Dr Richard Hudson-Miles

‘Theory’ has sat uncomfortably within the institutional curricula of UK art schools since its forced integration following the first Coldstream Report of 1960. From this moment, theory carried the dual pedagogico-political burden of demonstrating the degree equivalency of the new DipAD art awards whilst also, as Kantian ‘lower faculty’ of the art school, being the critical mechanism through which studio practice was presumed to accrue disciplinary self-knowledge. It was the invasive and threatening Pharmakon (poison, cure, illness, sorcerer, charm, colour, sacrifice…) for studio practice and, as such, triggered all manner of reactionary, and autoimmunitary, pedagogical defences of the presence or purity of the haptic in art school discourses. Drawing upon the famous chapter from ‘Of Grammatology’ (1967), this paper reads art theory as the dangerous supplement to the already supplementary art practice. Its danger resides in both its exposure of the supplementarity of artistic practice and its threat to substitute for practice. More frighteningly, the danger of theory is that it reveals the supplementarity of both artistic practice and artistic education, and even the mutual incompatibility of both. By remembering the danger of historic offers of theory in the art school, this paper seeks to imagine its future, perhaps as offering in the Post-Browne era.

Authors from the social sciences and humanities discuss the neoliberal re-structuring of higher education and the possibilities for progressive change to the social production of knowledge (teaching and research) in universities.

Drawing upon the work of Bataille (1985), this visual essay articulates a base materialism of the art school, which counterposes splinters, paint stains, chemical burns, cigarette ash, violent protest, and cirrhosis of the liver, to the strictly regulated and disciplinary space of the contemporary neoliberal art school. Herein, an anarchical general economy is invoked beyond the restricted economy of ‘economised’ (Brown, 2015) curricula, managerialism, signature buildings, and the latest studio gadgetry. Our video essay disrupts sanitised art school marketing with an ontology of dirt and debris.

This chapter transcribes a critical discussion between Richard Hudson-Miles and Jakob Jakobsen, founder of the Copenhagen Free University (CFU) (2001–2007, Copenhagen Denmark,https://cfu.antipool.org"xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://cfu.antipool.org/). The CFU was formed by Jakobsen and his partner Henriette Heise in their Copenhagen flat. Offering free university education from a space of domesticity, the CFU represented a radical university of everyday life. It also sought to establish educational networks with local activists, women’s groups and community centres, bringing the university into real-world social relations. Jakobsen describes how the CFU was inspired by the autonomous spirit of the free parties, occupations, protests and critical art practices he participated in during the 1990s in Britain. One key part of this discussion concerns the political power of the university title. Jakobsen describes the formation of the CFU as a ‘speech-act’, which reclaimed symbolic power from the state. So much so that legislation was passed by the Danish government in 2011 outlawing the CFU and any subsequent copycat institutions.

In this detailed critical introduction, Richard Hudson-Miles draws upon his previous research into the UK alternative art school movement. This critical introduction has three key sections. First, a detailed political analysis of the contexts of UK HER financing, which has led to the emergence of alternative art schools. Second, a conceptual definition of alternative art schools, which contextualises them within the educational turn in contemporary art, art school protests, and critical pedagogy relevant to art schools, using examples of key alternative art schools to illustrate. Finally, a detailed overview of the chapter structure, explaining the rationale for each of the book’s three thematic sections (Co-operation, Context, Strategies) and also highlighting the specific expertise and insight of each of the different chapter authors.

In this conclusion to the book, Co-operative Education, Politics and Art, Richard Hudson-Miles connects the preceding chapters to the principles of co-operation laid down by the Rochdale Pioneers of 1844. He also identifies four other key theoretical principles which unite many of the contributions to the book: Refusal, Collaboration, Politics and the idea of the Studio.

