As I struggle with papers at the end of the semester, I feel tempted to bemoan the futility of writing about art. I want to reassure myself that my problems come from the impossibility of my task, not from my scholarly inadequacies. In this rationalizing process, words often serve as a useful scapegoat. “Words get in the way,” as Gloria Estefan so trenchantly put it. We might reason that in matters of love and art alike, language doesn’t suffice.

If an early 90s pop ballad doesn’t carry enough gravitas, I could marshal plenty of academic machinery in support of a comparable claim about the insufficiency of language. The incommensurability of words and images, or the structuralist critique of the illusory nature of textual description…these words come all too easily. Deploying them might provide a boost to my intellectual ego at moments when I would otherwise feel helpless at expressing myself, but that defense seems like a cop-out. Plenty of writers whom I admire have done just fine with words, without recourse to qualifications about the impossibility of expression.

At the recent Fictions of Art History conference, organized by Mark Ledbury and Michael Hatt at the Clark Art Institute, a collection of speakers convincingly opened up the poetic possibilities of writing about art. For a full rehearsal of their arguments, we will have to wait for the planned book version of the conference. In the meantime, I thought I would highlight one moment that particularly caught my attention.

In the question and answer session, AIexander Nemerov noted how Helen Keller has shaped and affirmed his relationship to language. To paraphrase Nemerov imperfectly, the theoretical discourses that question the mediating function of words can make us forget the access language provides to the world around us. For a reminder of this capacity of words, one only needs to read Keller’s famous account of her experience at the well-house, where she learned not only the meaning of “w-a-t-e-r,” but also the function of language. For Keller, words provided a connection to the world that we often take for granted.

Nemerov’s comment prompted me to revisit Keller’s memoir. Re-reading the story surrounding the water pump, I paid particular attention to the preceding and following scenes. Just before visiting the well-house, Keller tosses a porcelain doll to the floor, shattering it to pieces. She gives little thought to what she destroys. After coming back from the water pump, she returns to the ceramic fragments of the doll, this time with a dramatically different relationship to them:

…every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.

In Keller’s story, words make inanimate matter come to life. They provide a “strange, new sight” that animates everything that was previously dead to her. A doll, a representation of another being, takes on a new value. It develops a vitality that Keller discovers, sadly, only after having destroyed it. This anecdote, whether truthful or constructed, captures the powerful possibilities of words. Keller’s narrative dramatizes the potential immediacy and occult power of linguistic description. That possibility, the chance of animating the inanimate and revealing the life of an object, provides a provocative model for speaking about art. Of course, it helps that Keller’s story is so beautifully written…

"Open Enrollment: Words" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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Over the past few decades, “interdisciplinary” has emerged as a popular designation in academic culture, particularly in the arts and humanities. Both as an undergraduate in studio art and as a graduate student in art history, I have felt the lure of this word, which packages a spirit of emancipation inside of institutionally sanctioned language. At the same time, I have always felt uncomfortable with the term since so many divergent activities seem to take place under its name. In an effort to work through some of these concerns, I spoke with Jesse Aron Green, an artist whose practice we might place under the interdisciplinary banner.

Green was born in 1979 in Boston, MA. He received his MFA from UCLA and his BA from Harvard University. His recent exhibitions include: a solo show at Halle14, Leipzig; a solo project in the Oil Tanks at Tate Modern, London; the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, NY; MOVE, Hayward Gallery, London; CCA Kitakyushu, Japan; and various other gallery and museum exhibitions. His upcoming exhibitions include solo shows at the CCA Ujazdowksi, Warsaw, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown. He was a Henry Luce Scholar for 2008/09, a Trust for Mutual Understanding/Location One Fellow for 2009/10, and is the Arthur Leavitt Fellow at Williams College for 2010/11.

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2010. Artists book. Hand-bound, hard-bound, with 56 french-folded pages. Featuring a reproduction of the complete series of 45 photographs titled "Illustration and Description of the Medico-Gymnastic Exercises," and 122 computer-assisted drawings. Courtesy the artist.

Oliver Wunsch: Can you talk about what it means for you to have an “interdisciplinary” approach to making art (if you accept this characterization)?

Jesse Aron Green: Interdisciplinarity is claimed for many practices and across many fields, which speaks to both the aspirational aspect of working across normative disciplinary boundaries, and the very vagueness of this kind of action or movement. I imagine the term is used liberally in the academy due to the influence of Cultural Studies as it is descends from both post-structuralist theory and post-Marxian critiques of ideology, with their emphasis on understanding social and historical phenomena in relation to both the objects of cultural production and their related subjects (and subjectivities).

However, we’re concerned with the field of art, within which the usage of the term “interdisciplinary” is a bit clearer (i.e. its lineage is clear, if not necessarily its current usage). Modernist practices from the middle of the last century claimed a kind of interdisciplinarity in their production across or between media. One thinks of everything from Black Mountain and the Situationist International to conceptual practices, performance, and so on (including all of preceding practices from earlier in the century to which these later ones claimed lineage, but which may have not made similar claims themselves); that is, all the practices that occupied the space of that which falls between [Michael] Fried’s refined, self-specific arts.

Moving forward, one can point to a range of factors that expanded interdisciplinary practice: technology’s erosion of medium-specificity; the dynamics of cultural stratification; and social movements that critiqued political and cultural institutions (Feminism, Civil Rights, and so on). It’s their legacy, and that of post-structuralism, that leads to a greater critique of forms and frames within the field of art, as well as the eventual theorization of post-modernism and the political imperatives of post-colonialism. It’s at this point, in the 1990s, that interdisciplinary practices are understood as those that borrow processes from other discursive fields: one thinks of both the “semiotic” and the “ethnographic turn,” as they have been called.

What interdisciplinarity means in the field of art at the current moment is unclear to me, except that those who make claims to it seem to do so out of an understanding of its relationship to critique, ideology, and histories of social change, especially as it also inheres a commitment or investment (or what have you) to other disciplinary or intellectual fields within or without the Academy. What the term signifies is even less clear when one tries to account for those who use it more generally: those who point in the direction of historical themes, or those who casually borrow the language of theory from one or another academic field.

