Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art, conclusion more

[Note to readers: this is a chapter from a book that is forthcoming from New Academia Press, www.newacademia.com. This text is unedited (it is not the final version), and it was originally posted on saic.academia.edu/JElkins. I have also posted the other three chapters that I wrote for the book. If you have comments or suggestions, please send them to me at jameselkins@fastmail.fm. More information is also available on my website, www.jameselkins.com.] 20 Brief Conclusions James Elkins If you have read the eleven essays in Part One, and sampled the eight excerpts in Part Two, then you have a fairly accurate picture of the state of the studio-art PhD. You may still be thinking: Okay, fine, but this degree is still a bad idea. It will keep young artists in school more than ever before. It will make it even less likely that they will develop individual voices. There are a lot of great artists out there, you might say, who don’t need the PhD—and there’s a lot of art that could not have been made in a PhD program at all. People who have taught in MFA programs know the sinking feeling of encountering more purpose-made, over-intellectualized art, whose raison d’être is determined by the institution, whose makers speak glibly about the biennales, the major markets, contemporary theory, and institutional critique. (Dave Hickey is especially good at this kind of complaint.) Surely the PhD will just make more people like that. It’s a hot house, greenhouse kind of idea, too ivory-tower, too shut away from the wider world. And besides—you may say—how many MFA students are capable of serious research? Or if you don’t like the word “research,” then how many can write 50,000 or 100,000 words on any subject? And look at what happened in the UK: some PhDgranting institutions are interesting, but many are a kind of prolonged MFA, with students 2 just sitting in their studios another two or three years, producing more of the same art, writing about themselves, navel-gazing, trying to achieve a pinnacle of self-awareness that may or may not make their work more interesting. Those aren’t real PhD programs, they’re just glorified studios. The students are not guided not by specialists but by their same old studio art instructors. Those are all legitimate objections. There is no real defense against them. Why persist, then? Why not give up and let the MFA or MA keep their places as the highest formal degrees?1 Why not be content to set up open institutions like the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht in The Netherlands, where artists can study beyond the PhD without getting any additional degrees? Why not let artists get degrees in other fields if they think they need them? Because of market pressure. Every indication is that the studio-art PhD will spread like the MFA after World War II. It will spread slowly in the US, because of the lack of financial incentives, but it will spread, and eventually it will be the degree everyone needs to get teaching jobs. Given that, it seems tremendously important to consider these two things:2 1. The impending PhD is a signal opportunity to rethink education. Art schools and colleges can learn from mistakes made in the UK and elsewhere, and institute a genuinely challenging, well-conceived version of the doctorate. For example US institutions can avoid the tortured uses of administrative jargon and the fragile deployment of half-understood theories that mar some existing PhD dissertations. They can avoid the descent into solipsism and interminable self-reflection that infests some studio-art dissertations. They can avoid the unstructured extension of the MFA that is so tempting for newly-implemented PhD programs. They can avoid parroting the sciences, or hopelessly emulating the disciplinarity they see in other parts of the university. Now is the time to rethink the concept of advanced art education, and by extension, all education that purports to include creative or expressive elements. The studio-art PhD is worth pondering and pursuing because it raises questions about the university that are not raised as forcibly in other contexts. I can think of five areas of 3 questioning in particular. First, the PhD involves a fundamental questioning of the MFA, which has never had a secure basis. As Howard Singerman, Timothy Emlyn Jones, and others have pointed out, the charter of the MFA is not itself a coherent document, and it has never been clear what the degree is intended to accomplish.3 It is based, so I have argued, on a set of mutually contradictory values that come from different historical sources: late Romanticism, the French Academy, the Bauhaus, identity politics in the 1960s and 1970s.4 A conceptually clear PhD would require a clearer MFA. Second: the PhD would be an opportunity to do serious work on the always vexed relation between studio art departments and the rest of the university. Studio art departments are always the poor cousins of academic departments, just as art schools throughout the world have only tentative and ad hoc relations with their local universities. (When they have connections at all.) The studio-art PhD is among other things a bid for parity and recognition, so it will entail re-opening the many half-finished conversations about the function of the university, the idea of the university, and the coherence of the university.5 Third, the studio-art PhD can be an occasion to revisit the entire question of advanced degrees (“terminal” degrees, in the somewhat startling US term). As Mick Wilson argues in this book, the history of the PhD is hardly a neutral one, and it can be argued that it sits uneasily even in fields where it now seems natural. Fourth, and most interesting to me, the PhD will ask scholars in all fields to reconsider what it means to supervise a dissertation. Nominally, supervision means that the student is guided to a level of competence