Thierry De Duve : When Form has Become Attitude ...and Beyond

The following essay by Thierry De Duve, excerpted from Faire Ecole (1992), was delivered to a conference of art educators the following year.

In his first paragraphs, I take issue with the paradigm he ascribes to "the old Academy".

Eventually, however,  it turns into a rather fierce screed against more recent trends in art education  in Europe and America.

Ho- hum.

Another polemic against contemporary art and art theory.

But rather than being delivered by a cranky outsider or wingnut -- De Duve is a respected philosopher and art school educator.  (the introduction to his latest book is a cry of despair in response to the 2016 American presidential elections)

He is the ultimate academic insider.

And he's also quite charming

******

It used to be that the teaching of art was academic and proud of it. Rooted in the observation of nature and the imitation of previous art, the long apprenticeship of a would-be painter or sculptor was primarily an acquisition of skills put under specific cultural constraints. Life-drawing and underlying discourse, anatomy, provided the basic skill ennobled with humanistic knowledge. Never, though, was art equated with skill. What deserved admiration in the accomplished artist was talent, not craftsmanship. Skill could be acquired, talent could not, since talent was thought of as a gift of nature - a gift, however, which could neither develop nor express itself outside the rules, conventions, and codes provided by the tradition. Tradition set the standards against which the production of art students was measured. Academic teaching had great ambitions as regards the maintenance of tradition and the passing on of quality standards; it had little vanity as regards its ability to "turn out" individual artists. All it could hope to do was nurture and discipline its students' gifts within the limits of nature's generosity. and to grant even the most ungifted students a technical know-how capable of securing them a recognized, if humble, place in society and a plausible, if modest, source of income. Between the work of the artisan and that of the genius the Academy recognized a leap in quality, but also the cultural continuity of one and the same trade in which everybody held his (or her) rank.

If this were a serious discussion of history, we'd be told when and where "used to be" took place- and what was the source for TDD's knowledge of it?  But as as he would profess later in the essay, he is not so much concerned with the history of actual art schools as with the paradigms of art education as he conceives them.

TDD has connected  "the observation of nature and the imitation of previous art" with an admiration for talent - but  I'm guessing that everyone feels that way about those who are exceptional performers in any any human activity - from baseball to politics, to even - gasp -- making conceptual art.




All this was destroyed in less than a century. Reynolds was probably the last great academic pedagogue; a century after him, the Academy had withered into academicism. As industrialization and the social upheaval, scientific progress and ideological transformations that went with it decomposed the hitherto stable social fabric and, on the whole, more or less destroyed all craftsmanship, the examples of the past lost their credibility. in art and elsewhere. and the chain of tradition was eventually broken. To the sensitive artist, academic art and training became just that, academic, and the new art began to look toward the future for its legitimation, with fear and hope alike. The avant-garde was launched. Painting and sculpture, progressively running away from observation and imitation of outside models. turned inwards and started to observe and imitate their very means of expression instead of exerting their talent within relatively fixed conventions, the modernist artists put those conventions themselves to an aesthetic test and, one by one, discarded those by which they no longer felt constrained. Excellence in art came to be measured against the resistance of the medium, with, as yardstick, the honesty with which the artist yields to it. All tradition rejected. painting came to be seen as a sort of essence, present in all painting. past, present or future. as if the medium in its purity could set the rules by itself, command over skill. and provide a vessel for talent. Sculpture, architecture, photography, even cinema became similar essences.

TDD  asks us to accept avant garde ideology at  face value -- as if those who joined it actually were the more "sensitive artists" who actually did look forward instead of backward.  An alternative characterization might suggest that they were sensitive to different things and looked backward at different kinds of art (as Kandinsky did).  It's concern with "the medium and its purity"  seems to come more from the writing of Clement Greenburg than from a response to actual art and artists.




Soon, art schooling was affected by the avant-garde. As the examples and standards of the past could no longer be trusted, as imitation and observation could no longer provide the basics for the apprenticeship of art, the teaching of an had to look elsewhere for roots in both nature and culture. This it achieved in two ways. The figure of Man - the universal measure of all things in nature - was relinquished as outer model for observation, but was recouped as inner subjective principle. Psychology replaced anatomy in its function as foundational discourse for a new artistic humanism. The new doctrine stated that all men are endowed with innate faculties which it is the function of education to allow to grow. Thus specialisation in the visual arts meant the specific training and growth of the faculties of visual perception and imagination. How to train them became the pedagogical issue. Again, psychology-nor the introspective kind but perception psychology, Gestalt theory, and so on-provided the idea  that the ability to perceive is, by nature, already cultural, that perception is, so to speak, a basic reading skill. It followed from there that imagination was a basic writing skill of sorts. "Creativity" is the name, the modern name, given to the combined innate faculties of perception and imagination. Everybody is endowed with it, and the closer it remains to sheer, blank endowment, the greater is its potential. A child, a primitive, has more creativity than a cultivated adult. The ideal art student, the artist of the future, came to be dreamt of as an infant whose natural ability to read and write the visual world needs only to be properly tutored. The problem became to find the appropriate means. lf only the practice of painting and sculpture could be broken into semantic "atoms", if only some elementary visual alphabet and syntax could be set up, then art - art itself, not merely skill - could be taught and taught without resorting to a now obsolete tradition. Talent. as such, no longer exists. It lies in a raw state in everyone's creativity, and skill lies, so to speak, ready-made in the properties of the medium: in the linearity of drawing, in the two dimensionality of the picture plane, in the volumetric properties of sculpture. In  principle, if not in fact, the learning of art became simple: students should learn how to tap their unspoilt creativity; guided by immediate feeling and emotion, and to read their  medium, obeying its immanent syntax. As their aesthetic sensibility and artistic literacy progressed, their ability to feel and to read would translate into the ability to express and to articulate. Nurtured perception and imagination would produce artworks of a new kind. 


