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There has been a wide range of understanding and acceptance as to where the art world is and where it is heading. The section in the reading “when form has become attitude-and beyond” by Thierry de duve, offers a typical diagnosis of the modern art world, which concludes with a tease on how to cure it. The art world, more specifically in the US, is gross and commercialized to the end of its witty inception. In this essay, through the guise of my mentors and my own research and experiences, I hope to define an approach to a cure to the epidemic that, of course, begins with academia.
From the beginning of my path through art academics I have been disturbed by the structure of the system. I have spent the last three years or so desperately looking for answers and asking everyone all of the many questions I’ve had about what was going on and, more importantly, why. I have been very fortunate to find a circle of mentors during my undergrad who are as diverse from eachother as their practices in the art world. One of which is a writer, curator, and theorist. The second, a more traditional sculptural master. And the third a digital and new media pioneer.
This “tripod” of mentors, in their own views, applied their individual knowledge to my persistence and desperation of flow of questioning I have had about what is wrong with the art world, how did we get there, and how do we fix it. My BFA experience was that of research and denial. I was in denial about the idea that this epidemic was all over the country. I had felt that the midwest was somehow disconnected from the rest of the world. I was wrong in a way that i wish Nebraska had an ocean so that i would want to just stay there. Many of my peers were in the same thought process, but had no real outlet for their questions or how to deal with the flux of confusion as to how to participate in the world of art. So, to put it plainly, i began to put the idea of experiences into my “well” of knowledge and share those experiences with the students and faculty. This brought out the first of many solutions I have devised for myself to help bring out the possibility of clarity and solution to the problem. I call it teacher/learner.
When the time came to declare my concentration, I specifically chose digital. It was the most difficult for the faculty to put into context, and the feedback was so dry and television and internet based. I began to try to build bridges to other concentrations, like bringing in projection work to sculpture critiques. I did this with many concentrations, mixing digital with paintings and so on. It was interesting that the professors were into it, but didn’t quite understand how to discuss it. In the end there was a split between those willing and wanting to learn something new or different, and those who thought what they knew was all they needed to guide the students into the future. It was a battle, but, it exposed the issues of how the faculty needed to grow and continue to adjust to the ever expanding world of art, and not settle into their own tenured bubble of mentoring and teaching. The faculty should be taking seminar classes with the students from time to time. We are all in this together as an art culture, which is another issue. There is no real hierarchy of art credibility in academia. Many majors outside of art do this to keep the faculty from falling off into a monotonous abyss.
The second lead to a solution came from the first, the critique or feedback. All too often do professors use the identity of another artist to critique students work. I understand the idea of packaging a lengthy critique into a name of another, but it does not bode well for the student. It often disheartens them into thinking their success will ride on the coattail of others, and furthermore directs them onto a path of creativity that is not their own. This has been expressed many times by many students.
The solution to this is a return to formalism, or better the structure of the identity of formalism. I have been writing about this for some time now. I hadn’t used formalism as a base, but the content was the same. One of my mentors, Dan Siedell, posted this in his open studio blog earlier this year, titled ‘Rescuing Formalism’, he writes-
“Any intellectual position that becomes too easy to dismiss poses a problem, whether it is in religion, politics, or culture. Such dismissals end up transforming serious intellectual positions, such as liberalism and conservatism, into caricatures to which only the silliest of ideologues could hold. This does violence to the integrity of these ideas and those that are or have been deluded enough to hold them.
This is precisely what has happened to formalism and its unsavory co-conspirators “autonomy,” “disinterestedness,” and “art for art’s sake” in art and aesthetics. Formalism holds that art is a self-contained entity sealed off from other objects in the world and that the experience of art is to be distinguished from other experiences in the world. A painting’s meaning, then, is determined through its internal structure, that is, the line, forms, and color that comprise it. The eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant is usually credited (or blamed) for developing the philosophical foundation for this position in Critique of Judgment (1790) and Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the twentieth century and apologist for Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s, applied its principles in developing his own distinctive history of modern art. Despite the power of their thought and influence, both Kant and Greenberg are nowadays invoked by right-thinking critics, art historians, and curators (especially curators) only to be dismissed and to serve as foils for the more enlightened and progressive approaches to art, approaches which affirms its participation in a broader, less “elitist” contexts, whether the artist’s intentional and biographical context, historical and social context, or the viewer’s own interpretive context.
