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Dan Mair has a traditional art education having studied a foundation at the Surrey Institute of Art and Design and his bachelor and master degrees at University of the Arts London.

 

In 2017 he created an artistic alter ego as a mechanism to return to the art world and enrolled in Wimbledon College of Arts under his alias Stanley Black. His aim was to explore being and identity through the use of persona. During his research his work became increasingly political, driven by issues of freedom of speech within the academy and the wider cultural environment.

 

During his first unit of study Stanley Black began to notice that there were certain topics that were discouraged from being explored or if they were to be explored had to be presented in a particular manner, adhering to the critical theory agenda of political correctness. Stanley Black saw this manifestation of wokeness as a direct assault on liberty, abstract thought & common sense and a limit on free expression. 

 

Interested in the role of the artist as provocateur, his work explored the boundaries of taste, decency and acceptable discourse within the academy. Often his art was presented in a blunt and ham-fisted manner which won him scant critical praise, limited friends and few allies amongst polite company and the degree educated. His main area of research centred around the orthodoxy of thought within university and he had hoped to offer a critique of liberal left metropolitian thinking and the intersectional identity politics which he feels pervades all the main institutional instruments of power - politics, media, corporations and the educational apparatus. 

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This section of the website is the written component as handed in to complete his course and is presented as a complete body of work, an artwork within itself and a digital archive of Stanley Black’s adventures whilst studying for his MFA Fine Arts at Wimbledon College of Arts.