Art student essays: CRAP!
Roy Claire Potter
Eliminating essay writing on an undergraduate art programme seems like a crap answer to the on-going problem of crap art student essays. I should say feels like a crap answer, as I am advocating for exactly that in my role as a lecturer participating in a curriculum review. It feels especially crap when the experience of writing essays has so much in common with that of making artworks. I’ll come to what I mean by crap art student essays but for the moment, I want to linger on the fundamental, if paradoxical, need of ‘not-knowing’ that sustains the practice of essaying on a subject and working in the artists’ studio, whatever ‘studio’ might mean for the wide variety of practices I refer to here. These are places where ‘pre-existing knowledge can lead to the lack of a creative challenge’ as painter and academic Rebecca Fortnum writes in ‘Creative Accounting: on not knowing in talking and making’1. These modes of knowledge pursuit hinge on not quite arriving. Perhaps the request to reign over two such paradoxical practices simultaneously – art practice and essay practice – is where an art student’s limit hits?
My experience as both a student and tutor of art writing and studio art programmes, attests to the matter of writing getting in the way of the learning. Essay modules sit forced and awkward in university-sanctioned versions of studio instruction, supposedly making it academic, proper. Competition for new cohorts of art students in the context of a 40% sector-wide reporting of financial deficit2, and a slew of related redundancies, isn’t with other art departments across the country, but with the growing number of unaccredited studio programmes that hold no truck with modular learning and assessment formats.
Here, I’m concerned with crap art student essays, a speck of an issue in the current mire of Higher Education’s difficulties. On reading ‘In Praise of Bad Writing’ – Julia Bell’s recent defence of unquantifiable learning in creative writing’s workshop methods – I wondered: is the bad writing Julia Bell deals in like the crap writing I do? Much stock is placed in the prospect of interdisciplinary research producing new, valuable knowledge, but would a cross-disciplinary account of not-excellent writing be just as valuable? Ridding academic art programmes of their essay writing components might not increase the number of bums on seats, as they say, but it might pull focus back to the foundational paradox of ‘not-knowing’ at the core of studio art pedagogy, where in the ‘creative processes [of artists] and the statements that emerge from them, there is a productive to-ing and fro-ing between the known and the unknown,’ and, Rebecca Fortnum advises, ‘it is important to keep mindful of their provisional nature.3’
I’ve supervised art student essays for seven years on a module with the acronym CRAP. I noticed these letters only when I was made responsible for the development and delivery of Critical Research and Publication. At that time, the programme was years from a comprehensive review of its modules, so I embraced the scatological and uploaded an illustration to the module’s virtual learning environment; a sketchy line drawing depicting two befuddled gallery-goers standing before an abstract painting. CRAP! one shouts to the other. Finding something crap might be a good starting point for research, the thumbnail suggested, while tacitly acknowledging from the outset – in the mildest of terms – a common student response to the module. The third thing I wanted to get across with the image is that some art student essays are crap, both to write and to read.
I’m familiar with both sides of this statement. My own postgraduate essays were baseless claims written in an affected essay-voice, never marked beyond sixty. Before this, my undergraduate programme had ridden itself of essay writing, favouring artist statements and creative-critical experiments with text, so while I didn’t write an essay in three years, I did find a voice. But I couldn’t apply what I had found to the form of an essay, and this made me an uneven candidate for the study of art-writing: full marks for originality but no sense of structure, and even less facility with grammar. When I returned to postgraduate study – this time a studio programme – some years after dropping out, I continued to avoid essay writing. In place of a dissertation, I made an academic case for an experiment in textual collage. I had wanted to write an essay, to really say something, but I found I didn’t know how to. And ten years later still, I realised that isn’t what they’re for.
Art students don’t want to write academic essays, they want to make art. They desire originality – novelty, even – to see and do things impressively. Among recent cohorts under my supervision, bright and capable students throw their energy defensively against that idea that their £30k of debt has been wasted on something unserious, mickey-mouse. They wrestle with lesser-explored ideas or complicated theory until they realise doing well in the essay module has a very limited percentage impact on their degree overall. It’s not enough to lose sleep over. Obtaining a high-class degree is the prime directive of many undergraduate art students, rather than a developed capacity for intellectual debate, or even a portfolio of artworks that will buoy their professional practice after graduation. For many, there is no professional practice after graduation. Instead, there are graduate jobs. To this reality, I find myself imparting practical advice – focus on the modules with the most marks – when I would like to dance them off into minor literatures, speech acts, and poetics.
