Download - How Can We Overcome
This publication was made in Communication Design department
in Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon as a project of Fatih
Gözenç’s Erasmus program.
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Fatih
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ç“How can we overcome the institutional forms of art
schools?” That’s our question. How can we improve
ourselves by searching new alternative ways? How can
we break ourselves free from the institutions? How can we
overcome this pressure?
My article is ‘Teaching to Learn’ by Joseph Kosuth.
I selected this article because it shows us what does
education need to be and I decided to defend that critiques
because its subject completely matching with my thinking
style in education. I want this publication can be a guide and
a thinking area for you.
If we read and analyze these articles with side notes, you
can find lots of options and answers. Side notes are related
with articles, you can read them to understand personal
ideas and thoughts of writers. I thought these side notes
Also you can use sides of pages to write your own notes and
thoughts.
‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ is an critique of modern
art and its education. Its author Clement Greenberg was
one of the best critics about art. It supports my thoughts
about education. Paul Barlow’s and Sean Buffington’s
texts are about same subject too but with a different sight.
They always refer to Clement Greenberg’s essays. Thierry
Häusermann’s interview with Pierre Fantys criticizes art
education in Switzerland nowadays. Article of Amy Tofte
is more personal text than others and it explains ways to
survive art school like my article.
On the other hand, I wrote an article about my subject
named ‘What Should We Do?’ that explains ways of
overcoming the institutions. I wrote my experiences that I
use everytime. You can read this article in last pages.
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Art Teaching For a New AgeSean T. Buffington
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Art and the Academy in 19th CenturyPaul Barlow
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Teaching to Learn Joseph Kosuth
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Towards a Newer LaocoonClement Greenberg
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38What Should We Do? Fatih Gözenç
28Ways to Survive Art School Amy Tofte
32Creativity is Only Born Out of SkillsThierry Häusermann
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It seems we begin with two points; an institution and a
conversation. An art school, simply put, is a representative
of the institutionalization of art. It represents the world as a
collection of rules, practices, traditions, habits about art that
are organized within a social order. The presumptions and
prescriptions that are taught there are description of what art is.
When you describe art, you are also describing how
meaning is produced, and subjectivity is formed. In other
words you are describing reality. By teaching a description of
reality you are engaged in constructing it, and in this sense an
art school is a political institution as much as a cultural one (in
so far as one can separate them to begin with).
The conversation is inherited along with the institution
(they form part of it) but that discourse is formed, possibly
transformed, by the living. The discourse, when it is
the choosing of how art is to be made, takes a certain
form, prioritizes certain meanings. The most prevalent
institutionalized form has been a concept of art which
presumes itself to be either painting or sculpture. In order
to liberate art from such a formalistic and prescriptive self-
conception it was the agenda of work such as mine in the
mid-sixties to critique that institution while it simultaneously
provided an alternative to it. Any other role envisioned for art
by necessity follows this transformation of our conception
of it. For art schools then, as for art, there is really only one
process: this is a questioning process as to art’s nature. This
inquiry itself constitutes an institutional critique because the
art student then sees his or her activity as being less one
of learning a craft or trade (how) but rather as one which is
fundamentally philosophical (why).
Since the role of all institutional forms is inherently
conservative, there is a process basic to an art school
which attempts to promulgate and preserve whatever other
institutionalized forms of culture exist concurrent with it.
Thus, the prescriptive nature of an art school based on craft
and tradition (or an updated version of that) means, that the
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institution is there to provide the answers as to what art is.
In other words it engages in legitimizing the status quo of
existing forms and norms; they know what art is and they are
simply teaching it. This attitude teaches the inherited past
of the art school. From the guilds of artists and craftsmen
to the Academy and then the trade school in the recent
past, artists have been taught how to make art, but not to
ask why. Inquiries of a more philosophical nature have been
seen as the preserve of the university and not appropriate to
the ‘trade school’ demands of teaching the artist. What this
has also taught, however, is that art —and culture itselft— is
apolitical. Importantly, even profoundly, this view, not limited
to institutions as you will see, sees art’s process itself as
apolitical. Whether the content of an artwork is politicized or
not is less of a problem for the instiutionalized view of art than
artworks that do not leave intact their conception of what art
is, and by extension, what an art school should be. In this way
such artworks question their authority, a much more political
act than the symbolic ‘acting-out’ of the use of political
content within an artwork which, as art, does not question its
own institutional presumptions.
As I see it, then, the teaching of art is an important part
of the production of art. In many ways it is the tableau where
society, in practical terms, makes visible the limits of its
conception of art as it attempts to regenerate the institutional
forms that depict its self-conception. When our view of
art is limited, so is our view of society. If questions aren’t
asked in art schools, away from the conservative heat of
the art market, where then? If the political responsibility of a
cultural reflexivity (why) is not taught along with a knowledge
of the history of how artists have made meaning, then we
are doomed to be oppressed by our traditions rather than
informed by them. The teacher of art, as a teacher and an
artist, can do no more than participate with the students
in asking the questions. This, rather than attempting to
provide the answers as art schools traditionally do, realigns
8the priorities from the beginning. The first lesson, taught by
example that is to be learned as a process of thinking and not
a dogma in craft or theory.
The teacher is not the representative of the institution, but
one artist among several sharing a conversation. What is said
has its own weight. If a teacher is any good he or she learns
as much as the students. The ‘answers’, if there are any, are
formed by all of the participants in the conversation within the
context of their own lives, and their practical effect only within
that larger conversational process; the shared discourse
of a community. It is in the making of meaning —art— as a
discourse that art students experience themselves as they
begin the process of making the world. The concept of art
shared by such a teaching process has institutional critique
basic to it, but, by necessity it must avoid that as its sole
description. Because art is the teaching of art (although the
format changes), description quickly becomes prescription.
What this concept of art really reflects is the responsibility of
the artist to be a whole person; a political being as well as a
social and cultural one.
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9The dogmatism and intransigence of the “non-objective”
or “abstract” purists of painting today cannot be dismissed
as symptoms merely of a cultist attitude towards art. Purists
make extravagant claims for art, because usually they value it
much more than anyone else does. For the same reason they
are much more solicitous about it. A great deal of purism is
the translation of an extreme solicitude, an anxiousness as
to the fate of art, a concern for its identity. We must respect
this. When the purist insists upon excluding “literature” and
subject matter from plastic art, now and in the future, the
most we can charge him with off-hand is an unhistorical
attitude. It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every
other cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other
circumstances of the age in which its creators live, and that
there is nothing inside art itself, disconnected from history,
which compels it to go in one direction or another. But it is
not so easy to reject the purist’s assertion that the best of
contemporary plastic art is abstract. Here the purist does not
have to support his position with metaphysical pretentions.
And when he insists on doing so, those of us who admit the
merits of abstract art without accepting its claims in full must
offer our own explanation for its present supremacy.
