philosophy of the Art School draws on first-hand accounts of art school teaching, and is deeply informed by disciplines ranging from art history and art theory, to the philosophy of art, education and creativity.

1
The Contemporary Art School

Talking with those without first-hand experience of contemporary art schools, I have often found them surprised, and even shocked, at the nature of that education. Four broad features of the art school seem to attract this surprise. The first of these I call deskilling of the curriculum, second is the extraordinary freedom available to students, third is the study of art theory, and last is the remarkable hostility of some teaching, which can cross a line into abuse. Together these will give a vivid introduction to understanding the art school in its contemporary form. This picture of contemporary art schools will in many respects be familiar to those who have been students or teachers there, but art school teaching is a little-studied topic, and I hope that many aspects of their history and character, both in breadth and detail, will be new to those readers too. This account of art schools raises questions which lead back to the question that motivates this book: what is taught at art school, and how is it taught? The Introduction considered theoretical reasons why this is an important question, and I here add to those some practical reasons. The chapter finishes by evaluating existing approaches to this question, including those of Thierry de Duve, Howard Singerman and James Elkins, as well as some ‘common sense’ responses. I criticise some features of these approaches and identify others that I will draw on in developing my own response to this question.

1. Deskilling

By ‘deskilling,’ I mean the removal of skills of technique and media from the curriculum. This includes traditional crafts of painting, sculpture and other media, and representational techniques such as drawing and painting from life. The deskilling of art schools reflects and reinforces what is known as deskilling in contemporary art, which on the whole makes much less use of these crafts and techniques than it has done in the past.¹

I give two first hand-accounts of deskilling, in the UK and US. The first of these comes from the poet George Szirtes, who attended Leeds College of Art from 1969 to 1972. Leeds at this time had been called “the most influential art school in Europe since the Bauhaus,” and it was an early and, indeed, influential example of an art school that had largely abandoned skills training.² As we shall see, it did not have all the features of a contemporary school as I discuss them here, but in the UK it marked a move towards the kind of artist training that is now typical. Szirtes had previously undertaken a Foundation course that had focused on teaching traditional techniques of drawing, sculpture and printmaking in a workshop environment.³ Reflecting on what he had been taught there, Szirtes writes,

[n]one of it, however, prepared me for the next stage at Leeds. Nothing was immediately useful. It was like being prepared for something that no longer existed.⁴

At Leeds, Szirtes took the Diploma course (equivalent to a present day BA):

In the first week we were shown the studio, told to find a space and make it ours, then were instructed to go to Woolworths, to buy a small tin globe of the earth, and to do something interesting but unspecified with it. Having thought a couple of days I decided to give it away, but, just to show it was not an abdication of responsibility, I cut a hole in the side of the globe and slipped a £1 note inside it [worth about £20 today]. I offered it to a woman pushing a pram and she accepted it.⁵

He records that his tutor was pleased with the outcome. It was, Szirtes adds, “the one and only project we were asked to undertake in the whole of the three years.” He writes of the remainder of the course:

Everything was informal. You grabbed tutors as they were passing, or they looked in to see if you were in your area of the studio. You could go for weeks without seeing them. I was nearly always in the studio—early there, late to leave—so I did see them…. I remember only one other painter, though there would have been about ten. No one, as far as I was aware, was painting what one might call conventional pictures…. One of my close friends … began as a painter in the spirit of [abstract painter] William Scott but within a term had moved into Conceptual art…. A good number would be in the library checking on latest developments in the magazines…. Two or three of the tutors took a particular interest in me and would come round and talk. I can’t remember the conversations but they seemed to be substantial, exciting—confidential in a way, and entirely encouraging…. One could make an appointment or simply try knocking on the Principal, Willy Tirr’s door and he would invite one in if he wasn’t busy and talk about anything that seemed interesting…. Was this an ‘art education’? It seemed to me something better than that at the time: it was an understanding of what art could be. Did it help me technically? Hardly.⁶

The kinds of skills that Szirtes learnt in his Foundation course—the ability to manipulate various traditional media to artistic ends—are unnecessary for the deskilled practice of contemporary art. In that sense, their limited place in the curriculum makes perfect sense. Today art school education at the BA-level in the UK is more structured than Szirtes describes. Thanks to the institutional demands of universities that have since absorbed them, it is made up of modular, individually assessed units. But the general character remains much as Szirtes describes. There are set projects that require creative resolutions (although more of them than Szirtes had), giving way as students progress to free self-directed work. Teaching primarily happens through two kinds of conversation—one-to-one student-teacher contact, which Szirtes describes happening on an informal basis, and crits, which Szirtes does not mention. Today, there will likely be some training in professional presentation, that is, advice on getting exhibited and funded. The documents that describe BA programmes in the UK are dreary pieces of writing—usually read only by the university administrators they are written to satisfy, but I footnote details from a better-written example to give an illustration.⁷ Now students often opt to go on to a one- or two-year MA, where, as in the latter years of the BA, student work is usually self-directed and subjected to a gauntlet of crits.

