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So as promised here’s my experience of my studies at UWS. Its pure anecdote with a creative rationale that finds its antithesis in the economic rationalism that would shut down our art schools. Its a way of affirming the positive experiences of my arts education at UWS by giving them a new textual life here, regardless of whether or not the institution that provided those experiences survives in its current form. I think affirming those experiences is the first step toward making sure that this sort of experience continues.

I started my undergraduate studies at UWS in 1998. I was fresh out of high school and had decided over the summer that studying art was a more attractive proposition than continuing my full time work as a waiter (best decision i ever made). On my first day at uni we were given a “project” which was to take the form of a response to the idea of “the presence of absence”. There was an Ives Klein retrospective on at the MCA at the time and as part of their presentation of this idea to us the lecturers decided that it would be good to tell us that when Klein died he was cremated and that his ashes were dyed his trademark IKB. They even went to the extent of creating a slide that they told us was the ashes in a museum in Europe. If this was a test to find out who amongst us fresh faced first years would actually bother to check the information that they fed us in that first presentation then i have to admit that i failed. In fact I think I was probably one of the last ones to find out that the blue ashes thing was an invention.

The “presence of absence” project set the tone for the study units which basically involved us responding to an idea in whichever medium we saw fit. beyond that there was the study of impressionism for our art history unit and an electronic arts unit. after a splattering of video, digital imaging and sound in first semester we were asked to choose one of the three in second semester, i choose sound largly due to the most excellent teaching of Chris Fortescue, aside from my high school english teacher i am yet to meet anyone who can manage the dynamics of a group discussion as good as Chris. He was able to balance the two most important aspects of this task, making everyone feel like the contribution is worthwhile and keeping the discussion focussed. Apart from that he helped in the education of our ears in providing us with a smorgasboard of sound art/experimental music to listen to each class.

Over the course of that year i emulated a range of modernist approaches to art making including pollock inspired drip paintings, Naumanesc video performance, abstract photography and nob-turning adventures in sound. i also recieved my first exposure to what i would later come to recognise as art-school cliches such as the classic “driving” or “smoking” videos.

Second year highlights included the realisation that instead of studying art history i could do a philosophy or cultural studies subject. As it turned out the introduction to cultural studies was the one that fitted in nicely with my other units, so from there i began to understand the world as structured by gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality etc. At the time this seemed to me to be far more relivant than knowing the title, date, place information for some of the key images of impressionism. Excessive marijuana consumption also led to some half-arsed acessments and the lovely Deborah Porch telling me at an appropriate moment that the work that i pinned on the wall on the morning of the group crit didn’t cut it. It was the kick in the arse that i needed and it added the ingredient of motivation into the mix created by Terry Hayes’ Beckett inspired experimental writing unit that put me on the path to a series of projects which continues to this day.

In third year there was more nob turning, more writing and more cultural studies. So while most of my friends were taking shit-loads of ecstacy I ate one or two pills and wrote a marxist-influenced critique of the situations that surround the sale and consumption of the drug. For me this was the cool thing about the way those cultural studies units were taught at UWS. The emphasis was squarely on providing you with ways of interpreting and analysing your surroundings.

The first semester of third year also brought a healthy coming together of UWS and SCA students initiated by Mikala Dwyer this was the occasion for the afore mentioned nob turning as well as the perfect excuse to paint myself white in the shopfront window of Newspace while being blasted by a soundtrack provided by Vicky Brown and Koji Ryui.

Coming after a classic “i’m gonna die” senario with magic mushrooms this was a particularly intense experience which had earth shaking implications that continued right up until the end of the year. reality was pretty thin in those days and it was a kind of thinness that left me with all sorts of doubts and fears. while in some ways those experiences were an affirmation that a lot of what the buddhists say about illusion is true, it took me a while to come to terms with such a hefty presence of absence. By the end of the year I’d managed to anchor myself a little more firmly in this world and finished third year with some solid work, (at the time i was definately quite thankful for the solidity of it).

It would be remiss for this very appreciative graduate and current student of the UWS Visual arts department not to make mention of the fact that as of next year the school will no longer be accepting students into the program from which i graduated. What makes this particularly sad for me is the fact that i know that my experience at UWS is merely a small fraction of what the Visual Arts Department has offered its students over the years of its existance. I feel like part of the success of the bean counters in writing off an art school as a bad investment is the fact that our experiences of our particular art schools are cut off from one another while the undoubtable effects of the school’s graduates on broader artistic communities are dispersed. This fragmentation and dispersion lead to the possibility of dehumanising our art education and hence the ability to render the value of an art school in dollar terms only. For me this has added new importance to the Art Schools section of the Wiki and to the possibility of collecting the experiences of students and teachers from not only Sydney’s art schools but also experiences of students of the arts everywhere. I see this process as both a practical way to offer support for Sydney’s embattled art schools as well as a means to consider what place the OSAS might occupy in the arts education. I think most of those people who have been involved in the OSAS to date take the view that this space is in no way attempting to replace conventional arts education. With this in mind by collecting experiences of that sort of eduction here there is also the possibility to see how an OSAS might evolve alongside the various Art Schools. So if your interested in posting your experience of your arts education you can follow the links below for Sydney’s main art schools or you can create a page for other schools or cities here.

