Let me begin by re-framing the question posed: the issue is not whether these changes are silly or sound, but rather how are we meeting the need to alter curricula evidenced by expanded artmaking practices and technological landscapes in the context of recent art history, theory and criticism?  Or as Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1965 "… people discuss automation as if we had not passed the oat barrier, and as if the horse-vote at the next poll would sweep away the automation regime."   The problematics of theory and technology, respectively, are not new to and in fact have long been part of art departments, however reluctantly.

Clearly the expansion and establishment of departments such as Performance, Art and Technology, Fiber/Material Studies and Film/Video/New Media is evidence of both a legitimization and specialization of formerly new and experimental genres.  Underscoring the ever-growing multiplicity of practices is that interdisciplinarity is the norm rather than the exception and pedagogical strategies have adjusted and accorded the last 50 years of paradigmatic shifts in artmaking production.  The task then before us is not whether we make these changes, but one of formalizing the introduction of these modes of thinking and making at the foundation’s level.  The real question is how do we introduce these formulations and to who are we introducing these forms?, because ultimately these mutations question and problematize the compatibility rather than the indoctrination of students to curriculum.

Postmodernism (surely a theoretical buzzword I will address later) has happily engendered this more democratic field in which art is both made and taught.  There has been for some time an implicit de-emphasis on technique at the beginning level in order to accommodate the varied populations of art students and introduce new perspectives. The combination of history, demographics and exposure provide a wide range of skill and aptitude in students with whom it is possible to engage the ample license “art” has engendered in the last five decades of the 20th century allowing for the experimentation in which inclination can arise.  That what is true for the postmodern object: de-centered in an expanded field is true for art education. 

The continuing changes in Foundations Education merely formalize the persistent contemporizing of artmaking and what has long been understood as necessarily bridging the gaps between student’s high school experience and accepted notions of the collaborative and interdisciplinary quality of much contemporary art.  Without dismissing the traditional base of artmaking such changes engage our own knowledge and experience in this ever shifting and broadening arena in which artists and educators practice.  This democratization, rather than foreclosing art practices and divesting connoisseurship requires higher standards of excellence through practice and choice in curriculum.

By writing curriculum that reflects the contemporary and introduces technology as a part of the actual context in which art is made we are educating students to become working artists/makers now.  Moreover it is imperative that we introduce ideas and forms in tandem.  Marshall McLuhan wrote, again in 1965: “Our education has long ago acquired the fragmentary and piecemeal character of mechanism.  It is now under increasing pressure to acquire the depth and interrelations that are indispensable in the all at once world of electronic organization.” 

In response to the scope of artmaking practices during our application processes we attempt to address the sometimes lacking and disparate education of high school art students.  We look for potential, manifest talent and innovation rather than simply a proscribed portfolio that demonstrates uniform representational, linear, spatial and formal acumen.  We do this because within the expanded field of making we see the need to invite the democracy of multiplicity and interdisciplinarity into our classrooms.  In our First Year Program we are challenged to facilitate and inspire an interest in ideas that are then translated into forms as opposed to molding what is already manifested into a higher aesthetic or formal state.  We begin by providing instruction in an interdisciplinary environment that emphasizes ideas, one we recognize as mirroring the reality of being a practicing artist or designer today where drawing, writing, sculpture and video can co-habitate within a singular work.

I suspect words such as postmodernism, conceptual art; semiotics and deconstruction are some of the theoretical buzzwords that are swarming in classrooms.  These words are part of the established lexicon of art and art history.  Is it being suggested that the last 50 years of art history have not happened, much less had an impact?  We owe a debt to semiotics and deconstructive theory especially as it concerns critique.  Reading art continues to be the main challenge in the classroom where the question is not just what does it look like, but also what does it say, what does it do?  This language or terminology, I would venture, is in use because it conveys the history, knowledge and an understanding of previous generations work and continues to be applicable to work being made now.