Discussion as to purity in art and, bound up with it, the
attempts to establish the differences between the various
arts are not idle. There has been, is, and will be, such a thing
as a confusion of the arts. From the point of view of the artist
engrossed in the problems of his medium and indifferent to
the efforts of theorists to explain abstract art completely,
purism is the terminus of a salutory reaction against the
mistakes of painting and sculpture in the past several
centuries which were due to such a confusion.
There can be, I believe, such a thing as a dominant art
form; this was what literature had become in Europe by the
17th century.(1) By the middle of the 17th century the pictorial
arts had been relegated almost everywhere into the hands of
the courts, where they eventually degenerated into relatively
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(1) Not that the
ascendancy of a
particular art always
coincides with its
greatest productions.
In point of achievement,
music was the greatest
art of this period.
10trivial interior decoration. The most creative class in society,
the rising mercantile bourgeoisie, impelled perhaps by the
iconoclasm of the reformation(2) and by the relative cheapness
and mobility of the physical medium after the invention of
printing, had turned most of its creative and acquisitive energy
towards literature.
Now, when it happens that a single aft is given the
dominant role, it becomes the prototype of all art; the others
try to shed their proper characters and imitate its effects.
The dominant art in turn tries itself to absorb the functions
of the others. A confusion of the arts results, by which the
subservient ones are perverted and distorted; they are forced
to deny their own nature in an effort to attain the effects of
the dominant art. However, the subservient arts can only be
mishandled in this way when they have reached such a degree
of technical facility as to enable them to pretend to conceal
their medium. In other words, the artist must have gained such
power over his material as to annihilate it seemingly in favor of
illusion. Music was saved from the fate of the pictorial arts in
the 17th and 18th centuries by its comparatively rudimentary
technique and the relative shortness of its development as
a formal art. Aside from the fact that in its nature it is the art
furthest removed from imitation, the possibilities of music
had not been explored sufficiently to enable it to strive for
illusionist effects.
But painting and sculpture, the arts of illusion par
excellence, had by that time achieved such facility as to make
them infinitely susceptible to the temptation to emulate the
effects, not only of illusion, but of other arts. Not only could
painting imitate sculpture, and sculpture, painting, but both
could attempt to reproduce the effects of literature. And it
was for the effects of literature that 17th and 18th century
painting strained most of all. Literature, for a number of
reasons, had won the upper hand, and the plastic arts —
especially in the form of easel painting and statuary— tried to
win admission to its domain. Although this does not account
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n(2) Pascal’s jansenist
contempt for painting is
a symptom.
11completely for the decline of those arts during this period,
it seems to have been the form of that decline. Decline it
was, compared to what had taken place in Italy, Flanders,
Spain and Germany the century before. Good artists, it is
true, continue to appear - I do not have to exaggerate the
depression to make my point - but not good schools of art,
not good followers. The circumstances surrounding the
appearance of the individual great artists seem to make them
almost all exceptions; we think of them as great artists “in
spite of.” There is a scarcity of distinguished small talents.
And the very level of greatness sinks by comparison to the
work of the past.
In general, painting and sculpture in the hands of the
lesser talents — and this is what tells the story— become
nothing more than ghosts and “stooges” of literature. All
emphasis is taken away from the medium and transferred
to subject matter. It is no longer a question even of realistic
imitation, since that is taken for granted, but of the artist`s
ability to interpret subject matter for poetic effects and so
forth.
We ourselves, even today, are too close to literature to
appreciate its status as a dominant art. Perhaps an example
of the converse will make clearer what I mean. In China, I
believe, painting and sculpture became in the course of the
development of culture the dominant arts. There we see
poetry given a role subordinate to them, and consequently
assuming their limitations: the poem confines itself to the
single moment of painting and to an emphasis upon visual
details. The Chinese even require visual delight from the
handwriting in which the poem is set down.(3)
Lessing, in his Laakoan written in the 1760s, recognized
the presence of a practical as well as a theoretical confusion
of the arts. But he saw its ill effects exclusively in terms of
literature, and his opinions on plastic art only exemplify the
typical misconceptions of his age. He attacked the descriptive
verse of poets like James Thomson as an invasion of the
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(3) And by comparison
to their pictorial and
decorative arts doesn’t
the later poetry of the
Chinese seem rather thin
and monotonous?
12domain of landscape painting, but all he could find to say
about painting’s invasion of poetry was to object to allegorical
pictures which required an explanation, and to paintings like
Titian’s Prodigal Son which incorporate “two necessarily
separate points of time in one and the same picture.”
Guiding themselves, whether consciously or
unconsciously, by a notion of purity derived from the example
of music, the avantgarde arts have in the last fifty years
achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of their fields of
activity for which there is no previous example in the history
of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its “‘legitimate”
boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy.
Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance,
of the limitations of the medium of the specific art. To prove
that their concept of purity is something more than a bias in
taste, painters point to oriental, primitive and children’s art as
instances of the universality and naturalness and objectivity
of their ideal of purity. Composers and poets, although to a
much lesser extent, may justify their efforts to attain purity by
referring to the same precedents. Dissonance is present in
early and non-western music, “unintelligibility” in folk poetry.
The issue is, of course, focused most sharply in the plastic
arts, for they, in their non-decorative function, have been the
most closely associated with imitation, and it is in their case
that the ideal of the pure and the abstract has met the most
resistance.
The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums,
and there they have been isolated, concentrated and
defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique
and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity
of its medium must be emphasized. For the visual arts the
medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting
and pure sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator
physically. In poetry, which, as I have said, had also to
escape from “‘literature” or subject matter for its salvation
from society, it is decided that the medium is essentially
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13psychological and sub or supralogical. The poem is to aim
at the general consciousness of the reader, not simply his
intelligence.
It would be well to consider “pure” poetry for a moment,
before going on to painting. The theory of poetry as
incantation, hypnosis or drug —as psychological agent then—
goes back to Poe, and eventually to Coleridge and Edmund
Burke with their efforts to locate the enjoyment of poetry in
the “Fancy” or “Imagination”.(4) Sound, he decided, is only an
auxiliary of poetry, not the medium itself; and besides, most
poetry is now read, not recited: the sound of words is a part
of their meaning, not the vessel of it. To deliver poetry from
the subject and to give full play to its true affective power it is
necessary to free words from logic. The medium of poetry is
isolated in the power of the word to evoke associations and
to connote. Poetry subsists no longer in the relations between
words as meanings, but in the relations between words as
personalities composed of sound, history and possibilities of
meaning. Grammatical logic is retained only in so far as it is
necessary to set these personalities in motion, for unrelated
words are static when read and not recited aloud. Tentative
efforts are made to discard metric form and rhyme, because
they are regarded as too local and determinate, too much
attached to specific times and places and social conventions
to pertain to the essence of poetry. There are experiments in
poetic prose. But as in the case of music, it was found that
formal structure was indispensable, that some such structure
was integral to the medium of poetry as an aspect of its
resistance... The poem still offers possibilities of meaning
—but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely
realized, the poem would lose the greatest part of its efficacy,
which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities
by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling
over it. The poet writes, not so much to express, as to create
a thing which will operate upon the reader’s consciousness
to produce the emotion of poetry. The content of the poem
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(4) Mallarmé, however,
was the first to base a
consistent practice of
poetry upon it.
