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By the same author

ARTISTS WITH PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art(New Academia Publishing 2009)

Read an excerpt at www.newacademia.com

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Art Critiques

A Guide

James Elkins

Second EditionRevised and Expanded

Washington, DC

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Copyright 2012 by James Elkins

Second Edition New Academia Publishing, 2012

First Edition New Academia Publishing 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number:

ISBN 978-0-9860216-1-9 paperback B&W (alk. paper)

New Academia PublishingP.O. Box 24720, Washington, DC 20038-7420info@newacademia.com - www.newacademia.com

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Preface

e first year I was hired at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, I was on apanel with four other instructors. We sat down on five chairs in an empty balletpractice room. An MFA student from the Performance Art Department walked outin front of us. e lights went down, and the spotlight went on her. She was wearinga 1950s-style calico dress. She spoke for ten minutes about her childhood, staringinto the darkness over our heads. When the performance was over, we all went intoa backstage room and sat on filthy couches for the critique. One instructor said thelighting was overly dramatic. e student had a little note pad, and she wrote thatdown. Another said the students story was interesting but too disjointed. And then

a third instructor said something that changed the way I thought about critiquesforever. He said:

You know, you have very hairy legs.I expected the student to be outraged. She hadnt mentioned her legs at all, so

the instructors remark seemed way offtopic, way out of bounds. ere was a pause,and then the student said:

Yes, I know, all the women in my family have hairy legs. My mother nevershaves.

e instructor grinned. Wow, he said, I think thats fabulous. Hairy legs on awoman have such an amazingeffect. Its so strong.

I havent thought about that, the student said, taking notes.e conversation got very animated aer that, and everyone started talking

about shaving. I dont remember if I said much: I was probably just taking it all in.I didnt mind the subject, as long as the student didnt mind. It was obviously morefun to talk about than lighting or narrative. What amazed me, and continues toamaze me, is that there was no sense that the conversation had strayed offtopic.isis an art critique, I thought: a place where all possible subjects are permitted, all atonce.ere are no rules. Anything at all might be pertinent. It was one of the strang-est conversations I had ever been part of. Not because it is strange to talk about whoshaves themselves, when, or where, or why, but because it is weird to mix that kind

of talk with talk about art, theater, lighting, and narrative, and then to try to under-stand it all together as a way of teaching art.

It might have been shortly aer that day that I decided to make a special studyof critiques. Ever since then I have participated in as many critiques as I can. I havemade audiotapes and transcripts; Ive taken reams of notes and photographs; Ive

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talked to students and instructors; and Ive read what little there is to read on thesubject. For me, critiques are the most interesting, infuriating, and challenging partof art teaching. Of all the things that happen when art is taught, critiques the hardestto understand, the trickiest to make use of, the least understood, and potentially themost helpful and rewarding.

Art critiques are very different from the exams, quizzes, and tests in most othersubjects. Critiques are more free form, more conversational. Critiques are some-times one-on-one, but more oen they involve a number of people. Sometimestheres an audience. Sometimes the audience participates. In the end, critiques dontalways result in a grade: usually theyre pass / fail, and sometimes they are just toencourage the student and theres no way to fail. An exam is on one subject, whicheveryone agrees on in advance. A critique can be about anything from the politicsof the day to the students hairy legs.

How boring tests are by comparison! I have taken, and graded, enough teststo appreciate how they measure very limited properties. An IQ test, an Iowa Test,a GRE, an SAT, a Leaving Cert in Ireland, an A-level or an O-level in England, theAbitur or Matura in the European Union, or any multiple-choice test in college, isusually a dreary affair. It tells me next to nothing about myself, if Im taking itandif Im administering it, it tells me only a few things about the student. A typical testis just a set of little puzzles, like a wheel for a hamster or a maze for a mouse. Testshave the virtue of ensuring that everyone in the class is on the same page.ey pro-mote the accumulation of systematic knowledge. At higher levels, as in Medical orLaw Boards, they ensure that people who make important decisions are competentin their fields. But what does any of that have to do with living an interesting life, orbeing an interesting person?

Critiques are an entirely different matter. ey are unbelievably difficult to un-derstand, and rich with possibilities. Critiques are public conversations, civic dia-logue as one teacher calls them. ey can be open, inclusive, democratic.1All kindsof meanings, all forms of understanding, can be at issue. Critiques can mimic real-life situations: they can sound like seductions, trials, poems, or fights.ey can runthe range from deathly boring to incoherently passionateand that is appropriate,because artworks themselves express the widest spectrum of human response. Butthe price critiques pay for that richness is very high. Critiques can come perilouslyclose to total nonsense. Sometimes they just barely make sense.

eres an enormous literature on testing, but almost nothing on critiques. eremay be up to five thousand institutions in the world that grant the equivalent ofBFA, MFA, and PhD degrees in the visual arts,2 and if each one of those holds justfive critiques a semester (and surely the number is much higher) then there are atleast fiy thousand art critiques each year. And yet there is no standard literatureon critiques: nothing about how to run them, what theyre supposed to accomplish,

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what standards they might employ. ere is a book callede Critique Handbook,but it is mostly about the basic terms and ideas that are used in art instruction, likeform and space. If youre new to the art world and youre looking for a book thatwill introduce you to critiques but also to form, space, scale, format, line, color, re-alism, and abstraction, thene Critique Handbookmay be a good choice.3ereis a fun chapter called e Crit in Sarahorntons Seven Days in the Art World;and some passages in the edited volumes Rethinking the Contemporary Art School,e Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, andAgonistic Academies.4eresa good book by Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen, Active Sights: Art asSocial Interaction, but its more about artists in the world than students.5And theresa book by Deborah Rockman callede Art of Teaching Art,geared to introductory-level drawing classes.6All of these books spend a lot of time on things other thancritiques.

is Book and Why Art Cannot be Taught

About 10 chapters of this book are expanded from chapter 4 in my book Why ArtCannot be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students.7It is the only time I have ever re-peated anything from one book to another. e reason is that Why Art Cannot beTaught should really have been a book about art critiques, but it grew into some-thing bigger.e chapters on art critiques were buried, and students didnt see them.I wanted to bring that material out, and write something focused on art critiques.Why Art Cannot be Taught also has a history of art schools, discussions of commonproblems in teaching art, and a section about whether or not art can be taught.isbook got an early bad review on Amazon because someone said I was repeating my-self.8I have worked hard on this book: it has lots of new material, and every sectionis rewritten. Its as good as I can make it.

