What Do Artists Know? 9780271060606

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What Do A rtists Know?

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The S t on e A rt T h e ory I nstitute s

Edited by James Elkins

vol. 1 Art and Globalization

vol. 2 What Is an Image?

vol. 3 What Do Artists Know?

The Stone Art Theory Institutes is a series of books on five of the principal unresolved problems in contemporary art theory. The series attempts to be as international, inclusive, and conversational as possible in order to give a comprehensive sense of the state of thinking on each issue. All together, the series involves more than three hundred scholars from more than sixty countries.

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This series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone, longtime friends of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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t h e s t o n e a rt t h e o ry i n s t i t u t e s v o lu m e 3

Wh at Do Artists Know? edited by james elkins event co - organized with frances whitehead

the pennsylvania state university press, university park, pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data What do artists know? / edited by James Elkins.    p.   cm. — (The Stone art theory institutes ; v. 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Brings together historians, philosophers, critics, curators, artists, and educators to ask how art is and should be taught. Explores the theories that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education, and the most promising current conceptualizations”—Provided by publisher. isbn 978-0-271-05424-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art—Study and teaching—Congresses. I. Elkins, James, 1955–  . Editor of compilation.

Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003

The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on Nature’s Natural, which contains 30% postconsumer waste.

n82.w49 2012 707.1—dc23 2012023602

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This series is dedicated to

howard and donna stone long-time friends of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

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contents

Series Preface ix

introduction James Elkins 1

assessments Jan Baetens

Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens

125

189

Robert Nelson

Janneke Wesseling

128

193

Bert Taken and Jeroen Boomgaard

Vanalyne Green

131

the seminars 1. Histories of Studio Art Teaching 13

2. What Parts of Those Histories Are Pertinent? 25

3. The Possibility of a Book on Studio Art Instruction Worldwide 33

4. Artistic Knowledge, Part 1 39

5. Artistic Knowledge, Part 2 47

William Conger 135

Anders Dahlgren

Tom McGuirk 146

George Smith 152

Martin Søberg 155

Su Baker

200

afterword Howard Singerman 205

Notes on the Contributors 217

Index 221

158

Gary Willis 162

Louisa Avgita

8. The MFA Degree

Rina Arya

9. The PhD Degree

Brad Buckley and John Conomos

103

Henk Slager

141

7. The BFA Degree

83

198

Michael Fotiadis

Yeung Yang

77

Glenn Adamson

139

6. The First-Year Program 59

196

166 171

175

178

Charles Green 181

Hákan Nilsson 186

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series preface

In the usual course of things, art theory happens invisibly, without attracting attention. Concepts like picture, visual art, and realism circulate in newspapers, galleries, and museums as if they were as obvious and natural as words like dog, cat, and goldfish. Art theory is the air the art world breathes, and it is breathed carelessly, without thought. It is the formless stuff out of which so many justifications are conjured. Art theory also happens in universities and art schools, where it is studied and nurtured like a rare orchid. And art theory happens in innumerable academic conferences, which are sometimes studded with insights but are more often provisional and inconclusive. In those academic settings, words like picture, visual art, and realism are treated like impossibly complicated machines whose workings can hardly be understood. Sometimes, then, what counts as art theory is simple and normal, and other times it seems to be the most difficult subject in visual art. A similarity links these different ways of using theory. In the art world as in academia, it often feels right just to allude to an concept like picture, and let its flavor seep into the surrounding conversation. That is strange because picture is so important to so many people, and it leads to wayward conversations. The books in this series are intended to push hard on that strangeness, by spending as much time as necessary on individual concepts and the texts that exemplify them. Some books are more or less dedicated to particular words: volume 1 focuses on globalization, translation, governmentality, and hybridity; volume 2 explores image, picture, and icon. Volume 3 is concerned with the idea that art is research, which produces knowledge. Volume 4 is about the aesthetic, the antiaesthetic, and the political; and volume 5 concentrates on visual studies, visual culture, and visuality. This series is like an interminable conversation around a dictionary—or like the world’s most prolix glossary of art. That isn’t to say that the purposes of these conversations is to fix meanings: on the contrary, the idea is to work hard enough so that what seemed obdurate and slippery, as Wittgenstein said, begins to fracture and crack. Each book in this series started as a week-long event, held in Chicago. No papers were given (except as evening lectures, which are not recorded in these books). For a week, five faculty and a group of twenty-five scholars met in closed seminars. In preparation for the week they had read over eight hundred pages of assigned texts. The week opened with a three hour panel discussion among the faculty, continued with four and a half days of seminars (six hours each day), and

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ended with a five hour panel discussion. All thirty-five hours of it was taped and edited, and the pertinent portions are presented here. This series is a refinement of a previous book series called The Art Seminar, which appeared from 2005 to 2008.1 Like The Art Seminar, the Stone Summer Theory Institutes are an attempt to record a new kind of art theory, one that is more inclusive and less coherent than some art theory produced in North America and western Europe since the advent of poststructuralism. The guiding idea is that theorizing on visual art has become increasingly formalized and narrow, even as art practices have become wildly diverse. Both of the book series are meant to capture a reasonable cross-section of thinking on a given topic, and both include people at the far ends of the spectrum of their subjects—so far from one another that in some cases they were reluctant even to sit together in the events, or participate in the books. Some conversations are genuinely dialectic, others are abrupt encounters, and still others are unaccountable misunderstandings. All those species of communication are recorded as faithfully as possible, because they are evidence of the state of understanding of each field.2 The Introduction to each volume is meant as a straightforward and clear review of the critical situation leading up to the seminars. The Art Seminar books then had a set of essays to help set the stage for the transcribed discussions. There are no essays in this series, because it is not possible to usefully condense the hundreds of pages of texts that informed these discussions. (References can be found in the transcripts.) The omission of essays makes this series more “difficult” than The Art Seminar, but the literature of art theory has grown beyond the point where it can be helpfully anthologized. The books in this series are not introductions to the various people who participated, and they do not usually function as summaries of the subjects they treat. They are attempts to move forward given the current state of discourse in each field, and they presuppose the readings that were assigned in the seminars. After each year’s week-long event, we selected excerpts from the thirty-five hours of tapes, and produced a rough-edited transcript. It was given to each of the participants, who were invited to edit their contributions and add references. After several rounds of editing the transcript was sent out to forty or fifty people who did not attend the event. They were asked to write assessments, which appear here in the order they were received. The assessors were asked to consider the conversation from a distance, noting its strengths and its blind spots, in any style and at any length. As the assessments came in, they were distributed to people who hadn’t yet completed theirs, so that later assessments often comment 1. The topics of the seven volumes of The Art Seminar: Art History Versus Aesthetics (2006), Photography Theory (2007), Is Art History Global? (2007), The State of Art Criticism, coedited with Michael Newman (2008), Renaissance Theory, coedited with Robert Williams (2008), Landscape Theory, coedited with Rachael DeLue (2008), and Re-Enchantment, coedited with David Morgan (2008). All are published by Routledge (Taylor and Francis), New York.

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2. Different fields have different kinds of incoherence. The particular disunities of art criticism are discussed in an email exchange at the end of The State of Art Criticism. The incoherence of theorizing on the Renaissance is the subject of another exchange at the end of Renaissance Theory. My own thoughts about the very strange second volume, Photography Theory, are in “Is Anyone Listening?” Photofile 80 (Winter 2007): 80.

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on earlier ones, building an intermittent conversation through the book. And finally, the books end with Afterwords, which are meant to paint a picture of the current condition of thinking on the subject, pointing out the results and noting the misunderstandings and dead ends. The objective of all this is not to produce a new consensus, but a new level of difficulty. I say in several of the transcripts that I would be happy if the seminar conversations and assessments make it harder to write about art. For some readers, art theory may seem too abstruse and technical, but at heart it has a different problem: it is too easy. Both the intricate art theory practiced in academies, and the nearly invisible theory that suffuses galleries and art fairs, are reasonably easy to do reasonably well. And as Wittgenstein knew, the hardest problems are the ones that are right in front of us: picture, visual art, realism. The purpose of the books in this series is to do some damage to our sense that we understand words like those. A Special Acknowledgment This is the kind of project that is not normally possible in academic life, because it requires an unusual outlay of time and effort: a month of preparatory reading, a concerted week without the distractions of papers being read or lectures that are off-topic. The originating events at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago are called the Stone Summer Theory Institute, after Howard and Donna Stone, whose gift made this series possible. They are dedicated collectors of postminimal art, with an eye for the most ambitious and characteristic pieces by a wide range of artists, from John McCracken to Gerhard Richter, Steve McQueen, Janine Antoni, Luc Turmans, Michael Krebber, and Marlene Dumas. What is remarkable about their support is that it is directed to content and not infrastructure or display. In the art world, there is no end to the patronage of display: corporate sponsors can be found for most every art project, and galleries traditionally depend on individuals and corporations for much of their programming. In that ocean of public patronage there is virtually nothing directed at the question of what art means. The market plummets onward, sometimes—as in the case of contemporary Chinese painting—with very little serious critical consideration or interpretation. The Stones’s gift is extremely unusual. Their own collecting interests are in line with the subjects of this series: the theories addressed in these books are only important if it is granted that the history of art theory exerts a pressure on the dissipated present, just as postminimalism is crucial mainly, and possibly only, for those who experience the modernist past as a challenge and not merely an attractive backdrop. So this series is dedicated to Howard and Donna Stone: if more patrons supported art history, theory, and criticism, the art world might well make more sense.

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The Topics in This Series Volume 1, Art and Globalization, is about writing in the “biennale culture” that now determines much of the art market. Literature on the worldwide dissemination of art assumes nationalism and ethnic identity, but rarely analyzes it. At the same time there is extensive theorizing about globalization in politics, postcolonial theory, sociology, and anthropology. The volume is an experiment, to see what happens when the two discourses are brought together. Volume 2, What is an Image? asks how well we understand what we mean by picture and image. The art world depends on there being something special about the visual, but that something is seldom spelled out. The most interesting theorists of those fundamental words are not philosophers but art historians, and this book interrogates the major theories, including those with theological commitments, those based in phenomenology, and those concerned principally with social meanings. Volume 3, What do Artists Know? is about the education of artists. The MFA degree is notoriously poorly conceptualized, and now it is giving was to the PhD in art practice. Meanwhile, conversations on freshman courses in studio art continue to be bogged down by conflicting agendas. This book is about the theories that underwrite art education at all levels, the pertinent history of art education, and the most promising current conceptualizations. Volume 4, Beyond the Anti-Aesthetic, is about the fact that now, almost thirty years after Hal Foster defined the anti-aesthetic, there is still no viable alternative to the dichotomy between aesthetics and anti- or non-aesthetic art. The impasse is made more difficult by the proliferation of identity politics, and it is made less negotiable by the hegemony of anti-aesthetics in academic discourse on art. This is the first concerted, systematic effort to understand the impasse. Volume 5, Farewell to Visual Studies, is a forum on the state of the once-new discipline (inaugurated in the early 1990s) that promised to be the site for the study of visuality in all fields, inside and outside of art. Despite the increasing number of departments worldwide, visual studies remains a minority interest with in increasingly predictable set of interpretive agendas and subjects. Hence our farewell.

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introduction

James Elkins

This introduction is adapted from the opening roundtable, September 21, 2009. Welcome, everyone. This opening discussion is meant to be very informal: we’re just going to talk about some of the questions we hope to raise during the week of seminars. After today’s three-hour panel discussion, there will be twenty-seven hours of closed seminars, and then on Saturday the week will end with another public panel discussion. That one will be five hours long—yes, I know, five hours—but in the past it has been a great way to wrap up the week. We have an outstanding Faculty here, and an equally amazing group of fifteen Fellows, from the United States, Austria, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Greece, Mexico, Hong Kong, Australia, Sweden, and Canada. Some are art historians who study the history of art instruction; some are philosophers; and others are experts in college-level art instruction, right up to the PhD. (And I wanted to record that we were going to have a Fellow from Iran, but the U.S. immigration people found out that she didn’t have a large bank account, and they decided that could only mean she was intending to settle here permanently.) We have all spent the last month reading. The Faculty assigned about fifteen hundred pages of texts,1 not including optional background reading on craft,2 design,3 and art education.4 There were also optional texts on related subjects such as contemporary art practices outside of academies.5 1. These are cited throughout the text: the following footnotes are only the readings that were not cited by the participants in the Seminars. 2. Glenn Adamson, Thinking Through Craft (London: Berg, 2007). 3. György Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1944); Nigel Cross, Designerly Ways of Knowing (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007); Alain Findeli, “Rethinking Design Education for the 21st Century: Theoretical, Methodological, and Ethical Discussion,” Design Issues 17, no. 1 (2001): 5–17; Jorge Frascara, “Hiding Lack of Knowledge: Bad Words in Design Education,” Design Issues 23, no. 4 (2007): 62–68; Clive Dilnot, “The State of Design History,” pt. 1 and pt. 2, Design Issues 1, no. 1 (1984): 4–23, and 1 no. 2 (1984): 3–20; these were all suggested by Michael Golec. 4. A position paper on art education was written especially for the event: CVAE Club, Chicago, “The Condition of Art Education: Defining the Field and Its Distinct Territories,” unpublished position paper, 2009, available

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on request from Keith Brown or John Ploof, Art Education, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 5. These include Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); The Object of Labor: Art, Cloth, and Cultural Production, edited by Joan Livingstone and John Ploof (Chicago: SAIC; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Claire Bishop, Participation, Documents of Contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Marion Milner (pseudonym Joanna Field), On Not Being Able to Paint, with an introduction by Anna Freud (New York: International Universities Press, 1957); the background reading included Bild und Bildung: Ikonologische Interpretationen vormoderner Dokumente von Erziehung und Bildung, edited by Christian Rittelmeyer and Erhard Wiersing (Wiesbaden: Ottto Harrassowitz, 1991), an anthology of texts on Bildung, paideia, and related concepts from antiquity to the seventeenth century; Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy, edited by Brad

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So we are hoping to make some headway on some of the more difficult issues about how artists are taught, and what they know. This is an enormous field—actually, no one knows how big it is. The website artschools​.com lists 2,055 art schools and departments in the United States, so there must be at least five times that number in the whole world.6 Another site, gradschools​.com​, lists 486 MFA programs in the United States and Canada. Every year there are too many conferences, symposia, and lectures on this subject for anyone to attend. But at the same time, some of the most fundamental issues are completely unresolved. I was amazed, really amazed, when I discovered that there is basically no definition of the MFA. It is not an exaggeration to say no one knows what an MFA is, except in the trivial sense that it involves professional-level competence in visual art and that for the moment it’s still the terminal degree. No one has a good account of how art should be taught, why it should be taught, whether it should be taught, or even if it should be taught.7 No one knows what knowledge goes into art, or what knowledge comes out of it. And this goes doubly for the new PhD degree in studio art, which has raised some extremely difficult philosophic problems that no one, so far, as made much headway with. All this may sound improbable, but I don’t mind saying it—I just feel a bit more confident saying it now that I’ve read the fifteen hundred pages of texts for our seminars. The first topic, the one that I think goes before all the others, is: What is the relevant history of art education? What historical periods, what institutions, are still relevant when we are thinking about how studio art is taught today? This may seem like a simple question, but there has not been much work on the subject, and even the basic outlines of the history of studio art instruction are open for discussion. Should we think of the French academy model as one coherent development? Or should we divide it into phases? Maybe it makes sense to distinguish five phases of academic art instruction in the West: the original Italian Accademia, the French academy and the proliferation of academies throughout Europe, the final phase of academies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as they were swamped by Modernism, and finally the straggling survivors that continue to the present. It’s not that there isn’t scholarship on the history of academies: it’s that the scholarship is only historical, so it needs to be looked at again with an eye to what matters for the present. Buckley and John Conomos (Halifax: Nova Scotia College Press, 2009) (this appeared during the Seminars); S. David Deitcher, “Teaching the Late Modern Artist: From Mnemonics to the Technology of Gestalt” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1989); “Unsentimental Education: The Professionalization of the American Artist,” in Hand Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955–1962, edited by Russell Ferguson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992); Frederick M. Logan, Growth of Art in American Schools (New York: Harper, 1955). 6. In 2005 the same website listed 3,623, which gives a sense of how variable the numbers are.

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7. My own notion is that art cannot be taught, because teachers do not know or control the moments when essential information is imparted, and students don’t know when they should listen for that information. That argument is not part of this book; see Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), Korean translation 학교 안의 미술 학교 밖의 미술 (Seoul: Chaek-Se-Sang, 2006), Chinese translation (Beijing: Peking University Press, forthcoming).

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Once that is decided, more or less, then it becomes possible to ask a second question: What practices, ideas, skills, techniques, and exercises are still relevant? In what specific ways is the Bauhaus still with us? What is currently done with Bauhaus exercises such as Joseph Albers’s color-sensitivity experiments, or the sequence from 2D to 4D, or the common first-year assignments where students gather objects of one color, or one texture, or one shape? What things have been introduced more recently—for instance, since the Second World War? And on the other hand, what remains from the Renaissance and Baroque academies? It  is necessary to make a provisional inventory of these things, to compare it with what it taught today, and that’s because our current way of teaching art is a mixture, a collage of all sorts of different things from different times and places, and unless we begin to understand where the parts have come from, we won’t stand much of a chance of making sense of how art is taught. We are also hoping to do some work on the very practical question of how art is currently taught around the world. That will be our third topic. It may sound unlikely, but actually very little is known about how art is taught worldwide. The major art schools in places like Los Angeles, London, New Haven, Helsinki, Maastricht, Frankfurt, Chicago, New  York, and Berlin know one another, more or less, because they trade faculty and students, and because they are part of the international circuit of the art market. But there is no place to go to find out how art is taught in provincial China, India, or South America, or even how it varies from one state school to another in the United States. The European Union has a major initiative called the Bologna Accords, which is engaged in comparing university departments and degrees across Europe. But outside Europe, there is no source, no central organization, and even within Europe there are any number of idiosyncratic institutions that fly below the Bologna radar. A few years ago I was in Bucharest, where I discovered the Academy there has a specialty in Romanian frescoes. You can go there to learn how to remove a fresco from the wall, and how to restore it, or how to paint a new one. But there are subtler differences everywhere. In Calgary, there is an emphasis on a particularly Canadian practice of painting, but also on conceptual art and postminimal sculpture. In Copenhagen, they read different art theory texts than in Stockholm . . . and so forth. Our third question is really just a forum: how can we gather information about how art is taught, so that the subject stops being such a black hole of endless anecdotal information? The fourth subject for the week brings me to the question of the conference itself, What do artists know? I was surprised last year to discover that someone else at the School of the Art Institute had been working on that exact question. Frances Whitehead, who has co-organized this event with me, teaches in the Sculpture Department here at the School of the Art Institute, and she had been working on the question for several years. She hears the question very differently than I do. For me, it is about the ways art is taught all around the world, the histories of art instruction, and how to make sense of art instruction. In other

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words, the question is about what artists are taught, how they are taught, and why they are taught the things we teach them. For Frances, the question is about artists in the world, not necessarily in art schools at all. She wants to know, What do artists know that other people don’t? What kind of knowledge is particular to artists? How is it related to knowledge that other people have? And how do artists use their knowledge? In the middle of the week, after we have discussed the history of art instruction and what elements of that history might be pertinent for the present, we will turn to Frances’s question about artistic knowledge. We’ll be considering texts by people who claim that artists have a special kind of knowledge called tacit knowledge, and arguments that artists’ knowledge has changed radically from what it had been in the past. It’s a wide-open field. In preparation for this event, I posted a couple of threads on Facebook, asking what artistic knowledge is. As you can imagine, the answers go across the whole spectrum from serious to completely goofy. Here are a couple, just to show the range: One person said artistic knowledge is “skills” and “techniques.” I think we’d all agree, but we’d also hope it is much more than that. Another said it is “intuition”: but what is that? And why don’t people who aren’t artists have intuition? Someone thought that artists work from a “different (more sensitized) position,” and others said it’s “personalized intelligence” or the capacity to work “at a heightened level”: but aren’t there callous artists? Impersonal artists? Stupid artists? Another said it’s “genius”—but in the art world, we’re allergic to that idea. Another person said what makes an artist is a “certain spiritual element”: I won’t go near that one. A couple of people, more active in the art world, proposed that artistic knowledge is a matter of an “abstract, diffused, and communal practice” or that artists’ knowledge doesn’t matter because “perceived social value” is what counts. And then there were the cynics (I imagine they all have MFAs). One said that artists know nothing, and that’s why they make art. Another said that there is no difference between artists and others because we all work for the same “entertainment industry.” And my favorite cynic wrote that artists only think they have knowledge, but really they just use their brains “in a strange way.” So it went on Facebook. Here we’re intending to have a slightly more serious discussion, first about tacit knowledge and other new models, and then also about the philosophic tradition of claims about the knowledge that is contained in art. We have an expert on that subject, Roy Sorensen: he’s not an art world person; he’s an analytic philosopher, and he’s here to make sure our claims about knowledge in general make sense. He is going to present the arguments that have been made on behalf of what’s called aesthetic cognitivism: the claim that artworks can give us new knowledge, and that the knowledge they contain is integral to their value as artworks. It is a very difficult position to argue. What exactly do you learn, for example, from the Sistine Ceiling? (Other than

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Christian doctrine, which Michelangelo would assume you already knew.) What knowledge do you get from a Mondrian painting? The art world can be very loose and inexact in its claims, and we are hoping Roy will make sure we make some kind of sense. In the Seminars, we will divide the question, What do artists know? into two parts: Roy Sorensen’s philosophic introduction, which will be our fourth topic, and Frances Whitehead’s investigation into tacit knowledge, which will be our fifth topic. Our remaining four topics are about individual degrees—the first year, the BA or BFA (outside the United States, it’s usually the BA), the MFA or MA (again, outside the United States. it’s usually the MA), several exotic degrees such as the MLitt and DLitt, and the very contentious PhD (which also exists as a DFA). What matters about these degrees is how people understand them. What should you expect, as a student, from a BFA? Why consider a PhD? It’s the same here as it is with the first couple of topics to do with the history of art instruction. There is no lack of conferences where the different degrees are discussed, but they almost always get bogged down in personal, anecdotal, local information. People speak about their own programs, and what they have put in place. On the other hand, there is an administrative literature on the different degrees, and there are professional associations that monitor and accredit the degrees, so we will be considering their literature as well as the local and anecdotal texts. Our aim is to ask how the different degrees are conceptualized. What are the best available models for what happens in the first year? What are the best accounts of what the BFA should be? What are the most convincing theories about what the MFA does? And what are the most interesting ways to think about the studio art PhD? All those are our sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth topics: the first- year program, the BFA, the MFA, and the PhD. Perhaps it’s hopeless to try to make headway on such an enormous subject. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, one of our Faculty, said he “desperately hopes” the week doesn’t “end in despair.” Let’s see how it goes.

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The Seminars

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the participants: The 2009 Stone Summer Theory Institute had five Faculty, fifteen Fellows, and two graduate students from the School of the Art Institute.

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the faculty: Frances Whitehead (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), James Elkins (School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Sir Christopher Frayling (Royal College of Art, London), Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen (Akademie der bildenden Künste, Vienna), Roy Sorensen (Washington University, St. Louis).

the fellows: Hilde Van Gelder (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), Ciarán Benson (University College Dublin, Ireland), Frank Vigneron (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Barbara Jaffee (Northern Illinois University), Doug Harvey (artist, curator, and critic for LA Weekly), Miguel González Virgen (Centro de Estudios de Diseño de Monterrey, Mexico), Daniel Palmer (Monash University, Australia), Marta Edling (Uppsala University, Sweden), William Marotti (UCLA), Jonathan Dronsfield (University of Reading, UK), Christopher Csikszentmihályi (MIT), Areti Adamopoulou (University of Ioannina, Greece), Ann Sobiech Munson (Iowa State University), P. Elaine Sharpe (York University, Canada), Saul Ostrow (Cleveland Institute of Art).

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the school of the art institute graduate class: Rebecca Gordon, Andrew Blackley.

auditors: Elena Ubeda Fernandez, Keith Brown, Mark Cameron Boyd, Fernando Uhia, Lisa Wainwright.

The panorama is courtesy of P. Elaine Sharpe, who took photo­graphs on three different days.

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The following conversations were recorded during the week of September 21–26, 2009, at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.

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1. h i s t o r i e s o f s t u d i o a r t t e a c h i n g

The idea in this first Seminar was to gather the principal accounts of the history of studio art instruction, in order to begin to understand the current state of art education. Readings in advance of the Seminar included histories by Nikolaus Pevsner, Carl Goldstein, and Stuart MacDonald. (They are cited in Section 3 of the Seminars.) Our conversation began with a text by Thierry de Duve, proposing that art education has three phases: first came academies, then the Bauhaus, and then the current condition.1 These are shown in the table below, with some comments interpolated. The nineteenthcentury academy

Talent

Skill

Imitation

Talent is unequally distributed, not universal

Skill is technique and métier, along with “canons of beauty”

Depends on ideas no longer accessible, such as the place of nature

The Bauhaus

Creativity

Medium

Invention

The universalism and “generosity of the ideology of creativity” discourage talk of content

Teaching by medium produces mistrust of skill, because mastery prevents questioning the medium

Paying attention to the unexpectedness of student work is an “unsuitable” way of recording progress

Attitude

Practice

Deconstruction

A “critical attitude” entails real political work, but it devolves into pose

Artists fought against medium but did not revive métier, resulting in practice

The “symptom” of teachers who critiqued invention but did not know imitation

The current condition

Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Thierry de Duve sees three periods of artistic education. First came the academies, then the Bauhaus, and then something disastrous happened. Today, he says, we are left with nothing. I call the third period, the one that describes the current moment, the “pop culture paradigm.” This schema is apparently a very general one, and the categories are intermingled in reality, but it seems interesting to follow his argumentation, because we can learn from it. According to Thierry, the Bauhaus concentrated on creativity. It is a democratic principle, in comparison to the academy’s insistence on skill. Instead of In these seminars, the notes have been added by the speakers, except in the italicized introduction to each seminar, where the notes are the editor’s, or where otherwise indicated. 1. Thierry de Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude—and Beyond,” in The Artist and the Academy: Issues in Fine Art Education and

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the Wider Cultural Context, edited by Nicholas de Ville and Stephen Foster (Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton, 1994), 23–40; Thierry de Duve, Faire école (ou la refaire?), new edition, revised and augmented (Geneva: Mamco, 2008); the Seminar read chapter 3, “Hypothèse d’école,” 103–46.

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referring to a métier, which you had to learn and practice, the Bauhaus stressed the medium, which was not simply to be practiced, but had to be questioned and analyzed. Students were invited to experiment: you used the brush, for example, but you tried to use it as if it were a pencil. The Bauhaus also emphasized invention instead of imitation. James Elkins: I thought it might be useful for the book we’re producing if we talked about the utility of Thierry’s schema, because it is the clearest and most forceful schema for the history of Western studio art instruction. Which parts seem most convincing, or most useful? And how might we want to talk about the schema’s deficiencies? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: What is interesting for us is what the third “pop culture period” signifies. The creativity of the Bauhaus era is replaced now by attitude. And Thierry leaves it open if this is simply a polemic label—a pose—or if we can use it as a real concept like Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus, which I would prefer. The dilemma of artistic practice and so-called theory might be resolved through habitus. Attitude is also critical— James Elkins: Not always, because Thierry also says it degenerates into “mere attitude”— Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: —that’s the connotation of “pose.” Thierry says that after about 1970, cultural and social theory entered the art school. After métier and medium, you therefore have practice. Today we are not painting: instead we have a pictorial practice. That indicates that it’s accepted that techniques have a strong conventional background. As a painter, you don’t genuinely reinvent the métier or medium, but rather you enter a conventional apparatus when you practice. Along with this idea of practice comes the idea of dematerialization. So we’re not talking any longer about materials or objects, but forms of practice and how to change them. And last—and I don’t know whether this is a very interesting distinction— after imitation and invention, we have deconstruction. Now, that is a little too close to French philosophy for me, but it is interesting that de Duve says deconstruction dissolves traditional oppositions such as presence and absence or original and secondary. So today we can expect an implosion of critical terms that had structured the identity of an artist. Along with this schema, I think we need to consider other sources. First is Foucault’s account of the ambivalent structure of power, according to which the intellectual is no longer a universal intellectual, but a specific intellectual, meaning that he or she interferes in specific social situations and tries to alter them.2 In the same way we should rethink the role of the artist not as a universal artist, but as a specific artist. 2. “ ‘Les intellectuels et le pouvoir’: Entretien de Michel Foucault avec Gilles Deleuze, 4 mars 1972,” in Gilles Deleuze (Aix-en-Provence: L’Arc, 1972), 3–10.

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I also want to add that creation is articulated through repetition. We keep language alive by repeating it: we keep art alive not by inventing new artworks, but because we repeat things in a particular way. Invention is no longer the first and most important task of an artist: instead it is the deviation from repetition that matters.3 That is what made appropriation such an important practice in the 1980s. Irit Rogoff’s idea of potentialities is a good example of how contradiction can be made productive. James Elkins: One of the things that concerns me about Thierry’s schema is that the first two periods he proposes are fitted out with three concepts each, which are all found in the historical record. But the third category, the postwar art school (what you call the “pop culture paradigm”), is a different kind of category, conceptually, because it is polemic. He admits this, and says that his analysis of the third period might have historical deficiencies, or may be waiting for a more positive account. Another issue is that two of the three concepts in the postwar art school period are nothing but “magic words,” as he says. But deconstruction functions differently because he explains it in two different ways: it is a “symptom” of exhaustion, a “magic word”; but at the same time, it actually explains what happened after the Bauhaus. I am thinking of his paragraph on Derrida, in which “deconstruction” has some force as an explanation of historical change. So we might want to decide what elements of his schema have historical purchase, which are useful for current discussion, and which are more like placeholders, ways of initiating debate in the absence of positive concepts. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: On the other hand, if you look for schemata of our current experience elsewhere, you find very little. James Elkins: Exactly. That is why it is so important. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: There are entire books comparing the first and second periods. I have found nearly nothing describing the contemporary situation. On the other hand, he does use “deconstruction” in a double sense. We could use that. Jonathan Dronsfield: But  I don’t recognize de  Duve’s “deconstruction,” which he characterizes negatively, as suspicion and negation, making it sound closer to skepticism than to deconstruction, which is productive in a way that he seems not to recognize. So I’m not sure it carries the explanatory force you seem to think, Jim. To deconstruct here would be to question the disciplinary distinctions of the art school, its dogmatisms and historical necessities, its political agendas, and so on—and I would say that to that extent deconstruction has 3. See Jacques Derrida, “Signature évènement contexte,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972); and Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: The Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially the introduction.

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not had the influence Thierry attributes to it. But its positivity is visible, his experiences of it in the classroom notwithstanding, and despite most attempts at deconstruction, or so-called deconstruction, being politically motivated, or politics in another name, for instance in how it questions the theory/practice distinction, putting it to work. But what is interesting about what he says about deconstruction is the distinction he makes between its influence in the classroom and its influence in art practice, where in the latter he admits that it can make for good work. Is that what you mean by deconstruction in a “double sense,” Stephan? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Thierry uses “deconstruction” polemically in the sense of a popular but superficial intellectual habit. But I think you are right, Jonathan: Deconstruction is also an antimetaphysical method which contributed to a pragmatic turn in artistic practice and elsewhere. The idea that the philosophic subject is not a priori given but is to be understood as something resulting out of practice is of crucial impact for the development of the arts since the seventies. Instead of “invention” and “the new” as the major aims of artistic production, we now have the construction of identity, of publics, of time and space. The geometry of existing social facts became much more important than inventing new facts. And criticality became so crucial because deviation from these geometries in process was established as a new criterion of artistic production. But then Thierry’s use of attitude still sounds very empty. James Elkins: To me, his use of attitude is the most wholly polemic. You wouldn’t want to start a serious discussion of contemporary art using the word “attitude,” in its polemic guide at least. His third term, practice, is only partly polemic. It has historical purchase, but the word also does a lot of work in contemporary art discourse, and it is often helpful to be reminded that it can tend to function as nothing more than a “magic word.” Saul Ostrow: There is also attitude as orientation to, rather than as personal attitude. James Elkins: But then what distinguishes our current use of attitude from its predecessors, which were also “orientations to”? Saul Ostrow: Because this notion of attitude takes precedence: it’s not that it hadn’t been there, but now it rises to the top. Previously, the attitude of the artist towards his practice was a minor consideration, but now, according to de Duve— James Elkins: Is that a real conceptual analysis? Wouldn’t you also have to say creativity was also an attitude? Saul Ostrow: I would take this critique to— Barbara Jaffee: Isn’t it that attitude is cultivated? Talent is innate, and we all have creativity, but attitude is cultivated—

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Saul Ostrow: I would take this, and what has always interested me in de Duve is that he stays very much with the dominant models. He doesn’t go to things like the Russian Constructivist model, which would come very close to what he calls the contemporary model. Russian Constructivism involved the site of production, the social, the notion of artistic practice, the Constructivist notion of attitude, and the question of the place of skill. Moholy comes out of the Constructivist tradition, and adopts the Bauhaus when he leaves. James Elkins: So if Thierry were here, and we were working on his schema with him, would that be an addition to his schema of three moments in studio art instruction? Or would Constructivism substitute for the third, most recent period? Saul Ostrow: It would be a fourth moment, one that would affect his third period. Christopher Frayling: I think attitude can be an analytic category, actually. I know this is not necessarily how he meant it, but the work on socializing someone into her self-image as an artist could be an instance of attitude: the art school as a sort of entrée into a world, a launching, an orientation towards the art world. If you treat it as a sociological category, attitude could be interesting. James Elkins: That would be a way of transforming Thierry’s text from polemic into history. Christopher Frayling: It makes it workable. Marta Edling: Yes, I agree. The third period is constructed, in accord with the polemical agenda, to show the emptiness of it. That is more explicit in Faire école, because there it is quite obvious that his notion of the artist and of artistic training is summarized by his first two periods. And that has been lost. So the description of the third period is negatively colored to demonstrate emptiness. But, as Christopher suggests, a close reading of the text reveals a sense of attitude as something very much like what Howard Singerman describes as the contemporary artists’ self-reflexivity. A self-conscious art is always aware of itself and the possibility of a critical meta-perspective, and contains a critique of each stance it takes. Which means that there always is an awareness of the presence of the artistic field and the development of the individual’s position in it. There is, as Singerman notes when he cites Bourdieu, “no room for naivety” in staking out a future within the artistic field for the young artist. No young artist can do without attitude today.4 James Elkins: That is true—it’s a useful reading—but attitude is also retroactively or recursively polemic, because the Bauhaus is described as the loss of the first period of academic instruction, in which Thierry has no active interest. William Marotti: That is almost like a reversal of the usual account of the rise of modern subjectivity. In de Duve’s three-stage account, there is a declension, but not 4. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 212.

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a progress: you go from a high point, to a democratization, to a zero. Attitude is described as a zero degree, a neutral point, a tautology: it is the inverse of creativity. It is a nothing. Saul Ostrow: It is an argument about what you lose when you lose Modernist negativity, when you lose the nihilism of Modernism. You end up with this, and Thierry cannot see it as a positive development. William Marotti: He does it with a sleight of hand. He talks about students “tapping pop culture.” What the hell is that? Do you tap it like a spigot? There is no input into the process? It’s a zero? Really? Christopher Frayling: He is lamenting the loss of hierarchies. William Marotti: Right, the inception of creativity was the beginning of the end. Marta Edling: Yes, and he laments also the loss of the actual work of art. The manual production of a thing called art. But whether we like it or not, the disappearance of métier and medium is a result of constantly negotiating the concept of the work of art as an object, since the 1960s at least. And, as the use of the word practice indicates, there is, since that time, a need for a concept that can describe what an artist does, without it becoming a fixed thing. We need practice to describe artistic work as processes, as ideas, as concepts. Hilde Van Gelder: Bill, do you see de Duve as a nostalgic connoisseur? I am not sure he would readily agree with that. Saul Ostrow: No, but that is the implicit driving force. The impetus is against hierarchies, but when you achieve a nonhierarchical state, you’re in trouble. William Marotti: I think de Duve has to own up to the implications of his account. James Elkins: This kind of conversation is very helpful for the book, but it would be even more so if we continue to look for alternate schemata, because as you said, Stephan, there is nothing else out there. I wonder also about habitus, and what work it could do for us. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: What happened in the third paradigm was, I think, a redefinition of the relation between practice and theory. And I think “deconstruction” was one of the reasons for this rearrangement. Althusser wrote about a “theoretical practice,” indicating that ideological work is praxis and not just theory. When Bourdieu talks of habitus he clearly wants to describe practice as something inherently “theoretical” and vice versa. It is very easy to read the work of, say, Baldessari or Richter as a “theory” about authorship. But in fact the repositioning of the author was not done through reflection, but in action. This seems to me a crucial point when we want to understand artistic knowledge: it is deeply pragmatic in the sense that any propositional content is inscribed— or should we say embodied—in the artist’s practical decisions. This is why I like

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Jean Christoph Ammann’s formula that artists don’t have theory: they are theory. I think that Bourdieu’s habitus is a good tool to develop this understanding. And by the way: his scientific practice, when he used interviews or photography, is very close to artistic forms of knowledge production. Daniel Palmer: Well, Thierry’s schema was presented first in 1993, when the original critical attitude had recently sunken into “a pose, a contrivance,” and political critique had sunk into political correctness. Remember, that was the crisis moment of critical postmodernism, with the Whitney Biennial of 1993. Saul’s point is that we have to move beyond it, and think where we are now. Marta Edling: So can we then really consider this as a workable historic account? De Duve is free to look at history any way he chooses, but we need not to agree with him, since his schema is clearly biased by a negative evaluation of the contemporary. My objection is that as historiography, his account won’t do. First there was the academy, then it died; then we have the Bauhaus, and then it died: that sort of historiography is useless for today. There have been renegotiations, redefinitions of the old inheritance: that is clear in the Bologna process. Christopher Frayling: By the way, I am cynical about the Bauhaus and its manifestos. They would have been brilliant at Bologna! All the books about the Bauhaus, and exhibitions, stress the beautifully designed manifestos and curricula. Right from the beginning, in 1919, they were an integral part of the school’s public relations—essential for its survival. But all the interviews with the students that I’ve read or heard stress the atmosphere of experimentation, adventure, and even chaos. Anni Albers once told me that day-to-day life had very little in common with the published manifestos. James Elkins: If Thierry were here, he might say: Sure, fine, some of these criticisms are true enough, and yes, we have to pay attention to history: but how would you revise the bottom line of my chart? What concepts would you put in there? Miguel González Virgen: In Pictorial Nominalism, de  Duve analyzes Duchamp’s appearance, and how Duchamp realized that with the coming of industrialization there was no hope for métier or even for medium, so that the artist was only there to nominate what art is.5 When Thierry talks about attitude, he has Duchamp’s perspective in mind: the pose according to which the artist tells us what art is. The three new characteristics, of the most recent period, are post-Duchamp. William Marotti: I think that’s what he means when he says it is “tautological.” He gives it the crudest possible meaning, which is that it’s all self-nomination and therefore a process of doing nothing other than pointing. It’s a very reductive notion of what is going on in art after Duchamp. 5. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, translated by Dana Polan with the author (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

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P. Elaine Sharpe: The problem I have with de Duve’s writing is that there is no definitive analysis of creativity. It comes back, for me, to the problem of intention as opposed to attitude. I don’t think that an artist is as wild a beast as that. There is definitely intention, and de Duve doesn’t address it. There’s a hierarchical expectation that stupidity is a bad thing. Avital Ronell writes about this.6 I would like to hope that an artist can retain a sort of cognitive stutter, and have a suspicion that the education of an artist to such an extent would remove the possibility for this intentional stupidity. Marta Edling: Jim, I think we have to write a more complex account of art education, because there are influences that have not yet been described. Several generations of Nordic artists, for example, went to Paris, and many studied at free art schools in Paris, before and after the turn of the twentieth century. Matisse’s atelier was one of them. This also put pressure on the old traditional schooling of the Academies: some of those who returned to Stockholm even started a free art school, and in the late 1930s their efforts resulted in a reform of the Royal Academy in Stockholm.7 Some of the questions that Walter Grasskamp talks about in his article, like for instance the question of the need (or lack of it) for time-limited professorships, or the question of the contact between the school and the contemporary artistic scene, were already discussed and solved in Stockholm in the reform of 1938. This reform turned the academy into what I would call a very radical institution, which stressed the freedom of education: the position that you cannot teach art and that every student has to develop in his or her own direction.8 Christopher Frayling: This is interesting; it would make a good corrective to our schemata. Is it written up somewhere? Marta Edling: Yes.9 It is important to note that the artistic development in Germany in the early twentieth century was met with suspicion in Sweden. Many artists and critics preferred French to German art because they considered it so brutal and primitive.10 6. Avital Ronell, Stupidity (ChampaignUrbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 7. In the reform of the School of the Royal Academy in Stockholm in 1938, the regulations were updated in accordance with modernistic ideals. Stressed were the need for professors to be in tune with contemporary art, time-limited positions, an age limit when recruiting professors (no one should be older than fifty-six by the time of appointment), the free choice of the student to follow the professor of her inclination, and so forth. See my Fri Konst? Bildkonstnärlig utbildning vid Konsthögskolan Valand, Konstfackskolan, och Kungliga Konsthögskolan, 1965–1995 (Stockholm: Makadam, 2010). 8. Walter Grasskamp, “Wozu Kunstakademien,” in Akademie der bildenden Künste München (Munich: Akademie der bildenden Künste, 1999), 16–27.

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9. The history of Swedish fine art education during the twentieth century is the subject of a research project that I, together with my colleague Maria Görts, am currently finishing. Currently available texts that comment upon this development are the article by Maria Görts, “När modernisten blev professor,” in Etyder: Tillägnade Eva Sundler Malmnäs, edited by Thomas Hall and Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf, Eidos 12 (Stockholm: Konstvetenskapliga institutionen, Stockholms universitet, 2004), and my Fri Konst? 10. The reception of German modernism in Sweden, and the conflict of what were considered German and French artistic ideals, are dealt with in Andrea Kollnitz’s dissertation in art history, Om tysk och österrikisk modernism i svensk konstkritik 1908–1934, Eidos 21 (Stockholm: Drau förlag, 2008).

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[Laughter]

James Elkins: That would give us three moments of Modernism instead of Thierry’s one: the Bauhaus, Constructivism, and (let’s call it) Matisse’s studio. Ideally, we would develop these so we have a sense of what concepts to associate with each. Christopher Frayling: In the talk I gave in Brighton, I was trying for an alternative scheme of the normative, critical, and expressive, which is a different level of concept altogether.11 I think it has a bit of mileage in it, certainly in relation to the British experience. Normative would have to do with all these grammars. The Victorians were obsessed, for all sorts of reasons, with “grammars of ornament,” “lexicons of design,” “principles of design,” and the language of evangelism applied to art education. Students were there to be converted, to buy into these grammars and principles. Design was a kind of science, as was taste. I’ve called this “the normative tradition.” Critical, in that you see the role of the institution as against the norm or the society; and expressive, to do with individuation, intention, finding one’s own voice, and so forth. It’s broader than Thierry de Duve’s schema, but it isn’t nearly so cynical. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Of course the third period in Thierry’s schema is mixed and polemical, but it provides a clear way of asking questions: Where do you find your understanding, as an artist? Is it the academic tradition? The Bauhaus tradition? Or another one? In the academy in Vienna, we have students who find allegiance to each of these. James Elkins: Yes, I agree. I find that in the School of the Art Institute about 10 percent of our students are academic in Thierry’s sense (and those are often students who have graduated from conservative “art high schools” in Japan and Korea), 50 percent late Romantic, 30 percent Modernist, and maybe 10 percent postmodern. There are ways to take those surveys, and find the covert conservatism that is sometimes papered over by what Thierry calls “deconstruction.”12 Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: I wonder if we can come up with some more criteria. You mentioned terms like creativity, intention, freedom, and expression. For me one of the aspects of the third, the contemporary paradigm, is the fact that these terms don’t fit any longer. How can you talk about being creative after Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons? How can you talk about expression after the critique of abstract expressionism? What is artistic freedom if we understand that the artist, like gender, is a social construction? I think we have to be prepared to reinvent the discourse which we use to describe art. 11. Frayling, “The New Bauhaus,” paper given at the conference Art and Design Education for the Twenty-First Century, Brighton University, February 6–7, 2009. 12. For example, the imaginary maps of art history described in my Stories of Art (New York:

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Routledge, 2002), which bring out affinities. It is also possible to survey students on concepts such as subjectivity, naturalism, skill, or expressiveness, without saying which periods those concepts belong to.

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And I want to come back to the idea of a local practice. To me one of the major changes between our first and second paradigm, on the one hand, and the third, on the other, is the complete loss of metaphysics, which in turn created a bigger awareness of the here and now. This is what Foucault’s idea of a “local” practice means: a critique of the very conditions of what you yourself do, without any appeal to transcendence. Apparently this motivates not only disciplines like cultural studies but also the intense exchange between cultural studies and the arts. Thierry’s schema is interesting: but are there more criteria? Saul Ostrow: He doesn’t address the foundational, structural elements of his models. The academy was about studying the past, and the Bauhaus was about the future. Christopher Frayling: I do think Thierry is onto something with the concept of attitude. Something happened in the 1990s: theory ceased to be critical: it had to do with launching people into the world. There was almost something of a revolution in the Royal College in the 1990s: painting students were desperate for business studies— Marta Edling: What do you mean, “business studies”? Christopher Frayling: They wanted information about how to start their careers, how to get galleries, how to persuade Saatchi to come to their exhibition. I wouldn’t have dared suggest that kind of business studies should be in a painting course: it was a matter of students wanting to be huge successes as painters. I think Thierry is onto something with attitude. He is interested in something that is not curricular; it’s not even institutional. It’s the kind of transaction that happens because of what people are thinking about. He is aiming at something more informal. It’s in the ether— Frances Whitehead: It’s in the drinking water— Christopher Frayling: Yes. You can’t measure it, so people think like that. And the result is a blunting of political activism. My students’ politics was: I want a spectacular exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. We could ask what kinds of concepts would operate now. Daniel Palmer: But Christopher, we should be wary of universalizing this condition. For instance, the impact of postcolonial theory was quite profound in Australian art education in the 1990s in the wake of local historical developments, while our art market in Australia has always been too small to generate the kind of market attitude often ascribed to contemporary art students. P. Elaine Sharpe: And we have to take into consideration the political works about various isms that are often at the core of Canadian artist-run culture, or any artistrun culture, which are entrenched in a liberal arts education. There is always a new generation that is more than willing to take up the flags laid aside by their

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predecessors—approaching old issues with new questions, wanting very little to do with so-called markets that are not about ideas and idealism. James Elkins: This might be a good place to leave this conversation: we have several alternate historical schemata—although I agree with Stephan that more needs to be done. Thierry’s model is an excellent one, but it needs adjustment and augmentation. Most of his concepts in the third period are double: students would agree to part of practice, but not another part. What matters is what we can add—what new schemata we would put in its place—not what we can critique. The strange thing is that in the ocean of literature on art instruction there have been so very few attempts to do the foundational work Thierry tried to do.

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2. w h a t p a r t s o f t h o s e histories are pertinent?

Once we have a working idea about how to think about the history of how art has been taught, the next question is what individual ideas, exercises, and teaching methods from that history are still present in art instruction. From the Bauhaus, for example, we have the sequence from 2D to 4D, which is still common in art schools, even though it comes from Kandinsky’s book Point and Line to Plane, published in 1924. It could be argued the Bauhaus also gave us sensitivity exercises, texture exercises, and many other staples of introductory studio instruction. It is more difficult to say what we have inherited from post–World Art  II art schools, although that inheritance would include the idea that art should act in society, that identity and its construction are fundamental in art, and that art schools work to educate citizens as well as produce artists. Those influences are hard to discuss because we are still living and acting under their influence. It is also difficult to say what we inherit from Renaissance and Baroque academies, although in that case the problem arises because they are so far removed from us that it can seem as if we inherit nothing. The idea of the following conversation was to gather those influences, and consider which ones might be appropriate or even essential, and which could be removed from the curriculum. In the excerpts presented here, the participants discuss three holdovers from the past: disegno and drawing (an inheritance from the Baroque academies), the master model of one-on-one studio instruction (an inheritance from Romanticism), and the persistence of realism in painting (mainly a holdover from late nineteenth-century academies). Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: I think we should develop the discussion of drawing, especially in relation to disegno. Disegno in the Neoplatonic tradition, which formed the philosophical basis of the old classicist academy, was not only an artistic practice; it was also the expression of an idea of the artist corresponding to a universal principle hidden in things. This is how Vasari spoke about disegno when he claimed that to draw means to articulate a judgment in the way nature formulates the idea in things. And Zuccaro made things even clearer when he differentiated disegno interno from disegno esterno.1 Today we are stuck with an understanding of disegno esterno. I think we have to remember that the tradition of the old academy, up to the early twentieth century, combined the pragmatic process of drawing with the simultaneous shaping of an inner image, the idea. Apart from the fact that we have lost transcendence, the double articulation 1. For an introduction to disegno in a Neoplatonic tradition, see Götz Pochat, Geschichte der Ästhetik und Kunsttheorie (Cologne: DuMont, 1986), 276–79 and 302–5. See also

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Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, translated by Joseph J. S. Peake (New York: Harper and Row, 1968).

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between the external line and the internal image remains, I think, one of the most significant characteristics of artistic practice. The central problem of the episteme (ἐπιστήμη) of artistic practice is: how can we actually talk about this type of productivity, if we must agree that talking itself is a way of drawing? James Elkins: I think the very broad, abstract sense of disegno is debatable—an emphasis on it is partly the product of mid-twentieth-century art history—but I think it’s possible to develop parallel ideas in curricular terms. There is a conflict between Drawing with an uppercase “D,” which would be drawing underwritten by theological convictions, and our current drawing with a lowercase “d,” without the foundations of Renaissance and Baroque academies.2 I think the current lack of resolution about the place of drawing in art schools—where it hovers between a requirement and an option, or between an exemplary medium and a medium among others—is due to the fact that we have not resolved how we conceptualize drawing. Stephan, I agree that Drawing is gone in a literal sense, but it remains as a ghost. We all feel, faintly, that drawing has that other function. Christopher Frayling: What is the thought on this around the table? Do most people feel that drawing is still central? Jonathan Dronsfield: At my institution there are no drawing classes. Many students applying for a place bring with them a portfolio heavy with drawing. But it’s not drawing in Klee’s sense, as in the first words of his Pedagogical Sketchbook: “An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal.”3 It’s more like tracing. At interview stage we stress that there is no drawing at Reading; that is a way of gauging their seriousness about entering a more experimental academy, and we follow it up with a question about what they would do were they given studio space, time, and facilities to experiment—which need not preclude drawing, of course. Christopher Frayling: We brought it back through student pressure. In the 1960s, they said they didn’t want drawing anymore, but now we have it back. Ann Sobiech Munson: A beginning drawing studio occupies one-third of our required common first-year curriculum. The course teaches drawing from observation, drawing perspectives, and drawing imagined forms, primarily in graphite and charcoal. Areti Adamopoulou: It is an entry requirement for all art schools in Greece. Candidates attend courses in private schools well in advance. Usually this preparation takes two years or more. I believe that’s why first-year students come with academic values set in their minds. Within art schools, drawing also retains a strong place as part of sculpture and printmaking studio courses. However, there is no 2. Drawing lowercase “d” would include ordinary uses of the concept of disegno in Renaissance and Baroque pedagogy. The philosophic reading of disegno, part of uppercase “Drawing,” is in part a twentieth-century emphasis. See, for example, Karen Barzman,

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The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145–48. 3. Paul Klee, Pedagogical Sketchbook (London: Faber and Faber, 1968), 16.

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rule about which way or to what extent each professor will use drawing in his or her courses. And just a short note here: drawing (as σκιαγραφία, skiagraphia) is described in ancient Greek mythology as a woman’s invention! And another point: the word for drawing and painting in Greek before the fifth century BCE was γραφίς (graphis), which relates to writing.4 Miguel González Virgen: In Mexico an artist’s recognition as a full-fledged artist, by both the art market and popular culture, is greatly sustained in his or her capacity to draw, even when that artist is conceptual or postconceptual. Education, still based largely on the academic tradition, puts enormous value in the kind of drawing ability that Stefan Schmidt-Wulffen describes as the identity of idea and pencil mark; consequently, it is a rite of passage for almost all artists to attend a drawing workshop with a master for one or two years. Hilde Van Gelder: Sint-Lucas Visual Arts in Ghent has recently founded a Drawing Research Group, which is organizing an international symposium called The Drawing Incident at this very moment.5 It wishes to reflect on the current importance of drawing as a direct means to materialize an artistic vision. The members of this group conceive of drawing as a medium that allows for visual understanding of its own generative process. They see drawing as a relatively transparent way to construct an image, as a drawing is composed by a chain of signs, one mark after the other. They also trust that the medium’s openness allows space for the unexpected and that what cannot be controlled, and believe that these are artistic qualities often appreciated in contemporary art. Saul Ostrow: Christopher, we retain drawing, but we have changed its orientation from a matter of hand-eye coordination to being a discipline involving perception and systems of perspective. It has become process-oriented rather than procedural. Roy Sorensen: Theories of expertise are all skeptical about talent. Some of them just say, “no talent.” Others say you don’t need to go into the question of talent. They want to regard it as a myth. But here, this would be a matter of debunking the debunkers. In the literature I know, for example, it is said that Mozart’s early work is certainly very good, but maybe nothing more than that. In the literature, expertise doesn’t show until the person has put in ten thousand hours. In art, there are also skeptics about this, for example in the case of Marla Olmstead6— P. Elaine Sharpe: The child prodigy whose father puts up the canvases for her and then coaches her to fill in the— Roy Rosensen: Yes. That would be the application of this kind of program of skepticism. In your case, you have the debunking of debunking.

4. See the discussion of graphein in Elkins, The Domain of Images (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 5. This was held September 21–25, 2009: http://​www​.kunst​.sintlucas​.wenk​.be.

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6. See the amazingly commercialized website http://​www​.marlaolmstead​.com (accessed September 28, 2009). [—J.E.]

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James Elkins: The debunking is never complete because it is haunted by the inarticulate sense that drawing is something more. So drawing is at once a heritage and not a heritage of Renaissance and Baroque academies. This is a curricular issue for us, but it is a live critical issue for projects like the Drawing Center, which revisit drawing from many angles, sometimes including ontological claims like Alain Badiou’s.7 Why would they do that if it weren’t that they are ever so slightly haunted? Daniel Palmer: At my institution, Monash University, drawing is the only element of the core curriculum aside from theory. I think it’s also interesting to consider the issue of God’s hand in drawing in relation to drawing with light; that is, in relation to newer technological media such as photography, which Talbot of course dubbed “photogenic drawing.” As to what elements of an undergraduate art education ought to be common or essential, I think of Moholy-Nagy’s famous dictum that “the illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike.” Rebecca Gordon: Students don’t arrive in art school with their ideas wholly unformed: many of them come through high school–level art education that privileges drawing as the basis of artistic practice. So the students already think of drawing as foundational. Ann Sobiech Munson: But at our institution we have lots of students who can’t draw; we tell them we can teach them. Lots of our students—remember, we are a big state school—do not have art programs in their secondary educational experience. P. Elaine Sharpe: York University, where I work, does have drawing as an elective for visual arts students, but it is not in any way a formulaic or how-to curriculum; it is about expression. Christopher Frayling: One of the differences between the academy and the modern version of drawing is that academies love prerequisites. Building on prior skill levels is a basic move of academic systems. The Modernists said, Let’s scrap all that and start again, and they constantly badmouth the previous level of education. That is one of the basic differences between the academic and the modern. James Elkins: Let’s consider some other elements from the history of art instruction that may bear on the present. One I think is especially interesting is the notion of the one-on-one instruction, the master model, which I see as one of the principal surviving elements of the MFA. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Is this true? Or shouldn’t we at least resist the dominance of the master model? I am interested in new definitions of how we can organize artistic training. I think that none of the existing historical models will really help in developing new curricula. The principal point is that we have to get used to the fact that artists do things other than produce artworks. I see more and 7. See, for example, http://​www​.lacan​.com/​ frameXXIV5​.htm (accessed September 28, 2009).