14is what it does to the reader, not what it communicates. The
emotion of the reader derives from the poem as a unique
object —pretendedly— and not from referents outside the
poem. This is pure poetry as ambitious contemporary poets
try to define it by the example of their work. Obviously, it is an
impossible ideal, yet one which most of the best poetry of the
last fifty years has tried to reach, whether it is poetry about
nothing or poetry about the plight of contemporary society.
It is easier to isolate the medium in the case of the plastic
arts, and consequently avantgarde painting and sculpture
can be said to have attained a much more radical purity
than avantgarde poetry. Painting and sculpture can become
more completely nothing but what they do; like functional
architecture and the machine, they look what they do. The
picture or statue exhausts itself in the visual sensation it
produces. There is nothing to identify, connect or think
about, but everything to feel. Pure poetry strives for infinite
suggestion, pure plastic art for the minimum. If the poem, as
Valéry claims, is a machine to produce the emotion of poetry,
the painting and statue are machines to produce the emotion
of “plastic sight”. The purely plastic or abstract qualities of
the work of art are the only ones that count. Emphasize the
medium and its difficulties, and at once the purely plastic,
the proper, values of visual art come to the fore. Overpower
the medium to the point where all sense of its resistance
disappears, and the adventitious uses of aft become more
important.
The history of avantgarde painting is that of a progressive
surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance
consists chiefly in the Hat picture plane’s denial of efforts to
“hole through” it for realistic perspectival space. In making
this surrender, painting not only got rid of imitation —and
with it, “literature”— but also of realistic imitations corollary
confusion between painting and sculpture. (Sculpture, on its
side, emphasizes the resistance of its material to the efforts
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15of the artist to ply it into shapes uncharacteristic of stone,
metal, wood, etc.) Painting abandons chiaroscuro and shaded
modelling. Brush strokes are often defined for their own sake.
The motto of the Renaissance artist, “Ars est artem celare”, is
exchanged for “Ars est artem demonstrare”. Primary colors,
the “instinctive,” easy colors, replace tones and tonality. Line,
which is one of the most abstract elements in painting since
it is never found in nature as the definition of contour, returns
to oil painting as the third color between two other color
areas. Under the influence of the square shape of the canvas,
forms tend to become geometrical (and simplified) because
simplification is also a part of the instinctive accommodation
to the medium.(5) Where the painter still tries to indicate real
objects their shapes flatten and spread in the dense, two-
dimensional atmosphere. A vibrating tension is set up as the
objects struggle to maintain their volume against the tendency
of the real picture plane to re-assert its material flatness and
crush them to silhouettes. In a further stage realistic space
cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward,
parallel to the plane surface. Sometimes this advance to the
surface is accelerated by painting a segment of wood or
texture trompe l’oeil,(6) or by drawing exactly printed letters,
and placing them so that they destroy the partial illusion of
depth by slamming the various planes together. Thus the artist
deliberately emphasizes the illusoriness of the illusions which
he pretends to create. Sometimes these elements are used
in an effort to preserve an illusion of depth by being placed
on the nearest plane in order to drive the others back. But
the result is an optical illusion, not a realistic one, and only
emphasizes further the impenetrability of the plane surface.
The destruction of realistic pictorial space, and with
it, that of the object, was accomplished by means of the
travesty that was cubism. The cubist painter eliminated color
because, consciously or unconsciously, he was parodying,
in order to destroy, the academic methods of achieving
volume and depth, which are shading and perspective, and
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(5) But most important
of all, the picture plane
itself grows shallower
and shallower, flattening
out and pressing
together the fictive
planes of depth until
they meet as one upon
the real and material
plane which is the actual
surface of the canvas;
where they lie side by
side or interlocked or
transparently imposed
upon each other.
(6) Trompe l’oeil, is an
art technique that uses
realistic imagery to
create the optical illusion
that depicted objects
exist in three dimensions.
16as such have little to do with color in the common sense of
the word. The cubist used these same methods to break the
canvas into a multiplicity of subtle recessive planes, which
seem to shift and fade into infinite depths and yet insist on
returning to the surface of the canvas. As we gaze at a cubist
painting of the last phase we witness the birth and death
of three-dimensional pictorial space and as in painting the
pristine harness of the stretched canvas constantly struggles
to overcome every other element, so in sculpture the stone
figure appears to be on the point of relapsing into the original
monolith.
Sculpture hovers finally on the verge of “pure”
architecture, and painting, having been pushed up from
fictive depths, is forced through the surface of the canvas to
emerge on the other side in the form of paper, cloth, cement
and actual objects of wood and other materials pasted,
glued or nailed to what was originally the transparent picture
plane, which the painter no longer dares to puncture —or if
he does, it is only to dare. Artists like Hans Arp, who begin
as painters, escape eventually from the prison of the single
plane by painting on wood or plaster and using molds or
carpentry to raise and lower planes. They go, in other words,
from painting to colored bas-relief, and finally —so far must
they fly in order to return to three-dimensionality without at
the same time risking the illusion— they become sculptors
and create objects in the round, through which they can free
their feelings for movement and direction from the increasing
ascetic geometry of pure painting.(7)
The French and Spanish in Paris brought painting to the
point of the pure abstraction, but it remained, with a few
exceptions, for the Dutch, Germans, English and Americans
to realize it. It is in their hands that abstract purism has been
consolidated into a school, dogma and credo. By 1939 the
center of abstract painting had shifted to London, while in
Paris the younger generation of French and Spanish painters
had reacted against abstract purity and turned back to a
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(7) Except in the case
of Arp and one or two
others, the sculpture
of most of these
metamorphosed painters
is rather unsculptural,
stemming as it does from
the discipline of painting.
It uses color, fragile and
intricate shapes and a
variety of materials. It is
construction, fabrication.
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nconfusion of literature with painting as extreme as any of
the past. These young orthodox surrealists are not to be
identified, however, with such pseudo or mock surrealists of
the previous generation as Miro, Klee and Arp, whose work,
despite its apparent intention, has only contributed to the
further deployment of abstract painting pure and simple.
Indeed, a good many of the artists —if not the majority—
who contributed importantly to the development of modern
painting came to it with the desire to exploit the break with
imitative realism for a more powerful expressiveness, but so
inexorable was the logic of the development that in the end
their work constituted but another step towards abstract art,
and a further sterilization of the expressive factors. This has
been true, whether the artist was Van Gogh, Picasso or Klee.
All roads led to the same place.
