2007 Commencement
Ted Purves
Independent Curator, Writer, Public Artist and Assistant Professor of Art, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California
May 13, 2007—Tryon Festival Theater, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Good morning.
I am honored to be here to speak with you today and specifically to the class of 2007. It is amazing to be back to the university and see how much has changed since I was in school here in the 1980's to see how much more connected the College of Art has become. When I was here, it seemed off the map, now it seems so connected and in dialogue with the world beyond.
I didn't go to my own graduation in 1985. Perhaps If I had been an Art Major, I would have. As it was, I studied Geography, which I was interested in as a subject area but not as a pursuit or career. I spent most of my time and effort playing in a hardcore band called The Breeders touring around the other towns downstate and working with friends to start some sort of scene here-we learned how to book shows for the bands we wanted to see, we started 'zines, we made our own records, we figured out how to rent the Jefferson Building to hold shows in, we hosted other bands and traveling kids in our apartment. Its a familiar story really, one that was probably repeated frequently across the Midwest at that time. Basically what we were doing was making our own version of the world that we could step into, based, in part, on our own imaginations and personalities as well as on things that we had read about in other places but never had access to.
I remember this conversation I had with another student in the dorms. Her name was Mindy Schwartz. I asked her what she was studying and she said "Sculpture". It's hard to imagine now, but it literally blew my mind that someone could major in sculpture. I knew that there was an art department, and that people studied art education and took painting classes, but it had never occurred to me that someone could come to college and major in making sculpture.
After that, I quickly recognized that the people I met in the art department were talking about interesting things, mostly in coffee shops, during the day when people were supposed to be in classes. I liked to hang around in coffee shops as well, and I loved talking about politics and social theory and popular culture, but I always felt like I was shirking my studies when I did it, whereas the patterns and habits of my friends who were studying art seemed to suggest that open discussion and leisure were actually part of the program, that it wasn't a conflict, that it was integral to their study and what they were here to learn.
At that point I knew that somehow I wanted to study art, which suggested by default that I wanted to be an artist. It has taken me more than a few years to align those two thoughts. What does studying art teach you? What do artists do in the world? What does a life as an artist mean?
From this present vantage point, it seems that I intuited something then that now seems very clear. While many degrees prepare you to study and practice in a certain field, or to move into a specific line of work, studying in the arts simply prepares to living life in a different way. It gives you an approach to living life that privileges creative thinking, collaboration, improvisation and critical skills for judgment.
In my last few years at U of I, I took as many art classes as my major would allow. Without a doubt, the one that I have valued the most was a class on Japanese Flower Arranging that I took with Professor Kimiko Gunji. I did go to Graduate school for an MFA, I studied photography and I have continued in various ways to participate in and around the art world ever since. Throughout these years, I haven't always been "an artist" in the strictest sense of the word-I have spent some of my recent years writing books and curating exhibitions , and some earlier years working as an installer in an art museum and playing music at night, but I have never once felt that I wasn't fully inhabiting my Master's degree, that I wasn't practicing what I had studied.
At present, I am a Professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
I run a small area of the graduate fine arts program called Social Practice, which I designed as a new academic program that allows me to work directly with some new ideas about what can be brought into the scope of a 2-year Masters degree.
Social Practices incorporates art strategies as diverse as urban interventions, utopian proposals, guerrilla architecture, "new genre" public art, social sculpture, project-based community practice, interactive media, service dispersals, and street performance. The program focuses on questions of aesthetics, ethics, collaboration, persona, media strategies and social activism that are central to artworks and projects that cross into public and social spheres. These varied forms of public strategy are linked critically through theories of relational art, social formation, pluralism, and democracy.
The term "Social Practice" was chosen for its openness. It is not a term of art or art history; its main use, up to this point, is in the context of a branch of social theory that considers human relationships to each other and to the larger society through the lens of "practices", i.e. formal structures such as customs, laws and habits that we step into and inhabit in order to exist as social beings. This underlying interest in form makes for a flexible common denominator.
For me, the central idea of art-based social practice has never been tied to any specific set of relational strategies, or about innovative responses to public commissions or about working with specific communities and locations, though it could (and does) use all of those forms. Instead, I have come to see that t he core lies in the desire for a project or practice to cross over, to leave: leave its original context as an art idea and its home in the "art world", and risk being seen as something else, some other form of creative production. This risk, like all risks, opens up a space for opportunities to arise, sometimes through confusion or misunderstanding, sometimes through mutual recognition. The opportunity for such works to be understood by other criteria and realms of experience has always seemed to be too rich to pass up.
The notion behind all of this is to invest in the idea of agency, or purpose, being at the heart of an arts practice. To shift the focus away from what art projects and practices might "mean" and to talk instead about what they can "do". How does an art project accomplish something? How can one measure its effect? What does it actually shift? We have many instruments in our world to make measures of things, how do we gauge the effects of art?
Some of the students come to the Social Practice program with a background in the arts or architecture, and others come from activism or social sciences. As the first group leaves this spring, some are continuing to think of what they do as "art", but at others are moving into design, public gardening and radio-journalism.
Again, I see this as a reinvestigation of purpose, of agency. Each of them is considering what they want to get done-what needs to manifest itself, and they are considering this before they consider what to call themselves. In this way, I believe that we are finally, in a small way, able to start re-connecting the practice of contemporary art to a more broad notion of aesthetic practice, one that sees itself much more closely related to design, craft, architecture and teaching.
In the past, this link was seen as limiting, that's fine arts freedom from purpose, from interest, was what gave it its power. The Art Historian, Julian Stallabrass, re marked in his latest book that we are living in a time when that idea has been turned against itself. The market forces of the art world, as a cultural expression of global capitalism, have taken this disinterest and sold it, again and again. Actual freedom for art, he suggests, might lie in knowing exactly what its purpose is, and to inhabit it ruthlessly.
One of my students remarked to me that the best reason to study in the arts is that it teaches you that you can make something both real and new appear in the world. With that basic knowledge, it's a small step to make other kinds of things—projects, spaces, movements, industries—appear in the world.
The key thought is the same-that what we have been given is not all we need.
Someone has to figure out what's next, and its worth saying that this has to happen pretty quickly. The planet needs a lot of help right now. It is a dark and difficult time.
I would add this. There are worlds behind the world. The choice to make something new, to make something in the world, affords a moment when the next world, the one that lies in waiting, can be seen. If we want it to become ours, we, of course, have to make it ourselves. It is, as ever, the only way things come about.
