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The Oxford Union

A few months ago I received a request to take part in a debate at the Oxford Union, to take place on 5 November. The motion was: "This house believes that conceptual art just isn't art." I was asked to oppose it. I agreed. Then I forgot about it. Time went by. One evening I read something interesting in the paper about a place where I used to have a studio. I sent a phone text to Adrian Searle, the Guardian art critic, who used to share that space with me: "Blimey, did you read that thing about the studio!" He phoned immediately. He hadn't read it, and it sounded appalling, but what did I think about this Oxford Union debate? I didn't know Adrian was on the panel too. Yes, he said, and did I know who was on the other side? I said no I hadn't thought about it. He said it was a guy from the Stuckists. I said that's a bit demeaning, but fine. He said plus Mark Leckey. This is the artist who won the Turner Prize last year for a conceptual art installation.

Mark Leckey, installation at the Turner Prize 2008

We agreed it was hard to understand what Leckey thought he was doing supporting a motion that said conceptual art just isn't art. I said I'd never been in a formal debate before, but I wasn't going to waste time worrying about it. We said we'd see each other on the night.

Stephen Deuchar

Another guy on the panel opposing the motion that conceptual art just isn't art, was Stephen Deuchar, outgoing director of Tate Britain (he's on his way to direct the Art Fund, an independent UK art charity that exists to save art for the nation). In the Oxford Union on the night of the 5th I said hello to Stephen, and we exchanged what little information we had about the evening. We were both nervous because of the hallowed nature of the venue. Someone from the Union now filled us in on the rules and structure of the event. At one point Stephen said to the Union representative that it was all right for me because I've been trained by the TV system to always have something to say. I thought about this and then said it wasn't true. The reason I often get work on TV is that I have something TV wants and doesn't already have, and can't easily find, which is someone who has knowledge about art and an ability to express it in a way that doesn't sound artificial. This way of talking about art on TV that I have is peculiar to me and rather than anyone at the TV teaching it to me I've always had to struggle against TV people to be allowed to talk in my own natural voice.

Although I didn't go into the matter at this moment, the hardest struggle was every year when I used to present the Turner Prize award live on Channel 4. The live part was always chaotic. Typically, I would have written some lines but I might not get any time to rehearse them, so they'd come out oddly or even incoherently. The programme always contained short "profiles" of the competing artists, which had to be done in the form of a sort of ghastly corporate promo, with the zombie gibberish the artists spouted taken absolutely seriously and used in the film as if it were actually saying something. Then there were pre-recorded short films. These I'd written myself and so I could say what I liked. My favourite was a horse race using plastic farmyard animals, where I drummed the William Tell Overture on a tabletop with my finger nails and moved the horses along, one pulling ahead, another falling back, and so on, as I explained the reasons why each of the artists were favoured or disfavoured by the bookies that year. I liked doing this kind of thing because I felt it was more realistic to the spirit of the event: the Turner Prize is a media event; it isn't profound. On the other hand it's a social event too, it's a way for society to get to know a little bit about what goes on in the inner sanctums of the art world. So it's a socio-cultural event. I'm for the event but not for the sanctimony of it. I don't know why I'm even going into it now except that it pertains to how I express myself on TV - I try and have a thought in the first place and then I try and get it across.

Mark Leckey

These reflections were in my mind when I saw Mark Leckey coming in the room. I've never met him but I recognised him from one of his Turner Prize films featuring himself giving a lecture about meaning and art. To be polite I said, "Hello Mark." He stopped in his tracks, turned away with a sort of strangled cry - "Gaahh!" - and went and sat on his own. I blinked and didn't say anything. Stephen Deuchar didn't say anything either. The Oxford Union people said later that they noticed it but not knowing what to make of it they too acted like us - as if something slightly horrible hadn't just happened. We resumed chatting, and eventually Stephen said he thought Mark might be nervous. I agreed. After all, we all were. Stephen said, "Not you surely. You do this all the time don't you?"