I find that I have offered no other explanation for
the present superiority of abstract art than its historical
justification. So what I have written has turned out to be an
historical apology for abstract art. To argue from any other
basis would require more space than is at my disposal, and
would involve an entrance into the politics of taste —to use
Venturi’s phrase— from which there is no exit on paper. My
own experience of art has forced me to accept most of
the standards of taste from which abstract art has derived,
but I do not maintain that they are the only valid standards
through eternity. I find them simply the most valid ones at this
given moment. I have no doubt that they will be replaced in
the future by other standards, which will be perhaps more
inclusive than any possible now. And even now they do not
exclude all other possible criteria. I am still able to enjoy
a Rembrandt more for its expressive qualities than for its
achievement of abstract values as rich as it may be in them.
It suffices to say that there is nothing in the nature
of abstract art which compels it to be so. The imperative
comes from history, from the age in conjunction with a
particular moment reached in a particular tradition of art.
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This conjunction holds the artist in a vise from which at the
present moment he can escape only by surrendering his
ambition and returning to a stale past. This is the difficulty for
those who are dissatisfied with abstract art, feeling that it is
too decorative or too arid and “‘inhuman,” and who desire a
return to representation and literature in plastic art. Abstract
art cannot be disposed of by a simple-minded evasion or by
negation. We can only dispose of abstract art by assimilating
it, by fighting our way through it.
Where to? I do not know. Yet it seems to me that the
wish to return to the imitation of nature in art has been given
no more justification than the desire of certain partisans of
abstract art to legislate it into permanency.
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It has become a cliche to identify ‘academicism’ in art as
a negative force, associated with the mechanisation of
culture and the repressive authority of social institutions.
The term appears constantly in commentaries on art in the
nineteenth-century, when an heroic ‘avant-garde’ is said to
have struggled against academic agents of conformity and
banality. But what exactly is this ‘academicism’? Numerous,
very different, artists have been saddled with the label.
Clement Greenberg in his essay ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’
(1940) produces a list of ‘kitsch’ nineteenth-century
academics, naming some of the culprits: ‘Vernet, Gerome,
Leighton, Watts, loreau, Böcklin, the Pre-Raphaelites etc’.
The list is odd, as we shall see, but one thing is clear.
Academic art is bad art. ‘Academic’ is not simply a label
which describes a particular type of painting. It is an act of
evaluation. As Greenberg himself says in his most influential
essay, ‘Avantgarde and Kitsch’(1) (1939), ‘self-evidentIy, all
kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that’s academic is
kitsch’.
What does this mean? Of course, the word ‘academic’ is
widely, if loosely, used to refer to whatever may be deemed
stuffy, irrelevant or uninspired. But here something more is
being claimed. Greenberg and other commentators do not
use the word simply to suggest such attributes, though the
are usually implied. Greenberg is claiming to place the artists
he lists within a critical and historical category. But how are
we to define this category? The list contains Neoclassicists,
Symbolists and Naturalists. All are apparently ‘academic’ in
the sense in which Greenberg is using the term.
Greenberg’s own attempt to explain this will be
considered later, but it is important to note that his usage
was thoroughly established by the time he attempted to
theorise it. Indeed, it has been central to the consensus
that has emerged in twentieth-century critical commentary
on nineteenth-century art. It is expressed, for example, by
the critic André Salmon, who describes an encounter with
(1) “Avantgarde and
Kitsch” is the title
of a 1939 essay by
Clement Greenberg,
first published in the
Partisan Review, in which
he claimed that avant-
garde and modernist
art was a mean to resist
the ‘dumbing down’
of culture caused by
consumerism. The term
‘kitsch’ came into use
in the 1860’s or 70’s
in Germany’s street
markets.
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the ‘naive’ artist Henri Rousseau at the Salon des Artistes
Français, the annual exhibition organised by the French
Academy. Salmon is at pains to point out that he was only
visiting the Salon ‘professionally’ as a journalist. Rousseau,
however, had chosen to go and was ‘transfixed before a
mediocre portrait signed by Courtois, an academical artist
today quite forgotten’. Rousseau, it seems, admired Courtois
for his ‘finish’. Salmon goes on to defend Rousseau’s
apparent lapse of taste.(2)
Salmon identifies Courtois’s ‘academic’ identity against
his own avantgarde values, and against Rousseau’s naivety,
both of which are identified with authentic art. Salmon’s
encounter with Rousseau is difficult because Rousseau
chooses to visit the Salon, an institution self-evidently,
for Salmon, identified with bad taste. Furthermore, it is
Courtois’s ‘finish’ —his technical skill— which fascinates
the untrained Rousseau. Salmon seeks to turn this very
skill against Courtois, presenting him as a petit-bourgeois
pedant, a man who restricts ‘expression’ to Thursdays.
For Salmon, Courtois’s skill is the centre of the
problem; it is something which obscures proper judgements
of taste. The technically incompetent, but artistically
worthy, Rousseau is emhralled by the deceptive skills
of the aesthetic non-entity Courtois ‘Academic’ culture
—normally avoided by Salmon— works to generate a
systematic misrecognition of art: alluring but false values
front which Salmon, the cultural sophisticate, must rescue
the naive Rousseau. Courtois is associated with both
compartmentalised conventional respectability(3) and with
production-line manufacturing.
This is the central ‘myth of academicism on which
Greenberg draws. It works to describe an institutionally
powerful but aesthetically impoverished art at its most
pervasive during the nineteenth-century. This academic
art is sustained by the teaching and exhibiting practices
of the various European academies, most importantly the
(2) What is best about this
story is that the answer
perfectly describes
Courtois’ work. He
was the honesty of a
bad academic painter
stuffed with ‘general
culture’ and his naivety
was not as worthy as
Rousseau’s. It is reported
that Courtois, having
been invited to lunch on
‘any thursday’, replied:
‘impossible, i am doing
a portrait and i always
put in the expression on
thursdays.”
(3) Expression on
Thursdays, religion on
Sundays, etc.
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French Academy. It’s the ‘official’ art of the nineteenth-
century. Despite its status, and its contemporary popularity,
it is in fact —as Greenberg and Salmon know— merely the
degraded remnant of post-Renaissance naturalism, destined
to be supplanted by the ‘avantgarde’, the oppositional and
innovatory art it seeks to denigrate.
What is surprising is that, despite its pervasiveness, this
usage has remained, for most part unexplored. Certainly,
the concept of the avantgarde itself has been examined at
length and, in addition, there have been important studies
of the major European academies of art, their histories and
values. Some biographical and critical literature also exists
on the work of better known artists who have been labelled
‘academic’, or ‘pompier’ — a pejorative term applied to
French nineteenth-century Neoclassicists.’ But in such texts
the central myth is generally either ignored or uncritically
repeated. It is clear that Salmon’s words are suffused with
complex and interrelated assumptions (concerning culture,
truth, class identity, institutions), all of which bear upon his
use of the term ‘academic’. These assumptions need to be
unpacked. This will involve exploration of the legitimating
and theorising function of the term ‘academic’ within avant-
garde discourse, its relation to the positions of so-called
academic artists themselves, their institutional roles, and the
ways in which the aesthetic nullity ascribed to academic art
by Salmon has been —and continues to be— asserted and
sustained.
