The Art We Deserve? - ACE082.6

Murals on wall at Charles Lamb Primary School, Islington, sponsored by the Inner London Education Authority. Cork believes that, if mural painting were encouraged in schools, art in general would "become more accessible" (the results of this project are also available to the community outside school) and would prevent art being cut off from the rest of people’s lives. Project leader, David Cashman, talking about children’s experience of "art" which he and his colleagues make less remote for them by referring to their work as "pictures". The murals, which show the pupils at football. Pupils making banners for the playground. Cork says all this will remain "experimental" until the state places more emphasis on art in education. Views of school playground from another building on the estate; all new features become "part of the landscape for the whole neighbourhood". Photographs of people – including children – building play structures. Children playing on finished constructions. Cork likens a layout of tyres to a work by Carl Andre, but without "the forbidding label of art". Class, helped by several adults, making and painting ceramic views of life on the council estate; Cork says that there is little reward for those who want to work with children, but such projects do suggest how artists can contribute to areas of society where they’ve previously "had no place". View over city; Cork says "artists should have the right to decide how far they can collaborate with the world beyond the studio or gallery", but they have to do it to find out where that point is. Tate; Cork: "the state … through … in particular, the Arts Council… must ultimately become responsive to the needs of the population as a whole …", while artists must seize new opportunities, and education must point to ways in which "committed artists can become a central part of the society they help to emancipate". "Until that happens, the old suspicions will continue to breed bitterness and disillusionment, with the top ten prints dramatising the destructive divisions within a nation which fails to give us the art we deserve." Constable’s Salisbury Cathedral…; Sunday Working; etc. Credits.