THE ART SCHOOL
AS SITCOM

The project has four phases, each of which is subject to change; 

 

1.

The workshopping, utilising Brechtian methods, of a number of scenes and situations, located in a fictional School of Fine Arts. We anticipate that this will take place in three parts; with a group of actors, with a group of non-actors, and with a combined group of actors and non-actors.*

 

2. 

The production of a completed script and storyboard. A rough cut of the workshop material by two different editors.

 

3.

The production of a sitcom pilot featuring the above actors and non-actors. 

 

4.

The production of a curriculum. In keeping with Brecht’s view of theatre’s capacity to transform existing conditions, we aim for the sitcom-as-learning play to inform to a new configuration of fine art education. This curriculum will be, for JCHP & AD, a manifestation of ‘what has been learned’ through the sitcom; ideally, an obliteration of existing practices of fine art education to be replaced by something else, as yet to be discovered through phase 1, 2 and 3. 

 

WHY BRECHT? 

 

Brechtian theatre aimed at the transformation of social reality. The social reality to which we point is the field of art in its embryonic form; the art school. 

 

Working against theatrical illusion Brecht developed techniques capable of politicising an audience. ‘Alienation effect’, ‘Epic Theatre’, ‘Gestus’ all, and in different ways, heightened the artificiality of theatre; speaking in quotation marks, acting amongst the lighting rig, the dramatic re-writing of scripts, and the deliberate sustaining of contradiction all worked against the forgetting of social reality by rendering visible the mechanics of the play. Acting as conceit; the actor does not immerse themselves in a role as in the ‘method actor’ but, instead, acts acting. 

 

In the late 1920s Brecht focussed on the production of Lehrstücke, or ‘learning play’. Played by amateurs, workers, actors, stage crew and audience members, scenes and their situations would be open to negotiation and change. Aimed at the politicisation of the worker in the face of fascist and capitalist oppression, its task was to show the world as it changes (and also how it may be changed). Our task is to present the complicity between art education and a bloated field of art that it presently serves; to set the scene for its dissolution and possible reconstruction. 

 

The sitcom-as-learning-play set within a school of fine arts draws on Brecht’s view of historical contingency - that political strategies, shaped by the conditions in which they were formed, become impotent over time. We see this impotence in the persistence of fine art methodologies, attitudes and affectations umbilically tied to originary narratives of the rock’n’roll 60s and 70s. The sitcom-as-learning-play set within a school of fine arts intends to present art education not as an immutable fact but contingent, if prone to the lazy reproduction of historical tropes.

 

Following the workshops and the production of a pilot, we intend to consolidate what has been learned from the sitcom into a new curriculum. The learning play, then, lies between the sitcom set within an art school and the curriculum for its replacement; it is the means to go from one to the other. 

 

WHY SITCOM?

 

Taken as we are by Brecht, we recognise that his, too, is a methodology rooted in its own historical moment. Our butting up together of the learning play with the cheap laughs of the (trad) sitcom is a means to dislodge the warm feelings of Bob Marley-round-the-brazier left wing solidarity that Brecht tends to summon. In this sense the sitcom appears to contradict the learning play’s promise of political change. 

 

The sitcom seems an appropriate form to capture the inadequacies, pretences, melancholic attachments and persistent contradictions of fine art education as it exists in the marketised university. Just as Fawlty Towers’ depiction of the shambolic regional hotel ushered in a new era of customer feedback, beige wet rooms, plastic key cards and Warty Towels, we sincerely hope that a sitcom as learning play within a school of fine arts might similarly accelerate change; to establish a representation to which no one should want to return, thus, making space for alternative forms to be established (dissolution-reconstruction). 

 

In its traditional form, a sitcom is a circular situation in which a number of characters find themselves trapped. The tutor? Trapped by the mortgage and short-term contracts, the legitimacy and purpose the institution provides, and occasional free trips to let loose in Berlin. Meanwhile the student is trapped by debt peonage, the promise of payback, the allure of reputation, and the affirmation of cultural capital, maybe even their hopes and dreams. And whilst both are riddled with doubt, a delicate ecology is maintained through their requisite complicity; to question would be to shatter the art school illusion and an investment based on belief. Each episode, scene or situation will provoke this equilibrium of doubt and belief before, in keeping with tradition, returning to normal; an appropriate reflection of the stasis of fine art education. 

 

The sitcom already shares epic theatre tendencies - the fragmentary, seemingly disconnected situations within which a motley crew of characters find themselves embroiled. Tensions and misunderstandings progress in fits and starts, the butting up of scenes and situations to deny the unified illusion that is promised through university marketing or the mythification of the art school as maintained by ‘successful’ artists, their tutors, their curators and their very, very good friends.

 

WHY ART SCHOOL?

 

In Brecht’s view, the cultural apparatus functions, among other things, to stabilise the existing social relations politically and economically. For JCHP & AD, the art school sustains the exponential expansion of an insidious, over inflated and nepotistic art world. What and how one should learn is a question rarely asked within contemporary art’s primary site of acculturation. Instead assumptions, inheritances and a sense of what ‘feels right’, ‘familiar’ and ‘similar to what I did’ shape the curriculum and its methods of delivery. Soon enough students, propelled onto courses by fast loans & high hopes of freedom following the relative incarceration of school, become partial to the predictable codes and conventions to which they and their likelihood of success- become subject. AKA the second year slump; out come the day beds, up go shifts at the local pub, and, apart from the en-route-to-a-first favourites, let the staff-student trade-offs between grades and national student survey scores commence!

 

The school of fine arts is an ideal environment for epic theatre because of its inherent contradictions. Set within an economised ‘learning landscape’ of UK higher education whilst revelling in tropes of its mythical past; disavowing the rules ‘n’ regulations of its current environment whilst quietly subscribing to them. Despite allegiances to autonomy, bohemia or criticality, the student’s need for cashback and tutor’s need for likes ensures a maintenance of business as usual. A fog descended in the 1970s that has grown thicker since; today no one knows quite what they are doing and it is the absurd interactions exacerbated by this fog that we wish to render palpable. 

 

The sitcom-as-learning-play set within a school of fine arts will, we hope, produce sufficient  insight to the impulses, hangovers, attachments and beliefs that condition the teaching and study of art so as to enable its reconstruction. And failing that we have no doubt it would make good TV.

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Annie Davey & Jeffrey Charles Henry Peacock