This is not the first time on Open Enrollment that I have discussed my post-graduate school future.
In January, I was already feeling the pressure as demonstrated in my post, “So My Last Semester Lies Ahead, Then What?” My colleagues were feeling this, several of them scoring a job and putting the last moments of finishing school on hold since a career trumps all. But now with my graduation a bit less than a week away, I am evaluating all I have done as I worked on my Masters in New Arts Journalism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).
On days I do not have class, I revise my resumes and my curriculum vitae. I like to think of the combination of my higher education and job experience as diverse, but in month three of a job hunt, I am considering why the application materials I spend entire days working on and sending fall on those proverbial deaf ears. It is disheartening, yes. But after the initial grief-coated haze of rejection cleared, I started to think objectively and pragmatically about how potential employers may be perceiving me.
Am I overqualified? Under-qualified? Is my education and experience so diverse that potential employers may be thinking that I lack focus? These are just a couple of the thoughts that occupy my mind when I consider my place in an already-difficult career field like the arts, often a tenuous place to be, but more so in an economy that continues to sink like stilettos in dewy lawns.
Open Enrollment | Nine Months Later, a Master’s Degree
Last Friday, my invitation to graduation arrived in the mail. It seemed rather premature as I am but a fraction of the way through researching and writing my final dissertation, but it was also rather fitting since the MA program at The Courtauld is one of the shortest Master’s degrees in Art History around: a mere nine months from the first day of lectures to the receipt of the diploma. Taking a (most welcome) moment away from my dissertation, I thought about the value of the nine month journey.
Signing up for my graduation: the letters arrive
A full-blown immersive plunge into art history was what I was seeking. My degree brought me into challenging thought, interesting discussion, and engaging writing projects. But it all happened so fast! It makes me wonder if The Courtauld is better suited for those looking for a fast track to a PhD? What of those people, like me, who (at the moment) aren’t considering continuing the climb of the ivory towers?
In cooking, there is a process called blanching, which can be used for greens like spinach and wild garlic (currently in season here in the UK), consisting of boiling the greens for 2 minutes before submerging them in a cold water bath in order to extend their freshness in the freezer. While the culinary analogy seems incongruous (besides an immersion into all things art, I’ve also nursed my passions for yoga and, you guessed it, cooking), it is rather apt in this case. As a student, I was thrown into the deep end (the boiling water) and now, my gestation time (my 2 minutes/9 months) is just about up. Now for the cold water bath.
Art21 Selects 2011-2012 Art21 Educators
Art21 is thrilled to announce the new cohort of teachers participating in the 2011-2012 Art21 Educators Program. Applicants were required to submit not only a written narrative, but also a video profile introducing themselves, their lives as teachers, and their interests. Each participant applied with a partner to provide additional support and feedback, as well as opportunities for collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching. Here is the breakdown of the new group:
- 16 teachers (8 pairs) representing Chapel Hill/Durham, NC; Burnet, TX; Chicago, IL; Brooklyn, NY; Spanish Fork, UT; Pittsburgh, PA; and Fremont, CA;
- 14 work in public schools (including 1 charter school) and 2 work in a parochial school;
- 5 of the 8 partner sets have an interdisciplinary member (representing Language Arts, Literature, Writing, Social Studies, and a generalist elementary teacher);
- There are 10 women and 6 men;
- There are 8 high school teachers, 3 middle school, and 5 elementary teachers.
Out of all the applications we received, why did we pick these 16? As a community of educators who will support each other over the course of an intensive year together, we were looking for equal parts passion and spunk, curiosity and thoughtfulness, and commitment to reinvigorating their classroom with contemporary art, artists, and ideas. In addition, we sought demographic diversity – rural, urban, suburban, West, Midwest, East, South, new teachers, and seasoned teachers. Over the next eight weeks, we will introduce you to each of the eight pairs who were chosen to participate in the third year of this unique program. Allow us to introduce the first pair of 2011-2012 Art21 Educators!