Recent, ideologically driven, governmental policy, specifically the Browne Review (2010), has resulted in the near complete removal of state funding from arts, humanities and social sciences courses in UK Higher Education. In this refigured HE landscape, the burden of financing education has been placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual student, who is now encouraged to view their education as a form of human capital investment. As part of this system, art schools could now be figured as disciplinary institutions (Foucault, 1975), or Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser, 1970), reproducing neoliberalism via what Jeffrey Williams (2009) has described as a ‘Pedagogy of Debt’. This paper offers a critique of the current trajectory of the neo-liberal UK art school through a critical case study of ‘The School of the Damned’, London, which in many ways could be considered its radical ‘other’. ‘The School of the Damned’ is a one-year course, autonomously organised and run by its tudents, who claim that it is equivalent in structure and rigour to an accredited MA. There are no fees charged for studying on the course and tuition is organized through a form of gift economy, where an ever-expanding network of artists, academics and activists contribute to the culture of the course in a system of educational reciprocity explicitly critical of the commodification of education and capitalist societal relations themselves. The current context of escalating student fees and austerity, and the new educational language of ‘value for money’, ‘institutional risk’ and ‘accountability’, has created a shift in institutional priorities that Andrew McGettigan has identified with marketization, privatization and monetization. Can it be argued that autonomous models of educational organisation, like ‘The School of the Damned’, offer the best contemporary defence of the art school? Part of this critique will involve questioning, following Readings (1996), the extent to which we now inhabit the art school ‘in ruins’, and if so, in what new formations can its disintegrating structure can be reconfigured? This paper will be illustrated with visual material produced by students of ‘The School of the Damned’ 2015 graduating year.

Music has long been mythologised as something occult or supernatural. It cannot be seen or touched, yet profoundly affects our mood, physiology, and activities. Mythic bards like Orpheus embodied this occult power: his music both bewitching nature, and opening up the depths of the underworld. The motif of the musician as someone in close proximity to occult forces has persisted through the Romantic period, and into rock n roll, embodied in tales such as bluesman Robert Johnson reportedly selling his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Clarksdale Mississippi USA. From the 1960s onward, this relationship between popular music, the occult, and the emerging counterculture came to the fore, coalescing into what Christopher Partridge (2013) has called ‘occulture’: our fascination with the occult, dark, romantic, and monstrous played out across the media-saturated cultures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Most prominently, The Beatles placed occult figurehead Aleister Crowley on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while Mick Jagger collaborated with avant-garde film-maker and Crowley-adherent Kenneth Anger, patronised the salons of esoteric cult known as the Process Church of Final Judgment, and released albums like the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) and songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (1968). At a moment where stars like Robert Plant and Jim Morrison were considered shamans, and the Grateful Dead conducted crowds of thousands through the psychedelic experience, a new generation were tuned into the occultural dimension of music as potentially mind-expanding, spiritual, or magical experience divorced from the influence of mainstream religions. The coining of the term ‘occulture’ is generally accredited to the musician, artist, and activist Genesis P Orridge, whose work effectively bridged late 60s psychedelia and the harder-edged, confrontational industrial music scene. Formerly of the band Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge founded the magical cult Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. His band Psychic TV functioned as their musical propaganda wing, exploring how the samples, repetitive beats, and euphoria of acid house music could create altered states of consciousness or ‘gnosis’ in which magical effects could occur (Dines and Grimes 2021; Siepmann 2021). The legacy of TOPY, Psychic TV and other ‘post-industrial’ groups has influenced many other musicians who sought to encode occult influences into their musical productions and to use their music to create mind-altering and magical spaces. Examples might range from the ritualistic polyrhythmic rock of Tool, to the glacial dark ambience of Arktau Eos and Phurpa. Rather than a conventional academic panel, this session will involve delegates participating in an experimental listening party of music designed to provoke the altered states explored by bands like Tool and Psychic TV. The session will conclude with a roundtable debate, including short talks from the panel members, and responsive contributions from the floor.

