MODERN ART: The Necessity Of Art Education

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

THE NECESSITY OF ART EDUCATION

by Peter Fuller, 1981

This paper was first given in Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic in January, 1981, when I was Critic-in-Residence there. Subsequent versions of it were also delivered at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford—and at the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education’s Conference, in London, in February 1982. Newcastle University (as opposed to the Polytechnic) was an important centre for the development of the ‘Basic Design’ theories here criticized. When published in Art Monthly this text produced an intemperate response from one of the principal Newcastle ‘Basic Design’ protagonists—Richard Hamilton. I have not felt it necessary to amend my remarks in any way following Hamilton’s intervention.

I have no need to remind anyone involved in education that we live in an era of rabid governmental cut-backs. Unfortunately, there are those in this situation who look upon art education as a sort of optional icing, or even a disposable cherry, on the top of a shrinking cake. Government education cuts have fallen disproportionately upon the art schools: the future of art education in this country is politically vulnerable in a way in which, say, the education of chemical engineers is not.

Peter Fuller

I want to begin by saying that I am an unequivocal defender of art education in general and of Fine Art courses in higher education in particular. I do not make this defence so much in the name of art as in that of society. I believe that ‘the aesthetic dimension’ is a vital aspect of social life: our society is aesthetically sick; without the art schools it would be, effectively, aesthetically moribund.

What do I mean by an aesthetically healthy society? The anthropologist, Margaret Mead, once noted that in Bali the arts were a prime aspect of behaviour for all Balinese. ‘Literally everyone makes some contribution to the arts,’ she wrote, ‘ranging from dance and music to carving and painting.’ This, of course, did not mean that the arts were reduced to the lowest common denominator, or anything of that sort. As Mead puts it, ‘an examination of artistic products from Bali shows a wide range of skill and aesthetic qualities in artistic production.’

If Mead’s account is correct, I would certainly be prepared to say that the Balinese lived in an aesthetically healthy culture: that is one in which individual expression (in all the manifold imaginative and technical variations of each of its specific instances) can be freely realized, through definite, material skills, within a shared symbolic framework. This surely is what Ruskin and Morris were getting at when they contrasted Gothic with Victorian culture. Basically, I find myself in agreement with Graham Hough when he points out in his book, The Last Romantics, that, in the nineteenth century, a spreading bourgeois and industrial society left less and iess room for the arts. As Hough puts it, the arts ‘no longer had any place in the social organism.’

Once, the term ‘art’ had referred to almost any skill; but as so much human work was stripped of its aesthetic dimension, ‘Art’ with a capital ‘A’ increasingly became the pursuit of a few special individuals of imagination and ‘genius’, a breed set apart: ‘Artists’. Of course, high hopes were invested in the new means of production and reproduction—from the mechaniza­tion of architectural ornament, to photography, mass printing, and eventually television and holography. But these things did not even begin to fill that hole in human experience and potentiality which opened up with the erosion of ‘the aesthetic dimension’ and its retraction from social life.

Portrait of Peter Fuller by Maggi Hambling

And so the art education system today is not just the most extensive form of patronage for the living arts in this country: it is the soil without which the arts would just not be able to survive at all. I would go so far as to say that the primary task of the art schools in general, and of Fine Art courses in particular, should be to hold open this residual space for ‘the aesthetic dimension’. In one sense, this is a conservative function—like preserving the forests, or protecting whales. But in another it is profoundly radical: it involves the affirmation that a significant dimension of human experience is endangered in the present, but could come to life again in the future, and once more become a vital element in social life. In other words—and this really is at the root of all the problems in art education—it is the destiny of the art schools, if they are successful, to stand as an indictment of that form of society in which they exist and upon whose governments they are dependent for all their resources.

In such a situation, of course, it is inevitable that art education should be fraught with contradictions and conflicts about its aims and functions. Although the battle lines are rarely clearly drawn, the underlying struggles are usually pretty much the same: they are between those who are basically ‘collaborationist’ in outlook towards the existing culture, and those who perceive that the pursuit of ‘the aesthetic dimension’ involves a rupture with, and refusal of, the means of production and reproduction peculiar to that culture. This may sound a bit complicated, so let me give you a specific example: some of you may have read in the press some months ago about the battles at the Royal College of Art in London. Basically, these were about the ‘usefulness’ of painting and sculpture as taught in the Fine Art Faculty.

