Looking Forward

I can’t yet coherently speak about Bourdieu.

On the other hand, de Duve’s ideas have helped me better understand my art school experience. I started out as an experiential painter, taught by a local artist who studied at the Art Student’s League in the 50’s. My memory of her words now has a context, as does what I have learned at SJSU with its strongly Bauhaus curriculum.

I find art theory helps me make choices in my studio work. For example, I’m remembering a discussion of genius by Kant, and its requirement for originality – which I apply according to my own definition. Is this work integrally of my own origin? There are outside influences which I may or may not be able to identify – but I still seek internal coherence.

In this class, I hope to find the appropriate academic theory bucket in which to place my attitude, practice and work.

I am leaving a comment here, because for some reason my link is leading me to Dore's other class Arth 277.

I think the two essays are similar in the fact that they are both addressing a heirarchy. Bourdieu is addressing the inevitable heirarchy of human nature-cultural field of production, and de Duve is addressing a heirarchy of learning.
I believe social dynamics are at play in any cultural field, whether it is art, literature, politics, etc. While De Duve is examining which field of learning should be nourished, Bourdieu is addressing the dynamics and the social "cultural field of production".
"The notion of field of cultural production...allows one to break away from vague references to the social world...with which the social history of art and literature usually contents itself."-Bourdieu
The two authors are both questioning a model of progression.

Whew

So the first time I read through Bourdieu it was more like seeing the words sequentially rather than actually reading. I, like Xiaoqing, found it difficult to absorb. De Duve was easier to grasp.

With both articles I found my mind drifting to fashion of all things especially with the statement by Bourdieu "Cultural producers hold a specific power, the properly symbolic power of showing things and making people believe in them, ...". In much of society, from the trailer parks to the high-end Manhattan condos, there are few things more influential than fashion and people blindly following trends because someone has made them "believe." Then I thought about traditional fashion/design schools that churn out the fashion BFA/MFA equivalents who learned by imitation prior to utilizing innovation--if they ever got that far--and comparing them with the upstarts in the fashion world who rely mainly on the notion of raw creativity and attitude to get their work out there and also with those who learned it as a trade (just translating "métier"). (In order I think about Stella McCartney, Zac Posen and Poupie Cadolle.)

Looking at the spreadsheet from last week detailing specifics about "Modern," "Post-Modern" and the ridiculously named "Post-Post-Modern" I focused on the bits that revolve around money and wondered which of these movements/thoughts/transitions/principles would garner the most admiration or success from the standpoint of de Duve.

I think this made more sense in my head before I began typing it out. I suppose what I want to say is that art, like fashion, is cyclical as I assume the methodology for categorizing, criticizing and teaching art is/will be.

The characteristics of the "cultural field of production" that Bourdieu defines in this reading (Power struggles, capital, symbolic exlusion/dominant definition, class structure) are evident in any field. I think that even if you decide to completely remove yourself from the commercial art world and do strictly anonymous Guerilla type art, you would probably allign yourself with other like-minded artists and eventually divide into dominant players with capital and the dominated rest. Its kinda human-nature, or at least democratic-nature. I wish Thierry de Duve would have talked more about his Paris art school and what teaching philosophies were to be implicated there. I think if you first taught in the Academic style, then Bauhaus, then the new-triad it would be a well-rounded art education. I see value in all three.

Bourdieu‘s writing is hard for me to understand. :(

Bourdieu talked about the homologies among all kinds of fields which relate to each other. Literary field is a site of struggles. The other fields are similar to it. The author talked about reducing the strategies, interests or struggles in literature world. He also pointed out that poetry is more and more completely reduced to its “essence”. Is this reduction influenced by Modernism?

De Duve, in my view, is a conscientious educator. He was trying to find the problems of the fine art education. With the change from Academism to Modernism (Bauhaus) then to Post Modernism (like Conceptual art and Deconstruction), the education form changed from imitation to invention to practice. I think all the changes in art world are inevitable because the art world is strongly influenced by the changes in the other fields. However some changes are negative as they make art school things a lot more complex, more subtle, and more ambiguous.
As the author said:”…rather misunderstood and badly assimilated, deconstruction is merely the symptom of the disarray of a generation of art teacher who have lived through the crisis of invention and have never themselves been submitted to the discipline of imitation. The result is that students who haven’t had the time to construct an artistic culture of any kind are being tutored in the deconstructive suspicion proper to our time.”

For me, my undergraduate is in the architecture department. I think we followed the way of imitation-invention-practice. I believe it would be better if teachers had encouraged us to do more thinking on art genres. It often limits the students’ creativity to over-emphasize memorizing the knowledge.

The notion of "creativity" of the artist is what seems to be of major concern for both Duve and Bourdieu. Bourdieu believes that artists (or what he calls "cultural producers") are granted "limited autonomy" and because of that they are able to create models of resistance against dominant social and political institutions. In this sense, artist can thus be "creative" due to the fact that they are not institutionalized. Institutions come into play in Duve's article too. He thinks that through institutionalization of art (namely limiting it to certain organizations of education such as art schools and museums), artists lose their sense of creativity. Instead they adopt a position in regard to certain ideological stand points that entered these (perhaps more French) institutions of education. In this sense, according to Duve, the "creativity" of the artist is gone and is replaced by mere "attitude."

One thing that remains vague for me is this: Bourdieu sees the artist as a "producer of culture." If that is the case, how can an artist be granted "limited autonomy"? In what sense is s/he granted a limited autonomy?

After reading these two articles, I have started thinking about my own "creativity" in art. Is it a natural talent, an interest, and an instinct? Or rather is it a mere "attitude" that I developed within the institutions I was educated at or the socio-political circumstances that I grew up with?

Re-encoded Power Struggles

An abbreviated quote from 'The Intellectual Field' by Bourdieu:

"... the aesthetic concepts that a certain aesthetic theory forces itself to ground in reason ... have functioned as symbolic strategies in struggles for symbolic domination"

I would agree that certain common social dynamics are at play in the art circles I know of as they are in other circles. Sometimes its power struggles, but sometimes its just ways of managing ambiguities together (or at least in parallel).

I think it's pretty interesting how he suggests that the specifics of the field are actually manifestations of the power struggles. This makes sense to me - I agree that people do that: re-encode certain things to be able to situate them in new contexts. Same (social?) drives articulated in any number of ways.

'When Form Has Become Attitude - And Beyond' by de Duve I found painfully descriptive of my art school experience. At least up until the Bauhaus style of teaching. My undergraduate program wasn't hip to the attitude-practice-deconstruction method. I fully endorse critically examining all those conventions - creativity, talent, attitude, etc. I also find it interesting to think about how thoroughly those notions have spread outside of art-schools. I find that most non-specialized-but-interested-in-art folks follow the creativity-medium-invention school...

My guess is that everyone is waiting for someone else to make an entry so they know what to blog about.
De Duve was a splash of fresh water after reading (or trying to read) Bourdieu. In this progression of models, is de Duve saying that the third triad is post postmodern as well as being already over with?