Secret Teaching Philosophy
Interdisciplinarity
As a teacher, I strive to build bridges to other faculties and communities for my students. I believe this is essential if we hope to restore visual art to a position of relevance in society at large.
If art history were represented as a line drawing, it would be a wedge, starting wide and terminating with a tiny black pinhole. Over the years—and especially since the advent of mechanical reproduction (and the consequent phenomenon of mass culture)—art has been relegating itself to a smaller and smaller arena, with less and less surface to come into contact with everyday life. This insularity is the result of two things: the idea that art must stand in opposition to mass culture, and therefore mustn't use the tropes and tricks mass culture uses, like beauty, sentimentality, slapstick, etc; and the Oedipal notion, originating with the isms of Modernity (impressionism, cubism, fauvism, etc.) that the purpose of art is to advance the discourse of art. I do not take issue with the first notion. Mass culture causes mass psychic damage and must be checked by something (though I do think art could do a better job of checking it). I do, however, take issue with the second. It has turned art discourse into Ouroboros, and I think we're all getting a bit sick of eating our own tail for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Interdisciplinarity offers us a way out—a veritable smorgasbord of ways, as a matter of fact. I'm speaking here not only about interdisciplinarity across the arts (although that's certainly the place to begin), but about reaching across the boundaries to other fields entirely: the social sciences, the hard sciences, the humanities. Maybe even Phys Ed (though that's a bit hard to imagine). Two weeks ago, an evolutionary biologist called Lynn Margulis came to speak at the university. She's famous for discovering symbiogenesis, a new way of understanding evolutionary change. The things she said that night were more deeply inspiring to me as an artist than anything I have heard at an artist's talk or seen in a gallery in quite some time.
Know the Software
If you're going to teach digital media, you have to know the software. A video teacher who doesn't know how to use the software is like a photography teacher who doesn't know how to use a camera or a painting teacher who couldn't tell a student that she was using the wrong brush.
Supporting diversity
There are a number of forms of diversity that emerge in the classroom. First and foremost, I am committed to encouraging ethnic and gender diversity in a field that has been so roundly dominated by white men from the time of its inception. This means actively seeking out works by women and people of colour to present throughout the semester—not just once a semester on Women and Minorities day. It also means making the classroom a place of acceptance for people with a wide range of beliefs. One of the challenges I have faced in the classroom has come from students who make faith-based works—something there is essentially an unwritten rule against in the world of contemporary art. It's crucial that those students feel safe bringing such works into the classroom. Without that safety there is no space for dialogue and critique.
Another type of diversity that presents itself is the split between students who will go on to be artists and those who hope to work in other fields. This can pose challenges in the classroom. My way of dealing with it if I'm working with, say, a student who wants to go on to work in television, is to point out the ways their work would and wouldn't fit into a fine art (gallery, museum, experimental film festival) context, and then to discuss its success on the terms on which the student made it. In short, especially with intro students, I talk a lot about context.
This brings me to another sort of diversity. In pretty much every classroom one is working with students at a variety of levels in a variety of areas. For example, there might be a student with excellent critical thinking skills but very limited technical skills, or vice versa. In some ways this makes a class harder to teach—one must be highly attentive to the individual students'—often non-verbal—expressions of comprehension (or incomprehension). In other ways it makes the class more dynamic. I have found that when students are working at different levels the relationships among them are foregrounded—more advanced students take responsibility for those with less expertise. This semester, for instance, in a mixed-level video course I'm teaching, I offered to meet with my less experienced students for a workshop on the software we're using only to find that one of my senior students had already been offering his classmates the same thing. So encouraging this sort of co-operation among students has proved to be a useful strategy.
Encouraging effective communication
Despite the almost hegemonic influence of the methods of New Criticism, I believe that the artist's intention is an important part of a work. The idea that we should base our judgments solely on the “text”, as though it exists in a vacuum, is an outgrowth of the same purist piety that has driven art into its current state of irrelevant insularity. I believe that artworks are inherently social. We have a word for the practice of making objects for one's own pleasure only, without consideration of audience. It's “hobby”. Cultural production is not a hobby for my students. It's a vocation.
