Tertiary creative arts: The next generation
‘After you've done a thing the same way for two years, look it over carefully. After five years, look at it with suspicion. And after ten years, throw it away and start all over’
Alfred Perlman’s quote reflects the New York Central Railroad of which he was President. However, there is a nugget of truth in his observation, even for academia where things move much more slowly. As Babyboomers and Gen X-ers prepare for well earned retirement, what might the new generation of creative arts academics and practitioners want to throw away or keep?
In this edition of NiTRO we hand over to the next generation of academics, teachers, researchers and graduates in creative arts to explore how they experience life in academia. We also include a NiTRO experimental special feature as Deakin University’s student journalists interview graduating creative artists to capture their journey from university to professional art world.
Editorial
Tertiary creative arts, and artists, have experienced significant changes over time in their working life. For many, perhaps the greatest change was the move of creative arts into the university sector nearly 30 years ago. Since then we have seen the numbers of students and staff grow, creative art schools form, restructure and even close. We have seen arts curriculum evolve to reflect new developments in technology, cultural expression, audience and student expectations, and shift to meet funding opportunities and university priorities. And the academic staff that inhabit our schools are changing. Graeme Hugo signalled academia’s demographic changes in 2005 and we are experiencing this personally with every retirement and leaving party that we attend.
Welcome to the final edition of NiTRO for 2017. It has been such a busy and turbulent year for many of us involved at all levels of arts education in Australia, and particularly for our institutional leaders many of who have spent the year juggling budgets and stretching their moral and ethical boundaries to protect the arts for our future students and communities.
Featured Articles
I teach into the field of studio-based craft and design (SBCD). When it comes to teaching SBCD there are some particular challenges.
In 2018, the theatre department at the Victorian College of the Arts will launch a new BFA Theatre - a course designed for ‘actor-creators’ – those theatre artists who want to devise and perform in their own work. As we developed the course this year, I found myself thinking often of a quote from Saint-Exupery’s Wisdom of the Sands:
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”
As a visual artist, my practice led-research is into frontier scientific technologies and computational aesthetics has resulted in transdisciplinary outcomes in the field of 4D Microcomputed X-ray tomography. Yet when I took my first permanent academic position as a part time lecturer in Foundation Studies, in 2015, I became responsible for convening and teaching a first year life drawing Figure & Life, a 12 week observational drawing course using a life model in a studio environment.
To work strategically can connote corporate, neoliberal ideology, selective professional networking, and economically motivated notions of efficiency that tend to exist in conflict with the ethos of the creative arts. But being strategic can also describe how we work creatively within our circumstances to enable a project to come to fruition.
Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne is moving into a new generation of Actor’s Training. We have taken the current Theatre Practice degree and divided it into a BFA in Acting and a BFA in Theatre. With the competitive nature of the entertainment industry, we feel it is our obligation to equip our students with the mastery of skills applicable to contemporary theatre and film.
In our current climate of Higher Education funding cuts, academics are dealing with many tasks and additional administration as part of their job. As the pressures on academics mount, part-time and casual positions in academia have become the rule rather than the exception
After completing and thoroughly enjoying my Honours research project I was inspired to pursue a career as an academic. Having now been awarded a Master of Arts in music performance (100% research) and after picking up small amounts of casual academic employment, I’d like to share my experiences so far to hopefully shed some light on the process for those considering post-graduate research.
As arts educators in a university context we are being asked to be curators and to effectively encourage the practice of curation within our students. Students today have access to unlimited amounts of online information and tutorials. But what they do not normally have access to is a strong curatorial filter – one that allows them to sift through information – beyond what is currently trending.
Transdisciplinary thinking, creating and collaborating provides a future of endless potential. Only with a foundation of education for all, ethical reflexivity and collective consciousness is there hope for the ‘humanity’ of the Homo sapiens.
As Tim Low suggests ‘Nature and people might be thought of as separate entities, but they don’t reside in separate places.’ Through their exhibition Thresholds and Thoughtscapes three artists; post-graduates Annette Nykiel, Sarah Robinson and Jane Whelan, ask the viewer to consider the familiarity of a place.
NiTRO Special Feature
When Deakin University’s Associate Professor of Communication, Lisa Waller, asked me if I’d be interested in helping a group of journalism students write feature stories about graduates from the Bachelor of Creative Arts to be published in a special edition of NiTRO, I paused. For about a second. I think I let her finish her sentence. If that magical combination of ‘publish’ and ‘student’ wasn’t enough, there was the added glitter of ‘artist’
Catherine Holder, past student, author and performer, is sitting at the share table at Corner Café, a popular lunch spot at the Burwood campus of Deakin University.
She graduated with Honours from her Bachelor of Creative Arts, Drama, in April this year and is here to catch up with members of the Arts Faculty and to borrow some props for her show at The Owl and Cat Theatre, Richmond
“I think going to university was definitely the right choice for me,” said visual artist and Deakin University final-year student Alice Radford. “If I wasn’t at university I wouldn’t have bothered to do the research, or have the resources to do the research, to create the works that I have,” Alice said. “I think I would be just creating art on a Sunday just for fun.”
Creative artist Louise Richardson, 23, said it was her father’s death from cancer that made her realise she wanted to follow her passion.
“We are very visual people, could you imagine a world without colour or without any pictures, without any lettering, without any drawing, literally a blank world?’’
For Deakin University graduate, visionary artist Marta Oktaba “When you strip it back to a blank world of just grey blocks all around us there is still form, there are still lines and it is still something.”
Suf St James creates artworks completely within the social media app, “Snapchat” to challenge how women are subjected to abuse online. “This is the work people seem most interested in,” Suf said.
Jessica Schwientek is known by her fellow artists as a “dirty photographer”. “I was always getting told off by how dirty and filthy my negatives were,” Jessica said. “I didn’t realize at the time that my lecturer did a similar thing . . .”
When Deakin University graduate Maddison Newman decided to create a performance to show audiences what it was like to live with the chronic pain she knew the process would not be easy. But the winner of the Vice-Chancellor's Medal for Recognising Excellence, which honours students who experience hardship while studying, was up for the challenge.
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Creative arts disciplines make up a significant component of the university staff and student population, yet we lack a vehicle to share common experiences and issues.
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