INTRODUCING: Let’s start this conversation at the point of ‘influence’ within the context of art education and go from there. What I find curious is your position as both an artist as well as one of the most influential art educators. In the length of your career you have worked with so many artists, some of who become your peers and some of whom you will continue to influence. I wasn’t a student of yours but I do feel like you have and continue to be a vital part of my education; I always enjoy the moments we get to sit down for these conversations.

Richard Wentworth: In education, there are lots of formulas for doing this and there are some very basic things that have very long ago been constructed. There is a thing called the working day, there is light and dark. We probably, very constructively, go on to change throughout the day, I never really know whether we all really agreed to be ‘as we are’ in the morning or is that a socially constructed condition?  In a working day there are all sorts of things to do with pace and stamina and focus and range, so causing the birth of things like the one-hour lecture, and other things that help build the structure of schools.

INTRODUCING: And this is the thing about art schools in particular, although they seem to come without a format there are actually formats in place i.e. The European and American formats vary so greatly and I am just curious its direction and if that has become a bit comfortable also whether you feel that it is either your role or that of the students to challenge or to inject some life into these constructions and ultimately contemporary art?

Richard Wentworth: I think it has become very habitual…

INTRODUCING: Yes, it just feels that everyone just knows how to be at art school now.

Richard Wentworth: Yes but then that could be compared to how we all know how to take coffee with one another, which is invented also. One model I have is a spatial model, if you accept that there is a certain kind of space in which humans can meet where there is the idea that there is something being made; we could go back to the Renaissance, a quarry, a long way, straight through the Greco Romans… there are places where people have assembled with many social programs, the way they have assembled for making things. There is this feeling that things are made; before electricity and before power, when power was actually a bit dumb, there is human power (which is not at all dumb) Renaissance power, none the less there is the power to get rid of the night and the power to drill a hole without feeling you gave any energy to it (other than economic energy) It is those gatherings of people to make a shape or change the shape of something or to paint a permanent picture so that you could go to things like frescos,  things that by and large we are not really doing anymore. Those things have very specific spaces in which they are made so the gap between the person and the material and the tools and the eye and the hand and the ability to raise and lower a brush or tap a tool to fulfill what are called wasting processes, those are quite social spaces, they are legible.

INTRODUCING: So do you think that art education has formed itself around these spaces?

Richard Wentworth: No, what I was going to say was that that then moves steadily into a Beaux Arts type of idea and if you look at archive pictures of the early 60s you will always see people standing around generically in space, relating to one another in space. There is a very well known picture of David Hockney and Derek Boshier, standing by their easels with their paintbrushes beneath their noses as if they were moustaches. In that photo they are doing something that causes a tension and the thing that always interested me about the picture is the that the space that they are in is framed by easel painting at quite a late period for that, this is 15-20 years after Pollock, so in turn the space they were in was a space designed for making a picture on an easel and those studios were populated with what we can call screens. Behind the picture is a person. At almost exactly the same time that I enter art school all these things disappear, there are always remnants but they become those things that are inoperable and that you are not terribly sure what to do with and these things can sit around as icons.

INTRODUCING: As the art world gets bigger and bigger and grows its inevitably it becomes an industry where people now have careers and artists are now making art to become professional artists, I am not stating so much that the legitimacy is lost, but that the audience of art or whatever we are cannot interact with it, unless of course you are directly involved in the machine yet it completely surrounds us and it is impossible to escape.

Richard Wentworth: The thing that you are describing is difficult, I don’t want to dispute it, what you are saying has a lot of anxiety about it and is accompanied with quite a lot of melancholy. The thing is, that within that huge world which you are describing, it becomes very important to pull out those few threads where that maybe isn’t the case, so those threads would be for example; particular curiosities, particular kinds of bitterness, the way that somebody just ‘is’, or particular kinds of connoisseurship. 

When you meet someone that you find particular, the interesting thing is that you try to pick some of it off, as that is part of the suspicious nature of humans. We ask; are they are fake? Is it bullshit? Is it a front? Are they just hanging around a scene… and these types of questions? I often think how interesting it is, that these people have met who couldn’t know that they would meet, and you have to eventually look back and consider that perhaps a school is just an agency.