“The Autonomous Force of Objects”: The Value of Fine Arts Research
Sheri Wills, Dean of Fine Arts
Rhode Island School of Design
It is an honor and a pleasure to be here, to have the opportunity to engage in this important event about the role of the arts in building a strong future. I am happy to share with you what we are doing in the Fine Arts at RISD, and I am excited to see first hand the exciting work that is happening at the Estonian Academy of Arts. I look forward to sharing what I am learning from you with my colleagues at RISD.
The challenges the world confronts, from climate change to changing demographics, are complex and intertwined – and will require every form of disciplinary knowledge to successfully navigate our way through them. Scientists and engineers have told me that they might be able to invent solutions to confounding problems, like climate change, but until there is a cultural shift – until people change – their solutions will not be effective. The world very much needs the fine arts, because we influence culture.
Before I talk about art, I want to say a little something about Philosophy. Perhaps the most significant contribution the United States has made to the discipline of Philosophy is Pragmatism. We use that term in a non-technical way, in a day-today context, to mean dealing with matters in one’s life realistically and in a way that is based on practical rather than abstract considerations. This is deeply embedded in US culture – as it sounds to me like it is in Estonian culture too. To ascertain value, in the US we ask: What is it good for? What is its use for individuals, for society? And, in the US of course, will it be profitable?
On the surface, the fine arts seem to operate under a value system that differs significantly from the pragmatic approach, so it can be challenging to quantify the value of fine arts research, fine art objects, and fine art experiences – and by extension assess and quantify a fine arts education. That means it is our responsibility, as educators in the arts, to be interpreters of the fine arts within the dominant culture – to make clear the value of the fine arts and fine arts research.
The title of my talk, “The Autonomous Force of Objects” is a phrase the American curator and art historian, Kirk Varnedoe, penned to describe the power and influence of art objects – art objects that even when stripped from the specificity of their cultural context – the time and place in which they were made, and separated from the personality of the artist who made it – still retain the power to influence people and the ideas that can propel positive social change and instigate new ideas and new works of art and in other arenas.
The autonomous artwork does not require language, long paragraphs of descriptive text, to explain it. It does, however, require an audience – individuals and the public – to engage with it, to wrestle with it, to reconsider itself and draw new understandings from it. And from those new understandings new knowledge is developed – and culture pushes forward.
In the next ½ hour I hope to build out this idea of the force art objects have to shift culture, and how we might build that into our curriculum.
I will start by contextualizing our approach to educating artists at RISD; the role of material culture; then I will speak about how exhibition – individual and public engagement with works of art – is perhaps the most important point in the fine arts research process. Because, like publishing, exhibition opens the work to the public dialogue. I will present three examples from RISD to illustrate these thoughts.
RISD Fine Arts Context
RISD is a school that values hands-on making and believes in the significance of the knowledge one develops when gaining mastery over materials. Those materials can be wood or clay or code or media. Research in the Fine Arts at RISD remains studio-based – we are not post-studio at RISD. But we also teach our students also to study ideas and grapple with those ideas – through the hands-on manipulation of materials. This is what we mean by Critical Making.
But there is something else that has always been important to educating artists at RISD:
Mission statement: This is our mission statement, like many such statements, is very broadly written. But I share this with you to point out that the educating the public is written into our mission. At RISD, making art is not just an individual endeavor, but we are educating our students to make meaningful contributions to a global society – and what that means in our material-based Fine Arts division is making contributions to material culture. And at RISD, we define material culture as a range of objects – both functional and non-functional – that make meaning of the human experience.
– Material Culture
If you go online and Google ‘material culture’ you will find an incredibly diverse range of objects come up. From cars to the Pyramids to quilts to Barbara Kruger.
So, it’s helpful to have some basic categories with which to talk about material culture and I’d like to suggest the following (sometimes overlapping):
Functional – from ancient to contemporary, we need functional objects to stir coffee, build houses, and get from A to B. These objects could be crude or highly designed. How well they function determine their value.
