voi Cespsychoanalytically- informed critique of art school romanticism, was based on the
principle that ‘there is no practice without theory’:
no matter how much theory is disguised or repressed, there is no practice
without theory. The theory that practice has nothing to do with theory is a
theory, a disingenuous or naïve one, but nonetheless a theory.
(atkinson 1990: 49)For atkinson, theory was primarily an activity of reading and reflection, rather than
one of making art. ‘it would be worth any art student interested in matters of aesthetic
ideology carefully studying [paul] de man’s text’. (atkinson 1990: 54)
as i have shown with reference to the more recent and world- weary reaction to
psychoanalytic theory by the critic hal Foster, an embrace of theory does not thereby
eliminate the intellectual framework of notions of practice, in which the position of
the professional artist and that of critic can comfortably co- exist. as well as claiming
that there is no practice without theory, it can be added that there is no theory without
practice, what lacan called ‘the myth of immediate experience that forms the basis of
what people call existential psychology or even existential psychoanalysis’ (lacan 1993
[1956]: 8). What atkinson states as an art school problem is in fact a general problem
for the humanities, where psychoanalytic interpretation services interdisciplinary
adventures, offering an alternative interpretive option where others have failed. in art
schools, this general humanities attitude to psychoanalysis has become institutionalized
within art and design pedagogy in the uK since the so- called Coldstream Report
(national advisory Council on art education 1960), which supported and reinforced
a distinction between a wide- ranging and interdisciplinary ‘complementary studies’ and
core studio disciplines. Rather than offering an alternative interpretation where others
have failed, the proper task of psychoanalysis is to indicate a certain deadlock or failure
of interpretation at the very point where critical ambition ‘cannot fail’ to generate a
new interpretation of an artwork using a psychoanalytic toolkit. The deadlock is around
the difference between interpretation, grounded in life experience and practice, and
psychoanalysis, grounded in nothing except the rigour of an analytical position that
can make unconscious knowledge manifest.
if the vicissitudes of atkinson’s uK- based ‘artist- theorist’ are linked to the integration
of art schools within the degree- awarding sector after 1965, where do we locate the
historical precedents for an inaugural moment for the artist- researcher? The possibility
of the arts- based researcher is predicated on a potential change in the subject position
of the artist, partly due to a new significance placed on the designer, which allows
for the construction of a unified field of art and design activity populated by creative
practitioners. in Britain, this potential shift is to be found in the early development of
the publicly funded art school and an associated model of public pedagogy linking art
schools, government and museums, following the Reform Bill of 1832 (Quinn 2008).
This initiative linked the fate of the artist and designer to mass culture and industrial
capital. This historical moment is important to a psychoanalytic orientation, because
it emphasized an approach to culture as a signifying system. The kind of mass cultural
epistemology that could have emerged from an early nineteenth century model of
cultural administration pioneered in Britain, and for which the art school could have