This paper critically surveys and contextualises the recent wave of autonomous art schools established in the UK since the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding & Student Finance, or Browne Review. It argues that these institutions have been formed as a direct response to this economic policy and the broader neoliberal economisation of higher education. By drawing upon the work of the Edu-Factory Collective, and the Autonomist Marxist theory that inspired their project, this paper argues that these new alternative art schools can be understood as ‘common autonomous institutions’. Furthermore, that they represent genuinely viable alternatives to the commodified, financialised, and marketised state provision. Finally, drawing upon the work of Santos, three alternative art schools (The Other MA, Southend, UK; The School of the Damned, London, UK; @.ac, UK) are analysed as nascent forms of the polyphonic pluriversity.

The concept of ‘the distribution of the sensible’, sometimes translated as ‘partition’ or ‘division’, arguably underpins all of Jacques Rancière’s work, though is only directly articulated in one of his later works ‘The Politics of Aesthetics’ (2004). This concept has quickly gained currency in the discourses surrounding cutting edge contemporary art biennales, and Rancière himself has become the ‘philosophe du jour’ for the progressive or radical artist. However, one rarely hears his name uttered in conversations concerning Graphic Design practice, either inside or outside of the academy. For Rancière, ‘the distribution of the sensible’ refers to implicit conventions, laws, social structures, modes of consciousness, the function to separate individuals or social stratas from each other, preventing participation in the creation of a common world. This system enables, legitimises, and authorizes some, whilst at the same time stultifying, disabling, and censoring other. For Rancière, this distribution operates at a meta-level, across both the political and aesthetic realms. Thought in this way, Rancière’s philosophy politicises aesthetics and even aestheticises politics, though not in the sense that Benjamin meant. Through a reading of Rancière’s philosophy, this paper will interrogate a specific aspect of the ‘the distribution of the sensible’ in operation within the arts, particularly their institutionalized forms in the universities and the creative industries. I wish to argue that it is the specific effects of this distribution, rather than the physical properties of the work, or qualities of the human creative labour, which separates Graphic Design from Art; which designate Graphic Design as not art; that creates certain institutional accolades. As a speculative proposition, this paper proceeds from the Rancièrian presumption that a creative ‘community of equals’,beyond disciplinary antagonisms, heirarchization, and seprations, is at least a possibility, and tries to imagine what the creative industries would look like if we proceed from this assumption. I reintroduce Rancière’s use of the term ‘indisciplinarity’ here to suggest that collaboration between Graphic Design and Fine Art is both possible and the necessary characteristic of a truly egalitarian democratic society.

le transcribes an interview with the Graphic Design collective ExperimentalJetset from Amsterdam, Netherlands. The interview was responsively structured,with three famous quotes from revolutionary critical theory guiding the discussion;one from Karl Marx and two from Walter Benjamin. These quotes suggest thatdisciplinary specialism is a consequence of the capitalist organisation of society andthat interdisciplinary or collectivised practice is the method for achieving radicalsocial change. The interview considers the ramification of this suggestion for thecontemporary visual communicator. It also considers the distinctions between art,design, theory, practice and politics today, and how a creative design practice can besustained at the intersection of all the above. The interview, which started out as aninformal e-mail exchange and retains the orality of that dialogue at times, has beenslightly revised to fit, under a process of co-authorship, within the conventions of ascholarly academic journal. References and brief commentary have been added inparentheses only when the author thought it might be helpful for readers outsidethe field of art and/or design.

