Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

After logging 11 years as Chair of Art Center’s Graduate Art department, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe handed over the reigns to incoming co-chairs Diana Thater and Jason Smith. Gilbert-Rolfe has spent a total of 28 years on Art Center’s faculty, and will migrate into a full-time teaching position in 2015 after a sabbatical during which he’ll dedicate himself to one of the many writing projects vying for his attention (see Q & A below for details).

Throughout his tenure with the college, Gilbert-Rolfe has had a hand in educating an impressive array of art world luminaries, including Lynn Aldrich, Lisa Anne Auerbach, David Bailey, Olivia Booth, Mason Cooley, Aaron Curry, Kevin Hanley, Nate Hylden, Melissa Kretschmer, Sharon Lockhart, T. Kelly Mason, Rebecca Norton, Steve Roden, Sterling Ruby, Frances Stark, Jennifer Steinkamp, Alexis Marguerite Teplin, Diana Thater, Pae White, Jennifer West and T.J. Wilcox. At the same time, he has distinguished himself as a formidable writer and critical thinker, best known for probing philosophical and aesthetic ideas around beauty and other issues informing the way we interact with art.

Gilbert-Rolfe makes clear in his candid and enlightening responses to our questions below that he will continue to build upon this legacy as an educator and critic.

The Dotted Line: How have your eleven years as Chair of Grad Art (and many more years as a faculty member) shaped and informed your work as a critic and as an artist?

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe: I was hired by Art Center in 1986 to build the school a graduate program in art. I was influential in every decision regarding the program from the start, and don’t really separate the years in which I’ve been the chair from the years before them in many respects. Being a teacher is bound to effect one’s thinking about one’s own work, not least because one is persistently surprised by the thinking of new generations of younger artists who have come to study with one. At the same time, teachers in graduate programs are there on the strength of their work as artists and/or critics and what they say to students is, to at least some extent, inflected by the critical view set out by the work they do themselves. That is why they’re there. I think that if you teach, you are more aware, at a practical level, of how perspectives are changing. I am going to write something soon about the very different thinking of people born after 1980 compared to that of people born earlier. I’d not have been so aware of that were I not a teacher.

TDL: How did your approach to teaching and the department’s curriculum change and evolve over the years in response to changes in the art world in LA and beyond?

JGR: My own approach to teaching has not changed very much over the years. I think that if you teach graduate students, you must concentrate on what the student thinks she or he wants to do. It’s not your business, usually, to suggest they do something else. I think we try to keep our program current in regard to the theory side of things, but also, if one has a publicly active faculty that is also something which tends to take care of itself. For example, and in regard to the LA art world, major players in that art world are on our faculty. It might be possible to say, similarly, we represent in a general way the turn to the social that has characterized much art production in recent years. Although it has to be said that we represent much more than that. Our faculty is extremely diverse and on all important matters we run the program collectively. It is not so much a matter of the chair’s approach to teaching as that of the core as a whole. Do we collectively look and sound a bit different than we did twenty years ago? Sure, half the core has been replaced during that time. Do I sound a bit different?  I don’t think so. Although surely my thinking has advanced and with that to some extent changed over that period, and I have published the primary results and developments of that.

TDL: What are some of your most gratifying and pivotal moments and relationships that have emerged during your time leading this department?

JGR: The two most gratifying things for which I take full and sole responsibility are getting the program moved out of the main building on the hill early in its development and, which I couldn’t really get done before I officially became chair, getting my colleagues a grown-up salary somewhat in advance of the rest of the school. I had to get that done or we’d all have had to leave. Those are pivotal moments. The rest of my experience in the program has had lots of gratifying moments, many, no doubt, also pivotal.  I am very pleased we’re on the way to being a genuinely international program with schools in Germany and France with whom we have ongoing relationships which will, I hope, lead to further connections, especially with Africa, eastern Europe, Eurasia and South America. I think I have been of some help in developing good relationships with the rest of the school while chair, and have enjoyed especially trying to help with regard to rules, too many of which seemed to me at first sight not to be designed for a college of higher education as much as for a high school. Back to the program– I think the most gratifying experiences involve the achievements of our students, of which we have various sorts, and from which one derives correspondingly varied gratification. It’s always great when they achieve public recognition. It’s just as good when they don’t and there are good reasons for it. It’s fabulous, always, when someone grasps a difficult thought and one has some responsibility for that.

TDL: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in shaping the department’s identity and approach to cultivating artists?

JGR: We had to get the rest of the school to understand that we were going to do everything in a way that had nothing to do with the Art Center way of doing things. I took the job in face of all my friends telling me it couldn’t be done and it was quite a thing. Our program would not exist were it not for the support of the school’s Presidents, first David R. Brown, and subsequently Richard Koshalek. Now everyone loves us because we put the school on all sorts of maps it didn’t know existed, and in any case, we finally have a President who’s not only well-meaning and smart but actually has some experience of education. So great, the frontier phase is over and I may comfortably settle into being a nice, old guy professor while one of our first students to be a big public success takes on the chair’s job and moves us forward to a future bereft of institutional misunderstanding. Perhaps we’ve had an effect on the Art Center way of doing things, although I note history has also dictated that in all sorts of areas in the school in any case.

