Is it because I'm bald?"
With this sardonic introduction, the keynote address "Photography and Reality" took the New York audience of arts professionals at the College Arts Association Annual Meeting off on a convoluted journey through the mind of artist Duane Michals. Listeners were alternately horrified and rolling in the aisles with his rapid-fire, straight from the hip discourse imploring artists and educators to "teach amazement," to wake up and take conscious action.
Michals's address, clearly a stream-of-consciousness performance, ranged from the abrasive (requesting the lights on the audience "so he could see people to attack") to the absurd ("I'm being sued by the Catholic church. When I was an alter boy, I used to abuse priests.") His own work, quirky, edgy photo narratives, with poetic text scrawled along the edges, explores themes of personal history, family, sexuality and body image, with a surreal aura and a sensitivity which belies his crusty persona.
Just a few days before, I was flying on a plane from San Francisco to Kennedy airport. There I was, at 30,000 feet, not quite able to sleep. Vaguely aware, as we all are these days, that my United jet was a potential soaring weapon. On my way to the CAA conference in New York in search of. what? Community, inspiration, excitement? Connection to a larger art environment? Perhaps simply because every time I've gone to the CAA meeting something happens that seems to matter. I discover something about art, or about myself. Hear something so brilliant, so stupid, or so incredibly touching that it lodges in my brain and takes root, and slender tendrils of thoughts begin to spread like vines.
When I was just out of graduate school, one of my colleagues at UC Berkeley expressed the opinion that the CAA conference was a vaguely hostile environment for artists. The atmosphere of academia, with a not-so-subtle implication that the historians are the intellectuals in the crowd, remains, with the studio art wing falling in as rather strange bedfellows. The CAA publication "Art Journal," for example, is often a bizarre conglomeration of articles about, say, 15th century altar carvings, juxtaposed with musings about sadomasochistic piercing rituals or public performances of excretory functions from the art practice wing.
So I found myself, at 30,000 feet, having irreverent thoughts. Does art history still hold significance in a society seeming on the brink of collapse? As painting "died" years ago, and "fine art" is now in some circles an endangered species, evolved into a creature which prowls the jungle, haunting the farthest corners of exotic lands looking for a spark of connection to the real, performing pieces which exist solely in helping the needy, serving the poor, building parks, picking up trash. How does academic debate about the certainty of authorship of a Renaissance painting or the significance of ornamentation on a Gothic cathedral arch share a kinship with the kind of edgy, desperate work so prevalent today?
History in all fields is by its very nature an exercise in inclusion versus exclusion, the official version of an event or time as opposed to the actual experience of being there. For many, certainly for minorities and women, marginalized or simply invisible for so long, the relevance of textbook art history might seem minimal: the strength of our enthusiasm for a discipline which has essentially excluded us is brittle, and our ivory towers threaten to shatter under the weight of our resentment.
While revisionist history and changing instructional media are the norm in art history, in the areas of studio art and design, even more radical changes are afoot. While painting and drawing classes are certainly not going to disappear overnight, their eventual atrophy does not appear as remote a possibility as it once did. Artists emerging today address a different set of criteria for creating successful artwork. Jacki Apple, professor at the Art Center for Design, chaired the panel "Rethinking Pedagogy in the Arts: New Models for a Changing World." The design and art history professors on her panel shared a vision of art practice and its study as an area in which the ground has shifted dramatically.
Hannah Higgins, for example, teaches performance art in the art history department of the University of Illinois, Chicago. As Higgins, daughter of Fluxus artist Dick Higgins remarked, "We are primarily trained to think about art visually and socially." Thirty years after Fluxus performance artists redefined the experiential nature of art, we must realize viewing these works in a lecture hall on a projector screen robs them of their vitality. Higgins makes a strong argument for the study of performance art as performative, rather than observational.
