Lofts
I always hoped that I’d get a university-level teaching job in the USA---my country, my home. I was qualified and employable as a university level art instructor with ample training and professional experience in Intaglio and Lithographic Printmaking. My undergraduate degree was from the University of California at Santa Barbara and my masters level degree was from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England. The actual designation I received from The Slade, as it is known in Britain and throughout the world, is HDFA Lond, HDFA meaning Higher Diploma in Fine Art. In Britain this is officially designated a “post-graduate” degree. The Slade is regularly ranked as one of the top ten art schools in the world, and many times has been ranked at number one. I also worked as a professional master printer at Petersburg Press in London in both intaglio and lithography with some of the highest profile artists in the world---David Hockney, Jim Rosenquist, Howard Hodgkin, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Henry Moore, Dieter Rot, Brigit Riley, etc., etc., so frankly I was better qualified than the vast majority of applicants for these types of jobs anywhere in the USA.
But the problem I encountered repeatedly when applying for teaching positions in the USA was that every place wanted to see official transcripts so they could count up all the A’s and B’s I had accumulated. However art schools in Britain didn’t assign grades. They just awarded degrees---provided you did the work---and some awarded ranked degrees, so for me there were problems securing permanent jobs in America as a result. I could and did get work in England, Ireland, Wales, and Canada, but not the USA, with the exception of sabbatical replacement positions, and I was hired to teach in that capacity in Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, California at various times.
When I was in grade school a family from England came to live in our village in Ohio, the father being a member of the “Brain Drain” as it was called back then. He was hired to work at the University of Akron as a polymer chemist and years later was credited with developing a polymer adhesive that addressed the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and ensured future missions would not suffer similar outcomes. There were three sons in the family. The eldest---Martin---was my age and we became friends.
As the years went by I began to think about studying in England at some point. Martin had come to America, why couldn’t I go to England? And when fine art---drawing, painting, collage, assemblage, etc. became a focus for me in high school I thought—two years in the Midwest, two years on the west coast and two graduate years on the east coast or in England---makes sense for an artist’s education, right?
I attended Kent State University (Midwest) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (west coast) as an undergraduate. My lithography professor in Santa Barbara, Steven Cortright, had spent a term as a student in England at the Royal College of Art in London. He advised me that, if I was going to England, there were really only two places to consider---the Royal College of Art and The Slade. I applied to both and was offered interviews at both. They were scheduled in the winter of 1972.
Most people entertain stereotypes about other people and other places. I had naively imagined men in bowler hats and spats traipsing through the streets of London with walking sticks clicking along the cobbled streets. So to be what I imagined would be respectful I cut my hair, bought a cheap version of a Burberry raincoat, got some sensible shoes and, well, prepared for my interviews in London, England. I managed to schedule both interviews on the same day. The Royal College folk would see me at 11:00 AM and The Slade crew after lunch, at 3:00 PM.
My RCA interview went like this: I met with the chicest, coolest art crowd in London---guys with paper clips stuck through their cheeks and pink/purple/orange hair, and jeans and tee-shirts so tight they looked like they’d been spray-painted on. A thirty-something woman with three inch platform shoes, sparkles covering her forehead and cheeks, and about two pounds of pancake make-up on her face sat on a desk chain-smoking unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes, grilling me on my knowledge of all the underground artists in London, and blowing smoke in my face. I was clearly out of my league with my short, combed hair, cheap raincoat, umbrella and no knowledge of minor British art stars who I envisioned them all sleeping with.
So I fucked up that interview and got rejected.
Off to The Slade in the afternoon.
There I was led to an office on the ground floor. The Slade is a 200 year old stone building located in a grassy quadrangle off Gower Street that is part of the University College London complex extending from Euston Road to Russell Square---and housing such facilities as the Courthold Institute, University College Hospital, the Ross Institute of Tropical Medicine, the British Museum, etc.
The office belonged to William Coldstream---Sir William Coldstream---knighted for his work in Art Education---The Slade Professor---the highest ranked art educator on the planet.
The room was pretty dark---lights off. Coldstream was behind his desk and stood up slowly, buttoning his suit jacket, and held out his hand.
“Welcome to The Slade,” he said.
I walked up to him and shook his hand.
“Would you like a drink?” he said, and pulled a bottle of Scotch out of his desk drawer.
