BLOG/WRITING

Ch-Ch-Changes

When I began my training to be a visual artist in 1976 the art world appeared a very different place than it is now. The difference is not in the appearance of visual art itself, in fact it could be argued that not much really novel, conceptually, has been created since the early 20th century.  The difference seems in contemporary art's supporting ideologies; what viewers expect from it; it's societal and economic functions; what art now means to people, and especially those in 'the arts'. Few individuals seem to have noticed what I believe are radical changes, or have at least made the effort to comment on them, but in this post I feel compelled to offer some observations from the point of view of a working artist. Commentary and philosophy about the visual arts seems to have muted what actual working artists themselves think about art, and amplified what those in the domain of educated 'experts' and academics think about it. The defining of what is art seem to have shifted dramatically in the direct of those who know about art, from those who actually do it. I think the point of view of a working artist should be prominent in the overall comprehension of visual art and meaning of art, as I believe it once was.

There were periods over 40 years during which I personally didn't feel aware of change; I was too embedded and too preoccupied with making images for both fine and applied visual art. Developing and employing the (now dismissed as 'traditional') skills for the making of visual art and then applying them requires an enormous amount of both time and effort. It is, or was, a lifetime project and I couldn't easily see the forest for the trees. But I'd regularly come up for air and take a look at the topography of the visual arts in general and notice that massive changes were afoot. For example, my old art college was jockeying to become a degree granting institution and bring in white collar professional art academics and cut loose blue collar occupational artist-teachers. Only working artists my age might be able to make the necessary comparisons to what art was like...for an artist...to what it has become...for an artist. Younger people have only experienced recent time so experiential comparisons of what was and what now is are not possible, nor the noting of observable changes over the last 50 odd years.

So here's some observations; bear in mind they are conjectural for being anecdotal subjective experiences filtered through memory. But I don't think this subjectivity rules out their value.

-When I went to study art it was more about training. This is not to suggest there was no education in the process, but the most significant things you could learn was skills. In fact, by learning 'how to' do something you actually learn a lot 'about' it. If you just learn 'about' something you don't necessarily learn 'how to' do it, and are lacking insight into the actual process. This is the difference between theoretical knowledge and technical, or practical knowledge. This is a recurring concern of mine regarding drawing; there is a huge difference between knowing 'how to' draw and knowing 'about' drawing, and the latter is severely lacking. If you are studying drawing today, at a university, the first thing you might ask yourself is 'is your professor actually excellent at drawing' and if not what is the basis for their expertise and can you expect any enthusiasm for the subject from them? 

-The flagship visual art institutions for study in Canada in 1976 were colleges, not universities and they were difficult to get into (I have been told about 300 successful applicants would be accepted by my college out of about 3,000). As well there were not a lot of major art colleges. People often went to universities to study art because they failed to get into a college or because they wanted to study art and receive a steady and relatively lucrative income as a high school art teacher. Some students would leave art college and go to university for academic studies in art and then, with their received degree, go to teachers college. I recall it being said at the time, quite cruelly in retrospect but with some degree of truth, 'those who can't, teach'.

-The art world seems to have been radically colonized by academia in the last 40 years or so. I would venture to say that academia holds an almost complete hegemony over the visual arts, particularly at the institutional level, in my community and country.

-Academia, universities, as an 'organism' or 'entity', don't recognize entities or individuals that aren't products of themselves. They are utterly blind or oblivious to capability, knowledge and skills gained from other locations in society, for example, the workplace ( I have worked for animated film directors who got a job painting animations cels after grade ten and continued working and moving both laterally and upwards in an 'animation factory', doing layout, storyboard, and design over periods of several years). Or, self study. Universities only acknowledge the fiat currency of credentials and are oblivious of commodity currencies such as skill. Increasingly over the years, as the arts technocracy (curators, arts administrators and instructors) has been filled by credentialed individuals, and the blindness to the achievements of those from outside the university system has increased. An obvious reason for this is, of course, is that by insisting on taking courses, programs and pursuing formal study universities make money and their employees receive relatively high rates of compensation. This system of operations for universities has almost certainly resulted in the 'educational inflation' in the visual arts.

