Teaching after the end

The conversation from which this article is excerpted took place on February 4, 2005, in a telephone call between New York (Strauss) and San Antonio (Martinez). This piece is the conclusion of a three-part series in Art Journal.

David Levi Strauss: We ended our last conversation with Pynchon's warning that if they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers anymore. So I'd like to begin this time by trying to ask some better questions about art and pedagogy. Art schools and MFA programs are currently inundated with applicants and overflowing with graduates. Why do so many young people today want to be artists? How does the fact that almost all young artists are now university-trained affect the kind of art they make? And how do you teach artists?

Daniel Joseph Martinez: Those are big questions, and they overlap. It is a curious thing that there is such a large population of art students currently in graduate schools. I wonder if the popularity of art school suggests that the way you become an artist is by going to school. And I wonder if this popularity is actually a result of the production of culture in the museums and galleries, and the way the marketplace functions in terms of the crisis of meaning in the representation of ideas that we have talked about before. Is it possible that there has been a trickle-down effect, in the sense that art is seen as entertainment, as something that is popular, acceptable, having to do with leisure time and life-style choices? Art in this sense has less to do with the mining of meaning and the representation of ideas that have the potential to be transformational, to affect or challenge people, to call things into question. It seems to me that when things become this popular it is because they have become fashionable. And when something becomes fashionable, it is easy. So people go to graduate school and everyone comes out an artist.

Strauss: I think that's part of it, but I think there is something else going on as well that is more fundamental and potentially more far-reaching. My daughter is fiftteen years old, and she and her friends talk about going to art school, not because they think it is fashionable, but because, in the midst of everything else that is going on in the world, art is the one thing they care about (in my daughter's case, it's art and writing). It is the one thing that is different from the normative spiel of consumerism with which they are continually being bombarded.

Martinez: I don't know your daughter well, but just from knowing you and your family, I think she might be an exception. She has been sensitized to the kind of motivation you talk about. Perhaps this is my cynicism to some degree, but having traveled through many art schools and MFA programs, and visiting students' studios and talking to them, and looking at what they are producing, I wonder if that's what they're looking for.

Strauss: That leads to the next question. All of these young artists are there in their studios, together, making art. How does this influence the kind of art being made?

Martinez: I'm very excited being around students, but I'm often disappointed at the same time. A lot of the work that I see is trying to tackle problems and questions that are fundamentally attached to the artist's success in the market. The work is likable, but I see less experimentation, less risk, and I see less work that is clearly trying to set itself apart from the general tone of work being made. I guess I feel that a lot of the work I see is very safe, very generalized, and consequently much of it is uninteresting to me. When you do see somebody who is working on a particular question in the work, you can tell what they're thinking about, their motivations and behavior, and that they're thinking about something much greater than themselves or their individual success. I don't know if this is entirely clear ...

Strauss: Let's talk about what you do, in your own situation. In our earlier conversation, we said that the only effective antidote to fundamentalism is education, but in the current political climate we have to be clear about what we mean by education, since all of these terms are being redefined. George Bush was the "education president" before he became the permanent war president. Laura Bush is for education. Lynne Cheney is for education. So what is different about your kind of education, your pedagogical practice? When you talk about teaching, you are the most idealistic about what can happen. So what do you try to do as a teacher, teaching artists?

Martinez: I think we both believe that human beings should be in a constant state or process of education. One should always be involved in improving oneself and never rest from that. This is distinct from the "no child left behind" approach, where there is a quantification of education through testing and mandates in order to reach a "democratic" mean. I have heard many, many teachers complain about the manipulation of test scores, the rules and regulations attached to funding, and the privatization of education here in Texas. (1) How do you clarify the difference between this and genuinely exciting people about wanting to be educated? People have eyes and they think they can see. They don't think they have to train their eyes to see. They have ears and therefore can hear. They don't have to train their ears to hear. It's as if things were naturally assigned to them to be able to exist in the world.