And then I turned around to see Bartholomew Dos Santos and Stanley Jones, the Printmaking faculty members, sitting on chairs, flanking the office door. Dos Santos was a Portuguese aristocrat. Jones was the Director of Curwen Press, Britain’s foremost hand printing facility for artists. Stanley Jones had printed for artists like Henry Moore, and John Lennon produced his famous suite of erotic prints at Curwen, parking his white Rolls Royce with a license plate that read “Lennon 1” outside the studio and then wondering why fans were pounding on the door to get in.
This is the place for me, I thought---The Slade. As the interview progressed I knew that it was. The trio of interviewers were calm and respectful, understated. They were uninterested in the cult of celebrity or where the “center of the art world” was. They patiently let me finish the questions they asked of me and were curious about American artists who I knew as a student in Southern California. As a young art student I felt like I mattered and instinctively knew I was in exemplary company.
University-level academia in North America is a bastion for some of the loopiest human beings, and it’s art departments are peppered with gurus who fancy themselves experts at everything, and psychopaths with personal agendas. It’s difficult for any of them to be held accountable for any shenanigans they get up to, or disciplined for them, due to “academic freedom” and the protection afforded by teachers’ unions. You don’t find this culture at a corporation like IBM or General Motors. Also the vast majority of academic institutions are run by teachers who are temporarily relieved of their teaching duties to take on roles as “professional administrators”. This causes no end of problems, particularly in Visual Arts departments.
In 1975 I had a job interview at a small but well-respected liberal arts college in Ohio. It was apparent to me that the Head of Department was a guru. I don’t know where he sat with the students but the faculty who interviewed me seemed to be in awe of him and hung on his every word, agreeing with everything he said, shaking their heads affirmatively and smiling whenever he made a comment.
The interview lasted over an hour. I thought I did pretty well but the guru kept letting me, and everyone else, know how important he was by controlling the interview and subtly putting people down when they made comments or suggestions, and correcting their knowledge of art history.
At wind-up time his final comments were emphatically and passionately delivered to me and to his audience of underlings. He was “on stage” at that point.
“You know”, he said “The great thing about teaching here is that we have such brilliant students. They’re so talented, so smart.”
He went on: “In fact……we have graduates……who are living in lofts in New York.”
And with that I burst out laughing.
Oops.
© Kent Jones 2016
I always hoped that I’d get a university-level teaching job in the USA---my country, my home. I was qualified and employable as a university level art instructor with ample training and professional experience in Intaglio and Lithographic Printmaking. My undergraduate degree was from the University of California at Santa Barbara and my masters level degree was from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England. The actual designation I received from The Slade, as it is known in Britain and throughout the world, is HDFA Lond, HDFA meaning Higher Diploma in Fine Art. In Britain this is officially designated a “post-graduate” degree. The Slade is regularly ranked as one of the top ten art schools in the world, and many times has been ranked at number one. I also worked as a professional master printer at Petersburg Press in London in both intaglio and lithography with some of the highest profile artists in the world---David Hockney, Jim Rosenquist, Howard Hodgkin, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine, Henry Moore, Dieter Rot, Brigit Riley, etc., etc., so frankly I was better qualified than the vast majority of applicants for these types of jobs anywhere in the USA.
But the problem I encountered repeatedly when applying for teaching positions in the USA was that every place wanted to see official transcripts so they could count up all the A’s and B’s I had accumulated. However art schools in Britain didn’t assign grades. They just awarded degrees---provided you did the work---and some awarded ranked degrees, so for me there were problems securing permanent jobs in America as a result. I could and did get work in England, Ireland, Wales, and Canada, but not the USA, with the exception of sabbatical replacement positions, and I was hired to teach in that capacity in Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, California at various times.
When I was in grade school a family from England came to live in our village in Ohio, the father being a member of the “Brain Drain” as it was called back then. He was hired to work at the University of Akron as a polymer chemist and years later was credited with developing a polymer adhesive that addressed the cause of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and ensured future missions would not suffer similar outcomes. There were three sons in the family. The eldest---Martin---was my age and we became friends.
As the years went by I began to think about studying in England at some point. Martin had come to America, why couldn’t I go to England? And when fine art---drawing, painting, collage, assemblage, etc. became a focus for me in high school I thought—two years in the Midwest, two years on the west coast and two graduate years on the east coast or in England---makes sense for an artist’s education, right?
