artists talk about teaching
2009. Interviews with John Reardon for "ch-ch-ch-cahnges: artists talk about teaching", published by Ridinghouse / Kartsen Schubert. ISBN 978-1-905464-13-5
[Late morning, mid-January at Klaus Jung’s office at the Glasgow School of Art on Renfrew Street.]
Let me begin by asking you what should art school train people for? And I say people, rather than artists …
A good starting point, although I find the word training difficult when it comes to art schools. I don’t think there is so much training involved. I don’t think there’s so much difference in the way people, or artists, teach, or relate to the idea of teaching, The way art schools are organised and art schools are placed in the educational system might be different. – While German art schools are very much focusing on, the career of an individual artist that might come out of it, I learned here, and in Scandinavia before that, that art schools can do much more. By learning through art, and being in connection to art so intensely, as it can be in an art school, you gain something that is relevant to many other areas in our society.
Such as …
For example social engagement, ways of managing yourself, and, that’s what I find most important, ways of taking a critical distance from yourself, which is absolutely necessary for any kind of art-thinking. You produce something, and you see it and you have to take a distance from it in order to judge it, or value it. That is absolutely valuable for other parts of society. I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s a skill that automatically leads to a common career in industry, it’s more a preparation for a social role.
It almost suggests some way to behave…
It’s probably an approach to learning, and if an approach to learning is a way to behave then I absolutely agree on that. This particular approach to learning is that you always have to base it on your own individual experience and decisions; it’s not learning facts, it’s actually learning by digestion, learning by dealing with things in a direct way. It’s not accumulating knowledge to use it for something. There is no endpoint. Learning leads to further learning and that would be a different social behaviour.
And is this particular to art schools?
I would not say that we are the only ones that do that. It’s particular, probably, to higher education in general, or should be, if we look back at the old Humboldt model. But I think it’s very explicit in art schools, because there is something visible, tangible all the time, -the work of art-, which requires further reflection, leading to a new visual result, and so on.
And can anybody teach this?
No. You probably would have to have an experience with this open ended learning.
But if you’re suggesting that it’s possible to find this form of behaviour in other forms of higher education, not only art schools, what is particular to an art school?
The open endedness probably goes even further: there is no final goal. The goalposts are not only shifting; the shift is determined by the learner, it’s not determined by another given context. Of course there is a market and other elements framing what is happening. But it often seems that the only way to get into the art system, or art market, is to criticise the art market. And that’s different. You don’t get into medicine just by criticising medicine, you have to learn the details to be a practicing doctor, and I would expect that my doctor knows how to treat me and not just be critical about it. Or that an architect knows how a building stands up, but I would not necessarily expect that from an artist.
What would you expect from an artist, if we’re talking about certain kinds of skills that a doctor or architect might have?
I would probably say the clear critical distance from yourself, and being able to review and renew yourself all the time. The other skill is about looking, better: perceiving. It’s having a chance to perceive out of your own judgements and not out of given judgements, not through mediation. When I get a mediated piece of knowledge, I still have to use my own ways of judgement and experience to understand what’s going on. You have to base everything on your own decisions, you cannot do things because they are done like that, and that is a particular skill.
And can you teach art?
That question again!
Again?
How old is that? And how often have you heard you cannot teach art? Coming out of the German system of the 1970s: any professor would have said that.
Who was your professor?
I was a student in Düsseldorf with Klaus Rinke. All of them said, ‘you can’t teach art’. And they also said, ‘good art just sells itself.’ If you believe it that’s fine, but better don’t believe it because it’s much easier for you if you don’t. At some point I turned around and said ‘if you understand teaching just as a technique to learn, If it’s about learning, then art and pedagogy are very closely related, because making art is a great way to learn, about your surroundings, about your world; I can help people to learn, which is close to teaching, but it’s not teaching in a traditional sense that sets achievable skills right at the beginning. A good pedagogue would always say ‘it’s about you learning, it’s not about me teaching,’
Do you need to be an artist to do this?
In an art school I think you do.
Can you say something about the advantages and disadvantages in terms of approach and outcome between the British and German systems?
The German professor system focuses on bringing in big international names, which creates a certain kind of trust in students; there’s somebody who knows what she or he is talking about. You can see it outside, they get money for what they’re doing, a very tempting role model. If it all works well it can lead to something very powerful for that particular student, to really see this professionalism in somebody else. We probally all heard the typical anecdotes, about some German art professors only being with students for just a brief visit in an airport lounge. However, it’s strange to still see, for instance, that a student of a big name professor has an easier access to the gallery world, than somebody who has been a student of a lesser known name. That could be very dangerous; that would be education by selection. Because I have been selected by artist ‘x’ into her/his class, gallerist ‘y’ might say, it must be interesting what I make. This can turn into a strange reproduction mechanism. It is not reproducing style, technique, or form; it’s reproducing attitudes. I’m worried about that. I would prefer the idea of students being exposed to many more influences, which I think we try to provide at least here in the Glasgow School of Art, and in many other UK art schools as well. It’s not only your professor you’re dealing with; you have different influences all the time. It gives students a wider sense of professionalism, which is different than selection. I think that there are far more students in art schools in the UK than in Germany. I spoke to a collector the other day and he complained that there is so much rubbish coming out of art schools today, and there might be far too many art students. I tried to explain, if you leave the assumption that art schools should only produce successful artists behind, you might find that learning through art might be of relevance for many, and a very valuable result of art schools as well .’
I was reading Stephan Dillemuth’s The Academy and the Corporate Public. How much do you think these things can be separated from the world of the academy and the world of the market place?
Not at all, they should not be separated. They are part of the bigger picture, the world of culture, or art. I had a discussion with somebody a couple of weeks ago about opera productions. Opera productions can now only be done as co-productions, you can no longer, as one opera house, produce big productions. The effect is that you see the same set up in Tokyo, New York or Paris. It’s very similar in the art market, with all the festivals and Biennales; you travel around, but you actually see mostly the same artists in Istanbul, in Venice, or in Los Angeles. But there is something beyond that: a rich culture of artists for artists with a strong sense of self-organisation. There is the curatorial level with exhibition’s curated around and towards the big market scene, but there is also – and Glasgow is quite typical of this – a level at which artists organise themselves, and sometimes that is much more influential. Normally it will become part of the market at some point. It will always be absorbed. But up to that point it is powerful in refreshing culture.