None of this, of course, answers your question, which was about my practice.

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2010. Artist's book. Hand-bound, hard-bound, with 56 french-folded pages. Featuring a reproduction of the complete series of 45 photographs titled "Illustration and Description of the Medico-Gymnastic Exercises," and 122 computer-assisted drawings. Courtesy the artist.

OW: As I hear you attempt to trace a history of interdisciplinary work, I wonder at what point these practices come to form a discipline themselves.

JAG: The multiplicity of practices today, and the great difference between global, spectacular culture, and local avenues of dispersion of cultural products, point to the relative relevance and irrelevance of this “interdisciplinary” way of working; which is to say that as modes of practice become accepted forms within certain contexts, they may fossilize and become bound to a set of conventions and understandings. The very terrain of that which is considered “interdisciplinary” must then shift, perhaps in context or even in name, to address that which it formerly struggled against. Given the history of the term—its implication of a political engagement with social movements—one should perhaps now speak of these artistic practices as “cultural resistance,” regardless of the bounds of the work, its processes, or its targets.

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2010. Artists book. Hand-bound, hard-bound, with 56 french-folded pages. Featuring a reproduction of the complete series of 45 photographs titled "Illustration and Description of the Medico-Gymnastic Exercises," and 122 computer-assisted drawings. Courtesy the artist.

OW: Am I hearing you say that institutional critique has become an institution itself? An interdisciplinary tradition has ossified into the exact thing that it initially opposed?

JAG: A statement of the irrelevance, ossification, or instrumentalization of work that addresses institutional power is like the refrain that painting is dead: it’s a provocation, except in this case it’s one that meets too little resistance. The practice has simply shifted, taken up new residence and new name.

So what does it look like now? I’m not an art historian, so I can only speak to what I brush up against. I think of artists or collectives like Ultra-Red (which started as an AIDS activist sound collective and has shifted to address a range of interrelated social movements, from prison reform to struggles around immigration). Due to the way they engage community groups within the context of the art museum, they’ve been included in exhibitions of “relational” work, like Nicolas Bourriaud’s Tate Triennial. I can’t speak to the way the group may or may not claim allegiance to either Bourriaud’s clan or a tradition of Institutional Critique, or anything else, but it seems that such claims are necessarily secondary to the work. And they, of course, are only one example among many. The Raqs Media Collective, LTTR, Walid Ra’ad’s Atlas Group…

Jesse Aron Green, "das Aufschreibesystem" (4/5; p.202, "Why Do You Not Shit?"). 2010. Archival pigment print. 19x27 in. Courtesy the artist.

OW: In light of this discussion of historical influence, even lineage, how has your educational background shaped your practice?

JAG: Anything I’ve learned has been by way of wanting to sleep with or be parented by the people I look up to; that is, by identification, projection, and desire. And anything I’ve made is by way of overcompensation or overstatement. It’s an undervalued tool, overdoing things.

OW: Overcompensation for what?

JAG: All I mean is that to make work is to aspire, to breathe out a proposition for the future, to give form to one’s imaginings and desires and attempts at understanding. I also mean, in light of your questions about education, that the preoccupations, struggles, and priorities—what have you—of my teachers and mentors may not have been my own, but by acknowledging, via identification or transference, some similarity (or desire to be similar) in my self, I was brought into the knowledge of the forms with which these teachers encountered their preoccupations, struggles and desires. This is how being a student usually works, isn’t it?

Jesse Aron Green, "Illustration and Description of the Medico-Gymnastic Exercises" (20/45; Bending of the body forward & backward). 2008. Archival pigment print. 30x40 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

OW: You suggest that your aspirations have been tied to particular people. What drew you to particular models or mentors?

JAG: I can only answer that identification happens. Sometimes it happens because the person with whom one identifies is sought out for a specific reason (in the way I followed my interest in feminism to Mary Kelly); or perhaps the person is the only one available; or perhaps identification doesn’t happen until it does, when you suddenly find yourself reflected in the person seated in the chair across from you.

OW: It sounds as if psychoanalytic ideas are part of both your work and your way of thinking. Some of your projects—Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik, for instance—deal directly with the origins of psychoanalysis. Do you find value in psychoanalytic theory beyond addressing the particular moment and context that produced it? Put differently, if we think of your work as historical in nature, does psychoanalytic theory serve as a primary or a secondary source for you?

JAG: You might say that my interest in psychoanalytic theory is overdetermined, or polyvalent, and so this distinction between primary and secondary is not one I would make. In the first case I can say that I see relations in subjective terms (as well as social and economic terms), which informs not only my approach to subject matter, but also the processes by which I make work, including aspects of its construction, display and dispersal. In the second case, I find it necessary and useful to situate both psychoanalytic theory and practice in its various historical or cultural contexts. Often these contexts form the very subject of the work.

Put another way, I might say I’m invested in both psychoanalytic theory for its processes, and for the way it’s been mobilized within the field of art (and other fields).

My motivations behind making Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik were many, but to give an example of my overdetermined interest in psychoanalysis, I’ll focus on one: in light of postminimal practices that engage sexuality and the body, and the relationship to “structural” ideas that are embedded within much of this work, I felt the need to look backward to the onset of Modernism to get to the roots, or the “pre-history” of the intersection of these forms and their theories; that is, I sought the concomitant roots of these aesthetic forms and their related discourses. This entailed a historical engagement with psychoanalysis—i.e. putting Freud and his work on Schreber in context—but also a discursive engagement with the theory as it stands in the current moment of artistic practice.

Jesse Aron Green, "Illustration and Description of the Medico-Gymnastic Exercises" (21/45; Bending of the body to the sides). 2008. Archival pigment print. 30x40 cm. Courtesy the artist.

OW: Do you see your practice as a form of historical investigation? Or does history enter your work more as background research that precedes the creative stage? I suppose I am asking how historical and artistic methods become intertwined in your work, if at all.

