TERRYSUPREAN.COM
Some Questions And Stratagies
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Art and education exist in very close proximity emotionally and intellectually for me. I'm keeping a running list of questions and experiences here regarding these
topics. Some of the entries are my own working out of things that psychologically and socially puzzle me on these subjects, and some belong to others. I think this is a
space where my personal philosophies and values will collide with my experiences with education and art. This is good for me. Maybe it will be good for someone else.
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MARCH 2011
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I have some questions about art. I don’t have answers to these questions, but answers rarely ever lead to interesting experiences anyway, I just have a lot of questions. In undergraduate school a professor I loved dearly, and who became a close friend and mentor until his recent death, once told me that after a life of making art, the only thing he really took away from it was a “shit-load” of interesting experiences. Somewhere along the line he had changed making art from a career into simply a way to a live an interesting life and have some positive impact on the community around him. He repeated the “interesting life” talk to me a couple months before he died, and it was only then that I really understood him, or rather understood him a different way. For some reason when he told me the first time how he felt I got it like a bolt of lightening, I thought, or I got it how I could at that moment rather, and I knew what I wanted to do in a world that I was having a harder and harder time reconciling with. I had no formal art training when I followed the before mentioned professor over to the art department away from a physics major, I had just been making weird things in my dad’s workshop for years.

After that conversion of sorts all went along well. I dived into art, tried every medium, ate it up, and read read read, and I followed the art student path into grad school where I learned to believe that the more academic the work was the better, and that I was on my way to an interesting life. And it was. For a while.
I followed this path into a few solo and group shows going through the motions of being seen and trying like hell to be known, while all the while my personal philosophies were deeply shifting, and my teaching and educational work began to outgrow in it’s complexity my studio art. I say this because at some point I had to admit that I was touching more lives through art through teaching then I was through my studio work (I think this is the case for the majority of artists that teach, it’s just the numbers and environment).

The second time my professor told me the “interesting experiences” bit, I understood it much differently, or rather I was at a different place, with many more questions regarding the art world and my path within it. I was of course questioning the relevance of that path I was trying to follow, cliche, but unfortunately often the secret dream path of young artists, of the artist alone in their studio making relatively easily commodified objects with the hopes that a gallery with some museum and art fair cred will pick up their ArtForum worthy/looking work and sell it for increasingly higher prices to an increasingly higher realm of the financial elites that will one day turn it over to the museums that sell an increasingly culturally obscure art form that has increasingly less and less relevance to the people around us in our communities. And then one day your name is on a big coffee table size book that resemble a family bible.

I still don’t have an answer to my questions about the relevance and responsibility of such a path, and I don’t believe that the studio arts are defunct just because the system that promotes them seems to be. But it does raise the question of whether or not studio art practices (as we have known them) in and of themselves can continue to be relevant and progressive in a larger social context. I still believe a painting or traditional art object is primarily an individual experience not a social one (as opposed to movies which seem to be both in our culture), so in this way, no matter what the context the art work is shown in, it still has the power to effect deeply the individual viewer no matter how they see the work. But in a time when the art world has become an industry that has come to be completely in line with the consumerist narratives that are leading us towards so many dead ends (culturally, environmentally, economically, etc. etc.), and seems to do what it can in so many quiet ways to keep the public and it’s opinions out, I question whether or not artists, if following the tradition of the avant-garde (or whatever academic excuse we need), should not be looking further than the studio to find new and more socially relevant ways of making art. Expanding our studios outward into our communities and work lives, making art relevant by showing our neighbors that anyone is an artist the moment they make something they call art, and that their creative voices are just as important as the priesthood of “original” artists cranked out of our industrialized universities, and do in fact have actual meaning when brought together with the creative voices of their community members.

The same professor I mentioned earlier always would ask me, “Terry what is the role of the artist today?”, he never gave an answer, and I don’t think there is one, other than that which we make, but I do think that that question is the largest question facing artists today. To have a role in culture, an art form must be relevant to that culture. And the fine arts are only slightly relevant to our culture and communities today (I’m reminded of this great little zine an artist friend put out called “Who The Hell Is Jeff Koons” , in which he recorded the response of passerby's to the question “who is Jeff Koons” while standing outside the MoMa. Of course most people had no idea who he was). Art today is relevant to it’s culture, but it’s a subculture now of the financial and intellectual elite, where the art works are used as symbols of power. The question I had to come to grips with was if that truly was the only audience I was concerned with impressing with my art, especially when philosophically and politically I tend to be at odds with that crowd anyway. What I really wanted I think, was to get the same feeling out of studio work as I did out of teaching, the feeling that I was giving art as a gift that was deeply affecting other human beings and the community around me. I want that to be my experience inside the art world. I want to learn how to do this, and I’m trying. If for nothing else than to live an interesting life. Random art actions, community involvement through education and empowerment through the arts, and those personal actions that keep one looking, moving, and learning. As an artist these are the things I want to be constantly experimenting with, while hopefully arriving at interesting perspectives I can point out to others so conversations can begin.

