UAM at Noon
Pack a lunch and come on down to the UAM for a series of free noontime programs centered around current exhibitions. This series is held on selected Tuesdays from 12:15 pm to 12:45 pm and features artists, curators, and scholars, including CSULB faculty, conducting gallery walkthroughs, musical performances, and panel discussions related to current exhibitions. Beverages and dessert are provided. The fall 2001 schedule appears below:

Tuesday, September 18, 2001
Curator of Exhibitions Mary-Kay Lombino gives a gallery talk in the By Hand exhibition

Tuesday, September 25, 2001
NewMusic @ noon concert in conjunction with By Hand

Tuesday, October 9, 2001
Gallery talk in conjunction with By Hand

Tuesday, October 30, 2001
Gallery talk in conjunction with Gay Outlaw: Centric 61

Tuesday, November 6, 2001
NewMusic @ noon concert in conjunction with Gay Outlaw: Centric 61 exhibition

Tuesday, November 20, 2001
Museum Studies students give a gallery talk for The Hampton Krasners, which they curated

Tuesday, November 27, 2001
NewMusic @ noon concert in conjunction with The Hampton Krasners

Tuesday, December 4, 2001
Gallery talk
 

Symposia
September 29, 2001
Contemporary Discovery II Symposium

In conjunction with the exhibition By Hand, the University Art Museum will present the second annual Contemporary Discovery Symposium that will focus on the topic of drawing. Contemporary Discovery II will be a full-day symposium exploring the issues surrounding the prominence of drawing in contemporary art today, offering viewpoints from artists, collectors, gallerists, curators, and other important figures in the art world. Contemporary Discovery is a new series designed to continue and expand on the UAM’s steadfast commitment to the presenting up-to-the minute programs related to our exhibitions which have been dedicated to bringing new work to our audiences and the artistic community at large for more than a quarter century. Partial support for this program is provided by The Pasadena Art Alliance.

For a full transcript of last year's Symposium, see text below following the educational listings.
 

Docent Tours
Docent-guided tours of museum exhibitions and the site-specific sculpture collection are available for campus and community groups. Tours may be arranged by calling the museum's Curator of Education, Liz Harvey, at 562.985.7601 or leave a message at 562.985.5761.

Art on Site at the UAM; Art to the Schools
The museum has a long-term commitment to collaborative projects with local school districts. Art on Site at the UAMand Art to the Schools are two joint museum/school programs that bring together art education graduate students and K-12 classrooms for special classes, museum tours, and on-campus hands-on workshops.

Art on Thursdays! & PhotoClub
UAM Outreach Programs at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Long Beach

Art on Thursdays! and PhotoClub are the result of a model partnership that presents workshops, led by museum staff and local artists, to groups at club sites and at the museum. Programs include exhibitions of participants' work at the UAM and at the Eastman Boys and Girls Club. The program is taught by CSULB Art Department alumnus Kim Hewitt.

Zeitlin Lecture Series, Evening Lectures
September 29, 2001
5:00pm
Featured speaker: Jim Dine
CSULB

Through the generosity of bookseller, poet, and pioneer patron of the arts Jacob Zeitlin (1902-1987), an endowment fund was established to present annual lectures by artists, art historians, and critics. Past Zeitlin Lecturers have included: Newsweek art critic Peter Plagens; the late critic Alfred Frankenstein; the late architecture historian and author Reyner Banham; artists David Hockney, Jenny Holzer, George Segal, Robert Irwin, Wayne Thiebaud, and Jonathan Borofsky; architects Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman; and museum director and educator Henry Hopkins.

Evening lectures are presented in conjunction with opening receptions for many exhibitions. Check the exhibitions page for program information.

Museum Studies
Offered jointly with the Art Department, Museum Studies classes provide students the opportunity to explore professional museum practices in such areas as museum registration, administration, public relations, publications, and curatorial practices. Check with contact person Marina Freeman, Registrar/Curator of Collections at (562) 985-7604 or marifree@csulb.edu.
 
 
 

Contemporary Discovery I Symposium
The first annual Contemporary Discovery Symposium was entitled Contemporary Discovery: Consequences of the New. A full transcript follows below.

Contemporary Discovery: Consequences of the New
Symposium held in Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall
California State University, Long Beach
Saturday, September 23, 2000

 PART I
 TEACHING TALENT: The Shaping of the Artist in the Institution

Welcome by Ilee Kaplan, Associate Director of the University Art Museum ("UAM"):

Welcome to our first Contemporary Discovery Symposium: Consequences of the New. Our Director, Connie Glenn, regrets that she can’t be with us this morning, but knows that you will enjoy the really provocative and interesting discussion that we’re going to have today. We have a stellar group of artists, scholars, and arts professionals here to challenge us with their ideas and their perspectives. And I think that we can look forward to a really thought-provoking and exciting day.

Contemporary Discovery is a new program for the UAM. It combines exhibitions bringing artists from all over the world, and from this country who have not really been exposed to Southern California and bring new ideas and new projects to us. In addition to that, we have started the symposium so that we can examine in context with our exhibitions some of the newest ideas and trends in the arts field. I’d now like to introduce the UAM Curator of Exhibitions, Mary-Kay Lombino, who will be our MC for the day. Mary-Kay has been with the Museum for a little over a year and has already introduced incredible artists and programs to our campus and to the Museum. With her experience at UCLA’s Armand Hammer Museum and the National Endowment for the Arts, she brings both a regional and a national perspective to the UAM. So join me in welcoming Mary-Kay. [applause]
 Mary-Kay Lombino: Hi, I want to thank everyone for coming today. A lot of new faces, so if you haven’t been to Cal State Long Beach before, thanks especially for coming. And now you know how to get here! I’m going to sort of map out the day for you before I introduce the morning panelists. There’s a lot going on. We’ve got a lot in store for you. First, we’re going to have the morning panel, which is called "Teaching Talent: The shaping of the artist in the institution." Then, there’ll be a lunch break. We’re going to try to have at least an hour and a half for you to both have your lunch and make it over to the UAM which is . . . We’ll give you directions. It’s just a short walk around campus. And we encourage you to go over and see our three exhibitions. One is from our permanent collection; another is Tania Mouraud (who’s on our morning panel) has a site specific installation; and the other is Amy Myers: Centric 60. And Amy will be serving on the afternoon panel. So these are all relevant to today’s discussion. And then, if you’ve reserved lunch, you should have gotten a little ticket in your envelope, and you’ll be able to pick up lunch right outside the lobby. Then, the afternoon panel, which is called "Discovering New Artists: The post-MFA experience," will begin at 2:30 and will run until 4:30. At that point, there will be a half-hour break.  And those of you who are staying for the lecture, the Zeitlin lecture with Eric Fischl will begin at 5:00 o’clock. So, other tickets in your little envelope will be if you’re staying for the afternoon panel, you don’t have to re-register again when you come. The ticket will admit you. And then you might have another ticket if you’re staying for the lecture. So, if any of that was confusing, I hope I cleared it up!

I’m going to introduce our panelists for today. I’ll just go down in order so you know who’s who. Beginning with Howard Singerman. Howard is serving as the facilitator of this panel, and he’s visiting here from Charlottesville, Virginia, where he’s professor of art history at the University of Virginia. And he’s also the author of an influential book called, Art Subjects: Making of the Artists in the American University. It was published last year by the University of California Press. I’m going to hold it up, because anyone who’s interested in the panel today would be really interested in reading the book. It was one of the reasons why I actually thought of this subject for a symposium. And the book really traces the history of the development of professional training in the country. I learned a lot reading it, and it also fleshes out a lot of the issues that surround this training process.

 Then we have Jay Kvapil, who is the Chair of the Arts Department here at Cal State Long Beach.  Some of you are from the Art Department, so you know that it’s one of the largest art departments in the area. And it’s still growing. We’re actually in the midst of a major construction, where when it’s all finished, we’ll have a brand new facility and seven new galleries for showing student work. So that’s something to look forward to that keeps Jay busy these days.

Then Kurt Kauper is here. He’s visiting here from the East Coast. Kurt is someone who graduated from UCLA. He got his MFA in 1995. And just within the last year, his work was involved in the Whitney Biennial.  He was given his first one-person show in New York at Deitch Projects.  He’s also beginning as a faculty member in the Art Department at Yale University.  And, he’s showing here at ACME in Los Angeles.

Tania Mouraud is visiting here from France. Tania’s installation, as I mentioned, is called "A Collection" and it’s up at the UAM. And "A Collection" is exactly that. It’s the titles of the collection of the UAM, and there’s a brochure available which you can pick up when you go over to the Museum. Tania has been teaching in France since 1976, so we’re hoping that she’ll bring the European view of art schools to the panel today.

And lastly, Francesco Bonami, who is the Senior Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Last year, he was the Curator of Manifesta-or actually, maybe that’s this year. Also, he’s been a contributor to Parkett, and very influential in the international magazine Flash Art. And last year some of you might have seen his exhibition Examining Pictures which was on display at the UCLA Armand Hammer Museum which was the traveling show that originated at the MCA in Chicago.

So, that’s the panel, and I’m going to pass the microphone over to Howard, who will begin the program. Thanks. [applause]

 * * *
 Howard Singerman: Thank you, Mary-Kay, and thank you all for coming out this morning. There’s a long tradition of complaining about art schools, a complaining about their failure. The president of the newly formed College Art Association in 1917 insisted that "in no profession is there such a woeful waste of the raw material of human life, as exists in certain phases of art education."  Recently, there’s been lamenting again. But what is being lamented and decried of late is not the failure of art schools, but their success. At least, what is lamented is their growth, which seems prodigious. And the kinds of careers they’re now producing. A little bit about that growth, first. The first MFA was awarded in 1924 to one Mabel Lisle Ducasse at the University of Washington. By 1940, there were some 60 graduate student artists enrolled at eleven institutions. In 1950-51, there were 320 MFA candidates at 32 institutions. A decade later, ‘60-‘61, there were 1,365 graduate students enrolled in 72 MFA programs. But only in 1960 did the College Art Association finally approve the MFA as the single terminal degree for graduate work in the studio area. Thirty-one new MFA programs opened in the decade of the ‘60s; 44 opened in the 1970s; and the first half of the 1990s in the United States, across this most recent decade, more than 10,000 MFAs were awarded.

