Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton Page B

and the hard-to-pinpoint femininity of the space suggest Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own . Ironically, given the name of the crit class (Post-Studio Art), the installation is a forceful reassertion of the importance—even the romance—of the studio. It feels as if a restrained outburst or cool tantrum has taken place here. It’s not grandiose or heroic but private and insistent. You can feel Fiona’s diminutive height and the lonely hours. And on one of the canvases, you can almost make out the word learning .
    Back in subterranean F200, the students sit in a different configuration from this morning. It’s 3:15 P.M . and Fiona, with a hibiscus flower still tucked behind her ear, has chosen to sit behind a table. One of the knitters has abandoned her needles and lies on her stomach, chin in hands, looking at her intently, while a guy lies on his back with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Fiona is setting out the parameters of the discussion. “I have a schizophrenic practice. I do dry sociopolitical work, but I always have, and always will, paint. I like the process. All the decisions that I made while making the Painting Room were formal. I didn’t want to work ‘critically,’” she says, sweetly but defiantly, as she pulls in her chair and straightens her skirt. “There is a real masculine aggression to iconic 1950s abstract expressionism. I wanted to revisit abstraction and explore the poetics of space with my own hand.”
    Shortly after Fiona’s introduction, a woman who is sitting on the floor and wearing her flip-flops on her hands says, “I find it interesting the length to which you conceptualize your work. A painting room requires a lot of justification in this class.” Her comment lingers until Asher says, “You see institutional limits? It would be good to be specific.” The woman, not a talker, fumbles for the right words, eventually spitting out something about the “ideological biases of CalArts.”
    A few days ago, a handful of students were loitering in the makeshift living room of the art department, a wide point in the hallway outside the dean’s office where a couch and a coffee table lend the feeling of an outpatients’ waiting room. There I took the opportunity to probe the jargon I’d heard on campus. Criticality was at the top of my list. “It shouldn’t be confused with being harsh or hostile, because you can be unthinkingly negative,” said a young photographer slumped on the couch. “It’s a deep inquiry so as to expose a dialectic,” explained an MFA student keen on doing a PhD. “If you’re on autopilot, you’re not critical,” said a performance artist, with a nod from her boyfriend. During our conversation, an African-American man of about sixty emerged from one of the offices. He turned out to be the conceptual artist Charles Gaines. The students flagged him over to pose the question on my behalf. “Criticality is a strategy for the production of knowledge,” he said plainly. “Our view is that art should interrogate the social and cultural ideas of its time. Other places might want a work to produce pleasure or feelings.” Of course! Conceptualism arose in the 1960s in part as a reaction to abstract expressionism. C riticality is the code word for a model of art-making that foregrounds research and analysis rather than instincts and intuition.
    After Gaines took his leave, I explored another word: creativity. The students wrinkled their noses in disgust. “ Creative is definitely a dirty word,” sneered one of them. “You would not want to say it in Post-Studio. People would gag! It’s almost as embarrassing as beautiful or sublime or masterpiece .” For these students, creativity was a “lovey-dovey cliché used by people who are not professionally involved with art.” It was an “essentialist” notion related to that false hero called a genius.
    Perhaps creativity is not on the agenda at art school because being creative is