Teaching Between Worlds

The following transcript has been lightly edited for readability. The conversation took place via Zoom on May 28, 2024.

Michael Jones McKean: Being an artist might have something to do very simply with cultivating a critical, yet still hopeful experience of living—of being alive. The tools we have to engage in this process are incredibly basic: witnessing, imagining, and making things. In addition to being artists and arts practitioners, we’re all teachers here. There are probably very few disciplines that offer up the possibility to imagine futures, dream of other horizons, [apart from] teaching—and, more specifically, teaching art. So, we’re straddling two disciplines—teaching and art—where, as part of a baseline engagement, we’re encouraged to imagine different kinds of spaces. Worlds, even.

So, I’d like to start out here: With teaching and mentoring young artists, does [it] still feel like a zone of possibility to you? Are you still hopeful, perhaps in the ways you might have imagined when you began teaching?

Arnold J. Kemp: From my beginnings teaching, I always thought, not only am I going to teach theory, or teach a skill, I’m also going to model behavior so that people who studied with me might also pick up a bit of how to be a good teacher. I’ve really tried to foster that, because I would like to see there be generations of good teachers. But I’m coming across more and more folks who, because of experiences they’ve had in school, different types of experiences, negative experiences around race or gender or sexuality, or just dealing with some of the rigamarole of going through school, [of] the cost of school. Because of those experiences they’ve had—although they could be great teachers—they might never teach.

I’ve talked to several younger artists who, I know, would be great teachers, and they think about it, but [makes a distancing gesture] that’s not on their horizon right now. That’s a concern of mine.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: I think something that is worth questioning is this idea of “dreaming” that you talk about, Michael. When you desire something, what is your foundation to want that thing? In my case, I studied philosophy, I studied art history. I didn’t have critiques, so, later on, it was mind-blowing to me to go to a place like Skowhegan, where it’s kind of an exercise of utopia. I didn’t know how to be an artist. I knew I wanted to make objects, things, video, and I was thrown off by 60 different ways of making work there. But this [experience] was very, very valuable for me.

I didn’t know what to expect, so I assumed that a lot of bad behavior in art schools was normal [some laughter]. But I’m glad I didn’t have [an art school experience] because now, when I teach undergrads, it’s very refreshing to be able to teach in the way that I would like to have been taught. But still there is that “image”—the image of a world when you think that being a successful artist means money. The only time we talk about success is in terms of people [who] get to be successful. So, how do we consider success—because we model it after those people—if there are very few models for how to not be successful? Or, how to be regarded as thoughtful or meaningful. In society there’s not a lot of models of how to be meaningful. This is problematic when we encounter how to run this dream machine.

Angela Dufresne: That was awesome. As usual, it’s like my hair: There are so many thoughts shooting through my head that I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pull it all together. But I want to ponytail in what they’re both saying and go back to this idea of imagining, “re-worlding,” that you prompted us with, Michael.

Since the pandemic, in academia, there has been this constant draw with different community groups that I’m involved in to siphon me into these spaces that are like what Nato [Thompson] has produced: self-organized popups, ad hoc structures that get past the bureaucratic quagmire that is academia right now. With most of the folks … I speak to, there is a consensus that, in academia, there’s so much bureaucratic weight coming from above to write benchmarks and create verifiable matrices for what it means to learn and to produce an intellect in a body as an artist. But [it’s also coming] from below, with certain kinds of expectations about mentorship that make it increasingly difficult to do what Arnold said in the beginning, which is to embody an alternative—an embodied way of living as an artist that can leave space that’s open enough for a person to imagine their own practice.

I agree with Rodrigo, and I think my department, in general, thinks that the most productive place for imagining and bringing up new modes of living is by the cohort model; by a bunch of people stuck together and, given enough time, where outcomes aren’t made verifiable or turned into benchmarks. Where people can actually experiment and develop unprecedented ways of being together. That becomes harder and harder in academia. That, to me, is what I read in your question: Is this kind of learning that we’re talking about, where artists develop in a way that is singular, or not within the normative progressive capitalist model of how a human being develops “into their full self,” whatever that even means. That it isn’t so imposed on by bureaucracy, or aestheticization, or success matrices, but [that it] allows them to become people capable of imagining new modes of community and new ways of interconnectivity.

All these things seem to get in the way, but to me the biggest hurdle are these benchmarks and these verifiable procedural reporting things that happen in academia now, that I think [are] just indicative of what’s wrong with most of the world … that there are potential lawsuits, and there are potential threats to the bureaucracy, that, at least as a Gen-Xer, I took for granted. Now, I don’t know. I think [of] Nato’s idea of a self-organization. I’m thinking [the] collection of essays … Self-Organized, edited by [Jan] Verwoert, is interesting here, because we need to think of different models.

It becomes more and more difficult in the given academic structures to figure out how to make these kinds of spaces of inquiry. But I’m still having a blast, and my students are still stabbing me through the heart and the eyes every day.

Arnold J. Kemp: I think it’s important for me to say that I have tried to model myself after certain teachers, like Baldessari, or Mike Kelley, or Paul McCarthy. Angela [Dufresne], I think, was in San Francisco at the time when I was [there]. When Tony Labat was teaching, and David Ireland, and the Kuchar brothers [were there]. When I started to teach, I was in Portland, Oregon, and I wanted to create that community among my graduate students—world making.