 Over the past decade, where the criticism has been focused most consistently-what has been decried the most consistently-are art schools in Los Angeles. Indeed, the art schools have come to characterize the art scene in LA, not only for those of us in it—or those of us who have been in it—but also nationally, and to a certain extent, internationally. A particular set of schools have come to stand for that success, and have become the particular target. In a series of articles written from 1989 to this year, Cal Arts, UCLA, and the Art Center College of Design have been singled out: beginning with Ralph Rugoff’s "Liberal Arts" published in Vogue in 1989 about Cal Arts; to Dennis Cooper’s "Too Cool for School," which was published in the music magazine Spin in 1997, about UCLA, to "Surf and Turf" by Andrew Hultkrans published in Artforum in 1998 about UCLA and Art Center; to Deborah Solomon’s New York Times magazine article on "How to Succeed in Art" from 1999. None of the authors, it seems, quite trust the school, the art school. And why should they? There’s a very old and still quite strongly held belief that artists, if they are real artists, are not made in school. That they cannot be made there. In earlier times, artists were born. "Truly he was a painter in his mother’s womb," Albrecht Durer was purported to have said of the Dutch painter Geertgen tot Sint Jans.   But even as late as the 1980s, around Mary Boone Gallery, Robert Pincus-Witten could write of David Salle that he was a "painter born." This is rather late in the day, for in the modern period, the myth, or the narrative, has been far more often that artists are formed in struggle. Most of the artists of this vanguard have found their way to their present work by being "cut in two," wrote Harold Rosenberg of the abstract expressionists. "Their type is not a young painter, but a re-born one. The man may be over 40, the painter around seven. The diagonal of a grand crisis separates him from his personal and artistic past." The slow, halting formation of the modern artist is a recurring motif. The path is personal and circuitous and the outcome far from obvious. Schooling in any conventional sense always and necessarily fails. A series of false starts that continue until the artist finally learns to make himself.

 The commentators on Cal Arts, UCLA, and Art Center-and indeed on art schools in general-clearly don’t trust the phenomenon they are describing. And it’s interesting that at some point in each of these articles—which I’ve spent a great deal of time re-reading of late—a certain version of the unschoolable artists, the irrepressible, unteachable real artist is rescued, whether in the halls or studios of school, or precisely outside them. For a couple of the articles, because the schools are schools, their graduates are in a real sense not artists-or at least, not yet. The LA art schools may be able to produce careers, and in that sense to make artists. But, for these authors, the very fact that these artists now come fully packaged, if not fully grown, out of art school and spring into galleries, is used as evidence of the shallowness of contemporary art ?its lack of culture or maturity, its aesthetic, or even its moral emptiness. At least that’s what it reads like in the pages of the New York Times, which has quite a high brow take on new art in Los Angeles . . . or at least an East Coast one. The audiences of Vogue and Spin expect something different from that of the New York Times. And what they use to rescue the artists, or the student artists, is youth and freedom. Schooling in any conventional sense is not what is going on in Ralph Rugoff’s Cal Arts, or Dennis Cooper’s UCLA. And since they are not schools, art and artists can emerge in the spaces they provide in the teaching they don’t do. According to Ralph Rugoff’s history of Cal Arts when it opened in 1970, it offered "no drawing classes" (craftsmanship was considered passé) but the course catalog included seminars in joint rolling and witchcraft." The editors at Vogue seemed to have understood Rugoff’s attempt to rescue Cal Arts from being a "school." They chose that sentence to blowup and box as a pull quote (you know, one of those pull quotes that goes alongside the article), along with part of the artist Barbara Bloom’s recollection that for the most part it was total anarchy. "We were irreverent, drug-taking, smart-ass kids, and we had a lot of fun." This they blew up, too. But what they didn’t blow up, what they decided was somehow part of the general narrative of the articles, and certainly not worth singling out, were the invocations of Deleuze (Gilles) or Baudrillard (Jean). And Ashley Bickerton’s commentary that "Intellectual terrorism is the Cal Arts shtick. It’s how students there prove themselves."

Not only did the students in the pull quotes of Vogue magazine and in Barbara Bloom’s recollection not play the role of students, the faculty, too, in these essays do the work of not schooling; of separating their involvement from the task of teaching, since art is, in some sets, the name of what cannot be taught. "As long as I’ve been here," said Charles Ray from UCLA, "I’ve never written a curriculum, never prepared for a class." And in Dennis Cooper’s article "Too cool for school," ranks this difference between UCLA and other art schools is constructed precisely around the roles of teacher and student, or rather the refusal to occupy either of those roles. Here is Charles Ray: "Most art schools are about students and teachers. UCLA is about artists working with artists. The reason the kids here are getting all this early success is because they’re not art students. They’re young artists. Young artists get galleries, students study. Simple as that." One UCLA graduate student profiled in Hultkrans’s Artforum essay makes it clear that the students themselves know this difference, that they’re taught it. "They stress production at UCLA, he said. During orientation, Larry Pittman told us, ‘We don’t want to think of you as students. You’re just working artists, who happen to be in school.’" Thinking of art students as artists, or the claim to treat them as such, isn’t unique to UCLA. It has been one of the defining pedagogical assumptions of contemporary professional training. And it’s something like an answer to, or an allusion to the question of whether or not art can be taught. This claim, that the student is an artist, has been the stated policy of a number of programs since at least as far back as Subjects of the Artists, an art school started by Mark Rothko, William Bazoites, David Hare, and Robert Motherwell in 1948. Robert Motherwell wrote the bulletin for the school, and in it is the following line: "Those attending classes will not be treated as students in the conventional manner, but as collaborators with the artists in the investigation of the artistic process—its modern conditions, possibilities, and extreme nature, through discussions and practice." Closer to home and closer to the present, when Cal Arts opened in 1971, its first catalogue pared Motherwell’s language down to its basics. "From the day he enters, the student is an artist."

 In this sense, artists, we could say, are neither born nor taught. They are seen and treated and thought of as artists perhaps until they learn to think of themselves that way. This is not a fiction, let me add. At least, it’s not any more of a fiction than any other modern identity. Working alone in a studio, making work, and being responsible for it, for its display and its interpretation, is being an artist, now. For many graduate students, indeed for most, despite all the success stories, the two years of an MFA program are the only time they ever will be artists, that they will ever be able to occupy that role. The architectural counterpart to that being-an-artist in the art school-being seen as an artist-is the private studio, the graduate studio, where one works on one’s work. This is, despite its ubiquity and its familiarity, a new form. It emerges in and around the 1960s, particularly in the form that it takes in graduate school, where everyone has a kind of private space that’s cobbled together out of a larger space, and kind of set in a grid of other private spaces, one after another. In fact, reading the bulletin for Tania Mouraud’s school in France, I was quite taken that in French the graduate studio is referred to as a box. "A box for your own work." They are, on the one hand, private, insular, as if to match or to make individual artists. And on the other, they’re strung along this grid, open to the public. Private, yet permeable. And what they are permeated by, and what passes between them, is language.

Irving Sandler, recollecting the school of art at Yale, in the very late 1960s and the early 1970s, suggests how language trades in and out of studios, how it ties these individual boxes together. "Like most other graduate programs, Yale’s was based on individual work, done by a student in his or her private or semi-private space. The basic instruction was criticism of ongoing work by resident and visiting faculty. "Work was proof of seriousness and it permitted students to enter into a verbal discourse with other serious colleagues." While the school may have been based on individual work, discourse, language, trumps work fairly easily in Irving Sandler’s description. What work does, is to allow the artist to speak ?to enter into discourse. That is the work’s purpose and the outcome. And at the same time, discourse, language, underwrites the work in the crit, in a seminar, it allows the work to exist by mapping it and articulating it. This is, by the way, the threat that Michael Fried imagined that minimal art posed to modernist painting, that it "defines and locates the position that can be formulated in words." And it’s also the threat that the minimalist Dan Flavin suggested that any smart young graduate student might pose to those teachers who would indoctrinate him into vocational training. "As he knows, he talks." He takes "overt verbal responsibility" for the work.

Along with the theme of artists—being seen, being thought of, being worked as artists, and graduate studio space that is its architectural counterpart, that speech (or the presence of language) is what characterizes modern teaching.  The two forums that seem to me to embody modern teaching as it differs from traditional or an earlier model of art teaching, are the visiting artist and the crit, both of which (if you think about them) are ways of focusing language on the student and on the student’s work. The visiting artist is easy to get. The visiting artist is that link between the language of the broader art world, its markets, its institutions, how real artists talk and stand and present themselves-and the individual student. In the crit, the work itself, and the artist (him or herself) is articulated by language. We could say, using a type of linguistic model, that in the crit both the student artist and the student work are like the linguistic sign, doubly articulated, plotted both historically in the history of art, and in the narrative of personal development. Across a field of positions and possibilities, likenesses and differences. The work is pushed along, opened up in relation to a narrative of exploration of what the medium or the times demand and what is to be done next. And the student is pressed to make it clear how the work belongs to him. What I want to say is that in the crit the student is produced in a certain way as an artistic subject.

So these are the things I’d like to sort of leave on the table, or the podium, for the panelists: the visiting artist and the crit, as they pump language in relation to works of art, and as they work as the network, the ligatures, that tie artists as individuals in the type of studio spaces that mark their professionalism—tie them together in something that we call the art world in art schools. Thank you. [applause]
 Jay Kvapil: Good morning. Before I start with the body of this, I’d like to give a little bit of my background, because it has a lot to do with what the opinions are I’ll put forth today. As an undergraduate, I studied literature and philosophy, but spent as much time in the ceramics lab as I did behind a typewriter. I studied in Japan and received my MFA from San Jose State, a school much like CSULB. I taught full time for ten years, becoming Department Chair here. Now I’m basically another boring administrator. The way I justify that existence to myself is to say that if artists don’t administrate themselves, then someone else, a non-artist, will.

Let me give you a little bit of background about CSULB, too, where I spend my days. Most of what I say today will apply to the undergraduate as well as graduate programs because I think more and more it’s difficult to separate the two, which is a whole other topic. At CSULB, there are 1,400-plus undergraduate majors in art and about a hundred graduate students. There are approximately 40 full-time faculty teaching and there are about 53 this semester part time faculty teaching in 31 degree programs and two certificates. There are more students majoring in art at CSULB, a university of 32,000, than any other major on campus. What does that tell us about the nature of art today? I’d also like to add that at CSULB the art department enjoys a wonderfully friendly and symbiotic relationship between studio art and art history. I might also add that as I talk about art schools, I’m primarily talking about American, and not European or non-Western institutions, that I’m primarily talking about universities. University art departments at private schools do have some differences. What I’m going to do with my ten minutes of fame here today, is to set down a series of observations, followed by several conclusions or pleas.

Observation No. 1. We cannot define art. This is central to my belief system, and central to the arguments I will make. I have yet to hear a conclusive definition of art. If we cannot define art, then we cannot conclude who an artist is, nor can we define the best or proper way to teach art or artists. As soon as someone defines art, someone else comes along and does something that we generally call art, yet does not meet the prior definition. We’ve seen that many times historically. Perhaps this alone is the best definition of art: Art is that which cannot be defined.

 Observation 2. Today, anything and everything goes in the world of art. If one opened an Art in America or Artforum (you couldn’t open Flash Art in the 50s and 60s), but these others, if you’d opened them in the 50s, 60s, or 70s, or perhaps even in the 80s, you could probably describe trends, styles, or isms. I challenge you to do that today. Perhaps the only ism that would apply is pluralism, which we’ve heard many times. Postmodernism either brought on this trend, or it is merely described as a trend that would happen anyway. It doesn’t matter which came first. Does any teacher today propose to teach a generally agreed upon good art or right art, or correct art of the times?

