College Art Association (CAA) Conference.
The first day at the College Arts Association (CAA) conference in New York offered a promising panel discussion: MFA? Ph.D.? DVA? Determining the Terminal Degree in Studio Art Practice for the Twenty First Century. Unfortunately CAA continues to disappoint as a forum for leading the debate about the problems and potentials of post MFA art education in this country. Although there are always instances of intriguing projects being undertaken by individuals that are profiled, the overall tendency in any discussion continues to highlight issues that are rather peripheral to the important topics that need to be addressed. Whether the possibility that an advanced degree in Visual Arts can indeed advance the field in the U.S. is not going to be seriously considered if we continue to see these moves as merely as credential creep or to see programs currently in place in other countries as merely exercises in economic opportunism.
A more substantive concept that was seen by one of the panel members as a problem yet to be faced by those advocating advanced research degrees in studio art was the ongoing difficulty in justifying the outcomes as “repeatable knowledge.” With a commonly cited goal of research being the “production of knowledge,” the expectation that outcomes of research can be repeated and independently replicated is a long-time gold standard of scientific research. The belief that all research should yield “repeatable knowledge” and that visual arts therefore has to address this criterion comes from arguments made over twenty years ago when the possibility of studio-based Ph.D. degrees were first mooted. The task at the time was to demonstrate that for artists who worked in the academy, what they did in their studios could be seen as “equivalent” to the research undertaken throughout the wider university. Understandably this raised considerable debate and some curious attempts to fit square pegs into round holes. It was also an initial step in opening the debate and got us a seat at the table.
But ‘equivalence’ is a rationale that is not sustainable. Acceptance into any community, such as a research culture, where acceptance is determined by those who currently control the conditions for inclusion or exclusion will always yield an unequal alliance. Unless artists whose motivation and expertise takes them into the academy are able to claim a seat at the table in terms of what art ‘does’ then we are destined to remain marginalized. Being on the edge is, of course, a great place from which to see “in and out’ at the same time. But if there is a belief that artists have a critical and creative role in the larger debates and dilemmas facing institutions and communities, then there is a crucial need to take control of the language of change.
There is no better place for this to happen than in art schools within university settings. Re-imagining the role of visual arts in these ‘institutional artworld’ spaces is already changing the landscape in many places. It can be seen in the slowly evolving, but adventurous work of students who have decided that a degree beyond the MFA is a place where ideas can be given a mature, rigorous work out that enhances rather than limits their creative capacities. And it is also evident in the questions posed and post-disciplinary attitudes present in the young generation of art students who are currently re-visioning the MFA itself. And this is global, not merely local. It seems to me that they deserve better leadership in opening up opportunities to continue to shape what it is that artists can do in the 21st century, and it is certainly not terminal.
PS: To read more about the background to the emergence of practice-led research degrees in visual arts see Chapter 3, Practice and Beyond, in my text, Art practice as Research: Inquiry in Visual Arts. A brief summary can be found in the Menu Bar>From the Book.
For more discussion about issues such as ‘equivalence’ and other arguments mounted to support practice-based degrees university settings see my chapter, Making Space: The Purpose and Place of Practice-Led Research. In Hazel Smith, H. & Dean, R. (2009) (Eds.), Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (pp. 41-65). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. A PDF can be downloaded for Menu Bar>Resources.
Please see below passage lifted from the Rhizome.org list. Ed Shanken has been holding a series of debates between the New Media Art and the Modern Contemporary Art communities and arguing for value-added by the NMA community. There exists a history of ghettoization and rejection of the NMA community within the larger art world. I think it pertains here to the above posting regarding the need for leadership in the movement towards artistic practice as research in the 21st C.
Shanken makes an argument that even when New Media Art fails it often offers “new knowledge” of value to disciplines beyond it’s own. Thinking in terms of the 21st C new media landscape and post-studio, perhpas post-media practice; it seems that there isn’t room for dispute. There is value inherent in the “re-mixologists” conducting artistic practice between discourses both within and beyond the purview of “the art world(s).” University communities in the U.S. may be late to acknowledging this but the trend is already here.
Ed Shanken 2011 NMA vs. MCA
At the same time, I’m compelled to agree with Catherine David’s assertion (quoted) that “Much of what today’s artists produce with New Media is very boring,” but I must add that much of what today’s artists produce without New Media is equally boring. While MCA curators and theorists like Krauss, Bourriaud, David make all the usual criticisms of NMA’s “vacuous celebration of technology,” I agree with Domenico’s assertions that some of this work, even if it fails as art, may have “heralded a new development in knowledge” and that “The New Media Art world can potentially generate the energy that powers the other art worlds, giving their respective ‘ideas of art’ a radical evolution.” Moreover, I argue that there may be specific strategic and conceptual advantages to using emerging media in a metacritical way. In other words, if used cleverly, technological media may offer precisely the tools needed to reflect on the profound ways in which that very technology is deeply embedded in modes of knowledge production, perception, and interaction, and is thus inextricable from corresponding epistemological and ontological transformations. I believe that such a metacritical approach is operating in the best NMA (and the best digital humanities scholarship.) Rather than shunning technological media, this method may offer artists the most advantageous opportunities to comment on and participate in the social transformations taking place in digital culture, in order to, as Bourriaud implores, “inhabit the world in a better way.”
Brooding, solitary and usually male, the trope of “the artist in the studio” has existed in multiple iterations throughout the history of art. From Rembrandt’s workshop to the twentieth-century Parisian studios of Picasso, Braque and others, to Warhol’s Factory, the studio contains within it an evolving narrative, albeit one that remains focused on a specific physical site of artistic production. In a particularly damning critique of this romantic construct, Daniel Buren posited in a 1971 essay, “The Function of the Studio,” that the studio has a “simultaneously idealizing and ossifying function,”1 a state of “purgatory” that grants artists limited agency in the production and dissemination of their own work and culture at large. Buren’s essay is a concise example of the postmodern conception of “post-studio” practice—a practice cultivated by the likes of Robert Smithson, who came to reject the confines of the physical studio as a site of production in favor of the unconfined natural landscape, or by John Baldessari’s infamous “Post-Studio Art” class at CalArts, in which students were encouraged to “stop daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone”2 and embrace a wider framework for art production. The influence of these artists is clearly evident in a range of contemporary artistic practices that continue to question traditional modes of production and dissemination.
The legacy of “post-studio” art is amplified for artists working with digital forms and online environments. Generally these types of practices are less an overt negation of the “ossifying” element of the studio and more a reflection of how the digital has changed cultural production at large. What happens when the studio in question is simply a laptop in the artist’s kitchen or the local coffee shop? When the studio exists in a network space and is linked to countless other studios, shifting the studio experience from ossifying to dynamic? Or when the site of the studio is the same as that of exhibition and distribution?
– EXCERPT FROM “THE FUNCTION OF THE STUDIO (WHEN THE STUDIO IS A LAPTOP)” BY CAITLIN JONES IN ART LIES, ISSUE 67