An MA in Chelsea It is difficult to establish the relation between learning and doing, to admit that the art process goes on for ever. It is further difficult to recognise when the thought process has taken off ; when to stop and show the work. Any MA should be a luxury, a cherished, protected and protective time within which to make work while questioning that which has gone before. But the opposite can be the case. Fear can override content and frustration can smother privilege. An MA can be wasted and pass too easily by. It may seem impossible to really challenge anything in such a short time. It is extraordinary that four terms on Chelsea MA are able to make such a dramatic difference. Many students have already spent time away from the art school and have probably forgotten that very particular combination of dependence and interdependence. While there is never any real time to settle into a cosy rhythm process still plays an obvious part. The laboratory atmosphere can open up, across the board, a dangerously heady sense of possibility; a million permutations twinkling in a rather daunting firmament. Yet also, at a certain point, the work and effort must stop and shift into another gear for the show, the end, the culmination of expression and intention. Here strange contrasts arise between ease, a sleight of hand, a conjuring act out of which a miracle can appear, ready made, and the broken collected moment caught very much en passant as it shifts by on the moving floor of everyday life. Questions are also asked about where the art should be seen; whether it should be taken out of the college and placed between the bricks, mortar, leaves, paths, roads in the reality of anywhere else but there? Down the road in what seems like a remote part of London; past smart housing, downwardly mobile housing, light industrial units, to finish the journey in an intensely familiar enclave of school yard, school buildings, portacabin, tarmac and car park. The situation may seem isolated, and yet 'enormous impersonal' London has been transformed by this reality and starts to feel like something else. Artists 'outside' work in studio complexes just like this one and, recent jingoism aside, London has become a compulsive and vibrant centre for art. What significance does the work have? Is it sensible to characterise what one sees? The fixed exclamatory art work perhaps, can be somewhat of a let down at this stage. But at what point can one see pattern enough to render it safe and profitable to generalise? The art world's perpetual pull between the desire to belong to a time and the even greater need to speak differently or individually presents a sort of premature bottle neck of intention at around the time of the MA. This year for the first time teaching has been across disciplines which, along with the move for all to permanently work and exhibit on this same site, reflects a very welcome change. A furtive, defensive, formally bound, desire to 'break' from any perceived restrictions can immediately be substituted by a more relaxed pursuit of media. Discussion is essential, and perhaps more political, more interesting questions can replace earlier preoccupations. Painting, photography and video profit from the current situation in which the illusion (long thought of as a bit of an artistic indulgence) really comes into its own. Any irony of the past, tiresome play on a play, or end of art quotation, seems to have been replaced by an acceptance of the power of the image combined with a loathing of the 'unnecessary' or 'pointless'. The questioning of a so called international language becomes relevant. Some art used to exist in art magazine form; countless reproductions of countless works presumed to be in a language common to all. In fact the most interesting aspect now is the way in which work is able to be specific, particular, and true. Chelsea MA brings people to the course from many different countries. Instead of a self conscious, united colours of Bennetton, approach the very useful definitions, distinctions and particularities contribute to an understanding of individual media. There is something absolutely fixed about the art image. Message, missive, meaning, and manipulation provide, at least at the initial point of observation, an equal or democratic vision. Photography might move into painting, sculpture into photography, sculpture can be photography and so on. Fluidity is important but the high level of contemporary sophistication admits that, at this stage at least, a greatest part of the practice is the practice itself. Rather than indicating a death, an end in itself, the 'moment' of seeing is the first guarantee of the continuation of speech and thought. © Sacha Craddock, July 1998