Observation 3. Since World War II, large university art departments have taken over the role of the chief patron of the arts, much like the church did in the earlier centuries. Would the art that is being exhibited today look different if the university system had not risen as the centerpiece in training artists? Would there be as much non-salable art—that’s not a derogatory term, it’s a description—in the museums and galleries if there were not so many art professors receiving a monthly salary from universities? It is difficult to separate the changes in art being made and art world itself from the influences of art schools since the end of World War II.

Observation 4. Art schools, or at least many art schools, are engaged today in a postmodern attempt to give students a smattering of all viewpoints. Because there is no correct art, and all the art isms are to be treated with equal respect, art schools attempt to cover all the bases. Therefore, large art schools, like ours, select a broad range of faculty to cover as many eventualities as possible.

Observation 5. Because most faculty and administrators in universities don’t understand studio art (we’re talking about the non-art people, mostly), and may be horrified that it got to the university in the first place, in some cases, there has been a demand to meet certain criteria to justify its position in the university. Art faculty have, as well, been guilty of playing the step-child, trying to demonstrate their values to the family by blending in. We artists have always been on thin ice in the universities and are received by some in the university as infiltrators.

Observation 6. Universities seek accreditation, especially public universities, because of the need to justify their existence to the public, and even more importantly to justify their existence and their beings to legislators and other politicians. Does accreditation demand standardizations? There is a danger that accreditation may create the "one size fits all" approach in art schools.

 Observation 7. Language—verbal language, that is—has become as important as visual language or object making in the art talk today. In some arenas, if a student can talk good art, that is good enough. Never mind that the object being talked of is a dismal failure in communicating visually. If one speaks in favor of visual language over the verbal, he or she is labeled as anti-intellectual. I would argue that it is the artists who are often the predictors of the theories that come later. Just as there are multiple intelligences, there are multiple languages. What if a graduate student is brilliant in their use of visual language, but cannot achieve a suitable score on the graduate record exam—the GRE—or the writing proficiency exam—the WPE? Should they never receive an MFA? Do we not grant it because we are saying that they are not licensed to teach? Should we never accept foreign students whose English is poor?

Observation 8. Universities like to hire people with credentials, and the Master of Fine Arts has become the credential of choice for artists to be hired by universities. What does having an MFA guarantee? Is the MFA degree a kind of license? Is it a license to teach? I would argue that it guarantees nothing other than in most cases the person holding the MFA has been in school longer than those without the degree. This does not say that the degree is not valuable.

Observation 9. Universities by their very nature have a tendency to round off the edge of artists. And if I’m not living proof of that principle, then nobody is. Today, in the quest for democratic principles of treating all equally and fairly, faculty have to justify themselves, their teaching methods, and now the outcomes of their teaching methods, almost daily. These are difficult constraints for all scholars, but even more so for artists. If I sound like I’m complaining, sorry—I’m not. If one believes in democratic ways as I do, then one must accept that all bureaucracy and sloppiness that comes along with that fairness.

These are some observations about where we are now, and how we got here, and where we’ve ended up. So, what do we do about it now? Here comes the pleas that I’m going to give.

Plea No. 1. We must be ever vigilant against discouraging and disallowing eccentricity among art faculty and art students. Eccentricity is one of the birth places of art. Having said that, we also must be careful not to confuse eccentricity with irresponsibility. They are not the same thing. A faculty member can be a wonderfully eccentric person and amazingly good teacher without creating problems for everyone else along the way. Those from Cal State Long Beach who knew Dick Oden know of what I am speaking.

 Plea No. 2. Bring artists into the university whose viewpoints are opposite of our own. Howard Singerman in his book, refers to them as excessive figures. Certainly not all artists can fit into the university teacher mold. Visiting artists and part time faculty are important to enrich the educational institute that is an art department art school. What could be more important for the regular faculty at the university than to go out and find artists whose viewpoint and methods are wildly different than our own and bring them into the mix? What is a stew without spikes?

Plea No. 3. Just because universities have more rules and policies than even the federal government, that is not to assume that there are not always ways to go about the teaching of art that don’t fit the typical mold. Despite what we’re lulled into believing, we don’t have to teach the same pattern day in and day out. There are ways to use the system to our advantage. Don’t accept that all curricular rules are written in stone. They’re not.

Plea No. 4. We must find ways to insure that there is great diversity among art schools, and how art is taught from school to school, and even within individual schools, as well. The bureaucracy brought on by public funding threatens to make the playing field so flat that we art schools, especially public universities, will be clones of one another.

Plea No. 5. Never allow anyone to convince you that verbal language is better, more important, or supercedes visual language. [applause] When was the last time a school hiring studio artists read the master’s thesis or project report of a candidate? Just like in real estate, where the three most important things are location, location, location, in studio art it’s visuals, visuals, visuals. That is not to say that verbal language is not important for some artists. My plea is that we not make it a threshold over which all MFA candidates must pass. [applause]

 Kurt Kauper: This might have been unnecessary, but I brought in some slides of artists I’m interested in, just to illustrate before I start talking the diversity that exists in contemporary painting practices. And I’m limiting my discussion of painting practices in a way to underscore the diversity that exists out there right now. Because it’s diversity as it exists in painting that when you add all the other practices into the mix . . .  I’ve include a range of artists working now, and not all of one generation. To also illustrate the professional context that graduate students are looking at. So I know most of these artists aren’t going to be revelations to anybody.

This is a still life by Gerhardt Richter from his 18 October, 1977 series. And this is a painting that’s actually upside down in the slide. It’s a painting by Tom Rudiman, where he very meticulously painted a map of the United States in acrylic and hung it upside down, and then painted all the geographical plates in it right side up. So it was a painting that was very much a conceptual gesture.

This is a painting by Sue Williams, an artist who’s moved from painting that had previously been much more raw, and assertive, and aggressive towards the viewer to work which recently has been much more porable and lyrical.

This is Kerry James Marshall, an artist whose practice really is about diversity all within the same frame, and a huge range of cultural and formal influences, both traditional, contemporary, etc.

This is Lari Pittman, who I’m sure everybody knows. Local California painter, whose work to no small extent was informed by a ten year career as a decorator.

This is a drawing by a local artisan, Tom Knechtel, and we’ve talked a little bit about . . . or part of the setup to our discussion was the criticism that art schools no longer teach technique. Instead, the training exists within the realms of language. And I would challenge that. And I would also suggest that Tom Knechtel went to Cal Arts in the mid-70s, which is when supposedly Cal Arts no longer offered technical instruction. And I would suggest that the artists who are working most successfully with traditional modes of representation are often artists who come out of programs that we would most completely describe as language-based programs. I think when an artist is forced to adopt traditional means of representation to fulfill conceptual gestures, I think that they are usually the ones who most successfully use those techniques.

This is an artist named Toba Khedori who also is a Los Angeles painter. For anyone who doesn’t know the work, they’re huge sheets of paper that the small images are drawn upon.

This is an artist whom I love, Lisa Yuskavage, a New York based painter. I think she’s another artist you could talk about in a similar way that you could talk about Tom Knechtel’s work as using very traditional means of representation for conceptual purposes.

Matthew Ritchie, a British born painter working in New York.

Laura Owens, who’s a Los Angeles painter. Again, an artist who works on a grand scale. Paintings are often something like 11x20 feet.

 Udomak Krisanamis is a painter who shows at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York and was born in Thailand. And his paintings are meticulous, sort of obsessive construction, where he takes sheets of newspaper, glues them to the canvas and then very slowly fills in everything on the sheets of paper except for the centers of letters and numbers, like the space inside an O or the space within the loop of a 9, and eventually arrives at this obsessively constructed abstraction.

This is an artist named Shahzia Sikander, who did receive an incredibly traditional training, but in the tradition of Indian miniatures in her home country of Pakistan. And uses that traditional training and techniques she was taught in that traditional training, again within a labyrinth intersection of contemporary and traditional information that comes together in her images.

I also wanted to point out that I pulled these slides from my own collection. So they’re all artists I love. And in a sense they don’t adequately represent the diversity that exists in painting right now because they’re all informed by my taste, which is limited to some extent. But I just wanted to illustrate the diversity of practices available to graduate students today.

I started by challenging the idea that technical instruction has been replaced by theoretical language in contemporary graduate programs. At least those that I’m familiar with, which are Yale, UCLA, the Museum School in Boston. In spite of everything that has been said about UCLA in the articles, which were incredibly flawed, as far as I’m concerned.

 Graduate art programs, of course, have to teach in a way that’s responsive to conditions and intellectual developments in the professional world. Technical instruction, which is part of graduate art education, has to change as contemporary conditions change. As I tried to emphasize in the slides just projected, there is incredible formal and conceptual diversity in contemporary painting. This formal conceptual diversity characterize the professional world which graduate students will soon enter if they haven’t already. A technical training, if it is to be worthwhile, has to take into account this wide range of formal, conceptual choices. A technical training valid for all conceptual approaches to painting probably hasn’t existed since the beginning of the 20th Century, when Bucoro and Gauguin were both working and using to a large extent the common set of underlying visual forms. It seems to me that visual modes introduced by such artists as Malevich and Puchov changed that, although it would be many years before the academy came to the same conclusion. It’s often stated that even the most progressive modernists had Beaux Arts training. Look at Pollock’s students’ student drawings, we are told, and you’ll see the traditional training that provided a foundation for his mature work. But in fact, had the training not been Pollock’s and the drawings he produced in his studio, they would have been unrecognizable to the Beaux Arts traditionalists. Their drawing is strongly influenced by modernist ideas. Benton offered Pollock a training modified by the cultural and social conditions of the first half of the 20th Century. Which brings me back to the conditions which existed at the turn of our century. What technical training could exist which would be relevant to the variety of cultural and historical sources informing young artists’ work? A good graduate training offers technical information in response to different students’ particular conceptual objective, which is what should at advanced levels determine technique. And I guess on that point I do draw a distinction between undergraduate training and graduate training. And I find nothing to criticize in the graduate model in which a graduate student is working in an individual studio, producing individually directed work. I see no point in criticizing that. Technical advice and training was certainly part of my education at UCLA, offered by artists as diverse as Lari Pittman, Tom Knechtel, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray, in spite of the quote that they’ve become somewhat famous from the Artforum article. Yearning for the unified technical training that once existed in graduate programs seems to me to be nostalgic at best and reactionary at worst. It also seems to me that if we’re going to talk about a unified technical training or yearn for some kind of technical training that still exists in a graduate school, there’s a kind of underlying Puritanism in that, or a belief that there still exists some common set of forms that are relevant for everybody. And we talked a little bit about professionalism and the word "professional" is a potentially disparaging remark. And it seems related to that sort of Puritan idea, where there’s a kind of pure art that we can try to attain, which is then polluted by art’s existence as a commodity in the marketplace, or by art’s existence out there in the real world, which is another suggestion that I would challenge. For me, my graduate education offered me an attitude and an approach to professionalism which has been very beneficial for me. For I no longer thought of it as that sort of thing that was different from Dr. Dutch in my studio. It was, instead, a way of making my work part of a much broader public discourse, making my work exist out there, in the public, instead of just in the confines of my own studio, which I think is really where art goes dead for the most part.

