Working full-time again

I’ve had no time for reflection lately due to the fact that I’ve been working full-time again. Kelly the head of first year and head of the drawing strand has been incapacitated by her increasingly bad back problems and has been off work. I was asked to take over and have for the past few weeks been sucked into the nightmare of administration and assessments. This blog started out as a reflection on my final years of teaching. The one area I have not really opened out is of course administration and assessment because both these areas never interested me and I never found them useful. In theory they ought to be of value but the reality is that they are often unnecessary evils. The attempt to atomise learning through the use of learning outcomes was something I’ve already pointed out was a failure. You shouldn’t know what outcomes are going to be achieved. Both staff and students should be open to discovery and the journey should be about self-realisation, not a demonstration of learnt abilities. In particular assessment begins to skew things around in ways that totally distort what the activity of becoming an artist is really about. The evidence trail itself stops us getting to grips with those moments of realisation that are like epiphanies. Artists can feel when the moment is right to talk about something. You see someone working and know whether or not they are lost in the making. If a student is lost in that making you wait until later and then you can engage with how that immersion was allowing them to reach a totally focused attention. It is more akin to the moment of meditation or being in the zone as sports-stars put it. You need practice and commitment to achieve this state and more experienced practitioners can guide you towards this, by pointing towards those necessary building blocks that take you through knowledge and beyond into the meaning tone of the practice. Instead what I often find is that students become obsessed with the evidence trail. Studio books full of photographic records of what they have done, notes that tell me they have done this or that, each component of course designed to lead me to the conclusion that they have satisfied the learning outcomes. This type of evidence gathering has usually been undertaken as part of a previous course and students have been trained to present the evidence in particular ways, but this is all they have been trained to do and it means nothing. I have been an external examiner and been faced with boxes of this sort of evidence and I had to ask courses to not do it again, and to try and think about how artists actually work. For instance; a painter who is totally in the zone might paint, scrape out, re-paint, scrub out, paint again, scrape off etc etc over and over again, each time building towards a moment of discovery. There will be no sketches, no preparation drawings, no photographs of each stage, no images of similar artworks, no studies; simply focused painting. If we look at a Frank Auerbach portrait drawing for instance, it will have been worked on and worked on, the image will have been cut back and re-built time after time, but all we have in the end is one drawing. The experience is in the mind of the maker, that experience is one that another artist can appreciate but you can’t give it a mark. What you can do is acknowledge intensity of involvement, you can help steer students towards their own areas of fascination, help them find their obsessions and acknowledge them.

However I’m employed to sort out the assessments and standardise the competing rhetorics surrounding different staff so that assessments are ‘fair and valid’. These rhetorics are to do with different value systems that staff come with, all of course valid but all subjective. I have to attempt to employ some sort of objective criteria to iron out these differences, but at the end of the day it simply covers up an activity that doesn’t make any sense. Students want feedback but they themselves get confused by asking for feedback on the marks. Why did I only get 56, why did I get 68 and not 70? These are meaningless questions except for those who want to achieve grades. Yes you can be told how to get higher marks, basically provide more and more evidence. If you work hard every day and evidence this you will get good marks but there is something else, it is closely related but different, you have to work hard to get into the zone, just ask a sports-star, they will refer you to hours and hours of practice, but then there is that moment of epiphany and it’s un-markable and yet essential to becoming an artist.

I may be having to work full-time for a while and if this is the case I suspect I shall be making far fewer posts, but it will no doubt give me lots to reflect upon again. In particular I have been writing lectures to support new modules and I might post these up when I have time.