In the US, there is a tendency for such self-directed study to largely be reserved for the two-year Master of Fine Art (MFA) degrees, while BA programmes, where students pursue a Fine Art major, retain something more of the character of Foundation courses in the UK (which otherwise have no counterpart in US art schools). For that reason, it is MFAs that most clearly provide the model for contemporary art teaching in the US.

The art historian Howard Singerman introduces his study of US art schools with an illuminating account of his own art school experience, before he turned to art history. He gained his BA degree in the early 1970s at Antioch College, where he learnt a range of technical skills, and later in the decade took an MFA at Claremont College Graduate School. His comments about his MFA study echo those of Szirtes and sum up the situation for most art students since their time.

I cannot carve or cast or weld or model in clay…. In some sense, I must admit, my inability was not my program’s fault. The tools and skills of sculpture were available to me as options. If I needed them to do my work as an artist … there were people who could teach me. But it was clear at the time that the craft practices of a particular métier were no longer central to my training.⁸

Deskilling is not usually complete. Most schools teach skills of some kind, often a combination of the traditional skills of fine art media as well as those of photography and newer media. But as Singerman says, these are usually no longer central to their teaching. An important exception is the introduction of teaching of skills in photography, video and other new media. But the skills required by new media are often taught more thoroughly and to a higher level in commercially oriented schools where students are focused on little else, and where a corresponding level of resourcing is thus more easily justified.

The 1960s and ‘70s saw the final loss of traditional skills of drawing, painting and sculpture. Roughly speaking, these had persisted from the days of academic art in the nineteenth century and earlier. I will look at this tradition of teaching in the following chapter. Here, it is worth mentioning that although they can be resilient, traditions can also die away easily. It only takes their neglect by a generation of teachers, and a tradition can disappear. Put bluntly, that is what deskilling in art schools has done to many traditional skills in the visual arts. Still, art schools often do try to cater to the expectations of their students and others, by giving students the opportunity to skills such as life drawing or painting, for example. But these activities usually exist only on the periphery of the curriculum—the resources devoted to them are slim, the time students spend on these activities are meagre, and the teachers employed often do not have the expertise needed to teach these skills. Occasionally an art school will devote itself more wholly to the revival of an academic tradition. Small private schools can sometimes find a niche in this way. But in the process such schools will usually isolate themselves from the concerns and interests of the contemporary art world, which is also to say, they will no longer teach contemporary art.

2. Freedom

The lifting of the constraints that learning skills entails was accompanied by a broader kind of freedom. In 1971, the abstract painter Patrick Heron wrote a polemical defence of UK art schools, then threatened by absorption into polytechnics. In it, he gave a vivid perspective on the culture of British art schools, new at the time, but now taken for granted as part of the culture of contemporary art schools throughout the English-speaking world.

About 10 years ago British art students suddenly became conspicuous on the pavements of our cities in a way they had never been before: it wasn’t just hair or clothes, or style of walking—but a mixture of all three—and all three were revolutionary. Take clothes: what was really startling was the utterly personal way in which each student put together ‘unfashionable’ and unlikely bits and pieces with a sense of complete personal authority: suddenly there seemed no need to conform to any accepted canon, still less to look over one’s shoulder at Paris or even New York.

This sudden release from any established fashion, style or taste arose out of a newly acquired willingness to please oneself, trusting only one’s own sensibility and satisfying only one’s own suddenly recognizable needs and desires. But the key to this sudden mood of innovative authority which began to show after 1961 among British art students was this new-found freedom from any sense of dependence on any foreign precedent of fashion or dress—and therefore in style of living—and finally in painting and sculpture …

There is not space here for a detailed consideration of this achievement; but let me give one example of what I mean. Freedom of intention and direction and of method and means has evolved to such proportions that it is impossible to go, now, into almost any art school in the country without finding that no two students overlap in terms of the idioms in which they are working. It is not an exaggeration to say that in a school where there are seventy students of fine art one will probably find almost as many wholly distinct idioms being explored in almost as many me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Contemporary Art School
• 2 The Art School: A Typological History
• 3 The Contemporary Masterclass
• 4 The Crit
• 5 Can Art Be Taught?
• 6 Lessons for the Art School
• Bibliography
• Index