 When we talk about theoretical language, which is supposed to replace technical training, what precisely do we mean? Do we mean discussions derived from specific works of critical theory? Do we mean intellectual discussions not backed up by practice? Do we mean interpretations of student work, peppered by references to Michel Foucault and Walter Benjamin?  In reference to the visual arts, the word "theory" is quite often bantered about without meaning.  Last night, I attended a panel organized by Cal Arts entitled something like "Art and Theory."  It was intended to investigate the relationship between theoretical texts and art production.  Yet speaker after speaker concentrated on theory and its values to education, in a sense reinforcing the academic theory that is offered at art schools.  And none of the speakers clearly defined what they meant by theory. I think though, that when artists and art educators refer to theory, they’re in fact talking about a relatively limited set of texts that appear over and over again in graduate art school syllabi. Texts I think of such artists as Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, etc.  The graduate seminar at the Museum School is called "The mind’s eye," and students read these authors as well as contemporary writers whose work derives from them. At UCLA, I was able to take seminars on Leotard, Foucault, Marx, and Freud. While the word "theory," it seems to me, should refer to an unlimited set of texts, and a wide range of possible source materials of contemporary artists—for example, Kent Henry James and Elizabeth Bishop, and Dominic Donflat Mahler are the theory that informs artists’ work—in actuality, it is severely proscribed by the contemporary academy, or graduate program. And this proscription is detrimental to graduate art students, and is far removed from the realities that inform the work of contemporary artists as any unified traditional or technical training.  So, again, I just go back to my problem with the suggestion that technical training has been replaced by theoretical language. I think that an over-emphasis on either one of those two things is harmful to a graduate art education. But I think that what makes some of these graduate art educations very strong which . . . the graduate art educations which have been disparaged in a lot of recent articles . . . is that in fact they make an artist’s role as a professional contributing to the discussion out in public—they make that role a reality for graduate students. And the strongest programs I think avoid too heavy an emphasis on academic technique, or academic emphasis on theory that’s removed from reality. So I don’t have a problem with contemporary graduate programs. In fact, I loved mine. Thank you. [applause]
 Tania Mouraud: I am going to speak a little about the French aspect of art education, which is about the same as what I have heard from the three people who talked before me. The big difference with the French system, is that education is free from birth to the highest level of Ph.D.  The French citizen is not paying anything to be taught anything. For example, the fees for a French school is $500 a year, and our students find that excessively expensive. Because the university is only $100 a year. So in France, you have two systems to learn art. You have the university system which usually creates teachers of art or primary school and secondary education. And you have École des Beaux Arts, which has existed since the 17th Century. Along those centuries, a lot of reform has been made, and the latest one was in ‘72, where all the teachers of the revolution of ‘68 came into the art schools. From a theoretical point of view, it stressed a lot of political education, and you can feel that in the arts somehow.

You have 54 art schools in France for only 50 million people. In each school there are about 200 students, and 25 teachers for the 200 students. Out of 50 students entering in the first year, 15 to 25 will graduate after five years. It is the equivalent of MFA. It is called DNSEP, and all the records that have been made recently were ending at the harmonization of Europe. European teaching. Because of course in France, we are thinking of building Europe with the other countries.

From the beginning, we don’t have this difference of undergraduate and graduate. We have the first year. And after the first year, either the student is taken up in the art school, or he’s not taken. So from the first year on, there are artist historians, philosophers, who are teaching students and who come from university. Most of the time, they prefer to teach in an art school because they find that the students are more creative. All the students must seek all the teachers. That is, apart from the classes, all the teachers do critiques on the work of the student. There are, of course, just like here, a lot of visiting teachers, there are a lot of visiting artists, and visiting critics and philosophers, and even circus people, and anything. [laughter] Because we consider that art should be open to every experience. So the only limit is money.

 Now, we have to speak about the money aspect. Each student who is not very rich will receive a small grant where he can eat with that grant. Then, half of the rental of his room or flat would be paid by the government. There is universal social security for all students, even as for any homeless.  So this problem of social security that I have read in the newspaper . . . We don’t have this problem. So after five years, they will succeed or not to get their diploma, and in fact it is a jury of five persons coming from the art world:  curators, museum curators, critics, artists, and a few others, and a representative of the Ministry of Culture. This thing about the government being so present within the world of the artist in fact is very old. It comes from the habit of patronage since the Middle Ages. Before it was the king’s patronage of the artist, now it is the state, after the city. Each student who is older than 25 years old, if he has no money, would get from the state about $600 each month like any citizen in France who is poor. So it will give him a small fee to help. His rental will also continue to be paid half by the state. So he will have a small fee to live, and will have just to find here and there a small job to continue his art.  If he has a project that he cannot realize, he will get a grant from the state to be able to realize his project. After one year that the student has shown (he must do a few exhibitions), he can apply to what we call "Third Cycle." That is one year in the school, where he is paid $1,000 a month in order to make his work. He has a studio. And during one year, he will see a lot of professionals coming to see his work-French and international.

Our state thinks that by helping the artist, they will have "rap" artists exactly the same way as "high art" artists. . .   circus artists, and things like that. It is a general way of thinking to try to promote a world where artists are patronized, because as we know, the quality of a civilization is not judged by its atomic bombs or genetically modified vegetables, [laughter] but by its relationship to the world’s art. So of course, when we are in France we are criticizing all that I have told you:  the student finds it is not enough money, this, that. But when I am in America, I find that somehow France could be a kind of paradise, and that somehow some things could be . . . copied. [applause]
 Francesco Bonami:  In France, that’s the way to keep jails quite empty. [laughter] I’m Italian. We have a long polemics with the French. We think that French are Italians that moved. We also think that there are not too many good artists in France except [laughter obscured the words]. Because of the patronage. But is a debate, the patronage, the state supporting the arts. It’s very good at a certain point, but also sometimes makes problems, because the artists are not in a way challenged sometimes to confront themselves with the system abroad, and with other internationals sometimes.

Tania Mouraud: Since 20 years, that’s changing. The proof is that I am here. [laughter]

  Francesco Bonami: There are a few cases. I am from Florence. So in Florence, when you come out from your womb of your mother, you are MFA. [laughter] According to the general understanding of someone from Florence, I . . . I just told her that I was from Florence, she say, "Ah!" And she’s from France, so it’s a compliment. But I . . . It’s not true. When you are 13 years in Italy, what you want to do is to play soccer like everybody else. And of course, when I was 13 years old, I wanted to play soccer, and usually when you want to play soccer, you want to become a goalkeeper, because the goalkeeper doesn’t need to know how to play soccer. And if you’re good, you become a hero, and it’s very rewarding, with very little work. So I bought this book that would say "how to become a goalkeeper," by this famous, famous Italian goalkeeper. And the first page in the book was, "you are born a goalkeeper, you don’t become a goalkeeper." So I closed the book and never played soccer in my life. But in a way, this goes to the teaching art. First of all, how do you know that you are not born a goalkeeper if you don’t become a goalkeeper, and you have to try to do that. And the same thing, you have to read the book. So I think that that’s the function of the school, to understand if you are an artist or not. And I think that maybe one thing that is lacking in the teaching system all over the world is the department that teaches people to cope with the fact that they’re not artists. To cope with the fact that they’ve been left out. [laughter] Seriously. It’s a big problem, because the fact that you enroll into an art school and immediately you have learned from mistakes that you are artists, learning, which is not true, absolutely. Unfortunately, there are very few people that become artists, and are successful artists. And I’m not measuring success in terms of economics, but in terms of urgency. And I don’t teach. I’m a curator, so my job is to try to find those people that have this kind of urgency in producing a work of art. And I know many artists, that they’re very bad artists. But they’re artists. And I know many good artists, that I know that they’re not artists. But they learn how to be artists. And I think that you can learn how to be an artist. You can learn, especially today, the practice. And you can learn the visual skills to put together something that really is professionally and technically extremely sophisticated, that can fool someone. And make you believe for a time. There is people that succeed in this very much, for a long, long time. To the point that they become artists. Because they build with the real skills. But really, I believe that what is to be taught is to understand urgency. And urgency in producing, or to say something that is relevant for the moment in time that the person’s living. And it’s a very difficult task. Because you can create something that can be described, and also technically a work of art. But there is not this urgency. Why has this thing been made? And I think that the problem is this: how we teach? I don’t teach. But how the other people can teach that, yes, you can enroll and become a student of the school of art. But you have always to be ready to face the fact that there is not the capacity to produce that kind of urgency—to produce that want—what we finally call the work of art. And I think that this is that big black hole of the teaching system in every school in the world, the almost psychoanalytic department that makes people understand, or tells people that they’re not artists. I as a curator go through many studios, and sometimes you enter in studio and after two seconds you realize that you’re not in the studio of an artist. So my big question is how I am discussing this thing, now, that they’re to stay here an hour, surrounded by paints that are not . . . they’re not in any urgency, except the one to be thrown away. And how can I tell to this person that has another two years to study in a school that he or she should try something else. And not necessarily to . . . I believe that in the arts there are many, many, many different possibilities. You don’t have to be only an artist.  You can be a fantastic teacher without being a good artist. You can be a teacher, that is an important role, even if you’re not Michelangelo. So that’s a big problem. How we negotiate and how we articulate this fact—the fact that people sometimes don’t produce art, and they insist to produce art and because we just play polite, we allow them to keep going, and create a huge misunderstanding, because they probably find even some dealer to show them, really escalating his problem over, and over, and over. Curators put them in a show, and probably me, myself, too. But it is a problem, because it’s an unfortunate reality, that art is a specific field. And it’s something that has to do with talent. And sometimes not differently than a sport. There’s people that run fast, and they run fast. And there are artists that run very fast in the sense that they have this urgency, the urgency to create, that allow them to produce things that are relevant, not only for other artists or for curators, but are relevant for people to look at them. And to make people understand this is, I think, a big challenge for a teacher and also for a curator. And to understand that we can accept and we can enjoy the creative experience without being a necessarily stubborn person, the role of the profession of an artist. And I think that’s something that should be studied more in depth in order to avoid frustration, to avoid a misunderstanding that art is democracy. Art is not democracy. It’s a very elitist system.  Because it is a system related to talent, it allows only people with talents to succeed most of the time. So, I play tennis, but I would never insist to play at Wimbledon. And you meet many times artists who are not good artists, or sometimes people that are not artists, but they demand the same attention that other people have because of their talent, their urgency. And I would underline more the urgency than the talent. I think that the urgency is something that really makes the work of art relevant. It would make the work of art not only a private matter, but something that speaks inexplicably about the world. In Italy, for example, I always make this comparison between Italian and American artists. An Italian artist always starts to think his work of art in relation to the universe, and then he shrinks it down to the size of his canvas. So it’s often not interesting. The American artist does . . . Some American artists, they start from the scalp.  And they get so obsessed with the scalp that the scalp becomes the world. And when you see the scalp, you don’t think about the guy or the person that did it, but you think about something else. I think that’s the difference in producing an urgent work of art. You have to try to look inside the scalp and see the world and try to make other people see something else that is not the scalp. [applause]

