Studio Art Grad Speech April 2009

Each year I choose a theme. This year it's a double theme: communication and transformation --- two of art's most important roles. How do communication and transformation relate to art education? Training artists is a privilege. But there can be no teaching and learning without communication, and the process of education at its best is transformative. The point is to get artists to the point where they find their own voice and visual language. The English professor Lauren Berlant noted in a public lecture that the true pedagogical moment is one of profound discomfort. I've always liked that statement, because it does not describe passive learning. I take it to mean active engagement and critical thinking. When they merge, perceptions change and one's worldview shifts. I have witnessed such moments and they are very powerful; actually they are the reason I am an instructor.

The art historian James Elkins has written: "Art is among the experiences I rely on to alter what I am (The Object Stares Back, p. 41). This altering can be uplifting, disturbing, unsettling, or emotionally charged.

What does the theme have to do with art practice? Embracing the potential of art to communicate and transform puts you, as artists, in a unique position of cultural responsibility. You cannot impose meaning in your work, though you might have meanings in mind when you create it. However, once it leaves your hands and goes out into the public realm, you have relinquished that control, that ownership.

Meaning occurs in that space of exchange between object and observer. Viewers are not passive either. Artists must understand perception and formal means of expression, and have absorbed the history of visual culture in order to communicate deeply with viewers. Art always involves self-scrutiny and self-criticism because of that immense responsibility. But what could be more enriching than facilitating a transformation in another human being, to change that person irrevocably?

The highest aspirations of art are not to be beautiful or to endure, but to communicate effectively, sometimes forcefully, sometimes in a way that leaves us frozen on the spot or awe-struck. Or sometimes, art quietly and silently nudges us.

Of course, this is only if we really see it. Because often we're blind to it, already too overstimulated, rushed, distracted with everyday challenges and struggles. It takes time, effort, and concentration to look. Looking is far from straightforward. It is very rewarding, though, when images and objects burn into our consciousness, when we are psychologically marked by the artist's mark-making.

Whether art delivers buoyant optimism or gut-wrenching despair, it expands our knowledge and awareness so that we better understand our place, are better able to respond, and better equipped for our confrontation with reality. But we have to be open to it, risk vulnerability, be willing to have our assumptions challenged, even demolished.

Here's hoping you can achieve that in your work. I can't think of anything more important than the fine arts for instilling a sense of deep conviction about who we are and who we can be. Like poetry, art is what nourishes us at a level far beyond basic necessities or material comforts. It sustains us in ways that words fail to describe.

If art did not have this power, it would be superfluous, just another form of entertainment or easy amusement. But art is not easy. So if you have skill and determination, if you have something to say, if you have a stake in what you're doing, if you feel compelled to create, then I hope we've contributed to that in some small measure. Don't let anyone stop you. As the artist Jean Tinguely said: "Let us be transformed"!

Sandra Seekins
Studio Art Coordinator