Attentive outrage and fine art higher education: a manifesto of the liminal

ABSTRACT

This paper outlines the concept of attentive outrage as a potential underlying principle for a manifesto of the liminal for fine art higher education in the UK. Crystallized from past activist experience and scholarship in the face of the here and now socio-political context of the UK and beyond, it defines attentive outrage as an optimistically evocative, critical attitude with momentum that can be inspired via studio-based fine art teaching. It proposes that attentive outrage in fine art higher education depends upon six intricately linked commitments to be shared equally by academics and students which capture: the nuances of intersectionality, managing dominant embodied social matter, critiquing cultural presences in the curriculum, recognizing the productive-conflictive tensions between cultural essentialism and cultural apporiation within the discourse of academic standards and artistic merit, fostering radical wilfulness and pragmatic wisdoms, and articulating the impact of this in terms of the outcomes of students’ programmes in a manner that can address the needs of higher education governance mechanisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Art education
• social justice
• equalities
• intersectionality

Acknowledgement

This paper was prepared for keynote delivery at the Paradox 2017 European Forum meeting in London, September 2017 and edited into its present form subsequently. Acknowledgements must go to those with whom I have travelled and/or remained near through the journey of my activism upon which this article is founded: Anthony Shrag, Dani Marti, Rowena Arshad, Jo Clifford, Nathaniel Adam Tobias C, Aisha Richards and her work leading Shades of Noir, Liam Seward and most recently, Medieval Queeries. Gratitude also goes to Ajamu X for granting me permission to use photographs from his Fierce collection: Fierce: Portraits of Young Black Queers (Ajamu 2013). In designing the slides for this keynote, I interspersed three portraits from Ajamu X’s recent work, Fierce: Portraits of Young Black Queers throughout. I wanted the audience to be looking at people, captured in the photographic moment, that our students are likely only to encounter infrequently in their formal Art School curriculum in terms of: who, on full time contracts, teaches them, who the Professors are, or the canon they study and what is privileged within it. In this I was not attempting to talk for or about Ajamu or his subjects, but I was trying to be near enough to illuminate the role visual absence plays in the continued perpetuation of reciprocal and structural disadvantage in fine art higher education. By disrupting the symbols via representation, I hoped to reset the balance of visuals in my own work, ask the audience to consider their practices, and highlight how exclusionary judgement hides behind what is not seen but is experienced in the intersectionality of our students’ lives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Vicky Gunn is the Head of Learning and Teaching at the Glasgow School of Art and Professor of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education. Most of her activism has been located firmly within LGBTQ rights and responsibilities, but she has been engaged in the full range of equalities work informally and formally throughout her academic career. Her most recent equalities-centred writing has been on learning in higher education fine art. She has a penchant for queer medievalism, arts-based social activism, and life-wide creative arts educational policy.

Notes

1 Republican politics under Ronald Reagan (40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989) had a particularly vicious response to the AIDS epidemic which, prior to the trialling of combination therapy (antiretroviral therapy), saw thousands of deaths amongst the gay community in San Francisco in a short space of time. This political injustice was paralleled in the UK (prior to the UN’s declaration in 2001 that HIV was a global pandemic). Indeed, at HIV-AID’s initial mortality height, the UK government saw fit to introduce the retrograde, clause (section) 28 to the Local Government Act of 1986, which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality by state bodies. This enforced formal silencing and encouraged informal acts of self-censorship at a time when communities needed more not less honesty regarding sexuality and sexually transmitted diseases. As a young, Catholic yet heretical, increasingly queer identifying lesbian in a community losing members through secrecy, cover-up, and shame, I found myself constantly angry and sad at the same time as liberated by my desires, loves, and fellow activists. The Kinsey Sicks are a drag, a cappella group, resident in San Francisco, founded by Ben Schatz as part of a radical response to the then contemporary Republican politics of the USA. Twenty-five years on and the group continues to challenge social injustices through outrageous performance. They still make me laugh, even whilst I am angry. For more information see: https://kinseysicks.com/25-years-of-dragapella.

2 Angels in America, part two: Perestroika, act 4, scene 8: ‘Have you no decency, sir?’ Louis asks this of his lover, Joe, on discovering that Joe works for Roy Cohen.

3 For the general background on the recent decolonizing movement in higher education, the following is a useful starting place: Bambra, Gebrial, and Nisancioglu (2018); for Art and Design, see the student zine from the University of the Arts London: Decolonising the Arts Curriculum: Perspectives on Higher Education (https://issuu.com/susanbubble/docs/final_decolonising_zine2.compressed).