The Mental Furniture Industry

exhibition on until August 11th

www.flattimeho.org.uk

at the private view

Exhibitions at FTHo are always challenging and thought provoking. The Mental Furniture Industry exhibition at Flat Time House is no less so! I went to the house expecting to see an exhibition and a performance and was confronted with an empty space and 'Campus' - a performance by participants who learnt their parts in front of the audience and by repeating the performance three times with direction from the producer. On the third time they had mastered it. The performers moved around the house as a group chanting slogans. I couldn't make sense of it.

At the private view I saw the performance from the week before in the wider context of the exhibition. The chanting was phrases from political protests and brief instructions given out in a sculpture class.

John Latham coined the phrase MFI  Mental Furniture Industry as a way of describing the sorry state of art education pre 1960s. Education was formalised in institutions with hierarchies and procedures that acted in opposition to creative thinking. Education was just mental furniture inside the head. This exhibition is about the protest action that took place to try to change art education. John Latham was part of those protests, FTHo is the house he lived in and which now stores and exhibits his archive.

In my visits to the exhibition I feel as though I am engaged in a self-directed learning exercise in which I question what education is and wonder about ways in which knowledge and thought  can be controlled  by those in power and authority over us. In the front gallery I watched 'The Hornsey Film (1970)' which raised the questions 'What is education for?' and 'What is art for?' The students in the film who were occupying the Hornsey College for a sit-in believed that art education is an opportunity to ask questions whereas GCE O'Levels were exams to answer questions. But is it all just a big pretence? Are the young really free to study what they want and challenge the status quo?

If art college should be there for the students and education is about asking questions and finding the truth; can truth be taught? No......so students need facilities to make and do in order to find the truth and so in being 'left to get on with it' they have less time with art tutors who are then accused of not teaching the students enough.

May be the onus is not to be on teaching but on students learning how to think and figure it out and whilst such a programme would be largely self-directed art tutors are needed to guide in the process of learning  and evaluation. But not evaluation in the form of an exam but a discussion between the student and the tutor as fellow artist and the other students as artists too. That is the crit at its best. And something that I have experienced  at art college. Alot of the ideas discussed and fought over in the 1960s found their way into the art college in the subsequent decades.

Is it perception and intuition in the present moment real education? Throughout school and college we make choices about which  subjects to study but can learning be confined within such narrow boundaries and still be called education.

As a visitor to this exhibition at FTHo I am considering my ongoing education post art school. How can I create situations in which to learn?

Alot of students in the late 1990s went to university in order to get a better job. Now unemployed they feel cheated. Is the role of education to get us ready for work or is it to give us the time and space to think. Paying large fees does not guarantee a 2:1 or a better job. Teaching and assessment is independent of the financial cost of paying fees.

As I continue to think on these things I will try to get to the exhibition again before it closes.