Artists in Academia with Tim Ridlen

We speak with Tim Ridlen about his new book, Intelligent Action: A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia (Rutgers University Press, 2024). Ridlen holds a PhD in Art History from the University of California, San Diego and is currently Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa. In Intelligent Action, Ridlen challenges dominant readings of mid-20th Century art preoccupied with critiques of the commodity form by shifting critical focus from the familiar spaces of the gallery & museum to the contested scenes of US higher education. 

Through archival research and analysis of artworks by Gyorgy Kepes, Allan Kaprow, Mel Bochner, and Suzanne Lacy, among others, Intelligent Action examines how these artists brought alternatives to dominant conceptions of research and knowledge production. The book is organized around specific institutional formations—artistic research centers, proposals, exhibitions on college campuses, and the establishment of new schools or pedagogic programs. Formal and social analysis demonstrate how artists responded to ideas of research, knowledge production, information, and pedagogy. Works discussed were produced between 1958 and 1975, a moment when boundaries between media were breaking down in response to technological, cultural, and generational change. In the context of academia, these artistic practices have taken up the look, feel, or language of various research and teaching practices. In some cases, artists bent to the demands of the cold war research university, while in others, artists developed new modes of practice and pedagogy. Reading these works through their institutional histories, Ridlen shows how artistic research practices and artistic subjectivity developed in the long 1960s within and alongside academia, transforming the role of artists in the process.

During our discussion, we consider the significance of Ridlen’s theorization of "intelligent action" for a democratic politics centered around public money, educational provisioning, and aesthetic experimentation.

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Transcript

Scott: 1:28

Tim Ridlen, welcome to Money on the Left.

Tim Ridlen: 1:31

Thank you. I'm really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Scott: 1:33

So we have invited you onto the podcast to discuss your brand new book from Rutgers University Press titled Intelligent Action, A History of Artistic Research, Aesthetic Experience, and Artists in Academia. But before we get into this book, what its arguments are, what its big stakes are, we'd like to invite you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself, something about your professional background, perhaps your personal background, and how you came to write this interesting and compelling new book.

Tim Ridlen: 2:49

Sure. So I will start a little bit before my turn towards a more scholarly form of practice, because it's relevant to the book. I started out, you know, I went to an art school in Chicago, the School of the Art Institute. And so I was headed towards art practitioner. And then I went on to do an MFA. And then I was working freelance in New York, trying to do the art thing, trying to make a go of it while also doing things like, you know, freelance artist assisting, freelance art handling for galleries and things like that.Kind of an important detail was that during that time, I worked for this organization called e-flux, which I kind of use in the introduction of the book. We can talk a little bit about why that's important later. But then I was always kind of academically minded as was artistically focused. And I think the experience of living in New York and not knowing where your next paycheck was going to come from sort of prompted me to think about, to look at options. And so that's when I decided to go into a PhD program. But the PhD program that I went into was one of the first programs that was specifically for art practice, the way that it was set up though, was through an existing art history PhD program. So you do all the training of an art historian, and then they call it a concentration in art practice. This was at the University of California, San Diego. And so I thought, well, that kind of fits with, you know, I think I could maybe get into that program first of all, and it kind of fits with how I see myself. So I really went into that program thinking that I was going to continue making art, being an artist, finding a way to reconcile that with my more academic interests. And that is what happened to a degree. And then the book project, I guess, sort of was the culmination of a kind of successful transition to more academic scholarly modes of producing work. And I haven't really made a lot of art recently, but I have continued to do that or continue to think of myself as an artist in this weird split between writing and thinking about other people's art and potentially creating my own. So I mention all that because that is kind of relevant to the topic of the book, the book being about artists in academia. And that really came out of the experience of going into this PhD program. And it being a pretty new PhD program and kind of a new idea that artists should even think about getting PhDs. I just sort of entered this very self-reflexive mode because there was a lot of conversation going on about PhDs for artists, but that was more in Europe. And this program in the U.S., it wasn't really clear if this was going to take off in the U.S. And I actually, to be honest, I'm not really so sure if it has even now. You know, this was. What was it? This was like 2011 that I went into that program. And at that time, it was sort of there was lots of conversations and conferences for the College Art Association about whether or not this was going to become the new terminal degree. that of course hasn't really come to pass what has come to pass is that there's a lot of interest in artistic research i was i thought maybe this will be like kind of a trend in the during this time that i was you know working on this project and i wasn't really sure if it would come back but what certainly was also at play is that there was a lot a big interest in art artists and education, not just, you know, how do we educate artists in colleges and universities or art schools, but educational structures as potential forms for art making and art exhibiting. So maybe we're getting into the territory of the book now, but that sort of is, you know, coming back to this organization that I worked for, e-flux, they were kind of a big part of that in the early, well, it was sort of like 2008, 2009, I think, when I started working there. And around that time, as a result of this interest in Europe and PhD programs for artists and artistic research, in addition to certain turns of events that were connected to the artists who run e-flux, people started to talk about an educational turn in art. And then when you talk to people who've been around a little bit longer, they're like, oh, yeah, this always comes back every 10 years. So this is not really anything new, but at the time it seemed like there was an interest in education and artistic research, and those things are connected, but not necessarily the same. So that's sort of a long, longish answer to the question of how I came about it. And there's a little bit more, I mean, I can say, I think I would like to share a little bit more about e-flux just because it sort of explains, I talk about it in the intro to the book, and it sort of explains where I was coming from when I started the project. E-flux is this artist-run organization. It's not a nonprofit, and it's not just a gallery space or something. So I always have a hard time of describing exactly what it is. But people probably know it mostly because of their email announcement service. They send out email announcements for exhibitions, and museums pay them. Basically, it's advertising. And this money funds all kinds of interesting projects. And now it funds a very reputable and influential journal. Not an academic journal in the sense that it's not peer reviewed, but it is sort of leading a lot of intellectual conversations in the art world. And so a lot of that came out of the artists Anton Vodocle and Julieta Aranda, who were the artists behind e-flux. They started to use the revenue that they were generating to do some very interesting projects, one of which was the Martha Rosler Library. And that's kind of the example that I opened the book with. And Martha Rosler is an artist who's, I guess, best known for her work in the 1970s, going back to the 1970s, as a conceptual artist. She's got, you know, one of her best known pieces is this photo conceptual piece called The Bowery into Inadequate Descriptive Systems. And in that piece, she is sort of critiquing documentary photography, critiquing systems of language and the way that they construct our ideas of the social world. It's very 1970s kind of piece. But so Martha Rosler was this artist that the artists at e-flux were kind of looking to as a source of inspiration and legacy. Although my experience of it at the time was that their project, Martha Rosler Library, where they took all of her books and put them on display in there. They rented a space in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which just so happened to be exactly the neighborhood where, or blocks from the Bowery, where she had taken the images for this project. And they exhibited her books. And it was treated as an artwork at the same time that it was really just her personal library. And when you ask them about it, ask Martha Rosler or the artists at E-Flux about it, they say, well, this started because she was looking for a place. She needed to move her books. She was looking for a space to store them. And they were like, let's exhibit them, right? And it was a very successful project. It went from its first exhibition in New York, toured all over Europe. And that was part of that educational turn--people were starting to get interested in thinking about artists as not just people that make paintings or do projects, but as people that study and research and read. And what do they read? And let's look at that. That became an interesting thing to actually exhibit as the artwork itself. The other kind of thing, the reason that I might bring up e-flux, I don't talk about this in the book, But there was at the time an exhibition called Manifesta. I mean, there still is. It's a biennial exhibition. At the time, Anton Vodocle, the artist from e-flux, was invited to be one of the curators for this biennial. And the whole format for that biennial was they were going to run it like an art school. They were going to invite, they actually did, in fact, invite artists to apply. And then the idea was that they would come to, it was going to be in Cyprus. They would come there and basically instead of an exhibition, it would be like a school. They would invite artists to teach classes and run seminars and that kind of thing. This was kind of in the air when I started that project. And that's sort of what interested me in approaching it and taking it on as a subject.

