Martin McQuillan, Head of the University of Leeds School for Fine Art, History of Art
and Cultural Studies, and IAPL 2003 Conference Coordinator

The Leeds name is most often associated with the intellectual developments which took place under the head-ship of T. J. Clark in the late seventies and early eighties, in which a politically and theoretically engaged social history of art challenged the hegemonic model of connoisseurial art history then prevalent in the academy. This work took place alongside the evolution of new formations in art practice, which in contrast to the then received wisdom recognised that art practice took place in history and in the presence of theory. That this view is now the dominant mode of art practice and art history in British universities is testament to the impact and dissemination of the Leeds legacy. The names of our current professoriat, Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton, are synonymous with the history of art history in the United Kingdom. The BA in Fine Art at the University of Leeds is still the only course of its kind in the country to offer a 4-year degree, split equally between art practice and a theorised history of art. It is frequently ranked as the UK’s number one degree in art and design in university league tables.

In the nineties, under the head-ship of Adrian Rifkin, the School built upon its position as a space for avant-garde art history and theory-practice to open the study of the visual onto a wider set of theoretical developments taking shape around the inter-disciplinary inquiry into questions of culture. Since this time the Centre for Cultural Studies within the School has made a profound contribution to the development of these debates. Cultural Studies, as practised by the Leeds School, turns the axis of Cultural Studies away from a too-easy and exclusive attention to the popular, orienting its inquiry along a double braid of cultural history and cultural theory. The former seeks to understand culture as a product of Modernity in its long history, while the latter provides a rigorous engagement with the contemporary theoretical and philosophical discourse around the conceptualisation of culture. The MA in Cultural Studies (directed by Dr Barbara Engh) is recognised as one of the most significant
degrees of its kind in the world, while the BA Cultural Studies (directed by Dr Eric Prenowitz) is rapidly emerging as an exciting space for pedagogy in this field. The unique set of intellectual relations which constitute the School was recognised as playing an important role in the development of visual and cultural studies in 2001 with the award by the Arts and Humanities Research Board of the largest grant ever awarded to a single School in the humanities in the United Kingdom to found the AHRB Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and History. The School is also home to a graduate programme in Sculpture Studies taught in conjunction with the Henry Moore Foundation, and the fastest growing Museum studies graduate programme in Britain, housed in our Centre for Architecture and Material Culture.The School’s title then names a complex problematic.

Do the three component parts of the School identify the process of a Hegelian dialectic or do they position themselves in accordance with a Kantian logic of Critique? The possible answers to this question are performed on a daily basis by the interactions within the School and by its ongoing research endeavours. In this respect, the visit of the IAPL affords us the opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of the contribution made by Leeds to the development of theory-practice and the radicalisation of its component disciplines. It also provides us with the exciting opportunity of continuing to address the on-going relevance of the work undertaken at Leeds by engaging with others on the frontiers of thought. Recently the research orientation of the School has begun to think about the ways in which the sort of philosophical engagement demanded by the practice of Cultural Studies at Leeds could be framed to further develop our understanding of art practice and its histories.

A key element to understanding the historical status of any art practice must be an appreciation of the historical genealogy of art itself. The art that arrives today in Leeds, ‘Fine Art’ no less, has a history. The record of this history is the aesthetic tradition of Western philosophy, which has over-laid and over-determined the meaning of ‘art’. It is not a question of holding philosophy accountable to art because the study of aesthetics demonstrates that art itself is a philosophical concept. Art, then, is the product of writing (the written history of aesthetics). The business of writing aesthetics is not the work of creating the idea of art. Nor is it the case, as Barnett Newman once observed, that aesthetics is to the artist as ornithology is to the bird. Art practice equally writes, re-writes, and over-writes the idea of art. Theory-practice both makes art and writes about art; it also writes about the way art has been written about. In this way, practice returns the gesture of writing to aesthetics, writing aesthetics, righting aesthetics, rite-ing aesthetics. The curious relation between practice, theory, and history and the gaps between them has always been the preoccupation of the interstitial disciplines of the School. What is of interest here is the relation itself, which as a relation is nothing of substance, not a work, but a relation between work (plural). Thus, ‘theory-practice’, cannot be an organisation of contents or of presences, which is to say it cannot be, it cannot present itself as a content, in some present. It can only be the name given to an experience of relation to and with others.

Every artist, every writer, every reader has this experience, but experience here does not present or manifest itself to us as such. To quote Peggy Kamuf in another context, ‘It is not a manifest appearance. This is the experience of experience, everyone’s
experience of a certain absence of appearance or manifestation’. If this experience were ever to manifest itself in such a way as to be apparent, it would be time to give up the practice of art and time to stop writing aesthetics. Thankfully, the excessive nature of this set of relations continues to defy our explanations while leading us in ever more compelling and complex directions of thought. Notably in the direction of the fine art of writing and in particular to writing aesthetics.