THE ART SCHOOL LIFE FOR ME

My anecdotes of easy disasters and tiny triumphs may lead you to think I disliked the Art School system and its participants. The reverse is true. The system was inconsistent, perverse and needed great ingenuity to explain and defend at parties or family meetings. I seldom chose to seek out official reports or historical reflections on Higher Education for artists. Each prospectus I read was a risible blend of puffery and sheer invention. I have saved a few over the years and marvel at the resources lavished on colour photography, dissimulation and in the case of Andy Vargo's giant brochure for Norwich, ingenious inserts. The students I encountered were uniformly bright and talented in a bewildering range of media and personal obsessions. Leaving education to sell my books, it was heartening how many customers said they would not have known of this artist had they not come to one of my lectures.Constructing this website, The Visual Telling of Stories, several correspondents were able, to spot how I'd changed the material over the years.

In the pursuit of cheap notoriety I delivered the Penis in Art based on the privately printed extra volume to Edward Fuch's Prints of the Era of the Gallant. A few months ago, a visitor to my website claimed I had suppressed the more garish material from the lecture she attended.

TALES FROM THE FRONT  (a small selection) University and Art School

Given the climate of moral outrage that prevails at the time of writing, I insist on anonymity in certain of these stories. Even though some colleagues were as daft as a brush, and even more irresponsible, the prevailing culture of the Art School was liberal, tolerant, inclusive and wholly delightful. It is hardly surprising that certain colleagues took this latitude as far as it would stretch. Their inventive pushing of the envelope, tantamount to origami on a Grand Scale, was, almost without exception delightful and hilarious. I want to spare them embarrassment because I love them just as much.

I had done a small amount of teaching at the University of East Anglia while a post-graduate where the conventions of seminar presentations and academic research were largely unchallenged despite it boasting of being a ‘New University’. Teaching and Learning at Norwich evoked wistfully the patterns of education at Oxbridge. Staff Student ratios did not permit the port soaked tutorial by the stuttering fire place. Seminars were held around large refectory tables where one poor sap read from a hurriedly assembled script with the occasional interjection by the Teacher who had read the text under discussion many years before. Fifteen bored individuals who hadn’t read the text at all,  sat around, rolling cigarettes or writing home. UEA rejoiced in the calibre of its staff, but they were judged not by original thinking but by the ingenuity of the ways they deployed critical terms, and by the sheer weight and obscurity of their footnotes.

At the University, the staff credentials, the terms of lectures and timetables extended from the fixed point of the present to the horizon of the discernible future, providing the convergence of forward planning, like some seventeenth century perspectival exercise.