Paper Abstract: Illustration; Education; Revolution. Richard Hudson-Miles Recent, ideologically driven, coalition policy, specifically the Browne Review (2010), has resulted in the near complete removal of state funding from arts, humanities and social sciences courses in UK Higher Education. In this refigured HE landscape, the burden of financing education has been placed squarely on the shoulders of the individual, who is now encouraged to view their education as a form of human capital investment. Art schools could now be figured as disciplinary institutions (Foucault, 1975), or Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser, 1970), reproducing neoliberalism via what Jeffrey Williams (2009) has described as a ‘Pedagogy of Debt’. Rather than lamenting a mythic model of art schools past, utopian radicals are already attempting to imagine an alternative future for arts education beyond commodity exchange and the cash-nexus. This paper proposes one such visionary project, ‘The School of the Damned’ in London, not just as a critique of the current trajectory of the neoliberal art school, but also as a proposal for autonomous, self organized, education that could, and should, be taken on board by the illustration community, who are often accused, perhaps unfairly, of disciplinary ‘navel gazing’ (Zeegen, 2012), inside and outside of the academy. ‘The School of the Damned’ is a one-year course, autonomously organised and run by its students, equivalent in structure and rigour to an accredited MA. There are no fees charged for study, and tuition is organized through a form of gift economy, where an ever-expanding network of artists, academics and activists contribute to the culture of the course in a system of educational reciprocity explicitly critical of the commodification of education and capitalist societal relations themselves.

The history of the university has been read as a cycle of foundational paradigm shifts, wherein emergent socio-cultural forces destroy dominant-hegemonic university problematics and rebuild the institution in their own image. Most famously, Bill Readings (1999, 54) identifies a sequence beginning with a Kantian 18th century ‘university of reason’, followed by a Humboldtian 19th century ‘university of culture’, which gradually cedes to the technobureaucratic ‘university of excellence’ produced by the socioeconomic forces of 20th century globalisation and the decline of the nation state. For Readings, one of the catalysts for the emergent university of excellence was the otherwise revolutionary forces of 1968. As institutional auto-critique, university occupations in Paris, London, and New York demanded the modernisation of the university through direct action and violent struggle. Of course, ‘68 also forged what Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) have called the ‘new spirit of capitalism’; that historic sublation of Left and Right energies which mitigates against meaningful social change. For Readings, what made France so unique within the global event of ‘68 in foregrounding the university as an institutional and political question was that the French university remained ‘paradoxically positioned as a structure that had remained largely feudal. The students thus resisted both the existing feudal structure and the nation state’s attempt to modernise it. This fed into a general critique of the nation-state’ (Readings 1996, 137). Pessimistically, Readings concedes that ‘what happened in 1968 as revolution now happens as student apathy, which is another name for consumerism’ (137). If ‘the replacement of culture by the discourse of excellence is the university’s response to 1968’ (Reading 1996: 150), then could its recent wholesale ‘commodification’, ‘marketisation’, and ‘financialisation’ (McGettigan 2013), on a global scale, perhaps be figured as a form of accelerationism (Land 1993) bringing us closer to another reckoning, or even proto-formation of the post-university? Certainly, serious questions need to be raised concerning whether the ‘university of excellence’ adequately respond to the 2008 global financial crisis and recent breakthrough of populism, both of which have shook the triumphalism and security of the neoiliberal episteme in different ways?

This chapter offers a critical case study of an educational collaboration between the artists’ collective @.ac (www.attackdotorg.com), and the staff and students of the University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK, 9th April - 2nd May 2018 (fig. 1). This pedagogical experiment saw the university gallery, Hanover Project, transformed into an autonomous art school whose curriculum and agenda was controlled entirely by the university’s students for the duration of the exhibition. This practice-based research project attempted to make visible the concealed power relationships operating implicitly within the teaching of art and design, and also participatory art projects. This artificial ‘democratisation’ of the art school within the institutional frame of the neoliberal university highlighted the extent to which the marketisation, commodification, and financialization (McGettigan, 2013) of HE art education have de-democratised the art school.

There is a stereotype that men – at least heterosexual men – are uninterested in fashion. Such stereotypes are inseparable from the broader logic of patriarchal society. Men are judged according to their economic power, and women are objectified into what the feminist Rosalind Coward called “the aesthetic sex”. As part of this, fashion is a way through which women negotiate patriarchal sexual relations and popular ideas of femininity. In turn, the beauty industry reproduces impossible ideals, pressuring women to perfect an ever-increasing amount of their bodies. The rise of the female or queer gaze has not resulted in the same social scrutiny of men’s bodies. Accordingly, fashion has become labelled as an essentially feminine pursuit. The fashion theorist Jennifer Craik went as far to say that the history of men’s fashion can be understood as a “set of denials”.

