Site Specific Module

 I have been back with the first year fine art students and working out at Thwaites Mill. This is the beginning of the site specific module and students have to get proposals checked off for health and safety and to ensure they don’t clash with each other/understand the nature of working in shared spaces.

This part of the year is very bitty. Last week I was working with third year students and starting to get a feel for where some of them were. Two days is though not enough to really get to grips with their needs. In my last post I made some remarks about the need for more supportive or collaborative working, but the reality is that most artists work on their own and this is the case for most of the people I was talking to. However I still feel conversation helps. Talking things through helps an idea settle, but it doesn’t have to be in the formal spaces of a crit.

A typical encounter that illustrates the reality of art education.

I was on my way home after a day of second marking dissertations. As I walked away from the office one of our second year students stopped me to ask about how he could embed a clock into a painting. We started to talk and I started to draw. I introduced the student to Billy Klüver, now dead of course but in his time vital to both Robert Rauchenberg and Jasper Johns. Billy was the technician behind many of their pieces and he was brought in to solve problems such as “how do you wire this up so it does this…etc”. I pointed out that Klüver helped artists to think through what they were doing. I drew some technical isometrics of how the back of some of Rauchenberg’s combines would have looked; detailed how thick the support must be to house a set of things that needed to be behind the canvas, and the need for precise planning and good woodwork skills. I ended up with drawings that looked like shallow shelving units, each element the student wanting to include, (the clock was just the first of several), being planned for, measured up and the support designed to fit. Then he could stretch his canvas over the now much deeper ‘frame’, knowing exactly where the spindle for the clock hands would go, as well as all the other bits and pieces he wanted to bring into the picture.

This accidental encounter was one of those ‘conversations’ all practical people have but they are vital to the learning experience. Perhaps all I need to do is to be let loose to have a chat. Doesn’t seem very pedagogically powerful does it? Hey ho, so it goes.

So back to the first years. It was very cold out there and I froze right down to the bone. This is a problem because I don’t think too clearly when I get cold. It slows my mind as well as my body. Working with Kelly, we had 25 students each and walked with them individually to where they had proposed to develop work. Each person was then questioned as to how they would project manage the work and why they had developed the proposals they had. (They had made a site visit a week earlier, taken photographs and developed ideas).

There are two main issues to consider, the context/history of the site and the phenomenological impact of actually being there. My own responses tend to be focused more on the “what would happen if?” side of things. I tend to be slightly suspicious of too much historical research if what it means is that students start to illustrate rather than respond. For instance the mill is very dark; something inserted into it that is light can therefore be fascinating. One student last year, working in the mill, simply covered half an old hanging rusty chain with aluminium foil. The visual impact was startling and the afterimage reverberations as to meaning, opened out into several different areas. If the work is to succeed I really feel you need to dance lightly, making several trials and testing how materials work. The other issue is time management; too many students have convoluted ideas that will take a long time to make up away from the site. The problem being that once you transport them out of the studio they often just look too small or totally ‘wrong’ because you have been unconsciously making the work to the studio and the studio is smaller and lighter and has different spatial characteristics. We shall see. We are off on an Easter break now and hopefully the weather will change, it’s much harder to make art in inclement conditions. I have also finished second marking my pile of dissertations, so am up to speed with the assessment processes. Too many of the students are writing these dissertations without an awareness of how the research they have done could support practice. I proposed 4 areas around which dissertations could be written some time ago, but as with so many things I have proposed over the years, it was ignored. Just for the record these were; Research into a context for practice; research into practice itself; research into subject matter to be used in practice and research into audiences for practice. The point being that ‘practice’ was always at the forefront of the students’ reason for writing, therefore they might find the activity useful.

Third year critiques

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. 

Critiques year three

Finally getting back to teaching today. I’ve been doing nothing but day after day of interviews. We had over 500 applicants and we see everyone. This meant looking through portfolios and giving each person approx. 15 minutes to convince us that they should be a degree student. In order to cut the time down, we choose one piece of work from the portfolio and take it to the interview room, this is what people have to then talk about, whether they like the work or not, the days of students going through the portfolio from front to back are now long gone. Sometimes potential students find the process one of opening up and being creative, at others I get the feeling they find it autocratic and impersonal.

As soon as interviews finished it was assessment time again and we were marking collaborative work done by the first year. This week though I’m doing critiques with year three. This group of students is one I haven’t worked with since I did a drawing week with them in the second year, so it’s interesting for me to get a feel of where they are. The morning session picked up some fundamental problems, the chief of which was pragmatic testing. I was worried that students were letting ideas drag on. The reality of professional practice is that you have to keep making things that can be exhibited. This means being pragmatic about what you hold on to and being prepared to let go. I think this group of students are over-working and over-thinking their production. They are not testing out the reality of how to get the idea out there and it feels as if everything is too comfortable. I realise they have just been writing their dissertations but again the reality is all of us have to manage multi-tasking if we are to get anything done. I’m also aware of students working out of other institutions and I would expect to see far more resolved pieces by now. Perhaps the critiques have not been aggressive enough or previous successes have been replayed too many times, whatever it is a wake-up call is needed. Above all the key issue is work. Work creates more work and work is often all there is. Then, when you have  a pile of stuff you can go in with that critical eye and pick stuff out, but fiddling about gets you nowhere, as I can clearly remember when I think back to some students I was at college with, including at times myself.

