Things will be out of sync.
There will be a large sauna.
The edge will be perceived from the inside and outside simultaneously.
The idea of boundary-pushing will remain.
There will be lots more bicycles.

- Liam Gillick, Nobody Asked You To Do Nothing: A potential school, 2009

In characteristic style, the artist Liam Gillick describes a potential art school; an art school that is like no other art school in existence. There is little mention of funding structures, institutional amalgamations, application procedures, or other governmental forces that act upon the running of the school. Neither is there any precise detail on assessment criteria, studio allocation, or the availability of workshops - the typical stuff of the printed prospectus.

Gillick’s potential art school floats free from this level of detail. It’s a fictional proposition, not demanding to be anything other than ‘potential’. (He goes on to describe a ubiquity of ‘large scale 3-dimensional printers’ and the feeling that ‘unicorns are about to return’.) Yet, this fiction is also an exercise in imagining the conditions which help toward open, experimental and critical art practice; prioritizing his own interests as an artist, no less.

While many of Gillick’s ideas are hard to refuse and are perfectly agreeable in principle (a large sauna, for instance), it is curious that the text begins with ‘synchronicity’, or the wanton lack of it. What sort of synchronicity is being referred to here? Just what exactly is being ‘out of sync’ got to do with art school potential?

Perhaps it is a different sense of synchronicity that occurs to me as I write this text.
As I’m sat at my desk, I’m aware that there’s a motion of parallel activity taking place. Deadlines are being chased, studios are being emptied, and preparations are being made for the exhibition which culminates 3 or 4 years spent at the Crawford College of Art and Design.

If all has gone to plan, the present reader will be holding the pages of a catalogue which also represents the synchronous coming-together of the graduating year group. Here - committed to print, emulsified by the varnish of the catalogue’s glossy pages - are individual art practices, collectively bound. It might be a truism, but still it’s worth identifying: this catalogue has the effect of making the participating artists appear in the same moment, all at once - give or take the time it takes to flick through the pages.

Yet, if what I’m describing is in someway synchronous, this is not exactly occurrent at the level of the artwork or art practice. Rather, this synchronicity exists in the relationship between these practices and the organizational structures that act to contain them, qualify them, and do their best to propel them – beyond the walls of the college and into a place that is sometimes abusively called ‘the real world’.

In the pages of this catalogue or in the spaces of the accompanying exhibition, it is difficult to detect those things that have fallen out of sync; those aspects of art practice that couldn’t step to the deadline, missed assessment, or that fell short of certainty at the cut-off point.

In the pages of this catalogue or in the spaces of the accompanying exhibition, it is difficult to detect those things have fallen out of sync; those aspects of art practice that couldn’t step to the deadline, missed assessment, or that fell short of certainty at the cut-off point. What we can see in these pages is a significant achievement for everyone involved, but what remains out of sight and out of sync here, is out there somewhere. it will surely appear in turn - just as the voice follows the lips in foreign TV transmission. Once the action is over and the focus is dropped, there is still potential.’.

Matt Packer,
Curator of Exhibitions & Projects
Lewis Glucksman Gallery, UCC.