This reads like nonsense - doesn't it ? How can a sheet of paper teach anyone how to draw  ?  How is this different from self-education ?  And if it's not -- why should the student attend classes and pay  tuition ?  This almost reads like a rhetorical straw-man set up to ridicule Bauhaus art education -- which is the kind of training that TDD had before he became a philosopher.


This pedagogical programme proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. All progressive pedagogues of this century, from Froebel to Montessori to Decroly; all school reformers and philosophers of education, from Rudolf Steiner to John Dewey, have based their projects and programmes on creativity; or rather, on the belief in creativity, on the conviction that creativity - not tradition, not rules and conventions - is the best starting point for education. Moreover, all great modern theorists of art, from Herbert Read to E. H. Gombrich to Rudolph Arnheim, have entertained similar convictions and devoted considerable energy to breaking up the "visual language" into its basic components and demonstrating the universality of its perceptive and psychological "laws". And finally, needless to say. there is not one pioneer of Modernist art, from Malevich to Kandinsky and Klee, or from Irten and Moholy-Nagy to Albers and Hofmann, who has not been actively involved in the creation of art schools and teaching programmes based on the reduction of practice to the fuudamemal elements of a syntax immanent to the medium. Kandinsky wrote Von Punkt zur Li.nie Z'lff Fliiche in 1924, and since then every art school in the world has a 2-D and a 3-D studio to prepare its students for painting and sculpture. If they had been strictly faithful to Kandinsky, if they had also taken their cue from Cubism, they would have a 1-D and a 4-D studio as well.


One  might note that TDD does distinguish a professional art education from a general program for childhood development.


My point is not just to be ironic, and certainly not to dismiss this philosophy without further trial, but merely to stress that a philosophy it is, a biased one and a dated one. Let's call it the Bauhaus model. It was never carried out with the radical purity of my description, not even at the Bauhaus itself: which died under the pressure of its own contradictions as much as it did under the hand of the Nazis. But the Bauhaus model, more or less amended, more or less debased, has set a series of assumptions about art teaching upon which dozens of art arid architecture schools around the world have been built, and which are, as of today, still underlying, often subliminally, almost unconsciously, most art curriculums, including (if I'm well informed) a great number of foundation courses across the UK. Moreover, it is seemingly the only model that pits itself coherently against the old academic model, such as it also survives, equally amended and often degenerated beyond recognition, not just in the very few Ecoles de Beaux-Arts that still defend it (actually, I don't know of any that still do), but also in the immense majority of art schools and academies around the world that seek to find a compromise between traditionalism and modernism.


If  the Bauhaus model is so biased and dated -- why should one prefer it to the "old academic" one?  One might also note that if written today, an informed writer would no longer be able to say that he knows of no educational ateliers where an academic model is practiced.




l have sketched out an oversimplified picture, a caricature, even, of the postulates underlying the teaching of art up to recent years. But a caricature is all the more truthful in that it is exaggerated, and 1 will not hesitate in exaggerating it even  more forcibly, in order to make those postulates appear as postulates - that i.e, as mere postulates. Two models, even though in reality they contaminate each other, divide up the reaching of art conceptually. On the one hand, there is the academic model; on the other, there is the Bauhaus model. The former believes in talent, the latter in creativity. The former classifies the arts according to techniques, what I would call the metier; the latter according to the medium. The former fosters imitation; the latter invention. Both models are obsolete. The academic model entered a deep crisis as soon as it began to deserve the derogative label of academicism. It's decadence was accomplished under the pressure of modern art, which is why no return to the past is thinkable lest the blackout is pronounced on all the art and all the artists of modernity. The Bauhaus model also entered an open crisis. That phenomenon is more recent but it isn't new; dating from the Sixties, 1 would say: It, too, goes hand in hand with the art of its time, and it is contemporaneous with the deep loss of confidence that modernism has undergone since those years. Now it is dramatic to have to teach according to postulates one doesn't believe in anymore. But in order to change them, one has to see them clearly. Let's review the evidence: do we have to choose between talent and creativity, between metier and medium?

This is one of the key paragraphs in this essay. It clarifies that TDD is comparing mere postulates rather than actual art schools.  He postulates the "academic model" as a belief in talent --  then he goes on to dismiss it from contemporary life unless "a blackout is pronounced on all the art and all the artists of modernity" -- as well as telling us the Bauhaus model has been in "open crisis" since the sixties.  But those two strong assertions are also mere postulates - aren't they?

