The Once and Future Art School
The Once and Future Art School, Winter 2008, pp. 83-86
There are few places I’d rather spend time in Halifax than the sun-filled harbourside studio of my friend, the painter Gerald Ferguson. And on this particular day in mid-August, we’re settling in for a long chat. “We can talk about whatever you like,” Jerry assures me, knowing I am in Halifax to write about NSCAD, “but I will not, under any circumstances, talk about the good, golden days of NSCAD’s past.” So that was pretty much that.
We talk all afternoon, and some of what we talk about is, nevertheless, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (as was) and what is now (and has been since 2003) NSCAD University.
NSCAD is a long story—an epic story, really—and to tell it properly would mean writing a book. The establishment in Halifax of the Victoria College of Art was largely the result of the efforts of Anna Leonowens (the subject of Margaret Landon’s book Anna and the King of Siam and the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The King and I). It first opened its doors in 1887, and, in the course of a respectable but sleepy 80 years, counted among its faculty artists such as Arthur Lismer, Elizabeth Styring Nutt and Donald Cameron Mackay. By 1967, however, the board of governors of the Nova Scotia College of Art (as it had become) was looking for a young and forward-thinking principal for the school. They found him in the 31-year-old Garry Neill Kennedy—a St. Catharines–born, Ontario College of Art – educated artist-teacher who had earned his M.F.A. at Ohio University in 1965, and, in 1966–67, was head of the art department at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. Kennedy became the college’s first president (rather than principal), renaming the school the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
One of his first moves as NSCAD’s president was to hire bright new faculty members. “He came to Kansas City, where I was teaching then [at the Kansas City Art Institute],” Ferguson tells me (both he and Kennedy had been graduate students at Ohio University). At this time a greatly galvanizing aesthetic and philosophical upheaval was taking place in the visual arts: “David Askevold was an art student in Kansas City then,” notes Jerry, “and we were both intrigued by Carl Andre’s bricks on the floor and the fluorescent tubing of Dan Flavin, and all that early Minimalist work. When Sol LeWitt buried a cube in the ground…well, David and I were highly interested in that!”
Anyhow, Kennedy came to Kansas and offered Ferguson a job in Nova Scotia. Ferguson said he’d have to see the place (“It was like Wheeling, West Virginia, on the ocean,” he told me). “The school is rundown, it’s nothing,” he complained to Kennedy. “Yeah,” Kennedy replied, “but it’s wide open. We can do whatever we want!”
And they wanted a lot—and accomplished a lot. The first thing Ferguson himself wanted was that Kennedy should hire David Askevold (1940 –2008) as well. Kennedy agreed—an acquiescence which, as will shortly be seen, had far-reaching, indeed epoch-making, consequences in terms of the fame and future of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
This is as good a time as any to bring up the NSCAD myth—the apparently untarnishable aura of its conceptual-art past. This is the “golden” era that is now so conversationally distasteful to Ferguson (who is deeply restive about either sentimentalizing or fetishizing the you-can’t-go-home-again past). In an address he delivered at NSCAD’s Anna Leonowens Gallery in November of 1994 as part of a Universities Art Association of Canada panel, and subsequently published in the catalogue for the gallery’s exhibition “Conceptual Art: The NSCAD Connection 1967–1973,” he noted that “This College and its graduates have had to bear the cross of conceptual art for many years. The fact is it only involved a small number of students and faculty and for a rather specific period of time. I make no apology for whatever role I may have played in fostering those connections. There are worse things in an institution than to foster concepts.”
But the concepts Ferguson mentions put NSCAD on the international map. For its first half-dozen years—everyone argues about when the college’s glory days essentially came to an end (by 1973, maybe?)—NSCAD was what Bruce Barber, who curated the 1994 Anna Leonowens exhibition, calls “one of the pre-eminent art schools in the world, arguably as important a centre in its own time as the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College had been for the fostering and dissemination of contemporary avant-garde activity.”
Of what did this avant-garde activity for the most part consist? In essence, NSCAD’s place in history was secured first by David Askevold’s Projects Class, then by the parallel and interrelated activity of the Lithography Workshop and, finally, by the establishing of NSCAD Press.
