A book of silences

Chapter five - Sykes

Sykes' arrival was a call to arms for various groups, sects, movements and revolutionary splinter cells in the Art School. His energy, his disdain for bureaucracy, his drawling sarcasm, his unwillingness to take part in anything that did not interest him, only served to highlight how staid, boring and conventional the Art School was. It was obvious that he was a talented painter, incredibly talented, but it was the way he presented his work that inflamed passions throughout the faculty. At his first lecture he dismissed the bulk of the conceptualists approach to art, epitomized by The Young Wankers, as pretentious crap. The Traditionalists, with their emphasis on technique and the Old Masters, he called 'a bunch of anal-retentive old farts. The Realists movement was derided as 'bad photography'. Installation Art was described as 'filling a big white room with crap and charging an arm and a leg for it'. He went on in this vein for another twenty minutes, insulting just about every art movement he could think of.

"You can see why he didn't fit in at Goldsmiths," whispered Bev, watching with glee as The Young Wankers tried to heckle Sykes from their position at the back of the lecture theatre.

"Creativity comes from the conflict of ideas," said Bee, a little pompously. She waited a moment, and, when no-one commented, said "Donatello Versace."

Bev nodded to show she was listening, then pointed at the Young Wankers, who were desperately trying to attract Sykes' attention. "Serves 'em right for trying to be cool and hip, sitting at the back of the room, can't make themselves heard. Too trendy to shout, too intellectual to throw anything. Now the Weird Painters, they've got the right idea." She pointed to a group of six or seven students sat at the front of the lecture hall.

A mixed group, these were the quiet, painting-obsessed students who spent hours locked in their studios, painting, to the exclusion of all else. Normally they did not come to any lectures, except ones by painters/for painters/about painters, when they would sit on the front row, taking copious notes and not speaking. Now they were talking loudly, waving their hands, red-faced and disagreeing with Sykes.

"Shit, that's Anna shouting down there!" said Cat, pointing to a short, bespectacled girl shaking her finger at Sykes. Anna was thought, along with Bev, to be one of the best painters the school had had for years. She did not speak much, suffering from a combination of a monomaniacal obsession with the work of Titian and crippling social shyness.

"She's certainly come out of herself!" said Bev with a grin. The small girl was leaning over the lecture hall bench, plaits waving with passion as she upbraided the lecturer.

"Lucky the lecture hall pews are fixed," said Bee, "Otherwise she'd be at his throat like a little terrier." Anna was now trying to climb over the benches to get at Sykes. She had her pencil case in her hand, and it looked like she was going to throw it. One of the other Weird Painters wrestled it out of her hands and forced her back into her seat.

Through it all, Sykes grinned and nodded, seeming to consider the irate students not-so-polite comments. Once Anna was disarmed and forced back into her seat, he placed his lecture notes in a shoulder bag and, with a cheery wave at the girls where they sat in the seventh row, left the lecture hall. He clasped his hands above his head like a prize-fighter as he left the hall. Insults and heckling followed his exit.

"Now that," said Cat, looking around at the buzzing hall, filled with students and lecturers arguing and shouting, "That is what I call a lecture!"

                                                                                         .....

After the lecture, the canteen was absolutely heaving. The kitchen staff were pissed off, glaring at the mass of undergraduates who had poured out of the lecture hall and were steadfastly not ordering food or coffee, just clogging up the cafeteria and shouting at each other. Cat watched with delight as one of the grumpier of the catering staff pushed a half empty trolley of dirty dishes straight through the crowd, people being thrust aside like pack ice before an icebreaker in the Spring, steadfastly ignoring a storm of complaints behind her.