Wounds (Exposición Final MA)

Exposición Final MA (MA Final Show)

The American art historian and critic, James Elkins, concluded his study of the art school somewhat ruefully: «Teaching in an art department or an art school is the most interesting activity that I know, because it is the furthest from anything that makes sense – short of psychosis»(1).

I say “ruefully” as this comes at the end of two hundred pages of critical examination – of trying to make sense of the pedagogic practices and historical evolution of contemporary departments of art and design. He devotes a whole section to the ‘critique’ – the standard model of fine art school analysis – exposing the hidden and explicit procedures of description, interpretation and evaluation that frame the exchange between student and tutor in the apparent search for meaning: the interplay of ‘judicative’ and ‘descriptive’ commentary (where the former is frequently concealed in the latter).

As one who has spent most of their professional working life in departments of art and design, and even though I part company with Elkins on a number of issues and assertions (he is recording the American university experience), his book is a useful reminder of the myths and contradictions of ‘teaching what can’t be taught’, and of the precarious cognitive value of aesthetic judgements. In an educational system where both students and staff are constantly under review and qualitative and quantative assessment at both local and national level rules our professional lives – current UK departments/schools of art and design – any reflection upon the art objects and practices produced under this rubric is to be approached with caution: one never knows whose interests might be served. That said, we are expected to make meaning/s out of the productive activities of our students whatever their multifarious concatenations: of film and video, photography and performance, painting and sculpture, sound and light, text and assemblage… a list as long and various as Borges fabled Chinese Emperor’s encyclopedia, or Lautremont’s ‘chance encounters’.

What, then, can one expect from one or two years as an emergent artist who has undergone (I almost want to say, survived) a post-graduate programme in fine art. A way of working – a method (not a methodology despite the regular confusion of those terms); some skills in making – facture and fabrication; knowledge of the historical antecedents to one’s own studio practice; a grasp of critical terminology – the discourse of art, and a degree of scepticism towards theoretical over-determination (again, Elkin’s comes to mind); a recognition of the demands and constraints of the pursuit of art-making as a career choice, including the institutions of art from museums and galleries to art fairs and auctions; a capacity for critical self-reflection and not always taking oneself too seriously, and the recognition that failure, mistakes, wrong turnings and doubt are as fundamental to the making of art as night is to day.

In another context, writing about the art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, I suggested that the particularity of fine art practice resided in the «fashioning of convincing alternative visual scenarios for our encounters with the world», (2) and this seems to me a reasonable summary of the aspirations of this year MA Fine Art group. The pitch of a note, the faint aroma of cut grass, light and space, the odd juxtaposition of found materials sewn together, the blending and tension between photographed and painted form, organic patterns of colour and line, paint dribbled across a surface: all in their different expression of intention and interest suggest a struggle and commitment to find affective forms of visualization for perceptual and imagined worlds. One can’t really ask for anything more.

Jon Bird
September 2012

(1) James Elkins Why Art Cannot Be Taught, Chicago 2001

(2) Jon Bird ‘Imagining Otherworlds: Connection and Difference in the Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith’ in Other Worlds: The Art of Nancy Spero and Kiki Smith, London 2003

This text was written in the context of the MA Final Show, Middlesex University September 2012.