CSM Time 14 - Time To Question

csm time to question

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

3

Three ‘POLITICALs’ — 4 WTPOAS — 6 HELLO the future of the arts and design in schools — 7 PHILOSOPHICAL TOYS — 8 ART SCHOOL OR BUSINESS? — 9 FUNDING IN A CRISIS — 10 WTPOAS when you are not an artist? — 12 art (school) without science — 13 VISIONS AND CAUTIONS — 14 HARD TO SOFT SKILLS — 15 NEWS FROM THE WASTELANDS— 16 art school attitude — 17 Towards a critical art school—18 art bites back — 20 Degree shows 2013 — 22 ba fashion show 2013 — 24 Coming soon to the Lethaby Gallery at KX — 25

Welcome to a special edition of CSM Time.

What’s the point of art school? In this issue we focus on our successful series of events born of a question set by Jeremy Till back in September 2012.

We’d like to thank all staff and students who contributed to the debate. If you missed any of it you can catch up via the special pages on our website www.csm.arts.ac.uk/wtpoas As another academic year closes we congratulate all our graduating students, who this year saw record numbers visit King's Cross to take in their degree shows. We wish you well as you venture forth.

For the rest of us staying on, we look forward to next year. Have a very happy summer break.

csm time TO Question issue 14 summer 2013

CSM Time is produced by Marketing and Communications editor@csm.arts.ac.uk in association with Rhombus Writers, and designed by Paulus M Dreibholz (alumnus and associate lecturer) and Kristína Uhráková (alumna). Photography John Sturrock © 2013 Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design unless otherwise indicated. We have made all efforts to credit images correctly. Please contact us if we have omitted to credit or miscredited an image – amendments will be made in subsequent issues.

4

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

5

THREE ‘POLITICALS’ What’s the point of art school? The reason I set that question in the first place was purely political – political in three senses of the word. I meant political with a capital P, political in the feminist sense of ‘the personal as political’, and political in the original sense of the term as polis or collective.

I’ll start with ‘political with a capital P’.

When I took over this extraordinary job in this extraordinary place I did so at a time when it seemed this government was doing everything possible to take away those extraordinary virtues. The imposition of the £9,000 fee on the basis of neo-liberal austerity cant, which said ‘we can’t afford it’ (even though in fact it is costing the taxpayer more to fund the loans) has had a profound effect on the perception of art schools.

In his ‘What’s the point of art school?’ address, CSM head of college Professor Jeremy Till argues that, if there was ever a time when we needed art schools and their thinking, it’s now find ourselves in a state of extreme challenge. That’s because the only thing you can do with commodities is buy, sell or exchange them. Art gets reduced to a part of the market mechanism.

So the first answer to the question ‘What’s It doesn’t take an economic genius to see the the point of art?’ is that collectively we austerity agenda as an ideological programme have to stand up – very politically – to this rather than an economic rationale. Our government and successive governments WTPOAS sessions have shown the profound to articulate exactly what the point is. effect austerity measures are having on access We have to take a very political stance about to education, with potentially even more what these policies are doing. impact on access to art and design colleges.

The other thing we need to do is stand That’s how it looked when I took over the together. There’s a ‘divide and rule’ issue job. Since then if you’d written the script where our students are described – you couldn’t have invented some of the disgracefully – as consumers. And in that things that have come out. You couldn’t have ‘consumption’ of their education all they invented the statement in the national can do is complain because that’s all curriculum for art and design – well, you consumers can do. In this way you set the could have if you were living in the 1850s. students against the universities.

Let me just remind you again how it reads.

‘Art and design teaching should instil in pupils an appreciation of beauty and an awareness of how creativity depends on technical mastery.’ It’s pathetic, but it’s also dangerously pathetic because of the reductive way in which art and design is described.

In that reductive context or outlook it becomes so easy to marginalise it. I’m very glad this university has taken a lead role in articulating a profound response to that.

So that’s my first political – political with a big P.

My second political is ‘the political as the personal’. We’ve heard a great deal about this in our sessions, and I take very seriously the effect of art school on individual empowerment. I count myself as one who went through a completely ‘miserablist’ Cambridge education in the pseudo-scientific model before moving to the Polytechnic of Central London where I discovered myself.

Secondly, when culture secretary Maria Miller So I feel part of this process of individual uses the word ‘commodity’ to describe art we empowerment, which we lose at our peril.

There is, however, a strange by-product of the newly commercialised world of education. Now that our students are paying for themselves, and doing exactly what that entitles them to do, there’s a flipside to the consumer society. What the £9K fee might do is introduce a kind of neo-libertarian landscape in which the choice and freedom of the individual student become paramount.

The danger here is what that empowerment means at a wider societal level. Although I’m proud of the history of this institution in terms of its alumni, I worry about just talking about it in these terms because that perpetuates a myth of individual empowerment and genius. This brings me to my third point, which is that art schools have to be more than merely the sum of individual agencies, however important these may be to the individual.

The politics of the polis is potentially what the real point of art school is. In Aristotle’s terms it has to do with a moral collective.

In contemporary terms it’s something to do with contested ethics.

My call would be for art schools to open up from internalised, minor preoccupations – which in their very internalisation seem so important – to major societal preoccupations, expanding outwards. My argument for this is that if there was ever a time when we needed art schools, and art school thinking, it’s now.

Professor Jeremy Till, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Head of College

A post on my Twitter feed captured my imagination. It was a statement by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT media lab, which said ‘art schools are where all the action is – business schools are done’. And I think that’s really interesting, not just because we know business schools are done.

The evidence is apparent – it’s called 2008 and their reaction to it, which was simply retrenchment to exactly what they’d been doing before.

It’s not just that we recognise business schools are done because their pedagogy is so limited and myopic.

It’s not just that business schools are done because their value system is limited to the value system of the market. In fact, the business school is a symptom of a wider malaise, the clinging to a certain set of paradigms and values. My argument would be that at a time of environmental apocalypse – and I use that word without trying to be extravagant – and in a time of crisis for capitalism, the paradigms and values of the business school and the wider set of Enlightenment values that dominate society have been found spectacularly wanting.

