Art departments are routinely marginalized on college and university campuses. They are perpetually underfunded, understaffed, and largely ignored; that is, until a censorship issue is raised with a student’s or faculty member’s work. Furthermore, their artistic work is often misunderstood even by the self-described “cultured” administrators who claim to “support the arts” through their participation in all the social performances and rituals of the local art community. When student or faculty work does not fit the needs of these administrators, what little support these departments might have is likely to disappear. The result is that the culture of an art department is one in which such an embattled, marginalized, and frankly paranoid atmosphere becomes the air that students, faculty, and staff breath. And the situation at Christian colleges and universities is no different, with only the additional challenges that fewer administrators “support the arts” and that student and faculty work is routinely scrutinized for potential confessional violations, or at least offenses to the sensibilities of board members or patrons.
Despite its problems and challenges, it is the art departments at Christian colleges and universities that have the potential to reinvest studio art education with the vocational identity and urgency that it should possess because these institutions, in various ways and to varying degrees, serve as stewards of the robust spiritual tradition that underwrites artistic practice in the Western tradition. But this is not to say that these institutions know they are stewards of this tradition. And therefore, it behooves art departments not to cow tow to their campus philosophers and theologians but to embark on their own historical, theological, and philosophical reclamation project of the inextricable relationship between aesthetic and ascetic practice and to embody it in contemporary cultural work.
A studio art education re-conceived along these lines will do at least four things:
1) It will instill belief in the efficacy of art, in the efficacy of art’s capacity to participate in the pursuit of clarity about oneself and the world. This is accomplished in part by initiating the student into the living tradition of modern art, teaching the student to understand his or her own personal experience through this living tradition as the source of meaning and significance. This can only be accomplished by radically re-conceiving the role that art history, theory, and criticism courses have in relationship to studio practice.
2) It will recognize that the education of the artist is not merely (or even partly) the acquisition of “skills” and “techniques,” but in the development of the self. The critic Donald B. Kuspit, under whom I studied, once argued that the art school’s primary goal is to produce a particular kind of person not a maker of a certain kind of art. The studio allows no distinction between one’s “art” and one’s “life.” Students who apply a craft or technique to produce an image are not artists, no matter how “successful” they are at showing and selling their work.
3) It will develop studio practices and disciplines that infuse aesthetic acts with wisdom and discernment, humility, and the capacity for self-criticism. In short, inculcate the student with the belief that the studio is not the place of indulgence but self-denial. Art is the practice of making finer and finer visual distinctions. Studio practice thus becomes a metaphor for the life well lived, a life in which finer and finer distinctions are made, in which every thought, decision, and action is recognized as significant.
4) It will demand that artistic practice requires every fiber of the student's experience, wisdom, and learning. Studio practice is not for "visual thinkers" who make art because they don't like writing, reading, thinking logically and rigorously. Art is so difficult that the student must constantly be working to fill his or her well, as I often refer to it in conversations with my students.
Not only can the art department at a Christian college or university participate in rejuvenating the ethical and spiritual dimension of artistic practice for a contemporary culture that assumes art is merely a subset of marketing or entertainment, it can have a significant impact on their colleges and universities as well.
Our spiritual destiny is made up of the multitude of decisions we make and actions we perform that go unnoticed. The studio is a place where these details take on urgency and profundity in a way that is more tangible than in any philosophy or theology or even spiritual formation classroom. There is no sitting around a seminar table talking about it. The studio is where you do it.
There is also no vocational context in which the human person is as “free” as he or she is in the modern (and postmodern) studio. How is the artist to act in a space in which he can, quite literally, do anything he wants? But that is not nearly as important as the challenge of doing something under those conditions. And moreover, the very possibility of doing something occurs only by imposing limits. There are virtually no other cultural practices or "careers" operative in modernity that such existential freedom of the human person is embodied. No one becomes an artist simply by taking a class, passing a test, receiving a B.F.A. or an M.F.A., having an exhibition or getting a teaching position. An artist’s identity is achieved over and over again. Moreover, a Christian is one who not merely "believes" certain things at a certain time, but "works out his salvation," as St. Paul says, moment by moment, with the hope that she will end her life as a faithful servant.
One of the worst legacies of the Reformation, which characterizes American Christianity and American culture, and which Christian colleges and universities derive their authority, is a complete disavowal and disregard for the monastic tradition. Christianity is at its root an ascetic practice of self-denial. A revamped and re-conceived studio art education in such colleges and universities would not only have an impact on the contemporary art world, it could transform how these institutions teach spirituality. In this revamped context, studio art classes would be required of all students, not as a way to expose them to the “arts and culture,” but to serve as a laboratory where they confront their freedom, their limits, their potential, their weaknesses, and the fact that every single decision matters, even the decision to put a certain line on a piece of paper next to another line.
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