The (Near) Death of Painting at Art School Lite

Art schools have always been problematic for bureaucrats and bean counters.
They are quite expensive to run: for the most part they operate on a one-to-one
teaching ratio rather than auditorium delivery. They take up a lot of room on
campus: each student requires a personal studio space which they inhabit for
three years. They are often noisy, messy and fumy. They have traditionally been
places which have fomented free-thinking and radicalism true of both student
and staff alike (although, tragically, this aspect has been largely written out of the
equation over the last several decades).

Add to this the fact that after graduation students traditionally find employment in
the hospitality industry rather than a specific art job and the problem magnifies.
Art schools simply cannot show that their graduands have become gainfully
employed in what is rather fancifully called the industry after their three-year
courses. It just doesnt happen that way. The cultural pay back or justification
for this expensive art training can not be quantified in the early stages of an
artists career. An artist spends an entire lifetime refining their visual language
and expanding their artistic boundaries. Nobody has ever graduated from an art
school with a fully formed artistic philosophy and the complete wherewithal to
apply it within their work. This slow-burn cultural effect is anathema to the
bureaucrats and bean counters, who see as justified their wish to regularly prune
what they consider unprofitable dead wood. Consequently, art schools are
usually the first to feel the heel of economic rationalists. When an art-friendly
head of school is at the helm compromises can sometimes be made. But,
paradoxically, it cannot necessarily be assumed that one has an art-friendly head
of school, and in these instances one can only look on, aghast, when she or he
enthusiastically ushers in the slash and burn brigade.

In Australia, up until now, students wishing to train as artists would traditionally

leave high school and enter a TAFE college to undertake a two-year Visual Art
Diploma course. In this nurturing environment they would be exposed to a range
of subject areas and would learn technical and conceptual skills across a number
of art disciplines. They would then take this knowledge into a three-year Degree
course at an art school, where they would specialise in one major area of art
production: Painting, Sculpture, Printmaking, Photography etc. Their previous
TAFE experience would have well-equipped them to take on the rigours of
specialisation at this level. But changes now underway in art education will affect
the standard of teaching at art schools and therefore, unavoidably, the standard
of artists being produced.

We are currently witnessing severe downsizing (or in some cases actual

closures) of TAFE Visual Art courses. A notion has already been floated that the
once two-year Visual Art course may, sooner rather than later, be chopped to
one-year duration. This will mean that degree programs will need to spend the
first year of their own courses filling in the pieces missing from the TAFE
experience in order to bring incoming students up to speed conceptually and
technically. Hence, in the process, they will effectively truncate their own courses
by one year. The student will never catch up with the full art school experience
gained by their predecessors in more enlightened times. We might call the effect
of this: Art School Lite. It will further diminish a training system which, it can be
argued, is already in decline for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the
steady abandoning of traditional skills. Last year at an Open Day at a pre-
eminent Melbourne art school I overheard a lecturer assure the mother of a
prospective student that teaching at the school was definitely not skills-based,
which begs the question: Then on what, exactly, is it based? At another art
school a senior lecturer once told me that he/she had a real difficulty with the
notion of Life Drawing as a valid artistic pursuit and that the idea of people
standing around drawing a nude person was abhorrent to him/her. In any event,
recent funding cuts at this art school have led to Life Drawing being all but
eradicated from the program.

At some art schools today it is quite possible for a student in, say, Painting or
Sculpture to travel through the entire three years of their enrolment without
having made a single drawing in the furtherance of their ideas. This is partly due
to the fact that Drawing is now a stand-alone subject in many art schools.
Therefore, if a student is not enrolled in this subject any drawings that they might
make are not assessable and therefore considered unnecessary to the steady
rolling grind of the bureaucratic machine. Too often, art subjects are
compartmentalised to fit the demands of the administration that controls the
program. This is particularly a problem where the art school is within the aegis of
a university (which is most often the case): under this situation there are greater
demands to conform to models which, while they may work splendidly for
business studies or engineering, do not work for the fine arts.

In the previous edition of Vault British artist Tony Bevan expressed his anger that
UK art schools are systematically closing their Painting departments. He
suspects administrators who dont know and dont care what they are doing. A
similar thing is happening here. Some art schools have already banned the use
of oil paint within studio areas. Others insist on the use of odourless solvents for
cleaning brushes in the foolish belief that what you cant smell doesnt hurt you.
At one college where I taught, several years ago, men in protective garments
were brought in, at great expense, to chisel out and remove a section of wall
after it was discovered that dried paint, which had been inadvertently spattered
there by a student months earlier may have had some lead content.

This is symptomatic of a broader distrust, even aversion, for painting which exists
not only in art schools, but also in a number of high-profile, publicly-funded,
contemporary art spaces. The general consensus within this way of thinking
seems to be that while Painting may not be officially quite dead, a plastic bag lies
waiting handily on the bedside table, ready to be dragged over its ailing face to
put it out of its misery. Paint is messy, runny, hard to control, vibrant stuff with a
glorious, delicious life of its own. In short, it is all the things that the new crop of
art school mavens proscribes.

I was recently involved in a round table discussion group one of those

meandering ponderings of hypothetical scenarios so beloved by art school
apparatchiks. The topic of discussion was: The Ultimate Contemporary Art
School. Naturally, people made claims for their particular areas of expertise. As
the only painter on the panel (which in itself is instructive), I naturally put forward
the idea that it would be great to have a large, properly ventilated, painting studio
for the students. At first, this suggestion was met with the stony silence usually
attending the realisation that someone has trampled dog turds across a brand
new Axminster carpet. Eventually, one of the so-called new media artists (there
were three in attendance, which in itself is also instructive) turned to me and said,
witheringly, I think that the operative word here is Contemporary. Duly
chastened, I bid my farewells and hastened to the nearest bar.

Accordingly, painting in art schools today is very often of the draw something
and colour it in kind. Rare indeed is the student with an innate understanding of
paints fluidity and inner life which should surely be the main reason to get
involved with it in the first place? It is a sobering experience to witness the great
legacy of drippy, splashy, unruly, mad, painterly Modernism too often reduced to
a sort of graphic illustration.

Perhaps we are now getting the painting we deserve. These days, invariably, a
students first point of research on an artist is to conduct a Google image-sweep
rather than visiting a library or even an art gallery. This has certainly made
research faster and more immediate, but it comes at a great cost, for it has also
led to a debilitating devaluation of imagery. Thanks to the Internet there is no
longer a hierarchical value within images; nothing is seen as more, or less,
important than anything else; on the computer screen every image is afforded
equal status and worth. Consequently, students art-taste is blunted and they
often find it near impossible to differentiate between good and bad, high and low,
diamonds and gravel. A poorly drawn graphic illustration of an elf sitting on a
mushroom may now be accorded, by many students, equal status to a drawing
by Annibale Carracci. But perhaps this may be the point. Perhaps it indicates that
we are moving beyond such traditional positions as the necessity of evaluating
an art work in relation to all that has come before it. Perhaps the introduction of a
national Art School Lite is merely the first step in a long dark descent.