In Terms Of

Tag: Carnegie Mellon University

  • Get Off the Internet

    Begun in March 2015, this essay was completed and published during a November 2015 residency at the Luminary in Saint Louis, Missouri.

    I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism
    Thursday, March 12, 2015
    Brooklyn Museum, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium, Brooklyn, NY

    Leah DeVun introduces the panel (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    From an aesthetic point of view, the term “punk”—whether referring to a music genre, a fashion style, or a nonconformist attitude—has generated an incredibly diverse creative output that ranges from cynical and nihilistic to self-empowered and ethically sound. Tonight’s panel, organized by A.I.R. Gallery and the Women and the Arts Collaborative at Rutgers University, addressed the passionate, potent combination of youth rebellion, women’s rights, and fast, furious music through the stories of five panelists who emerged from various punk scenes in the United States. The moderator of the panel, Leah DeVun, an artist and a professor of women’s and gender history, described the difficulty of summarizing each speaker’s impact on art, music, and culture into a one-paragraph introduction. One crucial thing, she contended, is that punk still has the power to fight the status quo.

    In a leather vest and boots, the singer, musician, author, actor, and spoken-word performer Lydia Lunch took the microphone and walked to the front of the stage, where she declared that she was No Wave, not punk. As opposed to the London variety, Lunch explained, “punk in New York was personal insanity, personified and thrown onto the stage.” Declaring affinities with the Surrealists and Situationists, she said, “I have always been fucking resisting.”

    Lydia Lunch in 1979 (photography by Ray Stevenson)

    Lunch grew up in Rochester, New York, and experienced the city’s race riots of 1967 as an eight-year-old. As a teenager she ran away from home, leaving behind her “asshole” father, a door-to-door Bible salesman, for a thriving underground scene. Finding Patti Smith inspirational but traditional, Lunch channeled her rage through abrasive music, angrier and artier than the punk of the Ramones. “I had a band that sounded like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,” she spat out, “at the same time I had a band that sounded like a slug crawling across a razor blade.”1 Other musical projects adopted other genres, such as big band.

    “Somebody had to come out with a woman’s voice and articulate aggression,” Lunch avowed, “and use some of the enemy’s language and put it right back in their fucking face. And that is basically what I’m still doing today, whether that’s through literature, art, photography, music, illustrated work, or writers’ workshops.” Her work over the past forty years can be characterized by a resistance to the patriarchal cycle of abuse. “Details are specific,” she said. “Trauma is universal.”

    Wearing her signature plastic mask, the artist and performer Narcissister read a short statement paper that outlines her project: to use intense eroticism, humor, and spectacle to address gender and racial identity and issues of representation. She presented images of Narc vs. Judy, a recent work made during a Yaddo residency, in which she placed vegetables and thrift-store bric-a-brac on the pages of a book on Judy Chicago’s canonical installation, The Dinner Party (1974–79). The older artist inspired Narcissister for several reasons—both changed their name as “a symbolic statement of self-determination” and both create vaginal imagery. Narcissister screened an eleven-minute draft of a video in progress, also made at Yaddo, that retells the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” with sexually explicit glee.

    Narcissister as Little Red Riding Hood (artwork © Narcissister)

    A champion of DIY, the curator Astria Suparak was a self-described Riot Grrrl as a teenager in Los Angeles. Working without formal curatorial-studies training or even a master’s degree, she surveyed her career in three parts: as a student, as an independent curator, and as an institutional employee. In the late 1990s, Suparak programmed a film series at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where she was an undergraduate, that showed experimental work, hard-to-find work, and the work of women, queers, and other marginalized groups. Because Pratt sponsored the project—nearly one hundred events in all—through student-activities funds, admission was free.

    Suparak connected with the larger experimental film scene in New York, which helped her as an independent curator after the turn of the century. She organized projects merging film and video, audio and music, live performance, and one-night art exhibitions; she even used dance and dinner parties as a medium. With the “rock-band model” for her activities, she “did a lot of shows in bars during those years,” in addition to nontraditional spaces: an abandoned mall in Louisiana, a disco hall in Dublin, and a roller-skating rink in Philadelphia.

    Astria Suparak is meeting her childhood goals (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    The third phase of Suparak’s career is unfolding in university galleries, where she seeks to expand an institution’s identity and audience, bringing in engineers, sociologists, and sports fans. “My curatorial work isn’t only meant for art-world consumption,” she stated. Since 2013 Suparak has been touring Alien She, an exhibition organized with Ceci Moss that originated at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh (which fired her early last year). Named for a Bikini Kill song, Alien She is not a history show but instead foregrounds the nonmusical “creative output” spawned by the early 1990s cultural moment of Riot Grrrl.

    Osa Atoe, creator of the music fanzine Shotgun Seamstress, is a potter and art teacher based in New Orleans. Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, she read record reviews for Smashing Pumpkins and Courtney Love in magazines like Spin and Rolling Stone, Raygun and Venus. (Her friends listened to TLC and Boyz II Men, and her parents to Afropop and R&B.) A believer in self-education, Atoe played in and toured with bands and did volunteering and organizing in Washington, DC—she finished college at age 28. Later, as a black woman in Portland, Oregon, she was surrounded by white liberals whose attitudes toward race she found awkward.

