Formal notes and abstract thinking

When I began teaching art ten years ago, I taught standard studio courses. Over the years, I have made the transition to teaching seminars with titles such as A Genealogy of Terms or The Re-definition of Art. These focus on the relationship between art making and its history, theory, and critical criteria. Designed mainly for advanced and graduate students in studio programs, these courses are meant to supply the practical and conceptual skills such students will need to understand the complex cultural issues that circumscribe their practice as artists.

While many studio art programs today acknowledge the importance of theory, they continue to make it available to their students in an ad hoc manner. My experience has been that more often than not theory is presented abstractly, devoid of discussions of its practical applications or historical context. This less than rigorous approach is a consequence of the fact that art students continue to be educated as if they were merely engaged in vocational training. To counter this I have developed for my own courses strategies designed to establish the continuity and relevance of theory to the arts and to motivate students to discover the over-riding schema of the material covered and its relevance to their own practices.

By linking texts dialogically (one text supplies the context for the discussion of the next) rather than topically (reading a group of texts that are thematically linked), I am able to demonstrate how theory, history and philosophy inform the practices of art and artists. All too often texts written twenty, thirty, or more years apart under widely different circumstances are taught as if they were written concurrently. In my course The Re-definition of Art, for example, Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility," Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Marshall McLuhan on media, Lucy Lippard on the de-materialization of art, Jean Baudrillard on the simulacrum, and Arthur Danto on the end of art are not presented merely as a sequence of detached opinions, but as a record of the philosophical discourse that has developed out of nineteenth-century views of technology, authenticity, and art.

Reciprocally, I have sought to solve the problems of intellectual discipline by requiring my students to produce formal notes of seminar sessions, as well as studio crits. Because these notes are written in a traditional outline format, the students are obliged to consider the topics covered in the class critically. These notes are handed in at midterm and semester's end, along with a synopsis of each of the assigned readings. At semester's end the students also hold a roundtable on a subject they have chosen collectively. In the past, topics have ranged from the role that desire plays in making art to the ideological effects of technological change. This has proven to be a more effective way of encouraging them to relate to the course material than writing research papers that they are all too often ill-equipped to do.

Saul Ostrow is an artist, critic, curator and editor living in New York. Presently he is acting co-ordinator for the M.F.A. Program at New York University. He has also taught art theory and criticism at the School of Visual Arts and Parsons School of Design in New York and is the editor of the book series Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture, published by G+B Arts International.

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