This project is complex. This essay merely seeks to
look at some of the issues to be addressed, and to bring
into the open some paradoxes and preconceptions which
are persistently occluded in art historical writing on the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We are familiar
with Salmon’s judgements.(4) His intervention at the Salon,
seeking to break the spell that traps Rousseau, is connected
to his implicit equation of academicism with the pomp of
public authority; a spectacle which generates a faith in the
(4) That the ‘bad’
painter Rousseau is, in
reality, good, while the
seemingly ‘good’ artist,
Courtois, is in truth bad.
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legitimacy of social institutions. It is no coincidence that the
modern concept of academicism de clops alongside the
Marxist theory of ‘false consciousness’. It can be plausibly
argued that this attitude emerges with the avant-garde
itself in the late 1840s. Courbet’s claims for Realism were
famously connected with his anarchist politics. Likewise, in
Britain, Pre-Raphaelite(5)criticism of the Royal Academy (RA)
arose from their belief that academic (Raphaelite) practice
was a form of mechanisation — the aesthetic equivalent to
the rationalising and disciplining functions of early industrial
manufacturing. If to the rationalising and disciplining
functions of early industrial manufacturing.This oppositional
identity is what characterises the ‘avantgarde’. It is certainly
new in cultural history and is tied to the emergence of
social criticism, which itself seeks to articulate radical
socio-economic transformation. When Greenberg equated
acadenticism with commercialls produced commodities
(kitsch), he repeated this connection, hut also sought to
claim a space flir the avant-garde apart from mechanised
market-led culture. However, an obvious difficult arises
from the identification of this lineage. The Pre-Raphaelites
appear prominently on Greenberg’s list of ’academics’. As
we shall see, this problem persistently recurs as soon as the
avantgarde/academic split is examined, but at this stage it
is enough to note that it arises from the double role of the
concept as Salmon and Greenberg use it —its conflation of
aesthetic evaluation and critical-historical description.
The questions, then, are these: how or why did academic
are become ‘bad’ art? Was it necessary that it should do so?
What is the logic —both aesthetic and historical— of this
judgement?
(5) The Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood (also known
as the Pre-Raphaelites)
was a group of English
painters, poets, and
critics, founded in 1848
by William Holman Hunt,
John Everett Millais and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
They argued against
institutions of Victorianist
traditions and hard rules
of Royal Academy in
London. They tried to
overcome institutions
after Renaissence era.
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In arts education, something profound is happening that will
force us to rethink what and how we teach.
Art making has changed radically in recent years. Artists
have become increasingly interested in crossing disciplinary
boundaries, choreographers use video, sculpture, and text;
photographers create “paintings” with repurposed textiles.
New technologies enable new kinds of work, like interactive
performances with both live and Web-based components.
International collaboration has become de rigueur. (1) Art
and design pervade the culture witness popular television
programs like Top Design, Ink Master, and the granddaddy
of them all, Project Runway. And policy makers and
businesspeople have embraced at least the idea of the so-
called creative economy, with cities rushing to establish arts
districts, and business schools collaborating with design
schools.
Those developments are already affecting how the
arts are taught: Curricula are becoming more flexible, with
students encouraged to reach outside their departments to
master whatever tools they need to make the art they want
to make.
The means of artistic production are widely available,
resulting in what I call a radical democratization of artistic
expression. It is possible now, at very low cost, to acquire
sophisticated creative tools and to use them without much
training. Indeed, the tools themselves can provide significant
guidance to the novice user and even make creative
decisions for him or her. And, of course, work produced in
this way can be disseminated almost instantly to potentially
enormous audiences —as free content or packaged and
sold as consumer products.
One might question whether such cultural production
ought properly to be called artistic. Artistry, after all, is
manifested not in the thing made but in the judgment
exercised in its making. Polaroid and Instamatic cameras
might have made us all vacation photographers, but most of
(1) Imposed. The thing
that has become
intolerable for some
people.
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nus never become Garry Winogrand or Lee Friedlander. And
Die Hard conceptualists might go further and argue that it’s
the idea more than —or in place of— its crafted form that
makes art meaningful and sets it apart from mere expression
or observation.
The technological changes we are witnessing will
not threaten conceptual rigor or craft, nor will the ease
of expression and communication make art obsolete. But
these shifts are changing what we mean by art making and
what counts as meaningful, crafted expression. To say so is
not to judge the quality of that expression or to lament the
rise of vulgarity or the lowering of standards. It is simply to
observe that this democratization of expression will alter
fundamentally how students —aspiring artists— think about
art, its meaning and purpose, and the ways in which it is
made.
These shifts will also change the professions for which
educational institutions like mine prepare students. After
all, if technology becomes smart enough to make design
decisions, then designers could increasingly become
technicians, operators of machines instead of creative
professionals. But the more profound and less visible impact
will be on how students think about their creative pursuits.(2)
They arrive at college having shot and edited
video, manipulated photographs, recorded music or at
least sampled and remixed someone else’s designed
or assembled animated characters and even virtual
environments, and “painted” digital images all using
technologies readily available at home or even in their
pocket. The next generation of students will have designed
and printed three-dimensional images, customized consumer
products, perhaps “rapid-prototyped” new products I can’t
imagine what else.
Students today are not simply bombarded by images,
consuming them in great gulps, as previous generations did;
they are making the environments they inhabit, and making
(2) We cannot say with
certainty what that
impact will be. The first
generation of so-called
digital natives is reaching
college only now; the
environment they grew
up in which seemed so
radical and new to many
of us just a decade and
a half ago is already a
punchline. Soon it will be
an antiquated joke that
doesn’t even make sense
anymore. Remember
AOL? Remember
plugging in to access the
Net? Today’s students
don’t.
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meaningful connections among images, stories, mythologies,
and value systems. They are creative and creating.(3)
So what is the task of arts educators? Is it to
disabuse these young people of what we think are their
misconceptions? Is it to inculcate in them an understanding
of the “proper” way to create, to make art or entertainment?
Is it to sort out the truly artistic from the great mass of
creative chatterers and to initiate them into some sacred
tradition? Maybe, maybe not.
Or maybe the task of the educator is to help them
develop judgment, to help them to see that creating, which
they do instinctively, almost unconsciously, is a way of
learning, of knowing, of making arguments and observations,
of affecting and transforming their environment. And
perhaps that’s not so very different from what we do now.
We do it now, though, in the context of a curriculum and
institutional histories oriented toward specific professional
training and preparation. We seek to develop in students
the critical faculties needed to thrive in clearly defined
professions. But in the future, we may have to rethink our
purpose and objectives. We may have to reimagine our
curricula, recast the bachelor-of-fine-arts degree as a
generalist not professional degree.