Richard Guyatt, who was then the rector, wanted the College to become a servant of industry. Guyatt had a background in advertising and the Graphic Arts: indeed, he was personally responsible for such triumphs of modern design as the Silver Jubilee stamps, the Anchor Butter wrapper, and a commemorative coin for the Queen Mother, issued in 1980. Predictably, when Guyatt was subjected to pressures from the Department of Education and Science, he responded by trying to drive the College along in a commercial, design orientated direction. As The Guardian commented, one question under debate was ‘whether scarce resources formerly offered to scruffy painters and sculptors should be switched to designers who might make some concrete contribution to Britain’s export drive.’

Inevitably, Guyatt clashed heavily with Peter De Francia, Professor of Painting, who clearly thought that it was preferable to teach students to create a ‘new reality’ within the illusory space of a picture, rather than to encourage them to design coins so ugly that consumers would want to get rid of them quickly in return for the slippery delights of New Zealand dairy products, or whatever. The battle was long and hard fought. Fortunately, given the support of his students, De Francia was able to win in the end: he remains as Professor of Painting, whereas Guyatt is no longer rector. But I have not brought this up as an example of academic intrigue: the Royal College affair was symptomatic of that struggle which has constantly to be waged against the anaesthetizing encroach­ments of the cultural collaborationists, even within the art schools themselves.

Of course, it is not often that the values of a major painter are so starkly pitted against those of a designer of coinage and butter-wrappers. In this situation, I think that most people who are involved, in any way, with the Fine Arts would have little doubt about where we stood. But, of course, it is not always as simple as that, and a major problem in recent years has been the betrayal of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ within Fine Art courses themselves. Indeed, I do not think that it is just a matter of protecting and conserving Fine Art courses against the Guyatt’s of this world, but rather one of reforming and rebuilding them, above all of undoing some of the damage that has been done, especially since the last war.

You could, I think, see something of this damage in a recent exhibition ‘A Continuing Process: The New Creativity in British Art Education, 1955-65’, which told the story of the establishment of the so-called ‘basic design’ courses, for Fine Art students, and of the way in which they proliferated until they became, effectively, the orthodoxy for a higher education in art. ‘Basic design’ was pioneered at the University in Newcastle by Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, and elsewhere, along rather different lines, by Harry Thubron and Tom Hudson.

The fundamental premises of ‘basic design’ are not easily identifiable; the various artist-teachers involved in the move­ment pursued different, and sometimes contradictory, emphases. But this much can be said with certainty: they are all united negatively. ‘Basic design’ involved a wholesale rejection of the academic methods of art education, rooted in the study of the figure and traditional ornamentation. As Dick Field has written, the watchword of the ‘basic design’ pioneers was ‘a New Art for a New Age’, and they set out to be deliberately iconoclastic towards what had become established academic methods of teaching art.

David Thistlewood, who organized the exhibition, has written that, as a result of ‘basic design’, ‘The aims and objectives underlying a post-school art education in this country have changed utterly during the past twenty-five years.’ He says that ‘Principles which seem today to be liberal, humanist and self-evidently right would have been considered anarchic, subversive and destructive as recently as the 1940s.’ He claims that what used to exist, the old academic system, was ‘devoted to conformity, to a misconceived sense of belonging to a classical tradition, to a belief that art was essentially technical skill.’ For decades before the arrival of ‘basic design’, Thistlewood complains, there had been unhealthy preoccupations with drawing and painting according to set procedures; with the use of traditional subject- matter—the Life Model, Still-Life, and the Antique—witn the ‘application’ of art in the execution of designs; and above all with the monitoring of progress by frequent examinations. But, he claims, the advent of the new methods of teaching art constituted a ‘revolution’ against all that: in its place there now exists ‘a general devotion to the principle of individual creative development.’

But was the advent of ‘basic design’ such an unmitigatedly beneficial occurrence? Far be it from me to defend the old academicism; nonetheless, I believe that British art education of the last quarter of a century has, in general, been peculiarly disastrous and the sort of thinking that went into ‘basic design’ has had a lot to do with this. It is not just that today, instead of providing an alternative to academicism, ‘basic design’ is itself a new academicism (i.e. it is just about as ‘revolutionary’ as Leonid Brezhnev!) I also believe that, from the beginning, it exerted a restrictive and finally ‘collaborationist’ influence. I think we really need to get rid of most—although not quite all—of the attitudes which it embodies if art education is to become truly healthy.