I could go on about all this, but instead, and precisely because I think admitting communication is based on listening, and not being afraid to use what we’ve heard to understand ourselves and form dialogue, I’m going to post a portion of an essay by the artist Harrell Fletcher. When I read his words recently, they so summed up my thoughts and experiences with art and education, that I figured I would just post them rather than blabbing on.

From the Essay: Some Thoughts On Art And Education
By: Harrell Fletcher

Open Source Approaches
In the art world there is so much emphasis on originality. Artists buy right into that, and even though they are always influenced by other people they try pretending that they are not. The galleries promote this idea and encourage "signature styles", rarification and the star/celebrity system. I can see why the galleries would like that way of doing business because it allows them to inflate prices and make demand, but for artists there is no real benefit. It just suppresses the true way that people develop their work through adapting and hybridizing and creates an environment where artists feel like they have to protect and make secret their process rather than sharing it freely and feeling good about doing that, which I think would be much more healthy both for individuals and as a system.

Social Practice as Opposed to Studio Practice
Let me define "art" as anything that anyone calls "art". That can be a maker or viewer. By calling something "art" it doesn't make it art forever just during the time that it is being appreciated as art. Similarly, I don't think, as Beuys said, that everyone is an artist, I just think that everyone has the potential to be an artist. If anyone wants to be an artist they can be one as far as I'm concerned and that is regardless of their credentials. You definitely don't need an academic degree to be an artist. Most of my favorite artists don't have academic degrees.
I think an artist is someone who gets to do whatever they want (within whatever limits might be containing them-financial, legal, ethical, psychological.) Other professions or practices don't have this level of freedom, dentists need to do dental work, dog trainers train dogs, etc. Those could be fun or not so fun professions to have, but regardless that is what those people need to do until they decide that they want to do something else. Artists can do a project about dentistry or dogs or anything else they are interested in at any time and then can do something else right after or even during, and still remain an artist.
Social Practice in regards to art can be looked at as anything that isn't studio practice. By studio practice I mean the dominate way of making art-spending time in a studio working out personal interests into the form of paintings, or objects, or photos, or videos, or some other pretty easily commodifiable form. The often unspoken intention for this studio work is that it will go off to a desirable commercial gallery, be reproduced in art magazines, and eventually wind up in museum collections, while making the artist into a celebrity of sorts, and paying all of the bills. That is the carrot on the stick that keeps this dominate approach alive and kicking, even though very few of these studio practice artists ever get their work shown at all, and most just give up and find some other way to pay off their student loans.

Making Work That is Accessible to Both Art and Non-Art Publics
When I was younger it seemed like it was good to make art that was very obscure, so obscure that even I had no idea what it was about. If anyone asked I would just say that I wanted the viewer to have their own interpretation of what the work was about, but really I now think that was just a way of avoiding having to know what I was doing or why I was doing it. Then it occurred to me that it might be nice if not only I understood what I was doing, but that even non-art trained publics would be able to find the work accessible.

Learning Environments
I like to read about alternative education for kids from the 60's and 70's. There is one writer I'm particularly fond of named John Holt. He wrote a great book called How Children Learn, and then about twenty years later he revised the book by adding comments on his own writing in the margins of the book. He thought that a lot of the text he'd written twenty years earlier didn't make any sense. One of the things he did agree with is that traditional classrooms are not set up as learning environments because the kids are divided up in terms of age, and because they are forced to sit in desks and not move or talk unless they raise their hand and are called on and then only to regurgitate what the teacher has already told them. He says that instead a learning environment would be one that has a mix of ages and experiences in one place so that people can learn from each other, and that learning happens through doing activities and talking with other people, so those things shouldn't be suppressed. In later books he suggests that typical schools are really more like prisons for kids rather than places of learning. I tend to agree.