No posts these last few months

Once again I have been removed from my proposed phased retirement and thrown back into teaching virtually full-time. Hence the lack of posts and the fact that I could give no notice of returning back into the fray.

I did deliver the life class and I feel managed to do this whilst not quite descending into the worst of what these classes offer. Some sessions were challenging and enlightening and the final three sessions which were much more student led, began to hint at possible ways to actually work from the model and not simply repeat what had gone before.

The key sessions were perhaps mid way through, once I had covered measurement, tone etc. I started to look at perceptual problems, one in particular being the problem with eye scan and size constancy. Students were asked to build images of the model, starting by looking at the feet and then moving up and using a new sheet of paper for each field of gaze. These were fitted together, to build large-scale images, which were themselves big enough to stimulate a more ‘phenomenological’ engagement. Each session following took on another aspect of looking, including a session on portraiture and how we gradually become aware of ‘likeness’, using soft focus techniques to gradually shift the face into view.

The collaborative sessions were fine and the mobile phone portraits in particular were fascinating glimpses into how quickly groups of students can work with this technology to make convincing pieces. Tiny videos were synchronised across lines of mobiles, or played off against each other when blue-tacked into geometric shapes on the wall. One piece in particular worked very well, students miming an idea that parts of their bodies were trapped within metal cages, then when run on a stack of mobiles new composite bodies were made, bodies that were banging and bumping into the ‘frames’ of the mobiles. The head bumping and bouncing off the sides of the mobile frame, creating a very physical presence in such a small series of linked frames.

Some of the small-scale joint work made for the miniature galleries was surprising and fresh and the invention levels were high and continued on into the construction of the galleries themselves. So perhaps I needn’t have been too worried about this module. The first mobile phone ‘concert’ was a great success and has already been used as part of an external event ‘icebreaker’. However these were just small drops in an ocean of teaching, once more having to support all first year modules, as well as taking over responsibility for third years on Fridays. The Friday work is however one to one tutorials and small critiques with usually highly engaged students who are well into what they are doing. This is nearly always a rewarding thing to do, just exhausting, because at the end of the day you feel as if you have given out just about every idea that you have. It takes a full day to recover and then another morning before I can start to think up some new stuff that I can use on myself.

This working almost full-time will continue and I have just been asked to carry on doing so until the end of this academic year.  So my idea of a gradual reflection will have to be put off once again. Perhaps next year will be less frenetic.

In the meantime Glynn Thompson has been showing his Damien Hirst inspired show at the Tetley and Terry and Colin went to see it. I’m not sure what they thought, but I presume they enjoyed the story. Terry contacted me to let me know that the experience had reminded him of another couple of stories, and so it goes, one story sparks off another and so on. Frank Lisle had told him a story about Jacob Kramer, Kramer not just giving his name to the art school, but providing a romantic role model of the artist/drunk, a role model, (according to Glynn’s story) apparently one that Patrick Oliver could have been responding to when he was a ‘wild young artist’, one of the ‘Teddy Boys of British Art’ as Patrick liked to remember. Tales of Kramer would have of course circulated around the Oliver house from the time when Patrick’s father W. T. Oliver was art critic for the Yorkshire Post.  Then of course according to Glynn, a young Hirst bumped into Patrick, a man who had refined his wild man artist image to perfection, and who would thus be an inspiration to said young man, and so it goes, and on we go into an eventual art history. I’m not sure, but a good story is a good story, myths are always better than reality, they strip out the dross and boring bits and leave us with what we need.

I am now of course part of the art college story myself. I’m not sure what role I take anymore, perhaps one of the old codger, or the historian or maybe it’s a bit like ‘Goodbye Mister Chipps’, O’Toole’s role in that film cementing another Patrick connection into place. Patrick used to say I was a good translator, working to help students understand all the things that were flying over their heads. Perhaps I was worried about bad teaching. I still want to see the business done well, I still want to see students fired up by excitement, but putting out stuff too far above their heads can mean they look up for a moment and miss it, but of course it can mean that some will look up and keep their eyes posted, these are of course those blessed with good eyesight and they will go far, but others need someone else to get them to look up again, and to help them focus, because if there is nothing there when they first look, they might not do so again.

Patrick’s wife has contacted me and wants to house his old notebooks somewhere, luckily the college has an archive now and they can go there, however I'm pretty sure they will need the services of a translator again if those old notebooks are to make sense to anyone.

Fine Art Year one. First briefings after Christmas

The lack of recent blog posts is a clear reflection of what happens if you return to full-time work. This past month or so has seen all my energy sucked into marking, organising and preparing for assessments across all three years of BA Fine Art, as well as continuing to teach on the evening access programme.

However, I have a brief moment of respite before a marks meeting so will attempt to put down some reflections on what I have been doing before I forget.

First year students were given two new briefs to work on in preparation for studio moves into strands which will happen next week.

