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| While many are familiar with the movie inspired by the same name, Art School Confidential was originally produced as a comic book poking fun at the art school experience. |
As the season of art
exhibition openings and festivals gets under way along with a new academic year,
I wanted to share a catalogue essay I had the privilege of writing for the faculty
art show of the Department of Fine Arts at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Opening
this Friday, September 16th at the Cloverdale studio from 6-9pm, “Art
School Confidential: Then and Now” features an intriguing set of themes related
to the art school experience, but also presents them in a powerful framework that
juxtaposes fantastic art projects from the participants' past (when they too were
in art school) with art works from present-day practices.
Having read over
the summer the complete version of Steven Henry Madoff’s important edited book of
essays and interviews contributing to conversations about the future of art school,
Art School (Propositions for the 21rst Century), I began my observations through
the lens of those debates. As both an instructive
and highly conceptual show, the final exhibition raises many critical questions
about what the art school experience can offer to both its students and the broader
public. 
ART SCHOOL,
CONFIDENTIALLY SPEAKING
Dorothy Barenscott
“No school is a school without an idea.”
Steven Henry Madoff, Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)
What is it about art
school, and the art school experience in particular, that signals such mystery,
fascination, and fear? Perhaps it has something to do with the enigma of the
artist’s role in our modern world—the power possessed to extract, focus, and
represent the best and worst of who we are— or maybe it has more to do with the
wider question of what a liberal arts education delivers in an increasingly
utilitarian and results-oriented university environment. However we approach the question, the spectre
of art school conjures notions of alchemy, a touch of danger, and the profound
capacity for transformation.
In the past, art
education based on the European model was forged in the tradition of the atelier or “workshop” method where
apprentices were taught a valuable skill set from a principle master. Starting
as early as the Greek era and gaining force and recognition in the late
medieval period, the focus of art making was based upon a system of empiricism
and the handing down of abilities to reproduce observed phenomena. Mimesis
ruled the curriculum, as did the ability to follow a strict set of rules for
art-making.
Over time, art schools
have evolved to facilitate a much more subjective endeavour, foregrounding
individual creative interpretation and discovery, together with a more issues
based approach to the making of art objects that takes into account the long
history and theory of art. Along with this shift, the focus towards group
evaluation and negotiated feedback via the studio crit now predominate. For
some students, this signals a difficult challenge. This is perhaps best
characterized in the film from which this exhibition takes its title, Art School Confidential (2006), where
the protagonist must adapt his own vision about what it means to be an artist
to those of his instructors, his fellow students, and the world around him. In
a favourite line from the movie, Professor Sandiford, an
acerbic art school instructor played so brilliantly by John Malkovich, exposes
the fatal error made by many an aspiring artist: “Now, everyone don't be so hard on Jerome. He
is attempting to achieve the impossible. He is trying to sing in his own voice
using someone else's vocal cords.” In this sense, the process of falling apart or going to pieces and then
coming back together again appears to typify the experience of many art school students.
A special chapter was
even recently devoted to the mysteries of the art school “crit” in Sarah
Thornton’s wildly popular ethnography Seven Days in the Art World (2008), exploring the many subcultures constituting
today’s contemporary art scene. Therein, her interview with famed CalArts
studio instructor and artist John Baldessari reveals something elemental about
the ritual of group critique utilized by almost all North American art
schools. “Art comes out of failure…you
have to try things out” he explains, adding “You can’t sit around, terrified of
being incorrect, saying, ‘I won’t do anything until I do a masterpiece.’ Students
need to see that art is made by human beings just like them.”
In this exhibition, we
bear witness to objects created precisely within this context of vulnerability,
transformation, and the very human process of experimentation. These are faculty
and department associate and support projects, past and present, which constitute
the ambitious and multiple roads to success forged in art school and
beyond. The interrelated themes of the
exhibition, much like a student’s rear view at the end of their art school
years, are set within the conceptual frame of “Then” and “Now” orienting
viewers through the gallery space.
The passage of time is
marked out in a number of provocative ways. At its most literal, we see the
material and unintended marks of deterioration in Maria Anna Parolin’s "Carega" Chair—the consequence of an
art student’s rookie mistake of not framing and storing art work properly—but
also in her more recent project Consumed
Series, which deals with the juxtaposition of littered manmade and organic
objects. At its most symbolic, the theme of time is played out in theory-based
transitions within long established practices—Frank Fan’s early ceramic works
give way to an exploration of the semiotics of pot making in Times River, while the spirit of
collaboration and human desire to shape the natural world unites Scott McBride’s special interest in new media art with Kent Anderson’s bold
experiments in sculpture in Suspended
Wall.
