The exhibition comprises paper documentation and some examples of the work they’ve been making so far, in very straightforward museum-style cases and using plinths and mannequins. Not many people came and so there was space to spend time alone with the work, particularly in the ‘tights cubicle’, which was poorly signposted and difficult to find. The project is much the same: private, and understated, and with some pieces too opaque to really understand.

The artists are looking at the clothes we wear and the ‘clothes’ we don’t: textile constructions that we wouldn’t call clothes because for one reason or another they don’t fit around the normal parts of our bodies. Garments for hands that you couldn’t call gloves because they only cover your palms; knee-warmers; jewellery for foreheads; a kind of skirt for your neck, that straps tightly around your chin to keep you warm on cold days. Then there are the so-called ‘accoutrements’: functional objects made from wire and plastic to help you put on, take off or store the garments. The accoutrements were all in a display case, but there was a demonstration in the early part of the evening.

The show presents as modest and practical, and I’d like to take it at face value. But the space it’s in is an art gallery, and I wonder whether a community centre would have been better, or a stand in a trade fair, or on a smaller scale, a tabletop at a church hall bring-and-buy sale. The effect of the art gallery context is something I’ve discussed before, and here it’s at its most vocal, in my view almost wholly obstructing the work. The gallery context here relegates the physical artifacts to the status of products or museum relics, while foregrounding the activity of the producers and their relationship with the works we’re seeing. “We’re doing something special here”, it says, “and we want you to consider it in a special way”. If I’d found the objects on my own in some unexpected situation it would have been a very special thing indeed. But here, inside the gallery-frame, it feels like all the work has been done for me, and what’s left is just a little bit patronizing.

The artists are reticent about their intentions, but they all have varied, experimental practices outside of this collaborative project, ranging from performance to drawing to writing to video, and once again, I wish I didn’t know that. It throws the delight of the demi-socks and mono-sleeves into sturdy irony, and makes their gestures clumsy, obvious and uncomfortably worldly.

This exhibition is imaginary.

“We are meant to think not about cracks in the floor, but about inequality and iniquity. Shibboleth risks being regarded as a banal cliché: the unblemished surfaces of the liberal art gallery riven by the ideological fissures opening up beneath. The real problem for Salcedo has been to work in the knowledge that liberal institutions absorb the shocks artists inflict by assimilation, and that Shibboleth will most likely be regarded as entertainment. That is art’s fate, and our loss.”

Here’s a handful…

• Crayon: I dunno. The fall of art into entertainment often seems to be presented as if it works by force of gravity. Is it so one-way? I would trust some viewers at least to be able to sustain two ideas at once and to recognize that there can be sturdy, searching ambivalence that is not equivocation.
• Daddysgonecrazy: Why shouldn’t art be entertaining? It can be whatever the artist wants it to be, surely? I would admit that to be purely entertaining would make a piece of art one-dimensional perhaps, but to deny entertainment in art is to create a closed, inward-looking, and ultimately sterile art.
  
• ShatterFace: ‘Shibboleth’ is right. The work is designed to seperate those ‘in the know’ from the plebs. ”We are meant to think not about cracks in the floor, but about inequality and iniquity.” Only if that’s what you have been tought to think. Elsewhere I see inequality and inequity in the sweaty arse-cracks of the guys fixing the drains outside my office.
• Dodle: i have several cracks in the concrete in my back garden, which symbolises the fact i’m a lazy sod. utter bollocks.
• RevMoola: It’s a shame that a work cannot be allowed to speak for itself, and that the audience has to be led down a particular path of interpretation by hordes of critical ushers. Tate et al have missed the opportunity to see what the great unwashed would have made of it first before issuing forth their interpretive diktats.
• rs1001: This is what the artist says about her work: “It represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. “It is the experience of a Third World person coming into the heart of Europe. For example, the space which illegal immigrants occupy is a negative space. And so this piece is a negative space.” I am all for artists aiming high, but I just cannot appreciate this work in the way the artist wants me to. I cannot connect the physical work with the things it purports to be about, except at the level of the most throw-away metaphor. Is the idea that we look at the crack, and simultaneously get a new perspective on the experiences of immigrants? I can’t make this jump. This doesn’t mean I don’t like Shibboleth well enough as a diverting curiosity. But like so much conceptual modern art, it just doesn’t seem to have nearly enough concept in it. Is this me being overly literal and limited or are there people on the thread who appreciate Shibboleth as a political expression, not just a three-minute amusement?