Tania Mouraud: I just got to answer my Italian friend, that as far as good politics is concerned, we are the best!
  DISCUSSION

 Howard Singerman: The next step here, I think, is to ask panelists whether they have questions for one another on issues of art and training. But I do want to say a few things to open up.  In each of the talks that were offered today, a number of terms came up that seem to me important, even pressing. Francesco Bonami’s "talent and urgency" might be terms that we can all agree on, terms that we all use. The question about contemporary practice, and maybe practice across much of the century has been about how and where to know where talent and urgency emerges. What talents does it take now, that it didn’t take a hundred years ago, or 200 years ago. It’s not clear that the same talents are involved in making work now as might have even been involved in making work even 20 years ago. Perhaps the urgency is the same, but what one might have needed to have been born with, or the interests one might need to have--it’s not clear that they’re the same now. And that moving target is one of the things that it seems to me makes art education, art training, so difficult, and that to pick up on a word that Francesco offered, makes the scene of teaching, as far as I can tell, the psychoanalytic scene? The scenario of teacher and student, of younger artists and older artists, the scenario of the crit that I began with, seems to be a specifically psychoanalytic scenario.  (I would sort of insist on that, although people can take this apart however they want to).  In some earlier training that I may or may not be nostalgic for.  What was worked on was a work of art for a certain set of technical skills. What is worked on now and has been worked on since the post-War years, is the artist, as a psychoanalytic subject. What is worked on in art school is the artist, which is why I think Tania’s question of money is kind of an interesting question.  One of the things that was circling around everything that she said is that, if you’re paying $24,000 a year to go to school, you might expect a different outcome, than, say, if you’re going to school for free. Where the time that it takes to be an artist, the kind of time to think things through, the time that it takes to learn that doesn’t have to be a necessary relation between production and consumption. I mean that the time it takes to be an artist may be different if the student loan meter is running. In France in 1968, they talked about the "time of the student" as though it was not a means-ends rationality put into the factory or model, because the time of the student could be outside that model. And it’s not clear that that’s offered to American students currently. And to speak to my nostalgic training, I would argue that, to Kurt and Jay, specifically, that there is a unified training now. And that the points that I was trying to . . . or the current issues that I was looking at-the graduate studio, the crit, the visiting artist-these are the terms of unified training. They assume (if not exactly what any individual work of art looks like) the arena in which art will take place. They assume the definition of art-- that category of art that Jay was suggesting they sort of couldn’t get--  and that’s one of the ways I would like to, in a very biased way, tie together some of the terms of the panel. But I would like to ask the panelists themselves whether they have questions for one another, or me, or comments they would like to make.

Kurt Kauper: Can I just say that what I was saying, the unified technical training. So, I’m not sure we disagree on that point.

Jay Kvapil: If we have this unified method of training graduate students, are you saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing?

HS: The advantage of being an art historian, is that I don’t have to say! [laughter] No, no, what I will say is I cannot . . . I have no suggestions and no clear sense of how it should be done. What I want to say is that the way it’s being done now allows a certain group of people within the school to emerge as artists. Both for themselves, for others, and to cultivate perhaps the kind of urgency that Francesco was talking about. It’s also really cruel to many others, which is one of the things that Francesco also mentioned, and that I talked about in the very beginning:  for most students in an MFA program, the time they will be an artist most successfully is actually in those two years… the time they will be able to believe themselves to be artists. So what I would like to say is that this is a system with . . . how to put it . . . contradictions and meanings built into it. And what I would want to say is that the reason I started to look at it is because in some sense it seems to have left its mark on the way art, both art we like and art we may not like, looks now. And so, that’s dodging your question even more. I think it’s a very mixed system.

Tania Mouraud: What I wanted to add is that I am going to stick on the money aspect because to criss-cross what Francesco and Jay told. In fact, the main difficulty during the first three years of teaching in France is that when the student arrives, they think that the artist teachers are sold, because they are selling art. Whereas when they arrive, they think of art, not as a profession, because they don’t pay to study. So they think of art as an ideal. And so during about three years, it is very difficult to speak with a student. And then slowly, they become like salesman (thanks to the curators and the critics speaking about their work) and they become more and more versed in selling their visual art. And that is the point. In fact, if we could ask the artist teacher to represent, I mean be, a kind of ideal in fact from the beginning, we are not an ideal. We are the devil. The devil who is selling what should not be sold.
 HS: What a great line that is. I think this might be a time (since we’ve spent a lot of time talking) we could ask those of you in the audience to ask questions.

Question [woman]: I’d like to ask, what is it that is being sold by the devil?

TM: No, in the eyes of the student, the artist teacher is the devil who is always selling art. And art should not be sold. It is so pure that it should not be sold.

Question [woman]: How did we get to a philosophy-driven curriculum? Such an intellectual . . .

HS: The question was how did we get to this intellectually and/or philosophically-driven curriculum?

JK: I don’t think it’s one thing. There’s a lot of things that came together. But part of what I regard is that it happened partly because the university became the center point for art. Not just for educating undergraduates, but for graduates, and largely a patron of the art, and so on. And when studio art especially came into universities through the back door or the front door, there was a need to justify our existence in the university, and I think many times we pushed more and more toward the edge of language becoming a central topic of art because we were now in the university, where language was the central topic of everything. And the studio artist had to participate in that as much as anyone else in the university.

 HS: I would also add to that, even without the university . . . I mean, the university is crucial to the story as I know it in the United States. But the other thing is that . . . and here again, I will compare it to an earlier academic mode of training. That in the École des Beaux Arts, for two and a half centuries, drawing was all that was taught. The actual technical skills you learned in ateliers and studios, but they didn’t enter the École…  what was at the École was drawing. And drawing was in some sense the theoretical practice of art based in the visual world. When that system breaks down, it is part because it no longer is able to carry and explain the kind of world that artists live in- All the academic tradition could explain, was the classical tradition . . . But when you have the art of tribal peoples, the people that were increasingly colonized and brought to European centers, that needed to be discussed in some way--however tied to a language of ethnography or anthropology, and so forth--others’ terms and other possibilities were made available to the tradition of drawing. And [413] academic drawing couldn’t hold couldn’t explain those possibilities. And I don’t want to talk forever, nor do I want to truncate this a lot. But in the 20th Century, it’s not clear what constitutes a work of art. And so in some sense, language is there alongside it from the outset, as the language that is the legitimating force for individual art works. And whether that language is self . . . whether what is told about it is self-expression, or historical progress, or exploration of materials, or French high theory, language has been a crucial part of 20th Century artistic practice. Because you can do anything. I mean arguably, you can do anything. Anyone can be an artist, and you can do anything, are the two tenets of 20th Century art. And that’s quite terrifying.

Question [woman]: My question is to Francesco, because I was very impressed when you held out that art is absolute to the extent that you were able to say, if someone is an artist, [they] should and could continue to study to be an artist when the works are valued for exhibition? The problem is, mustn’t you consider that the artist created a conflict? His frame of reference, her frame of reference denigrated? Because urgency is culture driven. And so it can be absolute if you draw a kind of circle around who your audience is.

 FB: Well I don’t think absolute. I don’t think I said it is absolute. I say that the urgency is exactly what you talk about, the caucus. It has to be urgent, not in absolute, but urgent for a specific moment in time. There must be something that is relevant in the moment that you produce something. And that’s the urgency, to produce something. It’s not only the personal urgency. Actually, I think that’s the problem. It’s not the personal urgency, but there’s an urgency that is in sync with the culture that you are participating in. And that pushes you to produce something that has relevance for the culture. I’m not talking American.  It’s the culture of the moment in time that you’re doing it. So that’s why, you know, you cannot repaint like El Greco or like Titian, because there is not the urgency for that kind of work. It doesn’t speak about something at this time. And there are many artists that do works that are very similar to other successful works, but they are not . . . they are just out of sync. So they don’t have that urgency any more. So I don’t talk about absolute, I talk about the urgency of producing something-a thought, an idea, a visual image that has to do with the moment in time that you live. And I think that’s why all the great artists is relevant, because they had that kind of urgency. I think we have a bad habit to think that the times that we live in are always the shittiest one. But, I don’t agree. I mean, if we go to the Metropolitan, we find El Greco, but surrounded by a lot of crap that was already pre-selected, but stops. Also in the 15th Century, there was production that was irrelevant and without urgency that went through the filter and arrived at museums. So, there are always very few urgent, specific elements in a culture. And I think today is the same. We have very few things that can come up with the same kind of urgency. But not because our times are horrible times. But because we can’t do a Titian.

Question [woman]: The sense of urgency that you feel might not be the same as mine. So it does become absolute in some sense, because the subjective level of your tastes and colors and moods, and urgency might be quite different for me.

TM: When you mix urgency with color from its art, it is not that which is at stake. The urgency is without form, color, or space. This urgency can be expressed differently with form, color and space by different artists. But the urgency is without form and space. That is why we have different expression among the different centuries.

Question [same woman]: Right. But once again, that urgency that the Westerner might feel is quite different from what the Easterner might feel because of their cultural background. How does the culture develop with the sense of urgency, and how do you respond to it? I don’t think it’s so universal.

JK: That’s why I would like to have both of you in the art school together, with opposite viewpoints challenging each other. Rather than "I share your urgency." [laughter]

FB: If you read a novel by Salman Rushdie, it’s so much about India, but the capacity to be at the same time authentic and authoritative and go beyond the specificity of the subject. And I think that’s the urgency. That you go beyond the specifics of the subject. And yet, maintaining the authority of the subject. And I think that’s the important thing. I don’t want to know about your grandmother—not yours, but generally—unless your grandmother tell me something about something else that is relevant.

Question [woman]: I think this comes back to the discussion about MFA. How do you teach an artist that urgency because it is a moving object? It’s not something an academy defines . . . So why would anyone want to go to an MFA program to be taught anything? [laughter]

FB: You can learn about talking about the grandmother.

HS: Could we leave that question just for a moment? There’s one back here.

Question [man]: I wonder if the panel members could say something specifically about how the teaching of art is practiced in the university today as a technical look of the art that we’re seeing at galleries and museums. What things would you attribute to the way that art’s taught?

