Abstract
This study investigates visual artists’ experiences and views of their undergraduate fine art education, focussing on encounters of professional development in London art schools between 1986-2016. I foreground artists’ voices, analysing their motivations behind attending, their participation in professional pedagogies, what was accepted, rejected, and incorporated into professional practices, and the effects of art schooling since graduating. Unique insights are presented into art schooled artists’ identities, myths, freedoms, and professionalisation. Through social scientific methods of Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM), with arts based/informed methods, including drawing, making, speaking, filming, editing, and performing, I analyse interviews with twelve artists, covering graduate exit points in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. This approach embedded reflexivity and performativity, bringing new methods to GTM, and expanding GTM’s set of recommended methods to include creative interpretation of what artists said of their art schooling, in developing the themes I present. Art school’s structureless pedagogies are revealed as being inequitable, dependent on students’ capacities to engage, and only workable for those able to participate in this accepted single choice study model. Structurelessness is shown to heighten the circulation of artistic myths, generating misconceptions of freedoms, which embed tensions in art schooled artists’ identities, practices, and careers. Art schooling is found to cause lasting tensions, conflicts, and contradictions in artists’ identities, myths, freedoms, and professionalisation. The implications question the longevity of structureless learning in higher art education, and asks if art schools can recognise their complicity in perpetuating the myths which underlie this in shaping artists’ careers and lives.
Presenters
Sarah ScarsbrookAssociate Lecturer, Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, City of, United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Structurelessness, Fine Art Pedagogy, Higher Art Education, Professionalisation, Identity, Myth
