[iDC] Praxis-based Ph.D.s

[twsherma at mailbox.syr.edu]

Hi Mary Anne and iDCers:

Thanks to Mary Anne Staniszewski (and Margaret Morse) for getting this
thread started. I've been watching these interdisciplinary PhDs develop
over the past decade, first in the UK and then across North America. As a
practicing artist it has always struck me as odd that artists would want
to go to university for eight to ten years (BA or BFA, MA or MFA and PhD)
before beginning their practice full-time. Of course an artist's practice
is more synonymous than ever with information provision and research in
this era, so there isn't the same disadvantage being in a university that
there once was.

I suppose there will be phds and PHDs in art praxis, in the same way there
are different kinds of MFAs. For those of us who work with graduate
students in three-year MFA programs, it is hard to fathom how people
develop their work sufficiently in a two-year MFA. Young artists rushing
to Brooklyn or LA or Toronto or London or Prague, sometime worry they will
lose their street smarts in a three-year MFA. You know, they don't call it
the 'terminal degree' for nothing. Artists functioning in a critical
academic environment often become so self-conscious and tentative they can
hardly go forward with their work (Marcel Duchamp said "art is a disease;"
and sometimes university-based art students are cured by the time they get
their diplomas).

With PhDs in studio we will have a greater diversity of types or classes
of artists: those who take their BFA to the city and start making art;
those who take their MFA to the city and start making art; those few who
take their MFA into a university where they balance their art making with
teaching and service; those who take their PhD into a university to make
art or conduct research and teach and provide service to a university; or
those who take their PhDs to Brooklyn or LA or Toronto or London or Prague
to start or continue to make art. (I guess most of them would be called
"Doc" at the neighbourhood bar)

Before becoming an academic I spent twenty years being an artist with very
little contact with universities. I conducted research and had shows,
made performances, published and interacted with other artists, writers,
curators, historians, scientists, business and government workers. I
moved in and out of several sectors, producing television, performing as a
broadcaster, consulting for a broad range of organizations, complementing
my work as an artist and writer. What I learned was that there were very
few borders between disciplines outside of academia. I'm told that this
is even more true today. Digital technologies and networks have knocked
down so many doors. Interdiscipinary studies continue to try to break
down disciplinary segregation in universities.

The reason I'm working in a university is not to forge interdisciplinary
links (although there are opportunities to do so), but to teach from an
interdisciplinary perspective, to share what I've learned before and after
becoming a teacher. I wouldn't have the right to teach if I wasn't
employed as a university professor. On top of the 25,000+ MFAs issued in
the USA and Canada over the past decade, we will now have hundreds of PhDs
in hybrid forms of art making on top of the composers already holding PhDs
scrambling for the right to teach. A PhD that can teach studio and history
classes and land research grants and commingle with PhDs across the
university might do pretty well in competition with the minions of MFAs.
Job descriptions in university art and media programs are becoming
impossibly complex.

The more degrees you have the more comfortable you are being in an
educational institution.

While the boundaries between roles in a digital culture are fast
disappearing, the gap between the street and the university is certainly
getting wider. My question is are these PhD studio programs closing more
doors than they are opening?


Tom Sherman

http://www.kunstradio.at/2006A/H5N1en.html