Category: politics (Page 2 of 5)

Beyond the crisis in art – making and doing…

November 16, 2009 / Shaun Belcher / 0 Comments

artschool

I have long been a fan of the Sharkforum and resident artist/critic Mark Staff Brandl’s take on the present state of art criticism.

This is by way of a practice run to ‘scope’ the afore mentioned ‘art criticism now?’ agenda :-)Â I love that word ‘scope’ you’d think we were shooting bears..maybe we are…certainly foxes…

His latest project involves asking artists to write about their practice and its theoretical basis as a challenge to the current curatorial/academic mish mash that sometimes pertains in the IAW (international art world). He (I think correctly) cites the current fashion orientated dealer driven art world as suffering from a ‘glossies’ approach that has jettisoned the baby with the bathwater and quite correctly identifies a gap ‘in the market’ (how loaded that phrase has become in the past 30 years) where artist’s voices have become swamped in other louder discourses. Usually these discourses are tied hand and foot to financial and kudos driven ‘standing’ in that same ‘IAW’ and have long since lost any real veracity or in some cases coherance as theoretical writings let alone curatorial statements or overviews.

We here in Nottingham have some recent first-hand instances of this I.A.W. Gobbledygook thanks to our sudden emergence into the IAW thanks to Nottingham Contemporary. As our provincial minds sink in the flood of propaganda we are about to be verbally lashed by maybe it a good point for some circumspect analysis of this phenomena.

My own artistic history is pretty much framed in two decades. Firstly 1980-1990 then 2000-2010.

Phase 1: I graduated from Hornsey college of Art London (Middlesex University as is now) in 1981 and my art history tutor there was John A. Walker who has written extensively about the specifically political dimension to celebrity art as well as popular cultural connections ( Art in the Age of Mass Media 2001). At this time there was little separation between ‘art’ and ‘theory’. Indeed it was common practice to read and absorb not only general theory but specific artist’s statements. Magazines like Artscribe and Art Monthly put artist statements centre stage and along with a varied ‘contextual’ studies area which ranged from contemporary poetry to applied design we were encouraged not only to think for ourselves but also to be as wide in our reading as possible. In those days notions of ‘networking’ and ‘careerist’ ‘making it’ were viewed from a heavily left-wing viewpoint ( Hornsey had been a scene of ‘Riots’ alongside actions in France in 1968 ) so much so that I do not think the words were ever used.

hornsey2

We were serious (maybe too serious) students with serious ambitions to create serious artworks. There was little hope of making money except in maybe the long term and we set ourselves for many years of cold, lonely debate and artmaking activity in usually sub standard freezing cold ‘studios’. We did have a sense of community and a shared sense of what the ‘art world’ was and what was ‘significant’. What was written about in Artscribe framed the debate and our sense of the ‘art world’. There were few curatorial driven exhibitions to see and a hang of Bacon or Auerbach at Marlborough would be the highpoint of a summer. Serious artists shown seriously with little theoretical framing except in large Thames and Hudson or Phaidon tomes or reviews in the ‘serious’ press. Waldemar Janusczack,Â James Faure Walker, Sarah Kent, Brian Sewell, Mathew Collings…the names of those critics I remember 20 years later such was there standing….Artcribe had a ‘local’ i.e. usually London focus.

The art world then may have been smaller (pre boom and bust and the internet) but one felt one could get a handle of the major developments and the significant figures as they emerged. I remember seeing early shows by Doig and Julian Opie. Indeed I even ended up as a figure in a Gilbert and George photo piece. This was pre Goldsmiths, Hirst and the collapse (in my opinion) of those values and the boom in a larger, more fashionable, successful and in my opinion shallower art world. That art world was fed, watered and bloomed under the hands of an advertising executive and there was indeed a cut off point. The change in attitudes can be dated to the Royal Academy Sensation show…soon Stuart Morgan tried to sail artscribe into ‘International Art World’ waters and promptly sank….he just didn’t understand the Prada Bag set…

There and ever after even the hard leftists in the artworld found themselves chasing a beguiling gravy train and penned many acres of explication to justify having sold out out to a capitalist driven art world on a scale hitherto unimagined. Craig-Martin at Goldsmiths and principles of newly business orientated Academies across the country raced to catch up and cash in. This also coincided with a boom in markets across Europe and the USA and suddenly Brit was HIP. Nobody could bare to criticise a position we so fully deserved…now we were art top dogs we could look down on others and crow….and of course objective criticism.hard criticism..was thrown out the window.

I remember attending a show in the mid 1980’s where the curatorial statement ran to over a thousand words and was written in such impermeable ‘academese’ that nobody could actually read it. I dismissed it but foolishly did not realise the power of the word was on the march…..

Soon fellow artists were ‘locating their practice’ and referencing Derrida and Foucault. Indeed one friend went from rather dull printmaker to being an expert on postmodernism in a matter of weeks. The honesty and integrity of magazines like Artscribe and Art Monthly were suddenly outshone by their glossy step-children …Frieze, Flash etc etc and countless others that spawned and drowned in their own scenes. This also coincided with the first attempts to push M.A.’s and Phd’s for artists…..up until that point M.A.’s were few and far between and centred on the ‘top’ institutions The Slade, Chelsea and Royal College. More importantly these were heavily studio-based courses…long on practice short on theory….evn in the late 1980’s one could still just paint at the Royal College like David Hockney……just….

I still have some of the copies of artscribe I would spend hours poring over..then for a few brief years before his untimely death Peter Fuller’s ‘Modern Painters’ seemed to show a way forward with erudite well written articles by the likes of Jed Perl rubbing shoulders with informed ‘outsiders’ like David Bowie and poet Jamie McKendrick. I ws verbally lashed by a graphic designer who then head of Goldsmiths M.A. for even suggesting Fuller was worth reading as too rightist..the same Goldsmiths that spun a silk purse out of a sow’s ear a year later with Damien Hirst……ah the irony of it all. Nothing corrupts good intentions and political principles like a hefty wad of cash especially in the Halls of Academe….

