The Tate Gallery have decided to dedicate one of their rooms to the
history of the basic design tradition within British Art schools. They hold
scholars' mornings every now and again to bring together people with a
particular interest and knowledge in a subject together to see if insights can
be shared. So yesterday I was at the Tate bright and early, 8.20am and spent a
morning with other ‘experts’ on the basic design curriculum.
The first person I met there was Roy Ascott.
He used to be at Newcastle with Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton and is
still very active teaching and working in the telematics/cybernetics field. He
is a global figure, as his Wikipedia entry states, he is “President of the Planetary Collegium an international
research platform that promotes the integration of art, science, technology,
and consciousness research”. He had a piece of work in the exhibition ‘Change Painting’ from 1960 and gave a
presentation on its gestation. All the other attendees appeared to be
scholars. Roy was to present last of four which was useful for me, as once I’d
realised he was there I was sort of in awe and if he had been on first I think I would have said nothing. He is one of that generation of
artists that lived the full blast of what was going on in art education at the
time. It was as if someone working alongside Harry Thubron at Leeds had worked
into the room (like Patrick Oliver for instance) and mentally I was quaking in
my boots.
However as the scholars
presented I realised I had a lot to contribute. They had not worked on the studio
floor with the concepts and practices that in particular Thrubron had
introduced and Ascott seemed to often agree with what I was bringing in.
Newcastle was sufficiently different in approach for there to be confirmation
without overlap.
As the session went on
we ended up in a general discussion and we were asked what was missing from the
show. My main feeling was that the student work, now framed behind glass and
carefully exhibited gave a false impression of what happened. A key image in
the exhibition was of a photograph of work put up for a crit at a Scarborough
Summer School at some point in the 1960s. A whole wall of images was being
discussed, work very similar to what was being done when I first arrived in
Leeds at the Jacob Kramer College in the academic year 1974/5. (LCA had been renamed JK at this time). The
hustle and bustle of the studio, the sounds in particular of staff talking and
shouting and singing now however all silenced behind the exhibition glass. When Roy Ascott had started talking about his
work he made sounds. A swish like noise that followed the gesture of his hand
as he remembered making the brush marks on glass that were essential to the ‘in
the momentness’ of the 1960s piece. No one commented on this, so I did. I
pointed out how sounds like this were constantly being made at the time and
that the understanding of what was going on was totally embodied. Roy
thankfully agreed.
Next to where we were
standing was a Terry Frost, one of those pieces where half circle images gently
tilt and rock like rocking horse bases and mirror each other. The centre of the
image had been vacated and the half sun shapes were collected mainly at the
top and bottom. I pointed to the spaces between two mirrored sun/boat forms and made the
noise that filled the space. The squeak emitted as the two lines squashed the
space was slightly higher than the one made by an almost the same conjunction
to the right, however the space at the left was slightly wider therefore the
space less constricted. The large open space below could then be sounded as a
much lower bass noise. As I went through this standing in front of a big group
of serious looking theoreticians and scholars part of me was deeply worried
that this would be a moment when all would come apart, but thankfully with Roy
Ascott being there as well I think there was enough conviction to make everyone
realise how important these things were and that they were never really
captured in the literature. I then carried on with the essential next stage,
setting up the rhythm of read; sounding the squeak, squeak, boom; the tick,
tock of boat-rock, and then asking for these to be rhythms that should then be
picked up by the body itself. I pointed out that for tutors at that time a good
solid pair of brogues were essential.
The sound of staff approaching not only quieting the expectant throng,
but setting out a rhythm for the session.
This embodied
understanding of basic design was something I lived with for 10 years. Both
Patrick and Gavin had been close to Thubron in those days and both still held
on to the principles inspired by him when I first began teaching; both of
course also telling me that that the other never really understood what it was
all about. This is perhaps because the one thing that was always key was that
things should never be really understood because then they would be
predictable. Art and life were things
that had to be entwined. So starting with how you walk into the studio was a key thing. Like your heartbeat, everyone has a rhythm of walking, its
sound unique. This is no different to the rhythm of your drawing, the speed of
mark making and the size and weight of the marks being something that comes
from a synthesis between your body size and physique, and your metabolic and
heart rate. A mental state may slow you down or speed you up, percepts will
change you and you will change them. What you need to do is make yourself
responsive and by setting up situations that you don’t know how to deal with,
your responses are more likely to be ‘true’ or at least ‘fresh’ and original. However
keeping things fresh is hard. In the exhibition was a video of Thubron working
with moving models. This situation was something I was very familiar with. Ann,
Mavis and Rosie were the models who worked at the JK when I arrived and they
knew this situation really well. Ann in particular knew exactly at what pace to
move and how to step amongst the students, making slow poses just long enough
for student images to start to arrive but not long enough for them to think
about trying to ‘draw the model’. This meant that to some extent an element of
prediction had crept in. However it was still fresh for all the students, just
not for the models or the staff. This need for constant invention was really
thrilling for me. Many a morning we would get together and decide what should
happen next, I’d work out lots of possibilities during a previous night’s
restless sleep and be thrilled if an idea was accepted as something to throw
in. These sessions eventually became what we called ‘morning drawings’ but at
the core was Thubron’s adage that nothing should be known, everything
discovered. In this way students would learn how to create life within the
inanimate. (As for myself, the fact that at the time I had a class of my own at the Swarthmore Centre meant that I could try out all my ideas on the students who attended those sessions, some worked and some didn't but what was clear was that if I was excited and fascinated in the possibilities students would be too. But I now teach far too many sessions where I'm simply presenting a module as a series of outcomes that everyone will achieve, what a long way from sessions where at their best no one knew what the outcomes would be).
At the end of the Tate session I was really tired, but had realised that what I knew was really
special. My intellectual and embodied knowledge of what was taught then was still strong enough
to get through to a group of mainly academics, who were very concerned to
encase the basic design moment in aspic. The moment of teaching in art and
design is just that, making the moment real, making it sensitive to life and
art at the same time and getting students to feel how special that is.
Even though I’m now in
phased retirement I feel I can still offer something and Roy Ascott is a
fantastic example of how you can still develop a cutting edge practice at any
age. In some ways I felt Roy was somewhat like a pixy, full of life and
insight and that he had kept himself lively by his many interests. One thing
that he said really struck me. I had pointed out how Cezanne was still very
important to people at this time. He went on to elaborate. He pointed out that
it was the late Cezanne watercolours that in particular were vital to an
understanding of what was happening. In order to grasp one of these images you
as the viewer have to engage with the perceptual process, to re-experience the process of looking, it is a process only
resolved in this joint action. Roy pointed out that this for him was the key
thing that fostered a lifelong interest in process and the way that people
could come together to ‘realise’ an idea. Roy further pointed out that ideas
where others have to come to the situation in order to advance the process are
more alive and vital. Perhaps all closed ideas need to have aspects to them
that are open.
I have been somewhat
remiss in adding posts to this blog lately and must return to the task with a
bit more energy, but meeting Roy Ascott (who interestingly also taught at
Newport, so we had a chat about who was there when he was etc.) has helped me
realise that the venture is a worthwhile one and that you need to keep going on
all fronts, retirement is not an option.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWoooooooossssshhhh! The sound of a great post, Cheers Garry
ReplyDelete