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more artists changing profession, and we need to get used to the idea that artistic practice may have left the art world. The production of artworks, which still is the model to define our courses and which shapes our museums, has been overcome, and we therefore have to come up with completely different questions. Jonathan Dronsfield: Stephan, what do you mean by “overcome”? You surely cannot mean that the art object is no longer privileged, or that production is no longer a dominant value. Still, today, every art student must produce a work for exhibition in a final degree show. Were a student to present a discursive essay or a piece of creative writing for that show, I would hazard that he or she would be failed. And collaborative work is still very little encouraged or produced for examination. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: To my understanding the master is connected to genius, to inspiration and invention. It’s a nineteenth-century discourse! The singularity of the invention of the genius demands the example of the master, which by the way represents an anti-intellectual way of nonverbal learning. This discourse contradicts every experience of contemporary production, where we have a completely diverse idea of the individual and her creativity. We have, I think, to reorganize major terms of our art discourse and the way we talk about art instruction. I don’t think we should begin by talking about the master model. We have been fighting that particular idea in Germany for almost two hundred years. I would be more interested in going deeper into the institutional structures that are in place today. Roy Sorensen: I am surprised about the resistance to the master model. There is a literature on master-student interactions. What happens when you abandon that? A music student, for example, will work to automate some behavior, tweak it to get rid of kinks, and so on. Christopher Frayling: One of the problems there is that the music analogy doesn’t work well for visual art. For dance, you need a sort of deep learning with a huge emphasis on craft technique, and it has to begin from about six years old. After that, it’s too late. It’s the same with music performance. Music and dance academies don’t have the same kind of crisis you have described, Stephan, because you have to be good at your instrument to be able to do anything with it. After the 1960s, all of that was gone in visual art. It leads to a problem: where does expertise come from? In music and dance, they still know. James Elkins: I think our divergence of opinions here, about the master model in the MFA, has to do with different models of the master. One model, which is Roy’s, has to do with slow, incremental learning. Christopher’s models, dance and music performance, are similar: they have to do with hierarchical learning over a long period. What I was alluding to was the Romantic notion that learning is best done from a single master, because what is being learned is individuality

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itself. Only the experience of a unique person can give you an idea of what voice, originality, and self-expression are. That is why the Romantic academies did away with group learning in ateliers. And what Stephan is objecting to, I think, is the persistence of that model in current curricular hopes. One model is the master as instructor: the other is the master as model. Jonathan Dronsfield: But the Romantics, or at least the early German ones, set themselves against the master model, for instance in avowing plagiarism and anonymity and the destruction of great works, which they saw as obstacles to creativity, etc. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Students of Whistler’s objected that he didn’t explain, and they just learned from his example. Embodied knowledge, so to say. When Vienna had master classes in the nineteenth century, the school couldn’t afford to pay for private studios of the professors. The instructors were indirectly paid by the state to keep their master classes going: they used master students to help with their commissions—so again, you had the master’s work as an example. But today there are no commissions, and a master in a class is doing just what we are doing: talk. But often they will be less prepared. It’s a black hole. The one-toone teaching situation is burdened with silence: people are not allowed to talk about it. Artists will never talk about their experiences in one-to-one teaching. It is one of the high secrets. Imagine: thousands of art students around the world are trained in this way, and we haven’t the slightest idea what is going on in their studios. Frances Whitehead: I think there’s a lot of talk about what happens between students and faculty—anyone else think so? Christopher Frayling: I agree. There is a lot of talking, even if it might ride around the issues you’re raising. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Sure, there is a lot of talking. But is there a lot of talking about the methods of face-to-face training? Jonathan Dronsfield: Yes, if the students, as they do in our case, have personal tutors to whom they can turn to talk about or be asked about what goes on in the studio, someone who is monitoring their progress across the board, someone who reads the reports of the studio tutor. Marta Edling: As James said, in studio practice we are dealing with a heavy inheritance from Romanticism. And I think Stephan’s got a point here. By which method do you actually teach or promote the individuality by the student? I think that face-to-face training (in its ideal state) perceived as method is a kind of identification process, a mirroring of the student in the professor. The professor is a model not by his art (or her art, but the model is in practice patriarchal) but a model as a mature colleague who has developed an individual, and original,

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what parts of those histories are pertinent?

stance. The Romantic origin of this idea is telling if we consider it. Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, said that there can be no real teaching of genius; instead the young artist discovers his own talent when confronted with the older artist’s genius. Genius stimulates and awakens genius.8 This charismatic relationship is the method. But this also why it sometimes does not work very well, and to my experience women students often lose a lot of energy in this “black hole” that Stephan talks about.9 James Elkins: And yet the master model persists. It is one of the principal default models for what the MFA is supposed to do . . . but let’s postpone that discussion until later in the week, when we explore the MFA. Any thoughts on other elements of the history of art education that are still around? Here’s an obvious example to close: the persistence of the Baroque and nineteenth-century academic practices of realism. Right here in Chicago, we have quite an array of art schools that few people from our institution ever visit: the American Academy of Art, right down the street, the School of Representational Art, and the Chicago Academy for the Arts.10 Elsewhere there is Richard Lack’s Atelier Lack in Michigan, and any number of similar academies: Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Connecticut, the Academy of Realist Art in Toronto, Mims Studios in North Carolina, the Studio Incamminati in Philadelphia, the Grand Central Academy of Art and the Harlem Studio of Art in New York, the Studio Escalier in France, and the Gage Academy in Seattle— among many others. Larger schools, like the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts or the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin, are more mixed, with academic and some modern and contemporary modes practiced together. In a subtler way, many smaller state schools in the U.S. have art departments that are slightly but perceptibly conservative. I spend a fair amount of time traveling to those institutions—I think I’ve seen a fair portion of all the state schools in the U.S. with art departments. It isn’t quantifiable, but it’s observable: the smaller the college, the more distant from a major city, the more conservative the art department may be. Sometimes the practices are only a couple of minutes behind the standard set in the major cities; other times the entire feeling of the place might belong more to the 1970s, or even the 1950s, with audible echoes of nineteenth-century skills. I wish I could write about this, but it’s what Christopher calls something in the ether: it’s often too subtle to pin down. (And I don’t mean to be derogatory. Some magnificent realist teachers flourish in smaller contexts, like Chawky Frenn at George Mason University.) The academy lives on in all those ways. 8. Kant, Kritik der Urtheilskraft (Berlin, 1790), §§ 47 and 49. 9. For a further discussion of the patriarchal structure of this relationship, see Griselda Pollock, “Art, Art School, Culture: Individualism After the Death of the Artist,” Block 11 (Winter 1985–86): 8–18; and Gertrud Sandqvist, a professor at the Malmo Art Academy, commenting

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on the traditional academic professor school, at http://​www​.youtube​.com/​watch​?v​=​k3ehi6zD2QY (accessed February 28, 2010). 10. http://​www​.aaart​.edu​, http://​www​ .representational​-art​.com​, and http://​www​ .chicagoacademyforthearts​.org/​, respectively (accessed October 4, 2009).

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P. Elaine Sharpe: I believe there is a place for these independent academies in today’s destabilized university economy: we will see more and more atelier types of learning environments outside of the university precisely because the voice of the master has gone missing. Areti Adamopoulou: In today’s art polyphony, I think all types of former education are accepted and present in various degrees. Each of these types had specific ideologies to support it and could therefore have a quite clear picture of its aims. Since contemporary education does not have just one ideal towards which to turn, and because we prepare students equally for tradition and revolution, one possible answer could be an array of idiosyncratic solutions.

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3. t h e p o s s i b i l i t y o f a b o o k o n s t u d i o art instruction worldwide

The only part of the world where art instruction has been compared across several countries is the EU, thanks to the Bologna part of the world where art instruction has been compared across several countries is the EU, thanks to the Bologna part of the world where art instruction has been compared across several countries is the EU, thanks to the Bologna 1 We spent some time talking about the EU, but our conversations about the world outside Europe were hampered by lack of information. Our readings included curricula from art schools, departments, and academies in Greece, Sweden, Mexico, Switzerland, France, Austria, Hong Kong, Canada, and Belgium—but it became clear that something much more ambitious would be required before it would be possible to have a useful discussion about how art is taught worldwide. Ideally, there would have been a chapter in this book on art instruction around the world: but the information just isn’t there. Several times during the week, the conversation turned to a very practical question: would it be possible to put together a reference book on studio art instruction in different countries? This section opens with an introduction to the subject, taped during the week. What follows are suggestions by the Faculty, Fellows, and students, made after the event was over. Christopher Frayling: The key thing in looking at art education outside the EU is to hear difference. The Bologna documents have a language that is quite uniform, and indeed they break up art education into familiar categories such as studio practice, theory, possible social engagement, and technology. I’d never thought about this before we did our homework for this week, but the historians of art education all universalize their experience. I hadn’t realized how Stuart MacDonald, the text I recommended, was really writing about Britain even though he claimed he was writing about world art education.2 In the same way, the Bauhaus, this rather small art school that only ran for thirteen years, is taken as a universal model, across the globe, as a way of teaching. I hadn’t realized before 1. Higher Education in Europe 2009: Developments in the Bologna Process, available at http://​ec​.europa​.eu/​education/​higher​-education/​ doc/​eurydice09​_en​.pdf (accessed October 3, 2009); Inter}artes [sic] Thematic Network Handbook, Tapping into the Potential of Higher Arts Education in Europe, available at http://​ www​.elia​-artschools​.org/​Documents/​tapping​ -into​-the​-potential​-of​-higher​-arts​-education​-in​ -europe​, (accessed October 3, 2009); Ute Meta Bauer, “Education, Information, Entertainment: Current Approaches on Higher Artistic Education,” in Education, Information, Entertainment:

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Current Approaches on Higher Artistic Education (Vienna: Edition Selene, 2001), 32–40; Irit Rogoff, “Schools of Thought,” Frieze 101 (September 2006): 146–47; Clifford Adelman, “The Bologna Process for U.S. Eyes: Re-learning Higher Education in the Age of Convergence,” Lumina Foundation for Education to the Global Performance Initiative of the Institute for Higher Education Policy, April 2009. 2. Stuart Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (New York: American Elsevier, 1970).

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I reread it that Goldstein’s book is a covert polemic in support of the academy approach, so that anything that deviates, such as Albers, is cast into the outer darkness.3 And Howard Singerman is universalizing the American MFA as if it has relevance to absolutely everybody.4 James Elkins: And Nikolaus Pevsner’s book, even though it is quite scrupulous, privileges western Europe and developments before Modernism.5 Christopher Frayling: So how many of our assumptions are Western ones, projected onto everyone? Do we project certain Western assumptions onto everyone? In Victorian times, it was all very straightforward where Britain was concerned. South Kensington sent out the curriculum to every art school in the empire. There were twenty-two stages to it, with textbooks, and teachers were sent out to implement the program—you could set your watch by what they were doing on any given day. It was exported via Princess Louise to Ontario, and to Massachusetts by Walter Smith. Then there’s the colonial issue. A book came a while ago about art education in North Africa, in relation to French art education in the nineteenth century.6 Basically, art schools in North Africa which were part of the French colonial regime imported a lot of their assumptions, habits, and theories from the heartland in Paris. Even their social assumptions, at times. James Elkins: One of the issues for contemporary art instruction is what to do with the enormous number of schools that teach local craft skills. Christopher Frayling: Just one anecdote along those lines: last year I took part in a seminar in Delhi, and another at the Nehru Centre in London, on finding a contemporary idiom. So you have all these wonderful, virtuoso craft skills, which are all bent on doing designs for tourists, and the feeling is: if only they could find some contemporary idiom for those skills, then they might start really cooking from the standpoint of contemporary design. James Elkins: It is nearly impossible to study how studio art is taught around the world, because there is a lack of international organizations, except in the EU. It is even hard to compare programs within the United States—and without comparative information, there is no way to make headway in discussing the current state of art instruction. So here’s an idea. Several years ago, in Beijing, there was a proposal to host an international conference of art school deans, rectors, presidents, and other administrators. The idea was to assemble a book that could be a reference for students looking for different places to study. That idea is on hold, but people 3. Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 4. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), discussed in Section 8 of the Seminars. 5. Nikolaus Pevsner, “The Revival of Industrial Art, and the Artist’s Education To-Day,”

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chap. 6 of Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), 243–95. 6. Hamid Irbouh, Art in the Service of Colonialism: French Art Education in Morocco, 1912–1956 (London: I. B. Taurus, 2005).

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the possibility of a book on studio art instruction worldwide

in several countries, including Denmark and Colombia, know about the plans, and they could easily be put in motion. I thought this might be a good place to mull over what could be in such a book. I’ll just make a few comments to get us started. First, we’d want to ask whether such a book should have quantitative measures in it. Stephan has prepared some very interesting statistics for this event, comparing, for example, the time spent in studios, or the time spent learning theory, in several EU art academies. Would we want such a book to have that kind of information? Second, how would we want to handle the problem of using Western terms such as art, fine art, and design, when those words have such different valence in different parts of the world? Third, how could we get institutions to send us candid and interesting assessments of their strengths, given that most institutions would want to be known as cosmopolitan and postnational? I can imagine that the academy in Bucharest would be glad to be better known as a center of fresco restoration, but I can’t quite imagine Yale saying they are strong on figural photography. Fourth, could we compile syllabi or reading lists? It seems to me it would be tremendously helpful to know exactly what books are being read in theory classes in different countries. I was fascinated to discover, a couple of years ago, that there is very little French theory being read in visual studies classes in Copenhagen: they are more oriented to English and German. But how could that work in practice? Fifth, how could we get information about how connected different institutions are? I thought we might ask, for example, how many art galleries are within a day’s travel from the art school. I thought we might use this book as a sounding board. If something concrete, like a conference and a book, isn’t produced, then at least we’ll be raising the question. Marta Edling: I don’t object to the idea, but the problem is, as I see it, that there is a fundamental difference between what is written in documents, or said in official statements, and what is actually done in educational practice. Official statements either have no contact with reality, or they are too general to be of practical use. In my experience, Swedish art colleges often take pride in being flexible. Their reading lists are never the same from year to year; there is a circulation of guest professors and the workshops; and projects or seminars closely follow the changing front line in art. The point seems to be maintaining a close contact with the artistic field. So there is a difference between formal criteria, objectives and statements, and reality. No documents describing the formal criteria for admission to the school ever say that you won’t get in if you paint too well, or if you are too old or experienced. Nowhere is it made clear for applying students that in reality you have to

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spend at least a year or two in preparatory art schools two be able to do the right kind of work. How do you communicate this to students? It’s a real challenge! James Elkins: Very true. I know MFA programs that prefer students who don’t paint too well. It’s a common enough reaction to the decades—well, the centuries— of academic skills. But it is absolutely undocumented and undefended. Hilde Van Gelder: That might be a feasible enterprise on a technical level, but the question remains what it would mean, in practical terms, to potential students all over the world. There is no longer a single, unified art practice, so this book would perhaps have to be compiled with rather wild subsections, such as (1) where should you go if you want to become an artist as part of the entertainment industry, (2)  where will you be trained in order to become a really subversive artist, and (3) where will you find out about the latest fashion, the “academicized” artist? Barbara Jaffee: I guess it depends on whether you’re talking about compiling data and creating an archive or database, or you’re talking about creating a work of comparative analysis. The former seems like an imperative, while the achievement of the latter, though fascinating to contemplate, seems like something of a hopeless idea, at least for the time being. (Whose ideological categories would provide the organizing principles? Whose analysis of meanings and effects would count? Whose interests would be served?) Of course, once the present is history, it’s fair game—and then wouldn’t it be nice to have all that data? Daniel Palmer: I’d like to see such a book, not least because I’d really like to see the possibility of more student exchanges, which at the moment are hampered in part by the lack of such information. It seems to me that the more mobile we can make our students, the more different experiences and contexts are likely to be understood and built on. Miguel González Virgen: It would be great to see what schools in other countries are reading for art theory. But how could we make sure that those reading lists are up to date, that they correspond to what is actually being read? Could an Internet database make more sense than a book, in the case of syllabus listings? As for the listing of all art schools in the world, which I feel is a great idea, perhaps it would make sense not to simply ask the different institutions to describe their programs, but rather to ask art historians or art critics in the different countries to do a kind of curating exercise, by describing the characteristics, features, and strengths of their countries’ institutions. It would be great simply to gather such a global team of experts describing their own countries’ educational systems for the arts. James Elkins: Yes, I agree that such a book should make minimal use of any official literature, because that literature will always claim the institution is contemporary

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the possibility of a book on studio art instruction worldwide

and international—and therefore, in theory, just like every other institution. A selection of voices from outside the institutions might be best. Areti Adamopoulou: Jim, the way you describe it, students would look in such a book for potential quick career opportunities. Would we want to promote such an idea? I don’t quite see how one can compare different systems, operating in different contexts, with different histories and notions of tradition, apart from a purely quantitative, bureaucratic point of view. What might appear as details or idiosyncrasies or local peculiarities in the worldwide, Western model of art education are what make the actual difference. Maybe we shouldn’t be looking for large-scale differences, as Christopher has put it, but for more subtle, locally determined shifts of the canon. Connecting to Frances’s work, maybe Sustainability could be the word for such a book: we would research locality (local histories and social contexts), look for renewable forces for the needs of art students and practicing artists, and review local art economies, examining the cultural frames in which they all operate.

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4. a r t i s t i c k n o w l e d g e , p a r t

1

We had two discussions directly on the subject of artistic knowledge. The first was a seminar led by Roy Sorensen, which is excerpted here. Sorensen reviewed philosophic arguments about knowledge in general, outside the art world. He is not an expert on art, but an analytic philosopher, known for books such as Blindspots (1988), Thought Experiments (1992), Pseudo-Problems (1993), Vagueness and Contradiction (2001), and A  Brief History of the Paradox (2003). The idea was to approach the problem of artistic knowledge by looking first at what has been argued by aestheticians and other philosophers, and then turning to specifically artistic usages and problems. Sorensen’s presentation focused on aesthetic cognitivism, the claim that art can give us substantial knowledge, and that this capacity partly determines its value as art. In other words, the knowledge we get from artworks is not just a matter of their narratives, symbols, or social contexts, but something in the art itself. Art can provide knowledge in uninteresting ways—by showing us the Franco-Prussian war, by recording the fashions of fifteenth-century Florence—but if it provides knowledge in a more interesting way, that knowledge has to somehow be intrinsic to the artwork itself. In these excerpts Sorensen discusses four topics: the kinds of artistic knowledge, whether or not images can argue (whether they are propositional), whether this entire analytic philosophy approach doesn’t play false with art by insisting on propositional knowledge (that part involved a brief discussion of Gödel), and whether skepticism about knowledge doesn’t enjoin the conclusion that there is knowledge that can be derived from art. In preparation for the seminar, the group read several texts assigned by Sorensen.1 Roy Sorensen: So aesthetic cognitivism addresses one kind of knowledge. You might say that artists have another kind of knowledge, perhaps tacit knowledge, which Frances will be addressing. James Elkins: I was interested in the list that is mentioned in Berys Gaut’s essay, which divides knowledge—that is, knowledge in general, outside of the question of art—into several kinds. I thought that was a productive way to prepare to ask, 1. In addition to those cited below, the texts included Patricia Greenfield, “Technology and Informal Education: What Is Taught, What Is Learned,” Science, January 2, 2009, 69–71; Ulric Neisser, “Rising Scores on Intelligence Tests,” American Scientist, http://​www​.americanscientist​ .org/​issues/​page2/​rising​-scores​-on​-intelligence​

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-tests (accessed October 3, 2009); and K. Anders Ericsson, “Attaining Excellence Through Deliberate Practice: Insights from the Study of Expert Performance,” in The Pursuit of Excellence Through Education, edited by Michel Ferrari (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 21–55.

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What do artists know?—by asking first, What is knowledge? Gaut’s list of kinds of knowledge includes propositional knowledge, practical knowledge, something called “the appreciation of significance,” and phenomenal knowledge.2 All Gaut says is that the ones beside propositional knowledge “resist adequate statement in propositional form.” But I wonder about that list, and about Gaut’s careless, informal manner when it comes to the list. Is meant to be taken as a complete list? Is it a list of equivalent items? Roy Sorensen: Well, there’s practical knowledge: I can ride a bicycle, but I cannot express exactly how I do so. P. Elaine Sharpe: Yes, but this is still in a tangible realm of experience: you know two things, that you are on a bicycle, and that your body is doing the work. James Elkins: Last week I was in the Florida Everglades, on a fan boat. So I have a vivid phenomenal knowledge that I didn’t possess before. Is it importantly different, from an epistemological point of view, from the knowledge we both have—if it is indeed comparable knowledge—about how to ride a bicycle? Saul Ostrow: We’re close to what Wittgenstein meant by the distinction between what can be said and what can be shown. Roy Sorensen: Right: in the Tractatus, he says whatever can be said can be said clearly. Saul Ostrow: But in the book on color, he has several pages trying to determine what transparency is. Roy Sorensen: Yes, the transparent white stuff out of Goethe. (That’s Goethe’s question: why can there be transparent red and blue, but not white?) Saul Ostrow: So those are special-status propositions, because they are very puzzling. And in this case, that’s what we might be considering as special categories of knowledge. Roy Sorensen: Take images in particular. They are pictorial sorts of things, so they can’t really have truth values. You can’t have an argument that is composed of pictures. You can have labels, but then it’s the labels that are doing the work. For something to be an argument, it has to have truth values, and there has to be a difference between arguing validly and invalidly. Images aren’t the appropriate sort of thing: they’re just the wrong medium in which you can have knowledge. Ciarán Benson: Does an image have to be pictorial? Roy Sorensen: Well, Ned Block, for example, has a book on the imagery debate.3 He says that you can say images can be used to make judgments, if you say they 2. Berys Gaut, “Art and Knowledge,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, edited by Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 437–49, especially 439. 3. Imagery, edited by Ned Joel Block (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981).

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are covertly discursive, covertly sentence-like. You’re saying, Things are like this picture. A picture of a box can be used to make a variety of claims: this is how to box, this is how not to box, this is an actor playing a boxer, etc. It only says something after we associate a sentence with it. The picture is then a useful supplement to the sentence; but without a sentence there is no judgment at all. The sentence need not be explicit or in English. Jerry Fodor says the sentence is in “the language of thought”—Mentalese. Ciarán Benson: But neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio use the concept of an image in relation to feeling.4 Let’s imagine an object presents itself to my consciousness. In looking at it, I transform my sense of myself, and I feel something. Images emerge in my consciousness. But they are neither pictorial nor discursive. That illustrates the use of the word “image” in a particular frame of understanding, but in this case it is not pictorial. Roy Sorensen: Here’s an illustration of that problem. In Art and Illusion, E. H. Gombrich has a section in which he is talking about a picture that George Inness was commissioned to paint.5 The people who commissioned the image wanted an extra railroad line in the painting, one that didn’t exist. Inness was consciencestricken. Out of family pressure, he painted the extra line, but he felt guilty. Gombrich asks, Did he lie with that picture? And he answers, No: the person who lied is the one who had to present Inness’s picture. You cannot lie with a picture. Lying requires an assertion, and that is impossible in a picture. James Elkins: There are two issues here, both pertinent but different. One is: When do we want to say that images are not pictorial (and therefore possibly propositional)? And the other is: Can pictorial images be propositional? Last year, at this same table, we debated both these issues at length.6 We also discussed whether or not images can negate other images: that is a further issue, once you’ve agreed that images cannot lie, or otherwise contain propositional content. In relation to the question about nonpictorial images, mental images, and so forth, I would just say that for purposes of linking this discussion to art-world concerns, the principal instance is the one in which images are indeed very pictorial, no matter what medium or ontological status they have. It matters that images are taken to be nonpropositional. Roy Sorensen: And negation is just a simple logical proposition. You could also ask: can images conjoin? Can you do other kinds of logical operations with them? Can “The cat is on the mat” be conjoined with “The dog is on the porch” to yield the 4. Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995); and see the review by Daniel Dennett in the Times Literary Supplement, August 25, 1995, 3–4. [—J.E.] 5. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, fifth edition (London: Phaidon, 1977), 58.

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6. What Is an Image?, coedited with Maja Naef, vol. 2 of The Stone Theory Seminars (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

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more complex judgment “The cat is on the mat and the dog is on the porch”? When you present two snapshots of your fan boat trip, do they form a conjunction like the sentences? James Elkins: In our discussions last year in the What Is an Image? seminars, people were unwilling to say that an image can negate another. Roy Sorensen: And if you can’t get negation off the ground, then you’ve got lots of problems. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: You are treating the world as if it were composed entirely of deducible or provable propositions. But we know this is not true. Many sentences are deducible, not provable. And then we have Kurt Gödel, who proved there are many sentences that are neither deducible nor provable, and one of the big problems of the analytical scheme you are proposing is that thanks to Gödel, we know Rudolf Carnap’s project failed. You can no longer treat the world as a complete calculus, or as a set of complete calculi. Roy Sorensen: Everybody accepts the Gödel result. It is beyond philosophy, as if it’s “just math.” It tells you what the conditions are under which a statement might be true. Some statements are unknowable, but necessary truths. Gödel’s theorems are all necessary truths, but they are unprovable with respect to the system you’re talking about. They may be provable in another system, but not in that system. Every system that is strong enough to express an arithmetic is going to have an indefinite number of these Gödel results. The thought was that you could reduce mathematics to logic. That would be good, because logic is very clear, but mathematics is some Platonic invention [gestures at the ceiling]. How do you understand these objects, these twos and threes, if you don’t reduce them to propositions? The Gödel results ruined that. That was a hit. But it wasn’t catastrophic through the programs. It simply ended the deviation into metaphysical worlds. Through the work of Saul Kripke and others, it has been heavily systematized. This doesn’t yet get into the epistemology problem, because it means we’re sort of setting up a lot of ignorance: we’re saying there are many counterfactual truths that are completely inaccessible to us. We have just revealed a huge field of ignorance. So, to continue: there’s also the issue of skepticism. You think you’re listening to me now, but actually you’re just a brain in a vat. The skeptic isn’t trying to persuade you you’re a brain in a vat, but just that you can’t disconfirm that you’re a brain in a vat. You do not know you have legs, etc. That is a standard and powerful kind of skeptical exercise. What’s interesting here is that the skeptic supposes his counterfactuals make sense. There are other possible worlds, completely compatible with the one you believe, and you are asked to say they make sense.

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So I do think that there are kinds of knowledge that can come from art, and that you can learn from art. There might for example be knowledge of significance, of the meaningfulness of things. John Stuart Mill, for example, had a burnedout feeling after his repressive upbringing, and came back into a feeling of life by reading poetry. James Elkins: Is there a way of thinking about the list of kinds of knowledge, either the one you’re building, or the one in Gaut’s text? Is there a meta-theory accounting for such lists, so that we could begin by thinking of the full range of kinds of knowledge? Roy Sorensen: No, no one has claimed to construct such a list. Ciarán Benson: You could add physical knowledge: I know where my arm is without looking, provided my proprioceptive system is functioning adequately. This may connect with Frances’s idea of tacit knowledge. Where would you put that in your scheme, given that it’s a preoccupation of many artists? Roy Sorensen: I don’t know. I was just trying to come up with examples. So to continue the list: aesthetic cognitivists have also claimed that artworks provide modal knowledge, which is knowledge that something is possible or necessary; knowledge of actuality, and practical knowledge. Moral knowledge has also been claimed, for example the knowledge we gain from novels. James Elkins: Is it a deep problem, or a superficial problem, that we’re not worried about whether these forms of knowledge comprise a list? In my count we have: modal knowledge, propositional knowledge, practical knowledge, kinesthetic or proprioceptive knowledge, phenomenal knowledge, knowledge of the significance of something, moral knowledge, concept learning, knowledge of artwork—a real miscellany, and as you say only some pertain to artworks. Roy Sorensen: People don’t worry about it. James Elkins: To worry about it, you’d have to start from the first (propositional or logical knowledge). You couldn’t begin from a phenomenological position, and worry about the others. So I am worried that you’re not worried. Roy Sorensen: I don’t know why you’d worry, aside from the interest in achieving a full taxonomy. But suppose you wanted to find out that some kinds of knowledge are not possible. To prove that negative proposition, you would be interested in getting a full list. James Elkins: But from the perspective of some of these, you’d be concerned about overlaps and repetitions, but not from other perspectives. Roy Sorensen: It’s a sloppy list, because I was just trying to show how it can be claimed that we know things from art.

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Saul Ostrow: Each element in the list is categorical, not definitive. That is, the list together does not constitute a definition of knowledge. So they don’t necessarily have to be reconcilable; they can be in conflict. Moral knowledge can be in conflict with experiential knowledge. Roy Sorensen: It is generally hard for the cognitivists to say there is that kind of variety of knowledges. The reason is that you want to be able to have arguments: you have some moral knowledge, some practical knowledge, and to reach some conclusions— Saul Ostrow: From the perspective of the artist, the negotiation is very important. Roy Sorensen: Okay, this part is true: you can concede that some things are not coknowable. I may have to be ignorant of some things to know others. But different kinds of knowledge that conflict in an incommensurate way would be worrisome. The idea for epistemologists is to pool kinds of knowledge that can be known. One last item on the list: there are also claims that artwork enables concept learning. Against that, Jerry Fodor has an argument that you cannot learn concepts, from art or from anything else. (“Concepts” understood as elements that go into propositions.) Suppose  I try to define a new concept. I need to have something that means the same thing but is learnable. We’re born, according to Fodor, with an innate stock of concepts.7 And people say, Even the concept of a spark plug? And he says, Yes, even the concept of a spark plug. It’s a great argument. He just keeps driving along until he runs off the cliff. And here’s the objection to aesthetic cognitivism I find most interesting. People argue that to get knowledge from art, you have to switch out of the aesthetic stance. This is how T. J. Diffey puts it: “An aesthetic response to art involves the suspension of reference by taking the work to be holding up states of affairs for inspection, scrutiny, or, to use the traditional term, contemplation. So, to learn from a work of art, that is, to move from what is shown in the world of the work to an assertion of what obtains in the world, requires a refusal of the aesthetic stance.”8 The point is that there’s a legitimate other stance in relation to art, and that shows that you’re not attending to the object as art. Ciarán Benson: Maybe what you’re left with is not the knowledge of what the object said. Instead what happens in the experience of art supplies you with memories, which are yours, as well as information, which is its. There is a type of knowledge. 7. Jerry A. Fodor, Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 8. T. J. Diffey, “What Can We Learn from Art?,” in Art and its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society, edited by Stephen Davies (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 30.

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Roy Sorensen: There is a kind of knowledge, even within the aestheticist stance. Ciarán Benson: This would involve a distinction between information processing, which we’ve mainly been talking about, and meaning making. The dominant model in cognitive psychology is also information processing, as against meaning making, which is a social knowledge. Saul Ostrow: Maybe we should add social knowledge to our list— James Elkins: Well, it seems clear to me that understanding the knowledge that comes from art will involve a conversation on the limits of knowledge as that word is construed in analytic philosophy, Kantian aesthetics, cognitive psychology, and other fields, all without exclusive reference to art. All morning Roy has been asking us to attend to what can be argued, but we have been swerving toward boundary cases. There’s a tidal pull, in art discourse, away from kinds of knowledge that can be argued propositionally, and toward things that cannot be logically clarified, but that can somehow still be called knowledge. I think we’ve been swept along by the strength of that tide, away from Roy’s territory and back toward the swampier regions we prefer.

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5. a r t i s t i c k n o w l e d g e , p a r t

2

That same afternoon, Frances Whitehead led a seminar on artistic knowledge. Her interest as a practitioner is in tacit knowledge: the question of what knowledge artists in particular can bring to the table. She has been involved in a series of linked civic initiatives, including the Embedded Artist Project with the City of Chicago Innovation Program 1 and the Great Lakes Basin Phenologic Garden Project, a climate change / culture change initiative for the Chicago Park District. Her introductory PowerPoint lecture included proposals in answer to the question, What do artists know? “Beyond a wide range of material practices, histories and techniques, concepts and theoretical frameworks,” she wrote, “artists are trained to use a unique set of skills, processes, and methodologies”: • Artists know how to synthesize diverse facts, goals, and references—making connections and speaking many languages. Artists are very lateral in their research and operations and have great intellectual and operational agility. • Artists know the production of new knowledge, as evidenced by the onehundred-plus-year history of innovation and originality as a top criterion. • Artists use creative, in-process problem solving and ongoing processes—not all up-front creativity-responsivity. • Artists compose and perform, initiate and carry through, design and execute. This creates a relatively tight feedback loop in their process, compared to some other disciplines. • Artists use a proactive not reactive practice—artists are trained to initiate, redirect the brief, and consider their intentionality. This intentionality is highly regarded, as are the internal logics of the work. • Artists develop an acute cognizance of individual responsibility for the meanings, ramifications, and consequences of their work. The downside of this is that artists are not always team oriented or willing to compromise due to the high premium placed on individual responsibility and sole authorship. • Artists have a deep understanding of the language of cultural values and how they are embodied and represented. They know revaluation, recoding, and recontextualization. • Artists know how to participate and maneuver in noncompensation (social) economies, idea economies, and other intangible values (capitals). • Artists have great proficiency in evaluation and analysis along multicriteria, qualitative lines—in qualitative assessment. Many are skilled in pattern and system recognition, especially with asymmetrical data. 1. http://​www​.embeddedartistproject​.com (accessed October 2, 2009).

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• Artists are skilled at making explicit the implicit, making visible the invisible. • Artists do not think outside the box: there is no box. Frances also argued that for artists seeking to address global issues and looking for agency that leverages their knowledge, Thierry de Duve’s rubric could be extended to Metis–Praxis–Re-direction.2 In preparation for Frances’s seminar the Fellows and Faculty read a range of texts on and around tacit knowledge.3 The transcript here begins with excerpts from Frances’s introduction and includes material on the philosophic approaches to knowledge; key concepts such as strategy, metaphor, and the artist; and a longer conversation about the relation between the practice Frances describes and art. Frances Whitehead: I’m going to be talking today about tacit knowledge. We could call it a process, or a method—this gets into semantics—but if we can’t ever get to the question of what good this knowledge is, how we can use it, how we learn it, how we can teach other people about it, then I’m not sure we’re addressing what is going on in the world. So I am going to map out for you today something that arrived, uninvited, in my practice. I stumbled upon it. It may be useful to you, or it may not. I make no claims about universality, no claims that this is a full list of anything. I make no claims that I can speak to all or art, or all of knowledge. I can only give you a report of what has happened in the last ten years around these issues, and what has arrived at my doorstep, and what I have tried to do with it. Rather than seeking to understand this question in the abstract, the question of artistic knowledge has arrived through the lens of sustainability as 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 3. In addition to the sources listed below, the readings included “Back to the Future,” chap. 7 of Michael Grenfell and Cheryl Hardy, Art Rules: Pierre Bourdieu and the Visual Arts (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 173–94, an overview and update of Bourdieu’s theories of how art operates in society, including key terms such as “field” and “habitus”; Tom Holert, “Art in the Knowledge-Based Polis,” on the E-Flux website, http://​www​.e​-flux​.com/​journal/​view/​40 (accessed August 10, 2009), an overview and critique of the commodification of knowledge and the rhetoric around innovation and knowledge production; Daniel Aronson, “Overview of Systems Thinking,” available from thinking​ .net​, http://​www​.thinking​.net/​Systems​_Thinking/​ OverviewSTarticle​.pdf​, a very brief introduction to the concept of “systems thinking”; Tony Fry, “Redirective Practice: An Elaboration,” on the Design Philosophy website, http://​www​ .desphilosophy​.com (accessed August 14, 2009), a call for an examination and redirection of habitus of the practice for all disciplines; Hugo Letiche and Matt Statler, “Evoking Metis: Questioning the Logics of Change, Responsiveness,

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Meaning, and Action in Organizations,” Culture and Organization 11, no. 1 (2005): 1–16; Bertil Rolf, “Two Theories of Tacit and Implicit Knowledge,” posted on the website of the Special Interest Group on “Philosophy and Informatics,” part of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik GI), http://​www​.nt​.fh​ -koeln​.de/​philosophyandinformatics (accessed October 1, 2009); and Gavan J. Mcdonell, “Disciplines as Cultures: Towards Reflection and Understanding,” in Transdisciplinarity: Recreating Integrated Knowledge, edited by Margaret Somerville and David J. Rapport (Oxford: EOLSS, 2000). For a taste of discourse around disciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, see Brad Haseman, “A Manifesto for Performative Research,” in “Practice-Led Research,” special issue of Media International Australia Incorporating Culture and Policy, no. 118 (2006): 98–106. Carl Frappaolo, “Implicit Knowledge,” Knowledge Management Research and Practice 6 (2008): 23–25; A. C. Spender, review of Philippe Baumard, Tacit Knowledge in Organizations, Academy of Management Review 25, no. 2 (2000): 443–46.

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I have sought to understand the cultural dimension of this issue and how the knowledge of artists might contribute to this effort. Like many contemporary artists, I seek agency. I arrived at the question of the tacit knowledge of artists by asking, what is the role of culture and the artist is the discourse of sustainability? What is my expertise? What can I bring to the collective table? Through this lens, one can begin to sketch out the disciplinary knowledge of artists, their field and habitus, and also how that knowledge relates to other ideas emerging in the so-called knowledge economy. This we can also tie to new forms of artistic practice, which can be modeled. I like to try on different words at different times, to see how far that gets me. When speaking of tacit knowledge, then, are we talking strictly about nonverbal knowledge? Is this the same as implicit knowledge? Is that embodied, somatic, kinesthetic, spatial, knowledge?—or is it really just a matter of good old-fashioned procedural knowledge? We are not the only people asking these questions; many other sectors are trying to understand and map out their field of operations and how they can understand and capture their knowledge. This has given rise in the business community to a field called knowledge management. I’m looking around to see what other people are talking about with regard to knowledge.4 In terms of philosophy, there’s the usual breakdown into episteme (ἐπιστήμη), pure knowledge (that is, abstract or theoretical knowledge); techne (τέχνη), craft or know-how (procedural knowledge); and praxis (πρᾱξις), knowledge in action (practical knowledge). Areti Adamopoulou: Since these are Greek terms, let me add a bit of linguistics: episteme (in modern Greek, the word for science) comes from ἐπίσταμαι, which means to know or to understand very well; techne (which now means art) from τίκτω, meaning to give birth or to bring to life; and praxis (which today means action) from πράσσω, which originally meant to go through, to cross and, later, to act. Note also that techne was used in antiquity also to denote slyness, deceit! Frances Whitehead: I would think of these as the know what, know how, and know that. But as we began to look at the philosophic background, it became clear we should also ask: what about know why, know when or where, and know who— that is, knowledge related to the intangible social network? Areti Adamopoulou: It may help that the current term for know that is gnosi (γνώση), for know how is technognosia (τεχνογνωσία). 4. The Seminar also read, in this connection, Chris Rust, “Design Enquiry: ‘Tacit Knowledge and Invention in Science,’ ” Design Issues 20, no. 4 (2004): 76–85; Sara Delamont and Paul Atkinson, “Doctoring Uncertainty: Mastering Craft Knowledge,” Social Studies of Science 31, no. 1 (2001): 87–107 See also Joyce S. R. Yee,

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“Capturing Tacit Knowledge: Documenting and Understanding Recent Methodological Innovation Used in Design Doctorates in Order to Inform Postgraduate Training Provision,” paper delivered at EKSIG 2009: Experiential Knowledge, Method and Methodology, June 19, 2009. [Last entry added by J.E.]

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Frances Whitehead: So, moving along through the cognitive and philosophic, when you begin talking about tacit knowledge, everyone mentions Michael Polanyi.5 I have to tell you, it was not of any use to me whatsoever. I found it logocentric, binary, hierarchical. It seemed like warmed-over midcentury thought to me, more about cognition and learning than knowledge. He is giving the subject electroshocks and then talking about knowledge! And spatially, it’s just too simplistic. In his model, knowledge moves as a link back and forth between the proximal and the distal, shuttling back and forth as if it were in Flatland. All this transpires in the soup of what he calls “indwelling.” He does later talk about emergence, but for me, the complex adaptive systems model is a much closer fit to what I see transpiring in the world. The models he proposes for what happens in the brain are just not as complex as what many of us talk about in the studio, in the art context, in terms of how things are functioning. I would recommend Gregory Bateson’s analysis of “deutero learning,” “learning one” and “learning two.”6 He talks about teaching dolphins: one is taught to do a trick, and gets a reward; but then he teaches one that it will only get a reward when it does a new trick. Eventually the dolphin learns the abstract rule of newness. (This of course is completely tacit, because they’re not talking to the dolphins.) I think it is worthwhile to think about newness, as it is discredited in the discourse of the avant-garde, but also as it persists as an inherent value in what we’re doing. I also want to introduce some linguistic terms related to art practice. This started as a lark with some graduate students, but it turns out the subject is studied in linguistics. The suffix in words like “artist,” “designer,” and “engineer”—the agential suffix, -ist, -er, and -eer—is related to the degree of application of instrumentation. It is also related to the original language we borrowed these words from, and how they came into English. For example, “art” as a noun ends in -ist, not only because it’s a noun, but also because the relationship between the profession, the artist, and the thing, art, is of an ideological character. It turns out that -ists are the most ideological. The person is deeply attached to the subject, for example in “scientist” and “artist.” The agential suffix -er is more applied. In the word “designer,” for example, the designer is applying the design. It is less ideological and more applied. The agential suffix -eer is the most applied, and even instrumental, as in “pamphleteer,” “racketeer.” So even in the language itself, we position ourselves disciplinarily and dispositionally in relation to the topics at hand. If we switch these suffixes around, it’s possible to see the plate tectonics at work. The other day our dean introduced me as a “designist.” If that is true, then I believe in design; I have attached myself to it—as in the words “communist,” “fascist,” “fashionista.” 5. Michael Polanyi, “Tacit Knowing,” chap. 1 of The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3–25. 6. Max Visser, “Gregory Bateson on DeuteroLearning and Double Bind: A Brief Conceptual History,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 39, no. 3 (2003): 269–78.

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Chris Csikszentmihályi: You have used the word “strategy” to describe what you’re interested in, and yesterday Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen also used it, in association with the Greek word metis (μητις). I’ve spent enough time with Greek scholars to know you can’t black-box a Greek word and use it out of context, as we often do—but my reading of metis is that it’s a tactical intelligence, a spirited, quick intelligence that certainly can be used to effect a larger strategy, but often isn’t. That doesn’t make it less important, though my sense is that many disciplines favor strategy. I completely agree that a lot of art intelligence and creativity, especially in music and in jazz, has to do with strategy, but what differentiates jazz or other improvisatory forms is that quick, tactical intelligence. In a way it is a subaltern intelligence, the intelligence one must develop when one doesn’t have the power or means to strategize—artists often don’t have the resources or ability to strategize. Frances Whitehead: I am interested in utilizing metis in the world— Chris Csikszentmihályi: But will you be able to do the strategic work you have outlined, with your training in artistic tactics? Frances Whitehead: I think it’s interesting that we’re considering the viability of this approach for the next couple of decades. The only way I knew how to talk about this was the way it arrived, what it delivered to me in terms of potentials at this time. Ann Sobiech Munson: Frances, maybe metis and praxis should be interchanged in your proposed scheme. Praxis suggests a strategic change, but metis relates to tactics, following de Duve’s trajectory skill-medium-practice. Also, the etymology of practice in the Oxford English Dictionary has to do with cunning, scheming, and trickery—very metis-like. Thus metis highlights this particular aspect of practice. P.  Elaine Sharpe: I am more inclined to use the term methexis, or meta exis, which Jean-Luc Nancy spoke about in a seminar at the European Graduate School, and which he defined as a kind of autonomous participation in creation—the example he gave was that of the photographer being the methexis of the camera. This goes back to Roy’s discussion of the phantom limb this morning, which I do believe exists as a valid circuitry in the sphere of art-making, and which also speaks to the notion of the synapses being tricked. Ciarán Benson: I am an outsider in this, so I am also struggling with the language. There’s a word you didn’t use, and that is “metaphor.” You mentioned turning one thing into another, and moving laterally, and you used the word “strategy” or metis: but you never used the word “metaphor.” This question of metaphoric meaning is quite well studied. My own students, for example, tend not to think metaphorically, whereas art students or poetry students often use metaphorical language.

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Frances Whitehead: I’d just remind you that the document I’ve just presented was written for a project I am doing with the Innovation Program of the City of Chicago, and they don’t speak about metaphor. They talk about “analogous thinking” and “synetic thinking” (note, not “synthetic”), but not metaphor. So this was crafted for them. Barbara Jaffee: I am interested in the replacement of ethics with art. There is an either/ or choice of ethics or the social. But if you burrow deep into studio practice, if you don’t go out into the world, are you not ethical? At what point is it possible for art to replace ethics? Frances Whitehead: Well, you know, here at the School of the Art Institute I run a project called Knowledge Lab (KLab). One of the rubrics that we’ve ended up talking about is new knowledge, and that raises the question of what isn’t new knowledge. We call that other thing known knowledge. A lot of what we are all doing as artists is keeping knowledge alive be reperforming it, re-exemplifying it in ways that create works that the current culture can understand. But there are also things at the edge of the known that are pushing change. As an artist, my disposition is to be at the edge, messing around in the region of change. Many other artists are at the other end of things, and that’s very important. We need not to forget the known knowledge, by reperforming it, re-presenting it. For example, regarding Jonathan’s question, if I “make art” alongside my transdisciplinary practice, I am making a series of watercolors of extinct plants where I can enjoy the personal artistic pleasure of speaking a “known” visual language, and also do the strategic work of rendering approachable a political subject. Barbara Jaffee: But that time in your studio, when you’re just sitting there: no one gives you a charge or a brief, and you have to come up with one: that has to be sustained within a future curriculum, if it is going to continue to happen. Frances Whitehead: Don’t we all agree with that? That the time spent in a studio is productive because it is where artists learn proactivity? P. Elaine Sharpe: Absolutely. Time spent in contemplation of an idea and bringing that idea into form. Christopher Frayling: Freud called that “unconscious cerebration.” Chris Csikszentmihályi: There’s a researcher named Rich Gold, recently passed away, who was at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, a big lab that invented laser printers, Ethernet, even the windowing software that Apple and later Microsoft ripped off.7 At PARC they had designers, engineers, and scientists working there. Gold thought they should also have artists, because the designers had no one to talk to, and because Xerox Park needed people of all sorts to work together. He found out that the designers and artists really hate each other— 7. Craig Harris, Art and Innovation: The Xerox PARC Artist-in-Residence Program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).

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Frances Whitehead: Because they are too close together— Chris Csikszentmihályi: Well, no, it turned out the artists and scientists got along— Frances Whitehead: It becomes about difference. Chris Csikszentmihályi: —the artists and scientists got along, and the designers got along with engineers, and Gold speculated that it was because designers and engineers are really okay with the idea of clients. Artists and scientists are supposed to be revealing truths, right? But engineers and designers have clients, and that’s okay, you can tell them to change something and it doesn’t impinge on their sense of integrity. Saul Ostrow: One of the issues here is what model of the artist is being put forth. Art history privileges one model, and ignores others. There is the entire history of art and technology in the twentieth century, which do not appear in the historical record. Areti Adamopoulou: How about other activities of the “great masters”? A  number of Renaissance artists, such as Andrea Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, and Piero di Cosimo, made ephemeral works for their patrons. Painting and sculpture are still the major subjects in art-historical research and writing. And this is what an art student, having attended a survey course, ends up with. Christopher Frayling: This pedagogic point goes back to Herbert Read. He didn’t use the same language at all, but he said there are certain things that doing art, in an educational context, brings out much better than any other activity. He called that teaching through art— James Elkins: Sorry, let me just put in there that we’ll be talking about Read and teaching through art at the end of the week.8 Christopher Frayling: Yes; just to say that Read listed the things that can be learnt through art: setting your own problems, your own agendas, and so forth. Frances, I think what you’ve done is update that, so it makes sense in a business context. And you’re absolutely right: whatever you end up doing, it turns out to be a certain way of thinking. I think that’s really important for the agenda of this week. We have been signally bad at articulating what art does well, even though we are good at saying that art does something well. Rebecca Gordon: Teaching through art doesn’t negate the possibility that art itself can give knowledge. It’s not an either/or thing. The result of art-making can be both the artwork itself and the development of the skills or knowledge of the artist, which could potentially be applied to many non-art activities. Christopher Frayling: There’s no need to be defensive: it’s no threat to autonomy if we teach through art.

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8. See Section 9 of the Seminars.

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Chris Csikszentmihályi: I remember when I came to the School of the Art Institute as a student, I had come out of the corporate world—I had been working at a design consulting firm called Doblin Group, which was founded by Jay Doblin, a student of Moholy-Nagy at the Chicago Institute of Design, and who took it over on Moholy-Nagy’s death. I learned a huge amount about the field of consulting, especially after we had been partly acquired by some rogue McKin­ sey Consultants. Frances, you have occupied the role of consultant in some projects you have done outside the School. McKinsey—this massive, powerful consultancy—has documents describing strategies and techniques that show how to analyze any situation or problem in an entirely structured way: it is almost the diametric opposite of the process that you are describing, Frances. You are making an argument for an approach that many people would say would be impossible to put on just one page.9 Frances Whitehead: And it has to be one page or many officials won’t read it! Jonathan Dronsfield: Frances, may I ask about these watercolors of extinct plants? Are you still doing them? Frances Whitehead: What is the real question there? Jonathan Dronsfield: I didn’t mention the watercolors, you did. Frances Whitehead: Well, it’s important to understand the purposeful manipulation of what genres mean and what they can deliver. I consider watercolor the most palatable, even effete, of all media. It is the consummate “known knowledge” and thus affords different opportunity and little risk. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: I think there is a point there. When we discussed interventionist art, one negative argument was that the artists weren’t on location long enough. The commitment only lasts a couple of weeks. Frances Whitehead: That is a huge point, huge. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: If you were to be hired as a consultant say to the City of Chicago for the rest of your life, you would definitely have a problem as an artist. In order that your contribution to the city politics is to be understood as an artwork, it has to have a limited duration. Otherwise it will be just that: a job for the City of Chicago. The traditional framing that made autonomous art autonomous—frames, plinths, white walls—seems to be given by the determined time span in interventionist art. And this causes also a problem for this type of social engaged art, because it is never exclusively devoted to its focus group and its problems; it always has an eye on its resonance in the art field. For a practice such as yours, there is always the same question: How long will it be art? Jonathan Dronsfield: Yes, that is where I was going with my question. 9. Frances had disseminated a page of talking points that included the kinds of knowledge listed at the beginning of this section. [—J.E.]

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Hilde Van Gelder: I have a serious problem with this institutional underpinning of what can be defined as art and what cannot. Stephan, today we should leave behind the idea that we need a consecrating instance like a museum, a gallery, or an influential critic, in order to decide what art is or can be. Art can be operative on all levels of society—even, now, in academia. For centuries, artists have been working directly for important historical patrons (think of the Medici). Frances’s practice reconnects with this age-long tradition of commissioned artistic production and thus radically reinvents this very old model for issues of the future. Given her teaching job and her official patrons, she can make her work independently from the commercial and institutional gallery circuit, which can be an advantage as far as the autonomy of her thinking and subsequent artistic output is concerned. There is artistic quality to gain from this approach, all the more so since her methods are so transdisciplinary. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: If you don’t switch, if you stay, then you turn into a designer or a social worker—which is okay! After two hundred years of autonomous art, perhaps it’s time for that role to disappear. William Marotti: But Stephan, I’m not sure that that needs to be an either-or proposition—that to act in the world, an artist needs to “get a job” or forgo art. Perhaps you’re being a bit hyperbolic here. But put another way, it seems like we’ve split the question of artists’ knowledge into a question of applied skills in other domains, and an indefinitely deferred issue of knowing through and in art itself—something that Adorno thought was very much caught up with art being both autonomous and social.10 Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Since we were confronted with the bottle rags and urinals as artworks, we had to take care about the frame which helped to direct the interpretation. And a social action is very similar to an appropriated everyday object. If there is no frame to the urinal, you run into the danger that someone will just use it. But I think Hilde is right: the bourgeois epoch of art produced a very specific framing, quite different at least from the framing of altarpieces in Gothic churches. It might be that we are witnessing the definition of a new function and social role of art in a postbourgeois society. Areti Adamopoulou: Maybe art historians or philosophers are more attached to categories and taxonomies than artists are. What if we see what Frances proposes as a return to former types of artistic creation or action? Or perhaps she can still do her watercolors and research as often as she likes, and when she becomes the leader of a decision-making committee she will have realized something similar to what Plato proposed in Politeia [Republic] about the philosophers as governors in his ideal state. 10. Theodor Adorno, Gretel Adorno, and Rolf Tiedemann, Aesthetic Theory, Theory and History of Literature 88 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 348.

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Jonathan Dronsfield: Stephan, I’m interested in the complementary case, the political artist who one day is no longer political, but continues as an artist. For instance, Jean-Luc Godard. In the late 1960s he was making very political films, Maoist films. The politics of those films meant that it was constitutive of Godard’s practice that the films work to change the world. One day he woke up and he was no longer a Maoist, but he went on to make films that can be seen as a continuation of previous concerns essential to his practice. So what happened there? What sustained that practice from the time he was a political filmmaker through to the point where politics didn’t matter, or at least were not essential? As an artist, he no longer avows a politics, but he is also not asked to justify his earlier practice from the 1960s, which involved calling for certain films not to be made, stopping people from going to theaters to see work that wasn’t political. Frances, what is it that sustains your practice as an artist? Frances Whitehead: Before I answer, it needs to be said that the concept of sustainability threatens the discourse of art as some people know it, and so they use the word as a way of talking about sustaining art. I see that all the time, so I thought I’d just point it out. In terms of your question, I agree that this would be an issue if the only thing I were doing was sustaining the role of the artist. But that is not all I am doing. The actual projects, which I haven’t talked about, are what matter. Jonathan Dronsfield: Yes, because you have a desired political outcome, and not because it is art. A lot of what you do is in the name of having a desired political outcome, and this becomes important in the academy in terms of how you teach artists. Frances Whitehead: Well, I’m conscious that I’m modeling the role of the artist, but it’s not the only thing I’m doing. I am joining a team of people who are also modeling, modeling the city of the future. Jonathan Dronsfield: If you see your practice as being on the side of life, so that you’re not worried about whether your practice is or is not art, and you’re teaching students along these lines, you will be sustained through the shift from the values of art to the ones you have been exploring by your practice, and presumably through any shift back to art away from social engagement. But by what are you sustained? Chris Csikszentmihályi: By your metis, or your strategy. James Elkins: Or, I would say: by formulations like the ones about tacit knowledge that you have set out. Jonathan Dronsfield: No, on the contrary, it’s precisely the falling away of these, their disappearance or negation, that you will need to be sustained through were you to turn away from politics, away from social engagement, back to something

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more properly called art. I would say that an artist is sustained through such fundamental changes by something about his or her practice as an artist, the practice of being an artist. But how do you teach that? Can one teach it? How to grasp one’s talent, or make of chance a necessity, or let the intensities emerge, that sort of thing. Can what will sustain a practice through the negation of politics in it be taught? Isn’t part of what students need to learn how to live the life of an artist as an overcoming of politics, which need not mean that they would be taught not to be political?

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6. t h e f i r s t - y e a r p r o g r a m

From here to the end of the Seminars, the subject was individual degree programs: the first year, the BFA, the MFA, and finally the PhD. In each case the purpose was to understand the ideal form of the program or course. What does an MFA offer, in theory, that a BFA doesn’t? What are the best ways of thinking about the PhD? What are the optimal arrangements of elements in the first year? In these conversations, we tended to go back and forth between official administrative documents, practical considerations, and ordinary, day-to-day understandings of the different degrees. There are administrative and professional guidelines (which are often dry and abstract, but also politically important); practical problems to do with required courses, funding, and faculty (what instructors and students talk about all the time); and the day-to-day notion of the degree (what students hope to get out of the program, and what instructors tell their parents). In the case of the BFA, the day-to-day notion is that the BFA is an opportunity to experiment before you settle down to find your own practice. It seems those three ways of talking are inseparable, and each is part of what the programs are. The subject of this first conversation is the here is the first year of college-level art education, also called the core or the foundation year. James Elkins: An initial problem here is that the first-year program is often considered to be relatively unimportant. There is a lot of talk about it, but that talk usually happens in lunchtime sessions at conferences (those sessions no one attends), and the conversation is often really just anecdotal: “This is what we do at our institution,” and so forth. There’s also a common idea that the first year isn’t important in the bigger scheme of things. In my field, art history, people don’t talk much about the first-year survey of world art, because they think it doesn’t have repercussions on professional life or on graduate-level study. I don’t agree at all with that assessment: I think the structures and ideas of the first year are fundamentally important for art history, and the same is true of studio art.1 Let me propose a couple of things about our conversation, and then I’ll introduce some themes we might explore. I would like to distinguish between first-order and second-order argument. The first order would be the work of assembling a list of elements of first-year instruction. (It is entirely typical that even something that rudimentary hasn’t yet been done.) Second-order argument would be about the relation between 1. The case is made in Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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those elements. Is life drawing compatible, philosophically or historically, with Bauhaus exercises in color perception?—and so forth. The first-order task can be simplified, I think, by avoiding the categories that are usually used to divide the first year. Ann Sobiech Munson’s institution in Iowa, for example, divides the first year into these subject areas: Critical Thinking, Visual Organization, Visual Translation (collage, mapping, model making), Media, Research, Ethics, Communication, Collaboration, Critical Evaluation, and Professional Awareness. The problem I see there is that several of those are compound categories, amalgams of potentially incommensurate elements. I think it is prudent to begin with the simplest possible categories. Let’s divide our discussion, then, into four large areas, which I think can reasonably be thought of as the fundamental constituents of the first year. They are the art history survey; the teaching of basic things like form, color, and space; the teaching of theory; and time students spend in the studio. I’ll introduce each one briefly, to get us started. 1. The art history survey. This isn’t always included in conversations on the first year, because it is often handled by the Art History Department, but ideally it should be fully integrated. There is a large literature on the ways the world art survey is taught, but virtually nothing on how it could be best altered to fit the needs of studio art instruction. The obstacle might be endemic to art history itself, because it would involve questions like: What judgments should govern the choice of artists, artworks, and ideas? Should art students learn different artists, artworks, and ideas than other students in the university? My proposal, just to open the conversation, is that art history is congenitally unable to address such questions because it is an historical discipline, not a critical one. Such questions need to be pursued outside the discipline, in fora like this. 2. Basic things like seeing, visuality, color, space, and time. There is no name for these things—and that itself is symptomatic of our reticence to talk about them. I’d like to call them rudiments: that was the name they had in the Renaissance, and it wasn’t pejorative. It is possible to list some of them: from the Baroque academies, we have the central place accorded to life drawing and to drawing in general; from Romanticism, we have the idea of art’s contingency, the importance of subjective expression, and the independence of art from the state. From the Bauhaus, we have all sorts of rudiments, including exercises in texture, motion, color, space, and line, and also the ubiquitous sequence from 2D to 4D. From the 1960s and 1970s, we have the preeminence of politics over aesthetics, the interest in identity, and the idea that art should act in society, the avoidance of essentialized media, and the fascinating problem of deskilling. Here’s what I wonder about all that: why is it we don’t feel comfortable assembling a list of such rudiments? Even if we restrict the listing to Bauhaus exercises, we probably wouldn’t want to come up with a reasonably complete listing of things students should know. But if this were a more conservative art school, or one in another country (I won’t specify that!), such a conversation would be easy and necessary. I wonder what causes our aversion.

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3. Theory. Here we could discuss two separable issues: first, the question of liberal arts, and then the question of art theory. In North American art schools, liberal arts requirements are stand-ins for the range of classes that students would get in universities. The question is whether or not art students should get this truncated version of a liberal arts education, or whether they should be given a customized education. The second topic, art theory, is also difficult to discuss, for the same reason that people don’t want to discuss rudiments—no one feels entirely comfortable saying which theorists are really indispensable for students. 4. Studio time. This is the fourth component of first-year instruction, but I won’t add anything here, so we can get on with our conversation. Ann Sobiech Munson: There are groups devoted to the study of foundation year in art and design education. Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE) has a website and a biennial national conference.2 The National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (NCDBS) has been holding annual conferences for twenty-six years now, and recently launched an archive at Louisiana State University.3 Both groups debate how and what to teach in foundation years, though of course there’s no one single list or program upon which everyone agrees. Barbara Jaffee: One of the readings we were given was the 1910 circular for the School of the Art Institute.4 It is a very Taylorist, assembly-line model. They describe the first year as a common basis for what happens later. James Elkins: And despite all the changes since then, I think you can argue the remnants of that idea are still around—so we need to come to terms with what we think are essential subjects. Ann Sobiech Munson: A few years ago Randall Lavender published an article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education that asks just this question: what are aesthetic fundamentals, where did they go, and what is their value for contemporary foundation instruction?5 He focuses on aesthetic fundamentals, though he argues that formal ideas have a place in the foundation. William Marotti: The issue of the art history survey—whether it’s that art historians would have problems with a class that has utility, or whether it’s the introductory survey so it gets the short shrift you could expect from departments that concentrate on higher-level work—is marginalized. But the stakes are significant, especially if you want to have an education that leads to a self-reflexive artist. If the survey is to provide more than an ability to recognize styles or artists on sight, as if in a police lineup, I think it should engage more deeply with the way such works represented specific forms of engagement with their context and 2. http://​www​.foundations​-art​.org (accessed October 27, 2009). 3. http://​www​.beginningdesign​.org (accessed October 27, 2009). 4. Art Institute of Chicago, School of Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Normal Instruction [teacher instruction, and] Designing, Circular of

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Instruction for 1910–1911, pamphlet available from the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, Art Institute of Chicago. 5. Randall Lavender, “The Subordination of Aesthetic Fundamentals in College Art Instruction,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 37, no. 3 (2003): 41–57.