    Issue 8 of Osa Atoe’s Shotgun Seamstress

    Looking for a means of expression all her own, Atoe found inspiration in the “educational and cathartic” zine Evolution of a Race Riot, which demonstrated to her that an audience for black punk culture existed. Yet when making a Maximum Rocknroll or Punk Planet for black kids, she said, “I didn’t want to come from a place of critique.” Not limited to music, she wrote about the photographer Alvin Baltrop and the video artist Kalup Linzy.

    “For better or worse, whether I like it or not,” said the writer and musician Johanna Fateman, “I’m associated with the historical movement of Riot Grrrl … which I’m happy about.” Though she said the movement was over by 1994, she channeled its energy into a set of strategies to make art for a wider audience—not just for a scene.2 One way to express her relationship to music and politics was through writing. Fateman read an early piece reflecting on a performance by the Bay Area lesbian punk band Tribe 8: “It was extreme” and “extremely interesting to us as sixteen year olds” to stumble aross “the stupid gratification of live performance of punk music.” She also read excerpts from articles on Sara Marcus’s book on Riot Grrrl for Bookforum; on her band Le Tigre for the Red Bull Music Academy; and on her experience writing a song and shooting a video for Pussy Riot’s appearance on the television show House of Cards for Art in America.

    During the audience Q&A, an attendee asked Suparak how she funded her projects. With several scales of economy, she responded. When she worked without a budget for events in living rooms and abandoned malls, the participants were aware of the situation (and were okay with it). At bars, Suparak split door revenue with the venue. “Universities have money,” she reminded us, saying she included a few tour stops at schools to keep a project afloat. For a while, Suparak sacrificed having an apartment to save money: “I was living out of a suitcase” and bartering. With punk, DeVun chimed in, you don’t need permission or even to know what you’re doing.

    Members of Pussy Riot and Le Tigre at Baltimore Penn Station on August 8, 2014. From left: Masha Alyokhina, J. D. Samson, Johanna Fateman, and Nadya Tolokonnikova (photograph by Petya Verzilov)

    An attendee asked the panelists to respond to Tumblr feminism, which apparently takes extreme positions and attracts online trolls. While advocacy certainly takes place on the internet, “you should be out in public doing it,” urged Lunch. That said, Atoe finds it important to have an online counterpart to real-world projects to reach those who can’t get a physical zine.

    Venues and institutions mattered to the audience. “I don’t expect to see feminist performance art in a gay bar full of shirtless men,” a male attendee told Narcissister. While that may be true, she broadens her reach by performing in alternative spaces, night clubs, galleries and museums, and performance-art festivals. The art world misunderstands the intellectual complexity of her work, Narcissister said, and gets confused by a more public approach—like when she wowed the nation on America’s Got Talent in 2011.

    Another audience member inevitably asked how punk survives in an institutional context—isn’t this selling out? While Lunch acknowledged that mind-blowing stuff is happening in small venues like Death by Audio in Brooklyn, museums are acceptable punk spaces. Sometimes at underground clubs, she joked, “it’s me and twenty fat guys with beards.” To go to a really underground punk show, DeVun said, you need to be the person “who knows to go under the fence, around the corner, and through the hole” to get there. Atoe maintained that tiny shows in intimate settings have great personal meaning. “I’m sick of squats myself,” Lunch fired off at the original questioner. “I was sick of squats before you were born.”

    Johanna Fateman (left) discusses her contribution to the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    You can’t get 350 to 400 people in a small club, Suparak remarked, referring to the size of tonight’s audience at the Brooklyn Museum, and institutions offer skilled technicians and designers—people to which artist may not have access. “The idea of museums as elite places is false,” Suparak stated. Atoe urged people to “create the kind of atmosphere that you want to be in,” especially in male-dominated music scenes, which is why she started booking shows in the first place. Lunch had the last word: “as long as you can communicate, I don’t really care where it’s at.”

    Does archiving change the nature of the medium of zines, someone asked the panel. Eschewing rarity and meeting demand, Atoe has made copies of the first two issues for people for eight years. Fateman said she could neither preserve her archive on her own nor handle every researcher’s request for material, so she donated it to the Riot Grrrl Collection at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University, which comprises zines, letters, flyers, photographs, audio recordings, videotapes, and much more. While her early creative expression is embarrassing, Fateman admitted, people are interested. Now her work is contextualized with that of her peers. Archiving changes zines, Fateman conceded, but so does time. The intersection of punk and feminism has changed since the late 1970s, but the interest of tonight’s audience proved that it has persevered and remains as relevant as ever.

    In Terms Of count: 2.

    1 This band was Beirut Slump.

    2 During the audience Q&A, Astria Suparak said the majority of people who associate with Riot Grrrl today are in Central and South America—especially Mexico City.

    Read

    Osa Atoe, “I Will Resist with Every Inch and Every Breath: Punk and the Art of Feminism,” Shotgun Seamstress, March 24, 2015.

    Emily Colucci, “Big Sexy Noiseless: Lydia Lunch’s Silently Visceral So Real It Hurts,” Filthy Dreams, May 10, 2015.

    Nicole Disser, “Feminist Punk Panel Talks Zines, Radical Politics, and Race,” Bedford and Bowery, March 16, 2015.

    Samantha Spoto, “Punk Rock Needs Feminism,” Breakthru Radio, March 19, 2015.

