Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016 | Page 12

I tell my students that art is a system of consensus—that what they make is
subject to a complicated and rigorous vetting by an arcane and often opaque
system that may or may not be amenable to their interpretations of art.

histories, practices, and theories of art or may attempt to dismiss
all that came before it and re-frame art as an entirely ahistorical
gesture. Either way, these artists are, by the obligations described
above, unable to practice in a vacuum; rather there is an inherent
responsibility toward an almost ineffable set of expectations for the
way in which the work is generated, circulated, and looped back to
the artist.
I tell my students that art is a system of consensus—that what they
make is subject to a complicated and rigorous vetting by an arcane
and often opaque system that may or may not be amenable to their
interpretations of art. The condition of art is arrived at by a pushpull entanglement of individual curiosity, a public, institutions and
politics. The university and academia in general are institutional
citizens of the larger “art world.” Those who teach within academia
are an essential bridge between the desires of a student who aspires
to individual citizenship in the art world, the marketplace of culture
or a particular sort of creative life, and the toolkit that will enable
them to access such citizenship. Professors of art are translators:
they make the histories, theories, and practices of what we call “art”
available. They gather the art world from afar and bring it closer to
the student. They do this through their own practice and through a
particular sort of engagement with art not solely as a solipsistic
X Quadrennial 2016

endeavor, but as a generative, generous public undertaking, the
results of which become the very material of teaching. The work
in this exhibition is a kind of evidence. It is evidence of engaged
research and an extension of citizenship in a complex and rigorous
art world, and a very public creative global community. Through
their work and working methodologies, the artists in this exhibition
model “professional practice,” artistic citizenship, and criticality.
This is, of course, not immediately knowable to the viewer of such
exhibitions; it may seem on the surface simply a show of varied
and variable approaches to art making. This exhibition certainly
demonstrates our faculty’s broad knowledge of style and materiality. However, within this space is contained a pedagogy for contemporary art. It is indeed a virtual curriculum that begins with
foundational approaches to handwork and makes a long arc to the
theoretical and or conceptual motivations of late postmodernism.
Passing through this exhibition, the viewer encounters a discursive
narrative of recent art history, reified as objects, time-based media,
two- and three-dimensional examples of thinking-as-action, and
gestures toward the distant and more recent trends one would find
in any global art-world space. And simultaneously, in parallel and in
tandem, the artists in this exhibition are also teachers.