Exhibition Catalog Introduction by Stephan F. F. Jost

The Master of Fine Arts Exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum for the Spring of 2002 will impress the visitor. It is an exhibition that stimulates the eye and titillates the imagination. What makes the exhibition a success? Perhaps it is all the hot pink (some of it hard and slick, other soft and fuzzy), or the robot that slowly scoots around hoarding little bits. Perhaps it is the delicate works on paper, the crisp photographs or human sized candy jawbreaker. The exhibition is strong because the work is of the highest standard both conceptually and technically with each art object rigorously vetted by the Mills faculty. It is strong because none of the artists have been seduced by an ironic and cynical posture. All of the artists attempt to engage the viewer in substantive issues that they find compelling and relevant. As a highly competitive program, Mills draws students from around the country (indeed the world) and thus inherently has an intellectually diverse group of students. The range of these pre-Mills experiences is evident and serves as the foundation on which the graduating artists stand. At its heart, this exhibition is the result of each artist having reached a higher level to create art that give us a clearer (and often clever) understanding of the world in which we currently live. I strongly encourage you to visit the Mills College Art Museum in person as I am convinced you will find it among the most engaging visual arts experiences of the year.

Stephan F.F. Jost
Director, Mills College Art Museum

 

Exhibition Catalog Introduction by Jeannene M. Przyblyski

Alchemy, it seems, is a concrete way of dealing with sameness.
—Robert Smithson

There is a lot of talk these days about the legacy of conceptual art. Most of it is simply that. The problem is that for better or worse hazy and indeterminate categories like "post-Idea Art" or "late Conceptualism" or the even more equivocally flat-footed "conceptually-based object-making" don’t begin to tell us why art looks the way it does at a given moment, or what its conceptual ambitions might be. And of course artists will always express horror at labels anyway…

That’s understandable, but avoiding the issue won’t help. So the first thing that should be said is that now more than ever we need to define the boundaries of art practice in ways that are vivid and punctual, not bland, agreeable and lax. After so many decades of the benign pluralism begat by Conceptualism (either accidentally or on purpose), the stakes may seem lower rather than higher, but I believe the opposite to be the case. The fact is, it is simply uninteresting to imagine art as an infinitely expansive field of endeavor, and even in the best of circumstances such expansiveness wouldn’t bode well for art’s future. The challenge is to locate practice at the very limit edges of whatever genre or convention is at stake, not to create generic art. What follows are some theses on how the former is achieved and the latter is avoided.

1. Art should be visually oriented even if it is not limited to the perceptual/experiential realm of the visual. Visual art should differentiate itself from the vast field of visual distraction that is everyday life because it is purposeful and lavish, and at the same time because it is purposeless and restrained. While sound, touch, smell and taste may play supporting roles, in the end an artwork should be held to critical account for its power as an image. An image can be a total experience.

2. Materials are the means by which we come to know about ourselves through manipulating and being manipulated by the surfaces, substances, textures and things of the world around us. While art can be made of almost anything or nothing at all, one difference between historical Conceptualism and the present moment lies in a renewed commitment to acknowledging that the choice of something or nothing is never neutral or value-free. Object relations are modalities of subject relations. Even just showing is still telling.

3. Process is so often to be defined by repetition, accumulation, serial tasks and images, classification and collection because these are important techniques through which the visual intersects the temporal (which may or may not intersect the time-based). Process may be immediate, intuitive, visceral—as direct as a punch in the stomach. Process is also about having to slow down in order to get where you want to go faster.

4. Form refers to a sense of structure that is as much epistemological and discursive as it is ontological and material. Form is not to be confused with formalism, but disenchantment with a merely retrograde formalism is no excuse for avoiding shape, scale and the relation of one element to another as issues of fundamental concern. Social systems are as constructed by shape and scale as aesthetic systems. Conversely, any aesthetic system is just another social system.

5. The forward-looking celebration of technology as such is a task better left to venture capitalists and the captains of industry. In the face of such unfettered boosterism, art should seek to make the most human uses of technology, no matter whether that technology is cutting edge or antiquated. This may be at most a question of metaphor. But a well-positioned metaphor may be virtually the only bridge over a futuristic abyss.

The artists featured in this exhibition provided the occasion for writing these theses. Then again, their work is also the best antidote to dogmatic theses in general. This is only to give due to the deserving. For together and separately these artists demonstrate the overarching qualities that make or break any aesthetic hypothesis: the deep conviction that art remains a thing worth doing and worth doing well, and the passion to seek out the lyrical in the most unlikely of places (and by lyrical I mean the beautiful, the startling, the poetic, the dangerous, the generous, the graceful, the unsettling and the unexpected). I wish each of them a continued good journey.

—Jeannene M. Przyblyski