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  • They’re Still Out to Get You

    They Know Everything about You: Privacy, Security, and Democracy in a Data-Driven Age
    Monday, March 2, 2015
    New York Institute for the Humanities, New York University, Cantor Film Center, New York

    The government has no compelling case for mass surveillance, proclaimed Robert Scheer, a longtime journalist and the editor in chief of Truth Dig. In the predigital days of snooping on the bad guys, he said, “All you needed was a half-sober cop to go sit in a car outside their house and figure out what they’re up to.” American authorities, Scheer continued, were already aware of the Boston Marathon bombers and Charlie Hedbo gunmen before their attacks, and preemptive surveillance by the government is “a betrayal of the American tradition,” to the audience’s applause. He defined this tradition as embracing transparency, honesty, open debate, consumer choice, and the ability to defend oneself within a legal system.

    Robert Scheer, They Know Everything about You (2015)

    Scheer said that his new book, They Know Everything about You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy (2015), whose release was being celebrated tonight, doesn’t attack technology but rather highlights how it is liberating and can save democracy. He feels a sense of loss regarding how technology’s marvelous potential is being squandered. Tonight’s panel, “They Know Everything about You: Privacy, Security, and Democracy in a Data-Driven Age,” cosponsored by the Nation Institute, highlighted how far we have come since the days of stakeouts, wiretaps, and dusty, sloppily transcribed files kept by the Stasi and FBI.

    Noticing a chilling effect on free speech and intellectual inquiry online, Helen Nissenbaum, professor of media, culture, communication, and computer science at New York University, explained how the digital surveillance of the online habits of Americans can predict if someone is a Democrat or Republican—a process known as voter targeting. With this information, marketers can influence a person’s political views. This “highly tailored” message, she said, drowns out conversation in the public sphere.

    Jen Lowe, an independent data scientist and researcher, argued that complex surveillance develops invisibly and so quickly that regular people can hardly keep up. “We are absolutely having fewer and fewer unobserved moments,” Lowe said. “We are being observed in our homes by our devices.” Advocating informed consent, Lowe pleaded for more “froth and dissent in democracy.”

    Edward W. Felten, professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University, stated that although algorithmic predictors offer customization and personalization, they serve interests that aren’t your own. “Predictors tend to work best if you’re very much like everyone else,” he said. Felton said that we live like public figures, editing our lives and strategizing our behavior in fear of the consequences of making a mistake.

    In an article he wrote in the late 1990s, Scheer remembered observing that “there is no other profit model of any substance” on the internet. “Basically we convinced people that giving up their information would enhance their shopping experience,” he said, “and we didn’t think what it might do to their self-censorship, to their citizenship, and so on.” And until Edward Snowden’s findings were made public, Scheer said, we didn’t know how massive post–September 11 government surveillance had become.

    “Where are the protests?” asked Mattathias Schwartz, a staff writer for the New Yorker who served as the panel’s moderator. “Is anyone quitting Facebook?” Felten claimed that individuals “feel powerless to change it.” Nissenbaum said the back end of data mining is complex. People might revolt if surveillance becomes more visible, Lowe offered, but she defended Facebook for being good at community: “There’s value that people don’t want to walk away from.”

    Turning back to politics, Felten stated that “we are still far from understanding the implications of the Snowden documents,” many of which, he said, have not been released. He believes the best stuff has yet to come: “That pot will continue to boil for quite a while.” Felten also brought up the recent revelation that American and British forces stole or cracked 2 billion SIM cards, which makes it easy for government agents to listen to calls and rewriting software to turn a smart phone into a recording or tracking device—even when it’s turned off. Scheer argued that technology simultaneously intimidates and seduces the masses. Younger Americans today think the government is benign, he said, but foreign-born students who have personally experienced repressive government regimes see things differently. But, he lamented, “As long as society can disperse the goodies, everything is fine.”

    Lowe doesn’t believe in Google’s rhetoric (“do no evil”), and Nissenbaum doesn’t trust “mammoth” companies more than she does the government. Felten said private companies want fences protecting themselves from government surveillance but noted that the feds can always buy data from companies and piggyback on existing surveillance technologies. Scheer somewhat agreed with the three others: “I hate to be reduced to hoping that Google and Apple and Facebook will do the right thing, but I give them a better shot than I do the NSA.” A misuse of data scandal, he conceded, might cause Facebook to collapse. Nissenbaum weighed the traditional right-to-be-left-alone versus the obligation to share information in a social society, but Felten reminded us that citizens freely give their information to data companies. He also noted that observation by surveillance cameras in public spaces, as well as via smartphone locational devices, is a given in society, not a choice.

    Scheer warned against collusions between business and government, like when privately held companies such as Palantir and In-Q-Tel analyze and sell data to law-enforcement agencies. “A wall has been breached,” he finished, “between the public and the private sector.” Palantir was founded with CIA money, he said, and the federal agency was its only client for three years. Lowe added that the Chicago Police Department has begun predictive policing, identifying criminals by algorithm and knocking on their doors, basically saying “We’re watching you.” The same police department, it was recently discovered, has been operating a black-site prison and interrogation building. “We’re being sold the story that data is unbiased,” Lowe said, “but it’s not magic either.” We shouldn’t forget about human error and bias.

    Schwartz asked about using Tor, PGP, torrents, Tails, and encryption, as well as the judicial system. Nissenbaum reminded us that the government isn’t monolithic; some agencies with good values conduct solid research and take positive action. To help thwart questionable surveillance, she suggested flooding online interactions to obfuscate the system, such as TrackMeNot, which she helped to create. People are more aware of encryption and privacy-enhancing technology, Felten said, and these tools are becoming more practical for ordinary users. “We’re seeing a growth of interest in these things beyond the tin-foil-hat crowd,” he joked. “And that demand is being responded to by, I think, a lot of public-minded researchers who want to try to improve the technical tools.” With hope in the power of the individual, not the corporation, Lowe advocated more education and tutorials for encryption. Deep Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is a new research group that is helping. Scheer said that every government claims to have enemies to justify its actions but implored, “If your cause is right, freedom will serve it.”