I’d always say, “Don’t wait for a curator or some gallerist to say, ‘Oh, I want you to show you in my space.’ Just make your own space. “My students, many of them, have done that. They did that there, and they’re still doing it, and some of those students have gone on to have many museum shows and win Guggenheim Awards. I’m quite proud of them.

Three of my students from those days have gone through gender reassignments, and I scratched my head when they wrote to me, each separately, and said, “I wanted you to know this before I told anyone else, because your classes gave me the bravery to explore who I really am.” I’m still not exactly sure what they meant; but the way I taught back then is not a way I can teach now. One of the things I did with all my graduate students during my four years in Portland was go to a woman-run, woman-owned, woman-operated strip club called Mary’s.

Angela Dufresne: I know that bar!

Arnold Kemp: Yes, we’d go there and talk about economics and gender and race and class and sexism and feminism. We’d talk about performance. We met amazing people there—one stripper who spoke six languages, and I really got to know her. She called me Professor Booty. She’d say, “Oh, Professor Booty is here with his students.”

Tony Labat would take his students shooting; they’d go to a rifle range. I don’t know if there’s anyone teaching like that anymore, and I certainly cannot teach that way now.

Michael Jones McKean: Weaving some things together that have been mentioned. Perhaps one of our shadow roles as teachers, working inside very bureaucratic, corporatized, and—in some cases—multinational university systems, might be to keep academic bureaucracy at bay. To push back at this growing behemoth, or at least try to hide its ill effects from our students and classrooms so that school doesn’t end up feeling, well, too much like capital-S school.

I think many of us might be trying to cultivate spaces that are more undefined; zones where we mostly can’t provide answers, where we might roll for long stretches not knowing what, or if, we’re even “teaching” at all. But in an increasingly professionalized context that is art school in 2024, one where we ourselves might also be allergic to defining what “success” means in this context, a tension emerges.

As we create and maintain spaces that feel nebulous—productively so, generatively so, and one where transformation can happen—more and more, those values feel at odds with the corporatized logic of higher-ed [that] we work inside of. This feels like one of the issues that’s at play. How do we maintain school, without debasing it into something “schooly,” or [something] rote?

Angela Dufresne: I don’t know. It requires leaps of faith. RISD had, until about two years ago—until they gave up their space because they were worried about litigation—a program in Rome called the European Honors Program. I taught in that for a year. We did presentations in a bus with a mic. We all got into my hotel room and watched The Leopard by Visconti. I was in bed with eight different students, and there were students on the floor and in the chairs. There was nothing weird; it was just what we were doing. There was literally zero reason to be concerned or any boundaries crossed, but on paper, it looks horrifying. Luckily, I worked with a guy there, Ezio Genovesi, who understood what a nebulous process—that’s a perfect word for it, Michael—becoming an artist is.

We got really assailed for inviting refugees into the Cenci to cook a meal. I was doing a project with African refugees in Rome and collaborating with this group of punk architects called Ati Suffix. Ati Suffix asked them what they wanted more than anything, and they said, “Well, we’re in a holding pattern in this airplane hangar built by Mussolini, waiting for our visas, and they won’t let us cook.” I said, “Great. We got three kitchens in the Cenci.” And they came, and they cooked.

In the meantime, we kept getting these emails through students mentioning stuff to their parents; just an onslaught of horrific racist assumptions and safety concerns because the students were going to be in the room with these 20-something-year-old guys from Africa. We did it anyway. We told them that there was a social worker in the house—which there was—and … basically to fuck off. We had the event, and it was totally transformative. It was a weekend in exchange with them, but it was pathologically stressful; that’s the only way I can describe it, and it should have been something else.

Gordon Hall: I want to come out in defense of school, and by “school,” I don’t mean what I’m hearing you describe as a very administratively driven bureaucratic mini-state. I came up through different kinds of progressive educational contexts when I was a kid. This version of education is fundamentally a group of people consenting to become a temporary community, in which one person—the “teacher”—takes on the responsibility of creating the structure: establishing the deadlines and, with kindness and love, maintaining structure, a level of formality unlike casual life. This produces a situation in which every participant’s ideas are taken seriously by everyone else in the group. This is what I try to do with my students. I take every single one of them seriously as a person, as a thinker; and then, hopefully, they start taking themselves and one another seriously, as well.

By the end of the semester, I feel like I succeeded if the class could continue if I were not there. Because what I taught them was just what they ended up creating—being there together, making their work and giving each other real feedback, agreeing to the structure—everyone reads the same thing on the same day so they can discuss it, for example. This sounds simple, but there are a million forces that impinge on [its] working. I still do feel—and maybe this is unique to my context—that I’m able to continue to do this in my classroom, even when there are other things happening around us that might make it difficult.

Michael Jones McKean: I think it’s great that you bring this up, Gordon. One other vector to possibly add: When we talk about handed-down mythologies within art schools, one where so much of what is learned often occurs organically, messily, and through osmosis; that this sort of learning environment can privilege students of certain educational backgrounds. So, there might be something important about structure, about clarity, about being able to establish hierarchies needed for classes to run, for them to even exist. That’s not exactly what you’re saying, but it’s something that I was thinking about as you were speaking.

Gordon Hall: I’ll just add, when I was a student, even within the context I came up in, I wanted my classes to have structure. I wanted the discussion to be moderated. I wanted us to focus on what we were doing. I didn’t like it when it was a free-for-all, or endless weird field trips. I think that, even within the progressive model, the freedom that education promises is found through self-discipline. I don’t mean top-down discipline; I mean self-discipline that creates the possibility for really different people from really different backgrounds, upbringings, and perspectives to find ways to interact and learn from each other.

