THE ART SCHOOL PROSPECTUS

What to do with your kids?  At first sight the Art School might perhaps be regarded as a Johnny come lately into Higher Education, an indulgent three years opportunity for your children to make their minds up.  But then you send for the Prospectus.

This glorious colour printed celebration of half truths and downright fibs, promised academic programmes unrivalled throughout the civilised world, comforting propositions supported by portraits of grave scholars, cheerful  artists and close browed administrators, all with unlikely Curriculum Vitae. It was significant that University prospectuses were printed then in black and white, being text heavy to give reassurance of careful use of funds.   Art Schools had every excuse to go in for the full McCoy.

At the half title of the Norwich Prospectus the principal turns to greet us from his desk with a wry smile as if to reassure us that he is glad to see us but wants to get back to his labours. Look – he is holding a pen. No worries though because the walls of his studio are crammed with paintings (perhaps his own).  Now for the unsolicited testimonials. Genial youths with unlikely names attest to the difference made to their drab and unsatisfying lives in Coketown and the Malay Peninsula by their experiences at Norwich.  And is it any wonder their creative tides are in giddy flow looking at the spacious studios with displays of modern technology and boundless resources. Among the easels and enlargers the winsome and determined students solved knotty problems with string and pigment. Any parent would be impressed. This is not the Tony Hart bit they anticipated.

From its bulging stacks, the Library clearly rivals that of Alexandria, and most desks enjoy the presence of students, very few of them asleep. Under community interaction,  you find the Annual Lecture, “Norfolk in World Culture”, with not an empty seat,  a heady mixture of town and gown, with a strong resemblance to a speech by Kin Il Sung. A printed insert encourages any doubting parent that, if this piffle doesn’t persuade you, then you should bring your offspring to an Open Day.

OPEN DAY.

I was rarely asked to contribute to these events at Norwich. Despite undoubted abilities as a public speaker, my capacity to undermine the corporate line with unscripted asides, made organisers suspicious. Believing that Thurrock was somewhere north of Glasgow I sympathised with their long and tiring journey, and made several cultural references to Scotland. It seemed to make no difference to my audience that they had been driven over the border from Essex. I seldom end a gig with a request for questions. My briefing however made clear that this was a vital part of their visit. “Have you had the cuts?” asked one girl from Thurrock. “No.” I said with a nod to Eric Morecombe, “I always walk this way.” Quick as a Flash.

When I arrived at Brighton Art School (then masquerading as a Polytechnic) I was persuaded in my innocence to host a stall at the Post Graduate Open Day representing the Department of Communication. Never again. Not only did I know nothing of the subject but most of my audience over the day were jeering vagrants or friends who called in to check my morale. It was enough to remind me that the public face of most institutions was a tissue of fantasy, how a Manager might have concocted an entity in his/her tired brain after a few glasses of sherry.

HIGH JINKS. In reality the Art School, everything observed was in a state of flux. On a daily basis, roles and reputations were challenged, projects came and went with no identifiable consistency. Time dissolved in the heat of making things and images, while managers sought to seduce visitors and funding bodies with persuasive scenery for the tableaux.  

I arrived as a teacher with a University patina,  expecting sensible debate and an underlying culture based on the values of the Guardian, In fact it was much more a reflection of the Daily Telegraph and Tit-Bits, with an occasional helping of Reynolds News.

This was clear in my first week teaching in Vocational Design, when a casual reference to the befits of multi-culturalism was met with a growl of contempt from the first year cohort who were, to a man and woman, well disposed towards the National Front. Some indeed had joined and took to prowling country lanes on motor bikes abusing anybody with a darker skin.

Early on I remember the Senior Librarian being a Member of a Far Right Political Party, infiltrating its pernicious propaganda on to the Library Information trolley. Among the “Teach Yourself Watercolour” Pamphlets were crude leaflets explaining that a town the size of Peterborough landed every six months in England. He would often ask me, on the strength of my surname, when I intended to go back to the Emerald Isle. He knew people who would pay my expenses.  He was succeeded by Tim, a consummate professional with a love of books whose support made my last years at Norwich supportable (see beneath).

The spirit of Joyful Absurdity reigned throughout the infrastructure at Norwich from the Switchboard Operator who had a medical condition that didn’t allow her to go near telephones,  to the Porter (well before my arrival) who moved his family into the basement. Their washing was strung out between the Boilers on a Monday down the darkened corridor to the Paper Store.