I encourage my students to think broadly and often about why they've chosen art (or design, or architecture, etc) as their vocation. I encourage them to consider the ways their work will serve their community and society at large. To do so we must begin by reviewing the purposes art has served since the origination of the Western tradition. Art no longer exists, for example, to glorify god, as it did in the Middle Ages. Nor does it exist to exemplify the ideals of truth and beauty, as it did in ancient Greece and Rome. Essentially since Manet painted Olympia reclining on her chaise, the role of art has been to critique mainstream culture. Unfortunately, this has become a bit of a default position for artists in school. Often students are unclear about what it is about mainstream culture they want to critique, or worse, are simply following the form—making work that looks like contemporary art without considering what it means to do so.
This is hardly surprising. Art has come to be so shrouded in a peculiar kind of mysticism—students are encouraged to follow their whims as if their whims were transmissions from the spirit world. Clarity is eschewed. Artworks should be “challenging” for the viewer (not to be misunderstood as challenging for the artist to make, a challenge that could result in dreaded virtuosity). Challenging here is to be understood as ugly, confusing and unnecessarily long.
As the rhetoric goes, works that are beautiful and/or interesting are “easy” (again, easy for the viewer, not for the maker), and as such carry a negative moral value. This, sadly, has led to an ethic of sloppiness, laziness and anti-intellectualism in art education that ironically tends to be referred to as rigour. When a work is pleasurable for the viewer (moving, well crafted, comic, etc.), it is often charged with a lack of rigour. Works that are shoddy, boring and apparently meaningless, on the other hand, are “complex”, “densely packed”, rigourous. Young artists are encouraged to abandon what they are good at (draughtsmanship, for instance) and pursue goals so nebulous, so hard to define, that they can only be described as mystical. Art school becomes an odd admixture of theosophical training and therapy, where the aim is to “stretch one's edges”, or, in the phrase of the 1960s, to find one's self.
Unfortunately, this brings artists into the professional art world ill-equipped for the challenges it holds. It may be true that Janine Antoni got famous for washing the floor with hair dye, and Jackson Pollock for drunkenly weaving around his studio, and David Shrigley for scribbling in his notebook, but that does not mean that everyone will get famous for uncritically following whims. In fact, hardly anyone at all will get famous, but we can increase our chances of having people at least look at our works if we do what we can to avoid them being repellant.
Toward Engagement
We have entered a new era of artmaking. We are not abstract expressionists, working from the conviction that we must get back to what is most essential in a medium (more about that in a moment). And by and large, we're not conceptual artists. By and large, that movement has come, done its (quite interesting) work, and passed. Nor are we part of the Avant Garde of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, triumphantly carting urinals into the gallery. People—even non-art initiated people—get it: it's art if you say it's art. But the truth is, you can make it art, but you can't make them care about it. And that's been the net result of these movements. People outside the art world no longer care about art. They listened when we said “Hey public, we don't care what you think! This is about me, The Artist, and what I'm doing to further the discourse of Art!” And the public said “Yuh-huh,” and turned back to their moving, well-crafted, comic tv shows. Not that I'm arguing that artists should be making television. I am not. I'm saying that if we hope to pull through the crisis of irrelevance in which the art world is currently slumped, we'd better put our thinking caps on. Clearly art exists in large part as a counterpoint to popular culture, and clearly it is part of the role of art to question the conventions of representation. But that's not all art does.
Abstract expressionism would direct us to find the “hard cores” of our various media. According to the ideology laid out by Clement Greenberg as regards Abstract Expressionist painting, what is most important, most “true”, about a medium is what's most material about it. In the case of painting, of course, that's pigment and surface. In filmmaking, it's light and the absence of light (and sound and the absence of sound, if you're slightly less of a purist). In digital video, we could say the pixel is the most basic material with which we make our work. In new media perhaps it's ones and ohs.
What I would like to posit is that there's something else that can be considered the hard core of all of our media—something that's been largely obscured by the formalist focus in the art academy. The stuff that I see as comprising that core is emotional connection. I would like to consider not what art is made of in literal terms, but what it does, and I believe that what it does, what it can do when it's working, is connect people together with threads of feeling. I'm not suggesting we abandon or disavow the old traditions of structuralism and abstraction, but that we move toward something else. Specifically, I would like to see the art world move toward empathy.