Advice for Young Artists

In a conversation I had with a photographer a little while ago, she mentioned how terrible most of her teachers had been at the art school she had gone to. However, there had been one exception, a teacher whose generosity and dedication towards his students had known no bounds: Allan Sekula.

Anyone who went to an art school might share similar experiences. I personally never went to an art school. But for a while, I had the privilege to teach at some. In that capacity, I taught alongside a relatively large grouping of other teachers.

Seeing other teachers at work isn’t comparable to interacting with them as a student. But it was straightforward to notice which teachers were generous and genuinely invested in their students’ best interests — and which ones were not. In fact, the best teachers — or what I imagine the people possibly perceived as the best teachers by the students — were those who inspired me and who had me jealous of what they had to offer.

Being able to teach alongside Barbara Bosworth or John Priola or Lisa Kereszi or Steve Smith or Doug DuBois or Mary Frey — to mention just a few names (I’m sure to for forget some, but completeness really can’t be the point here) — was an experience that I will carry with me forever. I’m still making my way through the many lessons they imparted on their students, a much delayed process that is not always easy.

What I realized watching these brilliant teachers teach is that in their own ways, they were giving a part of themselves that they then would not have for themselves. Teaching can be cruel that way — if you approach it with the greedy, selfish mind of an artist.

A brief aside: for someone to make art, they will have to be greedy and selfish while they do it (but hopefully not when engaging with other people). Through that greed and selfishness you get thrown back to your own innermost core. And it is only from there, when you’re as true to yourself as you possibly can be, that you can — and will — make art that has the potential to touch other people.

Teaching is only cruel if as an artist you don’t understand that it actually is a two-way street. If you go about teaching as a job that entails imparting your wisdom on young people who paid you for that, you’ll not only be a bad teacher. You also will not learn anything yourself. And what’s the point of teaching if you don’t use the opportunity to grow yourself?

I’m not at all surprised to see that Alec Soth has now made a book about teaching art. Even as our approaches to teaching were very different — for example, Soth has a sense of humour, whereas I don’t; Soth doesn’t take everything always seriously, whereas I take everything much too seriously all the time; Soth thrives in group settings, whereas I’m often wracked by social anxiety, etc. — it was abundantly obvious how much generosity and curiosity he brought (and I must assume still brings) to teaching.

And so there now is Advice for Young Artists, a book photographed at a number of undergraduate art departments in the United States. I don’t think the book was made for people like me. I see it as aimed at these young people who for some reason or another decided that they wanted to go to an art school (this group includes one of my nieces).

I don’t know whether there ever was a good time to go to an art school. As far as I understand it, studying art has always been seen as a futile endeavour, as something that would put you on a difficult track as far as later career opportunities were concerned.

Of late, US academia has become ever more corporatized. Tuition rates have exploded, saddling young people with a shameful and absolutely disgusting amount of debt. Meanwhile, teaching opportunities have become rarer and rarer.

Now it’s not even your parents who might tell you that going to an art school might be a bad career choice. It’s also the larger public sphere that continues to devalue the humanities, because the jobs are where bombs are being made or algorithms are being coded or new financial products are being packaged.

All of that makes going to an art school a bold act. It’s the pursuit of something seen as useless by the larger public sphere. For that fact alone I love the idea of doing it, and I have endless respect and admiration for those who do it. Pursue the useless! Or rather: pursue what other people might see as useless, and then really show them! But I’m getting carried away. After all, it’s not my advice anyone is interested in. For all the right reasons, it’s Soth’s.

If people might be suspecting a lot of heavy text, they might come away disappointed from the book. That disappointment is solely on them — and not on the photographer. Because one of the biggest lessons the work has to offer lies written in the faces of the young students who found themselves on the other side of the camera. Their earnest and so obviously heartfelt pursuit of art making — where else in this world do we get to see so much genuine earnestness and heartfelt pursuit?

What do we see when we look at the larger public sphere? A sphere filled with fascist shysters, no-nothing venture capitalists, and soulless politicians who have to focus group their lunch order lest they eat the wrong thing. What are we seeing in their faces?

I shouldn’t be comparing Soth’s portraits with my own for reasons that are too obvious to mention them here. Still, I will note that the students in front of Soth’s camera exude that sense of genuine earnestness and heartfelt pursuit I spoke of above (whereas the ones in front of my camera typically look stressed or worried — which, granted, works well for the themes in my work).

In the end, of course, what we see in the portraits is the person behind the camera. In other words, the photographs in Advice betray their maker’s dedication to teaching and the full-on earnestness and dedication to a greater good. And that’s a really good thing.

Advice for Young Artists; photographs by Alec Soth; 72 pages; MACK; 2024

If you want to destroy a democracy, you need to do two things. First, you need to destroy the idea of a greater good. Over the course of the past roughly 45 years, neoliberal capitalism has done that job. Margaret Thatcher famously said the following: “who is society? There is no such thing!” If there is no society, no greater good, if, in other words, only the individual matters, then you can pursue policies that disassemble what holds societies together (public infrastructure, the social safety net etc.).

Depriving people of their means of survival then is not an attack on every single person (in other words, on society itself). Instead, it’s merely an attack on some people who, and this is usually implied but occasionally said, for some reason had it coming (the poor, foreigners, asylum seekers, women, etc.).