-My instructors in the 70's were generally working artists, or had been. They might work as illustrators, costume designers at the opera, create displays at the museum or science center, and, in the Fine Arts Department where I studied, they would also be exhibiting regularly at commercial and public galleries. Most were teaching part time. The teaching, for working artists, was a relatively well paid gig that could make the difficult and fickle existence of being a working artist slightly more secure, as well as providing the satisfaction of passing on skills to a new generation of working artists. In fact, I returned to my art college to instruct drawing and painting for a period of about 5 years whilst exhibiting and working as an art director and background painter for animated films. It still seems sensible to me that occupational artists should teach artists. But things seem very different today. The visual arts now seem to be taught largely by a cadre of full time or aspiring-to-be full time 'regularized' or tenured professional 'art educators'. They are usually not full time working artists and have probably never tried to earn their crust as an artist; at best they do a bit of their own art on weekends or holidays and call it 'research'. This new model actually deprives actual working artists of potential supplementary income instructing, made worse by the fact that official government funded art programs are funded generously by governments.

Furthermore, if whoever teaches art to a new generation defines art for that new generation consider how the meaning of art might change when it is instructed by professional teachers and not working artists. I suspect this is one of the most salient mechanisms for a change in the understanding of visual art over the last 50 years.

-The 'New Model Artist', the sort of artist who most students probably aspire to be is someone who teaches art full time at a university and is ultimately, once tenured, paid a steady upper middle class salary. They do their art in their spare time similarly to how university professors publish in their spare time. Because of a secure teaching position and salary there is no obligation for their art to be a commodity. So it is easy for art educators to produce non marketable ephemeral art forms such as installations or projections. The institutional public gallery system, also colonized by academia, has fetishized this sort of conceptual art and, as I often notice in their literature, demean the notion of producing art that can be sold as a commodity. It has been my experience that art educators also tend to encourage not thinking of art as a commodity. 

-Artists are criticized by the arts technocrats when trying to make a commodity out of the product of their labour...their visual art...but the same criticism is not to be leveled at those arts technocrats selling the products of their labour. It is quite all right for technocrats to make a commodity out of their professional services to the arts, their teaching at official government subsidized institutions, their arts administration in public galleries, and their curating. Why should the work of artists not be valued similarly to the work of arts technocrats? I believe this asymmetry is best thought of in terms of the labour movement; workers vs. management, where workers value is degraded and managements is upgraded.

-Some of the 'new' nomenclature in art clearly suggests how art has been defined in recent decades by 'professional' educators. Artists invariably now have a 'practice'...like a lawyer. There is a preoccupation with the word 'research', as with an academic or scientist. Contemporary artists are inter/multi/trans disciplinary; another academic shibboleth. Signalling an academic education is paramount in any contemporary artist statement; they 'hold' BFA's, and 'received' MFA's, which, due to educational inflation the latter has become an extremely expensive minimum requirement for any self respecting artist. I have been told my old art college, now a university, won't look at anything below a Phd in hiring an instructor.

-The academic emphasis in arts education has plunged the visual arts into the domain of words, to which images seem subservient. This has created a demand for the explicable at the expense of the inexplicable. If an artist (or student) cannot create an image that can be compressed into explicability then they are often considered to have failed. I have often detected in younger (than me) critics of visual art, or film, a sense of...almost outrage really...at not 'getting' what an image or a movie is about. It is almost as though they are being cheated. They fully expect to be able to explain, or have explained, what they have experienced and that their failure to do so is the fault of the artist or filmaker. People who view contemporary art are now, generally speaking, 'educated' in the verbal and written domains and they therefore have expectations that they should effortlessly receive verbal meaning from what they are viewing. It seems  inconceivable that they should not understand an image. As someone from the 20th century I feel quite the opposite. I feel that the domain of images is irrational, surreal, and communicates to very different, non verbal areas of the brain. I don't expect to necessarily understand images at a logical, rational or conscious level (although of course I try to. Or rather that part of my brain does, but I try to avoid giving it complete control of my visual perceptions). I can happily walk away from a gallery or a cinema stimulated, perplexed, confused, or 'dumbstruck', but I find this is something that few people today can tolerate.

