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Article Excerpt
In the contemporary arena the studio art MFA is under pressure: many respected postbaccalaureate programs such as the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and the Rijksakademie in the Netherlands produce highly competent art graduates without offering a formal academic qualification. Other popular residency programs, like Art Omi and Skowhegan, bridge education and practical professional support, offering relatively short, intensive workshops that aim to train and network early-career artists at a fraction of the cost of an MFA program. There has been a general move to privatize all levels of education in the United States, and for some time now the country has ranked at near-bottom internationally for state funding of the arts. Nevertheless, applications to US-based MFA programs are at a record high. Balanced against this picture is the phenomenon of temporary schools, such as Anton Vidokle's Night School at the New Museum--a weekly series of lectures, workshops, and screenings for a year involving invited artist-scholars--as well as the ongoing forums and dialogues with artists, community activists, and scholars generated by organizations such as Temporary Services and 16 Beaver. (1)
Internationally, there is an increased fascination with the profession of "artist-scholar," a category that encompasses not only research-based art practice, but also the emergence of quasi-institutions or artistic platforms that represent radical, conceptual reinterpretations of established forums for scholarship and inquiry. Such highly interdisciplinary and nomadic projects knowingly mimic the structure of the academy and its theoretical rigor--they are often organized by professors and practitioners who hold positions in traditional university departments--but are realized through platforms more commonly allied to museums and exhibition spaces. The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, to cite one prominent example, staged an exhibition, curated by Charles Esche, that was actually called Academy: Learning from the Museum.2 The Academy project attempted to capture some of the lost momentum from the never-realized and by now notorious Manifesta 6, a three-month interdisciplinary symposium, which had a structure more akin to an international biennial than an academic think tank. (3)
Whether these nomadic, nonaccredited schools and artist-led and -run organizations offer new models of teaching or innovative curriculum alternatives to the MFA remains to be seen. Yet cumulatively these programs continue to foster, albeit unevenly, future artists who reclaim the links between art and democracy, between education and service to the community. The emergence of sites alternative to the MFA might be a way to remind administrators that the material benefits of the MFA do not depend on art stars or market-value returns. Rather, postbaccalaureate programs still depend on the basics--dedicated teachers and serious students, who together create a fertile ground for a vigorous exchange about art, knowledge, and power, and the exploration of an artist's creative potential.
In light of the strong international participation and interest in scholarly art practice and the European promotion of the artist-scholar, as well as the growth of studio PhD programs, our roundtable comprises an international panel of artist-practitioners who have worked and studied in both Europe and the United States. While there is a distinct lack of MFA programs in continental Europe at present, the majority of the phantom academy projects have been begun or realized there. The contradiction between an excitement generated by academic programs and the relative lack of state-funded institutions to realize such projects in a traditional academic setting occurs at the very moment when European academia is trying to align itself more with the North American system, in a tumultuous series of bureaucratic and institutional realignments that question the value and purpose of an MFA in the contemporary setting.
--Senam Okudzeto and Susette Min
Gareth James: It's hard to talk about the current pressures on graduate art education without thinking about whether we are talking about some kind of new paradigm in regard to recent history, or if we are talking about this as a new par adigm in regard to the nineteenth century.
Senam Okudzeto: I'm using the 1999 signing of the Bologna Treaty as my benchmark. The Bologna Treaty called for the regulation of academic degrees in Europe through modular coursework and assessment, in line with the North American system, with long-term goals of creating greater mobility for students and increasing resources to European universities. A number of academics felt threatened by the Bologna Treaty's aims to "rationalize" degrees across Europe. This fear and a frustration with the already strict hierarchies that institutions demand gave urgency to more spontaneous forums of debate and art production. Perversely, the nomadic aspect of these kinds of projects fulfills one of the major aims of Bologna--a program of exchangeability such that graduates would end up with qualifications recognized across countries and institutions, and therefore have greater access to travel: a new form of migrant worker, so to speak ...
James: I do not see the Bologna reform or standardization raising concerns in terms of the curriculum so much as it is raising financial concerns. The BFA-MFA split facilitates the neoliberal exploitation of "student--consumers" much better than this strange kind of extendable European model. So that's mostly what I am hearing from people working in European schools. It's not about questions of interdisciplinarity or specialization. Generally the MFA program is designed to make an autonomous artist--not autonomous in the aesthetic sense, but autonomous in the sense of having agency. Reading critical theories should be about improving your understanding of the conditions of your life, and if that influences the way in which you make work, then great, fantastic. And it will, of course, because it's changed your relationship to the condition of culture.
Odili Donald Odita: We also have to take into consideration where the students are coming from, the reality of who they are. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there was concern for a more social-minded education, a sense of social welfare and being socially conscious. Today, students want good job placement. It's the environment that we are drawing students from, where parents pay exorbitantly for their children to go to these institutions. Martin, in your institution, do you have these same situations, where the student wants a viable education and at the same time wants to have good job-placement results because they are paying great amounts of money for their education?
Martin Beck: They do exist to a degree, but the situation is different, as in some Central European art-school cities not much of a gallery market exists. In Vienna or Geneva the student's prospect of a gallery career is slim simply because of the lack of an economy for "young art." That is a decisive difference to New York or Los Angeles, where there are many galleries and numerous...
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