‘I've not finished’: why studios are still a fundamental requirement in the study of fine art

Abstract

This article offers a discussion of the continuing importance of the studio in the study of fine art in higher education. The historical and political context for the current, pressurised circumstances of higher education institutions is considered and the argument for studio study is supported with key descriptors from the Subject Benchmark Statement, also presenting a case for why undergraduate study of fine art continues to be a relevant social and cultural dynamic. A contemporary popular view of artists' studios is suggested along with an indication of the continuing importance of studios in the real world of artistic practice. An analysis is made of the nature and function of the studio in relation to the open, individual and critical curriculum that characterises fine art. This analysis is fleshed out with reference to key concepts relating to phenomenological and pedagogic understandings of the experimental and experiential process at the heart of this demanding approach to study.

Acknowledgement

This article is based on the discussion workshop presentation delivered at the National Association of Fine Art Educators Symposium, ‘45 Years of Fine Art Education: Drawing the Line?’, held at the Swedenborg Society, London, 31 March 2014.

Notes on contributor

Christopher McHugh is a painter and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Chichester. He studied at Bath Academy of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Sussex, was assistant to the curator at Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) and a founder of Manchester Artists Studio Association, Red Herring Studios, Brighton, Artonic, Video Virus and Fabrica Gallery, Brighton.

Notes

1. Polytechnics were, historically speaking, a relatively short-lived phenomenon under the academic aegis of the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) – a degree-awarding authority for non-universities from 1965 until its dissolution in 1993 – and in many cases amalgamated technological, art and design and other colleges.

2. The polytechnics inherited the focus on material practice, as well as the institutions themselves in many cases, from the heritage of art and design colleges established in an egalitarian liberalisation of the arts in the nineteenth century (Quinn 2012).

3. Fine art can no longer be bound by the limitations of a term such as ‘discipline’ for, by nature, it encompasses study, understanding and practice across a range of disciplinary boundaries.

4. This could be the subject of a major and international study. It could, for instance, include examples such as the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, Hertfordshire; Constantin Brancusi's atelier reconstructed by the Beaubourg in the centre of Paris; the house/studio Museum of Gustave Moreau in the 9th Arrondissement; Monet's famous garden compound at Giverny; or for that matter the reconstruction of El Greco's house and studio in Toledo or Dali's bizarre hideaway in the tiny fishing village of Port Lligat in Catalunya (to suggest but a few!).

5. These products present a baffling range of what we might refer to as simulations (or in Baudrillard's terms, simulacra), including, among many others, a rash of television programmes, from The Hills to Made in Chelsea, where non-actors ‘play’ themselves for the camera; the respectable constructs of ‘fly on the wall’ and naturalist documentaries; the blurring of lines between the lives of the stars and the antics of soap characters, not to mention the various aspects of virtual reality in gaming and the like.

6. The list includes many others – Amos 2007; McCabe and McNay 2008; Long 2009; Amirsadeghi and Eisler 2012, 2013; and embryonic works not yet in hard copy, such as the regional gallery of artists’ portraits, ‘at home’ in their studios, as collected from around East Sussex by photographer Alun Callender (http://aluncallender.com/artists-portraits/). For the counter-case about studios, see Davidts and Paice 2009.

7. My own studio organisation in Brighton and Hove, Red Herring Studios, has converted to studio use seven different industrial and commercial buildings from across the city, housing something like 200 artists over nearly 30 years.

8. For example, Acme in London has grown large on this premise (http://www.acme.org.uk/aboutacme).

9. Various different accounts offer different slicings of the faculty/intelligence pie; obvious other contenders for a piece of it include emotional, aural, kinetic, rhythmic.

10. See echoes here, albeit of a different nature, of Virginia Woolf's commentary on the necessity for A Room of One's Own (Woolf 1929) for women writing.

11. As an example of how this works in reality, on the University of Chichester BA (Hons) Fine Art programme, these underlying precepts of the way studio practice should work underpin the delivery of Level 5 (the middle level of undergraduate study), where ongoing discourse makes these precepts progressively more explicit through the year as students’ experience ‘catches them up’ with the potential for conceptual understanding. Obviously, this developing consciousness in the student of the complex architecture of learning, in this mode at this level, depends upon a larger journey from project-guided learning, exploring visual and other forms of research at Level 4 (undergraduate entry level) and progression into assumptions about artist-like independence of thinking and conduct at Level 6 (final year equivalent).

12. The notion of a ‘community of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) clearly relates to this idea and such focused learning processes no doubt form a key part of fine art studio study, although the ‘shared enterprise’ suggested here may incorporate a more formative and a more complex and possibly contradictory context than the collaborative engagements of practitioners initially conceived by Lave and Wenger.

13. This medical term best recalls Tim Smit's hilarious story recounted in Desert Island Discs (2000), of the unlikely necessity of shaking the trees in the protected tropical biosphere of the Eden Project in Cornwall. The story is salutary – in the too perfect conditions of the dome, the specimens were growing too quickly and were too weak to support their own weight. This required an artificial introduction of the kind of physical challenges that the environment would naturally hurl in their direction, producing in response the needed thickening of the trunks and branches.