ART&RESEARCH

Online coursework and independent studies are pursued through fall and spring semester and include regular individual faculty/student discussions, study group discussion and collaboration, and project research conducted through IDSVA’s virtual library.

Beyond the three-year curriculum, up to three additional years are allowed for completion of the dissertation.

Grant Kester: In the US system of higher education, art history and art practice are quite often segregated. This is especially the case at the graduate/post-graduate level, where PhD programs in art history are almost always housed separately from MFA programs in art practice. UCSD’s Visual Arts department was founded with an explicit commitment to trans-disciplinary work that challenges this segregation. From its earliest days, the department’s faculty included prominent artists who were also practicing theoreticians and critics, such as David Antin, Manny Farber and Allan Kaprow. It also included figures such as Helen and Newton Harrison, whose research moved across the boundaries between art and science.

In the mid-1970s, when the Department began to build its art historical component, it took care to recruit art and media historians who were interested in the issues posed by artistic practice and were committed to working with students in the MFA program. The continuity between studio practice and art history and theory is by now one of the defining features of our department’s activity. Today UCSD’s Visual Arts department continues to bring practitioners, theorists and historians together to encourage innovative work at the boundaries of disciplines, discourses, and methodologies, as evidenced by the work of figures such as Teddy Cruz, Kyong Park, Amy Alexander, Ricardo Dominguez, Cauleen Smith, Jordan Crandall and many others.

In 2002, the department launched a PhD program in Art and Media History, Theory and Criticism that has rapidly become a magnet for young scholars committed to historical and theoretical research into contemporary art and media. Six years later, in 2008, the Visual Arts department added a new Concentration in Art Practice to the existing Art and Media History PhD program. The Art Practice Concentration is designed for artists engaged in advanced research who wish to pursue their work in an environment geared towards doctoral study, and to produce studio work alongside a written dissertation. The concentration was a natural outgrowth of the reciprocal relationship between history, theory and practice in the Visual Arts department. The new Concentration in Art Practice is unusual, if not unique, among practice-based PhD programs in the United States, as it parallels other areas of specialization within our existing art history and theory program (from Meso-American to Renaissance to New Media). It thus acknowledges artistic production as a field of intellectual inquiry capable of an equal level of theoretical elaboration and conceptual density. Art practice students fulfill the same requirements as students working in other PhD concentrations, including the completion of 2-3 years of graduate level course work, language exams, qualifying exams and the submission of a dissertation. Their dissertations, however, combine a shorter written component with a completed art project (film or video, exhibition, installation, public project, etc.).

There is, of course, some controversy regarding the introduction of art practice doctorates in the United States. While they have been common in Europe for many years, they are still relatively new here and many are suspicious of the perceived institutionalization and codification of a form of cultural production (art practice) that is traditionally understood as intuitive, transgressive and decidedly anti-institutional. While it is easy to sympathize with these concerns (which were also raised during the widespread introduction of Master of Fine Arts programs in the US during the 1970s), they underestimate the extent to which contemporary art production is already subject to disciplinary protocols and forms of formal and informal institutionalization that exercise a decisive influence on the kinds of art that younger artists produce. While it is wise to retain some skepticism about the ongoing professionalization of art education, it is also important to recognize the increasing pressures exerted on art production, and culture more generally, by the forces of neo-liberalism. One of its chief effects has been the growing assault on all areas of “public” discourse that challenge or resist the imperatives of the market system, from attacks on public education and publicly-funded broadcast media to the erosion of state safeguards against corporate misconduct.

The public university, for all its complicity with the mechanisms of corporate and military power, remains one of the few sites left in the American cultural landscape in which at least the principle of independent critical thought and analysis can still be defended. A ready example comes from the Visual Arts department itself, where artist Ricardo Dominguez (associated with the development and theorization of “electronic civil disobedience”) staged a “Virtual Sit-In in Solidarity with the Striking Students of France” on March 16, 2006 using his UCSD b.a.n.g lab as a base of operations. The protest recruited several thousand supporters and the French government responded by threatening to block university access to French internet sites unless UCSD shut down its own network. The university refused this request and Professor Dominguez was supported by both his department and the Dean of Arts and Humanities, who defended “cyberactivist” practice as a significant area of research deserving of academic protection (see: http://post.thing.net/node/772). We are hopeful that the Art Practice concentration will, despite the dangers of institutionalization, provide a space in which critical forms of cultural production and analysis can be sustained, and even flourish.

