My experiences have shown that this intuitive and seductive method can also be very successful. In my first painting class, my teacher employed this method, asking me to loosen my grip on the brush so that the medium could help to clarify my ideas. As the son of first generation Indian immigrants unsure of their place in American culture, art-making in this liberated manner provided me with powerful tools for self-discovery. I made experimental videos on interracial adoption, compared the Mogul miniature tradition with Rothko and was compelled to carry my insights abroad to spend a summer in India promoting local art forms.

Though I have been inspired and changed personally by this process of using artistic medium as a vessel for internal discovery, I sometimes wonder if this freedom, while promoting individual growth, misses the opportunity to encourage something else. I wonder if there is a need for a discussion of the place of my work in a broader social meaning and context. Is theoretical study the only refuge for these considerations? I have become increasingly convinced that much more is at stake in a video or a painting than my own personal expression. And while my drug documentary was admittedly an extreme case, I wonder if it is ever really possible to create purely personal art. In other words, while I might have gotten myself mixed up with a set of particularly heavy social issues, I think it is inevitable that other students’ work will eventually engage some level of social meaning.

I realize here that I am treading on dangerous ground. In the first place, I must point out that many of the works of VES faculty are socially oriented and immensely powerful. Hooker Professor of Visual Arts Alfred Guzzetti and Arnheim Lecturer on Filmmaking Robb Moss have both made breathtaking films about, respectively, violent insurrection in Nicaragua and the decay of idealism in an aging generation. Even worse, my request for a discussion of broader social meaning in our art-making practice raises ugly specters of indoctrination. Stephen Prina was especially blunt in response to questions about professors’ potential role in shaping students’ feelings about broader social engagement saying, “We don’t teach propaganda.”

I agree that teaching an official party line is the last role we want our professors to fill. Indeed, one of the greatest triumphs of the art and art theory in the past 50 years has been to debunk myths of absolutisms. And, of course, I also see that despite my pretensions to addressing broader issues in my art, my desire for social meaning could easily be dismissed as merely my own idiosyncratic mode of personal expression.

THE LIMITATIONS OF FREE EXPRESSION

But I wonder if the freedom offered by VES doesn’t also amount to a new kind of limitation. An intensive focus on personal expression can result in a reluctance to work beyond one’s own horizons. I have often engaged in discussions about my own work with friends who share the concern that we are at times self-involved in our art, or overly pleased by our own idiosyncrasies.

I am not sure that the department’s advocacy of freedom stems as much from a desire to celebrate personal expression in itself as from a fear of addressing difficult issues of social context that have been problematized certainly, but hopefully not disposed of entirely. In response to my questions regarding social meaning, several professors countered with a worst-case scenario of propaganda creation. But I was not asking to be taught a fixed method for incorporating social context into my art. I was only asking for an open discussion of the issues at stake in art-making and its potential broader social consequences. I think that taking time out to explicitly address these issues in the department’s pedagogy could help strengthen the learning environment, whichever direction that may take in the years ahead. While I agree that firm answers may well not exist, I am not willing to give up the hope of pursuing them.