Welcome and Session 1

After a welcome from Pat Christie, ARLIS chair, Roger Wilson will be giving the keynote speech:

Standing in the shadows - the artist and the academy within living memory.

Abstract:
In the forty years since the first graduates of Art and Design emerged from art schools those of us remaining in ‘the system’ have been party to a professional transformation requiring the development of new competencies and personal attributes. Over the 50 years since the first Coldstream report launched the acceptance of our subjects as fully equivalent to any other academic discipline we have sought to reconcile public and academic responsibility with a profound sense of loyalty to our history and pedagogy. This history reveals an attachment to the notion that the practice of art, beyond the walls of the academy, is a highly desirable influence. That influence, though, is manifest not so much in terms of professional standards as in the case of, say, architecture or medicine, but as a pull on the collective consciousness and our behavioural traits. We attend as much to the work of art as to the works of art.
I will survey the artistic, cultural and political themes that are woven into the last 50 years of art education and that happens to cover the period from the moment that I first entered art school until the present day.