Has Art Surrendered to the Academy?
Art school is the accepted right of passage in most if not all countries. While artists have relied on education and training for hundreds of years, there is a growing demand for MFA degrees and now the Visual Arts PhD in recent decades. A PhD is desirable if you want to secure a coveted teaching job.
In art schools, especially those affiliated with universities, art has to call itself 'research' to compete with other disciplines and 'research environments'. Professors and lecturers within art schools are increasingly expected not only to exhibit but to discuss their artistic ‘research’ in conferences and symposia.
If one hand, art has become populist and oriented toward entertainment in the galleries, museums, and biennales, has it, on the other, become burdened by academic apparatus in the institutions in which it is taught?
Students at the School of Visual Arts, an art school in New York. Photo Sarah Trigg — http://bit.ly/3ri9qJg
The New Academicism?
In the era of the avant-garde that began roughly in the middle of the nineteenth century, until the late ‘60s, artists could still distinguish themselves according to their affiliation with the academy. ‘
Academic' when applied to art had a withering ring that suggested sclerosis, sameness, and complacency. It was at odds with what art was meant to represent: freedom, idiosyncrasy, innovation.
Today the art academy is all but ubiquitous, leaving the self-taught to the reckless or the very lucky. The exponential rise in world population means that certified qualifications are a must. Unlike several decades ago, a Bachelor’s degree is the new starting point and not the door-opener it used to be.
It is now the norm for art competitions to stipulate that an art degree is a mandatory prerequisite for entry. Moreover, almost all art schools worldwide are tied to a university, and the degree is ostensibly on par with other disciplines in the same institution. It is also now all but accepted that art is a form of research.
Yet, the introduction of this term, more typical to science, is marred by an unresolved wager.
While artists in art schools jockey for parity with the rest of the institution, agreeing to wear new clothing, this clothing is still ill-fitting.
Curiously, art is considered research, but it is what in Australia is called ‘non-traditional’, which means it does not accrue collateral funding open to 'traditional' forms, namely writing.
Caught in this condescending bind, to leverage income, art schools find themselves in the quandary where they need to support forms of research that they can justify, that is, which can be rationalized.
The answer is to encourage staff and postgraduate students to deliver conference papers on their studio activities. Under the rubric of 'practice-based research', this predicament has created a new trend and a new breed: the artist-driven to write more than make, to spill talk than spill paint.
Facilities at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). Courtesy MICA — Image: http://bit.ly/3ri9qJg
New Terms, New Classifications (New Labels on Old Bottles?)
First, let us look at some of these new terms. Not only are artists now researchers, but postgraduate students in Australia are 'HDRs' ('Higher Degree Researchers'); an explicit descriptor (postgraduate: after graduating from the basic degree…) is transformed into a phrase that does not only carry an elevated air ('higher') but also makes a claim.
With blithe semantic fast-tracking, the question as to whether these students are learning to research is comfortably elided.
Next: ‘non-traditional’ forms of research, a term that deserves some scrutiny because of its presumptions and misprisions. If we are to be captious, we might point out that the visual image predates the written word.
Here ‘tradition’, with no indication as to when this tradition began, really means forms of research linked to the model of scientific verifiability and peer review.
More to the point, it is a euphemism for ‘unconventional’, or, more aptly still, forms of research that do not suit the standards of those with which we are comfortable with, that is, forms (most of ‘us’ in the academy) recognize as research. In other words, once we scrape away the mystification, to abut ‘non-traditional’ next to ‘research’ is a way of undermining research without risking too much offense.
With this in mind, the phrase 'practice-based' now becomes ironic, since almost all the sciences are 'practice-based'. There is a blatant Platonism at stake here since the term is used far less in the sciences than it is in the applied arts. The list of qualifiers has a motive of describing while tacitly undermining; the need for a qualifier makes the discipline somewhat 'less'.
The real problem is that art is not verifiable, for as Wittgenstein observed, art does not ask a question, it answers one. But it still remains unresolved among both students and academics what the 'artist-researcher' must be doing.