This visual essay appropriates the aesthetic of Marxist art historian John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), which constructs an image driven argument which is radically open and reader centered. Our visual essay brings the current COVID-19 ‘lockdown’ into alignment with similar historical ‘lockdowns’ in a dialectical image of disciplinary society and disciplinary techniques. Foucault (1977) recognised in the plague village a vision of a perfectly ordered society where each individual is monitored, isolated, self-regulating, and fixed in their proper place. Following Foucault, Deleuze (1992) argued that these disciplinary societies had mutated into anarchic and decentered ‘societies of control’. Yuk Hui (2015) has recently demonstrated the hyper-acceleration of this process following the introduction of new media technologies and new forms of disciplinary ‘modulation’. Our visual essay seeks to map these mutations visually and textually, bringing the authors above into dialogue with found images from the digital commons.

This chapter gives an overview of the major approaches to the question "What is a Work of Art?" within aesthetic theory. It includes a discussion of the representational theory of art, formalism, expression, institutional theories of art, and the aesthetic attitude.

The 15th ELIA Biennial Conference, Rotterdam, brought into question the relation of art, education, and urbanism around the theme of resilience. We contend that such questions are inescapably political, returning in the final analysis to the current neo-liberal conjuncture. The paper below critically reflects our contribution to the conference, which took the form of an anarchic workshop or anti-paper. The paper also briefly outlines the contexts and politics of this anarcho-pedagogic intervention, before reading the work produced by delegates attending our session as critic-creative commentaries on the current socio-political conditions of arts education. This paper and the workshop intervention to which it relates both commit to making visible the voice of conference participants rather than our own, thus inverting hegemonic institutional power models. We forward this model of non-hierarchical art education as a form of politics, which we contend could be the foundation of a resilient, 21st-century art school.

1968 is now popularly regarded as the year of revolutions, having witnessed the civil rights movement, anti-vietnam protests, and a variety of political rebellions against the twin tyrannies of Capital and Stalinism. The student movement was at the centre of these struggles and, within the student movement itself, the radicality was often generated within the art school. Fifty years later, this paper refects on the radical history of the art school by focussing on two instances of its politicisation; the occupations of L’École des beaux-arts, Paris, and Hornsey School of Art, London in ‘68. Not only were these two occupations the catalyst for an impressive output of revolutionary graphic agitprop, now the visual metonymy of ‘68, but they were also the site of dissensual social organisation where proposals for the reform of art education were forwarded. Another soixante-huitard, Jacques Rancière (2010), has utilised the concept of ‘the police’ to refer to the ‘Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses’ (Althusser 1970) which maintain hegemony by stifing those marginalised groups who would otherwise threaten the status quo. In the contemporary university, where the art school was always already alienated, this police order now contains the ideology of austerity, the culture of managerialism, and abstract quantifying metrics like the REF, TEF, and NSS. This paper looks back to the revolutionary demands of the art school in ‘68, such as the manifestos of the Staf and Students of Hornsey College of Art (1968), to propose a future for art education beyond austerity and the police order.