TDL: How did your work as a critic inform and shape your work as an exhibiting artist and vice versa?

JGR: I don’t know. Hegel said that criticism takes things out of the world but art puts something in. I start to paint where things can’t be put into words. As a writer, I just do more thoroughly and exhaustively what all artists do, in the sense that I decide why I think some things are powerful and others not. I think it may also be the case that in my writing I probably pursue a certain question about incompatible logics that gets acted out in my painting.  When Leonard Bernstein was director of the New York Philharmonic, his assistant found him staring for several hours at a Beethoven score he’d directed hundreds of times before. He asked Bernstein what he was doing and he said he was trying to figure out the logic of particular sequence. I think art’s about logic in that sense, and there are always incompatible but interdependent logics at work.

TDL: What are some of your fondest memories of working with students and faculty over the years?

JGR: We’re the program that put on a conference about chance at a casino on the Nevada border who’s star performer was Jean Baudrillard. That was pretty good. With regard to working with faculty and students, the whole thing is nothing but a blur of fond memories, punctuated, of course, with episodes and moments of the other sort. In general we have managed to maintain a working and dynamic relationship between hilarity and rigor. Those who aren’t artists might need to remember we… really believe the world should make it possible for us to do exactly what we want to do. That is what we are. That is who our faculty and students are. It is a total hoot and can only work if everyone’s mind is focused like the proverbial laser on the need to have a good reason for making such demands on the world at large. The reason is, we make culture to a degree that goes beyond only responding to it.

TDL: Beauty as an abstract concept has been a fertile subject for you as an artist and a critic. Do you think your ideas and interest in that subject were fueled and informed where we live here in California and your position straddling your native England and the US?

JGR: Beauty is the thing art and even more than that, art historians and philosophers, have tried to ignore or resist or diminish for the last two hundred or more years. I had written around the topic for about fifteen years before being prompted to address it directly by a writer who pointed out that the word ‘beauty’ had been used without qualification (without adding ‘mere’ or something like that to it) only once in art criticism in the twentieth century. I gave a lecture at a conference in Sweden in the early nineties that led to my book, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. The problem with beauty is it scares tough guys because it’s about the involuntary rather than meaning you can determine and (in principle) control. It brings out the prissy and defensive side of those who like culture to be about power as control. The sublime side of the differential is what I’ve been developing since. Beauty and the sublime are a differential which allows one to describe experiences. They’re not opposites, but complements, and date from the eighteenth century. The sublime is the incalculable and immeasurable (beauty always being perfect by definition and therefore complete).  =In Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime I relocated it to technology from nature, where the eighteenth century philosophers had found it, because nature is no longer so immeasurable, but technology is. I shall be developing my thinking in this area during my sabbatical with a view to adapting a phrase from the historian Lewis Bernstein Namier, who said, “Religion is the name we give to politics in the seventeenth century.” I think ‘the sublime’ was what the eighteenth century called what we call indeterminacy, and that this has implications for thinking about art and cultural production in general that need me to explore them.

TDL: What are some of the projects and ideas you’re currently engaging in your work?

JGR: Well, I just mentioned one. Adjacent to exactly that, my collaborator Rebecca Norton (MFA 11 Art) and I are going to be doing some work with Giuseppe Longo, a mathematician whose work we have been attracted to for more than one reason. One of those is that he has spelled out some of the incompatibilities I mention with a regard to predictability and what frustrates and precludes it. We’re working on questions (or exciting thoughts) that follow from thinking about the double pendulum. It will result in a show as well as in some writing. I also have a book to write about how I think we actually take in works of art and similar material. It’s my view the whole thing is accumulative in ways more subtle than we tend to think. In my painting, I’m about to do a set of works that will return in some respects to something I did thirty or so years ago in the biggest work I have made so far, but in other respects involve some thinking about which I’m at this moment not clear. I make work that puts complexity out there, makes it visible or is meant to. I knew Susan Sontag a bit and had no problem arguing with her regarding this or that, but I treasure and agree with her insistence that if it isn’t difficult, it isn’t much. And I want the experience of that difficulty to be one that is involuntary. You have to figure out what’s happening (if you want to) as you go along.

TDL: What advice would you give the incoming co-chairs?

JGR: They’ll ask for advice if they need it, but here are a couple of things since you ask: Enjoy going to the chairs meetings, for if you don’t you will run the risk of going mad. And bear in mind that from now even the tiniest suggestion you have will be greeted with automatic skepticism by your colleagues. Here, too, is a source of enjoyment, being as it is no more nor less than the instinctive embodiment of that persistent criticality we in our program seek to exemplify and engender in those who come to study with us.