    In Terms Of count: 5.

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  • Art School Confidential

    Creative Extraction: Why Are Art Schools at the Vanguard of Unreasonable Debt Burdens?
    Friday, December 5, 2014
    Momenta Art and Occupy Museums, Brooklyn, NY

    In March 2014, the economics journalist Catherine Rampell crunched numbers from an online US Department of Education tool that collected data on college costs. Her results were stunning. After “subtracting the average amount of government and institutional grant/scholarship aid” for private four-year nonprofit colleges and universities, she determined that “seven of the top 10 most expensive schools are art schools or conservatories of some kind.”1 These included the familiar institutions: the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), and the San Francisco Art Institute. What’s more, two others on her list—the New School and New York University—offer numerous degrees in the arts.2 Tuition and required fees for the top ten range from $36,032 to $42,882 a year—which doesn’t include room, board, and related nonacademic expenses. Keep in mind that these are undergraduate degrees—master’s and doctoral degrees run even higher.

    It’s no secret that the tuition for all kinds of schools has increased significantly over the last thirty years, and thousands of students take out huge government and private loans to cover their educational expenses. Those armed with BFAs are unlikely to make tons of money right out of the starting gate, as the familiar narrative goes. Yet we live in a time in which euphoric articles pronounce the MFA as the new MBA appear with alarming regularity.3 What should a young artist do?

    Coco Fusco finds art-school debt to be unreasonable (photograph by Tal Beery)

    Neither alleviating nor preventing student debt was the subject of an informal, passionate lecture by Coco Fusco, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and visiting associate professor in comparative media studies and writing for 2014–15 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Speaking from her perch in the academic ivory tower, Fusco vented about the debt crisis, pointed fingers at numerous culprits, and found many sympathetic listeners. (She was a professor at Columbia University from 2001 to 2008—spending five years in the School of the Arts’ renowned MFA program—and following that was director of intermedia initiatives at Parsons the New School for Design from 2008 to 2013). Fusco was a “lone wolf in the wilderness” while teaching at Columbia during the boom Bush years, said Noah Fischer, a former student of hers and a founder of Occupy Museums, the group that sponsored her lecture and was participating in Momenta Art’s exhibition Work It Out.

    A year has passed since Modern Painters published Fusco’s essay “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns” in its December 2013 issue. For the article Fusco gathered anecdotal knowledge from conversations with students, arguing that debt influences the kind of art a person makes after graduation, that schools use recruiters, and that art theory influences students, for better or worse. While “Debating an MFA?” focused on expensive graduate programs, tonight’s forty-five-minute talk made few distinctions between bachelor’s and master’s degrees and interchangeably addressed art schools, liberal-arts colleges, and research universities. As a result, the targets of her accusations were confused, perhaps deliberately so for rhetorical effect, leaving me without a solid grasp of the problem. It felt like the mark in Three Card Monte.

    Cost of the Ticket

    The “cost of the ticket” for art school has risen significantly, Fusco said. The 1980s, when she earned her BA and MA, were different. “It’s not that we didn’t borrow money,” she explained. “We didn’t have to borrow as much.” Fusco ended up with “relatively little debt” from her undergraduate education and none for graduate school.4 Back then “school wasn’t the problem—school was the escape,” especially for those riding out tough economic times. Waitressing lunch shifts for four hours a day after first finishing school, Fusco said she was poor but had time for art, and even worked for other artists for free. Needless to say, few can afford this lifestyle today, at least not in New York.

    Design schools such as Savannah College of Art and Design and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago figure disproportionately among the institutions that use “predatory lending schemes,” Fusco declared, and the top debtor schools are for-profit institutions. Schools that teach software and web design are “massive factories with debt schemes built into them,” she remarked, and the situation has become intolerable and oppressive. Her information was confusing, since she didn’t explain what these schemes are. Besides, for-profit institutions such as the nationwide chain of Art Institutes or places like Full Sail University teach marketable skills in lucrative creative areas such as web development, video games, and film production.5 Their graduates are hardly knocking on the doors of Chelsea galleries. Fusco left me wanting to know how SCAD and SAIC, which are nonprofit institutions, compare to the for-profits.

    In Fusco’s experience, students are battling their parents over money for a collegiate art-school education, and parents are selling property, taking a second mortgage on their homes, and draining their retirement funds to pay for it all. At the same time, schools offer country-club experiences, with lavish dormitories and student centers—not to mention new buildings by starchitects like Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry—to supposedly impress wealthy parents to fork over cash. Paying for such expansions, Fusco said, is higher tuition.

