IT COMES down to does everybody think this work works? Or do they think it and why? It's kind of scary," says Jaki Irvine, recalling the unique educational methods of Goldsmiths' College of Art in London, where the Irish artist now teaches. "After a while, if you want your work to do what you think you want it to do, you have to accept people saying well it's not doing it for me."
The language is simple enough, but the approach to art education it describes, the suggestion that artists might be encouraged to refine their language based on audience response, has had tremendous impact on contemporary art in Britain. It has also had a sizeable impact on Irvine's own career, helping the Dublin born video artist gain a position among the foremost of the younger artists working in Britain.
For the last few years Goldsmiths' has been developing a formidable reputation as the art school for those who want to take their careers seriously. It encouraged a generation of visual artists to see that there is far more to contemporary practice than making art. Then it helped them to take full advantage of this knowledge. This was, after all, the college from which Damien Hirst launched his career. While still a student there, Hirst curated the infamous Freeze, a show of work by other students that sold out so quickly that by the time Charles Saatchi came to visit there was nothing left to buy.
Irvine says that she was unaware of the culture of Gold smiths' when she applied to take her MA there, after studying at NCAD and spending time working with the new media artists' group, Blue Funk. "It's kind of ridiculous how I ended up going there. I really knew nothing about Goldsmiths'. . . it's ridiculous but it's true."
WHILE she suggests that "here in Dublin the whole notion of having a career in art is treated as a bit of joke" Goldsmiths' introduced her to an effective forcing frame for her practice. The most innovative component in the course is a programme of up to 14 tutorials a year. These tutorials are organised as private sessions in which the students may select anybody they would like to talk to, with the college arranging and financing the visit.
"You could choose people who you thought would help your practice on any level. Gallery owners, curators, other artists, anybody you think might be useful," says Irvine. "I think it is a very reasonable approach. It gets you beyond the idea that you are burrowing away in your studio, as if you're not showing, and you're not concerned where your work is going to be shown. As if you are not concerned with how your work is received and how it is put out there."
Just how elliptical the relationship of these visitors might be to any of the artists' practices, is evident from at least one of Irvine's invites the cartoonist Glen Baxter. "In fact, all said and done, I didn't invite anybody from any galleries at all."
Nevertheless, the Goldsmiths' connection undoubtedly helped Irvine attract attention along with other members of the "Brit Pop" art scene, even if her curt, "literary" films and videos have little obvious connection with the bombast of contemporary London Pop. Sin cc Irvine moved to Britain, she has increasingly been classified as a British artist, something of which she is aware without seeming too tormented. "I think pragmatic is the word you're looking for," she says when the interview touches on this subject.
Last year she showed at the Venice Biennale in an exhibition of Young British Artists, while at the same time her video installation, Margaret Again, received a nomination for the IMMA Glen Dimplex Award for work by an Irish artist. To Irvine, the apparent inconsistency is one with which she can live.
"I did point out to people that I was Irish, even though it's bloody obvious I'm Irish," Irvine says. "The reply was basically well, yes you're Irish, but where have you just done you're MA? Where are you living? Why shouldn't you be shown as part of what is now going on in Britain? That's one of the contradictions about living away. I don't fall into the category of banging my Irish drum. I think it's fairly typical of British culture to assimilate and accumulate what arrives as its own when it suits it, and dismiss it when it doesn't. That's part and parcel of living in Britain and to refuse to show in those types of big shows would be just silly. You might as well go home."
