Goldsmiths: But is it Art? BBC Four

Goldsmiths has produced 20 Turner Prize winners. It produced Damien Hirst and the majority of the Brit Art pack that caused such a Nineties sensation. It has attracted some pretty impressive tutors to its fine art department – ground-breaking artists in their own right, in fact. As such, the school is considered to be something of a star in itself. So what’s its secret? This BBC Four two-parter aimed to find out - and, you’ve guessed it, in keeping with a certain jaunty documentary-making tradition, it gave the participants just enough rope to hang themselves.

If you tuned in last night, you may have come to this programme with quite a few prejudices already, one simply being that a lot of contemporary art is bullshit. Well, yes, that may be the case, but on the basis of this not particularly riveting slice of Goldsmiths life, following four students as they nervously prepare for their graduation show, the problem seemed to me to be quite the opposite: there simply wasn’t enough bullshit to go round - not to convince us, nor to convince the students themselves. For if there had just been a teeny-weeny bit of it, then we might have been saved such naked displays of floundering (not enough to make this toe-curling, fun entertainment, mind, but just enough to not so easily confirm some of those prejudices, perhaps). What’s more, we’d have thought that maybe, just maybe, it was us that was missing the point, not the students themselves – whatever that point happened to be.

There was, instead, no shortage of embarrassing, inarticulate floundering. Asked to explain what his conch shells with flickering strobes meant, Blue Curry (nice name, shame about the conch shells) suddenly came over all shy. “It’s a strange thing to try to explain what a strobing conch shell is saying,” he said (pity the poor critic then). Eventually – “God, I was hoping I was going to say something good just then” – he felt it necessary to read a pre-prepared mission statement, but even then neither he nor I were any the wiser.

Similarly, Ian Gonczarow, the lone painter in the line-up, huffed and puffed and mumbled and looked down at his shoes a lot. At points he looked like he just wanted his mum. He was feeling, he said, not entirely happy with his goose-stepping Chinese toy pandas.

But self-doubt is not necessarily a bad thing for an artist, and certainly not for a very young artist just starting out, and, in fact, Gonczarow’s paintings were probably the strongest in the work surveyed (though I’m being quite generous here – you couldn’t really have got a poorer selection).



It was difficult to extend any generosity to the deeply irritating “conceptual” artist Roisin Byrne. She didn’t exactly have much to say, either, although what little she did say was repeated with so much cocky assurance and self-belief that she ended up sounding quite demented. “Ideas are my commodity. Ideas are my product,” she intoned, unblinking, in her Irish lilt. Basically, these ideas consisted of her stealing things, swallowing them and then shitting them out so that she could “question ideas of ownership”. But this just raised a further question: wouldn’t just giving her own stuff away raise the same questions regarding notions of ownership that stealing things would? (No, silly, as she made quite clear in the programme, she was quite keen, actually, on making a living as an artist, ie selling stuff, and, hopefully, raking it in – you definitely got the impression that she wasn’t about to nobly impoverish herself.)

For her end of year show, Byrne went a bit further than stealing tiny bits of jewellery paste and shitting them out. She pinched a real, proper artwork – a nice rhodedendron bush (shame she wasn’t about to swallow it) -  by Turner Prize-winner (though not, regretfully - see comments - a Goldsmiths graduate) Simon Starling. Starling was not best pleased, but Byrne looked like the cat who had got the cream when he voiced his displeasure by email, thereby “completing” her artwork.

This left poor old Thomas Leahy, by far the oldest member of the class of 2009, and the one who, in fact, looked most like a fish out of water. Shooting paintball guns at camouflage canvases and displaying sets of police bullet-proof vests with the words Metropolitan Peace on them, he was criticised by his tutors as being “too literal”. Leahy felt that his problem was that he didn’t quite fit into the “Goldsmiths mould". To address this problem he produced two paint-splattered camouflage canvases which he dutifully entitled Elegy Light and Elegy Dark. Yeah, that sounded nicely conceptual, interesting and deep. Very Goldsmiths. But neither the tutors, nor us, nor even he was convinced in the end.

Finally, there was tutor David Mabb, who just came across as a muddled, soggy old Marxist. He was convinced that being an artist was one of the few jobs you could do where you weren’t “alienated from your labour”. After watching this, you knew that that was just pure bullshit.

• Goldsmiths: But is it Art? can be viewed on BBC iplayer. Part two is on 19 April.