What About Critiques Outside Art School?

is book is all about individual and group critiques in institutions like schools,universities, colleges, and academies. Critiques happen in many places: amongfriends, in bars, in artists residencies, in community centers, in commercial galler-ies, in project spaces. ose critiques can oen be less formal, because theres lessof a power relation, andmost important!because there is no money involved. Ihope that some of what I say can be helpful in those real-life situations. 9I have onepiece of advice about critiques out there in the real world. Aer you graduate, thechances are youll have a circle of friends, and youll all critique each others work.

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e danger is that as the years go on, youll get to know each other very well, andyour friends wont be giving you the serious, fundamental critiques you may need.Ive seen this happen many times: good friends aer ten or twenty years support oneanother, but that is not always what is needed. So my advice is: when you graduate,gather a group of friends, but then aer five years, dump them and find anothergroup. Critiques depend on honesty.

Terminology

A word about terminology. I call studio art teachers instructors, professors, andteachers indiscriminately. Sometimes I call the teachers in a critique panelists.In most of the world, professor is a special category, higher than an ordinary uni-versity teacher. In North America, every department is full of professors. I am notobserving those distinctions here.is book is about visual art instruction whereverit happens: in a two-year liberal arts college, a community college, a research uni-versity, an art department, an art academy, an art school, or a technical or designschool. I take examples from all of those, without stressing the differences, whichoen hardly exist anyway.

e same goes for the expressions art school, art department, art academy,and art university. Different parts of the world use different names. ere are overtwenty art universities in Japan, which sounds odd to someone from North Amer-ica. On the other hand the art schools in North America sound strange to peoplefrom Europe and South America, where art is usually taught in art academies. Whathappens in studio classrooms is oen surprisingly similar, so I have not made anystrict distinctions between schools, departments, academies, and universities.

I also dont distinguish between BA and BFA, or MA and MFA, or PhD andDCA. Degree-granting differences can be very significant, but not, I think, at thelevel of the critique itself.

Acknowledgments

is book was written specially for the Sophomore Studio Seminars at the Schoolof the Art Institute of Chicago, starting in summer 2011. It wouldnt have been pos-sible without all the colleagues Ive shared critiques with over the years. Id like toespecially remember four colleagues who have died since I started work in 1988:Paul Hinchcliffe, a very adventurous painter and teacher; George Roeder, an Ameri-canist political historian who managed, somehow, to bridge the gap between his

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field and art; Katherine Hixson, whom most people remember as the editor of theNew Art Examiner; and Robert Loescher, one of the art worlds real originals. Youwont find much trace of Bob on the internet, because he gave his life to teaching histhree specialties: Hispanic art, the history of sexuality, and the history of food. Hewas outrageously good at all three subjects. eres no way I can name all the col-leagues who have been part of critique culture at the School, but I especially want tothank Joan Livingstone, John Manning, Claire Pentecost, Frank Piatek, Chris Sulli-van, Lisa Wainwright, Faith Wilding, Michiko Itatani, Anders Nereim, Helen MariaNugent, Anne Wilson, Gaylen Gerber, Jim Nutt, Simon Anderson, Lynne Hixson,Alan Labb, Michael Miller, Stephanie Brooks, Beth Nugent, Werner Herterich, Mi-chael Newman, Susanne Doremus, Carol Becker, Shellie Fleming, Candida Alvarez,Gregg Bordowitz, Jesse Ball, Mary Jane Jacob, Sharon Cousin, Frances Whitehead,and Barbara DeGenevieve, for their many insights over many years. anks, too, tothe student artists who gave me permission to tape and transcribe their critiquesand reproduce their work: Sean Lamoureux, Alexandra Helene Copan, Chris Fen-nell, Diego Gutierrez, Rebecca Gordon, Chris Campe, Catherine Arnold (nowSchaffner), elin oHara slavick, and Andrea Schumacher. And special thanks toJoanne Easton, who shared her MA thesis on critiques with me; to the gang on myFacebook page, for lots of ideas (youre all thanked in footnotes); to Jerry Saltz (whoposted my project on his Facebook page on June 23, 2011), and all his friends ideas(theyre all thanked too); to Buzz Spector, and to Tom Mapp. I have traveled widely as a guest speaker, and I have participated in art cri-tiques in most states of the US (I seem to be missing Maine, Idaho, Missouri, Okla-homa, Vermont, Alaska, and Hawaii), and in about 15 foreign countries. (I havebeen to art departments and academies in 60 countries, but I have only been incritiques in about 15 of those.) My travelingon average once a week during theacademic yearhas given me a wide, nebulous, and unquantifiable sense of theflavor and style of critiques in many places. Ive tried to incorporate as much of thatinto this book as I could.

Feedback, Please!

is is an unusual kind of book. It will be revised each year, with new material, andre-published. e number of this version is at the bottom of the title page. (e bookwill also be available each year in two versions: one color, and one black and white,for students on a budget.)

I think of this edition as a sketch. I would like to keep gathering examples andstories. If you have photographs or other information on critiques, please sendthem! Im interested in five kinds of material:

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tiques are very disorderly things (that is why they are interesting), and whetheryoure a student or a teacher, you can read the book in any order you would like.

