This publication was made in Communication Design department

in Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon as a project of Fatih

Gözenç’s Erasmus program.

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ç“How can we overcome the institutional forms of art

schools?” That’s our question. How can we improve

ourselves by searching new alternative ways? How can

we break ourselves free from the institutions? How can we

overcome this pressure?

My article is ‘Teaching to Learn’ by Joseph Kosuth.

I selected this article because it shows us what does

education need to be and I decided to defend that critiques

because its subject completely matching with my thinking

style in education. I want this publication can be a guide and

a thinking area for you.

If we read and analyze these articles with side notes, you

can find lots of options and answers. Side notes are related

with articles, you can read them to understand personal

ideas and thoughts of writers. I thought these side notes

Also you can use sides of pages to write your own notes and

thoughts.

‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’ is an critique of modern

art and its education. Its author Clement Greenberg was

one of the best critics about art. It supports my thoughts

about education. Paul Barlow’s and Sean Buffington’s

texts are about same subject too but with a different sight.

They always refer to Clement Greenberg’s essays. Thierry

Häusermann’s interview with Pierre Fantys criticizes art

education in Switzerland nowadays. Article of Amy Tofte

is more personal text than others and it explains ways to

survive art school like my article.

On the other hand, I wrote an article about my subject

named ‘What Should We Do?’ that explains ways of

overcoming the institutions. I wrote my experiences that I

use everytime. You can read this article in last pages.

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Art Teaching For a New AgeSean T. Buffington

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Art and the Academy in 19th CenturyPaul Barlow

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Teaching to Learn Joseph Kosuth

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Towards a Newer LaocoonClement Greenberg

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38What Should We Do? Fatih Gözenç

28Ways to Survive Art School Amy Tofte

32Creativity is Only Born Out of SkillsThierry Häusermann

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It seems we begin with two points; an institution and a

conversation. An art school, simply put, is a representative

of the institutionalization of art. It represents the world as a

collection of rules, practices, traditions, habits about art that

are organized within a social order. The presumptions and

prescriptions that are taught there are description of what art is.

When you describe art, you are also describing how

meaning is produced, and subjectivity is formed. In other

words you are describing reality. By teaching a description of

reality you are engaged in constructing it, and in this sense an

art school is a political institution as much as a cultural one (in

so far as one can separate them to begin with).

The conversation is inherited along with the institution

(they form part of it) but that discourse is formed, possibly

transformed, by the living. The discourse, when it is

the choosing of how art is to be made, takes a certain

form, prioritizes certain meanings. The most prevalent

institutionalized form has been a concept of art which

presumes itself to be either painting or sculpture. In order

to liberate art from such a formalistic and prescriptive self-

conception it was the agenda of work such as mine in the

mid-sixties to critique that institution while it simultaneously

provided an alternative to it. Any other role envisioned for art

by necessity follows this transformation of our conception

of it. For art schools then, as for art, there is really only one

process: this is a questioning process as to art’s nature. This

inquiry itself constitutes an institutional critique because the

art student then sees his or her activity as being less one

of learning a craft or trade (how) but rather as one which is

fundamentally philosophical (why).

Since the role of all institutional forms is inherently

conservative, there is a process basic to an art school

which attempts to promulgate and preserve whatever other

institutionalized forms of culture exist concurrent with it.

Thus, the prescriptive nature of an art school based on craft

and tradition (or an updated version of that) means, that the

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institution is there to provide the answers as to what art is.

In other words it engages in legitimizing the status quo of

existing forms and norms; they know what art is and they are

simply teaching it. This attitude teaches the inherited past

of the art school. From the guilds of artists and craftsmen

to the Academy and then the trade school in the recent

past, artists have been taught how to make art, but not to

ask why. Inquiries of a more philosophical nature have been

seen as the preserve of the university and not appropriate to

the ‘trade school’ demands of teaching the artist. What this

has also taught, however, is that art —and culture itselft— is

apolitical. Importantly, even profoundly, this view, not limited

to institutions as you will see, sees art’s process itself as

apolitical. Whether the content of an artwork is politicized or

not is less of a problem for the instiutionalized view of art than

artworks that do not leave intact their conception of what art

is, and by extension, what an art school should be. In this way

such artworks question their authority, a much more political

act than the symbolic ‘acting-out’ of the use of political

content within an artwork which, as art, does not question its

own institutional presumptions.

As I see it, then, the teaching of art is an important part

of the production of art. In many ways it is the tableau where

society, in practical terms, makes visible the limits of its

conception of art as it attempts to regenerate the institutional

forms that depict its self-conception. When our view of

art is limited, so is our view of society. If questions aren’t

asked in art schools, away from the conservative heat of

the art market, where then? If the political responsibility of a

cultural reflexivity (why) is not taught along with a knowledge

of the history of how artists have made meaning, then we

are doomed to be oppressed by our traditions rather than

informed by them. The teacher of art, as a teacher and an

artist, can do no more than participate with the students

in asking the questions. This, rather than attempting to

provide the answers as art schools traditionally do, realigns

8the priorities from the beginning. The first lesson, taught by

example that is to be learned as a process of thinking and not

a dogma in craft or theory.

The teacher is not the representative of the institution, but

one artist among several sharing a conversation. What is said

has its own weight. If a teacher is any good he or she learns

as much as the students. The ‘answers’, if there are any, are

formed by all of the participants in the conversation within the

context of their own lives, and their practical effect only within

that larger conversational process; the shared discourse

of a community. It is in the making of meaning —art— as a

discourse that art students experience themselves as they

begin the process of making the world. The concept of art

shared by such a teaching process has institutional critique

basic to it, but, by necessity it must avoid that as its sole

description. Because art is the teaching of art (although the

format changes), description quickly becomes prescription.

What this concept of art really reflects is the responsibility of

the artist to be a whole person; a political being as well as a

social and cultural one.

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9The dogmatism and intransigence of the “non-objective”

or “abstract” purists of painting today cannot be dismissed

as symptoms merely of a cultist attitude towards art. Purists

make extravagant claims for art, because usually they value it

much more than anyone else does. For the same reason they

are much more solicitous about it. A great deal of purism is

the translation of an extreme solicitude, an anxiousness as

to the fate of art, a concern for its identity. We must respect

this. When the purist insists upon excluding “literature” and

subject matter from plastic art, now and in the future, the

most we can charge him with off-hand is an unhistorical

attitude. It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every

other cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other

circumstances of the age in which its creators live, and that

there is nothing inside art itself, disconnected from history,

which compels it to go in one direction or another. But it is

not so easy to reject the purist’s assertion that the best of

contemporary plastic art is abstract. Here the purist does not

have to support his position with metaphysical pretentions.

And when he insists on doing so, those of us who admit the

merits of abstract art without accepting its claims in full must

offer our own explanation for its present supremacy.

