FACULTY ISSUES

Ironically, the artist who would teach is often doomed before ever setting foot in the classroom. Appraisals of teaching ability get skewed during even the initial job selection process. Typical application forms allow few judgements about the quality of one’s teaching, but routinely demand some arbitrary amount of same. This makes newly-minted MFA graduates the perennial cannon fodder of the college job market, where they’re routinely axed before ever landing their first position. Moreover, the same system that ignores the potential of the newcomer often discounts the achievements of the veteran. The author recalls once serving on a university search committee while it compared two applications, one listing three years teaching for the local Parks & Recreation summer program, the other attesting to an equivalent tenure on the art faculty at Harvard. Under state hiring guidelines, we were required to accord the two records equal ranking — once the requirement for “three years teaching experience” had been met, discriminating on the basis of quality was specifically forbidden.

When teaching ability is relegated to a statistic, artistic ability becomes (somewhat surprisingly) an asset. (As an aside, universities rarely have trouble attracting good artists — art has the dubious distinction of being one profession in which you routinely earn more by teaching it than by doing it.) Final selection often turns on the strength of one’s standing in the art world: an impressive record of exhibition and publication, strong critical reviews, recognition from peers, honorary grants or fellowships, long-term involvement in the arts community — all these things help. In the best of all worlds, this would be a fine criterion ; in the academic world, it’s a setup for disaster. Higher education may excel in attracting a first-class artist, but it’s rarely capable of supporting one.

Viewing the scene neutrally — that is, at the purely structural level — the first breakpoint has simply to do with setting priorities. It is, after all, hard to imagine placing a full-time teaching career atop a full-time artmaking career without something going awry in the process. As the old proverb cautions: if you chase two rabbits, you catch neither.

Typically, the artmaking rabbit disappears first. If you teach, you know the pattern already. By the end of the school week, you’ve little energy left for any artmaking activity of more consequence than wedging clay or cleaning brushes. By the end of the term, nurturing unfinished work (and frayed relationships) may well take precedence over making any new art at all. The danger is real (and the examples many) that an artist who teaches will eventually dwindle away to something much less: a teacher who formerly made art. One-person shows become memories, older work shuttles around a circuit of perfunctory group shows, and finally things just trail off entirely. Like some perverse recycling process from a sci-fi novel, the same system that produces new artists, produces ex-artists.

Needless to say, this scenario is fairly depressing. It is, however, neither absolute nor inevitable. For that matter you might first ask yourself: What’s wrong with producing less art? After all, your kids are important, your job does serve a useful purpose — they deserve your time and energy too. And beyond that, strategies do exist — artistic strategies, if you will — that allow for and even enhance your ability to make new art while working in an academic setting. One way or another, most all these strategies build upon the widespread consensus among artists that the single most redeeming feature of teaching is teaching.

If you teach, you know that you gain as much from the interchange as do your students. The classroom studio, after all, gives you a forum where ideas are the coin of the realm. It allows you to draw energy from young minds filled with potential. It gives you a role in shaping the next generation of art. It keeps you alive. Teaching is part of the process of being an artist.

The corollary here is that the greatest gift you have to offer your students is the example of your own life as a working artist. There’s a story told about philosopher George Santayana — that while teaching at Harvard he was approached by a student who asked what courses he would be teaching the following term. Replied Santayana: “Santayana I, Santayana II, and a seminar in Santayana III”.

It’s that basic. Your life is a paradigm of the process of being an artist, a witness and record to the way time and circumstance, event and emotion, courage and fear surround the making of art. Your experiences provide an affirmation to younger artists that the path they have chosen does lead somewhere, and that you are all really fellow travellers, separated only by the time you’ve already travelled down that path. What good teachers offer their students is something akin to the vulnerability found in a personal relationship — a kind of artistic and intellectual intimacy that lets others see how they reached a specific point, not simply that they did reach it. It is that willingness to lay open the line that runs between their life and their art that gives meaning to technique, and empowerment to artistic goals that for the student may still lie many years distant. Learning is the natural reward of meetings with remarkable ideas, and remarkable people.

To share this as a teacher, your job above all is to maintain your autonomy — both as an artist and as a teacher. Maintaining that autonomy, however, is no easy matter. Obstacles to continued artmaking are sometimes hard-wired into academic policy. It is, for instance, the law in California that full-time instructors at state colleges be on campus every day of the week - even when they have no classes. With each day hopelessly fragmented, the large blocks of time essential to many artmaking processes are irretrievably lost. And beyond that, time for both teaching and artmaking must often be shored up against erosion from a steady river of administrative busywork. The magnitude of the problem varies widely. I recall that at the University of Oregon, Art Department meetings and memos routinely bled away twenty hours a week from otherwise useful time. I also recall (more fondly) that during an entire academic year at Stanford University, the Art Department scheduled exactly one meeting — and then cancelled it for lack of a quorum!

