Howard Singerman > Quotes

“Students at Subjects of the Artist struggled not only for the unrecognizable, but for recognition as the thing that once and for all fills and completes the Other. The student desires to be recognized as an artist, as the artist, to make the object Rothko has never seen, to make that something unlike anything else that would stop the series and the repetitions of art school painting and the teacher's endless desire for something else: Have you thought about trying it this way? Have you done that? Have you looked at this artist or at that one? The teacher desires, perhaps, to be the eyes, the knowledge, the reputation through which the student will be seen as an artist, an artist of his school. Even more, the artist, whichever artist—to be an artist—wants not to desire, not to want for anything. Only by disavowing this professional desire, this need for recognition—this want-to-be an artist (manque à être, in a Lacanian turn of phrase that assumes a lack of being at the center of the subject)—can the artist be an artist, uninfluenced, whole, without likeness. Only in this way can the artist be like the paintings that Yvonne Thomas and Mary Abbott described, paintings that refused to recognize their need for any other thing.”
― Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University

“All people are women when they consume, when they teach children; they are men, virile and efficient, when they produce.”
― Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University

“While both studio art and creative writing work to instantiate the difference of each individual practitioner, the practice of writing in the university aims at the "content," or perhaps the peculiarity, of the individual student writer. In contrast, studio work requires the student to construct his or her difference historically or positionally; the field and its recent past, and particularly the sense of its movement, the urgency of its present, mark the art department—and mark its hproduct as university research.”
― Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University