What Fuller recognised (he was a good critic grounded in an appreciation of the English Tradition especially the writings of Ruskin, Moore, Sutherland and Hockney..read ‘Beyond the Crisis in Art‘ currently out of print) was the essential connection between an artists’s writing and their art. Especially if one moved closer to the arts and crafts area of Gill, David Jones and all the way back via William Morris to William Blake.

That tradition has never been broken it merely been supplanted by the hysterical winnying of a thousand ‘on the make’ mediocrities in both studio and academia. Tie-ins and stitch-ups replaced a grounded and reasoned debate. A in-depth knowledge was not needed to spurt out a trendy 1000 word review of Hirst that never delved into his fragile and lately revealed lack of knowledge of anything remotely to do with art. Like the Peter Sellers film ‘Being There’ all that mattered was to be in attendance at the ‘Cinderella’s Ball’ to catch some benefits from the King’s largesse. Many very good painters and theorists (equally) retreated to the shadows …some never to return…..John Hubbard, David Blackburn, Simon Lewty, Gillian Ayres even artists with reputations as formidable as Athony Caro’s, John Hoyland’s or Tom Phillips’ were not safe. they were all pushed form the banquet table by the greedy and Sunday Supplement friendly advertising savvy new brood….they have never left nor raised their snouts since…..Chapmans, Hirst, Emin..you know the rest….

Now there seems to be a new mood afoot where not only Aesthetics but the artists themselves may once more be allowed their rightful place at the high table of art and there a very good chance their writing a lot better than the charlatans who supplanted them.

Read David Smith, Robert Motherwell, CY Twombly, Philip Guston, Picasso, Matisse…….it a long and noble tradition of both thinking and doing..

Hirst on Art………don’t make me laugh

Nottingham Contemporary: The good, the bad and the ugly..

November 3, 2009 / Shaun Belcher / 0 Comments

piggies

I have recently had to pull a discussion post from the Nottingham Contemporary Free discussion group on facebook. Here I explain why and deliver a more considered version of basically the same material which less likely to offend the great and the good of this noble art city.

The post was a hasty response to seeing the effect the opening of ‘The Golden Egg’ is already having on culture in this city.

Geoffrey Diego Litherland’s show at the Castle was his reward for winning last year’s Nottingham Open competition. A well deserving winner and a good set of paintings in a show spoilt only by the ludicrous arrangement of hanging on a staircase. Meanwhile pride of place as usual went to a travelling Arts Council show. No better nor worse than many but surprising that second show on this theme in as many months…..are our curators trying to tap into an underlying theme about Nottingham..i.e. are we all trapped..or criminals?

My real disappointment was with the Castle Permanent Collection. It has always been a lacklustre space full of frankly third rate paintings and some gems. But previous visits never saw it looking quite so tawdry. When I pointed out that some of the signage appeared to be little more than blu-tacked to wall I got response..well all the money gone to the Egg. True or not it did make me wonder if Jack hadn’t given the cow away for a hill of beans…

Bad signage aside if one scans the ‘hidden’ collection (including a fine William Nicholson of downland I seen but once) one realises that very little of it gets aired. Something more than occasional Brit Art shows should be done with this space. Which leads me on to my main point. The Nottingham Contemporary..for good or ill and whatever it costs is here now….it has raised a certain part of the profile of the local art scene i.e. the pretentious outward looking side a notch from the days of Angel Row but what does that actually mean? We have lost at least three contemporary gallery spaces..Angel Row, Yard Gallery Wollaton and Bonington Gallery and gained two..New Art Exchange and The Egg. The Castle under Deborah Dean continues the kind of work Angel Row did…tied to ACE and very rarely escaping the confines of a certain tired politically correct viewpoint…..noble causes…dull art. Angel Row occasionally surprised but more often was as dull too and only at the end did it burst into some kind of life with the Parade shows..too little too late.

Love it or hate it Angel Row did occasionally show a mix of local and ‘international’ (i.e. what somebody saw in a magazine made it international…generally this meant American as most Art Press is USA dominated). There were never contemporary Spanish or French shows….I may be wrong as frankly I hardly bothered going in the place and when I did just got annoyed…

But it did (particularly in earlier days) show local ‘semi-professional’ artists. What worries me about The Egg is that it is a Tate Lite for the region and nothing more……in this sense it very similar to the Museum of Modern Art Oxford which apart from a ‘local artist’ space in their cafe (still operating after 20 plus years) never showed local artists unless they had made it to the glossies….

This may be one of the reasons that Oxford has virtually no thriving local arts scene..like Nottingham had up to now….it virtually ended ambitions before they flowered….I knew however hard I tried I would never ‘make it’ there….

So if The Egg shows international ( USA and Bradford born Hockney so far but he famous so that OK) and New Art Exchange is so heavily ring-fenced by its own mission statement (although I hear the curator there is trying to reflect the changing nature of the environment..) then with the loss of so many spaces for exhibition where are local artists to show? If you then say but look at the plethora of cutting edge spaces that sprung up recently I’d retort with yes and how long without funding will they last? A few have been primed with money by the Arts Council to create the impression of a vibrant local art scene to spin around The Egg but truth is ACE finding will not keep them alive forever…..just long enough to get through next year’s Brit Art spectacular is my guess then what…?

Meanwhile the mid-career (i.e. older not dead yet but been going 25 plus year artists) who actually created the ‘Nottingham Art Scene’ have been turfed out of their studios or faced rent rises and most scrabbling in the gutter or the studio equivalent. Apart from the bitterness this provokes this also bodes ill for the future as younger artists see the good and bad side of dedicating a life to their noble career…

Discounting local anarcho-capitalist venture The Art Organisation and volunteer driven/ace space The Surface there is little in the way of a middle ground left..in fact nothing left…for a serious artist who not on the Faberge Egg list (i.e. international by the magazines definition or on the Tate’s radar etc etc ) to aim at.