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art worlds. Conveying a sense of why such works mattered to artists at the time they were made might make them more relatable to the sorts of choices students face in a different context. James Elkins: Yes, there’s literature on that, but it is also a question of how existing scholarship is taught. It might be useful here to introduce an idea of John Dewey’s, from the essay “Child and the Curriculum.” He imagines the issue as a law case, as if it were Child v. Curriculum. If the curriculum is some imagined body of art historians, the child is an imagined art student with fifty-two nose rings and an encyclopedic knowledge of art made in the last two seconds—all those clichés. As a thought experiment, Child v. Curriculum suggests that the problem of what to teach in the undergraduate curriculum is more a sociological question. Barbara Jaffee: Part of the problem is that when art history was introduced in American art schools it was as general education, not as a scholarly discipline. This is the institution where Helen Gardner taught, and where the first edition of her survey text, Art Through the Ages, was published in 1926. Back then it was possible to imagine that a bit of art history would make up for what was lost with increased specialization. I don’t really see the value today of the kind of superficial discussion that the survey offers. I teach the survey, but I never took a survey. It simply wasn’t part of my training as a scholar. There’s so much more and interesting things to teach. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Our art historians simply refuse to teach the survey. They say in art-historical terms, the enterprise is nonsense. The outcome is nothing; you can’t describe any artwork in a professional way. We have an ongoing discussion of what is needed in the first year, because art students have a very multivalent and practical interest. We decided we should cover major issues in the first year, which would contribute to the ways they organize their practice. We are working on a sequence of lectures on three issues. First is the understanding of space in Modernist painting and sculpture. How did space change after minimalism? And then a second part is devoted to a contemporary concept of time. Here we try to react against a concept of time as something naturally given and establish an understanding of the different ways history is constructed. Also by looking to other, non-European traditions which read time in a different way. And then a third part is on identity. Artworks are selected in reference to these three part of the lecture series. James Elkins: Those are common strategies, and elements of art history can be embedded in them. But here’s the tricky thing: the decision about what elements to include in such a pedagogic plan is not a disciplinary decision. The discipline contributes the decision not to present space, time, identity, and other themes in a disciplinary fashion. The arrangement you describe re-presents the art history survey (the first of the four topics I proposed) as, or in, the “rudiments” (the second of the four topics).

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Saul Ostrow: The arrangement Stephan describes serves the same function as the art history survey, because it constructs a continuum. It presents a history in which the theme exists— James Elkins: No, I don’t agree. Saul Ostrow: The minute you use historical examples, you are presenting a continuum. James Elkins: But in what discipline? Saul Ostrow: That of the artist. It is an ongoing practice, always changing, and different practices arise in that continuum— James Elkins: But Saul, if you say that, you short-circuit the discussion. The issue here is what happens to material from one discipline when it is reformulated in another context. Saul Ostrow: But the approaches to art history have to be seen in the context of the reasons art history is included. And the reason art history is included is because it provides a context that circumscribes the practice of the artist. Marta Edling: That is only after the 1960s. In the reform of the Royal College of Art in Stockholm that is precisely what happened. Before the 1960s, art history was taught as history. After, they put a here-and-now perspective on history. A kind of presentism was established; if they gave lectures on surrealism, it was not because it was interesting as a historic phenomenon, it was because they saw surrealism practiced in the contemporary scene. Saul Ostrow: But it was a tradition you could become part of. Marta Edling: No, no, no. That was the whole point of the reform. James Elkins: Saul, in your way of thinking of this, how is it possible to ever present something that is not a continuum? Saul Ostrow: This goes back to the question of what model of the artist is constructed. Jonathan Dronsfield: I agree, Jim, that it’s necessary to come to a decision about art history. That decision will be circumscribed by the institutional structure in which the question is raised. I imagine this question is different for me, because I work in a university that has a department of art history. The fine art department will present the relevance of art history very differently. Even if art histories are presented as nonlinear, competing, or fragmented, they are still presented by the discipline of art history as historical. I imagine that it would be good for an art student in a university to have a degree of flexibility. Students could be offered the chance, for example, to take a course in art history. Once you’ve got the history of art presented by art historians, then an art department can present it again differently for artists, and perhaps not as history at all. But here, in an art school, without a broad academic support structure, you have to come to

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this decision differently, but in either case, for me the answer is not to teach art historically at all. Rather than compensate for the absence or the lack, perhaps it would be better to internalize it, to grasp it as a chance. P.  Elaine Sharpe: I wonder what effect it would have to have an artist teaching the survey. Jonathan Dronsfield: It happens a lot—but let them teach it nonhistoriographically, let them not historicize art but teach it as sets of forces, or as maps, or as so many ways of questioning. P.  Elaine Sharpe: Yes, I know, but the artist teaching art history is not a member in good standing of the art history department—we do not meet the institutionalized criteria. James Elkins: From my point of view, I’d say that having an artist teaching doesn’t usually change anything. The enterprise of art history structures the concepts, methods, analyses, and descriptions, and parts of it are dragged along even when it appears that the artist who is teaching has made entirely idiosyncratic excerpts from the discipline. Jonathan Dronsfield: Yes, and parts of philosophy are “dragged along” too, in the form of presuppositions. I don’t see why the history of art should be any more important here, any more relevant or useful to the student artist, than the philosophy of art, or the history of philosophy, for that matter. Why history of art rather than philosophy of art? Is it that the art academy believes it is creating the history of art rather than the philosophy of art? When teaching students about what art has been made in the past, why call it history of art at all, why not simply art? Saul Ostrow: We don’t make it clear that art history is not something of immediate use to artists. They think it has immediate utility to the making of their art. Areti Adamopoulou: Students think that art history’s selection is a natural selection. They don’t understand that someone actually made that selection. Saul Ostrow: Right. They don’t see the selection of processes, and they don’t see that art history is interpretive in a certain manner. P. Elaine Sharpe: But they do see the existence of a canon. Jonathan Dronsfield: Bearing in mind that the question is if and how we are to teach art history to art students, artists see theory, they see philosophy, no less than they see history. Moreover, they see stuff about history and philosophy that historians and philosophers don’t see, something outside not just the disciplines of history and philosophy, which claim to be teaching history and philosophy as such, but something about history and philosophy as such. They see history outside of the ways art history is taught in surveys.

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P. Elaine Sharpe: I think they do. I can only address this teaching art history as an artist to a student body comprised of anything other than art history majors because I am tacitly forbidden to cross the academic threshold. In my teaching, it is usually couched in an expression of medium, social response, a certain history of the time or moment. Turner, for example, is not about dates and order of production, but is related to the sublime, to landscape, to the Industrial Revolution and the smog it produced. The artists I know who teach art history don’t teach it as chronological history. Roy Sorensen: There are studies that show that chronological order is the best for retaining in memory. So if you just want people to retain some of this material, why fight it? James Elkins: There are many reasons. Basically because the chronology isn’t just chronology. It brings with it the history and politics of the discipline. Daniel Palmer: I am interested in the possibility of teaching nonchronologically. What are the possibilities? James Elkins: There is a literature on this, but basically the universities that have experimented with altering or abandoning chronology have found their experiments fail. They confuse students, the material can’t be retained.6 Jonathan Dronsfield: Jim, I think you would then be teaching not art history (the first of Jim’s topics), but theory (the third topic). James Elkins: I’d like to distinguish two themes here, which I think may be confusing the discussion. One is about how art students receive the discipline of art history, and the other is about how to reformulate the discipline. Under the second heading, we have talked about avoiding the chronological exposition, about what happens when artists teach, and about finding new contexts in which to insert art-historical material. I doubt that art history is effectively rethought in any of those strategies. You can still impart the politics, the history, and the ideology of art history without chronology; and if you’re an artist, your source for the recontextualized excerpts of art history that you present in studio settings is still the discipline of art history. The challenge, as I see it, is to figure out what and how to teach to art students—not how to cleanse studio instruction of disciplinary art history, which I don’t think is usually possible. Ciarán Benson: Our questions have to do with intercepting in the lives of eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds. I wonder what students should be expected to learn from the survey so that they might change, because all learning is a form of change. And I wonder in what ways ought they be told they need to change. 6. See the discussions in a special issue of the Art Journal (1995), including “Parallel Art History / Studio Program,” 54–57.

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When  I was in Australia, I was struck by the excision of history from the curriculum. The historical consciousness of an eighteen-year-old could be profoundly different from that of an A-level student in the UK. One might then need to change more dramatically than the other. I would think of learning as change. Daniel Palmer: Precisely. I have had to introduce first-year students in Australia to the First and Second World Wars! I’m not kidding. For me history is essential not least because I think of the activity of teaching, in part, as a way of enabling students to position themselves as historical subjects, with agency; for me pedagogy is political insofar as it involves radical self-reflexivity that must include historical consciousness and an awareness of the limits of dominant accounts, art historical or otherwise. Chris Csikszentmihályi: If you take the model of artist as cultural producer that Stephan and others have put forward, then art history becomes more a matter of teaching cultural history— James Elkins: And then it becomes a question of cultural studies, history, political history— Chris Csikszentmihályi: Yes, it seems much larger than visual history. Hilde Van Gelder: In a country like Belgium, where there is a strong tradition of art history and art-making, students can expect that in the first year someone will tell them how to come to terms with the tradition, and with the art that they have seen all around them, in museums and churches, when they were teenagers. It’s the first thing they want to know: how can we use this? And for that reason, we hold on to our surveys in first year. This is questionable, for it has its consequences and impact on the students’ minds and choices. For example, the late 1990s and early twenty-first century has seen quite a boom of students in Flanders who turned to figurative painting in oil on a canvas, partly due to the fact that surveys introduced Luc Tuymans to them as a new “Flemish master” in the line of the Flemish Primitives. Areti Adamopoulou: For Greece also the issue of tradition is strong. Apart from the survey course of ancient, medieval, and western European art, in Ioannina we offer a national art survey course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is not just respect for tradition that keeps surveys alive and well. In peripheral art scenes new and contemporary artists operate within a limited local market. And art history needs to narrate at least the genealogy of these artists and their market, to create artists as subjects in the local frame. James Elkins: Let’s move on to the second topic, the “rudiments” of studio art education. The place of the art history survey in studio art instruction is an endless subject, I think, because art history cannot solve it or even really pose it. It has to be rethought as we’ve been doing it, from outside the discipline.

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Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Art historians, or philosophers, always tend to represent their discipline. So they have trouble working in the studio and making art history productive. Instead they try to confront the students with this different field and its different methods. So in Vienna we accept art history as a discipline in the seminar, but we also force the art historians to question their practice in the context o the studio. James Elkins: For me, there’s a question about whether art historians can be pushed to such questions, and still be identifiable as art historians— Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Actually it has become a very productive discussion inasmuch as the art historians try to understand their own field as a practice— James Elkins: Well, in a sense . . . but let’s move on to the second topic, rudiments. Here I’d like to begin with the second-order argument, about the incompatibilities of the rudiments, instead of beginning with the first-order argument, which would be about listing what the rudiments are. Maybe we’ll have a brave Assessor in the book who will give us a list of the rudiments every first-year student should have: color theory, composition, lectures on space, time, and form, texture, movement, identity theory . . . the whole disheveled lot. But I’d like to begin with the second-order problem, because I have detected a tremendous resistance among educators to talking directly about the rudiments, to list them, to commit to a list. To take just one example: there’s the book by Albers, The Interaction of Color, and color sensitivity exercises. They’re very common, all around the world, whether or not Albers is on the curriculum. The objective there would be to get the student to increase her sensitivity to chroma, hue, simultaneous contrast, and so forth. The underlying justification has to be that better, more interesting art is somehow made by people who have spent time making themselves more visually aware. I think of this as a second-order problem because I find it is very difficult to have conversations about what other rudiments, what other exercises, might go along with color sensitivity as indispensable elements in every young artist’s education. There is no discourse that includes color sensitivity as an element among others, underwritten by an account that is more than an unjustifiable list. Since poststructuralism, people don’t want to address that question directly: we want to try to rearrange the list, keep it open-ended, recontextualize it, rediscover it in new forms. Stephan, when you mentioned the lecture series on space and time with non-Western components, it reminded me of some other initiatives. I’ve tried one myself, a lecture series that includes a text called “A Multicultural Look at Space and Form.”7 The question I ask myself about that project is, have I just postponed a direct consideration of the elements I have reassembled in that lecture? Or is it a sufficiently radical reworking, one that could be a new starting place for first-year instruction? 7. This is available as a pdf at http://​saic​ .academia​.edu/​documents/​0008/​7359/​the​-visual​ -space​.pdf (accessed October 3, 2009).

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Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Our course was linked to a specific understanding of modernity. And the introductory course is a Modernist invention and a formalist invention also. You are forced here only look at the morphological and syntactical elements of art. If you’re in a school where everything is post-Greenbergian and antiformalist, why should you have an introductory course in which you’re trained to look at autonomous forms? To the contrary, you should make your students aware of the ideological impact of such an introduction. I can’t think of anything in the academic curriculum that is so intimately linked to an historical moment as the introductory course. James Elkins: Very true. But  I still wonder: can students be taught that formalism comes from an historical moment, while also learning formalism? And a deeper question: what has happened to the formalism once it’s been historicized? It’s still there, but in a shape that is hard to define. It’s something students know, something they can use, something they can’t believe in, something their own education has taught them is at once necessary and dispensable. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: What has changed is the way we relate form to content. In formalism form was identical with art’s legitimate content. And form was organized as structuralism organizes language. As far as I remember Moholy, one of the inventors of the introductory course was indeed connected to the Russian linguists. Beginning in the sixties we returned to reality. Content is not necessarily first, but at least content and form are constituted in the same artistic move. When you talk of form today, Jim, beauty comes to my mind, for instance the way Dave Hickey started a discussion on formalist issues in the early nineties.8 He does not talk about autonomous aspects of form that constitute the quality of an artwork, but about formal beauty as a political tool to create consensus. This seems to me indicative that the old discourse of formalism is really gone. Saul Ostrow: Part of what we look at while teaching rudimentary concepts, which include color, drawing, and materials, is ideation and concept construction. So they know more than how to see differences in color—so they can see how those differences raise questions about their own perception. Or so they know that drawing is not a means of transcribing the world, but a system of coding. We teach multiple systems of perspective, to show that it’s possible to think of representation from different angles. James Elkins: So here’s my second-order question for that. Is the reconceptualization powerful enough to completely dissolve the rudiments of color, drawing, and materials—or is there a question being deferred there, about how many such rudiments there need to be? Why choose color, drawing, and materials? Saul Ostrow: We choose drawing because of its role in ideation— James Elkins: Sorry, how would you talk about the complete list of such thing? 8. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993).

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Saul Ostrow: The list was constructed in terms of the question: what are the basic elements necessary for someone taking a photograph, making a video, doing a performance? Chris Csikszentmihályi: At the MIT Media Lab I am currently teaching a class on modes—or what the political scientist Charles Tilly calls “repertoires”—of social change.9 What I’m finding is that students are attracted to my classes primarily because they are idealizing themselves as artists who are trying to move society in directions in which they want it to move. There is nothing in those “rudiments” of color, drawing, or materials that approaches that, so I have had to cobble together from other disciplines. Of course, there is plenty in art history that is about social transformation—thinking of the Russian Constructivists, of the art that came out of May 1968, etc. But none of the techniques used by those artists was ever taught as rudiment or technique. So I remember from my art history classes here at the School of the Art Institute learning about people like Alfred Jarry who did that kind of work, carrying guns with them into bars. Those are the artists I remember from my classes! Saul Ostrow: You’d better remember them! Chris Csikszentmihályi: But these stories were offered as colorful stories, idiosyncrasies like the ones in Christopher’s biopics. Those personal actions were critical parts of their work, but there was no way that the art historians could abstract those more social parts of their lives, the parts in which they were agents of social change, as methods. James Elkins: For me, that points to a curriculum that has no need of the rudiments we have been enumerating: but it also points to a curriculum that needs a new sense of rudiments, ones that I think we might be just as loath to enumerate. Chris Csikszentmihályi: Yes, I think we would be loath to do it. But in the meantime we accept some of the older rudiments because they are like a doddering old grandfather . . . not too relevant, but you kind of feel like you owe them something. James Elkins: I can think of several different kinds of self-awareness, which might be deployed differently. First, students could be made aware of the history of art instruction—what comes from the Bauhaus, what comes from the nineteenthcentury academy, and so forth. Second, they could be made aware of the instructors’ choices of theory, although I imagine that might be especially difficult if the instructors haven’t chosen theories but been educated into them. P. Elaine Sharpe: Hold on, I need to think about what you just said. I’m sure, no, actually I’m convinced it happens, but it is kind of a remarkable thing to consider, especially beyond an undergrad level of education. I guess it comes back the choice of where one will study . . . 9. Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768– 2004 (Boulder: Paradigm, 2004).

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James Elkins: Third, students could be taught about the arguments about art instruction—whether art can be taught, why artists need to be taught, and so forth. Fourth: they could be taught about their own institution, its politics, and its purpose. (I imagine that could create some serious conflicts of interest, not to mention lawsuits.) And fifth: they could be advised on careers and careerism, as they often are, so they could instrumentalize their education more effectively. Perhaps each of those raises different questions about the efficacy or utility of self-reflexivity. Here is an example of the limits of self-reflexivity. I imagine that in all our institutions, the first year includes some units on space. Space has become a universal explanatory concept for art, even though it can be demonstrated that wasn’t always the case. The word “space” doesn’t occur in any architectural treatise before the eighteenth century, for example. And yet now, we’re inside the concept: we can’t see how to conceptualize art without it, and we can’t even see the need to consider our position as a problem. On the other hand, if I were to bring up Albers’s color sensitivity exercises, then we’d all agree: they are very much of their time and place, and we might well omit them. So there are two rudiments, space and color, which have very different relationships to selfreflexivity. One is such a large issue that self-reflexivity barely scratches it. The other seems so fragile that a moment’s reflection can destroy it. Saul Ostrow: Rudiments can be reconceived as skill sets. And there are technical and conceptual skill sets— Barbara Jaffee: Color has meant different things in different cultures. The Albers course presumes a certain kind of product—it’s quite instrumental. I know no one who was better at the Albers course than my father, who was to a degree colorblind! But, as a commercial lithographer, he needed—and had—a very sophisticated understanding of the color separation process. So if you need all those colors in your work, great, but there are many other ways of thinking about color. Roy Sorensen: The discoverer of colorblindness, incidentally, was himself colorblind! Saul Ostrow: The color course we’re proposing in Cleveland is called “Color, Projected and Applied.” It deals with color as light, pigment, and material. James Elkins: I like the word “rudiments” because it helps us stay focused on the difficult part of the problem. Classical lost-wax bronze casting is a skill, but it is not a rudiment. What would we think of as necessary for all students? (What color exercises? What color conceptualizations? And is color even a rudiment?) P.  Elaine Sharpe: It certainly is in photography, which brings with it the color temperature of light itself, metamerism, and the choice of whether to use color at all. Ann Sobiech Munson: We recently brought design principles back to our design studio. This is an example of what Jim refers to—educating students into something

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but, by situating it in its specific historical context, allowing the possibility that it is provisional. But we use the terms because we need a common vocabulary. I wonder if this is a way to think about rudiments: as a common language, a provisional starting point. Of course, this raises the question of how one becomes conversant in a discipline that is constantly shifting. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: We have a very problematic group of entering students in Austria. They come from a particular kind of grammar school that focuses on artistic education. For the last three years of their school, their main topic is art; they do a specific examination for it.10 My teachers tell me that those students who are technically perfect cause a problem, because they have to be deskilled in the first year. How do you handle this kind of question in a conversation on rudiments? James Elkins: This is also true of Korean and Japanese art high schools, which prepare students for the “art universities” using nineteenth-century academic training. Those students often need to be deskilled.11 Roy Sorensen: This problem is common to all kinds of training. It is called negative transfer. I am a tennis player, and I started playing squash. But tennis strokes are not squash strokes, and it was hard to break me of those habits. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: But I am not talking about two different fields. James Elkins: In part, however, deskilling is part of the traditional content of the first year program, because it was one of the Bauhaus’s goals: the achievement of a tabula rasa, the reeducation of the muscles, and so forth. Roy Sorensen: In tennis and in swimming, all spontaneous strokes are wrong. James Elkins: That’s a curious example, because of course spontaneity is one of the key critical terms of Modernism: it is exactly what was taught—or maybe I should say it was the negative capability that remained after the students were deskilled. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: So how do you deskill someone who is schooled in the Bauhaus tradition? James Elkins: That’s an interesting question. I bet Thierry de Duve would say that postwar academies deskill by misreading and ignoring previous educational régimes. William Marotti: That’s an example of why this repurposing of “deskilling” is inherently conservative. Listen to it long enough and you’d think the students have their hands broken and their brains washed by maniacal academicians. James Elkins: Nice image. Let’s go on to the third of the topics here, theory. In independent art academies and schools, which offer a BA or BFA, “liberal arts” is an 10. See http://​www​.hbla​-kunst​.eduhi​ .at, http://​www​.herbststrasse​.at​, http://​www​ .graphische​.at (accessed March 1, 2010). 11. See for example, in Japan, the Shonan School of Art, http://​www​.artshonan​.jp; the Saibi

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Saitama Preparatory School of Art, http://​www​ .saibi​-art​.ac​.jp; the Shinbi School of Art, http://​ www​.art​-shinbi​.com; and the Tachikawa Bijyutsu Gakuin, http://​www​.tachibi​.com (all accessed October 4, 2009).

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expression for whatever lectures or courses substitute for the “full” liberal arts education that students would get in a university. The other subject here is art theory. Here, as I said at the beginning, there is also a problem because it sounds a little brash to list the theory art students should know. In one text, Victor Burgin lists history, sociology, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. Here at the School of the Art Institute, I teach a required freshman class in visual studies. That forced my hand, and I had to choose, so I teach texts by Barthes, Foucault, Benjamin, Marx, Lacan, Buck-Morss, Mitchell, Rogoff, and Bal. Chris Csikszentmihályi: One of the things that strikes me about that list: for instance, Foucault serves to introduce questions of power and visuality, which works with the visual canon, but he also works for artists who are post-Duchamp, and thinking more about actions and identities—and who are writing to culture rather than canvas. In regard to the Frankfurt School, if you teach Benjamin and others, you can get production and history of visuality, but also other forms of culture. I bet if you go through and look at the texts that are seen as most useful in art schools, they would have that dual function; always a visual side, but not only. Miguel González Virgen: Is it time to pass by the homogeneous list of theory that is taught in art schools? It’s true that in Mexico there is already an accepted canon of theorists: Heidegger, Derrida. . . . James Elkins: There is also a second-order problem here. The first-order argument concerns what theories should be taught. The second-order argument is about whether they are taught in compatible ways: should art students learn Lacan the same way as students in universities? Or is the art-world discourse sufficiently different so that concepts like unconscious, screen, anamorphosis, and others require different expositions? Andrew Blackley: I think it would be important here to address situation of the teaching of these writers and theorists as if they were tailored to the arts specifically. Of course, we students in the art school will take what we find applicable and work from it, but teaching tailored theory to artists can nullify a lot consequence the texts were intended to carry in other fields. Of the theorists we’ve just mentioned, most are in fact social theorists. I’m afraid that this is a misuse of the texts, and then, speaking much more widely, it’s a disservice to the education of the artist because it ignores the social implications of being an artist. Jonathan Dronsfield: Jim, I think you can’t address that without grasping the problem of naïveté. My classes are open to students from philosophy, history, and other disciplines; and within art, at least a third are joint honors students—they are doing other subjects beside art. That condition makes me ponder whether I should be speaking differently to art students than to other students. In my view, you ought not to be speaking differently to artists than to students in other disciplines.

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James Elkins: Why? Jonathan Dronsfield: Because it’s not decided what their discipline is yet, if we’re talking about first-year students. James Elkins: So, to play devil’s advocate: why couldn’t you equally well teach them their Lacan as it appears in Screen or Artforum, as opposed to as it appears in the Seminars? Jonathan Dronsfield: I agree, if you are going to give them Lacan. If you’re going to give them Lacan. James Elkins: For me, this is an enormous submerged subject. The art world has developed to the point where entire histories of reception have developed, with their own literatures. Art world Foucault doesn’t have much resemblance to university Foucault. Art world Foucault is surveillance, the panopticon, some ideas about sexuality, some ideas about institutions. It isn’t epistemology, it isn’t historiography or history. No one, I think, has written about this, but it could produce entirely new curricula. Chris Csikszentmihályi: Jonathan, the logical extension of your argument is that art historians should teach art history to art students no differently than they teach it to art history students. Jonathan Dronsfield: That’s right. But I don’t think that we should be teaching art history as a requirement to art students! Saul Ostrow: In Cleveland, my students have decided they’re going to be artists; they know they are not going to the university, so they won’t have the smorgasbord of ideas the university affords. Several of us are proposing that the first year should have only concepts, occasionally with names attached to them. We’ve been thinking of the textbook called Critical Terms for Art History, because it gives overviews of concepts like representation.12 It would be introduced through the studio classes, not apart from them. James Elkins: But that’s an art history textbook—critical terms for art historians!13 Saul Ostrow: Yes. And then in the second year, we watch to see how those ideas are put to work, how they operate in the studio. Frank Vigneron: Saul, are you keeping track of the concepts as the students progress? Saul Ostrow: Yes. It’s an incremental and progressive curriculum. Frank Vigneron: What kinds of assessment methods are you using? Are the students writing about their experiences? Saul Ostrow: Yes; they write about how the concepts enter into their work. 12. Critical Terms for Art History, edited by Robert S. Nelson and Richard Shiff, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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13. See the critique of the book’s Western, art-historical perspective by Shigemi Inaga in Is Art History Global?, vol. 3 of The Art Seminar (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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James Elkins: Here is another example of how art students should, and often already do, get a different kind of theory than university students. In my experience, the art students who are enthusiastic about Arthur Danto like him because they have misread him to be saying that art history is over, art is a playground, I don’t have to do my homework anymore. That’s the reception, and if you wanted to teach the reception of Danto in recent art, that’s the effect you would want to explore. It wouldn’t have to do with his work in philosophy, in aesthetics. Or to take a more complicated example: what exactly is the interest in Rancière, right now, in the art world? How much does it have to do with the debates he engages in? Or Alain Badiou? What is the relation between his interest in ontology and the reception he has gotten in the art world? William Marotti: I use Rancière a lot, but for me he is a theorist of temporality and change. His theory is almost untimely, in that it is against trends in spatialization and territorialization.14 There may be an interesting echo there, in regard to our discussions on the use of the concept of space. As long as art appropriation of theorists isn’t just out and out misreading, it can make for some interesting avenues for conversations beyond the art world. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: I think Rancière is also very important because he can be used against a certain superficial kind of political activism in the arts. He shows you can work in a formal way, and your seemingly formalist intervention in society remains political. But Jim, I think you are much too defensive when you describe the role of theory for visual art practice. Apart from the fact that some art students might misuse it as an alibi, we witness, I think, a mutual approach by art and the humanities. Take the example of Derrida: he is a philosopher who demonstrates that the very basis of philosophy is the process of writing itself. So working with the material of language determines, to a large degree, what people once called “the truth.” The production of knowledge through the impact of a material is contingent in a way we only know from the arts. You might ask: why is contemporary theory so important in art practice? I would turn this around and ask: why is the contemporary art university so important in the development of theory in the humanities? We have to take up the urgent demand from the humanities—the interest on the part of people in history, in art history, in sociology, in philosophy, in other fields—the urgent interest in the art university and art practice. I have never seen this before, and I have been in the business twenty-five years. There is a deep philosophical problem in the humanities, which can reposition the art university. And  I hope that we can understand the art academy, the art university, as the main agent for producing content by working on form. 14. See Kristin Ross, “Historicizing Untimeliness,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 15–29.

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James Elkins: Stephan, I hope that is true. I hear that position articulated mainly by people in the art world, not in the humanities. There is also a serious question, I think, about how many people in the humanities, in universities, take Derrida’s arguments about writing seriously. I think of Hélène Cixous, and before Derrida, Barthes. Almost no one in academia pushes writing itself, the form and voice of the writing, in the ways they do. So I would hope that the people in the university who are interested in art schools would find places to work in new ways— Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Derrida is just an example. Think about the new courses like “Visual Anthropology” or “Visual Sociology.” This indicates that a new episteme is on its way which is much closer to artistic practice than science was ever before— James Elkins: But I can’t resist making a skeptical observation. There still remains the question of who you choose to present as indispensable exemplars. Will it be Derrida, or Cixous? Or both? Or neither? The question of the list is still there. Jonathan Dronsfield: The sorts of theorists we’re talking about now—Derrida, Rancière, Deleuze—made their names in philosophy, but rather than philosophize about art, all of them philosophize along with art contemporaneous with their practice (sorry, Thierry) as philosophers. And perhaps this helps account for why the work of these philosophers holds such appeal for art students, and indeed why they see it as material for art practice. If you’re talking about contemporary art practice since the 1960s, you have also to think about how artists use theory, how they internalize theory and philosophy as a means of wresting the authority for saying and writing what art is away from philosophers, how they see philosophy and theory not simply as a frame or support for their practice but as the very material out of which to make work, and as well how theory has emerged out of art practice. Andrew Blackley: Theory in the studio can be dangerous. Theory is quite real and needs to be engaged with; these are real categories. Even if they were not real in their inception, they produced new positions; or, alternately, through the teaching the positions and descriptions have been made real. They have been made necessary. So certainly, because the teaching of theory is necessary, we have to remember that within an art school or art department the writing of theory often uses artworks as illustrations. The danger is, then, that artists and art students use their artwork to illustrate theory: they don’t necessarily engage theory or produce new theory. Jonathan Dronsfield: Yes, there is always the specter of illustration, and we must watch out for it; but equally it goes the other way, no less dangerous, where artists use theory to illustrate their practice and indeed legitimate it. Also, there is the good danger that theory poses, in the form of questioning easy assumptions

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and certain presuppositions regarding practice and the purity of practice and the ease with which the practice/theory distinction is made. Marta Edling: There are two different traditions here. Jonathan, when you talk about curriculum and theory, you’re talking about a university, and that is one thing. But when it comes to the studio, that is a different tradition. The studio, as a practice, is opposed to that. I just want to remind us that some of these problems we are encountering come from the fact that we are mixing two traditions. Theory is important in the studio, but you cannot have a curriculum there, because what is done there is for art. James Elkins: Thanks, Marta, for reminding us of that. And it’s a good segue and a good place to stop: we are out of time, and we haven’t yet opened the fourth of the topics to do with the first-year program, which is the studio. What you’ve said is a nice reminder of how incommensurate the parts of the first year really are.

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7. t h e b f a d e g r e e

The conversation here continued the discussion of the first year into a general discussion of the three-year BA or the four-year BFA. (The former is common in Europe; the latter in North America.)1 For this seminar the group read parts of Why Art Cannot Be Taught2 and other texts.3 James Elkins: Perhaps we can begin where we left off. Is the problem of the place of art history in studio instruction solved by providing electives later in the BA or BFA? Saul Ostrow: We actually do the history backwards where I teach in Cleveland. History classes are electives in the BFA. Marta Edling: In Swedish institutions, the students have an entire smorgasbord of choices. But the whole ideological knot is that the students choose. William Marotti: I think about this question from the point of view of the argument in Why Art Cannot Be Taught.4 The claim there is that if you change the way that art is taught, you change the concept of art. There is a relationship between what is taught in art schools and what art is. That’s another level of self-reflexivity to think about, beyond the individual level. James Elkins: When the curricular issues get this complex, there’s a pressing question of how to fix them. There is one answer that seems to be in play at all levels of art instruction: you could increase the self-reflexivity of the students, make them aware of the teaching they’re receiving. This comes up in discussions of first-year programs: for example, you could raise some of the issues about the survey and how it is taught in different places. But a higher level of art instruction, selfreflexivity becomes the principal, foundational strategy of instruction. We will return to it when we talk about the MFA and PhD: actually I think the principal pedagogic goal of the PhD has to be that an increase in self-awareness, reflexivity, can make the practice more interesting. At the level of the BFA, it is a practical problem: how do you give a student self-reflexivity about a subject while they are only just learning the subject? How 1. In Australia the standard degree is three years plus an additional year, Honours, reserved for the top 25 percent or so of students, who complete an original research project and submit a small thesis. [—D.P.] 2. James Elkins, “Histories,” “Conversations,” and “Theories,” chaps. 1–3 of Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).

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3. In addition to those cited below, Raphael Rubinstein, “Art Schools: A Group Crit,” with contributions by Howard Singerman, Leslie KingHammond, Larry Rinder, Laurie Fendrich, Bruce Ferguson, Suzanne Anker, Thomas Lawson, Saul Ostrow, Dave Hickey, Archie Rand, Judith Kirchner, Jim Elkins, and Robert Storr, Art in America (May 2007): 99–113. 4. Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught.

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do you tell them art history is a history of nationalist narratives, when they’re only just memorizing the dates and names that were generated by those nationalist narratives? At a deeper level, the idea of increasing self-reflexivity begs the question of whether self-reflexivity solves the issues we’ve been discussing, or just makes them more complicated, more intellectually engaging. For example, imagine you have an art history lecturer talking about Hans Holbein, and then in comes another art historian talking about how patriotic German art history produced narratives about Holbein in the early twentieth century that propelled him to a place in the canon.5 Has that unseated Holbein? What exactly has it done? And, as a final question: what other strategies are there for mending these curricular problems, other than increasing the students’ reflexivity? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Is there really an alternative to the Holbein evaluated through historical development? And if you bind the artistic phenomenon to the social and historical context, don’t you necessarily produce reflexivity? In our school, art is always debated in relation to globalized market, politics, exploitation. Most of academies I know market themselves by saying: we teach critical capacity. Hilde Van Gelder: May I ask which languages you assign at the Vienna Academy? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: Mostly German, but most of the teachers had teaching experience abroad and can also teach in English. Certainly, language is still a problem . . . Hilde Van Gelder: In the past, French was the language that was most important in the art world. So now do you teach English? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: The situation in Austria is different from the one in the U.S., and possibly the UK. When students come to us, they already have six or seven years of school training in English. Jonathan Dronsfield: It would be hard to find an art student anywhere in the world whose second language isn’t English. It’s an interesting question, one which has been hardly written about, the fact that teaching happens more and more in a second language rather than a mother tongue. Hilde Van Gelder: Is that true generally? I find that a very Eurocentric presupposition, even for the European context. James Elkins: Well, I don’t want to stray too far from the question of how curricular problems can be addressed, and the role of self-reflexivity. But I would add that in the U.S., language courses in art schools exist as part of the general hope that students can have a university-style liberal arts education. 5. The example is from Oskar Bätchmann, Einfuhrung in die kunstgeschichtliche Hermeneutik: Die Auslegung von Bildern (Die Kunstwissenschaft), third edition (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988).

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William Marotti: Jim, speaking about the argument in Why Art Cannot Be Taught, do you think that art is in itself self-reflexive? So that having a self-reflexive education prepares students for the field? Or is your interest in self-reflexivity an attempt to change the art world, or improve it? James Elkins: Speaking for myself: I’m doubtful about the entire project of increasing students’ historiographic awareness and self-awareness as a strategy for meliorating the mixed curriculum they inherit from the first-year program. An ideal, full awareness of the politics and history of art history, the institutional history of their own academy, the history of the education of their theory instructors, and so forth, will make things more complicated and therefore more interesting: but it isn’t a fix: it doesn’t have a clearly nameable effect on the clash of rudiments and other things that are cobbled together into current art instruction. And it also seems clear to me that a fair number of art practices depend on more or less insufficient levels of self-reflexivity. Jonathan Dronsfield: What do you mean by self-reflexivity? Rebecca Gordon: The ability to theorize yourself, your practice. Saul Ostrow: Or, as in cybernetics, a feedback loop? Jonathan Dronsfield: There are philosophers who continuously ask themselves: what does it mean to write philosophy rather than literature? Or, what is philosophy? The sorts of theorists we have been talking about, such as Derrida and Deleuze, continuously reflect on their practice in terms of what it is not. Is that the kind of self-reflexivity you’re talking about? Are you saying philosophers who don’t do that are not self-reflexive? Or do you mean self-reflexive in Danto’s sense, if there is such a thing, that abstraction, or the nonrepresentational turn, is the internalization of the question, What is art?, and that this is how theory emerges from practice? Or do you want to say to the student, make him or her self-aware, that all art is the staging of the question about what art is, just as the philosopher might say that you cannot do philosophy without asking what philosophy is? Saul Ostrow: Is this self-reflexivity on the part of the individual, or the subject? James Elkins: I am an opportunist about this, because it depends on the subject. For example, if you want to tell a BFA student that there debates about whether art can be taught, you produce a certain kind of self-awareness. If you tell a BFA student that her institution was founded as a conservative academy in the nineteenth century, or that her art history professor was educated by Frenchschooled iconographers, you produce other kinds of self-awareness— Saul Ostrow: I deal with these things as system networks. If you’re going to be selfreflexive about pedagogy, it has impact on other things. I would argue the reason my faculty see art as a self-reflexive subject is that we view it as am emerging subject. It is literally still in the process of constructing an identity for itself.

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James Elkins: Sure, but then you have artists whose work doesn’t depend on the articulation or awareness of that. Identity is often built outside of awareness. Roy Sorensen: There is literature, for example, on golfers— [Laughter] James Elkins: That is another really bizarre metaphor! Roy Sorensen: As they improve, one way to mess them up is to improve their selfawareness. You have to concentrate on the small bits you need to change. You need to mostly not think about things. William Marotti: Self-reflexivity doesn’t not mean you hold a mirror in front of yourself at all times— Areti Adamopoulou: The first year is a very idiosyncratic year, and I don’t think it’s the time to teach self-reflexivity. I think it was Anders Ericsson who noticed that every expert came into their field in a very playful way,6 and I believe that’s the way visual artists should be introduced in their field. First-year students don’t know who they are, or what they are becoming, or what they want. James Elkins: And as the years go on, toward the MFA, do you think self-reflexivity is a better strategy? Areti Adamopoulou: Students need both art history and art theory. However, to really absorb and reflect on complex issues one needs time, life experiences, interaction with real circumstances, social education. We can sow the seeds of selfreflexivity during the first year and keep watering them to see flowers during the MFA. I understand education as a process, and as such it requires time to develop and grow. Self-reflexivity is certainly an answer to today’s fragmented reality, but it is a quality that requires maturity and from this point of view I can understand the existence of further education for artists. Jonathan Dronsfield: Areti, what you just said about play is interesting. How would you do that? Areti Adamopoulou: It’s the way you treat students. It doesn’t really matter what subjects you teach, but how you present the subjects. For example, I see my survey courses as studio courses, as a process lasting one semester, during which I have to make students realize the type of choices that construct art historical narratives. I present different and sometimes opposing theories about the same issue; I  urge them to participate actively in my lectures and play with various narratives, to think about the “what if ” possibilities. A  student remembers what strikes him or her as different, so I present variety and freedom of thought. That 6. K. Anders Ericsson, “Attaining Excellence Through Deliberate Practice: Insights from The Study of Expert Performance,” in The Pursuit of Excellence Through Education, edited by Michel Ferrari (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 21–55.

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cultivates self-reflexivity, even if the student may not experience it as such when it happens. Barbara Jaffee: Self-reflexivity gives students a sense that there’s a larger conversation going on that they can be part of. That can be very playful. Daniel Palmer: Jim, I don’t understand your nervousness about self-reflexivity, which I also recall from your texts on the studio PhD. It may be true that not all artists need or benefit from self-reflexivity, but what is the alternative? In any case, in my experience not everyone is susceptible to it. I don’t think art students are damaged by the process, and indeed old-school “mute” artists seem to survive no matter how much pressure is put on them to articulate their work in critical terms. James Elkins: That’s true. But some art students do pursue practices that are made difficult in an atmosphere of critical reflection. We can revisit this topic when we talk about the PhD, because it seems to me that one of the root justifications of the PhD has to be that some art practices can be made more interesting by increasing self-reflexivity. At the BFA level, I still wonder if there is a strategy other than increasing self-reflexivity which could address the curricular mixtures that plague current art instruction. I want to add one thing before we stop. When we discuss the MFA, we’ll be looking at official definitions and guidelines. Those also exist for the BFA. NASAD, the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, has guidelines for individual fields within the BFA, including ceramics, digital media, drawing, fashion design, film/video, and almost twenty others. The guidelines are used in their accreditation procedures. Here, for example, are some of the things that students in BFA painting programs need to be able to do:

• Gain functional competence with principles of visual organization, including the ability to work with visual elements in two and three dimensions; color theory and its applications; and drawing. • Present work that demonstrates perceptual acuity, conceptual understanding, and technical facility at a professional entry level in their chosen field(s). • Become familiar with the historical achievements, current major issues, processes, and directions of their field(s).7 We can explore this problem of definitions and guidelines when we get to the MFA tomorrow. Here I just want to note how little of the substantial historical and conceptual problems are included in this document. And how oblivious this document is to the vexed status of the rudiments. 7. aqresources​.arts​-accredit​.org/​site/​docs/​ AQ​-AD/​BFA​-Painting​.pdf (accessed October 5, 2009).

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8. t h e m f a d e g r e e

This seminar was partly devoted to a close reading of several texts, which should be read before this chapter is read: the current guidelines for the MFA, published by the College Art Association;1 and the chapter “Toward a Theory of the MFA” in Howard Singerman’s book Art Subjects.2 In addition we read several dozen other texts.3 A further text on the MFA, by Katalin Herzog, arrived after the event was over.4 James Elkins: It really matters that the MFA has no definition. Even if we only want to say the MFA is a professional degree—so that it doesn’t need a definition other than one to do with professionalization—still, the PhD is conceptually dependent on the MFA, so it will not be possible to build a coherent PhD program without a sense of what the MFA is. To me, it’s just an outrageous fact that the MFA has effectively no definition. I would like to approach the MFA from three directions: as a development of the first-year program and the BFA, as an administrative or institutional entity (as it is currently defined), and as something that can be positively defined (as we might want to reconceive it). 1. The MFA as a development of the first-year program and the BFA. Earlier this week, we talked about how the historical sources of current BFA programs are mutually incommensurate, including elements from the Baroque academies (life drawing, the emphasis on drawing), from Romantic academies (the emphasis on subjectivity and inspiration), from the Bauhaus and other Modernist academies 1. This is available on the College Art Association website, http://​www​.collegeart​ .org/​guidelines/​mfa​.html​, with a footnote on the PhD (accessed October 3, 2009). That text is compared in the seminar with “Standards for the MFA Degree (Visual Arts),” College Art Association pamphlet, 1977: this rare document, reprinted from the CAA Newsletter, is the first official definition of the MFA. (Thanks to Holly Dankert, Flaxman Library, SAIC.) 2. Howard Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” chap. 7 of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 187–213 and notes. 3. See the sources cited below, and also Harold Rosenberg, “Educating Artists,” in New Ideas in Art Education, edited by Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 91–102; originally published in the New Yorker, May 17, 1969. See also Clémentine Deliss, “Is it Possible to Map?,” Jan Verwoert, “Posing Singularity,” and Simon Sheikh, “Room for

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Thought,” in “A Certain MA-ness,” special issue of MaHKUzine, no. 5 (Summer 2008): 14–22, 23–27, and 28–32, respectively; College Art Association of America, MFA Programs in the Visual Arts: A Directory, published by the Association beginning in 1976 (the MFA was enabled by the GI Bill, but it was not defined until 1977); Karin Stempel, “Zum Stand der Dinge,” in Reality Check: Who Is Afraid of Master of Arts?, edited by Annette Hollywood and Barbara Wille (Berlin: Internationale Gesellschaft für bildenden Künste, 2006), 23–32; Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, “Lernen für die Kunst von Heute: Meisterpläne und Realitäten in Wien,” in Hollywood and Wille, Reality Check, 85–93; and Louis Menand, “Show and Tell: Should Creative Writing Be Taught?,” New Yorker, June 8, 2009. 4. Katalin Herzog, Show Me The Moves: Opstellen voor de MFA Schilderkunst van het Frank Mohr Instituut, Academie Minerva (Groningen: Frank Mohr Instituut, 2005); Herzog is a retired lecturer in modern art at the State University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

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(the tabula rasa, visual sensitivity training, the 2D-to-4D sequence), and from postwar art schools (the idea that art should act in society, the emphasis on politics and practice over aesthetics, deskilling). Other elements of the first-year program are seldom directly discussed. (They are proscribed.) They include the rudiments (color, space, form, composition, motion) and the theories (the essential writers, concepts, and methodologies). The theories and rudiments are not enumerated or debated because they are considered parts of older pedagogies, reflecting older purposes and ideals, and because they are considered as “solved” because they are folded into apparently new conceptual schemata. Together the incompatible elements and those that are not directly debated produce an extremely difficult situation, and that is enough to account for the fact that the first year and the BFA are always works in progress. The BFA inherits and expands these incompatible and proscribed elements. Their relationships are obscured in two ways: by dispersing them among increasingly specialized optional courses, where disciplinarity is increasingly clear, and by dispersing them among mixed and experimental courses, where the problems of incommensurability are increasingly difficult to see. In practice, the BA or BFA makes a virtue of this conceptual unclarity. In  day-to-day studio practice, the BFA runs by versions of the general claim that it is the time for experimentation. But I think the sense of experimentation and openness of the BFA is partly supported by the unarticulated, unresolved incompatibilities among its elements. Its virtues are partly really an effect of its unarticulated problems. So as a development of the BA or BFA, the MA or MFA proposes itself as the place where this incommensurability and irresolution shift or even resolve. In practice, the MFA is often projected for students as the place where the unclarity of the undergraduate years bears fruit: the student artist finds a voice, and orients herself to her practice and to the world. But of course this vernacular usage is treacherously close to the old artist-genius model, inherited from Romanticism. Jonathan Dronsfield: Well, we could also say that the MFA is the moment at which the student can work without tutelage, can separate himself from the master. James Elkins: Next there’s point 2, The MFA as an administrative or institutional entity. Here what matters is how the MFA is defined in official documents. Here I think it’s productive to do a little close readings of the North American documents that define the MFA. There is relatively little literature on the MFA in general, even aside from definitions. Of the fifteen hundred pages we all had to read for the Seminar, maybe a hundred are on the MFA. It’s amazing to me that the central document defining the MFA is a one-page text by the College Art Association, which is available on its website. That one-page text descends from an original written in 1977—a document so rare that our reference librarian could only find one copy, in a library in Australia! It turns out that the 1977 version and the 2009 version

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are very similar, and I thought it would be salutary to do a little close comparative reading of the second paragraph in both documents, which is only paragraph that really matters for the substance of the MFA. The second paragraph in the original 1977 document reads: First, and foremost, the profession demands from the recipient of the MFA a certifiable level of technical proficiency and the ability to make art. Having earned the degree does not, however, guarantee an ability to teach this proficiency to others. If work toward the MFA has concentrated in a particular medium, there should be complete professional mastery of that medium. The generalist, whose preparation has been broader and less specialized, must still meet the critical demands of the profession by demonstrating convincingly his/her expertise and knowledge in a number of areas. The need for a thorough training of the mind, the eye, and the hand is self-evident.5 The current 2009 version of that paragraph begins by substituting “professional competency” for “technical proficiency”: The MFA degree demands the highest level of professional competency in the visual arts and contemporary practices. (I wonder when “proficiency” became “competence,” and when “competence” became “competency” or even “competencies.”) The new document continues by expanding the original in the direction of conceptualization: To earn an MFA, a practicing artist must exhibit the highest level of accomplishment through the generation of a body of work. The work needs to demonstrate the ability to conceptualize and communicate effectively by employing visual language to interpret ideas. In addition, the MFA recipient must give evidence of applying critical skills that pertain to meaning and content, ultimately encouraging a comprehensive examination and critique of the function and role of art from a variety of views and contexts.6 A couple of things about this. Ideas are now expressed through art: the purpose of “visual language” is to “interpret ideas.” The “critical skills” of the final sentence are all verbal, discursive. Skill and craft are sequestered in the paragraph that follows, which enjoins “the skillful execution of tools, materials, and craft.” Things have become much more inclined to discourse, criticism, and theory. 5. College Art Association pamphlet, 1977, reprinted from the CAA Newsletter. (Thanks to Holly Dankert, Flaxman Library, SAIC.) I have omitted one sentence at the end of the paragraph.

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6. From the College Art Association website, http://​www​.collegeart​.org/​guidelines/​mfa​.html (accessed October 3, 2009).

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Marta Edling: From a European point of view this is a very ideological statement. The document implies that it’s unhealthy to stay in the studio, and there are other metaphors that imply that it is healthy to get out of the studio: that ensures a “sturdy” and “sound” curriculum. What does that imply about being unhealthy? What kind of artist are you? What about Modernist artists in Paris, leading bohemian lives, staying up all night, drinking, and speaking incomprehensibly? This document says the artist is “informed.” We also have another document, from 1987, which has a lot to say about the function of this “informed” artist in society.7 Is there a difference here between a belief in the American artist as someone who can truly contribute to society, and a European avant-garde artist that only does art-for-art’s sake? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: This is a bureaucratic document. I think we should not make it a piece of philosophy or aesthetics. It’s bureaucratic because it is intended to define an outcome. Compared to the Romantic tradition, this is already an achievement. The Frankfurt Städelschule wouldn’t agree: they would say that whoever you are as an artist, that’s what you are.8 There is no norm. James Elkins: True, it’s not a philosophic document: but how much sense can it make, in the end, when it defines outcomes without considering content? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: I don’t know how they developed the American standards. In Europe they worked for years to create a consensus amongst artists, teachers and so on about a minimum standard of professional behavior. But one of the deficiencies in the U.S. document is that if you were to try to define the MFA, you should define it together with the BFA or BA. This is what is being attempted in the Bologna Accords, especially in the tuning document.9 This CAA document gives the impression that everything is invented, that it is just jargon. But you need terms, so that things can be compared. In the tuning document there are elements in the BA definition that anticipate criteria for the MA and the PhD. If you are a bureaucrat, then you need to do things in an ordered manner. Saul Ostrow: This CAA document is a validating document for the place of the MFA in universities; part of its function is to claim the degree is a terminal degree in art. William Marotti: Both documents, the one from 1977 and the one from 2009, use the word “professional.” But the first one says the MFA is “unlike” other MAs, in that the MFA is about becoming professional: a strange thing to say in such a document. The second one is about equivalency. It’s as if it says, This is an MA like others, and it is exchangeable in the same ways. The new document defers 7. Richard Cowan, “MFA Symposium: Report and Recommendations,” internal publication, Alliance of Independent Colleges of Art, 1987. 8. See Kunst Lehren = Teaching Art, edited by Heiki Belzer and Daniel Birnbaum (Cologne: Walther König, 2007).

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9. Paradox, the Fine Art European Forum, Tuning Fine Art Education, Inter}artes thematic network, 2009, at http://​www​.elia​-artschools​.org/​ artesnet/​_downloads/​Tuning​_Fine​_Art​.pdf.

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its mission of saying what you might get out of the degree by saying, You get out of it much the same thing that you’d get out of other MAs. Hilde Van Gelder: I agree with Stephan that the MA or MFA has to be seen partly in its role of preparing for the PhD. Jonathan Dronsfield: I disagree with Stephan: you said it’s only a bureaucratic document. I think there are certain philosophic claims here, and certain philosophic presuppositions. Bureaucratic documents tend to cover themselves, and I don’t know that this one is concerned about that. One of the differences between the two versions is the section headed “Requirements in Art History, Art Criticism, and Other Cognate Areas.” The 2009 document retains the same heading, but the first sentence changes. The earlier document says, “Much of a practicing artist’s knowledge of his or her cultural heritage is gained through studying art history.” In the new version, it says, “A practicing artist’s knowledge of culture is gained through critical studies and art history.” There is no qualifier. In the earlier document that knowledge is gained through studying art history, but in the second document it’s through studying art history “and critical studies.” For me, that’s the significant difference between the documents. The term “theory” also appears in the new document, and together with critical studies and art history accounts for all of an artist’s cultural knowledge. James Elkins: And notice what “art history” is in the two documents. That first sentence in the new document has the expression “critical studies.” The next sentence adds “advanced courses in . . . visual culture,” and the paragraph after that adds “non-Western and Western cultures.” That sounds to me like visual studies and postcolonial theory as much as art history or theory. The earlier document pictures art history as connoisseurship. There’s a sentence that reads, “seminars are not favored except in areas of connoisseurship (where art students would have much to contribute),” the implication being that an art history seminar is a seminar on connoisseurship! Marta Edling: The document also speaks of art criticism as a part of art history. You might possibly also find a trace of theory there, because in 1977 criticism was considered the theoretical part of art history. Miguel González Virgen: To me, it’s interesting the new version mentions “nonWestern” art history and people of color: it’s almost as if the degree were a social remedy, to fix an imbalance. It also seems like students in the MFA will get a remedial course in art history, as if they didn’t have any before, or because they need to get it right. James Elkins: One other thing about the new document, which will tie it to out discussions of the PhD. I don’t know if anyone noticed this, but the document has one footnote. (And footnotes are unusual in Web documents!) The footnote says that the CAA Professional Practices Committee (PPC), “after discussing [the PhD]

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throughout 2008,” concluded, “At this time, few institutions in the United States offer a PhD degree in studio art, and it does not appear to be a trend that will continue or grow, or that the PhD will replace the MFA. To develop a standard for a degree that has not been adequately vetted or assessed, and is considered atypical for the studio-arts profession, is premature and may lead to confusion, rather than offer guidance, to CAA members, their institutions, and other professional arts organizations.”10 I did a little bit of calling around, but I haven’t yet discovered who was on that committee, or whether they really discussed it all year long. Hilde Van Gelder: Is the College Art Association a conservative institution? Putting that disclaimer in a footnote? It would be possible to psychoanalyze that! Barbara Jaffee: It’s just like it was in the 1960s: if you read that document on the creative artist, you find three viewpoints, none of which is very critical of the PhD; and then the document concludes, “The three statements aroused much interest, and led to lively discussion from the floor.”11 I wonder what that “lively discussion” was, since the very next statement is their resolution adopting the MFA as the appropriate terminal degree! Marta Edling: Before we leave the subject of the MFA, I want to ask a question. Barbara, you sent us along some documents on the MFA from the 1960s; they put a strong emphasis on teaching. In the later documents, that demand is adjusted. They say that it’s not necessary that graduates can teach, provided the MFA is a professional degree. Barbara Jaffee: Yes, that’s true. In fact, the 1960 resolution was quite dismissive of the very concept that any academic degree, PhD or MFA, can confer competence in the creative arts. It asserts explicitly that experience and success outside academia are better measures and that these can and should be accepted in lieu of a formal degree. Chris Csikszentmihályi: Joan Jonas explains that the problem was caused by the number of artists in the 1960s who decided to go to universities; they created a larger group of artists, a sort of academic artist Ponzi scheme on the verge of collapse. Daniel Palmer: I’m curious whether individual art schools read this document, and incorporate it into their documents—because I’m not aware of any such documents in Australia. James Elkins: I’m not aware of anyone taking such documents on board. But at the PhD level, you do find snippets of definitions taken as working documents. 10. http://​www​.collegeart​.org/​guidelines/​mfa​ .html (accessed October 5, 2009). 11. Allan Weller, Manuel Barkan, F. Louis Hoover, and Kenneth E. Hudson, “The Ph.D. for the Creative Artist,” College Art Journal 19, no. 4 (1960): 343–52.

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I saw one at the Visual Research Centre in Dundee last year—one paragraph, which serves as the talisman for the program. Hilde Van Gelder: For the Flemish Community of Belgium, the criteria for the MA are clearly defined in a protocol.12 Marta Edling: In Sweden it is the Higher Education Ordinance that regulates general conditions for the MA.13 There are two kinds, a one-year magister-examen and a two-year master-examen. Both are translated “master of art.” To my knowledge, the one-year magister will have no real practical use in fine arts education; the two-year master is the one preferred by all art colleges.14 Areti Adamopoulou: In Greece we don’t offer studio-based PhDs. There are three postgraduate programs that have been operating since 2004. One fundamental law shapes all postgraduate education in the country, and it states that “a postgraduate program of studies aims at advancing knowledge and at the development of research and leads to a doctorate.”15 The Athens School of Fine Arts declares that “the Postgraduate Program of Fine Arts aims at organizing the educational conditions for the creation of an advanced think tank of artistic thought. The PPFA is a dialogue community which will inspire and facilitate artistic process for the development and deepening of the work of new artists, as well as for the cultivation of self-awareness in order to gain their autonomy.”16 That is my translation, but I’m afraid it doesn’t make more sense in Greek. There is no other statement in Greece on the subject, so I guess we have tacit knowledge of what an MFA is or should be. Jonathan Dronsfield: Stephan, is there an analogous document in the Bologna Accords which permits comparison of MFA degrees? 12. This protocol can be downloaded at http://​www​.vlhora​.be/​vlhora/​kz/​vis​-accr/​nw​ -visitatieprotocol​.htm (accessed November 9, 2009). The general requirements for the master’s degree are specified on pp. 27–28 of the protocol. 13. Higher Education Ordinance (SFS 1993:100), http://​www​.regeringen​.se/​content/​1/​ c6/​02/​15/​41/​92fc8fff​.pdf (accessed November 9, 2009). 14. For the two-year master the ordinance includes the following objectives: “Knowledge and understanding: For a degree of Master of Arts (Two Years) students must demonstrate knowledge and understanding in their main field of study, including both broad knowledge in the field and substantially deeper knowledge of parts of the field, together with deeper insight into current research and development work; and demonstrate familiarity with methods and processes for dealing with complex phenomena, issues and situations in the field. “Skills and abilities: For a degree of Master of Arts (Two Years) students must demonstrate an ability to independently and creatively

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formulate new questions and contribute to the development of knowledge; solve more advanced problems; develop new and personal means of expression; and reflect critically on their own and other people’s artistic approaches, within their main field of study; demonstrate an ability to create and realise their own artistic ideas, giving them welldeveloped personal expression; to independently identify, formulate and solve artistic and design problems; and to plan and, using appropriate methods, perform advanced artistic tasks within specified time limits; demonstrate an ability to clearly present and discuss their activities and artistic issues in dialogue with different groups, orally, in writing or in some other way, in both national and international contexts; and demonstrate the skills and knowledge required to work independently in professional life.” [There is more in the document, do to with judgment and approach.—J.E.] 15. The Greek legal reference for this is Ν. 2083/1992, 11 [Law 2083/1992, article 11], ΦΕΚ 159Α/21-9-1992. 16. http://​www​.met​.asfa​.gr/​library/​skopos​ .html (accessed October 14, 2009).

