The Place Where the Arts Meet . . . Is a Person

by Will Heinrich MFA ’13

The first thing I went to see at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) after its recent renovation was The Shape of Shape, the 14th edition of MoMA’s long-running Artist’s Choice series, in which a contemporary artist is asked to curate a show from the museum’s permanent collection. Turning the corner into Room 516, I felt as if I’d stumbled upon an orchestra playing the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. Amy Sillman MFA ’95, the New York City painter who organized The Shape of Shape with MoMA curator Michelle Kuo and curatorial assistant Jenny Harris, had filled the place with so many prints and paintings that my first impression was simply of riotous color and noise. Instead of fixing the pieces into a linear narrative or using them to illustrate one overarching point, Sillman left it to the viewer to draw connections. And because every viewer will do this differently, the exhibit comes across not as the usual lecture but as an electric, potentially infinite conversation.

This dinner-party mode of curating is increasingly popular. After the renovation, most of MoMA’s collection was rehung along similar lines, if not always as successfully. It’s making itself felt in arts education, too. More and more American MFA programs are replacing topdown authority and explicit instruction with carefully guided but open-ended searches for meaning. In the museums, of course, the trend has many sources. It’s as much about knocking down exclusionary canons as it is about generating conversation. But in the academy, much of it can be traced back four decades to the founding of an interdisciplinary, low-residency MFA at Bard College. “What is proposed is different from other MFA programs,” the poet Robert Kelly declared in the program’s founding document. “The Bard Program addresses the place where the arts meet, and recognizes that place as a person—not as a set of theories or a set of skills. The work of the student is the center. That work will often enough involve exactly the accumulation and practice of skills, of making, and of judgment. But it will also entail learning about the world an artist makes by declaring it.” (The MFA program kicked off in the summer of 1981, but it became an official part of the College’s charter in December of 1980.)

How exactly do you organize an infinite conversation? All the work in the MoMA show, I had been told, was concerned with shape, which sounded impossibly nebulous. Doesn’t all plastic art deal with shape? But once I got my bearings, and read Sillman’s impassioned wall text, I began to understand. These were pieces that emphasized shape disproportionately—which meant that they tended to be graphic, high contrast, and somewhere in the borderlands between the figurative and the abstract.

I also began to notice, with increasing excitement, the way these densely hung artworks affected one another. The stubby back of someone’s head in a 1968 oil on board by Philip Guston made the

large gray-green blot on a nearby Helen Frankenthaler (Commune, 1969) look like a face tipped back in imperious silence. This, in turn, gave the adjoining Lee Bontecou construction (Untitled, 1959) the look of a bulging saurian eyeball, and it lit up the glowing heart, clutched in a sooty fist, in a facing painting by Charline von Heyl (Igitur, 2008). Sillman’s wall text suggests that shape marks “what we consider to be the self,” and after starting from the Guston, I really did feel surrounded by so many portraits of a stubborn but protean human presence, maybe an artist’s, maybe my own.

If I started somewhere else, though, my experience was entirely different. Chris Ofili’s tall, explicitly figurative painting The Raising of Lazarus (2007) was framed by a vibrant blue Matisse (Bather, 1909), a woodcut by the German expressionist E. L. Kirchner (Three Nudes in the Forest, 1933), and a fabric-on-canvas piece by Jorge Eielson called White Quipus (1964). Comparing Matisse’s bather and Ofili’s figures to the man leaning over in a Christopher Wool etching (Untitled, 1994), I might begin to think about posture. What does it communicate? How is it different from gesture? How do those terms translate into writing or visual art? Or I might notice the closely related shades of yellow in the Eielson, the Ofili, and the Kirchner and begin to compare the whole room to a mosaic or a tapestry. In the end, Sillman’s idea became clear to me, but it wasn’t one, pace the wall text, that was easily abstracted into language. It was an idea best expressed by the art works themselves.

When the sculptor Arthur Gibbons began teaching at Bard in the summer of 1988, the program was, despite its interdisciplinary ambitions, still dominated by painters. But Gibbons, who became director of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts just a few years later, recruited for the other disciplines aggressively. By the time Sillman came back to cochair painting in the late 1990s, every one of the six departments—painting, sculpture, writing, photography, film/video, and music/sound—was taking in approximately the same number of students each year.

