Chris Kraus- "Cast Away", Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness.

Kraus, Chris. “Cast Away”, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, New York: Semiotext (e), 2004, pp.145- 150

When Chris Kraus describes the story of a student of a high-profile graduate programme who flees the seminar room and subsequently quits her course due to her advisor criticizing her work as 'too sentimental' and likening it to a Hallmark greeting card she writes, rather cynically, that “it never dawned on her [the student] that anything is permissible in the contemporary art world as long as it is pedigreed, substantiated, referentialized”(147). In stating this, she, an educator of such courses herself, openly acknowledges that a student studying by the typical art school model today can present almost anything as long as she is equipped with the 'right' contemporary art ideological lingo. Concurrently, only 'anything' will be acceptable and deemed valid by the institution if it is dressed up in such a way.

   This raises interesting questions about contemporary art education which generally, as described here, places critical attitude hierarchically foremost over attention to other aspects or modes of teaching. If little else is yet clearly defined about what post-modernism is, we do know by it's very nature of continually seeking self-definition that it is characteristically inward looking and self theorising. Developing theoretical critique around practice is obviously a necessary tool for making and talking about art in such a climate. But does placing it as the dominant educational model for evaluating practice and thus marginalizing attention to other ways of making and talking about art such as technique or materiality necessarily equip students for making art in an art world where, just as Kraus states, anything is permissible? And further, does it merely train artists in an ideological gamesmanship necessary to evaluate and validate almost anything whilst leaving them with a very limited skill base or ability to think about or make art outside of this inherent language?

   These are enormous questions and part of the problem that not even De Duve In his analysis of contemporary art school education, When Form has Become Attitude - and Beyond, can claim to be able to answer ( 31). But I agree with his suggestion that the current model which he describes as the triad of notions 'attitude-practice-deconstruction' ( 26) is problematic. That it is less a newly devised doctrine for attempting to educate in the art climate now, but a postulate which has evolved out of a subversion of its predecessors values -- he states “a mere after-image, as the negative symptom of a historical transition who's positivity is not clear yet” ( 31). It looks neither forward nor back but deconstructs itself and tends inevitably to place suspicion against those it has followed, namely the materiality/invention of the modernists, the technique/imitation of the academy. As a perspective for education I believe it tends to stand to limit the credibility of other ways to teach, think, learn and make art in a contemporary art world where there are, it seems, limitless ways to make art and ways to be an artist.

De Duve, Thierry. “When Form Has Become Attitude- And Beyond” (1994), Theory in Contemporary Art since 1945, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 19-31

Kraus, Chris. “Cast Away”, Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, New York: Semiotext (e), 2004, pp.145- 150

Rakoff, David. “An Interview with the Artist David Fischl”. newyorkartworld.com, Oct 27 2002. Web. 2 April. 2011