Anatomy of an Art School: a series of provocations from Aberdeen

Changes around cost, access, value, larger cohorts sharing space and changing career paths for artists are topics that always come into play when talking about modern art school education. In the context of sustained pressures on art education from policy, funding and measures of course value and success, a recent event in Aberdeen asked how arts schools can continue to evolve, using the geographical and architectural structure of Gray’s School of Art as a starting point.

SCAN’s Deputy Director Helen Moore attended Anatomy of an Art School earlier this month, and shares some of the thinking and learning from the event. 

With contributors and visitors from beyond Aberdeen, the two day forum was an excellent opportunity for local voices to connect with wider perspectives around future possibilities for arts education. The event was hosted at Aberdeen Art Gallery, allowing us to consider the significance of the school’s modernist campus in Garthdee from a distance. A series of provocations, performances and discussions allowed those of us present to really consider ideas, questions and challenges as opposed to provide answers or solutions. 

A workshop with artist Desiree Coral and technician Helen Love encouraged us to build together, using the action of ceramic coil building to collaboratively create a pot whilst thinking about the technical staff who share time, skills and knowledge in the workshops in art schools and colleges across the country.

Professor Dan Allen, Dean of Gray’s delivered the first provocation challenging the metrics of employability, student satisfaction and economic return. These conditions begin to quantify the benefits of an artistic practice through monetary values as opposed to recognising impact across cultural life, placemaking, sense of identity, and health and wellbeing. We must find a way to highlight these softer, yet equally important values differently. 

Gavin Butt, professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University looked to the past: to experimental practices from the 1960s to 1980s, when state funding rather than student fees supported artistic possibilities. Citing the Hornsey College of Art sit-in that took place in 1968, an example was shared around how collective action from students and staff at the college around the withdrawal of student union funds led to open discussions, lectures, and workshops about how art education—and society more broadly—should change. 

Quoting the late artist and GSA lecture David Harding’s thesis that “the context is half of the work,” Michael Archer, Professor Emiratus of Goldsmith’s College, looked at the formality of assessment and where it highlights hierarchies and vulnerability. Should assessment be a process? Or an event? 

Artist Dr John Walter opened with a portrait of a fictional creative mentor, generated by AI. He asked if AI is really the threat to collaboration and creativity that we perceive it to be. Do we view it with similar apprehension that we held for other digital technologies twenty years ago? His provocation asked if black and white thinking around this issue really solves the problem and to remember that real innovation can happen in spaces of autonomy. 

Responding to this, Tim Ingold, Professor of Social Anthropology at University of Aberdeen interrogated the meaning of the word ‘contemporary’. Thinking about ‘before and after’ versus ‘past and future’ – artistic practice is always doing and redoing. Can art and art-making open us up to a sense of presence that can comment on past and future encounters? Where does art have a life of its own and where can work that we do now give hope for generations still to come? 

Dr Regina Sipos, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Munich, challenged us to think about designing systems with people and not for people, a comment on shifting design focus from the commercial to the political. Could this shift in design education bring new dispositions – humilty and reflexivity, thinking in ‘ameliorative’ ways? The most meaningful changes can happen when we can feel discomfort or vulnerability in making change. 

We learned a new word, ‘perkele’, from Jaana Erkkila-Hill, Professor and Vice-Dean of Fine Art at the University of Lapland. ‘Perkele’ is a fortified word, meaning that dissenting opinions will be countered by a threat of force from management or leaders. Against better knowledge, art universities are speeding up time spent in education. Is the radical present in the teaching of the traditional, where we trust that students will find ways of applying these skills when the time is right and they matter the most? 

Artist Andrew Bracey, professor at the University of Lincoln, started with the famous Bruce Nauman quote, “If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.” Bracey shared his collaborative research into “studioing”, including timelapse footage recorded in studio spaces in art schools across the UK and Ireland. Within this footage we saw real moments of ebb and flow, collaboration, discussion and experimentation. We were then invited to discuss what is essential to sustaining a healthy studio culture. The audience shared experiences around critique, care, shared meals, and an assortment of activities in what is often just defined as physical space. 

Philipp Sack, research associate at the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, drew our attention to the current state of this legendary art school, as it is held in a liminal space after being active for 14 years. What should the active preservation of this site look like, given it completely redefined what an art education could look like? 

 A powerful performance by Tako Taal commissioned specially for the event highlighted the origins of the school, founded by 19th century businessman John Gray with connections to global empire and industry. Having developed a script via archival material, the audience were invited to read collectively with the performers, creating an interruption of history via shared vocalisation, giving voice to a lesser known element of the school’s history. 

Ash McNaughton’s performance drew us into the Aberdeen Art Gallery sculpture hall. Through balance, movement, and weight distribution via the body and objects, the durational nature of the performance made us aware of labour and the accumulation of small actions. Ideas on the inside manifested themselves on the outside. 

Anatomy of an Art School felt so important and so timely, offering space to all of us present to think about what conditions are essential for creative learning and where the threads of these conversations can lead us. I’m looking forward to seeing ideas generated from the gathering in a forthcoming publication. 

Anatomy of an Art School was organised by Gray’s School of Art, in partnership with Look Again, Aberdeen Art Gallery and Robert Gordon University Art and Heritage Collections as part of the Gray’s 140 programme.

Images:

  1. 1. KYTHE, Live performance by Ash McNaughton
  2. 2. Living Table – Coils of Acknowledgement and Knowledge
  3. 3. Presentation by artist and lecturer Andrew Bracey