East End Review

Tag: London Metropolitan University

  • Students occupy gallery over plans to sell-off Cass art school

    An Cass occupation – Barbara Ntumey 620
    An occupier registers disapproval at plans to relocate the Cass. Photograph: Barbara Ntumy

    Opposition against a £50 million sell-off and relocation of the Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design has gathered pace, with students occupying a gallery on Wednesday evening.

    The students have moved into the Bank Gallery space on Whitechapel High Street to protest against London Metropolitan University’s plans to merge its departments into one campus on Holloway Road by September 2017.

    The plans, approved in October, would see The Cass’s current home in Aldgate and the rest of London Met’s East London estate sold off, with the proceeds used to revamp the Holloway campus.

    The occupation was sparked by the suspension of Robert Mull as Dean of Faculty, believed to be the result of Mull’s refusal to support the university’s ‘One Campus, One Community’ policy.

    A group called Occupy the Cass has issued a list of demands, which include not selling the Cass’s Central House building on Whitechapel High Street, and a commitment not to cut courses, staff numbers and student places.

    Courses in jewellery, silversmithing and the last musical instrument making BSc in the UK are being phased out at the Cass as part of the university’s ‘annual portfolio review’ but which the occupying students see as evidence of an “asset stripping exercise to balance the university’s books”.

    The group’s actions have been endorsed by the likes of artists Jeremy Deller, a visiting professor at the school, and Bob and Roberta Smith, an associate professor and course leader there. The latter described the occupiers as “wonderful people” who are “standing up for the Cass [and for] art education at all levels.”

    However, a statement released by London Metropolitan University said it is investing £125m in new workshops and studio spaces to create a new home for The Cass at the Holloway campus.

    “We appreciate that some students are concerned about the move, but we’d like to reassure them that the Cass is not closing, nor will its making ethos or successful studio model of teaching be lost,” the statement read.

    “By moving to Islington, the Cass will be in one location as opposed to the faculty’s current split between Central House and Commercial Road. Students have already highlighted the success of the previous merger between the School of Architecture and School of Art and Design to form the Cass three years ago, and we believe another move, with considerably more investment, can only be positive.

    “We are inviting students to work with us to shape the Cass’s future together, and we’d urge those occupying today to accept that offer.”

    The occupation is the latest measure in an increasingly high-profile campaign to ‘save the Cass’. A petition opposing the one campus plan has more than 2000 signatories, and last week the school’s proposed move away from East London was mentioned during a debate in the House of Lords. Bob and Roberta Smith has created a new artwork protesting the move, an open letter to chancellor George Osbourne penned on convector heaters, which is on display at William Morris Gallery.

    Mayor of Tower Hamlets John Biggs has described himself as “deeply shocked” at the decision to move the Cass, whose alumni include members of the newly-crowned Turner Prize winning collective, Assemble.

  • Mayor ‘deeply shocked’ at plans to close the Cass

    Photograph: Steve Blunt
    Last May’s Arts Emergency Response exhibition at the Cass. Photograph: Steve Blunt

    More than 2,000 people have signed a petition against plans to close an art school with “deep roots” to East London.

    Last month London Metropolitan University approved plans to consolidate all teaching to its Holloway Road campus, allowing its buildings at Moorgate and Aldgate to be sold.

    The Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, on Commercial Street, described as the ‘Aldgate Bauhaus’ by artist Bob and Roberta Smith, will have to relocate to Holloway Road by September 2017.

    Mayor of Tower Hamlets John Biggs said he was “deeply shocked” at the decision to relocate the campuses.

    “The loss of all the student places in the Aldgate area is a blow, but the decision to relocate the Sir John Cass Department of Art, Media and Design is particularly upsetting,” the Mayor said.

    “The Cass through its predecessor institutions has deep roots in the East End and has a wonderful reputation for combining academic study and creative production.”

    But Professor John Raftery, Vice Chancellor of London Met, defended the decision, saying: “We are excited about this project, which aims to create a one campus, one community university.

    “We believe this will benefit our students, who will enjoy an enhanced student experience, and our staff, who will have more opportunities to collaborate.

    A change.org petition led by Cass Faculty Officer Amanda Marillier has already attracted over 2,000 signatures.

    “The proposed closure of The Cass and Moorgate campuses represents a massive attack on students, staff and access to education,” the petition states.

    “These cuts can potentially lead to courses being ‘discontinued’, staff losing their jobs, and prospective students losing the opportunity to study as the number of student places are reduced.”

  • Bob and Roberta Smith: ‘Wealthy kids don’t tend to make terribly interesting art’

    Making a stand for art: Bob and Roberta Smith (Patrick Brill). Photograph courtesy of Bob and Roberta Smith
    Making a stand for art: Bob and Roberta Smith (Patrick Brill). Photograph courtesy of Bob and Roberta Smith

    Art in school and higher education is being endangered by government policies, according to Bob and Roberta Smith (B&R).