Must s/he set about finding the question to which the work of art is answering? Another vexed issue arises in the Visual Arts PhD. While a Masters degree requires the demonstration of a high level of proficiency in making works of art and their critical analysis and historical positioning, a PhD is 'new knowledge'.
This is relatively easy to understand when it comes to science (e.g., the isolation of a protein, correcting a hypothesis, etc.) and to the humanities (e.g., new historical insights, rethinking an historical problem, exposing theoretical inconsistencies, etc.), but when it comes to visual art it is unique from the very beginning.
But whether it is new knowledge is another matter altogether that hinges on whether the art is ‘good’.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to ask whether art ever deals in new knowledge at all or reasserts fundamentals about existence. Yet it would be absurd then to attempt to evaluate this, to gauge whether a work of art increases our awareness of something more or less since there is no adequate standard on which to base this critique.
We are back to the beginnings of art history and its foundation in the connoisseur, the one who knows better due to greater knowledge and better taste, a quality that can never be wholly taught.
The academic examiner is placed in this role but plays at imperfectly, since what criteria remain obscure. Any academic who has done enough examinations will be forced to admit that students can pass on mediocre work, but which is plausibly argued, like, say, a film that is accompanied by a forcefully written thesis that makes a strong case for the components and apparatus of the work, as opposed to the net effect.
More Arguments in Defense of Art as Research
Another argument to support that artistic research is research that is back-to-front (accounting for the uniqueness of something that is already unique) lies in the difference between researching and inventing.
Let us take a fairly popular and tried artistic formula of identity art. Someone who is not an artist seeking to find more about his or her historical background, like those voyeuristic, self-indulgent, and maudlin television shows of minor celebrities tracing their past, will go to archives, conduct web-searches, perhaps go on some personal pilgrimage.
An artist embarking on a similar task will perhaps begin in a similar fashion. This stage of unearthing, ordering, and justifying data is, indeed, research. It identifies a gap (there is stuff about granddad I didn’t know) and closes that gap with information (grandpa was a Nazi!), the more dramatic the better.
After that, what the artist does is something different, hopefully, although the recent bluster about research has precipitated forms of art that actively pursue a relatively dry model that reflects a research model (hence the rhetoric about 'the archive' and the like).
Producing art about this subject matter will use it as a basis, a touchstone, for generating a series of imaginary attachments that make the transition from unearthing facts to invocation.
Say the artist goes to a site with particular historical resonance and makes film footage or takes photographs or makes drawings. The film may have an evidential quality, but that will not be its sole purpose, nor the photograph or the drawing. The medium will be a vehicle to a broader imagining that is speculative and prospective. It reaches areas of thinking, perception, and experience that are not limited to the site's material substance and are beyond that site itself.
To use this case study as a model—and there are many others besides, of course—the work of art uses facts to reach spaces to which raw factuality is inaccessible. My Nazi granddad was here and executed a bunch of gypsies—how was it? In many cases, to find out the facts is to lose the wonder and delight in wondering.
This example serves the purpose of demonstrating that works of art engage in a refashioning in which facts are but an integer in the process. Because of this refashioning, reshaping, the result is generally different from the original intention. This ‘surprise’ in the final form is the basis of most analytical inquiry.
Artists as Creators of New Knowledge
In a recent book dealing with the way artists create knowledge, Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum begin their preface with the direct statement that 'Artists often begin something without knowing how it will turn out. In practice, this translates as thinking through doing’.[1]
To evaluate what has been done, the artist-‘researcher’ will embark on an explanation of what the artwork means and weigh up the effectiveness of its content and approach, almost turning him or herself into a personal critic.
This is one beneficial outcome of the research process, as it helps to refine the sense of self-criticism and self-evaluation that, at best, assists in independent reflection. But the advantages of this approach are only dependent on certain forms of art practice.
For art may be rich in meaning and insight, but it also embraces the oblique and the obscure. Fisher and Fortnum assert the currency, alive in art, of 'a kind of liminal space where not knowing, is not only not overcome, but sought, explored, and savoured; where favour, boredom, frustration and getting lost are constructively deployed alongside wonder, secrets and play’.[2]
The traditional and scientific model is about overcoming wonder and mystification, while art is about keeping it alive. If the riddle in the work of art is solved, then it dies. This is the double-bind that the artist-researcher is ultimately faced with: demystify or risk not be taken seriously.
