Goldsmiths: But is it Art?
Here’s a recap of the first part of BBC Four’s Goldmiths documentary which follows a group of students in the run up to their final masters show. The main players are Blue Curry, Roisin Byrne, Ian Gonczarow and Thomas Leahy and they are joined by Goldsmiths tutors David Mabb and Gerard Hemsworth…
We begin with some talking head type confessionals which emphasise the fact that Goldsmiths is about ideas over technique. The edit backs this up by following that with a look at some misshapen painted lumps.
First up is Roisin Byrne who explains that she shoplifts items by swallowing them and then “I shit them out and present them as art objects”. An interest in property is her justification for theft. “I don’t have to be focused primarily on creating original artwork, I just steal stuff. ” I get the feeling that Goldsmiths probably rather like her but the edit is a deliberately provocative one.
A gentleman named Blue Curry seems more thoughtful. He points out that visitors and viewers are looking for evidence of labour above other things which is why conceptual artists are often questioned or required to justify themselves.
Then to the sordid topic of coin: How skint are you? “Very skint” replies Ian Gonczarow. There is talk of maxed credit cards and loans which are paying off maxed credit cards. There is a furrowed brow during this explanation which I would argue is pretty standard when discussing the average fledgling artist’s business model – spending money to make work and then worrying about selling it.
Roisin is trekking to Spain to find some rhododendrons that Simon Starling originally transplanted there from Scotland. True to her ethic, Roisin is intending to steal them back. Her tutor thinks this is not necessarily an interesting route to go down.
Thomas Leahy, a former armour designer, has come to art later in life. He describes Goldmiths as “a troublesome journey”. He shows some of his work including a police vest created on the day of the 7/7 bombings which reads ‘Metropolitan Peace’ in place of the usual logo. He describes the literal nature of his work as problematic for Goldsmiths.
Blue Curry is intending to woo visitors to the show with strobe lights inside large conch shells in a darkened room. He reveals that in a recent tutorial the idea was criticised for being unsophisticated and tries to explain his reasons but falters. “I was hoping I was going to say something really good just then!”
Ian is worried and is becoming more worried because he thinks everyone else is really confident and self-assured. His own previous work focuses on Olympic mascots from Beijing – the cuddly, cutesy face of an authoritarian regime. He’s looking to build on that success but seems to be experiencing painters’ block.
Thomas is keen to point out the literal nature of his art as its virtue, making it accessible to the masses, not just the cultured few. His piece involves shooting a paintball gun at a military fabric. He and Blue agree that above all what they should have taken from their time at Goldmiths is the confidence to stand by their work. Thomas is concerned that this move towards abstract expressionism shows that Goldsmiths is influencing him.
Thomas’ final seminar reminds me of a panel at the laast Frieze art fair where Barbara Bloom expressed horror at a student becoming preoccupied with whether astroturf had a gender and was countered by a woman in the audience from Goldsmiths who felt that was actually an exciting idea. I experience a vaguely similar moment when someone carefully asks Thomas whether the fabric has to be camouflage print.
Roisin returns from Spain with one of Simon Starling’s rhododendrons. She reassures us that she has every intention of keeping it alive. She reveals that her project is entirely dependent on whether Simon Starling or his galleries are remotely bothered by the theft. No reaction equals no project. “I feel like the girl waiting for the fucking phonecall,” she sighs.
The Artists Move In
The artists arrive in their empty spaces and set about exploring. Thomas’ space is enormous, Blue can’t find a light switch and Roisin has a high wall to paint.
Thomas describes feeling like he’s trying to play by Goldsmiths’ rules and the reality of what’s marketable. I’m struggling to engage with his art (perhaps because he is too and the whole thing doesn’t flow) but have a lot of sympathy with what he’s saying.
Post Tropical is Blue’s final piece and he is still struggling to say what his strobing conch shells mean. All the elements of his art have a tropical aspect but take you in another direction. An unnerving paradise with annoyance over warmth. At this stage I think it would be more striking in a pitch black room
David Mabb explains that his role is to offer advice, what the students choose to do with it is up to them. Ian stands in his space with all the art on one side of the room. David advises: “This is dreadful”. He and Gerard Hemsworth make Ian get out his Chinese mascot paintings instead. There is a vague standoff but Ian decides to go ahead with his original plans.