I would say it is part of the market …
The market needs this, it’s not making the money, but it is part of the full economic model, which drives everything. I was sitting with our MFA students in Berlin a while ago. They were having a show there, and we were talking about all these new galleries in Berlin, hundreds of them just popping up, and one of the students asked, ‘are they sustainable?’ And I thought, ‘no’, they might not be sustainable. But the big galleries need the small galleries, because it’s the activities in the smaller galleries that actually attract the collectors to come to Berlin in the first place, although they would go to the big gallery to buy a piece of work. There is a symbiosis there. As students, when we had just finished the academy in Düsseldorf, we started a studio house -Hildebrandtstrasse, that was the address- and produced exhibitions there. We started in early 1980. We thought we’d just open our doors for a day or two, just for a weekend. In the beginning we didn’t even advertise anything, but to our surprise it was packed full with people. We didn’t know where they came from, including Konrad Fischer with Richard Serra, because he had Serra visiting. Serra hated what he saw there, but that’s another thing. But then I understood that there is a link; they need each other, we need each other. And that’s something we probably have to be even clearer about with students; it’s not just the drive into the direct market, the address-book pedagogy: ‘can I have the phone number of your gallerist, or would you make an appointment for me?’ That might help sometimes – but you have to make sure that there are other activities, running parallel to it.
I’m interested in how you talk about it being difficult to judge an artist’s practice on the basis of a single piece of work, and that you must look at it in terms of an overview. I was wondering if persistence is at the core of this, that one persists with one’s practice? And, if so, how do you teach persistence?
How do you teach persistence? In two weeks’ time we’re going to have a guest here for one of our talks. Nan Hoover, she is in her late 70ies now. She’s an artist who has been teaching in parallel to Nam June Paik in Düsseldorf, and I’m actually very proud to know her. Even after a period of 50 years of practice she still has the persistence to continue working. Many people know her and many people value her work highly, but she’s not necessarily making big money out of it. I think she continues working, working, working, because it is the only way of life that she wants to have. Then creativity is not a trick anymore that you switch on or off to make a product; then creativity becomes a way of life.
Can I turn to a question of architecture and ask you what the physical conditions are that either encourage, or limit creative learning?
Physical conditions … I used to use the term ‘complete flexibility’, now I use the term ‘complete adaptability’. That means that any kind of space could be used for any kind of purpose. What is a video studio today might be a studio for environmentally friendly painting tomorrow. If you can plan that way, you can change the use of space all the time, constantly. Many art schools around the world, including Glasgow, are thinking about new buildings. Resources are never enough to do what you want to do and you can be much more efficient with new buildings. One argument that you get back all the time is that the best thing for artists is to move into abandoned industrial buildings and just make new use of them. I’m actually not sure about this anymore. I think it’s probably a romanticism from the 1970s. We all did it as artists, used these industrial spaces. Now it actually limits exactly flexibility and adaptability. If we could find the right architects, to think with art school people how you can build something that remains flexible for at least the next 50 or 60 years ... When we started thinking about a new building in Bergen, I thought ‘we don’t need a new building, we just need building material and an open site, and students build their own studios on it. At the end of the year the rector would come with a bulldozer and tear it all down, to make space for the next generation of students.’ But you also have to provide some infrastructure. And I also think increasingly – and other art schools might think differently about this – you need a certain amount of openness for the public. The art school should not be a hidden place. We need the retreat where students can be left alone for a while, but, at the same time, we need to be as open as possible. When I arrived here and I saw the first guided tour coming through, I thought, ‘, we have to stop that!’ And now I really love it. The tourists come in and don’t disturb anyone, they don’t go into studios – that’s very, very clear – but they just have this kind of curiosity for the Mackintosh building and some for what is happening in it. They are all friendly people. Why should I lock them out? If one thinks about art schools, one probably should also curate a public.
You seem to suggest the art school should have a particular attitude/politics, or place in the public domain. What should that be?
All art schools ahould be rooted locally. That doesn’t make them a provincial place. There is a lot of influence coming in all the time. If I compare Bergen to Glasgow again: in Bergen we struggled to convince, or persuade students to remain in the city afterwards, to build up something like an art scene, because Oslo appeared to be so much more attractive. It’s starting now, but it really was a long, long, long struggle. Glasgow is the opposite; many of the students, also international students, who came specifically through the Masters programme, remain for a few years in Glasgow, and they actually do something to the city. The city is not giving money out for that, but it is embracing it, which makes a cultural scene within the city. All these artists in the city can sometimes be quite disturbing, but they are also necessary to break down the fatty deposits of continuous creative over-production, when the term creativity gets misused and everything has to be creative. At some point you have get down to the ground again. I’m not necessarily giving an argument here for the Richard Florida thinking, that creativity is defining a new class and it’s attracting people. There is something in it, of course, but I think you can also be lulled into something there, which is not real anymore – when creativity is regarded just as a trick. Let’s think about the political function again, or at least a critical function. One thing I thought about recently – and I don’t know when we will start yet– is to introduce a programme element that is literally about economy. To bring in people who can talk about how economy works, and listen to them, and the different kinds of schools and views on that. This could be the background to start thinking whether there are alternative economic models that will not only support art, but will support culture, and life in a city like this. I do believe that there are roles for artists in society that, at the moment, we don’t know of, that we still have to develop, and I have no idea what they are. Our students will develop them. I don’t want to sound too vague and Beuys-like. Of course, there’s a little bit of that in it. I would wish everybody to have success, also commercial success, but, at the same time, we also need to be realistic about it and start thinking about economically viable alternatives.
What was the outcome of the research initiative in Bergen?
You mean the research on building art schools? It never really started fully. We had quite a few conversations with a lot of people, but we did not find time or resources for deeper research. The situation in Bergen is that the site is there, and the building has already been designed by a very good architecture group. Then the financial plug was pulled.
So now they’re at square one again, having to raise money to make sure that the building can happen. How much of the discussion that we had before will, in the end, feed into the building, I don’t know. You have to be realistic about what is doable, and then, as Kasper König always says, live with your own frustration.
