More critiques this last week with third years. Most of the feedback was based on the pragmatic awareness that people have to get on with things if they are to get their final show up to the type of standard you expect. I was doing the crits with Sheila and David Steans, who came in for a day. It’s always interesting to work with someone fresh, David in particular is part of the young Leeds art scene, (if you can call it that), he is working as a curator as much as an artist, or perhaps in a merged field that covers both. This is a way of working that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago, curators were a breed apart and smelled of stuffy museum back rooms and hours spent pouring over old dusty art history books. How times change. I thought some good advice was given, but was left pondering the whole issue of the artist and being alone. What was great about those two days was everyone contributing to possibilities, people were giving openly of their experiences and skills and you could see work developing as ideas were clarified and tested out by the group. We are a social animal and ideas and art-work are so much easier to develop if we work together. The final product goes through a group edit and comes out much better for it. Making decisions on your own is very hard, working on your own is hard too, it’s always easier to keep going if you know a team of people are involved, as you don’t want to let others down. But our entire system is designed to promote individualism. The college marking system doesn’t work very well if students work as teams, academic measurement starts going astray and no one trusts a group mentality. I wonder how St Martins marked Gilbert and George in their final year? The group mind is far more powerful, this is why films are so great, so many contributions, people with an enormous range of overlapping skills coming together to make something that can at its best be wonderful. More art needs to be made like that.
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