Howard Singerman

DP

We wanted to begin by discussing your book, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, which was published in 1999. Why did you write it?

HS

Arts Subjects came out of the dissertation I completed at the University of Rochester in 1994 or ’95. The book was inspired by my experiences as an art student first, at a small undergraduate liberal arts college from 1971 to 1975, and then in the MFA program at what was then called Claremont Graduate School from 1976 to 1978. In the book, I say something like, “I have an MFA in sculpture and I can’t cast, I can’t carve, I can’t weld.” The book was an attempt to figure out what that was about and, in a related sense, discern what it is that I was trained to do. I was also interested in how it is that the MFA degree and professional training for artists in the United States have come to shape art worlds, both nationally and locally. That’s, as it were, the project of the book.

DP

Did you study with Douglas Crimp at Rochester?

HS

I knew Douglas before I started at Rochester, but we didn’t overlap. Craig Owens was on the faculty at Rochester, and I interviewed with him. But, by the time I arrived to attend school in the fall, he was too ill to teach. It was kind of a remarkable faculty. Beyond Craig and Douglas, Kaja Silverman, Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, Mieke Bal, Janet Wolf, who was my dissertation adviser, and Sharon Willis were all there.

HM

It was the place to be. We wanted to hang with the idea that you were trained as a sculptor but didn’t learn how to cast or weld. If that was the case, in what context did learning take place?

HS

All of the formal education I received on how to make things came while I was an undergraduate. I learned various printmaking techniques, how to make a color chart, how to paint, how to draw—at one point in time I could draw. I learned to use basic woodworking tools, power tools, the table saw, the bandsaw, all that sort of stuff. I worked with fiberglass resin. Undergrad was, in that sense, a studio-intensive program that trained me in the traditional ways of making modern art—not necessarily art of an earlier period, to be sure. There was no marble involved. I think that remains true in many places, and it’s certainly true at Hunter College, where there’s a good deal of technical training on the undergraduate level, while on the graduate level, there’s access to tools and access to skills, but they’re not at the center of coursework.

At the center of coursework in graduate school in the 1970s at Claremont was critique. There were two classes on history and criticism that were taught by wonderful people, one of whom was Richard Armstrong. He would go on to be the director of the Guggenheim, but back then was a curator and art critic in Los Angeles. Visiting artists also came in and taught those classes. Ann McCoy, who now writes regularly for The Brooklyn Rail, taught there for a semester. Otherwise, it was studio credit, one on one, to the greatest extent.

DP

What did your MFA thesis exhibition consist of?

HS

Six or eight long, narrow shelves. They were probably 8 feet long and 4 inches wide. I arrayed various small rocks atop them. I had seen an exhibition of Mel Bochner’s at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati as an undergrad. Included were pieces where he arranged small stones on the floor in Pythagorean patterns. I picked that up. Also, the art department at Claremont was in the basement of Harvey Mudd College, which was their school of hard sciences. The building was in a field of pebbles. I would pick up rocks on the way in and arrange them on these shelves. Each of these very long, narrow shelves had a plexiglass front; some were left transparent, on the others I painted images of the arrangement of pebbles on the other side of the plexiglass, some schematic, others quite representational.

DP

In Art Subjects, you talk a little bit about the relationship between the sciences and the arts, namely: how the research-based model of the sciences influenced arts education in the U.S. Can you speak to the relationship between those two fields?

HS

Although we were in the basement of Harvey Mudd, I think I knew one Harvey Mudd student the whole time I was there. I knew him because we worked together in the bookstore doing shipping and receiving. Most of the education that still matters to me that I got at Claremont came from working in the bookstore. Everybody in the back room except our manager was a PhD student or a dropout PhD student. There was quite a wonderful array of shared knowledge.