Talent vs Creativity

The difference between talent and creativity is that the former is unequally distributed and the latter universally. In the passage from one word to the other, there is of course a complete reversal of ideologies, and it is not difficult to see that, historically, the progress of the ideology of creativity went hand in hand with that of the idea of democracy and of egalitarianism. The use of the word creativity in this elevated sense itself is relatively recent, but its germs were already present in the Romantic notion of the genius. Creativity is grounded in a utopian belief summarized by a slogan that repeats itself with clockwork regularity throughout the history of modernity, from Rimbaud to Beuys: everyone is an artist. Of course, it always meant: everyone is potentially an artist. Talent is also a potential but, on the one hand, it does not depend on some psychology of the faculties, and on the other, it is inseparable from the specific terrain where it is exerted, which in the last resort is always technical. One has talent for music, for carpentry or for cookery, but not talent in general. Creativity, by contrast, is conceived as an absolute and unformalized potential, a supply of energy prior to any division of labour. One has creativity, without qualification; one is creative, period.

Three major consequences derive from this for any art-educational project based on creativity The first is that nothing should, in principle, restrict access to the study of art. The second is that art itself; and not just the technical means of art, can be taught. And the third is that initiation to art in general should precede every specialization (that was the role of the Grundkurs, or foundation course, at the Bauhaus). The contradiction between these principles is blatant: many art schools yield to the particularly perverse illusion (which, moreover, frequently backfires) that they produce or fabricate artists, while at the same time considering that their incoming students are artists already, even though only potentially. In fact, all teachers know by experience that talent exists and that creativity is a myth. On this point, the Academy saw things a lot more clearly than modernity. The myth is generous, and this is not a negligible quality when it comes to teaching. And as long as the myth functions, why denounce it? The problem is that it doesn't function anymore.

As TDD here presents it, 'creativity' does seem to be a much more nebulous notion than 'talent' - which is applied every time a young person accomplishes something exceptional. I can't remember ever using the word 'creative' - but then - I'm not a teacher.  I can't imagine how it ever functioned -- so I can't imagine how it would have ceased to function. 

Metier vs Medium

The difference between metier and medium is that the former has a historical existence and the latter a trans-historical existence. The Academy classified the fine arts according to the metier and everything the notion entails: specialized skills, artisan habits, sleights of hand, rules of composition, canons of beauty. in short, a specific tradition. Modernism classifies the arts according to the medium and everything this notion entails: particular materials, supports, tools, gestures, technical procedures, and conventions of specificity. That an artist practiced the metier of painter meant that he belonged to the guild of painters and had a place in a given affiliation. His definition of painting would have been, simply: what painters do. That an artist works in the medium of painting means that he questions painting for what it has to say about itself and hasn't said yet. His definition of painting might be: what no painter has done yet. The metier gets practiced, the medium gets questioned; the metier gets transmitted, the medium communicates or gets communicated; the metier gets learnt, the medium gets discovered; the metier is a tradition, the medium is a language; the metier rests on experience, the medium relies on experimentation. From the former to the latter, a reversal occurred in the conception of history. The metier is always received from the past; even when regulated by ideals that are supposedly eternal, those ideals are situated upstream in history (like the antique). The medium is received from nowhere; it purports to actualize transcendentals, that is, a priori conditions of possibility, which, regulating the work, should lead to the revelation of the medium's essence, paradoxically situated downstream in history. Thus, for the academic model, to teach painting means co transmit its legacy and to allow the apprentice to find a place in a chain of affiliation of which he has a strong awareness and which he will have to pursue. For the Bauhaus model, to teach painting is to open access to a being called painting, supposedly immanent to all paintings from all times, but whose ultimate revelation is yet to come; it is to invite the student to subtract from the medium and thereby to subtract himself from the chain of affiliation

As with his comparison of talent/creativity, TDD's comparison of metier/medium has nothing to do with  faiths- ideals - visions.  But doesn't some  kind of ultimate  purpose or vision always precede the metiers or media used to  express it? 



Three major consequences derive from this. First, teaching the arts according to the medium cultivates distrust of technical skill because mastering the medium gets in the way of questioning the medium; what matters is not technical apprenticeship but the discovery of those qualities that can be deduced from the medium itself. Second, in cutting off the arts from their specific affiliations and reorganizing them according to the specificity of their perceptive properties, this teaching denies itself the possibility of conceiving that there is art in between the mediums. And third, it seeks to teach the future, which is of course impossible. The verdict should be more severe, even, for the myth of the medium than it was for the myth of creativity. with which, moreover, it is contradictory under certain aspects. It has had considerable pedagogical efficiency, but its perverse effects now outrun its benefits.

This is turning out to be quite a screed against the Bauhaus kind of art education.