Whats New in is Edition

Each edition of this book contains new material.

First edition (2011): ten chapters from Why Art Cannot be Taught, with tenchapters of new material.

Second edition (2012): newly formatted; new pictures (from Tehran, in chapter41; from Singapore, in chapter 42); lots of stories and facts from Facebook; the listof failure terms is much longer (chapter 14); there are lists of the worst things youcan say during a critique (chapter 16); lots more words for successful art (chapter35); more on different critique formats (chapter 4); and five new chapters on thePhD (chapters 4448).

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Time for Critique!

A critique is an opportunity to see how your work looks to other people. eingredients are you, your work, and people. Some of those people have authority,and some dont. Some make sense, and some dont. Some are helpful, and othershave their own agendas.

Critiques take place in space (oen a cinder block room with a concrete slabfloor, or a classroom repurposed), in time (from five minutes to six hours), in

language (sometimes very abstruse and philosophic, sometimes technical), and ingestures (people walk, and point, and mimic art making). Critiques can be:

ConfusingInspiringBrilliantChallengingToo challengingOver your headBeneath you

AnnoyingMisguidedRepetitiveBoringExhaustingUnbelievably boringMind numbingToo shortIncomprehensibleStrict

Like an examinationLike boot campLike therapyChaotic

FrighteningTraumaticPersonalAggressivePredictableWorthlessIrrelevant

UselessExpensive and uselessIntellectualToo intellectualAnti-intellectualToo anti-intellectualEloquentToo verbalIntuitiveSupportive

Touchy-feelyInappropriateFabulous

Your purpose is to take it all in, and use it to understand your work more fully.

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A Sample Critique

Critiques have a certain flavor. ey are raw and undigested. ey are oen a bitdull. Inspiration isnt easy, and certainly not for instructors who might be tired ordistracted. Sometimes critiques are passionate and even violent, but most are fairlycalm. Every once in a while an instructor or a student will say something reallymemorable, but usually the language is a bit awkward, punctuated with gaps and

silences, repetitions and obscurities. Occasionally critiques are brilliant: insightsspark offeach other and stupendous ideas rain down faster than you can hear them.

But most of the time nothing tremendously interesting happens.It matters that critiques are this way. ey arent Shakespeare, and they are

definitely not the professionalized language of art history, art education, or art theory.ey arent philosophical investigations: theyre too disorganized and haphazard forthat.

I am going to be saying some fairly abstract things in this book, so I want to beginby giving the flavor of an ordinary critique. is is one that the student transcribedfrom an audiotape. It isnt the whole critique, but portions of it. I have added somecomments.

If its possible, you should read this aloud in a class, like a play, to get a sense ofits tone, its mood, its language. It requires eight students to play the parts.

e artists name is Andrea Schumacher. Shes a painter and sculptor, and youcan see her recent work on her website.1is was taped when she was a student atthe School of the Art Institute of Chicago. ere were seven people in the room,most of them faculty. I removed their names, and substituted letters: R, K, W, J, M,V, and Q. e teacher calledJis the moderator; she, or he, was in charge of keepingtime. e faculty saw a group of untitled pieces on glass, mounted together on awall; three Xeroxes on acetate; and two collages on paper. e first illustration hereis the group of pieces on glass.

e critique begins abruptly, with Andreas opening statement:

A is is work in progress, and I just started doing the liquid light on glass[illustrated above], and Im still in the early stages of working with it. By the

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Andrea says, Yeah, I mean they are not I mean. at sort of thing doesntappear in written texts on art, but it is part of the way people talk about art. It is noteasy to talk about art, especially if youre the artist and the work is new: youre likelyto be unsure how to speak, or what to say, or even what you really mean when yousay something. at is entirely normal, and it is important to attend to it and not

try to censor it out. Whatever Andreas works meant to her at the time, they meantsomething more than working with transparency: that was just the phrase sheended up with, aer two false starts.

R Will those other layers have other information on them?A Yeah, thats one of the main reasons I want to use glassthats one of the

things I want to talk about, the aspects of glass and transparency andwhat kind of connotations you get from it, or if the glass is adding to theimagery or taking away from it.e reason Im using it is that it was a way tofurther manipulate the images Im working with. Ive worked with xeroxes

a lot and I was getting a little I wasmanipulating them in collage and Istill work in a collage fashion, but Idlike more opportunity to manipulatethe images. ese works here[pointing to three images, one of whichis illustrated here] are Xerox collageson acetate.ere are a couple of layersto them, and Ive been scraping themand just trying to manipulate these

images, trying to put my hand onthem to a certain degree. So I went tothe glass hoping to find a way to geta little more flexibilityand I think Iam going to be working with maybea low-tech kind of photography sothat I can do things that are alongthe lines of collage and montage. Itsa relatively new thing for me, and alot of work has gone towards using

the glass and also about the level ofmanipulation. Right now I dont feelthat Im manipulating things as muchas I want to combining images. I thinkthat I would like to have a certain

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emotional or expressive content in these imagesI dont want them to bepurely postmodern appropriations or recontextualizations. I think that Imcombining traditions of expressionism and using something that is moremodern or postmodernusing appropriated images and I want to talk alittle bit about thatwhether thats schizophrenic to take an expressionisticbent to a more modern practice.So those are some of the things Id like to spark interest in.

K How do you see these being presented, seeing as you are using glass. Will itbe a hand-held object? Will it be on a stand? Will it be enclosed in a frame?Will it

A I have thought of a couple of possibilities which would be in a kind of ashadow box frame, possibly back-lit, or lights along the sides, or on somesort of a stand with the ability to adjust the space between the layersmaybeenclosed, but maybe not so that the light could pass through them.

