(Extract from) Lecture on drawing draft texts delivered on the 22 October 2008 Wimbledon College of Art.

ART SCHOOL  The name that hath no love

Terry Smith

Teaching Fellow in Drawing

University of the arts Wimbledon

In 1977 Terry Smith, a second year degree student at Goldsmiths College, took a year out from education. During this time, with fellow student John Wallet he visited almost every degree show in the England. This journey resulted in an article in Artscribe magazine entitled BA MEANS GOODBYE. Some thirty years later having exhibited in Museums, galleries and derelict spaces around the world, Smith embarks on his first real job in education in a two-year post as Teaching Fellow in Drawing at Wimbledon College of Art. He takes this opportunity to re-examine what art school is really about.

“We need to look again at how we organise art school.

We should we abandon the degree show and dissertation and get back to experimentation-“

There is a debate now forming that asks the question, what are we going to do about art school? Graham Crowley’s comments in Art Monthly have generated a discussion in the letter pages and raised the issues to a larger stage. To begin my Drawing Fellowship I am preparing a lecture to introduce my ideas about art and art education to the students and staff alike. Below is an enlarged, extract of the part of the lecture that deals with Education.

Artist have always been my ideal. They are usually positioned at the centre of culture, even if their activities place them on the margin. Artist tend to know the most current films, the most talked about books and be aware of cutting edge music.

It’s our business as artist to be involved in the world in the most direct way. I have met many academics, who might know everything about something, but nothing everything.

Artists generalise, we scavenge, and are cultural predators, borrowing and stealing anything we need. We are hungry for new ways and techniques of making, curious about philosophy, competitive, generous, and secretive but above all biting at the bit, to share our work.

Art schools should reflect this.

As part of this two-year fellowship, I proposed to play with the formats and design my time around my interests. Thankfully they agreed. I started in April 2008 and have been having meetings with tutors, giving tutorials to students and piloting an experimental drawing class. In eight morning sessions, I invited composers, dancers, historians, filmmakers as well as artists to workshop ideas around ‘line’. I called it an Experimental Drawing Class, but in essence it was on the model of an art school system that I experienced as a student in Goldsmiths in the mid to late seventies.

I officially began my fellowship in October with a one-day drawing day, where I have invited staff and students from three colleges to take part in an experimental drawing day. After this I have organised a series of lectures called SPEAKEASY, where artist and designers are invited to play with the idea of performance-information-communication.

I think art schools are easy to make work. College works this way, - after a vibrant foundation course; the first years are full of energy. The second year is where they have a wobble, and the third year is dogged by a dissertation and degree show. By trying to tie everything up at the end, it creates this tunnel vision, where students are anxious to please and abandon any experimentation in order to make their ‘final’ show a success. This means, a good grade and a sell out show, with the option of a commercial gallery.

This seems to me to be a total waste of time and energy. And completely in the wrong direction.

I propose that we drop the degree show and dissertation and concentrate on creating powerful and thought provoking experiences for the students.

If we must make assessments, then do it on their course work. Allow them to experiment and take risks right up to the last day at college. I think we will have better artists out of it. The current crop of young artists showing in galleries at the moment is, by and large, just utterly boring. If we give art schools back to artists to run, we may get better artists graduating out of it.

There should be a contract when you start art school that says at the top, - enter at your own risk.

I think its time now to really rethink everything. Students have less space than in my day, less time, and under more internal pressure. In some ways they are over taught, too many things going on, it’s like a conveyor belt and everyone is on board. Is this teaching or just processing.

I have given lectures in many colleges around the country, followed or proceeded by a tutorial list. With just a fleeting moment with each student you have to think is this really worthwhile. What is anyone getting out of this?

I guess for many artists of my generation, Black Mountain was the ideal. Which is also proof that location is not everything. When I was a student at Goldsmiths i was in a department headed by Michael Craig Martin called the back fields, I grew up in an atmosphere of inquiry and curiosity. Goldsmiths was not exactly ‘in town’. But it succeeded because it developed a policy that art was not about agreement, or average, or sameness. Diversity was paramount. Not everyone had such a good time as me, no system is perfect. And we are in different times now. But I was an awkward and demanding student and I have become an awkward and demanding artist. If I am going to spend some of my energy and time in an art school, I want to get something out of it, a lot more than just a salary. I have had this conversation with many people in art schools over the last few months, and I have found no one yet who disagrees. Art is about everything. And art school should be about expressing and developing as artists and human beings. We need to ditch all this assessment and start doing what as artist we do best challenge and disrupt the norm.

For me, I have no power other than argument. I have made it my task for the duration of my short tenure to invent a class that I would like to attend, create a lecture series that address the issues that I feel are important, and to encourage at every opportunity students to think for themselves, and to believe no one.

With the constant drive to define assessment what happens is that the work becomes standardised, work made by students fit the assessment criteria. Standardisation means mediocrity, mediocrity is the enemy of art.

Art is rebellious, and ground breaking. There are no rules, so know rules can be broken. What we have are protocols and these should always be challenged. Art education needs to recognise the enterprise of art is explosive and that students are not making art at art schools, they are learning and training how to make art.

I feel very strongly, that we should release students from the tyranny of the dissertation, a completely unnecessary process, and the degree show, which distorts the whole art school experience. It’s not necessary; assessment should be made throughout the year.

Space at art school as been traditionally generous, but now more students crammed into smaller spaces and each year greater cuts on the teaching hours as caused a crisis, where the teaching staff are over worked and unappreciated. Moral seems low generally, has they are drowned in paper work.

To be honest, the degree is next to useless, whatever grade is given. No Museum director, gallery owner, critic or writer has the slightest interest in what grade is achieved. The only use is if the students want to continue in MA and PHD. I am not sure what the regulations are but I imagine that MA staff is going to accept students based on their work and ambition.

Art schools have to be a joyful, intense and learning experience. We cant teach art, we can teach methods and techniques, I believe that art is self taught, and the job of art education, is to support the students in their personal curiosity, and ambition to create profound works.

To be an artist, is to be fearless, to expose your vulnerability, takes enormous courage, and again these are not things that you can teach, but they are things you can learn.

What’s the point of art school ? I think its a space to experiment, to play, to challenge and be challenged, a place of magic.

Joseph Beuys destroyed all his college work, asked why he said, ‘its just training work’. Maybe instead of a degree show at the end of the course we should have a huge bonfire.

October 2008

MANIFESTO

The experimental drawing class is a simple term to explain nothing. I think the whole idea of the class is to look, examine and practice art in every possible manifestation. To look forwards, backwards, upside down and sideways. Its a system of self organising cells that are independent. The class is simply a way of focusing ideas and projects whose main intention is to look at the making and breaking of art -