Consumer – consumer products might be functional, but function is not their primary purpose. How well they sell determines their value.
Cultural (artistic) – Some of these objects are functional, particularly when speaking of cultural heritage items. And some of them are on a market – an art or antiques market. But their value is determined by something different than use or trade – rather how well an object is made, what meanings are intrinsic to the piece and how they impact our understanding of ourselves and the world are the primary determiners of the value of artistic objects.
The art object does not have a function, in the way a screwdriver does, instead the art object can move people – emotionally, intellectually, and physically. Meaningful encounters with art open the public dialogue in ways that change an individual’s perspectives, societal opinions and lead to meaningful cultural change. Heritage crafts remind us of who we are, and provide a rich cultural identity that provide a foundation from which to make well-grounded decisions for the future. Unlike the consumer object, which is often also non-functional, we do need art objects. Humans have always needed art objects.
Lascaux cave paintings are part of how we understand what it means to be human. We do not understand who made this or why she or he made it. But we do recognize its power and find meaning in them today. We interpret it the only way we can – through our individual and cultural context. This is as, Varnedoe says – an object that is autonomous, and we continue to feel its force – 17,000 years later. This, I argue, is the function and value of the fine arts.
Therefore, for art objects to exert this force upon us, the point of exhibition becomes extremely relevant to fine arts research. Research is important at every stage of the artmaking process, but investing in the dissemination of the art – and providing a structure for the capture of its reception is where we, in the Fine Arts at RISD, have identified a critical role for the art school.
Because art must engage with individuals and the public for it to be fulfilling it’s function – now I’m using the pragmatic terms that make sense to us – art is doing it’s job when it’s engaging dialogue. This is the point in the process that is perhaps the most valuable for fine arts research.
RISD examples – of the three examples I will show, the first two are work by alumns – Anna Schuleit and Kara Walker – and the third is an example of how we are beginning to incorporate the idea of the importance of exhibition – and the dialogue and new work it prompts – into the classroom – through an experimental studio we partnered with the Raqs Media Collective with this last spring.
Anna Schuleit
Anna Schuleit is a visual artist whose work lies at the intersection of painting, drawing, installation art, architecture, history, and community. Her works have ranged from museum installations made with paint, to large-scale projects in forests, on uninhabited islands, and in psychiatric institutions, using extensive sound systems, live sod, thousands of flowers, mirrors, antique telephones, bodies of water, and neuroscience technologies.
Her work engages individuals on an emotional level, and has led to deeper empathy for people with mental health problems in the suburban and semi-rural region where she lives.
HABEAS CORPUS A site-specific Sound Installation by Anna Schuleit Northampton State Hospital, 2000. http://annaschuleit.com/habeas.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zg4jOBR083I
Habeas Corpus is a piece she began as a grad student in Painting at RISD. Northampton State Hospital was in the town where she grew up and she had long been fascinated with its history and presence in her town. While the hospital was built in the 1800s in the spirit of compassionate reform, with the changing ideas about mental health in 20th century, combined with over-crowding, it had become a controversial institution by the time closed and slated for demolition in 1992.
She started the project as a student, by going into the abandoned building and gathering paint chips that had fallen from the walls and using them in her paintings. Her professors pushed her take her ideas further. From this, she developed the idea of making the building the site of an installation.
She spent three years garnering the permissions and permits from the city and state. She installed a complex sound system within the building and played a recording of JS Bach’s Magnificate – so that the piece could be heard outside the building. The effect was that the walls of the building itself were making the music.
The project was affiliated with Historic North Hampton, the Department of Mental Health, and Smith College and included a symposium – in which leading psychiatric researches presented their work, and public forum in which former patients publically shared their experiences.
This work had a powerful impact on the community. It celebrated and dignified the lives of the mental patients who had endured being institutionalized in this place, and gave voice to their experiences.
Three years later, when the Massachusetts Mental Health Center was closing its building, one with a similar history to the Northampton building, they commissioned Anna Schuleit to make another piece for that building.