I imagine the defence of the university at large, and likely some conservative colleagues, is that essay writing is a good ‘transferable skill’, and rather the problem lies with the art tutors with their false insistence that they are teaching artists-already, and not students-in-general who are enrolled on an arts degree. I concur, not all undergraduate art students want to be artists, but those that do seem to want to be original in their essay writing modules. While there are no marks for originality in the undergraduate essay module’s marking scheme, in all other aspects of an art student’s learning there is both a direct and unspoken disciplinary focus on originality. A colleague recently called this the wow factor and we wondered where this would sit among the other, more concrete ‘learning outcomes’. It put me in mind of a former tutor of mine who would occasionally declare, ‘Now this is art!’ whenever they were impressed with a student’s work; you just didn’t know when you would hit the jackpot. In my own restricted capacity, I try to make room for art students’ desires for originality and, by extension, my own. I have received essays on marginal identity partly written in Welsh to be submitted to an only English-speaking assessment team. I’ve sat as an external examiner to debate the merit of a thesis replete with superscript hyperlinks that led only to other sentences elsewhere in the essay body. A convincing case can always be made to allow for a student’s critical demonstration, or self-reflexive application of a research method, but unless you present an examiner with the essential elements of research and writing, you’re snookered. It’s entirely possible to fail in a highly original way!
But if crap writing is all there is to teaching creative subjects in the university system, the author and academic Julia Bell suggests there may be diamonds yet. ‘When we add the pressure of attention to this bad writing’ she writes of the discussion attendant to a writing workshop’s production of texts, ‘space opens up for new, more expansive ways of thinking.’4 Bell foregrounds the social value of the writing workshop’s methods, arguing that the collective accounting for cliché, lazy ideas, and misrepresentation facilitates a ‘richer access to language’ and makes a ‘more critical perspective’ possible.5 The CIA indirectly invested in the method’s development in Iowa University, Bell tells us; believing the workshops to be an anti-Soviet countermeasure that could reproduce the values of an accountable citizenship, one in which people were responsible for their language and the beliefs underpinning it.6 Similar can be said of how art pedagogy’s core technique, the ‘group crit’, develops a student’s critical acumen by providing a forum for the communal critique of artworks, in a situation that playacts a public discourse. Not always, but often, this advances the quality of a student’s artworks by sharpening their decision-making processes against their experiences of their work’s reception.
Wrestling with ideas and discourse is important to professional survival as well as development. As an artist you need to write proposals, pitches, statements, applications, and because of this art programmes have their fair share of writing workshops. As a student, I once attended an artists’ statement writing workshop hosted by a sculptor that I’ve been tweaking and touting for years since. The workshop was not concerned with amending disciplinary jargon and didn’t mention Alix Rule and David Levine’s ‘International Art English’, nor did it introduce its creative-critical counterpart The BANK Fax-Bak Service (1998/9). In fact, there was no sense that we would write anything useful at all. Bring dictionaries and thesauruses, we were instructed, of any kind; one student presented a dictionary of fairies and folklore. Alongside sourcing these language guides, which are surprisingly difficult to borrow from libraries, we were asked to prepare our practice-specific vocabulary of upwards of fifty words, plus a list of all the mechanical words one might need to make sentences: pronouns, conjunctions, and such. The first half of the workshop expanded on our vocabulary and the second half was for writing new statements, reading them aloud, and discussing them. In a variation of this, I typically introduce a swap. A performer’s vocabulary will be exchanged with a filmmaker; an ecologically minded digital artist will take on the language of a painter. All you will manage is terrible beat poetry, I warn participants because the workshop does not set out to polish a turd, as the expression goes, it intends to produce one. In a reverse of Bell’s account of creative writing’s methods, striving inside the constrained expressions of this workshop enhances a desire to articulate what is core to your meaning but cannot be stated, like an identity made irrefutable at the point of its denial. Beyond such performative demonstrations, art students don’t tend to make the mechanics of language the focus of their studies so, by academic standards, their writing is generally poorer than their counterparts on more conventional courses. Bad writing slides in and out of focus.