It was in 1969 that Askevold, in an attempt to end-run teaching of the conventional kind (a practice he was never very happily to inhabit), established the Projects Class, asking artists he knew and admired to “submit proposals/projects for students to manifest.” Seeing himself as more a coordinator than an instructor, Askevold began to “operate through the mail and by telephone” (which became what he called “his rationale for the course”), and before you could say “I will not make any more boring art” (the wryly punitive phrase repeated in the famous and indeed canonical lithograph made by—or rather for—John Baldessari in 1971 from a handwritten note he sent to the college), NSCAD had been visited by an astonishing number of artists, famous or soon to be famous, who all trekked to Nova Scotia to see their projects realized—or to help with them: James Lee Byars, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth, Vito Acconci, N.E. Thing Company (Iain and Ingrid Baxter), Robert Barry, Lucy Lippard, Douglas Huebler, Jan Dibbets, Dennis Oppenheim, Lawrence Weiner and others.
In the fullness of a very short time, NSCAD was playing host to an impressive who’s who of (at first) mostly New York–based artists and then, more and more frequently, international figures—both male and, to offset the school’s growing “boys’ club” image, female (Mary Kelly, Alison Rossiter, Joyce Wieland, Miriam Schapiro and others; in 1979, in fact, Ferguson coordinated a symposium on women in the arts, organized by Martha Wilson. “The whole conceptual-art world was a boys’ club,” Garry Neill Kennedy told me over coffee before hurrying off to China for three months, “but when the wake-up call came, we were alive to it”). I once asked Ferguson how they ever managed to get somebody like Joseph Beuys to come to Halifax in the middle of winter. “We just phoned him up,” he said. Beuys’s first visit to NSCAD, in the fall of 1970, was, in fact, his first visit to North America.
It may not have seemed so at the time, but looking back now, it appears that stupendous things seemed to happen at NSCAD in the most offhand way imaginable. Take the Beuys blackboard. Beuys had been awarded an honorary doctorate by the college in May of 1976, and used the occasion to deliver a lecture (on “social sculpture”) during which he employed (for the first time) one of his now legendary blackboards. After the talk, the blackboard was casually left in a hallway. “We didn’t know what had become of it,” Ferguson told me with a rueful chuckle (despite their long association, there is little love lost between Ferguson and Kennedy), “but I tracked it down, and I insisted we screw a sheet of Plexiglas over it. It sat in Garry’s office for a long time, until it was sold in 1991 to the Art Gallery of Ontario—for almost a quarter of a million dollars.”
At the time of his recruitment from Kansas City, Ferguson also insisted that Kennedy hire Jack Lemon. Lemon, a master printer at the Kansas City Art Institute, had graduated from the renowned Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. He was appointed head of the new Lithography Workshop (Canada’s first) at NSCAD in 1968 and stayed for only a year (at which time Ferguson took over for a few years). From 1972 to 1974, the Litho Workshop was run by Wallace Brannen, a senior NSCAD student and workshop assistant who had been sent by the college to Tamarind for training and returned to Nova Scotia in 1972 as a master printer. “Our policy,” Ferguson said, “was that only artists who were not actually printmakers could make a print.” Those who made them included Sol LeWitt, Gene Davis, Robert Ryman and a host of illustrious others (when the Litho shop closed, in 1976, it had generated 110 prints by 55 artists).
The Litho Workshop was part of why Dennis Young, then curator of contemporary art at the AGO, left Toronto and moved to Halifax. Young (whom I regard as possibly the last really civilized man), now 80 years old, a NSCAD Professor Emeritus and a passionate yachtsman, tells me, over lunch at his yacht club, about the journeys Ferguson undertook in 1970 to try to sell the first NSCAD lithographs to Canadian art galleries (hoping to make the Litho Workshop financially self-sustaining). Nobody was buying. “I unwittingly endeared myself to him,” Young recalled, “by being the only curator in Canada to place a standing order for everything the workshop produced.” This, in turn, resulted in the delighted Ferguson’s inviting Young to come to NSCAD to head up the college’s art-history department, which he did, with great distinction.
It was the Lithography Workshop that led directly (albeit unpredictably) to the establishment of NSCAD Press. “I met Lawrence Weiner in New York in 1969,” Ferguson remembers, “and asked him to do an exhibition at the college that April—his first solo show in a public gallery.” Asked soon afterwards to make a NSCAD print, Weiner replied that he wouldn’t make a print, but that he would do a book, which was called Flowed and was composed by Weiner on his Amsterdam houseboat.
In the course of talking about the end of the Litho Workshop, Ferguson tells me that it was Dan Graham who suggested, half- seriously, that NSCAD “burn the paintings and keep the books.” It was also Graham who nominated the German art writer and editor Kaspar Koenig as director of the new NSCAD Press—a post he held from 1972 to 1976, after which (following two years of inactivity) the press was taken up again, at Ferguson’s invitation, by the German art critic Benjamin Buchloh. The books NSCAD Press published during these years were remarkable productions, instant and enduring classics—works by Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, Simone Forti, Steve Reich, Dan Graham and Daniel Buren, plus a hair-raisingly brilliant set of dialogues between a very young Carl Andre and a very young Hollis Frampton.
