Q-Art London

Art cannot be taught and any teacher who thinks they can teach it is going to be a bad teacher. A good teacher is one who thinks of himself or herself not as a teacher at all but simply as an artist. Likewise a good student is one who doesn't see himself or herself as a student but again as an artist. All there is and all there can ever be between art teacher and art student is a conversation - an informal and spontaneous exchange of ideas, knowledge and experience - and this is quite enough.

In the modern era, art is about particularity, about individuation, finding out what kind of artist you are in relation to all the others, so teaching it is bound to be tricky, because how can one being teach another being how to be? In psychoanalysis the analyst helps you to find your particularity within the general. There is desire and there is your desire; narcissism and your narcissism. In art there is painting and your painting, process and your process.

If a teacher has a desire to change a student, to shape or direct their practice, then they are projecting their own desire into the student where they imagine they can master it. Likewise, if a student believes a tutor can authorise their practice, tell them what is right or wrong, what decision to make next, who to look at, who to read etc, they are projecting their desire for legitimation, authorisation, permission, into the tutor, and they will only end up more lost than they were to begin with, since they are inhabiting someone else's desire and not their own.

The old Lacanian adage about the stick insect comes to mind: a stick insect is so good at disguising itself as a stick that it gets eaten by a giraffe. This is about identification: if you identify as something or someone other than yourself you have no one to blame when you are misrecognised. Being an artist means doing your best to not get eaten by a giraffe.

Identification, belief and desire. These are important things when we talk about art and the teaching or learning of art. Identification is when you insert yourself into the place of another in order not to be seen by them or yourself. We do this because it’s better than the limiting imposition of individuation. This is back to the stick insect again because for the stick insect the most dangerous thing to be is itself so it becomes something else instead. It identifies as a stick because it ‘thinks’ that sticks are safer than stick insects. This is identification.

Belief is very similar but more conscious. Where as identification is the unconscious becoming of another, belief is a conscious taking of sides with the other against the self because the other knows best. Belief operates around structures of hierarchy and authority whilst identification can take place anywhere regardless of perceived authority. Both are to do with authoring the self or self-authorisation, which is key in the discussion about art and the teaching and learning of it.

Desire is central to all of this. Desire, or enjoyment, is what defines us, it’s what sets us apart. Desire can only ever be inhabited and experienced from one place and one time and that is the self, the foundational self. In belief and identification desire gets passed through the other and can only be enjoyed through the legitimation of the other, the authorisation of the other. Desire is no longer desire, or it is but it is not mine any more. This is problematic for the teaching and learning of art because it is easy for a ‘student’ of art to get caught up in the desire, or the perceived desire, of the ‘teacher’: what do they want me to do/be?

The third way, the locating of my desire in myself and for myself alone is what’s difficult to do and difficult, if at all possible, to teach. But this is what must occur if you are going to become an artist. You must be able to inhabit your desire and to tolerate the limiting consequences of doing this, by which I mean the fact that when I am committed to my desire I alone can live it, and so it marks me out and separates me, it limits me and it exposes me, makes me visible, and the art world can be a humiliating place to be seen doing the ‘wrong’ thing.

Of course this is also a very liberating experience, and here comes another difficulty in the teaching and learning of art. If, once I am located within my own desire and I am fully self-authorising, then no other can have any bearing at all on what I am doing, since my desire needs, by definition, no external recognition or legitimation, because if it did it would not be my desire, it would be identification or belief. So what do I need a teacher for?

I am starting an MFA at Goldsmiths in September and before I went for my interview I had been talking to a friend who was at that time on the BA there and was also applying for the MA. Having asked the MA tutors what kind of student they were looking for she told me they had said they wanted people who were willing and able to talk about art. She said they said, “We talk about art. A lot. And you have to be ok with that.”

Which takes us back to the idea of conversation and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is simply two people in a room talking and listening. And that’s it. But somehow, as if by magic, it is transformative. It takes a long time, but it is transformative. How? What happens in that room and in that conversation? And why is this so important an analogy for the teaching and learning of art?

If stick insects had conscious thought some clever stick insect sooner or later would watch his neigbour get eaten – precisely because he was so bloody good at looking like a stick – and he would think, hold on a minute, that’s not supposed to happen, what good is my protective instinct if it results in getting eaten by a giraffe? That stick insect might then start talking to other stick insects and warning them about the dangers of being too good at being a stick insect. For humans, unlike stick insects, and especially perhaps for artists, biological survival is not so important, what’s important is symbolic survival (a distinction we have tragically lost sight of today).

Meaning in art comes from what’s already been culturally metabolised. If you don’t know what’s been metabolized you might be making something that means something you don’t want it to mean. I may be happily painting away white squares on a white ground thinking I am making work about purity and simplicity unaware that Malevich did the same thing in 1914 and that it meant man’s ascendency over nature. A teacher can help me know this and, whilst I don’t have to stop panting white squares, I can then have a more conscious and precise conversation with Suprematism. I might, for example, decide to make my squares a bit wobbly, like Rebecca Warren’s clay cubes, to debunk the macho certainty of the Suprematists.

The role of the tutor is to bring what you are doing into consciousness, into the discourse. And this again follows psychoanalysis, where the analyst, by reflecting back to the patient what they are doing and saying, enables them to bring their unconscious thoughts into the place of consciousness where they can be worked through and their meaning understood.

Speaking of Rebecca Warren, she has said that there came a point at Goldsmiths for her when she had to go it alone, when she actually drove a nail through her Fischli and Weiss book to prevent herself from being influenced by them any more. She was doing, up to that point, belief and then she realized she had to go it alone, to limit herself to her own desire and be responsible for it. But who can say – least of all a tutor – when and how this might happen? And who can even say that their presence or input had anything to do with it?

All a teacher can do is put a student in a wider context and help them to see what they are doing actually means. It’s then up to the student to either take on board the tutor’s input or discard it. In psychoanalysis the analyst has to be careful how much they say to the analysand because too much too soon can give rise to resistance. And while resistance is useful in revealing the structure of the neurosis it can cause the patient to flee the analysis. This is because having a narcissistic collapse is an extremely painful thing. A narcissistic collapse is when your self-image – what you thought you were – gets undermined. Narcissistic collapses are important because if we never had one we’d be psychotic and in art we would never develop. In art schools there are a lot of narcissistic collapses happening as tutors – and fellow students – expose each other to the actual significance and meaning of their actions.

By Andrew Bryant