Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  Each student has set up camp, staked out some territory, and distinguished him-or herself with a pet, a pose, or a signature activity. Even if crits are performances, the students seem not to be acting but searching for authentic self-expression. Many have put down more money than they have ever had. Tuition alone is $27,000 a year; even with the help of government grants, teaching-assistant positions, and other part-time jobs, some students find themselves nearly $50,000 in debt after completing the two-year program. In more senses than one, it costs a lot to be an artist.

  Twenty-four students—half male, half female—are sprawled around the room. A latecomer in a business suit and hair gel saunters in. He offers a shocking contrast to the jeans and sweatshirts that are the male norm. He’s from Athens, apparently. Hot on his heels is a blond guy in a lumberjack shirt, looking like the Hollywood version of a farmhand. He stands at the front of the class, examines the drawings, drifts to the back, surveys the room, puts his knapsack on a chair. He then moseys over to the food table, where he kneels to pour himself an orange juice. He’s Asher’s TA, or teaching assistant. His emphatically casual behavior is a mark of Asher’s tolerance. Two more men park themselves at the food table. They graze but do not talk. The room is full of activity, but there is no whispering or note-passing. Asher maintains that his crit has no rules except that students have to “listen to and respect each other.” Nonetheless, a chimp could sense the enduring layers of convention.

  Josh is sitting forward with his elbows resting heavily on his knees, stroking his beard with one hand and hugging his chest with the other. “I was doing work on race and identity in my undergrad, then I went to Israel and had the same feeling of displacement…” He sighs. “I think I’m gonna call the work I’m doin’ now ‘Anthro-Apology.’ I’ve been researchin’ African Jewry and their different ancestral stories. I’ve also been writing myself into the traditions of non-Jewish tribes. There’s a Nigerian tribe who drink palm wine out of horns and lose consciousness. I put myself in the story. It was like trying to fit a circle into a square.” Josh emits another long sigh. A dog collar jingles lightly as one of the mutts has a halfhearted scratch. “I identify with hip-hop culture rather than klezmer culture,” Josh says with a glum chuckle. He started loose, but now he is unraveling. “Sorry, I am doing this badly. I don’t really know why I am here.”

  A high proportion of students are looking at their feet. Asher clears his throat and leans toward Josh but says nothing. The knitters’ needles slow down, and the room comes to a standstill. Silence. Finally a woman’s voice cuts through the air. “I’m so conscious of the fact that Jews are totally uncool. Where do we see ‘Jewish art’? At the Skirball Cultural Center, not MOCA or the Hammer Museum,” she says emphatically. “And why do so many white kids want to be symbolically black? I think it is because they can displace their frustrations and validate them somehow. They can speak with the critical voice of the underdog…Maybe you could tell us more about how you displace your dislocation onto Africans?”

  Falling apart in a crit is not as shameful as one might expect. Intellectual breakdown is an essential component of CalArts pedagogy, or at least an expected part of the MFA student experience. Leslie Dick, the only writer with a full-time position among the artists of the art department, tells her students, “Why come to grad school? It’s about paying a lot of money so you can change. Whatever you thought was certain about how to make art is dismantled. You wobble. You don’t make any sense at all. That’s why you are here.” Yesterday Leslie and I had coffee on the terrace outside the cafeteria next to the desert pines and eucalyptus trees that surround CalArts. She was wearing a no-nonsense white shirt hanging loose over an Agnès B skirt, and no makeup except for some plum lipstick. She admitted that faculty members can be complacent about the pain of the situation, as they’ve seen it happen so many times. “Everything goes to pieces in the first year and it comes together in the second year. Often the people who are making sense are the ones for whom it hasn’t started working yet. They’ve still got all their defenses up. Sometimes the person is simply uneducable and there is nothing you can do.”