I hope we're eventually going to be told about those "perverse effects"

Imitation and Invention

imitation reproduces, invention produces; whereas imitation generates sameness, invention generates otherness; whereas imitation seeks continuity, invention seeks novelty. The Academy was aware that artists worthy of the name invent. However, even though academic teaching spotted a sign of a student's talent in his capacity to invent, it was not on his capacity to invent that it judged him, nor was it through stimulating invention that it claimed to educate him. Quite the contrary. It was through imposing on him imitation, invention's antithesis: the imitation of nature, of the Ancients, of the master. The Bauhaus model, by contrast, fosters invention, because every progress in its expression indicates a liberation of the student's creativity, an actualisation of his artistic potential. The abandonment of naturalism, the break with the Ancients, the rejection of the master are the predictable results. Now, that a teaching system should systematically encourage the rejection of the master isn't without contradiction. Creativity being the source of invention, the medium its target, the teacher - who is no longer a master - owes his authority to the very constraints of the medium while he invites the student to transgress the medium's limits in order to prove his creativity. He sees it as his task to detect the student's invention and to value it for its own sake, while referring it to the medium and interpreting it within the limits of the medium's specificity. 


 Again, I’m wondering about the source of TDD’s characterization of “The Academy”. The only academic he mentions is Sir Joshua Reynolds.

I also wonder whether every - or  even any - Bauhaus teacher would "detect the student's invention and value it for its own sake, while referring it to the medium and interpreting it within the limits of the medium's specificity."

 Has sensitivity to media ever been presented as a sufficient condition for good design?

Again, three major consequences derive from this. First, the kind of teaching that seeks to provoke invention tends to judge its students on a quasi-quantitative basis, on the basis of the frequency of invention as such, of its novelty. of its discontinuous and random-like character. of its unforeseen freshness: all qualities that are real in an accomplished work of art but quite unsuitable when it comes to recording the students' progress. Second, such teaching systematically encourages the students to experiment with. the medium, while containing their experimentation within boundaries that are seen not just as a terrain for apprenticeship, but as the limits of the field of practice itself. Finally, such teaching is loath to discuss the content of the students' work and cultivates formalism. These are the cumulative effects of the generosity of the ideology of creativity --  a conception of the history of art that banks on the future for its legitimization. The trouble is that the myth of creativity is suspicious, and that the future from which the Bauhaus model expected its legitimization, belongs to our past.

A creativity based art education certainly sounds absurd - unless, of course,  successful students attribute it to their success.


In view of this cursory analysis, it may seem that I promote some return to the academic model of teaching. Not so, of course. In fact, I don't promote anything, not in this paper, anyway. My only intention is to gain a clearer view of the decline of the Bauhaus model, which is far more important for the proper understanding of the present crisis than the long-accomplished demise of the Academy. lt is because the paradigm underlying the Bauhaus model, the creativity-medium- invention paradigm, still operates in most art schools, even in those - especially in those, l should say -that consciously bathe in its critique; it is because its three postulates are either inscribed in the structure of the institution, or linger more or less consciously in the heads of the teachers and of the students, that its perverse effects are so pervasive. Whether creativity exists or whether it is merely a useful illusion is for all practical purposes irrelevant as long as it works. Whether there is such a thing as a "visual language" specific to the medium or whether it is merely a pedagogical strategy is equally irrelevant as long as it works. The question is: does the Bauhaus model still work? Is it still useful? 


Hopefully, the paragraph that follows will give us some criteria for usefulness.





We, who teach in art schools, all have mitigated answers co this, l'm sure. Who among us hears the word creativity without wearing an ironic smile? Who among us still dreams of a utopian visual language a la Kandinsky, some Esperanto composed of red squares, yellow triangles and blue circles? Who still believes in the purity or the specificity of the medium, in the manner of Greenberg? Who, perhaps with Warhol in mind, or Toroni, or Richter, or Steve Reich, will deny that as much contemporary art of quality has been produced through repetition as through invention? If the Bauhaus model still works, perhaps it is in spite of itself. Many of us have grown to value the perverse effects of a teaching method organised, if only nominally, in terms of the purity of the media and the separateness of the disciplines. Many of us have grown to praise the subversive students who do not behave as if they tapped the unspoilt creativity with which they are supposedly endowed, but who, instead, tap the pop culture with which they come equipped. Those of us who teach the 'basic'' courses know all too well that they can communicate only rules and conventions, and that significant art is art that overthrows. displaces, abandons or subverts rules and conventions. Who has not dreamt, if only secretly, of having students - the best students - forcing the teacher to give them an A+ because they transgressed the rules of the assignment so intelligently that they displayed a perfect awareness of what art-making is about? Those of us who teach "mixed media'', ''intermedia", multi-media", or "experimental media" -whatever the name is of the no man's land that most art schools have ended up institutionalising as if it were a medium of its own - know all too well that if they did not assign subject matter or set technical constraints, formal limits, severe deadlines or whatever rules or conventions, they wouldd not achieve much more than organised escapism. The fruits that the Bauhaus tree yielded and still yields are strange hybrids. We all know that. We have come to expect it, even foster it. The last art school with a strict Bauhaus ideology(though already considerably amended)was the Black Mountain College, and its best "fruit" was Rauschenberg. Meanwhile, the Bauhaus itself, with all those great artists teaching there, did not produce a single student of a stature equal to that of the masters. Meanwhile, the most "advanced" art schools are those that, consciously entertaining this grim and disillusioned view of the Bauhaus legacy; openly bank on the perversions -they say the subversion - of this modernist model. The artists they produce - for they produce artists indeed - are people whose criterion is the derision of all the notions derived from that of creativity, such as originality and authenticity, without, for all that, necessarily displaying more talent; people who have pushed the rejection of both the metier and the medium to the point where their only technique is the appropriation of ready-mades or people who, through simulation, succeed in denying imitation and invention at the same time.