What I argue in the book, in one way or another, is that there was an attempt to scientize studio art practice rather than foster a real conversation between studio art practice and the sciences. University administrators, particularly those who wanted to support the arts, kept linking the arts to the sciences by way of their shared interest in the creation of new knowledge, in experiments whose outcome was unknown, and in the manipulation of the physical world. It was a way of separating the studio arts from the humanities. And, because studio arts are expensive and need space, linking them to the idea of open-ended research was a way of appropriating some of the money that was pouring into the university for the sciences.

One of the things I realize about Art Subjects more and more as it gets further and further away, is how much of the book was framed by my experience in California. At the time, California had the nation’s largest and most expansive state system of higher education, between the UCs, the California State Colleges, and an exceptional junior and community college system. Teaching art in higher education was a major form of employment for so many of my friends. So much of the money that came to the state from the federal government was committed to professionalization.

HM

Speaking of the real influence that being in California had on you, were you interacting at all with people at CalArts, which was, of course, a hotbed for the California conceptualists of the time? Could Art Subjects be a sort of alternate history of conceptual art, which emerged at a similar period?

HS

While I was at Claremont and still in school, I knew very few people from CalArts. But, almost immediately afterwards, I met sort of everyone from CalArts really quickly. The students graduating from Claremont, Otis, CalArts, Arts Center, UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, created a huge, but still local, art world in many ways. CalArts was the most internationally focused institution, which was something [John] Baldessari had set out to do. People would come from Europe and New York to do visiting artist gigs at CalArts and Irvine. At Claremont, we would basically piggyback on that—we would drive over and pick them up so that they could do one at Claremont, too. There were a couple of different institutions in Los Angeles at the time—the Foundation for Art Resources that Dorit Cypis had founded, for instance—that would basically say, “An artist is coming from out of town, let’s find a venue for them to speak in.”

That’s the answer to your first question. The answer to your second question is, yes, it is a history of conceptual art, particularly in its Californian form. I’m not the first person to say this, but L.A. did not have the money running through a gallery system the way New York did. The colleges and universities provided economic support in L.A. That meant that there was an audience for things like performances, ephemeral exhibitions, pop-ups, things like that.

DP

Have you ever self-identified as an artist? What was it like to go from practicing artist to art critic to art historian?

HS

I stopped making work within a year of getting my MFA. In part, I stopped because I had no idea what I was making and many people’s art seemed more interesting than my own. Even while I was still in school, I had started to write. I was complaining to Susan Larsen, a historian of American Art at the University of Southern California (and the other wonderful history and criticism teacher at Claremont), about some exhibition or another, and she introduced me to the editor at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art Journal, Michael Auping, who went on to run the Ringling Museum in Sarasota. I started to publish there and in Art Week.

It’s somewhat flippant, but I did just find everybody else’s work more interesting than my own, so I just kept writing. It wasn’t an immediate transition to getting a PhD. Some of that had to do with what PhD programs in Southern California looked like at the time. It wasn’t until I got a day job as museum editor at the Museum of Contemporary Art, which at the time was brand new, that I thought maybe I should go get a PhD. I didn’t want to have to think month to month in the way you do when you write art criticism. I wanted to think about something for longer. The program at Rochester was brand new. And, to be clear, I don’t actually have a PhD in Art History. That program is Visual & Cultural Studies. That has some effect on what I do.

HM

A decent bit of your work is concerned with artists who are either sort of in some way or other pedagogues or are taking up pedagogy as a concern. I’m thinking of your book, Art History, After Sherrie Levine and your work on Mike Kelley’s Educational Complex. Is that a self-conscious decision, or is it just what you’re drawn to aesthetically?

HS

I think it’s probably just what I’m drawn to, but I see what you’re seeing. Art Subjects is an institutional history. I’ve come to think about what I do as institutional history. Sometimes there are individuals at the center of those histories. And to your list of Mike Kelley and Sherrie Levine, I would add Frances Stark, whose work is strongly concerned with pedagogy, both formally and informally. Those artists all work at the intersection of a writing practice and visual practice. I would also add Allen Ruppersberg. The first major catalog text that I wrote was about his work. So it is there, and it is my taste. The project I’m working on now, the exhibition that’s up at Hunter College on the Acts of Art Gallery in Greenwich Village, is also an institutional history.