JAG: Instead of separating the two, I might propose that artistic work can be historical, especially as history must contend with the visual. This is to say that historical methods might be artistic methods when deployed within the field of art.

In another way, I might say that I engage with historical events, figures, and phenomena in order to grapple with the status of the referent; that is, to grapple with the way a historical marker can function according to its standard significations, its current understandings, as well as all of its associated contemporaneous entanglements. To continue with the example from before: when one points to structural film by making an artwork that adheres to its understood conventions, one not only makes a work that might be experienced in a way similar to that of the earlier works, one also engages all of the debates and theories that originally accompanied the practice of structural film in general. I suppose that some of my work attempts to make that engagement more explicit and more full.

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2008. High-definition video-installation (color, stereo sound). 80 minute loop. Dimensions variable (minimum projection size 18ʼ x 7.69ʼ, aspect ratio 2.34:1). Video still. Courtesy the artist.

OW: I think I hear what you’re saying. Would it make sense to distinguish between the illustration of a historical concept and the performance—or maybe the enactment—of that concept?

JAG: You’re grappling with the right verb to use—illustrate, enact, perform—all of these different ways of trying to capture what happens when one takes a pre-existing process and uses it, actions it. “Illustrate” clearly is not what one means, in the sense that it implies the reduction of a set of ideas to a literalized form. “Perform” implies a set of varying products that come out of a preexisting score or set of conventions, and so establishes a great distance between the poles of what should be interpenetrating ideas or forms. For me, the term with the most potential is “enact” or “enactment.” If one enacts something—and keep in mind that I do not mean reenact— one attempts to put into practice something that will allow for a coming into being, a coming into happening. It sounds very German, and perhaps rightly so. The idea of enactment has the potential to look back and find that which is important and useful from history and historical forms and practices, then relate them to a current context or moment. It is like a breathing into life. The key questions for me around enactment might sound too reduced, but they are (in light of enactment as political action): how can one do something? What does it mean to watch people do something, or attempt to do something?

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2008. High-definition video-installation (color, stereo sound). 80 minute loop. Dimensions variable (minimum projection size 18ʼ x 7.69ʼ, aspect ratio 2.34:1). Video still. Courtesy the artist.

OW: Switching gears: does the term “teaching artist” mean anything to you? I’ve always found it a strange designation, though I can’t quite pinpoint my reaction. Perhaps it suggests that teaching is some kind of condition, like pedagogy as pathology….

JAG: Artists-as-teachers exist to the degree they do because of the paucity of other options in the United States that do not seem either totally unrelated (day jobs), frustratingly proximate (gallery-sitting, installation work, and other ancillary positions within the arts), or instrumentalized (like artistic work as service provision within museum education departments, as Andrea Fraser has written about). It’s old hat to talk about the lack of governmental support for the arts, and how the university has attempted to fill that need (even if it is because art programs tend to bring in students and cash). Finally, it’s almost nothing but depressing to read something like the Rand report on the visual arts and learn that in 2005, the annual median income of people who consider themselves artists was about $700, with only 5% earning above $10,000 (especially when you consider that median production costs were twice the median income). Simply put, the attempt to be an artist, never mind a teaching artist, seems pathological, or at least totally foolish.

Regardless, I’m not sure what a career as an artist looks like, but I certainly know that working as a teacher and working as an artist are parallel careers. One can only attempt to clarify the difference between one’s practice and the services one provides, and the way these two overlap.

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2008. High-definition video-installation (color, stereo sound). 80 minute loop. Dimensions variable (minimum projection size 18ʼ x 7.69ʼ, aspect ratio 2.34:1). Installation shot. Courtesy Tate Photography.

OW: I was particularly speaking about the phrase “teaching artist,” which always makes me shift in my seat. Maybe the gerund of teaching suggests that pedagogy is not a separate activity, but part of the person.

JAG: Teaching isn’t the uncomfortable word. It points to the root of the discomfort, which is the word ‘artist’; that is, the discomfort of attempting to claim oneself as an artist before one is a teacher. Certainly people do call themselves artists within the classroom, and I imagine that when they do it serves to reify a rather old-fashioned conception of the artist-as-expert. That is, naming oneself as such implies a subjective position of individuation, and often privilege. Within the profession of teaching, this position implies an expertise that often covers over a lack of pedagogical intent.

This is all to say: traces of the atelier system still exist, and I wish they would be more fully replaced by an alternative that integrated historical and theoretical considerations with the practice of making work. Neither am I interested in a scientificized field of art-study, in which the priorities of the humanities replace those of working artists, nor am I interested in theory or art history as that which props up contemporary practice, with little regard to their full understandings; I’m interested in a more informed, integrated approach.

Jesse Aron Green, "Ärztliche Zimmergymnastik," 2008. High-definition video-installation (color, stereo sound). 80 minute loop. Dimensions variable (minimum projection size 18ʼ x 7.69ʼ, aspect ratio 2.34:1). Installation shot. Courtesy Tate Photography.

OW: You bring up the divide between theory and artistic practice, which returns us to where we started, to the question of interdisciplinarity. It sounds as if this more integrated approach that you call for might entail a kind of enactment. Can you elaborate?

JAG: I’m not sure I can, except by redirecting, again, to psychoanalysis. Insomuch as the field of art has focused on psychoanalytic theories, it may prove useful to look to an integration of its practice in its many forms, as messy and specific and contradictory and mysterious as they sometimes are. For example, the concepts of projection and introjection usefully explain how enactment might function; while a work that enacts in some way, according to the operation of these principles within actual therapeutic practice, might be exactly that which clarifies current issues of relationality, politics, and so on.

Perhaps the most reduced way of encapsulating this idea of enactment is to say that it is making as thinking, just as it is living as acting, with all of the political potential that such a likeness entails.

