Gavin Butt: Revisiting art education’s intermedia dream

Event description

Fluxus artist Dick Higgins wrote in 1966 that “much of the best work being produced today seems to fall between media … We are approaching the dawn of a classless society, to which separation into rigid categories is absolutely irrelevant.” By the following decade, educators in selected UK art schools continued to agree with him. They pushed a progressive pedagogical agenda encouraging students to work across, or between, media disciplines in the belief that the promise of radical aesthetic effect and the refusal of hidebound social divides was to be realised therein.

Focusing upon the historic fate of avant-gardist art education in Leeds, Gavin Butt, author of No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk, will reflect upon the challenges to such hopes for intermedia art in the context of changing realities of urban and social life in the 1970s.

Speaker biography

Gavin Butt is interested in how the social worlds and aesthetic preoccupations of visual artists can be connected, sometimes in surprising ways, to those within popular music, queer culture and performance.

He is author of No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk and Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963. He is also editor of After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance and co-editor of Post-Punk Then and Now.

Gavin often works collaboratively with other authors and artists on creative projects, including as co-director of feature film This Is Not a Dream. He is currently researching a new book which will tell the hitherto untold story of the roots of US pop, rock and disco performers in the art and theatre milieu of the 1970s queer underground.

Series description

The mission of our prestigious INSIDE/OUT series of lectures is to bring the best minds of our generation to inspire and support the work students and staff do across the Leeds School of Arts. To this end, we have flown in renowned speakers from around the globe. To enhance the cultural life of Leeds, we make the lecture series open to the general public and available to an international audience online.

Lectures will be available as digital films through the LARC website and open to all.

Host or Publisher Leeds Beckett University