Get a haircut and a real job

This art student knows that he would probably be better of with a haircut and a real job. However, what he is protesting about is actually something that we should stand up and take notice of. What I am talking about here is economic rationalist’s attack which is set to damage culture in the country.

He is protesting in the hope of saving his school. However, this is not just about the closure of any old school (though old it is). This is about the attempted death of and institution within the Australian art world. This issue is intrinsicly related to the potion of the arts (in general) in our society.

The State Government of NSW, wishing to relieve itself of the cost of the National Art School had cooked up a plan the hand it to one of the federal funded universities. In doing so it made the offer of the school, with its name (a name which includes very impressive alumni) and it beautiful and inspiring campus – the old stone gaol overlooking the old-ly-worldly districts of Darlinghurst and Surry Hills. Tenures were put out and after Macquarie took up and then put down the opportunity that University of New South Wales decided that they would be happy to take responsibility of the Art School.

The problem is that the UNSW already has a fine arts faculty. Cofa, the College of Fine Art, also at Darlinghurst but in much plainer buildings and further out, also offers graduate degree in fine art. The Cofa degree, not as well respected in artistic circles, is in reality a lot cheaper in the training than the equivalent degree from NAS. I use here loosely the term ‘training’ for that is precisely what the College of Fine Art does not do: train artists.

The National Art School, in its studio practices employs known and practising artists to mentor and hands on train its student. Class sizes are small and class hours are many. In fact, the three year degree at Cofa comprises of less than half the hours of the three year course at NAS. Moreover, NAS Students compulsory lessons in drawing (including that from life) all the way through their studies where as at Cofa one can take it as a small elective, most don’t. Anybody who knows anything about the visual arts knows how fundamental drawing is tho the practising and seeing of an Artist.

Major flour in the Cofa program is its lack of a proper education in art history and theories of aesthetics. As Dr Allen commented in the Australian (October 11, 2006) “The school believes that artists should be aware of the history of their practice and more generally of the history of the culture and society to which they belong. Consequently, the art history course is the most ambitious of any art school in Australia, covering the Western tradition from antiquity to the French Revolution in first year, the 19th and 20th centuries in second and Australian and the contemporary scene in third.”

The plight of the National Art School, I fear, is none other than the general trend and (dare I say) existing fashion and fascism of society and a cultureless culture (a kunst-less zeit geist) that is a dictatorship of a relativism that ignores the whole of human experience, love and beauty in favour of that which both economically advantageous as well as palatable only to a baby boomer bourgeoisie.


The following is an extract from the Allen article:
Educational philosophy is the crux of the matter. The NAS would have fewer objections to UNSW if the school could be guaranteed autonomous status similar to the National Institute of Dramatic Art, but that is not going to happen.
The NAS stands unashamedly for residual art practices. It believes that whatever shape the art of the future may take, the breadth and depth of skills it attempts to impart will serve its students well. It considers drawing to be the most fundamental practice of all: it is the first and most intimate contact of the artist's mind with the visible world, the first point at which what is seen or felt is turned into something finite and artificial. It also believes the study of the human figure - the hardest thing to draw but the richest in its endless potential for feeling and meaning - to be the central concern of drawing. In this, the NAS keeps alive a tradition that goes back to the Renaissance.
There is no reason to believe that the fundamental values of the NAS would be preserved in the event of a merger with COFA. A glance at the COFA website shows art history and theory at that institution are bogged down in the residual ideologies of the '70s and '80s. Lecturers seldom venture into the past without the protection of a predetermined theoretical interpretation. Students know in advance that the key to more or less any subject will be found in class, sex or race; they quickly learn, as in so many institutions, that doing obeisance to these fetishes is the path to academic distinction.
As for practice, it is hard to forget the occasion, a few years ago, when a lecturer from COFA gave a lunchtime talk to NAS students on the meaning of the expression contemporary art. She proceeded to show a series of slides, telling us what was and wasn't contemporary. Anything that was made by hand was dismissed as not contemporary; anything that was cut and pasted from previous works or media imagery was approved as contemporary, especially if it was done on a computer. This is the postmodern conception of art in its most primitive form, which denies the possibility of any real contact with experience and the value of tradition as the passing on of living ideas. In the postmodern world of appropriation, dead material is scavenged, and there is no getting past the clutter of cultural ready-mades.
There are some fine individual teachers at COFA, but the ethos of the place is permeated by stale ideologies and a moribund postmodernism that survives only in corners that haven't been properly cleaned out for ages, like universities. The living tradition of practice and an open, critical interest in the art and culture of the past are almost certain to be stifled if the schools are merged, and the range of diversity and choice in art education in Sydney will be dramatically curtailed. The NAS has often been accused of being old-fashioned, but in cultural matters it is better to be attached to traditions that are centuries old than to fashions that are decades out of date.