"Open Enrollment: Disciplinary Complex" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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I tried to write this blog post in the form of a story. The approach would have fit the topic: an upcoming conference at the Clark Art Institute on the relationship between fiction and art history. Somehow I couldn’t manage. Or maybe I wasn’t comfortable. I always feel uneasy about writing stories. They lack precision, thoroughness, and verifiability. Or am I reassuring myself here? Are these the self-justifying words of an art history student who doubts the rigorousness of his own methods? Am I nervously denying my propensity for narrative because it sounds unseemly? If we allow stories into the history of art, then what would that say about the people who want to make this “storytelling” their profession?

Fictions of Art History deals with these sorts of questions. At its most fundamental level, the conference asks what it is that art historians actually do. In order to examine fiction in relation to art history, we need to consider the origins of art history itself. Many of the early models of the discipline take narrative form. For instance, when Giorgio Vasari wrote The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (1550), he created a foundation for the history of art as biographical semi-fiction.

We now know enough to question the content of Vasari’s accounts, yet they continue to maintain a powerful grip on us. When Vasari tells us that Giotto fooled Cimabue by painting a perfectly realistic fly on one of the elder master’s works, I want to believe the legend. Or at least I want to find an excuse to retell it. Of course we can invoke such stories as meaningful evidence of the mythology surrounding an artist, providing the disclaimer that they offer little information about the reality of history. Yes, I can say to myself, I am not perpetuating the myth but interrogating it through my carefully honed skills of analytic fact checking.

According to legend, Cimabue discovered the young shepard Giotto drawing in the fields. Painting by Gaetano Sabatelli.

Analytic fact checking, though, has an unsatisfying ring to it. It certainly doesn’t provide an attractive slogan for the student of art history. Where is the life in facts? The endurance of Vasari’s Lives surely has something to do with its liveliness. If the stories are deficient in truth, then at least they got something right in their capacity to hold our attention. As conference participant Paul Barolsky has previously suggested, art historians’ attachment to stories may betray our suppressed imaginative inclinations. We slyly indulge these interests by revisiting figures like Vasari, who allow us to vicariously escape the analytic methods to which we feel bound.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to openly and comfortably craft stories about art. As an undergraduate, I majored in printmaking and regularly needed to explain my own work in narrative terms. In critiques, I found the easiest way to justify my pictures was through personal anecdotes, tales of agony in the studio, and accounts of miraculous inspiration. Stories felt like my medium as much as anything else. A convincing tale produced a powerful picture. The numerous contemporary artists who inscribe narratives within their artwork (like conference speaker Gregory Crewdson, for example) only seem to confirm this impulse to integrate art and fiction.

Gregory Crewdson, "Untitled," 2001. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

When I began taking art history courses, on the other hand, I immediately turned against the narratives and myths that artists bring to bear on their own work. Pictures ought to be treated as visual objects rather than verbal constructions, I thought. Putting the principle into practice was another matter. In turning away from the life of the artist, I found myself increasingly telling stories about the life of the object, or the life I ascribed to the object. Even if we reject a biographically oriented tradition of art history, we’ll still be hard pressed to avoid the narrative implications of putting words in the missing mouths of pictures.

Art history still hasn’t found a purely “visual language”—an oxymoron that might capture something of its impossibility. What, after all, is the language of pictures? Lines, planes, and forms all have their use in pictorial description, but they don’t entirely explain pictures. Even if we could figure out a visual code uniquely appropriate for deciphering art, I wonder if we would resist reconstituting our findings in narrative form. We only need to look to the invented field of “symbolology” in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code to understand how pictorial investigation gives way to the fictional imagination. Novelists, poets, and literary theorists like Marina Warner, Cole Swensen, and Marianna Torgovnick (who will all speak at the Clark conference) provide numerous other examples of the fictional possibilities found in art and the methods of art historical research.

While fiction may have embraced art history, I’m still ambivalent about art history’s relationship to fiction. That ambivalence, though, may not be so healthy. In my failed attempt to write this blog post in narrative form, I realize I wrote something like a sad little story—a meta-account of my own troubled relationship with stories. In a characteristically academic move, I’ve stepped outside my problem and pointed back towards it. Until I’ve dealt with that conflict, I’ll be stuck telling stories about stories about pictures.

The 2010 Clark Conference, Fictions of Art History, will take place on October 29 and 30 at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 225 South Street in Williamstown, MA. Click here for more information.

"Open Enrollment: Stories About Stories About Pictures" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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I suspect most people today would agree that making art involves more than technical skill. By the seventeenth century, the intellectual and philosophical side of artistic expression had already been institutionalized in “academies,” which broke from the guild system of instruction. Even the word “academy” asserted that art was a serious mental pursuit that deserved schools like those of any other humanistic discipline.

Unlike other disciplines in the humanities, however, visual art has carried on without doctoral degrees, at least until recently. When George Smith founded the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) in 2007, the program had few peers. While the number of PhD programs in art has grown significantly since then, IDSVA remains unique for its emphasis on theory and philosophy. Notably, the program does not include any studio work. Instead, reading, writing, and on-site discussions in the world of art form the basis of the low-residency school, which convenes for intensive sessions in Europe and the United States. I recently met with Smith at his home in Portland, Maine to talk about IDSVA and the basic question of whether artists need PhDs.

George Smith at his home in Portland, ME. Background photograph by Jocelyn Lee.

Oliver Wunsch: I understand that IDSVA offers no studio instruction, but theory plays a major role in the program. As a way of beginning, could you talk about the reasoning behind this format?

George Smith: If the way an artist sees the world changes, if her range of perception broadens and deepens, then her artistic ability, her ability to represent history, human consciousness, the history of aesthetic discourse, this will change for the better because she will have changed for the better. In other words, the studio practice gets taken to the next level because the artist who goes into the studio has developed intellectually, spiritually, and as a citizen of the world. In my experience as a teacher of artists, the rigorous study of theory and philosophy can make that happen. But IDSVA is not just about making better studio artists; we’re trying to produce artist-philosophers.

OW: Does that experience need to be called a PhD? Why not just invite qualified people who want to do this sort of thinking, reading, and writing, without the doctoral degree?