equal to others in the field; but with the increasing interest in interdisciplinarity, that model becomes weak. (How can a student be expected to be equally competent in two or three fields? What is competence when fields are mingled?) Studio-art PhDs raise such conversations to an entirely new level, because the student is making something, and scholarship is—often, as I argue in Chapter 11, but not always— subservient to expression. Fifth, and last: the studio-art PhD creates the possibility for wholly new kinds of interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and other unnamed configurations, because it does not add kinds of scholarship to one another: it mingles scholarship with expressive work. For these and many other reasons, the studio-art PhD 4 opens up the most basic dogmas and assumptions of the contemporary university. It is nothing less than a chance to re-conceive disciplinarity. 2. For artists, the studio-art PhD is only useful in a tiny percentage of cases, but those cases are extremely interesting. If, as an artist, you need to know about Lacan, cognitive science, chemistry, or Aboriginal culture, at a professional level—if it will somehow inform your work, if you feel it’s necessary to go forward—then the PhD is for you. If you are like ninety-eight percent of artists, you don’t need to know any academic field quite that well, and so the degree isn’t necessary. For many students, the degree could be actively harmful: it could keep students in the university, or in school, just when they should be out finding their way in the world. It will inevitably produce a scholasticism—a uniformity, an orthodoxy, a conservatism—as every academic discipline does. If your art is, say, Neoexpressionist, then an advanced degree may actually harm your practice by making you aware of historical and critical reasons to doubt your own interests. (I have sometimes advised artists who do expressionist work to drop out of school even before the MFA.) But if your work depends on, say, a feminist critique of psychoanalysis, then the studio-art PhD may be just what you need. Many artists and scholars are hobbled because they are insecure about theory: they haven’t studied enough of it to know quite what they are permitted to say, and so they become timid, and never really join the discourse on their subject. When a student comes to me and says she’s just discovered someone like Derrida, and can I please help her to find good books to read, I often say: You have two choices. Either forget about Derrida, and go back to your studio and get on with your art, or else take two or three years and really study him, until you feel you know his work inside out. That advice is intended to avoid the common situation in which a student learns some theory, but not enough to really move freely in it, or to use it to make interesting moves. As a result their art, or their scholarship in the case of academic students, becomes timid. For art students, the PhD in studio art should fix that. It can produce genuinely well-informed, professional-level practitioners, who really know the issues and how to intervene in current critical impasses. Such students would do the sorts of philosophically-oriented 5 work that is praised by Rosalind Krauss, for example, in regard to artists such as Marcel Broodthaers. For the small percentage of art students who really need to master some body of knowledge, the PhD is not only a good idea but an essential one. The art world is filled to overflowing with half-digested theories, bluster, incoherence, and disorganized, impressionistic writing.6 In a sense that’s the status quo, and it would not make sense to critique it: but in some cases, when particular claims are being made about specific concepts and philosophic positions, then the PhD would be the only place an artist could go to really join the conversation of contemporary visual theory. MFAs, despite their many virtues, simply do not produce graduates who really know theory. I say that after twenty years teaching at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago: in all that time I have seen no more than a couple of dozen students who were educated at the level of rigor that is expected of, say, philosophy students in major universities. MFA students are routinely given degrees even though they have only a sketchy, somewhat bewildered sense of such things as deconstruction, semiotics, or psychoanalysis. In virtually every case, that just doesn’t matter. In a small number of cases—maybe two percent of the general population of MFA students—it really does. Let’s work to raise the bar, and make art education more difficult. 6 Notes 1 Here let me cite again “A Certain MA-ness,” edited by Henk Slager, special issue of Makhuzine: Journal of Artistic Research [Utrecht School of the Arts] 5 (2008), ISSN 1882-4728, which has a collection of essays theorizing the MA and MFA. 2 A condensed, polemic version of what follows, which can also serve as a laundry list of points in this book, is my “Ten Reasons to Mistrust the New PhD in Studio Art,” Art in America (May 2007): 108-9. 3 Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 4 My Why Art Cannot be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001). 5 In addition to the sources cited in Wilson’s paper (Chapter 4) see R. D. Anderson, European Universities from the Enlightenment to 1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). The coherence of the “idea of the university” is addressed, with additional sources, in Visual Practices Across the University, edited by James Elkins (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007). 6 I try to analyze this in the “Editor’s Afterword to the Art Seminar Series” in ReEnchantment, co-edited by David Morgan, vol. 7 of The Art Seminar (New York: Routledge, 2008); the essay is an attempt to characterize the exact kinds of disagreement, incoherence, etc., that took place in the seven-volume series.