Alternative art schools: Juxtaposition sources of autonomy between UK and German cases.

Silvie Jacobi

Introduction/Abstract

This brief comparative study looks into the emergence of alternative art school groups and institutions in the context of recent changes within the UK and German higher education sector, and by doing so reveals different forms of autonomy that either led to their emergence or surfaced as a result of it. It draws this focus from various meetings with representatives from such groups, who I met during a longer-term study for my doctoral research, which looked into the role of art schools’ in forging relationships between artists and place. These meetings raised interesting questions around the future of art schools and art academies and how alternative institutions do not just fill a void but cross-fertilise this field.

Externalised alternative art schools in the UK

Since 2011 when higher education fees tripled, art schools’ operation in the UK’s formalised higher education sector faced an unprecedented and even existential crisis. This was in large part due to the commercialisation of art school education, which in turn results in an ongoing standardisation and rationalisation of fine art education, in particular. This, as many authors in Madoff’s (2009) edited book argue, is contrary to the freedoms an art school education should offer, which since the conceptual turn around in the 1960s developed around ideas of what art or education might be rather than relying on a written curriculum with set content or subjects. For a side-research project of my PhD (Jacobi 2017), I have met with 3 different alternative art school in London, initially to understand how they have negotiated urban space as part of establishing their artistic rationale and organisational form. For this paper, I am much more interested in the reasoning behind the need of alternatives in the UK context. The 3 cases I considered in the above cited study, were Open School East set up in 2013, School of the Damned founded 2014 and Turps Art School in 2012. The common strand around the initiatives were founded shortly after the 2011 hike in tuition fees, was not a coincidence but on the basis of a common understanding that art schools could not continue to function under such a regime of fees. Monetisation is the motor behind the despised rationalisation of fine art education, which is continuing to lead to increased bureaucracies, abolishment of expensive to run workshops and studio spaces, a misplaced focus on employability which falsely represents processes and success in the art world as well as accessibility issues for students from a lower income backgrounds. It can be argued that the alternatives today revisit the situation of Hornsey in 1968 (Tickner 2008) where students protested against narrow vocationalism and fine art’s instrumentalisation within that. However their protects signals a concern with autonomy of art more so than monetary autonomy, as education was free then. It seems that the formation of alternatives today is attributable to mainly monetary and therefrom arising organisational structures 19 as opposed to artistic autonomy. Positioning fine art education outside of the financialised higher education context in the UK frees up - at its best – its real potential and re-engagement with artistic autonomy. This includes an open-ended curriculum in which art students are embedded in a social-environment of crits and tutorials through which they become part of the local art scene (Thornton 2009). Because of this curriculum being so focused on social and symbolic interaction, it is absurd how a hefty price tag was placed on it. A lecturer from one of the alternative art schools noted, how students at existing art schools students “perform an act to be artists and art students” as part of a lifestyle they are now consume instead of developing artistic positions. Within that the quality of their work can often be aligned with commercial and lifestyle objectives as part of professionalisation teaching instead of the required critical faculty. The alternatives institutions I surveyed in the UK have developed models in which art education is either free or at lower cost while arguably providing more focus on a specific practice and connectivity with the art world. From my 2016 study surfaced that artistic practice led the way in which they ran a more or less sustainable organisational model, sometimes backed up by a business plan to secure space from the local council and operating resources. This underlines a professionalisation angle that even these alternatives could not escape from, as the reality in places such as London turns artists into arts managers and businessmen and women. They become autonomous from the art market by being skilled in fundraising or for example enabling social projects, which generates social value that is turned into financial value through public finance. Here however money still plays a central part on sustaining education, which is why artists cannot escape the economic value chain (Beech 2015). While Turps Art School charges a fee and with that provides access on the basis of money, members of Open School East are selected because of their socially engaged practices, which generate value for public funding applications. Turps offers studio space, tutorials and networking, but for a sum of currently £6,000 for a one-year studio programme, I find it problematic to frame this as a genuine alternative to existing art schools. Perhaps their difference is that existing art schools continue to reduce the pathway specific programmes such as painting to fine art generally, which opened an opportunity for Turps to fill this gap. OSE’s model on the other hand could be seen to instrumentalise students’ practices for fundraising, and therefore directly integrating their practices into the economic value chain of the school, i.e. social and symbolic value as a form of payment. This complex form of economic value generation meant a burden on OSE staff whose fundraising requirements outgrew their capacity, which is why the project moved to Margate in 2017. The only group that does consciously exclude themselves from a monetary regime, and therefore provides a genuine alternative to formal art schools is The School of the Damned. I have more recently come across a similar group called AltMFA who operate on a comparable model of free exchange as learning, but which I have not surveyed in detail. SOTD have changing cohorts every year, which are committed to carrying on the legacy from previous cohorts by having group crits, inviting artists and teachers and showing work in different locations in the UK. Through their opposition to money, they can reveal the mismatch between cost and value of formalise fine art education, which essentially commercialises social interaction and self-organised exchange, which is in fact easy to arrange for free. From this perspective they provide an organisational frame of exchange and mobile learners who interact with each other around their individual or collective practices. A problem they might encounter is the difficulty of commitment of artists when their resources are ever scarcer, however on the contrary could be argued that being part of a group of artists can mediate those risks (Banks, Lovatt et al. 2000) I have outlined how in the UK context alternatively art schools have mainly emerged because of an imbalance for value for money. But from an art-intrinsic and pedagogical perspective, alternatives could also be in opposition of the de-skilling of fine art education that went along with art’s conceptual turn in the 1960s. Fine art education has entirely abandoned the life room and drawing as a skill for artists when representational modes of artistic production declined, yet nothing has replaced this or engaged with what new production 21 skills artists may need, for example digital means of production such as coding which Goldsmiths is offering as part of their Digital Arts Computing BA. The digital realm, however, is not the only medium into which contemporary art is expanding. New paths for alternatives could re-engage with skills in contemporary art production and how a curriculum or pedagogic framework could suit this agenda without prescribing what these skills are. The 3 alternatives that I have presented here have not explored this path, as their immediate concern was to position themselves outside of bureaucratic and/or monetary structures of higher education.

