Dear Steven

Essay Published in: ART SCHOOL: PROPOSITIONS FOR THE 21ST CENTURY, MIT Press, Ed. Steven Henry Madoff, October, 2009

Dear Steven,

I am sorry but I cannot seem to be able to get a proper handle on what I want to say. Much of this has to do with a kind of doubt that I have about the role of the art school in today’s world. This doubt has surfaced from time to time, but never with such persistence as of late. Two years ago, I resigned from a tenured teaching position at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and this year I decided not to return to teach at Bard College in New York. I still enjoy teaching, but only in defined periods of time and if it allows me immersion in a new place. Writing this letter has been helpful in that it has forced me to reevaluate my relationship to both art and pedagogy. Despite my mixed feelings about the nature of many art schools today, I have found this exercise extremely useful in reminding me of why the teaching of art continues to be important.

For a number of years, I saw pedagogy as a veritable extension of artistic practice. Teaching offered me more than a monetary sustenance. It allowed me to survive without having to worry about living off of art sales. I was and continue to be grateful for this because the business of art has a way of shaping and even defining artistic production in ways that might not be in the best interest of being an artist. Yet it is important not to take this space afforded by teaching as a space of refuge and retreat from the world. All too often I have seen art schools exist as cloistered spaces where art is spoken about in lofty terms without any acknowledgement of how it is manifest in the real world. This is closely connected to a lack of attention paid to the life knowledges of students. These knowledges are grounded in the body and often discernable in the movement and conduct of individuals. The operative questions that should be asked are: What does it mean to be in someone else’s place? How is it even possible to express something of the pain and suffering or happiness and joy of someone else? The answers to these questions go beyond fostering social skills or finding paths of resolution as such answers would belong more in the domain of social science rather than art. The navigation of the social world is a life long process, but one that is especially important for artists to explore. There have been several times when I accepted teaching posts outside of my frame of social familiarity in places such as Fort de France in Martinique and Hangzhou in China. These experiences provided me with the opportunity to expand and deepen my understanding of the possibilities of art especially as it issues from radically different social contexts from which I was accustomed.

In 1995, I taught as a guest professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I was happy to receive this offer as I was deeply unhappy with my situation in Vancouver. Paris provided me with a renewed impetus to develop my teaching skills in a different language and setting. The École des Beaux-Arts is housed in a former cloister located in the heart of the city’s chicest arrondisement. Many of the interior walls have been designated heritage status and students are not allowed to mark them up in any way. I was struck by how the working environment was too precious for practical use. During my second year at the École I proposed an exhibition of student works, entirely organized by the students and in cooperation with the students of the École d’Arts Cergy. The latter is an art school located in the Nouvelle Ville of Cergy Pontoise built atop a geological rise at the very end of a Regional Express Network commuter line. A long pedestrian boulevard located at one end of its commercial district symbolically connects this distant suburb to the axial meridian line that connects to Paris’s Grande Arche, Arc de Triomphe, and Place de la Concorde. But Cergy Pontoise is somewhat disconnected from the mythic ideals inherent in its status as a planned township, as it is now home to a large immigrant community that has transformed the utopian architecture of the downtown core into a souk-like environment.

The aim of my proposed student exhibition was to bring together two somewhat separate worlds. I felt that it was important for both groups of students to be aware of what connected and separated themselves from one another and to work through these connections and separations collectively. The exhibition took place in a large but empty retail space in the main Cergy Pontoise shopping concourse. There was much support from the art school in Cergy Pontoise and the students there were excited if not a little surprised to be working with their Paris counterparts. What unfolded was an incredibly dynamic exchange between the students involved. Those from Paris realized that there was much to learn from their Cergy Pontoise counterparts and the latter realized that they were equal in every way to the Paris students. The end result was a vibrant exhibition well attended by the citizens of Cergy Pontoise. Regrettably, however, was the noted absence of the faculty and administrators from the renowned Paris school.

An important lesson I took from this project is that it really does not take all that much to transform student thinking about art and to open up a world of possibilities to them. In this case, all it took was a change in locale and a sustained period of time for students to get to know this new locale. A student from Paris told me she would never take the suburbs for granted again. She then added that she would also never think of Paris in the same way again. I did not ask for an elaboration, but I was pleased by what she said.

