School of Visual Arts New York 25Th National

CONTENTS School of Visual Arts 25th National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists: Crossing the Borders, Round Table Presentations and Talks on the Arts at the Algonquin Hotel. October 19-21, 2011 Keynote Address From Purity to Inter-Animation Noel Carroll……………………………………………………………………………… 3 Conference Proceedings Infusion of Northern European Art to Eastern Cape Province, South Africa Gleny Beach……………………………………………………………………………… 13 Vicarious Diaspora Harry Walton Boone……………………………………………………………………… 17 Passport to the Arts ~ for the Fine and Applied Arts Roxanne Cammilleri ……………………………………………………………………… 23 A Compendium of Animals Patricia Denys…………………………………………………………………………… 25 Who's Hamlet? Whose Hamlet? Gary Eberle……………………………………………………………………………… 33 Chronotopes, Zone Borders and Waiting for a Place to Belong Susan Fecho……………………………………………………………………………… 42 Harpo Marx as Trickster Charlene Fix……………………………………………………………………………… 46 Herbaria: Border Crossers Extraordinaire Maura Flannery………………………………………………………………………….. 51 World Rock Art, No Borders: A World Museum David Harmon…………………………………………………………………………… 57 Golem and the Sufi Maureen Korp……………………………………………………………………………. 61 1 Art Transport Along a Perilous Postmodern Silk Road Janet Larson…………………………………………………………………………… 71 Art and Environmental Design in the Icelandic Landscape Lee Lines, Rachel Simmons and Morial Russo……………………………………..... 78 The Transmigrating Evil Genius: From Boothby to Rohmer to Fleming Tom Mack……………………………………………………………………………… 81 Chinese Painting in the 20th Century: Reflections on the Place of Originality and Tradition in Painting Eugene E. Selk ………………………………………………………………………. 87 Writing Art History as the Practice of Freedom Robert R. Shane……………………………………………………………………….. 97 Crossing the Borders Between Drawing and Writing: How One Discipline Can Inform Another Betty Spence …………………………………………………………………………. 103 Google, Richard Prince and Gagosian: The Courts' 2011 View of “Borrowing” and What it Portends for the Arts Carol J. Steinberg ……………………………………………………………………. 109 Terra Natala and Terra Incognita Bozenna Wisniewski………………………………………………………………….. 117 2 FROM PURITY TO INTER-ANIMATION Noel Carroll Maryhelen Hendricks: Welcome. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the School of Visual Arts 25th Annual National Conference on Liberal Arts and the Education of Artists. This year our keynote speaker is Noel Carroll who is the Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; writer of over 15 books, of which the most recent are On Criticism and Art in the 3 Dimensions; past President of the American Society for Esthetics; recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship and has two Ph.D's, one in philosophy and one in cinema. This far-ranging career also includes being a film performance art and dance critic. He has written five documentaries and he used to teach a philosophy course in the Humanities and Sciences Department of the School of Visual Arts. Let me say one more thing. I've been warned by somebody who knows him and who respects his work that Noel “unlike most of his breed, can think productively, if sometimes combatively, about most any subject. His talk will be about purity versus inter- animation, which he assures me is a word he's made up and he's going to define for us. Would you please welcome Noel. [applause] Noel Carroll: Thank you for that very generous introduction. I'm extremely honored to be here. My talk is called “From Purity to Inter-animation”. As I said, I'm very honored to be invited here because I actually began my career as a philosophy instructor at SVA in the early 80's so I know that people who come to events sponsored by SVA and SVA faculty and students are very discriminating and that I'll have to be very careful. The topic is crossing borders. The borders that I want to talk about are the borders between art forms. When I entered cinema studies at NYU in the 1970's, the department was actually in the process of arguing for the establishment of a Ph.D. program in film history criticism and theory. And the leading argument back then, in behalf of the existence of such a program, was that film was a discrete art form unlike any of the others due to its medium. So literature theater and even scholars in the fine arts couldn't adequately address the issues specific to film or at least that was the argument back in those days, because they had approaches geared to different art forms with different media. Because film was a very distinctive medium, the argument was that you needed special scholars who were sensitive to the possibilities of the media in order to do it justice. And, back in the day in the critical estate, the most popular adjective of commendation for a film was that it was cinematic and the worst thing that you could be was un-cinematic, which was generally a code word for theatrical where if you were theatrical, you were actually trafficking in the