sat down this week with art major Anna Grofik ’16 and Gregory Bailey, Associate Professor of Art and current Chair of the Art Department. The subject was their subject: Art. Studio art, more precisely, as it lives and breathes in this particular enclave of academia.
The art world, in academia and elsewhere, is saturated with dichotomies. One of which is the distinction habitually made between artists and non-artists, between those who create and those who witness. In this view, each of us falls into one or the other camp, based on whether or not we have something called talent.
This idea, however, comes from those who identify as non-artists, those to whom art is something that exists only as a finished product, a concert or an exhibition. Artists, then, are the ones with the talent, those who can dance or paint or sing. They give the show, we watch it. Aesthetic feeling is sublimated to a recognition of ability, a dazzle hardly different from the admiration one feels for a star baseball player or a polyglot.
The artists see it differently.
An artist, in Grofik’s view, is not defined by one’s works but by an inner compulsion to create. They spend countless hours in the sole company of this imperative and its attendant doubts and victories. The work we see on stage or in the gallery is a small portion–the best–of a perpetual series of brow-beating cogitations and revisions. This process brings one ever closer to a certain ideal, says Grofik, that is impossible to ever really reach. The cherished creative imperative is attended by “a feeling that your work will never be good enough, but you keep going anyway.”
This is part of the reason why, when artists find themselves in interviews, they often feel themselves “being pushed into a box. They’ll become absurd and try to evade it. Artists don’t like boxes.” The interviewer, in this hypothetical situation, insists that the work is done, and seeks to define the artist thereby. The artist, however, is keenly conscious of what could have been better, and what might still be to come.
An artist, moreover, would not be keen to see themselves as a as a mere box of talent, who every now and then sits down and expels it for the entertainment of a real or imagined audience. Artists too, need to train. But though a perfect game of baseball is possible, a perfect work of art is not. An artist needs to come to terms with this fact as they hone their technique and their vision.
“Any art major would tell you that they don’t want to live the nine-to-five, cubicle life. And yet they choose to enclose themselves every night in the studio, where they stay for hours in a cubicle that is smaller and blanker than anything at an office.” It may not be the most inspiring place, but Grofik’s description of the studio highlights the dedication to craft that defines the artist. They choose this particular box out of the compulsion to be alone and create.
To contrast the necessary hours of isolation, however, the art department engenders a unique community. Grofik said that “it can be uncomfortable, and a little strange, but one of the best ways to get to know someone is to spend hours alone with them in the studio, making.”
She said further that she is inspired by few places on campus. Attracted to the absurd and disturbing, she finds our campus “too clean…sterile” to give rise to the creative impulse.
Another specious feature of the artist/non-artist dichotomy is the idea that witnesses are themselves without artistic feeling. The ability to witness artistically is integral to the training of the art major.
Professor Bailey described to me the event of the critique that follows the completion of every project in a studio art class. “We talk as a group about each student’s work,” he said. “The student whose work we’re critiquing doesn’t say anything about the piece before-hand. The other students say what they see and what they think. Only after that the artist gets a chance to say ‘I was going for this, or I saw this here.’ But of course the others don’t need to agree, and this way they get to see how their work is perceived by the others. Being critiqued informs their process, as does critiquing. Creation and critique, these things don’t exist in isolation from one another.”
He said the same when I asked him to describe how his work as a professor informs or conflicts with his work as an artist. The two, he insisted, co-habit, and shouldn’t be seen in isolation from one another.
The art department aims to give people with a particular passion, people who have the itch to create in a certain medium, the tools to actualize this interest in the multitude of forms this takes in professional and personal life. Student, teacher, critic, theorist, artist–each of these titles arise ultimately from the same impulse–they represent a number of attitudes toward the main event of creation.Through instruction in theory, technique, and history, through critiques and studio time, the department offers each student the opportunity to shape and craft themselves as artists.