GS: The PhD requires a measure of rigor that cannot be imposed upon people who are just stopping by for a conversation. For one thing, you have to write a dissertation and that dissertation has to be submitted to professional review. Writing to an audience of that kind is a tremendously important aspect of the experience. But more to the point, we want IDSVA graduates to go into universities and colleges and teach. We want them to lead the discussion that is shaping the future of American intellectual discourse, not just in visual arts, but in the humanities and in other disciplines as well. And to do that, they have to be credentialed.

OW: Right now, you can become a professor of studio art with an MFA. With a PhD, your graduates presumably would be able to teach not just studio practice, but also theory, philosophy, and so forth…

GS: Exactly.

OW: Why shouldn’t those artists simply get a degree in the subjects that seem relevant to their work? For instance, if psychoanalytic theory means something to your art, shouldn’t you just study in that field?

GS: The answer to your question is partly practical. If you have an MFA and want to go to someplace like the University of Chicago for a PhD in the history of psychoanalysis, they’ll probably say go back and do your MA first. IDSVA grants credit to the MFA for a humanities PhD. More importantly, though, we’re putting together an intensive collaboration. Most IDSVA students hold an MFA and many are studio faculty. Maybe half are tenure track, many are full-professors, and some are department heads. About a third are adjunct professors looking to strengthen their academic position. Others are curators or creative intellectuals with an MA in cultural studies or art history. We love the dialogical mix. The common thread is that most everybody at the table sees the world through the relationship of the hand, the eye, the body, and space, and they resolve abstract problems from that experiential standpoint as opposed to a purely abstract view.

OW: All of that makes sense, but I wonder if there’s a danger that you won’t ever really be in dialogue with the traditional scholars who specialize in the subjects that you’re studying. Do you worry about separating yourself from the people whose ideas you’re borrowing?

GS: We want to cultivate a space in which artists and creative thinkers can grow and develop as artist-philosophers, but also where all kinds of artists and scholars can gain from the process. For instance, someone like Stephen Greenblatt, a leading Renaissance scholar from Harvard University, comes to lecture for us at Spannocchia Castle in Tuscany and leaves deeply affected by the experience. We’re not looking to balkanize ourselves as some group of artists who are now going to take over the world from the standpoint of theoretical advancement. The point is to open up a discussion in a way that allows people like Greenblatt to hear what an artist-philosopher has to say about the Renaissance. Of course the artist-philosopher has a pretty wide-eyed appreciation of what Greenblatt’s saying, too, and it’s the exchange that makes the conversation so rich and productive.

Spannocchia Castle, one of the sites where IDSVA regularly convenes. Photo: Nil Santana

OW: Could you say more about the locations where the program meets, what goes on, and how these activities relate to the setting?

GS: I mentioned Stephen Greenblatt because his participation as IDSVA Visiting Faculty typifies our pedagogical approach in an important way. When Stephen lectures on the transition from Feudal to Renaissance to postmodern consciousness, for historical context he’s using Spannocchia Castle, which has been restored to its origins as an agrarian estate, and he’s using the art and architecture of Siena, which is a nearby medieval banking city. Then we go up to Milan, where we look at Da Vinci’s Last Supper as a visual dramatization of Stephen’s cultural critique, and afterwards we go across town, to a little-known cathedral that houses a Dan Flavin installation, and ask ourselves, “Okay, what’s the relation between Stephen’s lecture, Leonardo’s representation of Renaissance thought, and Flavin’s projection of light in a fifteenth-century Milanese church?” From there we go to Paris, where Étienne Balibar, the preeminent French Marxist, picks up the thread with John Rajchman and they talk about their new book on postmodern French philosophy and what they and others are calling “the contemporary.” In Januar,y it’s on to Harlem and Manhattan, where Jim Elkins, Julie Mehretu (Art21 Season 5), Simon Critchley, and Avital Ronell will push the question of the contemporary from within the framework of post-industrial urban space. Next June, we’ll be at the Venice Biennale. In years to come we hope to be in Berlin, Beijing, São Paulo, and Cape Town.

OW: The second portion of the program involves the dissertation, which I wanted to ask you about, but in a somewhat roundabout way. I read that you started out pursuing poetry. Since poetry merges textual communication and artistic expression, I wondered whether this early experience influenced your interest in seeing artists write PhD theses. Specifically, how do you see the dissertation in relation to creative expression? Do you consider the writing that comes out of the program to be art? Or is it totally separate from the artistic practice of your students?

GS: From writing poetry, I learned how to write prose criticism. And what I learned was that it’s arduous labor. It’s not a matter of inspired spontaneous expression. I don’t ever want a search committee to say of a job applicant from IDSVA, “Well, they’re writing on their own art,” or, “this creative expression of the artist’s relationship to the work of art lacks theoretical rigor.” Hence IDSVA students refrain from writing on their studio practice, especially in the dissertation. We have a lot of artists coming in who see their relationship to language—particularly abstract, philosophical language—as their weakest link. Through a very tough transformative learning process, they make their weakest link as strong as their strongest one, which is the studio. What they come away with is the inspiration to give those now inexhaustible powers to others—through their art, their teaching, their critical thinking and writing. If we said, “You’re not going to be like other scholars; you’re going to get the easy version where you can write about yourself or write non-critical prose,” we’d be selling everybody short.

IDSVA students with Professor Sharon Hecker at the studio/archive of Luciano Fabro in Milan. Photo: Nil Santana

OW: I’m surprised to hear you say that many of your students enter the program thinking that they have a weak relationship with language. Somehow I just assumed that you would only attract artists who already felt very confident about dealing with theoretical texts. What type of student makes a good match for IDSVA?

GS: It runs up and down the spectrum. Those who come in thinking that theory and philosophy are of less interest than career development often get drawn so deeply into the program of study that they wind up in a very different place. There’s no one type. I’ll say that there’s a general consistency in that even those who are “up” on theory make it plain that they’re not at IDSVA to primp their version of theory and philosophy. Most everybody comes wanting to know more and to share what they learn. It’s an amazing, incredibly generous, and intelligent bunch.