The best that the artist-researcher can wish for is to play at unpacking while ensuring that the work of art stays shrouded in its own perpetual ambiguities.
One way of doing this is to provide ‘artistic context’ for the work(s) of art. Here, the candidate places the studio work within the terrain of his or her peers and attempts to cite the family values in terms of artistic examples from other artists, either contemporary or historical, which amount to a particular sensibility.
This is far less problematic at Masters level, which only needs to demonstrate a firmness of knowledge without the onus of large claims of importance or originality.
If we are to run with the above example, let us also pretend that this is a PhD candidate in her mid-20s. It is feasible that in one part of her writing, she will compare herself to other artists in this vein, from Tacita Dean to Christian Boltanski to Gerhard Richter. It is tenable to explain her areas of affinity and also of difference, but the question of parity—which is theoretically necessary to defend the originality of her contribution—is altogether moot.
The Need to Argue for the Relevance of Your Art
The process of mounting an argument for the relevance and importance of the work of art has led to its own enclave of jargon. This is much the same for art academics who now need to write short manifests to the research office for each of their ‘non-traditional research outputs’.
In other words, 'traditional research' such as the peer-reviewed journal article can be submitted as an example of research activity. In contrast, the 'non-traditional output', such as an exhibition, must be accompanied by a text explaining the work's 'outcomes' and 'significance'.
In so doing, the artist makes a case for the originality and, in the end, aesthetic use of the work. This is not so hard if an artist uses technology or the work avails itself of some dimension with some orientation to outside of the aesthetic—the ‘merely’ aesthetic remains an anathema.
Heaven help a painter working in the still-life tradition. Ironically the word tradition comes up again, but one that is very important to art, since many practices work closely and within established traditions, continuing them.
The purpose is not to do something new, just to do it well, to participate in a dialogue with the past, and to safeguard a tradition into some imaginary perpetuity.
So a ceramicist would likely lose out, but to make traditional pots in a glaze with a new chemical compound would be of interest to research. Abstract painters are also in jeopardy since it is typically the purpose of non-objective abstraction to reach where words cannot. The best that they can hope for is to receive reviews and other forms of media attention that account for the work's 'impact', irrespective of the history of art is full of keywords that got lost in the critical mail were first exhibited.
Buzz Words: Verbal Viagra
To counteract this is a list of words that I like to call ‘vector words’. They are like the verbal Viagra for the explication of artworks. Here are a few examples: ‘challenge’, ‘dispute’, ‘reposition’, ‘gap in knowledge’, ‘respond to a lack’, ‘mobilize’, ‘cross-disciplinary’, ‘new knowledge’, ‘cross-pollinate’.
It is unlikely that research manifest will not have at least one of these words, which begs a huge question of whether the work's value ultimately rests in the written argument.
While the postgraduate student (‘HDR’) will have his or her work shown alongside the written thesis, this is not so for the art academic for whom the visual work ends in words.
His or her research is ultimately at the behest of a different medium and a different logic. Excepting the few and the fortunate, artists are expected to write more in order to stay artists.
In a recent talk for PhD students in symposium ‘Painting as Research’ at the University of Arts in London, Ian Kiaer makes the familiar, but still relevant observation that there is a ‘problem [with] the relationship between writing and making the work, it’s a problem for the PhD but it’s problematic anyway. From the beginning, I would think about this distinction … the very nature of how an artwork works is so different to [sic] how a text works, how thesis works—a written claim’.[3]
The Written Word vs. the Visual Image
The antagonism between the written word and visual image and their symbiosis is a venerable one. The most famous statement from Horace's Ars Poetica (19 BC) is ut pictura poesis—‘as in painting so in poetry’.
This was famously countered in the first studied examination of the formal properties of the arts, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Lacoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1767). Lessing emphasizes that painting is a spatial and more or less instantaneous phenomenon, while poetry and writing are diachronic and unfolds within time. And although time is recommended to study good painting, one's apprehension remains within the confines of what is materially given; it unfolds in a completely different way from painting.
