Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Sir Nicholas Serota
Chancellor, Professor Lubbock, Graduands, Ladies and Gentlemen
I begin of course with congratulations to those graduates here today and
those who have received their degrees in absentia, and I congratulate not only
the graduates but also their parents, their partners, their friends, that is to
say those who have sustained them, and probably worked nearly as hard as them,
in the achievement of these remarkable degrees.
I stand here today with some sense of misgiving that I should be sharing a
platform with people who have earned degrees when I am simply attending and
receiving this honorary degree. I have to say my misgivings were perhaps
even slightly enhanced when the Chancellor began his speech earlier, with
references to the Turner Prize and then Professor Lubbock continued with a long
description of the Turner Prize and my part in it. It is remarkable that
the vision of contemporary artists should still be as disturbing today as it is
- but it is not only the art of the present, but also even the art of the
relatively recent past. Earlier this week I was walking through the Duveen
galleries at the Tate where we have a fine display of early, coloured sculpture
by Anthony Caro, now a member of the Order of Merit, by Philip King, now
President of the Royal Academy. I encountered a couple, of a certain age,
on their way to see our American Sublime exhibition (an exhibition of American
nineteenth century landscape painting). They were engaged in polite
conversation, but looking up and seeing these brilliant coloured sculptures one
said to the other “What the hell are those **** works over there?”
Many of you graduating today will perhaps not yet fully recognise the
significance of the period that you have spent here at Essex. Certainly,
when I received degrees in the late Sixties, I had not, at that point, fully
appreciated the extent to which the time I spent at Cambridge and then at the
Courtauld, would leave an imprint and give me a set of values and a philosophy
that would guide me for much of the following thirty years or more. You
may have received a degree, you may have learned a great deal, but you will also
have encountered values, and indeed people, who will shape your lives in the
future.
Why am I here today in Essex? Well, I can only speak really about the
discipline in which I work, that is to say Art History. But in my field,
and I believe the Department of Art History and Theory here shares many of the
characteristics of those Departments elsewhere in the University, Essex is
remarkable.
Art History in the 1960s was a new discipline. It had been born,
essentially in Germany, and was taught in only a very small number of
Universities in the United Kingdom. The dominant tradition was one of
connoisseurship, that is to say appreciation of single objects or groups of
objects. When Art History was established as a discipline here at Essex, a
new tradition was established which looked back to other roots in Germany and
placed theory and aesthetics at the heart of the discipline. I take that
as being significant, because it asserted that in any endeavour an understanding
of the basis, the shape and the structure of your subject, is fundamental to
building a vision. Professor Lubbock has referred to a vision at Tate
Modern. I can tell you that there is no vision without the detail.
There is no vision without the scaffolding. As I encounter graduates from
Essex, both at the Tate and elsewhere, I recognise a particular form of training
that has left its imprint and makes those graduates, those curators, more
searching in their questions, sometimes more imaginative than their counterparts
from elsewhere. I am delighted that Tate and Essex are now working with
Manchester University now in a new Centre for the Study of Surrealism.
A second distinguishing characteristic of the Department of Art History &
Theory at Essex, was its international outlook. Today we have seen
graduands from countries across the world. Within the Department of Art
History & Theory a decision was taken in the Sixties and developed in the
Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, not just to concentrate on art of North West
Europe or even North America, but to go wider, to go to Spain, to look at Latin
America, at Native American art. In the modern world we need to think not
just about our neighbours and the traditions in which we have grown up, but also
those we encounter across the world. We can all learn from each other and
we all need to study and understand each other if we are to prosper. So
when you leave Essex and go back to wherever you have come from, do not forget
those people who you have met, those friends that you have made from other parts
of the world, because their standards and values influence yours.
It is a huge pleasure to be here today. I want to congratulate again
those whom have received degrees. I want to remind them to cherish and remember
their friends and their time here at Essex; to think about the fact that visions
are built on scaffolding, and not plucked from the air and to remember to look
across the world.
Chancellor, it is a great honour and I have to say a great pleasure to join
the Essex family. Thank you.