My ill thought out and pulled rant did raise one serious proposal that would help but which will not get funding. A serious space for local serious artists on a more permanent basis like replacing the tired dusty Castle collection with a proper survey of local artistic output (not the Open…that’s too much like a jumble sale) would help…..then we would have less bitterness and less frustration.

At present to be a mid-career artist in this city is to feel like a unwanted guest at a shiny teenager’s party we not invited to…and when we do arrive we constantly reminded that ‘making it’ is more important that actually making it…the art work…..it the disease of contemporary art institutions and education…..until that addressed we will continue to clutch at Golden Eggs that when cracked leak sand not gold…eggs…just eggs..

Bread and Circuses

August 17, 2009 / Shaun Belcher / 0 Comments

fineart For a long time I have been known for the acerbic (sour or bitter tasting) nature of my cartoons attacking the poor denizens of the contemporary art world or I.A.W. as it likes to call itself these days i.e. the celebrated International Art World…

For most of this time the cartoons have been born out of frustration and despair at the lengths individuals with slim talents and even slimmer grasp of ideas (let alone skills) would go to network their way into advantagous positions in the glorious I.A.W.

This has been particularly galling here in Nottingham as both the local council and the arts council here (desperate for some credibility and clout after several decades of little interest in the fate of the arts) have seemingly combined to save all our artistic souls.

So called ‘mid-career’ artists (polite euphamism for almost dead it seems) are being hogwashed with tales of cutting edge advances and a whole new generation of brilliant Trent graduates are about to break through big-time in the (you guessed it) I.A.W.

Well I am so out of the loop with current I.A.W. parlance to comment but frankly they will have to chuck an awful lot more than the current Â£19 million and rising at this lot to do that..Why?..

Simply put you cannot create a ‘scene’ EVER. You can puff yourself up and say yes we have more graduates than Birmingham or Leicester or cite the occasional fluke success (Mr Starling did photography here NOT fine art – that he learnt at Glasgow School of Art but that may just be another inconvenient truth for the powers that be).

So the shiny new shed (homage to John Newling?) with its colour co-ordinated green and gold exterior ( council colours ..what you hadn’t realised that??? perfect as a new Robin Hood Theme Park should art go west) is the gate to a new artistic dawn? Of course not and even the most deluded wannabe artist in desperate straits couldn’t quite believe that but there such slim pickings here these days that even that illusion is grasped like a nettle and hung on to…….tightly.

It makes good business sense (illusions drive key performance indicators….especially graduate recruitment).Trent already spills out 100 plus creative geniuses per annum….Where do they all go???….Well the dole seems a likely destination…and that just the start of the problem.

With an ‘unforseen’ downturn the great and good have committed virtually a year’s council tax to a project that already sunk…

There never was a bottonless pit of ever-increasing talent and parental finance to pay for this shiny future. Most of the newly enboldened middle classes hoodwinked themselves for a while into believing that all God’s children could work in the golden goose land known as I.A.W. but that dream has long since collapsed..fine art is not the new architecture…..or fashion come to that.

These days even talented graphic designers and fashion students (ones with both rich parents and some amount of actual skills) are finding the moveable feast has long moved on. So what hope for frankly less able fine art graduates in these poorer climes?

Banding together has paid dividends as groups mean points on those regeneration target wall maps..

Think I’m joking?

I bet some regeneration guru ( Â£700 a day consultancy fee) held the recently completed ‘Art Map of Nottingham’ up to some corporate financiers with no little pride…sadly it is about as accurate as a London cabbie’s idea of a route from Higbury to Islington when the occupant a rich Texan…

No we now live in a world of spin and so we have to believe we are part of this golden feast even us old farts on the margin making slim pickings from old ideas of so-called ‘Contemporary Art’ like the cast of Last of the Summer Wine attending another funeral. ‘Painting’ died last Thursday and they say ‘Drawing’ is looking decidely unwell…

Of course in a world in hock to sleasy developers the truth is an unecessary conceit we cannot afford. So we have the priceless sight of a American ‘radical’ artist giving us a lesson in how to be ‘rebellious’ with their stunning ‘installation’ in the ‘shop window’ of Nottingham Contemporary. Apparently this genius is critiquing the ‘capitalist baddies’ who run the state-sponsored satanic mills or car factories as we know them locally.

Try telling that to a recently laid off Toyota employee with two kids to feed and a mortgage that four tyres and a couple of trollies bolstered by the foundation student level ‘black and white TV screen’ flickering in contemporary ‘stylee’ is a good investment.

It so ludicrous it as ever beyond satire but that what our ‘Radical’ city council want us to think. My how cutting edge how adventurous how revolutionary……..oh how we laugh at the thrilling referencing in the new logo…..the world upside down…my word a telling reference to all manner of Luddism and revolutionary fervour…..next thing you know Mayakovsky will be marching down the road with a art workers of the world unite banner…..and oh we can save the environment too..just get on your bike……

Idiots.

But hold on this isn’t some revolutionary act..this is not an artists collective..this is state-sponsored art factoryville….this is just branding and spin. We are being sold a corporate identity sheathed in left wing ‘semiotic’ jelly……

It is a business model and it is failing but no-one wants you to know that.

Early interviews about the purpose of this palace of spin were defined by ‘marketing’, regeneration and hype…before boom became bust this glistening centre of the modern was to help drive up shopping..yes shopping……all those Texan Millionaires dissatisfied with Knightsbridge and L.A. would rock up in Snottingham (the gallery is opposite the original Snottingham cross ) and leave trails of cash like fat slugs all over our poor working class town……well that was until the I.A.W. collapsed and now even Sotheby’s are shedding staff like fleas shaken from a mangy dog. If they are in trouble imagine where the rest of us must be…..

So now we gaze on enthralled by the sheer spectacle of this farce….more installations,Â more illiterate artists chasing illusory careers in a city on brink of losing not only its manufacturing base but its credit and call centre base too…

Think I’m joking check out the staff numbers at Capital One on a weekend…….that avenue is over…

They have a good view of the gallery in the rain though….