Nato Thompson: When I was in junior high school, my dad went to grad school at CalArts, and we moved into the dorms—me and my brother—in 1981. There was a clothing optional pool, and that was my most formative educational moment by far, sitting around the pool with naked 18- to 24-year-olds. It was the first time I thought adults might be cooler than kids. But what I want to say about modeling behavior is that what I thought art school was, was more than a place to produce; it was a space where a way of being was modeled. Fast-forward, when I was an undergrad at Berkeley, I had an adjunct teacher named Kevin Radley. He said, “I wake up every morning and I’m going to blow my head off. But then I look at my arm…”—he had a tattoo that just said YES—”and I say, ‘one more day.’”

He let us do the craziest art assignments, and he loved everything I did. And that’s all I needed: crazy art assignments, and someone to believe in me. It was something that none of the art teachers did, and I really felt that what I needed was a license to ill, more than I needed anything else. I wanted permission to be as rebellious and wild as I could, with everybody else trying to make a poor case for the world being rational, when I could clearly see it was a mess.

Third point: I turned 50. I was a curator. I’ve worked for nonprofits my entire slovenly life. It became very clear to me that nonprofits are institutions that raise money for the purpose of raising money. That’s just the nature of the world. And rather than critique it—I didn’t want to be one of these people [who sit] on the sidelines and points at the problems of the world, and [complain] about higher ed, or museums, or whatever, because it’s one thing to critique. As Heidegger said, “Philosophy is like people standing around with knives with nothing left to cut.”

The tender act of building institutions is not easy. And our fragile institutions, whether it’s art schools, whether it’s our museums—our colonial museums—if they get erased, they do not get replaced. It’s not like you just tear down a museum and a new one emerges. If you tear down our art schools, new art schools don’t just emerge out of the rubble. I think the bureaucratic, painful task of world building that is the yang to the yin of art making is a tricky task; like the anarchist task … how do you make your shared economies? How do you employ yourself? How do you live? How do you pay jobs?

I have so many friends [who] are teachers, forget teachers—how many of us are in institutions we don’t believe in, necessarily, but we’ve got people [who] depend on us, and we’re trying to get the thing? I think students see that, but they don’t see any way out of it. And who does? With the Alternative Arts School, I don’t think it’s a solution. It’s not meant to be some sort of replacement of things, at all. I just felt like, in this Black Panther way, how can we share our money to build a different thing, and who’s going to be administratively on top of it, so it’s not just some utopian dream artist project that fails in four years, but actually lasts? And money, insurance, legal claims, all those things that are really boring, literally are the things that are preventing people from doing it. For me, world building is both a dream and, then, somebody willing to be an old 19th-century socialist—willing to compromise and do the hard work to just get the stuff done.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: So, how is your project finding ways to be sustainable, in some way, beyond the dream? Could you tell us more about the project?

Nato Thompson: Sure. The school is tuition driven and soon to be membership fee driven. Artists pay for classes, and then the classes pay for a teacher and a tiny administration. Our student body’s average age is 38 years old. It’s 85% female. We take the money from the Global North and apply it to the Global South and marginalized communities, so that it is globally diverse, but it is subsidized through North American cash. The internet is global, and the US dollar spends differently in different parts of the world. We aren’t interested in artists only being online and see our role as a part of a larger artistic life. I started school [while] thinking it would have 20-year-olds; it has 40-year-olds. It has a lot of artists who had family or kids or work/life issues, but art’s meant a big part of their life, and it’s something they’ve come back to.

The school has really come to reflect a larger portion of the artist community that we don’t generally see. Greg Sholette talks about [it as resembling] dark matter; that 98% of the art world is held together by artists you don’t see in museums or galleries or teaching positions. I certainly find that to be the case globally. I imagine if you looked across the globe, at who self-identifies as an artist—the skills involved are profound—they just can’t get gigs, nor do they have the bandwidth for them.

In general, what we offer is a critical community and skills. But out of the gate, artists don’t want to pay for community, even though that is exactly what they need. [They’ll] pay for classes; but that’s not what they want. So, you trick them with classes, and then you actually provide a global community of relationships that holds it together. We say we’re a school, but what we really are is more of a global YMCA for working artists.

Aki Sasamoto: Community is a thing I understand that’s been spoken about. I think, working at Yale, I realize [that] my role is really to provide access, and, to “point.” Basically, my job is being a pointer to different facilities, and [at] different fields of ideas. I believe [that] if I’m working in a research university, I’m making sure that the art school exists, but that art students don’t just look at art. They have to look at something that’s not art. That’s what my role is.

But the goals are different. It’s not so much [about whether] you are undergraduate; or graduate; or post-graduation, like Nato, [and] you’re talking about when you’re in midlife, having a crisis, and then want to re-create that feeling of a critique community, having community and conversation. That’s also a different type of desire. I think, with every institution I work with, I’m trying to figure out what that institution can best offer. So, I change my teaching tactic, depending [upon] the location.