Discussion as to purity in art and, bound up with it, the

attempts to establish the differences between the various

arts are not idle. There has been, is, and will be, such a thing

as a confusion of the arts. From the point of view of the artist

engrossed in the problems of his medium and indifferent to

the efforts of theorists to explain abstract art completely,

purism is the terminus of a salutory reaction against the

mistakes of painting and sculpture in the past several

centuries which were due to such a confusion.

There can be, I believe, such a thing as a dominant art

form; this was what literature had become in Europe by the

17th century.(1) By the middle of the 17th century the pictorial

arts had been relegated almost everywhere into the hands of

the courts, where they eventually degenerated into relatively

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(1) Not that the

ascendancy of a

particular art always

coincides with its

greatest productions.

In point of achievement,

music was the greatest

art of this period.

10trivial interior decoration. The most creative class in society,

the rising mercantile bourgeoisie, impelled perhaps by the

iconoclasm of the reformation(2) and by the relative cheapness

and mobility of the physical medium after the invention of

printing, had turned most of its creative and acquisitive energy

towards literature.

Now, when it happens that a single aft is given the

dominant role, it becomes the prototype of all art; the others

try to shed their proper characters and imitate its effects.

The dominant art in turn tries itself to absorb the functions

of the others. A confusion of the arts results, by which the

subservient ones are perverted and distorted; they are forced

to deny their own nature in an effort to attain the effects of

the dominant art. However, the subservient arts can only be

mishandled in this way when they have reached such a degree

of technical facility as to enable them to pretend to conceal

their medium. In other words, the artist must have gained such

power over his material as to annihilate it seemingly in favor of

illusion. Music was saved from the fate of the pictorial arts in

the 17th and 18th centuries by its comparatively rudimentary

technique and the relative shortness of its development as

a formal art. Aside from the fact that in its nature it is the art

furthest removed from imitation, the possibilities of music

had not been explored sufficiently to enable it to strive for

illusionist effects.

But painting and sculpture, the arts of illusion par

excellence, had by that time achieved such facility as to make

them infinitely susceptible to the temptation to emulate the

effects, not only of illusion, but of other arts. Not only could

painting imitate sculpture, and sculpture, painting, but both

could attempt to reproduce the effects of literature. And it

was for the effects of literature that 17th and 18th century

painting strained most of all. Literature, for a number of

reasons, had won the upper hand, and the plastic arts —

especially in the form of easel painting and statuary— tried to

win admission to its domain. Although this does not account

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n(2) Pascal’s jansenist

contempt for painting is

a symptom.

11completely for the decline of those arts during this period,

it seems to have been the form of that decline. Decline it

was, compared to what had taken place in Italy, Flanders,

Spain and Germany the century before. Good artists, it is

true, continue to appear - I do not have to exaggerate the

depression to make my point - but not good schools of art,

not good followers. The circumstances surrounding the

appearance of the individual great artists seem to make them

almost all exceptions; we think of them as great artists “in

spite of.” There is a scarcity of distinguished small talents.

And the very level of greatness sinks by comparison to the

work of the past.

In general, painting and sculpture in the hands of the

lesser talents — and this is what tells the story— become

nothing more than ghosts and “stooges” of literature. All

emphasis is taken away from the medium and transferred

to subject matter. It is no longer a question even of realistic

imitation, since that is taken for granted, but of the artist`s

ability to interpret subject matter for poetic effects and so

forth.

We ourselves, even today, are too close to literature to

appreciate its status as a dominant art. Perhaps an example

of the converse will make clearer what I mean. In China, I

believe, painting and sculpture became in the course of the

development of culture the dominant arts. There we see

poetry given a role subordinate to them, and consequently

assuming their limitations: the poem confines itself to the

single moment of painting and to an emphasis upon visual

details. The Chinese even require visual delight from the

handwriting in which the poem is set down.(3)

Lessing, in his Laakoan written in the 1760s, recognized

the presence of a practical as well as a theoretical confusion

of the arts. But he saw its ill effects exclusively in terms of

literature, and his opinions on plastic art only exemplify the

typical misconceptions of his age. He attacked the descriptive

verse of poets like James Thomson as an invasion of the

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(3) And by comparison

to their pictorial and

decorative arts doesn’t

the later poetry of the

Chinese seem rather thin

and monotonous?

12domain of landscape painting, but all he could find to say

about painting’s invasion of poetry was to object to allegorical

pictures which required an explanation, and to paintings like

Titian’s Prodigal Son which incorporate “two necessarily

separate points of time in one and the same picture.”

Guiding themselves, whether consciously or

unconsciously, by a notion of purity derived from the example

of music, the avantgarde arts have in the last fifty years

achieved a purity and a radical delimitation of their fields of

activity for which there is no previous example in the history

of culture. The arts lie safe now, each within its “‘legitimate”

boundaries, and free trade has been replaced by autarchy.

Purity in art consists in the acceptance, willing acceptance,

of the limitations of the medium of the specific art. To prove

that their concept of purity is something more than a bias in

taste, painters point to oriental, primitive and children’s art as

instances of the universality and naturalness and objectivity

of their ideal of purity. Composers and poets, although to a

much lesser extent, may justify their efforts to attain purity by

referring to the same precedents. Dissonance is present in

early and non-western music, “unintelligibility” in folk poetry.

The issue is, of course, focused most sharply in the plastic

arts, for they, in their non-decorative function, have been the

most closely associated with imitation, and it is in their case

that the ideal of the pure and the abstract has met the most

resistance.

The arts, then, have been hunted back to their mediums,

and there they have been isolated, concentrated and

defined. It is by virtue of its medium that each art is unique

and strictly itself. To restore the identity of an art the opacity

of its medium must be emphasized. For the visual arts the

medium is discovered to be physical; hence pure painting

and pure sculpture seek above all else to affect the spectator

physically. In poetry, which, as I have said, had also to

escape from “‘literature” or subject matter for its salvation

from society, it is decided that the medium is essentially

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13psychological and sub or supralogical. The poem is to aim

at the general consciousness of the reader, not simply his

intelligence.

It would be well to consider “pure” poetry for a moment,

before going on to painting. The theory of poetry as

incantation, hypnosis or drug —as psychological agent then—

goes back to Poe, and eventually to Coleridge and Edmund

Burke with their efforts to locate the enjoyment of poetry in

the “Fancy” or “Imagination”.(4) Sound, he decided, is only an

auxiliary of poetry, not the medium itself; and besides, most

poetry is now read, not recited: the sound of words is a part

of their meaning, not the vessel of it. To deliver poetry from

the subject and to give full play to its true affective power it is

necessary to free words from logic. The medium of poetry is

isolated in the power of the word to evoke associations and

to connote. Poetry subsists no longer in the relations between

words as meanings, but in the relations between words as

personalities composed of sound, history and possibilities of

meaning. Grammatical logic is retained only in so far as it is

necessary to set these personalities in motion, for unrelated

words are static when read and not recited aloud. Tentative

efforts are made to discard metric form and rhyme, because

they are regarded as too local and determinate, too much

attached to specific times and places and social conventions

to pertain to the essence of poetry. There are experiments in

poetic prose. But as in the case of music, it was found that

formal structure was indispensable, that some such structure

was integral to the medium of poetry as an aspect of its

resistance... The poem still offers possibilities of meaning

—but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely

realized, the poem would lose the greatest part of its efficacy,

which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities

by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling

over it. The poet writes, not so much to express, as to create

a thing which will operate upon the reader’s consciousness

to produce the emotion of poetry. The content of the poem

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(4) Mallarmé, however,

was the first to base a

consistent practice of

poetry upon it.

