(a response to) The New Hull School of Art

In November a group of artists set up The New Hull School of Art at the Red Gallery, a fortnight-long 'work-in' as a protest against the imposition of a modular teaching system upon their tutors and their previously 'open' Fine Art course.

The politics of modularity are specific and I assume they will be discussed in other contributions to this magazine. I will concentrate on some of my thoughts and experiences as a participant in the project, and whether the experiment was worthwhile.

Art, I have suggested elsewhere, is concerned with and driven by intensity and fascination. In a recent essay for Spine I concluded that the desire to communicate such drives has its virtue when being 'heartfelt, thorough and against the grain.'

As pointed out to me shortly afterwards, there is an ambiguity in this essentially romantic, egocentric stance, as nowadays what is 'the grain' exactly? One of the positive aspects of postmodern thought, for example, is an insistence on multiplicity, multiculturalism, and difference.

Was the New School's rebellion effective and significant?

A casual commentator reported that 'all rebellions are doomed to failure' (with tongue in cheek- I think!), whilst on the first day two students turned up briefly to say that modularity was here to stay and that they wouldn't risk getting kicked off their course by joining in with the project.
One could suggest, then, that a possible grain is one of timidity and- as one contributor put it- 'political lassitude'.

In terms of effectiveness and motivation, the same contributor asked whether ours was an ego-led exercise, especially as many of us responded to the 'buzz' of media interest and the television cameras which occupied the gallery within the second day.

One of the aims was to make a creative and peaceful protest and the TV crew respected this. For a change, a student action was not seen as 'bizarre', 'weird', 'wacky' etc, but as valid and enterprising. The reportage advertised the Hull School of Art and its students as an industrious and disciplined body of professional artists.

When it comes to experimental or antagonistic art-making, however, this business of 'validating' it by getting good media coverage is questionable. Would we still have regarded our venture as 'successful' if reporters had ignored us or- worse still- portrayed us as 'mad artists' or 'scruffy upstarts'?

Arguably it can be braver, although more detrimental, to eschew the phantom of the 'official' media and the securing of a 'good review'.

From mulling these thoughts over, two issues come to mind: our identity and our working practice.

Working Practice

The range of methods and work taking place was enormous. People drew on walls, sculpted, built musical instruments and installations, performed suspended from the gallery ceiling, took on Neoist correspondences, constructed temporary darkrooms, gave talks, painted, made sound recordings, wrote statements, and made interventions into the neighbouring department stores.

For much of the time our unheated studios- lacking toilet facilities- operated 24 hours a day with artists (and in one instance, with their dog) working through the night and sleeping on the concrete gallery floor. (According to legend, plastic bottles took on a new significance!)
It is unarguable that many of us working in the often cold and cramped conditions found the situation invigorating and inspirational. As a fervent, stubborn, mind-your-own-business individualist, the knock-on effect of communal artistic practice I found surprising, rewarding and fun.
It became obvious that most serious artists can work in excess of 12 hours a day almost by accident, and that such artists thrive in an atmosphere of activity uninhibited by the notion of 'closing time'.
It must be stressed that this action was against managerial manoeuvres, not against the Artschool or its staff. Infact, by its organic life our 'new school' was a reiteration of the ideal of the art school as a place for open-ended-ness, indulgence, and blurred boundaries.

All of these criteria are affirmative ones in the face of (farce of?) regularization, 'parity' and restructuring.

Our ideal for the New School suggested that contradictory (but no less credible) scenario of needing boundless freedom and 24 hour studio access, but alongside it someone to provide us with material wants such as a physical space to work in and, in many cases, specialist equipment (often most easily obtainable by signing up to a Fine Art course as a 'resource centre').

This scenario may echo the popular conception of the non-commercial artist as a 'taker', demanding buildings, resources and funding in return for a 'negligible' product difficult to quantify. (For those wishing to quantify artistic production, one may turn to the recent BBC2 documentary on the Royal College of Art: a nice pottery department and instructions to their students about how big their paintings should be.)

As practitioners an issue which emerged from our 'school' was one of time. Two weeks was short, but so is three years of institutional support, especially if after that one is cast into a world where facilities and studios are hard to come by- or if mere survival dictates resigning oneself to uncreative and mundane employment.

One artist suggested that considering our transient life at Artschool what one needs are artists' groups such as the New School's temporary populace to inhabit and be productive in buildings functioning both as studios and as galleries.

This is counter to a common assumption that one migrates to established 'nerve centres' for art in a singular attempt (or rather, a series of attempts) to wrestle funding for individual and self-concerned projects.

One of the questions regularly asked of arts activities in Hull (often with philistine disdain or paranoia about 'elitism') is whether or not such activities are 'relevant' to the wider community.

As suggested earlier, our cultural condition is one of multiplicity and difference. This said, our corner of artistic enterprize (non-commercial, experimental, 'difficult' etc) often fails- or perhaps chooses not to- assert itself within the context of the city's general identity. This may be a virtue considering the amount of lacklustre art justifying itself with claims to 'educate', 'enable wider access', 'address issues' etc, but what must also be recognized is Hull's startling disability: other than vapid T-shirt slogans ("It's never dull in Hull"), the city often fails to say how good it is.

As artists the physical presence of our work and our buildings are positive factors in expressing something other than tracksuits and fish-related iconography. As our protest was one against homogeny and standardization in education, so our presence should celebrate the fluid and the idiosyncratic.

The role of architecture and geography plays its part in our artistic sensibility. The Red Gallery has been called 'obscure' and 'off the beaten track' by people who do not go there.
Suggestions that were it moved to a more 'prominent' site, made bigger, turned into a generalized 'arts centre' (for example) illustrates this. As it is, and as it should remain, the gallery is small and nestles behind a shopping centre car park, tactfully sharing its street with local prostitutes.

The idea that cultural activities should take place under one roof- and an unremarkable roof at that- may be a concern to the nature of the Hull School of Art. Rumours about the future of its distinctive School of Architecture were recently exposed in the local paper (since refuted, I think), and if other buildings were to face similar threats the result would be to lose or compromise a body of disparate and remarkable sites which spread themselves out across the city, and which likewise advertise varied fields of creative endeavour executed by varied people.

As artists and art students are among the most curious (and critical) about our everyday environment, a matrix of studio and showing spaces at present generates a constant flow of such individuals, who in turn contribute their curiosity about the city in which they live and work.

*

One reservation was that the number of participants in the New School project would be too few to elicit enough response from the subjects of their protest. (All in all, there were about 40 or 50-plus involved).

Another reservation is that this kind of energy and commitment wanes after an initial flurry of excitement- a flurry combining antagonising management bodies and getting in the news.

The New Hull School of Art has been charged with the kind of dynamism that a 'cause' can provide, and offered productive experiences of open access studios, site-specific working, and an agreeable form of collective effort achieved through the integrity of self-maintenance.

Whereas many student protests consist of sloganeering, drawing up petitions and occupying offices for a finite period, The New Hull School of Art, in its impetus and execution, and with its itinerary of peacefulness and productivity, has a longevity of thought and deed beyond its immediate concerns.

(c) Philip Barnes, 17.11.99

(This essay was published in The New Hull School of Art magazine)