Scenes from the history of the art school

ABSTRACT

The following essay proceeds through twenty-one visual and textual ‘scenes’ from the complex history of the art school, as a contribution to debates about its political character. The title is taken from Jacques Rancière’s (2013) Aisthesis. This is Rancière’s most sustained exposition of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’. His strategy in this book is to juxtapose ‘the event’ of an artwork against ‘the interpretive network which gives it meaning’ (2013, ix). He is specifically interested in the transition between different ‘regimes of art’. The scenes in this article map the transition from what Rancière calls the ‘representative regime’ to the ‘aesthetic regime’ on to the historical, pedagogical, ideological, and political evolution of the modern art school. These scenes roughly cover the period from the formation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the art school protests in 1968. They also include references to the nineteenth-century UK Schools of Design, Socialist Realism, Greenbergian Modernism, Althusserian ideology critique, and the Bauhaus. This essay is a sketch leading toward a longer, non-linear, counter-history of the art school.

KEYWORDS:

• Aesthetics
• education
• Greenberg
• ideology
• politics
• Rancière

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art for granting permission to use images from their archive as the basis for the illustrations within this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Richard Hudson-Miles

Richard Hudson-Miles is an artist-researcher based in West Yorkshire, UK. He is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Yale’s Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. His research operates at the intersections of aesthetics, radical social theory, the philosophy of education, and the history of contemporary art and design. He will shortly be publishing an introduction to the thought of Jacques Rancière for Routledge.

Andy Broadey

Andy Broadey is Lecturer in Contemporary Art, History and Theory at University of Central Lancashire. His installations examine the post-communist imaginary and destabilise ideologies of globalisation. He exhibited at The Nehru Centre, London in 2019 and he has recently written on Tino Sehgal and Andrea Fraser (Jagiellonian University Press, 2020).