For now, I know the students come into our program, wanting to [use] the studio space, to really be introverted, and to use the library. They’re actually very clear on what they want. I’m not going to question that. The only thing I’m going to do to try to hold the community, is to discuss effective and respectful ways of talking, communicating. That has been very much a new thing, because we host students from different countries and cultures, and different backgrounds. So, how can we set that tone? Those are the things that I’m focusing on within our community, internally, but also what it means within the institution at large.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: I wanted to follow that. Yale and UCLA compete for the same grad students. Maybe for sculpture, some people go to VCU. Gordon is in a special condition, where they have really smart undergrads, and Vassar has an amazing financial aid system; [it’s near] the number one schools to provide financial aid, so they get smart students [who] are happy to be there. There is a certain amount of happiness that you have when you don’t feel that burden of money. A lot of models require money; even [when] running your own gallery, you can run it in your house only so long before you move it and pay real estate prices. And with RISD, the Core Program [in Houston] was started by people from RISD. That is what Joe [Havel, former director of the program] told about the story of grads, from RISD, moving to Houston and starting their own thing, and being embraced by the museum [MFAH] as a way to create this community [of] people making art. That could happen only in the economy of the 80s. It’s probably very, very hard [for such a thing] to happen right now.

I have noticed a big shift at UCLA. Rodney McMillian has worked really hard, really steadily toward shifting the culture of the department. I have done my part, too, [by] trying to look more at the backgrounds of our students. We have, every year, more and more students coming from community college, Arizona State; new grad students that are going to be so fucking excited to be at UCLA. Since I [got] here, very few of our grad students come from Bard undergrad, or MICA, or Cooper Union. That has generated a very nice cohort, where they feel the opportunity that has been granted, and they are so excited to take advantage of it.

And here is a problem I encounter morally: I want that. Obviously, we all want the opportunities—people [who] are marginalized, getting a lot of scholarships, or being the first in their family to go to college, or coming from general social disadvantage—whatever that can be. But how do we make it look like nothing happened? How do we make it look like the school does not have a history of being fucked up? How do we make institutions, with a kind of progressive mindset, erase their own stories, and eventually get to the point where it seems, from the outside, that nothing ever happened? Nothing to see here.

So, I encounter a lot of that. I try to do my part [in] changing the way that we take more people from community colleges, more people from state schools. But I am afraid now, because the system of starting something like the Core Program or starting alternative residency spaces, where these students are going to have a place after school, is unsustainable with the economy of 2024. And then, to get free tuition—we are a state school—we need to fundraise a lot, and then, as soon as people know where the fucking money comes from, you’re fucked. There’s no good money when you need $20 million for an endowment.

So, it is so complicated. Do we launder money through well-meaning education, or do you just tell people, “Hey, we are going to give you a prime education, but you’re going to have to be in debt and you’re going to have to deal with predatory lending systems”? I truly, truly encounter this problem every single day I wake up. I think I’m going to give them the best education—things I never had—though this means either getting a terrible loan or having to take money from terrible people? And it’s fucked up; it’s complicated.

Arnold Kemp: I feel that we’re talking about the institution, or institution building, and then we are also talking about the world building that Michael brought up in the classroom. I had said something earlier and I wanted to respond and say [that] just because we were going to strip clubs didn’t mean we also didn’t have a real organized discussion. Those students were also reading Kaja Silverman. We had deep, organized discussions and critiques in classes, and critiques, to me, are about generosity and rigor, but also—and I think this is responding a bit to both Gordon, and to Angela, and Nato, too—it takes vulnerability on the parts of the professors leading those classrooms.

And, because I work in a big corporate institution now, I’m always trying to give the students more than what they’re paying for. I think—personally, physically, emotionally, energetically—I have paid the price of having to give more and more, because the students are paying more and more. When I applied for my job to be the dean of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I gave a lecture as part of my job talk in which I talked about the expense of graduate school, and the real competition for SAIC coming from free nonacademic programs that were started by artists to support artists, such as C.O.P.S., which was the Conceptual Oregon Performance School. It was a pretty crazy school and [was] run by some very talented artists and teachers. One of them went on to Bruce High Quality Foundation and … just got his first teaching job in Florida.

But this thing about vulnerability seems so important to me in terms of taking chances—really helping people to experiment within some boundaries and [showing] them that there’s other ways of being in the world. To be as free as you can, without hurting yourself or someone else, is really what I often am trying to teach.

Nato Thompson: The task of producing a space, a breathing room, [doing] that makes no sense in a world of hypercapitalism, utilitarianism, and fascism; I think it’s worth saying what a noble journey that is. What a fraught historic journey that is. It is not a guarantee; so many of the cool institutions that were started in 68 are getting eaten up by the promise of the nonprofit system. This imperfect bureaucratic structure is meeting its own contradictions. It wasn’t as obvious in 68 what a board was going to do to an institution back then. It’s only become clearer 50 years down the road.

This journey of world building—the structures by which we could produce [worlds] that run counter to power, right? Or at least produces options outside of power. It perhaps is the definition of education, but it’s not a simple one. I think it’s almost like we can’t beat ourselves up about how hard this is. The task sets itself up for difficulties, but it does seem to beg for some reinvention right now, is my gut.

Arnold Kemp: [When] the institutions have some sort of crisis, they butt up against the students’ desires or needs, [and] something goes wrong. Some professor or some administrator says something that pushes the whole student body until they’re really angry, and something can change. Believe me, those institutions are looking forward to those students graduating. Whatever happened, they count on it being forgotten.

Michael Jones McKean: Totally, amnesia as a shadow policy feels very much alive.

I thought to dovetail off the subject around debt and tuition. Granted … our institutions are all different, representing very different student bodies. For context, my home institution, VCU, is a state school and, by most measures, deemed “affordable” for our undergrads, and, though on the chopping block every year, we’ve—against all odds—been able to hold on to full funding for our MFAs, at least within my department. But, even so, tuition, money are enormous issues.