That a fitting metaphor for these times…….underpaid call-centre employees staring out wistfully at the City of Dreams as they flog unpayable credit loans or administer foreclosing on some poor begger who cannot pay their council tax let alone the rent….

No I am not bitter or twisted I am a realist..a tired, disappointed and beside myself realist who one day may be accorded more respect for speaking out about fundamental matters instead of sweeping them under the carpet. Nothing matters more than politics…real politics….but nothing matters less than shiny towers decked out with spin.

Let the party begin..let that out of work car-worker eat art…..
After all there is no cake left….

What was it somebody said about bread and circuses……

panis et circenses – Juvenal……..nothing changes

Postmodernism is dead? Really?

February 10, 2009 / Shaun Belcher / 21 Comments

french1
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/altermodern/manifesto.shtm

Altermodern
Manifesto
POSTMODERNISM IS DEAD
A new modernity is emerging, salve reconfigured to an age of globalisation â€“ understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture

Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live

Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe

Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture

This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing

Todayâ€™s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves

Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.

The Tate Triennial 2009 at Tate Britain presents a collective discussion around this premise that postmodernism is coming to an end, and we are experiencing the emergence of a global altermodernity.

Nicolas Bourriaud
Altermodern â€“ Tate Triennial 2009
at Tate Britain
4 February â€“ 26 April 2009

Eyeblog review
http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=150

Dancing on the YBA grave…

February 2, 2009 / Shaun Belcher / 2 Comments

ozymandias1

A response to a Jonathan Jones blog entry on the Guardian website
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jan/30/contemporary-british-art-recession?

A generation of lo-fi subversives may finally have found something to be lo-fi and subversive about. After all, Hirst, Whiteread and their generation found their striking voices at a moment of recession.

The artists who think like this are kidding themselves.

Thankyou JJ I am pleased if I dumped in the ‘Lo-Fi’ bin with all the rest….sadly you utterly wrong because as an urban white middle class professional you cannot see past the ring-fence that been in operation for the past twenty years and which the ‘revolutionary joy’ about which you complain actually directed at….put simply I live and have lived outside that area for most of my life until now…ironically…you have no knowledge or experience of that so how could you comment or are you thinking of the shallow subversives of our modern art schools as they the only ones you ever met?

see Nick Cohen on this factor here..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jan/25/television
as he says..

In general, though, literary writers and filmmakers (AND ARTISTS/CRITICS my addition!) had little interest in deprivation and wealth, and failed to see the connections between the two. Raised in public-sector families, educated in universities and working in academia, they were the artistic equivalents of Westminster’s political class: narrow professionals with few experiences of life beyond their trade. No writer is obliged to write a state-of-England novel, but so few wanted to that the critic DJ Taylor complained in 2007 of “the fatal detachment of the modern ‘literary’ writer from the society that he or she presumes to reflect”.

Two generations of artists were as badly damaged as they were helped by the art market YBA years…..one of my best friends actually committed suicide because of it because of the depression of trying to survive with skills in a market which dumped those values and rode the stock market instead…..money and trash made good bedfellows …

So I found my subversive voice now have I??…sorry wrong again.

I like some others have been subversive since day I left Hornsey back in 1981…..I and others like me walked away and turned our backs on this parade of Goldsmiths driven rubbish and were ignored or worse pitied for our opposition.

There is no glee in my heart at all just a sad realisation that not only real lives but art school ethics and skills training has been dumped along with the giant YBA baby……Hirst was a giant Cuckoo in a very small nest who managed to distort a difficult occupation into an impossible one…now a lot of magpies, rooks and ravens are coming home to roost….they will pick a lot of corpses bare not just Hirsts….

CODA

Yesterday by some quirk of nature I found myself cheek by jowel with Mr Saatchi along with a dear friend who has been painting brilliantly in a council flat with no support from state or bankers for 30 years…..it was a strange moment to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea of real artistic talent…..I know which knew more about art….

The only difference between them was about a few million pounds…..I have no doubt Mr.S believes he right and doing good for artists…I do not think he was right and the period of YBA you identify RIP YBA 1991 – 2007 is just another lazy soundbite piece of journalism…. the rot had set in way before and the damage will last far longer and goes far deeper than you realise…

Does this matter in face of mass poverty and recession probably not…..make hay while the sun still shines for its going to be a bitterly cold year in all the arts….I take no joy at all in any of this….

In fact I trying to rebuild from ground zero like a lot of others……the view from the ivory tower is over….

Moogee

The New Depression Gallery

January 27, 2009 / Shaun Belcher / 0 Comments

whitesm

To be serious for a moment (it happens) the last postÂ from Badam saddens me greatly. I too was a ‘serious’ artist with unpaid bills, Â a freezing studio, an interview at Goldsmiths (same year as Hirst if accepted..I wasn’t ..too serious for the times it appears..Fuller/Bacon self-portraiture didn’t ‘hang’ well with a interview panel of a graphic designer,Â a conceptualist and a student who hung black bin liners in rows…I kid you not.. to look for the real tale of why art where it is go to the enfeeblement of the art schools by profit and Thatcherism and YBA’s)…

I hung in there in the starving artist manor a lot longer than most – in fact until 2004 when I finally did teacher training and I now teach multimedia students.

What saddens me is that Saatchi being a wiley coyote knows that with the collapse of state support as grants and the recession hit the art schools we will see a downturn in both student numbers and ability as working class students fail to make the financial sacrifices demanded of them. What chance a new Hockney, Moore or dare I say it Hirst these days??

Then Hey Presto! here comes a new income stream for his ‘global reach’. No longer able to afford art school ..just log on and become a famous artist Charles’s way…no need for time consuming education. The fact that one in a million becomes your betting chance of success as opposed to 1 in 25 or less AFTER graduating from the Royal College or any other Art School (official statistics reveal that you may become a teacher but a successful artist….well you have a cat in Emins chance)

So as art education collapses for lack of support who better to take over the education of our new ‘elite’ than…Saatchi Enterprises..who was rumoured to be preparing his own Art School as we speak..privately funded of course and what better way to promote it than getting prime time BBC2 coverage to get it going…no fool that one.

