Simon Morris

FREE download here
Year 2013
Format A3 format, screen quality PDF

In 1972 one of the twentieth century’s most important art educators, Garry Neill Kennedy, was asked by Studio International magazine to write an essay about the art school he was then President of, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, Canada. To resist and parody the PR-speak used by more conventional institutions he produced a legendary anti-essay that came to be known as Page 141. In it, Kennedy compiled quantifiable data about the institution, its staff members, and its students, and simply aggregated that data into a stream of comically material facts that were compressed onto one page of block text in the magazine with a tightly-cropped photo of Nova Scotia oxen.

In April 2013 Garry came to England at the invitation of information as material to stay at Shandy Hall (Coxwold) as Artist-in-Residence. To celebrate his Professorial Lecture at Teesside University, Simon Morris, Programme Leader for Fine Art, spent two weeks compiling a new, Teesside edition of Page 141. Through a string of uncomfortable surveys he eventually compiled Page 141 2, which was screenprinted in a limited edition and presented to the unsuspecting Kennedy at his first lecture. In response, Kennedy had a xerox reprint of his famous original made and hand-signed a copy for every student at his later Teesside and University of Leeds lectures. In this spirit Kennedy’s radical mode of engaged teaching — teaching as a productive collaboration between artists and students, dedicated to making the most interesting art possible regardless of status — was reinvigorated.

The screen quality PDF downloadable via the link above freely shares Morris’ work and Kennedy’s spirit.