JK: I think I alluded to that in my comments I made at the first in the general statement, that if an artist receives a paycheck for teaching that is sufficient to live on, it’s therefore not necessary to be selling work. And I think that works both ways. It can be a wonderful thing. It can mean that artists are therefore liberated to not be bound by patronage in a gallery world, and it can also mean sometimes too much freedom is not positive. That you end up with a weak artist. You can’t say it does one thing. But I think it’s there that there are thousands of university level and college level art teachers throughout the United States today that weren’t there 50 years ago.

TM: I can speak about my small experience. When I began to be a teacher, at that time I was a tough conceptual artist. I had been very much involved with a few of the key persons of the time. And I began to teach and I had in front of me people who had no notion of philosophy. So just to begin to explain that I am not a teacher of philosophy, just to dig into it was too complicated. So what I said was, "Do something that you feel." And that is how we created in France. We were the toughest conceptual, the toughest political people, the toughest materialistic people.  We created people who work about their body. That is how, now, in the galleries we see things that unfortunately we pushed the student to do. Because we had no communication possibilities. No intellectual communication. And now that the students are becoming more well-versed, there are more philosophers in our school, we see 30 years later very hard conceptual directions like in the 60s and 70s. So I always say, please don’t let me feel like a grandmother. Do something of your time.

Question [woman]: Howard said in his statement made earlier something about cultivating urgency. And I was going to ask Francesco if you thought that you could cultivate urgency or if urgency is from within a cultural context?

 FB: Well, I think you can cultivate a sense of urgency. I don’t know if it’s from within. As I say, you can point out when there is not urgency. And I think it’s a way to also teach urgency. I think that there’s some people that indulge in non-urgent issues which maybe they are capable to have that kind of urgency. So I think, yes, you . . . I don’t know if you can teach urgency, but you can definitely try to make it one of the major objectives of your practice.

END OF MORNING SESSION
  PART II
 DISCOVERING NEW ARTISTS: The Post-MFA Experience

Introduction by Mary-Kay Lombino:

For those of you who weren’t here this morning, the panel members had a very lively discussion which dealt mostly with what is occurring inside art schools, both BFA and MFA programs. And this afternoon, during the panel called Discovering New Artists: The Post-MFA Experience, the panel members are going to address, "What happens after school?" There’s again, some of the articles that have been written lately which deal a lot with what happens in school, also mention that there’s been a movement to show younger and younger artists in both our galleries and museum systems. So, that’s what we’ll be talking about here. And I’ll just introduce the panelists in the order.

Starting with Valerie Cassel, who is the former director of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Visiting Artists Program. She was also one of the co-curators of the Whitney Biennial this past year. And she’s visiting us here now from Houston, where she’s just taken a new job as the curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston.

And then Susan Cahan, who’s the curator here locally in Los Angeles for the Norton Collection, the Eileen and Peter Norton Collection which is based in Santa Monica. And Susan’s also done some teaching and curating both here and in New York before coming here.

And Randy Sommer, who’s one of the directors at ACME, which is a gallery in Los Angeles, which has become one of the premier galleries that isn’t missed when people are visiting Los Angeles. And it started as much more of an artist-run space back in the days of Food House when it was over in Santa Monica. And lots of the artists who are showing at ACME you might recognize from some of the graduate programs. There’s a show coming up in the fall, I think, of work by Stephanie Pryor. Kurt Kauper, who was on the morning panel, also a UCLA grad is showing at ACME, and a number of other wonderful artists.

And Lane Relyea, who is a faculty member at California Institute of the Arts, Cal Arts and also a visiting faculty member at the School of Fine Arts at USC, contributor to Artforum and Frieze and other art publications.

 And Amy Myers, who graduated last year from the Art Institute of Chicago and after about a year moved to Los Angeles and is now having her first one-person show in L.A. at the UAM. Hopefully, you were able to see the show during the lunch break. And if not, the show will be there until the end of October. And there’s also a catalogue that we did for the exhibition, where there’s an interview between Amy and me, so you can get some more of Amy’s perspective on her career and art school.

So, I will pass the mike on to Valerie. [applause]
 Valerie Cassel: Good afternoon. On behalf of myself and the panelists, I’d like to say, thank you, Mary-Kay and Ilee, for inviting us here this afternoon. One of the things that we have been mandated to discuss is this term of Discovering New Artists: The Post-MFA Experience. And the first line from this discusses the impact the MFA programs have on the art market. And I’d like to just turn that around right now and say, I think what we’ll be discussing this afternoon is the impact of the art market on the MFA experience. That’s just the beginning! I think when you have a term "discovering new artists," it implies already this aspect of discovery. It implies already this notion of the marketplace. And so it is with that that I began my discussion. There is also something very interesting about the composition of this panel, in the sense that I am the only individual who is not L.A. based. And I am the facilitator and moderator. My colleagues are here as representing different aspects of the field that is happening right now in Los Angeles. And I’d like to say right now as a person coming outside of this particular area, that there is a particular phenomenon which is happening in L.A. right now.  It is the relationship between the art schools and the art markets, which is quite unique to this region, although I think it is a template which we’ll see over and over again that has reverberations and an impact that will radiate across this country. So, it’s with that, that in conversation with each of the panelists, I’ve developed a loose frame which we’ll move in and out of, and the process will be this. I will just introduce five areas of topics of discussion, which again have come from my conversations with Susan, and Randy, and Lane, as well as Amy. From that, each of the panelists will be given five to ten minutes to either respond in some way to those questions or to simply present themselves in greater depth, their role that they play within the field in this particular area and across the country. And then we’ll move from that into a discussion amongst ourselves as panelists, and then eventually turn that discussion out toward you, to also become a part of this dialog.

So, given that, I’ll just jump right into it.

The first issue: The issue of the art ecology today. Particularly since 1995, with the funding cuts with the NEA, how that has in fact impacted the field. The fact that there has been a continuation of the demise of the alternative space. And that within that vacuum has emerged the space of the commercial field and its direct linkage with young artists. Also, how this demise of the alternative space now gives rise to the discussion which we’re having, which is this relationship between the art school and the art market. So that’s the first issue that I’ll throw out.

 The second issue is: The art markets themselves, and the complexities of those markets. In fact that they’re not modeled, they’re not all blue-chip galleries. That in fact we are individuals coming out of art schools with Masters of Arts or Bachelors of Arts, who are either trained in studio, or trained in history or theory, who are going out and also creating new commercial spaces which are young gallants, and how they also play into this post-MFA experience. For those artists who are trained specifically in art practice.

The third issue is about commercialization. And it’s again tacking upon what drives the pedagogy. Does the commercial role of the art market drive the pedagogy?

And the fourth is again the notion of discovery. It’s unlike the days of Christopher Columbus, where you discovered something, and whether you eradicated the individuals there or not, you continued a relationship. So, what are the responsibilities between those that discover with those who are discovered? And how does that relationship continue?

And fifth, but not the last, is: What defines success in a post-MFA world? And what is established in the MFA programs that creates those expectations? Also, the changing nature of these art institutions themselves.

So, that’s a lot to chew on, and I’m sure you’re formulating the responses out there, as well. But we’ll start with Susan, and move from there.
 Susan Cahan: I think I’m going to stand at the podium, because I have slides to show. You can leave the lights up for a little while. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to get started. And also, if the lights could be left sort of semi-dim, and not totally dark, because it gets kind of sleepy after lunch in the total darkness. [laughter]

As Mary-Kay said, I’m currently the curator for the Collection of Eileen and Peter Norton in Santa Monica. That’s not the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, which is a mistake many people often make. The Collection of Eileen and Peter is a collection of contemporary art. And they began collecting in the mid-80s and continued to collect artists-some of whom are very young-as well as collecting work by artists who they’ve been interested in for a very long time. I also come from a museum background. Prior to joining the Nortons in 1996, I was the Deputy Director at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, which is a non-collecting institution and which gave me yet a very different perspective on the art world from a not-for-profit institution. And I’ve also had teaching experience, both here at UCLA this last semester and at the Center for Territorial Studies at Bard College. At UCLA, I worked primarily with graduate students and within that group, primarily MFAs. At Bard, I work with young curators, people who are training to get into the curatorial field. And I think the professionalization of the curatorial field right now is paralleling-although at a much earlier stage-the development that we’re talking about now in terms of the professionalization of the training of artists.

All that to say, that in the discussion, I will be delighted to answer any questions or to discuss any issues that people are interested in with respect to the Norton Collection. But in my presentation, I’m going to focus on a very specific project that I worked on at UCLA in 1998 before I began teaching there that touches on some of the issues that Howard Singerman mentioned this morning, and hopefully provides a sort of "case study" in ways in which this interrelationship between the art market and the training of artists play themselves out.

 What I’d like to do is to tell you the story of an exhibition that I was invited to jury at UCLA. This was the annual undergraduate art show. Now, granted, not the graduate show, but my fellow panelists, and the moderator assure me, that we can extrapolate from my experience there with the undergraduates to the graduate situation.  And in fact, perhaps the things that I perceive in my experience with the undergraduates would be even more pronounced with students at the graduate level. I was invited to jury a show that UCLA has every single year. They always invite an outside curator. And typically what happens is that all the students who are in interested in being in the show bring their work to Wight Gallery. And usually it’s like two or three hundred people. And the juror comes and looks at the objects and sort of points and a little student assistant comes and puts some stuff on one pile and some stuff in another pile. You point at what you want in the show, and then you figure out how to hang it in a way that makes sense. And typically, the juror does not get to meet any of the students. You don’t get any information about who they are, or what they’re interested in. It’s zip. And I thought that was really bizarre. And when I talked to the students about it, they told me, "Well, our professors told us that this is the real world. You know, this is what it’s like when you’re out there competing in the marketplace. The art has to speak for itself. And so that’s why we handle the show this way." But I thought that that was just not a kind of healthy way of operating within an academic environment particularly with young people who are really at the beginning of their training. I mean, we’re talking about students who were 19, 20, 21 years old. So I approached my role as a juror of this exhibition with some trepidation. Juried shows, of course, are usually essentially contests, in which the juror makes choices based on cold viewing of one or two works by artists who he or she knows nothing about. And in a university setting, in an educational setting, I felt that the whole concept of the juried show was even more problematic, because it rendered invisible the most important aspect of the learning environment, which is its focus on research and experimentation, and on process. So in preparing to jury the show, I decided that I would tour the classrooms and the studios to get a feel for how the teaching and learning situation takes place there, and to find inspiration for approaching the show in a new way. And I saw that the students were doing some really interesting things: approaching aesthetic problems from multiple standpoints; experimenting with different styles, different materials, different techniques; working in various media simultaneously. Some of the students were doing class assignments, but had a concurrent body of work that they were working on that had nothing to do with the assignments that the teachers giving them, but really were explorations of their interests, that were self-directed and self-initiated. And what I found especially vital were individual studios. At UCLA, even some of the undergraduates get individual studios. These are the people who I guess, in Francesco’s universe, would be the ones that are presumed to have extra talent, so they get studios. And I felt that what was going on in the studios really captured the essence of what the learning environment was all about.