Notice whats just happened here, from Andreas point of view. First she talkssome more about her techniquethe glass and the acetate. But then, in the secondpart of her reply, she tries to change the subject. Shed like to talk about contentand meaning instead. She mentions a lot of things in quick succession: emotion,expression, postmodern appropriation, recontextualization, expressionism, evenschizophrenia! ere is plenty to talk about there, and she even says shed like tospark interest in what her work means. But the faculty member, who I am callingK, either doesnt hear or isnt interested, and the conversation goes right back totechnique.

W Have you only thought of transparent glass? Its that I mean Im just lookingat when you say backlit. Im looking at it and thinking of how that wouldwork or why the transparent glasshow would you backlight this? Howwould it affect this?

A I dont quite understand your question.W Um, maybe Im trying towhen you keep referring to backlighting itA If it were in a frame and it were enclosed, like in a shadow box there would

have to be some sort of light source so that the light could come through theimages as they overlapped each other.

W ats what Im trying to get atR Frosted light bulbs.W because right now you have the shadows giving that double image, and

thats part of the transparent quality of this glass; and you talk about collageand montage, and you are going to get more of that, and if you backlight it,it will eliminate that but I mean

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Critiques oen develop fixed ideas, which get tossed from one instructor to thenext, and they develop a life of their own. One of the fixed ideas here is that theshadows of the glass are creating double images. Actually, it is hard to see thosedouble images. ey show up next to the letter B in the piece on the next page.

But the plastic ruler already has doubled edges, and the rest of the image istoo blurry to make double images. People tend to stand at certain distances duringcritiques, and as the critique gets underway, its likely the faculty are all standingback five or ten feet, and they arent looking closely. at means the conversationcan go on about general ideas like glass, acetate, and double reflections.

A I dont know; I havent tried one yet. ese are possibilities. I have no ideawhat it will be likebut I have talked to my advisor about having some sortof lit shadow box so that it would be like a light tablethat kind of effect.

W You can print right on the frosted glassit would do the same thing all inoneand when you backlight

K or any other support that is not, that doesnt haveone of the mainconnotations that I can think of about glass is fragility or breakability. So Imean, how do you justify its use, maybe given your ideas, given that aspectof that particular material, because its not a hand-held object and you dont,you know, you dont impose any of these qualities about the material on theviewer, I mean then I would question the use of that as a support.

A Im not sure I follow you, but I dont For me the reason Im using glassis not for its fragility or breakability, thats not the main quality. Its thetransparency, and also I think there areit has a certain dated quality of olddaguerreotypes or negatives on glassthose are the qualities I think about.Im not really thinking about

Did you understand what instructor K was trying to say? I think she,or he, was saying that there doesnt seem to be a connection between the factglass is fragile and the way the images are mounted. But maybe the idea is thatthere is no connection between the choice of glass and the subject matter. Ormaybe that the characteristics of glass arent used in the piece. (I will comeback to this speech at the end of this book, in chapter 42.) Andrea tries her bestto answer, but she also wants to change the subject: and this time, she succeeds.

W What about subject matter, in relationship to why you chose glass? Is thereany connection?

A Well, yes, in that much of the imagery is medical. I think there is also thatsuggestionof a cell on a slideor on glass. So far that seems to be the kindsof connections that Ive come up with. I mean at this point Im working on

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glass, its the first thing that came to my mind. Im not sure if Plexiglas wouldwork with liquid light; the chemicals might affect it, and since I dont knowsilk screen at this point (Im going to be learning it) But at this point thisis something I know how to doand glass is one of the materials that liquid

light will work onso that was another reason.K Well if you disguise what it isI mean in a frame or some kind of enclosure

then, then []You know the material itself is significant to the kind of imagery that you arechoosing then it kind of does

A I dont know how much it is relatedthere is some sense of it. ats one ofthe things Im wondering now and I want to get responses about there area lot of reasons to use glass (the practical reason is that it is transparent), andI can expose liquid light on it, but Im not sure

K I just think that if it was used metaphorically it would be much more

interesting than to use it for any practical reason.A Yeah, well, I feel like there is a sense of it, but I dont know how far I want to

push that and I dont know if there is a different type of subject matter that

Now subject matter is back on the table. Andrea says her imagery is medical,

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about that? For instance, the one in the center (Im talking about the oneson glass) the sort of cloud shape is the least readablethe one to the rightof it is less readable than some of the others, and the top ones you can seewhats going on. So in some cases you are choosing images that are prettyobscure or the process to get them that way, [and] at other times you arepretty visible about it. How does that enter into it?

A ats notat this pointthats not a conscious decision on my part. athas to do with my ability, and Im just putting up examples of things thatIm experimenting with, so I wouldnt even dare to say I made a consciousdecision one way or another.

K You can take what you worked with, and even if in certain technical termsone can categorize it as a failure, you can take that thing and juxtapose itagainst something else. You might conclude that thats exactly the thing Ineeded to make, so if I were you, I wouldnt necessarily consider anything afailure.

A Well, these are examples. ese are some of the things that have stayedon glass okay, and Ive been experimenting with the enlargers and timeexposures. I mean I might not have put them up if I really thought that theywere I dont know I feel like Im not taking responsibility for them. Itsjust that they are experiments, examples of

W Youre investigating glass.