All we’re offered on the one hand are technocratic solutions – on the other, the appeal to a set of neo-liberal values that have to do with progress and growth. We only tolerate austerity in the name of growth.

These ideas are accepted as a form of natural order, as if there’s no alternative. And the

crisis perpetuates itself in front of our eyes.

I feel very strongly that art and design does offer a genuine alternative to those paradigms. That’s why I believe we have to be much more articulate about what we do.

In a recent collaboration between our students and science students there was a sense that they were doing us a favour. In fact we were doing them a favour because their students were able to think through their research projects in a completely novel way.

We need to be much clearer about the art school as a productive and constructive mode of research and action.

But this only works if we turn that thinking and making outwards, away from the refinement of the object towards the concepts and processes that contextualise the object, and to consequences of the object.

I would argue that art and design schools have been challenging those Enlightenment paradigms of truth, progress and growth – which in turn are associated with a neo-classical economic model – for a long time already. We just need to express this more clearly.

Let’s consider the idea of the critical reflexivity of design versus the rote reproducibility of science. What we do as designers is critically reflect on conditions.

The notion that critical curiosity is always intellectually restless. Its progress is lateral, as opposed to the linearity of rationality.

Let’s think about how processes within art and design education are naturally iterative and thus dynamic rather than endlessly circling towards a static end.

Let’s think about the way we all, as designers, engage with contingency and work with it rather than viewing it as an obstacle to objectivity. If there isn’t a right or wrong, as we’ve agreed there isn’t, this runs counter to the idea of searching for a truth.

Let’s think about how design looks for possibilities for the future instead of refining the status quo.

Reflexive, restless, contextual, dynamic, contingent, possible – maybe these are better terms to describe the state of ‘liquid modernity’ we live in. If they’re better terms to describe the condition we live in maybe they’re more useful terms for understanding how we might deal with that condition, as opposed to terms like reproduction, linearity, abstraction, stasis, objectivity and refinement on which the Enlightenment paradigm continues to rest.

There exists both the will and the means for places like CSM and UAL to extend their horizons, to use what they’re already doing in a more expansive, productive, positive way for the public good. Yes, we need to be more articulate and political about what we offer.

But I think that process has begun.

6

WHat’s The Point Of Art School ?

The debate continues, but we’ve made our mark, voiced our concerns and affirmed our collective spirit

the future of the arts and design in schools

BA PDP Students

We invited FE and HE delegates to debate questions arising from controversies over current education reforms. We hosted intimate round table discussions that explored the relationship between art and business. Staff and students joined panel discussions in the Platform Theatre to debate the role of art school if you’re not an artist, and to examine the interaction of art with science.

7

‘How are ways of thinking in art education relevant to broader spheres of thinking?’

CSM TIme invited Sara Dimmitt, MA Culture, Criticism and Curation student, to review our wtpoas events

Dr Kim Howells

Our WTPOAS series of events began in March.

Samuel Alebioshu

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

Johnny Vegas, Suzanne Moore, Professor Ute Meta Bauer, Natasha Chetiyawardana, Rob & Roberta Smith, Sally Tallant, Samuel Alebioshu, Shelly Asquith, Jess Draper, Neil Griffiths, Aisha Richards and Osei Bonsu, with a closing speech

by Professor Jeremy Till.

To view the conference events visit: www.csm.arts.ac.uk/wtpoas

Richard Wentworth gave a talk on the state of arts education in today’s political climate.

On the stage of his recent ‘Black Maria’ installation at CSM, the artist, curator and teacher spoke about the relationship between exploration and knowledge, and his belief in the importance of the word ‘let’s’ in education.

What’s the point of art school? Or, as reframed by Head of CSM Jeremy Till: ‘How are ways of thinking in art education relevant to broader spheres of thinking?’

Issues discussed included the importance of expanding community outreach and educating parents about the opportunities provided by an arts and design degree.

That’s the question London educators came together to debate at CSM’s LVMH Theatre in March.

As Jeremy Till explained in his opening remarks, arts and design programmes need better answers to questions arising from controversies over Britain’s current secondary education reforms.

Parents may not understand that an arts degree provides the ‘training to think imaginatively and present those skills to the world’. In reaching out to underprivileged In an evening devoted to the idea of positive groups, educators hope to give students change in difficult political and ideological the ‘sense of entitlement that comes from times, the debate over the future of arts and direct confrontation with art’. design education in schools focused on Widening Participation, which at CSM teams opportunity. As Richard Wentworth said in conclusion: ‘If there’s a cultural gap between student ambassadors and tutors with local Whitehall and the arts it’s our job to fill it.’ students who have no family history of higher education, was one example of successful outreach.

With thanks to Berni Yates and

Along the way we held design workshops that 'killed the art school', plus a 'speed dating' Q&A event in the Theatre Bar probing the values of the art school, while in the Window Gallery design students entered quirkily into the eclectic spirit of the ‘philosophical toy’.

Coming together in roundtable discussions to help create those answers were 150 London secondary school and HE teachers, UAL tutors, and representatives of London’s arts community.

These fascinating sessions culminated in a one-day conference in the Platform Theatre in May at which the central question was explored and debated by, among others, Nigel Carrington, Vice-Chancellor UAL, Dr Kim Howells, Dr Alison Green, Dr Malcolm Quinn,

Delegates considered questions ranging from what makes an excellent classroom learning experience to how teaching should respond to a rapidly changing world, and how UAL can support the implementation of educators’ ideas.

The partnership between CSM tutors and local schools encourages the students to explore their interests and offers insight into the arts and design discipline. As teacher Tessa Hall affirmed: ‘Collaboration is key to art education working in a contemporary setting.’

Ian Thompson for organising the event.

8

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

9

Art school or business?

What does art school have to do with business? Quite a bit, as it turns out.

In a discussion chaired by Design Week editor Angus Montgomery, five arts and business leaders came together at CSM’s White Lab in March to share their views on the relationship between arts education and industry.

