No Protest without Fantasy

Studio brief

This studio examines and questions habitual distinctions made between private and public, personal and political, psychological and material and how such ideas impact on visual practice.

In art production, does a scission occur in what is perceived to constitute the political and the subjective? Does work become separated into two camps: autobiographical confession on the one hand, agitprop or documentary on the other? How are we as practitioners to conceive of the political and the personal? How do we negotiate these concepts in a world where our terms of reference are ever increasingly defined by the dominant forms of mass media? And what visual languages and strategies might we employ in our practice?

The studio examines and questions the habitual distinctions made between private and public, personal and political, psychological and material, and how such ideas impact on visual practice.

We shall consider artworks in relation to these ideas and there will be a series of screenings, including films by Alain Resnais, Marguerite Duras and Derek Jarman. Key themes and ideas will also be presented through seminars and reading. The reading is drawn from a wide range of sources, including psychoanalytical texts, interviews with and texts written by artists, poetry and literary criticism.

Image credit Andrea Fisher, Impossible Relations VIII (1994), courtesy Gimpel Fils

Details

Course Fine Art BA (Hons)
Tutors Jonathan Whitehall
David Price
Jo Longhurst
Website jolonghurst.com