OW: If a student applies to the program and doesn’t feel especially grounded in theoretical thinking, then I wonder how do you figure out whether this person has potential. Do you see it in their studio practice? Do you find intelligence in works of art themselves?

GS: You figure out whether a person has potential through multiple interviews, writing samples, and looking at the work. But that’s hardly to say that every artist with an MFA should run out and apply to IDSVA. There are some, though—a tiny fraction of the total population of artists—who really want to understand theory and philosophy in relation to art and to themselves as practicing artists. IDSVA is a place in the world where artists and creative thinkers can go and do precisely that.

"Do artists need PhDs?" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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What defines “the contemporary” as an area of study? How does it relate to the writing of history or other fields of inquiry? In this edition of Open Enrollment, Oliver Wunsch, a graduate student in history of art at Williams College, speaks about these questions and more with João Ribas, Curator at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT. Ribas was previously Curator at The Drawing Center in New York, and has organized over thirty exhibitions in the US and abroad. He is the winner of two consecutive International Association of Art Critics Awards, and his writing appears in numerous publications.

João Ribas | Photo: Mario Heuschober, © Secession 2008

Oliver Wunsch: This Open Enrollment column deals with the questions and concerns of graduate students in the arts. In part, I was interested in speaking with you because you’re 31 years old and have a long professional record. During the years when many people pursuing a career in the arts would be in grad school, you were working as a writer and curator. To begin with beginnings, how did you start down this path?

João Ribas: I started through the practice of writing criticism — what I thought I’d be doing was focusing on post-war thought and contemporary art through academic work, though I became increasingly involved in the “contemporary art” part of the pairing, and so [became] an art critic and editor instead. Only later did I become involved with curatorial practice. That came with an interest in the discursive, narrative, and dramaturgical space of an exhibition, rather than the more analytical or reflective aspect of writing. What interested me at first was the production of a critical, judgment-based discourse, the kind of writing that exists before more sclerotic methodologies take over — maybe because of the aversion academic orthodoxy still maintains towards such belle-lettrist tendencies, like [Charles] Baudelaire writing on [Constantin] Guys.

OW: Do you see your time as a critic as part of your education?

Clement Greenberg

JR: Clement Greenberg, for all the polemics he entrains, called it “learning in public” — this sense of writing as a heuristic to discover what you think, as well as the gnawing fear of having to repudiate one’s previous judgments. What interested me was the reflective judgment enacted in the act of writing, itself part of the process of constantly seeing art. In the process of writing, you are forced to come to terms with something — like [Paul] Valery turning the seashell in his hands — and the object of your criticism is either less or more favored than when you first started, sometimes for altogether different reasons.

OW: “Art historians are slow critics,” according to Thierry de Duve. I’m interested to hear more about how your work relates to history since you’ve mentioned that an emerging historical narrative about contemporary art drew you to the field. Can you speak more about how a sense of history played a role in your intellectual development?

JR: My involvement in curatorial work was somewhat concurrent with the field becoming more and more “visible” — that is, coming to historicize itself along the lines of constituting a discipline. This project of a historiography of curating, or writing the history of curatorial practice, as well as an attention to the role exhibitions played in 20^th century art history, was under way. What the production of this history continues to show is the role curatorial work plays in the contextualization, and eventual historicization, of contemporary artistic production.  At the same time, as the field began to produce this history, there was a rise of new kinds of art that challenged the normative assumptions of precisely that historical narrative. Those methodologies were, and continue to be, largely put in place by new generations of curators working with new generations of artists.  This relationship is significant: it shows how curatorial work — meaning the production of exhibitions and its related discourse — operates in a state of critical in-between-ness — say the supposed logic of the market and the art historical process — and in effect produces the interpretative horizon for what we deem the “contemporary.” [Daniel-Henry] Kahnweiler thought museums had no business collecting or largely exhibiting art by living artists — this less than a century ago; it’s only recently that contemporary topics are generally accepted in the field of art history. I think the ongoing historiography of curating demonstrates the significant role it has played in producing what we call “contemporary art history” as a result, and I was interested in the temporality and historicity of that.

OW: I have heard a lot, particularly from professors, about the explosion of interest in contemporary art amongst a younger generation. Applicants to graduate programs in the history of art increasingly gravitate towards modern and contemporary subject matter. Do you have any guesses as to the origins of this?

Paris Poster, May 1968

JR: I’d think you’d have to look at the relationship of that interest to the two singular events that seem to structure the political and cultural imaginaries of that generation, namely 1968 and 1989. The latter is perhaps the most significant political transformation that defines it, in which the major ideological pivot of previous decades is no longer part of political life and where, as historical subjects, they are supposedly at “the end of history” and the universalization of western liberal democracy. So this generation is a product of the enormous benefits of those changes of the post-war world — at least until about 22 months ago — while dealing with its geopolitical consequences. Yet the event that most defines the cultural imaginary of that same generation, I would argue, is actually 1968. The most common references in the art world, in terms of texts cited and buzzwords quoted are those central to, and of, the generation of ’68 ([Walter] Benjamin, Situationism, [Gilles] Deleuze, [Antonio] Negri, [Michel] de Certeau, [Michel] Foucault, etc…) Even the aesthetics of politicized art is largely the aesthetics of the politics of the 1960s. So there is a tension with our cultural imaginary, which structures our aesthetic modalities of thinking and doing, and our historical and political condition.  This is not to say that art is drained of political agency, but that the politics that define our present condition are not those of the aesthetic language that is dominant, namely, that of the 1960s — collective social revolution, or revolutionary spontaneity, for example. Yet the aesthetic aspect tied to those politics somehow still survives as the lingua franca of contemporary art — without say, a clear directive of how the Left can reconstitute itself in light of the post-communist world.

OW: Can you say more about this tension?