PHILOSOPHICAL TOYS

Mixing enchantment with enlightenment, an exhibition at the Windows Gallery in April placed art school design in the tradition of the ‘philosophical toy’. with thanks to dr stephen hayward, Tim Rokos, Alumni and students of MA ID

Simon Allford, director at architects AHMM, described tertiary education’s role as ‘giving people the independence to learn, form opinions and demonstrate intelligence’.

Art school education in particular is ‘a balance between craft and creativity’. It’s about ‘teaching people to see the world in a different way’.

Imran Amed, founder and editor of The Business of Fashion and CSM associate lecturer, expanded on Simon’s view of higher education. ‘It’s about grounding students in the realities of how industry works while giving them the space to discover their creativity and to explore ideas.’

Cindy Godwin, marketing director at AlixPartners, broadened the discussion by noting there’s a real economic value to an art and design degree. ‘It prepares us for the long term. An arts education gives talented people the grounding they need to understand key aspects of their chosen trade. Art school equips us to go out and be part of a sustainable economic community,’ she said.

Panelists agreed that colleges like Central Saint Martins play a vital role in giving students the tools they need to explore independent ways of thinking.

The determination and confidence that stem from surviving the competitive art school environment are precisely the qualities that make art and design graduates valuable in the world of work.

‘We have crits all the time,’ said panelist Sebastian Conran. ‘They’re called pitches.’

The celebrated designer and businessman describes an arts education as providing the ‘freedom to think laterally, provocatively and disruptively.’ Creative thinkers come from a very wide bandwidth, he pointed out. ‘Think

of Galileo, Hockney, Richard Branson – there’s a lot of room for creativity in business.’

If art school equips students with the skills of their craft and the ability to think rigorously and creatively, real world experience can expand and improve on those skills.

alike. ‘Education doesn’t belong just in the academic environment,’ said Simon Allford.

Added Imran Amed: ‘If higher education institutions like CSM want to have a more meaningful dialogue with the business world they need to learn to speak the language of business. It’s the only way to teach students According to Simon Allford, students don’t how to communicate with potential finish learning once they graduate, and if they’ve been well equipped with the ability to employers.’ communicate clearly and confidently, future employers will be keen to have them join Feature by Sara Dimmitt, MA CCC student. their team.

Businesses, Simon said, look for people who can communicate ideas. ‘We don’t mind if the idea isn’t very good, because if the individual can communicate it then we can work on developing a better version.’

The responsibility for strengthening links between the academic world and the ‘real’ world falls on schools and businesses

10

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

11

funding in a crisis ‘The awards are intended to enable students to continue the upward curve of excellence’ promising candidate of whatever academic grade who has faced disadvantages is more than ever in the minds of members of judging panels.

For example, Felicity Green’s newly launched awards for journalism (about which more below) specifically encourages applications from talented students who may be experiencing financial hardship.

There’s a general recognition that the support provided does, in a meaningful sense, make a difference. Most awards have an eye on the college’s menu of incentives.

Benita Gikaite, Swaroski Scholarship winner - bracelet and earings

With the funding crisis within education in full swing, support for our students from CSM’s benefactors has never been more vital, writes Drusilla Beyfus

In the current climate of education cutbacks and rising tuition fees, philanthropy is in a whole new place. Scholarships, bursaries, awards and prizes are increasingly seen as providing vital lifelines of opportunity.

The need for support is echoed in Head of CSM Professor Jeremy Till’s ‘What’s the Point of Art School?’ address in which he draws attention to ‘the profound effect that austerity measures are having on access to education, with potentially more impact on access to art schools’.

How are the college’s benefactors in the field responding? I interviewed some of them to check on the state of play. Among widely shared concerns was the position of the MA student, now bereft of government funding.

Four of my interviewees have recently given support to postgrads. By the same token, the

This year, Corinne Avakian of Geneva-based jewellers Avakian announced her company’s support for a jewellery scholarship for one BA final-year student, to run for three years.

Among the incentives for the donation: ‘We wanted to find a way of integrating academics and students with our industry.

For us it’s a great way to find new talent.

We know it’s becoming a very competitive world out there.’

The Avakian scholarship covers full tuition fees and accommodation. Corinne says the jewellery department was the big draw in the first place – also that it was in London, for which she has a very soft spot. In addition to the scholarship she has also initiated a special student project. Among her plans is to launch a line of hair accessories. ‘We want to see what the students come up with.’

Jewellery attracts significant sponsors.

Swarovski, announced Benita Gikaite as the winner of its BA Jewellery bursary, now in its second year. Benita, a Lithuanian, is a conceptualist designer. The judging panel

Ana Schefer, MA CD, Alan Fletcher Bursary winner

included Nadja Swarovski, executive group board member, course leader Caroline Broadhead, and fashion journalist Hilary Alexander. Theo Fennell, the well-known London jeweller, is sponsoring the jewellery degree show.

‘We think CSM is one of the best schools for firing a student’s imagination’ Nina Mahdavi’s Caspian Arts Foundation set up an MA Fine Art scholarship last year to support students from the Middle East.

The Foundation’s work covers a huge region including North Africa, Syria and Israel.

‘The whole idea of freedom of expression is important right now,’ says Nina, adding that the judging panel is sensitive to the fact that many candidates live in inaccessible areas, come from financially disadvantaged backgrounds, and may well lack the training to be able to study at postgraduate level.

‘We choose the one with the talent and the need,’ she says.

The first Caspian Arts Foundation scholarship was awarded to a Palestinian, Bisan AbuEisen, whose work is due to appear in a group show of British and Palestinian artists at the ICA this summer. ‘CSM has a great model that should be replicated,’ says Nina.

‘The way the student community works together here is really impressive.’

The growing appetite for fashion and style as a subject for academic study has received a boost in the Felicity Green Awards for Journalism. Two new scholarships have been set up within the BA and MA Fashion Journalism pathways – rare examples of noncommercial awards in this field. Says Felicity: ‘The awards are intended to enable students to continue the upward curve of excellence in journalism coming out of 1 Granary Square. The magazines I was asked to judge had a standard of writing, research and presentation that was totally professional.’

Felicity Green is her own exemplar. She says a combination of clear, vigorous writing and a visual awareness ‘got me where I am’.