Billy: 11:32

So in your research, I guess, like any good dissertation, it's part biographical. Did you find that your turn to academe and your reasons for it were common among those artists that you looked into in the 60s? Was it a way to kind of bide time-slash subsidize your artwork?

Tim Ridlen: 11:55

Yeah, I think that's definitely, I mean, yeah. So my, like I said, my experience was sort of like, I didn't really know. I was looking for, you know, institutional support. And there's all kinds of places you can get that kind of support. It's not going into academia, but that was sort of what I thought would work for me. And I think that definitely resonates with the artist that I was looking into. And people like Alan Kaprow, who is a major figure in the book, he's got a great quote where he says something like, you know, I used to think teaching was a way to buy the groceries. But, you know, now I've come to realize that it's much, much more than that. I mean, it's not super poignant, but he admitted, it kind of talks about this idea that in the, in the beginning, it was a way to pay the bills. But then he starts to, throughout his career, engage more and more and more with academia as a, as a, as a site and a sort of a format that allows him to do more participatory kinds of work. And so I kind of try to contest this narrative that art became more academic. That's kind of the standard line that you'll get from people like Howard Singerman, who has a major book on the art schools and artist universities. He kind of traces the history of the MFA degree. And that book is very well-researched, I don't disagree with anything that's in it, but it tells the story of a tendency towards more academic development towards academia that sort of culminates in the 70s. And I guess there's truth to that, but I also try to point out that artists like Alan Kaprow were working in universities, you know, in the 1950s, and not just working in universities, but making that a kind of central component of their work, right? that that actually starts much earlier and that it has important consequences, especially for the important alternatives to engaging with ideas about research in academia.

Scott: 14:08

So one of the big claims, kind of meta claims or controlling claims for your whole project is really putting pressure on a certain, let's say, dominant reading of mid-late 20th century U.S. art that is rather sour on the trajectory in which it is transforming in its tendencies, its aesthetics, its social values, that is pretty preoccupied with the problem of commodification, right? And could you talk about, you know, who's behind those kinds of arguments? What are they really saying? And what does shifting the scene from, let's say, the gallery or the museum to academia as a heterogeneous institution, What does that do to complicate this kind of false story that's out there?

Tim Ridlen: 15:17

Yeah, I like that you call it a false story because it's part of a larger position that, you know, in the book, I also talk about people like Boltanski and Ciappello and their idea that, you know, the artistic, that the protests of 1968 in France were somehow, you know, co-opted. So I do see this as part of a larger kind of position out there. But to get to the question about who's behind this idea of art as a critique of the commodity and what my sort of response to that is, I mean, who's not? Who's not behind that idea in the sense that it's a pretty mainstream way to understand the turn towards conceptual art? So you could trace it all the way back to people like Greenberg, Clement Greenberg, that abstract expressionism and the idea of an autonomous work of art is supposed to somehow be a refuge or a holdout from the commodification of everything else and every other part of our life. So it starts with people like Greenberg, but of course, really the big, I guess, bet noir in the book is Benjamin Buchloh, obviously a very respected art historian who has a famous seminal essay on conceptual art, where he kind of critiques the turn towards language and information and what people had at the time called the dematerialization of art, but of course, then there's lots of questioning about was it ever really dematerialized? Buchloh sort of critiques conceptual art because he sees it as a breakdown of between the role of the artist and the critic, right? He sort of says there's a separation of powers between people making art and people critiquing art and conceptual artists went too far in critiquing art. And he kind of proposes that this is like a dialectical process that began with Duchamp and Duchamp's ready-mades and that sort of culminated in conceptual art and he sees he thinks that the way out of this was institutional critique but I guess what I'm what I'm trying to get at here is that Buchloh kind of makes this claim claim that the turn towards institutional critique was a way to bring back in some kind of bounded form, right? Conceptual art broke the boundaries of what could be considered the artwork and what could be considered criticism, whereas institutional critique sort of used the exhibition format or the institution itself as the container within which the artwork would be held so that it doesn't spill over into some other kind of role that I guess the critics are supposed to be in charge of.

Billy: 18:13

Could you say something about the examples of that sort of artist as critic? You mentioned Duchamp, but for listeners who may not have ready access, we're talking about the toilet, right?

