A RADICAL EDUCATION

Jessica Olivieri

I was 17 in 1999 when I declared to artist and lecturer Noelene Lucas, during the intake interview, that my desire to attend UWS was based on my assumption that it was not tied down by the weight of the sandstone histories carried by other art schools. I wanted to go to a contemporary art school. I didn’t really know what I was talking about, but it turns out I was right. UWS was a truly radical education, constantly reinventing itself in relation to current art practice and theory.

Most days of the week I would undertake the 2-hour train ride across western Sydney from Riverstone to Kingswood to sit in my studio in Z block – a huge warehouse at the end of a sprawling campus. Temporary walls divided the studio spaces in the middle and workshops dotted the permitter (welding, ceramics, photography, printmaking, video editing suites, etc). The lack of disciplinary boundaries (i.e. sculpture, painting, video etc), I later learned, was the first site of radicality. The concept of inter-disciplinarity was an emerging trend in academic thought and teaching at the time.

As Angelique Chettiparamb writes:

Interdisciplinary knowledge strengthens connections between disciplines and in that process it weakens the division of labour in disciplines, exposes gaps, stimulates cross fertilisation and creates new field of focus for knowledge inquiry.

Interdisciplinary thinking manifested in arts education as a resistance to a prescribed medium, form or discipline; instead relishing ideas and critical thinking. With a focus on problem solving we were encouraged to experiment with a variety of materials and across disciplinary boundaries to find the solution that spoke to the concept or problem.

The second site of radicality was that this art school was run by artists. Not just any artists but those presenting the big shows, in the big intuitions, nationally and internationally. Mikala Dwyer, David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, Terry Hayes, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Debra Porch, Peter Charuk and Julie Rrap were walking us through the ways they thought, made work and survived as artists.

The third site of radicality was the art school’s location in western Sydney. This decenteralised location spoke to the thinking coming out of places like the Asia Pacific, Africa and South America around the concept of the decentralised art world. A political move away from the white hegemony of the classic art centres – Europe and the US.

Western Sydney has the second largest population of First Nations Australians and is one of the most culturally diverse places in the world. As students, we were encouraged to face the world around us and draw from our experiences – we knew what the world looked like outside of the wealthy inner city. We found the space between social and contemporary art, and this meant our version of contemporary art looked different to that coming out of the College of Fine Arts (UNSW Art and Design), National Art School, and Sydney College of the Arts at University of Sydney.

Ironically, 12 years after its closure, the kind of work coming out of UWS, art that is unruly, political, socially reflexive or has ‘social impact’ has now gained mainstream traction. As those in the centre catch up to the idea that art can be socially relevant (as outlined in the Australia Council for the Arts’ recent Corporate Plan with a clear focus on social impact) we need artists with diverse experiences to be leading the conversation, artists who come from western Sydney as well as artists who identify with living with disability, who are part of the LGBITQ+ community and artists who have a broad and intersectional range of life experience. When an artist identifies with the ‘community’ they are working with or for or reflecting there is a different kind of relationship forged, one based on deep mutual respect and trust that comes from a shared understanding of the world, and as a result a different kind of story can be told. Rather than what Miwon Kwon describes in One Place After Another as “parachuting” into a place or community, without any connection and with little thought of the impact on people and the potential after effects of the project (on this, see Miwon Kwon’s One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, 2004).

The kind of program that UWS provided is now more than ever urgently required. As the newly appointed Artistic Director of long-standing western Sydney organisation Utp (formerly Urban Theatre Projects), it is my hope that through Utp’s relationship with Western Sydney University (and others) we can build a program to address this gap in the coming years, so that the current generation of artists, change-makers and critical thinkers coming out of western Sydney are supported to become our future leaders. I would not be here, in the position I now hold, had it not been for my time at UWS. I want to make sure we don’t experience in the arts what some are calling the Lost Generation of 2020, young people unable to access the education, careers and financial security they deserve. We need a truly radical solution to overcome this potential scenario. Watch this space.

Dr Jessica Olivieri is the Artistic Director at Utp in Bankstown. 
Bachelor of Visual Arts, UWS
Graduation show: 2002, 2003 (Hons)
Graduation ceremony: 2003, 2004 (Hons)