Bildungsroman
by Marco Marcon

I used to interview school leavers applying to enrol in our art school. As expected, most had an interest in and aptitude for traditional aesthetic qualities and activities. They could draw, paint, and make things; they had a natural feel for form, colour, texture, materiality and composition. Some were articulate; others’ portfolios spoke more eloquently than they did.
        Meeting these young hopefuls stirred conflicting feelings. I was charmed by their optimism, though I knew they were aware they stood a better chance of admission if they came across as eager. But I also felt a twinge of guilt knowing I was about to shatter their world. They arrived with deeply ingrained ideas about art and artmaking, the same common-sense views held by people outside the contemporary art world, and my job was to disabuse them.
        This was not sadistic nihilism on my part; it was school policy, openly acknowledged and explained to first-year students. We would inflict a little spiritual pain on them, but it was for their own good. This approach assumed that people not yet inducted into the inner sanctum of contemporary art had little or no idea what they would find once the veil of Maya was lifted.
        Charged with teaching modern art history and theory, my colleagues and I were on the front line of this assault on freshmen’s assumptions. Typically, they were somewhat familiar with Impressionism and Surrealism, knew abstract art existed, and had heard that something called the Renaissance happened sometime between the Stone Age and the Victorian era. To these innocents, we had to break the news that the most important artist of the twentieth century was a guy whose masterpiece was a urinal he had bought from a plumbing shop.
        Freshmen often knew some of the most notorious high jinks of contemporary artists, the guy who “chopped his arm off” on stage, the gal who presented her unmade bed covered in stained sheets, but they didn’t expect to see them treated with such pedagogical earnestness.
        And yet, even more disconcerting surprises awaited our fresh-faced, bushy-tailed recruits. For example, I had to tell them not to think of art in terms of visual pleasure but of ‘discourse’ and ‘criticality’, terms that required a fair bit of explanation, not just for students but also for some of the teaching staff. They also had to learn never to praise an artwork as ‘beautiful’ but to call it ‘strong’. We told them skills were optional, especially traditional ones, and that they had to talk about their work. Silent art was a thing of the past; we now wanted talkies.
        I already had some misgivings about these pedagogical principles, but who was I to swim against the tide of history? Besides, we PoMo theory lecturers had to hold our own against the ‘modernist’ staff members who still believed in the transcendental value of materials and techniques. So, while I was busy dismantling students’ preconceived, common-sense ideas about art, I was also imparting an equally arbitrary perspective: the canonical hierarchies of the latest trends in art theory. I was helping to perpetuate a system of art-historical pseudo-truths that needed questioning, not idealising.
        As for the students, their responses were mixed. Most pretended to listen, but ignored us, and simply went on making whatever they wanted. It was an exercise in passive resistance that, though laudable, required little courage, since they knew we would not fail them. Some of their classmates, however, saw an unexpected opportunity in what they were discovering about the contemporary art canon. ‘I, too,’ they thought, ‘can buy a plumbing fixture, present it as art, and call it a postmodern homage to Marcel Duchamp. Or I could paint a square canvas in monochrome hot pink and call it a feminist response to Malevich. How can they prove it is not art? I could even ask my bookish partner to write an exegesis citing all the right people.’
        Moreover, anti-aesthetic, dematerialised art of (mostly) ideas was what the cool kids did, and the savvier students cottoned on. In truth, even they admitted that such works were often hollow, predictable little in-jokes. But the institutions took them seriously, and they were so damn easy to make! This may sound farcical, but it happened.
        The trouble is that contemporary art notions such as ‘deskilling’ and ‘post-medium’ are sometimes interpreted too literally. We are material beings; our thoughts and experiences are embodied. When an artist has an idea and wants to make it tangible, reality fights back. Matter resists concepts; you have to struggle with it and tame it, without suppressing it. In this, the Modernists were right, though they went too far in building a quasi-metaphysical system around this insight.
        It is (almost) impossible to create a work of art without some physical medium and the ability to manipulate it. Artists don’t have to conform to traditional ways of working; they can choose or develop the processes and materials that suit their aims. And many do. In fact, developing an original set of expressive tools can be integral to the artwork, not just a means to an end.
        Furthermore, ideas and matter are not strictly separate. Ideas often emerge when artists playfully wrestle with their chosen medium. Even architects or designers, who do not handle materials directly, must understand them intimately. When I write, I don’t think first and then put thoughts into words; the two go hand in hand. Some artistic ideas may be nonverbal, but they aren’t immaterial. They concern what to do with form, sound, colour, and texture.
        The problem with some post-medium and deskilled art is that it doesn’t engage with the phenomenal world; there is no struggle, no resistance, all the doors are open, anything goes. It is an art haunted by arbitrariness, one that never confronts the Other of thought: physical reality.
        I feel for young aspiring artists. They look at what is exhibited and collected around the world, and everything seems possible, but nothing feels necessary.      

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Header image: Vincenzo Foppa, The Young Cicero Reading (detail), c.1464, fresco, 101.6×143.7 cm, Wallace Collection, London.