Felicity became the first woman director on the board of a national newspaper and has maintained her reputation as a pioneer of fashion and lifestyle coverage.

Perhaps the most heartfelt motivations come from alumni or their families. Paola Fletcher has set up the Alan Fletcher Bursary for MA Communication Design in her husband’s name. The late Alan Fletcher, who went through Central Saint Martins with the help of a scholarship, believed that his three years as a student were the basis of his future success. He went on to found the influential Fletcher Forbes Gill design partnership.

The bursary is worth £13,000, and is intended to help any talented first-year MA student who would otherwise not be in a position to further his or her studies.

Sometimes a link between the donor and the college lies in the public image of the former. ‘Value your imagination’ says a Samsung website tagline. The group has

extended its Samsung Fashion and Design Fund commitment by starting up a scholarship for a final-year MA Fashion student. Does the Samsung tagline feed into its support? SFDF committee president Moo-Young Lee comments: ‘Of course. We think Central Saint Martins is one of the best schools for firing a student’s imagination, and imagination should be the driving force in our industry.’ Samsung plans to maintain close relationships with scholarship recipients. Says Moo-Young Lee: ‘We think it would be great if they went on to become global designers, receiving the SFDF Award in the future.’

Says Karen Doyle, UAL’s Director of Development and Alumni Relations, whose team works with alumni to raise money for scholarships: ‘What’s working well is the way we collaborate closely with our academic colleagues and course leaders. Without that, much of our successful fundraising just wouldn’t happen.’

Drusilla Beyfus was a Senior Lecturer on our Fashion Communication and Promotion pathway for 19 years.

A former features editor at Vogue, she contributes regularly to the Telegraph Magazine and continues to work closely with CSM on special projects.

12

WHat’s The Point Of AN Art School when you are not an artist?

Chaired by Geoff Makstutis, BA Architecture: Spaces and Objects course leader, the debate spanned topics ranging from the relationship between science and design to Brian Eno and the making of Roxy Music.

It was all to explore and illustrate what has been a fundamental theme of the WTPOAS debates – that art schools don’t exist solely to churn out artists.

Rather, ‘art school is a place that offers the freedom to develop unconventional ideas’, explained Carole Collet, reader in textile futures at CSM. ‘Art schools should celebrate failure because failure means you’re trying new ways of doing a thing. Art school should be a place to fail safely.’

Guardian journalist Owen Hatherley used the example of ‘art school bands’ to illustrate art school’s role as a place for testing out creative ability. Bands like Roxy Music, Pulp, and Gang of Four were all made up of musicians who studied at art colleges or in art programmes at university.

Owen characterised art schools as a ‘free space for ideas’, and as places that encourage an idea’s potential to exist ‘in a place you wouldn’t normally look’.

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

Architect Paul Williams, of Stanton Williams, used Jarvis Cocker’s art school experience as an example of the long-lasting value and immeasurable impact of an arts education.

‘Encouraging initiative and divergent thinking – as well as the ability to converge when it’s right – leads to success outside the art and design world, said Paul. Jarvis and Pulp may not be painters or designers, but their experience in the creative environment had an immense impact on who they became as musicians.

Alison Green, MACCC course leader, emphasised the intellectual demands of art school and the role of knowledge as a source of creativity and invention. Citing historian Ernst Gombrich and theorist Adrian Rifkin, Alison defined art school as ‘a place to feel comfortable being marginalised’.

Artist Celine Condorelli focused on the wider societal role of art school: ‘Market value is not the only way to judge the importance of art school,’ she said. ‘Market value doesn’t equal social value.’ While terms like GDP may be useful as indicators of a sector’s contribution, the raw data rarely tell the whole story.

Added Paul Williams: ‘The government wants measurable outcomes, but target-driven policies inevitably marginalise the kinds of skills taught in art schools. It’s a case of what can’t be measured can’t be valued.’

‘It’s art’s reflective qualities that loosen the stranglehold on knowledge’

Art school might not be expected to create musicians, historians or critics, but its value for non-artists lies in the unique environment created when intelligent, imaginative and innovative people work together.

ideas we need to look at’. Of collaborating with scientists she said that together they create ideas that transcend disciplines.

‘The collaboration between art and science,’ she explained, ‘creates a much bigger cultural philosophy.’

Dr Steven Devleminck, director of transmedia at LUCA School of Arts, University of Leuven, focused on the ‘how’ of interdisciplinary activity. Steven’s background in engineering and design helps him translate the multiple viewpoints of different disciplines into a mutually comprehensible language.

He described ‘transmedia’ as a ‘translator of projects’, emphasising the positive outcomes that so often result from interaction between disciplines and bemoaning scientific methodology’s lack of a language that describes intuition as a valid research tool. Which led us to the point where Dr Dan Glaser, director of science engagement at Kings Cultural Institute, contributed to the discussion.

Colin Priest, BA Interior and Spatial Design course leader at Chelsea, likened an art college to a beach. ‘It’s a place of movement, of creation, of carefree abandon, of wilderness, of danger.’

Whether or not a student plans to become an artist, the intellectual rigour and freedom of art school has an immeasurable impact on his or her creative life.

Feature by Sara Dimmitt, MA CCC student.

‘It’s a place of movement, of creation, of abandon, of wilderness, of danger’

13

Professor Marina Wallace

no art (school) without science The collaboration between art and science is hardly a new phenomenon, however unlikely they might seem as bedfellows. Art and science have informed each other since Paleolithic cave painters first dipped their fingers into wells of pigment.

Progress, however, requires conversation, which is why five leading experts in the field of arts and science collaboration joined each other in CSM’s Platform Theatre in May.

Dan dealt with the ‘why’ behind art and science’s longstanding relationship.

