RCA SHOWs 2017 Over and Out

This years shows are now over, and another group of RCA graduates will be absorbed back into a world of ‘realities’. Each year an increasing number of artists and designers are completing degrees. The Royal College of Art’s intake and output has grown to almost a staggering 1,500 student population with 698 students graduating this year alone. Staggering because the College was historically an exceptionally hard place to win a place - and special because this meant that the students who won a place there were considered excellent and the post graduate tuition was intimate. And the numbers are set to increase… The Rector’s “forward plan” speaks of increasing the student intake to 2500, expanding the College with new campuses at White City and at Battersea replacing the current Sculpture School with a ‘new build’ to complement the Dyson and Sackler Buildings opposite. 

This inflation impacts not only on the quality of education post graduate students are receiving but also on our ability to comprehend the true ambition of the College.

Cynically, we could assert that the College is exploiting it’s history as a unique place of “excellence” through selling “virtual excellence” to an unending stream of wealthy overseas students.

The College’s reputation of being ‘exclusive’ - in the sense that it was difficult to win a place there - and winning a place was a mark of talent and potential has been overtaken by the art and design education industry. The RCA Society addressed these issues more than twenty years ago in a symposium “Fine Art & Design Education is Dying?” 29 April 1992. Delegates debated two opposing view points but the ultimate feeling was that Fine Art & Design Education is Dead…! That is these disciplines were being corrupted through the commercialisation of education and everything. the new parameter was global capitalism which expoits everything for financial gain.

Whether current students feel this is anybody’s guess. They are a generation whose values reflect a more recent history - they are post Thatcher’ite capitalists, they have seen a series of devastating wars in the Middle East, Africa, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan… They live in virtual societies which transcend borders and languages, they are watching the social, economic and ecological disintegration of the planet…. if not for real then virtually. So what is there out put and intention? Surprisingly many are perceptive and concerned - works across the disciplines touched on social and political issues. Some disciplines were stronger than others - performance art (a new discipline within the Sculpture school) dwelled on the human condition and were physically challenging whereas painting is still struggling under the burden of histroical expectation. The new categories ‘Information Experience Design’ and ‘Visual Communication’ are in the ascent and were visually and intellectually exciting. Textiles was strangely disappointing… nowhere to be seen were the ‘intelligant textiles’ which were so progressive a decade ago, neither the traditional skills of woven or constructed textiles. Fashion did its own thing and, although often stuck in its narcisistic habits, the intriguing installations and presentations (located throughout a refurbished and architected environment within what had been a disused ’synagogue’ in Chance Street, Bethnal Green E1) cocked a snoop at the ‘Industry’. The shows are no longer formal diplays of clothing for production they are garbled intentions - yet surprisingly well structured and cleverly deceptive.

Will the graduates of 2017 make their mark on society - will they survive as artists and designers - will the memory of the experience of studying at the RCA  linger on for fifty or more years or will it evaporate in a moment? 

I don’t think there is time for relationships to develop at or with the College as they did in the distant past - The increasing distance between each school works against interdisiplinary collaborations and reduces the physicality of interactive experience and intellectual challege which in turn sterilises creative output.

So what is the current purpose of post graduate “Art & Design Education”…?