‘Digital fashion’ is a catch-all term signifying an increasingly diverse range of technologically innovative practices within fashion design, garment technology, and fashion marketing. The field encompasses everything from the customisable clothing worn by user avatars within gaming subcultures to collectable digital versions of luxury couture. Digital fashion blurs the boundaries between the real and the virtual, via the use of increasingly sophisticated augmented reality [AR], virtual reality [VR], and extended reality [XR] technology. The term also refers to new forms of fashion consumption and usership within the latest iteration of the internet, commonly known as Web3. Much, but certainly not all, digital fashion is minted on the blockchain and traded as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Web3 is the latest iteration of the internet, built upon the cryptocurrency blockchain, which aspires to be decentralised from corporate or state control. Similarly, digital fashion enthusiasts advocate for a decentralised fashion industry, where creatives no longer depend on the ‘big four’ Western fashion capitals. In this vein, the Dutch digital fashion collective The Fabricant (discussed below), who self-identify as a ‘digital atelier’, promise to help ‘build a new fashion industry where everybody participates and profits’. Building from this, digital fashion has also become a speculative field of fashion futures, whose questions transcend those normally raised by commercial design. Yet, for all its radical, decentralising spirit, digital fashion is also a lucrative corporate space, dominated by predatory multinational brands eagerly seeking new markets to monopolise. Currently, digital fashion is one of the fastest growth areas within the creative industries, projected to be worth $4.8bn globally by 2031. There are unprecedented opportunities for new startups to become rapidly successful. Almost on a monthly basis, a new software application, or multi-million-dollar technology, rationalises, accelerates, challenges, or redefines the established practices of the fashion industry. A specialist think tank called The Institute of Digital Fashion was established in 2020. Based in Belgium, The Digital Fashion Group have already launched their own online academy and are developing partnerships with universities to explore future models of digital fashion education. The most heralded success story in digital fashion is the digital footwear company RTFKT [pronounced ‘artefact’]. The company was purchased by Nike, within two years of startup, for an undisclosed sum rumoured to exceed $1bn. The success of RTFKT and The Fabricant has inspired many copycat projects and many predatory investors. The digital fashion sector currently resembles the silicon valley boom of the 1970s and 80s. Indeed, the success of the digital fashion sector is partially built upon the NFT boom of 2021, where .jpegs made digital artists like Beeple sold for millions of dollars. Increasingly, digital fashion is where the bright young things of fashion design join forces with luxury brands, venture capitalists, cryptocurrency experts, coders, and occasionally cyber-theorists, in a melange which includes techno-utopianism, financial speculation, and conspicuous consumption in equal measure.

Slow Fashion is a movement which has emerged within the fashion industry, mainly during the last decade. It can be understood as a response to, and opposition to, Fast Fashion. In particular, slow fashion seeks to mitigate the harmful social, political, and environmental effects of the fast fashion industry. Furthermore, slow fashion forwards an ethical code for both sustainable design and conscious consumerism.

Scenes of the history of conflict within the university, and also the university’s conflictual history and present, shape this chapter. Short textual essays are combined with original composite images made by combining artists’ representations of the university with conflict photography taken by members of the University and College Union, the main trade union of British university workers, during recent demonstrations. The essays touch on critical university studies from Kant to Derrida to Readings, via discussions of university protests such as the Harvard Butter Rebellion, May ‘68 in Paris and Rhodes Must Fall.

REVIEW ESSAY Is it Simple to Be a Marxist in Pedagogy? The gold and the dross: Althusser for educators, by David Backer, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2019, 82 pp.,€45.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-90-04-39468-1

By introducing readers to the educational turn in contemporary art, this chapter shows how contemporary artworks and exhibitions can offer educational experiences in themselves. Furthermore, that such artworks constitute a radically expanded or situated form of art teaching. The author argues that educational turn art issues an important challenge to conventional methods of education which are still rooted in the classroom. The first section of this chapter surveys the art of the educational turn, demonstrating its pedagogic effects and innovations. The second section of this chapter draws on some of the lessons of these artworks, alongside some of the ideas from critical pedagogy (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 1996 [1970]; Rancière, 1991, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2010) which complement them. In conclusion, the author attempts to synthesize both into the outlines of a pedagogy of the pedagogical turn, based on principles of humanism, institutional critique, and democracy.