Tim Ridlen: 18:25

Yeah, we're talking about the toilet. We're talking about a fountain. You know, so it's starting with Duchamp, where he exhibits this urinal turned on its side. He gives it a title, calls it Fountain, submits it to this exhibition that was supposedly trying to be more open, trying to be more open to other kinds of work. And he does this on false name, knowing that, of course, they will reject it because it's ridiculous. And then sort of writes about it, not revealing that he was actually the one that presented it. And, and suggest that, you know, well, it's an artwork because the artist chose it. It's an artwork because he gave it a title and that gives a new thought to the object. And that's kind of the impulse that conceptual art runs with this idea that you can transform something into a work of art through the thought or, or through language. So conceptual artists starting in the mid-60s start to really pick up on this idea that art can be an idea, that it doesn't have to take a form or any one form, that art can be engaged with language. And this has many different, this has different flavors. There's different flavors of conceptual art. There's, you know, capital C conceptual art as a movement. And then there's also conceptualisms and a lot of interest in talking about global conceptualisms. How did, how did this turn in the 1960s take place in different, different places? But by and large, conceptual art and conceptualism is a kind of ontological break with how the artwork has been defined or how it has been contained so that you can have different iterations of artworks that are kind of the exemplary materializations of the idea. That would be the way that, you know, one of the figures in the book that I talk about is a curator named Elaine Barian, who was at this college on the Upper East Side of New York. And she sort of inadvertently was really important in developing conceptual art with the artist Mel Bochner. So Mel Bochner is sort of another seminal conceptual artist who is working with her on these exhibitions, sometimes as a co-curator, sometimes just as one of the exhibiting artists. And they talk about, you know, in this art and process exhibition, the exhibition is art and process. They talk about this idea that these artworks are just exemplary materializations of the idea, right? And so they sort of make the point that the artwork is not just what you see on display, but somewhere else. And that's why people say, well, it's dematerializing, but of course, it always needs to take some form, I guess, in order to be exhibited. So it's not exactly correct to say that they're dematerializing, but perhaps the idea that artworks take exemplary forms or exemplary materializations in different places at different times, and they can be, you know, fragmented or dispersed. The word that I use in the book is actually associated with the artist Mel Bochner. He talks about decentralized aesthetic experience, that the artwork can be decentralized. And that's kind of one way to think about it. Other conceptual artists were more invested in analytical philosophy. So the idea that artwork was a proposition, so that something like Duchamp's Fountain was simply a kind of proposition. This is an artwork, and therefore, it's sort of within the logic of analytical philosophy. But I think the other strains like Mel Bochner's are kind of more interesting because they don't get lost in the sort of instrumental logic of analytical philosophy.

Scott: 22:21

So to pick up on the latter part of my question, how would you say your shift of focus in this history to academic institutions and the figure of the artist as researcher in some more conformist and some more radical ways, how does that challenge the going fall story that's perpetuated by a figure like Benjamin Buchloh about the decline of mid-century art.

Tim Ridlen: 22:59

Yeah. Thank you for bringing me back to that, because that's an important point. So in challenging the idea that the turn to conceptual art was a critique of the commodity, that wasn't something that I set out to do. That was something that I sort of came upon because I was looking at these artists who were working in academia. And what I sort of started to see there is that if you think about what artists were doing as a response to what people in academia were doing, specifically, you know, Cold War researchers, you saw a kind of development, you know, you could think about it as a, in some cases, as a critique of knowledge production, as opposed to the commodity fetish. So if there's a critique to be had there, it was a, or, you know, kind of intervention that these artists were making, it wasn't just about the commodity formula. It certainly was in some spaces, right? But when you turn your attention to the university and academia and what research was supposed to be at that time, you see something different. You just see a little bit more, you see a different understanding of what creativity is or what art making is about, what it's meant to do. And you get a little bit away from the idea that art making is about producing objects. And you get closer to the idea that art making is a process of, I don't want to say producing knowledge, but a little bit, that's sort of where it starts out. The expectation for artists in academia is that they would be producing knowledge. But in fact, what artists do often, the artists that I look at, at least, and the ones that I'm kind of interested in, they don't just focus on producing knowledge. They focus often on creating experiences, right? Aesthetic experience. And that doesn't always look like producing knowledge the way that it did for other Cold War researchers, right? What that leads to is a transformation of who the artist is. And the way I talk about it in the book is that it's not really just about like literally what we're artists doing, but what does it mean to be an artist for society, for people outside of academia? What do they think of as the artist's role or what an artist does? And what I kind of observe and argue for in the book is that in the attempt on the part of these artists to engage with and challenge knowledge production, they end up reconfiguring the artist as somebody who is, you know, it moves away from this idea of the artist as sort of creative genius and visionary sole author of this artwork and towards something where the artist is actually engaged in society, engaged in the world. And that doesn't necessarily mean producing objects, but it means engaging in the social sphere. So it kind of leads into socially engaged art practices and examples of that. I mean, Martha Rosler is sort of an example of that. Somebody who starts out as a conceptual artist and then, you know, especially with some of her projects becomes more of a socially engaged artist where she's doing things, projects in New York that are engaged with, you know, housing, the housing crisis in New York in the 80s. So the idea, the upshot of all this engagement with the university is not just a more academic art, but it is a socially engaged art where it moves from university to the wider polis. So for folks like Buchloh, conceptual art is a bridge too far.

Billy: 27:03

So for folks like Buchloh, conceptual art is a bridge too far.For whatever else it is, it's undermining the kind of traditional, conventional infrastructures and institutions of art, capital A. And this is happening at a time where there's thought to be all sorts of threats to tradition convention and the sort of moral foundation of you know in the context of the United States the U.S. polity could you talk a little bit about how that may or may not have been coded or understood by folks like buklo or the the concept the work of the conceptual artist might have been perceived by folks at the time and and since then as participating in some way in, you know, the great communist conspiracy or, on the other hand, the great CIA conspiracies of the time in the heat of the Cold War.

Tim Ridlen: 27:59

I'm not sure if I can totally speak to what Buchloh, how Buchloh would have read these conceptual artists in the context of the Cold War. But what I can say, I think what's relevant to your question here is that there were some artists engaging. I mean, there's, I'm trying to sort of think here. The artists that I discuss in the book, conceptual artists are kind of one group of artists that I discuss. They're kind of a stop along the way in this trajectory for artists in universities. And really, these artists in universities start out more pressured by the demands of the Cold War, which is to say that you We must produce, you know, we're going to fund works that really produce basic research without necessarily knowing what that might lead to. So, you know, Vannevar Bush's statement on universities was that research is this endless frontier--artists were sort of some artists like Georgie Kepisch at MIT I think really kind of bought into this idea that artists should try to be like researchers and what that meant you know that meant that he kind of conformed in a way to these expectations in ways that other artists did not so artists that i look at who are at rutgers university alan kapra and robert watts and george brecht who wasn't teaching at Rutgers, but he was part of their milieu. They sort of paid lip service to some of these demands that the universities should be helping to fight the Cold War through developing research. They paid lip service in some places to get money, but they were also very critical of this idea. So they sort of point out that basic research in the sciences really serves you know technology so you know you alluded to the face race and and things like that but it's less clear what basic research in the arts leads to and and they they arrive at this answer that it sort of it leads to this reconfiguration of subjectivity first through what what artists what it looks like to be an artist and that becomes kind of a model for what it looks like for other people, for what the experience of life is like in this late 20th century.

