At Goldsmiths nothing ever went unnoticed during crits. If you had put your work on one of the studio desks because you hadn’t had the time to build a plinth then people would talk about the table. If you had wedged your laptop behind the tv screen and a wire was dangling from it, people would talk about the wire. (They would also very much discuss why you decided to show your work on a tv instead of the overhead projector.) And you should never put tape down on the floor, that was a guaranteed death sentenced.
I do not deny that these discussions were exercises in pretentiousness of the highest order, but they do highlight one very important aspect of all information – context. Ever since Duchamp and his urinal stunt a lot of art has to be interpreted in a web of context in order for it to a certain extend ‘work’. The move from the men’s toilets to the gallery was a choice and needed to be recognised. This had the knock on effect that now everything has to be recognised.
But here is something I would like people to borrow from Goldsmiths crits. For art students it becomes a competition to see who can decipher the web of context best. This is incredibly annoying if you just want to show the object you have been working on, but it also does highlight the importance of context and the need for it to be recognised. This approach could be useful when working with oral histories. The amount of meta data is huge and it is essential to recognise it. However there is an additional view that I would like oral historians to borrow from the art students and that is the focus on materiality. How things are recorded. The quality of the tape. Whether it is accessible. All these factor into the materiality of the oral history. To view the oral history within its status as an object could deliver some much needed relief to oral historians. You don’t need to have access to a certain interview recording because that fact that the interviewee does not allow access already tells you enough. The crackerly noise on the tape or the chore of having to find the right machine to play the oral history is all part of the oral history. It’s the studio desk. Sometimes it is annoying and you just want to look at the art but sometimes it’s necessary to consider the desk and the wide web of context.