Tales from the Crit

Hard to comprehend that today is the last day of the semester from hell for me, but indeed it is, and what a glorious day!
It was a wild ride, and it will be so nice to sleep in a bit later rather than wake up at 5 a.m., to maybe clean my house and watch a few dvds rather than work from sunup to sundown 7 days a week, for a few weeks at least, until the summer humanities classes I have registered for begin.
I think I have done well, still keeping my fingers crossed on my two big philosophy classes. I have a final video crit today at 1:00 and then a final exam in Dr. Todd's Western Intellectual History class, I have had little time to study for it, hopefully 15 weeks of attention and notetaking will magically flutter out of my brain tonight for this final exam.

Tomorrow is predicted to be a sunny day with temperatures in the mid 70's. Bring on the margarita's, bare feet and lounging on lake Washington in the boat :) I might even pick up a few geraniums for the deck.

It's been a great semester, I've worked like a dog, produced some decent work and have lots of ideas to spring board from over many disciplines and have deepened friendships with many talented artists. Life is good.

/big sigh of relief


Tales From the Crit: For Art Students, May Is the Cruelest Month
Micah Ganske

By JORI FINKEL
Published: April 30, 2006
AN early scene in "Art School Confidential," a movie by Terry Zwigoff and Daniel Clowes that opens Friday, shows a classroom of students analyzing one another's drawings. It takes less than a minute for one character to burst into tears. Her name is Flower. And she has just received a withering comment from her classmate Jerome, played by Max Minghella: "It looks like a lame Cy Twombly imitation to me. It looks like she did it in about two minutes."

So goes another day in art school, complete with the emotionally and intellectually trying ritual known as the group crit, short for critique. A staple of master of fine arts programs, the group crit consists of a student showing finished work to professors and peers, who then question, interpret, analyze, contextualize and otherwise assess its intentions and effectiveness. It's why so many students across the country right now are holed up in their studios, putting the finishing touches on their paintings, drawings and installations, in time for their last reviews.

"It feels kind of like being on trial, and your work is the evidence," Titus Kaphar, a painting student, said earlier this month, just hours before the final critique of his last year at the graduate program at Yale. "A faculty member will basically say: 'So you say your work means this, but exhibit A shows that.' " (Mr. Kaphar sounded remarkably calm for someone heading to trial, perhaps because he had already faced great scrutiny for his participation in "School Days," the much-discussed show of student work earlier this semester at the Jack Tilton Gallery.)

May is the big month for final crits, which often involves several professors weighing in on work. But group crits led by a single professor also take place throughout the year. Depending on the school, a student may face one group crit a semester, or one every week or two. The frequency of individual crits, which essentially resemble studio visits from a professor, also varies widely.

So are there really tears? "It does happen on occasion," said Gareth James, chairman of the visual arts program at Columbia University in New York, "but we try to make sure we are not just handing down judgments. These conversations are really about trying to get inside the internal logic of a work."

Catherine Opie, who teaches photography at the University of California, Los Angeles, adds: "There are criers. Usually women, but I hate to say that because it's so stereotypical."

Some of the tears can be attributed to the competitive climate of today's leading art schools, which have become so instrumental to gallery success. But much of the pressure comes from the loaded psychodynamics of the group crit, a ritual with counterparts in drama, design and architecture programs as well.

For not only are students exposing themselves in public to negative comments about their art, which is presumably close to their hearts, but they are fielding these remarks from professors they generally respect and students they invariably know, perhaps too well.

"They are your friends, your enemies, your lovers, your peers," said Lynne Chann, who finishes her M.F.A. degree at Columbia in May. After one rough crit, she said, she couldn't work for a couple of weeks.

"Think about the general nightmare of standing nude in public," said the painter Lisa Yuskavage, who earned her degree in 1986 from Yale. "But add something else you fear, like standing nude on a scale."

She compares the process to a friend's training in the military. "My experience was a lot like her boot camp," she said. "Only in the military they break you down to build you back up into a team player who serves a leader. At Yale they break you down and leave you to put the pieces back together."

Becky Smith, who earned her Yale M.F.A. in 1998 and now runs Bellwether Gallery in Chelsea, has another analogy: "It's like a gladiator spectator sport. And yes, it can be traumatic."

It's no coincidence that Ms. Yuskavage and Ms. Smith both attended Yale during the original "pit crit" days, known for being particularly brutal. Until six years ago, the art school was housed with the architecture school in a concrete building by Paul Rudolph that students compared to a prison, with a courtyard in the center known as the pit. That's where students gathered for spirited peer reviews and for some of the more formal final critiques, which drew the entire art department as well as voyeurs from other schools on campus.

Ms. Smith remembers a crowd of maybe 75 people on good days. "One of the meanest crits I can remember was of Everest Hall, who did these teeny-tiny, precious oil-on-copper paintings, old-masters-style paintings of gay porn stars," she said. "Everyone tore it to shreds. They thought it was illustrative, manipulative. They didn't like the subject, and they didn't like the presentation." (The market apparently disagreed. When he later exhibited this work in New York, Ms. Smith said, it quickly sold out.)