Evidently, I cannot do justice to ‘basic design’ philosophy here, but I want to draw attention to two of its most fundamental assumptions—which I believe to be wrong­headed. The first of these is the attitude to ‘Child Art’, which one finds in Pasmore and Hudson in particular, and which has had an extraordinary effect upon the way in which most art students have been taught in recent decades. To put it crudely, the ‘basic design’ view seems to be that the intuitive and imaginative faculties of the child are repressed by culture, and the primary function of art education of adolescents should be to restore that earlier pristine state. Thus the spontaneous and intuitive productions of the child are often supposed to be paradigms of human creativity. All art is assumed to aspire to the condition of infantilism.

I have to be careful here because I believe that enormous gains were made through the recognition of a ‘natural’ potentiality for creativity in all children. As a result of the ‘Child Art’ movement, which began in the nineteenth century and gathered pace throughout the first half of the twentieth, art slowly came to play an integral part in nursery, primary and secondary school education. The ‘Child Art’ movement underlined the fact that learning was not just a matter of the acquisition of knowledge and functional skills: creative living also involved the development of imaginative, intuitive and affective faculties of the kind which play such a conspicuous part in the making of art. And so this movement stressed the fact that the capacity for creative work is an innate, biologically given, potentiality of every human being, of whatever age, class, culture, or condition. This affirmation seems to me to have an importance extending far beyond its immediate applications in nursery, primary, and secondary school educa­tion. Nonetheless, there is a great gulf between the acknow­ledgement of the child’s capacity for creativity, and describing that creativity as some kind of exemplar, or epitome, for adult art.

Indeed, I have been forced to the conclusion that, healthy as the ‘Child Art’ movement may have been, in itself, it was also symptomatic of a profound cultural loss: that is the loss of what I have called the ‘aesthetic dimension’ in adult, social life, of the space for imaginative and fully creative work among those who are no longer children. Surely, in an aesthetically healthy society, the capacity for creative work should develop continuously from the spontaneously individualistic self- expressions of the child (shaped by the proccesses of psycho- biological growth and development) into more complex, meaningful, and fully social (but no less creative) productions of the adult. I came to realize that we have tended to fetishize ‘Child Art’ to such a degree only because aesthetic creativity is so rare in our society at other developmental stages.

To put it another way: I suggested earlier that Bali was an ‘aesthetically healthy’ society. In what sense could a Balinese painter recognize an infant’s immature aesthetic activities as any kind of model for his own? Think, too, of those forms of aesthetic creativity manifest in, say, Amerindian rugs, the Parthenon frieze, Islamic tiles, or those magnificent carvings of leaves which cluster round the tops of the Gothic pillars in the Chapter House of Southwell Minster. Such forms of art do not seem to me, in any way, to contradict the growth of ‘individual creative development’; but, in such instances, that develop­ment has been allowed to mature, to rise beyond and above the infantile, through an adult, social, aesthetic practice.

Even when such practices were driven out of the everyday fabric of life and work, painting and sculpture permitted the creation of a new and definite reality within the existing one, an illusory, re-constituted world within which the aesthetic dimension could survive, mature, and truly develop. Again, as soon as we ask in what sense ‘Child Art’ could have provided an exemplar for, say, Michelangelo, Poussin, Vermeer, or Bonnard, we begin to realize that the celebration of ‘Child Art’ may have reflected an extension of human experience in one direction, but it also revealed its diminution in another.

So one of my quarrels with recent art education in general and with ‘basic design’ in particular is that by venerating ‘Child Art’ as the paradigm of human creativity and expressive activity, they have not, as they claim, served the cause of ‘individual creative development.’ Rather, they have simply institutionalized the fact that we live in the sort of society in which such development tends to be arrested at the infantile level: i.e. everyone engages in the arts in our society, but only up until the age of about thirteen. In my view, higher education in the Fine Arts should involve the search for ways of breaking out of this aesthetic retardation rather than the celebration of it. The child may paint solely through bold, impulsive gestures, covering his surface in a matter of seconds: but that, to my mind, is no good reason why art students up and down the country should seek to imitate him.

Richard Hamilton

But I think that ‘basic design’ type teaching reflects the aesthetic retardation of our culture in another way, too. What I have in mind here is manifest in, say, Richard Hamilton’s contempt for the traditional art and craft practices, his obsession with consumer gadgetry and functional machinery, and his preoccupation with what he calls ‘the media landscape’ —that is with such things as advertising, fashion magazines, pulp literature, television, photography and so forth, which he thinks have replaced nature as the raw material for the attention of the serious artist. More generally, much recent art teaching has tended to foster the view that in order to be a Fine Artist today, some sort of radical accommodation with the mass media—that is with what I call the ‘mega-visual tradition’—is necessary. For Hamilton was not just the Daddy of Pop: he was also the Grandaddy of all those who believe that Fine Art practices should be displaced, or at least deeply penetrated, by such things as ‘Media Studies’, video-tape, and so on, and so forth.