    The opening scene of Daniel Clowes’s exposé, Art School Confidential, based on his experiences at Pratt Institute in the 1980s (artwork © Daniel Clowes)

    During the first audience Q&A, an older man recommended that artists “show up” and “be weird.” Why even go to art school, he asked, suggesting that we get rid of the middleman and hook up students with working artists through apprenticeships. “That’s the medieval way,” Fusco responded, which “can become free labor for a long time.” Another attendee, the writer Corinna Kirsch of Art F City, wanted to know how we might let parents know about debt in advance. I asked Fusco if she knew how much effort today’s students make to find nonloan funding for their education? What about student complacency regarding tuition increases, questioned another person. Fusco did not have adequate answers. We are at a point when the outrage is over, Fusco had said earlier, and organizing should begin. But the only solution she offered was going to free schools like the Bruce High Quality Foundation University and “others in Los Angeles,” as if these groups offer something comparable to a degree from an accredited institution. It’s disappointing if Bruce High Quality is the only alternative pedagogical project that she knows by name. Fusco can find a rich history of both current and discontinued alternative pedagogical institutions indexed by the TEACHABLE FILE and use Google to discover newer projects making headlines.6

    Proliferation of Degrees

    The proliferation of degrees at art schools isn’t an expansion of choices, Fusco argued, but an opportunity for schools to procure more students and dispense degrees without providing marketable skills (e.g., fabrication, installation, canvas stretching, and finding your way around a woodshop). Indeed, any subscriber to the Art and Education email list can vouch for the mushrooming of art-degree programs in discourse-based areas such as, for example, the MA in art, education, and community practice at New York University, the MA in social design at Maryland Institute College of Art, or the MA in social documentation at the University of California, Santa Cruz.7 Talkers who don’t make things don’t last long, Fusco warned, even though she acknowledged that she’s a talker artist herself.

    It’s more expensive for a school to maintain a glassblowing or ceramics studio, Fusco said, than to provide space for students doing social practice and, in her words, “transdisciplinary design.” While I generally agree with Fusco—it seems likely that programs for socially engaged art, which have multiplied in recent years as the genre gained visibility and respect, are less expensive to operate than programs in studio art—I can’t help but think that academic institutions are places where significant changes in how artists interact with the world take place. While initially frivolous sounding, these new degrees may evolve into progressive incubators for careers that haven’t yet grown mainstream roots. On the other hand, is a $50,000 to $100,000 investment in an experimental, emerging field worth the risk?

    Art School Administration

    Fusco stated that art schools increasingly operate in a corporate manner, a glib remark evoking the evil ways of vulgar capitalism. Yet pundits have proposed the same thing for ALL of higher education for years, if not decades, and the tedious concept of university-as-business becomes superfluous when considering that any institution that ignores balancing income and expenses will simply not survive. Continuing her blanket dismissals, Fusco claimed that art schools confuse students by promoting themselves as research centers for knowledge production, when in fact these institutions are trade schools focused on technical training. (Didn’t she say earlier that students aren’t being taught usable skills?) “There is no concept of research in trade school,” Fuso said, apparently comparing studying art to vocational training in refrigeration or plumbing. Her line of thought might have served a purpose if she had identified the BFA or the MFA as her target, or even specified the culprits of her critique.

    Image illustrating “Debating an MFA? The Lowdown on Art School Risks and Returns,” Coco Fusco’s article from Modern Painters

    Art schools devise ways to make the precarious employment of teachers permanent, Fusco continued, saying “It’s way beyond adjuncts now.” In fact, she stated that 90 percent of faculty members at art schools are adjuncts, without providing a source for this figure. “Those contracts have wonderful names,” she joked, “like visiting professor, visiting associate adjunct whatever, the titles go on and on, but the bottom line is that this is about the permanence of impermanence.” Adjunctification is indeed a huge problem across academia and especially in the visual arts. The three art capitals of America—New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles—boast a larger supply of artists, Fusco reported, and therefore teaching is a rough way for them to make a living. She floated the idea of living and working in Kansas City or Iowa City, in Dallas or Houston, but didn’t seem to take that seriously.

    A decline in full-time professors, Fusco went on, has adversely affected faculty governance. In addition to being poorly paid, she said, adjuncts lack a political voice within the institution and must placate students and not rock the boat—“it’s about hanging on.” Professional development has also suffered, which has led to teachers using thirty-five-year-old syllabi. “No one should be allowed to do that,” she fumed. Artists are the hardest adjuncts hit, since part-timers in design and architecture usually have day jobs, which affects their political outlook on precarious labor. “They don’t want more obligations,” Fusco said, so it’s hard to win their support for change. Art schools, she told us, employ students in positions where other institutions, such as MIT, have a support staff of unionized professionals. While a federally subsidized work/study program is certainly beneficial for students, I can imagine that not having properly trained people running the darkroom or the print shop to be frustrating.

    Because art schools face a dearth of applications from the US and a high turnover of students after one year, Fusco claimed, schools don’t have enough students—that is to say, they don’t have enough students to justify the expense of the legions of administrators who manage the pupils. Therefore an influx of foreigners has populated programs at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and CalArts. “Where am I, in Singapore?” she joked at the sea of yellow faces in art schools today. That comment sounded xenophobic, if not racist.

    Seductions Strategies and Art Market Collusion

    The seduction strategies that recruit students are real, Fusco said, and people aren’t told the truth before entering school—which is that most artists will not make it. (Who are these recruiters?) The lure for the Columbia MFA program in recent years, she said, is that an unidentified department head told students in private conversations that they’ll be rich before they finish school or they’ll hang out with famous art-world people who will help them find money. Fusco also argued that glamorous precarious workers—described by the journalist Riva Seth as “highly educated, skilled professionals who frequently are well compensated but nonetheless lack the security, social benefits or established career trajectories traditionally associated with their professions”—have an illusion of independence.8 Yet the media spin on successful young artists, she warned, fails to acknowledge that artworks bought by collectors who speculate are typically priced less than $10,000 each—hardly a get-rick-quick scheme. Of course, during her talk Fusco assumed—almost arrogantly so—that market success in the commercial art world is the solitary goal of those attending MFA programs. Throughout her talk she avoided discussing any other reason why artists might better themselves through education, leaving no room for other career pursuits.