James Kingston, Treasurer, Oxford Union

I was about to answer again - if I often communicate ideas about art they're not automatic, I have to think them up, and work out how to get them across, it's not a routine - but we were led into a room for a photo session. There were paintings propped up against chairs. They were by Stuckist artists. They had no intensity at all as art, and no identity as paintings. They were cartoons that happened to be done in paint on canvas. All the panellists were individually photographed. Some Stuckists dressed as clowns were in the room too. Then we were taken to a different place for a formal dinner. We heard the Grace in Latin. We drank port and toasted the Queen. A student asked me what I thought about the motion. I said it was ignorant and childish. He asked how was I going to argue against it. I said I was talking last, so I'd listen to what was said and from that I'd work out what I should say to begin with, but after that it would just be common sense objections to the motion; that is, common sense, if you knew anything about art.

It turned out he was the Treasurer of the Union. (He was studying political history.) The conversation developed a bit, him demanding to know if I thought nothingness could be art, me saying "Sure"; things like that. I found it helpful because I could rehearse my thoughts. The history of conceptual art, its relationship both to the internal ideas-systems of everything that we call "art," and to the new popular audience for this totality of art, which doesn't have any knowledge of these systems but which has been conditioned by market forces and by democracy to feel resentful if anything about art isn't instantaneously accessible - all this came up in our dialogue. He asked daft stuff and I tried to take it on board. He started out confident that conceptual art was rubbish and eventually agreed, refreshingly I thought, that he hadn't thought about conceptual art much before this evening, and in fact never thought about any type of art much.

Then the debate started. It was in a big room with formal portraits on the walls. (Three of these were visually acceptable if unremarkable. One was hideous - kitsch rubbish done from a photo. I wondered if I could build some kind of thought about them into my talk at the end of the evening.) The team in favour of the idea that conceptual art just isn't art consisted of a bright student called Alice Thomas; an Australian painter called David Armitage; Mark Leckey; and Charles Thomson, the leader of the Stuckists. Alice Thomas kicked off. We'd been told that if you wanted to interrupt whoever was speaking the convention was that you called out, "Point of information!" If the speaker allowed it, you could make your thought known to the room, so long as you did it briefly. If they didn't allow it you had to back down. When Thomas said she was sure no one in this room would say a woman having a miscarriage was art I called out "Point of information!" She allowed the interruption. I said if the woman having a miscarriage said it was art I would go along with it being art, so it was mistaken of Thomas to be sure that no one in the room would accept a miscarriage as art. She then finished her talk. It was out of control nonsense of the kind you hear all the time on Newsnight Review, Front Row and Weekend Review; plus you read the same kind of thing in almost all the art columns of the educated papers. Conceptual art relies too much on explanation; it doesn't requite any skills; real art is beautiful and emotional and you want to grab it and go back to it again and again; conceptual art doesn't give you anything to look at. Etc. When it's someone young I don't complain, they're copying their parents. But when it's braying cultural experts I find it infuriating that no one tells them off for arrogance. The equivalent level of ignorance about literature could never happen. Internally I doubted if Thomas really thought any of the things she was saying. They were clichés of middle class chat, and she had been in a debating society at school. For her this was just another subject for debate. When I applauded it wasn't for the content of her talk but her effort to do well.

Martin Creed, "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT"

Martin Creed, Work No. 227, The Lights Going On And Off, 2000

Our first speaker was Deuchar. His talk was dignified puffery for an art form that history has pretty much accepted. It was the right thing to say. I only didn't like it when he told the audience he was about to leave the Tate and so he'd ordered Martin Creed's neon letters art work "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT" to be installed on the side of the building as a goodbye gesture - parting on an upbeat note. This was an attempt to humanise conceptual art with sentimentalism, it seemed to me, which was really avoiding rather than tackling the problem of the evening. I also thought he praised Creed's Turner Prize-winning work of the lights going on and off a bit extravagantly, mentioning that it was about life and death among other oppositions. Personally I agree it's a good work and deserved to win the Turner Prize. But its qualities are more to do with drawing attention, in an elegant way, minimalist but also punky, to the role of the surroundings in any contemporary art experience.

David Armitage, painter and illustrator

Then David Armitage, who was introduced as an "abstract painter" and "illustrator," came on. He performed a kind of old fashioned after-dinner speech routine. The gags involved imitating fury at the incomprehensibility of a contemporary art curator whom he'd met once who used long words. Oblivious to changing trends in stand-up routines he managed to mock the disabled and refer repeatedly to women's big cleavages without anyone interrupting. Presumably the many cries of "Point of information!" that you might have expected to ring out were suppressed because of pity.

