Item details: Fifteen seconds of Flame

Fifteen seconds of Flame Portrait, book, gas flame Reduced to dust on 4 October 2008 Paraphrasing Andy Warhol's 'Fifteen Minutes of Fame' this photographs depicts the burning of the book ["Hornsey 1968" (The art school revolution) written by Lisa Tickner] to coincide with the Reunion of the Hornsey College of Art forty years after the Sit-In. Serial number: UKMOCAT0000173C Contributed by: Brian Marsh Submitted: Last modified: Sun Oct 5 03:22:56 2008

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Janie Greville Hello Sir Bry, or is it stuart brisley? This work immediately reminded me of you. I have some memory jolters below and two or three questions are embedded in the text which is quite long I'm afraid. My email is 'janiegreville@hotmail.com' I would be most grateful if you would reply to this letter. Thanks Janie Greville April 13th, 2009. I met you in the summer of 1979 when you had been hired as an external assessor for my final assessment. It was somewhere along the middle of the studios and it was a bunch of green A3 posters and A4 leaflets repeated over and over again all around three studio walls. At the entry to the exhibition, such as it was, was a desk. In its drawers was a sample of the work I had done during the previous 3 years. Each day I put it all on top of the desk, first freely and later sellotaped down. Each day one of the lecturers picked them all up and put them back in the drawer. I wasn't allowed to have them on the desk because the lecturers had taken personal offence at them and the Head of Department had ruled that anything experienced as offensive by the lecturers should be deemed inassessible by them and be disregarded. For some reason during the week of the finals show the staff felt it important that my offensive work, most of my work over three years it turned out, should be kept well out of sight. You arrived. You wanted me to offer you a conversation about the significance of Warhol in relation to my work. I declined your kind suggestion and said that I had better things to talk about. You said if I wasn't willing to converse about the relevance of Warhol when considering my work then you would probably have to go and agree with other assessors, in-house assessors, who had a very poor view indeed of my achievements. I don't recall what I said to that. Do what you like, probably. The recklessness of youth. You appear to have concurred with the dimmest and most petty minded members of Trent Polytechnic's teaching team at that time - 1979 - that I deserved to be awarded a disgraceful 3rd for my disgraceful behaviour and disgraceful work. I would like to thank you for this. I feel as if it tells me about you and tells me about myself. It tells me that disgraceful behaviour is often punished and pushed down and implicitly or more or less subtly discouraged and penalilsed. At one level I have to want to agree - grace is a lovely quality in a person and I'd want to encourage it. Anti-grace, or lack of grace hardly sounds like something to reward. Still, we probably both know that 'disgraceful' in this context isn't quite that sense of the word. 'Ungrateful' is almost a nearer connotation of it and maybe 'arrogant' as well, I'm not sure. Possibly 'drivellingly incompetent' is a further way of interpreting the word disgraceful in this context - not that it was ever used, since at that level it wasn't ever assessed. Having been deemed non-assessible because personally offensive. Actually I was clinically depressed at the time so I'm finding it hard to believe that I could have covered that up enough to come across as arrogant but who knows. Anyway; I didn't forget your question. Nor wonder what would have happened had I answered the question. If I could have answered your question in a way that would have led you to take the staff room by storm that year and insist that the vote Janie first exhibition be awarded a first. I'd say that would have been unfair in a restricted sense. I had been clinically depressed and untreated for nearly six months by that time. The idea for the exhibition had been more Mel Ramsden's than mine and he and others kept me well supported as I produced it for the day. I'd never been so seriously depressed before, nor for as long. I didn't know what had hit me nor what to do about it. I'd lost all my drive, my self belief, my passion. I felt utterly lost and utterly alone in the world. I had no sustaining raison d'etre. I was going through the motions of my beliefs and determinations. I was in a weird fog of night where I could faintly make out the world going on around me and could react sufficiently functionally to look as if I was almost in the same place/space as them while simultaneously being so stupid on the outside that it was surely obvious to someone that I wasn't myself and didn't know how to help myself. Anyway, I guess no-one did quite realise that. Well, I suppose Mel must have done, he worked pretty hard to try to cover up for me that year, bless him. Less happy moments to one side, Mel was a genuine friend to me that year. An article was published in November, I think, that year in Art Monthly. I've probably still got it somewhere. Initially it was going to be a specific account of a case study of 'freedom of expression' being censored in art schools I'd thought, but I think I was wrong and that it was a fairly generic article on that same theme that incorporated, implicitly not explicitly, knowledge of what had happened at Trent Polytechnic in 1979. It was said to have been written by Steve Lawton (now deceased) and David Batchelor and others, I believe. I have for a very long while considered that if Issue members of 1978 and 1977 graduation were awarded a 2:2 then I should have been awarded at least a 2:1 or 1st in recognition of the fact that until I arrived they were doing more bull-shitting than anything else and that once I arrived Issue 2, the 'best' Issue production according to some, (and typographically and graphically definitely I agree for a start on that) (issue 