The ‘instrumental value’ of art lies, he said, in its role as a ‘loosener’. Art allows the public to engage with disciplines that are usually reserved for experts. It’s art’s reflectivity that allows it to ‘loosen the Guided by Dr Marius Kwint, senior lecturer stranglehold on knowledge’. in visual culture at Portsmouth University,

three panelists from diverse backgrounds shared their insights into the world of art and Science, then, benefits from its relationship with the arts. ‘Scientists who engage with science, and into new realms of knowledge opened up by the interplay between the two. the non-specialist generally do better work because it requires reflectivity, building

an understanding of what you’re doing Artist Susan Aldworth, known for her and giving you a chance to respond to it,’ innovative integration of medical imaging said Dr Glaser. and printmaking, talked about her experience as an artist dealing with scientific The collaboration between art and science narratives – the ‘what’ of collaboration. benefits both disciplines. Art’s reflective and communicative qualities help make ‘Science’s philosophical background science accessible to a wider audience. Art, offers a material version of what it means on the other hand, benefits from adapting to be human,’ Susan said, describing scientific methodology and exploring its her engagement with scientists and their philosophical reach. Each creates better methodologies as creating another route work by engaging with the other, creating for figuring out ‘what the self might be’. new realms of knowledge along the way.

Susan finds these scientific narratives exciting because they ‘explore philosophical Feature by Sara Dimmitt, MA CCC student.

Convened by Professor Marina Wallace, director of Artakt at CSM, the last of our WTPOAS sessions focused on the interdisciplinary outcomes generated by the interaction of art with science.

14

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

hard to soft skillS Anna Baker artist and art teacher at Havering Sixth Form College, and graduate fellow at University of the Arts London

Margot Bannerman

visions and cautions

Anna Hart of AIR

Corinna Till

How should we respond to recent challenges to art education and help shape the ensuing debate? over the following pages, In a series of short polemics delivered at CSM ahead of a ‘speed dating’ Q&A session, guest speakers examine the values of art school, offering their visions and caveats

The event follows a speed dating model launched in 2012 at the Art Education Forum

by CSM fine art senior lecturer Margot Bannerman with colleagues Dean Kenning, Corinna Till and Anna Hart. The sessions are in response to the seismic changes confronting art education, with presentations and discussions – held in a Euston pub – open to all.

Neutrality as a position of academic integrity needs to change. Teaching the skills we need to challenge, confront and formulate opinions is empowering. It takes us a step closer to enhancing the public good, to making a difference.

So, these ‘soft’ skills are? Communication, conflict resolution and negotiation, personal effectiveness, creative problem solving, strategic thinking, team building and skills of enquiry. These are life skills, and they’re transferable.

It’s acknowledged in education that soft skills are essential. But they’re treated as second rate. It’s expected that students acquire these skills via their course content. In reality, the pressures that come from internal and

Although my focus here is on art in secondary schools and at further education level, what I propose is relevant to all arts education.

The college I work at has an arts department catering for over 600 students. High demand and an established inclusive culture means we’ve had to reconsider what and how we deliver.

It means our students learn how to question, challenge, analyse and contextualise as a priority. We’ve made a shift. We’ve swapped our hard skills for soft. The art of the conversation takes centre stage.

Understanding how to form a question and having the confidence to ask it becomes our main aim.

As tutors our time is spent not teaching how to weave or whittle – instead we construct and facilitate environments in which students make decisions about what matters to them and those around them.

The arts at their best engage with ethics, principles, values – the civic good. A duty to strive for something we believe in.

The artist as researcher is fundamental here.

Research is a formalised curiosity. Poking and prying with a purpose.

There has long been a schism between arts and sciences and it’s time to reintegrate them. Both the arts and the sciences attempt to build an understanding of the world around us. Scientists are as creative as artists should be analytical. Both construct and deconstruct. Both require creativity and logic.

In February the government published the draft national curriculum study programmes for 2014. The aim of studying art and design is described as follows.

Art and design teaching should instil in pupils an appreciation of beauty and an awareness of how creativity depends on technical mastery. They should learn to draw, paint and sculpt as well as design and create aesthetically pleasing objects in two and three dimensions.

There are a number of problems here. It’s simplistic, reductive and … wrong. We don’t want our students to simply be appreciative and have an awareness of something – we want confrontation, understanding and action.

And creativity doesn’t depend on technical mastery – not the technical mastery implied by this document. Here the emphasis is on making pretty things. And perhaps we find technical ability of this sort easy to measure, rate or grade.

Like many art schools we have little room, a small budget and large class groups. Many of our students intend to pursue a creative career (82% according to our most recent poll). What are we offering those who leave behind a formal arts education once they leave us?

We believe the arts can develop students’ broadest intellectual and ethical potential through a programme of study built for and with the individual – a programme that demands an engagement with the political and emphasises critical context. What does that mean?

15

Anna Baker

external measurement systems (timetables, exams, OFSTED) create an environment in which teachers feel they don’t have time to focus on anything other than a prescribed curriculum.

We are continually narrowing the focus, learning more and more about less and less.

We as teachers learn to hit a target but we are missing the point. How useful is it to be able to recall a handful of historical facts, to understand and use statistics, to carve a bowl or throw a pot? I would argue a lot more useful if you can bring those things together to inform and develop questions worth exploring.

The arts are perfectly placed to teach the interconnectedness of things. We can join up the dots. This approach is similar to the investigative practices of the sciences.

But the language is, of course, open to interpretation. The techniques I will be attempting to teach students to master will be those that develop flexibility of mind, multiplicity of perspectives, and capacities for collaboration and innovation.

An adequate system has not yet been developed to measure achievement within these areas. So for some (many?) this is a scary idea. And it leads us to ask questions about not only how we measure success but what success is! (A topic for another time.)

The arts are seen by most as an enriching activity. The true value of the arts may be understood better if we as students, teachers and practitioners highlight our positions as researchers, analysts and activists.

And so art school should avoid idealisation of the expert, fragmentation of knowledge, and emphasis on technical mastery.

Instead, art school should be a place where the personal and political are the organisers of curriculum – a place where structures connect rather than divide.

16

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

news from the wastelandS: art schools do not exist

art school attitude

David Burrows artist, writer and Head of Undergraduate Fine Art Media at The Slade School of Fine Art

Matthew Cornford artist and Professor of Fine Art, University of Brighton

News from the wastelands, a picture of the aftermath – the art schools you know and love do not exist. The art schools that produced the prizewinners, the ‘ones to watch’, the national treasures – they fell long ago to an enemy within. They succumbed to the non-art school inside all art schools.

