May 8, 2008
It is indeed an honor to be here today. When I came to Philadelphia in 1968 to teach at the Tyler School of Art, the Academy was the premier established institution for the teaching of the practice of art. The training that took place here had deep historical roots, and an established level of excellence against which student performance was measured, and it remains so. Academy Graduates define a level of mastery in visual art that is unique in the city and the region, if not the country. Its physical visibility in the center of this great city is appropriate, and a cause for celebration. Academy Graduates are imbedded in the fabric of Philadelphia, if not the nation, and turn up in every significant corner. The image of visual art in Philadelphia has been shaped by the Academy, its faculty and its graduates.
That same year (the 1968-69 Academic Year) was the last year that the Academy put together its survey of American Art, which had been an annual or bi-annual event since 1811. What I remember most about that show was the uneasy mix of old and new, of tradition rubbing up against innovation as represented by the inclusion of Franklin Watkins and Frank Stella. (If you do not know Franklin Watkins and Frank Stella, think of Lennart Anderson and Takashi Murakami in the same show). That standoff did not exist in other surveys like the Whitney Annual. Watkins and Stella in the same show gave fans of either ample means to be uncomfortable, and the unstable and shifting relationship between tradition and the new continues to provide the defining challenge and necessary edge to the enduring art of our time.
When you made a decision to study at the Academy you were choosing your style. If you had chosen Cal Arts, or UC San Diego, or the Museum School in Boston, your work today would be very different, and you can imagine how different. Your decision to come to the Academy has defined your work to this point, and the roots that have been planted here are very deep because they were planted at a moment when you were most unformed as an artist.
I think you made the right choice. But you need to be fully aware of the consequences of that choice, and its great strengths as well as what it has not provided. With respect to strengths, this Academy believes in teachable techniques: it places an emphasis on the acquisition of skill, places great value on the hand-made and well-made, on unique physically crafted objects. This is no small thing: In speaking of the importance of craft, Chuck Close said, “I wanted to get craft in there so people wouldn’t throw the paintings away. If they look like they're hard to do, people will value them. That means at the very least, they’ll keep them in the basement of the museum and maybe they will reassess them later, but if you do something with no particular craft, and it’s out of fashion, they will just considered it a piece of garbage.”
The Academy believes in the value of tradition and that the stupendous achievements of the past are worth linking up with. These values in my opinion are like money in the bank that you can do with as you please. If you don’t have it, or didn’t get it, you can’t spend it. And I have known artists with ambition but without the ability to realize their ambition: artist who can’t draw, do not know about materials and techniques and make decision by default. That fact, as well as the greater fact that digital technology seems to be changing everything in our practice is part of the reason that there is a look and feel to contemporary art that is specific but not necessarily stylistic.
So you have chosen your style, but that choice is not an end in itself. The certainties in place that have defined the Academy through most of its existence are an exceptional base, and never more so than in the present moment. Art however has never reached a state of stillness: it is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, constantly shifting, tilting to one side or the other – towards Franklin Watkins or Frank Stella, and that principal of uncertainty is its nourishment, its source of complexity; it makes it appropriate to its age, and it challenges you as artists.
You know the game, but you can’t stay there. You can’t simply get better at what you already know. Now, comes the hard part. You have to get to work (and remember as David Mamet said on PBS recently “Work is more fun than fun.”) The skills you acquired must be coupled with vision and vision can’t be blocked by old notions of circle the wagons, “can’t do that,” “us against them,” traditionalists against modernists, materialists versus conceptualists. The world is bigger than that, and the boundaries outside of school are not fixed. Keep an open mind. In the process of expanding your work, and in narrowing the gap between idea and realization, your confidence grows. This will not happen by next week, but with each success you learn to dare more, to take on riskier projects, to blossom as artists. The best work that you will do has not yet been done and is not behind you. When Bob Dylan sings “my future is now a thing of the past,” he’s not talking about you. The education you received here, coupled with your imagination will be the springboard to a new greater reality, and of course it is my wish for you that your gift will be recognized, appreciated and celebrated.
Finally, I know you have had to endure much advice and criticism in the recent past, some of it contradicting and confusing. I think my task, as commencement speaker is to end this confusion. Having participated in the marathon of final reviews recently, and heard frequent mention of the proverbial “fork in the road” that you have now reached (The easy way and the hard way and all the variations), the best advice I can give you is remember Yogi Berra’s observation, “When you come to that fork in the road, take it.”