Picaresque: A Response to Marco Marcon
by Francis Russell

The necessity of losing one’s innocence and naivety, and the tragedy of becoming worldly and cynical, are not only key themes in many of the works collectively grouped under the heading Bildungsroman, they are also central to the difficulties faced by the contemporary art educator.   
        Having worked in tertiary arts education for almost fifteen years, I would stake the claim that, regardless of what universities and art schools say about the purpose of an arts education—which is increasingly incoherent and self-defeating—if such an education achieves anything it is to instil an ethics of openness and generosity in the student.
        Arts education aims to make the capacity to notice and appreciate differences both possible and desirable. Putting aside the individual artist’s intention to propose the urinal or filthy bed as a candidate for artistic contemplation, the pedagogical aim of introducing students to such work is typically to foster an appreciation for all that is overlooked both by individuals and by societies. Overlooked materials and objects, excluded voices and perspectives, discarded practices and methods; a capacity to pay attention to and be sympathetic to whatever exists at the margins of everyday life—this is the subject matter of a successful arts education in its contemporary pluralist form.  
        And yet, like the protagonist of many a Bildungsroman, such openness and generosity to the world and to others can be easily exploited. Indeed, on leaving art school, many students encounter a hard and cynical world in which patience, tolerance, and hospitality become marks of being, well, a mark. The art world is typically not driven by an ethos of openness and pluralism, but is fad-obsessed, marketised, and deeply competitive. Such is the problem identified by Marcon at the end of his recent essay, the problem of everything being possible but nothing seeming necessary. “Anything can be art,” the recent arts graduate might agree, “but without a successful personal brand who is going to pay a moment’s notice?”
        While I’m sympathetic to this concern, I don’t buy the claim that a return to skill or materiality solves the problem for at least two reasons. Firstly, I don’t think the university is the right forum to master technical skills, especially given the difficulty of knowing which artistic skills will ultimately be useful for the individual artist. I’ve heard various claims about the centrality of drawing, or dance, or whatever other artistic technique as a foundation to all others, but I think it would be a disaster to arbitrarily force students to gain competency in skills they’re uninterested in when the option to merely introduce them to such skills is far more achievable. Secondly, real technical mastery requires far more focused attention than is possible during a three-year undergraduate course, especially given the state of the contemporary housing market, the disastrously low purchasing power of young people, and the increasing levels of part time work undertaken by students.
        Beyond the practical question of teaching, far too many influential artists and critics cling on to an outdated labour-theory of artistic value, as if the quantum of time spent producing a work of art is somehow a measure of its aesthetic or artistic value. While I understand my opponents in this debate aren’t absolutists—there is usually an acknowledgement that time worked = value created is a heuristic and not a precise formula or measure—Marcon’s reliance on the kinetic and muscular language of wrestling, resisting, and struggling with the physicality of medium and technique strikes me as missing the point somewhat. In a world so dominated by the atomistic logic of consumerism, the turn away from conceptual dematerialised works towards more intuitive and boisterous material experiments will do no more to provide art with a sense of necessity. The sake for which art is made has to rest with other people, with dialogue, and a shared capacity to think and feel publicly. An audience of slack-jawed gawkers is no better than one filled with furrow-browed ponderers if art remains the province of individual experience.      
        Perhaps, then, we should remember the picaresque as a forerunner to the Bildungsroman, one that reveals itself as alive in many of the classic examples of the latter. The picaresque is characterised by its reliance on anti-heroes, roguish side characters, and a satirical mistrust of institutions and social convention. Whether Henry Fielding's Tom Jones or Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore, the picaresque’s central anti-hero moves from misadventure to misadventure, banding together with others (many of whom are of questionable social status), in order to expose the failings of the social order and achieve victory, even if narrowly defined. Unlike a narrative of moral self-development and self-overcoming, of which the Bildungsroman is never purely, the picaresque is a narrative of solidarity and misadventure, in which cynicism and naivety are exchanged continuously in the struggle which is itself necessary—and what could be more necessary than that?   

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Picaresque: A Rejoinder
by Marco Marcon

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First, I would like to thank Francis Russell for taking the time to read and comment on my text.
        Coming to the issues at hand, I fundamentally agree with most of what Francis writes, but I would like to clarify a few points.
        I don’t think we can still consider plumbing fixtures or dirty beds overlooked or marginalised materials; on the contrary, many leading contemporary artists use them as their medium of choice. Rubbish, as it were, is the mainstream, not the marginalised “other.”
       I agree that teaching traditional techniques may no longer be viable or realistic, not least given the economic pressures on students that Francis describes; this is why I wrote that ‘Artists don’t have to conform to traditional ways of working; they can choose or develop the processes and materials that suit their aims.’ What counts is the learning process of getting to know your technique, process, modus operandi, or material of choice, whatever it may be.
        I describe the dialectical relationship between mind and matter as both struggle (‘Matter resists concepts; you have to struggle with it’) and play (‘artists playfully wrestle with their chosen medium’). Francis too ends by calling struggle “itself necessary”.
        I never argued that time spent on a work measures its worth. What matters is what the material teaches you as you push against it.
        Creating a tangible object and public dialogue are not in contradiction. An artist makes a statement by making a work; the viewer replies by ‘responding’ to it. An aesthetic ‘response’ is what the word says: a rejoinder in a conversation. Describing the onlooker's experience as ‘gawking’ does it an injustice: looking closely at a work is already a way of answering it.

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Images:
 
1. William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress, Plate 8 (detail), 1735, etching and engraving; third state of three, 35.4 x 40.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

2. William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress, Plate 3 (detail), 1735, etching and engraving; third state of three, 35.5 x 40.9 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

3.Salvador Dalí, Don Quixote (detail), 1959, colour lithograph. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.