I said earlier that, despite claiming to be concerned with ‘individual creative development’, ‘basic design’ type teaching just institutionalized the retardation of such development, which is so typical of our culture, and I think that Hamilton’s uncritical preoccupation with these non-Fine Art media proves my point. For the proliferation of these media seems to me to be one of the major reasons why infant creativity within our culture so rarely flowers into an adult aesthetic practice. These forms of mechanical production and reproduction of imagery are fundamentally anaesthetic: they do not allow for that ‘joy in labour’, that expression of individuality within collectivity through imaginative and physical work upon materials, within a shared and significant symbolic framework, which is characteristic of aesthetically healthy societies—like Bali, as described by Margaret Mead, or Ruskin’s idealization of ‘Gothic’. Indeed, that ‘mega-visual’ tradition, and those mechanical processes, which Hamilton celebrated are a major reason why ‘individual creative development’ tends to be so inhibited. But instead of challenging the aesthetic crisis, and proposing alternatives to it, the new art education simply mirrored it, encouraging the art student either to regress to an infantile aesthetic level, or to immerse himself in the anaesthetic practices of the prevailing culture. Behind this basic contradic­tion it is not difficult to detect the ghost of Bauhaus, the last movement within modernism which enshrined the belief that individual creativity was fully compatible with the methods of mass-mechanical production. I believe this to be nonsense: it is a simple historical fact that Bauhaus regressed, in its design practices, into the dullest of dull functionalisms—with appalling effects on the whole modernist tradition in architec­ture and design. I think we may have to accept that William Morris was right; machines may be useful to us for all sorts of things. They are, however, fundamentally incompatible with true aesthetic production.

I think the point I am making about the way in which ‘basic design’ type teaching internalizes this aesthetic crisis in our culture is clearly visible if you look at the development of its two principal Newcastle proponents, Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, as artists: ‘A tree is known by its fruit.’

In my view, Pasmore’s art has regressed steadily since the late 1940s, when he began to apply the kind of principles in his own art which he later inflicted upon his students. I have no doubts about my judgement that his painting of a nude woman, The Studio of Ingres, which he made in 1945-7, is far better than anything that came later: it was made when Pasmore was still under the influence of the ‘objective’ methods of the Euston Road School. I was shocked by the regression from this level of work to the blobs and daubs of Pasmore’s recent work, in his recent retrospective. I really could see no qualities in many of these works at all; indeed, they looked precisely like the offerings of someone who had been seduced by the paradigm of Child Art, and pursued it in a literalist way. Pasmore’s amoeba-like forms, and his barely controlled techniques, like running paint over tilted surfaces, splattering, fuzzing and so forth, remind one—if you will forgive the expression—of the work of a grown-up baby.

Hamilton took the other route. With his bug-eyed monsters from film-land, his quasi photographic techniques, and his modified fashion-plates, he began to offer little more than parasitic variations of ‘mega-visual’ images. All the awkward promise, and half-formed sensitivity of his early pencil drawings vanished into slick, collaborationist practice. I have a lot more respect for Guyatt’s coinage and butter-labels, than for Hamilton’s recent adaptations of Andrex toilet tissue advertisements: although neither have any grasp of the ‘aesthetic dimension’, at least what Guyatt does has some sort of social use.

However, I do not just wish to criticize two individuals. Over the last decade, I have been into art schools all over the country, and (until recently at least) I noticed how frequently the work done divided into two, for me, almost equally unsatisfactory categories. On the one hand there were the slurpy, ‘gestural’ abstractionists, and on the other what I would characterize as ‘media-studies’ styled modernists. I have tried to show you how these two approaches seem to me to be just two sides of the same rather debased art-educational coin, which deprives art students of those real, material skills through which their creativity might develop into something more than that of the child’s, and other than that of the sterile forms of the ‘mega-visual’ tradition.

Maurice de Sausmarez, a spokesman for the ‘basic design’ approach, has said that the new art education set out to teach ‘an attitude of mind, not a method’. This view, unfortunately, gained official sanction when the 1970 Coldstream report on art education declared that studies in Fine Art should not be too closely related to painting and sculpture, because the Fine Arts ‘derive from an attitude which may be expressed in many ways.’ There is, however, an enormous gap between an attitude in the mind, and the realization of a great painting: and I do not, myself, think that it is possible to teach art except through definite material practices in which the student is encouraged to achieve mastery.

