Glyn Thompson’s exhibition at the Tetley Educating Damien*,
continues into January and he is giving a lecture “where Thompson will ask
whether Hirst is merely the personification of the bohemian stereotype, since
he just happened to be in the right places at the right time, having first encountered
the archetype of the post-romantic tortured genius Patrick Oliver at Jacob
Kramer College”. I did think about going but hadn’t realised it was ticket only
and of course when I eventually went to book the event was full. However Glyn’s
thesis is interesting as it raises several questions that relate to this blog
and its posts.
In one of the rooms in the exhibition Glyn has had a
quote from this blog enlarged and wall mounted. I went to the opening and Glyn
pointed it out, he said that he wanted to use it because my words were public
and offered a verification of his own position. That was fine by me and I still
stand by what I had to say about his lectures at the time. However memories are
always selective and we construct narratives to fit our own very self-centered
world-view. (A reminder of this situation to myself is therefore needed and to readers of this blog)
Terry has been to see the show with Colin Cain, apparently as they
looked at the drawings Colin was laying claim to working with students to
produce the very images that Glyn had used in the exhibition to illustrate his
point that Damien had been introduced to the museum collections by Glyn’s
drawing sessions. Glyn however claimed a special relationship with the museum because of his then
friendship with the curator, so who was it did the deed?
My own view has been partly already expressed in my post of Wednesday, 21st November 2012 entitled Still Life.
In some ways you could say we all did it, but there were subtle
differences in our approaches.
When drawing from observation many of the staff would follow the “It’s not
what it is but where it is” mantra. Choices of objects were for several staff
more often than not made on a formal basis and as I pointed out in my earlier
post, to quote myself, “On the one hand there were concepts related to the
types of things available to make images from and on the other hand it was a
controlled situation whereby you could explore how to approach image making
itself.”
Glyn’s point is that he was adopting a less formalist approach to the
museum objects and was reversing the perceptual focus, recognizing that all
vision is socially constructed and that, “It’s what it’s social context is, not
how you see it that counts”. I did at the end of that old post mention that in
complementary studies these issues were being discussed but that they had yet
to really enter the studio floor.
The pedagogic point is that at the centre of all of this was the then primacy
of drawing as a ‘training for the eye’. The ‘museum’ object and its cultural
significance in levering forward a post-colonial awareness or being a centre
around debates associated with the ‘gaze’ and museology or a more technology
focused reading of art history, were always secondary to getting students to
look. When artists working in this territory started to re-visit the museum
they rarely drew, they photographed and re-presented. For many artists drawing
took attention away from the cultural significance of objects and moved it into
the arena of more subjective art processes. I would suggest that most of the
time spent in these sessions when students were drawing from museum objects,
that the conversations would revolve mainly around looking and its accuracy. My
memory of the module Glyn mentions was that if you were asked to work on this
you were asked above all to get the students looking. How you did this was up
to you, and each member of staff had a different focus. Kate’s growing
awareness of what was going on over at the university was also something to
factor in here as she was working through her own growing awareness of Feminism
and its reassessment of the ‘male’ bohemian
stereotype and the art associated with that.
Thinking of Patrick and Glyn’s assertion that Damien has modeled himself on Patrick's persona, well
I’m not sure, but I am sure Glyn will have a very well argued thesis for this. Perhaps
Damien modeled himself on Glyn, or his old art teacher Mr. Bell from Chapel
Allerton School or John Thompson when he went to Goldsmiths, or a black and
white picture of Frances Bacon in a bar. My own feeling about this is that you
are given rights of practice by some staff you come across and prohibitions by
others. Some people affirm your existence and other don’t. When I meet ex art
students, some remember the staff that held them back and others remember those
that helped them move forward. Sometimes the pedagogy of art education is all to do with damage limitation.
Art education changes with the years and the focus on 'perception' at the then Jacob Kramer was already behind the times and had already been debunked in several DipAD Fine Art programmes, not least at Newport where Keith Arnett was teaching us the post linguistic turn. The focus on a 'gestalt' of seeing was though powerful and it fostered a less intellectual approach, perception is though at the end of the day a cognitive process and as Goodman put it, "conception without perception is nearly empty, perception without conception is blind". (1987)
Art education changes with the years and the focus on 'perception' at the then Jacob Kramer was already behind the times and had already been debunked in several DipAD Fine Art programmes, not least at Newport where Keith Arnett was teaching us the post linguistic turn. The focus on a 'gestalt' of seeing was though powerful and it fostered a less intellectual approach, perception is though at the end of the day a cognitive process and as Goodman put it, "conception without perception is nearly empty, perception without conception is blind". (1987)
*and others
Goodman, N (1987) Of Mind and Other Matters London: Harvard
Goodman, N (1987) Of Mind and Other Matters London: Harvard