This paper reflects on a recent participatory installation by the artists’ collective @.ac, entitled Messy Democracy, as a case study to raise questions concerning the ‘distribution of the sensible’ within the neoliberal art school. The project set up a quasi-autonomous artists’ space within Hanover Project gallery 9 April–3 May, 2018 at University of Central Lancashire, Preston. This exhibition functioned as a space of collective pedagogy, co-labour and ‘dissensus’ situated in relation to the wider operation of the department of Fine Art. It also sought to operate as a critical alternative to contemporary models of the art school, rooted in notions of usefulness and romantic self-realisation, but re-structured in the service of ‘commodification’ and ‘financialisation’ in wake of the Browne Report (2010). Most importantly, Messy Democracy represented a ‘theatocractic’ ‘undercommons’ for alternate and counter-hegemonic subjectivities to emerge. However, hierarchical logics, resulting from the hegemonic ‘distribution of the sensible’ stubbornly persisted even within this nascent pedagogic democracy.

Review of: Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art and Design Education, Lee Campbell (2020) (ed.)

The following essay proceeds through twenty-one visual and textual ‘scenes’ from the complex history of the art school, as a contribution to debates about its political character. The title is taken from Jacques Rancière’s (2013) Aisthesis. This is Rancière’s most sustained exposition of the ‘aesthetic regime of art’. His strategy in this book is to juxtapose ‘the event’ of an artwork against ‘the interpretive network which gives it meaning’ (2013, ix). He is specifically interested in the transition between different ‘regimes of art’. The scenes in this article map the transition from what Rancière calls the ‘representative regime’ to the ‘aesthetic regime’ on to the historical, pedagogical, ideological, and political evolution of the modern art school. These scenes roughly cover the period from the formation of the Royal Academy in 1768 to the art school protests in 1968. They also include references to the nineteenth-century UK Schools of Design, Socialist Realism, Greenbergian Modernism, Althusserian ideology critique, and the Bauhaus. This essay is a sketch leading toward a longer, non-linear, counter-history of the art school.

Review of: Avant-Garde As Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930, Anna Bokov (2020)

AIM • To create a self-sustaining creative fashion ecosystem in the North of England as a contribution to cultural sustainability OBJECTIVES • To produce outputs for FABRICATE: Leeds Beckett's Fashion and Architecture research cluster • To develop a Graduate Fashion North event to rival London’s Graduate Fashion Week • To facilitate collaboration and creative knowledge exchange between leading fashion schools in Northern England • To prevent the ‘creative drain’ of talent to London • To celebrate the unique fashion cultures of Northern England.

This timely and compelling volume furthers understandings of contemporary art education in international contexts and the position of alternative art colleges in relation to the neoliberal academy and arts economy. Defining the concept of ‘cooperative education’ and articulating its centrality and relevance to the so-called ‘alternative’ or ‘autonomous’ art schools it examines, the book presents innovative explorations of its central topics such as art educator identities, the non-profitization of arts studios, and the Anthropocene, whilst drawing these into relation with important contemporary political and academic concerns such as decolonisation, feminism, and neoliberalism. Chapters showcase a range of international viewpoints, dialogues, and empirical research contributions from notable scholars, renowned artists and experienced educators. This book will be of use to scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in education policy and politics, arts education, and higher education. Members of professional bodies such as art historians, critics and curators may also find the volume of interest.

The article contextualises the emergence of the Feral Art School, established in Hull in 2018 by artist-educators following the winding down of Hull School of Art and Design. This alternative art school is the most recent of many established in the UK since the government’s Independent Review of Higher Education Funding & Student Finance or Browne Review. This article argues that the processes of ‘economisation’ enacted by this review have severely threatened the health of arts education in the UK, forcing the closure of provision and increasing barriers to higher education arts education for the disadvantaged. This article uses the example of Feral Art School to demonstrate how provincial art schools might re-emerge in new, counter-hegemonic forms. The Feral Art School is run as a Community Interest Company (CIC) with cooperative values. We argue that these values extend to the philosophy of education underpinning all of Feral’s activities.