Statement

A very warm welcome to you; we hope your interest in us can lead to a more productive engagement with the creative life. Clearly you have journeyed thus far because you have been drawn to this very possibility. But what is a creative life? Perhaps it might be described as a life dedicated to leaving the world more aware of itself than when we found it.

Art at its best functions like a mirror, allowing us to gain some insight into the complexities of the world around us; consequently our principal role as artists is to increase the quality of the collective awareness of where we are and of how we relate to each other.

We believe that each individual enrolling in our various courses and joining our community brings a unique set of insights, a narrative if you like, which is defined both by the particular cultural contexts that form each individual and by the various attributes that define personality.

This narrative is what distinguishes one view of the world from another. Each of the Department’s staff is dedicated to helping each student clarify and order the substance of that narrative and subsequently to begin to equip each individual with the necessary skills to manifest it effectively.

The key aspect of our role doesn’t consist in filling in the gaps between intention and manifestation with what we or others suggest might be the right phrase or the clever manoeuvre; what increasingly distinguishes us from other institutions is that rather than safely aggregating you to the endless queue that has attached itself to a broad mainstream language we are committed to helping you find your particular way of speaking, your way of telling the story; in other words we are here to help you identify and develop what might be termed your voice.

This voice as unique manifestation of self is neither simply coherent expressive technique nor singular narrative; rather it’s the embodied narrative, your story told through the means that are most relevant to your set of skills and aptitudes. Once identified it constitutes the cornerstone of an artist’s research and practice, characterising what the artist chooses to focus on and how this vision is described. In the end this is what artists do; through proposing an understanding of the world built upon their unique individual attributes and expressed in a voice other than reason, they explain the world to the rest of us.

In the book ‘Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature’ Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to the broad mainstream of cultural expression as the major language and each of the numberless individual voices that help shape it as minor literatures. But the truly influential minor literatures whose contribution have so significantly determined the major language currently manifesting contemporary thought forged their individual voices far away from the supposed centres of world culture. There are many examples: the Irish exile James Joyce lived in Trieste and Zurich for most of his adult life, at that time considered remote and alien, yet began the ‘Ulysses’ in Trieste and from the edge of Europe revolutionised twentieth-century English; Franz Kafka was a Czech Jew who spent the entirety of his brief life in Prague yet from there redefined modern German; Jorge Luis Borges generated his singular vision from a distant Buenos Aires and influenced contemporary Spanish literature more than any other writer of his generation.  

The potential consequences of simply enrolling in this course are therefore of great importance; there is a sensibility to shape and in order to do so significant sacrifices are asked of each incoming member of this learning community. The goal is to finally reach a space in which both a simple gratitude for one’s gifts and the sense of responsibility towards one’s fellow human beings dwell easily together, in the end manifesting as compelling contemporary art.

The world more than ever before needs artists, for we are the only ones able to engage with the world without prescriptive allegiances to political or economic agendas, but rather to the joy and the terror that is generated through the gradual discovery of self. The artist’s only agenda throughout life is to firstly locate and then express a coherently trained inner voice, directly contributing in this way to an understanding of the world’s complexities and contradictions.

The best possible way to give aspiring artists a sense of what attributes are required to achieve such coherence is to maximise their contact with the most successful role models. This requires us to construct systems that facilitate constant contact for our students with the dedicated professionals already on staff and with those we invite to participate in our visiting artist program from all around the globe.
 
A creative life in the 21st century is not necessarily restricted to contributing to the arts; beyond direct employment in the arts industries, which is nevertheless the fastest growing sector of the economy, managers and innovators everywhere are simply looking for individuals who are prepared to back themselves creatively in various roles and professions. You cannot go wrong if you stimulate and hone your creative skills!

Success in undergraduate studies can lead to an Honours year and perhaps eventually on to an MFA or a PhD. We would welcome this approach and enthusiastically support students through such a path. The range of creative and professional possibilities open to those choosing such a path is endless.

We look forward to welcoming you to this creative community, and wish you the very best on the commencement of your journey on the pathway of your choice.

Associate Professor Domenico de Clario
Head of Department