At Goldsmiths where I study my teachers seem constantly to be asking “What is Contemporary?” This was the topic for a series of artist’s talks and discussing this with a former Goldsmiths student I soon worked out this was a repetitive theme for the talk series, year after year, the new never gets old. This obsession of the school reflects the overall emphasis on a zeitgeist which artists and curators must possess in order to gain success. A German word, zeitgeist translates as “spirit of the times” (Zeit=time/tide, Geist=ghost). Where can I find this spirit? Is it an aesthetic? A form? A state? A style? Maybe even a concept? This search is what drives the art market. In some circles the formal spirit has more to do with capital and the conceptual spirit is somehow oppositional to capital, but for me there is no distinction. In fact, I think the answer lies on the surface, everything you want to see is there to see, art is about revelation, looking.
We are now in the midst of the degree show season and my compatriots at Goldsmiths are currently putting the final touches to their final exhibition. I managed to catch some of the early birds; Royal Academy and Slade. I didn’t make it to Royal College of Art but have studied reviews.
What strikes me when I look at the graduate work is how much it emulates the work of more established artists. I can’t post images as I don’t have permissions but type in the following search terms into google and you’ll get a feel for London degrees shows in 2011: David Wojtowycz, George Henry Longly, ART SCHOOL UK (by John Reardon), Seth Price, Nicolas Ceccaldi, Alistair Frost (all men too?). Many of them have studied at London colleges and/ or have exhibited in London recently which seems to challenge the idea that we live in an international village of the artworld. My suspicion is that students are far lazier than that, and I speak from experience. Once in London, it sucks you up into its vacuum and everything on the periphery gets lost. I’ve also found it’s a very locally specific scene in Chongqing. The zietgeist here, from what I can tell so far is a response to the massive architectural project of building colossal numbers high rise apartments to accommodate the exodus from rural to urban climes.
PsychoanalYSL use surface observations to build a critical spectacle of the zeitgeist. The process of observation and re-presentation studies the operation of the zeitgeist, showing it to be capital’s obedient gimp.
“Indeed, practically all metaphors for style amount to placing matter on the inside, style on the outside. It would be more to the point to reverse the metaphor. The matter, the subject, is on the outside; the style is on the Inside. As Cocteau writes: “Decorative style has never existed. Style is the soul, and unfortunately with us the soul assumes the form of the body.” Even if one were to define style as the manner of our appearing, this by no means necessarily entails an opposition between a style that one assumes and one’s “true” being. In fact, such a disjunction is extremely rare. In almost every case, our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face.” On Style, Susan Sontag, 1965
