A history of the Whitney Independent Study Program - In Theory & Practice

ArtForum, Feb, 2004 by Howard Singerman

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"Finishing school" is not the only comparison a former participant has offered to explain the program's form or its effects; George Baker, a participant in 1994-95 who now teaches art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, has linked the program's founding in the late '60s to broader postwar educational reforms and "the events of 1968," but he finds one counterpart for the ISP much earlier in the century: The "Whitney Program and VKhUTEMAS: one doesn't hear much about such a comparison, but it emerges as a testament to the Program's intensity and integrity that the anachronistic grandeur of comparing the Program to arts education in postrevolutionary Russia seems even remotely plausible." (5) In its bookishness as much as in its lefter-than-thou position taking, Baker's likening of the ISP to Soviet Russia's first state art school might be seen by some as symptomatic of the changes the program has undergone since the '80s. But if one takes his appeal as an attempt to describe the central place of discourse in the program and the insistent questioning of a consciously theorized practice, then it finds a curious echo in Bordowitz's recent comment that the ISP "reminded me of Hebrew school." (6) Though Bordowitz goes no further with his analogy, one might liken the work of the seminars to learning a foreign language with a messianic past, one that raises broad questions of social identity and history but that is held in its form as alien. And there is in both Hebrew school and VKhUTEMAS something of the cult that the Whitney's detractors accuse it of being. Bordowitz's recollection of how critical attention was focused on practice at the ISP, and how practice came to matter differently for him, clearly suggests the intensity and integrity to which Baker refers and the avant-garde pedagogical practice his analogy reaches for: "I was never more self-conscious, that intensely in touch, or burdened by a sense of responsibility for my gestures, that my gestures have political and ethical consequences. How to make a work or produce a gesture."

By the late "70s," says Clark, "semiotics and poststructuralism as they are informed by feminism and Marxism had become the intellectual content of the program." While he claims that "curriculum is too grand a word" for this leaning, the theoretical turn was in any case institutionalized in 1978, with the initiation of a second seminar devoted to critical readings, and reinforced after 1981, when the Studio and the Art History and Museum Studies sections moved into the same Broadway space and, with Hupert's departure, Clark became the overall director of both halves of the program. The discourse that Clark introduced was situated in the art world and in relation to practice, rather than in academic art history, and even after the programs moved in together, there was a growing tension between artists and those in Art History and Museum Studies around theory and the seminar. The "turn to theory at the time was largely (although not entirely) driven by artists, [who] sought out theoretical sources as a way to sustain and complicate their art practice," recalls Grant Kester, who entered the art-history program in 1986 with a studio background and now teaches at the University of California, San Diego. According to Foster, who began to visit regularly in the mid-'80s, artists dominated the seminars and were "much more savvy"--more aware not only of theory but also of how to operate professionally. Dana Friis-Hansen, a member of the Art History and Museum Studies class of 1981 and now executive director of the Austin Museum of Art, recalls that "the art-history people were not very involved in the serious reading program that Ron had. It was available, but most of us had jobs ... so our time was tight.... I think I was there for a few [seminars]." Even without the reading seminar, the art-history students had a more structured experience than their studio counterparts: They served as staff for the Downtown Branch, and they were required to propose and write a research paper and given an individual tutor. From the program's inception, they were treated more traditionally as students.