Editor’s note: This is an article from the Winter 1998 issue of UCLA Magazine.
The biennial exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art is invariably the object of intense criticism: One year it’s excoriated for being more concerned with political correctness than aesthetic significance; the next time around, it’s dismissed for lacking a challenging point of view. Yet surprisingly, no one seems to have protested that the 1997 Whitney show was too focused on UCLA.
That nearly a third of the UCLA art department’s faculty was included in last year’s exhibition is remarkable enough; more astonishing still is the number of recent UCLA graduates who also got the nod from the biennial’s co-curators, Lisa Phillips of the Whitney and Louise Neri, U.S. editor of the internationally respected journal Parkett.
As a barometer of the prevailing currents roiling the always-agitated American art scene, the Whitney Biennial, whatever its faults, is about as reliable as you can get. And Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight sums up the message of the most recent outing: “At any given moment in the art world, there’s a ‘buzz,’ and right now the buzz is about UCLA.”
Given the vigilance with which New York jealously guards its position as the center of the artistic universe, one might reasonably ask, “How did UCLA become the hottest art school in the country?” In the view of many informed observers, the evolution began when the department appointed Chris Burden in the late 1980s.
Burden, who garnered international prominence as a performance artist in the 1970s, quickly began to open doors in Westwood for other artists of his generation. “Chris, painter Roger Herman and multimedia artist Charles Ray were already here when I arrived in 1991,” recalls Henry Hopkins, director of the Armand Hammer Museum and the department’s chair during its rise to preeminence in the first half of this decade.
By the time Hopkins stepped down five years later, the department’s roster was a veritable who’s who of the most talked-about younger artists in the country. Burden, Herman and Ray had been joined full-time by performance artist Paul McCarthy, painter Lari Pittman, sculptor Nancy Rubin and ceramist/sculptor Adrian Saxe, among others. Again, Knight neatly sums it up: “The current UCLA faculty is composed of artists who have developed or are developing international reputations.”
All of UCLA’s current artist-teachers continue to show in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and Europe: Burden, Pittman, Ray and Saxe have already been the subjects of solo museum exhibitions, and Ray will score a hat trick when his much-anticipated “mid-career retrospective” opens this spring at the Whitney before traveling to L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “At more traditional schools,” observes McCarthy, “the people who are showing aren’t teaching, and the people who are teaching aren’t showing.”
As in any field, superior faculty serve as a magnet for the very best students. The significance of this attraction is not lost on Mary Kelly, the highly regarded artist and theorist who took over as the department chair in fall 1996. “Students gravitate toward places where they think they can develop,” she affirms. “You want to draw students who have ambition and talent. And we’re now attracting people who otherwise might have gone to a place like Yale.”
These students have not been disappointed. North Carolinian Casey Cook, a ’97 graduate painter, confirms that she was drawn to UCLA by the high-profile faculty. She describes her experience in a string of enthusiastic adjectives, with “amazing” recurring frequently. By being in close proximity to such an extraordinary amalgam of talented individuals, “both the professors and the other students,” she reports, “you learn in an amazing way. My teachers have been extremely generous with their knowledge and their time. And that’s rare.”
Cook and other students have, in turn, already begun to make names for themselves, landing gallery shows while still in school. Cook’s work has been seen in a one-artist show at Daniel Bernier Gallery in L.A. and a group show in New York. Such success stories used to occur sporadically: In the 1960s and 1970s, UCLA alumni who rose to international stature included Ed Moses, Vija Celmins, Peter Shelton and Judy Chicago.
But in the last two or three years, there are perhaps a dozen recent graduates who are now showing regularly. Painter Toba Khedoori has mounted solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York; sculptor Jennifer Pastor was the subject of a one-woman traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and represented America at the Bienal in São Paulo, Brazil; installation artist Jason Rhoades has received solo shows in L.A., New York and Europe and, like Pastor, is included in the traveling exhibition “Sunshine and Noir,” which will arrive at the Hammer this October; 1995 MFA graduate Martin Kersels has had one-artist exhibitions in L.A. and participated in group shows in New York; Liz Craft, a year behind Kersels makes her solo debut at Richard Telles Fine Art this May. The list goes on.
Unlike most highly respected art schools, the UCLA department has built its reputation not on the strengths of a particular medium or movement. Yale, for instance, has long been identified with its painting program and the California Institute of the Arts, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, became the mecca of conceptualism. “The strength of the UCLA art department is in its diversity,” says Museum of Contemporary Art associate curator Ann Goldstein. “You have so many options there.”
