CREATIVITY AND/OR FEAR
DRAWING. ART EDUCATION AND ITS SITUATION
Installation view from Tallinn Art Hall Gallery. February, 2011.
15 interviews on purposes and options of drawing studies with drawing teachers, students and curators. All the interviews can be read at joonmeedia.blogspot.com in Estonian language.
A selection of the texts in English below.
The goal of the interviews is to understand the current situation of art and drawing education and to guess forward how the situation should be.
You can find the sections from interviews with Andres Tali, Anu Juurak, Anneli Porri, Marko Mäetamm, Elin Kard and the thoughts of Drawingmedia (Siiri Taimla and Tanel Rannala).
ANDRES TALI
Siiri: Tell us about the vision where the fine arts' department is heading in the next 5-10 years.
Andres: I think it will deal more and more with “art” rather than with “technologies”. It is perceived more and more that art is not just a narrow technology. It is rather a question of attitudes, working methods, even the way you view or understand the world. Fine arts' education is also a matter of teaching the working methods.
Tanel: Would you describe the attitudes and the results of art education. Would you specify what you mean when you say that you feel about art education as an artist.
Andres: (…) Art is rather the certain way you think or act. It is important that you understand what you want to do, and on the other hand you realize what would be the best technology for it. (…) I see drawing more as a certain technology. The old and good Ando Kesküla (the former rector of Estonian Academy of Arts) said in the conversation about painting: ”so what’s so fucking noble in painting with oil colours. It is only paint and brush.” That is what I mean by fetish – it’s when the technology itself turns more important than what you’re doing with it. In every technology it is important what an artist can do with it. (…)
Tanel: Maybe you could name the characteristics of a good art?
Andres: I can name what is important for me. First – art should be interesting for the viewer. It should be communicative. It has been my goal. You have to make contact with the public and you have to make it rather quickly. If the art piece doesn't interest the viewers, they will just pass by. You have to have something which catches their attention in 10 seconds. All the rest – the concept, technology, standpoints – comes later. It is similar to kindergarten – when there is 20 children in the group and they all aim some attention from their educator, the only way is to shout as loud as you can. It is somewhat similar with the artists. (…)
Andres: For example we have a lithography centre in Estonia. Nobody forced them to establish this kind of centre. They just wanted it and they did it. And there's also EKKM (Estonian Centre for Contemporary Arts) – nobody gave them orders to do it. I have a huge respect towards the people who carry out their thoughts. It has to grow out from people then it will have a meaning. People have to believe in it.
Andres: You have to learn how to work. That's the only thing which will help you, what will prepare you for the future. When you go through the academy making only the minimum amount of work, then you have also the minimum results. And with those skills you have nothing to do with after graduating. (…)
ANU JUURAK
To map the contemporary drawing you have to map the “current situation” in the state first. You have to talk with today's artists who draw, you have to collect their works, publish monographs from these works. We could get to know how they think and what their artistic position is. Recently I've seen a lot of such drawing collections. Good work in this area is done in Netherlands. For example “Vitamin D” (D as drawing) is a very profound work – it has an overall view for the ongoing drawing processes. These kinds of surveys and monographs are most valuable, because the drawing as an independent medium has being seriously researched only in 21st century. It is being redefined. Serious institutions are dealing with matters of drawing. Every artist makes their own choices, but drawing should not be an aspiration on its own, where the drawing itself is a message and nothing else is important. You can express your ideas also in painting or new media. The question is which is the best medium for expressing your idea. To have a spark or inspiration you have to enter some “text”. It's a great work to get tuned in with a new theme and you can't teach art after some rules nor can you evoke creativity with uninteresting ways – that's why you have to keep searching for a new “text”. For example if you have looked and read a lot of materials and you have a whole room full of tags, you have been preparing for six days and in the 7th day you go in front of your students – it should be a staggering amount of inspiration.
ANNELI PORRI
Tanel: For whom and why is contemporary art?
