Balvir Nandra #VDEF21 – Twenty-first Century Art and Design Education: an artificial edifice.

“Learn to listen and engage in dialogue without being overtly judgemental, at least to begin with. Learn to write ideas and thoughts on paper, or some other tactile substrate. This physical act itself helps to base our thinking. Learn to engage in relevant reading to increase subject knowledge and broaden your mind in terms of detail and accuracy. Learn to investigate for more than one obvious source of something convenient like Google, for example, there are other search engines. Use multiple sources, including talking to people learn to question everything, starting with yourself, learn to be self critical without fear.”

(Rest in peace dear friend, you have inspired thousands!)

Hello, everyone, I hope you’re all well and in good spirits. Certainly, I’m very grateful to be at this conference. The aims of this conference are very laudable and well worth pursuing with genuine attention. And I’m equally grateful to the forum for allowing me to share some thoughts with all president. My presentation is actually entitled, art and design and artificial edifice. The purpose of my presentation is to consider where we are the present moment, setting aside the recent external pressures imposed by international socio political agendas, and the eroding of fundamental personal freedoms resulting from the COVID 19 crisis. It has made us think all again, a bit. As many of us are aware, the current system for art and design education has been teetering on the verge of economic unsustainability for some time now. So I suppose the real question for us here today is, how do we rescue our precious baby?

I strongly believe that we must make a conscious effort to ensure that the race towards alternatives does not mean that we merely impose a new set of Emperor’s clothes as the new credo. The last thing we would want is for one type of ideological Trinity to be supplanted by a new tyranny. Surely, this is already happening to some extent, given that our personal modes of thinking are being subtly but surely stunted by the limitations of the software engineers programming intentions. Our decision making is not always our own anymore. But design is exactly about making precise decisions. So I believe we need to think clearly at this juncture.

Let us take a step back and see how we got here. At least as far back as the time when art and design became recognised as a respectable pursuit beyond secondary school, and you’ll find the journey is actually quite amusing. At some point in the 60s, it wasn’t just free love, is also freedom of artistic and intellectual expression. The radar cameras SOT Ray at all. This shook us off for sure. And then in the 70s, we built upon the fact that US RT types had become very good aid, almost indispensable aid to prop up marketeers. This accelerated into the idiotic designer 80s Remember those. And then in the 90s, we became acceptable in the chattering class circles. Heck, we even concocted various versions of our own Oscars, polytechnics and colleges of further education used to be where the non gifted school kids were dispatched to pursue various practical subjects like hairdressing, apprenticeships of various kinds, mechanical, electrical engineering, plumbing, etc. Oh, an RT 40 People like drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and commercial art followers. Later to be redefined. collectors, art and design are hard the subjects are demanded the intellectual cells of heck your boy wrote a lot of us who are dyslexic anyway and had difficulties with the three R’s, and were labelled as lazy at best. But polytechnics and colleges, put up with the insecurities in 1992.

Our homes in the form of polytechnics and colleges, or further education were forced to convert to universities, that this was done with the zeal of the mediaeval reformists, who believed against or rambly rebelled against the Roman Catholic Church and the papacy, which ironically, gave us the Italian Renaissance and our current humanists legacy. The existing universities, the UK universities did not like this one little bit. But despite what our local politicians might say it was even today. They established the original educational cartel in the form of the Russell Group in 1994. At that point, it has 17 members to begin with, but has now expanded to 24. This cartel aims to preserve the elite status of the old guard and its methodologies and systems and it has done so very successfully to this day. I hope we are not becoming kind of like them.

I mean, now in 2021, we find ourselves a part of the same Cabal, albeit at footstool level. We’ve taken to the colour of the real vectors that old established God that permits us to share their crumbs. The problem is bigger because there are more of us enrolled this time around. Having followed the corporate business model and engineering the deliberate capitalization of education, our motives for being educators have also morphed into personal gain before dissemination of knowledge, personal want before student need less teaching, and less learning all around as a result? Many questions arise. obvious solutions are free unbridled inquiry. Are we instruct institutions of curiosity and investigation anymore? Are we free from the biases of our direct and indirect funders? Who is really in charge? The managerial class is really in charge when you look at it. Not teachers and technicians have actually produced the student product so to speak. Obviously teachers we’re learning is equal in terms of interest as the accumulation of real estate by a vice chancellor the random Are we just glorified training camps where students behaviour is moulded to retain a stitch, the current social status school day we let them loose, to challenge our thinking without repercussions. Where I asked, is our reformation going to come from? Are we really a professional evil? We are certainly a service. collectivity we have created entrenched silos of identity variants preoccupied with part and not the whole, somebody’s shackles need to be broken. And rather quickly before we find that our students rise up to the false mythos we have created an exercise on them all most art and design academics do it in my opinion at the moment is generate minor sometimes entertaining divergence from reality. We hear often see projects that are so self absorbed, that experience it provide can be compared with a fireworks show. The long anticipated launch the fantastic boom and sparkle, and then the total burnout. An individual or small crowd is entertained temporarily and then nothing of real consequence remains nothing that is of lasting value. Just temporary gratification, we’ve managed to shift a few crackers that is all from firsthand experience in practice, and teaching.

I know that most current online courses on offer are spearheaded by identity politics, social political indoctrination, denial of our real historical past, and the promotion of unrealistic expectations. As far as employment prospects are concerned, students are constantly told the myth that somewhere in design Disneyland, there is someone waiting give them the perfect job. Simultaneously, agencies are only to prepare to offer unpaid so called internships, on the promise for potential jobs somewhere in the distant future. slave labour really at the at the present time.

The mantra is that there is no crisis and job market and a hey, you can always study for a master’s degree, a PhD and of course become a teacher at the same Institute you graduated from to perpetuate the collective myth. Who cares what you have no experience in terms of working with people who will challenge your opinions and beliefs, and often tear them to shreds? Look at the bigger picture. But all cars are unsustainable. People are disposable. Conventional jobs are unnecessary unless you’re branded a key worker. A real education for sake of improving your mind is an expensive luxury now, and even training in some technologies is invariably ducked in that they are obsolete almost as soon as you’re finished your precious latte. The scope I believe have a problem is immense. The answer is not more or less of so called Future Proof curriculum. One hears a lot about these. It lies in acknowledgment that our entire system is broken and requires a serious lopping so that the core may survive.

Those of us who don’t forever need the crutch of machinery to exist or performance for daily tasks will be better engaged in the reality of making marks, drawing ideas envisions and immersed in human thinking, doing the making as a natural and sub sustainable activity. Does that make us modern Luddites, an emerging technocratic feudal system that is being birthed as we speak. If it makes us more than Luddites, so be it. Then I’m happy to be labelled as one. Perhaps Nick lands accelerationist manifesto, and Mark Fisher’s book, capitalist realism might be worth a read before we take a leap from the diving board guys, and ladies, and people of any gender whatsoever, whoever you choose to be. That’s the modern world.

On a more positive note, my suggestion for immediate application will be to create a personal culture, where very simple and doable things take place with little cost but some effort. I would suggest anybody can learn to observe with intention of discovering something new.

Learn to listen and engage in dialogue without being overtly judgemental, at least to begin with. Learn to write ideas and thoughts on paper, or some other tactile substrate. This physical act itself helps to base our thinking. Learn to engage in relevant reading to increase subject knowledge and broaden your mind in terms of detail and accuracy. Learn to investigate for more than one obvious source of something convenient like Google, for example, there are other search engines. Use multiple sources, including talking to people learn to question everything, starting with yourself, learn to be self critical without fear. And with that I say, good luck. It’s been a pleasure talking to everyone. Thank you!