Presentation for Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities 2017 Summer School

1. The Art(s) of Failure
Chris Fremantle
Gray's School of Art
The Robert Gordon University
and
Elizabeth Reeder
Creative Writing, School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow

2. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail
again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn
from them and start again.
Richard Branson
If you're not failing every now and again, it's a
sign you're not doing anything very innovative.
Woody Allen
Prescriptions

3. Mental Health Warning
Failure is closely associated with some mental
states including depression and anxiety.
Nothing in this workshop is constitutes any sort of
substitute for good mental health advice and
support.

5. Individuals consciously exercise choice and
judgement in its most heightened and skilled form in
the making and experiencing of art.
This is true for the artist in declaring a musical
composition or drawing as a success or a failure,
and also for the audience correspondingly
experiencing the work as a process of completing or
resisting and rejecting it.
Anne Douglas
Why does it matter?

7. Business
Failure is ‘expectation’ not meeting ‘outcome’
Are the expectations reasonable in the first place?
(I have completed my Phd therefore I should get a Post-Doc
position.)
Is the plan achievable?
(I’m going to secure funding for a Post-Doc position because my
research is brilliant.)
Were there unforeseen factors (or could they have been
foreseen)?
(My supervisor has other Phd’s in the pipeline and has their own
research for which they need funding.)

8. Culture
Ross Sinclair ‘We Love Real Life Scotland’, 2015/16

9. Culture
Ross Sinclair ‘We Love Real Life Scotland’ (Detail), 2015/16

10. Contents
Two Fables
+
Some Experience

11. ...a readiness to attack even those
presuppositions which for less critical thought
determine the limits of the range from which trials
(conjectures) are selected; with an imaginative
freedom that allows us to see so far unsuspected
sources of error: possible prejudices in need of
critical examination.
Karl Popper
The Positivist View

12. Post Colonial Critique
I think we can let go of the modern myth of
progress – the grandiose meta-narrative of
humanity gradually marching towards a better
world; “the progress of mankind” - and maintain a
relationship to failure just as long as we don't
understand failure in the same absolute terms.
Yoshua Okòn

13. Category D: Rejected. Amend the Submitted Item and Resubmit

14. Fable of Modernism
We think of art and failure together, however,
precisely because their conjunction is one of the
deep themes in the history of modernism, one of
its commanding plots, especially in the writings of
artists themselves, authors of imaginative
literature who anxiously but tellingly return time
and time again to the theme of the failed artist.
Barolsky,

16. Major Themes
8 (anonymised) members of art and design
teaching staff,
Semi-structured interviews:

Questioning of the concept of failure,
specifically, considering if failure is an end-point
or part of an overall trajectory;

the potential to learn from failure;

the role of failure in assessment.

17. Failure and Process
‘There are pieces that I’ve made over the years
that I’ve not been pleased with, but they’ve always
been ‘not a failure’ because they’ve stepped onto
something else.’
Jack

18. Artistic practice and its surrounding discourses,
though, operate somewhat differently: speculation
here is not necessarily intent on reaching a goal,
questions are no less powerful than answers and
the production of ideas has no end point.
Lisa Le Feuvre
Context on Process

19. David HockDavid Hockney, ‘Fredda bringing Ann and me a cup of tea ’ 1983

20. Failure and Learning
‘If I saw myself in the light of all the failures that
I’ve made – I’m much more of a failure than a
success – but then, I’ve learned much more from
those failures than the successes.’
Andrew

21. Failure and Assessment
‘…so, if you can have a discussion whereby you
say that failure is OK and that it might even be a
good thing, then the student is only going to say
“Yes, but what will that mean if I actually fail? I
can’t fail my assessment.”… It is really, really
difficult. I think the whole assessment process
makes it difficult to have a proper discussion
about failure’.
Margaret

22. David Haley
Moving away from Binaries:
The opposite of success may not be failure,
but desire?

23. David Haley
Moving away from Binaries:
The opposite of success may not be failure,
but desire?
The opposite of failure may not be success,
but kindness?

24. David Haley
Moving away from Binaries:
The opposite of success may not be failure,
but desire?
The opposite of failure may not be success,
but kindness?
The opposite of achievement may not be
failure, but contentment?

25. David Haley
Moving away from Binaries:
The opposite of success may not be failure,
but desire?
The opposite of failure may not be success,
but kindness?
The opposite of achievement may not be
failure, but contentment?
The opposite of success may not be failure,
but indeterminacy?

26. David Haley
Moving away from Binaries:
The opposite of success may not be failure, but desire?
The opposite of failure may not be success,
but kindness?
The opposite of achievement may not be failure, but
contentment?
The opposite of success may not be failure,
but indeterminacy?
The opposite of success may not be failure, but learning?

27. Conclusion
Failure defines success.
Success has been constructed as progress.
Failure has been mythologised.
But artists and designers do live with failure.
It can be understood in as integral to process.
There are some double binds, such as between
practice and assessment.
Some failures become highly sought after...

29. References
Antebi, Nicole, Dickey, Colin and Herbst, Robby. (2008). Failure! Experiments in Aesthetic and
Social Practices. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest.
Barolsky, Paul. (1997). The Fable of Failure In Modern Art. VQR: A National Journal for Literature
and Discussion. Summer, Volume 73 # 3
http://www.vqronline.org/essay/fable-failure-modern-art accessed on 16 October 2014
Danchev, Alex. (2012). Cezanne, A Life. Profile Books.
Deller, Jeremy. (2007). Rejected Tube Map Cover Illustration. Artist's website
http://www.jeremydeller.org/MyFailures/MyFailures.php accessed on 16 October 2014.
Douglas, Anne. (2014). Educating the artist as researcher: A case study of a doctoral/postdoctoral
research culture-On the Edge in Cartiere, Cameron and Zebracki, Martin. The Everyday Practice
of Public Art: Art, Space and Social Inclusion. Forthcoming
Haley, David ‘Neither Rhyme Nor Reason’ in CIWEM Art and Environment Manifesto
http://www.ciwem.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/WE-ASSERT-FINAL.compressed.pdf
Le Feuvre, Lisa. (2010). If at First you Don’t Succeed.... Tate etc(18, Sp), pp. 30-37. [Article] :
Goldsmiths Research Online. Available at: http://research.gold.ac.uk/2920/ accessed 16 October
2014
Popper, Karl. (1974). Autobiography. Extract in Le Feuvre, Lisa. (2010). Failure. Documents of
Contemporary Art. London and Cambridge MA, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.