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First Degree An Art History student charts his progress... | |||||||
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Fledgling | |||||||
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March/April 2010 As I restlessly squirm on my chair, reading and re-reading a couple of paragraphs of a certain mid-nineties critical text, occasionally standing up, pacing, and muttering expletives, my art-history degree most definitely feels like hard work. The current topic class I am enrolled in is directed by a young PhD student (palpably younger than my older brother – therefore a weird power dynamic) and is for the most part extremely engaging. The classes are always heavily discussion based and, as I’ve said before, this is the element of higher-education I enjoy the most. However, there can be a flaw in class discussions; namely, the lack of discussion. In any group of ten BA students there will be at least five who contribute so little you will have a hard time remembering what their voices sound like. I can predict that in the next topic class we have, the discussion, potentially an exciting dialogue, will be stilted and hesitant. This will happen for two reasons. 1) The silent spectator-students watching me and my loquacious kin examine art historical themes like a kind of public dissection are naturally taciturn (unavoidable and inevitable); but 2) The material we are expected to deal with is needlessly difficult and will be understood badly if at all. The texts on postmodernism that I constantly come up against are too tiring. They are written in a way requiring superfluous concentration to negotiate the style and acceptance of fatuous observations that bolster their theories. If I, a healthy, bright young man interested in Art cannot really understand what the fuck they’re talking about in this or that paragraph then it is essentially worthless literature. The ideas within these texts could be delivered in a way that makes them accessible to all who care, but they are not. I feel for the students who may consider they are not ‘getting it’ because they aren’t clever enough and by extension remain mute whilst more confident individuals jockey for position. I often note that these texts, written mostly by contemporary art-historian-cum-critics, wax and wane between non-readable and readable. But perhaps the authors themselves can only sustain absurdity (or what Foster deems ‘linguistically burdened’ writing) for short bursts before lapsing back into the real world of succinct ideas. I am slightly exaggerating. It’s just that I am very much frustrated with this unfamiliar feeling of incomprehension. There are genuinely interesting propositions in the text and neat and novel uses of analogy, but it definitely requires you to slow down the pace of reading to a crawl (ěwading through treacleî as one of my peers says). To give myself credit I suppose the problem lies with the actual scope of the texts. They focus on artistic production but implicitly deal with extremely complex ideas about changing culture and anthropological questions and as such channel those impenetrable 20th century French theorists. Art History – truly the most bullshit-laden of all the Histories. In about three months my year and I will be researching for a reasonably lengthy essay but it will be different from any essay we’ve done up till then. For the first time, and at about the half-way point of the three years, this piece of work will actually count towards our final degree. This isn’t unusual in the English education system but after comparing this with the American system (where you are also graded on your class participation, damn!) I feel it probably means we do less work for that first one and a half years. I wish this was not the case. My time in private education has conditioned me to work hard for examinations or to state it more clearly, to work hard when it matters. Very rarely did I have a teacher who brought the subject to the class with a strong sense of independence from exams. The ones that did were pivotal in my formative years and I believe I am a better person (let’s not get into value judgements) because of their presence. The syllabus-based system of teaching which is inherently needed for a graded examination to occur seems to incline the student and tutor alike to meaningless rote-learning and saps the power of the knowledge. As I grew up I realised the things I had been told were achievements were not as satisfying as I expected or wanted them to be. Being the significantly youngest of three siblings, and having the wisdom that comes with that, meant I never felt tricked, but it’s difficult not to absorb the dominant ideological mode of thought at least a little bit. If it doesn’t count then it isn’t worth anything – this is the dictum that has been drummed into me concerning structured learning. But what is the goal here at university, what are we counting towards? For the vast majority of humanities students across London it is to gain an upper-second and go into a graduate job. The subject is arbitrary. They work hard when it matters. It’s Blair’s mandatory university degree for the white middle class and it is an incomprehensibly stupid situation. | |||||||
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Fledgling All of this site is | |||||||
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