This is an article from the Dodo, the Royal College of Art's Student Newspaper. It chronicles a project I conducted over November 2023 where I challenged institutional barriers through site-specific interventions (that's artspeak for "I kept putting up signs on a door to annoy the school into changing their rules").
This is an article about the RCA but it is also about everywhere other than the RCA, every institution with ridiculous rules that don't actually serve the people who have to put up with them.
This project is important because it was also the unofficial start of the Common College of Art, at least in tone if not in name.
TRANSCRIPT
At the time of writing this, The Royal College of Art (RCA) is the #1 Art School in the world.
There is Nothing Wrong with the RCA.
The emotions that this phrase elicits in you is the entire point of this article. Everything else I have to say is an accessory at best. You can stop right here but I’d like it if you continued.
As for the “you” that I’m addressing? Richard Siken said it better than I ever could so I quote him here:
“I could pretend I’m speaking to everyone—assume a middle distance and transcend myself—but I’m talking to you, and you know it.”
This isn’t an article in a wonderful student newspaper (that could do with a lot more funding), it is a letter I wrote and left for you to find.
Did you know I was supposed to be an astrophysicist? I was going to go to Mars. I did a whole year of physics during undergrad until Calculus grounded me. My mom, unlike many brown parents of her generation, was thoroughly relieved when I switched over to the Arts.
Did you know I was supposed to be an astrophysicist? I was going to go to Mars. I did a whole year of physics during undergrad until Calculus grounded me. My mom, unlike many brown parents of her generation, was thoroughly relieved when I switched over to the Arts.
“How can I possibly make a living in the arts?” I wailed to her.
“Judging by your grades in maths, you’re not going to be making much of a living there either” she chuckled.
Harsh. True. I was an artist, something that can mean a little more than everything and close to nothing, depending on who you ask. And a few years later, I was a freshly graduated, unemployed artist in Toronto, looking for a job that could help me stay in Canada. I needed a year of combined work experience in skilled fields to be eligible to immigrate to Canada. I counted every hour I worked. A life measured in time sheets and payslips. However, it wasn’t all bleak, I made a lot of art when I found the time and then I fell in love, which felt a lot like making art, and I made time for that.
The RCA was the only graduate school I applied to. That is where we met. I tell myself that I’m here because a master's degree gives me extra points that I could use to immigrate into Canada and also because in the script for my life that I was presented, a master's degree was mandatory.
So, I wouldn’t say I expected much when I first walked through the corridor of the White City campus and accidentally walked into the bathroom.
Let me explain: The exit to the stairs and the entrance to the bathroom are right next to each other and the doors are identical. There is a sign hanging from the ceiling but when you’re in a hurry it is easy to miss. I’d heard you say in passing that someone
should just put a sign up on the door to the stairs and save everyone the inconvenience. I thought that was a wonderful idea and so I put one up, scribbled it on a piece of paper. It was taken down when I walked by the next morning and when I asked a passing member of the estates team, I was told that we couldn’t have any signage, artwork or promotional material on fire exits.
I mentioned how it was confusing and the various people I mentioned this issue to gave me a spectrum of responses from “You’ll get used to this” to “that will never happen”.
I was in the best art school in the world, and I couldn’t get a sign on a door.
I went around with a petition, detailing how the people who used the first-floor corridor felt very strongly about getting a sign for the stairs and then stuck the signatures up on the exit. When that was taken down, I promptly put another one up. Each sign was
different. There were memes and pop culture. There were artworks and parodies. Each sign was taken down almost immediately but over the days, the estates team started looking forward to the next sign and even began asking me about when the next one
would be up. What started as a lone crusade seemed to attract an amused community.
I discussed sign ideas with you as we navigated the program. One of the signs was a crossword and I saw you stop by and scribble on it. I felt closer to you a hundred times over in that White City corridor. I think it was funny watching you fiddle with the bypass tray on the printers that were broken every other week. I think the resource store has been closed more than it was open and I’m quoting you as my source. I remember that night when we wondered how we were supposed to get close to each other when there were so many of us. I remember those times when we would nod at each other in the corridor, having briefly talked once weeks ago and mutually content with never doing so again. I remember how excited you were for me when, after 19 signs and an entire month, we finally got an official sign on the door. I remember going back to Toronto for Christmas and feeling like I’d be in love with the same person forever and I will be forever grateful to you for letting me cry on your shoulder when that relationship sputtered out a couple of months later, as these things sometime do.
Perhaps I have a responsibility here to talk about the corporatization of higher art educations. How we feel like customers and products simultaneously. Maybe I should have talked about how the movement picked up after I got that sign, about the countless protests, interventions and pokes that have brought me closer to you, even if you’re in another campus or went to the RCA decades ago.
Shouldn’t I use this platform to ask important questions? What should an Art School look like? What are its responsibilities?
Will I ever feel like I’m not running a race? Will you?
I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know this:
Will I ever feel like I’m not running a race? Will you?
I don’t know a lot of things, but I do know this:
Perhaps there is something wrong with the RCA, but it certainly isn’t you.
GALLERY