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Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: It’s difficult to identify any correspondences. The MFA does not exist in Europe. There is only the MA. As far as the emphasis put on the studio program, these two might be comparable. But then we consider the European master’s as something that could lead to a PhD.  When you think of the MFA as something equal to a PhD, you might compare the American MFA with the European PhD-in-Practice. But in terms of the Bologna Accords the PhD should last four years, and therefore the MFA would be too short. So actually there is no way to fit the MFA into the existing European structure. No wonder: only now are the Americans starting to consider the Bologna process, which is meant to establish a ratio between all the programs in the countries participating.17 If you came from Florence and went to Paris, teachers would know exactly what you learnt in Italy, and they could put you in the equivalent class in France. Until now this didn’t work. For one thing, it is very difficult for all the different disciplines of the university to define common standards. For another, it proves to be extremely difficult for the arts. They formed groups of specialists from all European countries defining learning outcomes for bachelor, master, PhD: a long and complicated process of mutual negotiations. The universities are meant to use these criteria when they develop curricula. The aim is apparently a structured system between the value of BA, MA, and PhD which should be valued not only for one country, but for all the countries in Europe. In future, we will have agencies that approve these programs. They will refer back to the documents that are being produced now, and each institution will have to prove that its program conforms to these documents. Marta Edling: That is why the Bologna process stresses leaning outcomes: the idea is that this is what permits students’ knowledge to be compared. All the tuning documents are framed in terms of learning outcomes. No one says that you have to construct your modules or your curricula in a certain way, as long as you can guarantee that the outcome of your program is compatible with others. Some ELIA tuning documents are very telling, I think.18 Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: But Marta, that is part of the problem, because every school has defined learning outcomes by itself. There was something in the air about what the BFA was, but each institution set its own outcomes. Marta Edling: Yes, I agree in the sense that it is one thing what is written in the steering documents, and quite another thing what is actually done in educational practice. James Elkins: I just have to say the tuning process, and the stress on outcomes, sounds more than just strange. It sounds hopeless, or rather possible but irrelevant to what matters. It could only work at such a high level of generality that the content named by that generality would entirely escape. A student could be asked 17. See, e.g., Clifford Adelman, “The Bologna Process for U.S. Eyes: Re-learning Higher Education in the Age of Convergence,” Institute for Higher Education Policy, April 2009.

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18. See http://​paradoxfineart​.net/​paradox/​ wp​-content/​uploads/​2010/​10/​Paradox​-Fine​-Art​ -European​-Forum​.doc​, which gives a good idea of this kind of thinking. (Accessed November 9, 2009.)

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to be familiar with their medium, as the 1977 document puts it, but what in the world could that mean? And how would it be possible to be honest, to say, for example, that a student be “appropriately deskilled in academic drawing,” or “understand hybridity as it is understood in art schools, but not as in Homi Bhabha”?19 I can’t even begin to connect with the idea of comparable learning outcomes or transferable curricula. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: But Jim, we all have an intuitive understanding of quality standards in the arts. In any jury I learn that the critics and artists are very fast in finding the 10 percent or 15 percent whose work is worth discussing. Sometimes I have the feeling that being resistant to generalization is just an ideological reaction based on the Modernist schema of the singularity of the artist and her work. When I think of the movements like pop art or Appropriation, I understand that in the arts we have a common language, that there is a social definition of art production. If this is so, we should be able to find out these socially defined standards and overcome our ideological reflexes. On the other hand, I am also scared by a European or even worldwide master plan defining what artistic production is like. And then I am actually quite happy that the criteria are quite loose and open. P.  Elaine Sharpe: I have a problem with the language of the CAA documents: it is extremely vague. Students “might have,” “should have” . . . Chris Csikszentmihályi: The College Art Association is not an accrediting organization, right? So what are the accrediting organizations, and what are their documents? James Elkins: In North America, it’s NASAD, the National Association of Schools of Art and Design, and its associated organization, AICAD, the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design. AICAD has a Web page that asks, “What is an MFA?” Its answer derives from the CAA. It reads, in part, “The same aspects that distinguish a BFA from a BA, distinguish an MFA from an MA.” (In light of what we’ve been saying about how no one knows what a BFA is, that sentence is completely ludicrous.) And the next sentence appeals to professionalization: “The MFA,” they write, “is a concentrated ‘professional’ degree for students seeking advanced education prior to becoming practicing artists or designers.” (I love the word “professional” in quotation marks.20) NASAD has a somewhat longer document. The relevant portion says that to graduate with an MFA, students have to

• Demonstrate professional competence in one or more aspects of the creation and presentation of works of art and design, dance, or theatre. 19. The different meanings of hybridity are discussed in Art and Globalization, coedited with Zhivka Valiavicharska and Alice Kim, The Stone Theory Seminars 1 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

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20. http://​www​.aicad​.org/​whatsmfa​.htm (accessed October 5, 2009).

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• Produce creative and academic work that shows the ability to integrate knowledge and skills in their field and other areas of inquiry and research. • Complete graduate-level studies associated with their discipline in areas such as history, critical analysis, aesthetics, methodologies, and related humanities, sciences, and social sciences.21 There are also individual documents for competence in specific media, like the one I quoted for painting at the BFA level. Jonathan Dronsfield: When it says “education prior to becoming practicing artists,” doesn’t it imply or assume, or maybe even mandate, that you cannot be an artist and study at the same time? In that respect it would ideological. It’s precisely this assumption that is challenged by the concept of research in art, and by the PhD in art. Also, the last part is ambiguous; what does “associated” mean when it says that the student must “complete studies associated with discipline”? Who’s to say what is associated? What is the discipline outside these “associations”? Are these associations known in advance, or discovered in the study? (I notice that history is first on the list . . .) James Elkins: Let’s turn to the last topic, the MFA as something that is waiting to be defined: 3. Positive criteria for the redefinition of the MFA. This is something we can work on, something we can help articulate. I want to begin with a selective close reading of a chapter from Howard Singerman’s book Art Subjects, a book that shocked some art historians (but no studio people I know of ) when it appeared, because it is framed as a meditation on the fact that even though the author has an MFA, he can’t do casting or classical investment: he is unskilled, or deskilled, and that is what the MFA has become. It is worthwhile spending some time on a chapter in this book called “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” because actually it is one of the very few texts that purports to be a definition of the MFA. I’ll single out three concepts from the chapter: discipline, self-reflexivity, and deskilling. (And speaking of self-reflexivity: I have invited Howard to respond to the book—along with Thierry de Duve and some others we’ve mentioned— so you can imagine him as an invisible auditor. Howard is listening.) Discipline is one of the key concepts of the chapter, in my reading. He starts talking about it around page 199. There are maybe four moments in these pages where he makes claims about what discipline might be in the MFA, and then towards the end of the chapter, he says why he is interested in the concept. The first passage is a quotation from Edward Levine, to the effect that “it is through the development of theoretical issues that a medium becomes a discipline.”22 Here discipline is posed against medium, as a more elaborated concept. The second 21. http://​aqresources​.arts​-accredit​.org (accessed October 5, 2009). 22. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 199.

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passage concerning discipline quotes Thierry de Duve: “art, as Thierry de Duve has remarked, names the discipline that takes place where painting and sculpture were, on the site of, and in lieu of, their craft.”23 This excerpts Thierry’s ideas that we discussed earlier.24 Discipline in this sense is counterpoised against medium, but in a more historically specific sense. A third passage quotes Roger Geiger, in a book called To Advance Knowledge. Geiger defines a discipline “quite simply” (that’s Howard Singerman’s remark) as “community based on inquiry and centered on competent investigators.”25 It’s a completely different idea of what a discipline could be. And the fourth passage, which follows immediately, is a collage of quotations from Foucault, on disciplinarity. Discipline here entails “an examination of the procedures that select, organize, and distribute the production of discourse.” Disciplines “limit and bind” discourse. (There’s a lot to the sequence of brief quotations Howard uses: I’m telegraphing it here.) After these four passages, Howard gives the reasons why the concept of discipline is so important. The first is very explicit: “I want to use the concept of the discipline,” he writes,” “as it constrains and structures discourse, to keep from having to judge whether art is a profession.” The other reason is at the end of the chapter, where he says, “I do not intend to join my voice to those who would blame the university for the fall of art . . . indeed, the work that compels me is the work made, like its artists, in and out of the discipline of art in the university.”26 So his motivation stems from his investment in the university, and the art it produces. The other two concepts I want to bring out, self-reflexivity and deskilling, both appear on the same page at the end of the chapter: “I have written of the artist in the university as particularly aware of his or her place in the narrative of recent art, and have argued that awareness itself [is] a specifically professional knowledge.”27 Self-reflexivity is artistic knowledge in that formulation. The rest of the paragraph is about skill: “Crafting a history of the discipline, or mapping its contemporary shape, and producing work in relation to it, are skills—skills we admire in the university humanities. And these are the skills that have increasingly come to replace the workshop crafts and academy techniques of the objects the university teaches as art history. I remarked in the introduction on the failure of my program to teach me my métier, or to make it central to my formation. . . . In contemporary art and art schools, the frame and the field of work have become precisely the métier, the craft skills with which work is made, as well as the site where it is produced.” 28 23. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 200, para. 2. 24. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 25. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 201, quoting Roger L. Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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26. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 211. 27. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 201 and 212 respectively. 28. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 212.

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So: elements of a definition of the MFA, which turn, in this reading, on particular senses of discipline, self-reflexivity, and skill. I wonder if this isn’t stretching the concept of “skill” in a way that almost detaches it from previous usages? Is it a persuasive answer to the issue of deskilling, or is it an answer to another kind of question, one that comes through the value placed in the university and in disciplines? Jonathan Dronsfield: When Singerman quotes Levine in saying that “it is through the development of theoretical issues that a medium becomes a discipline,” doesn’t he do so to reinforce the hierarchization of theory over practice? Levine speaks of a theory affording a metacritical viewpoint.29 Yes, this viewpoint will extend the medium beyond itself into a discipline; but he doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that practice can attain the same viewpoint, therefore that only theory can fully circumscribe the limits of a discipline. William Marotti: The last sentence you read returns the frame of work to the question of skill itself. In many ways, it’s a better reading of the term “skill” from Braverman than the one that appears earlier, in Singerman’s citation of Ian Burn on “deskilling.”30 I think Burn’s is really a misreading: in Braverman, deskilling is about knowledge, not skill or techniques per se. It’s the difference between an artisan who knows how to assemble the complex joinery of a chair versus the knowledge, in an industrial setting, of each individual worker who knows only one part of the assembly of the chair. In this deskilling, knowledge is taken out of the person and put into the process, and under the control of management. Deskilling is about losing the knowledge that put you in control of the labor process. It’s the knowledge that orients and integrates an array of technical skills into a skillful production, the knowledge of the whole, rather than of specific tasks. So at the end of the chapter, Singerman is really coming back around to a more faithful application of the central point of Braverman’s book. Marta Edling: But “skill” in Singerman’s text is about knowing about sculpture, what sculptures do. He recognizes that there are also skills within the university, which are admired. He has an idea of replacement: that we now use the skills of the humanities. The problem I have with Singerman’s book is that he doesn’t discuss the fact that deskilling happened even at schools that were not part of the university. This happened in Europe. So what he identifies as a skill associated with the humanities is not necessarily a skill that was defined in universities. My research shows that art schools in Europe in the 1960s were well aware that the traditional studio practices had to be reformed, and many also held the view that theory was something that needed to be introduced and that had nothing to do with 29. Edward Levine, “Vision and Its Medium,” Art Journal 42, no. 1 (1982): 49. Quoted in Singerman, Art Subjects, 199. 30. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the

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Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974). Singerman introduces Braverman, and Ian Burn’s appropriation of Braverman, at 206–8.

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the universities. In Sweden there was a reform at the Royal College of Art in the 1960s that showed a clear decrease in the study of the model, a new interest in theory, and experimentation in new materials and techniques (like film or plastic) that were all in tune with the kind of changes that Singerman describes.31 James Elkins: If Howard would grant you that point, it would still leave the question of what he admires in the university humanities—the thing he ends up calling “skill.” Marta Edling: He admires a conceptual turn within art itself. It is something that happened in art, but I don’t disagree that this turn seems to have been further nurtured in art education within the university system.32 Saul Ostrow: Howard would argue that the university turned around and enforced and promoted one tendency before others in the arts. That is his complaint. It’s not that we introduced another set of competences, but—from his perspective— that we did that at the expense of another set of competences. Marta Edling: But it also happened outside universities, that’s the whole point! Saul Ostrow: His claim would be that it was a tendency in art, and that the university recognized that tendency, and privileged it. Marta Edling: But as an historian, I have to say that research shows that it also happened in Europe without universities. Saul Ostrow: That’s a determinist view. James Elkins: The wider issue here is whether or not we can find useful, positive terms in Howard’s account, things we could use to build a description of the MFA. That’s why I was asking whether he stretches the word “skill” beyond what might make it useful in studio discussions of skill in the older senses. When he writes that “crafting a history of the discipline, or mapping its contemporary shape . . . are skills,” he is close to institutional critique, a field that doesn’t use the word “skill.” Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: What is not so apparent in Singerman’s text is the contradiction between discipline and individual creativity. Especially if you follow the path opened by Foucault, you will find out that discipline results in a kind of body politics, where the subject is a result of the disciplinary structure. If we can say anything about the traditional image of the artist, it is not “community based.” (I like this formulation of Geiger.) Again I am faced here with the real difference between the older systems and the contemporary one: a completely 31. Marta Edling “It Smells of Wildeness [sic], Trouble, a Good Fight: On Experimental Art and Artistic Education in the 1960s,” in Det Åskådliga och det bottenlösa: Tankar om konst och humaniora tillägnade Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, Konstvetenskapliga institutionen, 2010). 32. An interesting text that sketches a development similar to Singerman’s in the UK, but

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that also acknowledges it as a combination of a striving within art itself and academic pressure, is Fiona Candlin’s article “A Dual Inheritance: The Politics of Educational Reform and PhDs in Art and Design,” in Research in Art and Design Education: Issues and Exemplars (Chicago: Intellect, 2008), 99–108.

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different way of constructing artistic identity. And also, skill hints at a conventional basis of artistic production. Self-reflexivity then has to create the awareness of these conventional structures which now should form the starting point of any artistic creativity. What is under discussion, it seems to me, is this conventional basis: Should art students accumulate knowledge? Or is it personal and spontaneous? Should modules built up on each other? Or should entrance for students be open at any stage of the program? Christopher Frayling: Part of the MFA, in some countries, is the relationship of the individual with the assessor. But there are also course elements which have a social function, and are attempts to distill what’s in the ether for the benefit of everyone. In that sense the MFA is also an attempt to generalize what is going on outside the individual; pivotal for the MFA program is the balance between that attempt and the dialogue with the individual student’s voice. James Elkins: Here’s what they call in physics a “toy model,” a simplified version that is easier to think about. We could define the MFA as the place where you experiment with the idea of voice, subjectivity, and individuality, and see if it works for you. If the institution swamps that idea, then you go on to the PhD. Barbara Jaffee: What is interesting about this statement of Singerman’s is the expectation that each of us makes our own history. What is the role of the university in helping us to craft individual histories of our discipline? Who performs that role? Daniel Palmer: Supervisors— Barbara Jaffee: Why is it the job of the university to assist in the process of creating personal mythologies? As an art historian, I don’t think that what I offer students is just raw material endlessly available for appropriation . . . Wikipedia does that! Daniel Palmer: Supervisors perform that function. Later in the text, he talks about de Duve and Bourdieu and how the university is engaged in the construction of the identity of the artist through their relationship to their discipline. But techniques of self-creation can be more or less directed to the inner or social world, and presumably hinge on the supervisor’s particular understanding of the discipline. In my university, one of the architects of our master’s and PhD programs, Robert Nelson, speaks about art in terms of being true to “consciousness,” which to me seems exceedingly Romantic.33 I’d personally like to see more collaboration than soul searching. Miguel González Virgen: It is clear to me that this sense of “skill,” as described by Singerman towards the end of his essay, has to do with the cultural frame and 33. Nelson, The Jealousy of Ideas: Research Methods in the Creative Arts (Fitzroy: Ellikon Press, 2009). Also available as a free e-book at http://​www​.writing​-pad​.ac​.uk/​photos/​ 21​_Resources/​08​_The Jealousy of Ideas/​04​ _jealousy1​.pdf (accessed October 27, 2009).

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the formation of subjectivity, rather than craft or métier. There is no talk here of the production of knowledge beyond the professional field of art itself, and Singerman also seems to omit the idea of the artist as a person who has a type of knowledge that she projects, in a positivist manner, onto the world. Rather, we have a professional with the skill to manipulate culture in order to assert his or her own subjectivity, or, as Singerman quotes Bourdieu, “the artist ‘working on himself as an artist.’ ”34 Thus, while art has been integrated into the university as discipline involving research, this research does not follow the paradigms of traditional academics; rather, it seems to be research into an individual’s subjective affirmation. Thus my sense is that while Singerman accepts the integration of art as a university discipline, he is aware that it does not produce the same kind of knowledge. Jonathan Dronsfield: But isn’t the kind of knowledge he is talking about, what he characterizes as professional self-awareness, isn’t it again historical knowledge? Doesn’t he say that it’s about being aware of one’s “place in the narrative of art”? Marta Edling: Singerman says that “on campus, studio art cannot be a calling or vocation. To be included among the disciplines, art can no longer bear . . . as craft or technique.” And he goes on to say art can no longer be “purely inspirational, or simply expressive . . . studio art must constitute itself within the university. There must be an object of knowledge, a field carved out or claimed in relation to other fields.”35 And this field of art, he argues, along with de Duve, is empty, it is a “discursive practice,” And he admits his story could be read as “a narrative of decline.”36 But that is an opinion: it needs to be debated. Hilde Van Gelder: I think it is also a matter of fact. Jim, you express this kind of fear in the introduction to Artists with PhDs, where you say art may become even more alienated from skill and technique. But the Belgian experience clearly counters that fear. We have people who have advanced in skill and technique, and have rediscovered techniques for contemporary art.37 This is something we need to take into account at the MFA level as well: Singerman’s argument might not be entirely true. James Elkins: It could be that in the end this entire text is not appropriate to help formulate a new sense of the MFA, because Singerman is thinking about art as fully integrated in the university, as a “discipline,” utilizing a new sense of “skill.” William Marotti: I think we have to come back to the question of skill. He says that manual skills “of the guild or apprenticeship” cannot be fully implemented.38 This is why the Braverman term is such a problem here. Its misappropriation in “deskilling” as a reference to specific technical art “skills” takes it in a direction 34. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 212. 35. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 198. 36. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 198, 200, 201 and 211.

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37. See, for relevant examples from Leuven, http://​associatie​.kuleuven​.be/​fak/​nl/​node/​290, http://​associatie​.kuleuven​.be/​fak/​nl/​node/​317, and http://​associatie​.kuleuven​.be/​fak/​nl/​node/​289. 38. Singerman, “Toward a Theory of the MFA,” 198.

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that’s really opposite to Braverman’s meaning. It works fine for thinking about a member of a guild, whose skills are then lost when production is divided up into parts, leading to a loss of the knowledge of the entire thing being constructed. But in the case of art, you can easily imagine a situation in which the minute, precise training in a skill could also in fact be a form of deskilling. You are left with a tremendous ability to do just one thing, but you have lost the ability to see where art is going. James Elkins: That is so subversive. It’s great. William Marotti: You can imagine someone who is tremendously well-trained in some particular material, but her work is met with a deafening silence. James Elkins: There are many examples. Thames and Hudson have just continued their relentless slide into popular subjects with a book called Exactitude, on hyperskilled painters who have almost no position in the art world.39 Chris Csikszentmihályi: These days Cellini would be one of a dozen craftspeople slaving away in Jeff Koons’s studio. Rebecca Gordon: I have lost sight of what we’re talking about in terms of craft, because if you go to an MFA exhibition, you’ll see that we have many skills—we can make all sorts of intricately crafted things, although the skills we possess might not be of the traditional art school set. We may not all know how to carve marble or cast plaster, but we know how to weave structures out of cardboard, or make stuffed animals, or organize happenings, or build websites, or edit video. All the anxiety about deskilling seems misplaced to me. James Elkins: Saul, you know Howard better than I do. Did he ever go back and learn classical investment sculpting? Saul Ostrow: Not that I know of. There are foundries for that! P.  Elaine Sharpe: I agree with Rebecca. I have seen exhibitions that show deskilling: they often have something else about them that’s magnificent. What concerns me is that we can’t rely on the notion of skill, or that the artist who produced this magnificence possesses or ever possessed it. My concern is that skills aren’t built in such a way that they are sustainable for the artist: they are often a oneoff thing, and that they may never again be able to produce in a way that they themselves want. James Elkins: Tom Friedman’s skills, for example— P. Elaine Sharpe: Ah, but he has an MFA and has shown at Gagosian! Daniel Palmer: I think Singerman is mainly concerned with the dehistoricization of skills, the loss of particular historical practices. From memory he refers to the 39. Exactitude: Hyperrealist Art Today, edited by John Russell Taylor and Maggie Bollaert (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009).

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Australian Conceptual artist Ian Burn, who borrowed the term “deskilling” from sociology in 1981 to describe the fate of the initially critical gesture. Burn was concerned to point out that skills are not merely manual dexterity, but forms of knowledge whose loss can be disabling. Saul Ostrow: Howard bemoans the notion that one upon a time, you asked an artist what he or she was, and you got the answer, I’m a painter, or I’m a printmaker. Now you get the flat answer, I’m an artist. For him, what is lost in that disciplinary answer is the ability to solve problems within painting, sculpture, and so forth. That’s the implicit argument in his book. Marta Edling: If I were a German rector, I’d say that now we’re talking as if art has skills. Art doesn’t have any skills: artists have skills. So you cannot teach art skills. It is out of the question. This is exactly why the German rectors objected to the Bologna process: “In künstlerichen denken . . . geht es um das Unvergleichbare.”40 Art hasn’t got anything to do with skills in the sense that you are talking about it: that is why there are no curricula in Frankfurt.41 James Elkins: I think we have three responses to deskilling. First, Howard’s response: skill is now a matter of institutional awareness and the ability to operate in the university and the art world. In his account, a deskilled artist would be one who is unaware of disciplines and her place within them—a stereotypical flower painter. Second, the standard defense of deskilling: that skills are all historically bound, so that deskilling is an illusion. Our own skills are simply escaping our classification, as Rebecca or Elaine are saying. Third, Bill’s very subversive idea that a very high level of specialized skill is itself deskilling. We’ve been implying that these issues are of pressing interest, but is the controversy itself a kind of definition of what happens in the MFA? And if that is not the case, then what work has our conversation done toward reconceptualizing the MFA? Hilde Van Gelder: I don’t want to sound conservative, but skills definitely need to be taught in the MFA. And that is even true of crafts, and traditional techniques. P. Elaine Sharpe: I believe as with any research, skill of any nature should be apparent in an incoming MFA student, that they should come prepared to explore and consolidate what they already know. Jonathan Dronsfield: Imagine you’ve come from a BFA with an emphasis on discipline-specific, traditional work. You might then find that restrictive. In your MA or MFA, you may want to get all that out of the way. So the element of deskilling must be as central as skilling. Hilde Van Gelder: You can sensitize people to that while at the same time stimulating them to continue their personal engagement with and investment in the already 40. Stempel, “Zum Stand der Dinge.” 41. Belzer and Birnbaum, Kunst Lehren = Teaching Art.

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known skills, perhaps even encouraging them to acquire additional, complementary skills. James Elkins: Okay, so the MFA might be a place where deskilling is actually taught. Jonathan, in practical terms, how would you do that? Jonathan Dronsfield: It could at least be introduced as a theoretical question. You’ve got to build in that element of reflection. On a practical level, that’s more difficult. Miguel González Virgen: If we follow Singerman’s argument, we would practice deskilling (skill as craft) by carrying out art projects that research the historical positioning of crafts or métiers—reinterpreting the past “as an artist,” as de Duve says—or projects that emphasize artwork that takes subjectivity itself as its medium. Chris Csikszentmihályi: You do it by showing an admiration for skills, but not determining which skills students need to learn. Students then seek out skills relevant to their work. James Elkins: The MFA as a place for passive deskilling! Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: We treat all the skills we’ve been mentioning the same way. We talk about painting, sculpture, photography, and so forth. Perhaps we need to be more precise about different kinds of skill: communication, negotiation, writing, and critical capacity. If we don’t make this distinction, the visual arts disappear! Jonathan Dronsfield: Stephan, would it worry you if an MFA student changed from painting, for example, to writing? Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: A couple of days ago, talking about Frances’s work, we had a heated discussion on this topic.42 If we are liberal in such cases, we open the visual arts to the point where visual arts might disappear. We would be training social workers, curators, teachers. In our architectural department, we do this: we say we’re not only training people to make buildings, but we acknowledge that architects are also people who argue with theorists, who educate the public. But we need to be aware of the consequences of focusing on certain skills. James Elkins: We have focused on skill and deskilling. I wonder if anyone else has other ideas about how the MFA might be reconceptualized. Even “deskilling” is an unusual “positive” term. I wonder about dedisciplinization. Chris Csikszentmihályi: Or deschooling. Jonathan Dronsfield: Or deconstructing, where you might be encouraged to walk the line between discipline and nondiscipline, in order not to have to worry about whether they were in it or out of it.

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42. See Section 5 of the Seminars.

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James Elkins: It’s been an interesting conversation: the conflict between the Romantic master model and its current alternates is undecided, I think, for two reasons: first, we have no clear decision about what parts of the master model should be retained; and second, we have no consensus about what positive precepts could model the current MFA. The only thing we’re sure of is that no one knows what the MFA is!

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9. t h e p h d d e g r e e

This was the last seminar of the week, but it was on the subject most of us had wanted to talk about all week long. The PhD degree is still a small phenomenon in North America, but it is common and even prevalent in other parts of the world. In Malaysia and Australia, jobs teaching art at the college level commonly require the PhD. In 2003 it was estimated that the UK had two thousand students enrolled in programs that could culminate in PhDs. For this seminar, the group read the book Artists with PhDs (that book is presupposed in the conversation that follows)1 and several dozen other documents.2 James Elkins: Welcome, everyone, to the axis of evil. For most of the art world, the PhD in art practice is irremediably compromised, if not actively evil. It may be worth bearing in mind as we go through that the PhD is a tiny minority interest, and when it comes up in conferences it is often greeted with choruses of boos. But it’s what most of us have wanted to talk about all week long, and I think it’s definitely the case that the PhD presents the most interesting conceptual problems. I’d like to suggest we have an abstract discussion: let’s stay away from problems of practicality, plausibility, probability, and inadvisability—let’s speak theoretically or idealistically about the conceptual forms of such programs. I don’t 1. James Elkins, Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (New York: New Academia, 2009). 2. Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design (Lichfield: UK Council for Graduate Education, 1997) 13–24; Christopher Frayling, Research in Art and Design, Royal College of Art Research Papers 1, no. 1 (London: Royal College of Art, 1993); Frayling, “To Art and Through Art,” in A Curriculum for Artists (Oxford: Laboratory at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford; New York: New York Academy of Art, 2004), 38–41; “Shared ‘Dublin’ Descriptors for Short Cycle, First Cycle, Second Cycle and Third Cycle Awards,” working document from a JQI meeting, Dublin, October 18, 2004; Newton Harrison, “Art Practice: A Whole Systems Approach with Global Reach,” proposal for a PhD program at University of California, Santa Cruz, excerpts chosen by the author, April 2009; Artistic Research, edited by Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager, Lier en Boog 18 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004); The Art of Research: Research Practices in Art and Design, edited by Maarit Mäkelä and Sara Routarinne (Helsinki: University of Art and Design, 2006); Tom Holert, “Art in the Knowledge-Based Polis,” e-flux, no. 3 (2009), http://​www​.e​-flux​.com/​journal/​view/​40;

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Robert Zwijnenberg, “Interterritorial Explorations in Art and Science,” in CO-OPs: Interterritoriale verkenningen in kunst en wetenschap = Exploring New Territories in Art and Science, edited by Kitty Zijlmans, Robert Zwijnenberg, and Krien Clevis (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Buitenkant, 2007); Alain Findelli, Denis Brouillet, Sophie Martin, Christophe Moineau, and Richard Tarrago, “Research Through Design and Transdisciplinarity: A Tentative Contribution to the Methodology of Design Research,” in “Focused”: Current Design Research Projects and Methods (Geneva: Swiss Design Network, 2008), 67–91; University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Dissertations 1991–2005, http://​www​ .stonesummertheoryinstitute​.org/​images/​pdfs/​ SSTI​_2009/​9​-08​-Helsinki​.pdf. See further: John Hockey, “Practice-Based Research Degree Students in Art and Design: Identity and Adaptation,” JADE 22, no. 1 (2003): 82–91; Sally Morgan, “A Terminal Degree: Fine Art and the PhD,” JVAP 1, no. 1 (2001): 6–15; John Hockey and Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson, “The Supervision of Practice-Based Research Degrees in Art and Design,” JADE 19, no. 3 (2000): 345–55; Fiona Candlin, “Practice-Based Doctorates and Questions of Academic Legitimacy,” JADE 19, no. 1 (2000): 96–101.

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mean to wall off practical questions, but there is a thicket of issues, and they have been very distracting in the past. I would also like to propose we distinguish two versions of the PhD degree: first, a PhD that would only be suitable for a very tiny minority of students (let’s call this the “specialized model”), and second, a PhD that would be, ultimately, the new terminal degree for artists (let’s call this the “terminal degree model”). I have provisionally divided the seminar into three topics: research, knowledge, and the nature of the dissertation. I’ll just introduce the first two together, to get us started, and we can talk about the dissertation after the break. First, research. Two of the authors we’ve read begin with dictionary definitions. Christopher Frayling distinguishes “Research” with a capital “R,” which means disciplinary, scientific, systematic work, from “research” with a lowercase “r,” which denotes curiosity, seeking, or general inquiry. Victor Burgin uses this dictionary definition: research is “experiment aimed at discovery, interpretation or application of facts, theories, or laws” which results in new knowledge.3 As you’ve all seen, my own argument is that the very idea of using research as a guiding concept in the PhD is the result of UK administrative jargon, and that it would be a tremendous relief, clarification, and opportunity to avoid it in the new programs that are developing in the U.S.4 To that end I suggest several alternates:5





1. Understanding (as in Dilthey, Heidegger, Gadamer) 2. Interpretation (as in Ricoeur, for example) 3. Writing (as exemplified by Cixous, or my colleague Joseph Grigely) 4. The nonconceptual, nonverbal, tacit, extralinguistic, nonconceptual (these are major tropes in Modernism, which is an initial drawback) 5. Top-down redefinitions of research (Henk Slager, Sarat Maharaj, and others have tried this, but I wonder if their formulations can work in interdisciplinary conversations in the university) 6. Emphasizing practice (here the problem is that as Thierry de Duve says, “practice” is a “magic word” and hard to define) 7. Taking the art object itself as the product and expression of research (let’s defer this to when we talk about today’s third topic, the dissertation) 8. Replacing research with doubt (as in, for example, Keats’s “negative capability”—but again, the problem would be showing people in other disciplines in the university that this makes sense as a foundational term for a discipline) 9. Emphasizing the difference between making and studying (this is promising, I think, but it needs theorization6)

3. Artists with PhDs, 72. 4. The discourse of research continues to expand naturally and exponentially, making it decreasingly likely that any forum can remove the concept. See Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, edited by Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter (London: Palgrave,

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2009). The book contains an excerpt from Artists with PhDs, but not on the subject of research. 5. Artists with PhDs, chap. 9, especially 117ff. 6. My contribution is an essay, “Why Art Historians Should Learn to Draw and Paint,” available at http://​www​.jameselkins​.com/​#page14 (accessed October 4, 2009).

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This is an open-ended list, of course, just to start the conversation. Our second topic is knowledge, which we’ve been talking about all week long. In the UK administrative literature, “research” is tied to “knowledge” in a particular and unhelpful way, because any new discipline has to demonstrate a consistent research methodology that results in “new knowledge.” As you saw from the book, I would like to avoid that sense of knowledge as much as possible. For the specialized model of the PhD this isn’t a problem, because for a few artists the outcome of work is new knowledge. But for the terminal degree model it is a problem, because it isn’t how the majority of artists talk about their work. Chris Csikszentmihályi: So you’re saying we could go the research route, but let’s look at these other options, because there are perils in the research model. Perils of instrumentality and, frankly, budgets. But did I hear you right, did you equate rigor and knowledge generation with the methods of science? James Elkins: I didn’t mean to say rigor is the domain of science: but I do think that people who are interested in applying the concept of research to visual art are often invested in rigor, reproducibility, and a consistent methodology. All those terms cluster, and maybe we could explore that. Frances Whitehead: There was a time when there were just fewer disciplines, fewer humans, doing fewer things, and they carved out these territories that became legitimized and historicized. So now you see people borrowing methodologies from other fields, and people react by saying that the methodologies aren’t being used in the right way, the pure way, the way we use it, and therefore it’s not rigorous, it’s not applicable. So when it comes to research, we need to unpack whether it’s “research” or “Research,” and whether it’s analogous, whether it’s applicable. So there’s a parallel between with big-S Science and little-s science. The claims of methodology and legitimacy become a part of what we’re talking about. James Elkins: Really all that matters is what is claimed in the name of rigor, research methodology, new knowledge, experiment, hypothesis, consistency, rigor, and scientific method. But the new readings and new contexts for these concepts are not always something that can be observed, with goodwill, as a continuous transformative process: it’s something that comes right down to claims and counterclaims in specific situations in the university. That is why it is so important for the PhD that people think through just what they want to do by claiming research, for example. Chris Csikszentmihályi: The point is to listen to what a discipline says gives it the right to expertise in a given area. Then it is possible to say, To what degree do you agree? One of my problems with the scientific interests of some art is that they don’t end up with any of the cultural legitimacy or authority of science. Sometimes artists’

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flirtations with scientific rigor or research can generate slight advantages in terms of funding, but in essence such claims aren’t about what the natural world is saying, but rather about how scientists are purporting to report it. Frances Whitehead: Failures definitely come out of this mix-and-match, but it’s not possible that all of it is misguided. Ann Sobiech Munson: Some disciplines have anxieties about what they do—they feel less rigorous, or less productive—and they may adopt the terminologies of other disciplines without adopting their methodologies. So the question is, are there other names for what is indigenous to art than “research,” which comes out of science? I work in a major science research university. The scientists look at what we do and say, That’s not research. We have resolved it on the bureaucratic side with lists of activities that are appropriate to different disciplines. We have “Research and Creative Activity,” “Professional Practice and Outreach.” You can do scholarship in any of those categories. You can have scholarship in each of those fields. James Elkins: Here’s another distinction that may be helpful, to bridge Frances’s and Ann’s concerns. Most of the literature on the practice-based or studio art PhD is focused on conversations that need to take place across the university, where it’s important that scientists can understand art instructors’ ideas about research. But some of the literature is also concerned with developing ideas that are of use for artists, within the art community. (Frances, I take it that is more your interest.) Those are divergent conversations. In Thinking Through Art, some of the most idiosyncratic essays, the ones that use Heidegger or Nietzsche to talk about research in the arts, are the ones that may stand the best chance of being helpful in the art context. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: I wonder why we produce such problems for ourselves by focusing on science. We have so many disciplines that are closer to our interests. For example, we could discuss research methodology in anthropology. We could come up with very interesting parallels. The anthropologist knows, for example, that the division between the subject and the object of his research collapses. He knows he will change the object he researches merely by researching it. There are, as far as I have seen, no experiments in ethnology. You have to do fieldwork, and consider how your writing relates to your fieldwork. The work is not about truth: it’s about legitimation, and those problems are very similar to artists’ concerns. So I propose we don’t talk about science in relation to visual arts.7 James Elkins: I agree, but we can’t legislate the overwhelming anxiety, as Ann says, or the desire, or even the habit of continuously looking to science. 7. From Margaret Mead to Clifford Geertz, the observer-as-participant is a leitmotif of anthropology. See, e.g., James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.)

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Marta Edling: I agree with Stephan. Science is not always the best model, and the research you are wondering about is still developing and changing. Judith Mottram’s short text on the development of research in the UK shows it already has a history.8 It’s as if you’re trying to capture something that still continuously changes. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: If you read James Clifford talking about “doing culture,” you have all the ideas we’re considering, already on the table. Chris Csikszentmihályi: Yes—James Clifford, we love him—but artists have a relation to material culture that is different from what the humanities have. We can’t simply copy their method, because the “texts” we generate are usually not linguistic, they are material or media. And we don’t peer review the same way that humanists do. From a science studies perspective, the perceived neutrality that gives natural science its authority—that it is just a matter of observing the natural world and reporting back to us mortals—is just crazy. So I actually don’t think that science is as different an activity—ahistorical, asocial, unembodied, and impartial—as scientists would like us to believe.9 So I don’t have as much trouble making comparisons to science. But on the other hand, to make change or argue for artistic research at the university level I would have to lead a roomful of administrators onto my science-studies path, and they wouldn’t follow. James Elkins: Any more than they would follow the Thinking Through Art essays that use phenomenology or existentialism to theorize what research really is. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: They don’t know Latour. Chris Csikszentmihályi: Right. Their loss; ours too, by extension. William Marotti: There is a wide anxiety about the PhD, because the notion is that a reflective process that might transform or reconceive the discipline is itself absolutely inimical to art. To bring the PhD into a university system, you’re setting up an engine that will instrumentalize, rationalize, and generally institution-up the practice of art. We had several readings for today’s seminar that express that anxiety. I’m not sure I agree, but those are the stakes. Marta Edling: It’s not merely anxiety. It’s an actual fact. John Hockey’s articles are both depressing, because there you can see that PhDs, at least as they were practiced in the UK, are not for art.10 Artists became researchers. If you read those essays, you’re really sad afterwards. Ciarán Benson: I still haven’t heard an argument for the PhD. In the UK and Ireland, I  have seen people twist themselves into a box, trying to fit themselves into disciplines that are already in existence elsewhere in the university. I’ve never 8. Judith Mottram, “Researching Research in Art and Design,” chap. 1 of Artists with PhDs. 9. See, for instance, Sharon Traweek’s “When Eliza Doolittle Studies ’Enry ’Iggins,” in Technoscience and Cyberculture, edited by Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Martinsons and

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Michael Menser (New York: Routledge, 1995), 37–55. 10. Hockey, “Practice-Based Research Degree Students”; Hockey and Allen-Collinson, “Supervision of Practice-Based Research Degrees.”

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understood why something as distinctive as art wants the same three letters, PhD. My own school, University College Dublin, was the first to argue for an alternative doctorate. It was for a species of psychologist called a clinical psychologist, and it was for a practitioner’s doctorate. For us, it has worked very well, because our criteria are external examiners and quality assessment.11 Material also has to be publishable. James Elkins: I wonder if, in the history of disciplines, there haven’t often been such discussions of comparative principles. There would have to have been arguments about the kinds of knowledge that could not be accommodated in the existing degree structure; questions of funding; questions of assessment; and questions of the place of the field within the university. This just occurred to me—it might be interesting to research the process of the emergence of other new disciplines.12 Perhaps the studio art PhD might not be unique. Ciarán Benson: It might be. I would have thought there is such distinctiveness that can be lost by trying to squeeze oneself into the wrong box. Jonathan Dronsfield: Does the concept of the PhD in art history exist? Does the concept of the PhD in philosophy exist? Chris Csikszentmihályi: For general exams in the history of art at Harvard, they take students to the Harvard Museums and ask them to identify and discuss objects they bring from the basement. That’s very different from other PhDs. Jonathan Dronsfield: Just what is the concept of the art history PhD, then? Frances Whitehead: Isn’t the difference tied to the investment in genius and autonomy? That there’s an autodidactic element in artistic practice, so that after a certain point structured scholarship is just the wrong model for the place from which the work emerges? Isn’t that really what the objection is? Jonathan Dronsfield: But will someone tell me what the concept of the PhD in art history is, as opposed to the concept of the PhD in philosophy, or art? Roy Sorensen: What does it mean to get a grade of “B”? Of “C”? It’s very hard to articulate what that is. James Elkins: Jonathan, can I just say: if I said “the concept,” I may have misspoken. I want to conceptualize the PhD, meaning I’d like to know what we do with words like “research” and “new knowledge,” if we want to continue using them. Chris Csikszentmihályi: Jonathan, there are differences. In ethnography, you have to spend a year or two in the field. In art history, you have to go into a museum and identify objects. These are substantively different. 11. For an introduction to both of these institutions, which are not used in the same form in the United States, see the introductory matter to Artists with PhDs. [—J.E.]

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12. Some information is in R. D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

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Jonathan Dronsfield: Roy, in philosophy, would you say there is a reflection on the conceptual level about what research is in philosophy? Roy Sorensen: There is a linguistic argument that “PhD” is a general term, not an ambiguous term. If you apply that to the PhD, it’s the same case as elephants: there are Indian elephants and African elephants. Or better, beetles: there are a lot of different kinds of beetles. James Elkins: Isn’t it two hundred and fifty thousand kinds of beetles? That would be lot of different PhDs. Roy Sorensen: But then the word “beetle” becomes ambiguous and it has to be separately defined for each case. There is a root concept and a general concept. Jonathan Dronsfield: What is the conceptualization of “research” in philosophy? Roy Sorensen: There isn’t work on that. Jonathan Dronsfield: Right! So we’re asking for that level of conceptualization in art. But why? James Elkins: Jonathan, this conversation is fun—I really like comparing PhDs to beetles—but it’s not fair to the facts. In fact, many people worry the concept of research in art, and what matters is what they write and say, not whether it makes sense to write or say it. The odd, tortured conceptualizations of research and new knowledge are the face that studio art PhDs present to the university. In practical terms: for how many students is “research” a good selfdescription? How many students think of their work as creating “knowledge”? That’s why these questions are pressing. If you took an average MFA student from the studios here and said, Is your work research?, chances are they’d scratch their head. Daniel Palmer: If we’re going to take up the challenge to find a more capacious way of thinking about “knowledge,” then I would begin with a distinction between Roy Sorensen’s and Frances Whitehead’s ways of thinking. Frances speaks of transformative knowledge, while Roy constantly goes back to propositions, as a form of analytical proof. The idea of a proposition has a long history in art, too, but that’s a different sense of proposition. Roy, you talk about it in terms of true and false. But a business proposition, or a sexual proposition, isn’t true or false. “Research,” too, has a history in art. It is sometimes about raising questions. That means that research in art is quite different. It’s back to front— Frances Whitehead: We’re looking for questions. I like that. Daniel Palmer: As a further footnote, I should point out that at my university, we have circumvented the question of “knowledge” in relation to the studio PhD altogether, replacing this requirement with the expression “a contribution of substantial cultural significance.”

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Roy Sorensen: That description you gave, about propositions, is a misconception about analytic philosophy. Everyone wants to be cited. What I like to be able to do is formulate a new question, that I and others won’t be able to answer very well, because that will generate a large literature and I’ll be cited a lot. Frances Whitehead: So if the artist’s research is looking for questions, is the artwork the answer to the question? Or is the question the engine that drives the work to the next question? Andrew Blackley: Artwork is the answer to the question we don’t know to ask, or haven’t learned to ask. James Elkins: Just for the sake of the conversation, let’s say we could work out an idea of knowledge that reformulates it as a matter of asking questions. Wouldn’t that do to “knowledge” what Howard Singerman does (so I think) to “skill”? That is, wouldn’t it stretch the word so much that it loses its anchor in vernacular meanings? (Wouldn’t we have begun a different language game?) William Marotti: In regard to “research”: we said “inquiry” instead; wouldn’t that work better? James Elkins: Yes, I bet it would. Jonathan Dronsfield: But artists were articulating their practice in terms of asking questions, and proposing their practice as findings and as a matter of resolving problems, as far back as the early sixties. Even when Kosuth was arguing that art was assertion or analytic proposition, the emphasis was always on questioning, questioning the nature of art, questioning the medium.13 Daniel Palmer: Arguably, making art always involves a degree of research. Starting from curiosity, artists look around, they find and transform things. James Elkins: Like Christopher Frayling’s “research” lowercase “r.” William Marotti: I teach in a history program. My students produce research-based theses. But they also produce the next set of practitioners in the field. There’s a direct relation between PhD production and the shape of the field itself. Whether you conceive research as an art, or if knowledge begins with questions . . . all those things are going to end up being addressed in the larger format of PhDs, and their relation to their fields. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: What about Allan Sekula’s piece on world harbors, Fish Story?14 He goes to different harbors and takes photographs. There is an idea behind it, of referring to the globalization of economies. Formal questions have a strong impact on the kind of knowledge that he produces. Isn’t that research? 13. Kosuth, “Art After Philosophy,” Studio International 178 (October 1969): 135. 14. Allan Sekula, Fish Story, with an essay by Benjamin Buchloh (Berlin: Richter Verlag, 2003).

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You have to travel, you have to know about the economic conditions in different countries? P. Elaine Sharpe: It’s not research. Daniel Palmer: It’s systematic inquiry. Hilde Van Gelder: Elaine, is it different for you? Why are you using a different word? P.  Elaine Sharpe: Research, for me, is in pursuit of an answer, and inquiry is about what comes next. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen: If you’re going to all those harbors around the world, you have a very clear schema— P.  Elaine Sharpe: Yes, but you don’t know what you’re going to get when you arrive, nor is your goal necessarily predetermined beyond the act of arriving. Even the act of arrival presents fields of inquiry with regard to the outcome, and a philosophical investigation will have a sense of these issues in the oblique aspects of the overall view of arriving. William Marotti: If you’re an historian, you don’t know what you’re going to get from an historical archive— Hilde Van Gelder: Isn’t that the same in pharmaceutical research? P. Elaine Sharpe: No, because the goal is already there. Andrew Blackley: Elaine, the success rate of medical and pharmaceutical research is so absolutely slim that their goals are usually never reached. A researcher and his lab do not identify a problem, say, Parkinson’s disease, and go out and solve it. Often it happens that failed research into one disease comes to be incidentally successful research towards a cure for another disease. There is a similarity with art practice here: Smith, Judd, LeWitt, and Serra did not solve sculpture, but in their comparative success and failures, they provided and documented what not to do. Gillick could be using cubic forms today in the way he does without that previous research, which, I’d argue, was goal-oriented—and yet, when we look back their work appears as inquiry. Ciarán Benson: A lot depends on the word you used, Daniel, “systematic.” The law is systematic, which means it’s possible to demonstrate reliable structures. Art doesn’t have that yet. You’d have to build that to get the credibility for your external examiners.15 Daniel Palmer: I wasn’t suggesting that art itself is necessarily systematic, just that the inquiry, the project, is organized in a methodical way. P. Elaine Sharpe: Sekula is the structure. 15. People who assess the performance of every department in the UK and Ireland every teaching term. See the introductory matter to Artists with PhDs. [—J.E.]

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Chris Csikszentmihályi: Yes, he is a structure of one. And you could say that is the problem for art: but I would say that is the advantage of art. William Marotti: It’s not entirely a structure of one: the stuff gets recognized as art; it’s within a field. Chris Csikszentmihályi: I don’t disagree, but perhaps only from the outside. Andrea Frank16 is also an artist who is photographing shipping. I think if you ask Sekula whether her photography is producing the same knowledge as his, he’d say, No, our methodology is different, our knowledge is different. Two ethnographers, a Geertzian and a Cliffordian, I am guessing there would be agreement that what they’re doing is part of ethnography, and they share methodology—but for a fair number of artists, there would be a tremendous amount of disagreement. Frances Whitehead: Are they sharing a methodology or a method? I have several colleagues who mince the difference between those quite finely. I believe this relates to a different conception of rigor, of consistency, and understands process and method as being under constant negotiation with outcomes. James Elkins: The new PhD is raising the issue of what research, new knowledge, and all the other terms, from “method” and “methodology” to “rigor” and “experiment,” can mean when they are put in new contexts. We push on the concepts and see how malleable they are. We’re not so much finding adequate terms to substitute for “new knowledge” or “research” in the UK senses—although I think that is absolutely crucial for the coherence of new programs—as we are playing with existing terms, to see what they can be made to mean. Daniel Palmer: Absolutely. Practicality cannot be separated from conceptualization. Frances Whitehead: I agree. Jim, I’ve been struggling with your rubric. Anyway, the part that worries me is the education industry aspect of this, and the fabrication of new products that can be purchased. So while we discuss what is research, and what is art, we need to think about how the education industry is involved. William Marotti: What form would that involvement take? There are of course all kinds of institutional concerns—they’re real, and not entirely a matter of paranoia—but it’s not as if art were sitting out there, safe, innocent, and unperturbed. It might be the case that some freedom for reflection not anchored to current institutional pressures might be useful. There is something to be said for the doctoral process. Saul Ostrow: It would be foolish to speak about this without speaking about capital. By expanding the idea of research, we gain territory and power. Andrew Blackley: Capital is the defining (irrational) logic of our society. It would be foolish to posit capital only in a new degree, or to say things such as “the education industry is too capitalist, too territorial, too power-hungry.” This brings up 16. http://​andreafrank​.net (accessed November 9, 2009).

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a huge problem: there is a very popular idea that art is outside of these systems of power, domination, hegemony, and codes of productivity and value, when in fact art is an exemplary—immanent—demonstration of these forces that a few of you are shuddering at. Jonathan Dronsfield: Let’s look ten or twenty years down the line, when we’ve got more of a culture of PhDs in art. Then art historians will be able to look at what kind of art is produced by PhDs, and what kind of art is being produced outside them. Now, if the kind of art that’s legitimated is done as research, calling itself research, is detrimental to art, then we might begin to see a bifurcation of art into two streams. Now we’re at this lovely moment when we can talk freely and speculatively about research and art: ten years from now, this kind of art may seem very determinate. James Elkins: Okay, I’ll make a bet on that. I bet that there won’t be a measurable difference. As Barbara knows, people made the same claims about the MFA: its academic nature, its ivory-tower artificiality, its distance from society, its putative inability to express that society. Frances Whitehead: We all have our autonomies and our instrumentalizations. The way you pick and choose those things determines how you situate yourself— in design, in other fields. Daniel Palmer: Especially given that research often really means “research and development,” which in turn often entails links with governmental and/or business imperatives— Jonathan Dronsfield: Not in philosophy it doesn’t. There is no research in philosophy that doesn’t take place in the academy. Daniel Palmer: Then we could say that it’s a privilege that government doesn’t in some sense mandate research in philosophy and some other fields. But in fact, when you apply for research grants, in Australia, everyone has to check boxes about national interest and things like that. As you can imagine, it’s not always easy for an artist to argue that their work advances the national interest—and artists working with new technologies are inevitably privileged. Marta Edling: That’s not just in Australia; that’s everywhere. Jonathan Dronsfield: What’s interesting about research in art is that there’s a lot of philosophy that takes place in art; there’s not much art that takes place in philosophy. Same with science. There is no art that takes place in science. But there’s a lot of science, or claims to that effect, that takes place in art. So art plays with other disciplines, in ways that other disciplines do not. James Elkins: I think it’s interesting that in the last ten minutes or so, we have naturalized the word “research.” First I was talking about alternatives to it, and then we

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were talking about adjustments to it, and now we’ve started posing questions about general topics using “research” as part of our vocabulary. I just wouldn’t want to lose touch with the fact that for many, many artists, the very idea of research or knowledge production is outside their normal sense of themselves. Sekula’s project is already 99 percent inside the whole question of method and research, system, project, and hypothesis. Anyway, we have to move on to our third and last topic, which is most difficult of all. I said “the nature of the dissertation,” but really what gets produced in PhD programs is more like a “dissertation/​artwork/​dissertation​-artwork.” (Normally I don’t like poststructural hyphenation and compound slashed terms, but that kind of over-the-top typography really fits the issue.) Here it’s helpful to think of two aspects of the problem, at least to begin. One is that this is a problem in defining what the dissertation is, and the other— I think the profound question—is deciding how thought can be embodied in an artwork, in general. The first question leads to the second. In the most restrictive formulation of the question, it’s a matter of assessing a dissertation that makes unusual claims about itself. Jonathan Dronsfield: It’s already a very difficult question. I have a student who has published two books. You could be forgiven for thinking they were literature. He insists that his writing be seen as art practice. He could have gone to a literature department, but he came to me. So now I have to think about an external examiner, the person who will look at this book and see it as art, and not as philosophy. James Elkins: Exactly. In Artists with PhDs, I tried to frame this as one of a series of possibilities. So first you’d have a kind of dissertation that presents itself as research, and the student says it informs her art practice.17 This is more or less Christopher Frayling’s “research for art,” which I’ll get to in a few minutes. The most common examples of this first kind of dissertation are written in, and as, philosophy or art history. In the book there are many more examples—natural science, chemistry, art criticism, economics. There are also technical reports, which Christopher also mentions in relation to the MLitt degree, which doesn’t happen in the U.S. Actually, it used to be possible to write MFA theses on things like “How to Construct Pumps for a Multifigure Marble Fountain”—Barbara, I remember seeing those in the University of Chicago library, written by students in the 1930s. Barbara Jaffee: Yes, I’ve seen those, too! I suppose there is an argument to be made that a thesis like this contributes to knowledge, though certainly in the most literal of terms—particularly if there was overwhelming demand for better pumps (and presumably better fountains) at the time! James Elkins: Anyway, the second kind of dissertation is the one that the student presents as equal to her artwork. Research and artwork can then comprise a new interdisciplinary field, or they can be understood as wholly separate. I emphasized this

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17. Artists with PhDs, chap. 11, 145ff.

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in the book, because I found some students in the Australian National University in Canberra who did their research in very different subjects, like chemistry. One student just made up her mind that she needed a professional degree in chemistry, even though her painting didn’t show much influence of chemistry. ANU Canberra supported her, which I think is great, because the implication is that art is a lifetime activity, and the university should foster whatever studies the students may want. James Elkins: The third kind of dissertation is the really challenging one: it’s where the written dissertation is presented as the artwork—as in Jonathan’s example. It can also happen the other way around: the artwork can also be presented as the research. Ciarán Benson: I’ve had the experience of being an examiner in Europe for a painting PhD.  The painter was already well-established, and had a show in a London gallery. So the examiners met in London. The work wasn’t the art per se, but a catalogue, which was not very extensive, in which he articulated his concern, which was erasure. And then he had to defend it by questions from people in the gallery. It was intriguing, and at the time there was no difficulty. The problem, which came up afterward, was, What happens if people complete these PhDs as twenty-two-year-olds, or twenty-three-year-olds? This man was in his late forties, and he had been a part of the institution and was an experienced teacher. I was left at the end thinking that the work really is what strikes you as meriting the PhD. Jonathan Dronsfield: Did he study for the PhD? Ciarán Benson: No. Jonathan Dronsfield: So this was a degree by publication, which we haven’t considered. Ciarán Benson: I thought Jim’s third category of dissertations might be getting near it. Jonathan Dronsfield: I think it’s another category, because to get a PhD by publication, you don’t need to have thought about a PhD— Ciarán Benson: It’s like a DLitt— Jonathan Dronsfield: You can do your work, write your books, and then you get it into your head that you want a PhD. One of my PhD supervisors got his degree that way, I believe, after I had been awarded mine. You submit your existing work with an account of why it deserves the PhD. James Elkins: I saw that when I was working at University College Cork: in the enormous book of the university’s laws, it occupies one small paragraph. Ciarán Benson: That’s the DLitt. What I examined involved an art college, merging with a university. In a sense the staff became the first guinea pigs for the merger.

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Hilde Van Gelder: This is a big source of tension. In Belgium we are not modeling the PhD on that kind of profile, although it happens. If you want to establish PhDs, you have to work with younger students. The older students make for an easier problem. We should really conceptualize this, and see what the model for younger people might be. Jonathan Dronsfield: There is one other possibility: you can study for and write a PhD, but bring in work that has already been published outside. In England, a philosopher can include in their dissertation something that has already been published, provided it has appeared in a refereed, peer-reviewed journal. Ciarán Benson: We encourage that in psychology at University College Dublin. James Elkins: It is common in the sciences. Jonathan Dronsfield: Now we have to think about how we can do this in art. In one case, the student has curatorial projects, and he will write a theoretical justification of the set of those exhibitions and how they hang together. Some of his work has been published, but not in peer-reviewed journals; it has appeared as art, fiction as art. There are all sorts of these . . . examples. They are not models, just examples. Hilde Van Gelder: Right, so far they are only examples. Jonathan Dronsfield: But not merely examples. They are examples which say something about how the discipline of art is being shaped through research, or in other words, that the discipline is always to be decided. Frank Vigneron: In order to get your PhD, you have to prove you have produced an original body of work that has been done over the course of the program. Hilde Van Gelder: Here is a question to the room: Do you think the PhD has to have a discursive part? Or could it just be an artwork? The doctorate could even be a ready-made: you’d put it in the room and say, This is my PhD. How would you assess that? Daniel Palmer: In our case, the exhibition or the work constitutes the thesis. But then you might ask, why do we require the written dissertation as well? The real reason, I believe, is for the examinable quality. And this in a sense comes back to the earlier question of how ideas are embodied in an artwork: the writing helps to make it examinable, not least by offering proof, if required, of the systematic inquiry that constitutes our accepted definition of research. Needless to say, you can see how the whole thing can easily become quite circular. Frances Whitehead: So making a narrative makes it examinable? Daniel Palmer: Yes. I’m not saying that’s justified, but that’s the situation.