UWS

NAS

COFA

SCA

Alternatively you can register to post on this blog by clicking here, or you can post your experience in the comments section below and it will get sorted into the wiki. also check out the save UWS Fine Arts Blog here.

Skanky Jane’s recent comments on the “War of Molarity” post has encouraged me to throw up a few more bits and pieces from the Massumi stuff that i’ve been reading. My first motivation for posting these quotes is to offer a little bit more of the Molecular possibilities as a neccessary tangent to the conservative molarizing forces described below. Second motivation involves providing a little background info for the discussion of Massumi’s most recent book, Parables for the the virtual that will follow, (as a bit a an intro to that discussion its worth pointing out that despite its title this book has nothing to do with VR or other digital forms, for Massumi the digital is almost entirely made up of already actualized sets of possibilities through which any “participant” might then move). But I’ll save a more in depth look at that book for another post, in the mean time here’s a little more from

Massumi, Brian
A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia- Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari
Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992.

““Nomad thought” does not lodge itself in the edifice of an ordered interiority; it moves freely in an element of exteriority. It does not repose on identity; it rides on difference. It does not respect the artificial division between the three domains of representation, subject, concept and being; it replaces restrictive analogy with a conductivity that knows no bounds.” p.5

“The question is not, Is it true? But, Does it work? What new thoughts does it make possible to think? What new emotions does it make possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions open in the body?” p.8

“Imagination, like habit, is a circuit – less between regularized stimuli and acquired responses in the actual world than between the actual (p101) and the virtual as such. Thought-as-imagination departs from the actual, dips into the fractal abyss, then actualizes something new. It short-circuits molarity, passing directly from a particular state of things to singular response. The generality of molar existence is present only to the extent that the selection of the response is still informed, as a pragmatic precaution, by the system of similarities dictated by molarity.

The fact that becoming-other takes analogy, metaphor, and molarity as its point of departure and moves from the general to the individual means that it is social through and through. It is a collective undertaking, even if only a single body mutates. Its point of departure is not the general in general but this generality (“my” Home), the categorical level of this body (Man or Dog) in this situation: in other words as instituted. There is no other way. Generality has no existence outside of its application to actual bodies. It is an overcoding that exists only as imposed and reimposed, habitually, in an endless being-made-what-one-is-a-priori (generally the same). It is no less a process than a becoming, it just moves in a different direction and frequents different circles. Even if a body becomes in the privacy of its own home, with no one else around, not even the dog, it is still committing a social act. Becoming performs an operation on collectively elaborated, socially selected, mutually accepted, and group-policed categories of thought and action. It opens a space in the grid of identities those categories delineate, inventing new trajectories, new circuits of response, unheard-of futures and possible bodies such as have never been seen before. It maps out a whole new virtual landscape featuring otherworldly affects. Other bodies may slip into that zone of indeterminacy, or autonomous zone, creating the conditions for a contagion of becoming-other – a process as fragile as it is infectious. When supermolecularity succeeds, the forces of molarity must accommodate or kill it. Accommodating a supermolecule means adapting the grid of molar identities to it. A new category is added to the recognized list, and procedures are established to ensure that the integration of the new kind of body into the shared environment does not upset the general equilibrium. A life space opens but it is no sooner surveyed than institutionalized, or captured: molarity is an apparatus of capture of energies that escape it.” p.100-101

“Becoming must keep on becoming, in an indefinite movement of invention opening wider and wider zones of autonomy populated by more and more singularities. Becoming-other begins by differentiating one molecular body from two molar categories, the slides into a cascade of differentiations, creating a volatile situation, with bodies moving in all directions at cross-purposes, in maneuvers of capture and escape that only increase the chances of collision and mutation. Successful becoming-other concerns the entire body politic, precipitating a hyperdifferentiation that exponentially multiplies the potential bodily states and possible identities it envelopes. Becoming bears on a population, even when it is initiated by a single body: even one body alone is collective in its conditions of emergence as well as in its future tendency.” p.102