What just happened here? e instructor M noticed that some imageshave clear subjects, and others dont. She, or he, wonders why. Andrea says thatshe isnt aware of the difference between a blob and a doctor injecting a patientsarm. If youre not an artist, you might not believe that. But for an artist, its acommon state of mind. You are so close to what youre doing, so engrossed in theglass, or the liquid light, or whatever youre working with, that you lose track ofwhat youre actually producing. Aer Andrea answers, instructor K jumps into try to make sure she doesnt feel like shes failed. K says that its normal tojuxtapose images and ideas, and that doesnt mean the artwork fails. K meanswell, but her speech is also lets Andrea offthe hook. Sooner or later, as an artist,youll need to take responsibility for what viewers might see in your work. isprobably wasnt the time to push that problem, and Andrea is relieved to be ableto go back to talking about glass, which is the subject shed tried, at first, to avoid.

is conversation is supportive and generous, but theres another side to things: atthe MFA level, you will usually be expected to be ready to justify what you do. Andreawould be expected to be able to tell the panelists why she chose that strange organ-shaped blob, why she put labels on one of the pieces, or why some images of doctorsmeasuring and injecting patients are realistic and others are hard to see. On the one

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to do all these things yourself. You can go to an industrial source and havesomebody work with you.

W You can do photo-etching on it.A Yeah, because I dont feel confident enough in a lot of technical areas.R Youre confident with this? With the photo-emulsion, right? ere are other

possibilities you may want to use.W at same photo-emulsion becomes a repellent if you apply it on thick

enough and you can blast right on to it. You can get some amazing qualities

with how light transmits through the sand-blasted glass itself, if its about thematerial sand. It does things youd never do with a camera, how it refractsand reflects light, these nuances that but thats about the material and

A And I think, as I said, since Im in an early stage I dont know the extent ofthe possibilities or maybe connecting the meanings and the images to thematerial, but it seems like there are many qualities that Ive just barely begunto think of, and there is something seductive about it that perhaps maybecould help some of my imagery.

W Do you ever think of glass as liquid?A No.

Q I immediately have all kinds of non-formal associations with the use of glassto carry photographic emulsion. I immediately have associations with thehistory of photography, and I also like that the kinds of images you are usingcould mean all sorts of things. So it does seem to be a very curious decisionto use this medium for some reasons other than transparency. Also, thatsenhanced by the medical illustrations that you are using, so I get a very keensense that there is some kind of historical comment here.

A Yeah, and I dont think Im aware of completely what it is. I wanted to getpeoples responses.

Q It does seem though, that with the medical illustration aspect of it, those

seem there seems to be something going on there. e one with the cloud,Im wondering about the juxtaposition of it, especially since some of theseillustrations have letters of the alphabet there, a suggestion of order. But theorder is not in sequence. Youve got B and C at the top and then you have Aoffto the side and E over there. So there is a suggestion of some connection

what you can do and what you can say with it. I think that there really couldbe possibilities. I think that you are right about that.

R ere are ways of working too where you can get a photographic image onand it kind of resists and it resists sand-blasting and you can sand-blast itand frost it, wherever you want. Have you seen that?

W Well I have, likeR You should get some glass and try some of these things. You may not be able

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in relations to the subject matter also that is enhanced by the use of theseletters and this cloud. It does seem to imply some kind of center, even thoughits notBut also seeing a connection with your other material not on glass and alsothe glass is tinted, that suggests yellowing. ese are all conscious decisions,or a sense of conscious decisions.

A A lot of the images I use I take from old encyclopedias and its not allmedical, its educational, and talking about a certain time frame in termsof the 40s, 50s and 60s. And theres something about an order. ere is anordered quality to them: there are elements that I want to draw in which areotherwise

M Whether you are aware of it or not, there does seem to be a narrative, poetickind of connotation

R I think it needs an external narrative to me, not necessarily something thatillustrates, I mean describes, but isnt a narrative. Maybe a parallel narrative,verbal (that is, a language carrier), because you have injection and scalesand mutation. All kinds of things are entering this way beyond the medicalimplications of it, and what I think about the narrative thing is not justsomething that might come later once this is successful. en youre goingto go to the narrative, but maybe it cant be successful unless you have thenarrative, another visual narrative that runs along with this story.

A I feel also that, in this state, I havent yet pushed the kinds of statements Iwant to make, the kinds of juxtapositions I want to make. ey really arentthere yet. So it really is hard for that to come out.I usually have very similar images in another image that is being injectedor pushed in, that helps support the connections. Sometimes Ill have someof the same images, only in different combinations that help amplify themeaning, but at this point I havent gotten those images all together and allon glass, but that has been one way for me to make the meaning additiveand help draw the meaning out. I do think they could have another layer onanother structure.

K Yes, because otherwise some of those references are kind of easy.e glass,the glass slides, the references that has to the medical and X-ray is kind ofeasy. It seems like you just need to get more complicated.

A You think I need to get more complicated? Because sometimes I feel like Imbeing very obtuse, but maybe Ive gotten to the other point.

K Well, theres a difference between obtuse and being ambiguous, soA One or the other, but I have felt in the past that the point Im trying to make

hasnt gotten across, so perhaps at this point Ive achieved that and Im goinga little bit too far the other way.

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K Well, sometimes thats what you have to do, I mean to clarify yourself so youcan really see it, but then maybe you can start to get more complicated withit so that your references arent quite so specific.is is is is this, unlessassociations are set up, but then you can go past, you can say well

V Whats your approach in terms of the collage? Sometimes I feel that we aresupposed to see it as one total image and Im aware that its been collagedand yet inIn other images its less obvious that you are trying to hide that its collaged,yet its coming through

A No, [it] hasnt been explored yet. I think that the collaging in layers willtake away some of that quality of the obviousness of the way Im applyingthe image, although I still do want there to be a sense of my hand in it andto have the choice of image itself be the sense of my presence. When itsexposed photographically, you take away that element of it application.

V I dont think that you use Well, I think that the mark is still very that ifyou start with something and its not what you want, youre going to end upwith not liking what you do with it.

A I dont want to take away the quality of my hand, thats not what I meant.V en I feel that I just need it more definite then, if thats what you want

definite marks. I feel that its too tentative.K Yeah, I agree with some of that. Its very much held back.A Well in particular Can you say in a particular piece? Im kind of going

back and forth on how much I want my hand to be there and how much Idont.

K Its tightly controlled on the one hand, but then on the other hand it doesntwork that well, you know what I mean.

A Im not sure what it is thats bothersome, the fact that its a small element, thefact that

K Its the middle of the road, I guess is the best way I can describe it, and Ithink thats what [speaker V] was saying as well. Its like you want to makethe mark. Ugh. Make the mark, you know, dont

A I dont know, what I talked about in the beginning was that I do like a certainexpressive amount, but I dont want to be, you know, a Pollock painter. Idont want to be a gestural

K Well this does not speak about something particularly expressive.A You dont think so?K No.A What would you view it as, I mean, what is the quality thatK ats why I said before I thought it was very tentative. I mean it looks very

much like a sketch actually, because the quality of the paper surface and so

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forth. I mean it looks like a plan for something else, something bigger orA Well, do you think thats a problem in talking aboutK In this case I do, because this is a very interesting form aer all.A Do you think that if you saw that photographically on glass it would beM You do have that image on glass.A Yeah, but its different.M Different image, but its the same. Just stick arms on that and you have it.A Yeah, there are figures inside there but what Im saying is, Do you think

thats enough of a change? Or do I still have the same problem there, that itstentative or

K Its better, its better, but its still hedging the bet, because this [the cloud-shaped image] is thats a very powerful form you know, [its] God, yet its[gestures to suggest doubt, that its uncertain or wishy-washy] e way itsmade up, its just

A [Laughing] ats the way I am.K I want it to be moreA Do you think size would be anything to.K ats part of it, yes. Something about size, something about tools.A But thats the way that I work, really, I mean I am like [gestures, moving the

brush more with the wrist than the whole arm]K But you have these ideas that are not necessarily coincident with that way of

doing it, so youve really got to look at that, you know, and try to Becauseyouve got some ere are some interesting images here, very powerful

J I think it might be time [to stop] Sorry.K No, no, go ahead, Im rattling on.J It might be time for you to step back. I sense a certain excitement with this

to go back to the original idea, being that of a strong limiting force, andhow to perceive this. Step one is made, and a technique is being learned, butlets do all that. Go back to the original idea and say: is is the idea. Dontget caught up in the image that youve chosen, that the original idea getswatered down or lost. I think in some of these thats been happening. eresa certain struggle in your way. I think that struggle is important but, goingback to that piece, because I sense

A Well, I havent developed a comfortable way of working with the glass. Idont have enough images yet to start manipulating them as I want to. edarkroom has become my studio, and Im not really comfortable workingthere. Im there in the dark room, and I have the films and Im trying to dothe creative part there.

J But my idea is: be resistant.K But dont be too clean about it either, you know. I mean look at that [pointing

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at the glass skylight], no Im And its got pieces of wire in it, and its cracked,and its got fiy years of grunge on it.

W I bet it would take emulsion.A No, I dont think so at all.K Its got a tooth to it.A No. You have to polyurethane glass before you can ever put emulsion on it,

so theresW or power etch it, or blast it. You need just a little bit of tooth for it to grab.A Well, Ill come in and talk to you about it. I know who to talk to now.W Well, Ive worked with glass forever. I dont work with it anymore.K Do you know the clich verre thing too, where you either draw on glass, or

you use an emulsion on glass and print that on paper?A Oh? No. Its a monoprinting of some sort?K Its contact printing, basically. You take one of these [the images on glass]

and you expose it on photographic paper and you get the results. But whatsreally interesting about it is the fact that [the glass] has a thickness to it sothe way the light goes through there modifies this image to some degree. Soyou should try that too.

A Yeah, well Ill have to talk to you about that later, because Im very open tonew

W Well there are a hundred different ways to work with any material.K And you can draw on thereA And I would really like to have some way of working with it thats freer.W ats why its important that you grasp on to the subject because its really,

really important, because you can get lost with it. e magic of manipulatingthat material, a hundred different variables, you really have to grasp on tosomething that you can carry through. And just something thats real to you,something that means something to you, that will keep you moving in thatdirection of exploration.Otherwise you can go a hundred different directions and you wont have anyfoundation for that exploration, and then youre going to have to come upwith your system of exploring, and uh its always good to really thinkthat one out personally, with that little bit that you really want, so you cangrasp it and say: Okay, I really feel this way about this image, and then I cantry one of those other variables that the glass is going to allow me to do, andthen make the connection so you can judge for yourself and see it there, andthen have something to grasp. Otherwise you are going to be all over theplace, and itll go, and itll grow out everywhere, all over the place, and youwont know where to stop.

K And it will help you to evaluate what works and what doesnt work, because

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in a certain sense what [speaker W] is talking about is that everything works,I mean its all so wonderful

W And how you look at itI mean there are a lot of possibilities that thematerial lends itself to, if you start looking.

M Ultimately I think that the success or failure of these is not going to rest withthe glass as much as with the images.

A Well, I feel confident that Im coming up with the images, and its just theirmanipulation and materials that I felt that I really needed to explore.I mean there are ideas there, there are a lot of ideas that I have, but I need toinvestigate more a way of putting them out and thats what it seemed to me

Q So do you have definite ideas about the criteria you use for choosingparticular images?

A Well, Yes. Sometimes Im not sure why I pick something, and then later itwill become clear. ere are, I thinkFor instance the inoculation and immunization images are a very strong andperhaps obvious metaphor for the introduction of foreign bodies or diseasesinto the body. I was then going to place whatever I felt I wanted to that wasbeing shoved into the body. Some sort of societal force or religion or imagesthat hit a spark for me..

W I just thought of something you said, inoculation, I think of glass and I thinkof microscopic transparence, [which] lets you investigateits almost likea like a

K A slideW A slide, a glass slide that gives you all this information, and it makes a lot of

sense with that investigation and inoculation, and certain things exist in thislittle world. Maybe you can use that as a diving board for you investigation.