There is growing evidence that arts students think and learn differently from their peers, and more consideration of how neurodiversity factors into arts education ought to come in at the level of curriculum design. Anecdotally, a least a quarter of students I encounter in undergraduate art are neurodivergent, and the entire postgraduate year is, to varying degrees, exploring how their divergent processing of sensory data and information relates to their art practices. This anecdotal evidence is bolstered by much research into the overrepresentation of dyslexic students enrolled on art and design programmes7, a neurological condition affecting reading and spelling, often coexistent with other neurodivergent conditions like autism and ADHD, and mental health conditions more generally. Inside institutional structures grounded in normative, objective measures of learning like the academic essay, the ability to attain a true assessment of such student’s knowledge is hampered. The additional teaching hours needed to support and clarify what is paradoxical for an art student, and maze-like for a neurodivergent student, simply do not exist in the metrics of allocating working hours to tasks. Being bad at writing becomes both a fact and a lie, one that cannot be adequately addressed in the context of the thirty credit essay module. Instead, to rebalance their claim to language, students would need a programme of study influenced by an intersectional linguistics.
As an antidote to the precarity of idiosyncratic writing, art critic and academic Gilda Williams published How to Write about Contemporary Art a Thames and Hudson route-map to stable writing, and a firm favourite on essay module reading lists nationwide. Williams imparts advice for a multimodal understanding of art-writing – review, essay, statement or otherwise – that seeks to stabilise the inherent precariousness of art’s meaning for a reader. Accordingly, the ‘three jobs of communicative art-writing’ are to 1) briefly comment on the material and process, 2) explain how an idea is traced in the object, and 3) answer what contribution this makes to the world8. Williams sets the formulaic business of writing about art apart from the slippery nature of producing it. The textbook nature of this approach at first seems a welcome resource to iron out vastly diverse approaches to crap art student essays but, ultimately, it is out of step with the paradoxical problem art students face when required to write what they know about art. For my own part, I’m certain artists have greater purchase on ekphrasis than the art historian or critic, when writing about what is behind the artwork, its actions of production. I’m sure also that idiosyncratic styles of writing, given the opportunity to exercise themselves more, can bring us critically closer to the evasiveness of artworks. Painter Amy Sillman’s acclaimed collection, Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawings, is a remarkable example of this. The essay ‘Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness’ pushes experiences of studio-based ambivalence into the centre of Williams’ third point: what contribution does a clumsy painting make to the world? We ‘metabolise’ it with our ‘loose baggy monsters’, Sillman might reply9. But even Williams concedes that writing ‘both about art and behaving as art’ is among the ‘most fertile’ of approaches to the task, it’s just not something she can make a textbook about10. These more experimental art-writing approaches have been championed in studio programmes over the last decade – statement writing workshops, publication making exercises – as a more kindred form of textual activity for art students’ linguistic expression. But trying to shape the paradox of the crap art student essay into another context for originality, for ‘wow factor’ in what is often half an academic year, is an ideal and absurd prospect.
Except for the rarer and equally valued contributions of curators and art historians in programme teams, undergraduate art courses are largely taught by artists and curricula draws heavily on their practice knowledge and professional experience. Besides the prescriptive learning outcomes that are set to examine the development of students’ knowledge, tutors seek to protect and uphold the sometimes-ineffable measures and sensibilities used to organise material and ideas. These are developed over much longer periods of excitement, trial, failure, envy, and warranted and unwarranted success than an undergraduate programme can tin into a can.