3 in 1979 was a graphic design disaster zone as well as being many other regrettable things - still, I love the naivety of it and keep a copy of it still), came out at christmas in 1976 soon after I arrived and that in addition to the two further Issue productions I was centrally involved in during my time at Trent Polytechnic I wrote a great deal more besides, most of which has now been lost, most of which was never even read since lecturers simply couldn't be arsed to wade through it all. And I was an expressive performer of a developing and non-theatrical kind. See if you can manage to remember the finals show I'm talking about and the undergraduate student with loose associations with Art-Language at the time who was teetering on the border of failing her degree and who you saw yourself, no doubt as offering the opportunity to salvage her claim to respectable status as an emerging Contemporary and Radical Fine Artist. If I'd chosen to try to persuade you that your only intelligent and principled position was to argue I should be awarded a 1st is it possible that I would have succeeded? I am planning to impact simultaneously on the credibility of Fine Art Education and critical literature of Fine Art and on the credibility of Psychiatry's claims to a satisfactory knowledge base for the observation, classification and explanation and appropriate treatment in relation to perceived or experienced mental health disturbances. In addition I will be addressing the vexed issue of the contingent, current, historical and desirable relationship/s between 'art' and 'science'. I will be seeking to be nominated for a national and/or international life time award as a conceptual and multi-media performance and installation artist. The work I shall be recording, archiving, making and performing within the next three years will provide the evidence for my claims. I need a three year subsistance grant and some decent materials - dvd camera x 2 good quality, apple mac computer top knotch with top knotch film editing software on it, 2 still cameras, and a paid column in the Sunday Observer in due course as 'rambles of a persifler'. So, I need a good sponsor or two and some fleet street links. Do you have any recommendations or advice? Thanks a lot - so that's three points then - do you remember me, and some clues, and you underestimated me, but don't worry about it, so did I at the time, so did everyone back then; and finally - still I don't underestimate myself now and so there's some things I have to do and say and I have to make those things fully public as art and social criticism and expression. By deciding to gather and present some of the work of my life over the last twelve years inevitably I am taking a lot of risk. If critical assessment of my work is very underwhelming or very negative or simply non existent then I am left with the temptation, theoretically, of facing the possibility that my self estimate in relation to what I have to offer to others in a number of ways is inaccurate, that in fact I have much less than I thought and was being grandiose to consider myself so highly. It is a risk I am prepared to take. The struggle I have suffered inside myself for most of my life of a conflict between my higher and more hopeful identity materials and self-thoughts and my lower and more frightened and overwhelmed negative identity materials and self-thoughts appears to be lifting and easing. Perhaps I am beginning to integrate as a person and to be more accepting of and kinder to myself. Perhaps that will enable me to be more accepting of and kinder about others. There was a time when I would have dismissed you as an over rated egotist. In fact some of your website is actively witty and I always respect a person capable wit. The art and society 'serious' stuff on some of the project profiles are the piffle in my opinion but that's just my opinion of course. I scanned two rapidly and it got on my nerves almost instantly but this doesn't necessarily say anything at all about you. It may just be an index of our different values and beliefs when it comes to making a difference in this life. Meanwhile, the reason why I need to start taking action on trying to seek out rapid action advice and sign posts from those who have the know how is that I am classed as 'suffering from a severe and enduring mental illness' - that of manic depression, or as is now its pc alternative 'bi-polar disorder'. The prolonged and quite deep depression of 1979 now begins to take on a more significant note. In 1997 I was hospitalised for the first time. I was hospitalised again in 99, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007. Involvement in my own care and involvement with the service user and survivor movement has changed my life over the last year or so, though it had already been in a process of positive transformation since 2004. I have been in the process of being 'hidden from history' over the last 12 years and I am trying to work out how to change my visibility status to 'on' not 'off'. It isn't about vanity. I don't necessarily even need to use my own name, it's not ego massage I'm after, it's two things really - 1.I need some money to pay my ex-husband off, £7000 to contribute to my children's fledgling adult provision over the next few years and 2.I need to challenge the very basis of psychiatry and of contemporary fine art in its post 1960 developments and in popular contrast with the concept of 'science'. I would also like to record and publish my thoughts on a few other things, the logical implications and ramifications for example, of quantum physics and the theory of relativity that enabled the development of quantum physics to some of our most basic assumptions about the world since probably about the 1750's. Thanks for your time. I notice you are the same age as my mother. That is young enough to form a sensible reply assuming that you're still alive. I hope you are after writing all this lol.   Have something to say about this submission? 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