How much do you immerse yourself in the Bergen initiative and, at a certain point, risk losing any kind of creative input?
No, no, no, I don’t … Yes it’s utterly frustrating, but I am here now. There’s always a big amount of frustration in any kind of organisational structure. And in political realities, and in funding realities,... But, again, it’s persistence. Even if I’m frustrated, it doesn’t stop my engagement and it’s still worth it. There is an equivalence to the process in any kind of artist’s studio; I just recently visited the enormous studio of a sculptor with a lot of little maquettes there, and models, and I realised how much is destroyed, how much isn’t good enough. You try something, it doesn’t work out, and you have to throw it away. But it’s the basis for doing something that works in the end. So you learn this kind of frustration right from the beginning. The idea of the studio, and specifically the studio in an art school is important: all the mistakes you make, you actually make in public. It’s a limited public – it’s your fellow students - but there’s a group of people who see your mistakes that you would usually hide. You would normally only present the final result. In the studio you learn that it is more important that everybody can see where you’re going wrong. That creates strength to live with the frustration. In Bergen, in Norway, when I started there, I discussed with a friend that trying to manage an art school could be seen as a sculptural process. It has the same elements in it; how you try to shape it. Maybe it is not such a big step from being an artist to being a teacher, to being an art school manager, because you’re still involved in the process of shaping. Okay, sometimes this can also be self-deception.
As you go further up the chain of teaching, the administration becomes a form of management where you have a certain influence on what actually happens on the ground. Do you understand teaching to include these kinds of management skills?
Absolutely. It doesn’t manage itself. That’s just an illusion. You need a certain element of organising, and some people are better at that than others. Some people enjoy providing the frame for others to do their teaching, to get the time for their teaching. Teaching is the individual contact with a student, or contact with a group of students, when you give a lecture, or a seminar, or a tutorial. But teaching is also being behind the whole kind of thing, providing the frame.
Do you have the Research Assessment Exercise here?
Yes, sure.
Do you think this is a useful exercise?
We had a very intense process and tried to be as inclusive as possible. At some point I found myself on a flight back to Germany to meet some friends and, all of a sudden, I heard myself saying, for the first time, ‘I really understand why German colleagues in art schools don’t want to be involved in that at all.’ The reconciliation between research and practice still needs some work. There should not be a value distinction, that research is better than practice. The exercise itself could make that gap bigger, rather than bridging it and bringing it together again. For an artist, there would not be any research without practice; it wouldn’t really make sense, probably for many others either. One of the experiences I have of the UK system really surprised me . It is far more an audited, controlling system than I had experienced in art schools elsewhere. I always thought the German Higher Education system would be world leading in bureaucracy, but that might have been challenged now. Of course a level of quality assurance is important. In the end it is about spending public money., In Scotland quality assurance is based upon enhancement, not just about judging, what is good and what is bad? But trying to find out, where things could go wrong, and if you know where things could go wrong, what will you do about it? When a reviewing team came to visit us in 2003, it had been made very clear that none of them would be a subject specialist, so it could be somebody from agriculture, somebody from chemistry, somebody from engineering. First, I thought, ‘this is mad’! In the end, I realised it was the best thing that could happen to us. The reviewers came with great curiosity: how actually are you dealing with the issues in Higher Education? It’s good to listen to the reflections of others and there I think German art schools make a mistake in isolating themselves too much, in isolating art education in itself. Glasgow, although validated by Glasgow University, is a small specialist institution, an independent art school, not part of Glasgow University. But we are part of the higher education system. Back in Bergen, at some point a new law for higher education was developed. My director colleague, the head of administration, and pulled political weight to make sure that it’s a law for universities and art schools, as a special category. It was a very important step to claim open, public responsibility for art schools as a special entity on their own. Of course it came with responsibilities to be fully accepted as part of the good society. But it also fostered the curiosity of the other universities: ‘hold on, there are art schools as well in our club. How are they dealing with things? ‘
So what is the art school’s relationship to the university?
The university is validating our degrees. We send an annual report to the university, and they have an annual meeting with us to make sure we’re not deviating too far from any kind of educational rules. They don’t take any influence on the content; we have our director, we have our own board of governors, we have our own management. At the moment, the relationship works very well. It can also be different. I remember other art schools being absorbed into universities. The first moment was kind of a golden marriage, the university saying, ‘oh, we’ll give you a new gallery, we’ll give you new material.’ But that can wear off and when the president, or chancellor, or vice chancellor changes the interest is not that big anymore. Then you’re just at the mercy of another bigger managerial structure. It also has disadvantages to be small, because we have to do all of the same things that a university has to do, but with much, much fewer people. So there’s quite a workload on the managerial group in Glasgow School of Art.
We’ve spoken a little about the relationship between teaching and management and this being, let’s say, an extension of a kind of pedagogical practice. What about the relationship between your practice and teaching?
It’s a little difficult to answer, because there is fairly little teaching for me at the moment. Just a little anecdote … at some point in Bergen, a student came to me and wanted a tutorial, and I said, ‘of course I can do that.’ I spoke to her about the work, and what she had tried to do, and the typical stuff you do in a tutorial, and we had an intense conversation. All of a sudden, she said, ‘you know what I actually really wanted to ask you was, do you know about somebody else that’s done that already?’ I couldn’t stop laughing! I had become the guarantor of innovation because I might have seen a bit more than the student. The attitude to teaching, the attitude to management and the attitude to the own work is based on the same attitude to creativity; creativity as a guiding principle. The constant shift between overview and detail, which surfaces a lot in my own work, is also typical in a managerial context and in a teaching context. What have you done there in this corner of that piece, or in this part of your concept? And how does that sit in a larger context? How does it sit in contemporary history? How does it relate to society? What has been happening in the world at the moment? That constant shifting in focus is the same.
Is there only one way you can teach? Is the way you teach somehow determined by some notion of practice if you’re an artist?
I don’t think there’s only one way to teach. Even if you just take your own individual experience; teaching only works well if you adjust constantly to the individual intentions of a student. This automatically asks for different ways of teaching. Does that need practice? It needs experience, as a practitioner in the arts or from the field surrounding it. We have quite a few curators and theory people in many art schools now, and they’re also doing an excellent job as teachers.