    During the 1970s, Fusco revealed, artists didn’t depend on the market: selling art was unusual and artists found cheap ways to live. Now those artists—whom she identified as male Conceptual artists teaching in higher education—aren’t the ones who can spread an awareness to students of the need for immediate financial returns after graduation. I’m not sure how that observation squares with her other comments. For example, Fusco said that some professor-artists connect their students to the market because that’s all they can offer as teachers. Art dealers visited CalArts in the 1980s to meet the students of Douglas Huebler and John Baldessari, the “spiritual children of the Svengali types” as she put it. And during the 1990s, Fusco continued, dealers visited students at the University of California, San Diego, and Yale University School of Art. It was certainly revealing that, according to the speaker’s anecdotes, the art market had begun invading MFA programs over thirty years ago, that it’s not surprising for gallery owners and collectors to pluck fresh talent from artists still in training.

    Debtfair’s contribution to Work It Out at Momenta Art

    If a young artist’s goal is to exhibit at galleries like Murray Guy or Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Fusco said, or to show in a booth at a New Art Dealers Alliance art fair, then he or she should consider attending expensive graduate schools. At Columbia, she disclosed, students specialize in networking, socializing, and drinking—and even complained to administrators when Fusco made them read and write. “Those students are like little barracudas,” she groused. “If they could kill me and get to my dealer, they would.”

    Since “you’re paying $50,000 a year to be looked at before you even begin your career,” as Fusco claimed, should a prospective student attend a top art school or settle for an MFA program in the hinterlands of America, where he or she might earn a full ride? In the age of $120,000 art degrees, to borrow a slogan from the collective BFAMFAPHD, the latter option is the only sensible choice. Fusco named Arizona State University in Tempe and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh as possibilities. For an artist interested in technology, she suggested heading to a school with the latest equipment, like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and not to a boutique MFA program that specializes in seminars. I’ve heard that the University of California in Irvine and in Riverside, the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale all offer generous packages to MFA students. Germany just made higher education free for anyone, Fusco pointed out, and students don’t even have to be citizens. If it’s actually true that “students who go to high-profile schools get a subtle eighteen-month bump after they graduate,” as the critic and adjunct professor Jerry Saltz wrote, then attending a less-prestigious and less-expensive school—and consequently incurring little if any debt—before moving to New York (or wherever) to break into the commercial gallery scene makes a lot of sense.9 This artist will have hundreds of extra dollars a month for studio rent, art supplies, and food.

    During the audience Q&A, the artist Kenneth Pietrobono, who like Noah Fischer is involved in Occupy Museums, declared that he turned down a spot in an MFA program at New York University because the cost of attending was too high, despite loan money being available. That was a wise decision. When faced with rising costs for art school and low expectations after graduation, prospective students must recognize that they are adults who are capable of conducting research, seeking counseling, and making their own decisions before accepting tens of thousands of dollars in loan money. They also must recognize the importance of saying no to unfavorable financial situations. But the fact remains that many artists have shackled themselves with huge amounts of debt, and that is a pity.

    In Terms Of count: 3.

    1 Catherine Rampell, “The Most Expensive Colleges in the Country Are Art Schools, Not Ivies,” Washington Post, March 28, 2014.

    2 The tenth institution, Beacon College, is a small school in Florida “exclusively serving students with learning disabilities, ADHD, and other learning differences,” according to its homepage.

    3 See Steven Tepper, “Is an MFA the New MBA?,” Fast Company, March 23, 2013; Glenn Schaeffer, “Why the MFA Is the New MBA,” Vegas Seven, May 20, 2010; Katharine Bell, “The MFA Is the New MBA,” Harvard Business Review, April 14, 2008; Janet Rae-Dupree, “Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain,” New York Times, April 6, 2008; Ronald Jones, “The Art Market,” Frieze 101 (September 2006). The concept of MFA=MBA was developed by the business writer and theorist Daniel H. Pink in his Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself (New York: Warner Books, 2002) and popularized in the February 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

    4 Fusco earned a BA in semiotics from Brown University (1982), an MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University (1985), and a PhD in art and visual culture from Middlesex University (2005).

    5 The Art Institutes, for-profit schools owned by Education Management Corp that teach media and commercial art, not the fine art of painting and sculpture, have had their own legal problems. See David Halperin, “EDMC Professors and Students Speak: How Lobbyists and Goldman Sachs Ruined For-Profit Education,” Republic Report, September 24, 2012; and Chris Kirkham, “With Goldman’s Foray into Higher Education, a Predatory Pursuit of Students and Revenues,” Huffington Post, October 14, 2011.

    6 See Maggie Gray, “Creative Schools: The Artists Taking Art Education into Their Own Hands,” Apollo, September 10, 2014; and Ryan Gander, “Ryan Gander’s Plans for an Art School in Suffolk,” Apollo, September 10, 2014. These kinds of conversations and projects, however, have been taking place for years, if not decades.

    7 It’s interesting that all three are MAs, not MFAs. Because these are not terminal degrees, their recipients will not be qualified to teach art at the college or university level.

