chaired by Brian Curtis, Associate Professor, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida
Panel participants:
Michael Aurbach, Vanderbilt University
Chad Airhart, Carson-Newman College
Peter Kaniaris, Anderson University
Franklin Einspruch Independent Artist, Art Writer
In the early 1970s, during perhaps the last decade of high Modernism in art schools, I was a BFA painting student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, a school deeply indebted to the movement and one with an equally formidable academic tradition. Then, in the late 1970s during the advent of Postmodernism, I was an MFA student in painting at the University of Houston - a school about to become known for its painting faculty and the meteoric rise of one of its recent students, Julian Schnabel. It is these fields of experience that inform the observations that follow: the first, prior to the spectacular collapse of modernity; the second, at the brink of its imposing nemesis and killer, postmodernity. Although they are not the extent of my experiences and are personal, they do have the benefit of providing my contextual framework on the recent past. For the sake of full disclosure, I’ve taught all levels of painting (retinal and otherwise) to undergraduate art majors for the past 3 decades - a career, for better or worse, that began when one of my undergraduate painting instructors asked me to assist him with teaching.
When comparing current art pedagogy to my own experiences 42 years ago, I sometimes scarcely recognize the contemporary art courses or even the studio classroom itself. These changes have profoundly recast the studio arts and their normative systems of instruction. The disciplinary studio, its associated training, and historic legacies are all steadily disintegrating, collateral damage of postmodernity and what has come to be known as the “Duchamp Effect.”1 The changes reflect the rise of postmodernity in the university and its effect on the discipline of visual art. Bluntly stated, “we are now locked in the embrace of postmodernity” and the inevitable outcomes are not only the dismantling of modernism and its assumptions, but also a corollary divestiture of the traditional studio disciplines.2 We can find a similar pattern in other branches of knowledge, particularly the sciences.
Historian Paul Forman has written extensively on the shift from modernity to postmodernity in science. He notes that the objective nature and “methodical procedure” of science was self-sustaining throughout the modern era and then asserts:
Today, however, in post-methodist postmodernity, the notion of a scientific method is regarded as naïve and outdated…3
This is essentially reiterated by historian Lewis Pyenson in Technology’s Triumph Over Science, where the “Modern Age was about objective social progress…” and that the “…notion of objectivity is absent from postmodernity.”4 Pyenson, in considering the effects of postmodernity on science education, describes features of postmodern pedagogy that are acutely familiar to art educators of my generation. The “rejection” of the “disciplinary specialist,” the replacement of “disciplinary laboratories with spaces for multidisciplinary projects,” and, the deep veneration for technology in place of specialization, which once was considered the “secure path to understanding”.5 These changes to traditional methods aim at upending the longstanding academic disciplinary orientation and the legitimacy of specialization as a mode of inquiry.
Modernity in the visual arts, as in science, depended on the notion of progress and specialization; furthermore, progress in the arts, conceived as formally objective, developed from a community of individuals who were committed to pushing art forward in a linear fashion. Formal invention in painting was propelled by the artist’s sense of continuity with the past and by the notion of seeking truth, an outcome of the painter’s knowledge of that discipline and its inherent differences from other forms of art.6 It is strange to hear these words in the company of art now: seeking truth.
The purity of that “expeditionary” moment in art history is long gone as is the transcendence-based aesthetic that it chased.7 Their inquiry into truth did not last long, and as if on cue, the avatar of postmodernity, Marcel Duchamp, reincarnated just in time to make it so:
In the early 1960s, after some 40 years of having enjoyed a state of comparative anonymity in the world of contemporary art, Marcel Duchampwas suddenly–and somewhat unexpectedly–resuscitated…Newly emergent Pop artists, who selected their subjects from popular culture—often mass-produced consumer products–adapted the strategy of the readymade,which Duchamp had introduced 50 years earlier.8
Like other painting students of the 1970s, I had been made aware of Duchamp’s legacy. In Cleveland, the readymade and its recent offspring, conceptual art, were emanating from a former student at the Art Institute, Joseph Kosuth. In 1969, Kosuth framed the terms of what would become known as the “Duchamp Effect” by declaring: “[a]ll art after Duchamp is conceptual.”9 At the time, Kosuth was referring to avant-garde art after World War II and that this art “represented a series of conceptual footnotes to Duchamp.”10 However, Kosuth’s message was about to become a cultural tide, notably: Duchamp had fundamentally “altered the trajectory of art history” and “art-as-idea” (exemplified by the readymade) was at the apex of art practice.11 The prophetic insight expressed by Kosuth became a kind of gospel for the artists that followed and it was nowhere more fervently received than in contemporary schools of art where postmodernity was ushering out traditional discipline-based education. As a consequence, under the influence of both the “Duchamp Effect” and postmodernity, art schools have persistently retreated from their studio legacies and are endorsing what we have come to know as post-studio forms of artistic practice.
