What Do Artists Know?

6. The First-Year Program

From here to the end of the Seminars, the subject was individual degree programs: the first year, the BFA, the MFA, and finally the PhD. In each case the purpose was to understand the ideal form of the program or course. What does an MFA offer, in theory, that a BFA doesn’t? What are the best ways of thinking about the PhD? What are the optimal arrangements of elements in the first year? In these conversations, we tended to go back and forth between official administrative documents, practical considerations, and ordinary, day-to-day understandings of the different degrees. There are administrative and professional guidelines (which are often dry and abstract, but also politically important); practical problems to do with required courses, funding, and faculty (what instructors and students talk about all the time); and the day-to-day notion of the degree (what students hope to get out of the program, and what instructors tell their parents). In the case of the BFA, the day-to-day notion is that the BFA is an opportunity to experiment before you settle down to find your own practice. It seems those three ways of talking are inseparable, and each is part of what the programs are. The subject of this first conversation is the here is the first year of college-level art education, also called the core or the foundation year. James Elkins: An initial problem here is that the first-year program is often considered to be relatively unimportant. There is a lot of talk about it, but that talk usually happens in lunchtime sessions at conferences (those sessions no one attends), and the conversation is often really just anecdotal: “This is what we do at our institution,” and so forth. There’s also a common idea that the first year isn’t important in the bigger scheme of things. In my field, art history, people don’t talk much about the first-year survey of world art, because they think it doesn’t have repercussions on professional life or on graduate-level study. I don’t agree at all with that assessment: I think the structures and ideas of the first year are fundamentally important for art history, and the same is true of studio art.1 Let me propose a couple of things about our conversation, and then I’ll introduce some themes we might explore. I would like to distinguish between first-order and second-order argument. The first order would be the work of assembling a list of elements of first-year instruction. (It is entirely typical that even something that rudimentary hasn’t yet been done.) Second-order argument would be about the relation between 6. THE FIRST-YEAR PROGRAM 1. The case is made in Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002). 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 59 9/14/12 1:17 PM what do artists know? 60 those elements. Is life drawing compatible, philosophically or historically, with Bauhaus exercises in color perception?—and so forth. The first-order task can be simplified, I think, by avoiding the categories that are usually used to divide the first year. Ann Sobiech Munson’s institution in Iowa, for example, divides the first year into these subject areas: Critical Thinking , Visual Organization, Visual Translation (collage, mapping, model making), Media, Research, Ethics, Communication, Collaboration, Critical Evaluation, and Professional Awareness. The problem I see there is that several of those are compound categories, amalgams of potentially incommensurate elements. I think it is prudent to begin with the simplest possible categories. Let’s divide our discussion, then, into four large areas, which I think can reasonably be thought of as the fundamental constituents of the first year. They are the art history survey; the teaching of basic things like form, color, and space; the teaching of theory; and time students spend in the studio. I’ll introduce each one briefly, to get us started. 1. The art history survey. This isn’t always included in conversations on the first year, because it is often handled by the Art History Department, but ideally it should be fully integrated. There is a large literature on the ways the world art survey is taught, but virtually nothing on how it could be best altered to fit the needs of studio art instruction. The obstacle might be endemic to art history itself, because it would involve questions like: What judgments should govern the choice of artists, artworks, and ideas? Should art students learn...