A Well, its been the metaphor Ive been pursuing, and theres that kind ofeducational quality to it, this is the way this is and that is the way that is,tradition, you know, all the stuff that weve had pushed into us throughtextbooks. Forces that make us up that create bias and limitations on ourthinking that are harmful.

Q I was thinking you might want to step outside yourself and try to focus onsome of the choices that you are makingYou dont want [to] make it so simple or so readable but also explore whathappens when [there are] accidents

A ats ultimately what ats how its meant to beQ at certain kind of focus, in some way not specifying, but focus on the

possibilities of connotations for your narrative, thatll help give you controlto explore your Of course thats easy for me to say.

A Yes, I mean theres the problem of setting up too much to be said, theres no

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emotional comment or to a certain extent Im usually able to comment onsome of the reasons why Im choosing these images Right now Im justtrying to pair offthe images.e combinations havent happened yet.is isjust a sample of images to show where my thinking is at.

R Excuse me for breaking in, does everyone know where room 260 is? Weare meeting back there at one. Its on the second floor and its somewherebetween printmaking and photo.

K e old fiber room.A Are we through? I guess now we are.R Usually we would ask you if youve got anything further to ask us, but I think

youve done that.A Um, yeah, I feel pretty satisfied that weve touched on some of the subjects I

introduced, and Ill be talking to you and you about some of these techniques.

A little exhausting to read, isnt it? You can feel the boredom of some of thefaculty, and you can sense the difficulty some of them had in trying to figure outwhat to say. All that is part of critiques. e boredom, the ordinary lack of energy,are the reasons I wont be quoting some very funny parodies of critiques, like RichardRoths play e Crit, the video animation e Crit, or the critique scene withJohn Malkovich in the movie Art School Confidential.2ey make critiques lookentertaining, funny, and absurd: and thats sometimes true, but critiques a lot morebesides, including boring, directionless, slack, and muddled. A film of Andreascritique might be even more exhausting than this transcript, because then youd seeeveryone shuffling and pacing and scratching their heads.3

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Abstract Expressionism. Takashi Murakamis sculptures are about consumerism. Inart schools and academies, there are mountains of literature about artists like Johnsand Murakami. Johns is about materiality, queer culture, and literalism; Murakami isabout Japanese kitsch and cuteness. (Murakami has a PhD in art from Tokyo Geidai,where you can go and see his dissertation on file. A page from it is reproduced in thenext-to-last chapter of this book.)ings are much more complicated in academiathan in the artworld.

So whatever critiques are, they arent just conversations. ey are very unusualsituations, and it takes a lot of work to try to understand them.

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Critique Formats

In a standard BFA, BA, MFA, or MA critique, one or more teachers talk with oneartist at a time. Sometimes the room is filled with other students, and sometimes itsprivate. In the first couple of years of the BFA, critiques are oen class discussions inwhich each student takes a turn saying something. But there are many variations indifferent countries. Here is a chart of some I have seen; you can mix and match the

columns to make your own critique format.

Time Number of Faculty Number of students present

other than the artist

5 mins. 1 0

10 mins. 2 1 (to take notes)

30 mins. 3 to 5 2 or 3

45 mins. more than 5 All the students friends

1 hour to 6 hours(with faculty from other

departments)A whole class or auditorium

Some critiques have a second part, where the students progress is discussedapart from the work. I was at one critique where the faculty met in an adjoiningroom, while the student and her friends waited outside. We wrote a report, with agrade.en the student was called back in. e Chair of the art department showedher the report upside-down on the table, so she could glimpse it. en the report

was taken back and put in the departmentfi

les!Critiques vary around the world. e academy in Zrich has a ProfessionalArtist Mentorship Seminar; each week a different professional artist comes to theseminar.1In London theres an initiative called Q-Art, a critique group that meetsmonthly in different institutions and has about 3,000 members.2Matthew Kolodziej,at the Myers School of Art in Akron, Ohio, has invented a format in which three

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or four students critique another students work, and at the same time other groupscritique other students; aer ten or fieen minutes the groups rotate, and eventuallyother students take turns being critiqued.at way the students hear the same ideasrepeated, but not by the same groups, so that the context makes the repetitionsinteresting.3 Despite the many variations in critiquesand despite the fact thatfaculty oen think they have unique critique formatsIfind that critiques are fairlysimilar in many countries. Most fit in with the possibilities shown in the Table.

A number of cultures dont have the tradition of harsh open classroom exchanges,making it difficult to get critiques started. In the Nanyang Technological Universityin Singapore, Joan Kelly helps her shy First Year students save face by asking them towrite their opinions on sheets of paper. e sheets are folded and put in containersin front of each artwork, and then read out by the students. 4

In general, the average situation is this: a BA or BFA critique is about 15 minuteslong, and is usually done with a class full of students; an MA or MFA critiqueaverages 30 minutes, and is done with more than one teacher present, in a studio,with minimal audience. ere is no standard form for a PhD critique, but it canamount to a far longer conversation, one on one, lasting several years. (Ill discussthat at the end of the book.)

Here are the average critiques formats for the BFA, MFA, and PhD:

Time Number of Faculty Number of students pres-ent other than the artist

BA or BFA 10 mins. 1 A whole class

MA or MFA 30 mins. 3 to 5 All the students friends

PhD 1 hour 1 0

Unfortunately, there is no history or comprehensive book on this subject.Critique formats spread by word of mouth, and people dont always rememberwhere they came from. Many institutions bring their visiting artists to studentsstudios, and that is one of the main ways that critique culture spreads from oneplace to another: people listen to the visiting artist, and absorb not only ideas andjudgments but their style of critique.

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How Long Should a Critique Be?