How to make art schools useful to the wider economy? That was the question that signalled the beginning of the end. While some fought tooth and nail to challenge the idea that art schools were a breeding ground for parasites, others did not. They embraced the idea. They closed their minds completely to the notion of competition. They refused to be more original than anyone else. (In truth, they thought creativity was for mindless robots.)

They dug in. They cultivated a filthy negativity. They affirmed things that made no sense. But then the cultivation of such things was always the point of art schools, even until the very end.

Great efforts were made by former artists turned managers to convince all that art could and should be a force for economic and social benefit. They failed.

Although the former artists turned managers worked tirelessly to transform art schools into lean, efficient training centres for the creative industries, they never managed to eradicate those troublesome louses that burrow into corners of studios and complain in a whisper that ‘the (new) building doesn’t work, that nearly all the staff are white, that it was foolish to dream of being a star, that students should choose who teaches in art schools, that you should be able to knock a nail into the wall without filling in a f*@!^<*% form etc’.

These parasites thrived and multiplied.

Fed on traditions that imagined something different, they proved harder to get rid of than rats.

For the parasites weren’t fools. They understood why art education had become a deadly enterprise. They realised they were being trained (professionalised) to take their place in an organised economy, although precarious work was the outcome for most.

Although I’ve spent most of my working life teaching in universities, I never studied at a university or former polytechnic (remember those?). I didn’t sit A-levels – instead I left school at 16 to study art and design, and spent the next nine years at various UK art schools.

How, though, did it happen? What triggered the destruction of art schools from within?

It was art that did it, a plague carried by those wretched parasites who held that, since the 1960s at least, art was an expanded field of practice with little concern for boundaries of specialist knowledge or hierarchies. The point of art schools was to engineer encounters with affective or thought-forcing displays – such was the business of art schools – and whether or not anyone recognised these displays as art was academic.

One day this idea got out of hand. The arguments of the former artists turned managers were no match for a tradition that switched on every potential function of each and every parasitical cell. The parasites did not miss the irony of this – after all, art was the product that UK art schools were selling to the world for 9-15K-plus a year. Art schools echoed with the slogan: be a breeding cell, parasitical on bodies that oppose you but with a germinal function too! For a long time, art schools existed in name only until a new generation declared the time of the non-art school was imminent. Yes, the school of nonstandard practice was created, which was, after all, always the potential of art schools.

What are our schools of non-art or nonstandard practice like? While dancing, science, cooking and philosophy among other knowledge fields are all valued, at the core of our new institutions is ‘art knowledge’, defined as knowledge of materials, media, performance, gesture, process and mediation, and knowledge of how meaning, sensation, abstraction and thought can be produced, captured and

I wasn’t the only one.

Many thousands opted to study at art school, a state-funded public higher education system, distinct and separate from the university system. Art schools attracted an odd mix of students. Some of us could do nothing else. Others had no idea what else to do.

David Burrows and Matthew Cornford

presented.’ Art knowledge engenders new presentations and assemblages of sense and sensation (diagrams of a kind), presentations free of the aesthetic didacticism that blighted art schools from their inception.

Non-art schools, like art schools of old, are connected to ‘an umbilical chord of gold’.

Yet non-art schools understand that it’s not the feeble stream of gold trickling down the placenta that’s the problem but the dysfunctional and hierarchical organisations of life itself. Many think non-art schools have a role to play in this critique of everyday life. Even so, non-art schools still incubate and host parasites, and probably always will.

An early influence and still one of my favourite books on art schools is Art into Pop

by Simon Frith and Howard Horn, which was published in 1987. The book is about the connections between British rock music and art, and the art schools’ key role in nurturing innovative approaches to popular music and performance.

It seems strange now, but at the time the book was published many towns and cities in the UK had their own art school (as distinct from an art department within a larger institution). This is no longer the case, and there are only a handful of dedicated schools of art and design in the country now. Hundreds of others have been merged, relocated, turned into mono-technic universities, closed, sold off or demolished.

In many cases they’ve completely fallen off the map.

In Art into Pop Frith and Horn weren’t writing about the complex reality of maintaining buildings, balancing budgets and recruiting students, or about curriculum development, research programmes and module evaluation (let alone the National Student Survey, Key Information Sets and the Research Excellence Framework).

What interested the authors more was the unquantifiable dimension of the art school experience, the way art school as a term of reference implies something perhaps greater than what it actually describes – a sense of lived possibility.

They sum this up as being about a commitment to a working practice, to a mode of learning that assumes the status of a lifestyle. Not a consumer-driven lifestyle as displayed in magazines and on TV, but lifestyle as a creative, lived experience.

There are, according to Unistats, ‘over 1000’ full-time undergraduate art and design courses on offer in the UK. Which, if we take a conservative estimate of 60 graduates per course per year, equates to 60,000 new art and design graduates entering the world of work each year.

Not everyone is going to be nominated for the Turner Prize. This inevitably begs the question: what do all the graduates who don’t become successful artists or designers actually do?

At last year’s fine art open day at Brighton, I flagged up some notable, non-artist alumni of our school.

Felix Dennis multi-millionaire publisher, poet, and philanthropist, studied at Harrow Art School (now part of the University of Westminster).

James Herbert world famous horror writer, studied at Hornsey College of Art (now part of Middlesex University).

Kim Howells former trade union official, MP and government minister, studied at Hornsey College of Art (now part of Middlesex University).

17

John Hurt actor, studied at Grimsby Art School (now defunct) and St Martins School of Art (now part of the University of the Arts London).

Molly Parkin novelist, boutique owner and editor for Nova magazine, studied at Brighton Colleges of Art (now part of the University of Brighton).

Eva Wiseman commissioning editor Observer, studied at Brighton Colleges of Art (now part of the University of Brighton).

Add to this the long and illustrious list of British bands and musicians with an art school connection – from the Beatles, Pink Floyd and the Sex Pistols to Scritti Politti, Radiohead, and Florence and the Machine – and it’s clear art schools have done a lot more than educate and train students to be successful artists and designers.