It was my original intention to spread NSCAD’s history around a little more, to treat its present as more than just an addendum. But auras are bigger than all of us, and certainly more forceful than good intentions. My NSCAD is clearly situated somewhere in that golden past of which Jerry Ferguson, as one of its prime movers, nevertheless remains so wary—and that is where, for me, it is likely to remain.
NSCAD’s long, slow trajectory from its mythical, auric days to its rather more workaday present is either painful or bracing, depending on where you stand.
During the 1980s, everything changed for NSCAD. A discussion in EightyTwenty: 100 Years of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, written by Robert Stacey and Liz Wylie and published in 1988, notes that art at NSCAD shifted from “conceptual” to “deconstructionist,” and that the structure and content of the college’s courses were also greatly altered by “the feminization of NSCAD.” The 1980s saw a new politicization of the college. In 1985, its faculty members were unionized (there was a three-week strike in 1986). This was a time of great struggle, during which Ferguson, who was fiercely opposed to tenure (“Teaching should be the most competitive profession in the world. It’s good for the culture,” he told me) and dead set against the college’s hiring back its own graduates as teachers, suddenly found himself no longer able to hire and fire faculty at will. It was also at this time— inevitably—that Garry Neill Kennedy was forced to step down as president (he still teaches part-time).
Barbara Lounder, an artist and a former dean of NSCAD, and her husband, the artist and professor Robert Bean, both witnesses to NSCAD’s transitional years, sit with me over a latte in the booklined Trident Café on Hollis Street on my last day in Halifax. The mid-1980s pretty clearly represent the start of what Bean terms “the age of accountability” at NSCAD. According to him, “NSCAD had been living in the community with the shades pulled down.” As Lounder puts it, “Before the strike, everybody was on thin ice. When they came back from the collective agreement, everybody had a job for life!” I forget to ask her if that struck her as a good thing or a bad thing. This was also the time, Lounder and Bean remind me, of the triumph of critique. That was the zeitgeist— everywhere, of course, not just at NSCAD. “The discourse was arriving,” laughs Lounder. But so, unfortunately, were cant, cliché, convention and bureaucratese.
In the course of a short interview with NSCAD’s current president, the 43-year-old David B. Smith (no relation, he admits sadly, to the sculptors David Smith or Tony Smith), I got the impression that the old NSCAD was decidedly ancient history. “There’s potential danger in going down that nostalgic road again,” Smith told me. “To try to relive those days is potentially a big mistake.” Smith then talked so much about accountability and fiscal responsibility and the creative economy of viable (i.e. saleable) ideas that my eyes began to glaze over. He got my attention at the end: “We are an art school,” he told me, “but through all that, there is an overarching thing called ‘creative thinking’—and that I can sell!”
Colleges and universities are to some degree like the buildings that house them. The mythic NSCAD years were conducted in the college’s old Coburg Road facilities, which were torn down last summer. In 1972, it acquired the amiable rat-trap premises at Duke and Hollis streets, a dear building so impossible to negotiate that it more or less legislated ingenuity and originality into the students who inhabited it. Now there is the brute, brown, steel-clad 72,000-square-foot NSCAD University Port Campus—by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects—which opened in July of 2007 and looks sort of like a massive ocean liner permanently moored in the harbour. I talked to a few students and teachers who use it. A couple of bright young painters complained to me that they couldn’t use their pigments and solvents there (“It doesn’t have proper ventilation, so we can’t paint in oils”)—but were happy enough to be confined to Duke Street to conduct their work. I talked to a young teacher who was upset because he couldn’t project images in the unstoppable harbour light or make his voice heard in a room with no walls. The views it affords of the ocean are, however, stupendous.
A few hours before climbing aboard VIA Rail and heading for home, I met with the master printer (and now art appraiser) Wallace Brannen. Brannen is, along with the NSCAD alumnus Ian Murray, assisting Garry Neill Kennedy on an authoritative NSCAD chronology Kennedy is publishing with MIT Press, tentatively titled NSCAD: The Conceptual Years (1968–1982). “Wallace and Ian know where the bodies are buried,” Ferguson once told me—and indeed (for once in agreement) Kennedy told me the same thing. We were chatting about NSCAD’s shape-shifting and endless process of redefinition. I ask him about the aura. “NSCAD really exists as a spirit,” Brannen tells me. “It doesn’t really have a building. What NSCAD has to do,” says Brannen, “is to get back together with its history, and find some way forward.”
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