    8 Riva Seth, “Give Precarious Workers a Chance,” Policy Options (September 2014).

    9 Jerry Saltz, “An M.F.A. Degree Is Too Expensive, and That’s Only the Start of the Problem,” Vulture, December 5, 2013.

    Read

    Corinna Kirsch, “No Remedies: Coco Fusco on the Ills of Art School,” Art F City, December 18, 2014.

  • The Punch in the Face That a Poster Can Have

    Curating Social Movements
    Tuesday, August 19, 2014
    ICI Curatorial Hub, Independent Curators International, New York

    An Occupy Wall Street poster from 2011 by the artist Lalo Alcaraz

    Weeks after the Occupy Movement started, in September 2011, museums began racing to collect the posters, flyers, and other materials from the protests. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History dispatched archivists from Washington, DC, and the New-York Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York sent representatives downtown, as reported by Artinfo, the Washington Times, and the New York Daily News. As an explanation, the Smithsonian released a statement on October 19 that read: “The Museum collects from contemporary events because many of these materials are ephemeral and if not collected immediately, are lost to the historical record.” In an editorial for CNN published in November, Michele Elam, a professor of English at Stanford University, wrote, “Occupy art might just be the movement’s most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist uprising frequently characterized as largely white and ‘hippie.’” Academics, museums, and the media clearly recognized the importance of both Occupy and its visual culture in American history.

    Though squatting in Zuccotti Park ended permanently by mid-November 2011, activists and artists kept the movement alive in myriad other ways. So did the institutions. In summer 2012, the Yerba Center for the Arts in San Francisco contextualized contemporary materials with those from the region’s storied past of political dissent in Occupy Bay Area. In spring 2013, the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, organized Artists Take Action: Protest Posters Today, an exhibition of posters and ephemera from Occupy, some of which were borrowed from the Smithsonian. In that same year, the Museum of Modern Art added the Occuprint Portfolio, consisting of thirty-one screen prints (including work by Molly Crabapple, John Emerson, and Katherine Ball) from the Booklyn Artists Alliance, to its permanent collection.

    At the beginning of “Curating Social Movements,” the curator Ryan Wong claimed that the topic of curating social movements is underdiscussed. “Social-movement stuff,” he said, “falls through the cracks.” Wong rightly identified curators as political actors—negotiation among parties of various backgrounds and competing interests is implicit in the job. He also correctly proposed that examining the visual culture of social movements help us to better understand their history. But considering the kinds of activity mentioned above, Wong’s notion that “art institutions are threatened by this kind of work, these objects,” felt off the mark. Which institutions are threatened, and what exactly is the threat?

    A view of “Curating Social Movements” at the ICI Curatorial Hub

    Wong’s fellow panelist, the artist and activist Josh MacPhee, grew up as a punk-rock kid in Massachusetts, where he graduated from making flyers for bands to designing posters for housing struggles, bridging music and politics with cultural production. With Dara Greenwald, he organized Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures 1960s to Now at Exit Art in 2008, an exhibition that served as a visual introduction to social movements around the world. (The show traveled to the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University a year later). MacPhee argued that the works of art, which were borrowed from eighty-two institutions, were integral to each movement’s political aspirations. Picking a bone with academia, he said that scholars tend to review what others have written (e.g., in journalistic accounts) and overlook the primary visual documents. I, too, find it odd that authors and historians could be so sloppy and wondered with scholars MacPhee had in mind.

    MacPhee represented Interference Archive, a collectively run group that acquires and houses materials and objects from social movements from the 1960s to the present, stages exhibitions of them, and makes them available for study. Based in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, the archive offers public programming, workshops, and events in a social space—just like many other libraries, museums, and cultural and educational centers. With a hands-on policy, he said, Interference Archive is not a quiet library.

    MacPhee offered seven ideas to distinguish cultural production, which I understood as useful materials for a particular purpose, from political art, a genre that operates in the world of so-called fine art. The first notion was autonomy. If I understand him correctly, the visual culture of social movements does not have autonomy—background information beyond a caption is needed for comprehending the full message of an image. To demonstrate, MacPhee showed a 1963 photograph by Charles Moore, depicting four American civil-rights activists sprayed by water hoses. The underlying significance to the image, not readily apparent, is not that these people are protestors, but that they’re protestors who are organized. I liked this point of view very much, but overall MacPhee’s logic regarding autonomy was unclear, since context is hugely critical for untangling the meaning of much contemporary art.

    charlesmoore
    A Charles Moore photograph of the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3, 1963

    The social forms of cultural production (MacPhee’s second idea) are important. He also emphasized the movement as producer (idea three), for which creative roles are flexible—teachers become television broadcasters. He also pointed out how arpilleras quilts were smuggled from Chile through the Catholic Church to raise funds for resistance efforts against a dictatorship. The stakes of visual material from social movements (idea four) are also vital: what are the intended goals apart from the individual concern? Prints depicting scenes from the Gwangju Uprising (by Hong Sung-dam and others) illustrated what was banned from television because, MacPhee said, journalists couldn’t work the right angle and the American government forced CBS not to broadcast footage. (Since I am not familiar with this history, I’ll take his word for it.) At this point MacPhee noted how Independent Curators International had recently been caught in crossfire with the BDS movement, which calls for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel, a country that, he noted, pays three to four times the regular fee for visiting speakers.1

    Since upheaval generates cultural production, MacPhee identified cacophony as a fifth quality. In 1968 France, the Atelier Populaire generated thousands of revolutionary posters after protesters took over the equipment in the occupied École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He also mentioned a Nicaraguan artist “known for [his] Marlboro Man cowboy style,” whose images alluding to the wide-brimmed hat of the national hero Augusto César Sandino were adopted by the Sandinistas during the 1980s as a symbol of resistance. (Was Róger Pérez de la Rocha the name of this artist?)

