Bonington Vitrines #32: When Attitudes Become Attitude
For the 32nd instalment of our Bonington Vitrines programme, we are delighted to present When Attitudes Become Attitude organised by Mark Dennis, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
In the wake of government reports, resignations and shifting ideas of what art could or should be, this presentation offers a picture of an academic discipline in crisis. During the 1970s Conceptual artists, to a varying extent, influenced the Fine Art teaching at ‘Trent Poly’ (Now Nottingham Trent University), often in tension with the management and more established models of art education. This influence offered models of artistic activity that challenged and mocked both art school values and the institution of the Polytechnic, plugging the students in to current art discourse, wider political and cultural agitation and a wider network of art students in other parts of the country.
This presentation is a display of administrative ephemera and memoranda, course projects, posters and student publications, detailing a microhistory of Nottingham Trent Polytechnic Fine Art Department. The specific archival material is aired to piece together different perspectives, to put them in conversation with a broader historical context, and to ask how they might speak to the current situation in art education.
About Mark Dennis
Mark Dennis is an artist, researcher and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Mark has researched various aspects of late 20th Century British Art, notably early Conceptual Art. He completed his PhD at Coventry University where he examined the influence of Art & Language on the Fine Art dept there and in art schools around England and Wales.
Mark’s thesis Strategic Anomalies: Art & Language in the Art School 1969-1979 can be read here.
Image: Masthead from ‘Issue’, a student run journal that ran in the late 1970s at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic.