Where Art Becomes Critical

            Hot on the heals of the Program Director’s dismissal, a promotional brochure for Vermont College of Fine Arts appeared in the snail mail box. Its mission statement reads:

“Where Art Becomes Critical   Guiding Principles   Artist =Thinker Artist = Speaker Artist = Community Maker   It is the Program’s hope and belief that our students are radicalized by their time in the Program. Radicalized in the fundamental sense of having gained a more complex and confident view of the world as artists and as people. Students learn that making art doesn’t have to focus on being better than, or isolated from, others. That it can be a cooperative, mutually-beneficial venture and that being open and truthful can lead to greater understanding of all involved. They realize that the real rewards in making art come from struggling with the process and not from the perfection of a shiny, fashionable, salable object. And perhaps most crucial, they recognize that art is not simply about art, and artists are not lone geniuses, but both exist and take on their significance through a relationship to the world. Both the art and the artist are part of the social, cultural, political, and economic context that partially influences and defines them, and therefore they help to influence and define. All artists have an obligation to understand and struggle with these extra-artistic issues.”

Enough said about “being open and truthful can lead to greater understanding of all involved” (3/21/10 posting, Tribute to Jessica Lutz) except that a comma is needed after “venture” (or is that intentional?). Let’s consider where art becomes critical!  

            In an essay entitled Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, secular criticism, and the question of minority culture (From Edward Said and the work of the critic: speaking truth to power, edited by Paul A. Bove’), Aamir R. Mufti elaborates on Edward Said’s “secular criticism” and its unique and integral association with exile. Referencing Said’s emphasis on Erich Auerbach’s compilation of Mimesis while in Istanbul during the Second World War, Mufti writes (pg. 236): “Said therefore reads Auerbach’s exile, and the composition of Mimesis during that exile, as questioning received notions of “nation, home, community, and belonging” (World, Text, and the Critic pg. 12)”. Later (pg. 237) he writes: “The German Jewish critic in (“Oriental”) exile becomes, for Said, the paradigmatic figure for modern criticism, an object lesson in what it means to have a critical consciousness: “The intellectual’s social identity should involve something more than strengthening those aspects of the culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its members” (WT 24; emphasis added).” On pg. 238, after quoting an essay by Emily Apter, he follows up with: “The form of cultural “literacy” that Said calls secular criticism makes an ethical imperative of loss and displacement. It holds, with Adorno, that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” (Theodor Adorno Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life 39) It sees minority as a permanent condition of exile and requires that in our affiliative efforts at critical community and comprehension we assume the posture of minority.” On 239 he emphasizes what he takes to be Said’s meaning of secular criticism: “Secular implies for Said a critique of nationalism as an ideology of hearth and home, of collective Gemutlichkeit; a critique of the “assurance,” “confidence,” and “majority sense” that claims on behalf of national culture always imply; a critique of “the entire matrix of meanings we associate with ‘home,’ belonging and community” (WT 11). It contains the charge that the organicism of national belonging, its mobilization of the filiative metaphors of kinship and regeneration, obscures its exclusionary nature; it can be achieved only by rendering certain cultural practices, certain institutions, certain ethical positions representative of “the people” as such. Secular criticism seeks continually to make it perceptible that the experience of being at home can only be produced by rendering some other homeless.” Finally, on pg. 240, he summarizes: “Said’s insistence on the critical imperative of the secular can appear elitist, and hence paradoxical, only if we forget the haunting figure of Auerbach in Turkish exile that he repeatedly evokes. It is in this sense that we must read Said when he himself speaks of exile not as “privilege,” but as a permanent critique of “the mass institutions that dominate modern life.” Saidian secular criticism points insistently to the dilemmas and the terrors, but also, above all, to the ethical possibilities, of minority existence in modernity.”

            Today, many artists, as well as their art, describe themselves as being nomadic. Nomadism shares many of the same characteristics as exile. Indeed, it would not be difficult to conflate the two. They are not the same. What Mufti is describing is a position in regards to the world rather than an economy of networking as “a relationship to the world”. The nomadic economy is underwritten by tribalism. One could almost say it is an essential condition of the nomadic. The tribal may not appear to be a “nationalism” that is tied to place (a “hearth and home”) but it is about belonging, being identified as part of a group. VCFA’s mission statement may not promote tribalism as such, but marginalizing the “isolated” or “lone” artist certainly does implicate that. Considering such an adumbration of collective art making and artists, and the excluded minority thereby rendered “homeless,” VCFA’s marketing department should revisit “Where Art Becomes Critical.”

Tags: Secular Criticism, Vermont College Of Fine Arts Master Of Fine Arts In Visual Art Program