    The White Bike Plan in Amsterdam was organized by a counterculture group called Provo

    Marginal ideas transform the world, which MacPhee called prefiguration (his sixth notion), referring to prefigurative politics, for which people imagine a better society before trying to realize it. The mid-1960s White Bike Plan in Amsterdam would have given free access to bicycles in the Dutch capital, he told us, but the CitiBike idea for New York was seized by sinister venture capitalists, just like portions of the code on which Twitter was built came from the open-sourced TXTMOB in 2004. It would be interesting to read a comparative analysis between the reception of the White Bike Plan and CitiBike—perhaps something has already been written?

    momalibrary
    Cataloger’s note from the Museum of Modern Art Library (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    MacPhee’s seventh and final idea argued that the art of social movements does not fit comfortably in museums and archives. Instead, he claimed, it often stays within the common—which probably means with private individuals who I imagine do not think of themselves as collectors or archivists. He showed a snapshot of a ten-year-old note referencing an unidentified collection of posters deemed “not cool enough” for initial cataloging by the Museum of Modern Art Library, which demonstrated a worker’s delightful sense of humor when prioritizing his or her work. Museums and institutions with different missions, though, happily collect social-movement ephemera, as I indicated in the opening paragraphs of this review. Nevertheless, I wonder if the creators of political posters aspire to have their work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—or to any institution that desires to preserve and present them—or if such fetishization is antithetical to revolution.

    Wong organized Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive in 2013–14, presenting the work of numerous activists in the 1970s. Early on, Wong noticed that the movement did not have a Wikipedia page, and only a handful of academic books deal with the subject. “Google searches turn up little,” he said. His exhibition focused on the Basement Workshop in Chinatown, which he said was a place to talk, hang out, and make posters. Photographs from the era are banal but offer the energy of the moment, Wong said, which sounded like a contradiction to my ears. But no matter—this was the “first time,” he said, “where Asian Americans are controlling their own image.”

    Ryan Wong talks about his exhibition Serve the People (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Serve the People incorporated diverse media: graphic works from the artist Tomie Arai; music from the folk record A Grain of Sand (1973) and by the jazz baritone saxophonist Fred Ho; copies of a newsletter called Getting Together; and posters for workshops, street fairs, and basic medical services; and more. The curator also included documentary photographs by Corky Lee of a Peter Yew protest against police brutality, during which twenty thousand people marched from Chinatown to City Hall. Wong said that didn’t know this kind of show was possible before [seeing] Signs of Change. When organizing Serve the People, Wong faced skeptics who asked him “Why now? Why you? What do you know about my history?” These are fair questions, but ones that a good curator will know how to answer.

    Conversation during the audience Q&A covered measuring success, intergenerational communication, and exhibitions at Interference Archive, such as reconciling participant’s recollections against material evidence and maintaining community after a show ends. Though the two speakers didn’t offer a satisfactory answer to that last point—Wong even said that exhibitions “do violence” to the memories of the movement—it seems as if a good presentation should sufficiently inspire or agitate people to organize on their own (while including the institution, if they so choose). An exhibition space shouldn’t be relied on to be the only group that can effect social change.

    Installation view of Serve the People: The Asian American Movement in New York at Interference Archive

    Interference Archive is staffed by volunteers, which come to the group out of desire. The organization minimizes hierarchy, MacPhee said, though he suggested that board members should be movement activists. He also said that 95 percent of funding comes from visitors via memberships, passing the jar at events, and selling works, which makes organizational sustainability an issue, especially regarding digital issues in archival work.

    Digitization isn’t a solution to accessibility, MacPhee explained, noting the time, money, and labor that goes into the effort—not to mention the difficulties of conducting additional research, assessing impact, and giving materials proper frames of reference in the face of the internet’s decontextualizing force. It’s better to set up archives in other communities, he recommended, and Wong noted that cultural production for the Asian American Movement is spread across the country: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. Each city can build its own Interference Archive. Someone suggested forcing big museums to do this work, but anyone who has spent time in a nonprofit knows that even the most prominent institutions suffer from an overburdened workforce. There is hope: Interference Archive has a Born Digital Working Group assessing the situation of storing and facilitating the migration of electronic material for future accessibility. But alas, “There’s no funding stream for an archive,” MacPhee resigned.

    An audience member asked about discernment when collecting objects, especially with movements whose political beliefs (such as white power or the Tea Party) may not align with the left-oriented Interference Archive. MacPhee said his group collects material from all kinds of movements and has accumulated right-wing stuff from what he called “counterintelligence” collections, not from the movements themselves. He explained that right-wing activists have typically favored television talk shows over printed matter—remember all those skinheads on Donahue and Geraldo? MacPhee clarified that even people on the left espouse violence, homophobia, and a naïve understanding of revolution.

    “Are kids still doing this?” someone asked regarding cultural production for social movements. “Yes, all over the place,” MacPhee responded positively. That was good to hear.

    In Terms Of count: 6½.

    1 See Mostafa Heddaya, “Creative Time Reneges on Promise to BDS Artists with Israel Exhibition, Artist Withdraws,” Hyperallergic, June 5, 2014; and Anne Pasternak and Nato Thompson, “Creative Time Responds to BDS Arts Coalition Petition” Creative Time, June 13, 2014.