In 1997, I spent some time teaching art in Fort de France in Martinique. This Caribbean island is not far from South America and yet Martinique television aired only French stations and kiosk stands sold only French publications. The art education of the students at the Institut Regional d’Art Visuel also reflected Martinique’s Outré-Mer status as a department of France. I remember witnessing the incertitude of the students about addressing their lives in their art. They doubted the possibility that their situation could be valid content for their art. They knew very little about contemporary art outside of France. They were familiar with Andy Warhol. But a discussion of Warhol would inevitably lead to Pierre Restany, Martial Raysse, and the Nouveaux Réalistes, not to Pop Art manifestations in South America, Britain, and the United States. The collation of the school’s pedagogical program with Paris was reflected in the school’s faculty. Almost all of the instructors were given isolation pay bonuses. And despite the paradise-like setting of Martinique, there was a palpable sense of humiliation on the part of the instructors for having to be there.

After centuries of colonization, Martinique was officially incorporated as a full extension of French territory in 1946. The dynamic of oppression was reframed by “a whole new set of assimilationist practices on environmental and cultural levels. The French politics of assimilation introduced onto Martinican soil a series of standardizing effects that would attempt to reconfigure the Martinican political, economic and cultural landscape in its own image:

Renee K Gosson, Bucknell University
http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/rgosson/beneath/

My students in Martinique were not very familiar with Frantz Fanon and his writing about the psychological effects of colonialism and the internalization of racism. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon wrote:

I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.¹

I felt that the students of the Institut Regional d’Art Visuel did not question enough the world that produced them. The problem was not that they were complacent, but that they had not been given the tools necessary to critique their own situation. As a result, they were unable to define themselves in relation to historical trauma in the context of the Caribbean. When I asked them where they had traveled to, they responded by saying they had not been anywhere except Guadeloupe, another Outre-Mer island of France to the north of Martinique. When I asked them where they would like to travel, they responded, Paris. Their unanimous response reminded me of a scene from Touki Bouki (1973) in which the two protagonists incessantly sing the Josephine Baker song, “Paris, Paris, Paris.” The film presents the dream of going to Paris as a selfsearching journey and makes ironic the unfulfilled promises of the post-colonial condition. The students I worked with in Fort de France saw the world in similarly bracketed terms. Their school ran counter to my understanding of what art should do: raise the consciousness of one’s place in the world and produce expression at the borders of what can and cannot be said in any given social and historical context.

In 2000, I accepted an invitation to teach contemporary Western art at the China Art Academy in Hangzhou. The campus was founded in 1928 and modeled after the contemporaneous Bauhaus campus in Dessau in both physical appearance and pedagogical direction. Many Chinese intellectuals saw the Bauhaus as a possible regenerative model for a China seeking redemption with modernity. In this way, the China Art Academy exemplified the desire to reconcile a tradition-bound culture with Western modernism. Yet while I was there, students lived in dorms on campus that would seem bleak in comparison to those found in schools in the West. The hallways were dark and the rooms cold. The men’s toilet was basically a communal trench in a concrete enclosure. There was only one computer for the entire school and a not very powerful one at that. It was located in the director’s office and was the only source of Internet access via telephone dial-up.

While in Hangzhou, I witnessed the selection process for new students. Works consisting solely of calligraphic and ink brush paintings were put on display in a large room. An elderly man with a long, white beard entered the room. An entourage of school officials followed him. I was told he was akin to a Professor Emeritus and highly regarded as a master ink painter. He surveyed the room and then pointed his cane to works by those applicants he deemed of sufficient quality for acceptance into the academy. I found this process curious based that it was on the reverence of a master as this figure is a contentious one in Western discourses of contemporary art. I was told that a master becomes one not just because of talent and skill, but because of a lifelong commitment to being an artist.

The curriculum at the China Art Academy emphasized traditional Chinese categories and standards of art. Students were not permitted to look at Western examples of art during school hours. But after school hours there were such no restrictions. Students would pin up reproductions of works by artists ranging from Jackson Pollock and David Salle to Anthony Caro and Nam June Paik. I actually held a number of my classes after hours precisely because the environment then was less official and more open. What the students at the China Art Academy learned to do is negotiate the restrictive and contradictory environment of the school. In contrast to the situation I experienced in Martinique, my students in China understood their position as political beings and were learning to imbue their art with a transgressive authority.

My experiences in Paris, Fort de France, and Hangzhou are never far from me. I believe that the role of the artist should be to give expression to his or her experiences in a continuous act of selfdefinition. This process is a crucial one to convey to students. In a famous passage from Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1913), the fictional narrator describes the experience of eating a petite madeleine biscuit over lime-blossom tea:

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palette then a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me . . . I put down the cup to examine my own mind.²

This passage articulates the centrality of sensory experience to artistic consciousness. Being an artist entails the assumption that everything in life is relevant. I have learned that the expression of experience need not be determined by the dictates of the art system. This does not mean that I have completely extricated myself from this system, only that I have reevaluated what it means to be an artist.

