Abstract/Summary

Current trends within Art create tensions in educational institutions between historical forces, logistical challenges, traditional codes of practice, budgetary limitations and inherited objects. The following performative study examines the artists’ relationship to medium within this complicated environment. The material emerges from workshops carried out with students in art school spaces across Britain; conceptual workshops that consider the current status of technical workshops in this awkward territory where industrial, craft, and avant-garde modes of making overlap. Through engagement with tools found within Art institutions -some abandoned, some unfamiliar, some ubiquitous- it attempts to visualise aspects of the myriad perceptions that the current student/future artist has of the notion of medium. Referring to the condition described by Rosalind Krauss that emerged from the cross-pollination of medium-specific disciplines in Art and its education in the late 20th century, a ‘post-medium’ approach is adopted to discover new potential of tools. While acknowledging the dominant legacy of the Bauhaus, there is a questioning here of how we consider material practice, and its mastery, after conceptualism, after institutional critique, and after the tech revolution that has divorced many modes of making from material engagement. The study’s own methodology is itself under analysis; an improvised mode of making that draws on theory, performance, conversation, image and sound manipulation, appropriation, collage and documentary. It is part of a body of work that attempts to confront the future of supporting material practice in Art School beyond the Post-Medium Condition.