Thinging the Thing - Art, Society, Nature MA Fine Art Degree Show

About

Our first ever cohort of MA students will be graduating this year from our Art, Society, Nature, Fine Art Masters. In celebration of their achievement they will be holding an exhibition of their work, showcasing the accumulation of 2 years of hard work in their final forms. Taking place at The Margate School, their exhibition will run 2—25 July, so come along to The Margate School and join us in celebrating their achievements this summer!

Thinging the Thing was chosen as the exhibition title from Bill Brown' s introduction to "thing theory" in an issue of  Critical Inquiry in 2001. There, Brown describes the questions that thing theory raises as queries not into objects alone, but into subject-object relations in particular spaces, at particular times. Literature was central to these queries, not only because English departments in the 1990s were home to the “high theory” that Brown draws upon, but because, as he argues, it is a privileged medium for revealing the force of inanimate objects in human experience. In other words, literature makes the “thingness” of objects visible. This distinction comes from Heidegger, for whom objects become things when they can no longer serve their common or intended function. When an object breaks or is misused, it sheds its conventional role and becomes visible in new ways: it becomes a thing. Thing theory draws upon this notion of productive estrangement to consider the meaning that physical artifacts can have for human subjects. While thing theory entails discussions of “real” artifacts, it has primarily been used by scholars in the humanities to discuss the representation of such things in art and literature—specifically as a means to understand what meaning such representations hold.

The Margate School (TMS) has developed an exciting international Masters programme called Art, Society, Nature in the discipline of Fine Art worth 120 ECTS credits. The course is approved by our French partners, the renowned art school from Normandy L’École Supérieure d’Art et Design Le Havre-Rouen (ESADHaR) with the support of the Council of Normandy and the French Ministry of Culture.

In our ambition to establish The Margate School we acknowledge that education is a privilege. Few can afford the time to reflect, to learn about what might be of value and what less so; to learn and apply skills in a meaningful, socially and environmentally sensitive fashion. For most of us learning takes place in intensive bursts in particular periods of our lives, institutionalised and structured. In a world of hyper-production and hyper-consumption, social inequality, human & environmental disasters, the opportunity to learn should not be removed from life but be part of it.