The first brief OUFA404 Materials and Processes is centred on documenting all the new materials and processes they are encountering. This brief was designed to run alongside the fact that workshops in clay, plaster, wood, metal, print, photography, video, specialist software such as Illustrator and Photoshop etc are being held, as well as the fact that they are preparing for entry into their specialist strand.

The second brief OUFA409 Fine Art Practices 3, is designed to help students think through how their practice might be affected by the move into a specific strand area, and it gives them time to start to demonstrate their own unique position in relation to their practice. In particular it stresses the impact that material thinking might have on their practice, this being why this brief is presented alongside the Materials and Processes brief.

The above are the two brief fronts, on their backs is all the technical information such as learning outcomes and weightings etc.

Both briefings involved students sitting through my PowerPoint presentations. So as it saves me time find these below. I did of course talk extensively and elliptically around these slides with much walking about and answering questions, but the slides may give a flavour of what was being introduced.

These are a selection of the slides to support the Fine Art Practices 3 briefing.

These are the slides to support Materials and Processes briefing.

The lecture finished with students listening to Reich's 'Come Out' as an example of how process and content can become synthesised.

End of year thoughts

In the sixth-century the following was written in the Visnudharmottara.

A king asks a sage about the meaning of art:

"Oh Lord of men," replied the sage,

"he who does not know properly the

rules of painting cannot discern the

characteristics of images."

"Then please narrate the rules

of painting," replies the King.

"Without a knowledge of the art

of dancing," says the sage, "the

rules of painting are very difficult

to understand."

"Then please speak to me about the

art of dancing … "

"The practice of dancing cannot be

understood by one who is not

acquainted with music. Indeed

without music, dancing cannot exist

at all."

"Tell me then first about music … "

"Without singing, music cannot be

understood," replied the sage. "He

who knows the rules of singing

knows everything properly."

As the sage continues you come to realise all is connected and that the arts feed off each other. They of course also feed off our whole life experience. A sense of balance comes from our peculiar ability to walk on two legs, our sense of rhythm comes from the constant heartbeat that lies beneath our chest, our feeling for the dark and light from our experience of the turning of the Earth away from and towards the Sun every 24 hours. A Guardian review this week of ‘The body in Indian Art’ reminded me of visiting the ‘In the Image of Man’ exhibition years ago at the Hayward Gallery. Indian art is about totalities, it doesn’t separate the body from the mind, doesn’t have a legacy of Christian bodily evil. Perhaps this is where our obsession with categorising things comes from. Sex and spiritual transcendence are close companions in the sensuality of Indian religious art, the body maintaining its centrality to experience. If the body is neglected or put at the command of a separate ‘mind’ this I believe only leads to repression and eventually some type of madness.

My recent venture back into working full-time on the fine art programme has convinced me that we have been getting things wrong. (See last post) I am reminded again of the time I spent with an Indian sculptor, he taught me much in the period he was over here, perhaps more than I knew at the time. In particular he told me that when he was working with his ‘master’ he was introduced to a method of understanding where the seat of the sculptural experience lay. He was first of all blindfolded, then introduced to a large stone carving by feeling it. He had to feel the forms of the sculpture and speak as he traced its forms with his fingers and every time he felt a significant change in the sculpture’s dynamics he had to explain this to the master. Sometimes the master would confirm his findings and at other times the master would retort that although there was a change it was not significant. He did this several times and several different sculptures were used, each time the master would also recite particular passages from scripture, intone lines of poetry or hum a particular rhythm that would be used to guide the young artist towards the wider consequences and meanings related to the sculpture that was being experienced. Gradually the young sculptor built up in his mind an understanding of the ‘touch’ of great sculpture. He grasped what it was for one form to meet another, how the rhythm of the hand-feel corresponded to the ‘life’ of the sculpture and how strong and weak joints feel. At the time I was very impressed, and more so now that I am older and look back upon the failure of atomised educational theory.

When I go back to work next year I will be presenting two new modules to the first year students and then moving immediately into assessment preparation for 2^nd and 3^rd years. I have tried to adjust my presentations to account for something more than what the modules aspire to, but I wont be available very often to personally explain or give advice as to what I meant because of my administrative duties. Perhaps what I resent most of all is the time taken away from students by the assessment process. What my old friend taught me was how important the ‘master’ / ‘student’ relationship is. Sometimes we forget how experienced we are, I have in my time looked at thousands of art works from many different cultures and spend many hours contemplating their meaning and how they were made. On top of this I have years of my own practice behind me and this is communicated at its best in a ‘one to one’ situation, where I can show what something can be, where I can demonstrate by miming or humming a tune or linking in a particular piece of music or poetry or simply pointing out something about life and how art can be made to reflect it. Life experience is something we don’t value as much as other cultures, as I was told when I went into phased retirement and questioned why my salary was so low, “We don’t value experience”. A strange phrase but one that is a product of a managerial culture, a culture whereby the people who make the decisions don’t have to be able to practice what is at the core of what is being taught. Once computers became readily available what they seemed to be used for more and more was the collecting of statistical information, each human contact reduced to number-crunched data and here perhaps lays the problem. In order to make decisions people need information but the only information that appears to count is quantitative. Qualitative information is either collected as sound-bites or simply ignored, but only in those ‘one to one’ moments of human contact will authentic communication take place and those moments are becoming few and far between. 

