Its Christmas again! Time for all the graduates from WA’s Fine Art courses to show us tax payers what they and, hopefully, their teachers, have been on about with our money since we last tasted champagne in the forenoon.
(Mr 8 Ball’s Christmas Quiz. Who said this and when ? answer at the end of the article. )
“Our present activities are futile.
We take what exists — the detritus of a defunct civilisation — and assume
that by sifting it, cementing it, mixing it wth bureaucratic gold or circulating
it in unusual channels, we can recreate a past glory, build the foundations
of a new civilisation. All that we can create in that way is an ersatz culture
the synthetic product of those factories we call universities, college or
museums. The universities never have produced an art and never will. All
our technical colleges and public schools even our primary schools and infant
schools, are all so many slaughterhouses, institutions for anaesthetising
the artist, instruments for eradicating sensibility, for repeating endlessly
and without variation the stamp of civilisation without art.”
Its Christmas again! Time for all the graduates from WA’s Fine Art courses to
show us tax payers what they and, hopefully, their teachers, have been on about
with our money since we last tasted champagne in the forenoon.
Before I continue, I had better say that this is not a review if I mention work it will be because I like it, it suits my argument and because it was, apparently, achieved against the prevailing ethos in our sart schools, as manifested in the confessions, even celebrations, of abject impotence to be seen on the walls and floors of their grad shows.
I visited the ECU and TAFE shows before I became too depressed to go further, depressed not just for the graduates but for everyone involved, including me. This was the embodied elixir of dullness, damnable beyond belief, beyond even faint praise. The great enterprise of fine arts education, from Schiller’s grand vision of a joyful harmonious even creative relation to the universe, through Herbert Read’s fabian dream of a tolerant society based on Education through Art, to the third form of knowledge, to the energetic, penalty free, learning environment, the precious exceptional zone of praxis, where art education was for those with the critical spirit, the wit and desire to seize it, whether or not they had the right piece of paper. I learned and worked in this through the 70’s andintot he 80’s but it has finally hit the wall.
There are too many self congratulatory dinner parties, too much money for too few tenured staff and far far too many students, poor lost deluded souls wondering what to do for redemption. The grad shows reminded me of the outer cellars of some post modern pyramid where the innocent lives of the hundreds of naive slaves had been wasted in support of some corrupt godforsaken faith. The high priests and the Pharoah were already on their three months paid holiday (Whoops! Sorry! Study leave? Studio time ? — take your pick of the excuses but don’t ask them to show you their work next March)
Frankly I do not believe that the self valorised, overpaid scoutmasters in charge of the jamboree of dullness to which our art schools have sunk would even recognise the names in the previous but one paragraph, never mind grasp what were once vital educational commonplaces. They are up to something completely different. This very day a friend of mine was winding up teaching for the year when a wad of paper was thrust in everyone’s face. It was a performance review, of sorts, but with only one purpose, to safeguard the institution in case a graduating student should choose to sue on the grounds that they were improperly or inadequately trained to be an artist.
What a give away !!
I am almost without words — but not quite! Do our institutions of “learning” and their scoutmasters really believe there is an ‘arts industry’ out there is some fairy land where even moderate to good graduate artists earn more than ten grand a year, even enough to pay a lawyer. If they do how do they propose to determine the range of performances which define an artist? I guess you could ask graduates whether they know which end of the brush the paint goes and which side of the canvas you smear it on. But Monet occasionally used the hard end of the brush and Francis Bacon painted on the wrong side of the canvas all the time.
Any institution whose first thought at Christmas is to protect itself against its own students has some very serious problems. It is certainly unfit to offer a Fine Arts course and should not be allowed to do so for a single day.
Watch my lips !!!
There Are No Rules In Art. not even in technique and you cannot teach the non existent. As for more complicated issues like having a plausible alibi for what you do as an artist the very idea is risible. Contemporary Art has always been irrational and inexcusable. Great, even just good art is not, repeat NOT a case of breaking the rules in the manner of some pseudo romantic transgression, the kind you see in television ads trying to sell cheap cars to young women on the basis that car ownership is a dangerous sexy step into freedom (spare me the big tits and the camera in the gutter!). There are no rules in art
In art there is just an ‘In-Your- Face’ confrontation with Life. For example no rule that says you have to draw breath fairly regularly, but try doing without it for an hour or two. This is the kind of contingency that anyone making art faces at every moment - do the wrong thing and you’re dead - you just don’t need rules.
[This does, not of course, imply that art is futile or pointless or that art can mean whatever you might like it to mean and to hell with every one else. Nor does it suggest as our local pseudo feminists and other art apparatchiks think that art is an ripe open territory to be conquered, held down, kept in order and exploited in manner of the SS in Byelorussia].
