2006 MFA Exhibiton & Graduate Program

CRITIC'S STATEMENT

It’s a pleasure writing an essay for a publication celebrating the 2006 visual art and design MFA graduates of the University of Illinois. For me that pleasure exists on several levels - personal, intellectual, social, professional, etc.—and it is very gratifying to associate my name, even obliquely, with this great university. Like many residents of Illinois, in various ways my life and career have intersected with the U of I; it is my state university, the single institution that can be referred to locally and around the nation as “Illinois.” Although my family is from New Jersey, both my father and my brother attended (albeit briefly!) the U of I, and I have regularly visited it as a lecturer and art critic since the late 1980s. A month does not go by in Chicago that I do not find myself interacting with artists and/or art historians who are alumni of Champaign/Urbana, or visit I Space, or hear of the doings at the Krannert, etc. I’ve written about many of the art faculty at the U of I, both past and present, and am very happy to count many of these artists as friends. It’s a great place, a great school, and every chance I get to visit is special to me.

This time around I was invited to Champaign/Urbana to meet with the graduate students whose work is noted in this publication, to do a series of individual studio visits with them and to return a month later and participate in the group final MFA critiques for some of them. It’s one of the most primal activities of our discipline—I walk into the studio of someone I’ve never met before and who has a very marginal impression of me as some disembodied critic whose writings he or she may not have ever seen. And for around 45 minutes we go at it, sometimes in front of actual work, sometimes looking at work on a computer screen, making connections, exposing biases and structures of thinking, etc. They explain, I opine (sometimes it’s the other way around!), and in what almost always turns out to be an extraordinarily intimate kind of aesthetic and philosophical commingling, something profound often occurs. Young men and women who are courageous enough to speak to an almost complete stranger and say “This is what I do, these are the ideas that move me, this is where I’ve made my stand, these are the problem areas I see, I’m aiming toward this, I believe this,” will get the best that I’ve got. It’s an unbelievably intense encounter and nothing I do as an art professional more exhausts me, and there’s also nothing I more look forward to doing. The final MFA critique is different, it’s public, the student is surrounded by his or her colleagues and faculty, and while there’s a bit of safety in numbers, there is also the pressure of a more theatrical environment, some-times slightly more adversarial in tone, with a variety of often contradictory responses to one’s work.

My visits to Champaign/Urbana were engrossing at that level, and I met students whose work I’ll remember for a long long time. With writing this essay in mind, though, I thought I would delve into some areas I don’t usually investigate in these situations. I was asked to breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the MFA students, to tool around town with them, and to meet with them as a group in a private classroom environment. While not everyone could attend those meals or meetings, enough did that I was able to debrief them a bit on their experiences as graduate students at the University of Illinois, to have them comment on the special qualities of this place from their very special vantage point. Why Illinois for grad school, I wanted to know, why not Wisconsin or Illinois State or Yale or the School of the Art Institute of Chicago? What did they gain from their years here, and what did they lose?

Of course, there was no single answer to these questions, or the subsequent ones engendered by our conversation. But there was consensus in three areas of defining interest—time, space, and support. Time—that intrigued me; the U of I is in most cases a three-year MFA program, making it one year longer than the great majority of its competitors in-state and around the country. Many of the grad students I meet in Chicago are in a hurry to achieve their Master’s degrees, eager to get on with their professional lives, and would see a required extra year of study as a negative. But the U of I MFA students I talked with universally praised their situation. They spoke of the luxury of growing as artists that third year, of the opportunity to teach that often accompanied it, that it gave them time to mature as artists and individuals, that it made an MFA program less rushed and manic than others, more an experience to be savored than a sprint to be endured. Space—I was a bit blind to this one, where I live you surrender space for other compensatory advantages. But the roomy nature of life in Champaign/Urbana meant a lot to these students, that graduate students were usually provided large and modern studio spaces, that a seemingly limitless spread out horizontal campus meant that they were not confined to cramped art cells, but given the opportunities to work at the scale and ambition they needed. Support—An unattractive aspect of late capitalism is that students often complete their education so crippled with debt as almost to begin their careers as indentured servants to banks and/or governments. By its charter a state university defrays a good part of those expenses, and these graduate students also felt that they were able to fashion a good deal—scholarship, teaching, etc.—with their university and would be graduating without crushing liabilities. Other issues more specific to Champaign/Urbana surfaced in our discussions, the great pleasure in going to school at a major research univer sity—as opposed to a more narrowly focused art academy-meant that students had access to minds and materials from whatever arena they desired. And the grad students were universal in making a positive out of the physical situation of Champaign/Urbana, its geographical location, distance from a major art center, somewhat insular nature, etc. One student celebrated it as “a self-contained biosphere,” a place encouraging individual development rather than herd impulses. A large and artistically diverse faculty gave the students a chance to consider a chorus of approaches and attitudes, and the sheer fellowship of one another provided an internal peer group. These students did exactly what all of us do in every phase of our lives—they found a way to work, live, and attempt to excel within the context in which they found themselves, and came to regard it as optimal and inevitable for their needs. They’ll do the same in their lives after the U of I, and I look for ward to hearing of their doings in the years to come. They join an incredibly distinguished roster of alumni of the U of I, a chain that extends further back than Ivan Albright and continues with the students who follow them in the unending sequence of individuals who choose visual thinking as a centerpiece for life. One thing I enjoy about the U of I is that it produces students such as these at the same time its university press publishes “Why Art Cannot Be Taught” by my friend and colleague Jim Elkins. To do so is not, of course, mutually exclusive or inherently contradictory, but reflective of what seems a willingness to preserve and extend a tradition while entertaining a challenge to its very premise. That’s pretty much what graduate students in the visual and design arts do anyway, they absorb and refashion, they stand at that amorphous transition point of what was and what will be. For these individual students we catch them at one of those wonderfully symbolic threshold moments, at the end of one process and the beginning of another one, that last one to take a lifetime. It is certainly appropriate at this special moment to congratulate them and wish them well, and if the work in this publicationis any indication, they will have much to offer.


— James Yood

(James Yood teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes regularly for Artforum, Aperture, GLASS, and American Craft magazines. He is the author of many books, including Spirited Visions: Portraits of Chicago Artists and Second Sight: Printmaking in Chicago 1935-95.)