'I Am Sitting in a Room (Zones). Go through the motions, pedagogue!’

Dawn Bothwell (University of Sunderland/Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss)

This paper focuses on Stuart Marshall: sound and video artist, LGBTQ activist and lecturer at Newcastle Polytechnic. During his time at Newcastle, Marshall co-produced the film Pedagogue (1988) with his students, a retort to Thatcher’s Section 28, and these students went on to initiate the arts project Ayton Basement, exploring the overlaps between sound, site and performance.

This paper will focus on the influence that Marshall’s interpersonal relationships had upon his work, including his tutor and collaborator at Wesleyan University, Alvin Lucier, peers from Hornsey College of Art, and various sound and video artists and filmmakers. Higgins’ idea of ‘intermedia’ will be used to examine how Marshall’s early work was influenced by the deconstructive, spatial and collaborative practice of sound art, pursuing not only the transferring of audio information but also the transferring of an affective experience from one person to another. Here, Marshall’s use of everyday technology will be discussed, and how this use of the medium is accessible to use of mediums accessible to and understood by the public.

Recent writing on Marshall’s work ignores important differences between art education in Marshall’s time and in the present day. Currently, it is less common for student and tutor to co-produce work as a method of learning. For lecturers, their own art practice is often separated from their teaching, due to course criteria, structure and time constraints. The current art school learning environment, and complex issues of co-authored works by teacher and student will be addressed, gleaning possible solutions from an analysis of Marshall’s collaborative sound practice and methodology.

Punk into Art: Ruth Novaczek and Ann Robinson

Rachel Garfield (University of Reading)

Before artists’ moving image (a 1990s neologism) moved to the centre stage of the art world, experimental film offered students an exciting new voice in 1980s art schools. The shift in language (and provenance of influences from experimental film to conceptual art) served to elide the importance of the 1980s generation of experimental filmmakers. Dominated by tutors who were structuralist filmmakers, many of these 1980s students reacted against the ideological strictures of their curriculum and brought attitudes and approaches into the art from the dynamic music scenes in which they were involved. I will argue that this particularly impacted on women who shifted their interests away from the structuralism of their tutors towards a kind of punk expressionism that focused on emotional landscapes and the connection between 1980s politics and relationships.

Through a close reading of works by Ruth Novaczek and Anne Robinson – both out of Central Saint Martins – I will discuss the ways in which punk fostered a new confidence in developing their own approach to filmmaking. I will contrast this with the slightly later but connected New Romantic works of Cordelia Swann and Sandra Lahire. In order to contextualise these artists, I will reflect on the environment of the art school and how, in the recently emancipated curriculum of the 1980s, these artists were able to give form to their external influences and engagements.

Transferable Skills: The Portsmouth Sinfonia, art school, and experimental music

John Beck (University of Westminster)

The Portsmouth Sinfonia was a group of staff and students from Portsmouth College of Art, organised in 1970 by Complementary Studies lecturer Gavin Bryars for an art school talent contest. The performers were mostly non-musicians and their awkward renditions of familiar classics did not win the contest but the performance was popular enough to keep the group going. More people joined, the rules requiring only that there was no deliberately bad playing, that musicians adopt an instrument they were unfamiliar with, and that everyone should turn up for practice. The point was not to make bad music but, following Cage and Cardew, via Fluxus and other experimental practices, to explore questions of performance, collaboration and the relation between composition and contingency. Bryars was part of a network of experimental composers and performers employed in art schools as a result of the changes in art education brought about by the Coldstream Report, and it is striking but not surprising that a project like the Portsmouth Sinfonia, which performed at the Royal Albert Hall, recorded three albums, and included among its members, at one point or another, Michael Nyman, Tom Phillips, Barry Flanagan and Brian Eno, emerged from an art school and not a conservatory or university music department. The line between serious and ridiculous, between the avant-garde and the popular, is more explicitly explored by the Sinfonia than by comparable experimental outfits of the time, and it is here, this paper will argue, that the distinctive dynamics of the art school environment contributed to this remarkable exercise in enlightened incompetence.