In 1973, Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger, two sociologists, published a book, Art Students Observed, which was in effect a study of the way in which the new art education was working out in practice. They reported that ‘half the tutors and approaching two-thirds of the students of certain art colleges agreed with the proposition that art cannot be taught.’ Understandably, the authors then asked, ‘In what sense, then, are tutors tutors, the students students, and colleges colleges? What, if any, definitionally valid educational processes take place on Pre-Diploma and Diploma courses?’ There can be few involved in art education who have not asked themselves these questions at some time or other. The authors reported, that nearly all tutors ‘rejected former academic criteria and modalities in art’, but none had any others to put in their place.

My own view is that it is quite useless to go on teaching this peculiar mixture of infantilism, media studies, and Fine Art ‘attitudes’ in post-school art education. Of course, I believe that a relatively unstructured situation is healthiest for young children, making their first tentative explorations into drawing and painting. (In such cases, the structuring comes from innate developmental tendencies, rather than from ‘culture’.) None­theless, it is at least worth pointing out that many infant art teachers are now beginning to argue in favour of a more ‘directed’ approach much earlier than has been fashionable in recent decades, and to look again at the creative value of practices like copying, which were once abhorred as being completely sterile.

I believe that, by the time the student reaches post-school level, he or she simply cannot develop creatively without the acquisition of culturally given skills. That is why Fine Art education should be based much more firmly and unequivocally than it is at present in the study of painting and sculpture. Imagination and intuition are indeed essential to the creation of good art; but these faculties are impervious to instruction. There are, however, many others integral to the creation of good art which can be taught. Drawing is, of course, the most significant of these: and, rather than ‘the Fine Art attitude’, I would like to see drawing of natural forms, especially the human figure, reinstated as the core of an adult education in Fine Art.

Of course, as soon as one mentions the figure, those who have been brought up within the ideology of the new art education raise the bogey of ‘academicism’. But this ignores a well-established tradition of anti-academic figure drawing in this country which, for my money, has produced far more impressive results as an educational method than ‘basic design’, or anything resembling it. I am referring to that tradition which emerged in the Slade at the end of the last century, under the influence of that great teacher, Henry Tonks. Tonks saw that there was nothing wrong with learning to draw from the figure, as such, although there was everything wrong with the stereotyped togas, and mannerist pretensions in which the traditional academics swathed this practice. Tonks held that drawing should always be both poetical and objective, but he recognized that only the objective part could be taught. Before becoming an art teacher, Tonks had practised as a surgeon: he denied there was such a thing as outline, and stressed the structural aspects of the figure. If you mastered the direction of bones, Tonks taught, you had mastered contour, too. Tonks certainly taught a method, and not just an attitude of mind. He wanted students to spend all day, every day, in the life room. Now according to today’s art educational theorists, he ought thereby to have strangled any conceivable talent that came his way. But he didn’t. Those pupils interested in the ‘objective’ aspect of painting certainly thrived under his influence: William Coldstream, himself a doctor’s son, went on to elaborate his own clinically ‘factual’ system of figure painting. But those drawn towards the ‘poetical’ dimension often flourished, too. Thus Stanley Spencer—than whom few can be considered more imaginative —learned what he needed to realize his great compositions in Tonks’ life room, too. Similarly, Bomberg, who laid an almost equal emphasis on imaginative transformation and empirical exactitude in his pursuit of ‘the spirit in the mass’, benefited from Tonks’ rigorously methodical approach . . . And then there were Bomberg’s pupils, painters like Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, and Denis Creffield, all of whom show a similar respect for the empirical and imaginative dimensions, and also for the specific traditions and potentialities of their chosen medium: painting. Work of this calibre is, to me, altogether more impressive and worthwhile than anything produced in the wake of latter-day Pasmore, or Hamilton.

But I do not want to be misunderstood: I am not saying that students should be shut up in the life-room all day iong and made to do ‘Tonksing’ against their will. I am however saying that what makes painting a particularly valuable and exceptional form of work is that, in it, the intuitive and imaginative faculties do not stand in opposition to the rational, analytical and methodical: rather, they can be combined together in ways which most work in our anaesthetic society disallows. This, if you like, is the excuse for painting, the reason that, when it is good, it stands as a kind of ‘promise’ for the fuller realization of human potentialities. And I am saying that precisely in order that the student can be helped to realize his individual creative potentialities to the fullest, art education must begin to concern itself with the ‘objective’ end of the expressive continuum much more than it has done in recent years.

