Last Thursday (22nd May), George Lynch visited LCC to give a guest lecture on her practice, a practice which prioritises writing. This lecture actually inspired me to prioritise writing myself in both my practice and my life, since then i have been spending time writing for personal projects and also about cultural and artistic subjects; with no aim to publish officially but as a form of practice.
George Lynch is a writer. Recent publications of her work include: Oxford Poetry, Fieldnotes Journal, Sticky Fingers Publishing, Datableed Journal. Her work involves performance — she has given performances internationally, most recently Galerie Molitor (Berlin) CCA Glasgow (Glasgow), and Cafe Oto (London), and programmed & produced numerous performance events at The Horse Hospital (London). She was a recipient of the 2023 Fieldnotes Development Grant. She is the founder of The Horse Hospital Collective.
I found George to be a very interesting guest to research and look into after the lecture. On the RCA website, an institution where she studied, there is a statement by her criticising the RCA:
‘The RCA is a failed institution. If an institution cannot provide job security for its teaching staff, chooses to outsource its maintenance staff, but is able to provide year-on-year pay rises to its rector, it is a failed institution. If an art school tells its international students that it will report them to the Home Office for failure to pay fees, in the middle of a global pandemic, while capitalising on claimed proximity to radical thinkers of the border, the violence of the nation-state, and anti-imperialism, then it is not only a morally abhorrent institution, it is a failed institution, too. If an art school which charges tuition fees vastly in excess of the government postgraduate loan offers no support to students who face financial difficulties while studying, allows classes to glut to sizes which fundamentally compromise the viability of its tutorial- and seminar-centric teaching model, and structures timetables with no consideration of students’ need to hold down jobs, then it is a failed institution. If the RCA cannot recognise the irony of its public espousal of “Black Lives Matter” coincident with its hiring of a white man as its head of ‘inclusivity’, and the dismissal of its casualised Black teaching staff, then it is not only an embarrassment, it is a failed institution. The RCA may well long continue on the path that it is on, but it ought to made clear that it is a fool’s errand to go looking for art in the direction of capital.’
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