So I decided to lay claim to some of my recent and/or edified influences upon my actions in the world as an artist, a cultural agitator, and a consumer of a BFA in digital art. These are some notes from a long session at the College Art Association Conference in Chicago this last February....
I took a lot of notes on this session... it was probably one of my favorite panels at the whole conference, hands down. Ideas about how the teaching of art in institutions is evolving were prevalent on this panel, and most engaging was the discussion & debate of the new PhD in Fine Arts or Studio Arts or whatever it's being labeled at this moment. What a time we are living in!
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Post-Duchamp Critiques in Art School: Following the Narrative of Originality, and she spoke of the readymade as political gesture. Duchamp shifted the focus from the art object to the art gesture and it was this very gesture that became the cause for us to stop and look and reflect upon our experience, rather than the art object itself.
Applying this to how critiques are run in art school and it is not difficult to see that a shift was necessary in the way we approach the structure of feedback between peers and professors; trying to define meaning in an artwork is an obsolescence that only produces vague and idiosyncratic critiques empty of value. Greenbergian-esque claims of impartiality, universality and objectivity put static meaning upon the work of art and produces not so much of a professor or teacher, but a connoisseur that simply reinforces an outdated hierarchy.
Over time we see trends in art practice and theory whereby as artists we go through cycles of building up value around a distinct theory or trend and then we later break down that value... over and over again. In this way, value becomes a performative act; it is a constant reorganizing of building and breaking. Value becomes a verb; we now have a non-linear, non-hierarchical practice of art production and evaluation based on the idea of the rhizome. The rhizome represents the structure known as network where related concepts branch but do not compete for power. Value need not be linear in the teaching and administering of art.
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Sean C. Lowry (The Agnostic Readymade: Beyond Art and Anti-Art, keeping me on the edge of my conference seat like some kind of geek. I highly recommend checking out Lowry's website and seeing his history in music and experimentation. A lot of what he was experimenting with back in the day - music appropriation and experimentation in melody matching - is very similar to the mission of today's internet site Pandora (Music Genome Project).
Lowry spoke of his earlier projects while in art school of strategic concealment of music appropriation (music sampling based on key, melody, etc.) which he is calling "subliminal appropriation". The main difference between the readymade-type appropriation and this type has to do with the intention of the artist. Blatant appropriation is different than concealed appropriation because of the differences in the self-consciousness of the artist. Lowry played samples of the musical experimentation that he examined while still in school. He gathered musical data (songs) that had similar melodic properties and played in similar keys, blended the data together to create a montage sound of familiarity, and had musicians play their instruments on top of those montage tracks... creating and essentially curating an entirely new sound that ended up getting him signed on to record deals.
Lowry said something profound that got my total attention and has been resonating in my mind ever since... he said that in a post-Duchamp world, we are agnostic. We don't believe in art anymore. We believe in the idea of art. No longer is it necessary to continue to enforce the binary of art and anti-art, where the aesthetic is a belief in art as an index of culture and the anti-aesthetic is a belief in art as culture itself. Art and anti-art are now entering the pluralistic state of being equivocal, of being companions and no longer opponents. In Lowery's opinion (and I completely agree), the most provocative art refuses to exist at either end of the binary. The agnostic readymade is about finding peace between cynicism and anti-cynicism.
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Natalie Loveless presented her written work titled Participatory Dissent and the Fine Arts PhD and I swear to you my NERDA friends, though her name is Loveless, she is more like love-full. The passion this woman has for the discourse around institutionalized artistic practice has gotten me to start seriously considering the possibilities of a much different future for artists in the United States... a very bright future.
Where to start? Well first of all, Loveless began the presentation of her paper with a call to action. Her first slide was a quote from one of my deeper and more potent influences in artistic practice...
Every human being is an artist... called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives. - Joseph Beuys
Loveless began by posing a very serious question:
What is the definition of PhD labor, or, what are the limits of PhD labor?
She spoke of the process of research being at odds with the process of making art, that art is at odds with the university proper because art itself is messy, indulgent and creative - far from research practice. She took a very critical look at the fine art PhD, calling it a candy-like degree that takes away the artists' creativity and economy. Calling for a new way to look at the degree, she laid the foundation for something she is calling "participatory dissent", a model for institutions to follow that supports and allows both dissent and libidinal investment on the artists' behalf, a model that would allow for all participants to reconfigure themselves in incredible ways. Using a Lacanian psychological model as the grounds to understand participatory dissent, we can transform antagonism into agonism.
Practice and theory need not be separate endeavors. One is not the instrument of the other. Using theory to make art or making art to create theory is not as transformational and engaging as living in a world where practice and theory envelop one another, become one another, and shape the way we live in profound ways. Practice becomes theory and theory becomes practice and there is no real boundary between the two. (One is not organized and one is not messy. One is not above and one is not below in a hierarchy. One is not words and one is not visual. That is my own interpretation of the idea.)
Loveless reminded us that pedagogy is a political act; it is social sculpture.
And she reinforced the important question in regards to the PhD... What is that labor that we call research?
It is important to remember that the PhD is not the same as an artwork. It is not an MFA in Studio Art. It's more of a question, a philosophy, a research practice where theory becomes practice and practice becomes theory without a collapsing of either of the two. The current structure of the Fine Arts PhD as a justification of disciplinary labor in art that entangles us in relations of debt, and it needs to updated to reflect the interests and needs of the artist.