JR: This generation you mention being interested in contemporary art as a field is also a generation whose visual language seems established through the “second event” of the 1960s: the historicization of its ideology, language, texts, and images. To be precise, what I think you are talking about is mostly a new academic interest in the art of that time, precisely the same era being historicized within museums and institutions, and which serves as the basis for the aesthetic vocabulary of much of contemporary art production—as well as the critical language brought to it. James Meyer has pointed out how central the 1960s are to the cultural identifications of contemporary artists. As a result, I think we need to expand the critical models and bring new language to that conversation.

OW: What role can university exhibition spaces play in dealing with this idea of the contemporary?

JR: What interests me in those types of spaces is the potential for contemporary artistic production to be treated as a field in which knowledge is produced, and for engaging models of how that knowledge might be constituted. How can contemporary art be engaged as a field of inquiry, and how does it relate to other disciplines and forms? Right now, the university art museum can also become a site to deal with another issue, the extent to which we have given up the arc of an artistic career to the market.

T. S. Eliot

OW: In concluding, I want to ask you about this T. S. Eliot line that I have seen you quote: “Where is the knowledge that we have lost in information?”

JR: I was really interested in the theorizing about media that seemed to lead to the conclusion that there was an economics of attention created by an overabundance of information. This was coupled with the fact that there seemed to be a lot of discussion about artists working with a kind of metaphysical slant, or press releases with staid language describing how such and such artist “alters our perception of the mundane.” Eliot just seems to encapsulate that idea very early, this pervasive idea in our cultural conversation that what we think of as knowledge is being lost, and replaced by information.

"Contemporary Knowledge: Interview with João Ribas" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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PHENOMENOWHAT?

by Oliver Wunsch

Katia Zavistovski examines Karin Sander's "Wallpiece"

In my first few visits to MASS MoCA‘s current exhibition InVisible: Art at the Edge of Perception, I missed the first work of art. Katia Zavistovski, the exhibition’s curator, eventually corrected my obtuseness. She directed my attention back towards Karin Sander‘s Wallpiece (2010), a 60 x 36 inch section of polished paint on the far wall.

Katia is my classmate in Williams College’s History of Art graduate program and it is easy to put our academic minds to work as we stand in front of Sander’s piece. I began to pontificate. Does the subtle reflective quality of Sander’s square insist on the phenomenological nature of viewing? Or is it a semiotic critique of the codes and conventions that normally separate art from its context?

This language may sound more appropriate for an academic paper than a blog post and I promise to keep it under control. The bigger question I wanted to address with Katia was whether this type of discussion belongs in museums.

Graduate students at Williams have plenty of opportunities to get out of the library and go to work on exhibitions. The program itself is based in the Clark Art Institute, which combines a museum and research center in the same building. Students can also take work-study jobs at the Williams College Museum of Art and MASS MoCA, both of which provide the chance to curate shows.

The Two Art Histories, a book based on the 1999 Clark conference examining the "tense relationship" between museum and university-based art historians.

Like Katia, I work at MASS MoCA and will organize an exhibition there next year. My time at the museum gives me a welcome break and sense of distance from my academic work. Still, this same feeling of separation makes me wonder how curatorial work fits into a graduate education in the history of art, if at all.

I never noticed much of a divide between these two worlds until coming to graduate school. Since then, I have heard a lot about the “two art histories,” one that exists in museums and the other in colleges and universities. In the most extreme version of this rift, academics see the museum as tainted by financial interests and associations with mass entertainment, while curators view the academy as blind to actual works of art.

This division creates some problems for a young student of art history. For instance, my classmates who hope to eventually work in a museum find that they need to carefully frame their professional ambitions when applying to PhD programs. Even those who hope to become professors have to figure out how to discuss previous curatorial work when crafting their intellectual biographies. If the boundary between the museum and the university is so professionally entrenched, then can a student productively move between them?

Two works from Christian Capurro's "Compress Series"

In Katia’s case, at first I had trouble making connections between these two places of work. Her qualifying paper (the Williams equivalent of a master’s thesis) deals with the grizzly morgue photographs of Andres Serrano. Flayed corpses and scorched flesh don’t quite fit in the serene atmosphere of InVisible. White is the show’s dominant color, not red. When I stand in front of Christian Capurro‘s Compress Series (2006-2008), a group of magazine pages whose surface the artist has nearly completely erased, I want to get closer and decipher the slight gradations of tone. When I saw Katia present a version of her Serrano paper this fall, I wanted to run for the bathroom.

In that sense you could say that InVisible and Katia’s academic work share an interest in our sensory limits. They both insist on an affective experience of art, albeit at two different extremes. When I asked Katia whether any of her studies at Williams had influenced the show, she talked about reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty‘s writing on the nature of perception during our first-semester seminar on the methods of art history.

Two of Joanne Lefrak's "Trinity Site" pieces

The French philosopher certainly came to mind when I looked at Joanne Lefrak‘s Trinity Site series. Lefrak etches lines in sheets of Plexiglas that she then mounts about an inch off of the wall. The picture that she draws in the transparent surface only becomes visible as light flows through the glass, causing the semi-opaque scratches to cast a shadow. It all reminded me of Merleau-Ponty describing the experience of swimming and looking at the tiles on the pool floor through the reflections of water. He notes that his perception of the tile and the watery play of light are inseparable from each other.

Students of art history read Merleau-Ponty under the banner of “phenomenology,” but that word never appears in any of the InVisible show materials. Katia explained that she included it in an early draft of the exhibition brochure, but later took it out at the suggestion of other people at the museum. The issue of audience clearly separates the “two art histories.” Text that makes sense in a conference paper may be of little interest to most visitors of MASS MoCA.

My attention to the show’s brochure may be heading off course, since an exhibition ostensibly speaks through the arrangement of works of art. That fact may be what separates the museum from the university more than anything else. The devices that a curator uses in hanging an exhibition don’t have much in common with the academic’s faithful tools of argumentation: Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.