Although I too am critical of Kantian and Greenbergian excesses and distortions, I have recently come to acknowledge the importance of what I would call a pragmatic, or “soft,” formalism. A work of art’s value cannot be reduced to what exists outside it, whether that is what the work depicts, the intentions of its maker, its historical, social and political context, or the intentions of its viewers. The work of art has some internal meaning. It is a tense and dynamic hypostatic union between form and content, between its presence as an artifact and its capacity to reference the world of meaning and experience outside it. This means that even though a painting may depict a vase of flowers, a sunset, or a human figure it always remains a flat artifact, albeit a painted one. This is not merely Kantian or Greenbergian theory. This is the essence of painting, including cave paintings and icons.
A soft or pragmatic formalism that recognizes the internal formal mechanics of painting helps keep the attention focused first and last on the painting itself and on the painting as a painted artifact. Deprived of this tether, many critics move a little too quickly from a painting’s form to its content and then from the painting itself to its myriad of contexts. Without a basic formalist vocabulary that can account for the union of form and content, that union that makes a work of art a work of art, and which can offer an analysis of the mechanics of how a painting works, then there remains in the end little reason to pay much attention to the object at all. The critic must tarry in the between of form and content. Although his critical insights brought him into this between, Greenberg feared it and moved too quickly to the terra firma of pure form. (Philosopher William Desmond suggests that Kant too found himself in the between, the between of self and Other which terrified him and so his philosophical system is in fact an ingenious fortress to protect him from the between.)
Critics of Greenbergian formalism tend to err in the opposite direction. They dissolve this between by rushing to the safe havens of content, imagery, and context. This is often what those scholars and critics who are interested in art’s religious and spiritual meaning do.They will extract an image from a painting, like a cross (or, in my own case, a chocolate Easter bunny), and perform an iconographical analysis. The problem is that such analysis doesn’t actually require the particularity of that cross and its function in that painting. It thus becomes merely a visual catalyst for religious and spiritual reflection that exists outside the work. We thus can find ourselves in the uncomfortable position in which the work of art is actually powerless to do anything except move us toward something else, toward religious or spiritual meaning, for example, that exists outside or beyond the work.
Many critics who eschew formalism have immense trouble standing in front of a painting and talking about how it actually works as a painting—not as a visual illustration of the artist’s intentions, or as a door that opens onto political, social, or religious “content” but its internal mechanics as a painted artifact. When I am in an artist’s studio and she asks me what I think of that unfinished painting leaning against the wall, he is not asking me to riff on the iconographical meaning of the tree, seascape, or figure. She is not asking me to reflect on her intentions or biography or to explore the institutional, social, and political contexts that determined its making. She is asking me whether the painting, as a painted artifact, actually works. Does this line work there? Does this color work there? If this sounds too “formalist,” then the baby has indeed been thrown out with the bathwater. The relationship between form and content, between presence and reference should never be ignored or dissolved. The responsibility of the critic is to keep alive the movement from one to the other and back again, which ultimately reveals what is truly remarkable about painting. This does not mean that the artist’s intentions, historical and social context, and the viewer’s “horizon of expectation” are in any way denied. It is, however, to assert that they proceed from and return to the dynamic between of the artifact’s form and content. And I am convinced that it is in this between that a painting’s distinctive embodiment of transcendence, where its particular religious and spiritual presence, is found. And this requires the critical language of formalism.”
