What if art schools' group critiques and end of semester reviews were all modeled on Liz Lerman's "Critical Response Process" ?
Artists guide the dialogue, framing it based on questions they have about the work.
An impartial person facilitates the discussion.
There are five discrete steps to the process:
Statements of Meaning by the Responders, Artist Asks Questions, Responders ask Neutral Questions, Permissioned Opinions, and Wrap-up.
respondents are required to respond to the work positively, based on multiple ways of experiencing the work. Any opinions offered by the responders are "permissioned", ie " I have an opinion about _ would you like to hear it?" The goal of the process is for the artist to obtain useful feedback on ongoing or finished work, and for the responders to deepen their insights into the work and their engagement with the artist.
I suppose I can consider myself lucky that my MFA department faculty doesn't engage in the all too frequent pissing contests I've heard described by colleagues from other programs. However, the end of semester reviews rarely seem to produce constructive feedback for the artists- they are more often used as a deadline for the students to produce a body of work to be judged acceptable ( or not) by the faculty. Students end up either trashed or praised, with little attention paid to the future of the work or the artist, to the meaning the artist is attempting to produce, to the possibility that learning and insight could occur as a result of 20 minds gathering in a room together to think about art.
This is why the reviews feel like a waste of time- not because we don't need stopping points at which to step back and assess the progress of our work, but because the paradigm used does not take advantage of the possibilities of the situation.
A consolation- the review format is such that if the artist feels empowered enough to take charge of the conversation, she can sometimes gain insight from the faculty. It generally must be pulled out of them, as they are likely to fall back on offering responses based in opinion and aesthetic taste.
And stay tuned for future: art reviews, thoughts on art education, images of recent work, etc...
(Images of student audience and faculty at Brooklyn College MFA reviews, May 2005)
