By Ian Haig
For some years now, I’ve taught a course called Pop & Trash. The basic gist of the course is to break down and question notions of cultural hierarchy, the old binaries of high and low, good taste/bad taste, sophisticated/unsophisticated within contemporary visual culture, or as Mike Kelley referred to the high/low binary: allowable and the repressed. It’s always struck me as entirely odd that I teach a course that attempts to critique such constructed cultural hierarchies, and the next day I need to report to my university my ERA outputs based on the same outdated and outmoded cultural hierarchies and notions of impact I dismantle in my Pop & Trash course. The ERA reporting framework is very much based on the ranking of venues within the contemporary art world, well, at least it was for some time and has now shifted away from prestige of the venue to impact. The entire notion of hierarchies in culture always seemed a tad outdated to me and was put to death some 40 years ago. I guess the university administrators never got the memo on post-modernism.
I spend a large amount of my time teaching about creative practice and its relationship to pop culture in particular. One of my favourite analogies of a flattened culture has always been the video libraries of the mid-1980s which later morphed into Blockbuster. All forms of cinema appeared on the shelves: horror, drama, porn, exploitation, action, thrillers, art house, mondo documentaries and Jane Fonda exercise videos. All appeared on the shelves in the store in the same way, with neither genre being elevated above the other. So the idea of hierarchy and measuring artists against hierarchies and then placing value on that has always irked me and is ultimately banal.
Notions of hierarchy are clearly inherited from academia, which has co-opted the corporate mentality: climbing the corporate ladder, getting in on the ground floor, corporate suits, you get the idea. Increasingly, universities have become corporatised, with top-down centralised structures, corporate branding, corporate messaging, managerial corporate speak and enough suits within the university higher-ups to resemble a real estate salesman convention. This corporatisation of measurement and metrics has, therefore, unsurprisingly spread to the art schools.
Corporate culture and corporate thinking are precisely what art should be critiquing, not using as any kind of meaningful model. Maybe this works in more applied disciplines like engineering and science, but fine art? Applied disciplines are more interested in rational and logical outcomes, instrumentality and use value. Art, on the other hand, can be illogical and irrational and ultimately useless. How do you measure that? I am not sure you can or even should attempt to. The danger here is that it produces a kind of thinking and approach to art practice that is constructed and artificially manufactured to ensure maximum impact, and maximum measurement and, therefore, guarantee a higher ranking on the spreadsheet: Tick-box contemporary art and tick-box contemporary art institutions.
Centralised corporate structures seem to be at odds with notions of diversity. Diversity, after all, is what creates new opinions and new knowledge, not centralised top-down structures. On the one hand, universities love to talk about diversity, but the very reporting systems in place restrict new ways of thinking. If you want more evidence of the corporatisation of the university, look no further than promotion pathways. Promotions are partly based on acquiring successful research grants, ARC grants seem purpose-built for this purpose. Capital now interpreted as knowledge.
I understand the reality of having to quantify things in today’s corporate university environment. Publish or perish and all that. However, projecting pre-existing centralised models onto fine art because they seem to work for other disciplines is just wrong thinking and asking the wrong questions. New models and new ways of thinking about measurement should be explored. After all, art schools are meant to be about innovation, well, they used to be.
Ian Haig‘s practice refuses to accept that the low and the base level are devoid of value and cultural meaning.