But is there only one way you can teach as an artist, that is predicated on the kind of practice you have? It’s absolutely what everything is built on and refers back to. Your practice, lays out a certain kind of framework and limitations for you as an artist/teacher …
I think you’re right, if you describe this as a position. You can only teach what is your own experience. But an artist’s experience normally would go far beyond the materials and methods one is using. If you focus on painting red paintings, that does not mean you can only teach to paint red paintings. You can talk to, or work with painting students, sculpture students, photography, film, whatever it is. Behind that is the same approach in how it relates to art, life and world, whatever form it takes. However, I think it’s crucial to be exposed to different kinds of teachers and forms of teaching. Students should have the chance to see different ways of dealing with things, and then make up their own mind out of it … that’s the whole point! If we just briefly touch on one aspect of the Bologna Declaration follow-up thinking – to divide studies up into two, or probably three cycles – with a possible PhD on top. German art schools are completely opposed, saying you cannot divide it. I actually feel they’re wrong in this decision; A student can –maybe should- go somewhere else after a BA to continue, because it’s so important to add a different kind of experience. You pack your cultural baggage in a different way. And if it would really be supported through mobility assistance, that means that you can decide to do a BA in Cologne and an MA in Reykjavik, or Istanbul, or even in-between. It’s more than exchange. Spending some time somewhere else helps to build up a new and individual view. I finished the academy in Düsseldorf after I’d been there for six years; quite a long time; at that time there was no end to it – you said when you wanted to leave. Then I went for another year to London, to the Royal College. It was a very important year for me, because it was taking what I had learned and having it tested and challenged somewhere else, and it was fantastic.
What you say turns on an idea that difference is always good, exposure to something new is always good. You might also say that six years in the German system is about consolidating something … Is it necessarily a bad thing that one consolidates, one puts down roots and says, ‘OK, this is where I stand’?
The consolidating happens anyway; do you consolidate just with one influence? Or do you consolidate as you consolidate, as the student yourself? And I think this is the point where art teachers have to let go. I have difficulty with the term ‘my students’. I don’t own any studens and it’s them who study, not about me who teaches them. I was quite lucky, at that time when Klaus Rinke just started. The most important thing he did was create a social atmosphere for a group of people to learn from each other. He came in and had his rants on and off and shouted about something that he’d experienced outside. It was very important that he was there and facilitated our learning, but it was even more important that we were enabled through him to have our own conflicts, and our own discussions, and our own way of thinking. There were other groups, there was Richter’s group and there was the Bechers’ group, and there was a very intense dialogue between these three classes. In that sense it was already a different kind of experience than the normal academy student would have at the time. Take Beuys for example; his teaching was always centred around Beuys. At some point he tried to accept 350 students into just his group, which was a little bit irresponsible and it didn’t work out. So they had to take matters in their own hands. Consolidating is your job as a student and not my job as a professor.
Was Fritz Schwegler …
Fritz Schwegler was actually teaching me in my first year.
What was that like?
I was seventeen and a half when I started. For Germany this was quite young. I always enjoyed talking to Fritz Schwegler and he was a very friendly and very supportive person. We went out with him and made some of those film productions he did using his sculptures. The first time I heard him sing on stage I was so embarrassed! I thought, ‘my God, what is this man doing?’ Later on I learned to love it as something very special. At that time, he was responsible for the first year; that was the first time ever that the academy in Düsseldorf had a first year. It was just after Beuys, so they installed something that they called Orientierungsbereich; you didn’t have your professor, you were in a group of people, a bit like a foundation year. Fritz Schwegler, however, really developed being Fritz Schwegler the professor, when he had his own class. I don’t think he enjoyed being in the Orientierungsbereich. He really wanted to get out of it and have his own group, and then, of course, he had his influence on people.
What I think is interesting about Schwegler is that he was teaching amongst some very renowned artists, like Richter and so on, but according to Martin Honert, his student, he really didn’t know much about Schwegler’s work…
Oh?
Until his last year.
Oh, really?
He said he was much more interested in him as a professor, as a teacher. He felt he had a profound influence on him …
I could imagine that. I think Fritz started at the academy in Düsseldorf when I started as a student in the Orientierungsbereich, He talked a lot about what he was doing. We were involved in his work, which we also did with Klaus Rinke, but on a different kind of level. Rinke gave us jobs. We had to earn money anyhow, so when he went to install a piece we were travelling with him to either the Documenta, or a gallery to do the work with him. It was a fantastic experience to see how this kind of context worked, how he dealt with a gallerist, or a curator. Not that it would then create an opening for us into that gallery, nothing of that happened, because we were the workers, paid for our labour. We were artists working there. It was a very interesting and important experience for that time. Now I see that sometimes being exploited: professors gathering a group of cheap assistants around them.
Do you think this is something that we don’t do as much here? Karin Sander for example will take her students to Italy for two weeks and they’ll work, eat and drink together. I was wondering if this is something we’re lacking in the UK?
It’s getting more and more difficult to do that in our system, isn’t it? How to fund It?, And then there is the loop of health and safety regulations and risk management before you take a group of students to Italy. That nearly kills it already. However, I think it can also be done locally. When it comes to the individual professional experience, what we started to do here in Glasgow, is to think about placements for art students. Placements could be with a gallery, but also with an individual artist. I’m not totally sure it worked out, but when Simon Starling was doing his project for Cove Park we managed to have two students work with him and that, I think, was a good experience for them. On the other hand, if we talk about our Masters programme again – the MFA, which is fairly small, with about 55 to 58 students over two years – one thing that attracts students is that it still has a sense of intimacy, that they create their own community. Of course, with the help of their tutors, but its their initiative, and that’s taken onwards and outwards, and it’s creating networks that hopefully will be sustained. We did that, in Hildebrandtstrasse, the studio house in Düsseldorf that I mentioned.
Somehow we now are back again at this bordered culture that we experience quite strongly here; people became too frightened of what they could do, and what they could not do. We recently talked to artists, architects and designers outside the school to think about how the Glasgow School of Art should develop. They all came back with ‘be more anarchic.’
Did they tell you what they meant by that?
