UC San Diego UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Research and Teaching of Art Despite Its Disappearance: Art in Academia, 1957-1977 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fc1w4xm Author Ridlen, Timothy Michael Publication Date 2018 Supplemental Material https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2fc1w4xm#supplemental Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO The Research and Teaching of Art Despite Its Disappearance: Art in Academia, 1957-1977 A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice by Timothy Michael Ridlen Committee in charge: Professor Grant Kester, Co-Chair Professor Mariana Wardwell, Co-Chair Professor Brian Cross Professor Harvey Goldman Professor John C. Welchman 2018 The Dissertation of Timothy Michael Ridlen is approved, and it is acceptable in quality and form for publication on microfilm and electronically: Co-Chair Co-Chair University of California, San Diego 2018 iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page ......................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents …………………………………………………………………. iv List of Supplemental Files ………………………………………………………... v Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………. vi Vita ……………………………………………………………………………...... viii Abstract of the Dissertation …………………………………………………......... ix Introduction…………………………………………………………………....…. 1 Chapter 1 – The New Academic: Research and Art in the University …………… 22 Chapter 2 – Aesthetic Experience: A Project in Multiple Dimensions ….……….. 64 Chapter 3 – Art in Process: Thinking Through Art …………………………....... 108 Chapter 4 – A Critical Program: CalArts ……………………………………...… 157 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………….. 198 Bibliography ………………………………………………………………........... 213 iv LIST OF SUPPLEMENTAL FILES ridlen_01_pasolinis_crow.mov ridlen_02_js_in_ps.mov ridlen_03_teaching_the_alphabet_botany.mov ridlen_01_installation_documentation.jpg ridlen_02_installation_documentation.jpg ridlen_03_installation_documentation.jpg ridlen_04_installation_documentation.jpg ridlen_05_installation_documentation.jpg v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation project has taken its inspiration from the history of artists working in and around universities and art schools, but first and foremost I conceived the project in response to my arrival at the University of California, San Diego. I would like to acknowledge the support of the Visual Arts department, the University of California, my committee members, my colleagues, and other members of the campus community. Most of all, thanks goes to my committee chair and adviser, Grant Kester, my co-chair, Mariana Botey (Wardwell), and the other committee members, Brian Cross, Harvey Goldman, and John Welchman. Lesley Stern also deserves credit for her support and service during my qualifying exams and early proposals. There are many others to thank for inspiring me to pursue the academic work that has culminated in this dissertation. Chief among those are the faculty and advisers I encountered at the School of the Art Institute and the Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Arts—namely Karen Morris, Margaret Olin, Claire Pentecost, Keith Sanborn, Les Leveque, Cecilia Dougherty, and others. For comments on drafts of these chapters and other feedback, I am grateful to Hannah Higgins, Julia Robinson, and Blake Stimson. For assistance with archival research, thanks goes to the Getty Research Library, The Archives of American Art, and Jeremy Grubman at MIT’s Center for Advanced Studies Special Collection. Thank you to Juliet Kepes Stone for granting permission to quote from the Kepes Papers at the Archives of American Art. vi I could not have completed this project without the support of friends and loved ones. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Katrin Pesch, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Samara Kaplan, Sascha Crasnow, and Elizabeth Miller for their support. vii VITA 2007 Bachelor of Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2007 Bachelor of of Fine Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2011 Master of Fine Arts, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College 2015-2016 Visiting Lecturer, Al Quds Bard Honors College 2018 Doctor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego viii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Research and Teaching of Art Despite Its Disappearance: Art in Academia, 1957-1977 by Timothy Michael Ridlen Doctor of Philosophy in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a Concentration in Art Practice University of California, San Diego, 2018 Professor Grant Kester, Co-Chair Professor Mariana Wardwell, Co-Chair This dissertation looks at artists whose work was closely aligned with research and pedagogy in the American university from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Four institutional projects structure the work: a collaborative research proposal at Rutgers University, a research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a series of exhibitions at Finch College, and an experimental school at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). My analysis begins with Gyorgy Kepes’s Center for Advanced Visual ix Studies at MIT, a center for artistic research meant to bridge the visual arts with the tradition of science and research. The Center’s model of research shared key characteristics with the scientific tradition, such as discovering fundamental principles through experimentation (emphasizing the visible experience) and creative-problem solving. Next, I look at the “Project in Multiple Dimensions,” a research proposal written collaboratively by Allan Kaprow, Robert Watts and George Brecht for Rutgers University. I argue that these artists’ works offer a knowledge alternative not unlike Dewey’s aesthetic experience and intelligent action, or knowing through doing, and that this model worked against the dominant trends of the university. The subsequent chapters look at the Art in Process exhibitions at Finch College, and the collaborative Feminist Art Program (1971-73) at CalArts. Some instances of conceptual strategies that appeared in the exhibitions at Finch College (seriality and the use of information and language in the work of Mel Bochner, for instance) transformed the understanding of aesthetic experience—not abandoned it—by aligning it with the ability to disclose and construct consciousness or subjective experience. The final chapter looks at how this new decentralized notion of experience collided with a political notion of experience at CalArts. Key works by John Baldessari, Suzanne Lacy, and the Feminist Art Program represented the artist in society in competing ways, as either critically detached or socially engaged. A practice component also contributes to fulfilling the requirements for the degree, included here as supplemental files. x Introduction The title of this dissertation, The Research and Teaching of Art Despite Its Disappearance, is intentionally ambiguous. Just what does the disappearing “it” refer to? Since the postwar period, not only has visual art undergone an ontological change (a change in the way it exists in the world) but so have the institutions of academia, whose primary tasks are research and teaching. As a discursive construct, academia has not literally disappeared, but there is certainly reason to think that the American university is no longer what it once was. This dissertation looks at a historical moment in which the confluence of art, research, and teaching produced a set of practices that ran counter to the dominant expectations of the university. Shortly after World War II, American fine art academies and technical art schools, among other for-profit vocational and trade schools, rushed into a new set of university, governmental, and philanthropic relationships ready to take advantage of new benefits afforded by the GI Bill. In order to do so, schools that had postsecondary, non-degree granting studio programs now offered degrees and were recognized as accredited institutions by the regional, state, and professional accrediting organizations. One of those accrediting agencies was the newly formed National Association of Schools of Design (NASD).⁠1 The Association actively declared a new role for art departments and schools, one that would bridge the perceived division between fine art and commercial art education by appealing to a university model, especially as research came to define its activities. At their third annual meeting in 1949, the NASD asked its members in a questionnaire, first, “Can the seeming conflicts between modern fine arts and commercial arts, as the student so often sees them, be reconciled for him?” And second, in reference to the methods of the old French Academy, “With academic methods of art instruction generally discredited, have any important values been lost? Are we in danger of creating a new academic?”⁠2 This lingering question at the 1 start of the post-war period expresses an ongoing conflict between art as a scholarly pursuit and art as something that, ultimately, cannot be practiced or acquired in academia. One of the central tensions of art in academia—to the extent that it was constitutive of higher art education—concerns the characterization of art as a scholarly pursuit—like research—that combines fine art and practical skill but denies the possibility that art can be taught. I began this dissertation