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Jonathan Dronsfield: Not just makes it examinable: makes it research. In the UK, for the recent Research Assessment Exercise, you could not just submit an artwork; it was strongly “recommended” that you write an accompanying statement saying what makes it research, stating its contribution to knowledge, its methodology, etc., something that a research output in the form of philosophy, for example, would not need to be accompanied by.18 And each department had to submit a statement narrativizing its research environment, including how PhDs being undertaken count as research so defined. Chris Csikszentmihályi: I’ve only gone through this process once: I examined one PhD, and there are two more in the pipeline of my research group. I don’t think any of them are hurt by the process of the writeup. And that’s partly because in the art world, very few people will read the dissertations. Jonathan Dronsfield: But it poses a question as to their integrity as an artist that they’re obliged to write this dissertation. Chris Csikszentmihályi: That doesn’t happen in my experience. One of my colleagues is an anthropologist; he told one of my students to just think of the dissertation as the longest form he’d ever have to fill out. James Elkins: Hilde, the idea of a body of work without a dissertation has been tried in two UK institutions; one was Plymouth. The justification, for the Plymouth College of Art and Design, was that students in every other field in the university had to only produce one body of work, not two. Daniel Palmer: Don’t scientists have to write up their work? Chris Csikszentmihályi: Yes; only in the humanities is it the case that there’s only one body of work. Rebecca Gordon: In teaching, you have to use language. You can’t teach by bringing in artworks or texts and simply showing them to the students without saying anything. So maybe the written dissertation also serves to assure some proficiency in teaching, explaining using language. Daniel Palmer: Yes, I think that’s part of it and a good point. But at the same time, everyone is mindful of the danger of gilding the lily. This was put to me well by 18. “It is recommended that a statement of up to 300 words is submitted . . . where the research imperatives and the research significance of an output (such as an artefact, curation, digital format, installation, performance or event, screening, tape, textbook, translation or video) might further be made evident by a descriptive complement. The statement might include: a brief description of the project and its stage of development; a rationale outlining questions addressed; a summary of approaches/ strategies undertaken in the work; a digest of further evidence (if any). . . . The sub-panel will ignore any evaluative commentary on the

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perceived quality of the research.” RAE2008: Panel Criteria and Working Methods, Panel O, RAE 01/2006 (Higher Education Funding Council for England et al., 2006), 26–27, http://​www​ .rae​.ac​.uk/​pubs/​2006/​01/​docs/​oall​.pdf (accessed November 9, 2009). The RAE was a periodic, systematic review of all departments and universities in the UK. [For more on the RAE, see the introductory matter to Artists with PhDs.—J.E.] It is to be replaced by the REF, Research Excellence Framework, where the criterion of “impact” will play a main role in evaluating research outputs. See http://​www​.hefce​.ac​.uk/​Research/​ref/​.

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a student recently, who said, “It feels like you can make any crud so long as you frame it adequately.” Jonathan Dronsfield: But you also have the viva, and maybe that can be a corrective. The examiners at the viva, in the UK, have guidelines for the questions they can ask: Can you circumscribe the field? Who or what is your addressee? Name the interlocutors, texts or thinkers or artists, you’re speaking with when you do your research. In what way is your PhD an original contribution to the field? In other words, you don’t have to demonstrate this in your work. The art you present might not have any relation to what your interlocutors are talking about. That wouldn’t be the case with the viva of a philosophy PhD. Your interlocutors would be visible in your work, in the footnotes and the bibliography. James Elkins: That kind of questioning, and the freedom it affords, goes right around the question of how thought is embodied in the work, because the hope has still to be that it is embodied. Hilde Van Gelder: I have another question: I have noticed that some PhDs have been criticized because the work was not noticed in the art world. Is this something that others have experienced? Jonathan Dronsfield: In the UK you may find that you are more likely to get funding to do your PhD in art if you propose work that involves a public space, outside the academy. Barbara Jaffee: This, to me, is an important point, because it reminds us that we need to at least try to answer the question, What, and who, is art for? The most successful models from the history of art education were those built on consensus around exactly this issue: the Academy produced a neoclassical art well suited to the purpose of propaganda; the Bauhaus produced a Modernist art well suited to the project of remaking the world in the image of utopia. What kind of art are we hoping to produce through the PhD? And what sort of work, intellectual or otherwise, do we expect it will do in the world? Saul Ostrow: There are fundamental questions for us in the U.S., because we don’t have the structures you’ve been describing: vivas with specified subjects, the Research Assessment Exercise, external examiners. Jonathan, I was struck by how conventional your notion of art is in these examples. Who would want a PhD here? What purpose would it serve? Without financial incentive, what is the purpose? Perhaps artists who need collaboration on the scale of what a university could afford. Jonathan Dronsfield: The university would afford the space for support and collaborations that would not be possible in the art world. Daniel Palmer: Recently a study was made by the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools about the PhD in creative arts, including the question of

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why Australian artists are doing PhDs. The primary reasons are because it’s free in Australia, and increasingly required for teaching positions; and then, more positively, there’s the period of time artists can set aside for in-depth research and development of their practice. There is also the access to studio space, to the library, to the scholarly community. James Elkins: We’re now talking about the specialized model of the PhD: the one that works for some people, in some places. In this case, I’d say the PhD is good for maybe one half of 1 percent of BFA students, and maybe 5 percent of MFA students, the ones whose practices require tremendous facility and immersion in theoretical and philosophic questions or other problems that can be best explored in universities. Saul Ostrow: My MFA students in Cleveland have three main reasons for wanting the degree. One is because they see the MFA as a necessity. Two is because they look at the school as a network, so they can be attached to the art world. And three is because they want two years to develop their practice without the pressure of a job. James Elkins: One way to think about the PhD, and the dissertation, is to use Christopher Frayling’s distinctions, which he adapts from Herbert Read. I thought I’d set this out, because it is scattered in several places in the literature, and tends to get confusing and be misquoted.19 And I should say that sometimes this is about “thinking to art,” “thinking through art,” and so forth, and other times it’s about “research to art,” “research through art,” and so forth. Of course my preference is to leave off the “research” whenever possible! Herbert Read To art

Through art

1. Education for the professional artist, including techniques and materials 2. Using art to learn about fields outside of art, such as “social relationships,” problem-solving, “independence of mind, flexible thinking,” “learning to see”

Into art For art

– –

In art

?

Christopher Frayling

– 1. Research in the field of art and design, for example MPhils and PhDs that investigate technologies. This is uppercase “Research”: systematic, disciplinary inquiry 2. Art history, perhaps aesthetics 3. Research leading to the production of art, so that the art embodies the thinking. This is lowercase “research”: nonprofessional “searching” ?

In Read, there are two formulations: research “through art,” and “to art.” In this case, “research” is scarcely noticed as a technical term. It means what 19. Frayling, Research in Art and Design; Frayling, “To Art and Through Art.”

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Christopher means by “lowercase ‘r’ ” research. Research “to art” is education for professional artists—research into techniques and materials. Read’s research “through art” is something very big, nearly as big as culture itself. It is a way of using art to learn about culture and society. For Read, this is a general education that takes you outside of art: it is not a general education for artists, but for anyone. It is a way of using art to what we would call a citizen. I haven’t had a chance to ask Christopher about this, but I think his sense of research “through art” is very different, even though he takes Read as a jumpingoff place. Christopher means research in the field of art and design, for example MPhils that investigate technology. It’s really Read’s formula that is closest to what we’re aiming at here, except that he isn’t concerned with educating artists, and all of us here are interested in that—even if the actual result of an average art school education is a citizen, not an artist! Jonathan Dronsfield: Ah, Kant! The one place Kant mentions the humanities in his Third Critique is in an appendix right at the end of the first half, when he’s talking about the aesthetic education of the artist, and he says that humanities [humaniora] are necessary as means of teaching artists how to communicate and participate in society, that these “forms of knowledge,” as he puts it, are prior to art, that they are what keep us from being animals, without which the artist would be just too free in the exercise of his freedom, without which the artist’s freedom would be unlawful!20 James Elkins: So to finish the chart: Christopher augments “research through art” with “research into art” and “research for art.” The second category, “into art,” includes art history, and perhaps aesthetics or other philosophy of art. And the last category brings us right back to our problem. (By the way, the bottom line, “research in art,” is just for fun: I thought there was an extra preposition there that someone might like to use.) Research “for art” results in the production of art, just as some of the other entries on the table do, but this time the artwork embodies the thinking, the research. This is still lowercase “r,” research that is more like inquiry or searching. To me, this is the most interesting case, and I’ve been involved in it for several years. To decide it, you have to decide how you think that thinking itself— thought, ideas—are embodied in visual artworks in general, completely aside from the PhD. There is an almost infinitely expandable body of claims about how thought, argument, or research is embodied in artworks. Just to name one example: Tom Mitchell, who was at this seminar table last year, has several ideas along these lines: “picture theory,” and the counterintuitive question “what do pictures want?”21 But you could almost enlist the full roster of art historians and theorists through the twentieth century, because each one has his or her own 20. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 229.

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21. What Is an Image?, coedited with Maja Naef, The Stone Theory Seminars 2 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).

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thoughts on the subject. Louis Marin, just to name one other, was haunted his entire life by the feeling that paintings, especially Poussin’s, were constantly redirecting his reflections so that he was thinking about reading, even though he knew he couldn’t read the paintings except in the obvious sense of decoding their narrative.22 But enough: that is the problem as I would frame it, and the reasons why I don’t think a discussion of the PhD can be coherent without a general theory of pictorial meaning. Miguel González Virgen: What if art doesn’t embody thought? What if it’s just art, and everything we’ve been talking about just circles around it?23

22. Louis Marin, To Destroy Painting, translated by Meete Hjort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See further, James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 23. In other words, what if art embodies a kind of mental process that does not fall into what positivism defines as thinking, a process that widens our present concept of thought? Jacques Rancière has explored the idea that the Freudian unconscious was derived from the presence of no-knowledge in the work of Romantic artists, but—and this is the crucial point—that in so doing Freud deprived Romantic no-knowledge of its nihilistic, nonrationalist component that is totally ungraspable by reason. To Rancière, this operation would contribute, on the one hand, to the development of aesthetics as a field that explores thinking in art, a field that reconciles the contradictory notions of “confused knowledge” and enlightened thinking; and, on the other hand, to the suppression of the poetic in the artwork: “It is only in the context of Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism—through the writings of Schelling, the Schlegel brothers, and Hegel—that aesthetics comes to designate

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the thought of art, even as the inappropriateness of the term is constantly remarked. Only in this later context do we see an identification between the thought of art—the thought effectuated by works of art—and a certain idea of “confused knowledge” occur under the name of aesthetics. This new and paradoxical idea makes art the territory of a thought that is present outside itself and identical with nonthought. It unites Baumgarten’s definition of the sensible as “confused” idea with Kant’s contrary definition of the sensible as heterogeneous to the idea. Henceforth confused knowledge is no longer a lesser form of knowledge but properly the thought of that which does not think. . . . My hypothesis in this book is that the Freudian thought of the unconscious is only possible on the basis of this regime of thinking about art and the idea of thought that is immanent to it. Or, if you prefer, Freudian thought, despite the classicism of Freud’s artistic references, is only possible on the basis of the revolution that moves the domain of the arts from the reign of poetics to that of aesthetics.” Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, translated by Debra Keates (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 6–7.

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the place to be

Jan Baetens

As all participants in the Seminar agree, some of them quite willingly, others more reluctantly, studio art training has been characterized for the last few decades by presentness. However, this presentness appears less as grace, to make a bad paraphrase of Michael Fried’s famous words, than as a narrow reduction to a here and now that is mainly, at least for critical observers such as Thierry de Duve, an excuse to focus on “attitude,” “practice,” and “deconstruction,”1 that is, on nothing. Yet the expression “here and now” is very deceiving, since the word “and,” which associates the temporal and the spatial aspects, does not really combine two equivalent terms. Although both the “here” and the “now” belong to the field of what Benveniste, in his study on subjectivity in language, has called linguistic shifters (terms that do not refer to any given lexical entity but help position the speaker in the world),2 the similarity between the adverbs “here” and “now” is tricky. “Now” is a universal: it may have a different cultural meaning for all those who use it, but at least it has the same reference for all those who speak in a clock-ruled world. Questions of time zones aside, the “now” of somebody living in New York and the “now” of somebody living in, say, Leuven (Belgium), which happens by coincidence to be the place where I am writing this note, are the same: Friday the 25th of March 2010, 8:04 a.m. The “here,” however, is a totally different story: whether I like it or not, Leuven is not (and will never be, for many obvious reasons) New York. More generally speaking, there is no possibility at all of taking the word “here” in the same universal sense as the word “now.” We cannot all be in the same place, except when we mean by “here” something like “on planet Earth” (but this is definitely not what Benveniste is hinting at in his analysis of subjectivity in language). Why does this matter for the discussions on studio art training and education? The reason is very simple. Throughout the discussions, the participants are all panic-stricken by the very idea, horresco referens, of not being in a specific “here” that corresponds in a stringent and universal way to the “now” that has become hegemonic in our “current condition” (I am quoting de Duve once again). The “here” in question would be something like New York, London, or some other “big city,” but certainly not Leuven (no way). Everybody wants to belong to the same “now” (which is not a problem), just as everybody wants to belong to the 1. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 2. Emile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1971), 223–30.

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same “here” (which is something less easy to accomplish). In other words: in the context of studio training, “here” ceases to be a linguistic shifter and becomes a real toponym. “Here” does not mean, as it does in Benveniste, the place where the speaker finds himself of herself, but means “the place to be,” the place where the rankings are produced, where sellers and buyers meet, where history is being made—and today that place is New York. Yesterday it was Paris, tomorrow it may be Shanghai, but this change does not affect the idea that in our “current situation” there is only one “here” that really matters. One must be “here” to make it happen (even if it happens that nothing happens at all, for many are called . . .), but as long as you’re not “here,” absolutely nothing can happen at all (even if you’re good, if you’re not “here” you can only be a loser). The hegemonic aspect of our current use of the word “here” is so strong that nobody seems to notice it any longer (well, that might be the definition of what doxa is about), and if one does, the conclusions that are drawn are never questioned or discussed. Two examples, dramatically representative of what I am arguing, since none of the participants in the debate even remotely reacted to them. The first is by James Elkins: “the smaller the college, the more distant from a major city, the more conservative the art department may be. Sometimes the practices are only a couple of minutes behind the standard set in the major cities; other times the entire feeling of the place might belong more to the 1970s, or even the 1950s, with audible echoes of nineteenth-century skills.”3 The second one is by Christopher Frayling: “last year I took part in a seminar in Delhi, and another at the Nehru Centre in London, on finding a contemporary idiom. So you have all these wonderful, virtuoso craft skills, which are all bent on doing designs for tourists, and the feeling is: if only they could find some contemporary idiom for those skills, then they might start really cooking from the standpoint of contemporary design.”4 The correspondence between the non-shifter use of “here” and “now” in both cases should not come as a surprise. What “now” involves is being defined in a specific “here,” which is not the smaller cities (it is the big city that matters), not Delhi (it is Britain that matters), not the Nehru Centre in London (it is non-Asian London that matters). Yet the hegemonic rejection of “here” as having another sense than “the big city” (and of course it can be a tale of two big cities, as in the examples above) is not only demonstrated by the very absence of any reply, not to say any critique, to Elkins’s and Frayling’s statements. It appears also, in a more Freudian way, in the unlimited obsession with something that takes the place of “place” and therefore helps to dissimulate it, namely “space.” The big advantage of “space” is that you can free-associate on it while never asking questions about “place,” which has become a dirty word. A paradoxical yet good point in case would be site-specific art, which at first sight reintroduces a “real” here in artistic practices. However, the very link with the doxa of the current art world ensures that these site-specific interventions are taken into account merely to the extent in which

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3. See Section 2 of the Seminars. 4. See Section 3 of the Seminars.

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they can reflect and articulate a strong sense of today’s standard as set by the big cities. Nobody cares about a site-specific work in, say, Leuven,5 or the Nehru Centre in London. Since Leuven and the Nehru Centre are not “here,” their site-specific interventions cannot be recognized as part of our “now” and will therefore prove unable to question the erasure of the “here” as a real shifter. The funny as well as the tragic thing, however, is that our refusal of “place,” of “here” in the shifter-like sense of the word, is far from being a neutral operation. Our lexical and toponymic reading of “here” as being “here in the big city, here in New York or London and sorry for all the losers out there,” is violently at odds with our “current” and often pathetic praise of things like deterritorialization, the border, decentering, the margin, the parergon, and so on. The fact that our modern doxa highlights the “now” in so violent a way that the “here” is being subjugated to its rule is an indirect but nevertheless very telling indication that we do not accept those differences that fall outside our current notion of “now,” “today,” “contemporary,” or “modern.” Yes, we are in praise of difference, but only if it increases our feeling of living “now” and, corollarily, if it strengthens the cannibalizing position of the “center” capable of telling the real now (“here”) from the fake now (“there”). Our ideology of difference is often nothing else than a mapping of what is happening “here” (for “there” cannot be “now”). And the exotic craze that has occurred and that continues to occur so frequently in our hegemonic art system does not change anything: it is just a supplementary proof of the discriminating power of the center. Obviously, much art produced “out there” may be uninteresting. But our rationalization of its exclusion (the art from “out there” is indeed often reactionary and old-fashioned related to contemporary standards) is not always beyond suspicion. In certain cases it is also a denial of a type of difference we cannot cope with. And for an ideology that claims as its founding dogma the “critical attitude” (I am quoting again from de Duve’s table), there is something wrong in paradise. Some might even say that there is something rotten in it. However, the question here is not how to change the system. Spatial concentration seems to be almost unavoidable in the art system, certainly in those sectors that involve a strong infrastructural dimension (museum, galleries, schools, the presence of a physical audience, etc., in the case of the visual arts).6 The solution is to be honest about it, and to recognize the limits of our craving for difference. It is one thing to live with the focus on “here,” and it is another thing—or should be— to use it a nonhegemonic way. In this regard, there is still a very long way to go. 5. A small anecdote: some years ago the City of Leuven commissioned Daniel Buren to create a (very extensive) site-specific work. Buren installed some twenty sculptures in the city’s central park. The work, which was not considered a great achievement, was immediately and systematically vandalized, and eventually taken away by the city council, although it was intended to be a permanent site-specific

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installation (the “Deux colonnes” of Leuven, so to speak), without any reaction from the artist, who apparently did not protest against the withdrawal of his work (which is now hidden in some carefully secured storehouse). 6. See the analysis of such “concentration” in Pierre-Michel Menger, Le Travail créateur: S’accomplir dans l’incertain (Paris: GallimardSeuil-Éditions de l’EHESS, 2009).

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reflections

Robert Nelson

The seminars are an impressive combination of erudite wit, earnest philosophy, and institutional hand-wringing. They perfectly capture anxieties over art education today, especially in relation to research. In their admirable zeal to explore the deficiencies of the contemporary academy, however, the seminars themselves mirror a widespread neglect of the salient ingredients of art and artistic process. It is difficult for me to respond to the searching and sometimes dazzling discussions without some embarrassment. My problem is, as Daniel Palmer notes, that I have written a book on the topic (The Jealousy of Ideas), which came out the same week the Seminar took place.1 Publishing this highly partisan account of research methodology leaves me rather overinvested before what is clearly a curious and open-ended discussion. Modesty prevents me from asserting shamelessly that many questions are answered in my text in a way which is not pursued in the Seminars. Meanwhile, the Seminars rather fall into the pattern of most graduate research programs themselves: we studiously concentrate on things that have already been said and are therefore easy to name, while ignoring the most important yet intractable things, those core features of art which are conceptually fugitive and shy of verbal language. How tellingly I cannot say, but the words “imagination” and “imaginative” are not to be found in the Seminars, in the same way that there is no word on humor or parody. If art could be described—among many possible definitions— as imaginative modes of investigating, developing, communicating, and transacting consciousness and subjectivity in the social sphere, we would find ourselves suddenly denuded of a credible vocabulary. A similar lacuna is the poetic, a central term of artistic aspiration and criticism that only manages to score an incidental footnote. Throughout the Seminar, ideas of inspiration and subjectivity are either implicitly marginalized or directly stigmatized with respect to the dialectical. Even the idea of art having a truth to consciousness is dismissed as “exceedingly Romantic” and damned as “soul searching.” Exactly why this scorn for the porous dimensions of the mind and art discourse has arisen remains to be analyzed. I enjoy the discussion about the illusory autonomy of art and also the hazards of its instrumentalization within the terms of research; but it is curious that these topics are seldom, if ever, squared with the necessary subjectivity proper to 1. Robert Nelson, The Jealousy of Ideas: Research Methods in the Creative Arts, (Fitzroy: Ellikon Press, 2009). Also available as a free e-book at http://​www​.writing​-pad​.ac​.uk/​photos/​ 21​_Resources/​08​_The Jealousy of Ideas/​04​ _jealousy1​.pdf.

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the artistic synthesis of ideas. There is recognition for artists as translators, synthesizers, and collaborators, not surprisingly, because this taxonomy is congruent with our academic templates. As theorists, we readily feel like theorizing the politics of aesthetics, and, especially where research is concerned, we naturally celebrate art’s engagement with other fields of inquiry in which the respective discourses are codified. In all of this, however, I see an unnecessary and unhelpful dichotomy emerging between the artwork as cultural production—or art’s place in the world— and the now challenged and embattled inspirational integrity of the artist. These two items are capable of resolution; furthermore, the synthesis is a large part of any artistic undertaking, and especially the research training toward its fulfilment. If the studio endeavor is not poetic, who, as critic or spectator, is going to take an artistic interest in the result? Would the creative work not be simplistic illustration or agit-prop or mere process talking to itself? Associating the subjective with Romantic incuriosity, mystification, and antidiscourse seems retrograde to me. Though a materialist, I am suspicious of the contemporary theoretical backlash against the subjective. Subjectivist positions are now institutionally discredited, not just because of the preeminence of ideological discourses but now also greatly augmented by a misguided quest for academic rigor in the field. A part of my own project is to historicize the concept of subjectivity; and upon this analysis, I argue that rigor in art discourse is only as good as the recognition of subjectivity that it applies to.2 The areas of art and technology, art and science, art and activism, art and the environment, and so on are not by nature antithetical to the older motif of artists investigating their subjectivity. Why polarize these two zones of artistic activity when the artistic succulence is precisely in their coalescence? If we dichotomize without offering the prospect of synthesis, we anatomize and disempower. Because I live in Australia, I think of the denial of Indigenous experience, where a dominant white power has illegitimated both the voice (subjectivity) and political presence of Aborigines through not wanting to hear stories in the language of the subject. It is a necessary debate in Australia about who imposes the templates of method and who, instead, encourages gentle listening. And this at doctoral level. With charming jocularity, James Elkins describes a toy model: “We could define the MFA as the place where you experiment with the idea of voice, subjectivity, and individuality, and see if it works for you. If the institution swamps that idea, then you go on to the PhD.”3 Depending on how we read the verb “swamp,” we may have here a satirical portrait of the karmic priorities in art academies, where voice, subjectivity, and individuality are to be transcended for higher doctoral ambitions. 2. Robert Nelson, “Toward a History of Subjectivity: A Call for the Deconstruction of Rigour,” paper delivered at Art.Media.Design | Writing Intersections conference, Swinburne

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University of Technology, November 18–19, 2009. See conference proceedings, http://​issuu​.com/​ gavinmelles/​docs/​amd​_2009​_fa​, 78–87. 3. See Section 8 of the Seminars.

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Amusing but also tragic for the misalignment of the academy and the disembodied art that it fosters at its most senior level! So, to avoid this treacherous promotional energy, my academy took a considerable step. Over ten years ago, Monash University amended its doctoral criteria to accommodate art. As  at other institutions for a long time, the doctorate at Monash had always been defined as “a substantial contribution to knowledge,” which is still the agreed convention internationally. Our candidates, however, must demonstrate that they make a substantial contribution to culture rather than necessarily a contribution to knowledge. And toward achieving that contribution, we have canvassed various methodologies for advancing studio production as a contribution to culture, so that the research includes material of an artistic or poetic or subjective nature. We maintain this dimension of the research irrespective of the fact that some artists pursue projects which are politicized or collaborative or theorized beyond the object or ideologically constructed in contrast to the personal and the subjective. We certainly cannot claim to have solved all the problems drawn out in the copious discussions throughout the Seminars, because in a sense these are infinite. But from my perspective, the agonies do not seem so oppressive and are greatly outweighed by some memorable and beautiful outcomes. Of course, these good experiences will not be universal throughout the fledgling doctoral programs of the globe, and I understand Marta Edling’s horror on reading some of the cases of art doctorates which “are not for art” and make you feel “really sad.”4 These unhappy outcomes do not surprise me either, because doctoral programs are often constructed awkwardly between methodologies in exactly the way that the Seminars lament, resulting in confused candidates and inartistic studio work. But the history of such mishaps is sure to reveal a suite of anxious methodologies in which the subjectivity of the artist is compromised or betrayed. In the end, our doctoral programs in art will only be useful and productive to the extent that they embrace and fathom conditions that are properly artistic. These will always be matters somehow related to concepts like humor and the poetic, regardless of other priorities and regardless of the rigorous scholarly backdrop that we like to erect around the sensory work. The Seminars, however, have been hugely useful in confirming that many of the necessary artistic conditions are missing from higher-degree programs in various parts of the world.



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4. See Section 9 of the Seminars.

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art education in a mediatized world

Bert Taken and Jeroen Boomgaard

We live in a media-dominated knowledge society. This describes the situation that has prevailed in the Western world for some three decades. The laptop, the Internet, the mobile phone, the scanner and video camera have become integrated into and an extension of our physical and mental way of life. They dictate the way in which we experience and shape the world. At this juncture we exist as mediatized creatures. One of the consequences of the development and dissemination of new technological resources is that we have never before been confronted by and had such easy access to so many images. Technology has created relatively cheap and accessible means of production and reproduction, giving rise to new ways of dealing with visual material and new means of perception. Thanks to this, the social position of the visual arts has been transformed. The visual arts can no longer lay claim to a domain of their own; now, more than ever, they have become part and parcel of consumer culture and the entertainment industry. And this has eroded much of the romantic value and pretensions of the artistic image—in short, it is no longer regarded as the unique and eloquent expression of an extraordinary personality. What it does stand for, and the specific meaning of the artwork in the context of the media society, is no longer clear. However, the Romantic notion of art that still largely predominates in art education excludes a clear grasp of this situation. Art education frequently envisages art in opposition to current society. Art is, for instance, considered the last refuge of social criticism, an exceptional expression of great insight and meaning, the touchstone of social freedom, or even an epiphany of truth and the absolute. The artist is expected to stand on the sidelines of society and, from this secluded domain, comment on the world. Isolation from society is elevated to a condition for developing new insights and wielding actual influence. The idea is that direct involvement in the ins and outs of social practices erodes the critical potential of the artist and compromises the purity of his or her work. Notions such as the art market, entertainment, and popular culture are avoided. They stand for the corruption of the high ideals of art and are barely touched on in art education. The opinions widely held in art education fail to sufficiently articulate the changes that the theory and practice of new media, the interweaving of art and market, and the worldwide spread of popular culture have engendered. The crossing of borders in the arts that has become commonplace, the fusion of “high” and popular culture, and the emergence of new domains such as virtual

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art and artistic research underline the fact that these developments can no longer be considered within the traditional parameters. A theory of the artwork no longer suffices and will need to be replaced, or at least supplemented, by a theory of visual culture and visual experience. Furthermore, the broad arena of “the aesthetic” must become the starting point, which thus includes both experimental and “major” works of art and the artistic expressions of the culture industry and modern media. The aesthetic experience should not be confined to the familiar dimensions of beauty, the sublime, the shocking, and the abject, but will need to treat with the required gravity the reactions that these diverse expressions inspire. The aesthetic is not simply the manifestation of those profound insights and intense feelings; it is also the terrain of the everyday, the exciting, and the banal. It is imperative that current art education sees itself as an explicit part of today’s media culture. In other words, it must take as its starting point the interlacing of contemporary art with the world of commercial and everyday visual production. In contrast to the departure points of the majority of academies, this is second nature to most art students. They combine and mix images and media without applying a specific hierarchy. The author of the images or how they came into being is of little importance. Their interest lies in the eloquence of the images themselves, not their historical or iconic value. The sociocultural and political content of the images is of far greater significance in this process than the formal aspect. What is addressed by or through the image, and how can this be played with? Of course, this does not mean to say that art education should surrender to the commercial and political agenda of the current media world. The acknowledgment that the visual arts have become integral to a broad and all-embracing visual culture and that they must define their position within this does not preclude them from assuming a relatively autonomous standpoint. An artwork can still be a critical factor in the continuous process of producing and circulating images, viewpoints and ideas. We do not mean critical in the radical sense of a total rejection of present-day reality and the design of a utopian reality; this type of critique has been rendered inert by the visual imagination of commercial media. The critical contribution could consist of making visible that which remains invisible or disregarded in the prevailing reality regime. The artist should be the critical conscience of contemporary visual culture, not from a position of splendid isolation but as specialist and stakeholder; not hampered by grand ideals but concrete, direct, and practical. The Modernist quest for the totally new should no longer be the driving force—artists should be driven by the desire to reveal the other and the discrepancies within existing reality. For art education this entails freeing itself of the Romantic, elitist notion of art. If today’s art student wishes to play any significant role as visual specialist, he or she must be immersed in the principles of mass culture, the power of

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the media, communication techniques, the information industry, and the art market. Knowledge of these social forces is equally essential for students who ultimately opt for a studio-based practice as painters. The lack of this knowledge in the curricula of art institutions in the Netherlands is partly attributable to the institutional distinction between colleges of higher education and universities. Art institutions are colleges of higher education; essentially, what this means is that they are institutions that place greater emphasis on the practical and vocational aspect of the program than on the theoretical or scholarly aspect. This applies both to the bachelor’s and master’s programs. Art colleges provide vocational education. Despite attempts at collaboration, colleges of higher education and universities are not natural partners. This is due in part to the art colleges’ suspicion of the way in which universities monopolize their use of knowledge and their fear of the institutional power of these organizations. The art colleges are anxious not to lose the idiosyncratic position that they so cherish. And it is due in part to the difficulty the universities have with the more pragmatic, less academic approach to knowledge in an art college. And yet the developments in the fine arts and in art education appear to necessitate a close interaction between both types of education. The term “knowledge society” refers to the new form of power represented these days by knowledge and technology. Possessing and demonstrating specialized knowledge has become essential in playing an acknowledged and key role in today’s society. Practical know-how and experiential knowledge are no longer enough; knowledge that is weighed and recorded—in short, certified knowledge—is what is desired. Contemporary forms of education are thus all embedded in complicated systems of assessment, norms, and evaluations to confirm and assure their mutual differences. Degrees and certificates create hierarchies and legitimize them. Nor can art education in the Netherlands evade this regulatory power. The relative autonomy that typified this type of education and was based on the idea that an artist’s practice is a calling rather than a profession has been rigorously curbed over recent decades by government guidelines and periodical accreditations. To use a term coined by Foucault, the artist has become a “specific intellectual,” someone who possesses controlled professional knowledge, a specialist in working with visual material and space, a relay in the network of the creative industry. To counter these developments and simultaneously introduce and apply the new position of art in society in the curriculum, the art college will need to be bold enough to open itself to far-reaching discussion. This does not mean that art colleges have no valuable standpoints and qualities to defend; it means that they must pay heed to the changes in the social constellation in which they function, and do so at a deep, fundamental level. They should enthusiastically embrace the potentialities offered by the current situation. The fact that art education is not a part of the university system must be grasped with both hands to create far greater awareness of the “knowledge” generated by art and

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design without falling back on obsolete notions of Romantic and Modernist art discourse. By working with universities, art colleges could become knowledge institutions where research is undertaken both practically and theoretically into (in the words of Jacques Rancière) the “distribution of the sensible” that determines our sociopolitical media world.

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a review

William Conger

The Fellows examined all sides of the question, What Do Artists Know? Their overall aim was to imagine an underlying theory for an art curriculum of necessary integrated skills and knowledge for artists from the undergraduate foundation level through the MFA and emerging PhD in studio practice. As distinguished artists, critics, and theorists, the Fellows are well acquainted with the greatly expanded nature of art practice and artists’ identities in recent decades. They know that a curriculum centered on traditional art-making skills, formalist principles, and art history no longer suffices in an art world being re-formed by theory that melds aesthetics with mass culture, societal critique, and transdisciplinary art practice. They know that art practice itself has no excluded media or skills. They know that the identity of both artist and art cannot be predicted beforehand. They recognize that the paradox of any art curriculum is its promise of expertise in a domain that has no certain dimension or contents. My brief comments respond to the Fellows’ discussion of the emerging PhD in studio practice (already established outside America). I also comment on the MFA and how I think it can be improved (or repaired) by moving some of its topics to the PhD level and replacing them with increased allied field study and studio practice. Finally, I suggest that a new topdown revision of the art curriculum could also improve the BFA. The Artist’s PhD Despite being in place outside America, the studio-based PhD is fraught with problems, mostly centered on the definition of research in or as studio practice. It is one thing to imagine an artist’s PhD as studio practice accompanied by research, a sort of dual activity, but it is more problematic when the practice is also the research and the dissertation is an exhibition of the artist’s subjective practice, as with a body of paintings. So far, the relation between practice and research has not been clarified. After all, what can an exhibition explain or prove in the traditional sense of research? How can it rise above illustrating or explicating a recipe for “art” when everyone knows that art cannot be predetermined? I don’t have uncomplicated answers to those questions, but since the MFA claims to do precisely what the new PhD purports to do—fuse practice with research or skill with theory—but in a much lesser way, it seems reasonable to use the MFA as a skeletal model for the PhD. What this means is that a supervised mix of independent studio practice (or poststudio practice) and research resulting in

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some formal original presentation would be the substance of evidence for the PhD. This matches the templates for PhDs in other disciplines. Hindering the introduction of a PhD in America are of course practical and academic turf objections from teaching MFA artists who don’t want a new layer of credentials devaluing their hard-won positions. Other academics also have difficulty understanding how “applied studio skills” can be construed as research and how theories peculiar to other disciplines like philosophy, sociology, or cognitive science, for example, can become the defining theories of art practice. I think these practical and turf issues can be resolved because the history of academe is the history of “applied” practices becoming transformed into disciplines by theory. Furthermore, all disciplines build their own theories by inhabiting neighboring disciplines and ultimately making themselves necessary neighbors. There’s one ambiguous issue I want to mention. The artist’s PhD is open to criticism and even derision as the symbol of academic and stultified art practice, withdrawn from the marketplace and the raw give-and-take of everyday experience long proven as the sources of Modernist creativity. Obviously the risk exists, and the lessons of the past are always in mind. As we know, today’s art is fully immersed in a marketplace that has become the arbiter of art definition just as the former academy once was. It’s an inversion. Art academe, now far more contentious, self-critical, and independent than ever, has become a haven for experimental art practice and theory, whereas, ironically, the marketplace redefines art practices as monetized aesthetic values. A formal strengthening of art academe with the artist’s PhD can restore a healthy dialectic between the pursuit of art for its own sake and its functions in the wider society and marketplace. The Repaired MFA Artists suspect that the MFA is an increasingly honorific credential and not a signal of masterly knowledge or expertise. Generally, today’s newer MFA artists don’t know much and can’t do much in comparison to the MFA artists of earlier decades, who knew more about less and could do more with studio skills. This is due not to artists becoming less and less curious or capable but to the fact that the typical MFA curriculum is centered on independent practice and talk-theory across a far wider spectrum than was the norm decades ago. The current MFA curriculum assumes too much to be attained in too short a time without much formal instruction or coursework. The gaps between undergraduate education and the typical experience of MFA study are huge and ignored. The fault for this lies with art faculty and administrative efforts to cram PhD-style research activity into a two-year “terminal” MFA. What used to be a fairly hermetic, coherent engagement with art history and skill development within a canonic art field aimed at furthering art and thereby shaping its reception has become a chaotic mixture of self-developed skills, arbitrary deskilling, and a potpourri of esoteric yet scanty theory peeled away from

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varied social-science disciplines and focused on mass culture and often resulting in sheer solipsism. I think it is necessary to restore the MFA to a degree representing advanced and diverse knowledge—meaning informed access to the methods and scope of scholarly and theoretical discourse—for the sake of deepening skills or practices without the premature expectation of a fully developed artist identity. The emphasis would be on coursework and ultimate comprehensive examinations, not a thesis or a thesis exhibition. The restored MFA would prepare an artist for the artist’s PhD or for career practice and undergraduate-level teaching positions. A Note on the Undergraduate Foundation Curriculum As for the undergraduate art curriculum, the Fellows realized that the crux of the issue is a foundation program, a core of rudiments that underlie and thus nurture subsequent study. Although few disputed the value of teaching basic skills like drawing, design, and color theory, nearly all favored “for artists” introductions to art history and allied subjects. It seems odd to advocate a neutral study of formal principles combined with a subjective acquaintance of their historical contexts. I can’t imagine anything worse. At the foundation level, students should be introduced to the methodologies—and techniques—of the fields they study for the sake of acquiring informed access enabling further study and research at advanced levels of their practices. This should also apply to allied field studies such as philosophy, sociology, and other arts and sciences. There are no good pedagogical reasons to distort access to knowledge and skills through subjective “for artists” treatments of study topics. Regarding foundational studio skills, drawing is the most important in my view, not only because it is a natural extension of writing but especially because it engages one directly with the most complex art ideas in culture, the structuring of visuality and explicating with marks what is experienced and seen. At its best and most inclusive, drawing is the study of form. Form as gestalt resists full description or translation into theoretical language. This leads to what to me was the most compelling but least discussed topic in the Institute Seminars, tacit knowledge. It must be true that art practice is intimately engaged in making the tacit explicit, but in the sense that the genuinely tacit is that which is inexplicable. There is something undone and overdone when tacit knowledge is explicated. If theory is seen as the explication of practice by means of words, then one is led to surmise that theory can be a word recipe for practice, a deadly thought. This is too huge an issue for this brief summary, but I am deeply skeptical of any art curriculum that fails to privilege tacit knowledge as the font and inexplicable, yet somatically communicable, essence of art and all art practices. Beyond a preference for foundation rudiments that center on form, initially by means of drawing, and theory by means of survey-type art history and

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philosophy, I am for the greatest possible breadth in the baccalaureate art curriculum. Narrow concentrations should be discouraged. My ideal curriculum would offer different practices—skill-based, studio-based, and poststudio— supported by a neutral approach to allied studies. The breadth of the baccalaureate curriculum is its chief virtue. A Last Note Obviously, my educational background has helped to shape my current views on the artist’s education. Following a BFA in 1960 and four years of day jobs and nighttime studio work, I entered the MFA program at the University of Chicago. In those days the MFA could be earned in a single year if entering reviews proved one was sufficiently prepared. Few students were. My weaknesses were in art history and high reading ability in either French or German. My strengths were painting and a growing record. Although my undergraduate study, split between the SAIC and the University of New Mexico, included plenty of art history (including Kathleen Blackshear’s famous “for artists” course, which I later saw as useless) , a minor in philosophy, and a marginal capability with Spanish, it did not prepare me for the rigorous academic standards and MFA requirements at the University of Chicago. A University Fellowship enabled me to enroll for two full years of study and thereby augment my formal studio experiences and knowledge of art history. The language I chose, German, had to be self-taught with occasional tutors. I was given a weekend job as the graduate studio assistant. I was at the university seven days a week for those two years working alone or in graduate studio courses in painting, printmaking, and drawing, ultimately completing eight art history courses (all of them aimed at future art historians, not artists) and gradually gaining reading skills in German, albeit with enormous difficulty. I pursued a study of anatomy for artists, and this became the topic for my MFA thesis. The thesis work had several components. I presented two exhibitions of work, one of paintings, one of drawings. The drawings were anatomical and were integrated with an expository thesis essay arguing the benefits of anatomical study over systems of proportion. In addition, I wrote two art-historical essays presenting my original research on the development of art anatomy in late archaic Greek sculpture and early Italian Renaissance art. I then completed a four-hour written examination based on Ralph Mayer’s Artist’s Handbook of Materials and Techniques. Finally, on my second attempt, I earned the required “high pass” on the German reading examination. I want to add that there were no studio critiques during my MFA study and no “art theory” talk beyond informal conversations with artists and teachers. I earned the MFA in 1966 and began a forty-year teaching career as an artist.

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the common denominator

Anders Dahlgren

It seems to me that artistic research is a concept that is as open to interpretation as art itself.1 When surveying the artistic research discourse, one finds multiple suggestions about what to call it, and endless alternatives on how to define its essentials. As James Elkins points out,2 a closer look at the MFA shows a similar lack of consensus. The MFA has been around for quite some while, but artistic research is surely a relatively new field, and therefore this state of uncertainty is understandable. Thomas  S. Kuhn’s term “the preparadigmatic period” can be successfully used to explain the confusion and disparate opinions about what artistic research is.3 The preparadigmatic period occurs, according to Kuhn, before a solid research practice is established. This is a time characterized by uncertainty, experimentation, and heavy debate about fundamental concepts regarding the emerging scientific paradigm. Kuhn writes, “No wonder, then, that in the early stages of the development of any science different men confronting the same kind of phenomena . . . describe and interpret them in different ways.”4 One can discuss to what extent Kuhn’s paradigm theory, constructed to describe the development of the natural sciences, is appropriate to be applied on artistic research. However, his description of the preparadigmatic period is spot on when transferred to our field. I agree with Christopher Csikszentmihályi that when talking about artistic research, we should keep in mind that science is a human “activity” that takes place in a historical and social context.5 I will not dwell on the similarities between science and artistic research, but just note that artistic research is in a preparadigmatic state. Perhaps this state is not transient, but constant, as in the case of the MFA. If this proves true, that this field will never establish a research paradigm, then I wonder: can we find something that the proponents of this emerging field agree about, a common denominator among the arguments advocating artistic research? When  I started to study the discourse about artistic research in Sweden, I was struck by the disparate notions about the nature of the artistic version of 1. In addition to sources cited below and elsewhere in this book, see Mike Bode and Staffan Schmidt, Off the Grid (Göteborg: Valand School of Fine Arts, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts, University of Gothenburg, 2008), http://​hdl​.handle​.net/​2077/​20342; “Employability,” http://​www​.ond​.vlaanderen​.be/​ hogeronderwijs/​bologna/​actionlines/​employability​ .htm; Mika Hannula, “Catch Me if You Can— Chances and Challenges of Artistic Research,” http://​gupea​.ub​.gu​.se/​handle/​2077/​21781; and Johan Öberg, “Introduction,” http://​gupea​.ub​ .gu​.se/​handle/​2077/​21773 (all URLs accessed

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March 25, 2010). The last two articles were published in ArtMonitor, a series of publications and a periodical published by the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg. 2. See Section 8 of the Seminars. 3. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, third edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 96. 4. Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 17. 5. See Section 9 of the Seminars.

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the PhD. My first reaction was that this is impossible to write about. There is no theoretical or methodological fundament or tradition to cling to. The situation is similar to the one described in the Seminar discussion about Thierry de Duve’s third stage, where attitude plays an integral role as a conceptual reference point. As such, it is not very productive or generative, because, as William Marotti points out, “Attitude is described as a zero degree, a neutral point, a tautology: it is the inverse of creativity. It is a nothing.”6 This zero point is present for the artistic researchers as well as for we who study it on a meta-level. Very few of the artistic doctoral theses relate to other work in the field, which makes every dissertation appear an isolated phenomenon. But after a while, having engaging with the writing about artistic research, I started to see a pattern. I began to form an idea about the common denominator of artistic research. One argument, maybe the only one, that the advocates of artistic research seem to agree upon is that artists today, for the sake of the art, need an artistic free zone, a sanctuary freed from the commercial chains of the art market. This free zone is a space liberated from all kinds of rules, as in Frances Whitehead’s statement: “Artists do not think outside the box: there is no box.”7 Two Swedish artistic researchers, Mike Bode and Staffan Schmidt, write in their doctoral thesis that “artistic research needs the authority of academia, in order to find a place and viable future other than the art market, and even in artworld institutions.”8 This argument, that artistic PhD programs within the university will create a space for a much needed free zone, can be found in many texts.9 The institutional critique seems long gone, even though, as William Marotti points out, many people within the art world and art departments are anxious about this institutionalization of the art.10 Maybe this anxiety is expressed in the common denominator, which is not so much an epistemological foundation or argument as it is a culture political argument, and as such it is surely not a new one. The cultural-political argument I am talking about is built on the opinion that art production is a sensitive business that needs to be protected. The economic pressure the art market puts on artists limits their possibilities of creating interesting art. As I see it, artistic research is an opportunity to and an excuse for consolidating the autonomy of the fine art departments within the university. This idea, of establishing institutions in order to protect certain idealistic values, is hardly new. We can find it in the German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1767–1835) thoughts on the organization of the university. For him it was of great importance that the state not meddle in the internal affairs of the university or place any demands on it. The state’s role was to be solely that of financier, like a patron who could enjoy the fruits of its idealistic investment. Thus, the Humboldt University in Berlin was founded upon principles such as Lehrfreihet, that the university teachers should be free to teach classes in whatever they 6. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 7. See Section 5 of the Seminars. 8. Bode and Schmidt, Off the Grid. 9. See, e.g., Öberg, “Introduction,” 10; or Hannula, “Catch Me if You Can,” 111. 10. See Section 9 of the Seminars.

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found appropriate, and Lernfreiheit, meaning that each student should have the freedom to find his own way in the education system. Freedom and autonomy were also one of the arguments for establishing the first Renaissance academies in Italy. One objective of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, founded in 1563, was to distance itself from the commercially oriented art market and workshop tradition. Its financial independence was guaranteed by the patronage of perhaps the most powerful man of the time, Cosimo di Medici.11 Since the Renaissance strong patrons have played an integral part in the foundation of academies, and in many cases the financial support has come from the royal families. Such was the case with, for example, L’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris (Louis XIV) and the Royal Academy of Arts in London (George III). In the writings of Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), one of the most influential artists and theoreticians of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, we can find arguments for the establishment of an institution that, like Humboldt’s arguments, stress the importance of autonomy: “An institution like this has often been recommended upon considerations merely mercantile; but an Academy, founded upon such principles, can never effect even its own narrow purposes. If it has no origin higher, no taste can ever be formed in manufactures; but if the higher Arts of Design flourish, these inferior ends will be answered of course.”12 Even though the historical academies were founded to house these free zones, sheltered from the pressures of the art market, they are seldom referred to in the discussions about artistic research or about the new fine arts departments that are taking shape in universities all over the globe. The reason for this may be that the historical academies are still too strongly associated with the intolerance and exclusion implied in academic doctrine, which was thrown over in the twentieth century by the Modernist avant-garde. Seen in the light of development of the Bologna Accords in Europe, where words like “employability” play a central role, the discussion about artistic research as a free zone seems to give voice to an idealistic counterculture.13 It is here that we find the common denominator of artistic research. The epistemological and organizational issues still remain to be solved, but the idealistic foundation for this project relies on the culturalpolitical belief that art needs a free zone in contemporary society, a belief that has deep historical roots in Western culture and philosophy. If this idealistic free-zone argument is the common denominator, then one can wonder whether it will ever be possible to define or formulate a strict curriculum for artistic research or to find even the slightest consensus about “a general theory of pictorial meaning” that James Elkins asks for.14 To do that would be to conceptually relate to the tradition of the academies, a tradition in which knowledge is accumulated and built upon previously acquired knowledge, in a 11. Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16–17. 12. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, edited by Robert R. Wark (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1959), 13.

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13. “Employability,” http://​www​.ond​ .vlaanderen​.be/​hogeronderwijs/​bologna/​ actionlines/​employability​.htm (accessed March 25, 2010). 14. See Section 9 of the Seminars.

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way quite similar to the structure of the Seminar discussion where the levels of art education are dealt with chronologically. As Christopher Frayling notes, this tradition is not possible to combine with the Modernist doctrine of the art world today, that artists must be free.15 Many people in the art world would like to see the artistic PhD as a step toward establishing an artistic free zone, with the university just happening to be the institution to host it.



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15. See Section 2 of the Sminars.

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thoughts on the seminars

Michael Fotiadis

I tend to be theoretical in my papers, at least where circumstances allow. In such cases, writing becomes for me a process of discovery: by the end of writing (if an end it is), I have learnt something that I did not know when I started; concepts have rearranged themselves in my mind in ways I did not anticipate, and something that was originally a mere irritation, a conceptual difficulty that I was inclined to push aside, has proven itself to be a symptom of an issue far more significant than the one I set out to explore. Needless to emphasize, exercises of the sort entail critical attention on the very apparatus of thought, that is, reflexivity. In practical terms, this takes the form of a search for the right words in the right order. Now, I would have no reason to go into this if I did not think that my way of engaging with writing in the occasional happy moment may bear crucial analogies with the visual artist’s work: just as writing is for me a process of discovery, so too working on a piece can for the artist be a process of discovery. I may of course be wholly mistaken here, so I put the above thought up for discussion. But suppose my idea is not entirely lacking in merit, that artists indeed are as reflexive and theoretical in their work as I can occasionally be in mine (bear in mind that “artists . . . are theory”1) and that, as in my case, they come up with discoveries, that is, they produce knowledge, in fact new knowledge. Does this mean that artists are in the business of knowledge (re)production? That their brief is (or should be), like mine, to preserve previously established knowledge (by passing it on to the young and thus preventing it from falling into oblivion, and also safeguarding it from the encroachment of fringe theories2) and, at the same time, to pursue the production of new knowledge? I strongly doubt it. In fact, I would never need to raise such an issue were it not for the existence of several official documents of recent, twenty-first-century, vintage, issued by academic associations/consortia, by states, and by supranational organizations,3 which mention knowledge and its production through research as essential dimensions of the artist’s education—or, indeed, of the artist’s definition. In short, I join forces here with the Seminar participants, all of whom maintain a skeptical, critical stance vis-à-vis those initiatives. Like them, I too, however, fear that the initiatives are not about to be abandoned, that artists applying for grants 1. See Schmidt-Wulffen in Section 1 of the Seminars. 2. See the discussion of “known” knowledge by Frances Whitehead in this volume, and see too, on the observation that it takes a good deal of work in order to maintain established

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knowledge in its place, Bruno Latour, “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, edited by Lorraine Daston, 247–69 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 3. See Sections 8 and 9 of the Seminars.

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some time from now may have to fill boxes with headings such as “Presumable contribution to knowledge” or “Research methods.” Somewhat different seems to me the case of the PhD as a terminal degree for artists. In rapidly growing economies with no shortage of job opportunities, the PhD may be dispensable even in fields for which elsewhere is regarded absolutely essential.4 And so, even if you made a perfectly intellectual argument in favor of a PhD in art, the argument would be suspect, or at least of secondary significance, for the establishment of new, ever higher degrees in any field plays into concerns well beyond that of knowledge acquisition. In the end, like Frances Whitehead, I suspect that the establishment of PhD programs in art caters in the first place to the concerns of the education industry.5 How many, for instance, of those two thousand or so students enrolled in programs leading to a PhD in art in the UK in 2003 were foreigners? But let me return to the artist’s knowledge and eventually to reflexivity. Let us say that the emergence of knowledge talk with reference to the artist’s work has been significantly conditioned by the retreat of formerly key notions— creativity, individuality, innovation, etc.—notions that, for a good part of the twentieth century, virtually monopolized our speaking about, and understanding of, art and the artist’s identity.6 Yet I wonder: is not knowledge talk, this novel gloss concerning the sign of the artist, equally opaque, just as problematic as the time-honored tropes of artistic creativity, individuality, and the like? Or, on the contrary, do we think that we understand knowledge better than we understand creativity, at least insofar as the former can be cast in articulate, propositional language and can thus be scrutinized by various methods? (But here we run into an army of difficulties, of the sort brought up by objections to Roy Sorensen’s remarks.7) Or—a darker thought—if we think we understand knowledge better than creativity, is this only because our thinking about the former is still harnessed to Lockean forms of empiricism, which abstract knowledge from the pathways—operations, equipment, institutions, etc.—along which it emerges as ephemeral nodes and which sever it from all its associations with power, and thus make it more digestible?8 Most participants in the Seminars did well to distance themselves from such Lockean, analytical, language-centered understandings of knowledge and to mobilize instead more insightful alternatives. My own objection above to those analytical understandings is not that they do not work well for approaching artistic knowledge (which they do not!) but rather that they do not do justice to 4. See the editorial “Do Scientists Really Need a PhD?,” Nature, March 4, 2010, 7; and responses in Nature, April 8, 2010, 831. 5. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 6. Cf. Schmidt-Wulffen in Section 1 of the Seminars. Personally, I remain skeptical about this “conditioning.” I would be more satisfied with a sociological rather than a culturalist explanation. 7. See Section 4 of the Seminars. 8. See Bruno Latour, “A Textbook Case Revisited—Knowledge as a Mode of Existence,”

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in The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, third edition, edited by Edward J. Hackett et al., 83–112 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). For Locke’s contention that language and, in effect, knowledge can be disembedded from both nature and society, see Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31–52.

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disciplinary knowledge in general. They take no account of the hybrid character of such knowledge, of the fact that this knowledge is constituted in collectives that include multifarious agents, human and nonhuman, institutional and individual, nor do they take account of the fact that such collectives have a temporal dimension (they transform themselves in time, as agents drop out and new ones join in), that knowledge is ever emergent. To this (heavily pruned version of ) Latourian wisdom I only wish to add that disciplinary knowledge derives its authority not so much from the rationality of the procedures by which it is produced (by being a “solid” construct) as from the fact that it is produced in institutions that embody the authority of the state (or a suprastate political organization). When, for example, I declare to a student that the Yeti (of Himalayan fame) is not a creature of evolution but a pure fiction, the voice is not mine but that of an institution that draws its authority from its association with the state. I am saying, then, that the ultimate source of the authority of disciplinary knowledge is the state, and, in any case, the source of such authority is external to disciplinary knowledge itself. What I have yet to clear my mind about is the extent to which the same applies to the artist’s knowledge as it is embodied in his or her works. It seems to me that the state in the present has a lesser role there, and that capital, banks and the like (still, external sources!), are more crucial.9 But I also think that the artist’s education may still be exempt from the directives of global capitalism. Again, I stand to be corrected in the matter. Last, a word about reflexivity: “it isn’t a fix,” Jim Elkins suggests; “a fair number of art practices depend on more or less insufficient levels of self-reflexivity.”10 Since I have a great respect for the power of reflexivity and for folks who practice it (see my opening paragraph), I puzzle about Elkins’s remarks: is he thinking of the rare charismatic individual who successfully performs his or her part while entirely unselfconscious of the forces operative on the self? But we do not teach such charismatic folks. It is another matter how you can teach reflexivity, but it seems to me that if you live around reflexive folks (if the institution where you study is staffed with such reflexive teachers), I bet some part of their reflexive practice will spill onto you.

9. The exhibit Macht zeigen: Kunst als Herrschaftsstrategie in the Deutsches Historisches Museum (2010) nicely bears this point out. 10. See Section 7 of the Seminars.

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when art turns its back on the body

Tom McGuirk

Universities are not devoted to the production and distribution of fundamental knowledge in general. They are institutions committed, for the most part, to a particular epistemology, a view of knowledge that fosters selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry. —donald schön

One of the more intriguing issues to emerge from the discussions at the Institute concerns the meaning of deskilling, particularly its significance for the constitution of fine art as a discipline within the broader framework of the university. This discussion emanated principally from a consideration of Howard Singerman’s text, more specifically his assertion—taking a lead from Thierry de Duve—that “in contemporary art and art schools, the frame and the field of work have become precisely the métier, the craft skills with which work is made, as well as the site where it is produced.”1 In other words, where once technical and craft skills essential to métier were taught, now what is taught in art schools is “consciousness of the field”2 as well as associated theoretical, formal, and strategic skills. Deskilling and the “Temporal Realm” Deskilling, formerly a Modernist tactic—to purge students of recidivist academic tendencies—ought now, according to Singerman, be understood as integral to such reconstitution of the field. James Elkins, in an insightful aside, points out that Singerman’s conflation of the craft skills of métier with these more strategic skills might provide some insight regarding “the value placed in the university and in disciplines.”3 It does precisely that. Thomas Kuhn suggests that “sometimes just its reception of a paradigm . . . transforms a group previously interested merely in the study of nature into a profession or, at least, a discipline.”4 Singerman’s is no mere analogy drawn between skills from different domains; it is rather the identification of (and a lament for) just such a fundamental alteration. De Duve acknowledges this shift to a new “radically, relativistic . . . orthodoxy,” outlining its trajectory from an academic and modernist concern with The epigraph is from Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983), vii. 1. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 212.

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2. Singerman, Art Subjects, 212. 3. See page 94, this volume. 4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 19.

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métier and medium to the contemporary concern with “practice.”5 More importantly, “practice” is, in this context, conceived of in a manner that, as he puts it, “puts the emphasis on the social” as opposed to “the technical division of labour.”6 This is a highly significant point, as it highlights two important aspects of this paradigm shift: the degree to which the reconceptualizing of the field of art is founded in the sociocultural or “temporal” realm and the commensurate degree to which it entails a rejection of those practical, physical, embodied, and specifically manual skills once regarded as integral to the production of art. Bourdieu, Singerman tellingly points out, recognizes the extraordinary degree to which this applies to the artistic field: “never has the very structure of the field been present so practically in every act of production.”7 Discipline and Disciplining Bourdieu—ever sensitive to the power play in and between fields and disciplines—also emphasizes the centrality of this temporal, indeed territorial, aspect with regard to the negotiation of cultural and scientific capital. A discipline, he points out, is not solely defined by its “intrinsic properties,” but also by “properties it owes to its position in the (hierarchized) space of disciplines.” As he puts it, “One of the most important principles of differentiation among the disciplines is the size of the capital of collective resources it has accumulated (in particular, theoretical-formal resources). . . . There are two principles of differentiation/hierarchization among disciplines, the temporal principle and the strictly scientific principle.”8 The skills of métier may heretofore have constituted “intrinsic properties” of the field of fine art. However, in the adjustments both de  Duve and Singerman outline, the “temporal principle” comes to the fore. One reason for this is elucidated by Bourdieu in his identification of an “asceticism” inherent in what he calls the “scholastic disposition,” involving a “repression” of appetites and “deferment” of satisfaction.9 He sees this as a factor in the “intellectualist divorce” of “soul and body (or understanding and sensibility)” whereby “the intellect [is] seen as superior, and the body [is] seen as inferior”; this tendency is in turn “rooted in the social division between the economic world and the world of symbolic production.”10 This particular aspect of disciplines and “disciplining” is also highlighted by James Clifford: “Disciplining . . . is not only a matter of defining scholarly territories, research topics, and analytic methods—the ‘content’ of a discipline. The term evokes older traditions of normative training and ascetic practice that take modern form in pastoral and governmental institutions, including the university.”11 Bourdieu makes it clear that

5. Thierry de Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude—and Beyond,” in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, edited by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 29. 6. De Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude,” 29. 7. Singerman, Art Subjects, 212.

