#interviews
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engaged artists pushing socially engaged art. Indeed, that may be the next fashionable class elective joining the interdisciplinary misnomer. But I fear that this is a new category that excuses all other art making from social responsibility, while it also fosters a prosaic art devoid of metaphor. Metaphor is not something dated. Just ask the advertising industry whose most successful campaigns remain all about sexy or poetic metaphors. If we stop teaching metaphor-making to artists, we might as well become craftsmen or social workers. I work in the public sphere with very difficult, religiously and politically conservative audiences. I do not consider myself a socially engaged artist making socially engaged art. I am a sitespecific, durational performance artist who creates portraits of people and places by generating space and time for silent reflection. The template is formal, the content is a vessel, my crew and our audience consist of everybody. Revolution So this is the disastrous state of many of our art programs, no matter how good our MFA shows look across the land. In fact, it feels as if graduate art programs are increasingly obsessed about producing commercial-galleryquality MFA shows that promote the programs (save face yet another year and increase enrollment) more than helping the indebted students start off. And yes, there are exceptional programs and exceptional teachers doing prophetic work that amounts to the heroic as they are surrounded and even sabotaged by mediocre colleagues and employers. Many more art teachers than we suspect have great field practices, but they are forced to leave them outside the classroom for the sake of fossil art program compliance. Thus, we need to start a revolution not just among art students but among art teachers, too. I love teaching; I am the product of memorable teachers. We need a horizontal and vertical academic revolution right now. Why? Because we cannot do without art programs. When healthy, they are the repository of art training history; they provide old and new technical resources; they offer a critical but safe and supportive community of peers, nurturing the visionary. While practically every