cyberscape on mon 6 dec 99
I don't usually enter into these kinds of discussions but I want to let
you know that the notion that universities should teach "concept" rather
than technique has been gaining favor for the past thirty years, as
facuty members have come directly out of MFA programs into teaching
positions in increasing numbers. I have heard it, increasingly, from
professors in major universities, not just in ceramics but throughout
the visual arts. I have even recently heard it from a teacher at our
county's School of the Arts (High School). He said that they do not
teach ceramics because it is too technically oriented and not enough
about ideas. How does one medium become less about ideas than another?
Is paint more cerebral than clay? This is not a figment of Mel's
imagination. It is a very real problem.
The great plan was that "technicians", trained in trade schools were
going to execute the work which our academic artists would create in
their heads. What a cynical view of the artist, the craftsman and the
whole creative process. What galls me is the notion that "artists need
to be taught how to think in the first place. What arrogance. It is
more likely that artists need to learn and develop their craft so that
as their lives provide insight and content through personal experience
and observation, they will be able to do something with the ideas which
they will inevitably develop and wish to communicate. If one does not
learn HOW, then one's hands are tied when trying to actualized what is
visualized.
Harvey Sadow
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