effects of another medium, and that violated the sense that the boundaries had to be very solid between the arts. Also a similar disposition was used to defend the still ongoing project of modernism as sponsored by Clement Greenberg and Michael Freed. It was argued that it was the role of artistic media such as painting to explore its own conditions of possibility self-reflectively. Paintings that is, should, by means of painting, interrogate the ontological basis of their own existence. Painting, that foreground did thereby acknowledging the flatness of the picture frame plane were esteemed because in that way they exemplified a unique feature of the medium of painting as an art form. Indeed, probably a lot of you remember that Michael Freed condemned emerging minimalist art as theatrical, thus accusing it of striving after the characteristic effects of an alien art form, that of theater and, for that reason, he was accusing it implicitly of impurity. Now, what I'd like to do is trace the origin of the philosophical commitment to the purity of the medium. I'll also then contest it and give it advertisement for an alternative 3 program that I call the inter-animation of the art, which is a call for impurity, a call for art forms to inspire each other, a call for strategies to move across the arts as the ideas of John Cage inspired developments in the choreography of dance theater, as well as the combines of Robert Rauschenberg. So I'd like to trace the theoretical itinerary of our conception of the borders between the various art forms, at least in the west, from the notion of the purity of the medium to our current acceptance of the porosity of media. Now, this notion of the purity of the arts comes in at least two different varieties. One is the autonomy of art view and the other is what you could call the medium specificity theory, the notion that each artistic medium has its own unique range of effects. Both of these conceptions come from the 18th century. I won't really be talking about the notion of artistic autonomy unless you'd like to discuss it in the question and answer period today and instead I'll concentrate on the notion of medium specificity or medium purity. So the first order of business is to say where this idea comes from and also why it's attractive, because it is very attractive. The background for the emergence of medium specificity thinking was the formation of what's come to be known as the modern system of the arts, which we'll also call the beaux arts and which we sometimes continue to call the fine arts. The core members of this system are poetry, theater included with poetry, painting, sculpture, music and dance. It's been argued that it's only in the 18th century that this system, which we could also think of art as a capital A decisively enlisted its core membership, that is art with a capital A is a modern idea. In pre-modern times in the west, the arts were any practice whose exercise required skill based upon training, rather than on some innate capacity like genius. So carpentry was an art and so was medicine, rhetoric, statesmanship, archery and navigation. This conception of art was descended from the Latin notion of the arts, which itself was descended from the Greek idea of [technay]. Often when these arts with a small a in the Latin sense were sorted into different categories, the basis of the category would really be social status. For example, the liberal arts such as rhetoric, grammar and, by extension, poetry, were those that were associated with freemen, while the contrasting practical or mechanical arts, such as armature, building and agriculture, were associated with slaves and laborers. That is, the liberal arts were liberated, the arts to be cultivated by the gentle folk, those who did not have to work by the sweat of their brow, as opposed to menial workers. Now, many of the arts that we presently think of as card-carrying members of the modern system of the arts were previously classified as useful or mechanical or practical. Painting, for example, was sometimes grouped with saddle making because saddles were painted. Even [Vassari] refers to painters as artifices, rather than artists. If the liberal arts were cerebral and/or theoretical, the mechanical arts including painting, sculpture and architecture were manual and held in diminished esteem for that reason. Also, musicians, even composers, were regarded more as servants than as artists. But in the 18th century, a consolidated way of grouping some of these arts with a small a took root. In 1747, Abbé, Charles Batteux publishes his treaties Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle. Batteux wrote we will define painting, sculpture and dance as the imitation of beautiful nature conveyed through colors through relief and through attitudes. Music and poetry are the imitations of beautiful nature conveyed through sounds or through measured discourse.

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