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8. Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 66. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 23. 10. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 23. 11. James Clifford, “Rearticulating Anthropology,” in Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle:

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this asceticism has its origins in what has been described as a “horror materialis” evident in “seventeenth-century rationalist discourse,” which Catherine Wilson sees as “marked by a Platonic-Augustinian effort to transcend and repudiate embodiment.”12 This is in keeping with Bourdieu’s analysis of the “scholastic view” as a “distant and distinctive relation to words and things.” It is a “disposition” which is fundamentally antagonistic to métier owing to both its essential “indifferen[ce] to context and practical ends”13 and by a fundamental antagonism towards the body. It is hardly surprising, then, that, as Edward Levine points out, a prerequisite for the “disciplining” of the field of fine art is the development of a “theoretical thrust” without which “it will be relegated to the status of craft.”14 Singerman also acknowledges this impetus in a reference to Ian Burn’s assertion that under the influence of the conceptual turn, “disciplinary practice” within fine art education promotes the “separation of mental or intellectual work from manual work, with a revaluing of the intellectual and a devaluing of the manual.” Indeed, Singerman sees this agenda as “one of the goals of the university.”15 The Valorization of Theory Jonathan Dronsfield—pace Singerman—critiques Levine’s view that only theory can provide the requisite “metacritical viewpoint”16 needed to “fully circumscribe the limits of a discipline.” Dronsfield suggests that this has the effect of reinforcing “the hierarchization of theory over practice” because this “doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that practice can attain the same viewpoint, therefore . . . only theory can fully circumscribe the limits of a discipline.”17 This attitude is reflected in official policy, particularly in the UK, as witnessed in Fiona Candlin’s critique of the UKCGE report Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design,18 specifically its stance regarding practice-based PhDs. She characterizes it as “privileg[ing] theory over artwork since it is the theoretical component of the doctorate that gives the work PhD standing.” She recognizes that this has the effect of “outlaw[ing] those candidates whose doctoral research is practice only” and of making “the place of art practice an ambivalent one within doctoral study.”19 Saul Ostrow also recognizes this dualistic tendency, citing both Bourdieu and Dewey as cognizant of it as constantly acting on the culture. Dewey saw its origins in the Greek disenchantment with custom in which practice shared a Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology, edited by Daniel A. Segal and Silvia J. Yanagisako (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 24. 12. Catherine Wilson, “Discourses of Vision in Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics,” in Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy, edited by David Michael Levin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 119–22. 13. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 13. 14. Edward Levine, “Vision and Its Medium,” Art Journal 42, no. 1 (1982): 41, quoted in Singerman, Art Subjects, 200.

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15. Singerman, Art Subjects, 207. 16. Levine, “Vision and Its Medium,” 41, quoted in Singerman, Art Subjects, 199. 17. See Section 8 of the Seminars. 18. Christopher Frayling et al., Practice-Based Doctorates in the Creative and Performing Arts and Design (Lichfield: UK Council for Graduate Education, 1997). 19. Fiona Candlin, “Practice-Based Doctorates and Questions of Academic Legitimacy,” International Journal of Art and Design Education 19, no. 1 (2000): 98.

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“philosophic depreciation.” The result was “to magnify, in higher education, all the methods and topics which involved the least use of sense-observation and bodily activity.”20 Social Division As the root of this fraught discourse Bourdieu identifies a profound “social division” rooted in class. In a memorable passage he observes that, “through oppositions like that between theory and practice, the whole social order is present in the very way that we think about that order.”21 Dewey touches the nub of this conflict through an examination of a “metaphysical division” of means and ends. Practice conceived of as métier in art and design cannot avoid the messy universe of means. The “scholastic disposition,” however, spurns means. Theory is all about neatly packageable ends, literally ends in themselves, unsullied by means. As Dewey puts it, “Means are menial, subservient, slavish; and ends liberal and final; things as means testify to inherent defect, to dependence, while ends testify to independent and intrinsically selfsufficing being. Hence the former can never be known in themselves but only in their subordination to objects that are final, while the latter can be known in and through themselves by self-enclosed reason. Thus the identification of knowledge with esthetic contemplation and the exclusion from science of trial, work, manipulation and administration of things, comes full circle.”22 Métier is inexorably wedded to the category of means. However, the “scholastic” disposition requires, in Bourdieu’s reading, a “sublimation” of “the material dimensions of [its] symbolic practices.”23 He puts this down to a species of “academic aristocratism”24 that demands an exclusion from “scholastic universes” of the base means that constitute practice unless it be, as it were, by the tradesman’s entrance. With regard to the continued expansion of the PhD within fine art, Saul Ostrow acknowledges in the text that “it would be foolish to speak about [the PhD] without speaking about capital. By expanding the idea of research, we gain territory and power.”25 Alert to the dominant role of science, Bourdieu recognizes that these are not the only gains; the adoption of the terminology of science also accrues cultural/scientific capital. The superior status of science is evident, he tells us, in, for example, the way quantum physics has “been set up as the sole model of scientificity, in the name of a social privilege converted into an epistemological privilege.”26 This “epistemological privilege” is recognized by Singerman when he suggests that for contemporary art practice, whether within or outside of the university, “the system of rewards depends almost entirely on disciplinary procedures, 20. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, in The Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 9, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), 285. 21. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 83. 22. John Dewey, Experience and Nature, second edition (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1929;

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repr., Berkeley, CA: McCutchen Press, 2008), 124. 23. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 23. 24. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 25. 25. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 26. Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 65.

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on the rereading and reshaping of historicized positions and practices as they inform the field in the present; that is, the system of rewards in art is that of most of the humanities in the university as they are cast in the image of science.”27 The Body In The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson traces a history of distrust of the body in mainstream Western epistemological discourse. Johnson claims that the Analytical tradition, for example, effectively brackets emotive meaning as “noncognitive,” retaining “an exclusive focus on the conceptual/propositional as the only meaning that mattered for our knowledge of the world. . . . Emotive meaning had no place in science or any allegedly rigorous, empirically testable modes of knowing.”28 By contrast, Johnson extols the role of the body in meaning and knowing, specifically with regard to art. He points out that second-generation cognitive science now supports the thesis that “meaning is shaped by the nature of our bodies, especially our sensorimotor capacities and our ability to experience feelings and emotions.”29 Theorists as diverse as Martin Heidegger, Dewey, and Bourdieu are alive to the fact that the body asserts itself in epistemological terms through physically engaged and situated practice. Heidegger argues that “the kind of care that manipulates things and puts them to use . . . has its own kind of knowledge.”30 The valorization of conceptual/propositional knowledge represents for him a regrettable and unjustifiable “absolutization of the theoretical.”31 The Pragmatist and Phenomenologist schools share remarkably similar objections to this dualistic epistemological stance, which as we have seen is deeply embedded within what Bourdieu refers to as the (hierarchized) space of disciplines” that is the university.32 This makes these philosophical stances more amenable to a more active, engaged, and situated understanding of knowledge. Conclusion Ways of knowing that are practical, situated, and embodied have traditionally been valued, validated, and supported in higher education in fine art and design. However, as we have seen, since the early 1960s a number of sociopolitical and broader cultural developments have impacted the status of such knowledge, with the result that it has become less and less a core concern. The phenomenon of the “disciplining” of fine art, outlined above, continues apace and is accelerated with the embedding of the PhD within the disciplinary structure. The question 27. Singerman, Art Subjects, 195. 28. Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 9. 29. Johnson, Meaning of the Body, 9. 30. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 95.

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31. Ted Sadler, Heidegger and Aristotle: The Question of Being (London: Athlone, 1996), 128. 32. Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 66.

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arises as to the appropriateness of this trend, which a number of contributors to the Institute’s discussions have recognized as having a conservative aspect. William Marotti, for example, suggests that “this repurposing of ‘deskilling’ is inherently conservative. Listen to it long enough and you’d think the students have their hands broken and their brains washed by maniacal academicians.”33 In a metaphorical note at the end of his book, Singerman draws an analogy in order to elucidate the significance of the paradigm shift that marks the disciplining of art in the university. He suggests that “the flattened bounded visual field of the Bauhaus has become the professional field, the field in which one positions oneself in relation.”34 A quarter of a century ago Rosalind Krauss commented on another Bauhaus device, the grid, describing its dominance in late twentieth-century painting as “what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.”35 It might legitimately be argued that under a new dispensation the art emanating from the reconstituted “discipline” of fine art—that “flattened” art which Singerman by turns both critiques and celebrates—may yet present us with what art looks like when it turns its back on the body.

33. See Section 6 of the Seminars. 34. Singerman, Art Subjects, 212. 35. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 9.

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kant’s assumption what the artist knows and the phd for visual artists

George Smith

If we believe Plato, the artist knows and represents nothing but lies. Not only that, but such lies make men cry—make them act, that is, like women. Aristotle replies, in effect, “The artist knows less than the philosopher, that I grant you. But it’s also true that the artist knows more than the historian, because [his] mimetic representations are universal, whereas the historian’s facts are particular.” Always the pragmatist, Aristotle takes Plato’s binary of the ideal/real and sets up knowledge as a working hierarchy: philosophy = high; art = middle; history = low. Hence begins one of the main dialectical histories of Western epistemology—with the science of philosophy always already in first position and art and history endlessly fighting it out for second place. But it is Plato’s original point about mimesis as the artist’s representation of lies that sets up the key aesthetic dialectic between truth and art—not to mention the ever-enduring relationship between aesthetics and misogyny. (Aristotle in the Poetics equates women and slaves, as if to assure Plato that whatever their differences on art, they’re a match when it comes to patriarchy.) In much of aesthetics, then, part of the game is to mollify Plato’s unbending law of the pure forms, to somehow reconcile the artist’s representation of art—of mimesis—with ideal truth. Toward that end, Aristotle’s tragedy purifies the soul and thus supplies the playgoer an instance of Plato’s Idea. Aristotle’s catharsis hardly lasts forever, though (otherwise, to see one tragedy would be to purify the soul for a lifetime), and comes nowhere near equivalency with eternal truth. Nor is that Aristotle’s intention. He merely wants to prove art’s moral efficacy in relation to the state. Of course, Aristotle’s case never quite sticks, at least not to everyone’s liking, and numerous other attempts to extend or assuage Plato’s moral objections to the artist swell the aesthetic record, including Plotinus, Aquinas, Spenser, Shaftesbury, Winckelmann. Even after Baumgarten’s formalization of aesthetics, when the focus turns more narrowly to the art viewer’s taste, there continues, certainly in Lessing and Diderot, a persistent if sometimes latent worry about what the artist knows. Morality, the good, ethics, representation, mimesis: whenever in aesthetics terms such as these come to the fore, behind them will likely hover book 10 of the Republic. In the first Modernist answer to the Platonic indictment, Kant, as we know, separates form from content, and in form he locates Plato’s universal truth, that is, beauty, freedom, the moral good. Content, in its ideological particularity and cultural specificity, he all but dismisses as beside art’s point. As far as Kant is concerned, the fact that the beautiful palace was conceived and built under the rule of aristocracy has nothing to do with the question of beauty and truth; what

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counts is the design, the form. And the artist capable of such design, the artist who conceives universal truth through the invention and the creation of original form, is the artist who disregards or breaks existing formal laws and makes new ones for (him)self. This artist, whom Shelley designates “the unacknowledged legislator of the world” (and whom a century later Pound rallies around the Modernist battle cry, “Make it new!”), is, according to Kant, none other than the genius. And Kant assumes that of necessity this genius knows philosophy. Nevertheless, in perfect keeping with Aristotle’s dialectic, Kant is quick to add that while the true artist is a genius, it is the scientist, the philosopher, who is endowed with the highest and most powerful of human mind. I traipse this well-trod ground partly to remind ourselves that we are still debating the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle on the question of what the artist knows. From Kant we can fast-forward to Wilde’s charming lament on “The Decay of Lying,” which turns Plato upside down and leaves the artist in possession of knowledge as the Platonic good. From Wilde there is a short stride to Fry, Bell, and Croce, each appealing for the artist as Keatsian knower of beauty and truth, at least implicitly. And from Croce there is but a step to Greenberg, who in the pure form of Jackson Pollock finds a more perfect answer to Plato’s charge against mimesis. For the other side—the side, that is, that has little or no use for Plato’s eternal forms—I posit Freud as giving rise to Duchamp; and from Duchamp it is a quick hop and skip to Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Craig Owens, Krauss, Butler, and so on. As much as anything else, the poststructuralists are deliberately or unconsciously talking about Oedipus the King in variation of Aristotle’s fear and pity. But now, truth appears as phenomenological deconstruction. This epistemological development is usually attributed to Heidegger. But who if not Oedipus was the first seeker of truth to demonstrate phenomenology as a method of deconstruction? And so maybe it’s better to say that poststructuralism stems not from Heidegger but from what the artist knows—namely, from Sophocles. We can quibble about the wobbly line I have drawn between pure mind and corporal experience, idealism and empiricism. But my more pressing point is to call for a return to Kant—not to genius, certainly, nor to form over content, but to the assumption that the artist will know philosophy. And why return to Kant in this respect? For the simple reason that a work of art is the concrete representation of a philosophical abstraction, and given her task of producing philosophical discourse as visual form, it follows that the artist should be trained in philosophy, as Kant well knew. Were it to get us finally out from under the dialectics of knowledge and aesthetics, the philosophical education of the artist would necessarily entail the philosophy of history, but also the study of history per se: the history of art, yes; but as importantly, the history of ideas, the history of science, and the geopolitical history of the state, as these histories mix with the history of art. Might we then expect philosophy to tumble from its rigged position at the top of epistemology?—that Aristotle’s phallo-perpendicular, pseudodialectical hierarchy of knowledge would at last give way to rhyzomatic and dialogical relations among history, art, and philosophy?

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If these seem like big, empty hopes, let’s not forget that a powerful and effective challenge to the intersecting dialectics of epistemology and aesthetics has already advanced from the likes of Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Ann Hamilton, Cindy Sherman, and more recently, Kara Walker. Others come to mind: Krzysztof Wodiczko and Marina Abramović, and Vito Acconci, David Driskell, Fred Wilson, and Liam Gillick. Each is an artist-philosopher, and the road these artists shared to that distinction was and remains closed to traffic. To quote Krzysztof Wodiczko, “When in the beginning of my artistic life I needed to prepare myself for the multiple task of becoming an artist, a researcher, a theorist, a writer, and an educator—an opportunity to do so did not exist.”1 The condition Wodiczko describes has been generally the case since the advent of Modernism. Specialization has segregated the artist from the study of philosophy. Be that as it may, the Modernist age, the age of specialization—the age that Habermas could not let go of—is fast receding. What comes in its wake, announced in Lyotard, is the recognition that the old paradigms will not serve contemporary thought, precisely insofar as we dare to think beyond hierarchy, beyond patriarchy. That the philosopher knows and the artist makes is one rule of specialization on its way out. This fast-accelerating trend is plainly indicated by the growing number of philosophers and self-taught artist-philosophers who belie epistemological dominance and foredoom patriarchal aesthetics. Which brings me to the PhD for visual artists. Educational innovators in the United States should envision more than one kind of PhD for visual artists. For starters, a good range would be a PhD in studio, a PhD in studio and theory, and a PhD in theory and philosophy. As for the current American rhetoric about an MFA being equivalent to a PhD and about the studio faculty enjoying the same status as the academic faculty: why do we train our artists for two years and our biologists, our physicists, our English professors, and our philosophy professors for a minimum of five? To put it in terms of a cash nexus, why do we spend on average $60,000 to train artists to teach college- and graduate-level studio and $150,000 to train classroom academics? I grant you, my $30,000 per annum average cost amounts to a roughly calculated guess; but the cost ratio—two to five—stands as a fair estimate. If art is valued less than the liberal arts, that is because we teach it more cheaply. The correlative is that whatever the cheapness of our visual culture, so the cheapness of our cultural consciousness. To keep this economy going, we keep the artist less educated than the philosopher. And we associate the artist with beauty and the sublime, but not with philosophical thought. What we will not stand for is the idea that the artist’s representation of the beautiful and the sublime constitutes philosophy. Nor will we educate artists well enough to establish the artist-philosopher as an abiding principle and a cultural fact. More and more, though, we are seeing propitious signs to the contrary, most especially in the PhD for visual artists.

1. From a letter to the author, published in ArtForum, November 2006, 226.

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what might artists learn from architects?

Martin Søberg

As was observed during the 2009 Stone Summer Seminars, there seems to be conceptual, epistemological chaos surrounding the new studio-based PhD programs in art, especially concerning the use of the term “knowledge.” Perhaps to help address this chaos, it would be advantageous to look to related artistic fields. My simple question in what follows is, What might artists learn from architects? I will point to some aspects of possible interest for further inquiry. Architects are as confused as artists when it comes to conducting systematic and reflected academic investigations based on specific architectural methods, whether such work is termed practice-based research, research by architectural design, artistic research, or artistic development work. The concepts overlap and are ill-defined; a taxonomy most certainly does not exist. Accordingly, assessment has proven very difficult when elements of design and artistic practice are introduced as part of research. Discussions of what is specifically architectural about architectural research have been around at least since the 1970s, but transparency in terms of methods and lines of thought is still lacking. The dichotomy between “artistic” and “scientific” measures is profound, and to a certain degree it reflects the fact that schools of architecture are generally situated either in universities or atelier-based academies. At my own institution, the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, attempts to deal with these issues have been made, and research is divided into the categories of scientific research and artistic development work. Both categories may function as the basis for doctoral projects and are often mixed and work from both categories is assessed as genuine research. But comprehensible standard definitions are by and large absent, and the few Danish schools of architecture do not yet fully agree on research criteria. The question of how meaning is embodied in visual expression is as difficult to handle in architecture as in art. As with studio-based artistic research (again, this awkward term seems unavoidable) in art, the question of how knowledge is transferred from an actual design into theory or reflection has gained some interest in architecture and hence presents itself as a real challenge. Donald Schön is commonly referred to, but although his concept of reflection-in-action as an intuitive occurrence taking place in creative practice, as well as the concept of tacit knowledge, might help us verbalize certain aspects of an expressive process dealing with physical matter, both concepts do not relate to a subsequent process of verbalized reflection and contextualization. In my opinion, translation and interpretation are needed. Examining Cy Twombly’s drawings, Gottfried Boehm has investigated the conceptual difficulties in transforming visual artifacts into

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words—a process frequently naturalized in art history. The drawings are identified as possessing a speechless quality of ambiguity, but nevertheless point to a relation between the word and the image in their simultaneous “presentation and concealment, expression and silence.”1 Since the meaning and appearance of visual phenomena are indistinguishable, a precise and linear translation of the content of these drawings is futile, says Boehm; it is a fundamental hermeneutic challenge concerning the interpretation of most modern and contemporary art, or what Umberto Eco termed the opera aperta. Text is obviously a problem when trying to figure out what visual expressions mean or do, and operations of translation and interpretation might still prove difficult, but not impossible. We should consider how these operations in some ways are already part of architectural practice when moving between models, drawings, and buildings. Could text not be included in the same list?2 Concerning these issues of representation and modes of communication and expression, Robin Evans has claimed a third power in architecture besides images and texts: the power of the drawing.3 In architecture the drawing (and model) functions as a translational device, though also as something in itself. Thus, the drawing has a special status in architecture parallel to the system of writing, a status now lost in contemporary art. This use of representations makes architecture different from other visual media, in which a bridged gap or connection between the representation and final work does not exist as unmistakably.4 Evans is worried, though, that appreciation of the drawing in architecture as a work of art distorts this idea of the transitivity of the drawing. However, while Evans sees the drawing as primarily a means of representation and transition, Henrik Oxvig has argued that it could also be considered completely in its own right as a device dealing with space and the relation of line, color, and figure. In this situation the representation and the world in general constitute one another as in a dialogue or programming and not in a predetermined hierarchical relation, where a building is conceived as the ultimate goal.5 Similar thoughts are shared by Albena Yaneva. Following her ethnographic study of the architects’ working processes in the office of OMA, she describes how the idea of the model as representation of a building is being disturbed. Building and model are simply two states of the same thing.6 “Foam cutting is the perfect medium for rapid thinking, allowing them [i.e., the architects] to imagine the new shape in the moment of cutting instead of anticipating in advance.”7 Yaneva notes how knowledge is diffused in the office and centered around the material objects, in this case models, in a 1. Gottfried Boehm, “Remembering, Forgetting: Cy Twombly’s Works on Paper,” in Writings on Cy Twombly, edited by Nicola del Roscio (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2002), 181. 2. For an account of modern architects’ uneasy relationship with text, see Adrian Forty, Words and Buildings (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 3. Robin Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997), 154–56.

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4. Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building, 156–60. 5. Henrik Oxvig, “Lines,” in Cartography, Morphology, Topology, edited by Cort Ross Dinesen (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, 2009), 52. 6. Albena Yaneva, Made by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design (Rotterdam: 010, 2009), 83. 7. Yaneva, Made by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, 58.

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nonlinear process where meaning and matter are connected, including a large amount of reworking, reprogramming, and reinterpreting.8 Since aspects of interpretation are already part of the design process, might we imagine verbalized interpretation as the foundation for the requested textual translations and reflections of PhD work? Such an idea has been suggested by James Elkins as a way to conceptualize knowledge production in studio-based PhD programs in art.9 In architectural theory, interpretation has also been proposed as a significant aspect of architecture production and the creation of meaning. In an attempt to reunite the conceptual and material aspects of architecture, Dalibor Vesely has argued for the hermeneutics of interpretation and the poetics of making as the two most central and sometimes even fully reciprocal concepts in the reconstitution of architecture as a communicative cultural phenomenon.10 By advocating the use of poetics as a central notion to architecture, Vesely points to architecture as essentially something that is acted out, the result of making. In this sense, he introduces an alternative notion of tacit knowledge, one that in the best case interrelates with verbalized interpretation.11 Marc Angélil and Andrew Whiteside have compared architecture and linguistics along parallel lines. They identify two possibilities of translation in architectural design, either as interpretation or as experimentation, that is, as a process of making. The former is associated with hermeneutics, the latter with heuretics, based in intuition and the production of text.12 As they state, “The significance of a hermeneutic approach to design . . . lies in its potential to integrate apparently irreconcilable aspects of signification without sacrificing operative coherence.”13 Could it be that studio-based PhD programs in art should look more like the trajectories of a design process, and that translation, including the verbalization of insights, should be understood as part of the creative process? Angélil and Whiteside put it this way: “No longer simply a bipolar device for joining two constructions, mechanisms of transfer themselves are suspended within a multiplicity of heterogeneous systems. Understood within the context of design as a domain characterized by a concentration of incompatibilities and discontinuities, translation renders an experimental field of architectural production.”14 Following this, I think reconsidering and reconceptualizing the aspects of representation, making, and interpretation as heterogeneous but interdependent processes, as well as specific reflections on the nature of these, are of profound importance to our conceptual disentanglement, in art as in architecture. 8. Yaneva, Made by the Office of Metropolitan Architecture, 70. 9. James Elkins, “On Beyond Research and New Knowledge,” in Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, edited by James Elkins (Washington, DC: New Academia, 2009), 117. 10. Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 6. 11. This was suggested by Katrine Lotz; see Lotz, “Architectors: Specific Architectural

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Competencies,” PhD diss., Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, 2008, 67. 12. Marc Angélil and Andrew Whiteside, “Oscillating Production: Architecture as Processes of Translation,” in Inchoate: An Experiment in Architectural Education, edited by Marc Angélil (Zürich: ETHZ, 2003), 114. 13. Angélil and Whiteside, “Oscillating Production,” 121. 14. Angélil and Whiteside, “Oscillating Production,” 127.

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the war is over

Su Baker

At a conference some time ago in Melbourne, Australia, where I live and work, we were discussing the current state of art school education (of course), and from the podium I looked out over the crowd onto at least three or four generations of people who were all part of this story: some nudging towards sixty years old or over, to some just into their twenties. The discussion was about how to make art schools the places we want them to be. Previously, some art educators drew on the practices of a golden past with fixed points of value and excellence and known ways to achieve that. For some this represented faith in a “canon.” Then we opposed that. Critical war broke out. We understood that making art was a process, both materially and critically, and that culture was an evolving condition, a product of social, economic, and interpersonal relations. We interrogated forms of representation and its structures. We looked at what images meant, at how they were made and what that did to the way we used them. Then, after a while, we thought maybe there was something in a new discourse of aesthetics that could be recuperated and that maybe we could speak of “beauty” again, albeit in relative and less absolute terms, but where judgments of value could indeed be claimed. These claims became the new discourse and operated, as they should, in a contested field. Now we can look ahead and feel that we see only every possible option open and no clear lines of distinction to slow the march off into a limitless horizon. But what if this was not your own personal education history? Do students working now need to be aware of these debates and recent historical polemic as if this is their heritage and they should learn to respect it? The students in the schools now (first-year art school students straight from high school were born somewhere between 1992 and 1994) have never known a world without the Internet, without mobile phones, without Google, and “always on” information. How they learn about the world and what is available to them cannot be compared to previous experiences. So, what do we know? What do the students know? What do the students need to know? What can they teach us? What is artistic knowledge? In the Stone Summer Theory Institute Seminars, Frances Whitehead, in her seminar presentation, recognized the tacit knowledge that artists develop, the sense of agency that emerges with their learning, and made a significant and very well-articulated analysis of these qualities. I commend her analysis to those who would develop programs in art schools and beyond. It shows us that in the emerging capacities that are gained in the practice of art—whether in a studio context or in the field

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referred to by Whitehead, one that engages with public spaces—the knowledge is in the making, it is becoming as it is revealed through the work. In that conference room in Melbourne there were people who had started their art education in private atelier studio courses or vocational training institutes, or in teachers colleges, the very few institutions that taught art in Australia. The next generation might have started a formal tertiary art education in the early 1970s with a diploma course, and in their time that course would become a bachelor’s degree. The next generation would have started a bachelor’s degree, and by the time they finished that there were graduate degrees just starting. As they neared the end of the new master’s degree, there was a new possibility opening up, the PhD. And finally there were some people in that room who had started their undergraduate studies knowing that there was at least eight years of study available to them, from BFA to PhD. These are the students we are now graduating. And they are good. This short summary of the history of art education in Australia tells of a young country and waves of evolving higher education policy keeping pace with growing populations and global trends and expectations. Much of our education culture was derived from Britain and Europe, and in particular the models of art education. I start with this point to illustrate the dynamism of the learning environment in which we live and work and for which we have to structure experiences and curricula material for students. Depending on where you are on this education continuum, you probably have firm ideas about what artists should know and how they should learn it. It might be what you were taught because it got you where you are today, or it might be everything they didn’t teach you and you wish you had learned. Whatever it is, designing curriculum is not an exact science, and there is a large slice of autobiography in it no matter how much we try to look outside our own experience. Much of the discussion about what and how we should teach and what and how students best learn is based on whether or not we subscribe to the notion of a canon, that is, a body of knowledge that we believe would be good for the students to know as a foundation for their future development. A timely example of this dilemma presents itself to me as I develop a new undergraduate studio seminar course that focuses particularly on the issues for undergraduate students studying painting as a major. In the 1980s and ’90s the theorizing and critical attention given to the painting discourse was very dominant and seductive, as important as theorizing on Modernism. To think about the place of painting in the field of contemporary art was to think about the institutional relations to power, to interrogate the teleological assumptions of Modernism, and to expand the representational capacity of the visual and expand the field into the domain of popular culture. More recently, this discourse has considered the strategic conditions for contemporary painting practice in a highly visualized mediated world where

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visuality is no longer the province of painting and the ubiquity of imaging in all forms has exploded the field, making the previous concerns of “painters” seem arcane. In some areas of this discourse, recent contemporary art was seen as a shift in the cultural critique, that is, from a critique predicated on the social, political, and institutional imperatives of the late twentieth century to a more performative one more akin to participation in an event in a particular time and space. That is, painting moved from an approach rooted in representation to one predicated on the “painting event,” in space and time. Relations between materiality in painting and the compositing and selection logic of digital systems and screen culture have also exposed expanded possibilities for painting as a practice, now one among many art forms that make up the contemporary art spectrum. It could be said that painting is now free from the burden of its isolated historicized self-importance and has been released into a diverse community of cultural practices that excitedly interact with each other. All the same, painting as a discourse seems to be a personification of a critical space that absorbs and morphs in a fluid accommodation of philosophical and experiential cultural shifts, and indeed persists in believing in such continuities. It could be seen as a form of animism in a way, one that gives the discourse of painting a connection to the “soul” of art, to the metaphysical questions that gave art its high status in preindustrial eras. New readings of Michael Fried and Clement Greenberg and renewed interest in formal abstraction can also be seen in the work of many artists, and not always artists whose background is in painting. The Modernist moment has passed, the heat has gone out of that debate, and its ideas are now seen as having cooled, but they live on in design aesthetics, as is evident in contemporary interior and product design. Contemporary art has moved on to other polemical domains, and these stylish speculations seem somewhat arcane—beautifully so, some might say. What could be wrong with the close reading of form and the explorations of structure of visual affect? When artists who call themselves painters get together, in covens perhaps, there is a delicious sense of entering into a specialized language, not unlike the coded dialogues of many professions. So what is a discourse of painting, and what do students new to it “need” to know? Do they need a familiarity with the history of certain recurring historical avant-garde debates like the “death of painting,” or the tensions between abstraction and figurations, or concepts such as “flatness” and “objecthood”? These were very much a part of the formative years of my generation, and important drivers of our work as artists/painters. We loved that stuff. Can it be true that those interested in “painting” are really compelled to fall in love with their “captors,” these orthodoxies, this belief in a continuity of discourse, this faith in a continuous conversation with history? Can it be that out of mortal fear, a fear that invokes intense desire, a fear of being artistically, and thus morally and ethically, wrong—indeed under threat of being summarily executed—they are

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driven by a desire to survive, a desire transformed into love? At the considerable risk of overstating the case, is this really not just a form of Stockholm syndrome, the inability to see the difference between a bond of loyalty determined by fear and the inherent contradiction in the denial of liberty? In the famous siege after which Stockholm syndrome is named, the captors, under the intense conditions of the terrorizing situation and acting presumably out of fear and the will to survive, began to take the side of the captors and eventually to defend them. What would happen in our case if the state of terror that has been imposed were to be called off. What if the terrorists were to put down their guns, say, “Okay, we no longer believe in this cause, The war is over,” and leave. What happens when the stakes change? Perhaps we should say that while painting remains identified with its history, it is no longer captive to it. This does not mean that we should return to an anti-intellectual essentialism or a form of reductive formalism, or to the abandonment of narratives. Nor does it mean imposing a single orthodoxy—on the contrary, it means embracing a free-form complexity, multiple genres, and eclectic reference points. It means investing the silent, visual, and libidinal economy of painting with a sense of intellectual gravitas, empowering the scopophilic enjoyment of making and looking with an underlying seriousness—serious pleasure. We may not be able to teach that, but we can help students learn it. The historical European avant-garde, so influential and authoritative over time, may well become now just one of the tropes, the histories that we approach in order to explore. This opens the way for students to pursue their curiosity about paintings that they are drawn to and about how they are made and through what historical frame they can be seen. We know that deep learning about these histories will not be in the straight line of the “authorized” view of Western art history but can be driven by a motivated and deep sense of enquiry. So my challenge now is, How do I help?

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what’s art got to do with it?

Gary Willis

Funny, at a time when so many young people identify as artists, so many theorists argue there is no point in looking to art. Many schools are dropping the “Art” prefix in preference for “Visual Culture,” “Creative Industry,” “Culture and Communication,” and so on. Mieke Bal puts the argument against art history this way: “to take visual culture as art history is to condemn it [visual culture] to the same future [as art]”; the problem is that the twentieth-century premise is irrelevant to twenty-first-century conditions.1 These conditions include the globalization of art and its networks; the democratization of art and its audiences; the impact of technological revolution on the exhibition experience; the postmedium conditions of contemporary art; and the postcolonial expansion of the concept of art to include a broader spectrum of sociocultural practices, including many operating outside gallery networks. Marta Edling reminds us that there is “no room for naivety” within art.2 Contemporary art has become a highly politicized public arena, dependent upon public funding. Outmoded practices are irrelevant to the curatorial initiatives that determine contemporary art. Thus, any question concerning the future of arts education must begin back at basics. What is art? My preferences are as follows: art as a critical instrument of cultural account to bring “being” back into play. Regardless of which métier, media, or technology an artist chooses, he or she must develop a responsive system of notation into a language of personal account to seize the day and speak to becoming. Joseph Beuys was right, “everyone should be an artist,” but, as James Elkins reminds us, an art education cannot make you an artist.3 Art education can’t do much for an individual talent. As Barbara Jaffee puts it, “talent is innate”;4 sensibility belongs to nature and stands beyond institutional control. “Attitude,” however, can be cultivated. Knowledge belongs to culture and must be cultivated. This is the production that Thierry de Duve defines as the “real political work” of an arts education. Christopher Frayling articulates this production as “an orientation towards the art world.”5 I imagine he means an orientation toward the shifting political economies, which determine the public face of art. But this is where the issues facing art become complex. Given that the institutional art world has become the patron of our times, it  should come as no surprise that many have fashioned art practices to take 1. Mieke Bal, “Visual Essentialism and the Object of Visual Culture,” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 1 (2003): 5. 2. See Section 1 of the Seminars, citing Howard Singerman citing Pierre Bourdieu.

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3. James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 4. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 5. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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advantage of public funding; not all of them artists.6 In this arena, the line between the artist and any other professional becomes fuzzy. Professionals from all disciplines can be contracted to illuminate the gap in the knowledge. Here the arts become preoccupied with ethics. However as Daniel Palmer notes, too much emphasis on “political critique” often results in the contrived posturing of “political correctness.”7 Artists become nonartists—nonartists become artistes. Frances Whitehead’s presentation does a great job of selling the artist’s skill sets to the public project manager.8 No doubt the capacity for lateral thinking and operational agility is a wonderful by-product of any education, and the ability to maneuver within cultural, social, and intellectual economies, a great asset. Nevertheless, I am impelled to ask, “What’s art got to do with it?” “Art” seems an unnecessary appellation. Artists are being generated from a broad spectrum of disciplines now, not just design but science, engineering, architecture, urban planning, history, politics, philosophy, film, fashion, music. High-level professionals are regularly imported into public exposition on the basis of the social relevance of their projects. The promotional skill sets of social engagement and creative display are not exclusive to art. The issue here is that “art” and “not-art” alike face the same the curatorial criterion: social contribution. And artists operate in a field where “artistic merit” has been discombobulated, democratized, and in danger of being displaced by social issues of accountability where art becomes a political instrumentality. The issue facing art education becomes, what does the study of “art” actually offer? Edling critiques de  Duve’s evaluation of contemporary art as “negative.” The problem that Thierry identifies is art’s lack of defining parameters; anything can be art—anyone can be an artist. In a globalized field where the curatorial emphasis has shifted to knowledge production, the issue facing art’s graduates is whether their deskilled, dematerialized, postmedia practice can compete with the work of “creative professionals” from more rigorous epistemological disciplines. This is no simple matter of “loss of hierarchies,” as Christopher Frayling suggests.9 At a time when art’s historical disciplines have been rendered redundant and the history of art irrelevant, it is important recognize the depth of the problem. Whilst Jacques Rancière gestures toward an intertwining of “art and not art,” Giorgio Agamben pinpoints the predicament. When so many art theorists align themselves with “not-art” in the “art–not-art” dichotomy, art’s future becomes obvious.10 Further, as art becomes more deeply integrated into the academic system, it faces rationalization and the same funding criteria as any other discipline, namely the caveat of “contribution to knowledge.” Despite the “contribution to 6. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43–51. 7. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 8. See Section 5 of the Seminars. 9. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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10. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007), 18; Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 51.

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culture” qualification that Monash University instates, as both Daniel Palmer and Marta Edling affirm from opposite sides of the globe, all academic funding is subject to “national interest” checklists; art is no exception.11 This brings me to the difficult question of foundations. Edling argues we need to understand art as a process, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen calls for a redefinition of praxis, the relationship between theory and practice.12 In this regard I am interested in Christopher Frayling’s three points of “the normative, critical, and expressive,” the last of which he qualifies as “finding one’s own voice.”13 Christopher describes the normative as the grammar of social knowledge; the base level of understanding we accept as the “known.” Through the establishment of common points of reference the normative lays the foundation for the “knowable” and introduction of the “unknown.” If an artist is to study anything, I believe she is well advised to study the signification of the known. The presentation of evidence is important, regardless of which system of representation she chooses to present it.14 Language is significant to art, not because communication is art’s objective, but because existential engagement is only possible through shared points of reference. I believe Christopher Frayling’s conception of the “critical” is the pivotal axis which signifies “art.” Art’s critical function is to counterbalance the “normative” pressures of society. The point of reference for art’s critical perspective is the interface between the hegemonic nature of the social and the instinct of the individual. This existential point between the individual and society is the gap from which art’s knowledge rises to assert itself. Which is to say, I do not believe in the instrumentality of art; art as agitprop. The “politically correct” may be ethical, but it ain’t always art. As Barbara Jaffee suggests, art replaces ethics.15 Art speaks back, it asserts itself from the gap in the known. However, to arrest the normative, the artist must be able to mess with the cultural coding. This is the significance of developing a language, an instrument for cultural incision. There are many systems available, but given the complexity of contemporary cultural conditions, it is up to each artist to fashion her own equipment. Art’s objective is to bring the unspoken truth of the artist’s knowing into “a language of form” to liberate being from the hegemonic conspiracy of the social obligation to an indeterminate future. Finally the “expression” word, which Christopher qualifies as “finding one’s own voice.” The big question facing art education now is, how does the artist develop a reliable language system? Here, “deconstruction” proves an invaluable tool. As Jonathan Dronsfield defines it, deconstruction is the doubled process of critiquing and rebuilding cultural knowledge.16 Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen is concerned that “deconstruction” sounds “a little too close to French philosophy,” where an artist ends up writing theory rather than making art.17 But the value of 11. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 12. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 13. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 14. Here I use Hans Georg Gadamer’s conception of “language,” which is not limited

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to spoken word or written text. By “language” Gadamer means “any language things possess.” 15. See Section 5 of the Seminars. 16. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 17. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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deconstruction is not in the study of philosophy, but in the reconfiguration of deconstruction as a praxical tool for the appropriation of cultural knowledge. Despite the demolition of art’s history, from the Barbizon School to Conceptual art, no period of art is without its insight. Each period of art must be seen in the context of the social, political, and economic forces which have given rise to it. Each successive period is displaced by the following generation, which inevitably reconfigures art’s parameters within the context of social, economic, and technological determinates of its own time. Art’s objective remains constant: to liberate “being-for-itself.” There is a pattern here. Whilst art is state of flux, its function persists. In answer to the question What does the artist know?, I offer the following paraphrase of Giorgio Agamben: the true work of art offers us the gift of poiêsis; the uncanny production of presence, where the past and the future are both at stake and the act of being-in-the-world claims its proper meaning.18

18. Giorgio Agamben, “The Original Structure of the Work of Art,” in Agamben, The Man Without Content, 94–103.

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art education in the university itself a perspective from general education

Yeung Yang

Writing this essay, I find myself asking, what do I care about university art education, when all I have done formally within the university setting with art students is to have given two lectures over the past two years?1 What does this have to do with me as an independent curator with no formal art (studio, theory, history) training and as currently a teacher of general education? This sense of speaking from the outside art and, inside an undergraduate university program that in the near future will radically change the first-year experience for all students, art majors included,2 compels me to engage with the Seminar discussion in the following three ways:

1. Bring the focus on teaching into relation with students’ learning experience so that teaching is not regarded as isolated from learning. 2. Offer information on the sensibility and concerns of recent art graduates from Hong Kong. 3. Consider art education as embedded in a university education.

1. What Art Students Are Learning In a society in which the value of art, and arguably contemporary art in particular, remains contentious in the public sphere,3 a timely question from Hong Kong regarding university art education may be not what to teach in a university 1. One lecture was entitled “To Curate Is to Take Care Of ” (for the course Art as Profession, Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008), and another was entitled “Art and Society as a Relationship of Inertia” (Hong Kong Art School, 2009). My contact with artists began in 1999 when I first joined an art criticism class organized by then artist-run space Para/Site Art Space in Hong Kong. Since then my contact with art graduates and art students has been on an informal basis. I have taught design students since 2001, but not art students formally. It was around 2007, when I curated my first exhibition, that my contact with art students intensified in various informal, unorganized communities outside the university. 2. University General Education at Chinese University of Hong Kong will launch its Foundation Program in 2012. All incoming first-year students will be required to take two courses, In Dialogue with Humanity and In Dialogue with

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Nature. I have included the reading list for the former course in a note at the end of this paper. 3. In 2009, a series of debates arose regarding the amount of space in use at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre, a converted factory. Artists publicly expressed their dismay over how society stereotypes artists and misunderstands how they work. See, e.g., Cheng Yi Yi, “Tie up the Artists Before Art Happens,” Ming Pao Daily News, February 12, 2009, and Koo Chi Hung, “Seventy Percent of the Units in Art Industrial Building Are Empty,” Ming Pao Daily News, February 2, 2009 (titles translated from Chinese). In 2010, hundreds of artists and art students marched in protest against the government’s “Optimizing the Use of Private Industrial Buildings” policy, under which industrial buildings that are home to many artists’ studios are “revitalized.” More information can be found at http://​www​.devb​.gov​.hk/​industrialbuildings/​eng/​ home/​index​.html (accessed May 20, 2010).

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art program, but whether the education that art students receive adequately prepares them for the range of issues and problems that they will face.4 I read through student graduation books of the Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUFA) to find evidence of what recent art graduates value in their learning and how they see the this learning as related to what lies ahead after graduation. The student chair of the 2006 graduation show, Yentl Tong, is concerned that the “discussion” alive in school will be lost. She writes, “If the learning environment did not encourage habits of discussion and multiple ways of reasoning, any call for deeper reflection on the subject matter and artistic language could be regarded as too demanding.” Many works may then fall into the myth of being so-called objective and neutral. They may even become an excuse for art to be exempt from the basic requirements for a university student, taking away the ability to create works to enliven discourses.”5 The value of discussion is also prominent in a published interview with Ah Hei, a  recent graduate of the Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University of Hong Kong (BUAVA), in which he says that he encourages students to discuss more because that is an opportunity that is available only at school.6 What could be in this activity called “discussion” that students value? In an academic, university setting, a good discussion may include the following: • The objects of discussion are theoretically informed. • The ways of discussion demand building and defending informed positions derived from traditions and their critiques, so that the discussion is not an exchange of opinions. • The ways of discussion also reveal the limitations of any position, communicating it verbally or in writing in an organized way. • There is a sense of value in the discussion as being contemporary to students. • There is the sense that such a discussion is a register of the fundamental human condition of being together. 4. As an example of responding to an issue, in 2006–7 university art students and practicing artists participated in a series of protests against the demolition of the Clock Tower and the Star Ferry Pier and Queen’s Pier in Central. See, for example, Today, no. 2 (Summer 2007); and “Hong Kong: Ten Years After Colonialism,” edited by Laikwan Pang and Lo Kwai Cheung, special issue, Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 4 (2007). Debates on art and activism remain alive. See, for example, the panel discussion “Artist as Activist, Art as Catalyst,” part of Backroom Conversations, organized by the Asia Art Archive for ART HK 10, May 29, 2010. For more information see http://​www​.aaa​.org​.hk/​(accessed May 20, 2010). See also note 2 above. In this section of the essay, comments from art students of the Department of Fine Arts,

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Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University, are quoted. The former was established in 1957, the latter in 2004. At the time of this writing, the school administration had announced that the Academy would be relocating to the Communication and Visual Arts Building. http://​ www​.comm​.hkbu​.edu​.hk/​(accessed May 20, 2010). Students began the AVACare movement in opposition to the planned merger. More details can be found at http://​avacare​.wordpress​.com/​ 2010/​04/​27/​avacare​_news/​(accessed May 20, 2010). 5. The Art of CUHK 2006 (Hong Kong Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006), 50 (my translation). 6. AVA Student Magazine 2, no. 45 (2010).

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The value students place on discussion is paralleled by the awareness of potential transition issues from the university to society. Lai Kwan Ting, chairman of the organizing committee of the student graduation show of CUFA 2008, says graduation is a matter of “treading the path of art bearing the spirit of ‘Cheng Ming.”7 In BUAVA, a blog formed by current students and alumni lists the kinds of positions graduates have taken up. The fields and positions include “window display, exhibition design, fashion design, jewelry design, camera research and development, auction house assistant, master’s program, teaching, calligraphy, entrepreneurs, teacher of Chinese painting, editor of photography magazine, wax sculpture restoration, archive manager, art consultant, art events coordinator, gallery manager, community center manager, construction supervisor, furniture design, photographer, Web designer, interior designer, bar owner, product testing, stage design, stage lighting, theater costume design, basketball coach, artistic director, graphic designer, film postproduction, makeup artist for weddings.” It concludes that the educational direction of BUAVA is “multitask” rather than being limited to specific job types.8 From the teacher’s point of view, this process of learning art in the university as related to the world at large begins during the program, not after. Kurt Chan, a professor at CUFA, writes, “[In] my contact with these students during the term, I found that their learning of art was not limited to the campus, but extended into different communities and organizations. . . . Art is no longer the manipulation of an isolated language. It is connected with other things in the world. This also explains the uniqueness and advantage of the Department of Fine Arts in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, an institution that has regarded general education highly.”9 He adds, “I imagine the future fine art graduate to have unworldly learning engaged in worldly things. They play different roles, but with the identity and the integrity of an artist.”10 Chan’s remarks can be read as a response to the reality that many art students do not end up being artists, not because they fail and hence need to “change profession,”11 but because, by choice, they take up different roles in the public sphere. Chan’s vision of art education is one that does not lose sight of the university education in which art education is embedded. Rather than “an implosion of critical terms that had structured the identity of an artist,”12 there is a positive embrace of their expansion and expression as an ongoing process relevant to the art graduates. 7. Half Step: Works of Bachelor of Arts (Fine Arts) 2008 Graduates (Hong Kong: Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008). “Cheng Ming” is the motto of New Asia College, where the Department of Fine Art is housed. The phrase originates from the Confucian Book of the Mean. Cheng means sincerity, and Ming means intelligence. 8. http://​avacare​.wordpress​.com/​2010/​04/​25/​ qna/​(accessed May 20, 2010). The blog, Academy of Visual Arts Care Group (AVACare), was

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established in April 2010 in response to the university administration’s plan to merge AVA with the School of Journalism and Communication. 9. Art of CUHK 2006, 2–3. 10. Chan’s comments resonate with the Seminar discussion on the artist as a cultural producer and historical subject with agency. Seminar Sections 5 and 6 are indicative of the concerns. 11. See Section 2 of the Seminar. 12. See Section 1 of the Seminar.

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These comments remain anecdotal. However, they register the presence of a sense of pride and confidence among art students who enter fields that are not art related. It also offers a way of putting the discussion on “teaching selfreflexivity”13 into perspective: the personal dimension of art education in a good university education program is unavoidable, even condemned, rather than taught. 2. First-Year Program What could the first-year experience of the art student be if art education were considered part of a university program?14 In the Seminar, one way of putting this question is as a transition issue: where the students come from, what they are like.15 In Hong Kong, entrance into a university is generally seen as an arrival after years of studying for and competing in public examinations. The first year naturally becomes a honeymoon period. In general, students are not encouraged to think about the personal meaning of a university education, let alone the humanist concern with the meaning of life. In my home university, a core curriculum for first-year students is to be fully launched in 2012 to fill the gap left open by the research university model of education and other historical moments shaping education today globally and locally.16 The idea is that general education can play a part in revealing and integrating the skills and models of thinking that students acquire in their majors. In a recent internal circular, Joseph Chaney and David Pong make the point that “the integrity of a university degree, the student’s sense that his or her educational experience is the first step in a life-long learning process, derives from general education.”17 My point here is that once the university art program is also considered as a life stage that prepares students for whatever happens next, the imperative to think about what and how to teach art necessitates a shift from considering it as continuing with or differing from art as a subject matter in secondary education, or art education as a training program for professional artists. Another way the question of first-year experience is framed in the Seminar is as a matter of teachers choosing between a “liberal arts” curriculum and one that is “customized” for art students.18 “Customization” is further discussed in terms of the “basic elements”19 of artists expressing their ideas in art forms. In line with 13. See Sections 1 and 6 of the Seminar. 14. I notice from Section 6 of the Seminars that there are questions about how art students are taught the same theorist in ways different from how other university students are taught. The “university” is taken for granted to mean everything and everyone else not in the art department. Here I am looking not at what is taught about Foucault, for instance, to art and non–art students, but at the university itself as an idea. 15. See Sections 2 and 6 of the Seminar. For instance, Ciarán Benson says that art education is “intercepting in the lives of eighteen- or

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nineteen-year-olds.” Rebecca Gordon mentions how students arrive at art schools not with their ideas “wholly unformed.” Areti Adamopoulou also mentions that students bring “academic values” in with them. 16. For the reading list, see the note at the end of this paper. 17. Joseph Chaney and David Pong, “What Is a Good General Education Course,” internal circular, University General Education, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009–10, quoted with permission from the authors. 18. See Section 6 of the Seminar. 19. See Section 6 of the Seminar.

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the previous point about art education as university education, I propose that once art education is regarded as embedded in the institution of the university, different questions arise: what is unique about the university that can contribute to the learning of basics? This question is related to the debates about the contemporary university and its purpose.20  I agree with Alasdair MacIntyre’s remarks: “Undergraduate education has its own distinctive ends, that it should never be regarded as a prologue to or a preparation for graduate or professional education. . . . It is also that undergraduate education, when well conducted, is in key part an education in how to think about the ends of a variety of human activities and, that is to say, in how to evaluate, among others, such activities as those of the specialist and the researcher, the activities of those dedicated to the ends which the contemporary research university serves.”21 Once this is registered, the concern of compatibility within the BFA program22 could be partially displaced, or become a concern of how major programs build on models of thinking shared, enhanced, and consolidated by general education. By way of conclusion, I reiterate that art teaching cannot be discussed as isolated from students’ learning experiences, which only have meaning to the art students themselves if they can attain and sustain the stamina and a sense of success as a lifelong process. Regarding art education as embedded in a university education facilitates this shift of attention.23

20. I have benefited from Anthony T. Kron­ man’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) and Alasdair MacIntyre’s “The Very Idea of a University: Aristotle, Newman, and Us,” British Journal of Educational Studies 57, no. 4 (2009): 347–62. One point to add here is that while participants in the Seminar discussion mention how the contemporary art university becomes important in the development of theory in the humanities (see Section 6 of the Seminar), there is no evidence of this phenomenon in Hong Kong. Art professors speak about being marginalized within the university system, and the conceptualization of courses like the CUHK Foundation Programme seldom addresses art as a field that inspires theorizing of the humanities. 21. MacIntyre, “Very Idea of a University,” 362 22. See Section 6 of the Seminar. Tertiary institutions in Hong Kong with art and design bachelor programs predominantly offer BA degrees: Department of Fine Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Department of Fine

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Arts, University of Hong Kong; School of Design, Polytechnic University of Hong Kong; Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University of Hong Kong; and Hong Kong Art School. As an exception, the Academy for Performing Arts grants BFA degrees to students of Dance, Drama, Film and Television, Music, and Technical and Entertainment Arts. 23. I append here the reading list for the course entitled In Dialogue with Humanity, part of the University General Education Foundation Programme, Chinese University of Hong Kong: Homer, Odyssey Plato, The Symposium Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics Confucius, The Analects Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi Book of Genesis and Book of Job The Qur’an The Heart Sutra Huang Zong Xi, Waiting for the Dawn Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor”

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art and the market of knowledge

Louisa Avgita

The discussion about art education and teaching methods seems to revolve around the main question that the Seminars have posed: “What do artists know?” What seems to be evident is that if we localize and analyze the types of knowledge that make an artist, then we can discuss what we can teach and how we can do it—or even if we can do it at all. An immediate response to the former approach would critically argue that the signification of art and the perception of the artist are not the same in all cultural and social environments. Although this critique appears to be justified, particularly in the light of postcolonial considerations, contemporary all-encompassing art everywhere is so much concerned with all sorts of particularities that such questions have been invalidated. The dominant idea is the following: of course art means different things in different cultural and social contexts, and we have a theory to incorporate each one of them in the art system: hybridism, marginality, diversity, heterotopia, and subaltern are only few of the concepts used in contemporary art exhibitions in order to systematize and manufacture particularity and turn it into mainstream. A great number of contemporary artists superficially mingle theoretical concepts—a bit of Deleuze, a bit of Lacan, a bit of Derrida—which are standardized in small packages of hybrid theories—equally by critics, curators, and art theorists—in a language that is inaccessible to the majority of people. Art institutions appear to agree that today’s artistic knowledge requires the mastering of those theoretical tools that address and construct all sorts of differences in order to make sure that art remains everywhere the same. The fictitiousness of contemporary claims for artistic diversity is suggested by the artist Mladen Stilinović in an 1997 artwork which declares that “an artist who cannot speak English is no artist.” Ten years later, the theorist Marina Gržinić corrected him: “an artist who cannot speak English well is no artist.”1 In global capitalism, no matter what artists know that others in culture don’t, it should not only be communicated, but also conceived in perfect English! Instead, then, of What do artists know, the appropriate question would be, What do we expect from art? Our expectations from art demarcate the sort of knowledge that we understand as inherent in art, as well as the discourse of such knowledge. So the question is not What is the knowledge in art, in order for us to use it—theorize it, teach it, etc.?; it is rather, How do we perceive art— what’s the use of it, what is our discursive position, what are our educational purposes—in order to see what sort of knowledge we get out of it? My point is 1. Marina Grz˘inic´, “Linking Theory, Politics and Art,” Third Text 21, no. 2 (2007): 205.

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that, instead of trying to trace what is inherently good and creative in art, what is the tacit knowledge that makes art what it is, we should ask, Good for what? Creative for what? Knowledge for what? So to the question of the Seminars, What are currently the best ways of theorizing the knowledge produced by art?, we should add, Who attempts to define artistic knowledge and for whom? This debate concerning the type of knowledge that derives from the specific skills and experiences that shape the artist, as well as the ways that this knowledge can be transmitted through educational processes, has brought up the discourse concerning tacit—or implicit—knowledge. According to the experts, such knowledge can hardly be articulated: “knowledge acquired from implicit learning procedures is knowledge that, in some ‘raw’ fashion, is always ahead of the capability of its processor to explicate it.”2 In the work of Michael Polanyi, tacit knowledge was established as a concept of the philosophy of science which opposed positivism; in the 1990s, tacit knowledge was reinvented in the field of the new discipline of knowledge management, in business administration and organizational development, in order to describe the know-how, the physical experiences, the skills and insights that employees and professionals acquire in the course of their working lives. The analysis of tacit knowledge in such a context concerns the evaluation and utilization of what is considered as the source of creativity and innovation that largely remains personal, mystical, and obscure. It is a great challenge for people in business to develop strategies and practices that enable them to grasp this underlying valuable knowledge that is otherwise lost: “Tacit knowledge may seem too mysterious to be usefully or consistently applied in a business situation, but this shifting, context-specific quality is precisely what makes it a powerful tool for innovation.”3 Business is interested in creativity, that is, in innovation and breakthrough, in the ability to produce novelty, new ideas that can be commodified, that can be antagonistic and sold successfully in the market. Art is an ideal field for the development of such “creativity.” The direct involvement of artists in business is revealing of the role of tacit knowledge: artists are equally useful for what they know and for what they ignore. In 1966, artists Barbara Steveni and John Latham founded the Artist Placement Group, which aimed to integrate artists into businesses and corporations around Britain. As Peter Eleey mentions, “APG favoured the notion that artists could have a positive effect on industry through both their inherent creativity and their relative ignorance of its conventions.”4 Contemporary artists are certainly much more familiar with the conventions of industry and the market than they used to be in the 1960s, and this knowledge makes them more cynical. The attitude encountered in many artists who exhibit their diverse particularities 2. Arthur S. Reber, Implicit Learning and Tacit Knowledge: An Essay on the Cognitive Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 64. Michael Polanyi, in his analysis of tacit knowledge, says that “we can know more than we can tell.” The Tacit Dimension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 4. 3. George Von Krogh, Kazuo Ichijo, and Ikujiro Nonaka, Enabling Knowledge Creation:

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How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7. 4. Peter Eleey, “Context Is Half the Work,” Frieze, no. 111 (November–December 2007). Available at http://​www​.frieze​.com/​issue/​article/​ context​_is​_half​_the​_work (accessed June 1, 2010).

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in exhibitions all around the world is indicative of contemporary cynicism: let’s pretend that we offer them our “particularity” so that we can have access to the art market. Often, though, the position of the art institutions is the following: let’s pretend that we will allow them access to the market, so that they pretend their particularity. What they all pretend, however, is that art, despite its affinities with the market, is still an independent, free space. The modern belief in the autonomy of art—and, consequently, in its inherent qualities of creativity, novelty, and unconventionality—is still prevalent, despite the explicit interconnections between art and political or economic institutions and the market; or, to be accurate, precisely because of them. As Slavoj Žižek points out in his analysis of ideological interpellation, ideology does not impose an absolute, automatic identification of the subjects with its principles; on the contrary, ideology is effective insofar as it constructs “a space of false disidentification, of false distance towards the actual coordinates of those subjects’ social existence.”5 In that sense, the autonomy of art serves this ideological selfdistancing that enables the effective, unhindered function of the market: if art is independent, then we can trust it no matter who is sponsoring it. However, what we see in most contemporary large-scale art exhibitions and biennials is quite the opposite: artists seem to be trapped in a network of meaning industries which do not allow much for a destabilizing discourse. In a period when art seems to be more and more open, without boundaries and limits, the art we see all around the world is repetitive, despite its “avant-gardeness”; conventional, despite its “subversiveness”; drained, despite its “creativity”; and standardized, despite its “multiplicity.” Art is transformed into a process for idea production, into an industry of new concepts, into a field of brainstorming for new commodities. According to Austin Harrington, “the new elites are commercial elites, most often composed of executives in the media and entertainment industries. In contrast to traditional gentlemanly elites, the new commercial elites have a greater interest in the short-term reconvertibility of cultural capital back into economic capital.”6 The market requires—and gets—from art more “avant-gardeness,” “subversiveness,” “creativity,” and “multiplicity” for its commodities, that is, more effectiveness in inventing new concepts and new ways of handling and combining means, materials, and cultural traits in addressing new markets and in adding value to commodities. In this context, historical avant-garde movements are considered to offer the keys for accessing the tacit knowledge of innovation and creativity, namely, the practices of breakthrough production: the know-how of novelty. If this sort of 5. Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek, “Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!,” in Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), 103. 6. Cited in Geir Vestheim, “The Autonomy of Culture and the Arts—from the Early Bourgeois

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Era to Late Modern ‘Runaway World,’ ” presented at the Fifth International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, iccpr2008, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, August 20–24, 2008, 16. Available at http://​iccpr2008​.yeditepe​.edu​.tr/​papers/​Vestheim​ _Geir​.doc (accessed June 1, 2010).