14is what it does to the reader, not what it communicates. The

emotion of the reader derives from the poem as a unique

object —pretendedly— and not from referents outside the

poem. This is pure poetry as ambitious contemporary poets

try to define it by the example of their work. Obviously, it is an

impossible ideal, yet one which most of the best poetry of the

last fifty years has tried to reach, whether it is poetry about

nothing or poetry about the plight of contemporary society.

It is easier to isolate the medium in the case of the plastic

arts, and consequently avantgarde painting and sculpture

can be said to have attained a much more radical purity

than avantgarde poetry. Painting and sculpture can become

more completely nothing but what they do; like functional

architecture and the machine, they look what they do. The

picture or statue exhausts itself in the visual sensation it

produces. There is nothing to identify, connect or think

about, but everything to feel. Pure poetry strives for infinite

suggestion, pure plastic art for the minimum. If the poem, as

Valéry claims, is a machine to produce the emotion of poetry,

the painting and statue are machines to produce the emotion

of “plastic sight”. The purely plastic or abstract qualities of

the work of art are the only ones that count. Emphasize the

medium and its difficulties, and at once the purely plastic,

the proper, values of visual art come to the fore. Overpower

the medium to the point where all sense of its resistance

disappears, and the adventitious uses of aft become more

important.

The history of avantgarde painting is that of a progressive

surrender to the resistance of its medium; which resistance

consists chiefly in the Hat picture plane’s denial of efforts to

“hole through” it for realistic perspectival space. In making

this surrender, painting not only got rid of imitation —and

with it, “literature”— but also of realistic imitations corollary

confusion between painting and sculpture. (Sculpture, on its

side, emphasizes the resistance of its material to the efforts

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15of the artist to ply it into shapes uncharacteristic of stone,

metal, wood, etc.) Painting abandons chiaroscuro and shaded

modelling. Brush strokes are often defined for their own sake.

The motto of the Renaissance artist, “Ars est artem celare”, is

exchanged for “Ars est artem demonstrare”. Primary colors,

the “instinctive,” easy colors, replace tones and tonality. Line,

which is one of the most abstract elements in painting since

it is never found in nature as the definition of contour, returns

to oil painting as the third color between two other color

areas. Under the influence of the square shape of the canvas,

forms tend to become geometrical (and simplified) because

simplification is also a part of the instinctive accommodation

to the medium.(5) Where the painter still tries to indicate real

objects their shapes flatten and spread in the dense, two-

dimensional atmosphere. A vibrating tension is set up as the

objects struggle to maintain their volume against the tendency

of the real picture plane to re-assert its material flatness and

crush them to silhouettes. In a further stage realistic space

cracks and splinters into flat planes which come forward,

parallel to the plane surface. Sometimes this advance to the

surface is accelerated by painting a segment of wood or

texture trompe l’oeil,(6) or by drawing exactly printed letters,

and placing them so that they destroy the partial illusion of

depth by slamming the various planes together. Thus the artist

deliberately emphasizes the illusoriness of the illusions which

he pretends to create. Sometimes these elements are used

in an effort to preserve an illusion of depth by being placed

on the nearest plane in order to drive the others back. But

the result is an optical illusion, not a realistic one, and only

emphasizes further the impenetrability of the plane surface.

The destruction of realistic pictorial space, and with

it, that of the object, was accomplished by means of the

travesty that was cubism. The cubist painter eliminated color

because, consciously or unconsciously, he was parodying,

in order to destroy, the academic methods of achieving

volume and depth, which are shading and perspective, and

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(5) But most important

of all, the picture plane

itself grows shallower

and shallower, flattening

out and pressing

together the fictive

planes of depth until

they meet as one upon

the real and material

plane which is the actual

surface of the canvas;

where they lie side by

side or interlocked or

transparently imposed

upon each other.

(6) Trompe l’oeil, is an

art technique that uses

realistic imagery to

create the optical illusion

that depicted objects

exist in three dimensions.

16as such have little to do with color in the common sense of

the word. The cubist used these same methods to break the

canvas into a multiplicity of subtle recessive planes, which

seem to shift and fade into infinite depths and yet insist on

returning to the surface of the canvas. As we gaze at a cubist

painting of the last phase we witness the birth and death

of three-dimensional pictorial space and as in painting the

pristine harness of the stretched canvas constantly struggles

to overcome every other element, so in sculpture the stone

figure appears to be on the point of relapsing into the original

monolith.

Sculpture hovers finally on the verge of “pure”

architecture, and painting, having been pushed up from

fictive depths, is forced through the surface of the canvas to

emerge on the other side in the form of paper, cloth, cement

and actual objects of wood and other materials pasted,

glued or nailed to what was originally the transparent picture

plane, which the painter no longer dares to puncture —or if

he does, it is only to dare. Artists like Hans Arp, who begin

as painters, escape eventually from the prison of the single

plane by painting on wood or plaster and using molds or

carpentry to raise and lower planes. They go, in other words,

from painting to colored bas-relief, and finally —so far must

they fly in order to return to three-dimensionality without at

the same time risking the illusion— they become sculptors

and create objects in the round, through which they can free

their feelings for movement and direction from the increasing

ascetic geometry of pure painting.(7)

The French and Spanish in Paris brought painting to the

point of the pure abstraction, but it remained, with a few

exceptions, for the Dutch, Germans, English and Americans

to realize it. It is in their hands that abstract purism has been

consolidated into a school, dogma and credo. By 1939 the

center of abstract painting had shifted to London, while in

Paris the younger generation of French and Spanish painters

had reacted against abstract purity and turned back to a

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(7) Except in the case

of Arp and one or two

others, the sculpture

of most of these

metamorphosed painters

is rather unsculptural,

stemming as it does from

the discipline of painting.

It uses color, fragile and

intricate shapes and a

variety of materials. It is

construction, fabrication.

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nconfusion of literature with painting as extreme as any of

the past. These young orthodox surrealists are not to be

identified, however, with such pseudo or mock surrealists of

the previous generation as Miro, Klee and Arp, whose work,

despite its apparent intention, has only contributed to the

further deployment of abstract painting pure and simple.

Indeed, a good many of the artists —if not the majority—

who contributed importantly to the development of modern

painting came to it with the desire to exploit the break with

imitative realism for a more powerful expressiveness, but so

inexorable was the logic of the development that in the end

their work constituted but another step towards abstract art,

and a further sterilization of the expressive factors. This has

been true, whether the artist was Van Gogh, Picasso or Klee.