Of course not! But I often wonder, ‘could we be more daring?’ But what would that mean, being more daring?
[Late morning, mid-January at Klaus Jung’s office at the Glasgow School of Art on Renfrew Street.]
Let me begin by asking you what should art school train people for? And I say people, rather than artists …
A good starting point, although I find the word training difficult when it comes to art schools. I don’t think there is so much training involved. I don’t think there’s so much difference in the way people, or artists, teach, or relate to the idea of teaching, The way art schools are organised and art schools are placed in the educational system might be different. – While German art schools are very much focusing on, the career of an individual artist that might come out of it, I learned here, and in Scandinavia before that, that art schools can do much more. By learning through art, and being in connection to art so intensely, as it can be in an art school, you gain something that is relevant to many other areas in our society.
Such as …
For example social engagement, ways of managing yourself, and, that’s what I find most important, ways of taking a critical distance from yourself, which is absolutely necessary for any kind of art-thinking. You produce something, and you see it and you have to take a distance from it in order to judge it, or value it. That is absolutely valuable for other parts of society. I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s a skill that automatically leads to a common career in industry, it’s more a preparation for a social role.
It almost suggests some way to behave…
It’s probably an approach to learning, and if an approach to learning is a way to behave then I absolutely agree on that. This particular approach to learning is that you always have to base it on your own individual experience and decisions; it’s not learning facts, it’s actually learning by digestion, learning by dealing with things in a direct way. It’s not accumulating knowledge to use it for something. There is no endpoint. Learning leads to further learning and that would be a different social behaviour.
And is this particular to art schools?
I would not say that we are the only ones that do that. It’s particular, probably, to higher education in general, or should be, if we look back at the old Humboldt model. But I think it’s very explicit in art schools, because there is something visible, tangible all the time, -the work of art-, which requires further reflection, leading to a new visual result, and so on.
And can anybody teach this?
No. You probably would have to have an experience with this open ended learning.
But if you’re suggesting that it’s possible to find this form of behaviour in other forms of higher education, not only art schools, what is particular to an art school?
The open endedness probably goes even further: there is no final goal. The goalposts are not only shifting; the shift is determined by the learner, it’s not determined by another given context. Of course there is a market and other elements framing what is happening. But it often seems that the only way to get into the art system, or art market, is to criticise the art market. And that’s different. You don’t get into medicine just by criticising medicine, you have to learn the details to be a practicing doctor, and I would expect that my doctor knows how to treat me and not just be critical about it. Or that an architect knows how a building stands up, but I would not necessarily expect that from an artist.
What would you expect from an artist, if we’re talking about certain kinds of skills that a doctor or architect might have?
I would probably say the clear critical distance from yourself, and being able to review and renew yourself all the time. The other skill is about looking, better: perceiving. It’s having a chance to perceive out of your own judgements and not out of given judgements, not through mediation. When I get a mediated piece of knowledge, I still have to use my own ways of judgement and experience to understand what’s going on. You have to base everything on your own decisions, you cannot do things because they are done like that, and that is a particular skill.
And can you teach art?
That question again!
Again?
How old is that? And how often have you heard you cannot teach art? Coming out of the German system of the 1970s: any professor would have said that.
Who was your professor?
I was a student in Düsseldorf with Klaus Rinke. All of them said, ‘you can’t teach art’. And they also said, ‘good art just sells itself.’ If you believe it that’s fine, but better don’t believe it because it’s much easier for you if you don’t. At some point I turned around and said ‘if you understand teaching just as a technique to learn, If it’s about learning, then art and pedagogy are very closely related, because making art is a great way to learn, about your surroundings, about your world; I can help people to learn, which is close to teaching, but it’s not teaching in a traditional sense that sets achievable skills right at the beginning. A good pedagogue would always say ‘it’s about you learning, it’s not about me teaching,’
Do you need to be an artist to do this?
In an art school I think you do.
Can you say something about the advantages and disadvantages in terms of approach and outcome between the British and German systems?
The German professor system focuses on bringing in big international names, which creates a certain kind of trust in students; there’s somebody who knows what she or he is talking about. You can see it outside, they get money for what they’re doing, a very tempting role model. If it all works well it can lead to something very powerful for that particular student, to really see this professionalism in somebody else. We probally all heard the typical anecdotes, about some German art professors only being with students for just a brief visit in an airport lounge. However, it’s strange to still see, for instance, that a student of a big name professor has an easier access to the gallery world, than somebody who has been a student of a lesser known name. That could be very dangerous; that would be education by selection. Because I have been selected by artist ‘x’ into her/his class, gallerist ‘y’ might say, it must be interesting what I make. This can turn into a strange reproduction mechanism. It is not reproducing style, technique, or form; it’s reproducing attitudes. I’m worried about that. I would prefer the idea of students being exposed to many more influences, which I think we try to provide at least here in the Glasgow School of Art, and in many other UK art schools as well. It’s not only your professor you’re dealing with; you have different influences all the time. It gives students a wider sense of professionalism, which is different than selection. I think that there are far more students in art schools in the UK than in Germany. I spoke to a collector the other day and he complained that there is so much rubbish coming out of art schools today, and there might be far too many art students. I tried to explain, if you leave the assumption that art schools should only produce successful artists behind, you might find that learning through art might be of relevance for many, and a very valuable result of art schools as well .’
I was reading Stephan Dillemuth’s The Academy and the Corporate Public. How much do you think these things can be separated from the world of the academy and the world of the market place?
Not at all, they should not be separated. They are part of the bigger picture, the world of culture, or art. I had a discussion with somebody a couple of weeks ago about opera productions. Opera productions can now only be done as co-productions, you can no longer, as one opera house, produce big productions. The effect is that you see the same set up in Tokyo, New York or Paris. It’s very similar in the art market, with all the festivals and Biennales; you travel around, but you actually see mostly the same artists in Istanbul, in Venice, or in Los Angeles. But there is something beyond that: a rich culture of artists for artists with a strong sense of self-organisation. There is the curatorial level with exhibition’s curated around and towards the big market scene, but there is also – and Glasgow is quite typical of this – a level at which artists organise themselves, and sometimes that is much more influential. Normally it will become part of the market at some point. It will always be absorbed. But up to that point it is powerful in refreshing culture.