It’s no fun fighting a two-front war, but one way or another you have to preserve time both for making art and for sharing that artmaking process with your students. Often the best strategy for cultivating quality time is to simply avoid like the plague all activities that don’t. Artist/ teacher Jack Welpott, who for many years ran the photography program at San Francisco State University, provided the classic model for this approach. When asked how he managed to teach effectively and make art prolifically in the face of full-time faculty duties, Welpott said, “From the day I was hired I began cultivating a reputation within the Art Department of being sort of a flake. I found that after a year or so of losing track of my committee assignments, forgetting to answer memos and missing departmental meetings — well, after while they just stopped asking me to do all those things.”

STUDENT ISSUES

Idealism has a high casualty rate. The chances are (statistically speaking) that if you’re an artist, you’re also a student. That says something very encouraging about the desire to learn art — and something very ominous about the attrition rate of those who try. There is, after all, a deadly corollary: most people stop making art when they stop being students.

Given that rather sobering reality check, our initial proposition — that art education does serve some useful purpose — triggers a flurry of student-related questions. Like what exactly is that purpose? Why study art in an academic setting anyway? Or for that matter, what does it even mean to “study art”? Are you there to contemplate universal truths, explore new artistic frontiers, or breed fame and fortune?

This contest to define the best framework for helping artists learn has been going on for at least a couple of centuries now, and chances are — surprise! — that we won’t suddenly resolve the issue in the next few sentences. You can corral good arguments, successful examples, prominent graduates — and insufferable converts — to champion any of a whole flock of possible pathways. Ideally your options range across colleges, art schools, workshops, apprenticeships, study tours, self-teaching and more. Empirically, they implode to a field of two: the University, and everything else.

It’s largely a question of structure. The strength of the university lies in the fact that you can study art, physics, anthropology, psychology and literature all at once. The basic strength of the “everything else” — an apprenticeship, for instance — is that you can devote your energies solely to art all the time.

Not surprisingly, each approach also carries built-in limitations. The university may prove too large and impersonal to nurture a young artist through long periods of self-doubt before craft and vision take hold. In addition, many university art courses are electives, their focus and intensity diluted by non-majors who bring no personal investment to the subject. (If calculus were tailored as a “fun” elective for art majors, math majors would doubtless feel their studies were being retarded too!) Conversely, a workshop or small conservatory may focus so tightly on art that you lose touch with larger worlds you need to explore. And in any case the very structure that makes most art education work — a sheltered and supportive environment for artmaking, and an invitation to disengage (for a time) from the day-to-day treadmill of income production-vanishes instantly once you’re out of school. The discouraging truth is that the rest of the world neither cares whether you make art, nor has much interest in buying it if you do. As far as most people are concerned, art may be acceptable as a profession, but certainly not as an occupation. (Or as one of the authors’ students dolefully pointed out, “Most professions come with a salary.”) Simply put, making art is not considered a real job.

But then, the role of the university has always been to provide an education, which is a small but significant step removed from providing training. Training prepares you for a job; an education prepares you for life. But if the university lays the foundation for rich and interdisciplinary achievement over the long run, it’s notorious for providing few employable skills in the short run. Art critic A.D. Coleman tells the story of a university art teacher who was frequently asked by anxious parents whether there would be jobs awaiting their children upon graduation. Invariably the professor would reply, “Not as a direct result of anything they’ll learn from me!” This approach, however truthful, is rarely reassuring: many students view graduating as tantamount to being pushed, unprepared, into some yawning abyss — forever.

That prospect is daunting enough that many artists drop out before ever completing their studies; others do graduate, but then — pressed by economics — find no way to continue artmaking afterwards. And yet others prolong the death-watch by entering graduate programs. The latter approach, placed atop fifteen-odd years of already-completed education, is superfluous at best and often actually harmful to the student’s artmaking capacity. (Jerry Uelsmann refers to coaxing art from graduate students as a process of “rehabilitating the over-educated”!)

This whole scenario is a tragedy seldom addressed by academics, and even then is rarely acknowledged as a failure of the system. Watching from a safely tenured vantage point, the system instead laments the failure of the student. Poor therapists, I’m told, always blame their clients.

