At Goldsmiths, staff members and artists Susan Kelly and Jesse Ash have formed a working group of eleven current and former students of the Joint BA Degree in Fine Art and History of Art taught across the Departments of Art and Visual Cultures. We began discussions about art education as a form of training for the contemporary economy and the particular dilemmas and possibilities that face art students and recent graduates in London today. Many questions emerged: Is it possible to live out the radical propositions of art college after graduation? What role does ritual have in learning? What are we getting ready for? What is the effect of living up to a ‘reputation’ in Goldsmiths when we know that it is a kind of phantom? What is worth knowing? Can informal knowledge be trusted? If not upon graduation, then when does an art student become an artist?

Students have formed themselves into smaller groups around three themes that emerged from these discussions. The first group looked at the rituals and rites of passage in education. The second investigated labels and identities of young artists, and the ways in which art schools teach students either a form of ‘professionalism’, or at least the capacity to fake it. The third group tried to imagine what art school might be preparing students for, if not what already exists.

Based on these themes several projects have already been made and are proposed. After an initial visit to the Trondheim Art Academy in 2009, Sarah Walters initiated a ten-day email exchange between 34 young artists and recent graduates from England, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Finland and Denmark, allowing the participants to compare the environments they work in and share common preoccupations.

Emily Ballard, Andreas Pashias and Tara Johnson-Comerford appropriate the Channel 4 TV show ‘Faking It’, in which participants are propelled into radically different jobs and after four weeks perform their imposture in front of a panel of judges who must spot who is ‘faking it’. Concerned by issues around the performance of professionalism, the requirement of flexibility in the workplace and rumours that in order to apply for art dealer Charles Saatchi’s new art school potential students will no longer have to submit portfolios of work but instead upload an audition clip onto youtube, the students use the format of the show to bring out the forms of 'fakery' employed by and taught to aspiring artists in the art school and more broadly in the art world today.

Concerning questions of precarity and opportunity for young artists and cultural workers, Marie Thams will produce a wall drawing of a gallery storefront and a folding sign that reads ‘Potentially Open’ on one side, and ‘Precariously Driven’ on the other. And in ‘The Action of Instruction’, Charlie Mills and Sarah Walters look at the dynamics of obedience and rebellion that ensue when they give five small groups of art foundation students a disassembled everyday object and a set of instructions for 45 minutes.

Taking up the curatorial questions of Manufacturing Today and the rare opportunity for a genuine exchange with other academy contexts and young artists in Europe, through processes of collaboration and self-organisation, the working group of students at Goldsmiths have begun to define for themselves the central questions and tensions between education, learning and the contexts and practices that follow.

The students names are:
Emily Ballard
Leandro Cardoso Torres Cunha
Abigail Jones
Tara Johnson-Comerford
Charlie Mills
Ana Noble
Lina Norell
Andreas Pashias
Anna Sjøgren
Marie Thams
Sarah Walters

Emily Ballard, Andreas Pashias and Tara Johnston-Comerford, Faking It, 2010, video projection, approx. 20 minutes. Are you making it or are you faking it? Channel 4's notorious reality TV series “Faking it”, takes working subjects and propels them into radically different sectors and after only 4 weeks a panel of judges scrutinize their performance to see if they can spot the imposter. Whilst providing an intensive crash course in skills, to truly fake it the participants must focus on the performative aspects of the vocation, adapting to vernacular or specific lexicons alongside gesture and body language and even forging a new identity to fit in and convincingly emulate their peers. In the same way, this project appropriates the show's performative strategies in order to challenge our own received notions around creativity, what it means to be an artist-student and how one can be educated in art today.