… and so on, page after page. I won’t add any comment of my own until I’ve seen the work. I might add though – Arts Council England started their own Arts Debate months ago and despite their very best efforts, they have yet to inspire such a lengthy and honest engagement with the starter-questions they offer as online discussion topics. ACE is trying to work out “how people value the arts”, and I hope in their quest they’re scouring public message boards like this one as well as their own.

Cumberland’s paintings look good. The best ones are bright green and brave, with brushwork that’s succulent and brash. And they’re of bottles of Champagne. One is of a bottle of Champagne with a cartoon foot in it. It looks like Cumberland’s been trying things out, one after the other, and I like the feeling that none of them quite did the trick so he had to keep starting new ones. But repeated over and over again with a stencilled outline, the image becomes more of a motif or a mantra than a statement of its own, and the statement you’re left with is the bald fact of repetition: no longer ‘here is this’, but ‘this is here many times over’. And so for all the vocal strength of Cumberland’s works, they stay immensely quiet.

Quietness is abundant in Peter Dreher’s project Tag um Tag ist guter Tag (Day by Day is a Good Day), an ongoing series of over four thousand near-identical paintings of the same glass in the same place. An earnest, quotidian study, at once exhaustive and hopelessly incomplete. Only a couple of dozen fitted onto the walls at the Approach in the summer, where the scale of the project was amplified by the immense absence of almost all of it.

Reiteration comes up a lot in my own practice because I work with translation, and I’ve found there’s something about translated texts that makes them resist being read. The meaning resides somewhere other than in the artefact you have in front of you. Translations enact frustration – they’re just off the tip of your tongue, or floating an inch from the surface of the page – and they excite the impulse to go back to the original and compare the two.

And just as a translation can never shake its original, so a repeated image can never stand on its own without recourse to its brothers. The Dreher exhibition is a quiet exercise in resistance. Even as you minutely watch the details of one canvas something is tearing you away, to look at the next one, or to stand back and survey them all at once. The possibility of such recourse is thwarted not only by their number but by the fact that most of their number aren’t even in the country – they’re on show elsewhere, or stacked up in the artist’s studio. The whole work is inaccessible; the work is wholly inaccessible; and this is all we can get at: it is the whole work.

So what are we left with, when our only access to the work is truncated, or whispered, or under erasure? We fall through. As each separate utterance of the physical thing is quietened we’re left with the space in between the words: the matrix-stuff that joins them. Cumberland’s Congratulations anthropomorphises the floating space in between, with some frustrated artist-persona springing to the fore, stuck making the same thing over and over again with a fervour that steals the limelight from the paintings themselves. But Dreher is private, and smooths himself out of his work. What he leaves behind is the cancellation of the project entirely; the pulse of insistent indecision; an anti-manifesto.

Tamarin Norwood

It begins “Art schools are plagued by those who see them as ‘the brand’ and driven by profits”. The complaint is that in the interests of keeping profits high, art schools have cut costs by dropping facilities, reducing staff numbers and increasing class sizes. What remains, it reads, “are businesses and the managers that run them”. Seek out AM and see what you think.

Tamarin Norwood

Saying my old college is cooler than Apple is a curious accolade. It comes from a Superbrands council representing “a diverse collection of perspectives and experiences, although they are mainly media personalities who influence opinion, e.g. DJ Trevor Nelson or VOGUE.COM editor Dolly Jones, as well as senior figures from marketing agencies across a wide range of disciplines – from advertising to PR”.

This bunch may be the cream of their professions but I’m not sure they’re the right people to be judging the quality of my education. But this is the point. They’re judging not what the university does but what it’s seen to do: what it stands for in peoples’ minds. Over the past six years Superbrands has whittled down their definition of ‘cool’ to six characteristics, which are: style, innovation, originality, authenticity, desirability and uniqueness. This, it seems, is what CSM means, irrespective of what actually happens in or outside its studios and lecture theatres.

Fair enough. I think Central Saint Martins is quite cool too (possibly something to do with Jarvis Cocker’s oh-so-ironic “she studied sculpture at St Martin’s College..”). But did that help me as a student? And does it do me any good as a graduate? I’m struggling to think of any benefit of the coolness factor that doesn’t just perpetuate the slippery commercialism of the art world, in which association with a big name does a good deal of the work for you.

I suppose there’s also the fact that universities are under pressure to attract funding and new students and research staff who can produce work capable of propagating the institution’s good name, and brand management goes a long way in terms of getting the right kind of business. But let’s not forget that brands aren’t cool by accident: there are teams of people hidden away whose job it is to create the brand that suits the product. If this is the case, why is it that art & design squares so neatly with ‘cool’? For a college that professes to set trends not lead them, cool sounds a bit too comfortable, and too boring to excite the best minds to join their ranks.

Tamarin Norwood