File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1996/96-11-30.184, message 22


Date: Sat, 09 Nov 1996 12:50:01 -0500
From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com>
Subject: Aesthetic Ideology 2


   Financial Times, November 9, 1996, p. XIX.


   Designs on the RCA

   Antony Thorncroft talks to the new Rector of the college,
   Christopher Frayling

      RCA knows that the closest possible links with business
      are the key to its future. "It is a question of how to
      get into bed with industry, not whether."


   It is rare these days for an insider to get the job of
   heading one of the nation's great cultural institutions.
   But the Royal College of Art, the UK's paramount centre for
   art and design, this summer looked to its own, and
   appointed its Pro-Rector Professor Christopher Frayling, to
   take over as Rector from Anthony Jones, who returned to the
   US after a brief spot at the helm.

   Jones had the task of calming the RCA's nerve after the
   battering it received from his revolutionary predecessor,
   Sir Jocelyn Stevens. Now it looks as if there will be a
   return to nonstop action from Frayling, a cultural guru
   whose life stretches seamlessly between the worlds of
   television, publishing and academia.

   The 80-odd RCA staff are being forced to confront the
   future. "We are a pragmatic place, not good at planning,"
   says Frayling. "I've set up committees which within the
   next year must decide on things to do -- or not do." If
   these committees plump for action the RCA will soon become
   a very different organisation.

   Perhaps Frayling's most dramatic idea is to move the RCA's
   fine art students, about 150 of the total intake of 800,
   out of the Kensington HQ and into their own premises,
   ideally on Bankside alongside the new Tate Gallery of
   Modern Art. The sculpture students were decanted to
   Battersea in the 1980s and seem to thrive in exile.

   Frayling believes, with airy confidence, that the L10m cost
   of the project will be met by a grateful sponsor, anxious
   to lend its name to an institution which has spawned many
   of the great British artists of the 20th century, from
   Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore to Gavin Turk via David
   Hockney.

   Frayling knows the drawback the move will deprive the
   designers in the RCA from immediate contact with artists -- 
   but the students may well prefer the big open spaces of
   some disused factory site down by the river. Frayling also
   has a committee working on another possible change --
   whether the photography students might not be happier
   switching out of the fine art department and into a
   communications, graphics, even advertising led,
   environment.

   The design role of the RCA is close to Frayling's heart.
   "Seventy per cent of what we do here is design". It is one
   of the inconsistencies of history that a college set up in
   the 19th century to reinforce the UK's dominance in the
   industrial revolution with the most advanced design skills
   should be called the Royal College of Art. For some years
   now serious consideration has been given to changing the
   name to the Royal College of Design, and Frayling seems
   keen to continue to push the RCA in this direction.

   Another of his committees is examining the creation of a
   new media laboratory: "We are not good at new technology
   here". But the RCA knows that the closest possible links
   with business are the key to its future. "It is a question
   of how to get into bed with industry, not whether." For,
   despite its eminence, government funding of the RCA has
   been remorselessly cut.

   The hunt is on to build up business support, both in design
   commissions, and in scholarships to help fund students.
   Frayling admits that the quality of applicant to the RCA
   has fallen in recent years because many British students
   cannot find funding. They also arrive "broader, but less
   deep, so the first term is now remedial". As a result the
   proportion of overseas students accepted by the RCA has
   risen to 30 per cent. Frayling denies that the quality of
   the intake has been diluted but he is pushing hard for 100
   business-financed scholarships by the millennium to ensure
   that the RCA maintains standards.

   Frayling is moving fast because there is danger on the
   horizon the Dearing inquiry into higher education. Money-
   saving college mergers are all the rage, and the 40 art
   colleges that once peppered the land have now been
   rationalised down to just eight that remain autonomous. He
   is determined that the RCA -- "too small, too expensive,
   too specialised" -- should not suffer a shotgun marriage.

   Its best defence is its ability to show value for money and
   to service industry. It is the RCA that is pioneering
   Design Age, helping Marks & Spencer come up with fashions
   to tempt the rising numbers of older people, and Safeway on
   how to streamline supermarkets to suit the the ageing
   shopper. It is the RCA which is the world's leading
   training ground for car designers, with half the current
   student intake financed by Japanese and Korean car
   manufacturers. Chris Svensson, the designer of Ka, the
   latest model from Ford, went through the car design course,
   and Frayling is keen to raise the profile of designers of
   consumer products who trained at the RCA to at least the
   level of the fashion designers (Ossie Clark, Xandra Rhodes,
   Bill Gibb) who were students there.

   Frayling also wants to push the RCA towards more "blue
   skies" research. "We handle artistic developments and
   industrial developments but not social developments. " The
   social implication of design is a more nebulous concept but
   as companies accept their responsibilities towards the
   environment it is good timing for the RCA to get involved
   in such issues.

   "I want an RCA with attitude, with a stronger emphasis on
   the social implications of what we are doing." But while
   Frayling's committees wrestle with such thoughts he is
   offering at least one sop to traditional artists. It was
   the RCA in the 1980s which re-introduced, at the request of
   students, drawing classes to an art college. It is now
   considering offering a full-time course in drawing, a good
   example of the shock of the old.

   [End]






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