Julia CopperSmith and Maureen Hergott
Maureen and Julia teach in the Mannheim School District #83 - located about a half-hour outside of Chicago, Illinois.
Monday Painter/Sunday Banker
I am so pleased to be a new guest blogger at Art21. We were encouraged to introduce ourselves in our first blog post, and so I thought I would write about art and economics. . . .
In 2004, Daniel H. Pink wrote in the Harvard Business Review:
The MFA is the new MBA!
It was number 9 on the list of breakthrough business ideas of 2004.
James J. Cramer—the television host I associate with loudness and a Daily Show sparring match on par with wrestling trash talk of the ‘80s— tackled the same topic around the same time in New York magazine. He wrote, “Analysts need fine-arts degrees. Like the modernists, they need to think creatively, think outside the walls of the 10-Q filing!” Cramer argued that this would help traders, like all great artists before, to foresee the opportunity to buy underrated AT&T stock that would double in value two days later.
At the time, I was receiving an MFA in painting after already having an MBA. Reading the articles, I felt like a guinea pig in the wild, who happened to be accidentally replicating the lab experiment that followed from the hypotheticals they put forth.
MBA-MFA thinking seems to be making a comeback:
In March, Steve Blank wrote on his blog that “Entrepreneurship is an art not a job.”
Last year, John Maeda, the RISD President, coined the term “artrepreneur,” offering RISD graduates Artrepreneur Starter Kits. (When I asked, John said the term has existed for some time and he resurrected it, like a found object.)
In 2008, Katherine Bell, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review issued an “HBR IdeaCast” titled “The MFA is the new MBA.”
New York Foundation for the Arts now offers an “Artist as Entrepreneur Bootcamp.” Creative Capital and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council jointly run an Artists Summer Institute which is also a business bootcamp. And California College of the Arts offers a “Design Strategy MBA,” to my knowledge the first and only MBA within an art school (and where I teach the core economics class each fall).
From the other side of the conversation, last month, I received a newsletter from Gotham Writer’s Workshop, where I take a class for fun. The lead essay by Jacob Appel painted a picture of the “All-MFA Society.”
I really like it. But what exactly does all this mean?
Turkish and Other Delights | Aslı Çavuşoğlu
AslıÇavuşoğlu, "A Few Hours After the Revolution," neon installation, 2010.
A small black and white newspaper photograph hangs on the wall of Aslı Çavuşoğlu’s studio, located in an old warehouse in Istanbul’s Karaköy district. The photograph is crowd shot, taken from above, and thus mostly of the tops of people’s heads. It is from the 9th Istanbul Biennial, in 2005. “That’s me,” she says, pointing to one of the tiny figures in the crowd. The Biennial was the first large-scale “art event” that Çavuşoğlu had ever attended, and she points to this moment as the point at which she realized she wanted to be an artist, to be a part of the community represented by the Biennial. Though she had completed her BFA in Cinema and Television at Istanbul’s Marmara University the year before and had already completed one of her earliest works, Dominance of Shadow (a project in which the poster for a made-up film was posted on rented billboards throughout Istanbul) and even participated in a group show at Platform Garanti titled That from a long way off looks like flies, she was not yet working full-time as an artist or even thinking of herself as such. Attending the Biennial changed all that.
Aslı Çavuşoğlu, "Dominance of Shadow," posters, 2004
In the nearly six years that have passed since this turning point, Çavuşoğlu has pursued her career at a breakneck pace, establishing herself as one of the most intellectually stimulating and active members of a new generation of young Istanbul-based artists, most of whom were born either in the years leading up to or directly following the 1980 military coup. Though they work in a variety of styles and media, these young artists, much like the generation of Turkish artists that proceeds them, all have at least one foot planted firmly in the field of conceptual art and continue to explore questions located at the intersection of art, everyday life, and politics in the tradition of artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Joseph Beuys, and the Paris-based, Turkish-Armenian artist Sarkis. While rooted firmly in the political realities (and surrealities) of life in Turkey, the many opportunities, made available to them at the early stages of their development, to participate in residencies and exhibitions throughout Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world, has enabled this generation to consider the conflicts and contradictions that characterize their locally specific experience through a broader lens that connects the local to the global flow of capital, labor, bodies, information, and ideas.