All roads led to the same place.

I find that I have offered no other explanation for

the present superiority of abstract art than its historical

justification. So what I have written has turned out to be an

historical apology for abstract art. To argue from any other

basis would require more space than is at my disposal, and

would involve an entrance into the politics of taste —to use

Venturi’s phrase— from which there is no exit on paper. My

own experience of art has forced me to accept most of

the standards of taste from which abstract art has derived,

but I do not maintain that they are the only valid standards

through eternity. I find them simply the most valid ones at this

given moment. I have no doubt that they will be replaced in

the future by other standards, which will be perhaps more

inclusive than any possible now. And even now they do not

exclude all other possible criteria. I am still able to enjoy

a Rembrandt more for its expressive qualities than for its

achievement of abstract values as rich as it may be in them.

It suffices to say that there is nothing in the nature

of abstract art which compels it to be so. The imperative

comes from history, from the age in conjunction with a

particular moment reached in a particular tradition of art.

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This conjunction holds the artist in a vise from which at the

present moment he can escape only by surrendering his

ambition and returning to a stale past. This is the difficulty for

those who are dissatisfied with abstract art, feeling that it is

too decorative or too arid and “‘inhuman,” and who desire a

return to representation and literature in plastic art. Abstract

art cannot be disposed of by a simple-minded evasion or by

negation. We can only dispose of abstract art by assimilating

it, by fighting our way through it.

Where to? I do not know. Yet it seems to me that the

wish to return to the imitation of nature in art has been given

no more justification than the desire of certain partisans of

abstract art to legislate it into permanency.

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It has become a cliche to identify ‘academicism’ in art as

a negative force, associated with the mechanisation of

culture and the repressive authority of social institutions.

The term appears constantly in commentaries on art in the

nineteenth-century, when an heroic ‘avant-garde’ is said to

have struggled against academic agents of conformity and

banality. But what exactly is this ‘academicism’? Numerous,

very different, artists have been saddled with the label.

Clement Greenberg in his essay ‘Towards a newer Laocoon’

(1940) produces a list of ‘kitsch’ nineteenth-century

academics, naming some of the culprits: ‘Vernet, Gerome,

Leighton, Watts, loreau, Böcklin, the Pre-Raphaelites etc’.

The list is odd, as we shall see, but one thing is clear.

Academic art is bad art. ‘Academic’ is not simply a label

which describes a particular type of painting. It is an act of

evaluation. As Greenberg himself says in his most influential

essay, ‘Avantgarde and Kitsch’(1) (1939), ‘self-evidentIy, all

kitsch is academic; and conversely, all that’s academic is

kitsch’.

What does this mean? Of course, the word ‘academic’ is

widely, if loosely, used to refer to whatever may be deemed

stuffy, irrelevant or uninspired. But here something more is

being claimed. Greenberg and other commentators do not

use the word simply to suggest such attributes, though the

are usually implied. Greenberg is claiming to place the artists

he lists within a critical and historical category. But how are

we to define this category? The list contains Neoclassicists,

Symbolists and Naturalists. All are apparently ‘academic’ in

the sense in which Greenberg is using the term.

Greenberg’s own attempt to explain this will be

considered later, but it is important to note that his usage

was thoroughly established by the time he attempted to

theorise it. Indeed, it has been central to the consensus

that has emerged in twentieth-century critical commentary

on nineteenth-century art. It is expressed, for example, by

the critic André Salmon, who describes an encounter with

(1) “Avantgarde and

Kitsch” is the title

of a 1939 essay by

Clement Greenberg,

first published in the

Partisan Review, in which

he claimed that avant-

garde and modernist

art was a mean to resist

the ‘dumbing down’

of culture caused by

consumerism. The term

‘kitsch’ came into use

in the 1860’s or 70’s

in Germany’s street

markets.

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the ‘naive’ artist Henri Rousseau at the Salon des Artistes

Français, the annual exhibition organised by the French

Academy. Salmon is at pains to point out that he was only

visiting the Salon ‘professionally’ as a journalist. Rousseau,

however, had chosen to go and was ‘transfixed before a

mediocre portrait signed by Courtois, an academical artist

today quite forgotten’. Rousseau, it seems, admired Courtois

for his ‘finish’. Salmon goes on to defend Rousseau’s

apparent lapse of taste.(2)

Salmon identifies Courtois’s ‘academic’ identity against

his own avantgarde values, and against Rousseau’s naivety,

both of which are identified with authentic art. Salmon’s

encounter with Rousseau is difficult because Rousseau

chooses to visit the Salon, an institution self-evidently,

for Salmon, identified with bad taste. Furthermore, it is

Courtois’s ‘finish’ —his technical skill— which fascinates

the untrained Rousseau. Salmon seeks to turn this very

skill against Courtois, presenting him as a petit-bourgeois

pedant, a man who restricts ‘expression’ to Thursdays.

For Salmon, Courtois’s skill is the centre of the

problem; it is something which obscures proper judgements

of taste. The technically incompetent, but artistically

worthy, Rousseau is emhralled by the deceptive skills

of the aesthetic non-entity Courtois ‘Academic’ culture

—normally avoided by Salmon— works to generate a

systematic misrecognition of art: alluring but false values

front which Salmon, the cultural sophisticate, must rescue

the naive Rousseau. Courtois is associated with both

compartmentalised conventional respectability(3) and with

production-line manufacturing.

This is the central ‘myth of academicism on which

Greenberg draws. It works to describe an institutionally

powerful but aesthetically impoverished art at its most

pervasive during the nineteenth-century. This academic

art is sustained by the teaching and exhibiting practices

of the various European academies, most importantly the

(2) What is best about this

story is that the answer

perfectly describes

Courtois’ work. He

was the honesty of a

bad academic painter

stuffed with ‘general

culture’ and his naivety

was not as worthy as

Rousseau’s. It is reported

that Courtois, having

been invited to lunch on

‘any thursday’, replied:

‘impossible, i am doing

a portrait and i always

put in the expression on

thursdays.”

(3) Expression on

Thursdays, religion on

Sundays, etc.

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French Academy. It’s the ‘official’ art of the nineteenth-

century. Despite its status, and its contemporary popularity,

it is in fact —as Greenberg and Salmon know— merely the

degraded remnant of post-Renaissance naturalism, destined

to be supplanted by the ‘avantgarde’, the oppositional and

innovatory art it seeks to denigrate.

What is surprising is that, despite its pervasiveness, this

usage has remained, for most part unexplored. Certainly,

the concept of the avantgarde itself has been examined at

length and, in addition, there have been important studies

of the major European academies of art, their histories and

values. Some biographical and critical literature also exists

on the work of better known artists who have been labelled

‘academic’, or ‘pompier’ — a pejorative term applied to

French nineteenth-century Neoclassicists.’ But in such texts

the central myth is generally either ignored or uncritically

repeated. It is clear that Salmon’s words are suffused with

complex and interrelated assumptions (concerning culture,

truth, class identity, institutions), all of which bear upon his

use of the term ‘academic’. These assumptions need to be

unpacked. This will involve exploration of the legitimating

and theorising function of the term ‘academic’ within avant-

garde discourse, its relation to the positions of so-called

academic artists themselves, their institutional roles, and the

ways in which the aesthetic nullity ascribed to academic art

by Salmon has been —and continues to be— asserted and

sustained.

