VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
From the mid-19th Century to the 1980s, the UK had an art school system so extensive that it could be said that every town had one. Particularly in areas without other large educational institutions, the art school served not only as a place of learning but as the cultural hub of the community. While art schools have played a significant role in the cultural life of the UK, most are now closed or absorbed into other institutions and the buildings repurposed, ignored or demolished. What did it mean to have an art school in every town? What can we learn by considering their fate? What forms of social and cultural life were generated by their presence in the local community? How are environments transformed by the loss of such institutions? How might attention to the buildings and grounds of past educational institutions provide access to the intangible heritage these sites often contain? How can forgotten or ignored histories be retrieved or represented? In order to explore these questions we are conducting a photographic survey of all UK art school sites, investigating local archives, interviewing past staff and students, and producing exhibitions and events in public galleries designed to draw out the hidden histories of art school as generative of a way of life at once embedded within the local community yet also sub-culturally supplemental to it. Our presentation will reflect on art schools as place-makers, as inadvertent monuments to past creative communities, and also as sites for critical reflection on the role of civic institutions in sustaining the cultural life of the community. We will also reflect on the hybrid research methodology employed in this project, which combines art practice, archival research, fieldwork, and oral history and relies upon collaboration with local curators, librarians, and community organisations to produce new maps of lost zones of affective and creative life.
John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster. His research is largely focused on issues of landscape, place and cultural politics in relation to 20th- and 21st-Century literature, art, photography and visual culture. Among his books are Landscape as Weapon: Cultures of Exhaustion and Refusal (Reaktion, 2021) and, co-authored with Ryan Bishop, Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-garde (Duke UP, 2020).
Matthew Cornford is an artist. He was appointed professor of Fine Art at the University of Brighton in 2009. He studied at Great Yarmouth College of Art, St Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art. In 1991 he began working with David Cross and for over 20-years Cornford & Cross undertook a wide range of art projects in response to specific contexts and situations. A monograph on their work was published in 2009; For over a decade, Matthew Cornford and John Beck have been researching and documenting the sites and cultural history of British art schools. The Journal of Visual Culture published their article The Art School in Ruins in 2012, and an artists’ book, The Art School and the Culture Shed, was published in 2014. In November 2018 their exhibition The Art Schools of North West England opened at the Bluecoat, Liverpool. Two further exhibitions in the North West grew out of the Bluecoat show, at Bury Art Museum in 2019 and at Touchstones Rochdale in 2021. The next stage of their project is focused on the West Midlands. The resulting photographs and archive material will be exhibited at The New Art Gallery, Walsall in 2023.