New guest blogger: Amy Whitaker
Thanks to Rebecca Leopold for her posts these last two weeks. Up next is Amy Whitaker, a writer, professor, and creative consultant. Her great passion in life right now is teaching economics to artists, which she has done at California College of the Arts, RISD, Trade School, and other places since 2004. Her first book, Museum Legs (Hol Art Books, 2009), was assigned to the freshman class at RISD last year, where she was invited to give the RISD orientation keynote. Museum Legs was also recommended by the Association of Art Museum Directors and was a selection of the Authors@Google program. Amy is at work on a new book about the lives of the creative generalists. Her current consulting projects include the new William Eggleston Museum in Memphis, and being a member of the team at Locus Analytics.
Center Field | Fielding Practice Episode 4: Chicago Art Fairs and Early Modernism Redux
It’s time once again for Fielding Practice with Bad at Sports, a special podcast produced for the Art21 blog. On this month’s episode, Duncan MacKenzie, Dan Gunn, and I are joined once again by Abraham Ritchie, Chicago editor of ArtSlant, to delve into the wild world of art in Chicago and beyond. April was art fair month in our fair city, with the Merchandise Mart’s Art Chicago and NEXT fairs taking place over the April 29-May 1 weekend and the upstart MDW Fair organized by threewalls, Roots & Culture, and Public Media Institute rolling out the weekend prior to that. We debate the pros and cons of both fairs, which–although polar opposites to one another–seem somehow to embody the strengths and weaknesses of Chicago’s own art scene at this particular moment.
Next, we move on to a more theoretical, and certainly more speculative, discussion of an early Modernist revival among some of the artists we’ve been looking at recently: from Ruby Sky Stiler, Mark Grotjahn, and Ryan Fenchel (artists who are featured in exhibitions this month at The Suburban, Shane Campbell Gallery, and Dan Devening Projects + Editions, respectively), to L.A.-based artists Amy Bessone, Aaron Curry, Thomas Houseago, and others. Play along with us at home as we struggle to make sense of what we’re seeing — examples of which can be found below. We finish off with our “What the F&*% Are You Looking At” calendar, where each of us plugs a local exhibition or event that we’re looking forward to seeing this month. Thanks for hanging with us!
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Click here to listen to the podcast.
Images and links after the jump.
Explosive Fragments: Poems and Photographs
Jibade-Khalil Huffman, still/page from “Way Down East” in “James Brown is Dead and other poems” (Future Plan and Program/Project Row Houses, 2011)
At some time, somewhere I read or heard some one say something equating novels with films and poems with photographs. I think it had something to do with time and space, or girth or something. In any event, many of the artists I know who specialize in photography are deeply immersed in poetry, and many of the poets I know, consistently write about and take photographs. How remarkable.
With this in mind, I visited my friend Jibade-Khalil Huffman at his studio in order to further discuss. One of the busiest dudes around, he is a poet and photographer (in which order I know not) who, in recent years, has been staging performances. Two 35mm slide projectors, one loaded with words, stands next to a carousel meticulously edited with beautifully scene images complimented usually, by live music. Like his work, Khalil is often elusive, piqung interest before quickly ducking back into the shadows, slide projector or subway station.
Khalil Huffman: It’s the most narrative driven poem I’ve ever written, it has a plot. There is this scene that occurs at an emergency room. I was in Florida shooting and the bulk of that trip was spent just walking around at night with my camera. Sort of as this figure – this character the “I” figure of the poem. Shooting with that in mind, but never with specific lines in mind. Except this one evening I thought, “Well clearly tonight I have to go out and shoot outside this emergency room.” And after the fact, before actually shooting – twenty minutes later on the way there, “wait, what am I doing? This is too easy and obvious.