Siedell has been a great help to my inquiries into the art world. I respect his ways of wanting to change the perspective of teaching. He intentionally moved from an area where ego and art have fused, to an area of great potential for growth and exploration. In a way he wants to build an academic style of fusing the theory and history practices of art with the artists. He expressed that for much of academic experiences in art kept both worlds from truly understanding eachother, and that he was working through ways to bring the communication and culture together.
He was doing much experimenting with the classes, not falling into the monotony of book guidance. He did alot of research and sought out multiple paths to understanding the content of theory and history. His critiques were nurturing that promoted the experiencing to truly understanding what was being said. He also works with many artists from all over, writing their essays and lectures, and participating in their work. The route he is taking becomes so much more credible than anyone I have ever seen or read about. He knew he understood the avenue of the critic, the theorist, the writer, and the professor. But he went even further down the chain to understand the artist and furthermore the student artist. The main faults I find, is that art professors are torn between being the artist and being the teacher. On one hand being the artist defines experience credibility to teach. On the other, the professor does not want to give out the avenues to success, as it is what they know and the fear that an up an coming student will take their spaces or fame. This has been clear throughout academia. It’s a huge conflict. This is without the identity of pop-up galleries. They carry no weight on the real idea of success as an artist.
Siedell works closely with another artist by the name of Enrique Celaya, which is why Siedell and I have become such good acquaintances. We, Enrique and I, both carry a fire to the disheartening destruction of the art culture through the academic process, and furthermore questioning the need for academia as an artist, other than the paper for a credibility swipe. Enrique, an extremely successful artist, and I a student in academia, both give Siedell an insight into the realm he is exploring from a theorist and writers view.
The third potential to a solution is intuitive and progresses the understanding of ones own experiences in life put into a formula to help with the progression of content in works of art as a student. It is merely a bouncing off point to express to the artist-to-be that there is a deeper and bountiful amount of imaginative content and expressions that every individual, who cares to tap into it, has. It’s in no way mechanical, but it difficult to embrace without the mentoring to show how it works and where it comes from. It is psychology and philosophy based, and I have used it and shared it with those who have a hard time coming into their own as a creator with a dynamic voice.
When the idea of this formula was introduced to those of us in a theory and practice seminar, not one person got it. It was shadowed by the artist who became the example. I took it and turned it I to a formula that can be better understood by the processes an artist type uses.
It is one thing to teach the foundations of art as building blocks for the future to mold, but it is another to express teaching in a way that guides potential down a path of the typical currents that is now. We should be fighting for our future, not accepting what is. The professionals were right though I thought it would only be 5 years before all of this gets old. They said 10, I was close. I truly see the future of academia and art leaving state universities, and only existing in the private and direct institutions, like art institutes. The commercialized art world e live in here in America is progressively getting stale and old, and just like the economy people will begin to stand up and fight for what art should be like.
The conclusion to finding a solution to the diagnosis to this essay by De Duve is that there is no way to solve this right now. One needs to stand up for what they believe and suffer throughout feeling of being outcast by the majority who honestly probably have no reason to be in the art world. Commercialized art is where we are at right now, but it won’t be forever. The more the populations grow, the more we will be inclined to separate the artist from the commercialized artist.
The three models of art practice are rather unnecessary, these models should actually be combined to express a more complete identity of artists in the future. There’s a top and bottom, and the bottom represents dabblers and weekend warriors. The top is something that cannot be categorized or clearly defined or understood…just embraced.
I’d like to end with another blog writing from Siedell-
Art is not merely a profession, a career. It is a way of life, a way of understanding life. This way of life indeed involves the development of a particular profession and a career. Yet it cannot be completely defined by it. In other words, it is insufficient merely to state that one is “majoring” in art in order to get a job, or have a career. One does not become an artist, art educator, art historian simply by completing a major, or even even completing an M.F.A. or a doctoral dissertation.
To devote one’s life to artistic practice, to the study of art, to the teaching of art is to devote one’s life to something that does not pay well and does not enjoy much social respect or understanding. And therefore it requires that one be committed to it in a way that can withstand the difficulties, challenges, and disappointments that will occur.