Scott: 30:37

It actually kind of reminds me of an episode we did with a professor of dance, Colleen Hooper, years ago. I mean, I think in our first season. She did important research into the CETA programs under Nixon, which were sort of poorly designed to address unemployment and had all kinds of stipulations attached to the public monies that were being allocated for this purpose. But a bunch of artists across fields and media, including dancers and dance choreographers, they were canny. And they saw a chance to have financial and institutional support and to build up whatever they were doing. And they sort of both molded themselves to, they changed their identities and their kind of rhetorical frames to gain access to this support. But then at the same time, ended up variously challenging the power structures that be some more, some in more radical ways than others. And all that's happening actually kind of at the same time as the art researchers that you're talking about. So this is not to excuse them, the ones that are more in line with the kind of Cold War science research model that's serving American militarized commercial imperialism around the globe. But it's to say that there's another lesson here in seizing an institution, seizing a funding opportunity and experimenting with that.

Tim Ridlen: 32:38

Yeah, exactly. And that's exactly kind of the point that I try to make in the book is that these artists were engaging with what other scholars have called the knowledge-based polis. But my argument is sort of like they engage with this knowledge-based polis only then to expand that to the polis at large, right? That becomes this kind of starting point. And the way that it happens is multifaceted. I should say, Buchloh is a Marxist. I'm not sure if I made that clear, but he is influenced by Greenberg and Adorno and Frankfurt School thinking, right? So, what would he make of all this? How was he thinking about this in relation to the cold war? His, his, he was just through and through, you know, Frankfurt school art critic. So that bears pointing out or clarifying, right?

Scott: 33:45

He's not afraid of any communist conspiracies. He is the communist conspirator.

Tim Ridlen: 33:49

Yeah, he's not like a super, he's not a traditionalist by any means. He's like, you know, he's thought of, he's part of October, the whole, the art journal that, you know, the leading art journal still probably today is one that's considered the most, you know, rigorous or whatever. And so that whole school of, he's the kind of representative, the most representative Frankfurt School person among October critics. But yeah, the October critics are not concerned about artists being communists.

Billy: 34:23

Well, I mean, it's happening in the context of all this. I guess, is all of this contest and debate and innovation happening somehow insulated from the broader politics of the time?

Tim Ridlen: 34:41

I'm just trying to get a sense for how shaped it is by the Red Scare, essentially, in any way, shape, or form. Conceptual art is kind of a fulcrum. It's a moment, it's a particular turning point. And that's not my argument. A lot of people make that argument. Like Peter Osborne, art historian, talks about how all contemporary art can be explained as conceptual art, that now that conceptual art was this particularly important turning point. And Buchloh is also engaging in that idea that conceptual art was a particular turning point, but for him, it was a misstep and it only kind of gets reconciled because some of that turned into institutional critique. So in a way, the book is not only about conceptual art, but that is still kind of a pivot point. And sort of try to explain that as well. When people talk about conceptual art, sometimes they'll say, well, we've actually got artists who are more associated with Fluxus in the early 1960s, who were like proto-conceptual artists. So oftentimes, some of the artists that I'm looking at, like Alan Kaprow and Robert Watts, are read as proto-conceptual artists. Conceptual art before actual conceptual art became what it became. And there's truth to that because, you know, some of the artists that I talk about in the book, like Jack Burnham, who was also at MIT, but he's kind of the, he had a big break with, with Georgi Kepes. He was writing about what he called systems aesthetics. And that has been, that was kind of his name for what he saw happening with conceptual art. And it was, that very much was sort of like, that was still connected to the kinds of Cold War research that was going on with things like cybernetics. But he was sort of saying, well, look, this is the kind of art that we're seeing today in the 1960s is this work that's a lot more like systems rather than objects, right? And so that kind of thing wasn't called conceptual art, but it was certainly a precursor to conceptual art. So there is a kind of an important place for conceptual art in the book, But Scott's right that it's sort of like it's not just about conceptual art. Research and artists working in the university started out doing, you know, things that looked like lectures or, you know, holding, you know, being invited to universities where they would give a talk and then do a happening, which is what Kaprow was famous for. And then and then have some kind of discussion afterwards that might look like a seminar. Right. So the idea was that these forms of that the university was providing enabled more participatory kinds of art and more things like that would eventually become conceptual art or be conceived and labeled conceptual art kind of at a later point.

Scott: 37:39

Yeah, I'd like to invite you to explore some of these details in greater detail. So maybe talk a little bit about Kaprow's works, his lectures with some specificity.