Anneli: Contemporary art is actually for everyone. Why it doesn't function for everyone that is a question of education, probably a bit of a question of art policy also. Why? - For the same reason why Aristotle found the drama art to be a value. The reasons to show and tell stories stay the same – to share the values and moral principles, forming a social coherence, catharsis and also entertainment. Art as an investment of ideas! Only the contemporary art is rather a provider of critical alternative narratives. So you could get the feeling that it is rather destroying the coherence of society. That might also be the reason why there is so few public interest in art. Above all I like to think that art is something that prepares us for the real life: art as a simulation of society... (...)
Siiri: What did you mean when you said that not understanding art is a question of education?
Anneli: Art is not being taught as a certain way of communication, code or language. It is taught through objects. Actually the characteristics of shapes are secondary in valuing whether it is art or not. Mostly kids don't get that idea from the schools that art is a language which might reveal in different forms, it's rather regular grammar and syntax what they get.
MARKO MÄETAMM
Tanel: Do you have your own success definition for artist?
Marko: No, I don't. But I have a certain belief that the success is a matter of being obsessive with your field. In that case the success will come most certainly. You have to be a bit autistic and totally committed. If you are able to do everything else besides art then sooner or later you will start to do something else. There's no point in suffering as an artist when you are well off in some different area.
(…)
Marko: In eastern Europe nobody protects artists besides themselves, the scholarships are marginal, so is the art market, the public has problems receiving the contemporary art because the interruptions are so big. It's normal in the art world that artists are applying long lasting scholarships and move from one residency program to another. It's normal. We don't have these kinds of practices. There are lots of artists and too few means. Besides the society sees artists as parasites who live cosy and lazy life with taxpayers money.
(...)
Siiri: When you meet a student who turns on seeing your art – as you self said before – and that student wants to get the best know-how from you, what would you teach them?
Marko: I can tell about those criteria which I value myself – honesty, straightforwardness, seeking problems close to yourself rather than from somebody else's life etc. Or that you should live a kind of life where there actually is something to tell about. (…) Of course you can't force it. I can't say that go to that dark tunnel in the night and let’s see if you get beaten up and later you have something to tell about. But I can say that I was in that dark tunnel in the night and I got beaten up and that later on I made an art piece inspired by that event – that I can tell them with no problem.
(…)
Tanel: If Estonian Academy of Arts drawing apartment would function as a drawing centre, then what would be its tasks?
Marko: It should be a kind of centre what would be a good platform for doctoral studies, which carries out experimental art projects, which communicates with similar drawing centres in the world. Many schools abroad have this kind of drawing centres and these are as synthesizing laboratories of arts and other fields. They deal with drawing as a medium which is quite universal nowadays and because of that very open to other fields. You can make psychoanalysis with drawing, make research, measurements, illustrations, planning, diagrams, tell stories, write novels, use it as universal language to communicate with instead of foreign languages, control the traffic etc. (…) The current role of drawing in the process of studies is to be a basis of art education, similar to the piano in the musical studies. It is traditional and absolutely adequate, but too modest considering the vast potential of drawing. (…) My opinion is that drawing should be a foundation of a building as well as a roof. It should be the place where things get started and where they end, if they end at all.
ELIN KARD
Siiri: How you see the role of drawing in the three years study in Estonian Academy of Arts? What kind of competence it should give?
Elin: (…) As my subject is contemporary drawing, or whatever it means, but mainly it means that it's an independent creative project. I try to take away that fear in drawing by creating a picture that everything around you is a drawing. Not only the things which leave the mark. Even speech, language, letter, movement of the air and light can be considered as a drawing. (…) So that students can think independently what they can do with those marks.
(…)
On one hand there's no right to give students the picture that future is rosy, because it isn't. On the contrary, I have tried to make them nervous by telling them that school will be over very soon and then what. And most certainly if you step out of that door nobody will need you. But I am not doing it to make them depressed, not at all. They start to look for a chance to go studying abroad or they start to find possibilities to show their work so that they could get inside the art world. I try to make them panic in a good sense. I've always told them why I am doing it - many of them are jobless after graduating. To make them try very hard.
(…)
When artist shows that something is wrong in the society, then it would be ideal if the public starts to think about it. And somehow it should reach to the politicians, scientists etc. So that it would finally lead to some kind of changes. I'm not sure it will ever happen, but it might be like this. You have to keep pointing! And maybe the scholarliness of the society improves.
(…)
