MissAniela

School of Saatchi

Saatchi on TV: School of thought… or wet fish?
Image from School of Saatchi website

When Channel 4’s Picture This came on the telly a while ago, I took pleasure in blogging my thoughts and engaging with other viewers on the programme. I want to do something similar for BBC’s School of Saatchi, a programme which was on recently here in the UK where reality TV meets the modern art scene. (Kate Muir on The Times Online wrote a great piece questioning the motives for Saatchi to be involved with a programme of this format, and indeed, questions why the mysterious Saatchi himself never appears in it). In the first episode 12 contestants are whittled down to 6 hopefuls who then create a series of artworks across 3 more episodes, creating public art for a seaside town, a stately home, and then Charles Saatchi’s gallery itself; the winner being selected to exhibit at The Hermitage in St Petersburg and to have a free art studio in London for 3 years.

I want to first describe my initial cynical reaction to the programme. The first episode irritated me from the outset because of the inevitability of the setup: yes, I’m glad to watch a telly programme about art, but everyone knows the formulaic limitations of anything televised in this way, so you’re going to get the cheap-thrill entertainment and humiliation factor. For me however, couple that with the utter nonsensical meaninglessness of contemporary art and you’ve got a recipe for neverending, hair-tearing frustration and cringiness. Basically, modern art is whatever you say it is. It’s whatever the VIP-status artists say it is. So, getting a bunch of wannabe artists in front of a panel, asking them why their work is ‘art’ and then choosing how to respond to their words is such an exercise of futility. It’s an exercise of sheer, obvious humiliation. To me, more than any X Factor audition or Apprentice cock-up. Like any other reality TV format, the people in question are inferiorised for one contradictory moment, allowing contemporary art to be simultaneously mocked and endorsed. The judges know their art can’t be explained, because they’re the pompous gits that invented contemporary art, who belong to the institution of art schooling, of art tradition; and they are the holders of power within that field, laughing at hopefuls who have been taught by the same institution to emulate them. It was felt all so clear, that it made me quite uncomfortable.

The only difference between established modern artists and wannabe ones, it seems, is of power: of oratory, of position, of money. The art students’ work has none of these, yet. The point of the programme is to lure in viewers by tantalisingly dangling the opportunity of power, money and oratory to one of these lucky contestants. Who wins is arbitrary: it’s telly. It’s also arbitrary because: it’s art. And art is all about opinion, especially in contemporary art where the gesture of objects’ placement becomes the focus of a piece. It seemed, at first, completely and utterly random whether their work was praised by the panel or not. This was made even more obvious for me, when in the second episode, artist Martin Creed came on to advise the contestants. His own art includes a piece called ‘A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball’, which is just as it is described. Parallel that with the work offered by a contestant in the first episode, two printed emails scrunched up into similar balls, which went down with the unimpressed judges in a manner, well, of what you’d expect from a scrunched piece of paper, and you instantly get the gist that the artist’s status and name plays a big part, sometimes all the part, of making a work acceptable.

Nothing new there. My first response to the programme was hardly unique. For me, however, it was also an interesting look at art education. I have often told people that I prefer that I have not studied art beyond college, partly because my emergence into photography was instead self-instigated, autonomous, spontaneous and passionate. The prospect of watching the programme was therefore like being able to collect bait to drop in the form of quotations in this blog post, to validate my pre-existing view that art education is a load of bollocks. Indeed, there were some telling attitudes revealed by the judges, which makes me feel as if tradition is intact as ever. They were eager to spell out ‘the one who hasn’t been to art school’ who is the token ‘normal’ person, so it was clear what the expectations were for the rites of passage of the ideal ‘artist’ figure. Judge Matthew Collins even admitted in Episode 2 that he feared the pretentious nonsense ‘one learns at art school’ would come through the student’s public art they were about to put up in Hastings.

I think I have much less of a problem with contemporary art itself than I do with the words and language people feel obligated to use in order to tell us what that work is about. It’s always so confabulated, so ridiculously riddle-like, that by the end of the sentence, which is often fifteen lines long, you’ve completely lost track and therefore any sense of what the person is trying to say. The words become a dumping ground for all kinds of theory, of ‘-isms’ and words ending in –tion, and trite references to identity, gender, place. It’s a tradition that validates you as an ‘artist’, if you can produce the necessary amount of oratorical patter to accompany your work. It becomes a desperate attempt to look as if there is something very astute going on in the piece, questioning whether there is something in the piece to see without the text beside it.