Tim Ridlen: 37:57

Sure. Yeah. So, yeah, like I said, Kaprow is a major figure in the book. And he is most known for the happening. And a lot of people did happenings, like people like Carolee Schneemann and Klaus Oldenburg. And this is kind of early 60s, late, late, early 60s. And sometimes happenings have just been understood as like performance art, right? It really comes out of the influence of John Cage. So these artists like Alan Kaprow and others like George Brecht and Robert Watts, who are teaching and associated with Rutgers University, they take this class, this composition class with John Cage that's happening at the New School in, I think it's 1957 to 1959. They take this composition class and so they try to apply the ideas and methods of chance composition that Cage is talking about to visual art. But what that ends up looking like is time-based performance hype art that Kaprow calls a happening and Fluxus artists start to conceive of as events. There's a number of different outgrowths from that class and that intersection with Cage. And Kaprow is just one iteration of that. He's showing in galleries in New York, but he's also doing some of these happenings on campus at Rutgers University. And so one of the first ones that he does is a piece called Communication, which is essentially part of a series of lectures that he and Robert Watts had organized at Rutgers. And it kind of uses the lecture format to disrupt the idea that art communicates in any kind of direct way. So he's standing on stage lighting matches. There's this kind of red light going off. There's banners that are hanging from the balcony. There's a recording that's playing where he is sort of giving, that's the part where he's actually giving his kind of speech about how the idea of communication is sort of the interest in communication, which a lot of people were talking about. A lot of academic researchers were talking about who are associated with like cybernetics research. He was sort of critiquing this idea that art was about communicating directly in that recorded speech. And then there he sort of planted some people in the back of the room to start taking tin cans out of a bag so that it would kind of, you know, be noisy in the audience. So he's sort of doing this kind of performance. And that one kind of looks more like a performance because he's standing up at the lectern and giving this, you know, performing these actions and you're hearing this recorded speech. But that's sort of the, he continues to do things that look more and more like participatory, more kind of like almost they look like rituals or something, right? He kind of comes up with these ideas for activities that he and the students or other participants will do. And usually what that looks like is that he will, you know, give a lecture and explain the piece. Oftentimes there's a kind of complicated score that shows you what the different parts of the happening are going to be. And then maybe the next day, everybody will come together and do that happening. And then not in all cases, but in some cases, then there would be this kind of discussion afterwards of what that was like. So my reading of Kaprow's trajectory is that he does lots of happenings in the beginning that are more focused on him as kind of a central actor. but it moves more and more towards participants being involved. And it also starts to put explicitly in conflict things like his intention, which he tries to spell out in the score and in the lecture, and the experience of actually participating. So I think that part of what develops over the course of his career, in the 60s at least, as he does more of these happenings on college campuses is that his authorial control or imprint on the work kind of, it doesn't go away, but it becomes joined by the actual experience of the participants, right? So he's sort of been, in some cases, critics have understood Kaprow's approach to incorporating chance in his work as distinct from John Cage because Kaprow still tried to say, well, I am the artist. I am creating this. This is my project. But I think that that might have been true at the very beginning, but I think that it's a little bit more complicated than that. I think that in a way, as he goes on in his career, he starts to think, you know, include more participation and then start to think about the place of the artist in all of this work. And what we eventually come to in the book is that Kaprow starts to talk more and more about un-arting, about leaving art, right? About a transformation of the artist into something else, right? And I think that's where his influence when he's at CalArts, that's when he starts to write these texts about un-arting and leaving the art profession or leaving the idea of being an artist. It intersects literally at CalArts with the feminist art program. And so I think that's where you start to see his kind of apolitical interest in participatory structures starts to have something in common with the feminist art program, but also literally intersects with the feminist art program at CalArts. So at CalArts, when Kaprow gets there, he is sort of one of three major strains of influence at CalArts and the visual arts. There's Kaprow, along with some other Fluxus artists like Alison Knowles. So they're kind of one big influence on the artists at CalArts. Then there's John Baldessari, who was brought up from University of California, San Diego, to teach at CalArts. And he is kind of the West Coast conceptual artist that I discuss also in this chapter on CalArts. And then there's the Feminist Art Program, which CalArts brings down from Fresno State University, and that's run by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. And so I discussed sort of the intersection of those three strains at CalArts. And the artist Suzanne Lacey, who's one of the students at CalArts at this time, is one of the artists who comes out of the Feminist Art Program. So she's a student of Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. And she starts to use consciousness-raising meetings as a kind of starting point for some of her works. And that looks very much like the kinds of discussions that Kaprow is having before and after his happenings. So there's a kind of, it's not that there's a, you know, I don't think it's just a one-to-one, it's not a question of influence, but it is a question of Kaprow, in his engagement with Suzanne Lacey, also starts to think of what he's doing in these same terms as a kind of mutual conversation that's happening between them. And so in noticing that, I started to notice the sort of latent political stakes of what Kaprow was doing much earlier in the late 50s that culminate in the kind of socially engaged art that Suzanne Lacey was doing. So her kind of best known project two weeks in May, where she, it's kind of a multifaceted project where she gets data from the police, police data about rapes in the city. And she creates this map that shows where rapes have been happening around the city. And she also goes around the city and, you know, marks in different places where these rapes are occurring. All of that, you know, came out of consciousness raising groups that she was a part of where, you know, women were recognizing this shared experience. And she kind of puts that into this project three weeks in May and really engages with public space to bring some of this to light, right? And so she's engaged. That's one of the examples where it's sort of like some of what we're seeing here is artists who are taking on a new role, who are taking on a new understanding of what they can do, and then engaging in, you know, the wider world, engaging outside beyond the boundaries of the university or the campus itself.

Scott: 47:02

Can you talk a little bit more about the Feminist Art Program and some of their productions and how they end up challenging a certain patriarchal male-centered approach to art and art pedagogy?

Tim Ridlen: 48:31

Yeah, the Feminist Art Program is really interesting. It starts in Fresno by Judy Chicago and Miriam Shapiro. It moves to CalArts in 1971. One of the first major projects that they do in CalArts is a project called Woman House, where they get access to this house, and they basically turn it into a studio, an art studio, and a place for installations and exhibitions and performance art, things like that. One of the goals of the feminist art program that Judy Chicago talks about was, you know, really trying to break down the barriers of the male dominated art world. She talks about how, you know, she would see her male counterparts furiously taking notes when they're, you know, in a sculpture class about, you know, how to set up the manual saw or something, because they know realistically that they're going to like run a studio of their own one day. And she thought that that was the kind of thing that was really lacking, that wasn't really emphasized for female art students. And she said, we're going to take this on by really giving students the professional skills that they need, right?transform it. That means everything from fixing up the drywall, repairing things in the house, to putting on performances there that comment on the experience of being a woman in the 1970s. What ends up happening that's kind of interesting is that although the goal for people like Judy Chicago was to professionalize these artists, people like Suzanne Lacey, who was one of the students, she doesn't just become an artist in the mold of other artists at the time. All of the experience of doing this woman house project it it transforms the i guess the possibilities or the imagined possibilities for what art can do right so it becomes more about socially engaged art that you know maybe it's also you know coming out of performance art and things like that so it has these sort of interesting upshots that weren't necessarily the the intention of of judy chicago is that there's a lot more to it there's it's more complicated that's great if you have more to say you can say it but if not that's great too i mean the kinds of things that one of the things that comes up a little bit in the book is that you know there's there's there are many artists who are part of this not just gree chicago and miriam shapiro but the the students that were there as well but one of the things that miriam shapiro's work was doing miriam Shapiro was doing things that were more straightforward pai nting, although she was part of this Woman House project as well. But they start to explore what Miriam Shapiro called central core imagery, which is sort of like trying to work on questions of representation, how feminine imagery is seen, to try to sort of reconfigure it as not passive but active and and in some cases that looks like painting and in some cases that looks like these plays that judy chicago was doing called cock and cunt play where they're working with these props of a genitalia props and they're doing these they're play acting these these conversations between a man and a woman that are very you know over-the-top ironic critiques of these gender roles. And then she doesn't just do that as a performance. She actually takes that around when she's invited to college campuses and has students kind of perform that play as a way to sort of, I mean, it's kind of, maybe it's crude or simplistic or something, but it's sort of effective as a way to, you know, draw attention to these gendered roles and gendered representation, in the way that those things get represented.