In a media-saturated culture in which everyone is both
maker and consumer of images, products, sounds, and
immersive experiences like games, and in which professional
opportunities are more likely to be invented or discovered
than pursued, maybe the B.F.A. is the most appropriate
general-education experience, not just for aspiring artists
and designers but for everyone.
That poses challenges for arts educators. We are good
at equipping students who are already interested in careers
in art and design with the skills and judgment necessary to
succeed in artistic fields and creative professions that are
still reasonably well defined. We are less good at educating
them broadly, at equipping them to use their visual acuity,
(3) But their notion of
what it means to create
is different from ours.
It’s something one does
to communicate with
others, to participate
in social networks, to
entertain oneself. Making
things; images, objects,
stories is mundane for
these students, not
sacred. It’s a component
of everyday experience,
woven tightly into the
fabric of daily life.
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ndesign sensibility, and experience as makers to solve the
problems—alone or in collaboration with others—that the
next generation of creative professionals may be called on
to solve. These will be complex problems that cross the
boundaries of traditional disciplines, methodologies, and skill
sets ranging from new fields like data visualization, which
draws on graphic design, statistical analysis, and interaction
design, to traditional challenges like brand development,
which increasingly reaches beyond logos on letterhead to
products and environments.(4)
Curricula would not be configured as linear, progressive
pathways of traditional semester-long courses, but
would consist of components, such as short workshops,
online courses, intensive tutorials, and so forth. Students
would pick and choose among components, arranging
and rearranging them according to what they need at a
particular moment. Have a problem that requires that you
use a particular software program? Go learn it, to solve
that problem or complete that project. Want to pursue
a traditional illustration-training program? Take multiple
drawing and painting studios.
Linking all of this together would not be a traditional
liberal-arts curriculum but what one faculty member at the
University of the Arts has called a liberal art curriculum—one
focused on design as problem solving, on artistic expression
as the articulation and interrogation of ideas. Instead
of an arts-and-sciences core curriculum separate and
disconnected from studio instruction, we would build a new
core that integrates the studio and the seminar room, that
envisions making and thinking not as distinct approaches but
as a dynamic conversation.
This fantasy of an alternative arts education—which
resembles experiments that other educators have attempted
in the past —begins to veer into utopianism, though, and
a vague utopianism at that. It would be impossible to
administer and to offer to students cost-effectively. And
(4) To do that, arts
colleges would have to
reorganize their curricula
and their pedagogy.
Teaching might come to
look a lot more like what
we now call mentorship
or advising. Rather than
assume that young
people know what they
want to do and that we
know how to prepare
them to do it, we would
have to help them to
explore their interests
and aspirations and work
with them to create an
educational experience
that meets their needs.
Needs like; trying a
different path that
student wants, showing
examples of people that
done before, being a
supportive mentor about
their decisions.
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most students would probably find it more perplexing than
liberating.
But I see an urgent need for new models that respond to
the changing conditions affecting higher education models
that can adapt to conditions that are in constant flux and
to an emerging sensibility among young people that is
more entrepreneurial, flexible, and alert to change than our
curricula are designed to accommodate.
We need an educational structure that takes instability
and unpredictability as its starting point, its fundamental
assumption. If a university is not made up of stable, enduring
structures arranged linearly or hierarchically —schools,
departments, majors, minors— but rather is made up of
components that can be used or deployed according to
demand and need, then invention instead of convention
becomes the governing institutional dynamic.
I’ve compiled a sort of 12 commandments for surviving art
school. And for those of us who have graduated… these are
reminders of what making art should always be.
Question Your Methods & Keep Yourself Open to
Changing Them
Most things in art-making relate to a comfort level. As
artists we are sometimes tricking ourselves into staying
inside our comfort levels rather than growing through new
things. Related to this is the idea of taking “real” risks vs.
“calculated” risks. A real risk is about what’s commonly
called “failure” but failure is only an attitude. Failure is
actually success because you have the chance to learn
something about yourself. You should never fear it.
Expand Your Practice
What better way to challenge yourself with real risk than
do things you’ve never done? Getting outside what you
already know not only expands your practice, it will give you
confidence in a new way. It might also change your methods.
Find Your Own Mentors
Mentors come from everywhere. A mentor is not determined
by age, occupation or position. This is the person that keeps
you grounded and challenges you in new directions. Listen
carefully when people talk about your work. They might be
offering you an ad-hoc moment of mentorship. Sometimes
this person is yourself.
Be a Mentor to Someone Else
When someone comes to you and asks for your help. Be
aware that they might be looking to you for mentorship.
Don’t be a dick and assume this, just be aware. And don’t
get full of yourself. Respond with the amount of care,
compassion and responsibility this task deserves. You
don’t have to know all the answers. The best mentors ask
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lquestions no one else can see. A Mentor is never a know it
all.
Meet Artists Outside Your Art
The faster you find and develop relationships outside your
specific art practice, the faster you will understand your own
art. Find reasons (or excuses) to collaborate in areas you
don’t know. Take advantage of someone who is an “expert”
in another field and study how they talk about your art. Do
the same for them. Learn all you can from how others create
and how they deal with the same questions/fears/doubts/
stresses that you do.
Meet People in the Real World
Get outside of your school and meet/see other artists
performing/working in your community, even if they are not
superstars. And beyond that, meet other people in the real
world who don’t even practice art for a living. Meet people
with “normal” jobs and talk to them about their worldview.
An artist is a disciple for the world, not just the circles that
drink our kool-aid.
Constantly Balance Your Arrogance and Humility
That’s right, be a little arrogant. A better way to say this
is create with abandon then assess with doubt. There is a
moment of creation where you have to work as if the world
can’t touch you. Then pull back and see what’s really there
so you can become someone with craft. Keep in mind this is
never an excuse to be an asshole. That’s why the balance is
important. You’re better than everyone but you also suck.
Constantly Develop Your Understanding/Relationship to
Feedback, Critique & Reviews
You are in a marriage with these things whether you like
it or not. You must constantly tend to them. Understand
the difference between them and how they are meant to
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serve your art. Take in all of them at a time that feels right.
Remember that you have the control in all of these situations.
But don’t be afraid to loosen that control. You learn most
about these things by assessing the work of others and then
talking to them about their process. The goal is to make this
marriage healthy, supportive and not abusive. Sometimes
the review needs to sleep on the couch and give you some
space.
Practice Being a Visionary
See the thing in your mind and then make it happen. Let
nothing get in your way. Don’t settle for almost. Adjust when
necessity dictates and when it actually serves the art. But do
everything you can to move things from your imagination to
the real thing. This takes practice. Don’t wait for that special
moment when you get a solo show, a concert at Carnegie
Hall, a bunch of money or cast in a lead role. Figure out how
you can make this thing happen the best you possibly can.