Now, going beyond my cynical gut reaction, I started to enjoy the programme once it got beyond the ‘look at these incompetent wannabes’ kind of tone which seemed all intent on boosting the TV ratings, and started to seem like it actually thought its contestants had some potential. I am increasingly becoming the kind of person who doesn’t like to limit their mind to one stubborn interpretation of something. The first moment where I thought differently about the programme was when I mentioned it to my sister Joanna on Skype. Did you see School of Saatchi? – with a vomiting emoticon next to it. She had watched it, and enjoyed it, didn’t agree with me that Tracey Emin was putting pretentious words into Eugenie Scrase’s mouth when she said of the handrail and whistle, ‘is it something to do with the sexual connotations, the blowing of the whistle, the holding of the handrail…’ , to Eugenie’s response ‘oh yeah it is’, etc. Joanna my sister had said to me ‘Oh, you don’t like Tracey Emin, do you, that time we went to see her films in Bradford…’ No, no, I said, I didn’t have anything against Emin, back then I was just being characteristically antagonistic against things my sister wanted to go and see, I hadn’t really seen Emin recently in oratorical action until watching this programme where I found her to be a scowling character with the expression of a toddler in an obnoxious mood… but if you don’t mind her, maybe she isn’t so bad…

So, I felt encouraged not to be so angry, and went to watch Episode 2, which I enjoyed. The artworks the students made to be shown in Hastings at first elicited a sarcastic response in me, particularly that dumb fake rock that turned out to be Charles’ favourite. However, the other pieces, particularly the ghost huts, made me think that the students weren’t relying on weird, one-dimensional costume department props after all, they were actually thinking both about aesthetics and concept. By Episode 3, my mind was actually turning more toward the whole idea of modern art, of installations, of found or simple objects that somehow with some strange application of artistic intent become ‘sculptures’ or ‘pieces’. I found myself strangely drawn toward Saad’s 2000 chapattis, which turned out to be favourable also with the programme’s Wizard of Oz himself. I even found myself not being too repulsed by the other weird crap that students hung up.

For the final episode of the programme, I was with my sister to watch it together. I didn’t find the contestants’ pieces that detestable. They weren’t talking that much about their stuff, so there was less verbal diarrhoea to cringe at. I was starting to see the point. I was questioning my thoughts: so, if I felt myself wondering ‘where is the skill in that piece?’ I would reply with ‘does art really require skill?’ and thought of photos of my own where a huge element of luck or randomness was involved. If I found myself thinking, ‘that piece is ugly’, I would then immediately think, ‘its very naïve and one-dimensional to expect that art should be beautiful’, especially as I’m feeling disinclined myself recently to produce stuff that is necessarily pretty. And with Eugenie Scrase’s piece, a tree trump stuck in a railing which she had seen round a building, had had detached and brought into the gallery, I was instantly drawn to it but found myself musing over whether it can be called, as the judges described it, a ‘sculpture’. As a found object, it’s implied that the artist’s vision, their selection of that object is the ‘art’. I felt half happy with that explanation, and half sceptical. After all, dozens of artists/photographers must have passed that thing before, admiring its potential as visual art, and not having the opportunity to ask to take it away for a TV programme/Saatchi exhibition, but just photograph it instead. That response, though, reeks of cynicism for me; it was the initiative of Eugenie and the context in which she used that initiative that was important. I felt strangely compelled by her piece (and bored by most of the others) so I was very pleased to see her win in the end (unanimously with the judges, and the tree piece was called ‘outstanding’ by Charles).

After the programme finished, that left my sister and I musing over the objects in our living room to suggest ridiculous ideas for our own modern art. Within that was a true curiosity, though, for the media beyond photography. I felt inspired to consider what I could do with installation and with artwork that wasn’t, at least on face value, about myself. It’s already a resolution for 2010…

Another thing I want to do: I want to challenge myself on my view of art/photography degrees. I have decided to do an interview with two third-year photography students (whom I met at my exhibition in London) to ask them about their degrees so far, to compare and contrast myself as a ’self-taught’ artist with their own experiences. I plan to upload the interview as an audio file, but we’ll see… say tuned!

Tags: art statements, art students, bbc, competition, emin, programme, saatchi, school of saatchi, tracey emin

Posted in Essays, musings on December 24th, 2009 | 6 Comments | Tweet This!