Staging Professionalization

Abstract

The institutionally accredited artist—professionalized to a high-gloss finish and trained to exhibit bravura fluency in scholarly discourse—first appeared on the scene in the 1960s, a standardized product of research-based graduate education and the newly popularized MFA degree. Coding oneself as an artist in this climate became synonymous with internalizing the codes of formalized arts education. As a reaction to the shift toward compulsory academicization, radical pedagogical formats proliferated in artistic output of the 1960s. At precisely this moment, the lecture-performance emerged as a vital aesthetic form. Throughout the decade, artists mobilized the format to imagine how knowledge may be produced and disseminated outside the academy: within alternative institutional frameworks, beyond authorized communicative forms and through embodied modes of performativity. Bringing its hitherto nebulous history into focus, this essay traces the deployment of the lecture-performance by postwar practitioners, contending that the origins of the format lie in artists’ critical responses to the university and the impetus to produce streamlined verbal discourse surrounding their work. Robert Morris’s 21.3 singularly addresses the conditions of academic institutionalization to which artistic practice had become subject. Despite its contemporary prominence, the origins of the lecture-performance in the 1960s remain critically neglected. Current paradigmatic shifts within the academy and the post-Fordist conversion of the educator into a manager of ‘knowledge assets’ demand that we revisit these early pedagogical experiments with ever-greater urgency. Looking backward toward Morris and lecture-performances of the postwar period, this essay charts possibilities for radical modes of knowledge production, performative pedagogy and zones of resistance in the present.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This essay would not exist without Sona Hakopian and her fabulist narratives of the Soviet academy. It is also deeply indebted to the generosity and editorial input of Kaja Silverman, Karen Beckman, Avi Alpert, Iggy Cortez, and Daniel Snelson.

Notes

1 Several scholars and critics have noted the correlation between graduate training for artists in the 1960s and the rise of explicitly pedagogical projects, including Jenny Dirksen (2009: 13), Howard Singerman (1999: 166–80), Rike Frank (2013: 6–8) and Marianne Wagner (2009: 20–2).

2 Gabriel Rockhill usefully critiques art historical methods that hinge on the ‘binary normativity’ paradigm of success and failure (2014: 47).

3 Patricia Milder provides a cross-section of contemporary works deploying ‘lecture-performance as activism through education’ (2011: 14).

4 For documentation and textual materials from this project, see A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (Fusco 2008).

5 Walkthrough’s themes are related to Raad’s political organizing as a member of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, the group responsible for the Gulf Labor boycott (Gulf Labor Artist Coalition 2016).

6 The video lecture documenting the live performance is not for sale. Instead, non-profit collections can acquire it through a donation to Kurdish refugee relief efforts.

7 For an account of the ‘educational turn’, see O’Neill and Wilson (2010) and Hlavajova et al. (2008).

8 Other frequently circulated examples of lecture-performances from this decade feature a familiar roster of post-war artists, including Joseph Beuys’ How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), Andy Warhol’s Lecture Tour (1967) and Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (1969–72).

9 Norman Rice quoted in Singerman (1999: 129).

10 In this period, Morris performed a markedly different kind of gender identification from the one exhibited in 21.3, displaying ‘nostalgia for the lost masculinity of working-class manhood’ (Bryan-Wilson 2009: 125).

11 Amidst Art Strike’s ongoing protest of museums’ exclusionary practices and complacency with US military actions in Vietnam, Morris issued the announcement, ‘Museums are our campuses,’ further identifying with student activist populations (Bryan-Wilson 2009: 120).