Rebecca Leopold: Too easy for you or too easy for the viewer?
KH: I think both.
Calling from Canada | An Interview with Tyson Parks
Exhibition view, Red Bird Gallery, Montréal. Photo by Raji Sohal.
The first really noticeable thing about new media artist Tyson Parks’s digital paintings is their fostering of tension between organic and synthetic elements. Images of readymades provide the tip of the paintbrush, and its stroke is the paint that traces across the canvas. He purposefully maintains the tension, too, by restraining from trying to make the digital trace appear like real, physical paint. But at the same time, Parks’s paintings are a new conceptualization across mediums. Parks makes his paintings using a combination of computer hardware and software that he’s designed, a setup he has appropriated from his practice as an electronic music producer, computer programmer, and video artist. He re-imagines the brush, the paint, the canvas. Parks overturns tradition with his technological approach to painting—embracing VDMX over oils, appropriated photo images of readymades over still-lifes, and computer screens over canvasses. There is no easy congruence of form and content in art, and I doubt that the Montréal-based artist’s paintings are an attempt to achieve that congruence completely. In one sense, these paintings embody a nod to formal conditions, and in another sense, there is an obvious aversion to traditional material conditions, while still referring to the history of painting.
Tyson Parks, "Composition #3," 2011. Gesture-modulated video-feedback painting, archival inkjet print. Courtesy the artist.
Parks’s practice, he says, continues from Wassily Kandinsky’s formal theories relating abstract painting to music. For Kandinsky, “the point is temporally the briefest form,” a complex and sharply-defined unit. The point takes on the character of a single sound, and quantitatively, this creates a composition pictorially and audibly. For Kandinsky, visual elements are likened to musical elements of orchestration. This approach is different from “visual music,” an artistic tradition practiced by Norman McLaren, Oscar Fischinger, and Len Lye, whereby music is visually interpreted and (often quite literally) represented in film and video works. With visual music, lines, colors and shapes correspond with music, appearing to move and react to sound like perfectly choreographed dancers. Kandinsky’s interest on the other hand, lay in developing visual abstractions analogous to, and in conversation with, the structure, form, and style of music composition.
Lives and Works in Berlin | Fratty Art
With its manic art world mingling, Gallery Weekend in Berlin can seem like a frat party with more tote bags. It is Berlin’s promenade into spring and is full of amateur cyclists, bunker parties and club kids. I will confess to being somewhat lackadaisical about this year’s installment, perhaps due to a case of “Frühjahrsmüde,”or “Spring Tiredness,” as the Germans say.* Any expression that explains away seasonal laziness is ok with me. However, I dutifully went to galleries, noting a curious navigation of formal concerns with a tongue-in-cheek impishness. Impish Formalism?
Tony Matelli, "Yesterday" (detail), 2010. Polychromed bronze, beer cans. Courtesy the artist.
At the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Falkenrot Preis 2011 recipient Tony Matelli displays instruments of recreational manliness. His card constructions, beer cases and flaming dollars read initially like Sigma Pi throwaways, but are in fact cast bronze. Pockmarked with eye-holes, cast beer cases are hinged to the wall in a way that recalls deer heads, ethnic masks and other living room trophies. Matelli’s mirrors are littered with dashed-off vaginas and a carefully infantilized personal script (see the piece entitled Bukkake). However, these “capricious” scrawls are not made with a dirty finger, but rather are meticulous enamel renderings. In his overly precious materials, Matelli fetishizes male adolescence with a self-aware wink at its dangerously manufactured mystery. His desire to capture and critique boyhood mysticism seems almost Franconian.
By Franconian, I am, of course, referring to James Franco, whose boy-vestigations at Peres Projects display artistic self-fellatio on par with a Charles Ray sculpture or a Donald Trump press conference. Where Matelli gleefully unravels the tropes and props of clichéd masculinity with nimbleness, Franco suffers from elephantiasis of the hand.
