Student Voices

Arts Spectrum asked undergraduate concentrators in Visual and Environmental Studies to voice their opinions on how academia influences creativity; the effects of teaching and mentoring by professional visiting artists; and improving visual arts training at Harvard. Four responded.

Arts Spectrum (AS): How have your VES courses influenced your artistic direction?

• They have helped me find it, since I had only basic courses in high school. I started with “Introduction to 3D Design and Artmaking” with Patrick Strzelec my freshman year, then moved to more advanced work in sculpture. I am now working on painting. The courses have given me the technical foundation for the work I am doing now. My concepts have evolved in the classes where I am able to pursue my own projects.
  
  
• I started out in photography. By studying the techniques of making still images I became interested in video and film. Each year my professors have given me undivided attention and invested interest in what I have wanted to express through film and video, making my work more precise and fluent.
  
  
• Before coming to Harvard, I had absolutely no artistic direction, so, VES has influenced me incredibly. I took my first painting class with Nancy Mitchnick, and that definitely piqued my curiosity about making art and how to think about it. And Martin Maloney’s class last fall is the one to which I attribute my seriousness about art; I would not be nearly as intellectually and emotionally invested in hart if it weren’t for that class. The VES department generally has such a wealth of information to share – not only do faculty members and staff give you advice, but my peers do too. I wouldn’t be anywhere without the direction of my VES buddies!
  

• As a VES-HAA [History of Art and Architecture] joint concentrator, I have the fortune of steeping myself in Art History and theory as well as art-making, and I know that my work would be very different if I hadn’t taken Ewa Lager-Burcharth’s class, “Introduction to Modern Art and Visual Culture,” last spring. I think it’s always good to know what people might say about art s that you’re armed to understand the perspectives that will be poured into your own work. Art history classes have provided a multitude of those perspectives.
  
  
• Yes. My freshman seminar on “Civil Society and Democracy,” which had a similar reading list to Social Studies 10, was pretty important and the core class I took on Enlightenment literature with Leo Demrosch had a lot of connections to the art I was interested in at the time. I was able to apply theory I had been reading as a background for my VES work in some of those papers.
  
  
• There’s a class I’m taking right now called “Globalization: Envisioning a World Community” which has influenced the spirit of an experimental video I will make this spring. It will be concerned with the experiences and stories of Harvard women’s expectations, goals, and beliefs that transcend cultural and physical boundaries.
  
  
• A lot of my work relates to modern design and architecture and I have been heavily influenced by classes I have taken in architectural history and urban planning. In my own work, I cite a lot of the projects I have examined in those courses. Coursework in Urban Sociology gave me a broader view of the forces that influence urban life. I am really interested in the effects of modernism and have found theses interests mainly through classes outside VES; the same ideas have entered my work.
  

• Martin Maloney, a visiting faculty member last fall, has been one of the most influential teachers in my lifetime. I think something that’s great about the VES department is that the resident faculty have a solid knowledge of how to work, and how you work, especially when you’ve been in the department for a while, and can help you along, and it’s great to get infused with new ideas by the visiting faculty. I find that it keeps me on my toes, never wanting to be complacent, and that’s a huge part of making art. I’ve learned that making art is about wanting to express different things, new things, all the time; that requires never stopping collating and collecting new images, new perspectives, new experiences, along with the familiar. And it’s really good to always keep that balance.
  
  
• Elisabeth Subrin was a visiting video artist who taught a class last semester on experimental strategies in video. She was completely honest, inspiring, and challenging. Her refreshing perspectives and techniques gave me new insight into working with video.
  
  
• I have had great experiences with the visiting artists in VES. They provide knowledge of the contemporary art world from the perspective of one who is in the midst of it and each brings his or her interests to the classroom. Since visiting artists are still primarily occupied with their own artmaking as a full-time job, they teach from a unique direction and provide practical knowledge of what one needs to be an artist. My interest in contemporary art was largely fueled by the presence of the visiting artists in my department. In turn, this has influenced my work greatly.
  
  
• I have had very good luck with the visiting artist program. Some of the most challenging courses I have taken were with visiting artists. Notably, working last year with Volker Heinze, who is a graduate level professor at the Univesitaet Essen in Germany, brought my work up to a much higher standard.
  

• Integrate an architecture studio class and also offer a multimedia class for freshman and sophomores, so they have a chance to experiment in various forms of art before they commit to track within VES.
  
  
• Make theory courses more rigorous, enhancing the advising system (a problem not by any means limited to VES), add visiting mixed-media artists to the regular schedule of courses and increase the number of advanced inter-disciplinary courses. In general I’ve had a really amazing experience and pretty good luck with my courses, but there were times when I wished that people had pushed me to try new things rather than stick with areas where I had already proven myself.
  
  
• I would like to see greater respect from the university administration for people who make art their field of study. It is honorable that people take part in extracurricular art activities, but I feel the students who are involved in the departments which deal with art are often overlooked. We would benefit from a graduate program in fine arts – this would draw more noted artists and more full-time professors, both of which would help undergraduates. Giving the department more space would allow more people to take VES courses; there is always a demand beyond what is available. As long as students want to take part in VES, they should be allowed to; this strengthens the department and helps make its important role more obvious to the general student population.
  The Brown Report on the Visual Arts at Harvard emphasized the need for students to learn a visual vocabulary to complement the humanities and sciences. I think this should be fundamental to a liberal arts education; thinking creatively in the artistic sense teaches a general way of synthesizing different ideas that translates well to other fields. An understanding of space, which we deal with constantly, is as important as the scientific process or the ability to analyze texts. Perhaps studio classes should become an option for filling the core. I would like to see a visiting critic program like those at architecture an dart schools. The more we can learn from people who work in the art world, the better I think it would also benefit students to give them more opportunities to create exhibitions with the work of artists outside the University. This would force them to make connections between disparate works.
  

• Particularly in painting. But I think that’s what makes creating so exciting – it’s the belief that something new can happen in your work, and you can put that into the world, contributing to the artistic dialogue. Theory is a little more like an afterthought; I think it comes in when I start thinking about my work critically – where is it fitting into the structures of the art world, art classifications, this moment of art. Sometimes, theory can be a way of understanding your work in ways that didn’t occur to you before. But I think the part I like best about making and practice is just MAKING, being totally immersed in the act of putting something together. It’s when theory and history get pushed to the back-burner that making is most exhilarating.
  
  
• I got very into theory earlier than most people and made a lot of really feminist/postmodern-influenced work from the end of my freshman year through early junior year. Now it’s actually slipped into the background: it’s definitely very important to learn the vocabulary of discourse, but after that I think it’s more important to figure out how to make the work stand by itself without a page of text to explain it.
  
  
• I feel history and theory are essential to the making of my work. I do not think that art can be relevant to contemporary issues unless one understands the context in which they work. I feel it is also necessary to understand the work that has come before one’s own – art is a dialogue and it is important to me that I am constantly responding to and referencing the past. For my work, I have avoided allowing theory to precede the making of the work. I don’t want theory to burden the work but do think it is necessary in order to place what I make among other contemporary artworks. The classes I have taken dealing with history and theory have been at least as important to me as those where I have learned the skills necessary to make art.

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