I have been increasingly troubled by the attitude of many students now in art school. Many of them have come from places of surfeit and privilege and they seem more alert to the gamesmanship of art as never before. They know how to produce works that achieve the appearance of completeness and finish. But something is missing. The high tuition fees necessary to attend art school today make it a place of privilege that disfavors those who are financially poorer. This produces a kind of insularity that distances students from certain kinds of “other” knowledge. What is important is that students be taught to recognize these limitations by considering and questioning the assumptions that they hold.

An art class should be a place of dynamic exchange fostered by the heterogeneity of the students. A heterogeneous student demographic is productive in the context of an art school in that it allows for the articulation of unexpected and different ways of knowing. In a 1976 lecture at the Collège de France Michel Foucault spoke about the place of subaltern knowledges in the formation of disciplines. He defined these knowledges in the following way:

When I say “subjugated knowledges” I mean two things. On the one hand, I am referring to historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systemizations. I am referring to blocks of historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked, and the critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship. Second, when I say “subjugated knowledges” I am also referring to a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges, knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity.”³

Foucault turned to the localized struggles of everyday life in order to challenge the autonomous production of knowledge. His contention was that these localized struggles produce life knowledges and that these knowledges are very different from institutionally produced and validated knowledges. What is important to grasp is that life knowledges do not lend themselves so easily to representation. This idea relates strongly to the practice of art where the aim is not to transparently represent the real (because this is an impossibility) but rather to reframe the real in ways that ask us to imagine the world otherwise.

I have encountered many students who are at an impasse in terms of what to say in their art even though they are inundated by contemporary examples of art aimed at providing a blueprint for creative and critical production. Often overlooked are the specific subject positions of the students themselves. These specificities are important but in danger of being subjugated in favor of a more homogenous narrative that complies to the expectations of what contemporary art should look like. I would argue that students need to be wary of the frictionless alignment of art school pedagogy and capitalist marketing strategies. In The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and Rise of Hip Consumerism (1997), Thomas Frank provides an astute reading of how countercultures have been co-opted by corporate marketing forces to promote specific products.4 This phenomenon is also present in the world of contemporary art where the production, circulation, and exhibition of art is anchored to corporate bodies and promoted like any other commodity in a capitalist system. This is in spite of the persistent myth that art is somehow separate from the world of commodities despite of art’s obvious commodity status. Students should be taught to recognize such myths and find ways of thinking about and making art in ways that challenge such myths. Students should be encouraged to make work that speaks about how they see the world in terms not solely defined by the art system.

New information technologies have opened up spaces for creative and critical expression not reliant upon this system. An example of this is YouTube, which functions as a site where people can be creative without having to vet themselves as artists through the art system. Despite YouTube’s corporate ownership and increasing problems with copyright infringement issues, it functions as an open repository for all kinds of spontaneous creative works that can be posted and accessed by just about anyone. An example of this is the outpouring of videos produced and posted on YouTube in homage to the actor Heath Ledger after his death. These came overwhelmingly not from artists, but from Ledger fans from all over the world. Many of the contributions were deeply affecting precisely because they connected directly to the feelings of a community of mourners. They were also affecting in their disregard for any rules that all too often precede artistic thinking and production.

But sites such as YouTube are not immune to the politics of the art world. Last year I attended a symposium in Chicago dealing with the relationship between globalism and the emergence of new aesthetic forms.⁵ One of the presentations under the panel discussion “Challenging Cultural, Political, and Formal Boundaries” included a YouTube clip featuring the Back Dorm Boys lipsynching the Backstreet Boys song I Want It That Way. The two performers are wearing Houston Rockets jerseys, the team of Chinese basketball star, Yao Ming. Significantly, no mention was made of the fact that the Back Dorm Boys were art school students from the Guangzhou Arts Institute in China. Huang Yixin and Wei Wei have spoken about how their art school education played an important role in determining the composition, visual effects, and lighting in their videos.⁶ Their YouTube posts garnered them international success and they were signed as spokespersons for Motorola mobile phones while still in school.⁷ A few months before they graduated, the Back Dorm Boys signed a five-year contract with the Beijing media company Taihe Rye to continue making lip sync videos.⁸ In Chicago, the audience was completely enthralled by the video. They assumed that it was a non-art expression of creativity. But when I pointed out that Huang and Wei were art school students making a work of art, the initial excitement in the room dissipated. We live in a time when knowing something is art may actually detract from an appreciation of the affect of a work.