He no more interested in the talent than Lloyd Webber……their real talent is pushing their tie-in profit making concerns..via these programmes…pure Cowellism.

Musicals or Singers or Artists its all the same racket….

As for Badem…do it for yourself mate there are no silver linings, no Galleries paved with gold…..my lesson in reality started early.

Unable to attend a Royal College M.A. in painting because Thatcher slashed funds I wandered into a gallery with some slides….

‘Don’t bother showing me the slides’ said the gallery owner..
“Dear boy we toddle along to the Royal College M.A. every year and pick the ones with prizes’ They choose for us the rest like you are forgotten….”

How true…

So well done Charles for proving that nothing ever changes..as for poor students…at least they don’t have to waste years paying off loans..they can be rejected from the get-go.

A Rake’s Progress indeed?

I shall be first in line for dismissal in The new Depression Gallery….

working

X-Factor for art – the arts devalued

January 26, 2009 / Shaun Belcher / 3 Comments

turn

Reality TV has nothing to offer the art world

Charles Saatchi, the Citizen Kane of the art world, is about to transform himself into the Andrew Lloyd Webber of art.

A new BBC2 series, site Saatchi’s Best of British, will see him preside over a contemporary art reality show, comparable with Lloyd Webber’s I’d Do Anything. Talented hopefuls (I’ve put that phrase in as blog-fodder …) will attend his “intensive art school, where they will be tutored by top contemporary artists.” The show will “attempt to discover the next Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin.” Well, I don’t suppose anyone would expect it to discover the next Cy Twombly or Jasper Johns. ContinueÂ reading…

I cannot really add to this ..the final nail in â€˜brit artâ€™ seems like a good comment to make..note the â€˜judgesâ€™..they not artists of any worth just spurious artists-cum-celebrity types I expect..Creed, Emin, whatever…step forward for some exposure as your sales plummet darlinks…

It time all of this sh*t was bagged up and tagged with its true nature..i.e. it celebrity compost nothing moreâ€¦

The saddest part is that those who pretend to know what they on about i.e. Arts Council and various arts organisations are terribly impressed by all this ‘exposure’, they long ago gave up pretending they could invoke any form of standards so now we have no common principles to work to..so quality and talent are jettisoned for ‘fame’ and joke opportunism like this.

Nothing here wasn’t flagged up long ago by the Saatchi website….if you allow people with no values and no taste to dictate to you then you get the artworld you deserve.

I for one long ago stopped playing in the saatchi sandpit and looked to people with true value to provide a deifferent definition of ‘standards’. Sorley Maclean in poetry, Howard Hodgkin in painting, Ken Loach in film there plenty of real artists around just they haven’t been much favoured in Saatchi Land’s carnival of minor celebrities……people of substance….not telly addled clowns…

For those with short memories there was a hilarious version of art school where various ‘intellect-challenged’ Chelsea School of Art scenesters tried to teach various celebrities to make art…a forerunner of this barrel-scraper of an idea…..

In that show such ‘artists’ as shown below changed the art world forever 🙂

Looks like this will be much the same…..i.e. rubbish

At least John Humphrys said what he thought….doubt if anybody in Saatchi Show will…oh and BBC2 as well- What a shameful waste of taxpayers money sayeth the man on the Battersea omnibus…if you don’t succeed give up next time and save us all the effort….

Five celebrities – John Humphrys, Ulrika Jonsson, Keith Allen, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Radio 1 DJ Nihal Arthanayake – are filmed taking part in a two-week crash course in fine art with tutors from the Chelsea College of Art. The series culminates in an exhibition; Winkleman’s role is to interview them throughout the fortnight.

Yes the artworld is waiting with baited breath for the shows judges to be revealed……

Here my betting slips…

Hester Von Blumenthal the III

fresh from revitalising Little Chef the cheeky chappy from the fat duck shows that the thin line between art and fine cookery is non-existant. Hester reveals that his whole premise for being a chef was it a stepping stone to being the greatest artist since Hogarth….his crispy fried duck will be shown at next year’s Venice Biennale as an example of site-specific cuisine..

finally the greatest artist in the world…..yes Rolf Harris ( 2009 before his sojourn in prison mind)Â will down tools for a second. Long enough to bring a much needed sense of tradition and actual technical ability to bear on our assembled ‘conceptualists’ , ‘site-specificers’ and ‘film makers’. Rolf will show them the correct end of the brush to use in episode one before doing an in-depth anlysis of the horrors of sable hair-plucking in a co-production with the RSPCA. Chanel Plus and some Tokyo cable channel.

I also hear there a famous surprise guest….yes….after disinterring Picasso’s bones his corpse will be ‘re-animated’ by forensic scientists in a tie-in with Waking the Dead. It is hoped that Picasso’s involvement will bring a much-needed sense of dignity to the show.

It rumoured that the winner will get to produce a family portrait of the Saatchis ‘en plein air’ like Stubbs…..a treat indeed

keep watching punters it can only get better from here on in….

reasons

Waterlogged: Surrendering the Physical Space

November 17, 2008 / Shaun Belcher / 0 Comments

Response to Waterlog: Fables of the Saturation (Saturn’s Rings)

waterlog-journeys

The Collection Lincoln.

Running from September 15 to December 16 2007, rx this group show featured new commissions by seven leading artists, all on the theme of the water drenched landscapes of the east of England.

In particular, the film, photography, sound and text works are inspired by the writings of WG Sebald in The Rings of Saturn. In the novel, the German-born writer describes a (fictional) walking tour in the East of England, where he lived for more than 20 years.

What follows is part review, part polemic written after viewing the show on Monday 24th September 2007.