This project is complex. This essay merely seeks to

look at some of the issues to be addressed, and to bring

into the open some paradoxes and preconceptions which

are persistently occluded in art historical writing on the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We are familiar

with Salmon’s judgements.(4) His intervention at the Salon,

seeking to break the spell that traps Rousseau, is connected

to his implicit equation of academicism with the pomp of

public authority; a spectacle which generates a faith in the

(4) That the ‘bad’

painter Rousseau is, in

reality, good, while the

seemingly ‘good’ artist,

Courtois, is in truth bad.

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legitimacy of social institutions. It is no coincidence that the

modern concept of academicism de clops alongside the

Marxist theory of ‘false consciousness’. It can be plausibly

argued that this attitude emerges with the avant-garde

itself in the late 1840s. Courbet’s claims for Realism were

famously connected with his anarchist politics. Likewise, in

Britain, Pre-Raphaelite(5)criticism of the Royal Academy (RA)

arose from their belief that academic (Raphaelite) practice

was a form of mechanisation — the aesthetic equivalent to

the rationalising and disciplining functions of early industrial

manufacturing. If to the rationalising and disciplining

functions of early industrial manufacturing.This oppositional

identity is what characterises the ‘avantgarde’. It is certainly

new in cultural history and is tied to the emergence of

social criticism, which itself seeks to articulate radical

socio-economic transformation. When Greenberg equated

acadenticism with commercialls produced commodities

(kitsch), he repeated this connection, hut also sought to

claim a space flir the avant-garde apart from mechanised

market-led culture. However, an obvious difficult arises

from the identification of this lineage. The Pre-Raphaelites

appear prominently on Greenberg’s list of ’academics’. As

we shall see, this problem persistently recurs as soon as the

avantgarde/academic split is examined, but at this stage it

is enough to note that it arises from the double role of the

concept as Salmon and Greenberg use it —its conflation of

aesthetic evaluation and critical-historical description.

The questions, then, are these: how or why did academic

are become ‘bad’ art? Was it necessary that it should do so?

What is the logic —both aesthetic and historical— of this

judgement?

(5) The Pre-Raphaelite

Brotherhood (also known

as the Pre-Raphaelites)

was a group of English

painters, poets, and

critics, founded in 1848

by William Holman Hunt,

John Everett Millais and

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

They argued against

institutions of Victorianist

traditions and hard rules

of Royal Academy in

London. They tried to

overcome institutions

after Renaissence era.

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In arts education, something profound is happening that will

force us to rethink what and how we teach.

Art making has changed radically in recent years. Artists

have become increasingly interested in crossing disciplinary

boundaries, choreographers use video, sculpture, and text;

photographers create “paintings” with repurposed textiles.

New technologies enable new kinds of work, like interactive

performances with both live and Web-based components.

International collaboration has become de rigueur. (1) Art

and design pervade the culture witness popular television

programs like Top Design, Ink Master, and the granddaddy

of them all, Project Runway. And policy makers and

businesspeople have embraced at least the idea of the so-

called creative economy, with cities rushing to establish arts

districts, and business schools collaborating with design

schools.

Those developments are already affecting how the

arts are taught: Curricula are becoming more flexible, with

students encouraged to reach outside their departments to

master whatever tools they need to make the art they want

to make.

The means of artistic production are widely available,

resulting in what I call a radical democratization of artistic

expression. It is possible now, at very low cost, to acquire

sophisticated creative tools and to use them without much

training. Indeed, the tools themselves can provide significant

guidance to the novice user and even make creative

decisions for him or her. And, of course, work produced in

this way can be disseminated almost instantly to potentially

enormous audiences —as free content or packaged and

sold as consumer products.

One might question whether such cultural production

ought properly to be called artistic. Artistry, after all, is

manifested not in the thing made but in the judgment

exercised in its making. Polaroid and Instamatic cameras

might have made us all vacation photographers, but most of

(1) Imposed. The thing

that has become

intolerable for some

people.

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nus never become Garry Winogrand or Lee Friedlander. And

Die Hard conceptualists might go further and argue that it’s

the idea more than —or in place of— its crafted form that

makes art meaningful and sets it apart from mere expression

or observation.

The technological changes we are witnessing will

not threaten conceptual rigor or craft, nor will the ease

of expression and communication make art obsolete. But

these shifts are changing what we mean by art making and

what counts as meaningful, crafted expression. To say so is

not to judge the quality of that expression or to lament the

rise of vulgarity or the lowering of standards. It is simply to

observe that this democratization of expression will alter

fundamentally how students —aspiring artists— think about

art, its meaning and purpose, and the ways in which it is

made.

These shifts will also change the professions for which

educational institutions like mine prepare students. After

all, if technology becomes smart enough to make design

decisions, then designers could increasingly become

technicians, operators of machines instead of creative

professionals. But the more profound and less visible impact

will be on how students think about their creative pursuits.(2)

They arrive at college having shot and edited

video, manipulated photographs, recorded music or at

least sampled and remixed someone else’s designed

or assembled animated characters and even virtual

environments, and “painted” digital images all using

technologies readily available at home or even in their

pocket. The next generation of students will have designed

and printed three-dimensional images, customized consumer

products, perhaps “rapid-prototyped” new products I can’t

imagine what else.

Students today are not simply bombarded by images,

consuming them in great gulps, as previous generations did;

they are making the environments they inhabit, and making

(2) We cannot say with

certainty what that

impact will be. The first

generation of so-called

digital natives is reaching

college only now; the

environment they grew

up in which seemed so

radical and new to many

of us just a decade and

a half ago is already a

punchline. Soon it will be

an antiquated joke that

doesn’t even make sense

anymore. Remember

AOL? Remember

plugging in to access the

Net? Today’s students

don’t.

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meaningful connections among images, stories, mythologies,

and value systems. They are creative and creating.(3)

So what is the task of arts educators? Is it to

disabuse these young people of what we think are their

misconceptions? Is it to inculcate in them an understanding

of the “proper” way to create, to make art or entertainment?

Is it to sort out the truly artistic from the great mass of

creative chatterers and to initiate them into some sacred

tradition? Maybe, maybe not.

Or maybe the task of the educator is to help them

develop judgment, to help them to see that creating, which

they do instinctively, almost unconsciously, is a way of

learning, of knowing, of making arguments and observations,

of affecting and transforming their environment. And

perhaps that’s not so very different from what we do now.

