Comments on: On Graduate Exhibitions

By: Julian Myers

Julian Myers — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:04:42 +0000

My point was that the exhibitions have neither a pedagogical function nor much of a public-discursive one, which is a letdown given the roots of the form. Sure, there are some distinctions to be made amongst the individual exhibitions (I had in mind also Cal Arts and SAIC). But I don’t think the overall logic is any different at CCA – do you?

To your second point: I wouldn’t think that a “broad range of styles and subjects deemed obsolete by magazines, museums and the market,” necessarily implies the work is “derivative,” just that it’s not what editors and curators are jazzed on at the moment. I guess I have a lot of things swimming around my thoughts here, in particular the writing on Asger Jorn in “Art Since 1900,” and Ian Burn’s misgivings about “deskilling” in “The ‘Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath.”

In particular this passage, speaking of art training after Conceptual Art:

“While persuasive arguments can be made in favor of discarding “anachronistic” practices in the face of “space-age” technologies, what is so often overlooked is that skills are not merely manual dexterity but forms of knowledge. The acquisition of particular skills implies an access to a body of accumulated knowledge. Thus deskilling means a rupture within an historical body of knowledge – in other words, a dehistoricization of the practice of art.”

By: Tara McDowell

Tara McDowell — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:58:57 +0000

While I agree in principle with most of the post, Julian, in some ways it’s not quite right to say that these shows all take the same form. SFAI, for example, is much more “hived,” with students getting their own “booth,” than CCA, where there are many medium-sized galleries that include pairs or trios of artists put together to elicit the very comparisons you remark on as being elided.

True, the shows function more as entertainment/shopping/strolling than spaces for public discourse. The salon had this e/s/s function, but also had 75 reviews. And finally, I wish you had said more about why an art school, when a bastion for derivative styles, can picture difference or expose the limits of the contemporary. If this is the best position from which to understand or critique “the contemporary” (and is it so homogenous?), we’re in sorry shape.

By: Julian Myers

Julian Myers — Wed, 27 May 2009 07:06:20 +0000

I don’t think Vis Crit students write about the MFAs in their classes. At that point there’s not really enough of a practice to write about, and things are often in flux. But I don’t know that it’s discouraged. It’s probably just not a great idea. (But I don’t teach in Vis Crit so maybe I’m missing something.) Curatorial Practice students at CCA _have_ included MFAs in their thesis exhibitions. Dina Danish, Patricia Esquivias, Andrew Tosiello and Hillary Wiedemann, off the top of my head.

But I don’t quite understand what that proves or doesn’t prove?

By: Suzanne

Suzanne — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:29:58 +0000

I want to clarify, Dominic, do you mean that student curators always put together their grad exhibitions with professional artists rather than fellow student artists? That’s the equivalent of student editors only publishing their teachers or established writers. (not sure abt the vanity press equivalent, unless the implication is about how expensive it is to go to graduate art school.) I asked Julian the other day, with respect to this post, if visual criticism students were encouraged along the way to test & sharpen their skills by writing about their fellow students’ work. I’m pretty sure–correct me Julian?—that this is in fact discouraged. Tonight I’m wondering—as I don’t know so well how these programs work—if there’s ever (or maybe there is usually?) a practicum or situational, say for the last month, or quarter, of all programs about-to-graduate in a given art school—CCA would be a good candidate for this—with a Stanford Prison Experiment-like set up. The writers review the student artists, and the student-curated shows, the curators curate only from their fellow student pool, and why not have some students assigned to stand in for relative values of wealth, class, purchasing power, education, taste, ownership of media sources, etc—or is all that already implicit or explicit?

By: Julian Myers

Julian Myers — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:53:55 +0000

That said, the problems that inhere to the MFA exhibitions are not exactly the same for the Curatorial programs. The exhibitions created by those programs are premised upon collaborative relationships among students, and aim (mostly) to structure visible and meaningful relationships amongst artists in their exhibitions.

By: Julian Myers

Julian Myers — Tue, 26 May 2009 20:42:19 +0000

I concur, though my position does complicate my objective evaluation. Because I have an inside view, I see the exhibitions as the results of an educational process. One can learn things, perhaps even more things, from a strange exhibition as a successful one. Whether they’re good or not is beside the point.

The larger problem is institutional and cultural: an educational culture that demands, on every other level and in every other context, individuation (above I trace this to the logic of the market).

By: Dominic

Dominic — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:33:48 +0000

I agree with all this. I guess they are a little like vanity publishing. But, Julian, what about the grad shows (always of professional artists) presented by students of curating? We’ve both (full disclosure) taught on the curating programs at both SFAI and CCA. Those are even stranger phenomena no?