What Do Artists Know?

When Art Turns Its Back on the Body

The epigraph is from Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (New York: Basic Books, 1983), vii. 1. Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 212. 2. Singerman, Art Subjects, 212. 3. See page 94, this volume. 4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 19. Universities are not devoted to the production and distribution of fundamental knowledge in general. They are institutions committed, for the most part, to a particular epistemology, a view of knowledge that fosters selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry. —donald schön One of the more intriguing issues to emerge from the discussions at the Institute concerns the meaning of deskilling, particularly its significance for the constitution of fine art as a discipline within the broader framework of the university . This discussion emanated principally from a consideration of Howard Singerman’s text, more specifically his assertion—taking a lead from Thierry de Duve—that “in contemporary art and art schools, the frame and the field of work have become precisely the métier, the craft skills with which work is made, as well as the site where it is produced.”1 In other words, where once technical and craft skills essential to métier were taught, now what is taught in art schools is “consciousness of the field”2 as well as associated theoretical, formal, and strategic skills. Deskilling and the “Temporal Realm” Deskilling, formerly a Modernist tactic—to purge students of recidivist academic tendencies—ought now, according to Singerman, be understood as integral to such reconstitution of the field. James Elkins, in an insightful aside, points out that Singerman’s conflation of the craft skills of métier with these more strategic skills might provide some insight regarding “the value placed in the university and in disciplines.”3 It does precisely that. Thomas Kuhn suggests that “sometimes just its reception of a paradigm . . . transforms a group previously interested merely in the study of nature into a profession or, at least, a discipline.”4 Singerman’s is no mere analogy drawn between skills from different domains; it is rather the identification of (and a lament for) just such a fundamental alteration. De Duve acknowledges this shift to a new “radically, relativistic . . . orthodoxy ,” outlining its trajectory from an academic and modernist concern with WHEN ART TURNS ITS BACK ON THE BODY Tom McGuirk 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 146 9/14/12 1:17 PM assessments 147 5. Thierry de Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude—and Beyond,” in Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1985, edited by Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 29. 6. De Duve, “When Form Has Become Attitude ,” 29. 7. Singerman, Art Subjects, 212. 8. Pierre Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 66. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 23. 10. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 23. 11. James Clifford, “Rearticulating Anthropology ,” in Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: métier and medium to the contemporary concern with “practice.”5 More importantly , “practice” is, in this context, conceived of in a manner that, as he puts it, “puts the emphasis on the social” as opposed to “the technical division of labour.”6 This is a highly significant point, as it highlights two important aspects of this paradigm shift: the degree to which the reconceptualizing of the field of art is founded in the sociocultural or “temporal” realm and the commensurate degree to which it entails a rejection of those practical, physical, embodied, and specifically manual skills once regarded as integral to the production of art. Bourdieu, Singerman tellingly points out, recognizes the extraordinary degree to which this applies to the artistic field: “never has the very structure of the field been present so practically in every act of production.”7 Discipline and Disciplining Bourdieu—ever sensitive to the power play in and between fields and disciplines —also emphasizes the centrality of this temporal, indeed territorial, aspect with regard to the negotiation of cultural and scientific capital. A discipline, he points out, is not solely defined by its “intrinsic properties,” but also by “properties it owes to its position in the (hierarchized) space of disciplines.” As he puts it, “One of the most important principles of differentiation among the disciplines is the size of the capital of collective resources it has accumulated (in particular, theoretical-formal resources). . . . There are two principles of differentiation /hierarchization among disciplines, the temporal principle and the...