INTRODUCING: That is something that I often think about, schools (particularly art schools) can almost in turn become an agency and a brand. If we consider the different types of educations that you get from the different school. Art school is about placing yourself, deciding what direction you see your career going as an artist potentially starts at the point that you decide to attend X school over Y school.  We in turn become a product of our education.

Richard Wentworth: I am not sure that doesn’t start when you are quite young. I consider my children who are in their late 20s early 30s and I am amazed by their social skills, I am intrigued by the process in which they make friends which is sexual, social, psychological, economic, circumstantial, geographical… all of these things.

INTRODUCING: It is just about where you see yourself.

Richard Wentworth: Yes and I think that where you see yourself is very often the product of a huge number of places that you don’t see yourself. My wife did a lot of research on this matter, interviewing a lot of people in their early to mid 30s about how they chose the university that they went to. Every single decision was emotional. Not one person said that their choice was based off of the curriculum or the staff.

INTRODUCING: It goes without saying that when you decide to work with one person you are in turn deciding not to work with all the rest.

Richard Wentworth: Exactly, so there is this thing that is quite binary. What I would like to get back to is this notion that you are always in your historical time, you can only be born once of the people who bore you.  Still to this day whenever I am on Oxford Street I think ‘every single one of these people is the result of a fuck’ but then I need to remind myself that I am part of the problem. There is something very odd about the historical time that you are in, which you don’t choose but you then contribute to it more or less. You can’t know another time in any very direct way other than through reading literature or studying history, as you are in your historical moment it is constantly speaking back to you.

INTRODUCING: If we look at this art-world there is the gallery, the public institution, the studio, the museum, the artist run space, the platform, there is this that and the other. We have all these models and they run very cleanly and perfectly within their own set of parameters but that’s all they seem to be doing. Possibly it is time to move away from these boundaries and recreate arts arenas.  

Richard Wentworth: The things that you are describing are all invented. I did this show at the Chelsea space with all these galleries that don’t exist anymore, because I happen to remember them and I went round and got all the pictures with somebody at the Tate. We went to where Robert Frazer was, Nigel Greenwood where I first saw Gilbert and George, about forty places just photographing the buildings. Of course you were walking through a kind of prior social space, which is incremental.

In fact this morning I wrote a relatively open email to the students on the curating course at the RCA, inviting them to come to the sculpture department to watch how they ‘bend the space’, so that they could enjoy the physical dimension of changing a space for a show, I then went on to say ‘exhibition makers have a very good sense of this, whereas curators often see it as shop fitting’ I am aware that this is very lightly provocative, but then somebody of some standing who teaches on the course wrote me the most fucking furious email full of statements such as ‘my practice..’ and so on. This was a total sense of humor failure and I was pretty shocked by the response where I felt that I was very careful in my intention. So I wrote a very jokey email in response saying; I had seen Phyllida yesterday and that it was a really romantic thought because it had been forty years since I met her at my degree show where we sequentially had a shouting match. But the point I made was that happened in the building that was the incubus for Royal College Sculpture at that period. I then said it is very funny, because up the road, a woman who no one ever mentions had fingered a very derelict building in Kensington gardens and starting a gallery, at this moment this woman was inaugurating the Serpentine Gallery, so in the time that I have known Phyllida is the same amount of time that it has taken Sue Grayson to homestead the Serpentine through to HUO. What the Serpentine was in the 70s was a badge of honor that you would hope to get about a year after your degree show. At this time there was nowhere else for young people with some promise to show, and this is exactly the same time that I remember spending a day in the middle of St. Catharine’s Dock painting out (probably with brushes as I don’t think rollers were invented or widely used at that point) the space WHITE for Bridget Riley. That is clearly not where we are now.

Now we are in art school and we are left with this discussion about what if we just gave them all desk space? This is where we are now. An art school is a quasi parental space, where you go to get attention.

INTRODUCING: Yes and if you fight against the space then you shouldn’t be there. But I fear that more tension should exist, students have come to except these models and sit comfortably within them.

Richard Wentworth: Is it your feeling that that passivity is a mounting force?

INTRODUCING: I am not sure if I have any particular feeling about the particular way that art schools are working, I don’t think that I am informed enough about it. I have my own experiences but that is exactly what they are and they differ from that of another student of the same time and education as me. Ultimately, there were moments as an art student that I felt far too comfortable, and I often felt that I could coast and get away with everything. There should be the ability for students to say that I am going to work in the opposite direction of this facility although I do choose to be here and to be educated here, I don’t necessarily accept the particularities of the education that I am being provided. But I don’t know how that works and I don’t know it is possible or at all relevant, as an educator do you want and accept this type of challenge?

Richard Wentworth: I find myself in a very funny position because I don’t quite know how this happened to me. I am honored and slightly ashamed when you say I am at all an educator. People recognize a transaction in me; I am as frightened as the next person not to be a bore or to wag my finger. I think that one of the important conditions is to feel very insecure about what you know.

We'll stop here.  For now.