Redmond Entwistle Walk-Through
[original score by Chris McIntyre]
Fri 11 May to Sun 17 June, 2012
Open: Wednesday-Sunday 12-6pm

CUBITT
Gallery and Studios
8 Angel Mews
London N1 9HH

Cubitt Gallery presents Walk-Through, a new film by British artist Redmond Entwistle set in the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles. The film explores the site, design and philosophy of CalArts as a starting point for posing wider questions about contemporary pedagogical models and their symbiotic relationship to new forms of social, political and economic exchange that have emerged since the 1970s.

Walk-Through is devised as a tour of the CalArts campus, which moves back and forth through the institution’s history, analysing the location, design and function of the building, as well as its life in media reproductions and art history. The studied voiceover articulates the rhetoric of CalArt’s founding mission which, when read through the current moment, pinpoints an early form of cultural capital embedded within the pedagogical institution.

Slowly the tour starts to shift as we see students gather in a classroom to attend a fictional recreation of influential artist and teacher Michael Asher’s ‘Post-Studio’ class. Taking the form of critical group discussions around students’ work, the Post-Studio class pushed CalArt’s mission to ‘haul the teacher from the podium’ and activate the student in the learning process, an approach, which has subsequently become one of the primary models of teaching in art schools today, and emphasises ‘speech’ as an artistic skill.

The forensic-like atmosphere of the staged classroom discussion, which mirrors the intensity of Asher's classes that often extended late into the night, shifts the film into a space of science fiction and allegory. Some students can speak while others can’t, as whispered lines are fed to the principal actors from those at the back of the class. These first person recollections, taken from former students, are increasingly interrupted by the reading out of bureaucratic information, detailing the literal financial and infrastructural underpinning of the institution as if the students have become the mouthpiece for the institution’s memory, also hinting at the institutional critique in Asher’s own work. As the discussion progresses we begin to understand that what is being staged is an exercise in assessing the parameters of the institution’s legitimacy and the legitimacy of the class as a space within which to speak, as well as individual speech itself as a principal tool of democracy.

Borrowing formal and atmospheric motifs from 1970s giallo films by directors such as Mario Bava and Dario Argento, Walk-Through re-imagines CalArts as a site of potential intrigue, subtly calling into the question the artistic and democratic tenets embedded in the school's founding ideology, which were regularly challenged by the critical practices of faculty members such as Asher. Through a style and form that shifts from didacticism to fiction the film expresses some of the complexity of the changing status of the body, memory and language in current educational and political formations, especially at a time when government cuts threaten the viability of arts education, and the marketisation of higher education is taking place worldwide. 

Walk-Through is co-commissioned by Tramway for Glasgow International Festival 2012, International Project Space, Birmingham and Cubitt Gallery, London

More information on Walk-Through at CUBITT