Roisin has heard from Simon Starling. He is apparently a bit upset but she shrugs: “You can’t be taking these things too seriously”. She reads a little of his response which is basically ‘I thought you empathised with and understood my artwork but instead you chose to destroy it and that’s upsetting’. She seems a little deflated by his response but continues taping it to the wall.
Gerard and David arrive at Thomas’ room. Gerard is preoccupied with whether viewers will know that the marks were made by a gun. They agree that the gun needs to be physically present. Thomas appears slightly frustrated, telling the camera that he has been constantly told off for being literal but the having the gun on the gallery floor is just as bad.
The tutors appear far more on board with Roisin’s work. She asks for their input in the presentation but they think what she has done, taping the sheets of correspondence to the wall, is fine. The camera lingers on the last line from Simon: “I’m sad and disappointed.”
Ooh – wine! It must be an art show. The final show, to be precise. According to his final speech the key points Gerard has tried to instill in the artists are visibility and responsibility. David admits that the people he really feels for during the final show are those with great work but who are ignored by the collectors – affability and confidence are often as important as the work.
During the show Blue emphasises the importance of having cards and contact details to hand. Roisin has not done this. “I prefer to spend my coppers on a few drinks” she grins. Thomas (entirely at odds with his preoccupation with being marketable) explains that he doesn’t think he wants to sell his works.
The camera then cuts to Ian who has an interested party – “£1,000?” he asks Gerard, although when Gerard leaves with this information Ian whispers “I’ll take anything – I’d take a can of coke. I’d take a cheeseburger for it.” He sells two paintings and is jubilant but wonders if he should have asked for £1,500. I suspect that after watching this the buyer will wonder if he should have just offered a Happy Meal.
Hi, I enjoyed your recaps of the school of saatchi and was hoping you would cover this doc too so thanks! Can I ask what did you really think of this program? It seemed like a badly run course to me. I read a review somewhere that said something like “it seems the problem isn’t that contemporary art is bullshit but that these days at Goldsmiths there’s simply not enough bullshit to go around”. I pretty much agree with this but my guess is the artists aren’t to blame. I’ve not been to art school and I know tv distorts terribly but it wasn’t pleasant viewing watching them all floundering around and though I didn’t like Roisin’s work at least she had some vitality and confidence in what she was doing. I felt particularly sorry for Thomas as he seemed out of his depth and the tutors seemed to make things worse rather than trying to inject some inspiration into the guy. I don’t have a problem with the ideas over technique philosophy they teach but if this is how you want to run it and there is no emphasis on skills which take time to master, why not tighten up the course and make it much more structured so they can still have ample time to come up with ideas and develop them as far as they can take them, but then if it doesn’t work drop it and move on, instead of having so much time that it seemed to strangle them and the ideas end up like millstones around their necks.
Hi Alex, thanks for the feedback – I’m glad you enjoyed reading the recaps!
I should probably qualify my reply by explaining that I’ve never studied at Goldsmiths so my view of it is based on conversations with other people who have had contact with it for one reason or another and on its media presence (this show included):
I get the impression that the Goldsmiths approach to art teaching is to look at it very much from a theoretical point of view. Lots of cultural theory, the body politic, lots of critical analysis of what you produce. Some people thrive on it, but I think others drown in it. That’s why you get overthought and overworked art which seems designed to fit a pet theory or a metaphor. If work is just demonstrating a particular thought I find it usually ends up rather flat because it feeds you everything and leaves you nowhere to go on your own with it. It’s advertising almost – you get it and you move on.
Looking at the artists themselves I must admit I did immediately think ‘I bet they love her,’ about Roisin. My suspicions were borne out by a Guardian article which confirms that she got a first and the highest marks in her year. Her work chimes with Goldsmiths’ approach in a way that Thomas’s never will. Like you I really felt for the guy. I think that coming from a non-art-theory background and not engaging with that side of things in the way they expected put him in a bad position. I felt like I couldn’t really judge his work because he clearly wasn’t comfortable or confident in it. It was him trying to reflect what he thought they wanted. Blue and Ian seemed to know what Goldsmiths wanted from them but I got the impression that Ian found their insistence that they knew what was best chafed at times whereas Blue let it roll off.