Kelly wouldn’t have it any other way. “Once they peg us as a particular kind of school,” she quips, “that’s the end.” Which is not to say that the department has no guiding principles or that there isn’t a relatively identifiable sensibility among the faculty, whether consciously cultivated or not. One nationally recognized, L.A.-based artist calls it “bad boy art.” Kelly doesn’t disagree, although she prefers the term “transgressive,” paradoxically bestowing a patina of respectability to an art that’s all about disrespect. Kelly’s bottom line: “We are not homogenous. This department is about pulling together diverse tendencies and making them gel in a postmodern hybrid. We want the best of all possible worlds: thinking bad boys and girls.”
“It’s not about consensus,” Pittman stresses. “Consensus brings about the lowest common denominator. Our strength is that we have a very willful, very professional, very acclaimed and very contentious faculty. That’s what makes the school interesting.” At UCLA, says McCarthy, “we’re dealing with the present, with what it means to be an artist today.”
To those outside the art world, being an artist typically means one of two things. The first is the Romantic notion of the artist as some sort of secular prophet through whom visions of an imagined world are given form. The other is the neo-classical counterpoint to this idea: the artist is a gifted craftsman who hones his or her talent to create objects of transcendent beauty. These are also the twin assumptions that have driven the way much of art and art history have been taught for at least a half-century.
“Historically,” asserts Pittman, “a failure of art schools is that they’ve been relegated to expressionistic, therapeutic roles; they haven’t been regarded as training grounds for a cultural profession of real importance.
“Nobody would question that notion down on the southern end of the campus. Doctors and scientists are trained to be professionals, with a working knowledge of their fields. Even in the performing arts and film studies, everybody assumes that the students are there to learn what they need to know to become successful professionals in their fields. It only becomes an issue in the fine arts.”
Formerly, instead of inquiry, the emphasis was on craft, style, technique. Content came later. But at UCLA, Pittman emphasizes, teaching and studying art is about “intellectual inquiry.” Indeed, the much-respected painter explains, “the majority of student artists I work with do not paint. I discuss and critique multiple practices: I’m interested in the idea rather than the medium. The work of art is dictated by the refinement of the idea.”
As if to reinforce the point, Kelly has moved quickly to shore up perceived weaknesses in the UCLA program. For starters, she rounded out the studio curriculum “which had maintained the relatively traditional divisions according to media: painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics and the somewhat vague “new genre” by introducing an option dubbed “interdisciplinary studio” for students whose work crosses conventional boundaries.
More importantly, she added a heady dose of criticism and theory to a program that had built its reputation on an endearingly anachronistic concern for the physical object. Toward that end, she inaugurated an annual spring quarter symposium that brings together artists, critics and theorists, as well as scholars from other disciplines within the university to engage in “a major critical and theoretical debate around culture.”
The 1997 symposium, “On the Ugly,” included presentations by such prominent art historians and theorists as Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster. This spring the symposium will comprise a variety of attempts to answer the question “What Do Pictures Want?” Once again, participants will include noted artists and filmmakers as well as influential scholars, from both on-campus and off, in such fields as literature and cultural studies.
Kelly’s third major innovation was the creation of the Wight Biennial, an exhibition of graduate student work from schools throughout the country. The show is curated by UCLA students, who visit other schools, spending days looking at their peers’ work and selecting one or two pieces that interest them. They then write brief essays, generally no more than a few paragraphs, discussing their selections. Playing the role of curator, Kelly believes, forces students to think about works of art from a different perspective.
Pittman sees these developments as part of a “historic moment taking place at UCLA and profoundly impacting the cultural change L.A. is experiencing.” Here he raises another salient issue. Where in the past artists would train in L.A. and then leave, mostly for points east, now they stay. The critical mass defining an “art community” has at last been achieved here.
Or, as Kelly drolly states: “The regional argument is over; the permission to exist in Los Angeles has been won.”
What the department offers today is an unusually sober and pragmatic approach to art-making. Yet the master-apprentice relation that has historically been the basis of artist training still has currency at UCLA, if with a fitting transfusion of fin de siecle independent-mindedness. The disciples of Mary Kelly, Nancy Rubin, Lari Pittman, Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy and other current faculty are likely to be very different from their mentors.
“There are moments in one’s development when you share affinities with the person with whom you’re studying,” Pittman observes. “It’s almost a rite of passage: You honor your mentor with some sort of homage. What I’m always waiting for is the moment the student says, ‘Yes, I recognize your help, but now it’s time for me to move on.’”
