A Lay Man’s Point of View
By Tucker Hollingsworth
I speak as a lay man, a maverick in this group, as I’ve entered the art world and become a full-time visual artist with neither an academic degree, nor any academic program. My photographic education was practical and my tutelage a one-on-one mentorship under Michal Daniel. Therefore I’m fairly auto-didactic.
I will try to talk when I feel my point of view is something helpful to further the panel’s explorations. But briefly, let me state my premise: At its most abstract, school acts as just another system to react to, to digest and filter, a dimension of experience that can offer entree and pass to particular key people in the art world, immediate irritation that leads to a young person conceiving a pearl, exposure to ideas or trends, time to catch up with one’s self, or distraction.
Again, I’m not an educator, but all learning has a relationship to the transference and self-flowering process that follows mimicking, from a blind reaction to what’s gone before into a restructured style that is, when successful, your voice.
To sum, education is about awareness and knowledge. Like the future, all of us are ignorant of what we don’t know, and measuring our ignorance isn’t something that seems to happen very much these days. Equally, quantifying one’s need to enter an education program because of your ignorance-quotient doesn’t seem to add up to the real package of why we enter or pursue anything. There’s got to be something more specific.
Quickly: While I attended the music department of an accelerated art school in high school and briefly the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music on a cello scholarship, I know more about the fringes of the arts school campus than anything else.
I’m more auto-didactically inclined. I very much respond to technique, tradition, and formalism, something that would historically belong to and be associated with an academy.
Post a Comment