Surrendering the Physical Space

Third area triumphalism: sponsored by Ace East Anglian Regeneration and Film and Video Umbrella + etc and so throw back to 1970’s and 80’s. – who makes ‘videos’ any more? Work that looks good on the internet or in theory but lacks depth in practice. Worst culprit Finlay and Guy Moreton = bad photos + bad concrete poetry = good art..so we are told….

More panning shots = film and ‘authenticity’ – landscape photos that make up in scale and printed ‘quality’ what they lack in composition – cf. Raymond Moore….no contest this is ‘illustration’ that all.

Spurious commentary, faux text art, limp ideas conceived as mediocrity piggybacking on other artists e.g. let’s throw a few references to Benjamin Brittan in. Indeed only the bell-ringing piece reveals any kind of purely aesthetic plausibility. Tacita Dean’s ‘art-umentary’ was unavailable but looks like more post Taylor-Woodisms…probably post Arena solipism. Leave it to the professionals. Two artists implicitly quote Michael Hamburger as subject – again hoping he will provide intellectual ‘ballast’ for shaky boats they are floating?

Is this the ‘High Water Mark’ we are seeing of a certain kind of modern irony (post -anti -recycled- ironicism at that). Concrete poetry, deadpan documentary – the assimilation of ‘museum collection’ pieces (Pope) which trade faux morbidity and memorial incompetance for genuine creativity. Pseudo-memory tricks and use of ‘real’ people on trips around Lincoln may set up nicely the next funding opportunity angle but says nothing about the actual area..historical skimming…internet knowledge substituted for depth and reality.

A landscape without a landscape…..

A quick check reveals that all the artists ‘involved’ in project have no real connection to the landscape..less in fact than Sebald himself…truly OUTSIDER ART…..playing to gallery and patronising to locality and locals.

The waterlogged Raft of The Medusa a la Gericault.

Compare with a ‘real’ memorials like the USAF bomber crew signatures on ceiling of the Eagle, Cambridge or Swan at Lavenham.

Sebald’s oblique desire to get at the ‘truth’ is acknowledged as being ‘unobtainable’.

These artworks are imitative, illustrational and sometimes simply non-sensical….but they act the part proffering a oblique sense of their own worth as ‘art objects’ no matter that their formation based on pilfering and quotation not inward depth.

When the physical nature of an art/i/fact is surrendered totally to intellectual ‘re-fabrication’ the fabric itself becomes immaterial (literally) – disolved and drowned in dissonance and (dis)illusion.

A fish viewed through water offers us a mangled image. These are waterlogged ideas…weighed down by their own conceits and leaving no room for trancendence or fulfillment.

We emerge exausted as if having clogged our way across a muddy field. Saturnation.

For a very pretty website which applauds itself throughout go to…

http://www.waterlog.fvu.co.uk/

â€™Squaring the Circleâ€™ – from student to practitioner to facilitator:

October 3, 2008 / Shaun Belcher / 0 Comments

Critical reflections on the delivery of fine art teaching as learner and practitioner.

Re-post – written 2004

2004 marks the 27th year from my enrolment on an Art and Design Foundation Course at Oxford Polytechnic (now Brookes University) and this essay will critically examine both my experience as a learner in various institutions in that period and a reflection on how the PGCCE delivery module and my current position as a teacher on a Foundation Art course at New College Nottingham are informed by these learner experiences. I have divided this timescale into three distinct periods for the sake of clarity. The first period from 1977 to 1981 details my learner experience at Oxford and subsequently on a Fine Art B.A. course at Hornsey College of Art (Middlesex Polytechnic now University). The second period 1994 -1996 details my activity as a practicing artist in Edinburgh Scotland whilst attending the Edinburgh University School for Continuing Education course in Scottish Cultural Studies. Thirdly is my present teaching experience before and during the PGCCE course. In all cases I am interested in the pedagogical theories and philosophies that have informed the delivery of teaching and will reflect on how this has wider social and cultural implications.

Â A quarter of a century is a long time in teaching terms and I hope to show that there has been a sizable shift in the way teaching is conducted and a wider shift both in societal and governmental attitudes to the delivery of teaching. I may not square the circle any more successfully than Leonardo Da Vinci but hope to show that my own circular journey back to Foundation Art also mirrors a wider circular journey in pursuit of ‘good practice’ in teaching. Has the warning of Glynn Williams ( Royal College Professor of Sculpture) about the future of art education come true :-

Instead of the old national curriculum of thirty years ago we could soon have a national system of quality appraisal appearing to work smoothly, recipe but once more incapable of attending to the individual expectations of the student’s creative work in relationship to the current reality of their subject.(Hetherington, drugstore 1994,p.27)

or have we entered a golden age of ‘creativity’ in education as promised by the DFEE report ‘All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture & Education’ (1999) which raised ‘creativity’ in teaching methods to almost mantra status. Has that ‘creativity’ flowed through to present day students and teachers? This essay examines the ‘outcomes’.

