This isn’t on the syllabus but it feels like a useful historical working-through about ‘the crit’, and is referred to in Orr & Shreeve (2018. If the crit might be intimidating to students, perhaps understanding the context in which it emerged might help to demystify it.
Crippa links this to a post-war (WW2) phenomenon of both a change in art making towards abstraction and also in the image of “the artist” themselves.
That whilst crits/discussion between art tutors and students had earlier precedents, the practice gained a new importance during the move towards abstraction because the idea about what made art “good” was being re-thought, in theory and practice. The discursive place of the crit allowed a space for that to happen, between tutors and students.
At the same time the image of the artist had become an important part of the reception of the artist’s work – which Crippa describes as the (check quote, “young, autonomous, self contained”) artist. We might imagine the photographs of abstract expressionists, or Francis Bacon, etc with their work. (Usually male, white etc.. but not exclusively so). But the image of “the artist” as contributing to the reception (and the marketability) of the work. (Perhaps the work itself was not quite as “autonomous” as it purported to be, given the image of the artist of was so iconic.. I am sure this has been argued so elsewhere…)
Anyhow. These two elements combined to contribute to a changing emphasis on how students were being trained to succeed in the art world/or to respond to changing values and expectations about what art is and how artists should be: a new emphasis on the intellectual/cerebral discourse around abstraction and a new need for the artist to promote themselves rather than the work speaking for them. This, Crippa argues laid the foundations for the ‘Crit’. (Which Orr and Shreeve described as a “Signature pedagogy” of contemporary creative arts higher education).
Pre-cursors to UAL colleges, such as St Martin’s, were at the forefront of that development, when, as Crippa explains, Frank Martin took over the sculpture department and Antony Caro also taught there. There was an attempt to remove figurative representation from the studio, an emphasis on direct construction and materials rather than preparatory drawing and model making.
She then charts how the lecture-as-performance emerged in part as an “critique” of the crit – highlighting how the persona of the artist had become a performance, and pushing it further, into self-conscious parody (in the work of Gilbert & George or Bruce MacLean, for example).
Crippa’s narrative resonated with my own experience, even in the early 2000s, at Goldsmiths. During group crits, we presented our work and our peers asked us questions, or give responses, which we had to try to respond to. The one difference was that the tutors themselves (possibly having digested discussions of top down pedagogy, or at feedback of previous students) chose not to speak at all – so the discursive element was just between students as perrs. (Which had plusses and minuses… Something I might come back to thinking about, regarding “equal participation”). But frequently, when students presented the work, the question would arise, no matter the format of what was being presented, “is this a performance?”.
The demand on young artists entering the market to present themselves as a whole package has thus already informed pedagogy. Perhaps we might argue it has only increased, and perhaps continued to change, with changing demands of the market. We might feel some of the changes to pedagogy have been self imposed at art schools to challenge the status quo. However, newer “critical” elements of teaching (around identity, social justice, climate change, combined with digital innovation), may, it be argued, also be a response to market demands, even if the self-understanding is that they are a critique of the status-quo. UAL’s USP is to be “radical”. It might feel an unsettling thought for us, that perhaps capitalism might be more radical than the average art student or art teacher… (Discuss!)
The above suggestion goes beyond the narrative that Crippa is presenting, but it’s been something I have been wrestling with. It is not an argument to to reject incorporating “critical” changes into our teaching, it’s just to trying to grasp an awareness of economic forces in which art school, and higher education, functions, for students, and for teachers.
More broadly, I am curious about what it now means at art school, for students and for teachers to be “critical”, to have a “critical practice”, or to think critically. And whether that is still something that art institutions (or indeed, the market) value.
Crippa, E. (2015). ‘From “Crit” to “Lecture-as-performance”‘ in, The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now, London: Tate
Orr, S. and Shreeve, A. (2018), Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum, Abingdon: Routledge