'Art School'

About

Featuring sculpture / installation, painting, mixed media and drawing this group show is a paean to four artists and their continuing individual practise - over time from a place where they once were to where they are now.

A celebration and testement to artists friendship.

“Those art school years are so vivid it seems like yesterday and I can still taste the exact air of those moments”
Robert Montgomery

We were best friends in the summer of 1990. We lived in the big double upper attic flat on Forbes Road where Jason Herzmark painted the last paragraph’s of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ huge around the entire stairwell in black foot high letters - “Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too upon every part of the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead….” We lived on lentils and bottles of red wine called ‘Fitou’ stolen from restaurant shifts and cigarettes from the Spar on the Bruntsfied Links called Skyy cigarettes, which had pictures of clouds on the packets. 

We wore long capes we designed ourselves and got Elaine’s mum to sew from scraps of wool and tartan. Anna Mason and the fashion students called us “the remnant king and queen” after the shop Remnant Kings on the Lothian Road where you could buy all the cheap fabric. We cut off our trousers at the bottom and painted suns on the knees and when the T-shirt that said “Inspiral Carpets- Cool As Fuck” came out and the Madchester kids were wearing it I made one in response that said “Oscar Wilde- Cool As Fuck”, and I wore that instead. 

Mainly we lived not in 1990 but in a bubble of ghosts- the ghosts of Richard Diebenkorn, Cy Twombly, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen and Joseph Beuys. We lived in a different time and in a bubble of art. Jason Herzmark gave impromptu ecstatic lectures on Joseph Beuys, Rudolph Steiner and Theosophy and painted the kitchen the pink colour Rudolph Steiner said was right for eating rooms. Paul Carter gave lectures on The Beatles and sometimes did speed in his bedroom, but we didn’t really do drugs. We stayed late at art college painting every night. The painting studios at night were our own private academy, a little hardcore gang of painting students who would be there every night. Sometimes this informal arrangement that you could stay and work all night was threatened- like when Keith Farquhar and his Leith mates painted giant gobbledygook graffiti about Michael Jordan on the Sculpture Court walls or Andrew Smith threw the bin through the tapestry room window, but it was allowed to continue, it was better than having us on the streets. 

When we met John Ayscough he was a handsome bolshie hippie student leader. He was sitting on a stage with long blonde hair and faded converse smoking roll ups and telling a hall full of students why we should go on strike. He was a little older and although it was the 90s he had the air of a guy who might lead an anti-Vietnam walk out in 1970. 

John showed us how to confront the world. He was loving and foul-mouthed, passionate and unreasonable. He was also married to an Italian woman who would throw you out of their flat if you insulted Pier Paolo Pasolini and he had a proper summer job and a car, all things that seemed still far off and unachievable to us. 

We became a little gang with John and we decided to push a little bit and see how much you could do things like ‘proper artists’ at art school. Our first idea was to send out work  to the curator of the art college gallery and ask for an exhibition. This was ‘The Sculpture Court’ the university’s space for proper exhibitions - maybe a small retrospective of the Italian Futurists or the exhibitions brought in by Richard Demarco of Joseph Beuys, Blinky Palermo and Gerhard Richter. The curator was Peter Pretzel who was also a printmaking tutor, one of the groovier tutors- he dressed like Dave van Ronk, and he had a smart irreverent assistant called Diana Henderson who went on to be the director of the Edinburgh Film Festival. At first they just laughed at us. No students had ever had the audacity to ask for an exhibition in The Sculpture Court before but then when they checked there was no rule against, and we had written a very official looking proposal letter and sent in slides, in the end I think they just thought fuck it and they said yes to us. 

And so the first time Elaine and John and I showed together was in February 1992 in the Sculpture Court Gallery at Edinburgh College of Art, when I was 19. We screen printed a very severe black and white poster with just our surnames, thinking that’s what ‘proper artists’ do and we had the whole gallery to ourselves. An opening with wine in plastic cups and smoking inside and discussing the work very seriously, like French people, we thought. I think I came up with the title, “Towards an Expanded Poetics” it was all about breaking the picture frame and bringing objects and context and politics and poetry into painting. I showed some paintings with objects incorporated into the canvas (like Rauschenberg) and words scrawled on them, Elaine showed some really expertly done brilliantly painted expressionist self-portraits of herself in the studio with an imperious gaze, and John showed a series of drill paintings he made that were really beautiful- like Twombly or Brice Marden paintings but made by attacking the canvas with a power drill from B&Q. 

We used to sneak into Maggie’s studio to look at her paintings at night. She was making these giant canvases that were expressionist but at the same time very modern, composed like Joan Mitchell paintings with lots of white behind the colour, but still figurative and with words that were sort of titles written into the paintings. The night they hung the degree shows for the year above us Elaine and I sneaked into the dark studios and turned on all the lights one by one for a sneak first viewing. Maggie’s degree show was the best we agreed. We wanted Maggie to be our friend. 

It was all a long time ago now but those art school years are so vivid it still seems like yesterday and I can still taste the exact air of the moments. 

Robert Montgomery 
www.robertmontgomery.org