Art Department Faculty Quadrennial Exhibition 2016 January 2016 | Page 15

transgress territorial borders. Often such research is not evident in
“the work.” Rather it is the generative move of the work. Such are
the immense possibilities of a university. Knowledge is an open well;
one can quite literally source anything within a stone’s throw and
collaboration is osmotic.
Such a rich and densely layered terrain leads to creative output that
is by nature complex and indeterminate. Artists in the academy
write, speak publicly, lecture, demonstrate, and gesture toward
an array of cultural impulses. This is a trope of the artist in general since the earliest days of modernism. The art of the twentieth
century was driven by manifestos and often such manifestos were
the by-product of complex systems of knowledge production. They
were the literal manifestation of performed knowledge, the result
of a kind of research that found its form in traditionally defined
disciplines as well as the most experimental theatricalized spectacle,
literary gamesmanship, or hybrid texts and screeds (consider Dada,
the Futurists, etc.). As such, they left behind an index of thinkingas-making-as doing,4 an archive of performed teaching as a virtual
manual for synthesizing both intellectualism and populism into art
practice.
Perhaps the works in this exhibition are best thought of not as artworks, but rather as the extension of art-lives. They strike us—the
viewers—optically, but they reverberate in our hearts and minds;
they are at once pedagogic and philosophic, poetic and literate,
provocative and generous. According to Barack Obama, “…we rely
on the arts and humanities to broaden our views and remind us of
the truths that connect us.”5 The truth of this exhibition is that,
artists who teach, open a door to creativity and to the dream of

a creative, engaged, and thoughtful life for their students, for the
public, and for the future of the arts as inseparable from education
and citizenship.
—Douglas Rosenberg, Chair, Department of Art

End notes:
1) Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object
from 1966 to 1972: A Cross-Reference Book of Information on Some Esthetic
Boundaries (New York: Praeger, 1973), 121.
2) Matthew Biro, “The Arts of Joseph Beuys,” The Journal of the
International Institute 2, no. 2 (Winter 1995), http://hdl.handle.
net/2027/spo.4750978.0002.203
3) Patricia Goldblatt, “How John Dewey’s Theories Underpin Art
and Art Education,” Education and Culture 22, no. 1 (2006): 17–19.
4) I adapt this wordplay from the title of a conference organized by
the scholar Miwon Kwon, entitled “Walking as Knowing as Making,
a Peripatetic Investigation of Place” (Spring, 2005, University of
Illinois at Urbana–Champaign), http://www.walkinginplace.org/
converge/others.htm
5) Barack Obama, “Presidential Proclamation---National Arts and
Humanities Month, 2014,” September 30, 2014, https://www.
whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/30/presidential-proclamation-national-arts-and-humanities-month-2014.
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