With this idea of very real debt lingering overhead, while we talk about crafting experiences in art school that might be more or less goal-undefined, purposely nonlinear, and very process-based—all sorts of tensions are bound to arise. Some related to student expectations, but also a new, emerging by-product may be forming: an allergy to risk. Not just with high-level questions like “Should I go to art school?” but [also] more deeply embedded, personal, and perhaps unexamined aversions to risk-taking with the work itself. The types of artists they might imagine becoming.

I want to linger here, thinking about the spaces that we’re creating, these spaces we’re holding, not just for more students but [also for] artists in the future. It’s a conundrum, and sadly one, against our will, [that] we might be complicit inside of.

Gordon Hall: I could offer a little bit of my own experience with this. When I got my current position at Vassar College, I had to adjust to no longer working with grad students, as we don’t have any grad programs. I love mentoring MFA students, because they’re so deep into what they’re doing and it’s so fascinating to be there for that part. I’ve been quite surprised, though, that I feel free from a guilt that I was carrying during the decade I taught MFA students. It got more intense towards the end, because I, myself, was deep in adjuncting, being underpaid, and with debt from my own grad degree, The MFA students would ask me, “Gordon, should I go into teaching?” Or, “I’m going to be an artist. How does this work, you know, financially?” And I couldn’t figure out what to tell them. Sometimes I was just brutally honest. “No. Unless you have family money, do not try to do this, because there’s absolutely no way to adjunct teach and make art and make a living. “And other times I’d try to be positive, like, “You can figure it out, and there still are some tenure track jobs, and you just have to stick with it.”

All those answers felt bad to me, very unsatisfying to me, and so I do feel a certain relief from directly being the person ushering them into what very likely will be years of financial precarity. I guess I wonder for the folks who teach primarily MFA students, and ones, especially where people take on a lot of debt to do them—how do you grapple with that? How do we balance the need for open-endedness and experimentation with the feeling that—and I say this hyperbolically—we’re possibly ruining someone’s life?

Aki Sasamoto: I don’t feel like I’m ruining their life. I pretty much have admitted that I work for money. I’m teaching for money, and I say that at the beginning. “Hey, by the way, I grew up with a lot of idealism, but I’m doing this as a job. So, don’t call me at night unless it’s an emergency, or something like that.” Those kinds of boundaries, giving people my own manual, and then I ask my students for their manual and a plan: how to make their art sustainable towards the end of their two years? Because the goal is really that, and to be honest about our relationship to money. Because I don’t want to think about how much privilege they have, because I can’t really decide what privilege is bad. Or what money is bad. Everything can’t be bad. If you have one privilege, do you always have to be sorry?

A lot of things are so American to me, to defend a privilege one finds themselves with; up, down, left, or right. As an alternative, I want to relax my defense, so that the students will not mirror [me]. Student debt can be a way to say, “I’m suffering. You, Aki, have to do more.” And I do more. I’m just going to meet you with what I can, and let’s find the most effective route for our conversation. Because as long as I can give good questions, that shouldn’t come up—hopefully. That’s my new idealism. Instead of trying to think about a new structure, I’m really trying to think about how to, one-to-one, figure out what to work on, like a working plan.

Michael Jones McKean: There’s a couple of things that you mentioned, Aki, that feel important. To underscore one, yes, we have jobs. When we’re talking about teaching, we’re also talking about, at some base level, a gig. Hopefully, it’s not just a gig, but it is a job, after all. I wanted to name that.

You bring up another thing, too, that’s worth considering. At one scale, we can imagine the idea of school, and all the ways that it might become something else. We imagine how it might unfurl into something more beautiful, something better. But as our institutions become more bureaucratic, the possibility of structural change at the scale beyond our voice in the room of students becomes harder to imagine. But at the end of the day—on a much more human scale—we spend the majority of our time as teachers using words, speaking with students in small groups, sometimes for long stretches, individually, about work and ideas. The main technology we have is what we say. Remembering how Arnold started off, about how we might model possibilities—futures—for our students. Our words, and the way we use them, feel like a big part of this.

I’m curious about this working tension that, on the one side, balances the behemoth of the institution, and on the other, the more intimate scale that we operate on as teachers—with all the complexities and freedoms it affords.

Angela Dufresne: I am going to chime in, just because I feel like Gordon was talking very specifically to me, because I work in the cult school that costs so much money. I’m implicated in that, and I haven’t had an ulcer yet, but I do throw up in my mouth every time a student says, “Is there more financial aid available?” We do actually have more financial aid available, and it is, like all money, covered in blood. But way more than, I think, what people expect in our grad program, anyway.

I don’t just work with grads. I also chair a department of 170 undergraduates, too, who come from all over the world and have, like Aki said, very different relationships with the debt fetish. Because I think education has been so seismically, systematically fucked in this country, this is just our way of trying to debunk the inequities of the system. But I think folks coming from other places—I have folks coming from the Middle East who were, like, “Nobody ever expected to get funding to go to school. Yeah, my family’s been bending over [doing] back flips to get me to be able to afford to have this opportunity, and I’m going to use it for everything it’s worth.” Aki, I just love everything you’ve said, in the sense that we just try to know them, listen to them, and get them pointed in the right direction and customize, individuate that relationship, so that they can move forward.