Rebecca Fortnum confirms this. ‘In talking and making the artist comes to know’, she writes, ‘but that knowing is never complete, in the same way that an artist’s work is never over.’11 While this is a bald and liberating fact for artists, to an undergraduate student on the verge of submitting an unsatisfactory essay half-way through their final year, and now almost £30k in debt, it’s a weak consolation. That said, ‘some artists write well not just about their own work but about other artists too’ and likewise there is ‘a long tradition of critic/poets,’12 Williams concedes. She names fifteen men, majority white and either dead or middle-aged at the time of publication. The list is partial, unstudied, but you can’t help thinking she has a point: there must be something about producing art and creative writing that makes Amy Sillman, Rebecca Fortnum, Julia Bell, or Hito Steyerl, Hannah Black, Kay Gabriel, Johanna Hedeva, among many others, such excellent art-writers. Could the experience of making be at the core of this writing? Are the durations, unavoidable materiality, embodied decision-making of producing art, poetry, music, a sort of dialect with which these people write? In the context of education theorist Sugata Mitra’s concept of ‘Self Organised Learning Environments,’ where future-knowledge in society operates a point-of-need access to information, Rebecca Fortnum writes that the ‘processes of contemporary artists are demonstrations of such environments and to create them, artists knowingly use ‘not knowing’’13. This is the hunt, the creative challenge, the paradox of pursuing a subject but manoeuvring, with your own style and technique, so that you never come to know.
Perhaps meaning to also address this paradox, Gilda Williams’ intuition tells her that ‘the most fertile new art-writing ground may be that currently being charted at the fringes’14 – fiction about and behaving as art, or other forms of hybridity covered more comprehensively elsewhere (such as in ‘11 statements around art-writing’ published in frieze some years previous, by Maria Fusco, Yve Lomax, Michael Newman and Adrian Rifkin)15. It’s no sleight to say Williams is the more conservative voice in this recurring, if passé consideration of what art-writing is and, bringing this back to the crap art student essay, I agree with her sentiments. Perhaps you can only experiment when you know what you are experimenting from?
When reviewing the modular structure and content of the university art course – a process I find myself in this year and next – making a case for written components can seem like a fail-safe mechanism to make a subject area so valorising of ‘not-knowing’ more legible against the norms of the university. By instituting essay writing, we both quantify and qualify studio instruction as learning; we sanction it, or stabilise it for the reader, as Gilda Williams might say. Here, the reader is the university’s programme-approving body, the Academic Registry. But by attempting to do this, we risk decentring the critical listening and speaking on which the social value of creative practice stands. The forms of paying attention that are core to Julia Bell’s understanding of the creative writing workshop’s pursuit of accountability are akin to art pedagogy’s group crit, with its performative acting out of public and disciplinary discourse. While I briefly referred to neurodivergent organisations of information – language and knowledge included – I have said nothing of the internalised inarticulacy experienced by those with English as a subsidiary language, or who are (also) working class. A critical, intersectional linguistic approach to other equally traditional academic forms, such as viva voca or other experiential, task-based encounters with others, might help art departments ‘resist the instrumentalisation of notions of knowledge’16 and uphold the valuable paradoxes that fuel artistic forms of knowing.
Rebecca Fortnum, 2013 On Creative Accounting; not knowing in talking and making, in ‘On Not Knowing, how artists think’ edited by R Fortnum and E Fisher. London: Black Dog Publishing, p.72
PwC UK, 2024 UK Higher Education Financial Sustainability Report [online] January 2024
Rebecca Fortnum, On Creative Accounting, p.82
Julia Bell, 2024 In Praise of Bad Writing, in ‘Too Little/Too Hard’ issue 2 [online] 2024, para. 5
ibid.
ibid., para. 17
Alison M Bacon and Samantha Bennett, 2012 Dyslexia in Higher Education: the decision to study art, in ‘European Journal of Special Needs Education’ Vol. 28, Issue 1 [online] 2013.
Gilda Williams, 2014 How to write about Contemporary Art London: Thames and Hudson, p.49
Amy Sillman, 2020 Faux Pas: Selected Writings and Drawing, Paris: After 8 Books, p.149
ibid., p.39
Rebecca Fortnum, On Creative Accounting, p.84
Gilda Williams, How to write about Contemporary Art London, p.39
ibid., p.82
ibid., p.16
Maria Fusco, Yve Lomax, Michael Newman, Adrian Rifkin, 2011 11 statements around art-writing in frieze [online] 11 October 2011
Rebecca Fortnum, On Creative Accounting, p.85