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tacit knowledge is important for business, it is clearly not interesting for those expecting from art the subversion of its established relations with the institutions and the market, for those who expect the new avant-garde. Historical avantgardes cannot provide a code for novelty, but a paradigm for the undermining of given meanings, the destabilization of the world as we know it—even if that means that historical avant-gardes are also affected by this endeavor. The art historian Julian Stallabrass concludes his book Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art with the following lines: “To break with the supplemental autonomy of free art is to remove one of the masks of free trade. Or to put it the other way around, if free trade is to be abandoned as a model for global development, so must its ally, free art.”7 In the light of this, the production and communication of artistic knowledge could raise awareness on matters of social antagonism rather than masquerading it with its fake independence and sterile creativity.

7. Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated: The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 201.

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knowledge and value in art

Rina Arya

Two of the main topics of interest in the seminar were about how art is currently taught around the world and what kinds of knowledge artists have. What struck me about this valuable debate is that there are differing standards and values in art education as compared with the education of science. This is largely due to society’s perceptions of what is regarded as useful and necessary. The nub of the debate then can be isolated in a single question: What kinds of knowledge can art give us?, and from this question we can begin to build a bigger picture. This particular debate was explored in two Seminar discussions; I will focus on the discussion of aesthetic cognitivism in Section 4. The Seminar discussion discussed art in a broader sense but also focused on pictorial images. When looking at pictures and thinking about the kinds of knowledge that are given to us, it is uncontroversial to assert that pictures give us phenomenal knowledge, including perceptual knowledge (knowledge of how things perceptually appear). We perceive pictures and so we have phenomenal knowledge of how they appear. Looking at pictures also gives us phenomenal knowledge of other things, such as emotions, as in the case of Edvard Munch’s Melancholy (1894–95). By looking at Melancholy we are able to perceive the melancholic mood of the work, and this may arouse corresponding emotions in us. Pictures can provide us with further types of knowledge, such as knowledge about the world. Analytic philosophers are divided as to whether they believe that art can generate truth claims (propositional knowledge) or not. Cognitivists, such as Nelson Goodman, believe the arts actually contribute towards the advancement of understanding the world, and hence should not be taken any less seriously than the sciences.1 In contrast, anticognitivists, such as Jerome Stolnitz and Paul Horwich, do not deny that art has some sort of value, but they claim that it does not generate propositional knowledge because, according to them, it does not generate any sort of truth that furthers our understanding.2 They would argue that pictures may variably enhance or undermine what we already know but that is all that they can do. They certainly cannot teach us things that we do not already know. In the Seminar Roy Sorensen takes an anticognitivist line in that he denies that art can generate propositional knowledge. He draws a series of contrasts between pictures and propositions. A  proposition can be asserted; a picture cannot. A proposition can be used to tell a lie because lying requires asserting 1. See Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). 2. Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 32,

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no. 3 (1992): 191–200; Paul Horwich, From a Deflationary Point of View (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004).

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and (as noted) propositions can be asserted. Since a picture cannot be asserted, it cannot be used to tell a lie. Sorensen further argues that propositions have truth-values but pictures do not.3 This is brought out by the fact that propositions can be negated or conjoined whereas pictures cannot. I agree with Sorensen that pictorial images are not propositions insofar as they do not have the properties of propositions—they can’t be described as true or false, nor can they be asserted or negated. However, it does not follow that if something isn’t propositional then we are unable to elicit propositional knowledge from it. A ripe plum is not itself propositional, but perceiving a ripe plum can generate propositional knowledge, namely knowledge that the plum is ripe and hence ready for eating. The same train of thought can be applied to pictures. So, mutatis mutandis, even though in themselves pictures are not propositions, they can provide us with propositional knowledge. Another claim that Sorensen holds is that “you can’t have an argument that is composed of pictures.”4 Sorensen’s reason for claiming this is that an argument “has to have truth values”: an argument is a piece of reasoning from things taken to be true (the premises) to something else that is to be established as true (the conclusion). Sorensen argues for the significance of the label attached to the pictorial image as “doing the work.” However, I disagree with this last claim. Continuing from my earlier point—if pictures can provide propositional knowledge, then they themselves can generate an argument even if they are not arguments. No labels are needed for them to do this. To give an example, we only have to consider the furor surrounding works such as Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary (1996), which was of a black Virgin Mary one of whose breasts was sculpted from elephant dung, and which also contained cutouts of female genitalia in the background. On September 22, 1999, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York City, threatened to cut off the city’s financial support of the Brooklyn Museum of Art because of what he regarded as the degenerate Sensation exhibition and in particular Ofili’s exhibit. The uproar caused by this picture demonstrates that pictures arouse certain emotions. They do this because of what they represent. But then the fact that a picture represents something means that it conveys certain information, namely, in this case, that the figure in The Holy Virgin Mary represents the Virgin Mary. The mode of conveyance of this information generates propositional knowledge of what is represented. The treatment of the subject—the use of elephant dung and the cut-out images of genitalia, for example—evoked strong emotions in those who viewed it as a blasphemous representation. Uproar was not caused by the aestheticism (in the sense of style) of the picture but by its alleged lack of respect to the truth of religion, the propositional truth of Christian doctrine. Sorensen may deny that pictorial images can generate propositional knowledge, but he agrees that there are other kinds of knowledge that art can generate and that they can have considerable value—what he described as “knowledge of

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3. See Section 4 of the Seminars. 4. See Section 4 of the Seminars.

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significance, of the meaningfulness of things.”5 Indeed, pictures provide us with a range of experiences: they lift or depress our moods, and they contribute to the cultural lives of many. Explaining the nature of this quality that pictures contribute to is complex. It can be argued that there is a special kind of knowledge that pictures contribute but that cannot be explained in cognitive terms. Douglas Morgan argues that it is this distinctive quality, the sui generis nature of art, that should be upheld in discussions about art, and not its cognitive significance. He regards any emphasis on art’s cognitive significance as reductive. He believes that art should not have to hold “certificates of legitimacy” to testify to its truth.6 Another way of thinking about the question of aesthetic cognitivism would be to evaluate our thinking about the truth claims of art. We could make a case that pictures do have legitimacy and can provide knowledge about the world, but only if we acknowledge that the epistemic base on which we view art cannot be the same ground as the ground that constitutes justified true belief. In other words, we have to shift the goal posts and widen our understanding of what we take “knowledge” to mean. The basis of artistic activity is the imagination, which is not to say that art cannot contribute towards “intellectual enquiry” but that “we can properly speak of works of art directing the mind, even though not by proof, demonstration or the presentation of propositions.”7 In “What Can We Learn from Art?” T. J. Diffey develops Stolnitz’s noncognitivist views. He argues that in order to gain artistic knowledge from art, one has to refuse the aesthetic stance: “an aesthetic response to art involves the suspension of reference by taking to work to be holding up states of . . . contemplation,” for example. The audience has to be prepared to “take what is imaginatively shown to be the case in the work to be an assertion that it is the case.”8 In response, Sorensen views this as problematic—since there is recognition that “there’s a legitimate stance in relation to art,” then precisely this stance has to be taken in order to attend to the object as art.9 Throughout the discussion Elkins seeks a complete list of the kinds of knowledge. Such a list would be useful, but it remains elusive. While different kinds of knowledge were raised—practical knowledge, modal knowledge, kinaesthetic or proprioceptive knowledge, to name but a few examples—no claim to completeness was made. Further discussion about a possible taxonomy of knowledge would have been useful and would have helped to locate these views in relation to one another.

5. See Section 4 of the Seminars. 6. Douglas N. Morgan, “Must Art Tell the Truth?,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 26, no. 1 (1967): 21. 7. Gordon Graham, “Learning from Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics 35, no. 1 (1995): 26–37.

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8. T. J. Diffey, “What Can We Learn from Art?,” in Art and its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society, edited by Stephen Davies (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 30. 9. See Section 4 of the Seminars.

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what is the current state of thinking on the phd by art practice?

Brad Buckley and John Conomos

What confronts today’s tertiary art institutions, their faculty, and, not least, art students is a complex and shifting geopolitical situation in which art and education are undergoing unpredictable transformations. Simply put, what role a PhD might play in fine arts education depends where one is. Everywhere one looks there are substantial “push-and-pull” factors—innovation versus tradition, experimentation versus resistance. Therefore, one is obliged to radically rethink what a contemporary art school is and whether a PhD has a viable future in such an academic institution. How will a PhD benefit the present and future generations of students who wish to be artists in our increasingly globalized and turbulent world? Whatever our specific sociocultural and political context, art academics must locate fine arts education between research and the marketplace. Both are multilayered in meaning and significance. Art students are very aware of the risks, implications, and possibilities of becoming “professional” artists in their society. But how do we define an “artist” today? Is it just a question of “professional status” and social acceptance, or does it signify something more? Does it also mean being engaged in (auto)critique of one’s place in our shared world? Is it possible for artists to have professional status that is consensually recognized, in contrast to the other professions that tertiary education is responsible for (accounting, architecture, law, medicine)? If art schools are to become merely departments within progressively more corporatized universities, what value will we place on art as “experimentation” (Deleuze) and sociocultural critique? Will art become a profession equivalent to the minor decorative arts? Will there still be art (and art education) as Socratic enlightenment? To echo Louis Menand’s recent fine probe of what ails our universities today: are they just marketplaces for occupational training and recruitment, or should they maintain their traditional larger role as a marketplace for ideas? These are some of the more compelling issues that the idea of a PhD in fine arts is raising. Each particular tertiary institution will respond differently, depending on its context—culture, geography, history, politics, and economics— in terms of its willingness to explore the educative, critical, and professional value of enhancing the creative, research, and occupational horizons of our art students. Let us now briefly look at what is happening with art PhDs in Canada, the United States, Europe, and Asia. Few institutions in the United States currently

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offer a PhD degree in studio art, and the College Art Association (CAA) remains very skeptical of the idea that the PhD will replace the MFA. Over the past five years, the debate has shifted somewhat. At least three university art schools in Canada have introduced PhD studio programs, and in the United States the University of California at San Diego has also offered a PhD. A number of prominent art schools in the United States are considering their options, so it remains a hot-button issue at every CAA conference. But while this debate continues there, Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, and some northern European academies have, for more than a decade, offered the PhD as the terminal degree in the fine arts. Given that art schools are riddled with contradictions, schisms, and tensions, what kind of PhDs should be taught once one accepts their validity? Textonly PhDs or studio-based PhDs? What is the function of scholarly art writing as research? There is a particular tension inherent in the relationship between the studio work and text in studio PhDs. It is a Herculean task for present-day art academics to persuade their university and artist peers of the complexities involved in understanding the aesthetic, cultural, and historical aspects of contemporary art and its teaching and research. Aside from questions of ignorance, indifference, and parochialism, there is also the constant problem of the very competitive pecking order among the departments of a university. The key idea of a PhD as research training in fine art education is slowly gaining ground, though. It is indicative of the dawning realization among the younger generation of artists who work in university art schools that a PhD should be encouraged for many reasons: it can give art students vital self-empowerment, professional recognition and a qualification, and, most importantly, new research horizons in their world of creativity, critique, and experimentation. What do artists know that others don’t? This question is always at the foreground for artists who seek to speak of their contemporary condition in critical and probing terms. This suggests a basic willingness to find new ways of speaking about the present in continuing dialogue with the past, and a constant refusal to accept the current explanations of our contemporary condition. In a word, an artist worthy of the name is someone who sees art as an expression of “untimeliness” (Agamben/Nietzsche)—neither now nor the past or the future—but whose creative output is significantly shaped by her own singular relationship to her own time. Artists are engaged, through their artmaking, in a continuing conversation about the larger questions: aesthetics, culture, economics, ideology, power, space, spectatorship, technology, and time. Hence artists who endure have always known that understanding and discovery come through the process of making, that the creation or generation of new knowledge is embedded in the work they make, even if they do not always describe it in such terms. Creating new knowledge is predicated on a basic refusal to accept the received wisdom of

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one’s context; it relies on doubting everything. In this sense the artist is always a contrarian, a public intellectual, and always coming to terms with the paradoxes of creativity and what it signifies to be contemporary (Agamben). Research in art uses different ideas, techniques, and methodologies than traditional research in the humanities and the physical and social sciences. In art it is not just a question of identifying “new untilled fields” (Beckett) of creative enquiry and production; it profoundly depends on the artist’s intuition, hunches, creative instincts, and sensory experiences. It also depends on knowing failure as an essential of artistic creativity (Beckett). Art can and does generate new knowledge as long as the artist maintains a capacity to question the more predictable explanations and norms of their world. Paradoxically, then, where contemporary art research matters most is when it is avowedly suspicious of its own ideological, institutional, and pedagogic definitions of research in the applied arts and crafts. Artists who go against the grain of what is considered research in the more traditional disciplines can generate exciting new paths of research activity and knowledge. These are the artists who are enthralled by the ongoing life project of art as pluralism, art as power, art as mirroring ourselves to ourselves. In short, the idea of art as research is contentious in the modern university, and is generating palpable creative, academic, and institutional anxiety. If art represents criticism, knowledge, and research, and uses its own definitions and methods, and matters precisely because society deems it “useless” (Wilde), then it behooves us to foster it within the university, which remains a cherished sanctuary of open debate in our society (Derrida). After all, artists can see, think, feel, and intuit possibilities of research, knowledge, and methodologies that may not be so evident in other disciplines. Artists are concerned with making the rest of society able to see, feel, and interact with vivid new uncharted domains of experience, knowledge, and perception.

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spook country training for conflicts of interest

Charles Green

Art school can be memorable. Art schools can also make art history. Without going back too far, think of Nova Scotia and CalArts during the 1970s. Think of the buzz around Los Angeles’s art schools and London’s Goldsmiths during the 1990s. What stood out was their participation in the creation of what we now call contemporary art. Otherwise, thinking about art schools dates as quickly as my memory of the last faculty graduate committee meeting minutes. It’s not the why, how, or what about artists’ training and thinking, but who, where, and when that we remember. This is one half of the relevant history of studio art education that James Elkins called for in his introduction: the story of how art schools connected with contemporary art. The other story is how art schools connected with the higher education sector. The gulf between the two histories is the moral of the Seminars, just as its implications are elided in the recent crop of books and articles on art schools, which are by contrast very partial self-portraits. But a General Theory of Everything about what artists know, it turns out, isn’t very exciting. Art schools’ pedagogical foundations could obviously be more profound. On the ground, however, these have little effect compared with the two parts of the picture mentioned above. The first of these stories, then, revolves around the type and intensity of each art school’s connection to the complex art worlds within which it is embedded. Is a particular art school a backwater, ignored and its academics in turn detached from contemporary art, from artist-run initiatives, from dealer galleries and biennales? Or is art school the circuit into wider, global networks of contemporary art? And does the memorable art school make this link through publishing, residencies, university art museums (which are as often as not cordoned off from the art school and even from the art history department), and cycles of symposia? Is each art school a player, an enabler, even an innovator in the art world, of which there are many (we’ll come back to the geopolitics of that shortly)? James Elkins wanted to distinguish between two themes: one was how art students receive the discipline of art history; the other was how to reformulate the discipline. However, the professionals—art critics, art historians, curators, artists themselves—do not generate art history’s judgments anymore, and so a training that assumes they do is already on the wrong track. What do I mean? One of my best students quoted a clever phrase, “The knowledge field of contemporary art is mapped by price tags.” Even after the global financial crisis, the

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art market is the place in which public reputations and artistic achievements are determined, though not the place in which most art is made, with the exception of Versailles School theorists like Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami. As Hilde Van Gelder observed, there is no longer a single, unified art practice. My student saw the implications: she was arguing that the concept of “art history” does still occupy a very significant place in contemporary art. In particular, “art history” is still used as a lens within which a narrative of the contemporary artistic period is formulated. But she understood that the composition of this narrative by the disinterested art historian has no place, even after July 2008, in an art world governed by money and the market. My experience as an art critic, an art historian, and an artist means I can commend the Seminar’s provocative and insightful discussions about the relationship of the haughty discipline of art history to the ingenuously willful art school’s disinclination to think such systems through. What my student meant was that the vast growth of collecting and of contemporary art sponsorship has resulted in a narration of our artistic period other than by the art historian. Induction into our period, I would add, is now not by the art school. The disguised disappearance of the gatekeeper role has affected the operation of studio art schools, increasing the friction in a twospeed economy in which the priorities of the world of contemporary art mesh badly with the priorities of the art school. We started with two narratives. The second was institutional and revolved around the degree to which an art school can tap into the resources of the wider university or college: research funding, sabbatical programs, infrastructure and IT upgrades, the positive aspects of curriculum review, and, most of all, cross-disciplinary and cross-faculty teaching and research. The research university does not quite move to the same rhythm as an art school. We must then acknowledge the fragility and ambiguity of many art schools’ positions within their host institutions, but also the powerful successes of many, in entering the wider institutional swim. Just as there is another story elsewhere—in the vast contemporary networks of biennales, art fairs, and art dealers, not to mention of the equally networked artist-run initiatives, or artist-run spaces, scattered from Khoj in Delhi to Conical in Melbourne—so art schools can work the wider university system well. The College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales in Sydney has won a sequence of national competitive grants in competition with—and often in collaboration with—medical and scientific researchers. Here’s where equivalence with other faculties is so necessary. This is why an abstract, inward-turning MFA/PhD discussion is so irrelevant compared with parity and participation. This in turn depends on systems of teaching and research accountability that allow comparison and competition with other faculties. Quantifying such art school activities—which in effect transforms the older concept of professional and studio practice into the newer domain (for art schools) of studio research—offers a risky but necessary equal standing

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within the wider institution. As every dean and senior professor knows, achieving recognition for art that enables it to be seen as equal to scientific work is a slow, never-ending, and incrementally accomplished process. Further, universities from Yale and UCLA to the University of Melbourne are now driven by research paradigms that emphasize interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity. These deliberately override disciplinarity but offer considerable resources, time, and money in return. Studio art faculties wither when they plead they are a special case. Emphasizing the unique integrity of creativity is no different than any discipline’s special pleadings. They are ultimately not convincing, for every discipline thinks it is unique, and every university president knows differently. So we could take into account, though it is not particularly useful, the persistent, perpetual worry about graduate studio art research degrees, and in particular the MFA/PhD discussions, all of which fade away in comparison with the imperative to survive and prosper in the wider university setting. This setting includes other elements as well. Just as art schools have gradually shed the language of professional skills training in favor of research (except where units of professional management skills, the mini-MBA component of undergraduate courses, are involved), so both critical writing and curator training courses are expanding in close proximity to studio art programs—and faster. For these, entry at graduate level, often after a studio art degree, is the norm. Even though there are no careers in art writing that I’m aware of (art reviewing in magazines is one of the most ephemeral forms of vocation possible, utterly without any career path except in the imagination), and even though a PhD (and thus years indoctrinated in the academic discipline of art history) is becoming normal for young people entering senior curatorial positions, these courses continue to expand. But the presence of curatorial studies programs as well as art criticism programs has been in the best interests of art schools. Both train the entrant in the complex undercurrent of conflicts of interest that characterize contemporary art. This training is more useful than any first principles. When the University of Melbourne began a university-wide transition to the Bologna Model (the 3 + 2 + 3 years model of study, in which the first three years incorporate a considerable quantity of generalist liberal arts study and a quantity of units taken in faculties other than each student’s own, and the last three years a research degree), it met massive, very vocal, and highly mediasavvy opposition from students at the university’s recently incorporated Victorian College of the Arts. (This opposition, I should add, was also to the massive budget stringencies forced on the college through its new need to conform to funding models—to arcane and often seemingly arbitrary financial sticks and carrots—operating all across the rest of the university but dire when imposed on the teaching-intensive, space-consuming creative arts.) The resistance was fierce. Students clearly did not wish to endanger their induction into the profession of artist and were not nearly as concerned with access to the university’s research training and interdisciplinary networks. Although the trend since the 1970s has

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been for students to increasingly describe their practices through concepts learnt in the seminar room—from critical theory, cinema studies, French philosophy, and so on—when it came to the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity, there was a student revolt. This rebellion was expressed through a nostalgic desire to conserve an older model of studio art training—a vocational rather than academic training. This chimerical utopia had been summed up well by the name with which it is enshrined in the college’s promotional literature, the atelier model, even though that idea of training had been creaking badly since the early 1970s, when it had been attacked by student activists for its legitimization of academic bad practice and staff slothfulness. But though the students said that they were worried about the preservation of the best elements of a disciplinary specialization that their own artistic work well beyond easels and ateliers increasingly and completely disavowed—as has a wide swath of contemporary art— it is clear that their protests were driven by something more. They were driven by the fear that a wider university would never value either what artists think or how they think. That this fear was at odds with the rhetoric of their own work did not lessen their rage. And their anger was not misplaced. Art as academic research does not mesh properly with art as part of the contemporary industry of dealers, exhibitions, and biennales. One of the seminar participants noted how ridiculous the appendage “Dr.” looks in front of an artist’s name in an exhibition catalogue. The most valuable modes of research outcome within a university’s research paradigm are little valued by curators, art magazines, and biennale directors. The reverse is just as true. So academics and graduate students in studio art schools constantly and increasingly—even more so as PhDs become normal—negotiate a two-speed economy. During the 1990s, it seemed that new media art would be the genre that successfully managed the friction. Art school art research intersected powerfully with this type of art practice, a practice that ostensibly had left media-specialization behind. More recently, however, as Net theorist Geert Lovink noted in his visionary book Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture,1 new media activists deserted new media art in favor of more vital new social spaces, leaving new media departments beached, with a generation of newly tenured professors—now almost indistinguishable from other artistprofessors—to negotiate exactly the same, uncomfortable, two-speed economy. Thus, we can more than glimpse a decline of the intersection of collaborative and networked new media forms in art. So anxiety is grounded in fact. The vulnerability of studio art graduate programs in financially stressed university-housed art schools in Melbourne and the rise and fall of critical writing programs in Art Center in Pasadena tell us that the place of studio art must be negotiated within the context of the wider field of visual culture, which ultimately includes the design and entertainment industries. So the more abstract the discussion about art schools and what they do, 1. Geert Lovink, Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007).

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the more the discussion dates quickly, as quickly as symposia on the perpetual crisis in art criticism. They date for the same reasons, because mostly the subject of discussion itself is less important than other players, and because genuinely founded anxiety has been incorrectly displaced onto an object that has little real impact in the world. So art schools have to decide, each one separately, how to deal with contemporary art’s globalization and simultaneous regionalism. First, the word “globalization”: the art world lazily assumes, with its hazy leftist nostalgia, that this means convergence. This is of course not true. A myriad of economic theorists and political theorists, from Daniel Cohen to Berger and Rawls, all find no sign in the data of convergence. But they do identify divergence, which is in no way inconsistent with globalization. Globalization really involves the global organization of production, which determines the art world now and any art school’s place in it. As Areti Adamopoulou said, “Students think that art history’s selection is a natural selection. They don’t understand that someone actually made that selection.”2 A good art school anywhere should be alert for the related term in its operation: “colonization.” This and “globalization” are confused by art audiences, but this does not usually confuse thinking artists. However, even this misses the point, which is that all this “here” and “there” is already part of how artists think and what they produce, and it is crucial that we not forget that hegemony is a part of the art world. In summary, the increasing and exciting commitment of art schools to symposia and discourse—to offering themselves as laboratories to the art world and hiring auteur curators as faculty members—does not represent a significant adaptation from any high institutional level to any shift to new models of multidisciplinary, antihegemonic artistic work so much as the diffuse, recuperative desire to mirror all types of activity to graduate students whilst continuing academic life as it has already been conceived. In the same way, the discursive status of art schools within the art world exists as symbolic and decorative—as style generator, and even as the locus of saleable resistance, an attractive form from which no contemporary biennale, triennial, or Documenta curator, or art magazine editor, is immune.



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2. See Section 6 of the Seminars.

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learning education

Håkan Nilsson

What do artists know? In the introduction to the Seminars, James Elkins compares his own take on this question with Frances Whitehead’s. While Elkins understands the question within an educational framework, Whitehead looks upon it in a broader context that also has bearing outside the educational system. One the one hand, knowledge is connected to the education of artists, and on the other, knowledge is something artists possess regardless of education. Here, if I interpret Whitehead right, one might say that it is what an artist knows that actually makes her apply for an artistic education. Within this structure artists finds a way to continue to develop what they already knew (or at least had a hunch about) from the very beginning. Elkins, on the other hand, focuses the place of art history in education, the role of studio tutoring, and the diversity of theoretical texts at different art schools. Here, the question of what the artist knows might be interpreted as What do artists learn? or even What do we want artists to know? Granted, knowledge has a lot to do with education, something the Seminars offer many interesting perspectives on. The educational system currently is undergoing quite radical changes in many countries. In Sweden, art education on a higher level has been transformed in accordance with the Bologna Process, also discussed at the Seminars; the transformation includes the division between a BA and MA and, of course, the new artistic PhD. The change is quite radical, from the former “greenhouse” art academies, where students were treated like delicate plants who should not be disturbed in their natural developing process, we now find ourselves struggling with complete transparency in every course and concepts of “employability.” I feel that the discussion in the Seminar about the BA concentrated more on What do artists learn? and less on What do artists know? I followed the discussion about self-reflexiveness with great interest but was struck by how much it focused on the art student’s reflexiveness as an art student. The previous section of the Seminar offered many interesting takes on the role of the artist in society as reflected through artistic knowledge, but this discussion does not seem to have affected the debate about the BA. Little was said about connection between art education and the art market, aside from some comments from William Marotti, who tried to engage in the question, raised in Why Art Cannot Be Taught, of the relationship between education and the concept of art, While this focus might have been motivated by the above-mentioned changes in art education, a discussion about how education is oriented toward the art scene

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outside the schools could have helped broaden the perspectives. In the following, I would like to reflect on some questions my students have made me aware of regarding education of artists and, indeed, what artists know. I teach art theory, mostly at the BA level, where I try to exemplify through practice; that is, I use art-historical examples, mostly of recent date, to make theory relevant and understandable. It is also a way of activating art history, for which a degree requires only fifteen points in mandatory courses , or ten weeks in two years. The lack of time means that both art history and art theory must be offered in a way that is adjusted to the situation, which is why I find it quite natural to have a different Jacques Lacan in the art academy than in the philosophy department, as Elkins discusses in Section 6. I also believe that these versions of Lacan should not remain the same over the years, but should be adjusted in accordance with the interests of the students. But maybe the role of art history and theory in fine arts education needs to be rethought in a more profound way. What is and isn’t taught is in constant need of reconsideration, and we probably should think more seriously about what it means that the theoretical education at art schools differs so much. (Although I would find it disastrous if every art school taught exactly the same things.) But then, we are still working on the assumption that students will opt for a career within the art market, and that the role of the art academy is to act as a breeding ground for artists, who will go on to be so successful that they will be represented not only in galleries but in museums and biennales globally. However, when I ask my students where they see themselves in the future or what kind of artists they would like to be, only some of them find this kind of career appealing. The others have quite different ideas about what art is good for, and many of them do not even bother to pay visits to galleries or museums. And just as the Lacan that is taught needs to accord with the interests of the students, the relationship between the academy, the art scene, and the students needs to be reflected in the curriculum. Of course, students’ aversion to the art scene might be explained by shyness or even by some misguided attempt to be humble in the face of the fact that so few actually have a “career.” But this is only a partial explanation. In my experience, things were not like this only ten years ago. This is not to say that previous generations were more careerist, but it seems to me that the art students of today know something different than previous generations did. I locate this change in what Thierry de Duve calls “practice.” I think de Duve is quite right when he describes practice as the classifier of the contemporary art academy, but I understand it more positively, the way Stephan SchmidtWulffen does when he connects practice with doing art. I think many students, especially those who conceive of a life as artists outside the art market, are looking for practice. Not only “social practice,” which builds on engagement with the beholder(s), but alternative practices where art and art-making can play a new role. It is definitely not about de Duve’s other two concepts, “attitude” and

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“deconstruction.” Both of these aspects have bearing only (if any at all) on an art made for the art market. Many of the different alternative art scenes that have arisen since the advent of modernity have been motivated by a desire to replace the dominating order. But there are others that do not build on such animosity. This is how I understand the current situation. The art market is not the enemy; it is just not interesting enough. Of course, Stockholm, like Leuven, is not and will never be “the place to be” anyway, as Jan Baetens so eloquently puts it in his Assessment. But this does not seem to worry the students; they are already trying to find other uses for art. Jeron Boomgarten is perhaps right in suggesting that art education needs to involve a broader understanding of visual communication if artists are going have any place as visual specialists in a broader context. But it is also of great importance to understand what new role art can play in the changing mediatized world. Perhaps the answer lies less in whether we see art as part of the narrow art scene or the broader media scene, and more in how we think about what art is good for. In “Free? We Are Already Free. What We Need Now Is a Better Life,”1 Jan Verwoert concludes that if we think of art production as indebted to the market and the institutions, we will continue to create for the symbolic power. But if we think that we are indebted to “our friends and to art,” we can enter any market with a different attitude. While this approach at first glance offers few guidelines, I think it captures quite well what today’s art students know; they are looking for a way to formulate a practice regardless of what agendas govern the mighty art market. This brings me back to Whitehead’s description of artistic knowledge: in one of her points in Section 3 she states that artists “know revaluation, recoding, and recontextualization.” If we are to be able to embrace these aspects of artistic knowledge in education, we need to look for answers in fields other than art education. I agree with Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen when he questions whether any historical model will help in developing new curricula. The change is coming from the outside.

1. “Free? We Are Already Free. What We Need Now Is a Better Life,” in Kunst lehren = Teaching Art,” edited by Heiki Belzer and Daniel Birnbaum (Cologne: Walther König, 2007).

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what artists know

Laurie Fendrich and Peter Plagens

In response to Professor Frances Whitehead’s list of the cognitive and operational virtues of artists (from the Seminar she conducted on artistic knowledge), we are presenting a more prosaic addendum, a filling in, as it were, of some abstractions. Artists do know things that nonartists don’t know, or know things that nonartists do know but in a different way. Moreover, deep down, they know that they should know things that they haven’t bothered to learn. Sometimes they’ve suppressed knowledge, for reasons ranging from feeling they have bigger fish to fry, to career convenience, to conformity with whatever part of the art world in which they’re trying to succeed. Although the items below are stated in terms of a simple, declarative “Artists know . . . , ” the statements include the variations mentioned above. Also, there are obviously many exceptions. Nothing anybody says about “artists” can conceivably apply to every artist on the face of the earth. Artists know early on that there’s something wrong with the world. “Artists are people who know at around the age of seven that there’s something wrong with the world,” a painter named Dick Overfield once said to us. Although it’s hard to predict who will become an artist, generally speaking, artists belong to the group of kids who carry some level of unhappiness or disillusionment with the way things are. They don’t emerge out of popular high school crowds consisting of kids who eventually become investment bankers, real estate developers, doctors, lawyers, and the like. Curiously, they don’t necessarily emerge out of the arty high school crowds either—too many of the kids in those groups end up with permanently fried brains and social alienation. But to be any kind of artist requires some degree of turning one’s back on the world as it is—including groups of people who are always preaching to the art choir that there’s something wrong with the world. Artists know they need a studio. An artist having a studio is like a musician having a chair or a stool on which to sit. Some artists, of course, can do without a studio. But some artists don’t maintain a studio simply because it’s the fashion to be peripatetic, to be “New  York–based” or “Madrid-based” or “Chicago-based,” as if an artist is a one-person multinational corporation with branch offices all over the world. A few years ago, the painter Thomas Lawson, who’s dean of the art school at the California Institute of the Arts (aka CalArts), wrote, “More recently I’ve moved

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back into the studio and begun to think of the work as not exactly a private enterprise, but an enterprise that has to do with thinking consistently through a set of problems and ideas without so much concern for the public . . . the significance of having a studio or not having a studio. . . . To me it’s absolutely crucial, I don’t actually any longer understand how you work without one.”1 Artists know that looks count. Artists are acutely aware of how the world looks. They possess a gimlet eye in surveying the world around them, and see things nonartists don’t see. They might notice a small, irregular freckle on an arm, for example, or take note of the odd form of a horse chestnut that’s lying on the ground at their feet. They quietly pass visual judgment all the time—that looks great, that’s interesting, that’s ugly as all get-out—even if they’re quiet about it. Artists know that color is important. Color is really hard to understand well, and leaving serious exploration of it to the interior decoration trade, or to costumers and set designers, or to the fashion business is like leaving the serious exploration of words to the advertising industry. The problem with artists acting on this knowledge is twofold: first, the serious exploration of color has a bad holdover reputation from the power days of Clement Greenberg and color-field painting and is now considered “formalist” and reactionary; second, much contemporary art, being ideological, has little use for color as structure. It prefers simply “using” it in rather blunt fashion for political flavoring. The bright spot (pun intended) in all of this is that since more and more artists are working in additive color (i.e., the colors of projected light itself ) instead of subtractive color (the color caused by daylight or its equivalent bouncing off pigmented surfaces), many artists are relearning color in terms of additive color. And what they learn and how they implement it may lead artists who use subtractive color to get back to exploring it more seriously. Artists know how to see negative space. Artists see negative space as easily as they see positive space. When they look at two trees, for example, they’re as likely as not to notice the space between the trees, or the spaces between the branches and leaves, as they are to notice the trees, branches, and leaves themselves. They see objects and the air around them as almost interchangeable, and understand what they see without having to begin by naming things. So when artists see a chair, for example, they don’t think, “Look at that chair.” They think, “Look at those shapes, that light next to that dark, those colors.” For artists, the world is much different than it is for, say, a literary person.

1. “GI Symposium: Painting as a New Medium,” special issue, ART&RESEARCH 1, no. 1 (2006/7).

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Artists know that they should know how to draw. Artists know that they should “know how to draw”—not necessarily in an expert trompe-l’oeil manner, or in an anatomically correct way, à la Pierre-Paul Prud’hon or George Bridgman (Bridgman’s Anatomy)—but at least along the lines of the content of Henning Nelms’s great book Thinking with a Pencil (preferably a little more fleshed out). Yes, an artist can make art that will get into one of the big international biennales, or a cutting-edge gallery in the Mitte, without knowing in the least bit how to draw. But artists who can’t draw at all—who have no feel whatsoever for pencil on paper—know, down deep, that they’re a little hollow at the core. (Whether artists who come from, and participate in, art of an emphatically different nature from Western art should “know how to draw” in the general sense described above is a question too big to be addressed here.) Artists who talk too much about art know that their talk gets in the way of making it. However much artists talk about art—and some artists talk almost nonstop—they know that they should be talking about art less than they do. Leonardo went on and on about art in his notebooks, and look what happened to him—he painted fewer than twenty paintings. Cézanne found it painful to express himself in words, but painted his famous mountain hundreds of times. Those who wrote copiously and were still great, like Van Gogh and Delacroix, put their words into the private repositories of letters and journals. And the best words of those within our living memory who published—Ad Reinhardt’s scolding meditations and Don Judd’s blunt art criticism—should be, if anything, a counterexample to those artists who want to blather on about art. Artists know how to live with an enormous amount of doubt. Every artist who reads Honoré de Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece” recognizes himself in the hero, Frenhofer—especially when it comes to his deep anxiety about his art. For artists, deciding when a work of art is finished is a momentous occasion. Artists are never sure about what they do, but that doesn’t stop them from asserting that something is finished. “Finishing” a work of art is necessary in order to move on to another work of art. Artists learn to live with being certain but wrong, and being absolutely right but never certain about it. Artists know the practically unmentionable Q-word is, in the end, all that counts. Since the fall of Clement Greenberg, artists have avoided the word “quality” as if it were poison. That doesn’t stop them from knowing it’s all that counts. The word of choice is “works”—as in “That works for me.” Art is art, not natural science. In the end, there’s no getting around the fact that the part of it that’s good is not provable.

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Artists don’t want to know that art can be dangerous. Most artists don’t want to think about the idea that art might be dangerous. They casually accept the idea that even if art is subversive or offensive, it’s always, bottom-line, somehow good for society. It’s too bad they haven’t usually read a bit of Plato, or Rousseau. Knowing the smartest arguments in favor of censorship of the arts would make artists more keenly aware of how easy things are for them now—at least in fairly democratic countries—compared to any other time in history. And Plato, Rousseau, and a few others could remind that them this business of having a semiautonomous human enterprise we fetishize as “art” (even “Art”) is one of the necessary neuroses of what we call civilization.

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how do artists think?

Janneke Wesseling

The question, What do artists know? is stimulating and thought-provoking, as demonstrated by the lively roundtable discussions that followed from it. The question occupied me over the past few months, when I continually felt forced to draw the absurd conclusion that artists know nothing. In the end I realized that that might not be such an absurd conclusion after all. To gather insight into what it is that artists do and how they apply their knowledge, and to develop an understanding about how art should be taught, why it is taught, and even whether it should be taught, as James Elkins puts it in his introduction, What do artists know? is not the proper question to ask. My argument is that the verb “to know” leads us in wrong directions, away from artistic practice and away from the artwork. I propose to recast this question as, How do artists think?, based on insights acquired from “Thinking,” the first part of Hannah Arendt’s book The Life of the Mind. I will put forward some speculations about what these insights might mean when applied to the practice of visual art. In “Thinking,” Arendt expands on Kant’s distinction between two ways of thinking, Vernunft and Verstand, which she translates respectively as “reason” and “intellect.” The distinction between the two coincides with the distinction between “meaning” and “cognition.” Reason and intellect serve different purposes, the first of “quenching our thirst for meaning,” the second of “meeting our need for knowledge and cognition.” In cognition, we apply criteria for certainty and evidence, in the kind of knowing that presupposes truth. Arendt closely follows Kant in stating that reason originates in our need to think about questions to which we know no answer exists and about which no verifiable knowledge is possible, for example, questions about God, freedom, death, and immortality. Reason therefore transcends the limitations of cognition and intellect, that is, the criteria for certainty and evidence, which she summarizes as follows: “The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And meaning and truth are not the same.” In cognition, or knowledge, thinking is a means to an end of establishing truth or scientific knowledge. Verstand desires to grasp what is given by the senses. Cognition is a play between sensual perception and intellect, of applying laws and evident criteria to the phenomena as they are perceived by the senses. In this way, it is based on common sense, on faith in the reality of the world. The scientist approaches the world to dissipate sense illusions and to correct errors in science.

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Reason, on the other hand, has its end in itself. It is the pure activity of thinking, and at the same time it is the awareness of this activity while we are thinking. Reason is both reflexive and self-reflexive. The awareness of one’s own thinking activity creates the sense of being alive. Reason is the never-ending search for meaning, propelled as it is by constant doubt. Because it is ultimately founded on doubt, it has, as Arendt puts it, a “self-destructive tendency with regard to its own results.” To experience one’s thinking, to know of one’s mind’s faculties, one has to withdraw from the world of the senses. Sensual experience distracts us when we try to concentrate and think. The scientist may also temporarily withdraw from the world of appearances to solve a problem, only to return to it and apply the answer, to insert the solution into the sensual world. Arendt says reason is out of order with the world because of a withdrawal from the world that it demands, and also because it produces no results that survive its activity, and no solutions. According to Arendt, the gap between reasoning and the world of appearances is bridged by metaphor and metaphoric language. What might this tell us about art and the activity of artists? It will be clear that the kind of thinking that is relevant to art is reason, Vernunft. The artist will of course use her Verstand to solve concrete problems relating, for example, to technique, or to the marketing of her work. Such concrete solutions are important to her practice, but they do not constitute the meaning of her work; it is the kind of thinking called reason, the search for meaning, that is stored in the artwork, which Arendt therefore calls a thought thing. Art “quenches our thirst for meaning,” it produces no solutions and has no end but itself. Criteria of certainty and evidence are not applicable here, nor can we speak of a quest for the truth, which comes close to a definition in the negative. So let us have a closer look at the relation between reason and art. The major difference between the two seems to be that the activity of reason presupposes invisibility. Reason withdraws from the world of the senses; artworks are sensual objects placed into the world of appearances by an artist. They are real and perceivable to the senses. However, their realness is of a different kind than that of other objects in the world. According to Arendt, “art tears sense-objects out of their context in order to de-realize and thus prepare them for their new and different function.” That new and different function is to produce meaning, or to give direction to the quest for meaning. The artwork is thinking made visible. It is the invisible transformed into an appearance. Through the artwork the connection between thinking and the phenomenal world is reestablished. The artwork is the materialization of thought, it is thinking made visible and sensual through the faculty of the imagination, which Arendt defines as “mind’s unique gift of re-presentation, making present what is actually absent.” The activity of reason, immaterial and invisible, is related to the kind of thinking the artist does; the artwork is the material and visible outcome of this thinking.

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Is not then the artwork the end result of the kind of thinking that the artist does? No, or if so, only momentarily. The artwork is not an end product but a station along the road, a momentary standstill in the process of thinking that never stops. As soon as the artist has placed the work in the commonsense world of appearances, her activity in relation to this particular work belongs to the past—unless of course she decides to turn back to it. At this point the spectator comes in and picks up the thread of thinking embodied by the artwork. The spectator carries on the never-ending process of interpretation and the quest for meaning. The verb “to know” does not apply to art or to what artists do. To know implies cognition, knowledge, evidence, truth, criteria for certainty, categories that belong to the world of science and to a kind of thinking essentially alien to art. It would greatly clarify matters when in the debates about research in art, about the phenomenon of the PhD in art, about how art should be taught, we would leave knowledge and cognition out of the argument. In art, which is a quest for meaning, there is nothing much to know. (In art history, of course, there is a great deal to know, which is why that is an entirely different discipline.) This brings me to the distinction made by Christopher Frayling between Research and research. Elkins refers to this distinction when he says Research means disciplinary, scientific, systematic work, and research is curiosity, seeking, or general inquiry. It seems to me beyond doubt that artists conduct the latter type of research. I would therefore propose to recast the question, What do artists know? as How do artists think? It follows that the following strategies are of vital importance in teaching art students: 1. To stimulate reflexivity in students. Students must learn to reflect upon their own thinking, upon their temporary withdrawal from the world and the re-entrance into the phenomenal world through the work they produce. Kant said it is the task of reason to reflect upon its own experience and its experience itself, to clarify its own structures, reactions, and autonomous actions, to dispel its own self-generated illusions, and to establish its own legitimate grounds. In other words, self-reflection happens through doing art, it happens in and through the act of producing the artwork. 2. To make students aware of the self-awareness of the artwork. Meaningful artworks are always self-reflexive. They seem to possess self-awareness about their status as artwork, as image. 3. To stimulate productive doubt as a tool in art practice and to make students aware of the fact that art is out of order with the world, even if that implies a self-destructive tendency of artistic practice toward its own results. All of these activities are variations upon thinking as reason, which ultimately gives us the sense of being alive—precisely what an artwork does to the spectator.

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beyond authority

Vanalyne Green

A number of things strike me about the discussions. 1. Formally, I found the almost random quality of conversation really difficult to hold onto. Even though there are bullet points, the back-and-forth nature of the interactions kept me zigzagging through the text. This was fun at first, but when I wanted to think of a way of responding, it was as if there were points of thought and suggestions but not a container for them. 2. The drama of interaction via transcripts—ellipses, politeness, emphases— inducted me into the role of voyeur. I always like being a voyeur, but in this case I felt as if I hadn’t been invited to the party, but to watch and record the party. That’s a bit uncomfortable. 3. There seemed to be something wrong about the discussion of Thierry de  Duve’s work. Here, about de  Duve, the feeling of voyeurism was most uncomfortable and there were only a few instances when someone gave de Duve thanks for the food that they were eating. 4. I’m surprised that missing from the conversation was the idea of a scene. I wonder if that’s because the random elements of a social education aren’t so easily bureaucratized, so easily managed. And yet I think it’s crucial. This is what I hauled in from the online dictionary on the origin of “scene”: Middle French, stage, from Latin scena, scaena stage, scene, probably from Etruscan, from Greek skēnē shelter, tent, building forming the background for a dramatic performance, stage; perhaps akin to Greek skia shadow—more at shine. First Known Use: circa 1520. Some of the above fits: the element of casting and staging involved in the dramatic performance of learning. But here, also, I mean to propose the responsibility of people taking on the role of teacher, or leader of teaching, to plait history and historical drama and contemporary politics into the moments of thinking about aesthetics and making. I write this because it is the bigness, the uncontrollableness of history and politics that can help art students to open the door of the atelier and see that the overdetermined “studio” is now outside the building. Saying this, I want to be paradoxical and protect the artists who make work from very private places. This, too, perhaps, is a characteristic of a scene: a tolerance for contradiction.

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A scene suggests work and play outside the perimeter of a formal situation of becoming aware of art. Echoes of the learned in the social and vice versa. A place just a little beyond the reach of authority. The site where someone learning plays fort/da. And, finally, I wish not to be confused with those who extol the virtues of hallway convos or a university’s idea to capture student interest with a predictably safe online learning experience. We have to like art and artists. We have to visit studios and see shows. This may seem rudimentary, but it’s not. Paul Sargent, a former student, recently wrote to me (on Facebook, mind you): I think that is the part about art (and life, really) that I love the most. School, daily conversation, an effectively curated exhibition, a well written review, a record collection, a lunch with good friends, or a plane ride to CAA with a particularly interesting fellow recent adjunct: I love those moments when art actually communicates. And so often, I’ve found, the best communication is simply catalyzed by art, sparked and flamed by a work or body of work—but that it is the makers and thinkers and individuals and subsequent communities that keep it all burning. Yes. A question that’s still open for me is what place there is for a scene in distanced learning. The predictable answer, I suppose, would be none. But my experience as a teacher is that online venues, such as blogs and private social networks, allow shy students to speak and lead. This is where we might do some thinking.

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when skill becomes attitude

Glenn Adamson

I come to this conversation as a specialist in the history and theory of craft. For me, the question of what artists know is inseparable from the question of skill. And the main thing to say about skill is that, almost uniquely among the variables in artistic production, it cannot be had easily. Art school is a very brief experience. Even a full-fledged master’s student will have spent only five or six years learning how to make art, and will have spent much of that time traversing many different studio disciplines, and perhaps studying academic subjects too. Just for the purposes of comparison, prior to the collapse of the guild system apprentices were expected to train for seven years at one specific trade before they were considered professionally qualified as journeymen. Further progression to the status of a master could take a further seven years, or longer. Ars longa, vita brevis. We simply cannot expect art school, as it is currently structured in Europe and America, to raise people to a professional standard as makers. The culture of art education is too firmly committed to breadth instead of depth. Given this, there are four options for students: wait to go to art school until they have already learned fabrication skills; be prepared to learn many of their useful skills after graduation, somehow making a living at the same time; make art that doesn’t require skilled making; or hire someone else to make their art for them. It is not surprising that most artists these days opt for one of the latter two courses of action. They either make work which places low demands on making, like word art, amateurish video, sloppy sculpture, or found objects; or they resort to outsourcing, with all the costs and compromises that entails. In his important recent book The Intangibilities of Form, British art theorist John Roberts has offered a theoretical model for understanding this reality.1 He envisions artists as operating in a triangular terrain whose vertexes are marked skill, deskilling, and reskilling. The first of these refers to any direct crafting of an object, like painting with a brush or carving with a chisel. The second is the artistic habit of producing a work through an act of selection or conceptualization, as in Duchamp’s readymades or Moholy-Nagy’s telephone paintings. And the last refers to the reframing of artistic practice along the lines of other occupations, such as business management or institutional critique. The reskilling artist still functions as a “producer,” but in the sense that term is used in the film industry. In such a climate specialization itself comes to seem suspect, or even anti-intellectual. 1. John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007).

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One feature of Roberts’s terminology is that it implies that skill is a static category, while deskilling and reskilling (as is implied by the gerund forms) are active. This accords with the commonplace assumption that craft is rooted in tradition. From this perspective, the artisanal aspect of “what artists know” is what they have learned from those who came before them. Deskilling and especially reskilling, by contrast, seem like the routes to innovation. They are the active ingredients in forming contemporary practice, as de Duve uses that term. This was very explicitly framed by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen at the first What Do Artists Know? Seminar: “Along with this idea of practice comes the idea of dematerialization. So we’re not talking any longer about materials or objects, but forms of practice and how to change them.” As Marta Edling noted, this results in “the loss of the . . . manual production of a thing called art.” From this perspective, good old craft skill seems like an anachronistic friction, a difficulty or even an inconvenience that artists face in trying to realize their ideas. At best it could be viewed as an anchor, in both a negative and positive sense: both a drag and a firm pivot. Yet I wonder if there might not be a way of conceiving skill in more active terms. Here Christopher Frayling’s discussion of the term “attitude” is a help. He comments that the work on socializing someone into her self-image as an artist could be an instance of attitude: the art school as a sort of entrée into a world, a launching, an orientation towards the art world.2 If you treat it as a sociological category, attitude could be interesting. Perhaps we might think about skill, in the art school context, not as an impediment (something hard to learn) or a static repository of know-how, but rather as an attitude. We might also want to use the word “stance,” as in a baseball player’s way of standing at the plate. Though it would have something to do with preparedness, the real use of skill to the artist would be its part in “launching” a career in an implied direction, a vector of future possible travel. When a student studies a particular craft—pottery, painting, architectural rendering— it may not be so important that the student master it. But it is crucial that students grasp the potential of those skilled repertoires. They need to know enough to make future possible actions evident, whether those actions involve further skilling, deskilling, or reskilling. Thus, at its best, teaching craft in art school is a matter of imparting very detailed “known unknowns” to a student. This means applying what James Elkins describes as “self-reflexivity,” a term he introduces in relation to theories and histories of art, to the most material level of studio practice. The more artists understand how little they know, the broader their horizons will be.



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2. See Section 1 of the Seminars.

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twenty theses on what artists know

Henk Slager

1. Artistic Research (Response to Section 4, artistic Knowledge, Part 1) 1.1. During the last decade the so-called Bologna Agreement has prompted many discussions and publications dealing with the academicization of art education, which, in my view, has led to an overvaluation of the concept of artistic research. 1.2. As yet, artistic research is a concept that provokes many critical questions. What form of research emerges in or through visual art? And if one can indeed speak of research through visual art, how does such research relate to the already established scientific-philosophical triad of alpha, beta, and gamma sciences? 1.3. Does the rhetoric of the concept of research indeed enable novel practices, or does it rather exclude and/or marginalize certain practices? Has the former opposition of art versus not-art perhaps now been replaced by a novel mechanism of exclusion through the opposition pair research-based art versus non-research-based art? Or does the different vocabulary of the research discourse point to an already existing practice which could be accommodated by means of a translation procedure in an academic architecture focused on knowledge production? 1.4. Artistic research seems to be a concept without any paradigm that can easily be deployed—because of its current or perhaps even intrinsic conceptual mode of diffusion—for a cognitive capitalism, that is, for a bureaucratic quantification ultimately developing in a technocratic, controllable form of obtained educative/research results in the realm of the current knowledge economy. 1.5. In brief: the assumption that the intended modular curriculum of the Bologna rules will entirely dissolve the problems of the introvert, predemocratic, nonagonistic model of master class education will turn out to be an illusion. In fact, what will happen is that a system focused on disciplining will be replaced by a system of control. 2. Artistic Thought (Response to Section 5, artistic Knowledge, Part 2) 2.1. In the light of such instrumentalization, the above-mentioned Bologna rules—or the introduction of the bachelor-master (BA-MA) system in art

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education—could ultimately have a positive and restraining effect. If a curricular, module-based model must be introduced in European art education, this will also necessitate a reconsideration of the specificity of art education, a reconsideration that will relocate the discussion on the academy where it belongs, that is, within the institutional framework of art education. And it was about time. For a moment it seemed as if the art academy debate would be claimed by curators and museums—see Manifesta 6 (2006) and Van Abbemuseum’s Academy project (2006–8). 2.2. In order to explicitly pose the question of the specificity of the academy, the Utrecht group called Artistic Research organized, along with the Brussels Sint-Lukas Academy, the Academy Strikes Back conference (June 2010). During this conference, which featured speakers such as Renee Green, Irit Rogoff, and Dieter Lesage, the issue of the art academy as research environment dominated the discussions.1 2.3. That issue clearly indicates that it is time to dispense with the ontological question, What is research? and direct ourselves from now on to the topological question, Where is research? Which institutional environments could qualify certain artistic practices as research? And what would that mean for how institutions position themselves as education and presentation platforms and how they relate to the topical debate in the professional realm? 2.4. This shift also indicates the necessity for a focus on what precedes artistic research, that is, what makes artistic research possible, including the investigation of modes of artistic thought, forms of differential thought, and thinking in multiple connections. A form of thought is needed that can manifest itself as research within an institutional environment by concentrating on, for example, artistic knowledge production. That form of thought, however, must at the same time be able to deform or deconstruct conceptual frameworks if thinking in terms of knowledge production becomes too restraining.2 2.5. The current debate on artistic research shows considerable parallels with the 1970s debate on semiotics—particularly as demonstrated by Roland Barthes. The tension between two focal points of the semiotic ellipse, that is, between phenotext and genotext, between homogenization and heterogenization, can be compared with the current tension between knowledge production and artistic thinking. 3. An Agonistic Curriculum (Response to Section 8, The MFA Degree) 3.1. Another pressing question emerges: how can the description of artistic research as a continuous tension between knowledge production and experimental thought processes be translated into a topical MA fine arts curriculum? Such a curriculum should explicitly concentrate on a continuous questioning 1. See maHKUzine 9 (Summer 2010), http://​ www​.mahku​.nl/​research/​mahkuzine9​.html.

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2. See Tables of Thought conference, Helsinki, April 2010 (www.e-flux.com/ announcements/tables-of-thought, [accessed July 29, 2012]).

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of acquired understanding and behavior; in other words, it should focus on the critical interrogation of how the world is presented. In fact, such a curriculum could be narrowed down to the basic and more interesting question of how the world is presented differently. That basic question contains all Dublin descriptors: a capacity to resolve problems and master complexity while implying communicative and contextualizing capacities. 3.2. In the What Do Artists Know conference (Chicago 2010), Singerman’s Art Subjects provoked the investigation of how art education integrated in an academic curriculum structure (“critical studies”) could contribute to a professional self-awareness based on the acquisition of cultural knowledge and, at the same time, imply a (de)disciplining of the professional artist. 3.3. The complexity of a pluralist, agonistic world calls for a curriculum that is similarly complex: a curriculum that does not nullify the existing productive tension between old and new media, theory and practice, word and image, tutorials and seminars, and thought processes and knowledge production. In short, a  curriculum that leaves a monolithic approach as a dominant art-historical form of thought behind and claims room for a multitude of interpretation models based on philosophy, media theory, communication science, critical studies, cultural studies, semiotics, contextual studies, curatorial studies, art theory, aesthetics, analysis of professional journals, and artists’ texts. Such a form of education could be described as “research-led” or “research-tutored” education. 3.4. Although we know—at least since Walter Gropius—that art cannot be taught, we could at least create a laboratory-type setting where constructive impulses can emerge through conducted (theoretical) debate, which could then indirectly make the artistic process of thought turn. 3.5. An aspect that could be accentuated further in the context of promoting a novel process of thought is the development of transdisciplinary modules. In MaHKU’s MA Fine Arts Program (Context-Responsive Research Project), for example, students must translate and test their research projects in different media and contexts such as public space or public art. Such an experimental detour method expands the insight in the medium- and/or discipline-specific conditions of their work. 4. The Third Cycle as Institutional Consciousness (Response to Section 9, The PhD Degree) 4.1. Another form of creating rigidity can be seen in the current debate over how artists conduct PhD research. The PhD programs offer artists a sanctuary for contemplating their artistic passions and strategies for a number of years. This sometimes leads to the local formation of an isolated, hyperacademic promotion class, in which three or four researchers discuss the progress of their projects monthly in the presence of a supervisor.

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4.2. However, conducting artistic research can never be a goal in itself. The researchers and their projects should relate in such a way to the structure of art education that a natural contribution can be made to the research environment mentioned above. The Dutch academic model of the AIO (researcher in training), where the researchers yearly teach advanced BA/MA students, could work as a catalyst in this context. Discussing advanced research projects (such as the MaHKU research projects by Irene Kopelman and Jeremiah Day) may turn out to be constructive for the artistic process of thought and the contextualizing capacities of the students involved; it may also involve a form of research-based education. 4.3. The art academy as research environment must not be tempted into pseudoscientific behavior, but must rather guarantee further contemplation of the art academy as possibly the last sanctuary for experimental research and pluriform artistic thinking that can and must continuously be redefined. 4.4. Time and again, we should stress that the greatest importance of artistic PhD research lies in how it functions as the institutional conscience of the academy while steering the pressing issue of what the paradigm of art education entails. 4.5. Art education must again be aware of its responsibility in the cultural field of force. In a time when the art academy seems to be losing its main core because of the vitality of neoliberalism and the homogenizing rhetoric of the creative industries, it seems imperative for the academy to focus on the reformulation and actualization of its original task, that of supplying novel and different forms of visual production and critical consciousness based on a committed autonomy.

