Portraits of the artists as . . . what?

Within the next two months, final year and MA Fine Art students at the country's various art schools and colleges will stage their degree or diploma exhibitions, a rite of passage that marks the end of their studies or, as is increasingly the case, of one phase of their studies. Art isn't what it was when the forerunner of the country's premier art college, the NCAD, was established as the Royal Dublin Society Schools of Drawing in 1746. Since then the evolution of the present day NCAD has mirrored the struggles enacted on the aesthetic battlefield, struggles which can be caricatured as a tug of war between a static, academic vision of art and a dynamic, open ended vision.

In terms of the NCAD, this particular battle reached its climax at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when the college was, as Charles Harper of Limerick's School of Art and Design has said, still seen as "a kind of finishing school." A wave of staff and student dissent, dismissals and occupations engendered reforms. As a student, Harper had enjoyed good relations with the old guard in the college, but he could see their limitations, in particular a blanket failure to address any ideas other than their own tradition of salon painting.

As things have developed, the revolution that actually happened wasn't quite the one the rebels had in mind. What did happen was that both art and art education in Ireland began a continuing move towards professionalism. This is not to say that teaching was previously unprofessional - though it had become casual. Harper characterises it as a kind of non-teaching: "They were just there, or made comments on what you were doing." But, from being a vocational pursuit, art and art teaching became professions. Even in the late 1970s, students began to think in terms of their careers, something previously unheard of.

As one artist, who graduated at the beginning of the 1990s put it: "Art education is more career orientated now. There's a sense that the work is more packaged, and the students as well." That quote is by no means untypical. In fact, every successive generation of art students professes more or less the same sentiment, probably because that is the way things are developing in the long term.

In the past, technique referred simply to methods of painting and drawing, modelling and carving, but no longer. The NCAD is in the process of establishing an MA in multi-media, and information technology is an issue that every art school has had to face. "As I see it," Noel Sheridan of NCAD says, "we have to ask ourselves what it will mean to be visually literate in the 21st century, and that means addressing IT." Yet while Sheridan and his peers recognise the need to be technologically proficient, they also take a healthily critical view. "I'd hate just to turn out people who make videos for MTV. It's important that artists don't fall in with the technology, that they seriously address the conceptual, intellectual end of it.

"IT is all about yes/no and art is all about maybe. You turn on this cutting edge technology and what do you find? They're all chasing logos down Piranesi corridors. It's a 16th-century space. They haven't even got beyond perspective. It has to do with the way it's set up. We're doing what Bill Gates wants rather than vice versa. We must have learned something from pushing paint around for several hundred years, and I'd like to see some of those skills applied to the new media, but I can't say I've seen it happen yet."

Geoff Steiner-Scott of Cork's Crawford College echoes some of these sentiments. "Computers are important. Every student should be computer literate and we try to make sure that they are, but not at the expense of life drawing. I feel one of the problems with computers is that they encourage a default mentality. That is they have certain settings, certain capabilities, and you are very subtly encouraged to go along with them." Aileen McKeogh, of the Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, also says that it is important to balance the purely technical with the personal and creative: "Computers are another tool." Central to this is a view of drawing not as a mechanical skill but as a way of thinking, as a means of fostering independence of thought. Steiner-Scott sees room for different emphases in different colleges. "The Crawford is an object based college, people make things. There is good work done in other colleges in other areas, but that's what goes on here. So stone carving, print making, the foundry, all those things are what we're about. There are regional specialisations as well. Painting here tends to be more figurative - looking at the schools up along the west coast it strikes me that you get a greater emphasis on landscape."

Sheridan points up one striking, often overlooked fact: "Something like 80 per cent of our graduates don't practice as artists themselves, they go on to other, related areas, so it's important that they have a training that is useful. So what we're trying to do is incorporate an IT foundation, encompassing Photoshop and Quark, for example, in all courses." McKeogh also has that 80 per cent of students very much in mind. "We're trying to address the issue of where they do go to, rather than saying that everyone who studies here is going to be an artist." It would be wrong to assume that art schools intend that every graduate will be an artist, but, she says, "It is important that their art education is significant in the contribution they make to whatever field they do work in, be it radio, or television, or whatever." Dun Laoghaire sets great store by flexibility, on making interdisciplinary courses available.

There is still an apparent feeling among students and ex-students that not enough is done to prepare them for the reality of surviving after college. There are seminars on the subject, and in Dun Laoghaire, for example, these start quite early on but: "As a student, you tend to have a romantic rather than a practical view of what you are doing," as one recent graduate observes, or again: "You're just trying to cope with all you have to do and you presume it will work out for you without specifically thinking about it." More pragmatically, a young artist points out that: "The day to day reality of getting a studio, of going in and working in it, of just surviving: I don't think any institution caters for that, and I don't think they can."

"We all have egos, but we don't have to impose them on students," Harper has said. "It's not so much what you teach, it's recognising what students are capable of." But inevitably students can be unduly influenced by particular tutors, and there are anecdotal accounts of individual students feeling themselves to be under ideological pressure from tutors, or of feeling confused by the conflicting views of different tutors, but by and large it seems fair to say that they are allowed space to develop in the direction they choose.

In the words of one NCAD student: "In terms of the direction you want to go it's pretty much wide open. In that respect I think painting is probably the best option because nowadays painting can incorporate anything, from sculpture to video to simply painting." There are, however, practical constraints. Perhaps surprisingly, students seem generally pragmatic about the limitations of space and facilities (incidentally, as a facility the NCAD Library prompts unqualified, unanimous praise from students and graduates), but new technology is surely one obvious area of contention. To make a drawing you just need paper and pencil, but to make a film or a video you are likely to need access to expensive equipment, facilities and technical support.

They are there in theory, but some of those who have done it say that getting what you need can be, simply, "an enormous hassle." One graduate sums it up astutely: "In every art school you have to negotiate with the people who are responsible for the equipment. They will have their own priorities, their own preferences, their own loyalties. It's a question of diplomacy. Art schools are notoriously political. In fact if I have one criticism I would say that the level of institutional politics, more than anything else, stifles creativity. But you have to take that on board. The learning process is as much learning about the politics as about creativity."

The high profile of the Young British Artists like Damien Hirst has led to higher expectations on the part of students, but also created greater pressures to achieve quick critical and commercial success. To peak early, you are expected to have a highly developed professional identity by the time you graduate, often a hopelessly unrealistic expectation. Finding the right balance between the need for a personal space, the opportunity to develop a sense of individual identity, and the need for direction, is extremely difficult.

Sculptor Kathy Prendergast has spoken of her gratitude to the staff at NCAD for, essentially, leaving her alone to find her voice. For others it can be more difficult. They can feel rudderless and confused. "A lot of people pretend to have ideas when they simply don't have any ideas," one graduate observes. "They don't realise that it's okay not to have ideas." It is the duty of the colleges to cater for that incalculable element of genuine creativity, and it seems fair to say that the art school environment was probably never more favourable than now, but in the end it's also the case that artists aren't made in colleges. One young artist described it this way: "There are those who leave college and are immediately successful as artists, others leave and make sandwiches for three years, and then one day they say: `I must make some art.' Some people are artists even if the last thing they think about is producing a product, or their career. You could see it in college. They have that sensibility, it's just a part of them and it seems to permeate every aspect of their lives."