Page 54 - Studio International - May 1972

population will remain undisturbed. Isolation, sustain a concept of art education which includes compatible. The fear to regulate, to decide and
social, cultural, financial, etc., is the key to the research as a vital function, and will tend to decide against can act as a masquerade for the
role of the art school and to its effect upon its instead—as already seems to be happening in fear of the responsibilities of maintaining
students. Art education will only become potent more than one instance—to enforce a freedom, in art and in art education as in other
if and when it overcomes this isolation; in this hairy-chested teleology: 'practical' teaching for matters. Social realism in art might come to
it faithfully reflects the condition of art itself in `practical' results. There are advocates enough mean something very different, very much less
Western societies. No wonder the consequences for such a policy, but I don't believe it could simple-minded, than we have been led to
of integration into the polytechnics have been operate effectively for long without a more expect, if it could only serve to describe an
so various and so confused—a medley of rigorous screening of potential student entrants intellectual accomplishment rather than an
advantages and disadvantages, of facilities lost to fine-art courses than the DES can afford to ideological stance.
and gained, staff hired, fired and resigned, permit. After all, there are still pressures to There is a kind of consensus of opinion, born
students exalted and repressed. The crucial maintain the notion that art students become art of an induced habit of mind, that 'artists' or art
issues become lost to view. The polytechnic students because they are not sufficiently students are not equipped to deal with
administrations must see the art departments practical to be anything else, and it is a legacy of intellectual matters, and that if they attempt to
essentially as new faculties to be administered: one function of the colleges of art that successful do so they stand in danger of losing their power
how could they see them otherwise ? So much applicants have to be provided with at least to work magic. (There's one grain of truth in
for the autonomy of the former colleges of art: some opportunities to exhibit their eccentricity. this : a moment's thought might indeed serve to
so much also, one would think, for their Under cover of all this there will always now be inhibit them from trying to work
isolation. But the art colleges, having become art some students who manage to research the transformations.) In actual fact it seems possible
departments, still seem to feel, even under consequences of a common-sense ontology. that the fine art departments include a higher
second-level administrations appointed and The second reason for optimism is that some percentage of students of high potential for real
effectively controlled by the overall polytechnic desacralisation of art is already inevitable as a and effective intellectual achievement than is
administrations, that they have mystical consequence of processes which have been at attracted to any other comparable form of higher
educational interests to safeguard: the 'visual work in art itself for a considerable time. The education. At the moment this potential is
intelligence' of students and staff, and their inevitable questioning of the hermetic status of largely squandered in the name of self-
power to 'enhance the quality of life', etc. etc. the art object (a pseudo-status, established as a expression—a part of the price paid by society
Of course, while the art departments are necessary condition for the development of a to maintain the illusion of the 'spiritual' and
preoccupied with impotent notions like these formalist 'ideology' of abstract art) has resulted `creative' freedom of the individual.
they will remain effectively isolated, i.e. in no in the availability to first-order art discourse, Ironically enough, it seems that the real
position to take real advantage of the greater once again after about twenty years of absorption barrier to an effective purpose in art education
facilities the polytechnics have to offer, nor to in essentially formal problems, of ideas and is the notion of 'are itself; it is upheld as an
benefit much from those interdepartmental information from other disciplines. It is now item of faith; it is a cause. In this cause, one
contacts which might result in some really becoming clear to some art students, if by no generation of students after another march
effective critiques being brought to bear upon means to all, that a series of problems can be purposelessly out into the wilderness, while
the current mythologies and theoretical seen to lie in the path of any assertion-making, behind them ring out the cries of their mentors :
vacuities of art. Unfortunately the 'outsider' in and that the pursuit of these problems cannot `Keep to the path now! Keep to the path!' q
such contacts, however well equipped in his be conducted within the conventional practice of
own speciality, comes initially to art in full and art and of art-object-making processes. (This is
awestruck awareness of his own unworthiness, not a justification of all claims to involvement in For example by Marcuse in 'Art as a Form of
Reality' in the symposium The Future of Art, Viking
his lack of 'creativity', his insensibility to the `conceptual art'; the majority of operators in Press; originally given as one in a series of lectures
mystique. So long as the mystical nature of art is `post-object' art rely, even more heavily than at the Guggenheim Museum, New York. See also
I. Mészàros, Marx's Theory of Alienation, Merlin
affirmed by the artists he is only too well those retardataire object-makers they claim to
Press, London, 1970 pp 205-214: 'In the form in
prepared to be baffled into silence or flattered supplant, upon mystification, fallacy and sheer which we know it, art is deeply affected by alienation,
into complaisance. Much of the original simple-mindedness.) because the "exclusive concentration of artistic talent
in some" is inseparably bound up with "its
art school outcry against absorption into The real concerns involved are wide-ranging.
suppression in the masses as a result of the division
polytechnics sounded a little like reluctance to The need to search for a body of theory in art— of labour". As Marx puts it: "as soon as labour is
join the hoi polloi, and plaintive voices5 still something to justify the practice, if practice it distributed, each man has a particular, exclusive
sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from
sound out against the idea that the art is—is an aspect of the need to end art's isolation;
which he cannot escape." '
departments should be administered by the the purpose of such a theoria would not be to 'What, for example, do we really understand by a
kinds of men accustomed to administering regulate the practice of art, but to establish passage like this : 'Sculptures like Span and
departments concerned with more mundane and some possibility of order and priority (in the Horizon are held together, not by the images they
may be seen to constitute, but, I want to say, by the
more 'practical' subjects—as it is there weren't broad sense) in its pursuit. In so far as art does meanings they make. It is as though Caro's sculptures
enough grounds for protest at the low level of indeed offer opportunities for access to and essentialize meaningfulness as such—as though the
administrative competence and vitality in the expression of some non-materialist systems of possibility of meaning what we say and do alone makes
his sculpture possible' ? (Michael Fried in Artforum,
average art college. evaluation, its practices and priorities are of February 5967). Is this a statement about
There is real hope that this whole situation wide concern. The pursuit of the theoria of art intentionality ?
will change with time, for two principal employs many more and more instructive kinds 3 During the years 1964 to 5970 the number of students
on degree courses in polytechnics and further
reasons. The first is that as the polytechnics of critique than those employed in the education nearly trebled (Statistics of Education
begin to recruit staff from among the ranks of conventional, therapeutic, art-school search for 1970, Vol. III : Further Education. HMSO); the
growth rate in art education during the past ten years
their own graduates, there is a chance that the `meaningful' self-expression.
has been around 50%, and a total brake was put on
influence of art-college isolationism will be The potential in terms of art education now the development of new Dip AD courses a couple of
gradually if slowly eroded. The bad alternative seems to lie in the direction of finding a means years ago.
to the old isolationism is that within the to explicate, rather than to decorate the world. 4 NUS Art/Design Education Policy Statement 1971;
not an impressive document.
polytechnics art education will become There is a connection between the need to 5 For instance Patrick Heron's as raised against the
straightjacketed and de-intellectualised. There realise this potential and the need to achieve `Murder of the Art Schools' in the Guardian last
is a danger that the polytechnics will be other aims with which the practice of art seems autumn.
6 See 'Some Concerns in Fine-Art Education', Studio
practically and ideologically unequipped to in other societies and at other times to have been International. October and November 1971.
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