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First Degree An Art History student charts his progress... | |||||||
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Fledgling | |||||||
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Jul/Aug 2009 As the chronic anxiety about first-year exams evaporates, the seemingly futile struggle to get a stable summer job begins. I say stable because that’s exactly what my constant gallery hopping is not. The irregular work is drying up. I recently did four days of ‘assisting’ in return for art (a green A2 life-drawing monoprint to be precise) rather than money. I’ve been rejected outright for simple administrative jobs and rebuffed on my earnest application to an arts-based temporary work agency. I’ve been here before, but this time it’s not because of naivety. Perhaps I’ll join a telesales company. Or hand out free newspapers – something appropriate to my standing as an Art History undergraduate. Because now I can’t even sit-in as a minimum wage room attendant in the National Gallery without first getting my degree, thanks to the hyper-inflation of educational certificates. My search for unpaid work experience has also come to nothing. These are bleak times. Reflecting on my first year, I most fondly remember my weekly topic course. The two tutors I had for the more intimate lessons were both extremely clever women whose teaching style was engaging and passionate. These are the best indicators I’ve had so far about the real nature of my university. But what other useful stuff have I learnt this year? University Halls of Residence are almost completely full of buffoons doing bland subjects – you should live with your friends instead. The Museums’ Association card can save you hundreds of pounds on exhibition attendance. And committees (or at least ones comprised of 18-21-year-olds) are ridiculous, tedious things that really require a cast-iron leader and vigorous deadlines. That final lesson came after attending the student-curated exhibition committee over the last nine months. It’s been an enjoyable extra-curricular activity but the bloated meetings regularly achieved absolutely nothing due to pussy-footing and a lack of direction. If ‘In The Thick Of It’ is anything to go by, it’s much the same in politics. The end-of-year exams, as always, were irritating hoop-jumping affairs. Back when I was doing A-Levels I had an intelligent friend who was angry at the exam system and couldn’t see why they were necessary. He felt they were just a test for short-term memory skills, that they lacked real in-depth knowledge, and so on. Much to his frustration, we all agreed with him but also unanimously agreed that they were a game and you just had to learn the rules and play rather than complain about ‘real knowledge’. In the end we all did very well and he floundered a bit owing to his thirst for more cutting-edge, specialist research that he read about in New Scientist but then obviously couldn’t use in a basic Biology exam. The subsequent exam results dictated our University placements and he unfortunately failed to enroll on his favoured course. I remembered this particularly tragic incident (although in the long run probably making no difference whatsoever) when I was revising the rudimentary facts about a broad sweep of art history and feeling it was all rather pointless to test us this way. Nevertheless, to jump through the proverbial hoop allows us to do what we want in the future and it is easier to be antagonistic and highly principled when you have reached a comfortable, safe position in your career rather than as a fairly clueless eighteen-year-old. A few weeks ago I went to the Slade School of Fine Art 3rd year undergraduate show in UCL. My companion and I both agreed it was boring and, as the countries top art school, extremely underwhelming. The spaces are incredibly big and one could imagine wondrous artworks being crafted and hewn in them, but the show sat uncomfortably within them and the whole interior felt sterile and unwelcoming. As a person I am a sensitive chap and I look for the pervasive moods and the total impression of whatever exhibition I go to. A crap show cannot be saved by one good piece, which will be unfairly sacrificed in the overall crappiness. I would expect such a prestigious place (only one person from my sizeable and uniformly virtuoso foundation course got into the Slade in 2007) to have a decent show but it failed on so many levels. There was an emphasis on concept and shock which seems to be almost retro nowadays. The concepts were pointless and the shock didn’t work. The walls of my room are covered in photos – my own and those cut from magazines; postcards; newspaper clippings; and posters. If I find an image I like, for whatever reason, I put it up around me. I picked up just a single image from the Slade show, a postcard of a ‘painterly’ painting by Zak Zhixiong Yeo. It’s a boy with a giant apple for a head, a cartoonish worm crawling from the pith of an eaten section, and a lion’s head for a torso. The boy wields a loaded paintbrush like a short sword as he clambers out of an abstract mountain. It’s a monumental composition with the large, bright apple forming an apex of the triangular arrangement which emphasises the art-warriors ascent out of the geometric chasm. I swiftly read it as the painter’s belligerence towards abstraction, and I like my interpretation. Strong images, competently executed like these were few and far between, shunned by the students in favour of naff installations and tedious conceptual pieces which no doubt required patience and time but had little impact. The near future remains uncertain for me; if no financial backer intervenes I am destined to return to my family home, far, far away from the cultural delights of London, and spend the summer mooching around in the inevitably cold and rainy countryside. | |||||||
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Fledgling All of this site is | |||||||
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