Milenko Prvacki

 

Making Art School More Rigorous

 

Former Yugoslav Milenko Prvacki is one of Singapore’s foremost arts educators. While heading the Faculty of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, he introduced a formal course structure to teaching the arts and has helped groom a generation of Singaporean artists.

 

In his 10 years as dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts in LASALLE College of the Arts, Milenko Prvacki has enriched the local arts scene and helped to further arts education in Singapore. He introduced rigour into the fine arts curriculum at LASALLE, training students to be independent, critical thinkers and have the confidence to explore and be experimental in their work.

Born in Vojvodina, Yugoslavia, in 1951, Prvacki graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in painting from the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest, Romania. He came to Singapore, carrying a little luggage and three bottles of Schnapps, in September 1991 at the invitation of a German design company. His first impression of Singapore was that of a Potemkin Village—a phrase used to describe a fake portable village that has been built only to impress. “It was fantastic and clean,” he said. Prvacki was hired on a two-month contract to build sets for Sentosa’s Maritime Museum. But after completing his contract, he did not return to his homeland. Civil strife was brewing in the former Yugoslavia and as it faced disintegration, Prvacki’s wife Delia and daughter Ana quickly joined him in Singapore. The couple has been living here ever since. Ana is working in Los Angeles.

In 1993, Prvacki held a joint exhibition with his wife at the LASALLE College of the Arts. It was there that he met Brother Joseph McNally, founder and president of the art school, who persuaded him to teach at LASALLE. When he began teaching in 1994 at the School of Fine Art, he realised that the Singapore education system emphasised rote learning. The students he came into contact with then lacked initiative and expected to be spoon-fed, he said.

Thus he set up individual tutorial and group critique sessions as part of the fine arts curriculum. The one-to-one tutorials forced students to think critically about their work and formulate opinions to explain and defend it. But Prvacki had another shock. He said, “These 27-year-olds were crying when they were criticised.” He realised the students felt that they had “lost face”. He assured them that the criticisms were not personal and as artists they need to have an inquiring mind. After a year of working with his students, Prvacki saw great improvements in it. He said, “Most kids are talented and teachers need to apply the right methodology to groom them.”

Prvacki joined as a senior lecturer at LASALLE’s School of Fine Art, which was under the Faculty of Visual Arts, and when the school set up its own faculty in 2002, he became its dean.

As dean, Prvacki reduced the formal curriculum hours from 26 hours to 22 hours a week for first-year students and to 18 hours for graduating students. This was met with vehement protests from parents. “They would say, ‘we pay more and you teach less’,” said Prvacki. But he felt it was necessary to give students more time to practise what they had learned in class and translate it into their work. Even as he urged them to be committed in their pursuit of art, he would tell his students that they had more reason than those in other professions to be exceptional. He would say in jest, “If you are a bad doctor, you may still have a lot of money, if you are a bad lawyer, you may still have a lot of money, but if you are a bad artist, you commit suicide or you become alcoholic.”

Prvacki took his own words seriously and devoted time to honing his craft, even as he played the role of administrator. Beyond the necessary formalities of his role as dean, he would spend two days of the week on his art. His former student Tan Wee Lit, who now heads the Faculty of Visual Arts at the School of the Arts Singapore (SOTA), described him as an artist-teacher. “Prvacki is supportive and always encouraged his students to work hard,” said Tan, adding that Prvacki opened doors for students by connecting them to prominent artists he knew. Prvacki has groomed many young notable artists, like Jeremy Sharma and Ye Shufang.

As an administrator, one needs to have ambition to implement changes, but “I’m primarily an artist” , said Prvacki, who stepped down as dean in 2012. He is now a senior fellow at the college and attends group critique sessions with Master of Fine Arts students. He enjoys being a teacher more than an administrator because teaching stimulates him to keep learning. “I can’t tell students what I don’t know,” he said simply.

One of Prvacki’s most famous works is The Ultimate Visual Dictionary (1997), which was inspired by the dictionaries he had used when learning new languages. Prvacki speaks German, Romanian and English, among others. Dictionaries, he said, contain words which are placed together, but not because they are part of a single narrative. “That was my idea to put things in my paintings, to combine things that were not related, but they stay there,” said Prvacki, who refers to himself more as a conceptual than as an abstract artist.

Prvacki and his wife Delia, a sculptor, have also collaborated on a mosaic and ceramic art piece as part of the Land Transport Authority’s Art in Transit programme, which integrates art into Singapore’s network of MRT stations. Their work is permanently displayed at the Dhoby Ghaut MRT station. Prvacki and Delia became Singapore citizens in 2002. Their daughter, Ana, too, is a conceptual artist. In 2012, Prvacki was awarded the Cultural Medallion for his contributions to Singapore’s visual arts scene.

References

Corrie Tan, “The Life! Interview with Milenko Prvacki,” The Straits Times, August 27, 2012.

Interviews with Milenko Prvacki and Tan Wee Lit, via email, in March 2015.

 

 

Milenko Prvacki
Yugoslavia, b.1951