DP

Near the end of Art Subjects, you distance yourself from arguments that the flatness of contemporary art is a result of artists’ retreat towards institutions and away from the literal world: “I have, over these last few pages, described a flattened landscape for, and an impossibility at the center of, contemporary art practice; perhaps I have written a narrative of decline, but I want to distance it from those arguments that fall back—with remarkable frequency—on the figure of the ivory tower. They continue to imagine that the problem lies in the retreat of artists and writers in the university from the ‘real’ world, in their taking refuge where they need no longer paint pictures that people want or write about common trials in common language.”

Earlier this week, we spoke to Our Literal Speed, a collective of academics and artists that presses a critique of the academy and art world. They made the point that the most profound instances of learning are unexpected, furtive, strange, and above all, literal. Is there a way to reconcile these two positions? How would you respond to critics who argue that contemporary art is flat because of its institutionality?

HS

I have a few responses to that. One is that contemporary art is an institution. I wrote those lines because I didn’t want people to read the book to say, “Oh, conventional university for artists is what has given us the flat, arid landscape of contemporary art.” Pushing back on that, I wanted to say, “Well, it also has given us Mike Kelley and Sherrie Levine and Allen Ruppersberg and a bunch of really interesting artists who are clearly working within it rather than trying to find their way outside of it.” I would also say (and I think I do in the book) that the modern university is fully enfolded in whatever it is we might mean by the “real world”; it has structured and shaped it. 

What I would say to Our Literal Speed’s point is that it’s right, except that those moments can and do also happen inside the spaces of the institution. You haven’t asked me about what it’s been like to have chaired a department that includes a huge MFA program for the last 10 years or to have taught in other art schools well beyond Claremont, where I went. It really isn’t clear what we teach artists or how to teach artists or what the necessary skills are to be an artist now. What is clear is that almost all of it happens one on one, even if you’re in a classroom of 15 people or 30 people. Pedagogy has to do with how someone speaks and how someone listens to what is being said. Learning is high touch in the sense that it really happens one on one. And it’s hard to predict. The MFA is not a degree that secures anybody’s ability to be successful as an artist.

When discussing arts pedagogy people will often want to point to Black Mountain College, for example. What they mean when they point to Black Mountain College isn’t the September to May version of Black Mountain as an undergrad college. They’re pointing to the summer sessions which ran from 1944 to 1953, and most often to the summer of 1948, which happened once and which was absolutely formative for a very specific group of people. Black Mountain didn’t last that long. The thing about art schools is that sometimes they last centuries if they’re European, or decades if they’re in the United States. Some years the faculty is engaged, fully there and present, and there’s a really great group of students, and it feels like energy. I realize that’s a very soft and humanist thing to say, but I do think it happens in the way that OLS suggests. That process, however, can take place within architecture that looks like the institution.

HM

How do you see the relationship between the art historian and the young artist?

HS

To be frank, it varies. And on both sides. I recently co-taught a class with Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who I’ve known since I was an MFA student, about art and social structures in California in the post-war period. One of the students in that class had her thesis exhibition last night, and mentioned to me that she’s continued to take art history classes beyond the required number and that she’s decided that she absolutely loves Greek and Roman art. That’s an interesting thing. One of our faculty members in Medieval is also really popular among MFA students. In part, MFA students come to the art historians at Hunter to take what they need from them.

That relationship has to do with looking at things, seeing things, thinking about the relationship between the artworks or material culture or visual culture that is the subject of the class and their own practice from within their own contemporary moment, and probably modeling versions of the relationship between artworks, social, economic and cultural structures at other historical moments to think through their own.

