Art as Extraordinary Science by Jenny Waller & 9781911110095

Author:Jenny Waller & 9781911110095 [Jenny Waller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911110095
Publisher: Clink Street Publishing
Published: 2023-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

7: Art and the university

‘There is no doubt that studio art is marginalized in university life. But what exactly is the cure…I am engaged in finding ways to argue that fine art production has a place in the university. The problem is immensely difficult…’32

If we return now to where we left the historical narrative, we find that by the mid-twentieth century the elusive and paradoxical nature of art teaching and its institutions has resulted in a widespread sense of crisis. In America, art colleges have become a piecemeal collection of “private conservatories and schools of art” languishing in a state of economic and intellectual decline (Risenhoover & Blackburn, 1976, p. 3), while in the UK, art schools are characterised as failing institutions lacking in intellectual and pedagogical rigour.

For example, in 1923, the Camden Group painter Walter Sickert dismisses art students as “an immense mob of idlers, male and female, to whom art schools serve as a kind of day nursery” (Macdonald, 1973, p. 89). In the 1970s, architect and industrial designer Misha Black dismisses art colleges as “sanctuaries for the determined and refuges for the idle” (Black, 1973, p. 30); while art tutor Sjoerd Hannema at Manchester complains that:

Generally speaking, the student is left to work out his own salvation…There are also those tutors, particularly common in the field of painting, who believe, as an article of faith, that students cannot and should not be taught; instead, they should be left to ‘feel their way’ and ‘organize their own experience’. (Macdonald, 1973, p. 89)

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