The guy on our side that I haven't mentioned yet was Miroslaw Balka, the Polish conceptual artist who has just set up the latest Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern. He had written his statement for the evening and he now read it out. It was about his academic training and the options that conceptual art offered in the early 1980s for finding a way to exist as an artist in a realistic present moment, as opposed to a nostalgic idealised past. It was extremely persuasive for me, but I suspected the sophistication of the narrative, with its subtle poeticising of concepts that were already from within art-world culture and thus inaccessible to outsiders even in a plain form, would alienate the audience.

Then Mark Leckey came on. He too had written something. It was partly about his reason for being on the anti-conceptual art side. Apparently this was because he wanted to distance his work from the achievements of "Damien" and Tracey," which he said was "trite." It was clear he wanted his own conceptual art to be seen as different to theirs but he didn't say exactly what he thought was overused, unoriginal or stale (which is what "trite" means) about the YBA aesthetic, as opposed to his own. Saying the word with a fierce look was the equivalent of an argument, it seemed. I think these figures should be criticised too, but you have to come up with some concrete observations to do it. As if to make his own work seem like a summation in art form of the thoughts of a mind far deeper and greater than those of Hirst and Emin, the rest of the talk was an attempt to explain the development of conceptual art from Duchamp to now. I appreciated the historical perspective but it was clear no originality of thought was being applied to the approach and Leckey was soon drowning in received ideas and terms, "readymade," and so on, like any student who's just heard of all this. (His artwork sometimes takes the form of illustrated lectures but they are long and rambling and it's all on his own terms; he's his own pet on these occasions, there's no rigour or tension.)

There's a ten-minute time limit in these Oxford debates. He probably could have read all his stuff by then if he'd just launched into it confidently without so many self-conscious asides about the difficulty of the time constraint - which seemed designed to convey the impression of greatness frustrated by bureaucracy. And an extra minute or two would very likely have been granted. But he was nervous, and perhaps had a heavy burden to bear of inner rage. Anyway it was all too much. After seven minutes you get handed a card that says THREE MINUTES. When this happened he tried summarising some of the written thoughts, abandoned that, tried reading from a bit nearer the end of the essay, but then abandoned that too. I can't possibly tell what was going on in his head, or what his motivation was, or how he thought it would help, but he then pointed at me, said "Gaahhh!" and cried out: "I can't stand being in the same room as this man."

Mark Leckey

There was a baffled silence. The debating room is vast. It's odd when there's no sound. He looked back at his stack of essay pages as if hoping the audience might read the gesture as one turning from the embodiment of triteness to notes by Socrates. I thought for a moment and said politely, "Point of information!" He allowed the interruption, or else had forgotten what the form of words meant, and was either too startled to object or actually grateful for a diversion. I really did have a conflict about what to do. If I stayed it was a tacit acceptance of rudeness from a silly man. If I went out in a spirit of outrage it gave the insult dignity. I said I had to go to the toilet. He glared. There was laughter. I went out. When I came back Adrian Searle was talking. His gist was that you had to put in a bit of work in order to get anything out of art. He was challenged by a "Point of information!" outburst by the Union Treasurer, the same student I'd been talking to at dinner - he brought up notorious conceptual artists who put their own shit on display in containers and call it art. Adrian gave an informed account of what Manzoni had actually done in 1961 and the possible ways in which the gesture could be read.

Manzoni, Artist's Shit, 1961

There were several more cries of "Point of information!" Almost every interruption throughout the debate so far had been in support of the motion that conceptual art just isn't art. I had no idea what I could say when my turn came that would make any difference. It was hurtful to be "Gaahhed" at by Leckey, but I couldn't change made-up minds merely by playing the sympathy card. He probably assumes that I am Mr Dumb Down Art. He sees an opportunity to define himself as a radical intellect by distancing himself from the type of person he mistakenly fantasises I am. (At 45 he's maybe a bit old for that kind of thing.) In any case, Leckey wasn't the problem. It was obvious I was in a room full of hundreds of young people who were naïve about any kind of art, conceptual or otherwise, even though I'd been told earlier some were studying art history at Oxford and some were artists from the nearby Ruskin School. The motion, philistine and depressing as it was, was going to be carried, and I'd just have to not take the event too seriously.

