The strange case of Steve Kurtz: Critical Art Ensemble and the price of freedom

Afterimage, May-June, 2005 by Robert Hirsch

RH: How did you get involved in cultural/social issues?

SK: What shook me out of my academic slumber was the U.S. intervention in Central America and the AIDS crisis because so many friends were dying.

RH: How did you get drawn into the arts?

SK: That began in 1985. I was into my PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities in Tallahassee, Florida and was getting more alienated by the day from abstract theoretical work. All through college most of my friends were artists. The academics were much too stiff and boring. Cultural intervention seemed like a viable way to reground myself in everyday life and politics. I was teaching film studies at the time and was interested in film/video production. This was the point that I met Steve Barnes, CAE co-founder, in a film class. From that moment, I was involved in concrete cultural practices.

RH: Did being an artist in the traditional sense have any appeal to you?

SK: No.

RH: What other people and ideas shaped your thinking?

SK: I'm not sure that CAE or myself had any unique influences. Most were the usual suspects. One of the odder ones was the Living Theater. They were really important to us in terms of understanding participation and how to blend the real and the hyperreal (symbolic realities that have no material corollary). The artists of interest were Group Material, Guerilla Art Action Group, Hans Haacke, Boal and the Feminist Art Movement (one had to be selective, but when carefully mined there is a wealth of cultural and political value to obtain from this movement). Others that were important for us were the Situationists, Felix Guattari and Antonio Negri. We liked anyone that demonstrated critique by doing. The proof of one's validity wasn't in the logic and specificity of the argument, but in the ability to produce concrete results when the theoretical principles were put into action.

RH: What made you decide to work in academia?

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SK: I have always been interested in pedagogy. As soon as I started as a teaching fellow in Sociology at UNT, I felt a compulsion to figure out how to be effective. The acquisition of knowledge is a pleasure whatever part one plays in the process and is one reason why open access to knowledge is being stopped as quickly as possible (as evidenced by my arrest for daring to engage amateur science). Plus the hours are good. It leaves a lot of space for cultural production that is not focused on the creation of profit.

RH: What were your first teaching positions?

SK: I worked in experimental programs at Vermont College and Goddard College in the early 1990s. I still work at Vermont College as Graduate Faculty in Art.

RH: How has academia changed?

SK: Academia is giving a greater nod to interdisciplinary studies. There seems to be a desire to offer more than specialized programs, and to investigate where disciplines intersect. The irony is that the university is still an enlightenment institution grounded in a form of knowledge management based in specialization, so it has no way to really implement this desire except in the most superficial of ways. Further, many areas, such as business, engineering, computer science and the hard sciences, are so deep into corporate and military relationships that they have had to close their doors to "outsiders" for fear of losing intellectual property. An additional consequence, intensified by budget cuts, is to create workers rather than thinkers. It's a sad time when doing is decoupled from critical thinking. Instrumentalization has intensified in most universities. So much of school is just about job training. And sadly, as with all institutions, universities are growing more conservative. Administrations are afraid of losing funders/investors, litigation of all types and political punishment. Consequently, the spectrum of research possibilities is at a low point.