Second, you need to establish doubt as one of the drivers of public discourse. Arguing for truth (one of those larger goods) is tedious, and it takes too much time. Instead, you only need to instill in people that their own personal doubt, whatever it might be based on, is valid and that everything, however much it might be based on facts or reality, should be subjected to doubt.

In a nutshell, this idea pours gasoline onto the small fires in the reptilian parts of people’s brains: if it is acceptable that everything can be doubted, there will be strife. And strife serves the purposes of those who want to destroy democracy and replace it with something else (whether they’re a former TV personality with a severe psychiatric disorder or a street thug whose education was provided by the KGB).

Doubt, of course, has long played a role in the lives of human beings. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with doubt per se — quite on the contrary: the most dangerous people usually are those who are incapable of doubting themselves.

We all experience doubt throughout our life times. On a larger scale, we might question our life choices (“maybe I should have pursued a different career?”). On a daily basis, the sheer infinity of choices we face each come with a bit of doubt (“should I have bought eggs from a different company?”).

In other words, doubt is part of the essence of being human being. Doubt comes with — or creates — uncertainty.

It’s so interesting that even as doubt is essential to being human, if there’s anything we hate it’s uncertainty. For example, when physicists developed quantum theory, one of its most bewildering aspects was what became known as the uncertainty principle. The cat in the unopened box, to use the image widely known outside of the world of physics, should be thought of as simultaneously alive and dead. How can this be when in our daily lives we only know cats that are alive or dead — but not both?

Anna Püschel‘s Encyclopedia of the Uncertain attempts to provide an answer, even though it will largely depend on the reader her or himself to determine whether that’s the case. Some readers might embrace the uncertainty; others might discover the solution for their personal conundrum.

The book compiles a large number of text fragments with images and illustrations (the list of references runs all the way up to 517). Interspersed in between are excerpts from the artist’s own writing.

This is an unusual book for a publisher that has so far focused on a very specific style of photobook, one in which text typically plays a large role. There is a consistent didacticism to their back catalogue that is entirely at odds with what this Encyclopedia provides.

Even though the book purports to follow the conventions of encyclopedic books, it’s probably closer in spirit to a pre-scientific Wunderkammer approach. And how could it not be that? How could there be certainty in a book focusing on uncertainty?

Encyclopedia of the Uncertain is not the type of book that you would read like a novel. Or at least I am unable to do it (there are people, I was told, who do read encyclopedias). Instead, you’re much better off nibbling here and there, whether in the order in which the material is presented or not (I don’t think this matters).

Opening the book in a random spot might deliver something genuinely interesting, or it might not, much like reading it from the beginning (something I initially attempted to do) delivers the same experience.

What I especially appreciate about the book is that it rejects the idea of making ultimate sense, the idea of coming to a specific conclusion. Too often when artists attempt to engage in what they think is scientific work, the end results are simultaneously scientifically clumsy (if even that) and artistically needlessly didactic.

Of course, didacticism has its place — but not in the arts, the domain of the useless, the poorly defined and uncertain, the domain of love and doubt.

“As individuals in uncertain times,” the text accompanying the book says, “we not only have the right but also the duty to look for truth, and not blindly follow the loudest voices that (un)knowingly propagate falsities.” You get to hear or read that a lot these days: it’s the idea that you can fact check away fascism. But you can’t — unless you understand the idea of truth better.

In an episode of Seinfeld, George tells Jerry: “Jerry, just remember. It’s a not lie if you believe it.” To treat utterances by, say, Donald Trump as lies is pointless, given that there is no shared understanding of the idea of truth. I’m convinced that Trump actually believes all the things he’s saying, even if he changes his mind all the time. He’s not a liar: ordinary liars understand and accept the idea of an agreed-upon truth.

That’s why Trump’s world and Vladimir Putin’s converge. Putin emerged from the Soviet Union’s KGB. Under the Communist system, truth was defined by facts or reality. Truth was defined by the party and its ideologues. And that truth could radically change from one day to the next (as it occasionally did). People were sent to the gulag or shot in KGB prisons because what had been true the day before now was not any longer.

I think the only way to re-center the truth is to first re-center something else: the greater, universal good. You will need a greater good, because if there is no greater good there will be nothing that provides the solid ground truth can stand on. And that greater good will have to be unconditional and apply to everyone.

The one thing that most people still don’t understand is that the sciences work with doubt all the time. They acknowledge uncertainty, and they incorporate it into their work. Given that we live in a quantum world, it would be scientifically unsound not to do so.

While absolute scientific certainty can never be had, it’s doubt and uncertainty that actually drive scientific progress: what if there were a better way? What if we attempted to be a little bit more precise? What if in that tiny little imprecision lies a way to improve our understanding of what’s going on?

As individuals in uncertain times, we thus have to understand that uncertainty is not the — or a — problem. Doubt and the resulting uncertainty are what make us human. Doubt creates the most beautiful art.

Our main problem is our lack of a will to work towards the greater, universal good. After all, there is such a thing as a society, and it is rather beautiful, however imperiled it might be right now.

Encyclopedia of Doubt; text fragments, images, and illustrations compiled by Anna Püschel; 768 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2024

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