It’s time to heed the complaints and free art schools from the constraints of the university system, says Niru Ratnam
The Turner Prize award ceremony always attracts protest — usually in the shape of the Stuckists, a group of bedraggled, eccentric-looking artists who gather outside Tate Britain in funny hats and bemoan the death of representational painting. But this year they were upstaged by around 200 art students, who entered the museum in the afternoon and refused to leave, staging what was described as a ‘teach-in’. In addition to wearing their own humorous hats, the students made speeches, marched round and chanted. The ‘teach-in’ was a protest against proposals unveiled in the Browne Review to remove state funding from university undergraduate fine art courses (along with all other arts, humanities and social sciences subjects).
The Turner Prize teach-in was one of a number of such protests at art schools. Goldsmiths students occupied their library (some presumably overjoyed at having finally located it), students occupied the Slade and there was a teach-in at the National Gallery. Art students are good at this sort of creative protesting, and they drew a large amount of support from established artists and art school academics. Many of the art world grandees at the Turner Prize party expressed their support.
There is a reason for this: creative dissent is just about the only thing art schools teach well any more and that artists all agree is worth doing. The American academic Thierry de Duve pointed this out in a paper he delivered in 1993, which was subsequently published as ‘When Form Has Become Attitude — and Beyond’. De Duve argued that first modernism and then postmodernism stripped the art school of any useful function aside from teaching an attitude of dissent.
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