The continuing fear of theoretical dogmatism in academia, no less in art departments, is rather disconcerting at this late stage.  Theory clearly had a bearing on all of us in the last twenty years.  But today students obviously feel free to embrace, reject, or ignore the writings of their time and previous generations.  We as faculty are responsible to present groundbreaking history and theory; by asking students to invest in the study of ideas in order to understand and sustain their own practice, but it is clearly not something we can demand that they embrace.  Thus the challenge posed by theory whether postmodernism, post capitalist consumerism, globalism or intellectual property rights is not categorical but rather is in fact conditional.  Meaning theory is made and used specifically by artists as they continue to challenge the boundaries and definitions of forms.  Why would artist, much less students, not need or want to understand their ideas in the context they are making?  Somehow I can’t help wonder if these prohibitions to change, come down to the perennial, albeit imagined, threat to painting.

The arguments surrounding theory’s validity are old and stale and really point to a fear of the new, unfamiliar or the dispelling of universal truths.  Postmodernist theory continues to be both instrumental in and responsive to our actual political, social and economic history.  That said, of the two issues raised by this panel technology is, by far, the more compelling and important theoretical and practical concern, given its pervasiveness and indeterminate future.  Its impact on art has been felt since the first video works were made.  We have accommodated this form and we have been making room for the utility and experimentation possible with the personal computer since the late 1980’s as both vehicles for production as well as communication. 

Yet our implementation of technology ought to be done with a degree of trepidation.  Regarding technology, Tony Fry argues in his book Toward a New Design Philosophy:

“In this situation of the planet defutured by past and present acts of human agency, sustain-ability is learning to change, not as some gradual process of reform but as focused and dynamic acts of intervention to introduce a major breakdown in the ‘system’ of dysfunctional exchange and its automatic technology.  Such an intervention is not a call to re-enact the failures of revolutionary utopian gesturalism.  Rather it is a call to designing otherwise.”

In this passage Fry calls for making the opportunity to directly address both technology’s cultural practices and environmental impacts – how is this “tool” being used and what is its impact on learning and production?  It can also be read as an imperative concerning educational practices.  Institutions are responding to the pressures of culture but are we questioning technology’s ability to foreclose possibilities.

Technology as a tool is in many ways a hidden maker.  It is very important that we suspend the tool becoming the maker.  I think the risk is that student use of computers will incline the way they make art, becoming an instrument of the computer as opposed to the computer being an instrument of making the work.  This risk can be limited in two ways.  We, as faculty, have the agency to teach technology as a tool, determine its use and non-use.  We can, by balancing exercises between solely manual and/or a combination of digital and manual, but moreover through discussions and explorations examine the ramifications of the digital age on making and thinking.  The balance between technology and the hand is key in the success of these changes and especially in terms of interdisciplinarity.  It is too easy to interface the research of ideas and the making of images for both development and output.

The unease these changes have garnered is legitimate.  Regardless if we ignore the dual imperative of the diversification of artistic methodology and the ubiquity of technology we will foreclose the largess of art history that is the continuum of experimentation and advancement of new ideas and forms.

In closing I would like to return to Marshall McLuhan’s assessment of the educational need to engender connections between disciplines in order to meet the unrelenting expansion of computer technology.  We hope through an emphasis on liberal arts education, the interdisciplinary and ideas our students driving their own curriculum (students creating their own pathways) will be active participants in the dialog clarifying and generating sustaining answers to the implications and lasting effects of technology on communication and creating.

 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, London, Sydney, Toronto, 1965, p.349

 Foster, Hal, “Re:Post”, Art After Modernism, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in association with David R Godine, Publisher, Inc. Boston, 1984, p.191

 McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, London, Sydney, Toronto, 1965, p.357

 Fry, Tony, A New Design Philosophy – An Introduction to Defuturing, University of New South Wales Press Ltd, Sydney, Australia, 1999, p.266