Blueprint of an Arts Education

When I was asked to write about how art is taught in Harvard, I initially set out to speak to as many faculty members and students as possible. It was obvious from the outset that pedagogy in the visual arts is a difficult subject. It involves on some level navigating a difficult paradox in which a student is instructed on how to create an individual art.

I asked professors how they go about teaching the creative process, and students what they glean from this instruction. Their sentiments demonstrate a shared exuberance and powerful sense of freedom that ought to be a source of inspiration for the wider Harvard community.

Yet any whole-hearted embrace warrants further investigation. I speak from the perspective of a junior joint concentrator in Social Studies and Visual & Environmental Studies. I have now followed both the video and the studio art tracks for several semesters, focusing on the role of arts within movements of social change. Looking back over my experiences in the department, I am filled with admiration and, I must admit, a few lingering questions. Is there an implicit direction in the transformative freedoms that are afforded to VES students as they explore their artistic media? Similarly, does the blessing of unfettered self-exploration stand beside the risk of self-involvement?

The reflections that follow were prompted both by my conversations with students and faculty over the past week and by my own experiences in the department over the last two and a half years.

JUNK DOCUMENTARY

In the second semester of my freshman year, I enrolled in Alfred Guzzetti’s Visual & Environmental Studies documentary video class “Life Stories.” Within our first several sessions, we were given a camera, a list of a few essential videos to watch, and a simple assignment: to narrate the story of someone unaffiliated with Harvard in a five-minute video clip. In other words, within two weeks of beginning my first art class at Harvard, I had already been granted an exhilarating freedom—I found myself turned out into the world to make art.

As I was filming street musicians one afternoon, a man approached me offering a far more engaging story. I followed him on a 40-minute subway journey to his apartment. Once inside, he lit a flame, opened a drawer, and injected himself with heroin. The story we were going to tell, he said, would be called “Junk Documentary.”

I spent the last two months of my freshman year following him through his daily routines as he struggled with his addiction. Yet as much as I saw of the problems that surrounded heroin use, I was also constantly reminded by the man himself that the video should be an avowal of the excitement of his lifestyle rather than a critique of it.

I was faced with a dilemma. Was it best for me to focus on the negative aspects of drug use, perhaps even creating a video that I could present to treatment centers urging for greater retention of users, for methadone maintenance and for more holistic treatment practices? Or was the story really not mine to tell? Was I providing a chance to those outside of Harvard, outside of VES, to speak through the video?

On one level, the task of sorting out these issues was both exciting and liberating, and I was indebted to my professor for giving me that opportunity. The independence he gave me helped me gain a new degree of confidence in my work and a passion to do it well. But in retrospect, I wonder if I was really qualified. While my fellow students, and especially my professor, were extremely supportive, I myself did not have enough of an understanding of the situation to even ask for the help I really needed.

Is it possible that I was given too much freedom too early? Though students do benefit from the opportunities for exploration this liberty provides, it may also come at a cost. It begs the question of what motivates the teaching strategy that gives that freedom.

LEARNING THROUGH THE MEDIUM

I have asked a number of VES faculty how they teach art, and have heard similar answers from painters and filmmakers alike. I hear two shared aims: to show students the options provided to them by the materials they use and urge them to find their own creative direction. Every teacher I spoke to agreed with recently tenured Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies Stephen Prina that the mastery of technique is not an end in itself. Instead, they argue that technique must be put to the service of an individual’s ideas. Teaching students to explore their personal directions through work with materials seems to be the paramount pedagogical goal.

My experiences have shown that this intuitive and seductive method can also be very successful. In my first painting class, my teacher employed this method, asking me to loosen my grip on the brush so that the medium could help to clarify my ideas. As the son of first generation Indian immigrants unsure of their place in American culture, art-making in this liberated manner provided me with powerful tools for self-discovery. I made experimental videos on interracial adoption, compared the Mogul miniature tradition with Rothko and was compelled to carry my insights abroad to spend a summer in India promoting local art forms.

Though I have been inspired and changed personally by this process of using artistic medium as a vessel for internal discovery, I sometimes wonder if this freedom, while promoting individual growth, misses the opportunity to encourage something else. I wonder if there is a need for a discussion of the place of my work in a broader social meaning and context. Is theoretical study the only refuge for these considerations? I have become increasingly convinced that much more is at stake in a video or a painting than my own personal expression. And while my drug documentary was admittedly an extreme case, I wonder if it is ever really possible to create purely personal art. In other words, while I might have gotten myself mixed up with a set of particularly heavy social issues, I think it is inevitable that other students’ work will eventually engage some level of social meaning.

I realize here that I am treading on dangerous ground. In the first place, I must point out that many of the works of VES faculty are socially oriented and immensely powerful. Hooker Professor of Visual Arts Alfred Guzzetti and Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking Robb Moss have both made breathtaking films about, respectively, violent insurrection in Nicaragua and the decay of idealism in an aging generation. Even worse, my request for a discussion of broader social meaning in our art-making practice raises ugly specters of indoctrination. Stephen Prina was especially blunt in response to questions about professors’ potential role in shaping students’ feelings about broader social engagement saying, “We don’t teach propaganda.”

I agree that teaching an official party line is the last role we want our professors to fill. Indeed, one of the greatest triumphs of the art and art theory in the past 50 years has been to debunk myths of absolutisms. And, of course, I also see that despite my pretensions to addressing broader issues in my art, my desire for social meaning could easily be dismissed as merely my own idiosyncratic mode of personal expression.

THE LIMITATIONS OF FREE EXPRESSION

But I wonder if the freedom offered by VES doesn’t also amount to a new kind of limitation. An intensive focus on personal expression can result in a reluctance to work beyond one’s own horizons. I have often engaged in discussions about my own work with friends who share the concern that we are at times self-involved in our art, or overly pleased by our own idiosyncrasies.

I am not sure that the department’s advocacy of freedom stems as much from a desire to celebrate personal expression in itself as from a fear of addressing difficult issues of social context that have been problematized certainly, but hopefully not disposed of entirely. In response to my questions regarding social meaning, several professors countered with a worst-case scenario of propaganda creation. But I was not asking to be taught a fixed method for incorporating social context into my art. I was only asking for an open discussion of the issues at stake in art-making and its potential broader social consequences. I think that taking time out to explicitly address these issues in the department’s pedagogy could help strengthen the learning environment, whichever direction that may take in the years ahead. While I agree that firm answers may well not exist, I am not willing to give up the hope of pursuing them.