What the hell are we teaching artists?
It’s beautiful up here. And I’m feeling like I’m having an actual piece of vacation. Even though there’s work in the morning, I have felt relaxed and happy all afternoon. In fact I feel good enough to rant.
Sometimes the New York Art world (which is shorthand here for the Current State of Affairs in my chosen field) makes me furious. These mornings here I meet with and talk to artists, many of them on a brief hiatus from their regular lives in New York. In so many cases, I hear stories of people frustrated and cowed by a system that they percieve as unyielding and oppressive. Now there’s oppression and oppression, these aren’t people having to struggle against totalitarian regimes in conditions of desperate poverty. Their wounds are more often than not self inflicted, stemming from a belief system that makes them feel like failures. But I have to ask myself, where are they picking these beliefs up from?
And it makes me ask, as someone who has taught artists for twenty years, what the fuck are we teaching artists? How is it that so many people exit art school with a hunted, hounded sense that they only get one shot to be noticed by the right people to get inside the system that will then treat them like some sort of piece worker, churning out stuff until it is no longer interested in what they have to offer? How is it that so many artists have so little sense of their own agaency, or hope that they can make their own lives meaningful? Why do so many feel defeated out of the gate? When did the notes of cynicism, pusillanimity and self sabotage become part and parcel of the art curriculum?
Artists have created spaces of freedom, and turned them into cages of attitude. So many of the people I talk to when I do these sorts of visits are afraid to make the work they really want to because they’ve been given the message that it is too confusing, or too goofy or too obsessive or just too something for anyone else to be interested in it.
Artists and art teachers: we are the guardians of our own power and our own freedom. The next time you start talking to students about how they will never have a career, or how many of them will stop making work or how they have to position themselves and get “exposure” or any of the other tripe that passes for “realism” in art school, shut the fuck up. you are perpetuating a system that keeps artists at the bottom of the heap.
Wow. Thank you for writing this, I really needed to hear it right now as I try to pick myself off, dust myself off after a brutally scathing midpoint review by the big wigs of my MFA program (the upshot of which was “Do art that is less like the art that you do and we’ll pass you through & like you more”). Talk about your “cages of attitude”! I had already decided I couldn’t go back until I was in full custody of my personal power…and that’s taken me almost a year to regain. I’m putting this in my “Never forget” file because I know they’ll come after me again when they see that I’ve gotten out of my cage..
I agree wholeheartedly in art school its really easy to lose sight of personal artistic growth when spend so much time competing for slots in group shows, and avoiding harsh critiques. All to the constant beat of a fear of failure. What I always have to keep reminding myself is that if I feel a piece is successful there is always a audience for it. It is just a matter of them finding it.
I was fortunate to go to a school where the faculty led by example; working artists on a variety of paths to being active participants in the development of their work and engagement in the art world. It’s one of the reasons I went back there for grad school … I didn’t want to be in a program f*cked with me for the sake of it.
Whether it is their work, their career, or their life, we should be asking our students, “Where are you? Where do you want to go? and How are you going to get there?” Encouraging them not to answer with a set model but devise one by working with their strengths, having faith in their work and the direction it is leading them, and creating a life that supports and feeds being in the studio instead of solely being fueled by the external. They also need to know (as was said above) life is not a one shot deal.
Every couple of years I go back to my list of what success as an artist is for me. Of course having my work seen and recognized is on that list but so is waking up in the morning and having coffee in my studio, and keeping my studio practice going during the busy semester, even if it is only one 4hr session a week.
I was fortunate to go to a school where the faculty led by example; working artists on a variety of paths to being active participants in the development of their work and engagement in the art world. It’s one of the reasons I went back there for grad school … I didn’t want to be in a program f*cked with me for the sake of it.
Whether it is their work, their career, or their life, we should be asking our students, “Where are you? Where do you want to go? and How are you going to get there?” Encouraging them not to answer with a set model but devise one by working with their strengths, having faith in their work and the direction it is leading them, and creating a life that supports and feeds being in the studio instead of solely being fueled by the external. They also need to know (as was said above) life is not a one shot deal.
Every couple of years I go back to my list of what success as an artist is for me. Of course having my work seen and recognized is on that list but so is waking up in the morning and having coffee in my studio, and keeping my studio practice going during the busy semester, even if it is only one 4hr session a week.
Thank you very much! I’ve been attempting over the last four years to be a successful artist, or at the very least an artist that’s not starving. Cheers to (hopefully) new paradigms
Amen!
Artists: Don’t wait for any sort of validation from anyone. The same critics that diss work on Tuesday might love it on Thursday.
Work hard / be true, and the rest falls into place.
Speaking from experience.
Michael Todoran
Having been an art student I wonder how art teachers got the jobs they have. I was a visiting artist at a college in upstate New York. I went on the rounds and one of the teachers was giving a matting demonstration using making tape for hinging the window matte and the backing piece of matte board. There are examples of this. Suffice it to say some of the artist/teachers that I have met cannot even tell you what Liquin is or know how to scrape a lithographic roller.
When I was in school I want to learn and grow as an artist. None of the aforementioned is a criticism as much as it is a revealing of how little is known by some of the people who teach us.
I am reading two books one about James Rosenquist and the other about Jack Tworkov. I have found that reading about the lives of artists is one way to funnel back information to yourself in terms of your practice. To students I recommend leaning to use all manner of paint and supplies connected to your particular endeavors. If you are planning a career in art you don’t necessarily want to look as if you are a self-taught artist. To students I recommend that you overlook the last statement and search out your instructors to see if they are competing with you or a afraid that you will make it and they won’t. Thirdly don’t spend time with a lot of artists or teachers who suck the air out of the room, atelier or refectory: learn good work habits and learn to like being in your studio working.