Despite my ambivalence towards the art world, it is important to acknowledge that the art world has afforded me with many experiences that I would not have had otherwise, growing up as I did in a poor neighbourhood on the East Side of Vancouver. Whenever I teach, I am always mindful of my roots. In 1982, I made a sculptural installation out of rental furniture. The installation was exhibited in my studio. I was taken aback by how the responses of those who came by to view the work. Most laughed at the perceived tackiness of the furniture. Others thought my aim was to poke fun at bad taste. But this was not the case. I had rented the best sofas I could based on what I thought my mother would have liked. Today, however, I can see how garish the selected furniture must have looked. I recently recounted this story in a presentation at a well-known American art school. A noted art curator was in attendance. At the post-presentation dinner, I noticed the curator looking at me. I turned towards him and he said somewhat tentatively, “I don’t believe you.” “What do you mean?” I replied. He then said, “I don’t believe you when you say that you liked the look of the furniture you selected. They were clearly ugly.” His words shocked me. They were a prescient reminder that little has changed in thirty years. This individual refused to imagine how class inflects on what is possible in terms of art production.

When I was six years old my mother would wake me in the middle of the night. After breakfast we would walk to the edge of Chinatown, where a delivery truck would pick us up. It would be filled with elderly Chinese seated on small wooden stools. They would be holding onto a thick rope hooked to the wall in lieu of safety belts. My mother and I would climb aboard and the doors would be shut behind us. The interior would be completely dark except for a beam a light that would stream in through a slit located at the top of the doors. This was the beginning of what would be an hour and a half journey to the strawberry fields located beyond the Vancouver suburbs. The truck would always stop at the same gas station so that we could get out and stretch our legs. After this brief interlude, our journey would resume and we would eventually be dropped off at the edge of the fields ready to work for the next twelve hours. The sun would be located low on the horizon line. I accompanied my mother to these fields during the summer months in order to help support our family financially. I was not the only child doing. But I was the youngest. Perhaps this is why my elderly traveling companions treated me with such affection.

I recount this experience not to solicit sympathy, but to open up a space for others to consider what such an experience might have entailed. What concerns me is who has the power to articulate their experiences and under what terms those experiences are validated. Gayatri Spivak addresses this concern in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1985). Her central point is that the subaltern cannot speak because the channels for being heard are absent.9 If the subaltern could speak—that is, speak in a way that really mattered to us—then it would not be subaltern.10 Spivak concludes by stating that the task is not to speak for the subaltern but to open up a space where the subaltern can be heard. There is no more appropriate place for this to happen than in art school.

I enrolled in my first art class thirty years ago. It was comprised of approximately fifteen students diverse in terms of their backgrounds, ages and aspirations. Most did not know much about art and possessed only a vague notion of what is meant by the art world. I was a science student who did not have any plans to be an artist. Our instructor was began the class by giving us an informal exam to assess our knowledge of art. Slides were projected and we were asked to identify the artist responsible for the work. Several seminal works from the canon of twentieth century art were shown and I was unable to identify any of them (including those by Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol). Although the instructor was incredulous at my lack of knowledge, I was not made to feel inferior. After all, my background was in the chemical sciences. However, his incredulity revealed a too common assumption about the accessibility of art—the democracy of art—and belied the fact that art is an insular enterprise subject to specificities of time and place. If this insularity is removed, then great things can happen for art and the art school environment.

I am going to conclude this letter by reiterating a point that I made earlier: it really does not take much to make a dynamic art school. The place to start is for students to theorize the environment in which their school is situated. This means that students in Kansas City or Mumbai begin by thinking about their place in Kansas City or Mumbai and the complexities of their subject positions in relation to the rest of the world as they know it. This is important because it allows for art to be defined in ways not necessarily dependent on the authority of the art capitals but rather in counterpoint to this authority. What is vital to remember is that art is about making everything in the world relevant.

Yours sincerely,

Ken

Notes

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 226.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Volume I—Swann’s Way and Within a Budding (New York: Grove Press, 1982), 48.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 82.
Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 4.
The symposium was titled “The Art World is Flat: Globalism—Crisis and Opportunity” and took place from 26 to 28 April 2007 at the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Chicago. See http://symposiumc6.com (accessed 12 May 2008).
See Beth Coleman, “Back Dorm Boys Interview,” Project God Luck (29 August 2006) http://www.projectgoodluck.com/blog/2006/08/back-dorm-boys-interview.php (accessed 13 May 2008).
Sam Flemming, “China net stars not just for geeks,” Sam Flemming’s China Thought Book (30 November 2005) http://www.samflemming.com/2005/11/china-net-stars-not-just-for-geeks.html (accessed 13 May 2008).
“Out of the Dorm,” The Economist (6 April 2006) http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6776404 (accessed 13 May 2008)