Ernesto Pujol: An American Visual Artist's Address to the National Council on the Arts

[Remarks given by Mr. Pujol to the National Council on the Arts.]

Thank you. I truly regard the opportunity to address the National Council on the Arts this morning as a humbling honor.

The National Endowment should stand as the symbol for a conversation between art and society, a critical conversation that was unfortunately hurt and interrupted several years ago, and that we must continue to try to heal and restore.

The National Endowment should be the country's forum where the sometimes difficult but necessary conversation between art and society should constantly be taking place. That is both the conversation that informs and anchors art in American society, and that is formative of American society through cultural policy-making. To allow this vital conversation to continue interrupted is not only to forego your leadership role, but also to allow art to evolve into a remote language and practice, and to allow society to only feed on popular culture.

From the series "Gulliver's Dream." C-Print. © Ernesto Pujol.

Therefore, I would like to thank those brave and visionary individuals within the NEA who have been trying to reintegrate selected visual artists into that crucial conversation. I sincerely believe that all proposal reviewing and grant awarding panels, all decision making processes concerning contemporary arts programming, as well as our cultural heritage and legacy, will not be complex and complete without the participation of American artists.

Part One: Selected Issues Facing American Artists

I have been asked to share with you some of the issues faced by individual American artists. And so, making use of a term coined by Carol Becker, Dean of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, that is, an understanding of artists as citizens, I would like to share with you the one overriding concern I have, and this is the increasing absence of individual visual artists from American daily life.

I would like to briefly present three issues that currently contribute to this:

1. The Graduate Structure

Aside from the fact that some undergraduate art programs often promote a false notion of the artist as celebrity, giving the impression that this is a career about fame and fortune rather than about cultural legacy, our training has become hyper-professionalized, in terms of required graduate college and university degrees. This means that young visual artists often graduate from MFAs with as much as 60 to 80 thousand dollars in student loan debt, according to anecdotal CAA information. Of course, many other young professionals graduate with a similar debt burden. But in the case of most visual artists, their job options are basically limited to teaching, and this financial burden is forcing far too many artists to immediately seek full-time jobs in academia, making it almost impossible for them to return to their original communities, or to move into new communities and being physically immersed in society.

Detail from the "Formation" installation. © Ernesto Pujol.

Our young artists are increasingly missing something that no art school can provide, that is, the first hand experience of struggling to make images from within communities, in daily dialogue with them. This lack of formative field experiences is creating a generation of artists whose work is narrowly informed by theory. And, in fact, if you analyze our visual landscape, that is one of the reasons why globalist cultural programming has increasingly become so appealing to us, because it brings back to our view the art of artists living and working within communities about their issues, in Africa, Asia, Australia, and Latin America.

Much of the appeal of globalist cultural programming has to do with unconsciously seeking the satisfaction of confronting, of witnessing experiences profoundly grounded in the human condition. But as valid as our thirst for catharsis through art may be (something that is as old as the Greeks), and as Toni Morrison has written in Playing in the Dark, to seek this in the art of other peoples (of The Other) is to perpetuate a basically colonial dynamic.

We cannot afford for all high art to be a closed conversation between artists about art. Some of it should be, for the sake of the healthy theoretical development of the field, but not all. Some artists should be supported in taking on social concerns. Therefore, we need to consider the creation of:

1. more visual art scholarships, for those who are in art school.
2. We should consider establishing a network of competitive regional internships in museums, cultural centers, and non-profit art spaces, by way of cultural field service in return for some school debt relief. This has been done with other professions and I believe we could also experiment with a program like this for visual artists.
3. And we must continue to award fellowships for professional visual artists, so that they can take time off to live and work within American communities. Of course, short-term residencies in professional artist communities are very important in providing visual artists with time and space to create, as well as feedback from colleagues. However, these programs tend to attract a certain kind of late Modernist practice. Therefore, nothing has replaced individual fellowships as bridges between artists and lay communities.

2. The Development of Curatorial Practice

Years ago individual artist fellowships were discontinued for a number of reasons that I will not address here. However, I would like to analyze the critical impact of that measure, as far as it meant that the NEA began to delegate that responsibility to others.

From the "Hagiography" series. Digital print. © Ernesto Pujol.

I would like to state as firmly as I can that the Federal responsibility to select and work with individual American artists is not something that disappears into the night from the cultural responsibility of a nation, of government, because of a law. It is a responsibility either that you embrace or that you delegate.

Therefore, five years later we have delegated this responsibility to a new set of gatekeepers, in the form of curators. Indeed, Arts International called the late 1990s the Age of the Curator. Curators have been empowered to do your work by receiving funding with which to interview, select, and commission American artists to do new pieces, site-specific pieces, and short-term residencies. And although delegating your responsibility to curators was sufficient for these years, it is not enough anymore.

Curators do not always have the pedagogical training to engage the many complex social issues that our increasingly diverse American audiences, our so-called minorities, ethnic groups, and new immigrants, face and bring to museums, if they come at all. In addition, this is complicated by the fact that international curatorial practice has evolved, in a very interesting way, into a pseudo-art form, so that art and artists are treated as the raw materials of the new curator-as-artist, in an elite conversation with other curators, and biennials often become events about a curatorial signature rather than about artists. In fact, curatorial projects have taken on the edge that individual visual artists projects used to have, and they are beginning to be censored just as often as these used to be.

3. The New Frontier: Museum Art Education

The NEA now stands at the threshold of delegating again its relationship with artists to others, of creating again a new set of gatekeepers. You are in the process of spending millions of dollars in museum art education. You are hoping that because educators are concerned with audiences, with children and families, they will identify the right socially-concerned experienced artists, or inexperienced artists whose work nevertheless has the potential to be used in such initiatives, and to select, interview and commission them to create new and site-specific pieces with or about specific communities.