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afterword a reserve army of intellectuals

Howard Singerman

Perhaps it is significant how few artists are mentioned over the Seminar’s 270 manuscript pages, as though artists somehow had nothing to do with studio art teaching. And since I plan in the coming pages to read their absence as symptomatic of a problem I think is made quite clear by the Seminar, let me start by acknowledging that artists were missing from my book, too. While there were a number of artists mentioned by named in Art Subjects, they appeared there as educators, administrators, or commentators, figures who, at best, might also be or once have been artists. But these are not the sort of names or artists I mean—the artists who are conspicuous in their absence here are those who are most conspicuous and most present in surveys of recent art or mappings of the contemporary art world. Why is it so hard to speak of artists—specific artists—when speaking of art teaching? Aren’t artists of repute in some sense the living examples, the very embodiments of the outcomes we want? My guess is that the answer is no, for at least a couple of perhaps contradictory, but mutually reinforcing reasons. It may be that such singular artists aren’t what art educators and their institutions want, because most of us continue to imagine “real artists” to be anomalies—and we want them that way. It might be that even among the critical thinkers in the Seminar artists exceed teaching and the university’s traditional forms of knowledge, as they have since Kant.1 “Maybe art historians or philosophers are more attached to categories and taxonomies than artists are,” posits Areti Adamopoulou in a discussion of what might constitute artistic knowledge.2 This is a straightforward and obvious position, and a very familiar one, but its familiarity stems from how well it matches our image—that is to say, our stereotype—of the artist. How well it matches, say, the opening line of Roberta Smith’s review of William Copley and Peter Saul in (as I write) this morning’s New  York Times: “Sanctified art movements aside, most artists worthy of the name are loners and renegades. They operate without licenses—or Ph.D.’s— striving to be themselves as only they can, as clearly and intensely as possible.”3 While the seminarians might reject Smith’s boilerplate romanticism, it’s worth noting that she speaks directly to the question of the name, and of artistic identity, and, curiously, but perhaps no longer arbitrarily, to the PhD. Formal 1. “Art, as human skill, is distinguished also from science (as ability from knowledge), as a practical from a theoretical faculty, as technic from theory (as the art of surveying from geometry). For this reason, also, what one can do the moment one only knows what is to be done, hence without anything more than sufficient knowledge of the desired result, is not called art . . . . Camper describes very exactly how the

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best shoe must be made, but he, doubtless, was not able to turn one out himself. Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, ed. and trans. James Creed Meredith (London: Clarendon Press, 1911), sec. 43, “Art in General.” 2. See Section 5 of the Seminars. 3. Roberta Smith, “Art Review: Playing the Renegade with Eroticism or Rage,” New York Times, November 11, 2010.

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education didn’t create this artist, or indeed any artist “worthy of the name,” and perhaps can only hurt him (to choose the pronoun that usually accompanies the stereotype)—this is, again, a very old idea. It is certainly older than R. L. Duffus’s 1928 assessment—“Once or twice in a generation a genius will appear—and if the school helps him, even to the extent of teaching him how to mix his paints or clean his brushes, it may have justified the grief, the cost, the waste of what is admittedly a haphazard scheme of education”4—but Duffus’s statement makes both the logic and the educational remainder (the waste, the cost) of artistic exceptionalism quite clear. Artists are missing from the Seminar because they shouldn’t be there in the first place. The question is what to do—pedagogically, perhaps, or administratively—with the rest. Perhaps this is too harsh. Certainly  I have slid too quickly from Areti Adamopoulou’s quite reasonable statement to Duffus’s rather more intemperate one. It may well be generally accurate to say that art historians or philosophers are more attached to categories and taxonomies than artists are, but what does it mean about artists and the educational apparatus they are threaded through? Are artists artists in the same way that art historians are art historians or philosophers, philosophers? Frances Whitehead may have gotten to some of this when she spoke of the kind of belonging to that inheres in suffixes. “The suffix in words like ‘artist,’ ‘designer,’ and ‘engineer’—the agential suffix, -ist, -er, and -eer—is  related to the degree of application of instrumentation. . . . For example, art as a noun ends in -ist, not only because it’s a noun, but also because the relationship between the profession, the artist, and the thing, ‘art,’ is of an ideological character. It turns out that -ists are the most ideological. The person is deeply attached to the subject.”5 The suffix -ian wasn’t on Frances Whitehead’s list, but one could argue, at least empirically, that when art historians don’t get tenure they quit being art historians; they apply for other jobs. An artist is an artist with or without tenure, whatever other job he does—if he is really an artist. This tautology is the lived ideology of the artist, and why the word is so hard to use in relation to the educational system—and the problem belongs not just to the artist in (benighted, romantic) relation to his or her profession, but to all of us. Perhaps particularly to those of us who are educators: we too want something—something more authentic, more necessary, more “critical”—from the name “artist,” as though the name was too important to let be. Which leads to the second reason that artists are missing from the Seminars. If we cannot hope to educate an artist-genius like Matisse or Cezanne, to make him an outcome of our training, we are deeply fearful of creating Julian Schnabels or Damien Hirsts, or, for a younger audience, Piotr Uklanskis or Dan Colens. The list goes on, and I venture we all have one—artists who are, in someone’s measure, not worthy of the name, and thus those names our students are to be protected from. It seems there is something unseemly, untrustworthy, not just about the true artist but also about his ambitious and successful 4. R. L. Duffus, The American Renaissance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 187–88. 5. See Section 5 of the Seminars.

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pretenders. “You mentioned terms like ‘creativity,’ ‘intention,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘expression,’ ” says Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen. “For me one of the aspects of . . . the contemporary paradigm is the fact that these terms don’t fit any longer. How can you talk about being creative after Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons? How can you talk about ‘expression’ after the critique of abstract expressionism? What is artistic freedom if we understand that the artist, like gender, is a social construction?”6 Indeed, and these artists play on just such terms, not just their deep histories but their contemporary ironies. Artists such as Schnabel and Hirst and Colen know precisely, cynically, that the artist “is a social construction”; it was a lesson they were taught in all good faith by Ron Clark at the Whitney Independent Study Program, perhaps, or by Jon Thompson at Goldsmiths—but that doesn’t mean that the construction can’t be effective, even lived. Indeed, I would argue that the idea of the constructedness or at least the fictionality of the artist predates Warhol and Koons if not Duchamp; Pollock and Clyfford Still and David Smith, who spoke of the “building of identity,” understood artistic identity as produced, constructed, if not exactly in the way Schmidt-Wulffen intends it. And certainly despite his exasperated, rhetorical “how could you,” the art world is more than happy to talk about intention, creativity, expression, and even genius after Koons and Warhol, and indeed to extend those distinctions to them. Of course, the art world too is relatively absent in the Seminar except as an other place, Freud’s “andere schauplatz” perhaps, a place the university protects artists from. Or, as Jonathan Dronsfield says, as he constructs their spatial difference: “the university would afford the space for support and collaborations that would not be possible in the art world.”7 We would like artists for something other than the market, and collaborators other than gallerists and publicists, fashioning press releases still written in the language of expression and creativity and genius, of masters. In many ways, and in a single line, Saul Ostrow said much of what I’ve said thus far, and much of what I want to say: “One of the issues here is what model of the artist is being put forth.”8 None of Ostrow’s interlocutors take up the question directly, but a model does emerge, I would argue, and it is kin to a much older one, the artist-citizen that American art reformers have asked for since the 1910s. Haunted by the loners and renegades who despite our best efforts continue to fill the galleries and be celebrated in the newspapers, art educators have long worried that “there is danger in the fostering of the idea . . . that the artist is a man apart from his fellows to whom is due special consideration. This is injurious to his standing as a citizen, a member of organized society.”9 And citizenship comes up in the Seminars, as James Elkins and Christopher Frayling look back to Herbert Read for the ways in which art might constitute knowledge, or better, and more formally, research. “It’s really Read’s formula that is closest to what 6. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 7. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 8. See Section 5 of the Seminars. 9. Ellsworth Woodward, “What Instruction in Art Should the College A.B. Course Offer to the Future Artist?,” Art Bulletin 1, no. 2 (1917): 19.

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we’re aiming at here, except that he isn’t concerned with educating artists, and all of us here are interested in that—even if the actual result of an average art school education is a citizen, not an artist!”10 Let me pause a moment here to wonder, again, whether we are all interested in educating artists, given their absence, and wonder also whether it’s just semantics or are artists necessarily—again—not citizens. Is Elkins suggesting (or complaining) that most of those educated in art schools do not end up artists but—only, merely—citizens? And is his problem with art schools, then, that they aren’t effective at making artists, or is it that they don’t make the kind of artists we want, those who might be recognizably, marketably or historically, artists, and citizens as well? The artist-citizen and his counterpart the artist-teacher were goals of an earlier moment, earlier ways of erasing artistic peculiarity in other job descriptions. Perhaps what we are after now rather than citizens are critical and engaged artist-workers—or to update that from the 1960s, artist-researchers—artists whose ambitions are pointed not toward art world fame and what John Dewey dismissed as the “over-individualistic character” of modern art,11 but something like a “Reserve Army of intellectuals equipped with a new, rigorous cultural criticism.” I take this remarkable phrase from a poster that has hung in my office for years, designed for the 1985 exhibition Proof and Perjury at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art. The image is a drawing by Dennis Balk, who wrote the text as well, as I recall; it borrows the tropes of Stalin-era Soviet posters, and features five of the exhibition’s six artists—I recognize Larry Johnson, Luciano Perna, Claudia Walther, and, I think, Uta Barth; the other is either David Cunningham or Balk himself. The artists hold fast to the tools of cultural analysis, or at least those of a certain kind of “critical image-text work” then current at CalArts and UCLA: a book, a T-square, and, held highest, a camera. On one hand, these are precisely the implements that, for Schmidt-Wulffen, threaten the disappearance—the nonvisuality—of the visual arts: “communication, negotiation, writing, and critical capacity”; but they are also, and more benignly, perhaps, the emblems of just the set of skills retooled artists should have—particularly if art is part of the knowledge industry, or if making works of art requires, as William Marotti suggests, “the ability to see where art is going.”12 Clearly, there are arguments to be made either way here, arguments that might lead back to the questions of deskilling that occupied so much of the Seminar. I won’t speak directly to any of the questions posed to me by the participants, and I do thank those who posited answers in my voice. But I do want to take a moment to rescue Ian Burn’s position, and maybe to thicken Harry Braverman’s. William Marotti, who presents the argument against Burn’s adoption of the term deskilling for the art world, criticizes Burn for his focus on specific skills, on the traditional skills of the artist. “In Braverman,” he counters, 10. See Section 9 of the Seminars. 11. John Dewey, “Experience, Nature, and Art,” in Dewey et al., Art and Education (Merion, PA: Barnes Foundation Press, 1929), 6. 12. See Section 8 of the Seminars.

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“deskilling is about knowledge, not skill or techniques per se. The difference between an artisan who knows how to assemble the complex joinery of a chair versus the knowledge, in an industrial setting, of each individual worker who knows only one part of the assembly of the chair. In this deskilling, knowledge is taken out of the person and put into the process, and under the control of management.”13 This seems right, but using Marotti’s own language, one could note the difference—a very old difference—between “know-how” and knowledge. Indeed, for Braverman the artisan’s knowledge (as Marotti’s “know-how”) was manual and embodied, and knowledge only becomes an applicable, alienable term only after craft skills are destroyed: “For the worker, the concept of skill is traditionally bound up with craft mastery—that is to say, the combination of knowledge of materials and processes with the practiced manual dexterities required to carry on a specific branch of production. The breakup of craft skills and the reconstruction of production as a collective or social process have destroyed the traditional concept of skill and opened up only one way for mastery over the labor process to develop: in and through scientific, technical, and engineering knowledge.”14 That is, through school, and through what Braverman ironically describes as an “increasingly ‘better-trained,’ ‘better-educated,’ and thus ‘upgraded’ working population.”15 Braverman is scathing about the educational system—and higher education in particular—not only for its culpability in relation to deskilling but also for the relative emptiness of its content in relation to labor—to being able to do something, anything: mass education’s “place in the social and economic structure became ever more firmly guaranteed by functions which have little or nothing to do with either job training or any other strictly educational needs,” particularly as “education has become an immensely profitable area of capital accumulation,” and as it is now “difficult to imagine United States society without its immense ‘educational’ structure.”16 Braverman grasped early on the implications of what one could call the educational-industrial complex in a way most of the members of the Seminar do not, a formation we might want to think critically about as we consider the PhD in studio, and its seeming inevitability. Even more than the figure of the artist, the university is naturalized and universalized in the Seminar—and this is particularly visible in the chapter on a worldwide history of art training. Why or how—and for whom, besides Elkins, speaking in the name of “contemporary art instruction”—is “the enormous number of schools that teach local craft skills” an “issue”?17 Christopher Frayling’s anecdotal response insists in its way precisely on Braverman’s “upgrading” (as well as what Ian Burn will deride as “an imported avant-garde context” that is part and parcel of the “Americanisation of art”18): the production of a different, better-educated 13. See Section 8 of the Seminars. 14. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 443. 15. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 424.

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16. Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital, 439–40. 17. See Section 3 of the Seminars. 18. Ian Burn, “The 1960s: Crisis and Aftermath,” in Dialogue: Writings in Art History (North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991), 111, 105.

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sort of virtuoso to produce more cosmopolitan—and more authentic and more critical—goods for a different order of audience. Both Elkins’s comment and Frayling’s response assume—like much of the chapter—not only a globalized cosmopolitan art world, the political and ethical implications of which I think the Seminarians would own up to, but also a universal university. “Could we,” asks Elkins, “compile syllabi or reading lists? It seems to me it would be tremendously helpful to know exactly what books are being read in theory classes in different countries.” Miguel Gonzalez Virgen sounds an enthusiastic second, a small caveat, and an elaborate solution: It would be great to see what schools in other countries are reading for art theory. But how could we make sure that those reading lists are up to date, that they correspond to what is actually being read? Could an Internet database make more sense than a book, in the case of syllabus listings? As for the listing of all art schools in the world, which I feel is a great idea, perhaps it would make sense not to simply ask the different institutions to describe their programs, but rather to ask art historians or art critics in the different countries to do a kind of curating exercise, by describing the characteristics, features, and strengths of their countries’ institutions. It would be great simply to gather such a global team of experts describing their own countries’ educational systems for the arts.19 Elkins’s query and Gonzalez Virgen’s response assume not only theory and reading lists, and curators and art historians—the apparatus of the art world as facts on the ground—but also and far more innocently, it seems to me, the transparent presence of classrooms and classes, the structure of the university, and of art structured as a course within and by it. It’s not only that studios and workshops within the university or art academy go unmentioned, but there is after Frayling’s anecdote no outside to the concerns of “contemporary art educators.” There are other art worlds, other modes of making and consumption, and other ways of the passing along of craft skills and the role of the artist, or artisan or craftsman or citizen. I am not holding out for “real art” or the indigenous craftsman; it is only that I would have liked some friction in the production of more and better knowledge, an increasingly upgraded and better-trained artist. If Burn’s view of the Australian university’s aspirations as culpable in the imperial expansion of the New York art world is a misreading, it is at least for me a strong and effective one. Actively stripped of the “body of accumulated knowledge”20 that the mastery of the historical skills represents—the skills that belong to the name one hopes to occupy, and to the local definition of that name—and stripped too, though Burn doesn’t mention it, of the pragmatic, transferable skills of representation that might allow other modes of employment, in favor

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19. See Section 3 of the Seminars. 20. Burn, “The 1960s,” 105.

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of an increasingly specific professionalizing knowledge, his artist is quite literally left homeless. Or perhaps he is only at home in the art world, whether it has a home in Australia in 1972 or not. Burn’s artist is perhaps reskilled, retooled for a more contemporary art, with “the ability to see where art is going,” but it is that skill in particular that allows Burn (to borrow the rest of Marotti’s argument) to “imagine a situation in which the minute, precise training in a skill could also in fact be a form of deskilling. You are left with a tremendous ability to do just one thing”21—to make color field paintings, if one wants to be flatfooted about it, or, more expansively, to read an art world. And to lean on Elkins’s gloss of Marotti’s “very subversive idea that a very high level of specialized skill is itself deskilling,” what would constitute a higher level of specialized skill than the PhD in studio? My argument is not that “traditional skills (e.g., figure drawing, composition, perspective, colour theory, knowledge of materials and techniques)”22 should be taught, nor is that Burn’s argument; rather it is that we might want to register what it means about art and artists and the apparatuses they are threaded through and valued in that they are not, or are not necessarily. “All the anxiety about deskilling seems misplaced to me,” counters Rebecca Gordon. “We may not all know how to carve marble or cast plaster, but we know how to weave structures out of cardboard, or make stuffed animals, or organize happenings, or build websites, or edit video.”23 The problem with those manual or technical skills that are now most prized in the art world (particularly those on the first half of Gordon’s list) is that, as Elaine Sharpe says, they are “oneoff”—that is, they belong to the artist. And, as though to underline their scarcity and their particularity, they are also deliberately volunteeristic, excessive in relation to the choice of materials, and, crucially, ahistorical: that is their effectiveness and their meaning. Tom Friedman’s success doesn’t mean that it is necessary to teach cardboard weaving; Tara Donovan’s doesn’t herald courses in plastic cup stacking or tape folding; but one could teach, say, “Installation and the Hardware Store” or “The Grocery as Art Supply Store,” and those might be effective courses. The problem is that increasingly any practice, any dexterity, is the same as any other. It’s not that we have nothing to teach, but rather that, given the art of the recent past—the art it is our duty as “contemporary art educators” to present and emplot—there is no particular thing that needs to be learned. We have no idea what craft skills, traditional or otherwise, should be taught as skills, as techniques that can be mastered, because there is no longer any skill whose mastery is tantamount to making art. Thus, the art of the recent past, its names and procedures—and the peculiar skills that one artist’s usage will both enshrine and place out of bounds—are what we have to teach, and the lesson to be learned, as Marotti says, is “the ability to see where art is going.” Long ago, the painter Raymond Parker said much the same thing, but very differently— and maybe still a little old-fashionedly. Because “art escapes the formulation of standards and methods,” it cannot be taught—and maybe particularly not in

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21. See Section 8 of the Seminars. 22. Burn, “The 1960s,” 105. 23. See Section 8 of the Seminars.

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places like the University of Iowa, the MFA factory where Parker picked up his degree in the late 1940s. In lieu of art it is “the art-world [that] can be understood and taught as a subject.” Thus, “a degree describes no more nor less than the particular and datable idea of an art-world as modeled by the school that gives it.”24 Which was, in its way, Burn’s complaint as well. Let me return by way of an ending to Saul Ostrow’s core question: “what model of the artist is being put forth?” In the end, or near it, it turns out that a model artist is put forth, the only artist who is addressed directly at any length and whose work is taken seriously: Allan Sekula. Elkins notes his exemplary status, and his promise: “I just wouldn’t want to lose touch with the fact that for many, many artists, the very idea of research or knowledge production is outside their normal sense of themselves. Sekula’s project is already 99 percent inside the whole question of method and research, system, project, and hypothesis.”25 I turn to Sekula here neither because he is a very interesting artist (which he is), nor because he may be a PhD-worthy one, but because, as it happens, he arrived at CalArts just as the enlistees in Dennis Balk’s Reserve Army were graduating. One could take him as the model and master of those artists of a “new, rigorous criticism,” except I’m not sure he was. Balk was working with, among others, the theorist and historian Sande Cohen and making faux public service posters and information kiosks; Larry Johnson was working primarily with Doug Huebler. They may well have worked with Sekula too, and maybe John Baldessari or Michael Asher or Judy Fiskin or Jo Ann Callis. At UCLA, Uta Barth was working with me, though I’m not sure how much that was worth, and with Robert Heinecken or Pier Marton or Barbara Jo Revelle or Jeff Weiss. These artists and teachers are neither absolute masters nor simply reading lists. Unlike the master model that comes up with some frequency in the Seminar, most American MFA programs have, for better or worse, multiple, often conflicting, and more or less interesting voices, voices that offer up multiple and necessarily partial readings of the art world and of student work and theory. And, thus, multiple and conflicting—and again only partial—opportunities for identificatory self-fashioning or aggressive rejection; the voices after all can be played off one against another, like stepparents, perhaps . . . but I will leave psychology out of it for the moment. If certain members of the Reserve Army situated research at the center of their practices, if they continued at least for a time Sekula’s legacy (and perhaps Michael Asher’s or even, after a fashion, Baldessari’s) one might say they got there haphazardly, to use Duffus’s word, or by choice—and in practice. That is how Sekula himself got there, in the university perhaps, but in its conflicts or its incoherence. Various gallery and museum profiles note that Sekula studied with Herbert Marcuse at UC San Diego, clearly a telling detail, to which he adds, in interviews, John Baldessari. “You can imagine the sort of inchoate, imaginary dialogue that a seventeen-year-old from the LA industrial-harbor 24. Raymond Parker, “Student, Teacher, Artist,” College Art Journal 13, no. 1 (1953): 29. 25. See Section 9 of the Seminars.

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suburb of San Pedro might have made from simultaneous courses with Marcuse and Baldessari,”26 he tells an interviewer, but the problem, as we’ll see below, is that we can’t imagine it, and we tend to clean it up. Thus, the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography reads, “From [Marcuse], he learned one of the central tenets of the Frankfurt School, which tirelessly sought to elucidate the complicity of the educational system in general and of high science in particular with what Eisenhower had identified as ‘the military-industrial complex.’ . . . From Baldessari, he learned to re-think art photography as prescribed by modernism, and to see it rather as contingent on the ideas of photographer and viewer.”27 The pairing seems right; it does its explanatory emplotting very well, as though Sekula had the perfect education—an education one might think was planned, given, but was, of course, serendipitous; it had to be construed, one could say, and probably was only afterwards and at a distance. And one could add yet other teachers to Sekula’s résumé, though he tends not to, perhaps because they are not, in retrospect, explanatory, or because they are assumed or too close: Fred Lonidier and Phil Steinmetz. These are younger artists, closer to Sekula’s own age: Lonidier was a fellow student before he was hired as faculty, as was Martha Rosler, a member of the same group of photographers, all students of Steinmetz—and of course others. Steinmetz is particularly interesting for me here, since he came to UC San Diego as a photographer rather than an “artist”; he had a commercial studio near campus, but his “photographic skills were mostly self-taught, except for a two year period of casual study in Carmel, Ca, primarily with Ansel Adams and Wynn Bullock in the late ’60s.”28 This too is a kind of explanatory construction, but it doesn’t help explaining how one gets from Ansel Adams to Allan Sekula, or indeed to Steinmetz’s own work by 1973. I would venture that at a certain moment in the late 1960s and early 1970s in La Jolla, the distinction between student and teacher, certainly between student and master, had become quite porous. Teaching in that moment may not have been as direct or as unidirectional as we might imagine it, as we might need to in order to plan out lessons and define degrees; it seems—at least from the outside—to have fulfilled a kind of dream of teaching, to “break through the boundary between those teaching and those being taught, because then everybody will be teacher and student at the same time.”29 The dream might be Rancière’s, but the words are those of that old pedant and master Joseph Albers. An old pedant like Hans Hofmann, whose strictures—which he got secondhand, like most of us got Albers’s exercises—Mike Kelley has likened to child abuse. What does it mean that Albers was Rauschenberg’s teacher and Kenneth Noland’s, and Eva Hesse’s and Ray Johnson’s? Or that Hofmann was Allen Kaprow’s (an artist and writer whose “Education of the Un-Artist” might 26. Debra Risberg, “Imaginary Economies: An Interview with Allan Sekula,” in Allan Sekula: Dismal Science, Photo Works, 1972–1996 (Normal: University Galleries, Illinois State University, 1999), 250. 27. Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Allan Sekula,” in Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century

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Photography, vol. 3, edited by Lynne Warren (New York: Routledge, 2006), 1400. 28. http://​www​.phelsteinmetzphotos​.com/​bio​ .html (accessed November 22, 2010). 29. In Eva Diaz, “The Ethics of Perception: Josef Albers in the United States,” Art Bulletin 90, no. 2 (2008): 265.

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have had a place in the Seminar). Or, locally, that Ansel Adams was Phil Steinmetz’s? Let me use these questions to come back one more time to the question of why there are so few artists mentioned in the Seminar. It’s kind of simple: in addition to not being sure whether we want to make artists, or what sort of artists we have in mind, we don’t know how artists are made and we can’t judge who will be one—for a couple of quite determinant reasons. Stephan SchmidtWulffen gives voice to one in a remarkable lament: “a master in a class is doing just what we are doing: talk. But often they will be less prepared. It’s a black hole. The one-to-one teaching situation is burdened with silence: people are not allowed to talk about it. Artists will never talk about their experiences in oneto-one teaching. It is one of the high secrets. Imagine: thousands of art students around the world are trained in this way, and we haven’t the slightest idea what is going on in their studios.”30 Not only do these art teachers have no syllabus and no training, he complains, those of us who are contemporary art educators are not allowed to know what goes on. There is a problem, but I think SchmidtWulffen misses it. The issue isn’t that there is some sort of artistic cabal, a vow of silence against the art historians and critics: there is indeed a black hole, it just isn’t where Schmidt-Wulffen puts it. It isn’t between us and them, it’s between the student if and as he or she wants to be an artist and the teacher who has that title, whether he or she is a master or not—a teacher who can confer that title upon the student, perhaps, but also, if the student is ambitious enough, cannot live up to it, or has lived past it. There is, as I’ve argued elsewhere,31 no clear path that goes from fulfilling assignments to being an artist. There is a point, but again also a black hole, where that training switches from the answering of assignments—color and design exercises out of Albers, perhaps; the standard procedures of a medium-based art education and the sorts of things that can be taught, practiced, and corrected against a standard—to the demand, however buried, that one make one’s own work. This is an increasingly opaque and unmappable transformation insofar as it is no longer obvious what it is necessary for an artist to know, what skill it is he or she must have, and whether that skill, those skills, can ever be the same as the work. The scenario may well be Oedipal, it is certainly intersubjective, and it inscribes a moment of abandonment, at least perceived, on the part of the teacher, and, on the side of the student, of aggressivity and identification. Unfulfillable, the assignment and all the talk that Schmidt-Wulffen notes becomes a demand posed to the student as artist; its question—that is, the question it raises in the student—is “He is saying this to me but what does he want?” This is Jacques Lacan’s formula for the birth of desire in the child, but it could also describe the scene of professional desire. For Lacan, it is the child’s unvoiced question to the parent, and to the “enigma of the adult’s desire,” but it is also, I argued in Art Subjects, the question the young San Francisco painter Ernest Briggs posed to 30. See Section 1 of the Seminars. 31. See Howard Singerman, “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural Studies,” October, no. 126 (2008): 45–68.

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his teacher Clyfford Still in the late 1940s, or, rather, in recollection, about him: “he became a problem to me . . . in terms of, what does it mean? What does he mean?”32 Mean to me, of course: how can I give him what he wants? Not what he asks for, but what he lacks, what he won’t dismiss right off as sheer repetition, the same stuff students showed him ten years ago, or twenty or more—something that will make him acknowledge me as an artist, and if we stick with Lacan, will be proof that he never was one . . . as if his being here, in a college art department in Charlottesville or Ann Arbor or Boulder, wasn’t proof enough. I don’t have to make this quite so antagonistic, but even when the relationship between teacher and student is more open, more porous and fluid, the modern art school at both its best and worst produces not likenesses—neither representational drawings nor model artists—but differences. Its best students and its worst are produced by stronger or weaker versions of what Harold Bloom called “antithetical completion.”33 It is—and this is very unlike a PhD program, or even a music school—a difference-producing machine. Thus perhaps the last reason that this is so hard, that art education is haphazard, that the MFA doesn’t have a definition beyond the institutional, is that the art school and its outcomes might be peculiar versions of what Alain Badiou has called an “evental site,” not the site at which an event has occurred, or even must occur, given history and its determinations, but a site at which an event may emerge, unpredictably and yet rooted. While becoming an artist may be a process, it is not, despite our best efforts, a procedure fulfilled according to a script or narrative or reading list. Rather, it is unpunctual and again haphazard; it has the character of both incident and accident, a moment however unpunctual or elongated it may be. “Learning in art centers on more of an event than a subject,” wrote Raymond Parker long before Badiou, “and occurs through the flexible, unscheduled and often inverted exchanges between students, teachers and artists. Art schools are an embodiment of these people’s differences in faiths and motives, as follows from their acceptance or rejection of their roles in school and art. These inherent contradictions in the working situation of schools ought to be welcomed as natural, though disorganized.”34

32. In my Art Subjects: Making Artist in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 146–47. 33. My thanks to Seth McCormick for his discussion of Albers, Bloom, and Rancière. See his

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“Pedestrian Colors: Neo-Dada and the Education of the Eye,” a paper delivered at the Southeastern College Art Conference Annual Conference, Richmond, VA, October 22, 2010. 34. Parker, “Student, Teacher, Artist,” 30.

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notes on the contributors

Areti Adamopoulou works at the Department of Plastic Arts and of the Sciences of the Arts at the University of Ioannina, Greece. Her publications include Postwar Greek Art: Visual Interventions in Space (in Greek) (2000); “Interpreting Space: Aspects of International Sculpture since 1960,” in Art and Landscape, edited by George L. Anagnosto­ poulos (2001); “Art and National Character in the 1960s in Greece,” in Prosegiseis tis kallitehnikis dimiourgias apo tin Anagennisi eos tis meres mas (Approaches to Artistic Creation from the Renaissance to the Present Day) edited by N. Daskalothanasis (2008); and “When the Virtual Affects the Real: An Internet Art Case,” International Journal of Computational Science, special issue “Computational Art” 2, no. 1 (2008): 82–91. Glenn Adamson is Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is coeditor of the triannual Journal of Modern Craft, and his publications include Thinking Through Craft (2007) and The Invention of Craft (2012). He has also edited an anthology entitled The Craft Reader (2010) and coedited Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World (2003), Global Design History (2011), and Surface Tensions (2012). With Jane Pavitt, he was the co-curator for the V&A exhibition “Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970–1990” and coeditor of the accompanying publication (2011). Rina Arya is Reader in Visual Communication at the University of Wolverhampton. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include art theory and cultural studies. Her publications include Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless World (2012) and two forthcoming works, Chila Kumari Burman: A Celebration of Shakti and Abjection and Representation. Louisa Avgita  is an art historian and theorist based in Thessaloniki, Greece. Her research centers on the criticism of multiculturalism and the discourse on cultural identity, particularly within the Balkans context, with special emphasis on issues of globalized capitalism, ideology, and the politics of representation and display in the visual arts. She organized the series of events (comprising lectures, exhibitions, and discussion panels) “Art Under Construction: The Balkans in Context” (London, 2006). She coedited (with Juliet Steyn) the special issue “Balkans,” Third Text 21 (2007) and (with Paul Ardenne) the special issue “Borderlines,” Gazet’art, no. 4 (2007). Her publications include “Thinking in the House of the Balkan ‘Gloc-art,’ ” in “Glocalogue,” edited by Zoran Erić, special issue, Art-e-fact, no. 4 (2005); “ ‘With Us or Against Us’: Structures of Space in the Period of Globalization,” Gazet’art, no. 4 (2007): iv–vii; “The Balkans Does Not Exist,” Third Text 21 (2007): 215–21; and “Marketing Difference: The Balkans on Display,” in The Global Art World : Audiences, Markets, and Museums, edited by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg (2009). She has contributed papers to many international conferences and workshops.

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Jan Baetens teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. His publications include Hergé écrivain (2006); “Constrained Writing (I and II),” a special double issue of Poetics Today 30, no. 4 (2009) and 31, no. 1 (2010), coedited with Jean-Jacques Poucel; and “The Graphic Novel,” in The Cambridge History of the American Novel, edited by Leonard Cassuto, Clare Virginia Eby, and Benjamin Reiss (2011). Su Baker  is Professor and Director of the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She is an artist with a national reputation, the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and a commentator on contemporary higher arts education. Her most recent publication is “Art School 2.0,” in Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The  Artist, the PhD, and the Academy, edited by Brad Buckley and John Conomos (2009). She was co-convenor of the Australian research project Future-Proofing the Creative Arts in Higher Education: Scoping for Quality in Creative Arts Doctoral Programs (2009). A forthcoming publication, My Stockholm Syndrome, or How I Learned to Love My Captors, will accompany a new exhibition of paintings. Ciarán Benson is Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University College Dublin, former Chairman of the Irish Arts Council, and a member of the International Association of Art Critics. His books include The Cultural Psychology of Self: Place Morality and Art in Human Worlds (2001) and The Absorbed Self: Pragmatism, Psychology, and Aesthetic Experience (1993). In 2007 he was Royden Davis Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University. Andrew Blackley completed graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. His artwork has been shown and collected in Britain, France, Turkey, and domestically, and his publications are distributed through Printed Matter. Jeroen Boomgaard is Professor of Art and Public Space at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and Head of the Master of Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. Among his publications are Wild Park: Commissioning the Unexpected (2012); High Rise and Common Ground: Art and the Amsterdam Zuidas Area (2008); “The Chimera of Method,” in See It Again, Say It Again: The Artist as Researcher, edited by Janneke Wesseling (2011); “Between Romantic Isolation and Avant-gardist Adaption” (with Bert Taken), in Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm, edited by Pascal Gielen and Paul de Bruyne (2012). Brad Buckley  is Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture and Associate Dean (Research) at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. He edited, with John Conomos, Republics of Ideas (2001) and Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy (2009). Over the past decade he has lectured and written widely on higher degrees and research in the art school context. He has delivered keynote addresses at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Tsukuba (Japan). With senior faculty he also convened “Evolution: Art and Design Research and the PhD,” a conference at Parsons the New School for Design (October 2010). William Conger  is an artist whose abstract paintings are exhibited nationally in the United States and Europe. He is Professor and Chair Emeritus of Art Theory and

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Practice at Northwestern University. His recent publications include “Abstract Painting and Integrationist Linguistics,” Language Sciences 33, no. 4 (2011): 654–61; “Ariadne on the Grande Ile,” with Mary Matthews Gedo, in her Monet and His Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life (2010); “Can Art Be Moral Again?,” http://​www​.neotericart​.com (2011). Christopher Csikszentmihályi  directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media and the Computing Culture research group for art, technology, and politics at the MIT Media Lab. His publications include Skin | Control, with McKenzie Wark and Caroline Jones (2005). His art exhbitions have included solo shows “First Airborne” (Los Angeles, 2007) and “Skin | Control” (Manhattan, 2004), and “Natural Language Processor” was included in the Alien Intelligence show at Kiasma Museum (Helsinki, 2001). His media interventions and political technologies have included “Afghan Explorer,” “DJ I, Robot,” and “Probots,” and have been covered widely in the popular press, including the New York Times, BBC World Service, Washington Post, New Scientist, and Drudge Report. Anders Dahlgren is an art historian and an architect who teaches in the Department of Cultural Sciences at the University of Gothenburg. His research interests include urban history, Swedish architectural historiography, and the relation between architectural history and architectural practice. Marta Edling teaches in the Department of History at the University of Uppsala. Her recent publications include Fri Konst? Bildkonstnärlig utbildning vid Konsthögskolan Valand, Konstfackskolan, och Kungliga Konsthögskolan, 1965–1995 (2010); “It Smells of Wildeness [sic], Trouble, a Good Fight: On Experimental Art and Artistic Education in the 1960s,” in Det Åskådliga och det bottenlösa: Tankar om konst och humaniora tillägnade Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlöf (2010); and “Placing Artistic Work in Perspective: Artistic Research at Valand Around the Turn of the 1990s,” in A Disarranged Playing Board: Art in Gothenburg During the 1980s and 1990s, edited by Jeff Werner and Kristoffer Arvidsson (2010). Michael Fotiadis  teaches at the Department of History and Archaeology, University of Ioannina, Greece. His publications include “The Historicism of Postprocessual Archaeology and Its Pleasures,” in Historicization—Historisierung, edited by Glenn W. Most (2001); “Factual Claims in Late Nineteenth Century European Prehistory and the Descent of a Modern Discipline’s Ideology,” Journal of Social Archeology 6 (2006): 5–27; “There Is a Blue Elephant in the Room: From State Institutions to Citizen Indifference,” in Archaeology in Situ: Sites, Archaeology, and Communities in Greece, edited by Anna Stroulia and Susan B. Sutton (2010); and “Naked Presence and Disciplinary Wording,” in Modernity’s Classics, edited by Sally Humphreys and Rudolph Wagner (forthcoming). Professor Sir Christopher Frayling was until recently Rector of the Royal College of Art in London and Chair of the Arts Council of England. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art, a Visiting Professor at the University of Lancaster, and a Fellow of Churchill College Cambridge. An awardwinning broadcaster on radio and television, he is the author of, among other books,

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The Royal College of Art: 150 Years of Art and Design (1987), The Art Pack (1990), Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death (2000), Once upon a Time in Italy (2005), Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design (2005), and On Craftsmanship (2011). Miguel González Virgen is Head of the Digital Art and New Media Business program at CEDIM, Centro de Estudios de Diseño de Monterrey, in Mexico. His publications include Of Games, the Infinite, and Worlds: The Work of Gabriel Orozco, edited by the Douglas Hyde Gallery of Trinity College (2003); “Towards a Norteño Globalization: Emerging Art in Monterrey,” in The New Lions, edited by UNESCO and Fundación Monterrey (2007); “Irrational Numbers and Symmetry in Pythagorean Doctrinem” in Gozne, edited by Gabriel Orozco (2006); and “Globalización, Vanguardias, Colonización: La No-investigación Arquitectónica en México,” in Movimiento Actual (2002). R. E. H. Gordon  is an artist and writer based in New  York. Gordon has exhibited and performed in such venues as the Kitchen (NYC), Taxter and Spengemann (NYC), Samson Projects (Boston), LaMontagne Gallery (Boston), Roots and Culture (Chicago), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), Gallery 400 (Chicago), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago); has been published in Critical Correspondence, Monsters and Dust, New York Arts Magazine, and Make Literary Magazine; and was the curator of Second Gallery in Boston from 2005 to 2007. Gordon is currently the director of the Center for Experimental Lectures. Gordon holds an MA in Visual and Critical Studies and a MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and currently teaches at Parsons the New School for Design. Charles Green is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art in the Art History Program, School of Culture and Communication, at the University of Melbourne. He is author of Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art, 1970–1994 (1995) and The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001), and is currently co-authoring a history of biennales since the 1970s. He is also an artist working in collaboration with Lyndell Brown. Vanalyne Green is Emeritus Professor of Fine Art, the University of Leeds. Her publications include “An Argument for the Web in the Equally Messy Realities of Life, Democracy, and Teaching,” in Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy, edited by R. Trebor Scholz (2011); “Compass,” Parallax 13, no. 1 (2007): 9–19; “Vertical Hold: A History of Women’s Video Art,” in Feedback: The Video Data Bank, Video Art, and Artist Interviews, edited by Kate Horsfield and Lucas Hildebrand (2006); “Mother Baseball,” in M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An  Anthology of Artists’ Writings, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Mira Schor and Susan Bee (2001). Green’s video art has screened extensively, including the Whitney Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Vidéothèque de Paris, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the Guggenheim Museum, and many other museums, universities, and film festivals. Barbara Jaffee is an Associate Professor of Art History at Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. Her work on American modernism and design includes “Jackson Pollock’s

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Industrial Expressionism,” Art Journal 63 (Winter 2004): 68–79; “Before the New Bauhaus: From Industrial Drawing to Art and Design Education in Chicago,” Design­Issues 21 (Winter 2005): 41–62; and “ ‘Gardner’ Variety Formalism: Helen Gardner’s Art Through the Ages,” Partisan Canons, edited by Anna Brzyski (2007). William Marotti works in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His publications include Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (forthcoming); “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” American Historical Review (February 2009): 97–135; “Sounding the Everyday: The Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone Noise Media Language, edited by Brandon LaBelle (2007); “Political Aesthetics: Activism, Everyday Life, and Art’s Object in 1960’s Japan,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7, no. 4 (2006): 606– 18; and “Simulacra and Subversion in the Everyday: Akasegawa Genpei’s 1000-Yen Copy, Critical Art, and the State,” Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 211–39. Tom McGuirk  is Senior Lecturer in Art Theory  / Critical Theory at the University of Chester. His publications include “From Disegno to ‘Epistemic Action’: Drawing as Knowledge Generation,” in Art Education in Contemporary Culture: Irish Experiences and International Perspectives, edited by Gary Granville (2012); “The ‘Rift-Design’ Conundrum: Drawing as Form-Giving and Knowing,” ACCESS 30, no. 1 (2011): 45–56; “A Nomos for Art and Design,” Journal of Research Practice 7, no. 1 (2011); and “Beyond Prejudice: Method and Interpretation in Research in the Visual Arts,” Working Papers in Art and Design 5 (2008). Robert Nelson works in the Office of the Pro Vice-Chancellor Learning and Teaching, Monash University. His books include The Jealousy of Ideas (2009), The Visual Language of Painting (2010), The Space Wasters (2011), Moral Sustainability (2011), and The Spirit of Secular Art (2007). He is the author of many articles, such as “Toward a History of Rigour: An Examination of the Nasty Side of Scholarship,” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 10, no. 4 (2011): 374–87, plus a thousand art reviews in the Age. Nelson is also a scene painter. Saul Ostrow  is an independent critic and curator and Art Editor at Large for BOMB. Since 1987, he has curated over seventy exhibitions in the United States and abroad. He is presently working on two curatorial projects: “The Gravity of Sculpture” (White Box and Dorsky Projects, March 2013) and “The Lure of Paris: American Abstract Painters in Paris, 1950–1960” (Loretta Howard Gallery, September 2012.) His writings have appeared in numerous art magazines, journals, catalogues, and books in the United States and Europe. His most recent catalogues are A  Detailed Account of Some Aspects of Balázs Kicsiny’s Installation: Killing Time, Kemper Museum, St. Louis; Flashback: The Pre-feminist Works of Judy Chicago, Nye+Brown Gallery, LA; and To Scale: The Sculptures of Mia Westerland-Roosen, Betty Cunningham Gallery, New York. He is presently working on a book of his essays from 1996 to 2010, to be titled Making Sense: On Transitioning to the Contemporary. He and the artist Charles Tucker are also continuing to collaborate on a project begun in 2008, in which they seek to construct a quantifiable “systems-network” by which to analyze artworks. Ostrow was Chair of Visual Arts

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and Technologies at the Cleveland Institute of Art (2002–12) and serves on the board of directors of the College Art Association. He has served as coeditor of Lusitania Press (1996–2004) as well as the editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory, and Culture (1996–2006), published by Routledge, London. Daniel Palmer is a Senior Lecturer in the Theory Department of the Faculty of Art and Design at Monash University in Australia. Formerly a curator at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, he has written extensively on contemporary art and photography in journals such as Art and Australia, Broadsheet, Photofile, Reading Room, and Frieze. His publications include Photogenic: Essays/Photography/CCP 2000–2004 (2005); Participatory Media: Visual Culture in Real Time (2008); and, co-authored with Blair French, Twelve Australian Photo Artists (2009). Peter Plagens  is a painter who has shown with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1974. He was the staff art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003. Plagens has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (painting), the National Endowment for the Arts (painting, art criticism), the Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital (arts writing), and the National Arts Journalism Program. He is the author of two books of art criticism, Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–70 (1974) and Moonlight Blues: An Artist’s Art Criticism (1986), as well as a novel, Time for Robo (1999). His online novel The Art Critic has been published as an e-book by Hol Art Books (2012), and his book on the artist Bruce Nauman will be published by Phaidon in 2013. Currently, he writes the “Gallery” art-review column for the Wall Street Journal. Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen is the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. His publications include Perfektimperfekt: Aufsätze aus 15 Jahren (2001); “Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places,” in Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (2004); “Not Only on the Wall,” in Silvia Kolbowski: Inadequate . . . Like . . . Power (2004); and The Artist as Public Intellectual (2008). Howard Singerman  teaches in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (1999) and Art History, After Sherrie Levine (2012), and numerous essays, including “The Educational Complex: Mike Kelley’s Cultural Studies,” October, no. 126 (2008): 44–68; “Non-compositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970,” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 1 (2003): 125–50; and “Excellence and Pluralism,” Emergences 12, no. 1 (2002): 71–89. Henk Slager  is Dean of MaHKU (Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design), Visiting Professor of Artistic Research (Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki), and curator of “a.o. Flash Cube” (Leeum, Seoul, 2007), “Translocalmotion” (Seventh Shanghai Biennale, 2008), “Nameless Science” (Apex Art, New York, 2009), “Critique of Archival Reason” (RHA Dublin, 2010), “As the Academy Turns” (Collaborative Project Manifesta, 2010), “Any-Medium-Whatever” (Georgian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011), “TAR—Temporary Autonomous Research” (Amsterdam Pavilion, Shanghai Biennale, 2012), and “Offside Effect” (First Tbilisi Triennial, 2012). Recent publications include The Pleasure of Research (2012); Agonistic Academies, coedited with Jan Cools

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(2011); “Context-Responsive Investigations,” in Intellectual Birdhouse: Artistic Practice as Research, edited by Ute Meta Bauer, Claudia Mareis, Michael Schwab, and Florian Dombois (2011); and “Differential Iconography,” in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Henrik Karlsson and Michael Biggs (2010). George Smith is founder and president of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, where he also serves as Associate Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture. His publications include “Intermediality and the Equivalency of Time and Space: Manet’s Psycho-Chronotope,” in Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics, edited by Henk Oosterling and Ewa Ziarek (2011); “The Non-Studio PhD for Visual Artists,” in Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, edited by James Elkins (2009); “Concerning Doctoral Studies” (panel discussion with Mick Wilson and Grant Kester), MaHKUzine, no. 7 (Summer 2009): 45–51; and “The Last Phase: Henry James and the Psycho-Painterly Style,” Henry James Review 30, no. 1 (2009): 62–67. Ann Sobiech Munson works in the College of Design at Iowa State University and directs the school’s common first-year curriculum, the Core Design Program. She holds a dual appointment in the Departments of Architecture and Art and Design, where she teaches beginning design studio and introduction to design and culture. Her backgrounds in architecture and English combine in her research as she takes up issues of writing and architecture in relationship to design pedagogy and the history of writing in design practices. Recent work includes “Lewis Mumford’s Lever House: Writing a House of Glass,” presented at the annual Design History Society Conference (University of Hertfordshire, September 3–5, 2009) and “Reflecting on Reflection-in-Action,” presented at the National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (Louisiana State University, March 12–15, 2009). In 2005, along with Tom Leslie, her work in developing and teaching a seminar course entitled “Writing About Architecture” earned an ACSA Creative Achievement Award for teaching. Martin Søberg teaches at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, in Copenhagen. His publications include “Christianias romantiske landskab,” in  Forankring i forandring, edited by Anne Tietjen, Svava Riesto, and Pernille Skov (2007); “Inszenierte Natur oder Hypernatur,” in Neuland, edited by Bettina von Dziembowski, Udo Weilacher, and Joachim Werren (2009); “C.  C.  L.  Hirschfeld, Joseph Ramée og havekunsten omkring 1800,” in Skjulte skatte i grænselandet, edited by Badeloch Vera Noldus, Kasper Laegring, and Jakob Aahauge (2010); and “Between Architectures: Problems of Transition in Artistic Research,” in Constructing Knowledge, edited by Susanne Schindler, Axel Sowa, and Ariane Wilson (2011). Roy Sorensen is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of six books: Seeing Dark Things (2008,) A Brief History of the Paradox (2003), Vagueness and Contradiction (2001), Pseudo-Problems (1993), Thought Experiments (1992), and Blindspots (1988). Bert Taken is a philosopher. He teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and at the Academy of Architecture, both in Amsterdam. On art education he recently published,

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together with Jeroen Boomgaard, “Between Romantic Isolation and Avant-gardist Adaption,” in Teaching Art in the Neoliberal Realm, edited by Pascal Gielen and Paul de Bruyne (2012). Currently he is preparing a dissertation on the legitimation problems of present-day art education. Hilde Van Gelder is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. She is director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, editor of Image [&] Narrative and of the Lieven Gevaert Series (Leuven University Press), and a member of the editorial board of A Prior. She has guest-curated several exhibitions, including “Constantin Meunier: A Dialogue with Allan Sekula” and “Allan Sekula: Shipwreck and Workers: Version 2 for Leuven” (2005). Her publications include contributions to History of Photography (Spring 2007), Recherches Sémiotiques / Semiotic Inquiry (Fall 2008), and Visual Studies (Fall 2009). She has also contributed to Photography Theory, edited by James Elkins (2007). Together with Helen Westgeest, she is currently writing a book on photography in contemporary art, to be published by Blackwell. Frank Vigneron teaches at the Fine Arts Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His publications include Zhijian: Zhongxi Yishu Shangxi Bijiao (2007); Shen Zongqian: Jiezhou Xuehua bian, un traité de peinture chinoise du dix-huitième siècle (1999); “Curators and Translators as ‘Passeurs,’ ” in OASIS: Artists’ Studio in Hong Kong II, edited by Victor Lai Ming-hoi (2008); “Honored Guests,” in Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook 2006, edited by Harold Mok (2008); and “Implications of Vision: Phenomenology and Ho Siu-kee,” White Text, no. 1 (2005): 5–34. Janneke Wesseling is Codirector of the doctoral program for artists and designers PhDArts at Leiden University and Head of the Research Department Art Theory and Artistic Practice at the University of the Arts, The Hague. She writes as art critic for NRC Handelsblad, and her publications include See It Again, Say It Again: The Artist as Researcher (2011), Het Museum dat niet bestond (2004), and Schoohoven, beeldend kunstenaar (1990). Frances Whitehead is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Director of the SAIC Knowledge Lab. Whitehead founded ARTetal Studio, a collaborative creative platform focused on cultural change. Recent projects include the Embedded Artist Project with the City of Chicago; the Phenologic Forest, a multisite climatemonitoring project with Hessen Forst and the U.S.  National Phenologic Network; SuperOrg​.net​, an urban revitalization plan for Cleveland, Ohio; Spoleto Festival USA, Charleston SC, Places with a Future; and a site-remediation pilot for the NEA and the U.S. Office of Surface Mining. Whitehead has exhibited widely for thirty years, including COP 15, UN Climate Change Conference, Copenhagen. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Art, Design, Politics, Art in America, Artforum, Frieze, the New York Times, and the Discovery Channel. Gary Willis  works with Performance Lab, Melbourne. His publications include The Key Issues Concerning Contemporary Art (2010); Art as Meme (2008); Diary of a Dead

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Beat Modern Art Type (2000); “. . . A Dedicated Follower of Fashion?,” Un Magazine 6, no. 1 (2012); and Tony Woods: New York, 1968–1969 (forthcoming). Yeung Yang teaches in the Foundation Programme of the Office of University General Education, Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also an independent curator and art and culture writer. Her curation includes the Around Sound Art Festival in 2009 and 2010. Her publications include Alfred Ko, Hong Kong / China Photographers Series 7 (2012); “(Is There Such a Thing as) Sound Art and Its Development in Hong Kong,” in Hong Kong Visual Arts Year Book 2009 (2011); “To Curate Is to Take Care Of,” in Muses and Drivers: Twenty-Three Curatorial Propositions for Tomorrow, edited by Michael Lee (2010); Grandma Grandpa Cook (2009); and “To Show, to Hide, to Seek,” in Chinese Is a Plus, edited by Sylvie Boisseau and Frank Westermeyer (2009). She founded the nonprofit organization soundpocket in 2008 to produce and research sound as art in Hong Kong.

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index

Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, 141 Accademia del Disegno, 141 Academy of Visual Arts, Baptist University of Hong Kong (BUAVA), 167–68 Adamopoulou, Areti, 206 aesthetic cognitivism, 4, 39, 43 Africa, art education in, 34 n. 6 Agamben, Giorgio, 163, 165 Albers, Joseph, 67, 70 American Academy of Art, Chicago, 31 Angélil, Marc, 157 architecture, 155–57 Aristotle, 152–53 art, why it should be taught, 2 art history, 87 first-year program and, 60, 65 artists, missing from the Seminars, 205–8, 214 Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD), 91 atelier system, survival of, 31–32 Athens School of Fine Arts, 89 attitude, 13–14, 16, 21, 140, 199 Australia, art education in, 158–61, 182–83 Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. See BFA degree Badiou, Alain, 28, 215 Baetens, Jan, 188 Bateson, Gregory, 50 Bauhaus, 13, 15, 21–22 manifestos, 19 as universal model, 33–34 beauty, 68 Belgium, art education in, 66, 89, 125–7 BFA degree, 77–81 Block, Ned, 40 Bologna process, 33, 89–90, 141, 183, 186, 200 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14, 18, 49, 97, 147–49 Braverman, Harry, 208–9 Burn, Ian, 94, 208

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Candlin, Fiona, 148 Chan, Kurt, 168 Chicago Academy for the Arts, 31 Chinese University of Hong Kong, 167–68 Clifford, James, 107 cognitivism, 175. See also aesthetic cognitivism College Art Association (CAA), 84–85, 88, 91 color. See rudiments of visuality competence, 85, 95. See also de-skilling concept learning, 44 craft, 34, 85, 97. See also Bauhaus; design creativity, 13–14, 21, 95–96 Csikszentmihályi, Chris, 139 Damasio, Antonio, 41 Danto, Arthur, 74 Day, Jeremiah, 203 de Duve, Thierry, 13–22, 71, 92–93, 100, 104, 135, 147, 162–63, 187 inadequately acknowledged, 196 schema of art education, 13 dematerialization, 14 Derrida, Jacques, 74–75 design, 21, 50, 61 de-skilling, 92–101, 146–47, 208–9 Dewey, John, 62, 148–49, 208 Diffey. T. J., 177 discipline, 92–95, 147–8, 200 disegno, 25–26 drawing, 26–27. See also disegno Dronsfield, Jonathan, 148, 164 Edling, Marta, 130, 162 Eleey, Peter, 172 episteme, 26, 49 Ericsson, Anders, 80 Evans, Robert, 156 expression, 21 first-year program, 59–76, 137–38

Fodor, Jerry, 41, 44 Foucault, Michel, 14 foundation year. See first-year program Foundations in Art: Theory and Education (FATE), 61 Frankfurt School, 72 Frankfurt Städelschule, 86 Frayling, Sir Christopher, 104, 119–20, 126, 142, 162–64, 195, 199 Frenn, Chawky, 31 Freud, Sigmund, 52 Gage Academy, 31 Gardner, Helen, 62 Gaut, Berys, 39 Geiger, Roger, 93, 95 Gelder, Hilde Van, 182 genius, 4, 29, 153 George Mason University, 31 Ghent. See Sint-Lucas Godard, Jean-Luc, 56 Gödel, Kurt, 42 Gold, Rich, 52 Golstein, Carl, 13 Gombrich, E. H., 41 Gonzalez Virgin, Miguel, 210 Gordon, Rebecca, 211 Grasskamp, Walter, 20 Greece, art education in, 66, 89 Green, Renee, 201 Grigely, Joseph, 104 habitus. See Bourdieu, Pierre Harrington, Austin, 173 history of art. See art history Hockey, John, 107 Hong Kong, art education in, 166–70 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 140 images, propositional content of, 40–41, 175–76 India, art education in, 34 interpretation, 104 intuition, 4 introspection. See self-reflexivity Ireland, art education in, 107–8, 115–16

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index Jaffee, Barbara, 162, 164 Japan, art education in, 71 Johnson, Mark, 150 Jonas, Joan, 88

Nelms, Henning, 191 Netherlands, art education in, 133, 200–203 Ostrow, Saul, 148, 212

Kandinsky, Vassily, 25 Kant, Immanuel, 153, 194, 205 Klee, Paul, 26 knowledge, 39–47, 105–21, 143, 193, 201–2 economy, 49 Greek terms for, 49 kinds of, 40, 43, 175 phenomenal, 40 of significance, 43 tacit, 4, 39, 48–57 Kopelman, Irene, 203 Korea. See South Korea Kuhn, Thomas, 139, 146

Palmer, Daniel, 128, 163 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 13, 34 PhD degree, 103–21, 154, 178–80 CAA refuses to define, 88 lack of a definition of, 2 phenomenology. See knowledge, phenomenal Plato, 55, 152 Polanyi, Michael, 50, 172 practice, 104 praxis, 49, 51 quality, 91

Lack, Richard, 31 languages in art instruction, 78 Lavender, Randall, 61 learning, 44, 50 Lesage, Dieter, 201 Levine, Edward, 92, 148 liberal arts, 71–72 Lovink, Geert, 184 MacDonald, Stuart, 13, 33 Maharaj, Sarat, 104 Marotti, William, 140, 186, 208, 211 master, 29–30, 84, 212 Master of Fine Art degree. See MFA degree Matisse, Henri, 20–21 medium, 13–14 metaphor, 51–52 methexis, 51 Métier, 13–14, 93, 97, 149 metis, 51, 56 Mexico, art education in, 72 MFA degree, 83–101 lack of a definition of, 2 Moholy-Nagy, Láslzó, 28, 54, 68, 198 Monash University, 28 National Association of Schools of Art and Design (NASAD), 81, 91 National Conference on the Beginning Design Student (NCDBS), 61

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Rancière, Jacques, 74, 163 Read, Herbert, 53, 119–20 reflexivity. See self-reflexivity research in art, 103–21, 143, 179–80, 195, 200–201 Roberts, John, 198–99 Rogoff, Irit, 15, 201 romanticism, persistence of, 21, 30, 86, 129, 132 Ronell, Avita, 20 Royal Academy, Stockholm, 20 Royal Academy of Arts, London, 141 Royal College of Art, Stockholm, 63, 95 rudiments of visuality, 60, 62, 67 Schmidt-Wulffen, Stephan, 4, 51, 164, 188, 199, 208, 214 Schön, Donald, 146 Sekula, Allan, 110, 212–3 self-reflexivity, 70, 79, 92–96, 143 as a good, 145, 195, 199 Sharpe, Elaine, 211 skill, 85, 94, 98 absence of, in art, 99, 137 See also deskilling Singerman, Howard, 83, 92–101, 151 universalizing the MFA, 34 Sint-Lucas, Ghent, 27

Skiagraphia, 27 Slager, Henk, 104 Smith, Roberta, 205 Smith, Walter, 34 Sorensen, Roy, 4, 109, 175 South Korea, art education in, 71 space. See rudiments of visuality Stallabrass, Julian, 174 Stockholm. See Royal Academy, Stockholm Studio Escalier, 31 Studio Incamminati, 31 South Kensington, 34 sustainability, 56 Sweden, art education in, 89 tacit knowledge. See knowledge, tacit Talbot, Fox, 28 techne, 49 thinking in, for, through, and to art, 119–20, 193–95 theory, 61, 87, 148–49 artist’s need of, 143 in and out of the art world, 73 philosophy and, 75 Tilly, Charles, 69 time. See rudiments of visuality unconscious cerebration, 52 understanding, 104 Vasari, Giorgio, 25 Vesely, Dalibor, 157 Vienna Academy of Art, 78 Whistler, James Abbott McNiell, 30 Whitehead, Frances, 3–4, 109, 158, 186, 188–92, 206 list of components of artistic knowledge, 47–48 Whiteside, Andrew, 157 Wilson, Catherine, 148 writing, 104

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