    The East End contemporary artist (confusingly, he is actually just one person, whose real name is Patrick Brill) is so concerned about the future of the subject he loves that he is standing in the 2015 general election in Surrey Heath – the seat of former education secretary Michael Gove.

    Although standing as an independent, B&R launched an informal political group, the Art Party, back in 2013, to apply pressure on the government to protect workshops in schools.

    The party took inspiration from American wartime leader Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s post-war Works Progress Administration, which employed millions of people to carry out public works including art projects.

    B&R, who has a studio off Cambridge Heath Road and whose work was shortlisted for the Trafalgar Square forth plinth, says the initiative paved the way to economic recovery from the depression and the USA’s subsequent successes in the 1950s.

    One of the Art Party’s key beliefs is that art in schools should be practical rather than simply about appreciation and enjoyment.

    Workshops are more expensive to maintain than classrooms, says B&R, and accountants and politicians “see them as resources that can be cut”.

    Another subject B&R is concerned about, and once wrote to Michael Gove to address, is access to opportunities in art.

    “Schools, when they achieve Academy status or if they’re Free Schools, don’t have to follow the national curriculum,” says B&R. “So that means that they don’t have to teach art, and that means then that if you have a Free School set up by whoever it is, a businessman or ex-serviceman or someone with a particular passion for a particular thing, they don’t necessarily have to teach art.

    “This means that pupils at primary level might not be taught art, and that’s really bad.”

    Free Schools are a flagship part of the government’s approach to education, and their supporters say they give educators more freedom.

    Pupils in inner cities will be most affected by the changes, as these are the areas were Free Schools are being set up – and B&R thinks this means art could become more homogenous as poorer pupils could have less access to the opportunities to create it.

    B&R says: “If you go to Westminster, if you go to The Tate or St James’s, as I do occasionally, you can walk past Westminster School [the elite private school]. It has fabulous art rooms, so it’s not that the rich or wealthy don’t want art.

    “But the thing is, we want culture made by everybody, and every child should have a right to make it. It makes culture more vibrant if you have lots of different voices participating in it, and actually wealthy kids don’t tend to make terribly interesting art. We don’t really want a monoculture of just one sort of people making art.”

    B&R says the government’s approach is “daft” even when looked at on their own terms.

    “Conservative people are always very keen on business and enterprise and that sort of thing,” he explains. “And actually it will cripple British design if you don’t have people like Jonathan Ive, who was the son of a CDT (Craft Design and Technology) teacher.

    “He grew up in Chingford and he went to a regular comprehensive school and went on to design the Apple Mac.

    “It’s about plurality and getting as many people involved in culture and design as possible. That’s basically my problem with what the government has done.”

    B&R, who teaches at London Metropolitan University, is passionate about higher education too, viewing it as key to individual development, and he is worried about increasing fees and “privatisation”.

    “I think education is pretty much diagnostic,” he says. “When you start off doing it, you need to do as broad a curriculum as you can, and as you go through it you get passionate about certain things. The mathematicians get passionate about maths, the footballers get passionate about football and the artists get passionate about the arts. As you get further along with it you find yourself as a human being.

    “Protecting support structures for artists is actually quite important. It’s important for the artists, and also it’s important for society more generally. I think one of the things that’s going to happen, one of the things people are worried about anyway, is what will happen to postgraduates and degrees.

    “It’s not just the Conservatives that have been responsible for what has happened in higher education, the Labour Party instituted the Browne Review on Higher Education [which led to the cap on the amount universities could charge in fees to be removed].”

    The 2013 student visa saga at London Met, which put foreign students at risk of being deported, brought the problem of funding for universities into even sharper focus.

    “The government’s whole model has been increasing fees for home students and then getting as many overseas students in as possible,” says B&R. “That model for London Met is just being ripped away.”

    As for whether aspiring artists should gain higher education qualifications before launching their careers, B&R clearly believes the answer is yes.

    “The foundation course is kind of the great invention,” he says. “The thing about any kind of higher education, whatever subject it may be, is it’s as much about the subject as it is about those crucial years between 18 and 21 or 22 when you really do grow up. And young people need to do that in that environment which they can expand themselves and push and find the edges of.

    “It’s not just about learning the subject, it’s about developing as a human being.

    “As an artist you think maybe you should just go ahead and sell paintings or get something going on that front straight away, but the problem is once you do that people then tend to want the same thing that they bought last time, and it does actually tend to stunt the development a little bit and a make you a bit stale.”

    http://bobandrobertasmith.co.uk/