Traditionally, at the point in an Oxford Union debate at which only the last two speakers are left - each is supposed to sum up the argument of their panel - individual audience members are allowed to take the floor for a short statement. This now happened. Again the announcements were mostly preposterous put-downs of something the put-downer hadn't ever encountered in any serious way, in the name of something else (traditional art) that they also didn't know anything about. I felt it was an abject situation: bright kids, daft thoughts, and a badly behaved artist who was obviously just tortured by being out of his depth. And another artist who'd come all the way over from Poland, and who'd made the effort to write a beautiful thoughtful text. And me, who doesn't care about conceptual art as such, but I see its place in history, and I want to resist ignorance. And in the end it would all be a pointless farce.

Charles Thomson

Charles Thomson, the Stuckist leader, summed up what had been said and made a few points of his own. He had a filmic talking manner as if he was actually in a film, in a court maybe, dramatically standing for justice. Where Miroslaw Balka had said that all art has "a spine of conceptualism," Thomson now said, "And what would we look like if we were just spines!" Where Stephen Deuchar had mentioned Martin Creed, Thomson fulminated against the Tate buying some metronomes by him that you could get much cheaper on ebay. Then I had the last ten minutes. I said there was a lot of innocence in the room. It just came to me to put it like that. You could say I really meant that there are sometimes intellectual exchanges in which someone confidently proclaims big-sounding thoughts and really they don't know anything, and worse they don't know that they don't know - and the attacks on the legitimacy of conceptual art this evening had certainly been one of those situations. But everyone in the audience, and the boss of the proceedings, the Speaker, or whatever he was known as, and some kind of secondary boss, the student who handed out the cards with the timings on them, whose title it eventually turned out was Union Secretary - they were essentially nice. They didn't know about the tormented world of contemporary art but they loved being verbal, being in a ritualised argument, loved hearing ideas tossed around. Technically they were pretty much children. There was no one old in the room except some of the panellists. You can't be offended by what children say about art. They need to be educated. And I thought Mark Leckey and Charles Thomson couldn't really offend me either. They're hustlers on the art scene who both have acts that depend in different ways on a pretence of great knowledge or great currents of deep thought, without either of them apparently ever having encountered any significant resistance to their bullshit. Good luck to anyone who lives by their wits, even if they're a bit Hitlerian like Charles, or deluded about their own sophistication like Mark.

Lou Stoppard, Secretary, Oxford Union

So I did the rest of my talk. After a short account of how the chat of conceptual artists in the 1970s had helped form the way I think and communicate about art, especially the aspects of scepticism and irony that characterise such chat, but also the aspect of logic, I moved the base from conceptual to non-conceptual. The only figures whose names I mentioned were Rembrandt, Gauguin, Piero, Van Eyck and Mondrian. I said when you think about what makes such art beautiful or emotional, or what is really meant by "emotion" in terms of art, you find art becomes more complicated and multi-layered than a simple standoff between real and unreal. I elaborated: Mondrian's paintings certainly seemed beautiful to me, but not emotional particularly, while the formal portraits around us on the walls of the Oxford Union were neither beautiful nor emotional but performed a certain useful memorialising function. Maybe one could see conceptual art performing a function too, one of philosophical enquiry (even if its present phase, as exemplified by the annual Turner Prize event, was more devoted to a sort of comedy pop entertainment, in the name of enquiry - whether it was of a pseudo-political kind or frankly sensationalist kind). And the ten minutes flowed happily to an end. No one interrupted. I said I had no idea what Mark Leckey was going on about with his hostility to me but I didn't bear him any, and I hoped everyone would vote for the right side. Then, amazingly, there was a huge win by us! The audience's prejudice seemed so entrenched all evening, I'd thought that nothing that Stephen Deuchar, Adrian Searle and Miroslaw Balka might say, even though they were the right things to say, would change anything, and nothing I could come up with would either, but here we were with 52 votes for the motion that conceptual art just isn't art and 252 against it. The way the voting happens is that the entire audience leaves the room through two exists, one marked NO, one YES, and it was clear NO was packed and YES relatively clear. Even Alice Thomas, the leader of the anti-conceptualists voted against her own side. The Secretary of the Union, who hands out the cards saying THREE MINUTES, came up to me to pay respect, saying she usually glazed over during the talks because she had to watch the clock but she'd been all ears during mine. In the Union bar later when the official announcement was made I laughed with Stephen (the other two had already left to catch their return train), made a humorously idiotic punching-the-air gesture, and said "Hurray."

Matthew Collings