Alternatives within German academies

The German perspective on the other hand offers a very different disposition, in which higher education is a public good, funded jointly by national and federal governments. Here, one can argue art school education benefits from the freedoms that have long vanished in the British context, which once saw art school education as a way of providing social mobility for working class communities (Banks, Oakley 2016). From interviews I undertook with students at Leipzig Academy of Fine Arts as part of my doctoral research, it was even noted how questions around money do not even arise before graduation, especially in Leipzig where rents have been one of the cheapest in Germany. Demands of autonomy and for alternatives to the existing system despite all the advantages of a free education have not waned; in contrary are perhaps more articulate. It seems that the freedom from monetary constraints allows artists to reflect on the curriculum structures, especially those formulated around an out-dated Masterstudent model, which is still prominent in some German academies especially in the East. This can be compared to with the demands for more autonomy in the uprising of students in Hornsey, whose students wanted more decision making power and less hierarchy in their art school education. Hierarchy has also been a problem at Leipzig Academy as some of my respondents noted how the teaching there is top-down with lecturers’ specialisms occupying a central understanding of what art is, whereas critique is not always welcome. An example here is not just the way in which Leipzig became known for representational painting through lecturers such as Arno Rink and his students and then lecturer Neo Rauch, but how even within the media art faculty certain forms of socially engaged art and urban involvement are being frowned upon as compromising the autonomy of art. My respondents felt in the contrary that these aspects are crucial in sustaining artistic practice in Leipzig and that some of the activities in the local art scene (e.g. house projects, work with local communities and politically engaged art) are consciously blinded out by some teaching staff. This may in fact hinder innovation in contemporary art, where an open dialogue and critique should be central to developments, instead of lecturer’s internally framed views of autonomy of art. AGzkl (“Arbeitsgemeinschaft zeitgenössische künstlerische Lehre“) is a project that was founded by 3 students at the academy and can be translated as ‘working group for contemporary art education’. The 3 friends formed around the wish to address some of the above concerns about the prevailing system by turning the school’s main gallery into a collaborative and social space. In 2014 where they staged a month-long series of events, which then continued as several one-off events in subsequent years. Participants of the project recalled how this was an unusual opportunity in which all the students at the school could come together, exchange their experiences and develop new ideas for pedagogies. When students come to the Academy they study for two years across disciplines as part of a 2 year foundation, yet after this there is less interdisciplinary exchange as students choose to study with a specific lecturer and therefore develop increased specialism, which can lead to more fragmented views on art. The AGzkl organisers invited speakers from other academies to contextualise their activities from an art historical and critical theory viewpoint. But they also connected with students from other European academies where similar alternative pedagogy initiatives surfaced. At Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna 23 students founded a ‘free class’ (“Freie Klasse”) as an alternative to the strictly determined curriculum informed by professors. ‘Class’ means the group of artists who study under one professor, while ‘free’ does in this case not refer to monetary constraints as with the UK case but freedom from determined specialism. The free class are above all concerned with open and participatory methods of learning and teaching, in which the students can actively challenge institutional hierarchies by means of developing their own curriculum responsive to students’ (not professors’) interests. Here the danger is that without a sense of direction commitment can easily be lost, although they indicated that class meetings take place on a weekly basis during term. In this case the free class model is not entirely anti-institutional or removed from formal higher education, but is embedded in the institution by way of its participants being formal art students. This signals much potential for innovative exchange with the other classes. Although AGzkl was less of a sustained project and focused more on outreach to the schools’ student and staff body, it engaged substantial critical interest of students and staff in reforming tacit pedagogies. Here again, the institution is central to alternative activities rather than these being removed from the institution and formed externally.

Conclusion

In comparison to the UK context of alternative art schools, the German (and central European) case has much to offer in terms of understanding what alternative means, with many more dimensions of autonomy emerging than the mere autonomy from the markets and the monetary value chain. The urgency of an existential crisis in fine art education in the UK forces upon a commitment that has the power for sustaining externalised organisations, whereas within the German context there does not seem to be the necessity. Salford’s alternative arts school Islington Mill in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University1 called for more research on the formation of alternative art schools as part of a funded doctoral research project. With this project they are planning to find out what their realistic potential is and how they can innovate the field of fine art education more so than removing themselves from higher education. As the German case has shown, there is indeed much to be said of cross-fertilisation and collaboration between the two, which has yet to be investigated in the UK context. What the UK case could reveal however more so than the German case is how alternative art schools attend to the questions of access, as this has been compromised through monetisation and stands in opposition to the original intent of art schools in providing social mobility for the working class (Beck, Cornford 2012, Banks, Oakley 2016, BBC Radio 4 2014). Diversity of a student body is important, especially from an ethnic profile, as this deserves more focus in the German case, which could ideally enable wider cultural influences to determined developments in art. Another aspect from which alternatives could navigate is a re-emergence of skill-based education and how best this could be merged with an open-ended curriculum without this being mutually exclusive.

References

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MADOFF, S.H., 2009. Art School (propositions for the 21st Century). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. THORNTON, S., 2009. The Crit. Seven Days in the Art World. New York: W W Norton & Company, pp. 41-74.

TICKNER, L., 2008. Hornsey 1968: The Art School Revolution. London: Frances Lincoln. 25