Dennis Hollingsworth

2nd Hand Symposium Report

I was able to get out and about late Saturday evening, after missing most of the big events going on in LA (I was about to list them all but shame caught up with me). Openings in ChinaTown were the draw, Mario Correa was opening his studio and Sister Gallery and Acu?a Hanson Gallery had openings too.

I asked a few friends who went to the USC Symposium earlier that day. What happened? Lane Reylea held forth and said a few profound things... none of which could be recalled. Bruce Hainley was brilliant, keeping quiet until nearly the end of the afternoon session when he got all volcanic. None of this vulcanism could be summarized afterwards, either.

One buzzword floated to the surface of my freind's memories: deskilling.

Deskilling is the name of an effort on the part of ambitous graduate art school programs to roll back the emphasis on technique inculcated in undergraduate art school. Evidently, theory and technique are taken to be antithetical, antagonistic. They used to call this "post studio" in CalArts back in the nineties.

Post studio was a conceptualist's triumph over studio practice, the status of the latter was lowered to spotlight the virtues of the former. I have heard tell that much of the attitude of the students of that time was that technique should be dumbed down, a kind of baby talk in art media. My take was that the generation of art students in the early nineties realized that the agenda of the 80's (critical theory) couldn't be carried on after the fall of the Berlin Wall and since they could not take the Oedipal turn and slay the father ("to question the answers given to us in school", L. Wiener), they infantalized the appearance of the medium even as they sought to raise the bar in the world of letters. Fair enough. This is a strong indication that the conceptual impulse that informed postmodern art from its inception with Pop art at the beginning of the sixties has been going strong for more than fifty years now.

Ok. That was then, this is now... but now is then?

This sounds like the same dynamic of the rebellion against the retrograde that I tried to describe in an earlier post. A small but important caveat: I didn't go to undergrad art school. When I left the Navy years ago with an eye to do what I am doing now, I substituted undergrad architecture for undergrad art. Call me naive, idealistic, easily impressed with the Renaissance Man model, hare brained, whatever... that's what I did and for better or worse, here is where I am now.

But there is one thing that I learned in architecture school: that there is no easy nor desireable separation between the ability to handle the medium and the ability to conceptualize the art form. What happened to fusion: finding theory in skills, finding skills in theory? Is the world of materiality so easily substituted by the world of letters?

Skillz.

That's the term the kids use in computer gaming. Can we learn something from the gamers? Maybe there's a difference between skills and technique? In the latter, the means is the end... in the former, the means is deployed at its highest level so that the end can be served cold (like revenge) and with bravado. Perhaps skills instruction should be minimal and skillz instruction should be maximal?

Just a thought.

Silly me... there is no end game in art, afterall.