I'm around two weeks away from handing in my research proposal, my life has been completely taken over by this work for a long time, but the last couple of months have been the most intense. I have said a number of times previously that I have a genuine regret that I did not study an academic discipline, I have very little other than the sort of autodidactic knowledge that never ever feels completely secure. I am aware also that my refusal to ever head back and start at the beginning has made the road all the harder. A question I return to frequently is "what should an art education consist of?" and the follow up question "what is an art education for?" What I think is missing from such an education is an engagement with a wider reality, in place of hours of undirected time and an insular self-referential environment, there should be enforced encounters beyond experience, and radical critique of such experience. Gone should be the comforts of learning a craft, of learning the encyclopaedia of technique instead we should muck out stables, cook at a shelter, write a radio-play, haul back-line for a music hire company, sit in on history, midwifery and beauty therapy lectures in a variety of institutions. Art education has shown use only in the instances where it advances an individual's capacity to engage with the world, but it has done this badly and patchily. Career lecturers while away a student's time with the same list of artists, alluding to a lofty ideal of aesthetics and philosophy while hiding the only practical information they might impart for the future they present before the student's eyes, namely to learn to identify, accumulate and use the social currency which drives art as a business above all else. Why not instead enhance the individual so that they might construct an alternative to that awful system? How can we sit by as the institutions which pride themselves of their position as the vanguard fail to remove their activities from the bourgeois production of commodities for the gentry via the patronising exploitation of the lower classes? Why do we ignore the system of courtship and favour which effectively renders all other variation of artistic practice as flavours of the same ice cream? There should be no distinction between theory and practice and advancement should be of the self rather than what the self can present to a world. I do not wish to see the things made shiny by the morally bankrupt, the confidences of the middle-classes who see early on that what is needed to be successful is first of all to look successful. Be careless with professional materials and your efforts will be rewarded. Regardless of how it has ever been, that is now absurd. In the face of so much creativity in riots and animal husbandry and communication infrastructures, art education has been fatally uncritical of its own role and its own potential. The role of artist is primary that of the bricoleur, the adapter, the one open to meshing with new systems and throwing up new systems which are founded only upon the moving things that pass around rather than a static academy. That should be the training, and then the drive to learn how to throw a pot, or prime a canvas or shear a sheep will not only come forth naturally, but will make sense in terms of its use, rather than simply the accumulation of a skill which might, if one is luckily, be exploited by another further up the food chain.
I do not in any way bemoan my own education, it was the only one I had and the only one I could get and I am grateful. I do think the undergraduate art system will, in the face of genuine free-schools, pirate academy and bendy-bus pedagogy find itself utterly lacking and I hope that it does something about this before all but the most needy, foolish and scared abandon it for a more genuine experience of art learning.
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