Scott: 51:59

I want to give you an opportunity to talk about the theoretical framework for the book, which is encapsulated in the title, Intelligent Action.You take that title from John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher, and you run with it in your own direction. Would you discuss what intelligent action means for you in this project?

Tim Ridlen: 52:14

Yeah, you're right. It comes from Dewey, and it's not like Dewey had a theory of intelligent action. It's really kind of a phrase that he uses once or twice and that I kind of run with. It also happens to be a phrase or at least variations on that phrase that Kaprow also uses. He talks about intelligent activity. And so starting with Dewey, I guess that's the best place to start. Dewey was an influence on some of these artists, but it's not the only influence. To sort of give you a quick brief on Dewey's philosophy of art, he has this idea that when he talks about art, he's really talking about aesthetic experience. So he's talking about not just making art, but seeing art. And he's also not just talking about art. He's actually talking about any kind of experience that you might consider aesthetic. And for him, he uses this metaphor of a stone rolling down a hill. And he says, you know, the stone rolls down the hill, not passively, but actively, right? Feeling all of the little bumps along the way. And an aesthetic experience can be considered aesthetic, not just everyday experience, when it is consummated in some way. He uses the word consummated. So that it has this quality of wholeness, that it comes to some kind of moment of completion. And so some of these artists were influenced by that, and that's sort of how they understand things like their happenings, but it wasn't strictly like an application of Dewey. So for me, that's why I sort of tried to start there, but articulate this idea of intelligent action, where these artists, again, as a result of them being in the university, they start to think about other places where other parts of this aesthetic experience. So the aesthetic experience is not just what you see or what you experience somatically, but also there's an inner dimension to it. What are you thinking about? So the language becomes a part of that and other systems of knowledge can become a part of that. And the idea of intelligent action is that is a a little bit messier than what Dewey proposes. Dewey proposes this very nice idea of this whole consummated aesthetic experience. And he doesn't really have in mind something that I bring to the table as well, which is that sometimes this experience has conflicts within it or tensions within it. I don't think that, I mean, Dewey was also concerned with democracy. And in a way, there's a link here between his theories of aesthetic experience and his idea, his writing about education. Part of his critique, as I understand it, of education at the time, turn of the 20th century, he's talking about how schools are missing this aesthetic dimension, right? They don't bring this aesthetic dimension to learning. And that sort of folds into his his critique or his, you know, ideas about democracy, that we need these, these, these moments of sort of understanding the aesthetic dimension to, to learning and working together. And I guess that involves recognizing this, this, this experiential dimension. But to return, I'm probably getting on a tangent there, to return to his idea of aesthetic experience. And the way that I kind of try to supplement that is that I try to bring in or allow a bit more for this idea that within an aesthetic experience, sure, maybe there's some kind of conclusion or consummatory character, as Dewey calls it, but there's also a lot, there's also lots of room for tension and conflict to be kind of staged within that. So the way that I talk about it with the work of these artists is that in some cases they are staging the conflict between, you know, language and vision and experience in the case of Kaprow with where he sort of, or, or even like his intentions as the artist and the experience as the participant, that staging that, that conflict or that disconnect is part of what intelligent action is about. The other thing that I borrow from Dewey, actually I'm kind of borrowing it from a thinker named Hans Joas, and he's writing about Dewey. He's, he kind of pulls out of Dewey this idea of ends in view, the idea that, you know, again, going back to this idea of the stone rolling down the hill, that action in the present or experience in the present is also guided by or informed by this end in view. And he distinguishes the end in view from a goal because it's not just goal-oriented action, but it's this way in which the action in the present has some end in mind and is informed by that end and moves towards that end. And so it's not just a matter of like arriving at the end and reflecting back on the experience, right? That would be more maybe like the idea of contemplating a work of art. But it is about this aesthetic experience that is in creativity that is in action, right? Creativity that is in action. And for somebody like Joaz, it's not just the creativity of making art, it's the creativity of social action. So that's also kind of the link there. The other important influences here on this idea of intelligent action are Donna Haraway and Gayatri Spivak, who both talk a lot about doubling, right? So Haraway's idea of situated knowledge kind of resonates with what Joaz attributes to Dewey as situated creativity. And Haraway talks about this idea that there's always at least two modes of knowing, right? That we're always sort of experiencing at these two kinds of knowledge or ways of knowing. And Spivak in particular, who's kind of interested in a critique of enlightenment institutions from a post-colonial perspective, she talks a lot about playing the double bind. That's kind of her phrase for talking about how does one work within these institutions that have these demands of, you know, whether it's research or enlightenment reason, what does one do with that? And she talks about the role of the aesthetic as, again, this kind of conflictual model that the aesthetic is that space for play. And the phrase, I mean, interestingly, the phrase playing the double bind, she's getting that from Gregory Bateson and applying it in a kind of different way. But basically it's a way of saying like, well, what do you do with these competing demands? And play is a very interesting connection because people like Kaprow also talk about play. People like, you know, Joas in his reading of Dewey is also talking about this idea of situated creativity as play. But play is not just about open-ended, open-ended, you know, messing around, but it actually is informed by some kind of end in view, even if that end is not instrumental in the same way.

Billy: 59:45

Could you reflect on what has happened to the artist as academic in the intervening years? The 60s are a very active time, and a different time in a lot of ways. Of course, beginning in the 70s and into the 80s, we get the kind of dawn of the neoliberal era and the imperatives of the university change, the experiences of academics and students change. So I'm not asking you to write a sequel, but if you did, what would it look like? What do you think you would pick up on as continuities and divergences?