To better grasp some of the intrinsic differences between modern and postmodern art education, I offer two sample statements one from each era. I concede that these are just two examples, that they do not represent the diversity of practice from either. Yet, both are exemplary statements by their authors and offer a desirable contrast, pointing to their irreconcilable differences. The first, by Joseph Albers, illuminates the claims of the modern age for specialization in art school, the necessity for objectivity with knowledge, and that some knowledge is fundamental to the purpose of art (he also had a link to my alma mater in that many of his former students at Yale were my teachers at the Art Institute).
In 1963, Joseph Albers wrote in Interaction of Color:
If one is not able to distinguish the difference between a higher tone and a lower tone, one probably should not make music. If a parallel conclusion were to be applied to color, almost everyone would prove incompetent for its proper use.12
He wrote and taught his course with the understanding that students were not conducting “original” experiments with color, in fact, they were learning through what Pyenson calls “model experiments.”13 The color experiments were well understood, specialized, and considered absolutely essential to the practicing artist or designer. In my time at the Art Institute, many of the foundations courses used the model experiment approach to teaching art students: the past was employed to teach the present.14 Students worked through the essential ideas of visual art by retracing the steps of the past; they were asked to understand how the “earlier knowledge had emerged” by “recovering” this for themselves.15
This system was unremarkable for its day as most teachers practiced some form of model experiments. I would guess that I am not the only one here who experienced the Albers course, whose main purpose was to train young artists in an observational skill, a capacity for learning to see color. As my own teachers mentioned, Albers insisted that students were not artists but merely students of art in school (a fair description of the way many student experiences were considered in foundations courses). Therefore, students were expected to place practice before theory while basing theory upon experiences (not the other way around). Students generally came away with a deep understanding of art and its history as a practice; this grounding was expected before they were asked to conduct their own original experiments in upper level courses. Far from discouraging conceptual growth, it set the stage for the accelerated and competing ideas of the advanced courses.
The second example, by Boris Groys, illustrates postmodernity’s abrupt reversal from the claim to objectivity in knowledge. It adopts the position that art school training is neither privileged, nor specialized – it is just another form of discourse sanctioned by the cultural context in which it is embedded. He writes in his 2009 essay Education by Infection:
Today art education has no definite goal, no method, no particular content that can be taught, no tradition that can be transmitted to a new generation– which is to say, it has too many. Just as art after Duchamp can be anything, so can art education be anything. Art education is an education that functions more as an idea of education, as education per se, because art education is finally unspecific.16
The pedagogical chasm between Albers and Groys of course mirrors the distance between our faded past (modernity) and our uncertain present (postmodernity). Where Albers insists that specific foundational knowledge is critical to establishing a visual arts practice, the new front-line of art education asserts that there is: no end to be achieved, no common criteria to bind education, and no certain need for mastery of disciplinary subject matter. The postmodern orientation most evidences itself in art school curricula that minimizes or does not include the study of drawing, painting, sculpture, nor any specialized discipline as a necessary part of undergraduate study. Disciplinary courses are optional choices among the plurality of alternative practices, new genre and performative art classes. These are given over primarily to the development of multidisciplinary thinking and original experimentation. In this case, original experimentation generally means that students are encouraged to look everywhere and anywhere, except in any one studio area to solve their problems, thereby fostering the destruction of disciplinary knowledge.17
Fundamental to this approach, first-year students are immersed in a battery of critical studies and art theory; typically theory precedes the students’ own practice while directing it, thus reversing Albers’ conclusion in regarding theory as an outcome of practice. Students, as a result, make art that conforms to prescribed conventions. One might say that the art neatly fulfills the rubric that the students received.
In the postmodern visual arts culture, the emphasis on the plurality of knowledge and the conceptual basis of art finds its fortified home in the work of Duchamp and its aftermath, the “Duchamp Effect”. As the readymade did not require the authority of the artists touch, hand, or intervention (the means of art) so too contemporary art education prefers art that exactly foregoes its means and leaps directly to its ends. The new foundation of postmodern art pedagogy is that the ends justify the means: students “arrive” almost as soon as they start. Today’s schools pursue the ends unabashedly, from commending their own expectation that beginning students immediately create original art in multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary fashion, to thinly disguised appeals to the market rewards of the successfully prepared artist. So, today’s art curriculum is basic training in the primacy of ends. In this environment, disciplinary education is viewed as an impediment.
The ends, in this paradigm, “are bound to no subject matter, to no method, to no body of knowledge, to no specific expertise.”18 It is, after all, a kind of readymade art education; an embodiment of the anti-aesthetic and anti-authorial sentiments of Duchamp. The readymade education, like its artistic namesake, seeks to reposition the meaning of an established practice through its indifference to historical methods and the visual aesthetic, the readymade education may well end disciplinary training in academe. Inasmuch as the term “readymade” was taken from the term for manufactured items to distinguish them from handmade goods, so to the readymade education is a kind of manufactured product with indistinguishable outcomes from one school of art to another. Regional differences that formerly existed between schools are largely washed away by the globalizing influence of postmodernity.