Charles Mills, Lina Norell, Ana Noble and Sarah Walters, Art of Instruction, 2009-10, 8 objects, text, dimensions variable. A group of 4 artists have collaborated to produce 8 objects of desire. Each member of the group produced a set of written directions for the production of an object that they desire. They then passed these directions to another member of the group who attempted to produce the object. On receipt of the object the artist that originally wrote the directions evaluated how much the object has fulfilled their expectations. In this piece, every artist plays the role of both a teacher -- outlining their expectations -- and also a student, struggling to create within a set of parameters. This work attempts to highlight the rituals that are conducted in University, often without students completely understanding their purpose. Only a teacher fully knows their expectations, and so this piece attempts to draw the role of teacher and student closer together, everyone becoming both sides of the story. This work also attempts to examine ideas surrounding desire and fulfilment of expectations of others.

Leandro Cardoso and Matt Lewis, Political Chants for the Future / Fzooooooosh Phhhhhht Vathroooom!, 2008-2010, sound installation, with paper airplanes, text and image. The torpedo corridor of Dora is filled with two sound pieces running concurrently. The speakers in the corridor are activated by people walking past. In the corridor, there is a stack of paper airplanes printed with text and images related to the project. When thrown in the air the paper airplanes also activate the speakers. Political Chants for the Future draws from historical material to propose a different kind of protest sound and a different use for the collective voice: sound weapons for cities of 100-200 million inhabitants. FZOOOOOOOSH PHHHHHHT VATHROOOOM! plays the sound of helicopters, an often heard but unseen ominous presence during times of unrest and warfare. Historical material is drawn from Chile in 1970, when Salvador Allende was the first Marxist to become an elected national leader on the American continent. Before his socialist government was tragically ended, Chile saw a flowering of the culture of street politics. Groups for and against the Unidad Popular disputed the streets, the factories, the copper mines, the plantations and all kinds of institutions, including art museums. Political chants functioned strategically as means to mark territory and propagate messages nationwide and beyond. They organized the crowd and composed collective voices, or rather, collective rhythms. For the exhibition ‘Manufacturing Today’, Leandro Cordoso has edited some of these historical chants (drawing from archive material and re-enactments) to produce potential sound weapons for the future. The prosaic meaning has been reduced to instant order-words such as ‘justice’, ‘power’, ‘freedom’. Conversely, looping makes the words mutate and gain different phonetics. Matt Lewis has made recordings in various rural and urban areas including at military air bases used by the UK Royal Air Force. These sounds are then processed by the artist. The architecture of a city defines its sonority and as helicopters fly through a city the sounds of the rotor blades and engines attract the listener’s attention to the architecture of the city through their interaction with the buildings. On a simple level flying objects can draw our attention to the nature of sound and music itself in that they move the air.

Abigail Jones, Future Correspondences, 2010, signage, posters and exchange between London and Trondheim. The starting point for this project is a series of posters put out in public spaces in London in Spring 2010 asking people to nominate themselves, their date of birth and the exact moment (down to the minute) they want a brass plaque containing all this information to be nailed up on a tree in Trondheim. These statements or figures are inscribed onto standard brass plaques and fixed to hidden trees in and near Trondheim. The signs look much like the ones you often see on trees or benches in parks commemorating someone. The piece aims to enact an anticipatory freezing of time. Documentation of the plaques will also be seen in the gallery.

Marie Thams, Potentially Open, 2010, wall drawing and sign. This piece focuses on the conditions of the art world, the production of art and artists possibilities to work or not to work. It emerges from both discussions with The Carrots Workers Collective in London over the last few years and from the many questions and answer people expressed in the European Text Exchange, organised by Sarah Walters in December 2009.

Tracing the Borders: A Collective Reaction from Emerging European Artists to their Contemporary Cultural Environments, initiated and edited by Sarah Walters in collaboration with recent graduates from from Art Schools in London, Vilnius, Trondheim, Copenhagen, and Helsinki. After an initial visit to the Trondheim Art Academy in 2009, Sarah Walters initiated a ten-day email exchange between 34 young artists and recent graduates from England, Norway, Sweden, Lithuania, Finland and Denmark, allowing the participants to compare the environments they work in and share common