In Defence of the Art Student Essay

As part of an ongoing dialogue in response to 'Art student essays: CRAP!' by Roy Claire Potter.

Recently, a number of our peers, friends and colleagues have expressed the desire to abolish the dissertation or essay in Art in the context of Higher Education. In ‘Art Student Essays: CRAP!’, Roy Claire Potter writes: ‘Eliminating essay writing on an undergraduate art programme seems like a crap answer to the on-going problem of crap art student essays’, but that this is nonetheless the position they are advocating given the way writing can get in the way of learning in the art school.¹ We share much of their frustration: anyone who has taught Art in the higher education sector will have encountered some diabolical writing by students, who have as little interest in complying with the requirement to submit it as the staff want to read it. Where in the near past those most averse to the task might have paid someone to do it for them, we are now faced with the grim prospect of machines grading essays written by machines to no discernible benefit (apparently some universities are already using AI to generate feedback). The environmental cost alone of this bureaucratic exercise should deter us from lending support to the institutional framework of contextual studies. This is not to mention reasonable concerns about equity for students with less access to English language skills and academic training, or learning difficulties that make essay writing especially challenging. We would nonetheless like to mount a passionate defence of critical and contextual studies within the UK HE framework for Art degrees.

The compulsory theory component in Fine Art and Design degrees has been contentious from the moment it was introduced, in 1961. The Coldstream report had recommended that all Diploma courses in these subjects, as they were then, should allot 15 percent of student time and 20 percent of their mark to art history and ‘complementary’ studies.² The implementation of this recommendation was fraught: staff felt patronised by the assumption that studio teaching was not intellectual, students questioned the relevance of art history to studio practice and there was concern around the possibility of marks being ‘brought down’ by an extraneous element that would privilege students whose prior education better prepared them for academic work. The impetus for the reform was not an academic urgency to engage with general or historical contexts. Rather, Coldstream sought to modernise the somewhat shambolic provision of the National Diploma in Design, which delivered a range of handicraft courses at local colleges and was centrally examined. In the face of growing mechanisation and against the backdrop of the Cold War, it was felt that Britain could not compete in the international market by means of lace makers and specialists in marquetry. The report stated that ‘in many fields of industrial production’ there was a need for ‘large numbers of workers who are not necessarily creative, but who are sufficiently responsive to the ideas of those who are, to be able to interpret their designs perceptively and sympathetically’.³ The new polytechnics, which agglomerated pre-existing colleges in the wake of the reform, would train modern product designers at the standardised academic level dictated by the Diploma in Art and Design. Admissions to the now reduced number of larger diploma providers were likewise streamlined, now requiring a GCE qualification (with a proviso that exceptionally ‘talented’ students thought to be of ‘lesser academic ability’ could also be accepted, through what came to be known as the ‘loophole for the loopy’).⁴ Ironically, it was precisely this articulate, critically minded cohort of GCE school leavers that mounted the strongest resistance to the changes culminating in the Hornsey sit-in of May 1968. As a contemporary document put it, ‘that was the “time-bomb” built inadvertently into Coldstream’s new system’.⁵

In their book Art into Pop, Simon Frith and Howard Horne write extensively of the role the exposure of working-class kids to art theory in the illustrious history of art bands in the UK that reached its apogee in punk. This account played no small part in our own decision to come and study art here. According to the mythology repeated in so much writing on punk, the uncomfortable accommodation of critical theory in the art school context allowed ideas derived from otherwise purely academic discourses to bleed outside the confines of the university into records, television and street style. The promise of ideas in books that could result in these things seemed incredibly seductive, and fully in line with artistic practice rather than opposed to it. In trying to convey this excitement to students, however, we have been consistently confronted with the suspicions of both colleagues and tutees that the writing submission is a foreign body to the art school, an imposition put in place in bad faith as mere means to secure accreditation. As Joseph Noonan-Ganley puts it in his essay, ‘Abolish the Writing Strand in Art Departments’, ‘Writing is submission and a compromise of artistic logic’.⁶