We do it now, though, in the context of a curriculum and

institutional histories oriented toward specific professional

training and preparation. We seek to develop in students

the critical faculties needed to thrive in clearly defined

professions. But in the future, we may have to rethink our

purpose and objectives. We may have to reimagine our

curricula, recast the bachelor-of-fine-arts degree as a

generalist not professional degree.

In a media-saturated culture in which everyone is both

maker and consumer of images, products, sounds, and

immersive experiences like games, and in which professional

opportunities are more likely to be invented or discovered

than pursued, maybe the B.F.A. is the most appropriate

general-education experience, not just for aspiring artists

and designers but for everyone.

That poses challenges for arts educators. We are good

at equipping students who are already interested in careers

in art and design with the skills and judgment necessary to

succeed in artistic fields and creative professions that are

still reasonably well defined. We are less good at educating

them broadly, at equipping them to use their visual acuity,

(3) But their notion of

what it means to create

is different from ours.

It’s something one does

to communicate with

others, to participate

in social networks, to

entertain oneself. Making

things; images, objects,

stories is mundane for

these students, not

sacred. It’s a component

of everyday experience,

woven tightly into the

fabric of daily life.

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ndesign sensibility, and experience as makers to solve the

problems—alone or in collaboration with others—that the

next generation of creative professionals may be called on

to solve. These will be complex problems that cross the

boundaries of traditional disciplines, methodologies, and skill

sets ranging from new fields like data visualization, which

draws on graphic design, statistical analysis, and interaction

design, to traditional challenges like brand development,

which increasingly reaches beyond logos on letterhead to

products and environments.(4)

Curricula would not be configured as linear, progressive

pathways of traditional semester-long courses, but

would consist of components, such as short workshops,

online courses, intensive tutorials, and so forth. Students

would pick and choose among components, arranging

and rearranging them according to what they need at a

particular moment. Have a problem that requires that you

use a particular software program? Go learn it, to solve

that problem or complete that project. Want to pursue

a traditional illustration-training program? Take multiple

drawing and painting studios.

Linking all of this together would not be a traditional

liberal-arts curriculum but what one faculty member at the

University of the Arts has called a liberal art curriculum—one

focused on design as problem solving, on artistic expression

as the articulation and interrogation of ideas. Instead

of an arts-and-sciences core curriculum separate and

disconnected from studio instruction, we would build a new

core that integrates the studio and the seminar room, that

envisions making and thinking not as distinct approaches but

as a dynamic conversation.

This fantasy of an alternative arts education—which

resembles experiments that other educators have attempted

in the past —begins to veer into utopianism, though, and

a vague utopianism at that. It would be impossible to

administer and to offer to students cost-effectively. And

(4) To do that, arts

colleges would have to

reorganize their curricula

and their pedagogy.

Teaching might come to

look a lot more like what

we now call mentorship

or advising. Rather than

assume that young

people know what they

want to do and that we

know how to prepare

them to do it, we would

have to help them to

explore their interests

and aspirations and work

with them to create an

educational experience

that meets their needs.

Needs like; trying a

different path that

student wants, showing

examples of people that

done before, being a

supportive mentor about

their decisions.

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most students would probably find it more perplexing than

liberating.

But I see an urgent need for new models that respond to

the changing conditions affecting higher education models

that can adapt to conditions that are in constant flux and

to an emerging sensibility among young people that is

more entrepreneurial, flexible, and alert to change than our

curricula are designed to accommodate.

We need an educational structure that takes instability

and unpredictability as its starting point, its fundamental

assumption. If a university is not made up of stable, enduring

structures arranged linearly or hierarchically —schools,

departments, majors, minors— but rather is made up of

components that can be used or deployed according to

demand and need, then invention instead of convention

becomes the governing institutional dynamic.

I’ve compiled a sort of 12 commandments for surviving art

school. And for those of us who have graduated… these are

reminders of what making art should always be.

Question Your Methods & Keep Yourself Open to

Changing Them

Most things in art-making relate to a comfort level. As

artists we are sometimes tricking ourselves into staying

inside our comfort levels rather than growing through new

things. Related to this is the idea of taking “real” risks vs.

“calculated” risks. A real risk is about what’s commonly

called “failure” but failure is only an attitude. Failure is

actually success because you have the chance to learn

something about yourself. You should never fear it.

Expand Your Practice

What better way to challenge yourself with real risk than

do things you’ve never done? Getting outside what you

already know not only expands your practice, it will give you

confidence in a new way. It might also change your methods.

Find Your Own Mentors

Mentors come from everywhere. A mentor is not determined

by age, occupation or position. This is the person that keeps

you grounded and challenges you in new directions. Listen

carefully when people talk about your work. They might be

offering you an ad-hoc moment of mentorship. Sometimes

this person is yourself.

Be a Mentor to Someone Else

When someone comes to you and asks for your help. Be

aware that they might be looking to you for mentorship.

Don’t be a dick and assume this, just be aware. And don’t

get full of yourself. Respond with the amount of care,

compassion and responsibility this task deserves. You

don’t have to know all the answers. The best mentors ask

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lquestions no one else can see. A Mentor is never a know it

all.

Meet Artists Outside Your Art

The faster you find and develop relationships outside your

specific art practice, the faster you will understand your own

art. Find reasons (or excuses) to collaborate in areas you

don’t know. Take advantage of someone who is an “expert”

in another field and study how they talk about your art. Do

the same for them. Learn all you can from how others create

and how they deal with the same questions/fears/doubts/

stresses that you do.

Meet People in the Real World

Get outside of your school and meet/see other artists

performing/working in your community, even if they are not

superstars. And beyond that, meet other people in the real

world who don’t even practice art for a living. Meet people

with “normal” jobs and talk to them about their worldview.

An artist is a disciple for the world, not just the circles that

drink our kool-aid.

Constantly Balance Your Arrogance and Humility

That’s right, be a little arrogant. A better way to say this

is create with abandon then assess with doubt. There is a

moment of creation where you have to work as if the world

can’t touch you. Then pull back and see what’s really there

so you can become someone with craft. Keep in mind this is

never an excuse to be an asshole. That’s why the balance is

important. You’re better than everyone but you also suck.

Constantly Develop Your Understanding/Relationship to

Feedback, Critique & Reviews

You are in a marriage with these things whether you like

it or not. You must constantly tend to them. Understand

the difference between them and how they are meant to

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serve your art. Take in all of them at a time that feels right.

Remember that you have the control in all of these situations.

But don’t be afraid to loosen that control. You learn most

about these things by assessing the work of others and then

talking to them about their process. The goal is to make this

marriage healthy, supportive and not abusive. Sometimes

the review needs to sleep on the couch and give you some

space.

Practice Being a Visionary

See the thing in your mind and then make it happen. Let

nothing get in your way. Don’t settle for almost. Adjust when

necessity dictates and when it actually serves the art. But do

everything you can to move things from your imagination to

the real thing. This takes practice. Don’t wait for that special

moment when you get a solo show, a concert at Carnegie

Hall, a bunch of money or cast in a lead role. Figure out how

you can make this thing happen the best you possibly can.

