Page 15 - Studio International - February 1973

connexion with the programme have been Correspondence difficulty that Ascott seems to have found is
offered by the British Council and other bodies. associated with the fact that education for the
Further grants for European activities at the artist occurs at art colleges. Now art colleges are
ICA, and for activities in Europe sponsored by themselves peculiar institutions. The US has its
the ICA, have been promised by the British fair share of them and Canada has still fewer
Government subject to our putting forward that have survived intact into the latter part of
satisfactory proposals. this century. The question of the survival of art
colleges is itself a contentious issue as witnessed
Content of the French programme by the furore that has accompanied the
The programme has been planned according to absorption of British art colleges into the Polys.
the following broad criteria. First, it is intended In Britain this is a national policy. In Canada the
that the exhibitions and events should not only situation in which Ascott found himself was
be of high quality in themselves but also fit in different — it is in effect, 'hands off'. An art
with the ICA's artistic and cultural policy (fluid college may do its own thing but it must be done
and pluralistic as this is). Second, they should as in isolation, and Ascott finds that this is not
far as possible offer a challenge to the British `relevant'. Whether it is relevant or not, it has
consciousness in 1973. allowed colleges like OCA to survive and
There is little doubt that the most challenging flourish, albeit detached from the mainstream of
aspect of French culture at present is in the education which of course occurs at the
intellectual field, particularly the movement university.
loosely and confusingly called 'structuralism'. It is the university that has picked up the
This has a small body of enthusiastic supporters challenge as far as art education is concerned. A
in this country (of whom Stephen Bann is a glance through the credentials of most major
well-known contributor to this journal) as well American artists will testify as to where they
as some outspoken critics. There is even perhaps received their education — not at art colleges
a certain latent francophobia among many which are associated with lack of rigour and
influential British intellectuals. Whatever manual training alone, but at the universities.
private reservations one may have about some Wittgenstein's house Ascott wished in his short year at OCA to
aspects of the French intellectual style, we have Cambridge philosophers have just heard, to form a community of artists, philosophers,
decided to seek out what is most vigorous and their alarm, that the Wittgenstein house is (once psychologists, etc. If he had walked one half
exciting in French intellectual life and to again) about to be demolished; attempts to save mile he would have found all this and more at
present it as constructively and lucidly as it as an archive and study centre having failed. the University of Toronto. It is however a quirk
possible to an English audience. The philosopher had this house built for his of administration, which he did nothing to
Some of the most eminent French people we sister in the Kundmangasse, Vienna, during the correct, that the facilities of a great university
would have liked to have in London were not late 192os. He designed it himself, with some are unavailable for art students and those of art
able to come: Levi-Strauss, Sartre, de Beauvoir, collaboration from Engelmann, who had been a colleges are unavailable for the university. The
Barthes. However, at the time of going to press pupil of Adolf Loos. Loos himself was a friend situation is endemic for art colleges in general.
we have acceptances from Jacques Derrida, of Wittgenstein; and the house is a remarkable Although your columns are not the place to
Raymond Aron, Tzvetan Todorov (who will and very personal example of an idealized dispute the issue a last word remains to be said
converse with George Steiner), Henri Lefebvre `Sachlichkeit'. about Ascott's reports of Canadian nationalism
and many others. The French Institute will run Every detail of the house was supervised or and the arts. It is not within the visual arts that
a parallel programme in March concentrating designed by Wittgenstein himself, and from all Canadian nationals have raised major issues,
on two specific themes : psychoanalysis and accounts its relation to the modern movement in rather debate concentrates, and rightly so, on
education. architecture is not unlike that of Jefferson's the absence of Canadian participation and
As regards the visual arts, we have found two Monticello to the building of that period. content within the social sciences. However
original French artists who are not well-known No study of the house has yet been written. when attention is focused on this issue of
in England. Paul-Armand Gene's exhibition, At the very least, this should be done before it Canadian cultural life it will not be as if there is
`Secondary Successions', consists of photos, is lost. To all accounts the present owners have nothing there to be found and all is, as Ascott
documentation and botanical specimens left it to fall into dilapidation in order to speed says, to be invented. A Canadian cultural life is
recording common plant life on the banks of the a demolition order to claim the value of the site. already there and all that is required are
Seine and the Thames respectively. I saw the Through your pages, please urge readers to educators who are aware and somehow
Seine part of the show at the Galerie Weiller in phone, write or call at the Austrian Embassy. appreciate this fact.
Paris last summer and invited Gette to prepare a DAVID BRETT ALFRED DANCYGER
parallel study of the Thames. Bernard Borgeaud Guiseley, nr. Leeds Dept. of Philosophy, Birkbeck College
writes of Gette's work: 'This is not a scientific University of London
study, nor a caricature of a scientific study, but Art education in Canada
simply a proposal for the "reading" of a place It would I think be wrong to allow no reply to
through certain elements which can characterize what Roy Ascott says about aspects of 'Art AMERICAN AND
it . . .' Bernard Lassus is an urbanist and education in Canada', Studio (October 1972),
plasticien who also practises a thorough and simply because of the misconceptions he leaves. CANADIAN
painstaking observation of popular art and Art education in Canada has long been the SUBSCRIBERS
architecture in the suburbs of Paris and other cinderella of the curriculum, much as it has Commencing with this issue,
French towns. He has a remarkable eye for been in Britain and the US. However there are subscribers in the US and Canada
gardens, window-boxes, roofs. serious differences that Ascott found out about will receive their copies of
There will also be a French film festival at the when he tried to apply a conception of British Studio International via air
ICA during March, directed by Derek Hill. q art education to the Ontario College of Art, 'the freight.
JONATHAN BENTHALL largest and oldest college of art in Canada'. The
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