A Huffington Post
essay by F. Scott Hess on de-skilling has been making the rounds.
I won't spend a lot of time on this - it's irritating to read an artist writing about the systemic problems with the art world that make his obvious brilliance invisible to everyone else on the planet. However I am interested in a couple of claims about education Hess makes and feel the need to address them.
After pointing toward a 'prejudice' in academe that privileges "Postmodern hybridity, identity politics, or pure theory", Hess writes:
The idea that you might train a surgeon to be clumsy, or an engineer to build poorly, or a lawyer to ignore law, would be patently absurd. In the arts, however, you will find an occasional musician who purposely plays badly, or a writer who ignores grammar, but only in the visual arts is training in the traditional skills of the profession systematically and often institutionally denigrated.
Can we impose a ban on comparing entirely different things...like the education of artists and physicians or attorneys? Aside from its obvious foolishness (do you really train anyone to be clumsy? isn't the
point of training to remove clumsiness?) Hess' analogy obscures the fact that some surgeons
are clumsy, and some lawyers
do flagrantly ignore (what other people to believe to be a correct interpretation of) the law. Without these incidents, there would be no malpractices suits or legal debates.
Arguably, there would be no innovation, either. More on that in a minute, too.
Hess' article was re-posted by a few friends who identify with the crafts world, and its to that audience that he makes his strongest appeal. His ego still bruised from an incident in college (in the 70s...please... isn't getting over insults a part of growing up? If not, dealing with criticism is certainly part of becoming an artist...) Hess rails against 'conceptual' art (which he apparently confuses with the presence of concepts
in art...more on that later) by collecting anecdotes from artists who have been criticized for their aesthetic conservatism or their interest in displaying skill in their work.
And yeah, I'm not going to pretend that I have never seen crits in which a student's representational work (...or exhibits in which a practicing artist's work) was greeted with yawns. But nine times out of ten those yawns came because the work was
boring, not because it was figurative (believe it or not, there is dull performance, dull video art,
all kinds of dull art...it's not just figurative painters who are singled out). Artists of all kinds tend to forget that the display of skill is often very dull for audiences. Couple it with the preachy allegory of Hess' paintings or the mawkish moodiness of the work he favors in his article, and you've got a dreadful cocktail of narcissism and self pity.
Like most conspiracy theories, Hess' claim that skill is out of favor sounds like an explanation for all that's wrong with the world until you look at some evidence. There are a huge number of teaching artists (working both representationally and non-representationally) for whom the conspicuous use of craft is an issue. (Locally, I'm looking at you, artist/teachers
Judith Schaechter,
Kurt Kauper,
Susan Moore,
Mark Shetabi; on a national stage, you could start with painters
Kehinde Wiley,
Walton Ford, sculptor
Judy Fox, and go on and on and on...)
His claim that schools are brainwashing students or withholding vital information about craft is also hollow. Hess describes his tortured studies at 'a small midwestern liberal arts college in Wisconsin' (one assumes he's trying not to invoke the anger of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from which he graduated in 1977) where the faculty failed to cater to his every whim, preferring, one assumes, to teach the curriculum they had devised...or at least to teach what they knew or believed to be important.
What Mr. Hess seems to have forgotten that to be young is to be misunderstood - terribly, savagely, horribly misunderstood. To be a
young artist is to magnify that condition fifty-fold. If you're not doing something that people ten, twenty, thirty years older than you can't understand, then you're doing it wrong. Nor does he seem to appreciate that schools are not like fast food restaurants. A McDonald's hamburger in Moscow tastes exactly like one in Times Square, but a drawing class at Yale is very different from one at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Students shouldn't expect fast food hamburgers from their schools, and they should look pretty closely at the menu before they commit to attending them.
Such diversity troubles some people...especially those who hold that there are 'timeless principles' to art that must be understood. Such people tend to annoy the living daylights out of me because what is 'good' in art is what comes closest to those abstract, Platonic principles, never the messy, contingent things - the ones that tremble on the edge of falling apart in some way - that interest me. Does anyone else find it remotely troubling that all of the images that illustrate Hess' essay correspond neatly to western aesthetic fashions of the 18th and 19th centuries?
But back to clumsy surgeons and creative lawyers. Skill perfected and repeated has its place, but it's often in working
beyond skill, working skillfully with unforgiving materials, or working with ideas to which the skills are not so perfectly matched that creates
art in our time. (Of course one can make anything one wants in our pluralist era, but one shouldn't expect that it will be talked about...but that's another post.) It is out of these struggles that new images and ideas are born.
Once upon a time (when I happened to be an art student at the very figurative Boston University School of Fine Arts) I worked in an intensive care unit where we took care of patients who'd just had heart transplants and other cardiac procedures. (An aside: medical students - especially sleep deprived ones - are clumsy without having to be trained to be.) In our unit, physicians performed operations on some risky candidates. Some who'd had multiple previous surgeries; others whose multiple complicating factors like age and obesity made them questionable candidates. Our hospital experimented with a ventricular assist device so horrific that one doctor compared it to parking a 'lawn mower on a patient's chest'.
By working at the very edge of their skills and technologies, by working with patients that others wouldn't work with, by transcending the display of skill and testing themselves on difficult problems with real consequences, these physicians, nurses, and patients taught me what it means to make art. There were mistakes and there were failures, but we learned from them. Hess wants us to think of artists and doctors in the same frame of mind...but I am here to tell you that it wasn't enough for the doctor to be a brilliant surgeon. You needed a smart, dedicated, and tireless nursing staff. (Maybe that nurse is the curator, or the critic...essential parts of the art world who never get mentioned in Hess's essay.) And - this is the kicker - you need a patient who is going to take his meds, do her exercises, and not assume that getting cut open is his only job. (If you're following this, the patient is the audience who is as much part of the art work as the artist).
So perhaps the last word on Hess' lament really belongs to Roland Barthes, whose writing Mr. Hess no doubt despises because he's a staple of those horrible theory classes we insist on cramming down the throats of young artists. One of Barthes' contributions to the late 20th century was the idea that readers mattered as much as (if not more than) writers. As readers, we have the authority to challenge the implicit assumptions of artworks, to question what they represent and how they represent it. We have the responsibility to ask whose interests are being served by the publication or display of some works and, if we're interested in social justice or equality in the real world as opposed to the images of these ideas that have been handed down to us, to create new visions of these virtues. It's a world where literature or art or music are not
automatically important because they are connected to traditions or because artists say they're important. It's a world in which paintings, stories and songs achieve significance because people
use them. "The birth of the reader," Barthes writes, "must be ransomed by the death of the author."
And the birth of the viewer comes when we stop letting our artists tell us what to think.