  During my stay in Los Angeles, I asked all sorts of people, What is an artist? It’s an irritatingly basic question, but reactions were so aggressive that I came to the conclusion that I must be violating some taboo. When I asked the students, they looked completely shocked. “That’s not fair!” said one. “You can’t ask that!” said another. An artist with a senior position in a university art department accused me of being “stupid,” and a major curator said, “Ugh. All your questions are only answerable in a way that is almost tautological. I mean, for me, an artist is someone who makes art. It’s circular. You tend to know one when you see one!”

  Leslie Dick couldn’t believe that anyone had taken offense. “The work you do as an artist is really play, but it is play in the most serious sense,” she said. “Like when a two-year-old discovers how to make a tower out of blocks. It is no halfhearted thing. You are materializing—taking something from the inside and putting it out into the world so you can be relieved of it.”

  Twelve forty-five P.M. The crit class discussion has been meandering for over two hours. About half the students have spoken, but Asher hasn’t said a word, and no one has discussed Josh’s drawings directly. Although the talk is intelligent, it is difficult to feel fully engaged. I have clearly parachuted into the middle of a very abstract and often inchoate ongoing debate. Many of the comments are rambling affairs, and it is impossible not to drift off into one’s own thoughts.

  A few days ago, I drove out to Santa Monica to see John Baldessari, the gregarious guru of the Southern California art scene. Baldessari is six-foot-seven, a giant of a man with wild hair and a white beard. I once heard him referred to as “Sasquatch Santa,” but he makes me think of God—a hippie version of Michelangelo’s representation of the grand old man in the Sistine Chapel. Baldessari set up the Post-Studio crit class in 1970, the year that CalArts opened, and has continued to teach despite a lucrative international career. Although he was hired by CalArts as a painter, he was already exploring conceptual art in other media. As we sat, with our feet up, and drank ice water in the shade of an umbrella in his backyard, he explained that he didn’t want to call his crit “Conceptual Art” because it sounded too narrow, whereas “Post-Studio Art” had the benefit of embracing everybody who didn’t make traditional art. “A few painters drifted over, but mainly I got all the students who weren’t painting. Allan Kaprow [the performance artist] was assistant dean. In those first years, it was him and me versus the painting staff.”

  Baldessari has mentored countless artists, and although he now teaches at UCLA, he is still seen to embody the think-tank model that exists in one of its purest forms at CalArts, even if it has spread all over the United States. One of his mottos is “Art comes out of failure,” and he tells students, “You have to try things out. You can’t sit around, terrified of being incorrect, saying, ‘I won’t do anything until I do a masterpiece.’” When I asked how he knows when he’s conducted a great crit class, he leaned back and eventually shook his head. “You don’t know,” he said. “Quite often when I thought I was brilliant, I wasn’t. Then when I was really teaching, I wasn’t aware of it. You never know what students will pick up on.” Baldessari believes that the most important function of art education is to demystify artists: “Students need to see that art is made by human beings just like them.”

  At 1:15 P.M. we’re in a definite lull, and Asher speaks his first words. With his eyes closed and hands tightly clasped in his lap, he says, “Pardon me.” The students raise their heads. I sit in anticipation, expecting a short lecture. A straight-talking moment. Or a lightning epiphany. But no. Asher looks up at Josh’s drawing, and true to his minimal art about absence, he says, “Why didn’t you enter the project through language or music?”

  One of the early mantras of CalArts was “No technique before need.” It used to be said that some art c
olleges instructed their students only “up to the wrist” (in other words, they focused on craftsmanship) while CalArts educated its artists only “down to the wrist” (its concentration on the cerebral was such that it neglected the fine art of the hand). Today at CalArts the faculty is diverse—“We all contradict each other,” says Leslie Dick—but the prevailing belief is that any artist whose work fails to display some conceptual rigor is little more than a pretender, illustrator, or designer.

