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Odalis Valdivieso: Ben, I remember that not long ago, soon after my visit to Luther, we started with great enthusiasm configuring this exhibition. Were you concerned at that time about the selection criteria and cohesiveness of the show?
Ben Moore: I was concerned. After the initial excitement of giving my students the opportunity to show in a professional venue, I was very nervous about the quality of work that would be presented. The conversation that happens between faculty and student is very obvious in visual language to the educator, but could easily be lost in a group exhibit.
OV: During my visit, I had the opportunity to meet them at the Korsrud Studios on campus. I had a great time critiquing their works and yet, I never intended to see them as conclusive artworks, probably because they were all made within school boundaries and as part of their curricula. How do you see them?
BM: That is always a concern guiding young people in making work. Along the way of making things there are moments and passages in works, and occasionally whole pieces, that are of value. That value is relative to the individual student’s level of facility, conceptual development, or simply a shift in their handling of building/finding form. I try, a much as possible, to treat curricula as parameters for making things of lasting interest to the maker. These works, I hope, use guides as a springboard for taking ownership. As educators our fingerprints are present in each piece, but I hope that they are able to function as artworks outside of the undergraduate context.
OV: Something that happened to me is that my work almost went in the opposite direction after I finished my undergrad program. Did it happen to you when you went to grad school and do you think that you carried with you a sort of normative system or methodology from your undergraduate education?
BM: I still make figurative paintings, so that thread lingers from undergrad. There were drastic shifts that happened concerning subject matter, but my work has always used figurative language. How I approach painting is, perhaps, the opposite direction from my undergrad. Painting is the point now, not what is painted.
OV: One of the thoughts that your students’ work trigger in me is if each piece can be considered an artwork or just a visual/aesthetic exercise. The question comes from the fact that at a student level, one is immersed in given/found references, which gives the works almost a leftover-charged-condition. Do you think the works are fully built based on the evaluation process that they pass through with you and the rest of the faculty?
BM: The trick is getting students to recognize when these visual/aesthetic exercises are producing something interesting, or at least something that is moving to something substantial. I think it has to do with ownership because we are giving constantly to students saying, “Try this, take this, what about this idea…” I agree that this results in almost “second-hand” making. There is something nice about it though, there is a certain validity to that young work and those moments when the work starts to absorb those references and become something new.
OV: The role of the pre-avant-garde art academies had to do with the well-established criteria of technical mastery—in painting, sculpture, and other media—that could be taught to art students. Today, art schools are partially returning to this understanding of art education—especially in the field of new media. But of course, art cannot be reduced to the sum of technical abilities. This is why we now see the reemergence of the discourse on art as a form of knowledge—a discourse that becomes unavoidable when art comes to be taught.
Boris Groys mentions that today, in fact, everyday life begins to exhibit itself—to communicate itself as such—through design or through contemporary participatory networks of communication, and it becomes impossible to distinguish the presentation of the everyday from the everyday itself. The everyday becomes a work of art—there is no more bare life, or, rather, bare life exhibits itself as artifact.
What’s your comment on that?
BM: I think that there is definitely a shift towards fundamentals, which can be seen directly in the growth and increasing roles of foundations programs and courses in art education. There is a great story a friend Pete Schulte told me. One of his students was struggling with the problem of “if your idea is more interesting than your object, then your idea is your object.” He was walking down the street reading, his nose buried a book on critical theory, and walked directly into a stop sign, knocking him to the ground. I think that is a pretty good idea for understanding the substance of things. I feel that the shift of art education towards the foundations model is to give effective visual form, or substance, to idea.
OV: Furthermore, as you know, the dominant mode of contemporary art production is the academicized late avant-garde. All art education—as with education in general—has to be based on certain types of knowledge or a certain mastery that is supposed to be transmitted from one generation to another. In your opinion, what kind of knowledge and mastery is currently transmitted at your school?
BM: I think interdisciplinary practice is what is best transmitted here at Luther. In an academic institution the idea of cross-disciplinary work is inevitable, if not desirable. Teaching at a B.A. institution affords me the opportunity to work with students and other faculty in biology, mathematics, religion, philosophy, etc. Those conversations and collaborations really shift thinking about art practice and boundaries between disciplines become blurry.
OV: It seems to many (going even more forward) that MFA programs have become a tool of propagandism that has had an abnormal assimilating effect on artistic practices around the world, an effect that is now being reproduced with curatorial and critical writing programs. Is this something that you have noticed?
BM: I’ve noticed a fair amount of assimilating practices. But I think that in some instances that can be a good thing. The absorption into a working practice can be very healthy, so long as that reproduction happens in the idea of practice. I would agree that there is a bit of unhealthy assimilation when that practice becomes dogmatic.
OV: Would you like to ask me something?
BM: I really enjoy the idea of this show, the drop-edge of yonder where something might be artwork and where something might need to be realized. What sort of shift in teaching practice would you like to see in art education?
OV: Me too, in fact, the show also pointed me to the question of what the good and bad work is, something that we talk to students about all the time. But what criteria is used for this good/bad judgment and furthermore, how long can a marker like that sustain in time? In regards to your question, I have to admit that I keep on changing what I foresee from teaching practice… Having said that, and being aware of the nature of schools as networks of communication and the fosterers of artists as institutional figures as well, I would like school programs–at any educational level– to be able to offer a transformative experience, generating knowledge and stimulating self-discovery through non fixated thinking and practice; helping students to be aware of their present times, to question current models of knowledge, and to propose alternative answers as a regular-bases mechanism. I would like teachers/professors to be able to remain present and to challenge themselves with new bodies of research, as well as to remain active in their practice/career especially if they are studio instructors. All off this still sounds like romantic idealism but I like it!