The diary of a Scot in Amsterdam

Next week I’m in Enschede, but in the meantime there has been some art-related activity elsewhere. Along with my fellow students Julien, Emily, and Nikos, I was selected to take part in a three-day workshop being held at Expodium, a platform for young art(ists) in Utrecht. This master class was to be run by the Irish artist Gerard Byrne, and would involve students from several masters programmes in the Netherlands. The intention was to develop some insights into the type of issues which a masters-level art education programme brings up, as a development from and at a higher level than bachelors-level education.

This was mainly related to the contextualisation of one’s work, which in non-art-speak concerns how art works are seen in relation to other work which has come before, in relation to how and where they are shown, and in relation to the general cultural climate in which they exist. Since I had received the grade “needs development” (ie not very good) for this aspect of my work at the end of the first year of the course, I was very keen to make some improvements.

So, was this achieved? I would have to say that I did not find the class tremendously helpful in this regard. Three days is really pretty short, and I felt that we really didn’t get into the level of detail or extended discussion that I would have liked. Further to this, we were asked to video ourselves in small groups discussing the work and presentational skills of the others, the completion of which turned into the focus of the last day and a half. Naturally, we could not resist the urge to make this into something of a work in itself, and this emphasis on having a “product” tended to push everything else aside.

Another problem is that it was difficult to resist the temptation to be nice about each other, when what was really needed was some honest and incisive criticism. This definitely limited the usefulness of the feedback, which in any case ended up being more or less limited to the work itself, rather than its context and other wider issues as had been hoped.

All in all, something of a disappointment. Gerard Byrne himself is certainly a very agreeable man and an interesting artist, but I do feel like the format of the workshop could have been improved quite a lot. Still, it was nice to be able to discuss our work and get some feedback outside of the DAI, and they fed us very well too!

I have to say that making the videos was fun, though; since the video which our group recorded whilst talking was not so interesting, we mimed talking in a sort of goldfish-like way in front of a green-screen background, which we then replaced with a picture of a tropical island beach. Why? Because if you have nothing intelligent to say you can at least make people laugh.