Joe Patrick mentioned an article to me about Neo Rauch, written by Peter Schjeldahl, and while looking for it I found this GREAT transcribed talk regarding the education of artists, and the distinction between what makes someone a successful student and someone else a successful artist, and why there may be no happy synthesis of the good student and the good artist. (I have included the Neo Rauch article at the end of the post.)
As an aside, William Butler Yeats has a couple of melodramatic but interesting quotes that are applicable to this conversation:
"Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire."
“But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”
I have been thinking about this specific topic regarding education. Why students who excel at specific assignments are often poor innovators, and why excellent students shrug off the responsibility of creating something unique and prefer to be told what exactly they are supposed to be doing.
It is very hard for me to understand not wanting more freedom when making art in school.
When someone opens their mouth and dictates the terms of my creative activity they transform the environment into one laden with tension, it becomes a primed, pregnant, slow-motion movie where their words lose there meaning and metamorphose into the words of an adult in the world of Charlie Brown, wah wah waaa waaaa wonk, and that voice is practically begging to have its authority stripped and its positions subverted. Like a kleptomaniac who has to take the little glass bottles of chalky blush from her best friends medicine cabinet I can not help myself once someone crosses the line into impinging on the quality of my daydreaming.
(When I was growing up one of my Dad's favorite things to say when something bad happened to someone we knew was: It is all over but the crying.)
During the process of creating drawing assignments I wonder about the level of freedom to include, my disposition usually leads me to giving out assignments with a lot of freedom. An assignment with a lot of freedom is hard to control, but I don't want to control the students, I want them to experience what they need to do to be creative. I do have to guard against sloth, it is doing my due diligence, and not let the individual down in the context of the class.
This is a good topic, because I see a lot of room for increased understanding on my part, and writing about it has made me realise more about the nature of the conversation that happens in art school between teachers and students.
Here is the Neo Rauch article Joe Patrick told me about. (It is worth reading, and the article feels finished at the end of the first page, but there is a second page too.)
Earlier posts on Ink Stained Hands about Neo Rauch
Neo Rauch at The Met
Great Art Book
Thanks Joe!!
