As a research student of the RCA there is not the same link to the college as the MA student. I don’t think there should be, as research by definition involves setting up your own schedule and going wherever you want, or doing whatever is relevant to your research. But noticeable, if you spend just a few days in the RCA, is the oddity of the split campus. Fine Art and Sculpture are down just below Battersea Bridge, the rest up in the Jay Mews site, SW7.

Many students go through their courses up at SW7 without the will or chance to go down to the Battersea site, but on 24th February I went down and participated in a series of performance lectures set up by Fay Nicolson and Charles Ogilvie. I repeated a talk that gave as a part of the Dialogues in Design session about ‘amateurism’ in January. (For more information on the other performance lectures follow link – www.theperfectlecture.wordpress.com)

A word on the context. The Sculpture and Fine Art departments are on Howie Street, just behind Foster + Partners and the developments of Albion Riverside, which touts that it is ‘vibrant’ new quarter of London, but looks more like a lot of highly desirable flats where residents are more likely to stay in and look at their river view than ever venture out to the local area.

The locality just south of Battersea Bridge is odd. An almost high street, with a few grocery stores, a Pizza Express and some fancy looking restaurants opposite a rusty fast food chicken outlet. Among the various amenities, housing estates and cash machines that charge between £1.30 – £1.94 for transactions, are the grey slabs of the RCA Sculpture and Fine Art departments.

And Richard Wentworth introduced the performance lectures with a praise of the Fine Art seminar room as one of the few truly open spaces of the college, perfect for student-led initiatives. Open indeed for the well thought out and idiosyncratic lectures on show.

Richard Grayson started with Ghosthouses, an excellent narrative on history, destruction and the ephemerality of traces that corresponded with images projected on two screens. The students followed: a statement on nuclear fallout, performed with a deflating airbag; a spoof of Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’; a musical and sung number; an examination of lecture spaces; and a Victorian-style lecture on Pythagorus.

There was a division in the presentations between some kind of examination or play of the conventional lecture form, and those that used multiple mediums to present something about their work. The latter style was a lot to take in: I had a Wispa bar and 7Up for lunch which brought on a headache that was not going to get better throughout the afternoon with this sensory bombardment. But that was okay, just, some pieces were more lectures with performances in them, rather than a performance lecture.

Out of the students’ presentations Charles Ogilvie’s lecture on Pythagorus must have been more of a subtle play on the lecture form. I challenge any member of the audience to remember all the facts, figures and hypothesis that were asserted in this headmasterly dissemination of information on Greek knowledge and lunar observations. He asked an assistant by the computer to move the slide on for him, “Next slide please”, like a true authority on a subject and kept on going and going in the same measured tones. I looked around at the audience sitting in their squeaky chairs and thought that it would be great if this lecture went on for hours, like what used to happen in the olden days, slowly wearing down the students in the room and hurting their backs in the process.

The diversions were endless in this talk: “I’ll just explain that to you because it’s quite interesting!”

And the trip down to Battersea, another offshoot of my experience of the college was just that – quite interesting.

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