Letter from the Director
To Younger Artists, Concerned Students, and Dropouts,
Did you know that the Nile River flows North, which is unusual for a river. I'm sitting on a bluff at a bend in the Mississippi River looking due West. Which is unusual for this river. Below me, in a primeval gorge, is a huge bald eagle's nest in an oak tree. Eagles mate for life. By talon and beak they've built this 10ft diameter by 14 ft nest—a real collision of sticks for the two fledglings they are teaching to fly.
Did you know that the largest property owner in Manhattan used to be the Catholic Church? The largest landowner now is NYU. The largest landowner in New Haven is Yale. Let's think about this.
Let’s suppose you are considering a formal education in the visual arts. I sympathize with the thought because I have done it. And, I mention the two institutions above as I have taught in each extensively. But there is something in the land grab, the sprawl, that inversely reflects an acute issue. It is not exactly causal (I’ll take some liberties in this story), but it is telling.
When the growth drive of the University-host eclipses the utility and relevancy of the education they provide, the quality and concern of the student becomes lesser and smaller. First, a self-perpetuating and exponential administration develops. They are a clever and dispersed bunch, preoccupied with their own necessity. Then a language of expediency develops around predictable yield (of endowment, of publishing, of building, and most importantly, of reproducing). To pull off such a feat requires an effective consensus, the opposite of friction and critique. Consensus uses gauzy concepts like ‘the community’, or puerile, nonsense, words like ‘equity’ to protect and advance itself. Eventually the native tongue of the horde becomes an ideological miasma, and an infected goo trickles into the seminar and studio. I have had some on me.
While this corrosive process takes decades, there is a point where this entire enterprise becomes an unsustainable apparatus, dies, and begins to outlive itself. We are at that point. The apparatus-host is undead. Though somehow it is still standing, unaware of its own condition. Maybe mathematics made it out?
I saw an amazing exhibition last month at the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand in Paris. Called Apocalypse, Yesterday and Tomorrow, it featured a lot of war and evangelism, a lot of Goya and Dürer (alongside a few horrible pieces of contemporary art). Weeks following, I thought, what in the face of the end would be useful to know something about. Answer, discernment. Obviously, resilience and resourcefulness would help too. But visual discernment, that, I already teach. For instance, the 19th Century jurist Jeremy Bentham developed a carceral/prison model using sight, or the presumed sight of authority, to suggest a system of complete control through surveillance. He thought, what if you could get prisoners to warden themselves in a shadow theater of frictionless coercion? His schema, the Panopticon (a tower completely surrounded by a circular structure, the cells of which were completely visible, exposed) worked through the visual phenomena of axial transparency and lateral opacity. Much like communication today. Oh wait, but that’s horrible! It’s actually worse than that. The schema was designed to be internalized and replicated. In other words, it was designed to be contagious, producing multitudes of the unliving, milling around, checking their dating apps, unaware of their own condition.
All of this puts us in a real zombie wonderland. I suggest you grab something sharp.
Corey McCorkle, Director
Audit Institute
PS. A friend of mine asked why now? Answer, when I noticed that every time a former student asked for a letter of recommendation, usually for Grad School, I would get sick to my stomach.