And go do it. And if you can’t get help do it yourself. You
need to know what it takes.
Finish Things and Move On
No matter how you work… find an end point to aim for, even
if your work is a larger work-in-progress. A sense of meeting
goals is important for your forward movement. Break larger
projects into steps you can handle. Or get to a point with
something and put it down. You can always come back
to things. Nothing ever dies. Nothing ever goes away. It
becomes an important part of your infrastructure. The more
you have in you… the stronger you will be. The more you
can explore new avenues, the more opportunity you have to
discover new things.
Be Patient. Be Kind. Be a Good Person
To yourself and everyone around you. Even if you don’t
respect or like someone, you will be a better artist by being
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lkind because it keeps you in touch with your humanity. I
didn’t say be a pushover. I didn’t say don’t stand up for what
you believe. But I’ve never known a conflict between people
to be helped by anger, pettiness and aggravation. Being
an artist is hard enough, embrace those around you with
respect at all times.
Write a Personal Manifesto for Your Art
Start with “I believe…” and keep writing about all the
things you believe personally that you want to create/reflect
with your art. This document might be 1 paragraph or 30
pages. Doesn’t matter. You should constantly be revising
and refining it. You should go back to it often and make
adjustments. This will evolve as you do. Doing this will slowly
change your life.
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Pierre Fantys is a photographer, formerly professor and head
of photography unit at ECAL Ecole (Cantonale d’Art de
Lausanne), Switzerland and now director of ERACOM (Ecole
Romantic d’Arts et Communication), Lausanne, Switzerland.
TH: In Switzerland, the 20th century bequeathed an
incalculable graphic design and typographical heritage
to current generations and clearly continues to influence
students and professionals, from an aesthetic but also
and above all, from a methodological point of view. What
influence do you think previous generations of designers
have had on the most recent and what do you find worth
developing in this respect, as the new head of a graphic
arts school?
PF: In our country, there are two slightly different contexts
to consider; the”Suisse Romande” (French-speaking part
of Switzerland) and Switzerland. I think there was a kind of
slump, there was a generation of respectable designers, like
Werner Jeker and Roger Pfund... Then it seems to me there
was a break, as if, to put it simply, they had no children.
In some ways they let the light go out, and that light was
quality. I find that their descendants, if indeed there were
any, were not equal to the task. For me, there was a gap
and then a renaissance with, firstly in the city of Biel/Bienne
and people like Norm (Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs), for
example, who came from a professional school; and in its
wake there was the ECAL (University of Art and Design
Lausanne).
Before that there was a clear filiation, the Basel
designers, modernism... basically a whole series of people
who built the reputation of Swiss design. Those people
taught, whether at Basel, Biel/Bienne or elsewhere. And so
they created a kind of family, with a quality that was passed
on to the next generations. I think this worked well until there
was the break of post-modernism, which is currently much
discussed, but which left graphic design a bit like an orphan.
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tysSo there was Biel/Bienne, the ECAL, and then as a
result, it seems to me that everyone is now trying to raise
standards. There has been widespread reawakening and a
high level of quality. In education, and from the point of view
of a teacher, I have the impression that before, while I was at
ECAL, you could feel a little isolated, whereas now, you see
people doing interesting things at all of the schools. When
you look at the success of HEAD (Geneva University of Art
and Design) —it subcontracts communications, unlike ECAL
which entrusts this task to its students.(1)
TH: What educational approach do you envisage to
sustain this impetus? Perhaps a return to fundamental
benchmarks? I see Müller Brockmann’s fundamental
work on your bookshelves.
PF: Now is an opportunity to return to fundamentals —that’s
what I preach. I would use the word “revisit” fundamentals
that we have almost forgotten, rather than returning to
the past I see the potential filiations of people like Müller
Brockmann or great typographers like Wolfgang Weingart
with designers like Ludovic Balland, Jonas Voegeli, Cornel
Windlin or, of course, Norm. At a given point in time, these
people have to some extent reconnected with a tradition
which dates more from the 1950’s than the 1980’s. We hit a
crisis in the 1980’s...
But there is still the matter of tools and results. Suddenly,
the arrival of digital technology and IT tools created
confusion, which gave the impression that it was enough
to just be “creative” a word I find extremely ill-used, to
mean anything and nothing. Today everybody, at all levels,
says they are a designer, be they graphic or something
else, and I think we need a little order and, above all, a little
professionalism.
Professionalism needs to be adapted to the times. We
are no longer in the heroic Switzerland neither in the 1950’s,
that is over, but we must re-examine the fundamentals of this
period, it is the basis of true expertise. Creativity does play
(1) Generally speaking,
the schools profiles
are rising and there is
a movement that will
continue to create
emulators and followers.
I hope that ERACOM
(Ecole Romande d’Arts
et Communication
Lausanne) will soon
enter that race.
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a part and it must be stimulated in young designers, but they
must also be given the tools of the trade; it is something that
is becoming essential.
TH: You have spoken about the profession and expertise
and have also mentioned the subject of creativity.
Ideally, what place does it hold in training?
PF: I think that both are absolutely necessary and I don’t
mean to say that we want to cover everything.
There is an ideal blend to be found between rigour,
which is typically Swiss, and a kind of impertinence,
creativity, I would even say madness that can exist at the
same time, and that is when it becomes fabulous. For
example, when you have the rigour of modernism, with all
the freedom that is to be found in recent years in some
graphic designs, you find fantastic interactions. It is essential
to achieve both. If you only take refuge in creative design,
you create useless individuals and, by locking yourself up in
technical skills, you create skilled boars. That is the problem
and it is a real trend. Freedom is only born out of skill.(2)
TH: On this subject what about the new media?
PF: That domain is even more complicated to grasp because
it’s like the Wild West. You find all types, from a geek who
tosses a few pixels around his screen at home and thinks
he’s a designer, to others with an IT background who
are convinced they are creatives because they have the
technical expertise; or designers who know nothing but are
convinced of the opposite.
It is extremely important to instil order into all of this. I
am not for decrees and laws, but the Swiss Confederation is
now trying to organise education. It is extremely complex to
manage because by the time these decrees are written, they
will probably already be out of date. But at least there will
be an intention to define objectives in terms of production
and knowledge. I am not a fan of these processes, because
the documents are often too rigid and sclerotic, but we
are obliged to use them so as not to creates generation of
(2) Its essential to achieve
both. If you only take
refuge in creative
design, you create
useless individuals and,
by locking yourself up
in technical skills, you
create skilled boars. That
is the problem and it is
a real trend. Freedom is
only born out of skill.
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designers who have random skills and who will very soon be
out of their depth.
TH: Is there a difference in teaching at an art school
(training by apprenticeship work experience) and a
university education (more academic along the lines of
the HES - Swiss University of Applied Sciences)?
PF: To be clear, there are two types of initial training. There Is
the CFC (Federal Certificate of Ability) with both college and
on-the-job training and the full-time education CFC, which is
what we mainly do here at ERACOM.