The show itself was clearly looking for someone like Roisin to work around – it began by having her saying exactly the right things to push most peoples’ buttons and provoke a ‘what a load of bullshit’ response and then went through reconstructing her character as fun and interesting and provocative and emphasising the process as more important than the final piece. I’m not sure how successful it was in terms of helping the image of Goldsmiths though. I would think that the first impression – the bullshit one – is more likely to be what people remember. I agree with you that her work has vitality though – there was a spark to it even if it wasn’t breaking new ground.
In response the the quote you gave in your comment (which did raise a guilty smile!), it might be a little unfair to expect everyone to be a great artist but I think that at Goldsmiths you need to do it their way and be the sort of person who responds well to their kind of tutorials or you’re going to butt heads with everyone at every single turn and to survive that you need a hell of a lot of self-belief!
(Good lord that was far longer than I intended – sorry!)
Interesting reading. I went to Goldsmith’s in 2005 but left after one and a half years because I felt that I had wasted my money. I was passionate and enthusiastic when I started but craved knowledge of artistic techniques that could allow me to better express my ideas. I was a passable draughtsman, self-taught in oils and acrylic and had dabbled with casting and other sculpting techniques in my Foundation year. Being a freshman at art school is like deperately wanting to get an idea across but not having enough vocabulary in a new language to explain it. It’s acutely frustrating and this makes it vitally important that the staff are there to train and guide the student until they are in a position to produce the best work they can in the medium that suits them, without being held back by lack of technical skill.
The interviews in this documentary terrified me. These student are post-grad yet they seem to have been given no tools to enable them to express their ideas. The ‘conceptual artist’ can’t explain his concept, the ‘painter’ can’t paint and the one student with any confidence in his ideas ends up with a final project that nobody is sure about – least of all him. I have no doubt that all of them started at Goldmith’s with big ambition but there is no use having Big Ideas when you have no medium to properly express them.
When I started, I thought I’d be taught how to paint, how to mix my own pigments, how to make a life-size bronze casting or edit a film on Super-8. Instead I got a big white studio space and hours and hours to sit there staring at the white walls wondering how I could justify my place in this hallowed institution during the monthly presentation of my work. (Every month or so each pupil sets up a mini-exhibition of their work in order to recieve a tutor-led critique. Often the work was too undeveloped to be discussed helpfully and most students had their work torn apart before it had even started.) The few taught lessons a week seemingly crammed as much ‘fine art technique’ as possible into as few hours, and seemed to barely scratch the surface of any kind of disciplined practice.
The problem with Goldsmith’s isn’t that the students choose to pursue a verbose conceptual path at the expense of any craft, it’s that they don’t have any choice because they never get properly trained in any artistic techniques. If you don’t know how to compose and excecute an oil painting or a resin casting or how to use any other medium to a professional standard, the only thing you have to fall back on for 3 years is convuluted ideas.
Whenever I read comments about the college or about this documentary it seems that the majority of intelligent observers have hit the nail right on the head. Goldsmith’s is a college very firmly stuck in the past, re-living it’s past glories and trying to mould new students into models of its famous and starry alumni. The students remind me of the Emperor with his new clothes, completely lacking in any discernable skills yet told by the tutors that they ARE conceptual artists and that anyone who doesn’t recognise their work is simply incompetant. But as this documentary sadly proves, when they’re pushed out of the Goldsmith’s nest and into the real world, it isn’t long before everyone notices that they aren’t wearing any clothes..
Thank you for taking the time to comment – it’s really interesting to hear an insider perspective.
As a matter of curiosity, did many other people leave your course?
Hi Phil! No worries. Was reading up on all the reviews and it stirred up all my past frustrations, sorry for ranting!!
Yes, during the time I was there, 2 other people left one very near the start of the course and one about the same time as me.
In addition to this, two of my closest friends have graduated from Goldsmith’s in the past five years with good degrees – neither of them can now afford to pursue fine art as a career and have full-time jobs in other fields…
Happily I’m returning to another college this September to study Restoration and Conservation. I continue to show my artwork but will also graduate with a career I can fall back on.
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