It is nature which has somehow disappeared from recent art educational practices. I prefer a much wider view of natural form than that implicit in Tonks’ approach. There are even elements of ‘basic design’ which I would like to see preserved and extended: the most significant of these is the attention which Pasmore and Hamilton, at least in the early days, gave to the structure and growth of natural organisms—like crystals. My only objection to their approach here is that it was much too narrow: the student should be encouraged to attend to the full gamut of natural forms, beginning with the figure, and extending outwards.

Ron Kitaj

Tonks once said that he had no idea what the body looked like to those who had not studied anatomy. I believe that before students involve themselves in the microscopy advocated (though not in fact much practised) as an element in ‘basic design’, they ought to achieve a real knowledge of the structure of the human body itself, of anatomy. It is no accident that Ron Kitaj, who is one of the best figurative artists working in this country, is also one of the very few who has actually conducted an autopsy, and worked with a cadaver. Of course, that guarantees nothing: but, equally, it remains true that neither Leonardo, nor Michelangelo, could have achieved what they did without this sort of knowledge. But I would go further than this: I believe that the practice of drawing needs to be supplemented with certain knowledges, beyond anatomy, which the present art schools simply do not teach. Why, in complementary studies, does one find so little instruction for Fine Art students in such topics as metereology, botany, geology, and zoology: in order to offer an imaginative transformation of the world in one’s work, one must first attend to that world, and above all to the visible forms through which it is constituted. But most art students grow up with an impoverished conception of reality which owes more to cigarette advertisements and sociological theory (with perhaps a dash of art history) than to empirical perception and the natural history of form. Personally, I think you would learn much more about the business of painting if you spent an hour, say, drawing quietly in a natural history museum rather than studying that ‘media landscape’ which seduced Hamilton, or ‘expressing yourself’ in abstract, like a child.

I have put a lot of emphasis on painting and sculpture. What about the ‘other media’? In an ‘aesthetically healthy’ society, the aesthetic dimension permeates throughout all work, and extends to every part of the social organism, regardless of class and condition. But we do not live in such a society: and painting and sculpture, alone, offer this promise of a new reality, realized within the existing one. That is why I think that the priority of Fine Art education should be the preservation and encouragement of these practices.

Nonetheless, I also believe that it should be part of a Fine Art education to learn about, and to practice, other aesthetic pursuits—namely those offered in the whole field of the ornamental and decorative arts. Indeed, this is where recent education has gone so wildly wrong: it has encouraged Fine Art students to engage in the anaesthetic practices of the prevailing culture, not only the sorts of things that interested Hamilton, but the whole field of video, applied photographic processes, mixed media, etc., etc. I think it would be much more valuable if they were encouraged to look at things the other way round: i.e. to think about taking fully aesthetic, creative practices out into that aesthetically sick society.

Peter Fuller

Dennis Gabor was the man who invented the new medium to end all new media, the hologram which offers a fully three- dimensional image. But he certainly did not think that he had rendered traditional aesthetic pursuits obsolete. He once wrote, ‘Modern technology has taken away from the common man the joy in the work of his skillful hands; we must give it back to him.’ Gabor went on, ‘Machines can make anything, even objects d’art with the small individual imperfections which suggest a slip of the hand, but they must not be allowed to make everything. Let them make the articles of primary necessity, and let the rest be made by hand. We must revive the artistic crafts, to produce things such as hand-cut glass, hand- painted china, Brussels lace, inlaid furniture, individual book­binding.’ These are sentiments with which I agree entirely; and there would be nowhere better to start this revolution than on Fine Art courses.

I am not, of course, suggesting that students should set off along that narrow path which leads to a potters wheel in Cornwall: a better paradigm of the sort of thing I have in mind would be say, the revival of mosaic in Newcastle, linked to an officially sponsored project to produce wall decorations for the new Metro system. The project, as I understand it, is that well- known artists will design mosaics, and that students from the Polytechnic Fine Art Department will assist in the making of them. I think that the arts schools could, and should, do much more in this sort of direction. Indeed, in short, rather than allowing Fine Art values to be assimilated by mega-visual tradition, art schools should be encouraging students to take aesthetic values out into that anaesthetic culture: otherwise, one of the most significant of all human potentialities risks being lost altogether.

1981