I would say it is part of the market …
The market needs this, it’s not making the money, but it is part of the full economic model, which drives everything. I was sitting with our MFA students in Berlin a while ago. They were having a show there, and we were talking about all these new galleries in Berlin, hundreds of them just popping up, and one of the students asked, ‘are they sustainable?’ And I thought, ‘no’, they might not be sustainable. But the big galleries need the small galleries, because it’s the activities in the smaller galleries that actually attract the collectors to come to Berlin in the first place, although they would go to the big gallery to buy a piece of work. There is a symbiosis there. As students, when we had just finished the academy in Düsseldorf, we started a studio house -Hildebrandtstrasse, that was the address- and produced exhibitions there. We started in early 1980. We thought we’d just open our doors for a day or two, just for a weekend. In the beginning we didn’t even advertise anything, but to our surprise it was packed full with people. We didn’t know where they came from, including Konrad Fischer with Richard Serra, because he had Serra visiting. Serra hated what he saw there, but that’s another thing. But then I understood that there is a link; they need each other, we need each other. And that’s something we probably have to be even clearer about with students; it’s not just the drive into the direct market, the address-book pedagogy: ‘can I have the phone number of your gallerist, or would you make an appointment for me?’ That might help sometimes – but you have to make sure that there are other activities, running parallel to it.
I’m interested in how you talk about it being difficult to judge an artist’s practice on the basis of a single piece of work, and that you must look at it in terms of an overview. I was wondering if persistence is at the core of this, that one persists with one’s practice? And, if so, how do you teach persistence?
How do you teach persistence? In two weeks’ time we’re going to have a guest here for one of our talks. Nan Hoover, she is in her late 70ies now. She’s an artist who has been teaching in parallel to Nam June Paik in Düsseldorf, and I’m actually very proud to know her. Even after a period of 50 years of practice she still has the persistence to continue working. Many people know her and many people value her work highly, but she’s not necessarily making big money out of it. I think she continues working, working, working, because it is the only way of life that she wants to have. Then creativity is not a trick anymore that you switch on or off to make a product; then creativity becomes a way of life.
Can I turn to a question of architecture and ask you what the physical conditions are that either encourage, or limit creative learning?
Physical conditions … I used to use the term ‘complete flexibility’, now I use the term ‘complete adaptability’. That means that any kind of space could be used for any kind of purpose. What is a video studio today might be a studio for environmentally friendly painting tomorrow. If you can plan that way, you can change the use of space all the time, constantly. Many art schools around the world, including Glasgow, are thinking about new buildings. Resources are never enough to do what you want to do and you can be much more efficient with new buildings. One argument that you get back all the time is that the best thing for artists is to move into abandoned industrial buildings and just make new use of them. I’m actually not sure about this anymore. I think it’s probably a romanticism from the 1970s. We all did it as artists, used these industrial spaces. Now it actually limits exactly flexibility and adaptability. If we could find the right architects, to think with art school people how you can build something that remains flexible for at least the next 50 or 60 years ... When we started thinking about a new building in Bergen, I thought ‘we don’t need a new building, we just need building material and an open site, and students build their own studios on it. At the end of the year the rector would come with a bulldozer and tear it all down, to make space for the next generation of students.’ But you also have to provide some infrastructure. And I also think increasingly – and other art schools might think differently about this – you need a certain amount of openness for the public. The art school should not be a hidden place. We need the retreat where students can be left alone for a while, but, at the same time, we need to be as open as possible. When I arrived here and I saw the first guided tour coming through, I thought, ‘, we have to stop that!’ And now I really love it. The tourists come in and don’t disturb anyone, they don’t go into studios – that’s very, very clear – but they just have this kind of curiosity for the Mackintosh building and some for what is happening in it. They are all friendly people. Why should I lock them out? If one thinks about art schools, one probably should also curate a public.
You seem to suggest the art school should have a particular attitude/politics, or place in the public domain. What should that be?
All art schools ahould be rooted locally. That doesn’t make them a provincial place. There is a lot of influence coming in all the time. If I compare Bergen to Glasgow again: in Bergen we struggled to convince, or persuade students to remain in the city afterwards, to build up something like an art scene, because Oslo appeared to be so much more attractive. It’s starting now, but it really was a long, long, long struggle. Glasgow is the opposite; many of the students, also international students, who came specifically through the Masters programme, remain for a few years in Glasgow, and they actually do something to the city. The city is not giving money out for that, but it is embracing it, which makes a cultural scene within the city. All these artists in the city can sometimes be quite disturbing, but they are also necessary to break down the fatty deposits of continuous creative over-production, when the term creativity gets misused and everything has to be creative. At some point you have get down to the ground again. I’m not necessarily giving an argument here for the Richard Florida thinking, that creativity is defining a new class and it’s attracting people. There is something in it, of course, but I think you can also be lulled into something there, which is not real anymore – when creativity is regarded just as a trick. Let’s think about the political function again, or at least a critical function. One thing I thought about recently – and I don’t know when we will start yet– is to introduce a programme element that is literally about economy. To bring in people who can talk about how economy works, and listen to them, and the different kinds of schools and views on that. This could be the background to start thinking whether there are alternative economic models that will not only support art, but will support culture, and life in a city like this. I do believe that there are roles for artists in society that, at the moment, we don’t know of, that we still have to develop, and I have no idea what they are. Our students will develop them. I don’t want to sound too vague and Beuys-like. Of course, there’s a little bit of that in it. I would wish everybody to have success, also commercial success, but, at the same time, we also need to be realistic about it and start thinking about economically viable alternatives.
What was the outcome of the research initiative in Bergen?
You mean the research on building art schools? It never really started fully. We had quite a few conversations with a lot of people, but we did not find time or resources for deeper research. The situation in Bergen is that the site is there, and the building has already been designed by a very good architecture group. Then the financial plug was pulled.
So now they’re at square one again, having to raise money to make sure that the building can happen. How much of the discussion that we had before will, in the end, feed into the building, I don’t know. You have to be realistic about what is doable, and then, as Kasper König always says, live with your own frustration.