Tim Ridlen: 1:00:35

Hmm, that's a good question. It's a bit speculative, but let's riff.Well, I'm thinking, I mean, initially I was going to answer your question by talking, by bringing us back to kind of where we started in terms of things like relational aesthetics that start to, the artists start to engage with, or, you know, sometimes that goes by socially engaged art or, you know, dialogical aesthetics. There's all kinds of names for this kind of work that actually begins with people like Suzanne Lacy in the 70s, and then has this continuation today, this tradition that continues today. And that is sort of joined by artistic research. And I think, I guess, that kind of brings me back to where I started, where I said, you know, in the early 2000s, there's this interest in artistic research, a lot of which comes from the Bologna process in Europe, which was a kind of standardization framework. You know, once the EU was in place, there was this attempt to standardize university education in Europe that was called the Bologna process. And that's sort of what led to the creation of PhDs for artists. So initially I was going to sort of say, well, that's sort of part of the story, but I think there's obviously a big gap in the middle there. There's also kind of a disconnect because that's something that's happening in Europe. And I'm talking about, I'm really just talking about US context. But I guess if I were going to start to think about what happens in universities, I think some of the big changes are, I mean, like, I don't have a lot of this history of, you know, the university in the 80s at my fingertips, but there are quite a lot of changes, like you mentioned, like the university is becoming more and more neoliberal throughout the 80s. And I think that that has some pretty dire consequences for the possibilities of artists working within those institutions. But I guess the way that I read it is that there's this move from the university to the wider social sphere. So I guess that's where you get artists who are doing things that look like socially engaged art or even look like education out in the public. And maybe in some cases they are supporting that work through university positions. It's like in the late 70s that the MFA degree becomes the terminal degree. So artists have a kind of more secure position in the university. And that doesn't always doesn't translate into research-based art the way that it might have been pushed or impressed upon artists that they need to frame their work as research earlier in this history. But it did continue to give them security so that they wouldn't necessarily have to be gallery selling artists. And then there are really good, I mean, there are really good texts out there about socially engaged art in the 1980s, some of which takes pedagogic form. So like Adair Runthwaite's book, Asking the Audience, in a way, there are parts of that book that could be sequels to what I'm talking about, because she's talking about socially engaged art and how it engages in some of these pedagogic forms, not just in the university, but in other places. So that might be something to take up. I think in my next, thinking about a future project, It probably won't be about the university per se, but it would potentially be about transformation of art away from, you know, medium specificity and objects to, you know, a kind of transformed role for artists.

Billy: 1:04:37

And if I could maybe offer and see what you think about this, the university in the 60s is, if nothing else, a lot cheaper, a lot more accessible in certain ways and a lot more exclusive in other ways. Today, of course, working at a university, as opposed to if you could get employment back in the 60s, there are more and different positions, but a lot more precarity as well to distribute across ranks and things. Students are paying a lot more. I guess I'm trying to think about, you know, the allure or the space that artists may feel today in academia, the invitation from your own experience, right, to have support for your work and to also sort of think about that work. It seems like there's different constraints, pressures today that artists in academe would feel, and then that it might be a more hostile, in some ways, place.

Tim Ridlen: 1:05:41

Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely some truth to that. And I mean, you know, there are reasons to critique the MFA degree, as people have talked about it as, at worst, a Ponzi scheme, you know, like the idea that you're going to take out a loan and go to an MFA program, which being somebody who's in academia now, you can see a lot of times master's programs, not necessarily MFA programs, but a lot of times master's programs are like money-making devices for universities. And so there's definitely room for a critique there of the idea of getting an MFA, that it sells you this idea that you're gonna make it as an artist if you get an MFA, and that's not necessarily the case. I don't think the PhD has become like that, at least not in the US. There might be a little bit different story in Europe. So, yeah, I mean, I certainly, I guess in a way what I was, I'm aware of that critique, and I don't think that it's wrong, the critique of the university as this kind of, there's some problems there. I guess with the book, part of what I was trying to do was learn something. Well, I guess one of the things that I was concerned about was the way that that critique of the university and specifically getting an MFA or giving money to get an MFA that might not guarantee a career. I wanted to sort of try to separate that very real critique from the persistent critique that going to school or going to a university as an artist is somehow taming the artist or somehow, you know, taking away the creative genius. I guess what I was kind of interested in was to say, was to sort of push back against that anti-academicism that I saw. It's kind of weird because at the same time I mentioned there was this educational turn, what seemed to immediately follow was this idea that MFA programs are ruined, and that really pushback against artistic research was rethinking good things came out of it, like rethinking artistic research as artistic thought. But I think also some of those critiques are easily bound, they easily return to this idea that the artist is some kind of representative of a free-thinking individual that kind of sounds naive or sounds naive at best or at worst, sort of perpetuates a neoliberal way of thinking that artists should be independent people, like freelancers with projects instead of, you know, , people with institutional support. , so that was sort of part of my concern and sort of like, I definitely think that the university costs too much money, that like, there's a, there's a problem here with, with the, the way that students are asked to pay and then fund these, these programs. And that sometimes the, the idea is that you need it, that you have to have it in order to be an artist. And that's just not true. But at the same time, it too easily ends up becoming part of a logic that I think is also problematic. This logic that artists are meant to be like starving in an attic somewhere, because they're brilliant, you know, something. Brilliant in a way that's not academic. Brilliant in a way that's somehow outside the bounds of intellectual activity or thinking, right? That it's something else.

Billy: 1:09:31

I'm reminded of how cultural critic and commentator, Mark Fisher, liked to talk about how the Beatles were on the dole for the production of some of their finest music. And I'm just thinking about that because there were, you know, different kinds of supports in Europe in the 60s. Thinking about the remnants of the welfare state in the context of the 1960s versus the complete wasteland of, you know, social support for that could fund somebody who wanted to just make art. It's just not an option for most people.

Tim Ridlen: 1:10:16

Yeah.

Billy: 1:10:21

I think where we land with Money on the Left is like, we find lots redeeming, I think, in academia and share your critiques. It would also be great if we had means and mechanisms in place at the level of policy to just pay artists, you know, more directly as artists who would then have, you know, more discretion about whether or not they would seek additional employment at a university, for example, where they might feel, you know, variously part of a system that tends to divert student energy in directions that they might not need to go and student resources and finances in ways that aren't super helpful. So I guess I'm saying, I don't imagine you'd be opposed to a job guarantee for artists, but I wonder if you have any thoughts on what that might do for your history and maybe the future of the artist as an academic or as a researcher.