Does the Bauhaus  model still work?  Here are TDD's reasons for why it does not:

1.  Art teachers are uncomfortable with the word 'creativity'
2. Art teachers no longer believe in purity or specificity of medium
3. Contemporary artists apply repetition at least as often as invention
4. Contemporary artists may tap popular culture instead of unspoiled creativity
5. None who studied at the original Bauhaus became as famous as their teachers
6. The most famous student at the last American Bauhaus-type school did not exemplify the ideology.
7. The "most advanced" art schools promote subversion of the Bauhaus legacy

All of which may be true -- but doesn't that just prove that the Bauhaus model is no longer fashionable?

Is there any  criteria other than fashion to measure the success of a program of art education?

Is there any daylight between the concepts of "most advanced" and most fashionable ?

The Academy model went out of fashion in the early twentieth century - but weren't the most advanced modernist artists of that time (Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse) trained by it?



Such is the present situation. A paradigm has imploded, and though it might be that we are in the midst of a "paradigm shift" (if so, it will be for our successors to see it), what I believe is apparently organising the most advanced art schools is in fact the disenchanted, perhaps nihilistic, after-image of the old Bauhaus paradigm. Let me quickly review the evidence in relation to both the postulates of the academic model, talent-metier-imitation, and those of the Bauhaus model, creativity-medium-invention. What seems to have taken their place is a new triad of notions: attitude-practice-deconstruction.

I've heard that new triad of notions mentioned in contemporary academic art talk.

But I've yet to see it connected to anything that I wanted to look at more than once.

Talent and Creativity vs Attitude

 In the wake of the student upheaval of the late Sixties no one was ready to admit the inequality of talent, out of fear of seeming irredeemably reactionary But the May '68 slogan, "all power to the imagination", didn't last very long, and soon creativity lost its aura, too. Philosophically speaking, the times were very suspicious of anything moree or less resembling the old psychology of the faculties, and creativity, which is a neo-Romantic amalgam of the Kantian faculties of sensibility and imagination, became old hat. It had everything against itself: being universal, it could only be 'bourgeois"; being transcendental, it could only be "metaphysical'"; being natural, it could only be "ideological". But its greatest sin was that it could not be willed, and the most progressive art and art teaching of the Seventies thought that art had to be willed, whether it aligned itself with some political programme bathed in revolutionary rhetorics, or whether it saw itself as the relentless critique of the dominant ideology Anyway, it had become hard to suppose that creativity was the potential of mankind in general, and equally hard to hope that it could be instilled through propaganda or education (think of Joseph Beuys, in this context: he certainly represents the last great and tragic hero of the modern myth of creativity; immolating himself on the altar of both pedagogy and "social sculpture"). Thus another concept took the place of creativity; that of "attitude".  A concept that is a blank, actually: a sort of zero degree of psychology. a neutral point amidst ideological choices, a volition without content. Of course, in order to be progressive - and how could art of any significance not be progressive? - attitude had to be critical. Lukacs, Adorno, Althusser and others were called in to tell would-be artists that neither talent nor creativity were needed to make art but, instead, that "critical attitude" was mandatory. And the fact that not just artists but all "cultural workers" were thought to be in need of a critical attitude of course helped to shape a new, strongly politicized discourse about art and its relation to society, a discourse that, throughout the Seventies and part of the Eighties, became the dominant discourse, not in all art schools, admittedly, but certainly in the most progressive, the most avant-gardistic or - why not say it? - the most fashionable ones. Even if you turn to less politicized aspects of the dominant discourse about art in those years you will see the central position of the notion of attitude confirmed. It is towards the end of the Sixties that the concept of "aesthetic attitude" surfaced in art theory, thanks to Jerome Stolnitz in particular, but also, I should say, thanks to Duchamp's growing reputation as the first conceptual artist, a combination of influences that greatly helped in pushing aside aesthetics while retaining the notion of attitude. Finally - and this, l believe, clinches it, if only symbolically - it was in 1969 that Harald Szeemann organised the famous exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, at the Kunsthalle in Bern. Both the date and the title coined for this exhibition are symptomatic, for it was then and there that conceptual art was acknowledged for the first time by a major art institution (MoMA was to follow before long with the Information show, in 1970), providing a new model for advanced art soon to be emulated and disseminated by most art schools.

When Attitudes Become Form, Bern, 1969

" The artists represented in this present exhibition are in no way object-makers. On the contrary, they aspire to freedom from the object, and in this way deepen the levels of meaning of the object, reveal the meaning of those levels beyond the object." .. Harald Szeemann

Information, MOMA, 1970

"Many of the highly intellectual and serious young artists represented here have addressed themselves to the question of how to create an art that reaches out to an audience larger than that which has been interested in contemporary art in the last few decades," Mr . Mc Shine says. "Their attempt to be poetic and imaginative, without being either aloof or condescending, has led them into the communications areas that INFORMATION reflects." The only common denominator is that all are trying to extend the idea of art beyond traditional categories. Several pieces in the exhibition can only be realized with the active participation of people either in or outside the Museum... Press Release




This has been quite an education for me -- I  was not  aware of the institutional history of conceptual art   This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Szeemann's ground breaking exhibition of artists who were not object- makers.