And go do it. And if you can’t get help do it yourself. You

need to know what it takes.

Finish Things and Move On

No matter how you work… find an end point to aim for, even

if your work is a larger work-in-progress. A sense of meeting

goals is important for your forward movement. Break larger

projects into steps you can handle. Or get to a point with

something and put it down. You can always come back

to things. Nothing ever dies. Nothing ever goes away. It

becomes an important part of your infrastructure. The more

you have in you… the stronger you will be. The more you

can explore new avenues, the more opportunity you have to

discover new things.

Be Patient. Be Kind. Be a Good Person

To yourself and everyone around you. Even if you don’t

respect or like someone, you will be a better artist by being

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lkind because it keeps you in touch with your humanity. I

didn’t say be a pushover. I didn’t say don’t stand up for what

you believe. But I’ve never known a conflict between people

to be helped by anger, pettiness and aggravation. Being

an artist is hard enough, embrace those around you with

respect at all times.

Write a Personal Manifesto for Your Art

Start with “I believe…” and keep writing about all the

things you believe personally that you want to create/reflect

with your art. This document might be 1 paragraph or 30

pages. Doesn’t matter. You should constantly be revising

and refining it. You should go back to it often and make

adjustments. This will evolve as you do. Doing this will slowly

change your life.

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Pierre Fantys is a photographer, formerly professor and head

of photography unit at ECAL Ecole (Cantonale d’Art de

Lausanne), Switzerland and now director of ERACOM (Ecole

Romantic d’Arts et Communication), Lausanne, Switzerland.

TH: In Switzerland, the 20th century bequeathed an

incalculable graphic design and typographical heritage

to current generations and clearly continues to influence

students and professionals, from an aesthetic but also

and above all, from a methodological point of view. What

influence do you think previous generations of designers

have had on the most recent and what do you find worth

developing in this respect, as the new head of a graphic

arts school?

PF: In our country, there are two slightly different contexts

to consider; the”Suisse Romande” (French-speaking part

of Switzerland) and Switzerland. I think there was a kind of

slump, there was a generation of respectable designers, like

Werner Jeker and Roger Pfund... Then it seems to me there

was a break, as if, to put it simply, they had no children.

In some ways they let the light go out, and that light was

quality. I find that their descendants, if indeed there were

any, were not equal to the task. For me, there was a gap

and then a renaissance with, firstly in the city of Biel/Bienne

and people like Norm (Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs), for

example, who came from a professional school; and in its

wake there was the ECAL (University of Art and Design

Lausanne).

Before that there was a clear filiation, the Basel

designers, modernism... basically a whole series of people

who built the reputation of Swiss design. Those people

taught, whether at Basel, Biel/Bienne or elsewhere. And so

they created a kind of family, with a quality that was passed

on to the next generations. I think this worked well until there

was the break of post-modernism, which is currently much

discussed, but which left graphic design a bit like an orphan.

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tysSo there was Biel/Bienne, the ECAL, and then as a

result, it seems to me that everyone is now trying to raise

standards. There has been widespread reawakening and a

high level of quality. In education, and from the point of view

of a teacher, I have the impression that before, while I was at

ECAL, you could feel a little isolated, whereas now, you see

people doing interesting things at all of the schools. When

you look at the success of HEAD (Geneva University of Art

and Design) —it subcontracts communications, unlike ECAL

which entrusts this task to its students.(1)

TH: What educational approach do you envisage to

sustain this impetus? Perhaps a return to fundamental

benchmarks? I see Müller Brockmann’s fundamental

work on your bookshelves.

PF: Now is an opportunity to return to fundamentals —that’s

what I preach. I would use the word “revisit” fundamentals

that we have almost forgotten, rather than returning to

the past I see the potential filiations of people like Müller

Brockmann or great typographers like Wolfgang Weingart

with designers like Ludovic Balland, Jonas Voegeli, Cornel

Windlin or, of course, Norm. At a given point in time, these

people have to some extent reconnected with a tradition

which dates more from the 1950’s than the 1980’s. We hit a

crisis in the 1980’s...

But there is still the matter of tools and results. Suddenly,

the arrival of digital technology and IT tools created

confusion, which gave the impression that it was enough

to just be “creative” a word I find extremely ill-used, to

mean anything and nothing. Today everybody, at all levels,

says they are a designer, be they graphic or something

else, and I think we need a little order and, above all, a little

professionalism.

Professionalism needs to be adapted to the times. We

are no longer in the heroic Switzerland neither in the 1950’s,

that is over, but we must re-examine the fundamentals of this

period, it is the basis of true expertise. Creativity does play

(1) Generally speaking,

the schools profiles

are rising and there is

a movement that will

continue to create

emulators and followers.

I hope that ERACOM

(Ecole Romande d’Arts

et Communication

Lausanne) will soon

enter that race.

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a part and it must be stimulated in young designers, but they

must also be given the tools of the trade; it is something that

is becoming essential.

TH: You have spoken about the profession and expertise

and have also mentioned the subject of creativity.

Ideally, what place does it hold in training?

PF: I think that both are absolutely necessary and I don’t

mean to say that we want to cover everything.

There is an ideal blend to be found between rigour,

which is typically Swiss, and a kind of impertinence,

creativity, I would even say madness that can exist at the

same time, and that is when it becomes fabulous. For

example, when you have the rigour of modernism, with all

the freedom that is to be found in recent years in some

graphic designs, you find fantastic interactions. It is essential

to achieve both. If you only take refuge in creative design,

you create useless individuals and, by locking yourself up in

technical skills, you create skilled boars. That is the problem

and it is a real trend. Freedom is only born out of skill.(2)

TH: On this subject what about the new media?

PF: That domain is even more complicated to grasp because

it’s like the Wild West. You find all types, from a geek who

tosses a few pixels around his screen at home and thinks

he’s a designer, to others with an IT background who

are convinced they are creatives because they have the

technical expertise; or designers who know nothing but are

convinced of the opposite.

It is extremely important to instil order into all of this. I

am not for decrees and laws, but the Swiss Confederation is

now trying to organise education. It is extremely complex to

manage because by the time these decrees are written, they

will probably already be out of date. But at least there will

be an intention to define objectives in terms of production

and knowledge. I am not a fan of these processes, because

the documents are often too rigid and sclerotic, but we

are obliged to use them so as not to creates generation of

(2) Its essential to achieve

both. If you only take

refuge in creative

design, you create

useless individuals and,

by locking yourself up

in technical skills, you

create skilled boars. That

is the problem and it is

a real trend. Freedom is

only born out of skill.

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designers who have random skills and who will very soon be

out of their depth.

TH: Is there a difference in teaching at an art school

(training by apprenticeship work experience) and a

university education (more academic along the lines of

the HES - Swiss University of Applied Sciences)?

PF: To be clear, there are two types of initial training. There Is

the CFC (Federal Certificate of Ability) with both college and

on-the-job training and the full-time education CFC, which is

what we mainly do here at ERACOM.