This resulted in BLOOM – 28,000 potted, blooming flowers selected and sorted by color and placed throughout four floors of the historic building. Again, this piece included a symposium and open forum for people to talk about their experiences with the institution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnEpFjIJ0nM
http://annaschuleit.com/bloom.html
The artist says: “The reactions to Bloom ranged from expressions of delight to raw and renewed sorrow. It was a strange duality: at its core this project was intended to allow people free access to a building that had always been locked and mysterious, while opening its doors also (and especially) to those who had been there for years. The building meant many things to many people, as a workplace, a refuge, a place of confinement. The installation of live flowers…elicited as many reactions as there are stories.”
“I walked through Bloom with a close friend of mine who has spent a great deal of time inside similar hospitals. He was close to tears and repeated said he felt the desire to jump into the flowers… We recognized that Bloom brought beauty and wonder to what has always been an inherently taboo subject matter.”
“‘Never worry alone’ was a Dr. Tom Gutheil classic line, but because of the lack of social support, too many patients who came here had to worry alone. Anna saw these corridors as places to be filled with growth. For all the patients who never received flowers, these flowers are for you.”
“My therapist’s office was in the basement and the floor is covered in grass. Grass does not bloom but it cushions and it is in the right place. It is the foundation, it softens everything.”
“My mother told me, 36 years ago, “Hang on. They’ll find a cure. And today… oh so grateful… beyond any words, so grateful. Lives and sufferings have been redeemed here, and today we celebrate and honor, all of us, in this place, for better or for worse. Today, we flourish.”
Anna Schuleit spent years doing the groundwork, both artistic and bureaucratic to make these pieces – pieces that engaged a regional audience on an intellectual and emotional level and as such, shifted the public perception and response to those with mental illness.
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Kara Walker
Kara Walker is an African-American artist who explores race, gender, sexuality, violence and identity in her work. She is best known for her iconic, often life-size, black-and-white silhouetted figures, arranged in unsettling scenes on gallery walls. These visually arresting narratives draw viewers into a dialogue about the dynamics of race, sexuality, and violence in both the history the US and contemporary culture.
My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love http://www.walkerart.org/calendar/2007/kara-walker-my-complement-my-enemy-my-oppress
In “Seeing the Unspeakable” art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw Describes Walker’s work:
“Through her words, drawings, and silhouettes Kara Walker plumbs the unspeakable regions of our American collective memory as a way to confront spectators with their own psychological repression of negative historical imagery….Her silhouettes encourage involvement and interpretation, making for an interactive form in which the racial and cultural specificity of the spectator takes primacy.”
The black silhouette at once references a historic form of women’s handcraft that was often used for portraiture – while the human-sized scale brings the cutout characters face to face with the viewer. The silhouettes become like the shadows of those standing before them, a visualization of private sexual fantasies or violent nightmares, thoughts too terrible to utter. Like an unsparing mirror, Kara Walker makes visible what we wish would remain invisible in ourselves and in society.
There is a great deal to talk about with this work – but I want to focus on the impact the objects she makes have on individuals and the public – and the dialogue they generate.
A Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby http://creativetime.org/projects/karawalker/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/arts/design/a-subtlety-or-the-marvelous-sugar-baby-at-the-domino-plant.html?_r=0
In 2014, Kara Walker was commissioned by Creative Time in NY to create a piece in the cavernous space of a ‘historic’ sugar factory that was about to be torn down in Brooklyn, NY. The histories of sugar production and slavery in the US are deeply connected, so this project presented an opportunity for Walker to take her work to a monumental scale.
Roberta Smith in the NY Times describes the piece:
“Dominated by an enormous sugarcoated woman-sphinx with undeniably black features and wearing only an Aunt Jemima kerchief and earrings, it is beautiful, brazen and disturbing, and above all a densely layered statement that both indicts and pays tribute. It all but throws possible interpretations and inescapable meanings at you.”