One of the things I always tell them—and I think I’m quoting one of my colleagues, Kevin Zucker, here—is, if somebody makes their best work while they’re in grad school with us, we’ve done a disservice to them. We need to make that environment of vulnerability and risk in the studios, the culture, the work culture in the school, the opportunity for people to reinvent even their perception of themselves.

One of the ways to do that is—ponytailing back to Arnold—is vulnerability; actually trying to find a way. At least, this is my methodology—clearly, because look at me—to embody fully all the vulnerabilities and the ridiculousness that is the haptic body; that is me.

And to your comment now, Michael, it is … a linguistic thing, but it is also a haptic thing. Right? It is a way of actually showing up for the students and listening to them, but also bending towards and away from them in the room when they are going through some real shit. Right? And going through some exuberance and some excitement.

That is another kind of knowledge that I think that we—in particular, that teachers in art schools—should have. I said “should.” I dropped the S-bomb. I feel like, just the way that you make that space is, without a doubt, with great assignments, and then getting the fuck out of the way. But also showing that you’re vulnerable and flawed and are still functioning in a way that could inspire them to invent something sustainable for their lives.

I do the bad thing, though, and I think it’s because we don’t have as much financial aid as Yale. I wake up with my menopausal body at 3 am, and I’m writing endless letters of recommendation, and I’m throwing summer parties for my students in the Catskills, where we have a little cabin. And I mow the lawn so they can camp in the yard to connect the different years of students, because it eats me alive that it’s so much. That the tuition is so much. But I also don’t take it on myself entirely. But it doesn’t mean that I don’t take it seriously, and [that] I don’t do extra for it. I do. It’s a systemic problem with this country. If you think about it, it’s like a house in LA, back in 2009, was, like, $500,000, and it’s a two-bedroom with one bathroom, and it’s a cute little mod. Now it costs 9 million. The cost of living, the way things are going in this world, is so batshit crazy.

It’s not just art school that is ruining people’s lives. I think we have such huge systemic problems that are making it impossible for anybody but the top 10% of wealthy people to flourish in any meaningful way. It’s ridiculous.

And so, there’s a certain way in which I have to be, like, if you will show up, and be with me, and take my support, I will support the fuck out of you, as much as is humanly possible. And, at a certain point, if you aren’t, if you’re my student, and you want to go talk to somebody else, great. Go pursue the most meaningful vehicles for you. I have no great hopes for how they’re going to flourish, and I don’t think that it is arts education or [the] college’s fault that they’re not going to. I blame it on the real estate peoples.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: I have been thinking why art school is so interesting for us to examine. It’s that, in most disciplines in a university, there is a very clear goal. If you’re studying medicine, you want to get a job in the hospital. Right? I think that very few artists have the goal of selling their paintings. They just want to make a beautiful painting, or show it somewhere. Right? Being in the show is the goal. Sometimes you’re a little disappointed to not sell, but the main thing is showing your work, getting something out, getting ideas out. That is the goal when you’re in school. Very few people are dreaming about selling out all their shows.

Because the goal is nebulous, the goal is so blurry; what do you want with art? Maybe it’s easy for us to say, because we got the job in academia, which is not that sustainable. By the end of the month, I don’t have a lot of money left. Definitely not when you count materials and experimentation. But I can afford to have health insurance, and a house, and pay minimum bills, which frees you in some way. That’s the thing that’s amazing; when you are going to a place like The Core, or Skowhegan, for a little bit, you’re not worried about bills, and it frees so much space in your mind to not worry.

I think about Arnold having a poetry practice, and Gordon having a writing practice. And you, Michael, having this long-term project that is 12 years long. I think you have built resilience. There is another outlet, something they didn’t teach you at art school, but there is something that makes your life resistant to this thing, right? To something that embodies creativity, and not in the way that it fits into the studio practice. That is the thing that is very hard to teach, how to build within their practice, the thing that they didn’t sign up for; the thing that the class is not about. How to have that little je ne sais quoi, in your practice, that builds resistance.

That is the thing that, to me, is the hardest thing: how to transmit the resistance. I teach a class about the history of punk in Latin America, and what is very clear every year I teach it, is the lack of consciousness that peripheral movements have about how important they are. You don’t do it with the purpose of even pushing “the button.” You just do it as a way of subsisting, and then that creates a ripple effect into modifying paternal cultures. Then, eventually, that gets co-opted by capitalism, and everything gets fucked, and then a new movement that sucks comes up. Right? It is maybe a question for the panel: how to teach them … to be resilient, but there is no one way to be resilient, and it’s definitely not the class that I took.

Nato Thompson: At the Alternative School we have, basically, all these middle-aged, female avant gardists. One thing that’s beneficial is that everyone’s worked crappy jobs by the time they’ve come to this school, and many of them have given up on a career. I feel like the art world—artists—are very anxious, [whether] they’ve made it or not. It’s the most career-ignoring—and career-obsessed—field, maybe because the goal is not clear. Like you said, it’s nebulous. It’s nebulous. But the thing that I find most valuable is art as world-builder.

There was an artist in my class who had been sending postcards to her whole family, her whole life, and didn’t think that was an artistic practice. It was a way she navigated social relationships. Some find art as a way to legitimate their weird lifestyle and to find community. It seems like those intangible things are the things that hold up the most over the course of a life. It’s not the object. Sometimes I wonder how much art teaching is reifying the setup for failure. The object you make, the thing to display, but in fact it’s the process of living non-utilitarian that is the actual tissue, that is the world building, that holds it together through a lifetime.