DP

In Art Subjects, you discuss at length how the language and critical theory consolidated under the banner post-structuralism became central to arts education in the ’70s and ’80s. I was reminded of a quote from The New Yorker’s Jackson Arn’s review of last year’s Whitney Biennial: “This year, as ever, eclecticism is mistaken for richness: ‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’ makes a well-publicized push for geographic diversity, but its most important lesson might be that twenty-first-century art can come from anywhere and still speak in the same jet-lagged monotone. More than a quarter of the artists on display, by the way, went to one of three schools.” How big can contemporary art’s public be if, as Arn suggests, an understanding of the codes of arts pedagogy are essential to its appreciation?

HS

Art Subjects was written in 1999 and lived and researched between the ’70s and the ’90s. It was very much written in a moment where postmodernism as a specific and pointed critique of modernism and a fulsome bibliography was given and understood. We had just entered a couple of versions of the pushback and intensification of that in relation to, on the one hand, the 1993 Whitney Biennial, and, on the other hand, the emergence of post-structural or Frankfurt school informed artistic practice conjoined with identity-based practices and politics. In California we called it the Beauty Wars: the sort of Dave Hickey plea for more color, more painting, more whatever. The polemical landscape was quite clear. My sense is that I have students—MFA students and MA students—that come in relatively armed with theoretical practices. Whether it’s post-Frankfurt School, post-Marxist, critical race theory, queer theory, or straight up post-structuralism. Some come in with that language, others not, and then still others with a kind of “it’s in the air” version of those languages. I guess I would say language is still absolutely crucial within the pedagogical scene, but the bibliography is no longer as settled as it was before.

As to where a possibility for contemporary art practice is or what the experience is like for the average museum goer: I was at the Museum of Modern Art last week, and it was packed. I don’t know whether people are taking away that which would have been in the artist’s statement, but there’s clearly some relationship between the two. And, I’m not trying to be pollyannaish about it, but I also don’t know that understanding is what the contemporary museum is about. For that you’d have to ask a museum expert, about what it is they want museum goers to take away from their visit. So, how’s that for a non-answer? [Laughs.]

DP

Not to take a paranoid position, but to take a paranoid position, I just found the Biennial exhausting. I felt that so much of the work looked like “art” and was couched in language or discourses that I couldn’t get. [Shrugs.] The wall text spoke more than the work, drowning it out, really. I say all this having written a thesis that was concerned with, in large part, the emergence of queer theory as an academic discipline and a political thing.

HS

It’s interesting because almost no artist whose work has any kind of research base or backstory is well received or well served by the Biennial format. The Biennial format, after all, was founded on paintings and discrete sculptures, things that were primarily visual objects. And, now I think the way you describe going through it, Drew, is like—to use a terrible word—shopping for the work you’re going to invest time in. Otherwise there’s a certain amount of cacophony and it may or may not be the fault of any given work of art that it's just not coming through. It might just not have the time or space to come through it. It’s a hard thing to curate a Biennial.

DP

Henry and I were just talking about the real predominance of figurative work.

HM

Yeah, I almost feel like we’re in another iteration of the Beauty Wars, where you go to any gallery in Chelsea and it’s just full of figurative painting. I’m not asking you to diagnose it, but maybe you can reflect on it in the context of the way fine art is being taught today.

HS

The art world runs on fads and amnesia. That’s a very cynical thing to say, but it indeed runs on an idea of the new, or the fresh. I think that figurative painting has also been really important for a younger generation of Black diasporic artists as part of a way of insisting on presence, identity, and being there. That turn has ramifications for studio art education, in so far as acknowledging it and posing more models and doing more drawing classes. The painting faculty at Hunter say to me, “We need a figurative painter on faculty, right? That’s how students want to work.” Of course, there’s a great variety of ways of going about this.

HM

I like the formulation that the art world runs on fads and amnesia. That model seems to run contrary to the model of a BFA or MFA where a rigorous art history curriculum is included. We were wondering whether developing a historical consciousness is still viable. Should an artist necessarily place their work in relation to historical work? Should they run with the incessant need for new stuff in the art world? What needs to be learned to be able to adapt?

