I cannot remember giving that advice, but he assured me I did give it and he took it to heart.
At the time, I was alluding to the fact that during teaching in the studio or the workshop, both open environments, you invariably give advice to a specific student, but that advice can quite often be applicable in more general terms across a range of student experiences and studio practices. Often it's meant to be overheard. Accidental asides; the casual imparting of information, discussions sparked by a dialogue between student and tutor are crucial to a healthy environment in any art school, where I've always striven not to be the dominant figure - you need to leave spaces for young artists to engage and voice opinions, however challenging or contradictory.
'Lugging in' (a great Scottish term), should be encouraged and branded a crucial skill for all young creatives.
Not that I'm averse to listening to music only I can hear; I still have my original Walkman I used during the early 1980's and lots of distorted C90 cassette tapes as testament. The crucial difference was that the Walkman was more often a tool to make interminable bus journeys from the North to Glasgow and London bearable. It served to nullify dead time. It was a tool to purposefully shut me off and enable withdrawal. Art School is not a place to shut yourself off, it's a place where you need to be, should be at your most receptive. Plenty of time afterwards to exile yourself in your studio. Nowadays, I teach many students who have an EarPod in one ear and the other supposedly listening. Quite often these are students who use noise cancelling headphones and/or music to aid concentration and retention of information. I often question: if they can't hear me, concentrate fully on my voice, how can they hope to retain the information I'm passing on? What are they missing from the incidental conversations and dialogues?
Perhaps as a result of this fairly recent phenomenon, an increasing number of students will record, both aurally and visually during print workshop instruction. Both have become almost reflex nowadays with the increased quality of audio and visual recording capabilities of smart phones. I've long stopped asking beforehand if they intend to record and film me and students have long stopped asking if it's permissible. But are they really listening in the moment, or do they rely on the playback later? What this engenders surely, is a one voice conversation, a monologue on my part; neutralising the to and fro of discussion and resulting off-shoots with very little dialogue as a result. Any questions?...shoe gazing and silence. And what they might listen to and watch later is of course another monologue, very similar to ubiquitous Youtube videos albeit with better content I hope. But, a very important but, they've lost the opportunity to let me know if they don't get it.
I made a piece of work a number of years ago called ' Listening for Snow'. It had nothing to do with snow at all really; what it evoked was the sensation of listening for what's not there; the missing. The gaps, the voids and the the small voices. White noise, Norwegian, static, white noise, Andorran, static, white noise, unknown language, static, white noise, Gaelic, static, white noise, Danish, static...shipping forecast.
I suppose that's why I've always enjoyed sitting in a bar by myself; it affords a rare opportunity to just sit and listen.
I'm pretty sure too that Nick and I could sit in a bar and say nothing much and be quite content in doing so. Unlike Sinatra, I don't want to engage the barman in melancholy chat. I'm not morose; I'm listening.