A transcription of a discussion lead by Sarah Jones & Charlotte Price, during the Independent Art School Conference 2000.

Pictured: Sarah Jones, Charlotte Price and Pippa Koszerek.

Sarah Jones and Charlotte Price, graduates of Hull School of Art & Design and members of the Red Gallery, Hull, discussed the importance an exchange trip to an Academy in Poland had had on their understanding about and relationship to their own education. Advocating travel and new experiences, they discussed the confusions they had had in being placed in a completely different and much stricter educational environment. Below is a transcription of part of the discussions which arose from their ideas.

Charlotte Price: Going on an exchange to Poland gave us an awareness that where you go to college, well for me it was total luck and it shouldn't necessarily have been that way, but the way the systems alter between locality, within a nation…

Simon Ringe: What you seem to be talking about is the realisation of potentiality. Given you saw an extreme against what you thought was normal here. You saw that kind of chasm where you could operate that given potentiality. So your answer of giving people money to just wander off doesn't actually serve to indicate any potentiality of any situation other than the reading 'spent money' which is the leisure system. I'm saying that because you've said at the beginning that previous to coming to art college you sat around watching TV. Given that outside of your experience, that was, as you termed it, normality. Maybe normality as we perceive it now is governed by a leisure industry that says 'there's what you can do, but we're actually going to guide you in terms of what you can do as consumers.' And you had to step outside of that system to realise that maybe you could use it to more personal gains. You only see the constraints of it while you're in it, once you're out of it you're able to reflect back on it and you can use that to go beyond those constraints.

Clare Charnley: Did going outside it actually throw up criticisms of the situation here as well as pointing out advantages it had.

Charlotte Price: It's kind of easy the way artists are so respected in Poland.

Lee Merril: Maybe the system here is better at marginalizing people and making them into eccentrics.

Trevor Batten: If we take this idea of how important it is to step outside the system in some way, how do we relate that to art as expression which is encompassing the system?

Stuart Bradshaw: How can art encompass the system?

Trevor Batten: If one is expressing oneself in the sense of doing what one wants to do, then one is following inside ones normal pattern, ones desires, ones wishes, ones training, ones conditioning, etc, etc. And yet, we've just seen that it's only when you are forced outside that system, confronted with, for example, Poland which is a completely different academic system, then you suddenly understand lots of things about your own system. Maybe this expressive idea of following your own desires is completely wrong and in fact, maybe art should be in some way pushing people outside of their system. Or art education should be ways of breaking through peoples systems and pushing them outside, perhaps rather violently, at least on a psychological level.

Rob Gawthrop: Or, it's creating an environment to establish desire for people to want that so as they can push themselves outside the system. If you actually push them, it might work for some but the others, they'll be oppressed.

Stuart Bradshaw: Just on a personal level, one of the things I found about art education. It became very obvious to me when I was a student that, in the practice of an activity that I'd actually chosen to do, In actually practising that activity, there were whole aspects of myself, a whole other personality came into play that I hadn't known about. It was something else which must have been part of me, something that came into being through the relationship between me and this medium occurred, but it was like, I made free choice in a strange way in order to alienate myself in a conventional sense. But, in order to get in that position, I had to make a free choice. It wasn't an external system that dictated to me that I was to do this.

Trevor Batten: I agree, but I think there's too much emphasis in art education about expressing oneself and not understanding how much in a certain sense, alienating oneself and putting oneself outside the system voluntarily is, I think, a very important part of ones working technique.

Stuart Bradshaw: It is, but, I think the idea of expression in the conventional self-expressive way was never much more than a myth, a romantic myth.

Duncan Reekie: I think that's quite interesting, the two systems you're talking about, because I think that in a way the relative freedom of one system and the relative contrast of the other system is a bit of a misapprehension. It's about what those two different systems want their artist to be. Perhaps I'm just extemporising, but maybe in Poland they want an artist who is very disciplined, well educated, the sort of 19th century artist who can actually produce work. Whereas in England, what the bourgeoisie want from their artist is the bohemian. They want somebody who is eccentric, who has very strange ideas, who can do very strange things, and think outside of systems and is given the liberty to think outside of systems and to be bohemian. But that really isn't a freedom because that is in fact what the bourgeoisie want from you. They want you to be eccentric and free, and that is your prison.