Behind Unfruitful Crits

Reading Thierry de Duve’s essay about Art Education I finally came to realize why I felt so uninspired at the end of college. In When Form Becomes Attitude, he talks about deconstruction as the new form of teaching art in college (this essay is from 1994 but it’s still pretty true, at least at RISD).

There are a couple of problems here. It is the method of deconstruction that has evolved with postmodernism that smothers art students into quiet despair, or else it drives them into a drunken stupor by the end of senior year. According to this model there is always a way to take apart verbally a work of art (or anything else) and to figure out what it is about. It presupposes that categorization is an inherent factor of critiquing art.

One aim of the deconstruction’s method is to force the students to create more complicated works by training them to resist easy classification by peers. So if a painting by a student is purely abstract his peers must find relationships between that piece and the ones made by influential abstract painters from the past, in a process that relentlessly reminds the student that research should consist of looking back in history at your “predecessors” in order to avoid falling into clichés. The result might be constructive but it is always a negative experience for the student.

Another problem is that there are so many branches of painting by now that student’s are getting used to associate themselves with only some of their peers and with only certain lineages. And of course some professors encourage this. This creates niches within the art school of students who follow similar lineages and students who are trying to come up with new and rebellious ways of working which is a lineage on it’s own. So there are groups of students who work with oil paint only and make abstractions on canvass, there are the conceptual artists who work with found objects and text, then the installation artists, or the performance artists who work with bodily fluids or make performance videos, and then there are of course the figurative painters, and those people who make crafts with an "edge". There are of course more subtle individuals who manage to transit throughout various circles and are hard to classify, but the groups are there and they are inclusive and skeptical of strangers, and to have access to more than one is certainly a privilege.

What this turns into eventually is very long and boring critiques, where students only speak during their own turn or their close friends’. During these crits some people fall asleep, and the people who do try to participate end up bashing their peer’s artwork because it has nothing to do with how they work or what they think like, or they just can’t deconstruct it so they say whatever, things as irrelevant and vague as "I don’t like the yellow there, it’s distracting". Realizing this tendencies might be the purpose of the last semesters of college, the next step is to forgive and to ask for forgiveness for any biased clashes, but then again, to really stick with and explore those circles that make most sense.