I propose that the point of art schools is that they are not universities but distinctive educational institutions where students can learn through not doing what’s expected.

At their best, art schools not only encourage practice-driven creativity but also offer an environment in which questioning, independence of mind and resistance to social conformity are admired and celebrated.

The amalgamation of these values and ways of seeing forms a particular kind of attitude – the art school attitude.

18

Towards a critical art school Artist and Writer Dean Kenning is a tutor at CSM At a recent event hosted by UAL on The Future of Art & Design in Schools & FE Colleges the value of art was defined in three ways.

Art, it was said, has intrinsic value, instrumental value, and economic value. I’d like to add a fourth value, critical value, which may come into conflict with the other three, depending on how they’re defined.

I would argue that critical value is vital if we are to promote the necessity of art in society and therefore its central place in formal education. So what does a critical art education look like? As criticality can be a fairly loose term, I’ll begin by saying what it is not, both as an activity and in terms of status.

First, in relation to an activity or practice, criticality is not about making authoritative judgments, or learning the rules of appreciation so as to distinguish yourself from common understandings and tastes.

Nor is it simply a question of a more sustained interpretation, interrogation and reflection in so far as the object of study – an artwork or a piece of writing – is isolated or bracketed off from considerations of how it came into being, and why it should be looked at.

Nor is criticality adeptness in certain forms of reflexive practice – the artwork’s solipsistic commentary on itself. Moreover, as an activity and attitude, criticality should be distinguished from so-called ‘creative’ or non-linear thinking seen as enabling students to adapt to new fluid and flexible forms of capitalism, and equipping art students to take their place within existing social structures.

In relation to status, criticality, or ‘critical theory’ is not a canonic list of theorists’

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

In making things, humans transform the world and make themselves too

names, or a set of key terms from recognisable discourses, which, in either case, are acquired in order to add value to distinct artworks and individual practices in the form of explanations, press releases and statements.

Nor should an institution view critical theory as merely a supplement to creative practice and an academic justification for creative arts degrees at university.

Having established what it is not, let’s turn to what criticality in the art school is.

First, in relation to activity, critical thinking is about contextualisation and reflection in order to understand society and to question fixed beliefs. In this respect critical thinking has a vital democratic function, and critical education assumes a social responsibility to produce active, thinking citizens.

But criticality goes beyond reflective capacity.

According to Max Horkheimer, critical theory seeks ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. Critical activity, then, concerns itself with a wider, political goal of social transformation. In this

respect critical thinking incorporates opposition and resistance – social reflection and contextual analysis move beyond academic skills to inform political agency, giving shape to rebellious instincts.

Second, in relation to status, criticality should be fully integrated into the art course as a whole, not categorically distinguished as a ‘theory’ element separate from ‘practice’. Contextual analysis, resistance to conventional forms, questioning of hegemonic structures, and possibilities for difference should accompany creative practice – and here the conceptual tools provided by a range of disciplines from sociology to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy are as essential as the tools of the workshop.

There’s an urgent reason to assert the centrality of critical thinking within art departments right now. Under financial pressure as a result of changes to the funding of higher education, universities are becoming increasingly corporate and commercial, investing heavily in branding in competitive bids for students in a global market, raising revenue through business

19

Dean Kenning

ventures and sponsorships, and outsourcing aspects of teaching, administration and technical provision.

Furthermore, as the logic of university fees is to view students as customers purchasing a product, education becomes a commodity.

What all this signals is a collapsing of distance between formal education and the values of the business world – competition, accumulation and profit.

What is threatened is education’s autonomy from the dominant social forces in operation today. As free market practices and methods subsume more and more areas of civic and democratic life, we recognise two things – on the one hand the absolute social necessity for critical voices to come through of the kind raised by the utopian and oppositional spirit associated with art school; and, on the other, new limits to access and the subsuming of art institutions within neoliberal discourses and practices.

The danger is that this contradiction is addressed not necessarily by replacing critical theory with something supposedly more ‘relevant’ – although this could happen –

but by emphasising either the acquisitional reading (specific knowledge as cultural capital adding value to an individual’s profile), or else the adaptive reading (a type of ‘outside the box’ transferable skill, making the newlyconceived ‘entrepreneurial’ art student well placed for today’s competitive and precarious workplace).

Opposition to the status quo, transformation of cultural forms and institutional structures, and the desire to bring about something new are written into the DNA of modern and contemporary art, from experimental movements and schools to polemical manifestos and radical interventions.

Be it by rejection of authority, or tradition, or elitist-bourgeois tastes, or mass consumer markets, or existing circuits of validation, the political spirit of the avant-garde lives on in the potentialities of art and the creative energies of students.

A final point – the critical approach is tied absolutely to the activity art students engage in every day, that of making things. In making things, humans transform the world and make themselves too.

The object of study for creative arts students exists only in its production – it is not a separate, already-formed object. In this sense critical thinking should become immanent and enter into its object – in this case the institution and its determining framework.

For example, how do critically informed thoughts about art school feed back into changes to course structure and the use and control of space? How can discussions about the reproduction and sustainability of art be carried into proposals regarding student debt?

Criticality, in other words, must confront head on the contradictions of critical theory within increasingly neo-liberal institutions.

As the study of art has moved beyond representational illusion, self-expression and medium specificity, students now seek out material in all its physical, technical, symbolic, cognitive, cultural and institutional forms. The entire social world is opened up for investigation and creative re-engineering.

This is what critical thinking in art is – the attempt to confront and understand the material all around us, with a view to its potential transformation.

20

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

21

ART BITES BACK

Johnny Vegas in conversation with the Guardian’s Suzanne Moore was just one of the highlights of CSM’s one-day spring conference debating the question ‘What’s the Point of Art School?’ louise tickle reports for the guardian

He's hiding it well, but comedian Johnny Vegas is feeling a bit traumatised as he steps onto the stage.

of their use, and this is increasingly how we look at humanity overall,’ he says.

Johnny, we soon discover, is searingly angry at the state of art and design education in Britain today – and at who does, or rather doesn't, have access to it.