Now Yale's art school has its own building, but it, too, has a pit. And the pit crits, though said to be less torturous, continue. "The philosophy here is that you shouldn't sugarcoat anything," Mr. Kaphar said. "I can't think of a more rigorous program anywhere."

One reason is the Conceptual artist Mel Bochner, on Yale's faculty since 1978, whom many students singled out for being particularly blunt. He is known for telling students whose grasp of art history seems thin to "go back to the library and start with A."

Mr. Bochner declined to be interviewed, but the photographer Gregory Crewdson, who has taught at Yale since 1995, tried to explain the educational rationale. Applying such pressure to a student's work, he said, is meant to help them gain the critical distance and vocabulary to analyze their own work, and ultimately improve it. He finds that photography critiques also help students to think in terms of groups of pictures, instead of just individual shots.

"The crits that I received were always devastating," said Mr. Crewdson, who earned his Yale M.F.A. in 1988. "The idea is that what doesn't break you will make you stronger. But I always tell my students to forget 99 percent of what they hear. Find that 1 percent that really helps you."

Mr. Crewdson compares the experience his students are facing to group therapy. "My father was a psychoanalyst, and I see a lot of similarities," he said. "The act of putting your pictures up on the wall involves a lot of trust, like sharing your personal history. And the whole thing can be very theatrical, very emotional." He likes to end his crits by heading across the street to a bar, so that everyone can unwind over a beer.

If Yale represents one model, U.C.L.A. offers another — or at least John Baldessari's course does. He has taught a popular crit seminar there for the last seven years, and earlier he introduced the first group crit to the California Institute of the Arts, or CalArts, in Valencia. In all that time, he has never seen tears in his class, "though I don't know what happens afterward," he joked.

"For me the group crits are really successful if I could walk out of the room" and the conversation continued, he said. "I see my role as being a good moderator or navigator."

Some say this is typical of group crits on the West Coast, which are known for being more relaxed. Thomas Lawson, a CalArts dean, argues that this is for the better. "The courses out here tend to have more student participation — more of a peer review process," he said. "On the East Coast there is still a lot of faculty grandstanding."

Several of Mr. Lawson's students agreed. "Generally the faculty will quietly, or subtly, direct the conversation to make sure we cover certain topics," Kaari Upson, a first-year student, said, "but there seems to be a respect for the M.F.A. students to drive the discussion."

The most famous critique course at CalArts is taught by the Conceptual artist Michael Asher, who is known for his discursive endurance. Once a week, he leads a detailed discussion of works by two or three students, beginning at 10 A.M. and sometimes running until 10 that night. ("I throw away the clock," he said.)

If the crit dynamic has not fundamentally changed over the last couple of decades, student awareness of the ritual — and the attendant horror stories — has grown. In fact, some students are making art about the critiques themselves, which they then cheekily submit for review.

Last semester at Columbia, Lynne Chan, a second-year M.F.A. student, staged a boxing match called "Big Crit Brawl," pitting student against student in a ring in her studio and playing hip-hop music to set the mood. The performance drew on her training in Thai kickboxing and also served as a pre-emptive strike, as the professors decided not to interrupt the event to critique it.

A couple of years ago at Hunter College, for his mid-program review, which is closed to students, Jules de Balincourt, an installation artist, built a tree-house-like structure in the school gallery. His act of resistance was to hide in the shelter and videotape the proceedings. Around the same time at Yale, Hein Koh made a painting that depicted an entire panel of professors reviewing her work. When it was hung in front of that very panel, it made one faculty member so uncomfortable that he changed seats.

Today on the Yale campus, students still speak of a 1995 painting by Hilary Harkness of Mr. Bochner, which depicts him naked, sliding down an icy slope, being sexually assaulted by a cow. The painting, she says, was her way of turning the tables.

"Mel is very smart and a very good critic," said Ms. Harkness, who now shows with Mary Boone in New York. "But he once said to me, 'If I saw your paintings in a window, I would walk right on by.' Maybe he meant that constructively, but it was hard to take that way."

Mr. Bochner's reaction to the scene with the cow? "He didn't want to discuss it," she recalled. "He said he didn't care for revenge paintings."

But silence, the student artists agreed, is very rarely the goal. The only thing worse than receiving a harsh critique is to make a work that gets no reaction at all, whether because the work does not find an audience or the audience does not find it worthy of contemplation. That, of course, mirrors the experience of many struggling artists after graduation, even in today's youth-obsessed market.

And that was also, it turns out, the classroom experience of Mr. Clowes, the graphic novelist who wrote the "Art School Confidential" screenplay after his comic of the same name, both of which were based on his undergraduate days in the early 1980's at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. A cartoonist surrounded by fine artists, he felt neglected.

"Here I am spending hundreds of hours creating a narrative with words, while someone else puts a tampon in a teacup and calls it art, and all they can do is give me a lot of blank stares," he remembered. "The students were not interested, and my teachers were actively discouraging."

Did he get anything out of the critique process? "Nothing," Mr. Clowes said, before pausing to rethink the question. "Then again, I have a very contrary personality. The fact that nobody encouraged me may have helped in the long run. It probably helped me to feel like I was going in the right direction."