The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978

Art schools are all the same now, but once upon a time NSCAD, CalArts, Black Mountain and the Bauhaus were different. The Last Art College is a chronological history of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design from 1968 to 1978, its radical years. What are its lessons for contemporary art schools? Can this book explain why art academies are becoming more conservative, why today’s visual artists crave respectability more than they ever did, and why our art schools are so anxious, for example, to create PhD programs in studio art?

The book does not cover Garry Neill Kennedy’s entire tenure as president of NSCAD from 1967 to 1990, so we don’t get to see in detail how NSCAD became absorbed into our uniform international system of higher education in the fine arts. Perhaps the book should have ended its story in 1987, when a strike by faculty ushered in a new era and an important conference on the College’s patron saint, Marcel Duchamp, happened.

The Last Art College might be, among other things, an artist’s book. Garry Neill Kennedy is clearly the editor, and yet he is listed as the sole author. He has not taken liberties with the truth (as far as I can tell) as one might expect an artist making an artist’s book might, and this is not hagiography, which Kennedy could also have orchestrated. Both positive and negative characterizations of the College and Kennedy are included.

NSCAD ran on a double track during its peak years, expanding its academic offerings and student numbers while welcoming teachers, students and visitors aboard without regard to academic credentials but with an eye to avant-garde credibility. The main lesson here, delivered between the lines to the attentive reader but already well known to anybody who ever attended NSCAD, is that most of the innovation happened after hours and not in day-to-day classes, and that most of the innovators—in addition to core NSCAD administrative and teaching staff such as Kennedy, Gerry Ferguson, David Askevold, Dennis Young, John Murchie and Charlotte Townsend-Gault—were freelance artists. Ferguson, a key Kennedy partner in NSCAD’s glory years, often told me that radical NSCAD was mostly extra-curricular activity, and Young, another important player, agrees. Aside from David Askevold’s projects class, which was indeed a radical classroom idea, the college’s painting, drawing, sculpture, art history and other areas hummed along in a traditional way. There is some evidence of this in Kennedy’s book, but it is elided, probably because discussion of day-to-day curriculum would be boring.

The Last Art College mentions almost every show and talk by every obscure and not-so-obscure NSCAD-visiting artist between 1968 and 1978. The book’s format follows early rule-based tropes of conceptual art with bibliographical zeal, the way Sol LeWitt gave instructions to assistants to make his drawings (of which The Last Art College includes hilariously subversive examples). The instruction for this book might have been: everybody gets at least a mention, be systematic and let the art fall where it may—even if it is not conceptual art. And so a picture emerges of 10 years at an art college during which every conceivable type of visual art appeared, not only by the likes of conceptualist Lawrence Weiner, but also by colour field artists such as Ken Lochhead, Realism by Jack Chambers, prairie Surrealism by Ivan Eyre and minimalist sculpture by Carole Condé.

Les Levine speculated that NSCAD may have been the best art school in North America, but we really don’t know what that means. Emmett Williams, also in the book, proposes that a successful art school produces many artists, but did NSCAD do that in its heroic years? NSCAD student Ian Murray remembers that half of his NSCAD class disappeared by the end of his first term: should that be counted a pedagogical success or an art school failure? Murray obviously thinks it a success but, of course, he survived and thrived, and others did not. NSCAD’s famous 1970 Halifax Conference was an organizational coup that gathered together art superstars in Halifax, but since the stars and the audience were connected by fuzzy video and bad audio and no substantial documentation exists, we must ask again: success or failure?

This book offers a fascinating peek into the petty doctrinal disputes of the era, for example, the fraternal contest between Fluxus and conceptual artists. During the Halifax-Vancouver exchange of 1972, the Haligonian conceptualists thought the Fluxus Vancouverites insufficiently rigorous, while the Vancouverites bemoaned the conceptualists’ lack of a sense of humour. Both conceptual and Fluxus artists made and did seemingly absurd things, but a canyon of conceptualist solemnity separated them. Invariably the Fluxus artists from Joseph Beuys to Emmett Williams to Robert Filliou come across in this book as more engaging and open and human than conceptualists such as Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner. Comparing Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s inspiring talk (as described by Peggy Gale) with, for example, conceptualist Alan Sondheim’s vacuous blathering might seem, at this distance, unfair, but Filliou’s concept of the Eternal Network seems so joyfully prophetic in its description of a network bigger than our Internet—and Sondheim seems so obviously to be a very bad philosopher—that Fluxus is made to look especially good.

Kennedy himself has been linked within the history of conceptual art to the idea of “administrative art.” Could he also be called a “bibliographical artist?” Notably, a book by Peter Trepanier published simultaneously with The Last Art College, entitled Garry Neill Kennedy: Printed Matter/Imprimés, 1971–2009, may be more literally a bibliographical effort, but, in conjunction with other retrospective publications, perhaps Kennedy is proffering a new way to flesh out a life, that is, by situating oneself and one’s art within a community such that the artist himself almost disappears, and (this is important) by creating beautifully designed documentation. Maybe The Last Art College is the first major socially- networked retrospective book about art. We should hope for an adjunct website that has participants and scholars wiki-out Kennedy and his era in endless detail. ❚

The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968–1978, ed. Garry Neill Kennedy, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012, 480 pp. $60.00.

Cliff Eyland is a Winnipeg artist who has a special interest in libraries.