Class Dismissed (an excerpt)
FRANCES STARK: Frankly, I did not know how to teach. You go to a university and you think it’s supposed to be an institution of teaching, that you’re supposed to be with teaching experts. Guess what? They don’t give a shit about teaching at all. They don’t hire people based on teaching experience. They just want to make sure that you’re going to meet your tenure standards or that you have a high-profile career, that you’ve published a lot. Artists who want to grow as educators are not supported by the institution, because the institution isn’t invested in their methodology.
I came into a mess and was asked to address the division between fine art and design. I did my best. Thank God my partner was a design expert, and I tried to tackle those problems. But basically, everyone is on their own. You go into the dean’s office and you negotiate your private salary and you don’t tell anybody else. If this is a pie factory and you’re selling your MFA pie for $100,000, Mr. Pie Manager, can you tell me what the ingredients of your pie are? They should be able to say, “We like a flaky crust. We like a soft crust. And in order to get a flaky crust you must do this and that.” But they don’t know the recipe. They don’t know the ingredients of the product that they’re selling.
I’m not saying that I want them to tell me what to do. I’m saying people don’t know how to teach. Students are not able to write paragraphs. And yet artists are coming in and they’re like, “Read this Deleuze handout.”
HELEN MOLESWORTH: You’re speaking about a very real part of this current crisis. We are living in a culture where some students get to college and still don’t know how to write, don’t know how to read, much less read critically. And then we have faculty who assign them twenty-five pages of Mille Plateaux and throw up their hands when it doesn’t go well. This is a kind of perverse version of the post-’60s fetish for de-skilling. Values that once seemed germane—like skills in draftsmanship or Cibachrome printing or color theory, as well as conceptual practices that confronted and critiqued traditional artistic skills and craft—have become profoundly perverted as they’ve been put through this corporatized, for-profit model that has no dialectical balance anymore. There is no counterweight.
FRANCES STARK: I was talking about undergrads, by the way. One of the main questions is whether there is a distinction between how you teach MFA and how you teach undergraduate. And what happens is that everyone starts to teach undergraduates like they’re graduate students. But that kid can’t even parse an episode of The Simpsons.
HELEN MOLESWORTH: Here’s what’s good. It’s trickling up. [Laughter.]
MIKE ESSL: I have taught at a place where—I mean, I probably shouldn’t say the name of the school, but I can tell you the initials are SVA. [Laughter.] I had a student who just never showed up. There was no medical reason, no explanation. When she did show up, there were just excuses as to why she didn’t do her work. I failed this student. And then I was called into the department chair’s office and I was told, “If you fail this person, she might not come back and we will lose $30,000.”
CHARLIE WHITE: Wow.
MIKE ESSL: And I said, “Well, that sounds like your problem. I’m not changing the grade.” And they gave the student’s mom my cell-phone number. She called me and said, “How dare you fail my daughter,” and I said, “How dare you raise somebody so lazy.” [Laughter.] And I hung up. And I have never been asked back to teach there again.
CHARLIE WHITE: Art students at an undergraduate level need an undergraduate education, like Frances said. They need strong foundational methods, the things that schools like Cooper have refined over generations. Graduate school is a completely different beast. It is in constant reevaluation and has changed radically from when I was in school. For example, the average age of the student has changed, who might go has changed, what they want out of the world has changed, why they are there has changed. So I want to cut the cord and say that undergraduate school and graduate school have nothing in common, but everything to gain from each other when they are in the same institution.
FRANCES STARK: Exactly.
A. L. STEINER: But teaching is such an incredibly intimate act. It can be very egalitarian. It can be very authoritarian. Everyone who comes in to teach has different interests, methods, experiences. I’m dedicated to teaching and learning, but they’re not solely experiences I’ve had inside an institution. I can relate to Frances on this. You know, I learned an incredible amount from artists and activists in Queer Nation, ACT UP, and the Women’s Action Coalition in the ’90s. I participate in pedagogy because I learn, not only because I teach. They’re symbiotic. But I will say that the intimacy of teaching, regardless of whether it’s a class of a hundred people or five people or one-on-one studio visits—there’s something that never changes, which is the energy of the people and the room, an interest in responding to what’s happening around you.
After my final year at USC, I felt extremely disheartened. We had recruited these people on behalf of the university, and what happened to them was something I could never have imagined, that absolutely did not need to—and should not have—happened.
HELEN MOLESWORTH: You’re talking about coming of age in the ’90s. I think that there is a generation now who has come of age underneath a huge umbrella of economic trauma, of the financialization of culture and the production of debt on the lower and working classes as a way to finance the extraordinary expansion of an oligarchy class. But amid today’s talk of trauma and things being stolen, promises broken and lies, the words of Walter Benjamin haunt me right now: that the state of emergency in which we find ourselves is not the exception but the rule. And those ruptures and breaks are part of the engine of how this slow, stuttering, iterative process of social change and something like forward movement—or just movement—happens. I just want to be mindful of how we understand the crisis we’re in now: It is real and it is particular, but I’m not sure it’s new.
CHARLIE WHITE: Yes, exactly,the financialization of culture and the production of debt on the lower and working classes. So? For this very reason we should consider the terminal degree something to support, not sell, right?
We have to see the logic of that move in ourselves as artists first. Truly free expression and experimental thinking are civic enterprises; they are not privatized exchanges. Art pushes boundaries for everyone. Our creative freedom is indebted to those who took risks before us, those who tested society’s readiness for new ideas. How do we support a generation of radical thinkers—radical individuals—if we shackle them to a monetized system by making them have to dig themselves out of a hole on day one?
FRANCES STARK: All I know is that art is something that I want to do because I have seen it work. It functions. I could look at it, and that dead artist, every single thing that they meant, could go into my brain. It’s a magical technology.
I want to honor that magic. And that’s what it means to be a teacher. I can learn from Amanda, because she’s putting form in front of me. She’s thinking through form. I’m looking at her stuff and it’s blowing my mind. The form is the art. It’s why we do this. It’s not because we want a certain position in society, or to climb up the ladder, or to juke the stats to ensure that we get a raise. We do it because we revere the form and the physical ability to have thought in form. That is why we are here. And the administrators don’t believe in that religion—don’t see that form, or don’t even understand form.
We believe that form manifests and resonates in unexpected, magical ways that other things don’t.
HELEN MOLESWORTH: Or, as my friend the artist Steve Locke says, there is no content without form. Ever.
CHARLIE WHITE: I’m a great believer in form—and school is form. I didn’t even love school when I was a student, but I have come to be a great believer in what art school can offer and the changes it can make, that it must make.
FRANCES STARK: I’m a great believer in school, which is why I quit USC. [Laughter.]
A. L. STEINER: I am dedicated to continuing this, whether it’s inside somewhere, outside somewhere, or both.