Mick Wilson: I would like to identify some divergences and convergences between what is happening in the European domain and what is emerging in the US. I think it is worth emphasizing that not all doctoral programs in Europe entail funding. They are quite often self-funding. In terms of the institutional politics of legitimacy, a key measure is to access funding for researchers, to demonstrate viability in the larger academic funding landscape and, thus, to establish proper status for a research undertaking.

It strikes me that in Europe - my colleagues from Europe might slightly disagree on this - the predominant mode of debate around the issue of a PhD in art has been to focus on methodology and epistemology, i.e. the production of knowledge through a creative act. Many of these debates have become tiresome in their repetition. The importance of the intervention of the Nameless Science exhibition is its attempt to displace epistemic kinds of debates by concrete instantiations of specific projects, so that a different kind of conversation might emerge. However, I am still intrigued by the little squabbles that might appear from biochemists or sociologists when the question of an artistic research project hits the committee table. I am curious to know whether the same contest of legitimacy would play a role in such context.

The motivation for the PhD programs in Europe is complex, since it is rooted in five or six different processes. On the one hand, you have what has been described as the discursive turn in conceptual and post-conceptual practice, whereby a range of practices outside of the academy engage with notions of the relational, the discursive, the production of meaning, the production of knowledge, and the production of science. The discursive turn is also allied with the emergence of a remarkable curatorial discourse; a discourse not filled by institutions of higher education or by museums, but actually emerging from the informal networks of cultural practitioners or artist-curators throughout the 1990s. That discourse started to put on the agenda questions of agency, of conditions for understanding what it is that you have done as a cultural practitioner. Within the academic discourse, the questions of agency seem to have been displaced by the triumph of a third-hand postmodernism. I think that is one of the reasons why there is a desire on the part of practitioners themselves to generate a space that is neither fully that of the art academy, nor fully that of the university, nor fully that of the art world, but something that is both hybrid and interstitial. Something between these modes allowing these spaces to co-produce an independent discourse.

Another contributing factor is I believe the issue of professionalization. The question of the competition for reputation, status, standing, and power within institutions as played out around and contested by the standing of the professor with PhD and the professor without PhD, expressed in salary differences and in terms of difference of authority when it comes to a discussion at the committee table. Other factors include the desire to take ownership of a body of theoretical and discursive work, which was largely seen to belong to philosophers. There is a significant engagement with doctoral programs in Europe prompted by mid-career artists with an established international profile, who re-enter an academic frame in order to get empowered in relation to a body of theoretical work seen to be setting the terms for the discussions happening in mainstream art world.

A number of additional factors are at play as well. One of the things that is really important and has not been fully thematized enough yet is Grant Kester’s reference to the universities and their privileging of the technocratic agenda, i.e. the agenda for science and technology. The emergence of such a subsidized research wing of corporate industry as a dominant within the university is a problem for the humanities in general. It seems to me that the art research agenda - not only the PhD construct, but also the larger agenda of art research - must be part of a permeable academic institution that re-addresses the situation cogently. The art research agenda is forcing new relationships with the world beyond the academy in a way that could moderate the debate across the entire spectrum of the humanities.

The debate in the humanities played out in the US is internationally known - as say for example in the sequence of “cultural wars” throughout the 1980s and 1990s. But a credible and disseminating rhetoric, with which to champion a hermeneutical humanities-type of enquiry that traditionally inhabit philosophy, history, literature, and so forth is still lacking. That could change. I am not talking of artists having a fetish for philosophy or, vice versa, of art historians and philosophers having a fetish for artists. This is something else. What is of interest here is a new domain coming into being, a space of independent possibilities. The bureaucratization of this space is also an eminent threat - something colleagues in the UK would be very well-positioned to address. Clearly, there is a dull, grey instrumentalization in many new research initiatives. Indeed, this is a very dangerous threat for us all and something we need to be more willing to openly discuss with each other in order to resist bureaucratic, institutionalized exercises of self-reproduction. Yet, an art-research mode of inquiry open to a larger world beyond the academy could take advantage of the potential of the academy and at the same time be transformative of the academy.