The sugar baby is a monumental 35’ tall, encrusted with sugar, and surrounded by 13 molasses-colored boys — underage blackamoors — made of cast sugar. This piece expresses the complexity and multiple manifestations of power, as seen through the lens of the history of race and gender.
Kara Walker has said she would like her work to produce a sense of ‘giddy discomfort.’ I think that well describes the viewer’s experience of this work.
130,000 people visited this piece in one month. Walker purposely left the piece open to public interpretation – there were no placards defining the artist’s intent, no descriptive text that one would normally find in this kind of exhibition. The work spoke for itself, without language to shape one’s interpretation.
A Subtlety presents a black woman’s body as powerful, but also completely open for consumption – and is not only a comment on history, but clearly relevant to our current cultural moment. It doesn’t require a significant leap to think about celebrities, such as the singer, Beyoncé or American tennis champion, Serena Williams, to see a similar dynamic mirrored in our daily life.
Leaving a work like this open to public interpretation invites an uncontrolled element into the work. It was a bold and risky move for Walker to take, particularly because these issues are so current and sensitive in the US.
In our camera-obsessed culture, it was easy to predict that people would want to take pictures of the piece. So this activity was encouraged, including a hash tag for posting to social media. The pictures that people took of and with this piece extended the piece from a factory in Brooklyn to a worldwide freewheeling discussion, mostly online, of the issues the piece forces us to confront.
Not all of the pictures were ‘appropriate’ – and as is often the case when people are discomfited, they respond by attempting to diminish the power of that which is making them uncomfortable. In the case of Walker’s Sugar Baby, in resulted in photos that echoed the behaviors that she has embedded in the piece. Consciously or unconsciously people took these images that said: I’m part of the problem.
These selfies generated a vigorous dialogue all their own – inspiring blog posts, Facebook arguments, Twitter posts, newspaper stories and academic journal articles – that forced a new debate on race and gender that did not previously exist.
There was even a so-called selfie generator so that you could insert yourself into a picture with the sculpture, and then post to social media, so one did not need to visit the work to participate in the piece.
But not all of the images spoke to the lowest common denominator.
In the US, race and gender are two of the most volatile social issues we face – and Kara Walker’s giant sugar sphinx works to draw the public into the conversation and forces us all to confront our own, often unconscious, complicity in perpetuating the problem.
As such it is a dramatic example of how the force of an art object can shift the cultural dialogue and be enlarged by the public response to the work.
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Raqs Media Collective
The two examples I just gave are both from RISD alums – the question remains what are we doing in the classroom to educate artists to make “make meaningful contributions to a global society” and to become makers who generate a public dialogue to promote positive social change and generate knew knowledge?
We, like our peers in Estonia, are continually working on ways of reconceiving the studio experience, to blur the lines between the studio and other fields of research and engage with a global community of artists and thinkers. This must be a multi-pronged approach.
This spring we invited the Raqs Media Collective to host an experimental studio course in the Painting department, called A Myriad Marginalia.
(slide: Jagdeep Raina, The Gateway of Kingdom and Riches) http://jagraina.tumblr.com/post/117110632785/the-gateway-of-kingdom-and-riches
Artists, curators, philosophical agent provocateurs – Raqs is three individuals, based in New Delhi, who have been working together since the 1990s as a collective. They are interested in the transformation of urban space and contemporary realities, especially with regard to the interface between cities, information, society, technology, and culture. They have made a dizzying range of work, from films to sculptures and installations, to writings. It is appropriate that “raqs” is a word in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu meaning the trance state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl.
Their work is fascinating on many levels, but it is their approach to fine arts research that I am particularly interested in, and why I feel their work in the classroom is important.
Raqs believes that conversation – and the dialogues that art provokes to be a primary methodology of fine arts research. This is what they call ‘kinetic contemplation’ – and it very much aligns with RISDs perspective on fine arts research.
