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