Thinking of long gone days, this is another of those foundation ‘Morning Drawing’ exercises.

‘Looking down at the body and drawing what you can see’.

Students are asked to draw landscapes of the body. Standing at an easel, they are to simply look down at themselves and draw what they see. Gradually the drawings would move from having to deal with extremely foreshortened perspective, to issues such as in and out of focus. In particular drawings would have to deal with disappearing noses, shapes that were shadows of their former selves, coming into and out of focus. How the eye works its way across surfaces previously understood from views in the mirror, now having to be re-invented as landscapes of personal ownership. The point about these drawings being of course that the familiar can become strange again, simply by taking a new perspective on it.

The students I spoke to this morning need to be able to grasp this point. They all had interesting subjects, but they needed to refresh their ideas by taking on new and different perspectives. Always of course easier said than done.

Assessments and Interviews

This is a very strange time for me in terms of teaching. If fact I’m doing very little work on the studio floor. Most of my time is spent either writing and putting together lectures, or focusing on those other aspects of the job such as assessing or interviewing. It’s also the end of the dissertation supervision process; (something I will return to at some point), I will though have to mark them of course in the near future.

I still find assessments hard. The four learning outcomes for this last one are weighted, one at 15% others at 10%, 25% and 50%. These differences of course are supposed to relate to relative weightings in importance, but I can never get my head around this. We were assessing the module, ‘Fine Art the Individual and the Social’, my feeling is that what the module does is help students identify what sort of practitioner they are. Are they someone who responds to the social conditions around them or are they someone who depends on mining into their own lives and their own responses to making. It’s a very crude division of course as every individual is part of the social group, but early on in an artist’s career it’s a good thing to test yourself out as to approach. For some students it’s simply a question of deciding whether or not they are an observer or an engager. But I’m supposed to give a number to a weighted outcome that is an assessment of a particular ‘skill’ that the student now has. But these are not measurable skills. How do I know what has happened in someone’s head? A switch might have turned on because of this experience and I might be able to guess that it has from a change in the type of work being done, but it’s not something you can give a mark to.

Perhaps it’s all about conversations. Each time I actually have a conversation in front of a student and their work, I feel as if something is being passed on. Just the way you speak about work opens out opportunities. You might be elliptical and circle round things and always allude to things ‘off stage’ so to speak and this might be the best way of getting someone to realise how their work operates and yet on another day you might be very direct and to the point and just use ostensive definitions. It’s about what works and what is memorable. Confusion can lead to clarity, just as clarity can lead to confusion. But how can I give a mark based on the fact that I believe the student’s understanding is ‘off stage’ at the moment, but that I also think that’s the best place for it, as a too clear understanding might lead to a loss of magic and mystery. All I can say is I think/believe based on my gut feeling that a student is doing something right and that they are doing things that suggest that they might make a good/interesting artist. However, I have to do my job and that means I have to conjour up a number. Kant as always has a good phrase for this, "An intuition of the bare two-oneness", his point being that before the full blown system that we call mathematics was an intuitive phase, one within which the rules were worked out but which operated on pure intuition. I would say that is how my maths operates when it comes to giving numbers to students during assessments.

I’m also interviewing. Interviewing takes me back to Foundation days, either because I’m looking at ‘A’ level students who ought to take a Foundation course before going onto a BA or finding students from foundation courses that are simply not covering the range of basics that I would have thought they ought. It’s not all bad news though. I interviewed a couple of students from Greenhead College in Huddersfield this week and they had very strong ‘A’ level portfolios. John Standeven an ex-Leeds foundation student is head of art there and has been doing a fantastic job of passing on some of the key visual thinking skills that all art students ought to have before setting out on a degree programme. It’s not the qualification that’s important, it’s the experiences that students have while they are on programmes. As always it’s about passionate individuals who can communicate.

Fine Art Year One Collaborative Module

Tuesday was again working with Fine Art year one and getting students ready for collaborative practice. We now have the groups finalised so have to make it clear as to what they need to do. Part of this is delivering a short presentation on the use of gantt charts and how to develop and use project management skills. Students actually seem to be interested in this, the chart I started with them is now posted onto the ‘EStudio’ site. See below.

We also showed examples of last year’s collaborative module, this all being possible because video inductions and introductions to how to use video editing software are done in parallel with the project. Click below to see an example from last year:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZZZzUAf8O4

Video has become one of those tools that have become almost mandatory for student artists to understand. It is used to make practice, as well as to document practice and because we are surrounded by a media soaked world, without an understanding of how the language is constructed, you are in risk of being cut loose from your culture.  Every group will have to make and screen a video as part of the module and they only have two weeks within which to get this done. This will force group interaction and they will quickly learn to have to manage group dynamics, which is another area we have to introduce.  Tuckman’s "forming, storming, norming, and performing" being another 1960s concept they are being introduced to.