 So, what I decided to do was to ask the students . . . Well, I thought that the show had to have three important criteria. That it would have to present the process of art making as much as the finished products. That it would have to actively involve the students in the actual configuration and installation of the show. And third, that it would have to be self-reflexive. That is, it would have to respond to the specific context of UCLA’s learning environment.

Now, this was in January 1998. And as Howard mentioned this morning, Dennis Cooper’s article, "Too Cool for School" had come out the prior summer, 1997. And the students that I encountered, both the undergraduates and the graduates, had been very influenced by that article. They so conscious of the spotlight that was being shined on them, that everyone I talked to brought it up. And even the 18-year-olds. The 19-year-olds, really felt like they were the living embodiment of everything that Dennis had described. Let me show you what I ended up . . . Well, first let me say that I also decided as part of my preparation for the exhibition that I would give the students a questionnaire. And part of the reason was I felt, well maybe some of the text might be interesting to put in a flyer, you know, what have you. I asked the students, why they decided to study art. I asked them, what has been most meaningful to them about their experiences at UCLA. And I asked them, what qualities they think make a good art teacher. And the responses that I got were so fascinating, that I decided to incorporate textual material into the exhibition itself. So when I show you the slides, you’ll see that their texts kind of punctuate the installation, and are drawn from the responses of the students.

So, can we have the slides now, please? And again, the lights not too low, although the slides are a little dim. I took them myself. (It’s a result of not having gone to art school. [laughter]) Okay, great.

This is the first wall that you saw as you walked into the exhibition, and it presented a work by an artist named Isaac Chelland. Isaac had done a series of drawings called "The Pros and Cons of Art School" that were hysterically funny. And I don’t know if you can really read them, but I will just recount to you one of his cartoon drawings. One of the "pros" of art school: you get to be creative thinkers. And there’s a drawing of student at an easel, and there’s a thought bubble coming out of his head, and it says, "This is the best idea I’ve ever had." One of the "cons" of art school: the converse of this is, that we think everything we do is creative. And there’s the same easel, it’s got a square drawn on it, and the thought bubble says, "No one has ever done a square before."

 The exhibition was basically a replica of some of the learning environments and art-making environments that I saw on my tour upstairs. The first gallery was a re-staging of Chris Bergen’s classroom, using it as a backdrop for some of the projects that had been done in Chris’s new genres class. The room was designed and installed by a team of students led by Leslie Davis, who was a student in the class. And this is just a detail of one of the projects. It’s this bacterial culture that one of the students did where she went around kissing other students and then spit into Petrie dishes and cultivated the bacteria. And the texts are the documentation of what it was like to experience the kiss. [laughter]

This is one of the texts, which I transcribed in order to read to you, because it was one of the most poignant texts, and it responded to the question of, "What has been most meaningful to you about your experience at UCLA?" The student wrote, "I’ve had to learn for myself what it means to be a good artist. Some people insist that being good means having a hot new show at Dan Bernier’s gallery—ha-ha-ha." (For any of you who know, Dan Bernier no longer has a gallery—you can tell the art world does have its ups and downs.) "Being good means having a hot new show at Dan Bernier’s gallery, means having an article in Artforum, means partying with famous artists . . ." I edited that one, it really says it means doing coke in the bathroom at parties. I didn’t think the faculty would appreciate having students’ texts say, "being an artist means doing coke in the bathroom." But it gives you an idea of like where the student is coming from. Okay, it means "having an article in Artforum, means partying with famous artists, . . . the hardest thing is figuring out what it truly means to feel good, how to feel good and strong about what I make."

So, after Chris’s classroom, there were (these slides are bad, I’m really sorry) . . . there was another series of rooms that re-created the working environments of six of the students: Chris Hauk, Sayu Mitsuishi, Jonathan Molvick, Jason Monroe, Minn Pac, and Anne Wang. And this is JP’s studio, or re-creation of it. And these environments were intended to capture the flavor, if not the true configuration of the students. This is a detail from JP’s studio showing the kinds of books that he was reading, and sort of ideas that were influencing the art that he was making.

This is the studio of Minn Pac and Chris Hauk. They shared a studio. This is a view looking from out of their re-created studio to the gallery.

There also was a section that presented the work of an additional fifteen or so students in a more conventional type of hanging in order to amplify the number of students who could be represented in the show, but who didn’t necessarily have studios upstairs.

 This is Anne Wang’s work. I’m just basically walking you through. Okay, and that’s the last slide.

What I discovered was that the kind of attitude that Howard quoted from the Spin article this morning, like the quote from Lari Pittman, "We don’t want to think of you as students. You’re artists who happen to be in school." You know, I don’t know if Lari ever said that, really. I know that some of the faculty members at UCLA were very unhappy with the article, and felt that it misrepresented what they were doing. But what I can tell you is that the article itself really influenced the way the students thought about themselves. And this permeated all the way down to the undergraduate level. The show that I ended up doing was an outrage and a disappointment to many, many of the undergraduate students because they felt that they were artists. And that I had not presented their work with a level of dignity that it would have been presented in a more conventional environment. That I had somehow debased their work by presenting them as students, and fore-fronting the issue of teaching and learning in the exhibition itself.

You know, I would suggest that there is a way in which the mythology of what art school is has really permeated students’ own notions of their identity. And it’s given the students myths to live by. And these myths are really against the idea of pedagogy. They are against the idea that there is anything specific and substantial that can be gained in a learning environment. And I believe that there is a lot that can be substantial and significant to gain in a learning environment. This attitude that learning isn’t really possible when you’re an artist is of course a very nostalgic notion. It’s a holdover from a modernist notion that artists are sprung from the head of Zeus, or born from the womb of their mother, or what have you. And now the word we use to describe it is the "slapper attitude" —you know, "Too Cool for School." I truly believe that there is something very significant to gain from art education, and from MFA programs in particular.

 Now, is it better to try and construct a pure learning environment, a learning environment that doesn’t have any contact with the art market? That really dissociates itself from commercialization and from the whole nexus of galleries, collectors, magazines? Again, I don’t know if this is totally true, but I have been told, that at Cal Arts, collectors and dealers are unwelcome! That the school does not allow collectors and dealers to make studio visits with the graduate students because in a complete 180-degree shift from UCLA, Cal Arts is trying to create an environment in which, you know, learning can take place without the performance anxiety and the pressures that the art market places on artists. And I believe that this is equally nonsensical, because contemporary art we all know is not divorced from the marketplace. It would be naive to imagine that it is. This is one of sites in which it operates. And it has also been-you know, the whole idea of art and commerce, the relationship between art and commerce, has been an important topic of exploration for artists in the very contents of their work. You know, most vividly in the work of many conceptual artists from the 1970s. So all of this discussion begs the larger question, "What does it mean to be an artist?" But the answer to this question is not one thing. We have a name for artists who don’t go to art school. They’re called "self-taught," or "outsider artists." But even their work has a market. Even they engage in the very structures that we’re talking about with respect to MFA programs. You know, we live in a capitalist society, and it’s naive to ignore that. So the question for me is, how do you engage with the terms that define your situation, and how do educators handle that situation responsibly?

I think that it’s essential to engage these questions within the pedagogical environment because if we don’t do that, I think that the students that we work with tend to internalize the myths with which they’re surrounded. Whether it’s the myth of the artist totally removed from commercialism, or the myth of the artist as being a pure commodity. And so, that’s what I think, and there you go! [laughter, then applause]
 Randy Sommer: At this point, I just want to say about myself, whatever I’m talking about, or addressing or get involved with, what you should know about me if you don’t already is that I was trained as an artist my whole life. I have a BFA in printmaking and an MFA in painting. So I don’t have a degree in business. I know nothing about business. It’s amazing that my gallery is still in business! And my partner is the same way. He was an artist, and less formally educated than myself, even. So we’ve both kind of come out of what Valerie was outlining in the last ten years. Both of us coming out of economically down-turned times, alternative spaces, angry artists’ reactions to affluent, fluid, high-end of art markets, and now I’m at a point where I’m realizing . . . Valerie and I were talking, everything’s always changing. And I’m suddenly becoming the establishment. I’m becoming what I used to fight against, just because I’ve been in business long enough now. It’s what’s happening. I’ve become more and more of a traditional gallery. And whatever dialogue I get involved with here, I think it’s important that you know that about me. I’m not a traditional dealer-gallerist. Although I’ve had to learn to be that way in many respects. So I think at this point that’s all I will say about myself.
 Lane Relyea: What I want to do is, having worked in Los Angeles for a while now, as both a teacher and a critic, I want to try to put criticism as an issue on the table, and also link it with art schools. Both criticism and art schools are typically presumed to have some distance from the art market. Schools would come before entering that market, and criticism would have to have some critical distance from that market in order to retain its integrity, its validity. And I mean these aren’t just myths. There are things like conflict of interest issues with criticism and also . . . You know, current battles or debates, wars, over tenure as a mechanism to ensure integrity of scholarship and research, and things like that. So, distance is crucial in some ways. At least a lot of our perceptions of criticism and schools. And this distance is supposed to have a lot to do with criticism and schools being able to nurture or protect what could be called "the higher aspirations" or the "better sides" of things like artworks, and artists. It somehow facilitates or again protects artists and art works to engage with higher aspirations above and beyond self-interest and sales, and success, and the seeking after these objects for status and privilege, and so on and so forth.

The thing about today that I think is an issue is that this distance has seemingly collapsed, for both art schools and criticism. Both now get remarked upon. Both get talked about as having no distance any more from the market. You know, I think it still shocks a lot of people when they hear . . . And I know that at UCLA the faculty is somewhat upset by the Dennis Cooper article because of the constant imagery in that article.  I don’t know if any of you have read it, but there’s this constant imagery of collectors, curators, dealers, walking through . . . that’s even too mild of a word . . . stampeding, raiding, pillaging. The Warner Studios, I mean, with checkbooks out, with date books out. It becomes like the salon of late 18th century France, realized in Culver City.