HS

Well, it’s not for me to say what people should and shouldn’t do, despite the fact that I’m a teacher and former department chair. I’ll be very specific. I went to a two year MFA program at Claremont. I may never have been an artist, but having two years in MFA school was not helpful in the sense that you spend your first year figuring out what not to do and your second year panicking about putting up an exhibition. Hunter’s program is three years. I’m sure that both the undoing and the panicking exist, but there’s just a longer time to develop something like a practice. As trendy a word as some people think “practice” is, it really is a process of being able to go to the studio. Whether you’re a painter and therefore know what to do every day, or whether you’re making research based work or performance work or whatever, you’ve still got to make time and space to think and work. Slowing things down is step one.

At Hunter, both art historians and studio faculty are deeply engaged with linking students and their work to other artists, other kinds of work, histories of art, histories of thought and other discourses. In that sense, there’s the opportunity for either historical consciousness, or a situating of the work that one is doing. What any individual artist wants to do with that, that’s a different question. Thomas Crow once noted that Julian Schnabel was a student at the Whitney ISP and learned its cultural and historical lessons very well. He just didn’t quite take them in the way that other Whitney ISP students did, or that the faculty might have intended. I think we have a large program at Hunter and there are a number of different models of art worlds within that program. There are students in that program or recently out of that program who think about Chelsea and Tribeca. There are others who want nothing to do with the commercial gallery world, and don’t imagine that that’s what the school is for. They’re there in a sense to be in a community that they continue to build outside the program. And there’s a number of shades in between.

HM

It makes complete sense that any given MFA class is completely polyphonic in its interests. What does that mean practically for you as the chair? How do you attend to all of those interests and hold them up as valid? Is there space to be polemical?

HS

Our faculty can be critical, and they are. The most important thing, and it’s a thing I hope that we achieve, is that faculty are engaged, ethical and are speaking about work from a place they believe. In a way, that’s the best you can do. Most of the time it works out that way. I’m not speaking about Hunter specifically, but there are stories of students who while still in school are actively showing and engaged in a very high end art world. Those people are sometimes wonderful people, but it’s hard to say to them that their work isn’t working when they’ve sold a work to a collector for some chunk of money. There’s a fine line between promoting the program, promoting students in the program, networking the students in the program, and, at the same time, protecting students in the program from the sugar high of the art world. There’s the immediate attention you get when you’re just out of art school, and then the time comes two years later when you have to figure out what to do in your studio, all by yourself. That becomes more difficult.

DP

Is there a way that an MFA program could be a failure? Failure in the context of pedagogy is something I’m interested in.

HS

I’ve got a couple of answers. One is that it depends on what the expectations of the students coming into the program are—whether or not those expectations are realistic. It also depends on how it is that the program itself, the department itself, acknowledges what it’s doing. So one level of success has to do with whether or not students are coming out feeling cheated or not. And one of the wonderful things about Hunter is that, as a public University, it’s relatively speaking, truly inexpensive.

It’s studio space in New York, if nothing else. For in-state students, it’s about $10,000 a year and you get your own studio in Tribeca, so that’s not so terrible for three years. The faculty can sleep at night in the sense that we are not driving debt for a profession that is still very risky. So that’s one aspect of it: whether students’ expectations of the school kind match with what the school can do.

There’s over 200 MFA programs in the country. Whether and how they all work, whether they work locally, whether they work nationally, whether they’re represented at the Whitney Biennial, etcetera, that is another set of questions.

The other thing is: are the people who came through that MFA program still making art 5 years down the road, 10 years down the road, 15 years down the road? Is art their primary source of survival? Do they continue to practice? That’s another measure of success. It is our argument to our administration when they say, “Well, other schools get rid of people in two years. Why do you take three?” Our argument back is that it is our hope that that year in the middle allows you to establish the foundations of the studio practice that you can build on 5 years out, 10 years out, and so forth.

The other measure of success, and I won’t be alive long enough to see it, is whether people are 70 years old or 80 years old and still being artists. I find it remarkable when artists who are in their 80s and 90s, continue to make work, despite the fact that nobody’s paid attention. I think of that as kind of miraculous.