How much do you immerse yourself in the Bergen initiative and, at a certain point, risk losing any kind of creative input?
No, no, no, I don’t … Yes it’s utterly frustrating, but I am here now. There’s always a big amount of frustration in any kind of organisational structure. And in political realities, and in funding realities,... But, again, it’s persistence. Even if I’m frustrated, it doesn’t stop my engagement and it’s still worth it. There is an equivalence to the process in any kind of artist’s studio; I just recently visited the enormous studio of a sculptor with a lot of little maquettes there, and models, and I realised how much is destroyed, how much isn’t good enough. You try something, it doesn’t work out, and you have to throw it away. But it’s the basis for doing something that works in the end. So you learn this kind of frustration right from the beginning. The idea of the studio, and specifically the studio in an art school is important: all the mistakes you make, you actually make in public. It’s a limited public – it’s your fellow students - but there’s a group of people who see your mistakes that you would usually hide. You would normally only present the final result. In the studio you learn that it is more important that everybody can see where you’re going wrong. That creates strength to live with the frustration. In Bergen, in Norway, when I started there, I discussed with a friend that trying to manage an art school could be seen as a sculptural process. It has the same elements in it; how you try to shape it. Maybe it is not such a big step from being an artist to being a teacher, to being an art school manager, because you’re still involved in the process of shaping. Okay, sometimes this can also be self-deception.
As you go further up the chain of teaching, the administration becomes a form of management where you have a certain influence on what actually happens on the ground. Do you understand teaching to include these kinds of management skills?
Absolutely. It doesn’t manage itself. That’s just an illusion. You need a certain element of organising, and some people are better at that than others. Some people enjoy providing the frame for others to do their teaching, to get the time for their teaching. Teaching is the individual contact with a student, or contact with a group of students, when you give a lecture, or a seminar, or a tutorial. But teaching is also being behind the whole kind of thing, providing the frame.
Do you have the Research Assessment Exercise here?
Yes, sure.
Do you think this is a useful exercise?
We had a very intense process and tried to be as inclusive as possible. At some point I found myself on a flight back to Germany to meet some friends and, all of a sudden, I heard myself saying, for the first time, ‘I really understand why German colleagues in art schools don’t want to be involved in that at all.’ The reconciliation between research and practice still needs some work. There should not be a value distinction, that research is better than practice. The exercise itself could make that gap bigger, rather than bridging it and bringing it together again. For an artist, there would not be any research without practice; it wouldn’t really make sense, probably for many others either. One of the experiences I have of the UK system really surprised me . It is far more an audited, controlling system than I had experienced in art schools elsewhere. I always thought the German Higher Education system would be world leading in bureaucracy, but that might have been challenged now. Of course a level of quality assurance is important. In the end it is about spending public money., In Scotland quality assurance is based upon enhancement, not just about judging, what is good and what is bad? But trying to find out, where things could go wrong, and if you know where things could go wrong, what will you do about it? When a reviewing team came to visit us in 2003, it had been made very clear that none of them would be a subject specialist, so it could be somebody from agriculture, somebody from chemistry, somebody from engineering. First, I thought, ‘this is mad’! In the end, I realised it was the best thing that could happen to us. The reviewers came with great curiosity: how actually are you dealing with the issues in Higher Education? It’s good to listen to the reflections of others and there I think German art schools make a mistake in isolating themselves too much, in isolating art education in itself. Glasgow, although validated by Glasgow University, is a small specialist institution, an independent art school, not part of Glasgow University. But we are part of the higher education system. Back in Bergen, at some point a new law for higher education was developed. My director colleague, the head of administration, and pulled political weight to make sure that it’s a law for universities and art schools, as a special category. It was a very important step to claim open, public responsibility for art schools as a special entity on their own. Of course it came with responsibilities to be fully accepted as part of the good society. But it also fostered the curiosity of the other universities: ‘hold on, there are art schools as well in our club. How are they dealing with things? ‘
So what is the art school’s relationship to the university?
The university is validating our degrees. We send an annual report to the university, and they have an annual meeting with us to make sure we’re not deviating too far from any kind of educational rules. They don’t take any influence on the content; we have our director, we have our own board of governors, we have our own management. At the moment, the relationship works very well. It can also be different. I remember other art schools being absorbed into universities. The first moment was kind of a golden marriage, the university saying, ‘oh, we’ll give you a new gallery, we’ll give you new material.’ But that can wear off and when the president, or chancellor, or vice chancellor changes the interest is not that big anymore. Then you’re just at the mercy of another bigger managerial structure. It also has disadvantages to be small, because we have to do all of the same things that a university has to do, but with much, much fewer people. So there’s quite a workload on the managerial group in Glasgow School of Art.
We’ve spoken a little about the relationship between teaching and management and this being, let’s say, an extension of a kind of pedagogical practice. What about the relationship between your practice and teaching?
It’s a little difficult to answer, because there is fairly little teaching for me at the moment. Just a little anecdote … at some point in Bergen, a student came to me and wanted a tutorial, and I said, ‘of course I can do that.’ I spoke to her about the work, and what she had tried to do, and the typical stuff you do in a tutorial, and we had an intense conversation. All of a sudden, she said, ‘you know what I actually really wanted to ask you was, do you know about somebody else that’s done that already?’ I couldn’t stop laughing! I had become the guarantor of innovation because I might have seen a bit more than the student. The attitude to teaching, the attitude to management and the attitude to the own work is based on the same attitude to creativity; creativity as a guiding principle. The constant shift between overview and detail, which surfaces a lot in my own work, is also typical in a managerial context and in a teaching context. What have you done there in this corner of that piece, or in this part of your concept? And how does that sit in a larger context? How does it sit in contemporary history? How does it relate to society? What has been happening in the world at the moment? That constant shifting in focus is the same.
Is there only one way you can teach? Is the way you teach somehow determined by some notion of practice if you’re an artist?
I don’t think there’s only one way to teach. Even if you just take your own individual experience; teaching only works well if you adjust constantly to the individual intentions of a student. This automatically asks for different ways of teaching. Does that need practice? It needs experience, as a practitioner in the arts or from the field surrounding it. We have quite a few curators and theory people in many art schools now, and they’re also doing an excellent job as teachers.