 Anyway, that’s going on with art schools, and I think it still shocks people. I think it still shocks people to find out that Jason Rhoades had a dealer, Rosamund Felson, attended his first graduate review, or his first faculty review when he entered graduate school at UCLA. This is a three-year program, I think. So, it’s the first of three years, and a dealer already there.  He participated in two group shows while he was still there. And if you look at Jason Rhodes’s catalogue that he did for a show in Germany a few years ago, called "Volume" and he turned it into like his own catalogue-resume at age, whatever, 34. But a third of those works catalogued in this survey of his whole body of works are made at UCLA. I mean, art school was not distanced from his "real world" career. It was the beginning of his real world career. His career started in school. And also it still shocks us somewhat to find out that Toba Khedoori had her graduation show, her UCLA graduation show, at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York. So to the degree that it’s shocking, this is an issue, that the distance has collapsed. And it’s maybe less shocking that this distance is collapsing criticism. But we still get this really grinding resentment or accusation leveled at criticism for not having maintained its distance. I mean, working on a catalogue essay for this show that Howard’s helping organize at the Museum of Contemporary Art that will be opening in March, called Public Offerings. It’s kind of a survey of artists who broke through in the 90s, both here, London, and New York, Berlin, and Tokyo—artists who broke through in the 90s, very shortly after coming out of school. Just got uplinked into this international art circuit almost immediately. But researching the LA artists included in that show, it’s just, for me, incredibly depressing how many times you come across descriptions of criticism as nothing but PR. Art magazines, as nothing but trade journals. It is a dominantly held opinion now. And you even hear it from critics themselves. They applaud art works for being anti-discursive, and so on. And this is fairly new. This hasn’t always been the case with criticism. It’s good to remember that back in the early 70s, Robert Pinkus Whitten . . . or actually it came out in ‘77. But this article from the early issue of October in the later 70s, are Robert Pinkus Whitten. He recalls an afternoon when he was in the editorial offices at Artforum and a young artist came in to visit and I forget who was in the room, but at the time, the editors of Artforum were Michael Fried, Rosalind Kraus, Annette Michaelson, Lawrence Halloway, Robert Pinkus Whitten himself, and this young artist tells the editors present that, you know, it’s almost impossible for us to make art any more because of the advanced state of criticism. This criticism is so out in front of what we’re doing.

Anyway, it’s a very far distance now traveled from that point to the present. I think that you read a lot now, or at least in the 90s, it seems to me very familiar to hear about recollections of criticism in the 80s, and how powerful it was then. I mean this was supposedly the decade when PC art came to the fore and that there was a tyranny of French post-structuralist theory in criticism and in art work itself. But these accounts from the 90s, recalling back to that point, characterize the presence of theory in art and criticism during the 80s as not theoretical, as again just a part of the market, it’s a market move, it’s a market ploy. I brought in a quote from a critic named Robert C. Morgan. This is something that he wrote in 1992 about the 80s.

 "One way of succeeding within the game (one way of artists succeeding within the game) was to be adopted by a writer or a magazine, preferably both, with the ‘right’ art world credentials, who would quote Enyamine, Adorno, and the five famous French post-structuralists and thus to . . . legitimate one’s position in the mainstream. An important aspect of the new game was to find a writer or an artist functioning as a writer or a well-connected critic functioning as a theorist in order to transmit the parameters of the newest trend by endorsing certain artists who fit the network of social sawings, and dealt with those signs effectively in terms of their worth."

And here criticism—even the most highfaluting criticism-is just seen as a void and unfair business practice. Right? It’s what artists do when they try to pull off a power-grab. They appeal to some higher authority in order to advance their private interests, their private position. This, I think, is a 90s view of criticism. It’s again, about the collapse of difference.

And so, one thing I want to say about that is that despite all the descriptions of the scene today, and the pleas for what we should do today that we even were in luck to hear it this morning for pluralism, for including Henry James and Elizabeth Bishop, along with Dairydon, and so on. Or, you know, all these things about letting as many flowers bloom, and everybody following their bliss, there’s a sense that despite all this diversity and pluralism, the system is incredibly compressed. It’s very well integrated. If there’s no distance from these two typical sights, it means that the economy has been able to stretch out and incorporate, but also enfold within its tightly bound structures, its tightly bound workings, places formerly thought to be somewhat apart.

 I wanted to say one other thing, or maybe two other things about all that, which is that somebody asked earlier this morning what effect this has had on the look of work? And I’ll suggest maybe the beginnings of an answer to that. I don’t know if this really holds water. But I think that the combination of artists’ sensing this tightening of the art system, and also with their loss of faith in discourse, and the ability of discourse to redeem or elevate art and our thinking about art above the market, or the brute mechanisms of the art system, I’ve also taken this (along with the sense of a tightening of the whole system) has left artists to maybe privilege, an avoidance of language, an avoidance of language in the sense of avoiding, first of all, anti-PC art, which was a big fad in the early 90s. As a matter of fact, it’s a bigger fad than PC art.  I only really started to become aware of something called "PC art" through anti-PC art. And I always think that anti-PC art was actually just anti-pedagogy. It was anti- this alignment between art schools and the art world and criticism. With this loss of distance that I’ve been talking about, the fact that by the early 90s the book titles and course titles in school translated into hot topics in the salable items in galleries. And also advanced critics’ careers. There’s the phenomenon of anti-PC art, which is basically anti-pedagogy, anti-folk lists and footnotes. The other thing is an avoidance of categories, interdisciplinary art. Trying to do not just painting, but painting and installation, painting and drawing an installation, like with Kidori. Actually being not just an artist, but a collector, designer, architect, curator, DJ, and so on and so forth. Not filling the roles that Howard put it: Harold Rosenberg collecting in the 50s-that you become the painter, and so on. To be real authentic, or just yourself, and not be in this system is to avoid roles, also to avoid the abstractions of theory and deal with the realness of whatever gallery or my friends, or what I eat for dinner today, or the music I listen, and so on and so forth. And just also just to avoid text.

The last thing is that although there’s all this avoidance of language, it all happens in public. Like somebody said this morning, people don’t expect to graduate from school and paint in their closet, to be the closeted artist. They expect to shout. In fact, in school, they’re taught to shout. Their studios are open in public. They’re constantly invaded by a stream of visiting artists and faculty, and so on and so forth. And so what you get is a very, very public art that is trying not to say anything for fear of becoming all the more integrated. [applause]
 Amy Myers: I did my BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in May of ‘95. I took two years off between my BFA and my MFA to make a decision whether I was going to pursue an MFA. I decided to do so at the Chicago Art Institute. I completed that in May of ‘99, and remained in Chicago for about nine months, and moved to Los Angeles recently. I’ve been here for about six and a half months. So, I’m a transplant from Chicago. And my work is currently at the University Museum.

Valerie Cassel:  Do you want to talk to us about transplanting here and what your experience in L.A. has been?

Amy Myers:  Sure.  My last semester of grad school at Chicago, the question started to float around the studios, "Are you moving to L.A. or New York?"  And since I do have family members out here, and knowing that I would be working with Mary-Kay on this show, I opted for LA. And it’s been interesting.

VC:  "In what way?"

AM:  Well, in comparison to Chicago, the structure of the art scene is a little bit different. There was a density, and accessibility, I felt, in Chicago, that I’m kind of re-learning here in LA. It’s really kind of spread out. It isn’t like there’s like really a center for the galleries. So it makes it a little more challenging to kind of negotiate that area.
  DISCUSSION

Valerie Cassel: All right. Now I guess is a good time for the panelists to address anything that they have heard spoken or to further elaborate on their own positions. And so I’ll just throw that out if any of the panelists has any response to what has been said.

Susan Cahan: I’d just like to ask Lane to elaborate a little bit further about what you were saying about the relationship between art and criticism in the marketplace, because it seems to me that there have long been close relationships between critics and artists. And you know, critics who’ve become champions of particular artists’ work and acted in a sense of PR agents. And of course, Greenberg and Pollock come to mind as the most famous recent pair, but both Laire and Manet, you know, going back to the 19th Century. But what seems to me to be quite different about the situation today is that art magazines as vehicles for art criticism also have a certain relationship to the galleries who place ads in them, and one of the things that I find a little bit frustrating is the reluctance of . . . that the absence of writing that’s strongly opinionated and the absence of writing that is interestingly critical of art work. And I wonder if you think that there is a way in which art magazines (because they are beholden to their advertisers) are culprits in this process?

 Lane Relyea: That’s a pretty constant refrain, too.  I’ll try to elaborate, but not too much. Got to understand that for twenty years, I’ve been dealing with trying to justify my being a critic. So that my skin is kind of thinned. But I think that one thing that’s definitely true is that criticism was born with the public spear in the 18th Century. It was always . . . judgments . . . Talking about taste, talking about opinion and the aesthetic experience was always done in public, to an audience, amongst people. And it was also born with little pamphlets that would also sell things. Or pamphlets that were invented for buyers, collectors. So Dietereau’s famous criticism of the salons in the late 1700s was not really . . . You know, they were all sent to a small subscriber ship of people who wanted to know what to buy, basically. Because they couldn’t go to Paris to see the work. So it’s always had a difficult, but also interesting, and if you want to push a dialectical tension between advancing opinions and advancing careers. But I think that that’s great. One of the things that worries me about the current state of art magazines and art publishing is that if you take a magazine like Artforum, it seems like contemporary criticism has a bit fissured in that magazine. And a lot of critics talking about art works gets pushed into the reviews, somewhat marginalized there. The middle part is art historians talking about retrospectives, older art, and artists doing something that seems incredibly demeaning, like a thousand words. Like, we’ll cut the mike after a thousand words. Because we know how those artists are . . . This is definitely different from the 60s when artists would write, critics would write, and art historians would write, and there was no distinguishing by the magazine between who was who and what was what.

Susan: Or in the 80s.

Lane Relyea: Yeah, even the 80s, right. So having little soap boxes, an artist’s 1,000 words now, and having a different frame like that just seems kind of ludicrous. But it’s part of (a) the kind of separating out of functions within that magazine. It templates the magazine very much. And you get in that templating, in other words, you have a scheme that just gets different contents slotted into the scheme every month. That leads to the sense of an "integration efficiency of the whole system. Plus this all happens, . . . this all came about, . . . all these changes took place in Artforum right at the time ten years ago that they started running more product advertising for mints, clothing, liquor, you name it, glasses. They never used to have product advertising before. And it leads to all sorts of conspiracy theories, or problems of perception, or problems of belief in the credibility of the magazine. And I think there’s something to the fact that a lot of contemporary criticism now just happens in the reviews. And the reviews are the most conspicuous place for talking about art as linked to duplicity with the market.

Valerie Cassel: I want to jump in here with two comments. Well, a comment and a question. One is that I think we live in a moment of excess. And the question is whether the ethics excess. And they permeate and revolve outward. Because we see this a lot within the sphere of sports. We see young athletes being taken directly out of high schools, and before the completion of college, and given one million to 2.5 million dollar contracts. And then we bemoan the fact of their behavior in the sport. So, my sense is, how does this also impact the field? Because we are talking about young artists being ripped away from their studios before they’ve even completed their MFA or even their BFA programs, having money thrown at them. In a way it’s like, what becomes the life line for these artists? And that was my comment earlier about the responsibilities of the person who discovers to the person who is discovered, and how you continue on those relationships, and not suddenly abandon that artist, or the next hot new thing, and discard them as if they are a commodity.

 The second thing that I want to talk about, or have you talk about or address, is who attends art schools? And the sort of lack of diversity, if you will. I mean, who has access to the marketplace if the art school is the feeder to that? So, I’ll throw those two out there.

Randy Sommers: Susan, when you were talking, before we came in, about the statistics of, say, the number of men versus women that in the graduate school.&