Every year at the Creative Time Summit, the most innovative artists, activists, critics, writers, and curators come together in New York to engage with one another, and a global audience, about how they are attempting to change our world in unprecedented ways.
Link to video of Creative Time Summit talk above.
Text of Creative Time talk:
My name is Lee Relvas from MFA no MFA, and I’m here today speaking as one of the seven artists who made up the incoming class of MFA students at USC Roski School of Art and Design in the fall of 2014. After nine months, this past May, we collectively, as an entire class, dropped-out of the program in reaction to the school’s reneging on funding and curricular promises made to us, as a protest against the normalization of massive student debt, and to act on our desire to put our energies towards structures that encourage participation, agency, more weirdness and more joy. Before I begin, I want to draw a frame around our drop-out action and the larger context of this moment. Actively talking about difference and privilege is particularly important in light of the violence of white supremacy and erasure that students and faculty of color are experiencing and confronting right now at the University of Missouri, Yale, and campuses across the country. These communities cannot walk away from their experiences of and responses to racism any more than a person could drop out of her own skin. We want to take a moment to acknowledge our privilege in being able to walk away from our institution -- in the midst of its dysfunction and dismantlement-- and to stand in solidarity with the students, faculty, and communities responding to these very urgent conditions. Zora Neale Hurston wrote: “Gods always behave like the people who make them”, and today I’d like to remix that statement by replacing one word so it goes like this: Educational institutions always behave like the people who make them. Over the past century, we have had many makers of the educational institution, resulting today in a University that is a shimmering juggernaut of contradiction, a site formed as strongly by notions of exclusivity, elitism, and profit as it is by access and emancipation, each conflicting and co-existing with each other daily. In this specific moment, in addition to those histories, we have an educational institution increasingly made by, and in the image of, the corporation. We see this corporate model in the simple facts that USC tuition, like other universities, has increased an astounding 92% since 2001, while compensation for USC’s top 8 executives has more than tripled since 2001. Meanwhile, 80% of all faculty at USC is adjunct faculty, who are often paid less than the federal minimum wage. This severe imbalance creates leadership structures which rarely feel the impact of the systems they manage, and are most often held unaccountable for the negative consequences of these systems on others. This distanced leadership is in thrall to a disembodied technocentric world-wiew that believes that everything can be measured empirically, assigned value, and monetized for maximum profit, and this worldview becomes more entrenched the more it ignores the concerns and conditions of the classroom. These leaders are interested in short-term extreme changes - which mimic metric-tinged "results" - to serve as a false front of their "effectiveness" and "innovation capabilities". This lavishly-funded leadership defends their actions by freely employing an austerity rhetoric while never experiencing the austerity measures themselves. The re-making of the educational institution in the image of the corporation is by no means complete, nor is it total. I want to try to look at everything as complicated as it really is. And yet this re-making, because it was so quickly, forcefully, and incompetently attempted at Roski, had clear effects to those of us experiencing them. Erica Muhl was appointed Dean of the Roski School in May 2013, despite having no background or expertise in the visual arts field whatsoever. She was simultaneously named Director of the Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation, a new school within USC birthed with a 70 million dollar donation. Of this grand endowment, not a single dollar went to student scholarships. As this new Dean began to implement her systems over at Roski, there seemed to be a nearly immediate reversal of the tangible and the intangible. It was the intangible activity of what happens in the studio that was quickly targeted. New curriculum was proposed without studio visits, the thesis paper weighted over the thesis show, and the very idea of a close, longer-term mentorship with a Core Faculty jettisoned, because the work we did in our studios- the intangible processes of looking and learning and thinking, the intimacy of giving each other’s work our close attention, was dismissed, deemed irrelevant, without a place in the university because it couldn’t be easily measured, it could not be statisticized, and it could not be any further monetized. Meanwhile, every attempt was made to make our tangible, material concerns irrelevant. We were suddenly, and almost offhandedly, presented with a new funding threshold that would potentially double the debt we thought we would graduate with. When we pointed to documents clearly stating our existing funding packages, we were framed as being “demanding” simply for advocating for those things the School had already promised us. As if we were employees who had gotten bad Yelp reviews, apparently, the problem was with our attitudes. Contracts were broken by denying there ever had been a contract; promises were diminished into “unfortunate mistakes”. It was almost hypnotizing, and certainly infantilizing, the way these administrators tried to make the reality of tens of thousands of dollars in debt just disappear from our minds. But ultimately, it was my body that remembered the debt. When I started grad school, I had been paying off my undergrad loans for eleven years. Every time I was tempted to just go with the status quo and pile on the debt, I remembered those envelopes from Sallie Mae, and later a collection agency, showing up in the mail, the black type flickering into red signaling delinquency, the distracting panic that smudged my vision when I didn’t have the money for it, the surge of adrenaline swelling the tips of my fingers when Kevin from the collection agency called and demanded $500 dollars, and the defiant embarrassment electrifying the skin of my cheeks when I offered them $50 instead. This is the muscle memory of debt. And it was this bodily memory of debt that was triggered every time the Roski administration attempted to make debt inconsequential and incorporeal. We talked so much with each other, the seven of us. We were often huddled in the parking lot, or hunched around the kitchen table. As we talked, we realized how different our various positions were: we were at different points in our lives, we came from different cultures and backgrounds, we had varying levels of support from the larger art world, we were taking on different amounts of debt to be in the program, we enjoyed different privileges and would suffer different losses. And yet, finally, at different speeds and for different reasons, we all came to the decision to leave the program together. After we made our collective decision, we kept getting incompetent and contradictory emails from the administration, and instead of crying, like I often did at first, we would all start laughing! That’s when I felt like we had come to the right decision, when we all started laughing. Our individual decisions transformed into one collective action, and I think our laughter was an expression of that sudden magic. Zora Neale Hurston also wrote: “The dream is the truth”, and I want to share a few of our dreams-slash-truths we came to in our nine months of collective decision-making: That education should give you more options, not fewer options. That debt on such a scale that is now “normal” is invisibly inscribed on and held in our bodies, and often limits movement even as it provides access. That there is work to be done from inside the institution, and that there is work to be done from outside the institution. That school should never be the only option for material and immaterial support for people who want to think and create. That refusal is not an absence but an elsewhere. That our decision of collective drop-out was deliberated by each of us at different speeds, for different reasons, and from different moments in our lives. Our collective decision should not flatten these differences but instead highlight the incredible fact that collective action can be taken, and is taken, by people who exist in overlapping realities. This last one seems like the most important. Being with people: there are no terms for this friendship. And we came to this dream/truth: It’s not a drop-out, because there is no “out”; we’re still in this stew of debt and autonomy, art and money, access and exclusivity. No solutions have been found. After the one-way movement of dropping out, since then, our experiences have become diffuse, dispersed, scattered, although we continue to gather together. As the seven of us look for jobs again, look for new places to live, try to find new solutions to the old problems of time and money and art and resources, it is hard to know what the impact of our drop-out is, today, in the next week, in the next year. But simply, after nine months of attempting to speak back to the institution, after nine months in which our material realities were belittled and our immaterial work devalued, we actively choose to put our energies elsewhere. We decide to be the makers of something else. We choose to ask a different set of questions, and I want to ask them here now: Not what are we up against, but where are the openings? Not where are the resources, But what is our resourcefulness? What can we do when we do it together?
-November 14th, 2015
Written by Lee Relvas and inspired by conversations with Edie Fake, Ellen Schafer, George Egerton-Warburton, Julie Beaufils, Lauren Davis Fisher, and Sid M. Duenas