But is there only one way you can teach as an artist, that is predicated on the kind of practice you have? It’s absolutely what everything is built on and refers back to. Your practice, lays out a certain kind of framework and limitations for you as an artist/teacher …
I think you’re right, if you describe this as a position. You can only teach what is your own experience. But an artist’s experience normally would go far beyond the materials and methods one is using. If you focus on painting red paintings, that does not mean you can only teach to paint red paintings. You can talk to, or work with painting students, sculpture students, photography, film, whatever it is. Behind that is the same approach in how it relates to art, life and world, whatever form it takes. However, I think it’s crucial to be exposed to different kinds of teachers and forms of teaching. Students should have the chance to see different ways of dealing with things, and then make up their own mind out of it … that’s the whole point! If we just briefly touch on one aspect of the Bologna Declaration follow-up thinking – to divide studies up into two, or probably three cycles – with a possible PhD on top. German art schools are completely opposed, saying you cannot divide it. I actually feel they’re wrong in this decision; A student can –maybe should- go somewhere else after a BA to continue, because it’s so important to add a different kind of experience. You pack your cultural baggage in a different way. And if it would really be supported through mobility assistance, that means that you can decide to do a BA in Cologne and an MA in Reykjavik, or Istanbul, or even in-between. It’s more than exchange. Spending some time somewhere else helps to build up a new and individual view. I finished the academy in Düsseldorf after I’d been there for six years; quite a long time; at that time there was no end to it – you said when you wanted to leave. Then I went for another year to London, to the Royal College. It was a very important year for me, because it was taking what I had learned and having it tested and challenged somewhere else, and it was fantastic.
What you say turns on an idea that difference is always good, exposure to something new is always good. You might also say that six years in the German system is about consolidating something … Is it necessarily a bad thing that one consolidates, one puts down roots and says, ‘OK, this is where I stand’?
The consolidating happens anyway; do you consolidate just with one influence? Or do you consolidate as you consolidate, as the student yourself? And I think this is the point where art teachers have to let go. I have difficulty with the term ‘my students’. I don’t own any studens and it’s them who study, not about me who teaches them. I was quite lucky, at that time when Klaus Rinke just started. The most important thing he did was create a social atmosphere for a group of people to learn from each other. He came in and had his rants on and off and shouted about something that he’d experienced outside. It was very important that he was there and facilitated our learning, but it was even more important that we were enabled through him to have our own conflicts, and our own discussions, and our own way of thinking. There were other groups, there was Richter’s group and there was the Bechers’ group, and there was a very intense dialogue between these three classes. In that sense it was already a different kind of experience than the normal academy student would have at the time. Take Beuys for example; his teaching was always centred around Beuys. At some point he tried to accept 350 students into just his group, which was a little bit irresponsible and it didn’t work out. So they had to take matters in their own hands. Consolidating is your job as a student and not my job as a professor.
Was Fritz Schwegler …
Fritz Schwegler was actually teaching me in my first year.
What was that like?
I was seventeen and a half when I started. For Germany this was quite young. I always enjoyed talking to Fritz Schwegler and he was a very friendly and very supportive person. We went out with him and made some of those film productions he did using his sculptures. The first time I heard him sing on stage I was so embarrassed! I thought, ‘my God, what is this man doing?’ Later on I learned to love it as something very special. At that time, he was responsible for the first year; that was the first time ever that the academy in Düsseldorf had a first year. It was just after Beuys, so they installed something that they called Orientierungsbereich; you didn’t have your professor, you were in a group of people, a bit like a foundation year. Fritz Schwegler, however, really developed being Fritz Schwegler the professor, when he had his own class. I don’t think he enjoyed being in the Orientierungsbereich. He really wanted to get out of it and have his own group, and then, of course, he had his influence on people.
What I think is interesting about Schwegler is that he was teaching amongst some very renowned artists, like Richter and so on, but according to Martin Honert, his student, he really didn’t know much about Schwegler’s work…
Oh?
Until his last year.
Oh, really?
He said he was much more interested in him as a professor, as a teacher. He felt he had a profound influence on him …
I could imagine that. I think Fritz started at the academy in Düsseldorf when I started as a student in the Orientierungsbereich, He talked a lot about what he was doing. We were involved in his work, which we also did with Klaus Rinke, but on a different kind of level. Rinke gave us jobs. We had to earn money anyhow, so when he went to install a piece we were travelling with him to either the Documenta, or a gallery to do the work with him. It was a fantastic experience to see how this kind of context worked, how he dealt with a gallerist, or a curator. Not that it would then create an opening for us into that gallery, nothing of that happened, because we were the workers, paid for our labour. We were artists working there. It was a very interesting and important experience for that time. Now I see that sometimes being exploited: professors gathering a group of cheap assistants around them.
Do you think this is something that we don’t do as much here? Karin Sander for example will take her students to Italy for two weeks and they’ll work, eat and drink together. I was wondering if this is something we’re lacking in the UK?
It’s getting more and more difficult to do that in our system, isn’t it? How to fund It?, And then there is the loop of health and safety regulations and risk management before you take a group of students to Italy. That nearly kills it already. However, I think it can also be done locally. When it comes to the individual professional experience, what we started to do here in Glasgow, is to think about placements for art students. Placements could be with a gallery, but also with an individual artist. I’m not totally sure it worked out, but when Simon Starling was doing his project for Cove Park we managed to have two students work with him and that, I think, was a good experience for them. On the other hand, if we talk about our Masters programme again – the MFA, which is fairly small, with about 55 to 58 students over two years – one thing that attracts students is that it still has a sense of intimacy, that they create their own community. Of course, with the help of their tutors, but its their initiative, and that’s taken onwards and outwards, and it’s creating networks that hopefully will be sustained. We did that, in Hildebrandtstrasse, the studio house in Düsseldorf that I mentioned.
Somehow we now are back again at this bordered culture that we experience quite strongly here; people became too frightened of what they could do, and what they could not do. We recently talked to artists, architects and designers outside the school to think about how the Glasgow School of Art should develop. They all came back with ‘be more anarchic.’
Did they tell you what they meant by that?
Of course not! But I often wonder, ‘could we be more daring?’ But what would that mean, being more daring?