Tim Ridlen: 1:11:32

That sounds great. And that is a little bit, I mean, that is a little bit the story of how I, of why I went into academia in the sense that like, I mean, it's sort of funny to think about now that I thought it was a source of stability, that I thought it was going to be a more stable job than being an artist or trying to make a living in the art world as a freelance art handler or artist assistant. Because, you know, now I can say this as somebody who works in academia, that it's not any more stable. I mean, maybe a little bit more stable. But yeah, it was kind of funny. But I also think that what you're saying is also kind of how I understood these artists, like I mentioned earlier, Kaprow, who did say, like, I started teaching to pay the bills, but then realized that there was a lot more to it. I mean, I think that's sort of, you know, echoes what you're saying. and yeah, the idea of, of that some artists might still engage with the university, I think is, is definitely true. I mean, I don't think it's in all cases that artists take jobs just to make money because a lot of artists, there are examples of artists who make tons of money in the gallery art world and they also take teaching jobs, you know? , so there's as many examples of ways to engage with academia or not, as there are artists out there. , yeah, I mean, I think I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take us in another direction here because you mentioned like, how does this book potentially fit with, with Money on the Left and, your project, which I know a little bit about from Tom to Scott and, you know, reading Scott's book and things like that. And I think one of the things that was, in addition to, you know, some of the projects that you guys have been involved with the Uni. Right. I mean, that's sort of like, that's really interesting way in which the university becomes this like staging ground for something larger. Right. And for me, that's sort of how I'm understanding these, the transformation that's happening from the late 50s into the 70s is that there's a transformation that occurs in the way that people can imagine what artists do, right? And that it goes from thinking that artists are like people who make objects. And at the very best, according to somebody like Benjamin Buchloh, they can critique the commodity fetish through the kinds of objects that they produce. But part of what I'm saying here is that, well, what happens with artists in the university is that we start to see that artists can do something else. And, and that's not just a transformation in, in artists' roles, like, oh, artists can also be useful or something can, can have, you know, they can, instead of just making paintings, they can also build bridges or something. It's actually a transformation that happens because we start to imagine artists not as these kind of beautiful souls with creative genius who are going to express something insightful about the world, but they're actually more like researchers, but it's not necessarily the kind of research that produces new technologies or better television or better missiles. There are researchers that actually stage aesthetic experiences that are intellectually informed, that are sort of intelligently informed, intelligent action coming back around as the name that I apply, that I come with for that. So I think that that's kind of my understanding of how the book might resonate with some of the interests of your podcast. The other thing that I'll say that I think is kind of interesting, that I found really interesting in talking to Scott and learning a little bit about MMT, was that there's a lot of the sort of criticism from people like Buchloh that comes out of the Frankfurt School is based on this idea that artworks work under the same logic as the commodity or the commodity fetish. Value is sort of developed or, let's say, deposited in the object, and then the object goes and gets exhibited, and it's then withdrawn by the viewer, right? So what was sort of interesting to hear about and learn about was the idea that value doesn't necessarily inhere an object in that way, but has its origin somewhere else. Right. And I think, Scott, you can put better words on this, but this idea of a fiat currency comes to mind that, that, that understanding of value, where value in money comes from. And I guess, you know, that really, there's other, other critiques of, of this commodity fetish that I think are also interesting. So there's multiple ways to sort of understand this. But one of the things that I think the book does underneath the surface, maybe not always overtly, but one of the things that the book does and that I'm interested in continuing is rethinking how we understand art away from this idea that it somehow works the way that the commodity fetish works. Yeah. So that's kind of those are sort of my own thoughts on what my project might have to do with the things that you all are interested in here. But I don't know if that's accurate.

Scott: 1:17:27

I think it's accurate. I'm going to add one more one more twist. So in formulating your theory of intelligent action, you know, you're starting with John Dewey, you're moving through Spivak and multiple authors. One author that you haven't mentioned on the podcast that you do cite is Paolo Freire, right? And, you know, radical pedagogue and pedagogical theorist. And I was really taken with his critique of the sort of hegemonic model of learning. And that hegemonic model sort of assumes that the teacher is a kind of vat that's filled up with stuff. In this case, it's knowledge or data or whatever. And that the student or the class is sort of empty and they come and get their heads filled up with this stuff. Right. And I agree with with Freire that this is a this this traditional model of teaching and learning is garbage. It doesn't work that way. And trying to pursue pedagogy as if it works that way is a big problem. But what I found really interesting apropos of this conversation and thinking about connections between your project and money on the left is that Freire calls it the banking concept of teaching and learning. And from a Money on the Left point of view, what's so fun and funny about that is that that's not actually how banking works. Banking is not about having emptiness and fullness and moving, you know, bits of value from one place to another. Banking is an institution that is driven by multiple values and money is created ex Nilo as a function of its authority and its standing in a particular community. This doesn't make banks good. This doesn't make the corporate private banking sector morally OK. But in terms of just thinking about, well, how do we understand, how do we contest, and how do we build otherwise? Banking doesn't even work according to the banking concept of teaching and learning. So I think that there's all kinds of sparks and resonances that can happen there between these two categories.

Tim Ridlen: 1:20:09

Yeah, exactly. And the parallel that gets made actually by Grant Kester, he actually makes this similar comparison to Freire that, you know, it's the parallel is that meaning gets deposited in the object to be taken out later. That's the kind of parallel that Kester makes. And yeah, that's kind of what's being contested or, you know, what I'm trying to sort of go around or think about in another way. But yeah, you're right. Freire is not interested in banking and getting that metaphor correct. But what he is interested, I mean, to sort of riff on that a little bit, one of the things that comes up in the book is that some artists in the university, like Georgi Kepes, are interested in creative problem solving. I had to think about this a little bit because Freire talks about problem posing versus problem solving. And I thought that was kind of an interesting distinction because somebody like Kepes is interested in creative problem solving and making artists useful in this kind of crude way. There's more to his thinking than just that, because he also talks about aesthetic virtue. He doesn't talk about aesthetic virtue, but his way of thinking about what art does has been referred to, and I like this phrase, as cultivating aesthetic virtue among students. So Kepes is a little bit more complicated, but he's still thinking about creativity as part of this kind of instrumental problem-solving. And Freire talks about problem posing. And I think that people like Henry Giroux also, he's building on Freire, but pointing out the ways in which Freire's idea of problem posing is not so instrumental. It's not really intended to be this kind of instrumental problem solving.

Scott: 1:22:16

Tim, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast. Everybody should go out and buy Intelligent Action, a history of artistic research, aesthetic experience, and artists in academia. Thank you.

Tim Ridlen: 1:22:26

Thank you for having me.