-Returning to credentialism; when I was a student the diploma I received, the piece of paper, after four years of art college, wasn't the most important take-away. What was important was demonstrated competency through a portfolio. Your 'bag' was everything. Highly competent drawing was still valued as tangible evidence of having taken the time to observe and describe form, something that was considered essential for a visual artist. Drawings might not be the be-all-and-end-all of a portfolio but they seemed essential to demonstrate visual competency. If we view the visual arts as an economy, decades ago the strongest currency was the 'commodity currency' of demonstrated competency. This now seems to have been replaced by a fiat currency of paper credentials. The fact that a dim view is today generally held of skill based commodity currencies such as drawing means it can be almost impossible to determine 'how good' someone is by looking at their work alone. I have heaped art images found online from high school students, undergraduate students and graduate students into files and mixed them up and looked intensely at them individually. In all honesty in most cases I cannot discern, by looking at skill levels, to what level of education an image belongs. Only when I read what is written about the image by it's creator do I realize the level of education achieved by the creator; this is demonstrated, of course, by what are essentially fashionable academic code words/signals written in an obtuse post modern style that escalates according to achieved level of university education.

-There have never been so many people calling themselves artists per square kilometer in human history. Not just the astonishing numbers of people recruited by institutions to go to university to study visual art (and this is truly a huge difference between the past and present) but all the millions of people with no training, no ability, no idea, who suddenly become self declared artists, perhaps for example, when they retire. This is sort of the NeoDuchampian wet dream we live in. Everything is art. Everyone is an artist. But if everything is art then surely, realistically, nothing is art. This is the underlying nihilistic subtext to this way of thinking; antiart.

-The flow of value in the visual arts now seems to be primarily away from artists. The arts are no longer a model where, primarily, artists produce art which is consumed by others. Artists now spend vast sums of money obtaining an education (money that goes to art educators and the institutions that employ them), and then continue to spend considerable sums of money paying for materials, for studios, paying to exhibit online or in galleries, join galleries and organizations, and purchase arts services. Juried exhibitions are an astonishing example of this; they have become a business model for fundraising by fleecing artists in the vague/vain hope of exhibiting and receiving 'exposure'. You pay to play, and in return get only the hope that your art will be included in the juried exhibition. The model is really no better than a lottery. Working artists have been reduced to consumers at best and gamblers at worst. It seems it is artists themselves who primarily fund and float and drive the arts economy; it is not artists who benefit from the fundamental economic structure of art as an industry. It has been my experience that it is largely artists, bless them, who buy other artists work.

-It seems to me there was a time when visual culture was in large part defined by artists themselves. Not completely, of course; academics, aesthetes, collectors and critics all had their input. However, artists had a profound role in the definition of what visual art was because they used to be valued and their opinions respected. In the past culture transpired far more significantly from those who produced the artifacts, the arts was more of a 'bottom up' process, more authentic, more 'self propelled', and the non artist contributors role seemed in large part to describe or facilitate what was taking place on the ground more than trying to wrest control of it. There seems to have been a significant change in this respect over my lifetime. Artists don't seem to be having much of a say in defining art anymore; that has become the purvue of the professional art educators, the curators and arts journalists. If you view the visual arts as an intellectual economy it is now a kind of Soviet supply side economy that is steered by bureaucrats. Artists themselves are mere interchangeable fodder, Proletariat, in the contemporary regime. Observing how my local public gallery operates confirms this hunch.

-In the past, skilled artists made art. Now, anyone is allegedly capable of it. In our local public gallery, people apparently come off the street and are 'engaged' in 'make art' projects. Anyone can make art! So...who needs artists? This engagement is often described as a kind of accessibilty issue, a democratization of the arts, that everyone is open to the 'opportunity' to make art regardless of visual training or aptitude. All attempts at art are somehow equal. But why are accessibility and equality demanded for the making of art when it isn't for the curating of art, or the teaching of art, at universities for example? Teachers and professors work behind formidable gate-keeping institutions, unions and professional organizations and consider their professions exclusive. How would we feel about anyone off the street flying airliners or performing brain surgery? Why shouldn't visual artists be entitled to some kind of exclusivity as I believe they had in the past?