We have training programs that encompass all of

the technical and graphics skills, such as printers, offset

machine operators, what we call advertising directors,

binders, screen-printers, etc. These are the skills for which

practical on-the-job experience is irreplaceable. These are

training programs which can only be carried out as a dual

course, that is to say that there is no continuous full-time

college training. These students work at a company and

come here for lessons. There is an essential complementarity

here, thanks to strong professional links, which works

extremely well. There are also courses that can be taken

both on a full-time basis and as a dual course, this world is

developing. The issue of training graphic designers in dual

courses is a bit complicated. It seems to me that this kind

of training is in decline. Why?—Because now, instead of

taking on an apprentice who they need to train entirely from

scratch, employers prefer partly trained interns who will be

more effective straightaway. Consequently we make our

full-time students carry out lengthy training periods over four

years, amounting to a one-year training period altogether

(two six-month training periods). This is much more

interesting to employers, as these interns are in their third

year and can already switch on the computer, open InDesign

and then basically not mess it all up (laughs).

These trainees represent serious competition for the

applicants for traditional graphic arts apprenticeships.

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In new media, it’s the opposite We are seeing the

disappearance or decline of dual apprenticeships for graphic

designers and a reinforcing or increasing emergence of dual

training new media programs. At first sight, the HES is a

degree higher. This is a university style bachelor degree —a

different training program. Then it’s a matter of skills. The

bachelor degree is a different training program which pushes

the student to develop stronger conceptual skills. These

are more intellectual studies, less solid in terms of technical

skills. The danger of this more conceptual or creative side

is reaching the end of a three year bachelor degree with no

real professional knowledge. We do not discourage those

who have artistic ambitions, but we try to inculcate technical

skills in them, for myself, when I taught at ECAL, it was

notably in terms of photography. The requirement in all cases

is for them to learn professional and therefore useful skills.

To summarise, someone coming from the CFC will

certainly have a very solid technical expertise whether from

dual or full-time college training and they will be capable of

working; the HES graduate is going to have more conceptual

skills and might find it more complicated to enter the

professional world but I think that there is a demand for that

type of profile at the minute.

We are in an era when everyone wants thirty thousand

qualifications and we often neglect and forget about skills.

The other fundamental thing is that it is perfectly legitimate

to work on self-development.

The Higher training that we are setting up emphasises

practical and professional skills. In a different way, I set

up a masters’ course at ECAL with Francois Rappo that

experiments with other paths, in very spesific fields, intended

for students who want to experiment on personal projects—

new, untried things, including theoretical research. We are

seeking new teaching paths.(3)

TH: You are a photographer and have taught

photography within the photography department at

(3) We have noticed that

it is always important

for students to achieve

their potential on a

journey that corresponds

specifically to them,

more academic for

some, more practical for

others, meaning that, at

the end of the day, they

will find themselves at

about the same level

with the same skills.

They are not the same

qualifications, but

they are in the same

profession.

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ECAL which you managed. Strengthened by this proven

experience, do you intend to develop photography

teaching at ERACOM? What importance do you attribute

to photography in a graphic designer’s training?

PF: It is essential —I even think that greater importance

should be given to photography. It will enable graphic

designers to be more effective partners and then to produce

a series of things by themselves during their educational

and vocational journey. What I really hate is that most of the

time and by default, we look for images on the Internet. I

would prefer that, by default, we take our own photos. Even

if they are not as good, they have the advantage of giving

more personality to their designs and that is essential. In the

new college year, I will be running a course, for those who

are interested, both for my pleasure and the pleasure of the

students. It will be a course with optional elements, free of

charge, one evening a week, here at the ERACOM.

TH: So, art school, isn’t that a false designation?

PF: I am very attached to this notion of applied arts and not

of art in the singular; I want people to know that we teach

‘Applied Arts’ at ERACOM. Image is also important. I am

also going to work on the school’s image.

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çInstitutional forms in art, always blocked art students and

artists. Some of these people could overcome it or couldn’t.

It’s a hard situation and only depends on person. It only

depends on our effort to break these blocks, these chains. I

wrote these elements for institutional forms in design. With

these elements that I am using always you can overcome

with institutional forms in art schools. These are my

experiences.

1We have to see what we look for. We have to see

different things everytime and improve our eyes.

The only way is to see around the world. Not

“looking”only, with ”seeing”. That’s the difference that

separates us from non-designer and non-artist people.

Seeing around us is improving our eyes everytime. Signs on

roads, packages in stores, forms of objects, commercials,

posters, newspapers, books. All of these visual solutions

improve our eyes when we see and analyze them. For

example, I always take brochures in stores, analyze

packages of fast-food products, look at the interior

typography of some transportation vehicles like station

signs in subways. This “looking” action always improves

your visual sight. Improves your decisions while you are

designing.

2We have to experience what other artists did. If we

look to works that was done by artists and designers

—that means new solutions or experiences of

others— we will improve our eyes and our decisions a lot.

Seeing what others done always affect our inspiration and

inspirations can be a good partner while we are starting

a new design or a new painting. For example analyzing

typefaces of Erik Spiekermann(1) always affects my typeface

design process. With that element we can overcome with

these institutional forms. Inspirations are always good

starting points for works.

(1) Erik Spikermann is

a typeface designer,

known by his famous

typefaces; Officina, Unit,

Meta etc. His design

rules always affected

my typeface designs.

He says: “Typeface of a

firm should be different

than the others but not

so odd and so different,

because we only read

what we want, not only

what we see.” This

sentence can be a nice

guide for a designer.

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3We have to sketch all the time. Sketching everytime

extends our imagination to design. Sketching

something that you see or something you think

or inspire, improve your technique and your visual sight.

For understanding the form of objects or typefaces or

dimensions of a design work, you should sketch a lot. Try to

sketch everything that inspires you and you will notice your

improvement about your visual sight. Sketching a human

body, also improves your eye too. Understanding the forms

of human is also understanding the golden ratio which is

also named as golden number 1,618, the phi number. You

can use this number as a guidance for you works.

4We have to know the history of art and what

classicism is. We have to respect old ones because

they also overcame with the instutions. If we know

what was done in the past, it will affect our creation of

unique ideas and our inspirations too. This element is also

related with the second element. If we look to works of the

artists in the past, it also improves our sight too.

As a conclusion, with these elements we can overcome with

the institutional forms of art schools. These advices can be

given from a teacher too but my advice is look works of a lot

of artists who is famous or not and they don’t need to be an

artist too, you can inspire yourself from everything that you

look (every little detail and function). Art and design depends

on our decisions, our eyes, our ideas and our techniques.

We are able to improve them with the pressure of school

by using these elements. Pressure of the institutions can

weaken us and block our free and unique decisions. I can

act freely and decide my options with my experiences that

come from these elements. I am using these elements all

the time and these elements have taught me. I hope these

elements can be a guidance for you too.