We have training programs that encompass all of
the technical and graphics skills, such as printers, offset
machine operators, what we call advertising directors,
binders, screen-printers, etc. These are the skills for which
practical on-the-job experience is irreplaceable. These are
training programs which can only be carried out as a dual
course, that is to say that there is no continuous full-time
college training. These students work at a company and
come here for lessons. There is an essential complementarity
here, thanks to strong professional links, which works
extremely well. There are also courses that can be taken
both on a full-time basis and as a dual course, this world is
developing. The issue of training graphic designers in dual
courses is a bit complicated. It seems to me that this kind
of training is in decline. Why?—Because now, instead of
taking on an apprentice who they need to train entirely from
scratch, employers prefer partly trained interns who will be
more effective straightaway. Consequently we make our
full-time students carry out lengthy training periods over four
years, amounting to a one-year training period altogether
(two six-month training periods). This is much more
interesting to employers, as these interns are in their third
year and can already switch on the computer, open InDesign
and then basically not mess it all up (laughs).
These trainees represent serious competition for the
applicants for traditional graphic arts apprenticeships.
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In new media, it’s the opposite We are seeing the
disappearance or decline of dual apprenticeships for graphic
designers and a reinforcing or increasing emergence of dual
training new media programs. At first sight, the HES is a
degree higher. This is a university style bachelor degree —a
different training program. Then it’s a matter of skills. The
bachelor degree is a different training program which pushes
the student to develop stronger conceptual skills. These
are more intellectual studies, less solid in terms of technical
skills. The danger of this more conceptual or creative side
is reaching the end of a three year bachelor degree with no
real professional knowledge. We do not discourage those
who have artistic ambitions, but we try to inculcate technical
skills in them, for myself, when I taught at ECAL, it was
notably in terms of photography. The requirement in all cases
is for them to learn professional and therefore useful skills.
To summarise, someone coming from the CFC will
certainly have a very solid technical expertise whether from
dual or full-time college training and they will be capable of
working; the HES graduate is going to have more conceptual
skills and might find it more complicated to enter the
professional world but I think that there is a demand for that
type of profile at the minute.
We are in an era when everyone wants thirty thousand
qualifications and we often neglect and forget about skills.
The other fundamental thing is that it is perfectly legitimate
to work on self-development.
The Higher training that we are setting up emphasises
practical and professional skills. In a different way, I set
up a masters’ course at ECAL with Francois Rappo that
experiments with other paths, in very spesific fields, intended
for students who want to experiment on personal projects—
new, untried things, including theoretical research. We are
seeking new teaching paths.(3)
TH: You are a photographer and have taught
photography within the photography department at
(3) We have noticed that
it is always important
for students to achieve
their potential on a
journey that corresponds
specifically to them,
more academic for
some, more practical for
others, meaning that, at
the end of the day, they
will find themselves at
about the same level
with the same skills.
They are not the same
qualifications, but
they are in the same
profession.
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ECAL which you managed. Strengthened by this proven
experience, do you intend to develop photography
teaching at ERACOM? What importance do you attribute
to photography in a graphic designer’s training?
PF: It is essential —I even think that greater importance
should be given to photography. It will enable graphic
designers to be more effective partners and then to produce
a series of things by themselves during their educational
and vocational journey. What I really hate is that most of the
time and by default, we look for images on the Internet. I
would prefer that, by default, we take our own photos. Even
if they are not as good, they have the advantage of giving
more personality to their designs and that is essential. In the
new college year, I will be running a course, for those who
are interested, both for my pleasure and the pleasure of the
students. It will be a course with optional elements, free of
charge, one evening a week, here at the ERACOM.
TH: So, art school, isn’t that a false designation?
PF: I am very attached to this notion of applied arts and not
of art in the singular; I want people to know that we teach
‘Applied Arts’ at ERACOM. Image is also important. I am
also going to work on the school’s image.
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çInstitutional forms in art, always blocked art students and
artists. Some of these people could overcome it or couldn’t.
It’s a hard situation and only depends on person. It only
depends on our effort to break these blocks, these chains. I
wrote these elements for institutional forms in design. With
these elements that I am using always you can overcome
with institutional forms in art schools. These are my
experiences.
1We have to see what we look for. We have to see
different things everytime and improve our eyes.
The only way is to see around the world. Not
“looking”only, with ”seeing”. That’s the difference that
separates us from non-designer and non-artist people.
Seeing around us is improving our eyes everytime. Signs on
roads, packages in stores, forms of objects, commercials,
posters, newspapers, books. All of these visual solutions
improve our eyes when we see and analyze them. For
example, I always take brochures in stores, analyze
packages of fast-food products, look at the interior
typography of some transportation vehicles like station
signs in subways. This “looking” action always improves
your visual sight. Improves your decisions while you are
designing.
2We have to experience what other artists did. If we
look to works that was done by artists and designers
—that means new solutions or experiences of
others— we will improve our eyes and our decisions a lot.
Seeing what others done always affect our inspiration and
inspirations can be a good partner while we are starting
a new design or a new painting. For example analyzing
typefaces of Erik Spiekermann(1) always affects my typeface
design process. With that element we can overcome with
these institutional forms. Inspirations are always good
starting points for works.
(1) Erik Spikermann is
a typeface designer,
known by his famous
typefaces; Officina, Unit,
Meta etc. His design
rules always affected
my typeface designs.
He says: “Typeface of a
firm should be different
than the others but not
so odd and so different,
because we only read
what we want, not only
what we see.” This
sentence can be a nice
guide for a designer.
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3We have to sketch all the time. Sketching everytime
extends our imagination to design. Sketching
something that you see or something you think
or inspire, improve your technique and your visual sight.
For understanding the form of objects or typefaces or
dimensions of a design work, you should sketch a lot. Try to
sketch everything that inspires you and you will notice your
improvement about your visual sight. Sketching a human
body, also improves your eye too. Understanding the forms
of human is also understanding the golden ratio which is
also named as golden number 1,618, the phi number. You
can use this number as a guidance for you works.
4We have to know the history of art and what
classicism is. We have to respect old ones because
they also overcame with the instutions. If we know
what was done in the past, it will affect our creation of
unique ideas and our inspirations too. This element is also
related with the second element. If we look to works of the
artists in the past, it also improves our sight too.
As a conclusion, with these elements we can overcome with
the institutional forms of art schools. These advices can be
given from a teacher too but my advice is look works of a lot
of artists who is famous or not and they don’t need to be an
artist too, you can inspire yourself from everything that you
look (every little detail and function). Art and design depends
on our decisions, our eyes, our ideas and our techniques.
We are able to improve them with the pressure of school
by using these elements. Pressure of the institutions can
weaken us and block our free and unique decisions. I can
act freely and decide my options with my experiences that
come from these elements. I am using these elements all
the time and these elements have taught me. I hope these
elements can be a guidance for you too.