These artists I meet, they’re, like, “I was sidetracked with kids for 18 years, and now I’m back. I realized art matters so much to me. The way I’ve made it work in my life was all this interstitial space.” I’ve just become so aware of how art is this connective tissue, more than a defined discrete object. That it is a world-building process. In a world that wants goals and all this stuff, can it be a tool of resilience in a really difficult, demanding, sensory-overloaded planet? You know what I mean?

Gordon Hall: I’ll just quickly say I didn’t mean to start some shit, because, God knows, if I’d gotten a job at RISD instead, I’d be teaching there with you. And, who knows, maybe someday I will want to be back in an art school.

Angela Dufresne: Oh my god. No, I was just fucking with you.

Gordon Hall: I agree with what Nato just said, which is that even with the precarity, even with the debt, even with the very unclear career path towards some kind of sustainable life—developing one’s thinking as an artist; solving problems as an artist, [problems] of having an artistic community, [problems] of having art be your life, regardless of whether you find any quote unquote success. These things are, I feel, worth a lot of risk and precarity.

Nato Thompson: And it’s what the world needs.

Angela Dufresne: As a middle-aged lady who has done so many crazy jobs, from being a bike mechanic to [being] a line chef, I can concur. Seriously.

Aki Sasamoto: Arnold was talking about role modeling as a teacher. I remember, recently, a student came from Cuba, with two kids and a wife; it was quite a risk that he took to come to the school. I had just become the director, and he told me, “Hey, I’ll be watching how you do this director job,” or something like that. I was, like, “Ooh.” [laughter] I knew, as a concept, that yes, a teacher is a role model and whatnot, but I realized I wanted him to think that it’s an easy job, rather than a difficult job. So, I tried really hard to work less. To role model this idea of having fun, and approaching the job as a job when necessary, so that I could give a better picture of a teaching artist to him.

I think it was an eye-opening moment for me. Working more is not a painful thing for me, but I didn’t want him to work more.

Another thing that really helped me was to start critiquing [the students’] teaching. So, I’ll give an assignment for them to teach a 15-minute workshop. Then, afterwards, everybody critiques their teaching. The students appreciate that because, when they are asking about teaching jobs, it’s usually so opaque. It’s like a restaurant job. Everybody pretends [that] they have three years of experience when they [actually] don’t, because every restaurant requests experience. So, it’s impossible to start, and that jump is really stupid. So, why don’t we just break it down, instead of, “You have to teach semester courses at university and have a career.” Teaching can start anywhere, in any way.

Michael Jones McKean: Time goes by quickly. We should probably begin winding down, but I want to give space for a final thought from everyone—something you’re thinking about, something for us to muse on as a group. Perhaps something optimistic to imagine. However, you want to treat it.

Arnold Kemp: My one final thought is three thoughts, but I’ll be brief. Hearing everyone speak, I think we’re all amazing in the classroom. My naive question is: How do we get the institution to look more like our classroom?

Something else: When I was an undergrad, many things were said to me over my five years, but something I really remember was my graduation speaker, Nancy Spiro. She said, “I’ve been making art for a long time. I feel like I’m just starting to get noticed, and it’s always been about resistance and persistence.”

I feel like I sound old, but it echoes some of what we’ve been talking about, resistance and persistence. I think what Aki just said was really important to think about—lessons we give students as they’re leaving academia. Lessons that might give them hope, or send them in a direction, or answer questions that seemed ambiguous to them. I’m going to come away from this [talk amid] thinking about an assignment like that, [one] that helps answer questions. I just wanted to thank Aki for that.

Gordon Hall: I’ll just add a final thought, which is that having this conversation is great. Even in this short time, I’ve learned a lot from each of you. I wish there were more situations like this, because once you’re linked to an institution, you tend to just be there. And when we’re not at school, we want to be in our studios. So, it’s hard to know where the time for this kind of thing would come from, but it feels valuable to me. And, speaking of learning, I also want to add that, for me, world-building in the classroom happens when I am learning alongside my students. Learning with them, from them. I teach a multidisciplinary, critique-based course where, each week, a different student selects the materials and leads the class, and I participate in the discussion having, often, also only read what they chose for the first time. I learn so much, and I try to model this for them—that there is expertise in being a teacher, but also, I’m learning and digesting new ideas in the present, with them. And that, often, these discussions end up informing my work and the things I think and do in the rest of my life. These are the things that keep me coming back to teaching. I’m facilitating my students’ learning, but I am also continually learning with them and from them.

Arnold Kemp: I’ve been folding my laundry while we’re talking. Sorry. Just so little time. [laughter]

Nato Thompson: I really feel, hearing from all you instructors, [that] there’s a lot of young people very frustrated with the world right now—reasonably so. But it’s really helpful to hear from those [who are] on the other side, navigating difficulties, in terms of your institutions or structures, and the magic that they produce …. I think, in some ways, [we’re] making a defense for art instruction, with a caveat that you’re aware of the problems—[all of this] is helpful for people to understand.

Maybe the arts need to make a better case for why they exist. This idea of world-building, [this] idea of producing new paradigms, it’s much bigger than making art shows for the museums. Maybe there needs to be a stronger case for why art is so urgent now. Maybe we’re making it privately, to ourselves, but solidarity within the arts is hard to come by. I think we all urgently, magically, believe in the arts, and understand what role they play, but sometimes I don’t know if folks are hearing it in a way that isn’t reduced to something very small. Maybe there’s a better case to be made for the arts today.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: I totally agree. I think solidarity is a wonderful thing that I always liked about other disciplines, but at UCLA we’ve been getting better and better at it. For example, hiring the best fit for what we think the artworld should be, and not necessarily hiring the most famous artists [who] applied to the job. I benefited tremendously because of that. I got this job when I was 34, and I didn’t have a career. So, I thought—

Nato Thompson: That’s the old UCLA.