Pupil – Student
My abiding memory of school art teaching was of a strictly timetabled and pedagogic manner. Teachers were strictly referred to as ‘Sir’ in my Grammar turned Comprehensive school. The art teaching was generally under-resourced and relied on a great deal of setting of ‘titles’ or projects which were then worked to. There was little group work although pupils did sit around tables and homework was set in a similar way. Art within the school environment was regarded as a ‘lesser’ subject as the overall ethos was that of a watered down public school. Coming from a working-class background it was thought slightly odd to even pursue art as a career and it was only the intervention of more enlightened teachers at 16 plus which overcame familial concern and allowed my continuing to a foundation course. The scenario was probably common at this time and reflected wider concerns for upward social mobility and a lack of understanding of exactly what ‘art’ was for. The teachers were generally good but there was little reflection on teaching methods and a high turnover of staff who ‘rebelled’ against the old-fashioned grammar school regime. Having gained entry to Oxford Polytechnic I was immediately thrown into a more adventurous teaching environment where variety, experimentation and artistic theory were delivered in a fairly structured way. The curriculum was based on a Bauhaus model from Weimar Germany and stressed avant-garde solutions alongside staples such as observational drawing. However none of the teaching radically departed from the current pedagogical fashions. All coursework was to be assessed by course tutors and there was no substantial group delivery or one-to-one tutorial set-up.. On the plus side a lot of the part-time tutors were radical art practitioners in their own right.
One-to-one teaching also prevailed in the B.A. tutoring at Hornsey College of Art (1978-1981). Again the model was influenced by Bauhaus although a more ‘hands-off’ attitude prevailed and self-directed and experiential methods were used extensively. Alongside this art history was delivered in a lecture style. Individual tutorials were the major point of contact between teacher and student. Once again this was a common teaching style in art schools at this period. This maps closely to Williams’ analysis of the progress of art teaching as outlined in 1994. The old Diploma courses had metamorphosed into polytechnic degree courses and slowly the haphazard regime of part time tutors was replaced by a more structured and accountable system of teaching. What was lost was the student/practitioner contact that was one of the more important benefits of this period of teaching. During the late 1960’s, 1970’s UK art schools were amongst the best in the world both in terms of resourcing and the quality of practitioner engagement. By 1978 this was starting to change as the cold winds of Thatcherism blew through the academic world. I fell foul of this political change personally as a grant to attend the Royal College M.A. in 1981 was siphoned off to provide scholarships for ‘working-class’ achievers to attend public schoolsâ€¦.ironically. At the same time the early buds of ‘post-modernism’ were shooting up in the art colleges and older traditional (and expensive) methods such as printmaking and life-drawing were losing their place in the art school curriculum to ‘new’ media and fashions. Ironically it was at the point of greatest right-wing ideological intervention in the creative arts that the more extreme left wing radical teaching strategies gained their foothold in the art colleges. In a pre-internet age computer art, video, installation and performance were all making inroads especially as this seemed to mirror ‘important’ transatlantic developments in the arts and ‘provincial’ UK could not be left behind in the race for international avant-garde status.

Practitioner – Learner
Skipping ten years and 1993 saw me in a very different situation from the ‘ivory tower’ of art college. Whilst not claiming to be self-sufficient as an artist I could claim to be a ‘practitioner’ although practitioner/teacher appointments were not forthcoming. I had briefly taught creative writing and illustration at evening class level but whilst in Edinburgh for two years my educational experiences were firmly in the learner field. Without excessive detail these two years on a Continuing Education course in Scottish Cultural Studies introduced me to some very conservative teaching styles and some very radical wider cultural theorising. The delivery of lessons with exception of some folk music was exclusively pedagogic and strictly conservative with a great deal of lecturing and detailed handouts being provided. However the information contained therein was radically orientated to a notion of Scottish independence and introduced me to the generalist philosophy of Patrick Geddes and in turn his influence on Lewis Mumford and the development of the arts in Scotland. This may seem irrelevant to art teaching delivery but at the same time (published 1989) Peter Abbs brought Herbert Read, Lewis Mumford and D.W. Winnacott’s theories to bear on his ‘A is for Aesthetic’ book where he gave an impassioned plea for a reversal of ‘technicist’ trends in art teaching. This was bolstered by the late art critic Peter Fuller who gave a highly rational argument for a change in the way art and art schools in the U.K. were heading. This also coincided with the Glynn Williams article on ‘the practitioner’ which I referenced earlier. The argument contended that ‘specialism’ rather than ‘generalism’ was the over-riding principle in art teaching and that students were being denied the spiritual and traditional areas of teaching in pursuit of a new glossy trans-avant-garde fashionability. There was also a ‘localist’ agenda wrapped up in this argument as the contemporary (metropolitan) art scene extinguished the ‘provincial’ and this was felt keenly in Scotland around the generalist table.

Within a few years the ‘fashionistas’ had won as through intense lobbying, metropolitan art school conformity and the arrival of large dollops of Thatcherite loot ( e.g. The Satchi Collection) the UK art world was reinvigorated or destroyed depending on your point of view. Most importantly however you view the ‘Brit Art’ phenomena fine artists had become the new pop stars and the repercussions of that are still being felt in educational terms. Recently the electrical engineering department at Trent University Nottingham was slimmed down due to lack of applicants and its computers switched to the over-subscribed web/ digital arts and design courseâ€¦.a reflection of the current popularity of arts courses. This trend can be directly attributed to the much higher profile that artists such as Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst enjoy in the popular media. The shark was everywhere in more than one sense.

Practitioner – Facilitator?
..universities and institutions of higher learning are called upon to create skills and no longer ideals – so many doctors, so many teachers in a given discipline, so many administrators etc.
(Lyotard, Jean-Francois from The Postmodern Condition quoted in Bentley,D.M.R, 2000)
So where is art teaching after nearly thirty years and how have these changes and teacher training influenced my teaching practice? In an era of drive-thru web delivered degrees and mass media overkill what are the definitions of good practice and can one teach art at all? My present teaching practice incorporates one morning a week at New College Nottingham Foundation Art Course so in some respects I have come full circle. For an analysis of this present teaching I have drawn heavily on David Jones and his work for Nottingham University Department of Continuing Education. Jones a fine artist by training ( Leeds Art College) has theorised and published on the question of fine art teaching and creativity in some depth. In particular I am drawn to his

analysis of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs as expressed in his pamphlet entitled ‘Creativity’ (Jones,D.1984).
Here he describes Maslow’s three stages of creativityâ€¦

.primary creativity isâ€¦.concerned with the generation of symbolic images, with myth,with legend,ritual and phantasy.
It is concerned with content rather than form, with metaphor rather than structure.

..secondary creativity â€¦concerned more with structureâ€¦.designing rather than dreaming.

a synthesis of these two forms of functioning’â€¦is the third form..
‘integrated creativity’
This not only applies to art teaching but when correlated with John Cowan’s version of Kolb’s learning cycle (Hetherington,1994,p.29 – see below) can be seen to map closely with the experiential way art students actually learn. If the past experience, exploring and consolidating fields are aligned with the above categories we are some way to understanding the processes that affect individual learning.