By the time of Russian and Greenbergian formalism, this was a distinction that was taken as a given, and was used to distance the visual, in late modernism, primarily painting, from the written word, which resulted in a phase where painting attempted the sublime and numinous (as with say Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko).
This leads inevitably to a form of mysticism which, once the enthusiasm wears off, enforces a silence, a wordlessness, that can be quite boring. However, statements such as the ones by Kiaer above, which have been sounded many times, are not to be seen in the same context, but rather are sounded by the consciousness of what visual artists need to do to get a higher degree, which means write and use linguistic channels foreign to artistic process.
Anyone who has observed the march of professionalization and the art academy and the development of the visual arts PhD in the new millennium will have observed candidates who are outstanding artists but whose suitability is less than appropriate because they are not particularly good writers. This means art PhDs are of a particular genus, and the long-term effects remain to be seen.
The New Textuality and the Need for Artists to Write
The mandate of writing for artists and academics is only compounded by the need to show a work or an exhibition's importance according to citable values. As an experienced artist knows, reviews are arbitrary at best: it is either to do with the venue, the subject matter, or who you know.
Few magazines run reviews, and newsprint is only interested in what the non-specialist public is likely to read, such as the National Gallery's current blockbuster. One way to address this is to give conference presentations on ‘practice-based research’, where the artist effectively writes an analysis of the studio work for formal discussion in an academically sanctioned environment.
Leading conference organizations like the College Art Association (CAA) or the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA) and their various off-shoots such as the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (POPCAANZ), are all now open to contributions by ‘studio researchers’, and actively encourage them to deliver together with those presenting more ‘traditional’ kinds of papers.
This would have been the exception in the 1980s, and unheard of earlier, unless the artist also had an established reputation as a writer (e.g., Robert Motherwell). Today, the testimonial model is unquestioned and welcomed.
Yet, there are apparent virtues to the standard default, in which the externality to the artistic process admits of a more objective setting for ideas and observations. An artist discussing his or her work has a fundamentally limited amount of critical distance.
Another positive justification for the testimonial style conference paper is exposure against a publicity market that is erratic, inconsistent, and fashion-conscious.
But self-promotion can only go so far.
There is as yet little agreement on the form and shape of the research testimonial (the artist giving a formal presentation on his or her work). For example, there is little account taken because the overuse of the first person pronoun dims the critical faculty, on the part of both deliverer and audience.
In so writing, the artist enters into a quasi-diaristic genre in which subjective choice and point of view are privileged over dispassionate evaluation. And the process of self-promotion can only go so far, and an over-enthusiastic presentation can have the opposite effect.
Nonetheless, there are now a growing number of artists in conferences, as there are journals about the artistic process. More knowledge and more opportunities are welcome, but we might also reflect on how this knowledge is skewed and the forums in which it is aired.
Art is now not only exhibited; it is exhibited for the sake of being turned into an academic presentation and article.
Marcel Duchamp’s lapidary statement, 'stupid as a painter', was meant to be provocative and ironic. It both defended and satirized the romantic stance of the modern artist who protected himself from the barrage of verbiage through the bastion of a visual domain that words found impenetrable.
It also suggests that the artist has an air of stupid about him to anyone else who isn’t an artist.
Then there was the statement made by Georges Braque that ‘one can explain everything about a work of art except the bit that matters’. Perilously misunderstood, it does not discount words altogether since it can suggest that one can come closer to the 'bit' in question in the explanation.
The conceptual artists from the '60s responded to what they thought was an anti-intellectualism that had seeped into art; the high modernist belief in a pure presentational visuality had run its course, the exclusion of words was deemed specious and overly severe.
(Let us also not forget, as Tom Wolfe famously remarked in his classic study of Abstract Expressionism, The Painted Word, that the movement about pure visuality had hitherto never been so insulated by so much writing.)
But the new textuality in the academy is something different again, a kind of rationalization by stealth. In the end, it might be salutary to notice that in art’s campaign to find parity with ‘traditional research models’, it runs the risk of escaping itself. As art in institutions continues to curry favour with other disciplines, the reward for compromise is so far only the prize for second place.
