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Gravy Train Rerouted around Lecture Circuit This autumn, both my sons are planning to go back into education and do MAs. Will it improve their job prospects? Possibly not. But it will keep them out of the stagnant unemployment pool and preserve their CVs from the sorts of yawning gap that lead employers to suspect lost years in prison. Actually, the way things are going, they may soon have as good a chance of acquiring letters after their names in prison as out of it. With higher education budgets slashed and new university buildings left half built, the Blairite pipe dream of 50% of school-leavers in higher education by 2010 has gone up in smoke. As for art schools, we can only hope that Graham Crowley’s description last year of the University of the Arts as ìthe educational equivalent of British Leylandî doesn’t turn out to be prophetic. Certainly, there will be further cuts to teaching before what one ex-art college governor has called the ìdamp duvet of administrationî gets a shakeout. Things probably couldn’t get much worse if the doyenne of damp duvets herself was invested as Rector. So far, though, the sinking of higher education’s hopes hasn’t stopped the art rats scrambling for the academic lifeboats. If there’s no market for your product and the widening gap on your CV is making you look like a loser – so the logic goes - get with the program and get yourself an Artists’ Fellowship. Everybody’s doing it, even painters. This spring Chris Gollon took up a Fellowship and Residency at the University of Durham’s Institute of Advanced Study, where he contributed to an international research project on the theme of ‘Being Human’. While weeds invade abandoned university building sites, academic institutes sprout like mushrooms, their vague names reminiscent of those bogus colleges favoured by foreign students with diplomas in bomb-making from Swat Valley High. Of course research is something artists have always done. Millais and Holman Hunt ‘investigated’ Elizabethan costume, while Gabo and Vantongerloo ‘explored’ mathematics. But they didn’t expect the public to want to hear about it, let alone pay for the privilege. Today, artists’ research is an end in itself. It is also an opportunity for less fashionable universities to put themselves on the cultural map. Loughborough University, for example, recently launched an initiative called Radar which it claims is ìfast becoming one of the most innovative and important research laboratories for new artistic practice in the UKî. So what new ground is it breaking? ìThe programme has a particular interest in working with artists whose practice explores the relationship between artist, environment and spectator.î If your heart is already sinking, look away now. The highlight so far has been a creative collaboration on product design between artist Kathrin Bˆhm, Loughborough’s Sports Technology Institute and local teenagers. After seven months of R&D, the result was launched in mid-June. It is – wait for it – a range of second skins for footballs. Why did no one think of this before? Because no one felt the need to ìreinvent the ballî, ìchange the bounce aestheticî or ìpush the boundaries between art and sportî. Research is not confined to academic backwaters; it’s all over this year’s Venice Biennale like a cheap corduroy suit. A thousand square metres of the Arsenale Nuovissimo’s Tese did San Cristoforo has been annexed by Moscow Museum of Modern Art to exhibit the results of 16 international artists’ researches on the theme of Unconditional Love. For the Belgian Pavilion, meanwhile, veteran artist-researcher Jef Geys has put assistants to work in New York, Paris, Moscow and Villeurbanne collecting botanical data on ‘so-called weeds’ growing in cracks in the pavement. Full documentation of his interdisciplinary research project – comprising plans, inventories, descriptions, maps, photos, dried specimens and drawings (or ‘graphical artistic interpretations of the plants’ appearance’, as the publicity explains for the benefit of the unfamiliar) – is displayed in the exhibition Quadra Medicinale. Findings are also published in the current issue of the Kempens Informatieblad, Geys’s personal journal, whose special Biennale edition of 150,000 includes an overview of the 53 projects he has conducted since the late 50s. (Apparently he was hoping to make the paper edible so as to illustrate the idea that ‘knowledge is food’, but the technology failed him. A potential area for future research.) Another avenue open to the academically ambitious artist is the lecture, or ‘lecture performance’ as it is now known. Of course this is not a new idea either. Salvador Dali set the standard for artistic sacrifice in the cause of lecturing with his death-defying stunt in a diving suit at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, while Joseph ‘Chalky’ Beuys was such a fixture on the lecture circuit that his blackboards are still touring on their own. Nowadays the best the cutting edge of lecturing can offer is the dandified Mark Leckey, a sort of safety version of Russell Brand with all of the vanity and none of the chest hair. Still, the Turner Prize success of Leckey’s filmed lecture Cinema in the Round seems to have prompted a national rush to the podium. Manchester Cornerhouse anticipated such demand for its autumn series of Tuesday Talks - coordinated by Prof Pavel B¸chler, artist and Head of Research at Manchester Metropolitan University - that it scheduled them for 11am. Would you have got out of bed to hear Tim Brennan, AHRB Research Fellow in Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Sunderland, expound his theory of ìhow all behaviour can be thought of as performanceî? Probably not – though if you had, you might have demonstrated that sleeping was an exception. In May the ICA - long ‘a site for heated exchange through conversation, oration and performative speech’, by its own description – went all out with Talk Show, a month-long celebration of the ‘speech act’. It was accompanied by artists’ residences, performances and presentations addressing ‘speech as a tool and as a medium to produce and negotiate meaning’ and supported by something called the London Consortium, a ‘multi-disciplinary graduate programme in humanities and cultural studies’. Even the Royal Academy Schools has joined the circuit, inaugurating a new annual series of artists’ lectures last November with an address by Thomas Hirschhorn on the subject of ‘Doing art politically: what does it mean?’ For £7, ordinary members of the public could hear the neutral Swiss artist ponder the difficult questions: ìWhere do I stand? Where does the other stand? What do I want? What does the other want?î (ìI don’t know, dear,î was the kindly response of one blue-rinsed matron, ìbut I’m sure someone will be along to help you in a minute.î) In America the National Endowment for the Arts has been trying desperately to defend its slice of Obama’s stimulus package against accusations of waste by senators from states like Oklahoma by promising to ìmake awards that result in job retentionÖ for example grants to arts education programmes.î We mustn’t stoop to similar subterfuges. Experience should by now have taught us that any initiative whose professed aim is job creation is bound by definition to be bad for art. Funny, isn’t it, how when economic blight shuts down our city centres, artists are first in to open up the shops? Artists don’t need stimulus packages, or podia; all they really need is a shop window. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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