As with TDD's discussion of Bauhaus education, a thinly veiled sarcasm seems to lurk just beneath the surface - as with his characterization of "attitude":  "A concept that is a blank, actually: a sort of zero degree of psychology. a neutral point amidst ideological choices, a volition without content."

A volition without content sounds absurd  if not idiotic.  At the very least, it is useless.

And when he tells us that "attitude has to be critical"  because " how could art of any significance not be progressive?" --- that's even more absurd.  As if one becomes a soldier by  clicking the heels and snapping a salute.







Everybody here, l'm sure, is familiar with what happened next. Linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism. structuralism and post-structuralism, in short, "theory'' (or so-called "French theory") entered art schools and succeeded in displacing- sometimes replacing-studio practice while renewing the critical vocabulary and intellectual tools with which to approach the making and the appreciating of art. With considerable differences depending on national and local circumstances (the Anglo-Saxon world having the lead), this shift - whose first aspect is the shift from creativity to attitude - occurred in the mid- to late Seventies and was a fait accompli by the mid-Eighties. By then, to take just a few prominent examples, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax had its most prolific period behind itself, Cal Arts was launching a generation of successful alumni, and Goldsmiths' was the place to be. In those days -attitude still had to be critical, which basically meant: critical of the social and political status quo. But soon the very success of these art schools began attracting students who went there because of the instant rewards they were seemingly able to promise them. For these students (with or without the conscious or unconscious complicity of their teachers, I can't tell), what had started as an ideological alternative to both talent and creativity, called "critical attitude", became just that, an attitude; a stance, a pose, a contrivance. This phenomenon, of course, widely  exceeds the few art schools I just named; it even exceeds art schools in general, for it is rampant throughout the whole academic world, especially in the humanities. It can be summarized by saying that political commitment sank into political correctness. Meanwhile, what remains of the old postulates - the academic postulate called talent and the modernist postulate called creativity - on which to ground a plausible art curriculum is the poorest. the most tautological notion of all: that of an artist's attitude.

Yikes!  TDD has moved beyond  sarcasm to frontal attack.  Good for him. (though he's going to back off a bit in a few paragraphs)

"Political commitment sank into political correctness"

Which is as  true today as it was thirty years ago.

Metier and Medium vs Practice

Dividing the arts according to the medium rather than to the metier; reading art history in terms of "a progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium" (Clement Greenberg); fostering the purity of the medium as a value in itself are the three strong points of formalist criticism and modernist doctrine in art. As is well known, -formalism and modernism have been under heavy fire since the mid-Sixties, first in America, soon after in England, and then in the rest of the Western world. Just as with Harald Szeemann's show, When Attitudes Become Form, let me choose a symbolic eve11t to pinpoint this, an event all the more symbolic in that it happened in 1966 at -an -art school. John Latham was a part-time instructor at St Martin's, in London, when he borrowed Clement Greenberg's Art and Culture from the school's library -and, with the complicity of Barry Flanagan, then a student at St Martin's, organised an event entitled Still and Chew, when a number of pages of the book were chewed by the participants and spat into a jar, then submitted to a complex chemical treatment. You know the aftermath of this performance ( or was it a happening?): a year or so later, when asked to return the book to the library, John Latham remrned it indeed, but in the shape of a jar containing the unspeakable, let alone umeadable, mixture. He was fired the next day.  Today, needless to say, he could do the same performance with the principal's blessing, and the librarian wouldn't even bother to reorder Art and Culture. Events, happenings, and performances have long been absorbed into art schools, and even though most schools keep a painting studio, a sculpture studio, a printmaking studio, and so on, they have added to the list a "mixed media", an "interdisciplin­ ary", or a "free-for-all" studio-whatever the name-which definitely indicates that the teaching of art no longer rests on an aesthetic commitment to the specificity or the -purity of the medium. By 1970 Clement Greenberg and MichaeJ Fried were already the last art critics to uphold the idea that no arc of significance could be done that sits in between media, and that if something is neither painting nor sculpture, then it is not art. Against them, a whole generation of conceptual artists were relying on Duchamp in order to maintain that rhe art was in the concept, that it was dematerialised, that it did not cling to any medium, above all not to painting. They fought against the medium but, of course, didn't rehabilitate the metier for all that.Just as with the word "attitude", what was soon to replace both the metier and the medium with an another magical word, “practice”