In Cowan the model assumes that tutor/student contact occurs at points on the loop where the tutor is asking questions, provoking, hearing responses before the next ‘surge’ of learning. It is compared to a plane looping the loop. This accords with my own feelings of the relationships I have established with fine art students. It is a dual process of mutual learning that depends on mutual respect and an attempt to guide rather than ‘lecture’ the student into a new phase of learning. New College assessment requires students to peer review each other’s work and this definitely brings out a mature response. On the down side there is a ‘flattening out’ of critical responses too. In some ways peer reviewing also allows ‘firm’ judgements to be avoided
in an area where ‘absolute’ values are dangerous and opinion can be confused with taste. However if we are no longer judging technique or ability only ‘creative process’ are we in fact judging artistic ‘content’ at all. The most notable aspect of the New College curriculum is the open-ended nature of both assessment and curriculum planning. Students are ‘introduced’ to materials and ‘self-initiated’ project work. Inclusivity and mutual respect are prioritised and atmosphere friendly but nowhere did I feel that rigorous criticality was to be encouraged. This is not just a problem on the small scale. Modern teaching and artistic movements overlap to a degree where a recent exhibition at the Serpentine ( ironically titled ‘State of Play’) stated boldly..
art can no longer be defined through a single dominant movement or school of thought
(Serpentine catalogue of exhibition sponsored by Hugo Boss, 2004)

Faced with this kind of statement it is small wonder the art tutor feels unable to make bold statements in a teaching context. It is my firm belief that this ‘process’ is what Abbs and Fuller warned about that in a world of all opinions being equal nobody can actually apply standards. It is my intention to teach fairly but with a strong emphasis that art history and notions of taste do involve choices. This is at odds with some of current teaching practice in this area but as Jones himself statesâ€¦
If we are to help adults to become involved in creative activity we cannot ignore the difficulties, the anxieties and the internal struggles which form an essential part of the process.
(Jones, 1984, p.18)

In the move from ‘teacher’ to ‘facilitator’ I believe we may have thrown out the baby with the bath water. In the process of assessing fine artists we really have three options according to Jones. 1) Finished work 2) Watching students work and 3)Talking to students. In this sequence the second and third options are vital if we are really to engage with their ‘creativity’. I fully endorse Jones’s take on Knowles of referring to a climate of ‘mutual enquiry’. It is in individual tuition that the strength of UK art teaching once lay especially if that teacher was a practitioner. The process of moving to ‘sessional lecturers’ , project and ‘self-directed’ working strategies and the ‘homogenisation’ of criticism have lead to a fine art sector that obeys all the whims and criteria of management but few of the truly creative demands of students. Efficient throughput of these ‘units’ in a growing market causes smiles in the accounts department but are we delivering the best and ‘creative’ education we can. As I look back over nearly thirty years I see many good aspects of art teaching that have been lost and although both teachers and students are more information ‘rich’ they seem creatively poorer. Time is one category that can no longer be easily providedâ€¦one to one tutorials cost money. Yet in those moments of reciprocal learning and reflection in the 60’s and 70’s were planted the seeds of some of the best artists of the past thirty years. Those connections have been severed and will not be easily replaced however prudent the college finances. Finally a practitioner on art paraphrased by painter/teacher David Ainley at a conference on Lifelong Learning and the Arts in 2001â€¦
â€¦.if a teacher is any good he or she learns as much as the studentsâ€¦the ‘answers’ if there any, are formed by all the participants in the conversation within the context of their own lives (Kosuth,J. Ten Points for an Art Academy, 1999)

References

Abbs, P (1989) A is for Aesthetic: Essays on Creative and Aesthetic Education. Lewes, Falmer.

Cowan,J (1994) ‘How can students of art and design best be helped to learn and develop?’ in Hetherington, P Artists in the 1990’s: Their Education and Values: Issues in Art and Education Volume 1: Papers submitted at conference held at the Tate Gallery in 1991 and 1992, organized by the Wimbledon School of Art in collaboration with the Tate Gallery. Wimbledon, London.

Farthing, S (2000) An Intelligent Person’s Guide To Modern Art. London, Duckworth.

Ainley, D (2001) ‘Structure, Space and Clutching Water in the Art Education of Adults.’in Jones, D.J. and Normie, G ed. 2001-A Spatial Odyssey: Papers from the 6th International Conference on Lifelong Learning and the Arts. Nottingham, Continuing Education Press, School of Continuing Education, University of Nottingham.

Jones, D.J (1984) Creativity : Adults: Psychological and Educational Perspectives 8. Nottingham, University of Nottingham Department of Adult Education.

Jones, D.J and Chadwick, A.F ed. (1981) Adult Education and The Arts: Nottingham Working Papers in the Education of Adults 2. Nottingham, University of Nottingham Department of Adult Education.

Williams, G (1994) ‘The practitioner, once a ubiquitous presence in art and design education, is now a rarity: A history of the blooming and decline of the species.’ in Hetherington, P Artists in the 1990’s: Their Education and Values: Issues in Art and Education Volume 1: Papers submitted at conference held at the Tate Gallery in 1991 and 1992, organized by the Wimbledon School of Art in collaboration with the Tate Gallery. Wimbledon, London.

Department for Education and Employment.(1999) All our futures: Creativity, Culture and Education. Sudbury, DfEE Publications.

Internet Sources
Bentley, D.M.R
1999
“Art for Arts’ Sake; or, Humanities for Humanity’s Sake. A Discussion Paper.”
Canadian Poetry
[online]
University of Western Ontario, Canada
Available at: http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/artsnew.htm
[Accessed 17.02.2004]

Jones, D.J
1999
“Different Theatres, Different Audiences: The Arts and the Education of Adults.”
British Education Conference Programmes
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 29th Annual Conference, 5-7 July 1999, University of Warwick.
[online]
University of Nottingham. United Kingdom.
Available at : http://www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/000001002.doc
[Accessed 17.02.2004]

The Turner Prize

September 29, 2008 / Shaun Belcher / 3 Comments