Faced with such poor odds for artistic survival (much less success), upper division students migrate in droves toward the one job for artists that society does validate : Teaching. This is a perilous course. There are many good reasons for wanting to teach, but avoiding the unknown is not one of them. The security of a monthly paycheck mixes poorly with the risk-taking of artistic inquiry.

The discouraging truth is that MFA degrees were created largely to provide — and then satisfy — a prerequisite for obtaining teaching jobs. This in effect rendered the entire system a pyramid scheme: it worked only so long as there were a dozen entering freshmen to match with each graduating MFA. For better or worse, this pyramid began crumbling years ago. Today art education is a steady-state universe, creating virtually no new jobs at all. Chances are — statistically speaking — that if you study art with a goal of teaching it, you’ll end up with a career in sales. You study artmaking in order to learn about artmaking.

BOOKS ABOUT ART

Books on art, even books on artists, characteristically have little to say about actually making art. They may offer a sprinkling of romantic parables about “the artist’s struggle”, but the prevailing premise remains that art is clearly the province of genius (or, on occasion, madness). Accepting this premise leads inescapably to the conclusion that while art should be understood or enjoyed or admired by the reader, it most certainly should not be done by the reader. And once that kinship between reader and artist has been denied, art itself becomes a strange foreign object — something to be pointed to and poked at from a safe analytical distance. To the critic, art is a noun.

Clearly, something’s getting lost in the translation here. What gets lost, quite specifically, is the very thing artists spend the better part of their lives doing: namely, learning to make work that matters to them. What artists learn from other artists is not so much history or technique (although we learn tons of that too); what we really gain from the artmaking of others is courage-by-association. Depth of contact grows as fears are shared — and thereby disarmed — and this comes from embracing art as process, and artists as kindred spirits. To the artist, art is a verb.

This distinction has substantial footing in the real world. Substantial enough at least to support the provocative — if not entirely airtight — proposition that nothing really useful can be learned from viewing finished art. At least nothing other artists can usefully apply in making their own art. The really critical decisions facing every artist — like, say, knowing when to stop — cannot be learned from viewing end results. For that matter, a finished piece gives precious few clues as to any questions the artist weighed while making the object.

You know how it is: in the heat of working, the thoughts in your head ricochet among a bewildering jumble of personal, shared and universal concerns. (But oh yes: for each artist, a very specific jumble!) And physically, you may be at your best when you’re sweating in the sun, responding to a live audience, or — like the author as he writes this sentence — relaxing alone with a glass of wine. It’s easy to imagine a hundred different states of mind that might have led Edward Weston to photograph his garden vegetables, but we have not the faintest possibility of knowing whether our best guess from that hundred matched his actual state. And equally poor prospects that the resulting print will provide any guide to understanding the state of mind that transformed pepper number thirty into Pepper #30.

This impasse may be what led Ezra Pound to remark that the one thing he learned from viewing a good piece of art was that the other artist had done his job well, and thus he [Pound] was freed to explore another direction. The art critic faces a more vexing dilemma: in a nutshell, he cannot explain the finished art piece from looking at the artist, and he cannot explain the artist by viewing the finished art piece. And so art is treated like some foreign object, analyzed from afar for its relationship to politics and culture and history and (incestuously) to other art movements. Or more drudgerously catalogued into successive styles, periods and “Masterworks.” Textbooks compound the problem by reducing the history of art to the history of art that can be reproduced. VerMeer miniatures and Bierstadt murals are allotted identical quarter-page niches, and art that doesn’t lend itself to halftoning disappears entirely.

We’re not trying to set up straw men here, and certainly there’s no harm in standing back occasionally to gain an overview of history (and fantasize about your place in it). The point is simply that none of this will help you to get the paint to fall to the canvas the way you need it to. None of this will tell you what it’s like to set the hammer to the marble for the first time. None of this will convey the terror of walking onto the stage to face a thousand people. For the working artist, the very best writings on art are not analytical or chronological; they are autobiographical. The artist, after all, was there.

An ancient tenet in Chinese painting holds that the Master paints not the created thing, but the forces that created it. Likewise, the best writing about art depicts not the finished piece, but the processes that created it. In his Daybooks, Edward Weston offered an intimate account (too intimate, some would say) of the myriad of influences bracketing the moment of exposure. In The Double Helix, Watson & Crick recorded (in more restrained style) the conjecture and experiments that led to their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. In Daybook, artist Anne Truitt began a one-year journal (which in due time stretched to seven) filled with wisdom and insight. Weston’s passion, Watson’s logic, Truitt’s introspection: these are all driving mechanisms of process. Every artist has issues that lie similarly close to the heart. Every artist could write such a book. You could write such a book.