So, instead of organizing forums and public symposia (as Anna Schuleit does around issues of mental health care), or opening their work to public interpretation to be played out on social media (as Kara Walker did with A Subtlety) – Raqs integrates conversation into their work process, and invites others into that process.
The experimental course they taught at RISD was called A Myriad Marginalia. It was also the name of the exhibition that took place at the same time. The course took place in a public gallery in the RISD Museum – the gallery was at once transformed into a studio and gathering place for Raqs, the students and the public.
The course and exhibition celebrate the “marginalist”—usually an apprentice or scribe—who inspires new ideas by constructing a counter-narrative to the main body of a text.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pkzqPSdVI0
The group spent every afternoon in the gallery for a month. They set up a couch and chairs and provided tea and generally created a welcoming and contemplative environment – with museum visitors, students, faculty and staff to together develop a body of artistic, philosophical, and narrative resources that ranged from the medieval to the contemporary and produced an experimental manuscript. The studio/salon/gallery was a porous place, where students were taking a class for credit, but anyone from the RISD community, and the public was invited to drop in and join to any degree they wished.
Slide: Jagdeep Raina, Gems, Jewels, Rubies: On These Blessed Walls http://jagraina.tumblr.com/post/117110563730/gems-jewels-rubies-on-these-blessed-walls
This experimental studio engaged both students and the public in a complex dialogue that included both discussion and hands-on making that continues to generate new ideas and new knowledge in the RISD community and beyond.
As one student, Jagdeep Raina, described the experience: Conversations were held, laughter was constant, and the crowd became extraordinarily eclectic. One Sunday afternoon a museum guard excitedly grabbed my arm and asked if she could sit in and draw in the manuscripts. An elderly gentleman picked up a rare first edition of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, helping himself to some tea and sitting for hours engrossed in the novel. These are just two of hundreds of small, visceral memories that changed my relationship with the RISD Museum. Every person who entered became a part of a conversation and had his or her voices heard.
He goes on to say:
We engaged with intensive criticality the question of how we see ourselves as artists and realized the necessity of engaging with the world around us every single day. To enter a course with rigid expectations of how I should live my life as a thinker and artist and then have those expectations completely unraveled and remade—nothing is initially more devastating yet ultimately rewarding.”
As an academic institution, we uniquely positioned to structure and incorporate the importance of the dialogue surrounding the art object into the pedagogical program.
From the experimental studio that Raqs taught this spring, we now have a model from which to design and incorporate into our curriculum.
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Long Term Investment
I started this talk by speaking about pragmatism and the challenge of quantifying the fine arts in functional or economic terms. However, there are some parallels between art and economics. In economics, one can make a short-term investment, with the hope of immediate pay-off. Then there are long-term investments that will endure over many years.
As these three example illustrate, an important job fine artists do is, instead of looking for solutions, fine artists reveal different questions – I often say, instead of creating solutions, fine artists find new questions. We are problem-finders. This can be uncomfortably challenging to the status quo, and it can also be where some of the deepest value of art resides. As a society, we can’t begin to develop solutions, until we are asking the right questions.
The value of the fine arts is in unpacking the complexity of our contemporary interconnected, but diverse, global cultures. Artists often find the most meaning in the margins, in the places where the dominant culture is not looking, but where something profound is happening. In this way, (and many others), the fine arts make (and have always) made meaning of the human story, with complexity and nuance.
I chose these three examples because they very clearly illustrate the impact works of art can have on the public, but I do not mean to suggest that it is only work like these that is essential to cultural progress. When an artist pours personal and cultural meaning into a work, be it a painting, a ceramic pot, or digital media – that that object takes on an autonomous force that can shift culture.
The scale of that shift can be minute and personal or monumental and global.
We know the impact of a work of art may not be fully understood for generations to come, because educating artists is a long-term investment in culture. I mentioned at the start of my talk that scientists and engineers recognize that any solutions they develop will be useless, without cultural change. Therefore, educating fine artists is essential, perhaps more today than ever before in history.
Thank you very much.