Oblique Strategies: Watford College of Art and avant-pop in the 1960s and 70s

Matthew Cornford (University of Brighton)

In his book on post-punk, Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978–1984 (2005), Simon Reynolds describes Watford College of Art as exemplifying, in the 1970s, ‘the anything-goes, mixed media playfulness of the more progressive sort of British art school – what [Brian] Eno later hailed as one of the most highly evolved forms of liberal education available on the planet’. For a modest provincial art school mainly focused on training apprentices for the local print industry, Watford could, for a few years, boast an extraordinarily rich mix of staff whose work left a lasting impact on British culture. As well as Eno, Watford also employed the guitarist and audiovisual (AV) technician Bruce Gilbert (who formed the band Wire with student Colin Newman); painter Peter Schmidt; artist, printer and publisher Hansjörg Mayer; and pop artist Tom Phillips. Schmidt’s work featured on the cover of Fripp and Eno’s album Evening Star (1975) and on the back cover of Eno’s Before and After Science (1977). Phillips’ After Raphael (?) (1973) graces the cover of Eno’s Another Green World (1975) and Mayer published Trailer (1971), a precursor to Philips' acclaimed artist’s book, A Humument (1971). Most importantly, it was whilst teaching at Watford that Schmidt and Eno produced a set of printed cards in a black box titled Oblique Strategies (1975). Intended to help artists and musicians break creative blocks, the cards were used to great effect by Eno whilst producing David Bowie’s triptych of Berlin LPs: Low (1977), Heroes (1977) and Lodger (1979). This paper explores the ways in which Watford came to typify the ‘highly evolved’ avant-pop milieu of the 1960s to 1970s British art school.

1980s Leeds, the Dada spirit and rock as a weapon

John Hyatt (Liverpool John Moores University)

The spirit of the May 1968 Parisian street protests had its roots in Dada and the photomontage work of John Heartfield via the Situationist International. It inspired occupations in the art colleges of Hornsey, Liverpool and Croydon amongst others, by students demanding more localised institutional change. In 1976, Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid, both veterans of the Croydon occupation, employed effective photomontage techniques to realise Christopher Gray’s (of British anarchist group, King Mob) anti-art idea of forming ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’: the Sex Pistols. Punk rock was formally inspired by the music of the Velvet Underground featured at Andy Warhol’s evenings of experimental filmic montage: the Exploding Plastic Inevitable events of 1966 and 1967, inspired by Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire. The Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict (1977) record sleeve by Malcolm Garrett and Liverpudlian artist Linder Sterling featured a photomontage of a woman with a domestic iron for a head. The iconic safety-pin of punk was Westwood’s textile equivalent of Heartfield’s glue.

This cultural chain influenced radical British post-punk. Dada and John Heartfield’s work was seminal in 1980s Leeds music, its DIY fanzines, and my own practice as an artist and as singer/songwriter with The Three Johns. This paper traces these influences and maps them onto Leeds-based 1980s post-punk and its anti-Thatcherite, pro-striking miners, anti-art and anti-pop rock aesthetic, and lyrical and political strategies using my own band, The Three Johns, and our contemporaries as an art school/rock/politics historical nexus.

The Reggaeton/Visual Artist: A new ambicultural disruptive

Carla Garlaschi (Cherish, Stockholm-based label)

Originating in late 1990s Puerto Rico, the music of reggaeton became a massive Latin American regional entertainment format during the early 2000s with hits such as Daddy Yankee’s Gasolina and Luis Fonsi’s Despacito, the latter breaking into the global mainstream in 2016 and alerting Western pop giants Justin Bieber, Beyoncé and Madonna to reggaeton’s ambicultural possibilities.

At the same time, the Latin American underground was busy reinventing the genre, with Chilean artists developing an alternative scene that reached the stages of international festivals such as Coachella in 2019 with artists including Tomasa del Real. Looking closer into the Chilean scene, a number of these artists share a common background: the visual arts. Many of them, including Cholita Sound (Caterina Purdy), El Bruja (Nicolás Astorga), Planta Carnivora (Fabiola Alarcón) and Princess Prada (Carla Garlaschi) earned BAs from the Universidad Católica de Chile, and Garlaschi also studied for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm and Lizz  Art Theory in Universidad de Chile.

Now based in Santiago de Chile, London, Mexico, Los Angeles and Stockholm, some of these artists claim their nation is the Internet, and most embrace DIY aesthetics. How have post-dictatorship Chilean art schools grounded or influenced this gender-defiant Millennial diasporic soundtrack? And what is the role of autofiction (as a reggaeton-cool visual artist persona) for engaging in the contemporary art scene?