 By 1975 the word ‘practice” was widely in used by all thee people in touch with "French theory", and since "French theory", after all, originated in France, it is there, in the writings of the Tel Quel people, in particular, that it acquired a cluster of interesting meanings in the context of literature and art. One of its benefits was that it was charged with prestigious political connotations, Marxist, of course, and A1thusserian. More important is that it is a general word not a specific one, or, to say this difference that it puts the emphasis on the social, not on the technical, division of labour. Applied to painting, for example, it allowed us to conceive of painting not in terms of a specific skill (such as entailed by the notion of metier), nor in terms of a specific medium (such as the Greenbergian flatness), but in terms of a specific historical institution called "pictorial practice". This is the way both the painters belonging to the Support-Surface group, and their arch-enemy; Daniel Buren, used the word in defence of painting. Other artists, who were defending interdisciplinarity against specificity; began speaking of "artistic practice" or "practices", depending on whether the generic was thought of as being one or plural. But the most interesting- i.e. symptomatic - phenomenon is that the word art itself (simple art) became taboo. lt was guilty of conveying some faith in the "essence" of art, I mean, in the existence of some transhistorical and transcultural common denominator among all artistic practices. Our epoch being radically relativistic, it wouldn't allow such unorthodox belief. The orthodoxy of the times prescribed - and still prescribe - conceiving of art as being just one "signifying practice" (that expression was coined by Julia K.risteva) among others.



 When I first heard “practice” refer to art making, I associated it with its use in other professions like dentistry or legal advice or architecture - and it seemed inappropriate. Unlike those practices, there is hardly a consensus concerning what art should accomplish and whether it has succeeded.  And presumably it would not apply to those who did not paint or sculpt professionally -  so serious amateurs and  outsiders would not be included.

 But now, I’ll  accept TDD’s explanation that 'practice' comes from a  recent strain of French  philosophy that wants to deny any transcultural notion of art. By the way,  I still subscribe to that notion that inspired the establishment of encyclopedic art museums all over the world - as well as Malraux's "Museum without walls".





I have just said: "prescribed-and still prescribe".In fact, I'm not so sure. One of the things I expect from this conference is that it may help me understand to what extent the orthodoxy of discourse (what I nastily referred to as political correctness) fails to hide the reality of anxieties, disappointments, shattered beliefs, which, I suspect, have a hard time expressing themselves without giving the impression (as I most probably do) of wanting to go backwards and resorting to nostalgia. I hope that the discussion will bring these difficulties into the open, but meanwhile I would like to stress that what was in the Seventies an avant-gardistic discourse has, by now, been largely institutionalised I know of at least one art school where the students have the choice of enrolling either in '' Communication" or in 'Artistic Practice". As always, the magic of changing names is a symptom: the expression "artistic practice" has become a ritual formula, conveying. the vague suspicion that has come to surround the word art, while failing to designate referents in the world (that is, actual works) of which one could be sure that the word art has ceased to apply to them significantly.



It's not about going backwards -- it's about accepting that forwards and backwards are not relevant to a transhistorical  notion of art.  TDD  would seem to agree -- but may be cautious about saying so.

Imitation and Invention vs Deconstruction 

When the culture that fosters invention starts to doubt, it ceases to oppose itself to the culture fostering imitation that it claimed to supplant. Conversely, when the absence of models to be imitated begins to be felt as a loss and no longer as a liberation, this can only mean that this culture's capacity to invent without looking back has dried up. Once this point is reached (and God knows it has been reached: look at all the neo- and all the post-movements; look at the endemic practices of quotation, second- or third-degree self-referentiality, replicas, and the like), then it is no longer enough to say that imitation repeats and that invention makes the difference. The very concepts of repetition and difference ought to be thought anew, transversally, so to speak. Towards the end of the Sixties, again, and sitting on the uneasy boundary between literature and philosophy, Jacques Derrida, but also Gilles Deleuze and others, began thinking about difference and repetition together. Between the live voice creating newness and the trace that supplants and supplements the missing origin, they showed the link dismantling their expected opposition. Derrida sought ecriture in creation and difference in reproduction, while Deleuze showed that the eternal return of sameness inhabited the production of difference. Traditional concepts such as presence versus absence, immediacy versus mediation, originality versus secondarity, were no longer secure oppositions, and had to be deconstructed. The success of deconstruction is not simply explained - let alone explained away- by the quality of the philosophical work done under its name, and even less so by the mere influence of Derida - and of Paul de Man on the other side of the Atlantic- on literary criticism. If it had not resonated at a very precise stage in the crisis of modernity, it would not have achieved success at all. But, as we all know, it has, to the point where deconstructionism - and that's the last straw, really became the banner under which an architecture movement developed, after having invaded art criticism and, more recently, the teaching of art itself. Rather misun· derstood and badly assimilated, deconstruction has apparently become, in the Eighties, a method by which to produce art and to teach it. As such, however, rather misunderstood and badly assimilated, deconstruction is merely the symptom of the disarray of a generation of-art teachers who have lived through the crisis of -invention and have never themselves been submitted to the discipline of imitation. The result is that students who haven't had the time to construct an artistic culture of any kind are being tutored in the deconstructive suspicion proper to our time. I have seen one art school (not that long ago) where the first year course (what used to be the foundation course) had been transformed into a seminar in which the point was to "deconstruct" anything entering the classroom. One week it was an advertisement, another week it was the policy of this or that public art institution, and yet another week it was a student's work- a work done at home, that is, as if no assignment had been given to her beside the unspoken injunction to produce material to be deconstructed in the classroom. The ensuing paralysis was not just sad, it was revolting.


