MIDVILLE ART SCHOOL
Steve Hawley
A TRUE STORY OF A MYTHICAL ART SCHOOL
MIDVILLE
FluxusMuseum prize for Experimental Video 2025.
TRAILER
3 minute trailer from 14 minute video Midville 2025 experimental AI documentary opera by Steve Dutton and Steve Hawley
Midville 2025 by Steve Dutton and Steve Hawley
‘Midville’ was the pseudonymous name given to a Midlands art school in the United Kingdom when it was studied over a period of three years from 1967 by two sociologists, Charles Madge and Barbara Weinberger. They observed and recorded in great detail the teaching in the fine art course, the critiques, the tutorials, and the assessments where students were classed as either 'interesting' or 'mediocre'.
Totally by chance Madge and Weinberger had arrived at a point when the School was improbably about to become the world centre of conceptual art, from which a new art movement was generated. The resulting book, Art Students Observed, published in 1973 has become a classic document within art teaching literature, a verbatim account of where 'romantic' and 'conceptual' art first collided.
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Six decades later Steve Hawley traced some the students in the book and
interviewed them about their recollections and experiences (sometimes traumatic). They include ‘Liz,’ described as a ‘puddingy sort of student’, ‘Brian’ the technical whizz kid, ‘Dave’ who brought his chickens into the studio and became the outstanding success of the course, and several others. For once the art school experience is seen completely from the point of view of the students rather than their artist/teachers.
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We have recreated‘Midville’ as a 15-minute AI supported mini collage opera, where the students as they were then and now, pronounce their testimonies via AI voices, avatars, choirs and singers, and real-world original footage, structured around one of the drawing projects briefs as outlined in the original publication. The ‘opera’ is made of three parts based on points A, B, and C of drawing project brief. As "Coutts" reminded the students as he set the first year project;
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For the purposes of this project you will forget the following value concepts so many of the
areas of modern and contemporary art.
A. INVENTIVENESS
B. ORIGINALITY
C. CREATIVITY
MIDVILLE
A MYTHICAL ART SCHOOL
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Steve Hawley and Steve Dutton
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based on the book Art Students Observed
with additional interviews by Steve Hawley
Copyright Steve Hawley and
Steve Dutton
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EXT. DAY
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It is the late 1960s, an art school, somewhere in the Midlands of the British Isles, a brutalist concrete building.The camera takes us smoothly inside where...we glide slowly through a series of empty and desolate art studios. And as we do we hear a series of voices...
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JOE
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In the introductory speech given by the foundation course staff, Keith Armitage asked the new comers, ..."who wants to do Fine Art." I put my hand up. He said something to the effect that it was a mugs game and do something that could earn you a living.
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DAVE
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My parents didn't want me to go, they wanted me to go to university to get a degree in a proper subject you know what I mean.
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LIZ
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I had to fight to get to Art School. My parents were very reticent about it they wanted me to go to university to do English or something. I had to really fight to get there and so having got there it seemed like a fight all the way through.
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ARTHUR
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I didn't take much notice to be frank of most of what the staff were saying. I sort of in a rather arrogant way thought They're not that bright anyway. why should I be listening?
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BRIAN
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They were strange times in Midville. We were all in a little play almost, like a theatre group working, and we were being moved in a particular direction. Directed I suppose. And it was all new to us, we all had our own ideas and trying to fit them into this conceptual art idea was actually not the most straightforward of things.
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BLACK SCREEN
SUPER: "MIDVILLE"
SUPER: "1967"
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NARRATOR
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From 1967-70 two sociologists studied the socialisation of art students at a Midlands art school, and published the results in the book Art Students Observed. The same students remembered their experience over fifty years later. In a document dated October 1968 on 'The Re-Organization of Art and Design Education the then Principal of Midville College wrote: I believe that one cannot teach art and that neither art institutions nor educational structures should be organized for the rare, highly gifted individual.
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BLACK SCREEN
SUPER: "The PRE-DIPLOMA COURSE"
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NARRATOR
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The function of a foundation course is to bridge the transition from the largely fine art based idea of art experience in Secondary Education and the concepts of diplomas in art and design.
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ARTHUR
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The pre dip course was on a different floor to the fine art course. The building in Portsmouth Street, I always thought it looked like a cigarette packet made out of concrete
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NARRATOR
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The tutor in charge was Mottram, the students were given the traditional art school 'prop' of a naked girl as a model, but she was not there for them to draw in the traditional way. The technique they were to use was one of 'mark-making'. September 25th. Boys and girls separate naturally. The tutor tells them to make as many marks as possible with brush and black paint, starting from the least obvious way of using the brush-end. The tutor asks that intellect should not take over too soon as happens in modern fashionable painting which he deplores as dull because over-intellectualized.
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NARRATOR 2
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September 26th. The tutor wants the students to produce marks or symbols which are real in themselves, and do not stand for something else. Marks must not be decorative or designed. Students who commented on their work by describing the feeling the work evoked in them were told that the current trend in art was to be extremely suspicious of such statements, owing to the bad influence the romantic tradition has had in English art.
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