Rodrigo Valenzuela: Yeah. [laughter] For example, in poetry and filmmaking, very fancy filmmakers will look at amateur films all the time. Stephen Spielberg is not [looking only] at James Cameron movies. That’s the thing in the art world that has always felt so strange to me. It makes sense to me, as a teacher, to take students to some studio of an artist that will have the space to host 17 students. But it’s very hard to give them a tour at Gagosian or David Zwirner, when the reality is that they’re supposed to be going to a group show in a house. That is the reality. In every other discipline, poetry readings—even for fancy poets—they are the saddest things. It’s five people in a bookstore [laughter], and it’s fucking amazing. When you encounter those things, you feel so rewarded. Every small, independent movie teaches you so much more. I feel like that is a problem in art; there is only looking up. As a teacher, I try not to do it, but it’s very, very hard. Even for me, because there are some people [whom] I admire, some people … I look at, people [who] get written about. It becomes this endemic problem where there is not, again, come back to this, the [necessity of peripheral] vision, [which] is very minimal in art.

Angela Dufresne: I feel this all so deeply, that the real sustainability for life as an artist is a social one. I’ve just been working more collaboratively and asking my students to work more collaboratively. But I also think there’s something haunting—Arnold brings this up in his question—how do we convince institutions, make the boards and higher leadership, understand and support what works in the classroom? This disconnect is massive. And that is jouissance. If I can define it as a word, it is the kind of magic of jouissance; it is unverifiable, it can’t be defined, and it’s singular, and it’s transformed. Identities change, hopefully, hundreds of times during a lifetime.

This … part, in all these conversations, [is] actually curatorially ubiquitous at museums now, this idea of self-care and self-organization. I think artist collectives and things like that are a big curatorial pitch. I think it’s reparative, on an institutional level, to make them seem as though they’re up to date with politics, which has to do with failing institutions. The failing institutions of higher ed, the cost-of-living cataclysm. That people are caring for each other in ad hoc communities and supporting each other. I think we need to acknowledge that this is also the manifestation of really, really big, bad, and ugly systemic problems in our culture. I will specify that as America, just because that’s been my upbringing. But when self-care becomes a radical politic—and I think I’m quoting Stokely Carmichael, or someone amazing like him, right now—then people are not actually tending to the larger structural problems that need to be taken care of in a culture.

I want to also make a shout-out for jouissance, for the fact that we are still in the front lines trying to do this unverifiable work, and I will die trying. I’ve seen many, many lives transformed—[their] values, in terms of how they define success, this need for validation, all those things that can actually be deflected by meaningful jouissance in a lived experience. This is becoming harder and harder to come by, on an institutional level. It can be fostered in the classroom. The students want it—they do—to be able to play and experiment in unverifiable ways.

Angela Dufresne is a painter originally from Connecticut, raised however in the town in Kansas (Olathe-Suburbs) that Dick and Perry stopped in before they killed the Clutters (In Cold Blood), and now based in Brooklyn. Through painting, drawing, printingmaking, performative works, and community building she wields heterotopic narratives that are both non hierarchical and unapologetically perverse, conjuring the rage, piss and vinegar and passion of being female in America in 2022. She currently serves as the department head of Painting at RISD.

Gordon Hall is an artist whose work encompasses sculpture, performance, and writing. Prior to joining the faculty at Vassar they taught fine arts practice and theory at RISD, Parsons the New School for Design, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in the Sculpture & Extended Media MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Gordon holds an MFA and an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in Philosophy and Studio Art from Hampshire College.

Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968) has been concerned with artists, writers, curators and educators working in art spaces founded by and in support of other artists for almost four decades. His artistic work and writing is rooted in research and process, and engages ideas about the permeability of the border between self and the materials of one’s work. Kemp lives and works in Chicago, IL, where he is a professor, and former Dean of Graduate Studies, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Aki Sasamoto works in sculpture, performance, video, and more. In her installation/performance works, Aki moves and talks inside the careful arrangements of sculpturally altered objects, activating bizarre emotions behind daily life. Her works appear in gallery spaces, theater spaces, and odd sites. Aki Sasamoto is a professor and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in Sculpture at Yale.

Nato Thompson is an author, curator, and what he describes as “cultural infrastructure builder”. He has worked as Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary, Creative Time, and MASS MoCA. He is the founder of The Alternative Art School, an online art school matching established top-teir artists with working artists around the globe.

Rodrigo Valenzuela is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography, video, painting, and installation. Using autobiographical threads to inform larger universal fields of experience, his work constructs narratives, scenes, and stories that point to the tensions found between the individual and communities. Much of Valenzuela’s work deals with the experience of undocumented immigrants and laborers. At UCLA, Valenzuela teaches graduate and undergraduate students in photography.

Michael Jones McKean is an artist and teacher based in the US and France. His work have been shown extensively throughout the world, and has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and fellowships at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Core Program; the International Studio and Curatorial Program; the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program’; the MacDowell Colony’; the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center; and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, among many others. He is currently an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Sculpture + Extended Media Department