Revolting? That cranks up the passion of this critical assault yet another notch. Attitude-practice-deconstruction is presented as merely a symptom of the crisis in modernity. He also repeats — without any attempt at explanation - his assertion that deconstruction has been "misunderstood and badly assimilated" by the art world



Of course, as I warned you at the beginning of my talk, I have simplified matters, and 1 have turned the world of present day art schools into a caricature, just as 1 did with the old Academy and with the somewhat younger Bauhaus model. In the everyday reality of art schools things are a lot more complex, more subtle, more ambiguous. But since all of us, here, are gathered around the problematic and general issues of "perspectives in fine art education", l hope you understand that it is not on the level of our everyday endeavors that l have situated my remarks but on that of the historical ideological paradigms that we inherit from our institutions or with which, willy-nilly, we have to work. It is thus my contention, which 1 really want to offer as an open basis for discussion, that the triad of notions, "attitude-practice-deconstruction», is not the post-modern paradigm that supposedly substituted for the modern paradigm, "creativity-medium-invention" but is the same one, minus faith, plus suspicion. I tend to see it as a mere after-image, as the negative symptom of a historical transition whose positivity is not clear yet. As such it is quite interesting, and it can yield strong works of art. But for the teaching of art it is sterile. Once it is possible to put it down on paper, as I have just done, this means that its potential for negation has already become conventional (deconstruction is today's good taste), that its anguish is no longer of the kind that nourishes true artists (it is fake, because it is reconciled with the present); and that its suspicion is, unlike Descartes's doubt, not fruitful (it is aimed at the other and not at oneself).


The knife has just been driven in a few inches deeper:

 "it (attitude, practice, deconstruction) is fake, because it is reconciled with the present"

 Reconciled, presumably because it exists only to criticize the present rather than building something better for the future.  It needs the present like a parasite needs a host.

This paragraph also reveals the context of this essay  (actually, it's become more like a polemic)

 It was presented at some kind of seminar in the UK for  college art educators entitled "Perspectives in Fine Art Education".  TDD is assuming that they all dismiss the "old  academy" as dead and buried, while they are ever more skeptical about  the Bauhaus paradigm with which they grew up.



1 shall stop here, rather abruptly, on purpose. Having offered a diagnosis, l refuse to suggest a cure- which is not to say that the cure interests me less than the diagnosis. Quite the contrary. As some of you might know, I spent the past three years conceiving the project of a new art school on behalf of the City of Paris, until it was abandoned by the very same City of Paris for financial reasons. In the process I had dozens of meetings with artists, teachers, critics, intellectuals, technicians; I wrote a book on the issue of art schools, of which you have just heard the first fifteen pages; and I was lucky enough to be able to organize a one-month summer school for thirty-two students, as a sort of "dry-run'' test of the future school,just before the project went down the drain. In the process I also learnt that there is no ready-made solution to the crisis in art schools; that the first thing to do was patiently to reconstitute a community of good artists who love art, who respect each other and their students, and who take their task as transmitters seriously; and that the last thing to do was to want to unite them. around a banner, a program or an ideology. I hope you will pardon me for refusing even to suggest that I might hold such a banner.


If art educators  are not transmitting an ideology -- what  would they be  transmitting?

skills ?
attitudes ?
a critical vocabulary?

That would not be any kind of progressive change at all --  just the same post-modern art school as TDD knew it then -- and as  it still exists today, thirty years later.

Which might not be such a bad thing.

For students whose family can afford it, art school provides a safe and stimulating environment for young adults not ready to commit to a more results-demanding profession.

For educators in the arts and humanities, art schools provide status and employment.

And it can't be denied that many of the successful and/or good artists now working have graduated from BFA  or MFA  programs.

All of which is useful to someone -- but perhaps not to the civilization as a whole.

The worst consequence, as I see it, is the perpetuation of conceptual art in public and university museums.   2019   marks the 50th anniversary of the 1969  "When Attitudes Become Form"  - the Swiss exhibition that gave permission for art museums worldwide to exhibit that which can only be called "art" if their exhibition makes it so.

But all of this is  hardly a tragedy for De  Duve, who has spent his career working in art schools and has written several books about conceptual artists.

In 1993, after his attempt at reforming art education had failed,  Thierry De  Duve  delivered a speech severely criticizing it.  Then he went right back to being the philosopher-in-residence at the kind of institutions he had just attacked.  His service to them is now even greater - as his sharp criticism  demonstrates their commitment to free inquiry, even as he augments their authority by linking it to his own reputation. He is, what might be called, a company man.

His critique of the "old academy" is rather mild.  It's not that they perpetuated bad art - it's just that they are now so way-way-way out of date. And unlike the creativity-medium-invention or the attitude-practice-deconstruction paradigms, he did not argue that there was anything absurd or fake about an  art education based on talent-metier-imitation.

Thirty years later, we have discovered that it is not so out-of-date  after all.  Academic ateliers have sprung up in many cities (including Chicago). Many people are still moved by many examples of historical art, from ancient Egypt through the Modernists.  That's what "blockbuster" museum shows are all about.  And people still want to see imitations of the unchanging natural world.

Perhaps it's time for De Duve to publish a revised edition of this essay. Though one might note that
 the "old academy" did not, and does not, employ resident philosophers like himself.