  Following Asher’s question, there is a conversation about the concept of drawing. At 1:30 P.M., Josh peels an orange. Someone’s stomach grumbles. Asher vaguely raises a finger. I expect he is going to adjourn for lunch, but instead he asks, “What do you want, Josh? Put the group to work.” Josh looks exhausted and dejected. He reluctantly pushes an orange segment into his mouth; then his face brightens. “I guess I’m wondering about the viability of political activism in my work.” The room wakes up to this topic. Politics is central to the conversations that go on in Post-Studio. A mature Mexican student who has already done a lot of posturing on the “Israelification of the U.S. with this homeland security bullshit” seizes the opportunity to launch into a new rant. After his five-minute sermon, a woman of mixed race on the other side of the room delivers a quiet but seething response. The two students have a dazzling rivalry. Their hatred is so passionate that I can’t help but wonder if they’re attracted to each other.

  Crits may be opportunities to hash out communal meanings, but that doesn’t mean that students finish the semester with uniform values. The character of Asher’s crit varies from week to week (and from one semester to the next), because each artist sets the agenda for his or her own session. This tendency is no doubt enhanced by the way Asher effaces his authorship: “Ultimately, Post-Studio is the students’ class, not mine.”

  Group crits are such an established part of the curriculum in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Europe and elsewhere, that only a few teachers reject them. Dave Hickey, an art critic who describes his pedagogic style as “Uncle Buck—Hey, smoke this,” is one of the few. “My one rule,” he says in his freewheeling southwestern drawl, “is that I do not do group crits. They are social occasions that reinforce the norm. They impose a standardized discourse. They privilege unfinished, incompetent art.” He tells his students, “If you’re not sick, don’t call the doctor.” Hickey is not alone in thinking that there is undue pressure on artists to verbalize. Many believe that artists shouldn’t be obliged to explain their work. As Hickey declares, “I don’t care about an artist’s intentions. I care if the work looks like it might have some consequences.”

  It is curious that a form of oral exam has become the chief means of testing visual work. Mary Kelly, a feminist conceptualist who has taught at a range of institutions, including Goldsmiths (University of London), CalArts, and UCLA for more than forty years, thinks it’s fine for artists to have crits where they give an account of their intentions, but it shouldn’t be the only way. Kelly wears her hair swept back in an odd 1940s pompadour that one writer assumed must be her “auxiliary brain.” She initially comes across as a stern headmistress, but during our interview, which took place in her kitchen over homemade soup, I encountered a soft-spoken, maternal intellectual. At CalArts in the mid-eighties and now at UCLA, Kelly hosts an alternative group critique where the only person who is not allowed to speak is the presenting artist.

  Kelly tells her students, “Never go to the wall text. Never ask the artist. Learn to read the work.” In her view, works of art produce arguments, so “when you ask an artist to explain it in words, it is just a parallel discourse.” Moreover, artists often don’t fully understand what they’ve made, so other people’s readings can help them “see at a conscious level” what they have done. Kelly believes in preparing to view the work properly: “It is a bit like yoga. You must empty your mind and be receptive. It’s about being open to the possibility of what you could know.” Once everyone is in the right frame of mind, the class starts with the phenomenological, then moves on to deciphering the “concrete signifying material of the text.” You tend to “read things very quickly by their transgression of codes,” says Kelly. The most crucial question is when to stop, so she asks, “Is this in the text? Or is this what you are bringing to it?” She stops the interpretation at the point when she thinks “we might be going too far.”

  As an exercise in refining the work’s communicative connotations, Kelly’s crit method would seem to be exemplary, but most crits espouse a more complex mix of goals. In the context of an expanded market for concept-based work, the integrity and accountability of artists are as important as the specific aesthetics of their work. William E. Jones, a filmmaker who studied with Asher and then taught the course on two occasions when Asher was on leave, is a staunch defender of crits that interrogate the artist about his or her intentions. He feels they prepare students for a professional career because “negotiating interviews, conversations with critics, press releases, catalogues, and wall texts are part of the responsibility of the artist.” When artists are put on the spot, Jones feels, it helps them “develop thick skins and come to see criticism as rhetoric rather than personal attack.” Finally, art students need to understand their motivations deeply, because in grad school it’s imperative to discover which parts of their practice are expendable. As Jones explains, “You have to find something that is true to yourself as a person—some non-negotiable core that will get you through a forty-year artistic practice.”