The demotion of the means of art – a way of collecting, ordering, and testing knowledge – is a fundamental reorientation specific to postmodernity, not comparable to past changes in art education.19 It is, in fact, a new paradigm for art education, one that deserves our intense consideration and debate. Postmodernity is still very new and we have the advantage of hindsight where modernity is concerned. That is, as visual artists, it would be questionable to try to reclaim the position that High Modernism once held; it would be a fruitless adventure in nostalgia. So, it is not the purpose of this paper to argue for a return to Modernism. But the era of modernity was a child of the Enlightenment, and it acted on the belief in progress and the hope for the betterment of human society through objective knowledge. If postmodernity has devalued the ideals of the Enlightenment, should we give up or try to hang on to its aims? The belief in progress implies that some knowledge is secure and worth saving and that the systematic aesthetic training that was available in art schools was not trivial. What might be the state of education when we can no longer agree that the future is worthwhile? And does academe bear responsibility for the transmission of its own aesthetic legacies? Might an art education with little or no value for aesthetic training become pointless, or irrelevant?
Before I conclude, I would like to summarize the points made in this short paper. The differences between modernity and postmodernity are irreconcilable. Modernity grew out of the Enlightenment narrative of rationality, objectivity, and the belief in forward progress. Its cultural outcomes for art education were linked to objective standards of knowledge and artisanal specialization as a path to understanding. Visual arts disciplines, with discreet and intensive training (the means of art), were considered essential to the autonomy of the artist. Postmodernity repudiates modernity and its ideals, while asserting that modernity is a failed project. In place of objective knowledge, postmodernity finds only discourse or knowledge mediated and sanctioned by its cultural context. Unwilling to value any one form of knowledge, postmodern education expresses itself in multidisciplinary courses, antagonism towards specialization, an emphasis on theory and instant access to the ends of art. Duchamp’s effect, the insistence on the concept as the true medium of art, a kind of conceptual despotism, maintains its ironclad grip on contemporary art education in its opposition to traditional art forms.
Thus, the changes wrought by the shift from one era to the other are now visible in the new hierarchies in art education. One does not have to go far to find them. It is worth noting that knowledge can be lost and not recovered. This has been the case in the past and it may be the case for our future. It would be reasonable to presume that prospective students would benefit from disciplinary training; it has proven its worth. But art school conservatories, by their websites, admonish potential students to be prepared for circumventing their desire to pursue any single discipline. This might be plausible or desirable, if their introductory disciplinary training were substantive, but it is not. Frequently, these courses, which may last as few as 6 weeks, are little more than a token gesture. A foundations drawing course can retain its significance only if one recognizes it as an authentic form of knowledge, necessary for the development of a student. But this kind of scholarship is always purchased with strenuous effort, by both faculty and student.
One can wonder what the readymade art education will offer students of the future, and whether academe can sustain the effort required in the historic studio disciplines. Knowledge of studio practices, studio skills, and the resulting aesthetic awareness are learned, not inherited. The readymade education harbors a crisis of its own making, that is: can an art education that disavows it own means survive? The risks posed by the long shadow of Duchamp and the conceptual despots are self-evident. Will art education become, in the end, an empty vessel? For my generation, art school provided a forum for intense debate – students were invited to weigh in on the issues. In this current moment, can we teach students all sides of the debate (the legacies and the new) that inform this intellectual climate? Or, is the blueprint for the vessel ready-made? If so, the empty vessel, purchased at so extraordinary a price, should be raised high to celebrate its victory. Perhaps on the way up one might notice inside the vessel, a “stale smell of success.”20
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1. Buskirk, Martha, and Mignon Nixon. The Duchamp Effect. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. 1996.
2. Pyenson, Lewis. “Technology’s Triumph Over Science”. The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education. March 11, 2011. B4 – B5. At B4.
3. Forman, Paul. “The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology”. History and Technology. Vol. 23, No.1/2, March/June 2007. 1 – 152. At 3.
4. Pyenson, B5.
5. Ibid. at B4.
6. Forman, Paul. “In postmodernity the two cultures are one - and the same”. Unpublished paper delivered at Stanford University, January 26, 1998. (see: www.stanford.edu/dept/HPST/FormanThinkPiece.html).
7. Ibid.
8. Naumann, Francis M. “Marcel Duchamp: Money Is No Object”. Art in America. March 2003. No. 3. 67-73. At 67.
9. Kosuth, Joseph. “Art After Philosophy, part 1.” Studio International. October 1969. At 80.
David Hopkins. “Rethinking the “Duchamp Effect.” A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945. Edited by Amelia Jones. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford: 2008. 145
Examining the Conflict Between Sensory Aesthetics and Concept Driven Cultural Practice