Back to work

Monday and Tuesday saw me back into work. As I’m in phased retirement I don’t have to spend my summers timetabling and writing schemes of work and all those ARPs, APEs and other reports are being written by others, thank God.

However this does not mean I escape planning and preparation all together, and as this type of work is essential to any successful art educational experience, some reflection on the issues are perhaps needed. Suffice it to say that this has always been for me the least enjoyable part of my work in the Art College, and paradoxically because I have been in charge of several departments has been one that I have had a lot of experience with. Timetabling in particular was and still is a nightmare because it is often taken out of your hands, even though it appears at first sight to be something you can control. For instance I went to the HR department before I left for a break to let them know I was teaching contextual studies to 2 groups of Fine Art first year students every Monday all day, every week this coming year. They took down the information and were pleased that I had made my request timely. However I come back to find that the rooms have now been booked to someone else, who has argued priority. I have no status anymore and so what was a simple operation has now become a troublesome time consuming worry. I may find myself in a totally inappropriate room, don’t know how I will manage the group size, am not sure of availability of ceiling projectors etc. All have knock on. The later you get to find out what room you are in the less time you have to book equipment. I can see the “Why didn’t you order a projector earlier on?” question being asked me in a couple of weeks time as I’m desperately chasing round trying to solve something I thought I’d solved at the end of last year. Even after all these years of teaching things like this really stress me out.

The other issue is of course how does everything it together? The course is re-structuring and we are moving towards a system of 4 pathways. I have mentioned this before, but they are: Painting and printmaking; sculpture; drawing and finally media. I’m sure this will be interesting and will allow for different types of focus to develop, whilst hopefully maintaining an awareness that Fine Art practice is now multi disciplinary and that practitioners are much more mobile with their concepts. Sometimes making a film, sometimes a painting and at another time creating a performance. An artist like Frances Alys being typical of the contemporary practitioner. At one moment drawing, at another film-making and at another we might find him making exquisite small oil paintings. Quite a challenge of course to decide what the focus would be. The real driver being perhaps his conceptual engagement with the world and therefore I’m reminded how important the contextual studies part of the course will be. It will be the context that will often drive the enquiry, no matter which strand the student is in, their own sensibility will be what initially suggests which strand they move into, but they will need to inform that sensibility and at times challenge it.

In order to manage the new strand system, studios will become mixed year studios for the first time. The second and third year students initially moving in together in the 4 designated areas and 1^st years moving into the strands after an introductory diagnostic first term. The logistics of this will need lots of fine-tuning, because no matter how much you plan in advance reality will rear its ugly head and un-thought of scenarios will develop. My main worry would be numbers. What if all the students in year one wanted to paint? How would we persuade three-quarters of them to go into strands they didn’t initially think of as being suitable. I had a lot of experience of this with electives. It was a choice based system, but with only so many places on each option. I eventually developed a system whereby there was a part ‘lottery’ element to the system, which operated as an escape valve for those students who felt they had ‘missed out’. They only had the system to kick out at rather than an individual. However in the fine art case I suspect students will be told which strand they will go into if choices become unbalanced. We shall see.

Each year has different needs and planning how to serve these, as well as merge the work spaces is very difficult. This is particularly worrying during a time when we are taking 80 first years, effectively almost doubling numbers.

I shall try not to focus on these things as I don’t want to get too involved with management but I’m sure that at times they will create issues as the year progresses. My main issue however has been when do I have to deliver and what. After our various jaunts and happy sessions during Freshers week , I shall be kicking off the first years with a lecture and a ‘Transformations’ brief. I shall be examining how ideas can travel across cultures, times and practices. Looking at how similar forms and concepts reshape themselves as materials change, artists find alternative approaches and culture or society shifts value sets. Then students will put up a display of what they were doing before they came to LCA and this will become the starting point for a series of transformations, both intellectually and materially. (It also allows us to get lots of students through workshop inductions as well). This will all kick off on the 30^th September and then the following week I will give an introductory lecture into the critical studies area of the programme, again with first years. (Looking at my timetable, I will only work with the 1^st years this first semester.) The key practical module that I will be supporting will be ‘The Individual and the Social’. I will be re-introducing Modernism/formalism Greenberg etc and the move towards sociological interests, Berger/Clark etc. and cover the rise of Feminist practices, the male gaze etc. all to be fitted in during this first semester of 8 lectures and associated seminars. Students will give presentations in December and in order to do this I will need rooms for two days. A long way off but already a worry considering how hard it is to find a room for one day. Semester two will cover issues relating to the various strands, but I wont be preparing lectures for those until the Christmas break. I have taught contextual studies across several programs here and for a while was head of the contextual studies department but so far this blog has not really touched on this. I will try and open out the issues as they arrive., in particular the thorny problem of how to make a synthesis between practice and theory. Praxis.