Art, he says feelingly, became his ‘saviour’ after he was told while doing A-levels that ‘you can work when you want and there's no right or wrong answer – it's about how you interpret’.

Though the right to be creative belongs to all, he says, he fears government policy on arts education and tuition fees will exclude those ‘who are from backgrounds where they need the loan, who need to go to art school and learn to question. The ones who can afford it, they don't need to question, because they've got the trust fund.’

Johnny understands why students from poorer backgrounds are wary of signing up for an arts education at a cost of £9,000 a year. Given his family background, he says: ‘There’s no way on God's green earth that I'd have borrowed that sort of money.’

‘Art schools are where the action is – business schools are done’

Recalling arts secretary Maria Miller's recent decree that British arts and culture should be seen primarily in terms of their economic value, Jeremy Till, head of CSM and UAL Pro Vice-Chancellor, points out that ‘if you use the word commodity, then art gets reduced to ‘Art school teaches you to rethink the world part of the market mechanism’. and rebuild the world,’ says Sally Tallant, who, as director of the Liverpool Biennial, has Art, and its influence on society, he argues been involved in the re-imagining and emphatically, amounts to so much more that this. ‘We have to stand up very politically regeneration of a city until recently on its knees. Art schools shouldn't be valued as to this government in order to articulate hallowed ground for ‘ethereal’ types, others the point of what art is.’ Jeremy quotes argue, but as a crucible for original thinking, a tweet that makes its point succinctly: ‘Art risk-taking and – to the powers that be, no schools are where the action is – business doubt – a dangerously questioning creativity. schools are done.’

‘He's just met the person who gave him a bad mark for his final show,’ grins journalist Suzanne Moore, with whom Vegas is about to start chatting.

From that day on, Johnny says, the art room ‘was the only place I wanted to be’, and art school, where he went on to study ceramics, was a critical influence in his political coming-of-age.

Shelly Asquith, President SU

Johnny Vegas with Suzanne Moore

This barrier is the subject of much anger throughout the lively one-day conference hosted by Central Saint Martins in May. CSM Student Union president-elect Shelley Asquith says she had no choice but to drop out in her first year when her loan failed to arrive before her rent fell due. She notes that universities don't always stand up for their less economically advantaged students.

‘Some VCs at leading universities are lobbying for us to pay back our loans sooner,’ she says, warning that less well-off students will think even harder about embarking on an art course if their repayment burden is increased further.

‘I believe the arts are becoming more elitist, more inaccessible,’ Shelley says. ‘We need to be fighting back against dangerous government policy, and against those in our institutions who toe the line.’

Education policy, however, is driven by an overarching political view of how the world should work. A sense that government sees every aspect of cultural life purely in terms of its economic utility is a recurring theme of the day, trenchantly expressed by Arts Emergency founder Neil Griffiths.

‘The government argues that culture is a luxury we can't afford. We're looking at students as a means to an end now, in terms

Sally Talent

Art education is a force for individual and collective social good that deserves to be protected.

And that's why it matters that everyone has access. That's why we must be concerned when the new national primary and secondary curricula are, as Jeremy Till describes them, ‘dangerously pathetic because of the reductive way in which art and design are described’.

And that's why, as Johnny Vegas concludes, we have to become ‘politicised’ as artists.

‘We have to fight,’ he says, ‘for the survival of art.’

22

csm time to question â&#x20AC;&#x201D; issue 14 / summer 2013

degree shows 2013 congratulations to all our graduating students

csm time to question â&#x20AC;&#x201D; issue 14 / summer 2013

23

24

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

csm time to question — issue 14 / summer 2013

Giacomo Cavallari

Mao Usami

BA FASHION SHOW 2013 Report by Louise rytter, ba fashion communication with promoton student The soundtrack to this year’s CSM BA Fashion show was an electrifying mix, propelling an international group of 40 graduate designers from Womenswear, Menswear, Print, Knitwear and Fashion Design with Marketing into the spotlight.

Overall, the show was a statement of how traditional craftsmanship, innovative materials and conceptual ideas are at the core of tomorrow’s fashions.

Phoebe Philo, CSM alumna and creative director at Céline, awarded Mao Usami the prestigious L'Oréal Professional Young Talent Award for her casual but meticulously constructed womenswear collection.

Fellow alumnus and the evening’s MC Giles Deacon awarded FDM student Narae Park and menswear designer Giacomo Cavallari the second and third runner-up prizes.

Judges included CSM graduate Roksanda Ilincic, the Independent’s Alex Fury, Grazia’s Susannah Frankel, Joe Casely-Hayford, Huishan Zhang and James Galvin from L'Oréal.

Held in the Granary building at King’s Cross, the show’s front-row guests included Fashion East’s Lulu Kennedy, designer Celia Birthwell, and singer Will Young.

Narae Park

Charismatic artist Andrew Logan made a star appearance in James Buck’s men-in-skirts collection, and dubstep DJ Don Letts stalked the catwalk in a silk suit by Nicholas Daley.

Colombine Jubert and Morgan Levy used unconventional materials such as concrete and wood with Swarowski crystals. LVMH Grand Prix Scholar bursary recipients Nathaniel Lyles and Asad Rehman Khan showed just how dazzling colour can be.

And Marco Pelosi responded with the most beautiful avant-garde ball gowns.

Lois Blamire stole the show with her absolute pink sleeve-hugging creations, and Samuel Yang’s sculpturing garments and light-up trainers impressed from every angle.

Two very different students created a stir, not only for their skillful tailoring and knit, but also because of their powerful presentations. Roni Ilan’s models sported a mix of grey suits and workwear with giant metallic sculptures round their necks.

Linda Engelhardt’s minuvscule skirts graced the coolest girls in town.

The show was truly a display of the most creative force in fashion – right here at CSM.

25

Coming soon to the Lethaby Gallery Rodney Graham, The at KX Phonokinetoscope Exhibition: Monday 23 September – Saturday 9 November 2013

MA Fine Art Auction 2013 Exhibition:

Wednesday 13 – Thursday 14 November 2013

26