The Art School at Norwich had once housed an ambitious course in the making of Boot and Shoes. My late pal David Moore had even taught their students English seventeenth century history, a necessary part of their Intellectual Portfolio, it was claimed. A secret compartment at the back of the Vocational Design studio in the monastery, well above eye level, contained a dozen large industrial sewing machines for leather sandals, glimpsed through frosted glass, a last remnant of this long defunct course.  I still have an unused reel of pink edging for Riviera sandals as a souvenir. Down one corridor in Fine Art there was a row of infrared X Ray machines that, at some danger to the flesh, indicated whether your feet suited your choice of footwear.

The Photographic Technician,  Mr. T we shall call him, recorded every Jimmy Young show for eight years, lovingly shelved in sequence around his work room. Often I would take a pile of books into this space for slide making, only to discover from the news on his speakers that revolutionary students in Tehran had seized American diplomats. Not again, I thought. I couldn’t go through that hysteria again. But no, it was the  Jimmy Young show from 1979. substantiated by the characteristic music of Russ Conway and Frank Ifield. Mr.T was big locally in Citizen’s Band Radio where he purported to be a bearded castaway from the safety of his Kitchen table in a village outside Norwich.

It was Mr.T’s regular task to take the formal photographs of all new students. He would choose slightly flirtatious poses, and, it was rumoured suggested ‘a little more shoulder’. But he allowed one minx to waylay him and got him to photograph her nude on a sofa behind the locked door of his Darkroom. I remember her name to this day, as well as her endearing slur of speech. The revelations were hardly seismic and the scandal ended with a warning as mutual embarrassment shuffled the narrative under a carpet.

According to M. T’s lapel badge he belonged to the Casualties Union and officiated at Football Matches. My pal with whom I often went to the Canaries’ Home Fixtures at Carrow Road said it would just be his luck to pass out on the terraces and come to his senses gazing up at this beaming but faintly sinister face. He also was Official Photographer to the Norwich Anglo-Saxon Society where plump middle aged men with winged helmets stood over prone damsels dressed in very little.

The prospectus of course detailed disciplinary options and the protocol of assessments throughout the School, but failed to specify any of the juicier case studies. A Senior member of Staff spent more time than he should have running a business from a city many miles away. Like colleagues he got the late train in, refusing to compound the congestion of other travellers during the peak period, he claimed. Needless to say, his Managers called him in front of an ad hoc disciplinary panel to account for his attendance (and other matters). The panel was held in the late morning but still several members were themselves late or still at the bacon sandwiches in the canteen. Ten minutes into the solemn proceedings, a high pitched siren sounded from inside his trousers, revealing his amateurish attempts to record the proceedings. He didn’t realise that the tape had to be turned over.

I should add I was a Visiting Lecturer for many years, avoiding the tedium of academic meetings and general administration, so my perspective is a narrow and clouded one. Many anecdotes reached me at third, even fourth hand, yet the gist rings true. The stories I pass on are undoubtedly apocryphal and exaggerated. Please regard them as fables of Good and Evil, the Tragic and the Hilarious. A naïve and even-handed observer would suspect that students had a raw deal. Despite the rich mix of incompetence and folly in British Art Schools, most students burst forth in remarkable and unexpected ways. Jaundiced observers from outside questioned the cost of this happenstance.

Just as telling were those meetings where student successes were recorded, and read out to a meeting as if a Parish notice. We sat nodding sagely as this talent we had so astutely identified at an early stage, and nurtured so sensitively over the years finally reached the pages of the Creative Magazines. Past students, now celebrities, we were told, would just adore to come back to their alma mater for mutual glorification. In reality it was, in my judgment, amazing that students received anything like a proper education for the money, let alone, forge a career from the nonsense they learnt.

I remember attending a meeting at Brighton where some glib, statistically orientated manager claimed that the University’s success at recruitment and retention were almost entirely down to the flexibility and integrity of its Modular structure of courses. My snort of derision came out too loud for comfort.  I suggested that the nightlife, the clubs, the proximity of London and the gay friendly atmosphere ran the Modules close.  I was immediately cast as a Vulgarian but was proved right in the end. It was further revealed that very few students had the faintest idea what a Modular Course was.

If the end product (as students came to be known) was a creative energy, a fresh way of seeing the world, a delight in collaboration and a suppression of the corrosive effects of the Bohemian, many of those teachers to whom they were exposed shone out as beacons of learning, playfulness, probity and understanding.