A very simple reason why some critiques dont make sense is that they are too short.Even an hour can be barely enough to get acquainted with an artwork. It can take5 or 10 minutes just to see an average 2-D or 3-D artworkto walk around andlook at it, to find the right angle, to feel it or hear it. (If its film, video, animation, orperformance, just experiencing the work might eat up the entire time allotted to the

critique, but thats another problem.) Consider the stages, from the first encounterto the end of the critique.

A. In the first 10 secondswhich Ill call the recognition stagea number ofideas fly through the teachers mind, most of them not very well formed, and theresult is a tentative overall verdict. is can happen nearly instantly, in the spaceof less than a second. If I walk into a critique room, for example, and I see somegeometric abstract paintings, Ill form a first impression in the first second or two,and a couple of seconds later Ill know some of the things well be talking about.efirst thing a teacher might be aware of thinking is I like it, or Im interested, or

I dont quite get it yet. And then, a second or so later, ats a pretty interestinggeometric abstraction, or I wonder if the student has done anything else, or Ihope its not acrylic. Older or more experienced teachers might have all sorts ofthoughts in their heads in just a second or two.

B.Acclimation stage. In the next 20 minutes or so the teacher acclimates herselfto the work. Some comments are inevitable, and there are things that always seemto have to get said, and that takes some time. If the works are paintings, it is almostinevitable that the teacher will mention framing, hanging, lighting, scale, medium,or color. If the work is an installation, the teacher has to mention the peculiarities

or inadequacies of the studio space. I dont know how many times Ive heard,Of course the floor is distracting, or Ideally, youd change the lighting. In theacclimation stage, teachers tend to review their first reactions.at means the reallyinteresting, difficult questions are only just ready to be asked when a 20 minutecritique is drawing to a close.

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stories meant to ease the tension or to be polite. In a typical critique the acclimationand analysis stages are intermixed, so that people speak at cross-purposes, and thatalso wastes some time.

If a graduate critique is 45 minutes long and there are 5 or 6 panelists, and if noone else speaks, and if each of the panelists speaks continuously, then each panelisthas less than 9 minutes. Some undergraduate group critiques are 30 minutes longand have 10 or more people participating, which would give each person about3 minutes. It takes time to discover a worksometimes, it takes yearsand inthose few minutes, between silences, repetitions, mis-hearings and mis-seeings, thepanelists scarcely have time to adumbrate a considered response.e illustrations here are of a performance piece by a student named Rebecca

Gordon. is was an MFA critique, so she had 45 minutes, but the performanceitself would have taken 19 minutes, so she decided to show me, and the otherfaculty on her critique panel, some video excerpts. Observants was a very complex,choreographed performance with a sound component. If we had seen the entirepiece, we wouldnt have had time to talk about it at all. As it was, we saw the video,the space, and the pieces she had made for the performance. It took about 5 minutesto get settled, 10 minutes to see the video excerpts, and another 5 to walk around,leaving 25 minutes to talka good compromise given the time limitations.

But with work this complex, a critique just cant address anything except generalimpressions and random details. None of us on the critique panel could rememberthe details of the video.is may sound unfortunate, but its typical. A student whomakes a 15 minute film has the same issues. e teachers will see the film, but bythe end theyll have forgotten lots of detail: no one can remember the sequence ofscenes in 15 minutes of a Hollywood film, much less in a complicated experimentalfilm. And these examples are not at all extreme. I had a student who made a 5-hourfilm, which only a few people saw. Another student made a performance so intricatethat it required a wall full of maps and diagrams, which he could only begin toexplain. A third student made a roomful of computer-generated sculptures, atapestry, manipulated photographs, engineering diagrams, a painting, and an entiremythological novel about 300 pages long. (I was that students advisor, and I didntmanage to get through the novel.)

If your work is complicated, or if it is time-based, any critique will be too short.e challenge, for you, is tofigure out how to present parts of it in such a way that youget the best feedback.e usual compromise is to take half the time and show verysmall portions of the work, but in the best of all possible worlds, you would showyour work over several days. If Ive seen a complicated work once, I can say certainthings; but if I see it again, I can remember much more. Each repeated exposuredeepens my response. If it is a film, I may want to see particular scenes again, or seethem in slow motion. If its a performance, I may want to have it repeated several

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e Last Ten Minutes of the Critique

On the other hand, it may well take more than 20, 30, or 45 minutes to changea teachers first impression. If a teacher doesnt like the work, oen she wont sayanything right away. Partly thats common politeness, and partly its because it maytake a while for the teacher to find a way to say what she thinks without beingcurt. Sometimes it is possible to see that dynamic at work: the first few minutes, the

teacher will be deciding how to say what she has already decided about the work;in the next few minutes, her opinion will slowly be shiing, and in the last fewminutes, she may have time to develop second thoughts.

Because there is no way to predict the speed at which a person re-learns an artwork, or erases and adjusts her first impression, the best you can do as a student isto notice when that might be happening, and engage the teacher with questions andnew ideas.

e last ten minutes of a critique can also be the best, because people know timeis winding down. Teachers will make an extra effort to say something new, and theconversation may suddenly become energetic and unpredictable. is is where both

students and teachers should hold the reins, because free association, especially ifit ends abruptly, can be more confusing than enlightening. As a student, you mightlatch on to just one or two remarks, and ask your teacher to follow up on them.

Since we only have ten minutes le, your teacher might say, lets talk aboutwhat you might do next.

Im not sure that kind of suggestion is always helpful. More oen than not, itmeans your teacher has just run out of things to say. You can try to make better useof the last ten minutes of the critiques by asking to return to something that wassaid earlier:

Okay, but Im more interested in what you said about my drawings, that they

are too fragile. I wonder if you think thats true of all of them.Anything to bring the teachers attention back to the place where they got stuck,

to provide an opportunity for them to re-think their opinions. (And to work a bitharder!)