| A Celebration of Failure |
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What we have seen endlessly in the arts pages of the press for years is a celebration of failure. For something like 30 years now the art world has been subverted by those who believed that progress in art was made by by-passing or suppressing previous conventions of making art. That they haven¹t succeeded entirely in this is a result of figurative art being a fundamental of human nature. They seem to have succeeded in art colleges though, by turning them into a sort of advanced level play school. Now, having left no barrel bottom unscraped, lo, they discover drawing and painting again. The only trouble is that their graduates look as if the last art lesson they had was in the 5th or 6th form... which was probably the case. But do we admit to failure? Do turkeys vote for Christmas? The key to the free-for-all that has seen in many instances price increases in inverse proportion to worth is the term ŒArt¹ itself. No one dares define it for fear of ridicule and it is not in the interests of the vested interests to have it defined. Nevertheless, I believe that someone has to be rash enough to have a go. First, however, I¹d like to consider how we got into this mess in the first place? In the early 60s art had always been the skive subject at school. Art school was the option for those not bright enough for university but who had a modest facility with drawing. What the art establishment thought of this attitude can perhaps be surmised from the junking of the old National Diploma in Art and Design and the introduction of degree courses. This meant that students were more able to get grants while tutors got an upgrading of status and salary. But it also meant that applicants for the courses had to have more O and A levels ¬ and candidates with those were not necessarily the ones who possessed the key to visual literacy, namely drawing. It was convenient therefore that the old mould of art had been cracked. We had Pop Art, Op Art and something called Conceptual Art, so who needed good drawing anyway? Life drawing, hitherto the backbone of art training, became an optional extra and life classes began to close. In its place writing a clever rationale for one¹s work became as important as the artwork itself. A sort of miragespeak crept into the art scene designed always to just elude comprehension, whilst looking good from a distance. But what did you do with an art graduate who could neither draw nor paint? Why, set him to teach of course! And was he or she likely to encourage a student with incipient drawing and painting talent? No. I gather that students are nowadays actually threatened with being marked down if they persist in trying to improve their drawing. All the older tutors with solid groundings in painting and drawing retired or gave up. A decade later and we were left with the supreme achievement of British art in the form of a light going on and off in a room every seven seconds. The media played a willing part in this decline. One could see their problem. Artists couldn¹t cut off their ears every day. By fulminating about such like as the Tate¹s bricks in the 1970s artists got the message: ³No publicity is bad publicity². Writers and critics soon began to behave as though stunts were the only game in town. If they didn¹t play the game they wouldn¹t get invited to the party. In a world in which art can be literally anything the term has become meaningless and without a definable meaning who can be held to account. In the end it comes down to those practicing real art to pull out the stops and regain the attention of a public grown bored. However, I get the impression that we are all keeping our heads down waiting endlessly for a return to sanity. We are punch drunk. We have been deemed ³the wrong kind of artists² by those in charge of the Arts Council and the national collections. And even the Royal Academies have caught the disease and are beginning to squeeze us out too. By rights, this should be the time for the pendulum to swing back but it is being held in check by vested interests. Here is my definition of art. Art is a visual counterpart of verbal language. It takes one substance and transforms it into the visual appearance of another. Take a bicycle. A pseudo artist might hang it upside down, strew it in bits, crush it or even file it down and eat it. Any of these would require written accounts of why someone thought this a worthwhile thing to do. Picasso, meanwhile, takes the handlebars and the saddle and makes a bull¹s head. Not great art perhaps but clever and amusing and requiring no Œartist¹s statement¹ at all. Art is the ability to turn the rudest of materials into eloquent meaning. It is this that makes one an artist. Gary M James |
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