Yesterday, I gave an illustrated lecture to seventy of the lovely BA Fine Art Level 5 students at Margaret St, home to the School of Art at Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University. The session forms part of their Art, Space and Audience module and each student is working on a review of their own to be assessed. They have to review a given exhibition which includes David Tremlett at Ikon and Exposed: The Body in Art from Dürer to Freud.
The talk explored ideas of critical writing, art writing and exhibition reviews in contemporary contexts, looking at the following:
– value, function and purpose of the review
– judgment and subjectivity
– ideas around authorship and voice
– narrative, structure and language
– timeliness in terms of history, archive and deadlines
– how reviews might connect to the visual
Many thanks to artist, curator and academic Cathy Wade for inviting me to speak. I loved my first taste of art school lecturing!
Anneka French 