  Howard Singerman, the author of a compelling history of art education in America called Art Subjects, argues that the most important thing that students learn at art school is “how to be an artist, how to occupy that name, how to embody that occupation.” Even though many students don’t feel 100 percent comfortable calling themselves “an artist” upon graduation—they often need the further endorsement of a dealer, museum show, or teaching job—in many countries the roots of that social identity lie in the semipublic ground of the crit.

  2:00 P.M. A long silence. Josh is looking at his hands. Laughter tumbles distantly along the hall. Next to me, a petite woman with mousy brown hair has made a double-page spread of inky doodle hearts. A clean-shaven chap stares at his mute laptop, discreetly scrolling through e-mails downloaded from the room’s one Ethernet connection. At the back of the class, a guy and a girl lean against the wall, looking at each other.

  “Let’s think about winding this down now,” says Asher. “Josh, do you have any thoughts?”

  “I really appreciated everyone’s comments,” Josh says lightly. “I’d like to see you all for individual meetings next week. Please sign up on my office door,” he jokes. Josh looks better than he has all day. He has survived the ordeal. There were moments when his crit might have turned into a group therapy session, but the cool discipline of his fellow students kept the conversation in check.

  “Class to resume at three o’clock,” says Asher.

  The exodus is smooth. We’re all desperate for fresh air. Hobbs, one of the three students set to present work today, offers me a lift to Whole Foods Market, where the students customarily pick up their lunch. Four students and I squeeze into her beat-up Honda. In the middle of the back seat, I listen to the ping-pong of their dialogue. First they have a debate about one of the most vocal men in the class. “He’s so arrogant and patronizing,” says one of the women. “When he says, ‘I don’t understand,’ he really means, ‘You are an idiot, you’re not making any sense.’ And why does every observation he makes have to begin with a position statement and end with a list of recommended reading?”

  “I think he’s great,” counters one of the men. “He’s very entertaining. We’d go to sleep without him.”

  “He’s overinstitutionalized, domineeringly PC, and macho, all at the same time,” intercedes a third student, who then turns to me and declares with glee, “He got ripped to shreds when he had his crit.”

  Then they talk about Asher. “He certainly gives y
ou enough rope to hang yourself,” says one.

  “Michael is so minimal and abstract that sometimes I think he might dematerialize before our very eyes,” quips another.

  “You gotta love him,” says a third. “He’s seriously good-willed, but he’s also lost in a world of his own calculations. He should wear a lab coat.”

  We drive past bland houses with two- and three-car garages, green lawns, and deciduous trees that defy the desert landscape. Apparently these Valencia neighborhoods inspired CalArts alumnus Tim Burton’s vision of suburban hell in the film Edward Scissorhands.

  What do the students want to do when they finish their MFA?

  “I came to grad school because I want to teach at college level. I was an installer in a gallery, but I’m interested in ideas. I think my work will be better as a result of teaching,” says the fellow to my left.

  “My work is going to fly off the shelves. It is not de rigueur to create commodities, but it is part of my work to create this fantasy economy which overtly tries to sell things,” says the male student in the front seat.

  “What to do when finished? That’s the big question. Go back to Australia and drink. I don’t want to teach. I’d rather waitress,” muses Hobbs as she takes a left into the parking lot of the grocery store.

  “MFA stands for yet another Mother-Fucking Artist,” says the girl to my right as we climb out of the car. “I will just try to graduate as preposterously as possible. One year twins received their diplomas while riding matching white horses. Another year a student walked up onstage with a mariachi band. But my favorite story is when a male student locked the dean in a full kiss on the lips.”