In its structure, the program still reflects the outsize influence of painting: There are disciplinary seminars and cross-disciplinary reading groups, but the students’ chief activity is meeting one-onone with 30 or more of the professional artists who pass through every one of the program’s three summer terms. It’s a loose equivalent of the studio visits that painters and sculptors especially will be trying to arrange once they graduate. Most nights there are also all-school critiques of student work, another format that fits more comfortably with the making of objects than with time-based media.

But in its conversations and relationships, the Bard MFA is as interdisciplinary as can be. A poet might find the most striking and transformative responses to her work coming from a painter, or vice versa. And the fact that everyone is trying to communicate without being able to count on any shared technical vocabulary gives the discourse a distinctive character, concrete in its references but strangely abstract in its overall movement. It takes time to catch on, and still more time to integrate. If the program’s 10-month intersessions are convenient for midcareer artists with jobs and families, they’re also about as long as it takes to think through what you see and hear in six weeks at Bard.

Poet and longtime MFA faculty member Ann Lauterbach singles out the program for what she calls its “institutional alacrity,” pointing out that it has been able to respond quickly to a changing academic and creative environment because it “trusts in a group of people, not a single person. . . . At the core of this program is discourse, and discourse can make things happen.”

Certain words float up again and again in the nightly critiques, emerging spontaneously to anchor the otherwise freewheeling conversations the way “shape” anchors MoMA’s Room 516. There must have been several such my own first summer, in 2010, but the one I remember is “anxiety.” I had come to Bard, after studying Japanese literature at Columbia and spending a fairly hermetic decade as a novelist, hoping to overhaul my creative practice and, not incidentally, find a community of peers. But with no substantial background either in contemporary art or in critical theory, I found the “crits” almost impossible to follow. I could recognize that the hundred-odd artists surrounding me, staring at work that as often as not was completely opaque to me, too, were speaking English. But for the first few weeks, at least, I rarely had any idea what anyone was talking about. This might be one reason I initially felt most comfortable with classmates from other countries: I felt as if I’d wandered into a foreign country myself.

One of these classmates was Ragnheiður Gestsdóttir MFA ’13, whose trajectory encapsulates the generative magic of the interdisciplinary. After college in Iceland and a master’s in visual anthropology from London’s Goldsmiths College, Gestsdóttir spent 10 years making documentary films. “I had mostly been making films about music or art,” she explains. “[But] they slowly became more and more artsy and abstract until I realized I wanted to be making art myself.” Though she enrolled in the film-video department, Gestsdóttir’s work continued evolving after she graduated. I was able to visit her during a 2017 group show at the Gerðarsafn in Kópavogur, Iceland, and the piece of hers I best remember was a sculpture, Who created the timeline? (Column).

Cut out of a 7-foot-tall sheet of marble held in a black steel frame is the shape of a classical column. On the face of it, the sculpture is a clear shot at the social infrastructure that makes some, and only some, of our shared human history canonical. Without modes of teaching and learning almost as rigid as marble, the shape of a column wouldn’t have more resonance in Kópavogur than the shape of an adobe brick.

But because this is a column you can see through, the piece makes another point, this one about the fundamental mechanism of successful art. It’s only when you leave space for the viewer’s own imagination, when you present a set of facts or gestures and let the viewer draw her own conclusions, that your work is really alive.

By the end of my own first summer at Bard, I could more or less follow the conversation, which was a great stroke of luck because that fall an editor I knew asked me to start writing reviews for the New York Observer. Over the next two years, even as I produced a tortured mix of fiction and memoir for the MFA, I reviewed something like 100 New York City gallery shows—about one for every third-year critique I attended. The time I spent in galleries trying to understand what the art was doing, and how to articulate my understanding, enriched my experience of Bard and its critiques even as those tense, dramatic, quickly moving critiques helped me learn to write about art. To me, it all felt like a single conversation.

It’s a conversation, moreover, whose potential goes beyond art itself—as Lauterbach says, the Bard MFA’s creative, unfixed, non-hierarchical conversation relies on “the ways in which art making can be seen as an analogue to a kind of democratic ethos.

Will Heinrich MFA ’13 was born in New York City and spent his early childhood in Japan. His second novel, The Pearls, was published by Elective Affinity, and he writes regularly about art for the New York Times.