I attended Kent State University (Midwest) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (west coast) as an undergraduate. My lithography professor in Santa Barbara, Steven Cortright, had spent a term as a student in England at the Royal College of Art in London. He advised me that, if I was going to England, there were really only two places to consider---the Royal College of Art and The Slade. I applied to both and was offered interviews at both. They were scheduled in the winter of 1972.
Most people entertain stereotypes about other people and other places. I had naively imagined men in bowler hats and spats traipsing through the streets of London with walking sticks clicking along the cobbled streets. So to be what I imagined would be respectful I cut my hair, bought a cheap version of a Burberry raincoat, got some sensible shoes and, well, prepared for my interviews in London, England. I managed to schedule both interviews on the same day. The Royal College folk would see me at 11:00 AM and The Slade crew after lunch, at 3:00 PM.
My RCA interview went like this: I met with the chicest, coolest art crowd in London---guys with paper clips stuck through their cheeks and pink/purple/orange hair, and jeans and tee-shirts so tight they looked like they’d been spray-painted on. A thirty-something woman with three inch platform shoes, sparkles covering her forehead and cheeks, and about two pounds of pancake make-up on her face sat on a desk chain-smoking unfiltered Gauloises cigarettes, grilling me on my knowledge of all the underground artists in London, and blowing smoke in my face. I was clearly out of my league with my short, combed hair, cheap raincoat, umbrella and no knowledge of minor British art stars who I envisioned them all sleeping with.
So I fucked up that interview and got rejected.
Off to The Slade in the afternoon.
There I was led to an office on the ground floor. The Slade is a 200 year old stone building located in a grassy quadrangle off Gower Street that is part of the University College London complex extending from Euston Road to Russell Square---and housing such facilities as the Courthold Institute, University College Hospital, the Ross Institute of Tropical Medicine, the British Museum, etc.
The office belonged to William Coldstream---Sir William Coldstream---knighted for his work in Art Education---The Slade Professor---the highest ranked art educator on the planet.
The room was pretty dark---lights off. Coldstream was behind his desk and stood up slowly, buttoning his suit jacket, and held out his hand.
“Welcome to The Slade,” he said.
I walked up to him and shook his hand.
“Would you like a drink?” he said, and pulled a bottle of Scotch out of his desk drawer.
And then I turned around to see Bartholomew Dos Santos and Stanley Jones, the Printmaking faculty members, sitting on chairs, flanking the office door. Dos Santos was a Portuguese aristocrat. Jones was the Director of Curwen Press, Britain’s foremost hand printing facility for artists. Stanley Jones had printed for artists like Henry Moore, and John Lennon produced his famous suite of erotic prints at Curwen, parking his white Rolls Royce with a license plate that read “Lennon 1” outside the studio and then wondering why fans were pounding on the door to get in.
This is the place for me, I thought---The Slade. As the interview progressed I knew that it was. The trio of interviewers were calm and respectful, understated. They were uninterested in the cult of celebrity or where the “center of the art world” was. They patiently let me finish the questions they asked of me and were curious about American artists who I knew as a student in Southern California. As a young art student I felt like I mattered and instinctively knew I was in exemplary company.
University-level academia in North America is a bastion for some of the loopiest human beings, and it’s art departments are peppered with gurus who fancy themselves experts at everything, and psychopaths with personal agendas. It’s difficult for any of them to be held accountable for any shenanigans they get up to, or disciplined for them, due to “academic freedom” and the protection afforded by teachers’ unions. You don’t find this culture at a corporation like IBM or General Motors. Also the vast majority of academic institutions are run by teachers who are temporarily relieved of their teaching duties to take on roles as “professional administrators”. This causes no end of problems, particularly in Visual Arts departments.
In 1975 I had a job interview at a small but well-respected liberal arts college in Ohio. It was apparent to me that the Head of Department was a guru. I don’t know where he sat with the students but the faculty who interviewed me seemed to be in awe of him and hung on his every word, agreeing with everything he said, shaking their heads affirmatively and smiling whenever he made a comment.
The interview lasted over an hour. I thought I did pretty well but the guru kept letting me, and everyone else, know how important he was by controlling the interview and subtly putting people down when they made comments or suggestions, and correcting their knowledge of art history.
At wind-up time his final comments were emphatically and passionately delivered to me and to his audience of underlings. He was “on stage” at that point.
“You know”, he said “The great thing about teaching here is that we have such brilliant students. They’re so talented, so smart.”
He went on: “In fact……we have graduates……who are living in lofts in New York.”
And with that I burst out laughing.
Oops.
© Kent Jones 2016