Jaime Pitarch's "Preliminary Drawings for a Show, Erased" (left) and an untitled fabric piece by Janet Passehl (right)

All of these tools come with their own dilemmas. When walking through InVisible, I asked Katia to talk about the role of the glass display cases in the show. I noticed that a vitrine protects Jaime Pitarch‘s Preliminary Drawings for Show, Erased (2006), so you don’t get much of a look at the artist’s blank sketchbook (the title should explain the blankness). In contrast, the delicate fabric pieces of Janet Passehl remain exposed to the air.

Katia defended the choice, noting that the glass over Pitarch’s drawings makes them even more invisible because it keeps the viewer from flipping through the sketchbook. Passehl’s piece, on the other hand, depends on the tactility of the fabric and a clear view of its subtle folds.

Still, the answer did not entirely satisfy me. In an effort to rub the “two art histories” against each other, I began to indulge my academic imagination. Invoking Merleau-Ponty, I told Katia that I couldn’t separate my perception of an artwork from the glass that stood in front of it. Within a show about the edges of perception, doesn’t glass itself become a charged medium? Amongst works that challenge the visibility of art’s borders and interrogate the ontology of the frame, doesn’t the vitrine itself become a questionable device?

Katia offered two more justifications that were harder to refute: insurance waivers and contractual obligations to the owners of the work. No amount of phenomenological theory could change that.

CHANGING ECONOMIC TIMES FORCE ARTISTS TO ADAPT

by Mike Brenner

When Milwaukee hosts its quarterly Gallery Night, thousands of people descend upon the city’s historic Third Ward. It’s one of those neighborhoods that 25 years ago people were afraid of. When galleries and theater companies started to move into this neighborhood anchored by my alma mater, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design (MIAD), so did the restaurants, bars, and high-end retail. Now everywhere you look, there are cookie cutter condo developments popping up, and in the last ten years, rents have soared to a point where only a handful of galleries can still afford to stay in the area.

"Necessary Struggles" by kathryn e. martin

In 2000, a group of MIAD students started doing a series of installation-based shows, they called Rust Spot, in one of the many empty warehouses in the Third Ward. The local business improvement district got them the space for free, and they were given carte blanche. For three years, the group put together some of the most exciting shows in the city. These one-night exhibitions drew in over 2,000 people every Gallery Night, until the space became more valuable to a local real estate developer sitting empty than as an incubator for exciting, fresh art.

Around the time Rust Spot was evicted and empty warehouse space started disappearing, the nonprofit I was running, the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network (MARN), started an exhibition series called Destination. MARN would find a local business that saw the value in having artists in an otherwise unused space, and then MARN’s board of directors would jump through all the bureaucratic and financial hoops of getting a temporary occupancy permit ($200), event insurance ($175), and a temporary liquor license ($10) to sell beer and wine to cover costs. The organization did shows featuring 20-40 artists (ranging from students to established professionals) in a parking garage, an old burned out ballroom, an empty building the art school owned, and even took over an entire floor of a high-rise office building.

MARN's Destination series - "Company Man"

While putting together exhibitions in these empty spaces was relatively inexpensive, they were often fairly labor-intensive shows. It took 7 hours just to run extension cords and hang clamp lights in the office building, and a few of MARN’s board members had to meet with the building’s management several times to assure them the artists would act “appropriately.”

While MARN was able to leverage its nonprofit status and board members’ connections in the business community to obtain spaces in the lean times following 9/11, as the economy continued to improve, finding free space for exhibitions became more and more difficult.

So in 2004, when I opened my gallery Hotcakes, MARN started using the space for all of the organization’s meetings, workshops, and annual exhibition that featured the artists in our mentoring program (many of whom are recent art school grads). Initially, my monthly expenses (fixed costs) at Hotcakes were about $1600, which included rent ($400), postcards ($230), stamps ($420), 4 cases of cheap wine ($144), food ($160), heat and electric ($120), phone ($90), insurance ($65), and my web server and email newsletter ($30). But after a couple years, I started doing all my promotion online, ditched my insurance, and had the gallery calls go to my mobile phone, which cut my expenses in half.

Luckily, after I closed Hotcakes and resigned as executive director of MARN in 2008, the annual mentor show’s proven track record, abundance of press, and high caliber of artists, made it easy for MARN to find another venue to continue the series.

"Eat Wild" by Jesse Graves. Photo by Nicolas Lampert.

While the economic crisis has been terrible for art sales the last couple years, it has made some really exciting exhibitions possible in Milwaukee. Just last week, three seniors from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, Makeal Flammini, Ella Dwyer, and Jes Myszka, put together an exhibit of over twenty local artists, poets, and musicians in and around a few of the empty buildings that used to house the Pabst brewery. Aside from art hung on walls, there were improvised performances, outdoor projections, and mud stencils on the old Pabst grain silos. The Parachute Project was formed specifically to hold shows in different vacant spaces each month. Makeal said they just made a list of realtors in the area and called each one until she found Mike Kleeber of Town Investments, who was excited by the idea of hosting local artists on Gallery Night. The one night event received a lot of great press, including on air interviews on two local radio stations, and cost the group just shy of $700, which included the $200 one-night event insurance policy.

For an event occurring the same night, MIAD professor, Jason Yi, found a great free venue to host an exhibition of his freshman students’ work, while sitting in his dentist’s chair. It turns out Jason’s dentist, Dr. Mike DeWan, loves art and saw a Gallery Night exhibit in the unrented, first floor of his building as a great opportunity to show off his space to potential tenants. Dr. DeWan even donated the $140 to print the postcards and paid for the food and drinks. The show cost MIAD and the students nothing. Jason was thrilled his students got a real experience organizing an exhibition (including writing press releases and designing postcards), and the feedback on the students’ work was fantastic.

Milwaukee’s next Gallery Night isn’t until July, but The Parachute Project has already met with the owner of their next exhibition space. Their recent success, as well as that of Jason’s students, will undoubtedly inspire other local artists to also create something interesting beyond the white box. I can’t wait to see what it is.

"The Exhibition in Art & Business" originally appeared on the Art21 Blog

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