These are half day sessions and we are working with groups of approximately 25. The First year has 50 students on it this year, (planned for 85 next year due to changes in funding and other issues), on Tuesdays the group is split in half to enable more theoretical issues to be introduced within a question and answer framework. While one half of the group is getting gantt charts and group psychology, the other half is getting a more detailed look at the history of collaborative practice.

Collaboration day one

Monday and it’s snowing heavily. I have to deliver a lecture on Collaborative Practice as it’s a briefing day for the new module. I concentrate on how every artist is and always has been linked to other people. I used this diagram below as a key image, each line drawn figure being directly connected to each other and relative sizes can be changed easily according to focus.

The main historical reference I use though is Colab and 1980s post-punk practice, students seem to find the 1980s very like the present climate and I can make lots of references to both art and politics.

The afternoon is mainly spent trying to get the students into groups of 6, the following day will be working with these groups to establish what it is they can achieve in the time allocated for the module. The snow kept up and college closed early, so we all had to be out by 4.00pm.

Back to Work: Fine Art Year One

It has been a slow start back to work this New Year. I have been back for two weeks but week one consisted of pastoral tutorials with the first year and Monday week two was about catching up with those who weren’t spoken to the week before. On the Tuesday we took the students on a tour of local galleries. Most of this was to do with making sure students are well on with their modules and that they understand what to do for each one. Not my most favorite aspect of the job but it is now a technical requirement that students understand module outcomes; they will be asked directly whether or not they were helped understand how they would be assessed and answers go into the student survey, which will at some point be published. Students are working on three modules. The first of these, ‘Individual and Social’ will need to be handed in during week three of the new term. This is the module most of us would have in the past thought of as ‘studio practice’ or ‘the student’s work’.  Alongside this module they are also developing evidence for ‘Materials and Processes’, which is essentially a record of every technical process they come across. It mainly consists of documenting inductions into workshops, and the other module is ‘PPP1’ a professional development module whereby everything from visits to art galleries, transcriptions of artists talks, and reviews of art magazines is done. This can also be a blog, so some students will just have to tell me they are ongoing with this as there is no computer terminal available where I’m working. Both these modules will be handed in later on nearer the end of the term. The rest of my time has been spent doing dissertation tutorials. On Wednesday I sat from 9.00am till 7.45pm doing these one after the other. The writing is now getting to the point that I can see what is emerging and on the whole students are coping well with something that can be an onerous task. The hand-in is mid February and once that date passes I might reflect on the process.

Probably the most interesting session last week was the galleries visit. We started with our own gallery that is showing a curated response to the Brontes, a very Yorkshire show, but one whereby I could explain how sometimes galleries will work to a theme. In this case the work ranged from projection, via intricate paper-cutting to weather records of the Yorkshire Moors. It was put on in conjunction with a conference over at the university and curated by an ex-member of staff, Nick Cass.  This was totally different to the show over at the Burton Gallery which was hosting Christopher Wood an ex student from the 1980s. Chris has been painting for some time now and has a solid reputation. This was his first one-man show in Leeds, which surprised me. He was showing a lot of his prints, mono and etching in particular. We also looked at how this was hung. The prints were all different sizes and Chris had had them all hung to an invisible horizontal at an eye level of about 4 feet from the floor. Students were asked to check fittings and to think why each exhibition was hung differently. After looking at the permanent collection we went on to the Henry Moore institute. The 1913 show is very good, but I’m aware most students are not aware of how important some of these pieces are. In particular I wonder how long it will be before we see a classic Metaphysical De Chirico, Duchamp’s ‘Standard Stoppages’ and a Picasso cubist still-life together on show again in Leeds. There is also an excellent Helen Chadwick show on which details how she put together her light-boxes. Colour tests, technical drawings, mock-ups etc. were all used to help get a picture of how she went about thinking through the process, this was excellent material for the PPP1 module. Hopefully it was also a useful experience for any student thinking about what it is to be an artist. Before we left to go for dinner all the students were inducted into the Henry Moore library, again a fantastic resource.

The afternoon was spent initially at the Leeds City Art Gallery  Nike Savvas exhibition and students were taken into the accompanying installation by Amanda Phillips the education officer. Whether or not they liked the work, the control required to get all the coloured tapes in place was a useful lesson, together of course with an understanding of how the artist sent the work, (rolls of coloured plastic tapes with instructions) an aspect of sending work off to exhibitions that is so often forgotten about.

Finally we went to ‘Mexico’ (an independent art space) and another ex-student, James Maxfield gave a presentation as to how the space had developed. I could tell this was where most of the students were at last taking an interest.  The fact that the curators were young and not long out of college obviously ticked their boxes and this was the first time students asked questions all day. Fair enough I thought. This was something they could relate to and James was able to explain to present students how his second year cohort developed a gallery in a basement and that the experience had been invaluable. Making links and networking as always seem to be the key elements to getting off to a successful career. If only I had been better at it.