The only respectable reason for having a school of any kind is so that the community within it and the greater community, can achieve more than if they acted alone or in an informal coalition of common interests. I saw nothing in the grad shows that could not have been done as well, perhaps even better, by a student working part time and meeting her friends and fellow artists for a drink now and then. At least in the pub some one might tell you the truth, without demanding a HECS fee to pay their lawyers.
Fine Arts is not economics or law. The first day a student begins a Fine Arts course is as difficult and impossible as the last. All a school can do is give its staff and students a better grasp of the extraordinary problems they and they alone will face in making art. their way This involves pain, the renunciation of illusion and the abandonment of all security from day one. Good teachers can help but only if they are given a chance. There was no evidence in the work I saw that anyone had faced up to this. I saw very little courage and creativity on the walls. On the contrary students are being stuffed, willingly for the most part, with untruths, unreal expectations and anaesthetic assumptions that lead them to a selfrighteous resentment of the very possibility that their art might involve even a little suffering.
If this reads, so far, like a mixture of impractical demands and rabid resentment , you are not wrong.- But this is art we’re talking about - perhaps the only thing worth caring for and certainly the only thing that has no practical use whatsoever, extreme rhetorical measures may be unavoidable. Then there are all those poor students who have given away their best learning years to do little more than prop up someone else’s pay packet while they acquire a substantial debt. How will they feel in a few years ?
One way to define the depth of misery, the hopelessness of our grad shows is to ask about their increasing absences, hidden shallows drowned in silent darkness , depths no longer present. You can do this yourself — just try to remember what you saw There was almost no humour, no sexiness or sensuality and definitely no social commitment and no visible politics, in short no passion. These are for most part students in their late teens and early twenties yet they have made such grim, tyrrannical, joyless, irrelevant work that Stalin himself would have been happy, never mind our current corporate scoutmasters.
Two questions arise. Why did this happen and where did the passion go? The second question is easy - it went into the independent dj, music and dance scene which is striking both for being the first music scene for a long while without a direct causal connection with the visual arts and for its love of digital media for their own sake rather than as a container for some wanky parasitic pretension or other. The first is of the same astounding order of difficulty and mystery as, Why is John Howard Prime Minister? - I suspect some of the reasons might be identical for both questions.
Others are obvious - theory as taught in art schools has turned out to be nothing more than set of proscriptions, things not to be done at any cost or texts to be illustrated. I know of students in all our institutions who have been more or less put on trial for their independent opinions. At least old fashioned art history for all its problems had a content beyond a set of incoherent prejudices. Theory also suggests that incomprehensible full of jargon are as good as the real thing — sooner illustrate Derride than worry about whether your work has its own passion and poetry. whether it is, as it should bet, he apotheosis of a well lived life.
Then there is the pointless debate about media. Any medium will do, from shit to sugar cubes, even film making, carving, welding and painting have their place. In our art schools though each medium has its empire and its territorial politics, with the result that students are taught a lot about how to manipulate a particular medium but next to nothing about why they should use it or anything else. This not an education in art. The digital art/new media cowboys are the latest in a long line of malevolent opportunists to promise the earth just because they have a whizzbang new medium. One Tafe student has their number as y ou can see from the photocollage at the top of this article.
I could go on, but more
detail would postpone the debate as it has done for fifty years. Its enough
to point out that the drop-out rate in fine art courses is often thirty or forty
percent of the intake. Even so the numbers are huge, far too many to be realistic
reflection of the number of potentially serious young artist. This wastage of
human potential and resources is a scandal. A little more honesty and commitment
to student welfare from the institutions would both cut the numbers by about
50% and keep the good ones committed. A few tenured positions would have to
go but given most of the occupants this would be an unmixed blessing.
There were a few things I enjoyed.
I took pictures of the only two views I liked at the TAFE. You can see them.
I didn’t want a catalogue with names because this critical game is not about
picking winners and losers. It concerns whether or not something important struck
me about the work on the wall. At ECU the photos didn’t come out too well so
I should mention Winnie Lim’s outrageous fashion dynamisms in purple fabric
and Bill Puzas Whaling wall with punning extension of misery from the black
depths of The West Australian to failed scratch and match cards. These were
both works with serious ambition that stretched beyond the framework of exhibition
premised on a future career. I enjoyed Jane Devine’s determined struggle with
painting and life as a domestic. These were among the very few pieces in both
shows not packaged as ready made exhibition pieces. The rest prize winningor
not was, well, “nice” like sunday afternoon tea, something to pass the time
with no pain. Nice, alas, is just Not Art. even if it sells and I doubt there’s
a market that big, even for extra nice.
Answer to Christmas Quiz -
Sir Herbert Read — Lecture to Unesco 1948
If you got it buy yourself a large Guinness You can buy me one too. Mr 8 Ball.