There is no question that art educators deserve much recognition and praise, because multicultural programming often entered museums through the back (service) door, that is, through art education departments dealing with our increasing American cultural diversity long before curators still caught in Modernism did. However, in the age of the curator the high art world tends to dismiss educationally driven exhibitions and programming. If the recruitment of an artist does not originate in the curatorial department and that artist's project does not bear the recognizable signature of a nationally or internationally known curator, the art world will often consider the high art quality of that project compromised and will feel no obligation to fully acknowledge it.

Museum art educators deserve the national and international stature that curators have achieved. Nevertheless, most educators are not curators, and we stand in danger of polarizing the already tense relationship between curators and art educators even more.

There is no question in my mind that even though the NEA is not allowed by law to fund artists directly, many among you understand how crucial it is for the cultural life of our nation to support the work of individual artists. Therefore, I applaud your efforts of funding artists indirectly, first through curators' projects, and now increasingly through art educators' initiatives. But this is again a short term patch, and another five years from now you will be somewhat dissatisfied; and just like you have curatorially-driven projects that do not engage our general population enough, you will have educationally-driven initiatives were art quality is indeed somewhat compromised, and you will look again for new gate keepers.

Perhaps at that time you will seek to fund museum in-house cross-departmental projects through which well known curators and more empowered art educators come together to dialogue as equals, and to develop joint exhibition concepts and programming, expanding more wholesomely the indirect artist-funding structure that has developed.

Part Two: Reconsidering the American Artist

However, I would like to invite you to stop for a moment, to retrace your steps, and to gaze again at the American artist. And I am going to argue for the fact that if you are unable to fund visual artists as image makers, a fact that should change, I would like to challenge you to recognize that in America art making has evolved into a very complex social phenomenon where artists are often recruited by curators and educators to act as bridges between cultural institutions which are reevaluating their missions and fighting for their social relevancy, if not their survival, and disenfranchised communities.

During the last decade, you have funded curators and educators to fund visual artists to work with children, families, low-income communities, and new immigrants, confronting visual artists with many new roles. You have asked them to deliver bridge-building messages from institutions to communities, and to deliver difficult responses from communities to institutions that must change, as well as interacting with permanent historical collections, and explaining/translating contemporary art. Therefore, we now have a well-trained generation of artists with much experience. Thus, can someone please trust the American artist again?

If the NEA remains legally unable to give fellowships to artists as image-makers, can it recognize that there are artists who can and do generate curatorially and educationally complex projects on their own without the constant need for chaperoning mediators? The fact is that artists who continue to choose to work with communities, who are willing to open their creative processes to the general public for the sake of art education, who choose not to become full-time academics, to conduct their careers through the gallery system, or to pass everything they do through an institutional filter, are increasingly orphaned.

We need to reconsider new fellowships to individual American visual artists on the basis of art making that addresses education, community, and leadership. Of course, NEA fellowships reestablished within those humanistic parameters would scandalize many in the art world. But you would assume a remarkable visionary position, you would send a loud message that needs to be heard about the complex multi-disciplinary challenges of art making in America in the 21st century, and you would publicly reestablish and rejoin, as a significant player, the once interrupted and now urgently needed conversation between art and society. Perhaps your own destiny and dignity as a relevant cultural institution depends on this.

Part Three: A Brief Comment about September 11th

On September 11th, our political and economic life changed. I would also venture to say that on Sept. 11 our cultural life began to change. If I were going to point out one single feeling this has given me, I would have to admit that it has made me profoundly impatient. There is no time to waste.

During times of war we all run the risk of becoming visually hypersensitive, so that anything that appears critical of our heroes and our intentions is often regarded as somewhat suspect, maybe unpatriotic, perhaps even a betrayal. As visual artists, we cannot and must not lose our right to critically deconstruct the difficult images generated here and abroad by this armed conflict; our ability to learn from these images, to become wiser as a people, depends on this freedom.

I meditate on the necessary participation of visual artists in this process. I think of Salman Rushdie, condemned to death by fundamentalists because of his words. His case leads me to think that writers remain strong in our society, even as we read less. I also think of individual actors in Hollywood. And although I only pay attention to their craft and refuse to follow their lives through the tabloids, I am amazed by how their celebrity, when properly harnessed, can help charitable causes, and I am disturbed by how terrorists were planning to attack Hollywood in some way early on. Therefore, I stand humbled by American popular culture, so problematic, but such a formative part of our lives.

And so, writers and actors and journalists as American cultural ambassadors have all come under the threat of terror. And although I don't want any more weapons directed at anyone, I have to admit that as a visual artist I stand a bit jealous of the relevancy of these professionals within our national and international cultural consciousness, while we visual artists remain on the sidelines, harmless. We have been made so culturally invisible. Perhaps at a time like this, of so much fear, of not knowing who to trust, our nation should reconsider putting its trust back on its artists as citizens truly capable of helping it through a period when the meaning of symbols is changing so fast, and we are going to be refashioned as a people.

Thank you.

Ernesto Pujol is an artist whose work crisscrosses boundaries among sculpture, painting, photography, and performance art. His imagery draws on religious art history as well as contemporary conceptual photographic practices. Born in Havana and raised in San Juan, Pujol has received grants from the NEA/Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Regional Fellowship program, as well as the Pollack-Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Cintas Foundations. His work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, the Casa de las Americas in Havana, and El Museo del Barrio in New York. In 2000, he was an NEA Museums panelist, and in 2001 he participated in the Endowment's colloquium, Artists Making Work.

Images of Mr. Pujol's work shown above were presented at the National Council meeting. © Ernesto Pujol.

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