The interrogation of
identity so key to the art school experience is likewise a principle theme of
the show. We see approaches moving from the more distinctly personal and individuated,
as in Robert Gelineau’s early Untitled
double portraits set alongside his more recent explorations into the
transgression of socially constructed boundaries in How Do I Look?, together with Paulo Majano’s interrogation of “uncanny”
figurations in Valley Woman, Man and
Kira Wu’s poignant and intimate image capture of her mother in Woman with the Bracelet. Sibeal Foyle’s timely My Sister in Benghazi series bridges the personal with the
historical, reflecting on comparative experiences of violence and the view of war
at a distance. This emphasis on
identity and the contours of history—critical to an understanding of how we
construct our collective experience—is also present in other components of the
exhibition, played out in Eryne Donahue’s study of memory preservation in Family History, Merrell Gerber’s
recollection of dark moments in human activity with Faggots, and Nicole Brabant’s reflections on human/animal
correlation in Hive Study.
As an exhibition
seeking to instruct as much as it seeks to question, the themes linking Art
School Confidential also reveal traces of knowledge gained through years of
sustained art practice. Nancy Duff’s The
Artist’s Studio: A Real Allegory (after Courbet) confronts emerging artists
with the weight of art history and the cult of artistic “genius”, while Excerpts from the Artist Taxonomy Series
recognizes the present-day conditions of artists’ many artificial worlds. Traces
of this wisdom and dialogue also emerge in the installation of Alison MacTaggart’s interactive Promising
Objects examining notions of invention and problem-solving set alongside the
visible struggle to mediate traditional painting within a post-industrial
context in Elizabeth Barnes’ Proliferation
of Possible Plausibilities. We are still
reminded, however, of the instructive dimension of art objects through David Lloyd’s Candle Lanterns, initially
conceived as class demonstration pieces for beginner’s projects. Other works reveal the consistency of
exploring core themes over the span of a career. This is seen in Ana Black’s
investigations into the conflict between viewer and performer and the model of
experience in Teen Beauty and Audition Series, together with Terry Sawatzky’s kinetic experimentations culminating in the mash-up between past and
present 3D and 2D forms in the Albatross
Series.
What then is the place
of the art school today and what role does art education play in the shifting
and rapidly changing world that we inhabit?
We find clues in the exhibition through Kent Anderson’s ironic wall
sculpture Bright New Idea, reminding and
even warning us of grand claims to ingenuity. Still, Scott McBride’s whimsical Sketch for a Video advises students of
the value associated with play, humour, and “fun”—hinting at key components to success
and longevity in an arts career. But more than ever before, these are critical questions
to ask as we all seek creative and out-of-the -box solutions to an accumulation
of unanticipated and pressing global challenges. At the same time, artists themselves
face a confluence of institutional change, including the increasing pressure to
professionalize early, the growing influence of contemporary art market trends,
and the revolution in new media and information technology (together with their
many new theories)—which all threaten to transform the terms of current art
making practices.
Most recently, these
issues were probed by poet and writer Ann Lauterbach in a poignant essay “The
Thing Seen: Reimagining Arts Education for Now” in Steven Henry Madoff’s Art School: Propositions for the 21st
Century (2009). At the conclusion of her treatise, Lauterbach asserts the
urgency and importance of art education to the vision and fabric of democratic
social space: “How do we inform the public that art is not a luxury, not mere
entertainment, that artists are not spoiled children of an indulgent culture?
Perhaps most important, how do we slow down our responses so that our opinions
are aligned to judgements that are informed by what we know? How do we convince
the public that neither complexity nor difficulty in art—in thinking about and
responding to art—is a formula for estrangement but an invitation to imagine
solutions to seemingly intractable problems and predicaments in contemporary
life?”
For Lauterbach, as indeed
for the multifaceted participants in this exhibition, the answer lies not just in
the creation of critical and provocative art objects, but also in the
facilitation of open and free-flowing conversations in the studio and classroom
that generate new ways of seeing and challenging what students encounter in
their world. “To teach persons to make art,” writes Lauterbach “is to teach
them to resist the commodification of their wills and desires, to use
flexibility and ingenuity in the face of adversarial forces, to build a
capacity for the attention and response to which is not like them or belongs to
them.” That is the real secret, the mysterious alchemy and transformational
power of the art school experience represented by this exhibition. It is a secret
that continues to play an equal role in art school’s great power and in its perceived
and sometimes necessary danger.