Statement on the Role of the Visual Art
In Rice's Academic Community
Thomas McEvilley
Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus, History of Art
The purpose of education can be stated in various ways, including the attempt to pass on to the next generation the traditions of culture. Understanding education in this sense, studio art is as central to it as art itself is to the cultural tradition. To think of the western tradition without its arts is to think of it shorn of not only its greatest adornments, but also one of its most effective critical and analytic tools. It is hard to imagine, say, the Renaissance, without thinking of the work of Michaelangelo, Leonardo, and Titan. An education system which attempted to proceed without giving a central place to the arts would be crippled, decimated education representing a falsified and deficient view of tradition.
Nor can education's obligation to the integrity of tradition be satisfied by the study of art history alone. To study the history without also learning the practice would be to act as if the western tradition were dead and gone, a thing of the past, rather than a vital and muscular tradition still making its way into the future in a variety of avenues-science, philosophy, religion, art, literature, and others.
The history of Rice as an institution has been especially bound up with the sciences-assuming that the term includes the various branches of engineering. However, Rice's development into a full-scale world-class university represents the enlargement of its mind and its spirit in ways that affirm its original mandate as a center of learning for literature, science, and art. To see scholars turning their backs on the enlargement of spirit which opens the way to the arts is to see them not only betraying their own tradition, but also abandoning the ambition that lies behind Rice's growth into a full university.
Recent psychological testing has shown that high school students who have taken courses in the arts do better on the SATs. This fact shows the deep imbrication of one branch of study with another, an imbrication that seems to extend deep into the mind itself. But that fact does not serve as a justification for the arts, because they need no justification in terms of other disciplines. They stand in the forefront of our tradition with no sense that they must serve other branches of knowledge first, and are themselves second.
Visuality is a language as surely as verbality is. Plato recognized this when he showed deep uneasiness at the role as communicator the arts might play in his Republic. His fear of visual language and its special powers of persuasion showed the smallness of the conservative aristocratic spirit that underlay his vision and caused the philosopher Sir Karl Popper to label him an "enemy of the open society." That any branch or element of our faculty should show the same unease reveals the same smallness and fearfulness of vision.
The art department is proud of its responsibility as custodian of the visual language of our culture. In introductory studio classes we convey the essential vocabulary elements of this language-mark, line, value, hue, intensity, and so on, along with an awareness of the rigorous communication conveyed by compositional decision making. This level of exposure opens doors beckoning the student to deeper levels of aesthetic and critical understanding. While the aesthetic level of understanding is often regarded as a kind of happy celebration of the goodness of life, it must be stressed that the critical level involves a confrontation with the deeper and darker shadow areas of both society and the psyche, driving problematic matters into the open and clarifying them for conscious treatment. [Both Freud and Jung were well aware of this important contribution of the arts to the basic sanity of an individual and of the society around him of her.
Ongoing studio practice leads to the student into progressively deeper apprehensions-from the alluring sense of truth conveyed by pure or abstract forms to the specific, particularity of representation and the critical emphasis or shading of their distortions. Meanwhile, in concert with art history, studio practice begins to create an almost organic linkage between the living student and the past which has been formative on him without his awareness of it. It is doubtful that one can function as a fully formed human in a healthy society without knowing a variety of language forms-verbal-poetic, verbal-discursive, mathematical-numerical, visual-aesthetic, visual-critical-and merging and combinations of them.
For Rice, at this point in its expansive development, to begin to marginalize the arts-as, for example, not fit for "distribution"-would mimic the small-minded and fearful mentality of those who have for a decade or more been seeking to defund the NEA, and so on. The misunderstanding that leads to distrust results from exactly the lack of education we are working against.
Houston is an art center, with major museums, vital alternative exhibition and performance-art spaces, a large number of art galleries, and various forums for the discourse in which art and culture interact with the issues of society as a whole. The city art scene is an extension of the studio classroom, in terms of the formation of the humanity of its students-which is to say, its future.
Today, the Visual & Dramatic Arts department at Rice gives students the opportunity to focus their art education in one of three distinct tracks of study. Studio, Theatre, or Film. In addition, we supplement course work with distinguished speakers, visiting artists, exhibitions, film series, and competitive residency programs. .
Many of our students link their careers in art to other disciplines of study. We work hard to provide an active, artistic environment where individuals can pursue art interests while continuing other fields of scholarly study. We stress the importance of these connections and feel that the artwork produced is clearly richer and more diverse because of collaborative engagement.
Our faculty is a diverse group who contribute significantly in the profession of art on the local, national and international levels. In addition to our permanent faculty we annually host eight guest artist/instructers from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's Glassell School of Art. These MFAH Core Fellow participants are some of the most talented artists chosen from a competitive national and international pool of post-graduate artist/teachers.
Finally, Thomas McEvilley's words about the importance of art in education continue to resonate for those of us who fiercely battle on, inspired by those who set the initial rules of engagement at Rice like, John and Dominique DeMenil, Colin Young, James Blue, Bas Poulos, John O'Neal and many more.