Wrapped Up in Books: C. Thi Nguyen’s The Score

One of the major adjustments for first-year students in art and design classes is the three-hour studio. For most institutions in the States, a three-hour credit course in studio art and design actually involves meeting twice a week for three hours at a clip. I assume this is because these classes fall somewhere between so-called lecture/seminar courses and labs and, as a result, are created by administrators to figure out how to institutionalize art and design, but I don’t really know. (By the way, if you do know the history of the three hour studio, I’m curious!). Anyway, most, if not all of my first year students really struggle in the first-semester to figure out how to spend three hours of time in a class without losing their minds. Pre-internet, there was a lot of bullshitting that went on in class. Post-internet, and with computers and phones readily at hand, I sometimes observe students with a television program streaming (something light, like the Office) or, more recently, gaming. In the face of this, I wonder what I could be doing, particularly because my college offers a degree in game design. It feels more than a little weird to try and police their interests when we have institutionalized them.

In the mostly analogue days of my class, I would play music for the students on my cd player that a few would like and most would hate. DJ Shadow, Do Make Say Think, and Tortoise were staples. Often, in the first week of class, I would hand out Dave Hickey’s essay “The Heresy of Zone Defense” for the students to read for homework. Hickey’s essay starts with the famous Dr. J play against the Lakers in 1980. Hickey describes the play as, “[B]oth new, and fair!”, writing at length:

If this doesn't intrigue you, it certainly intrigues me, because, to be blunt, I have always had a problem with "the rules," as much now as when I was younger. Thanks to an unruled and unruly childhood, however, I have never doubted the necessity of having them, even though they all go bad, and despite the fact that I have never been able to internalize them. To this day, I never stop at a stop sign without mentally patting myself on the back for my act of good citizenship, but I do stop (usually) because the alternative to living with rules—as I discovered when I finally learned some—is just hell. It is a life of perpetual terror, self-conscious wariness, and self-deluding ferocity, which is not just barbarity, but the condition of not knowing that you are a barbarian.

Armed with this article and new knowledge, my class could all talk about the omni-present rules: 3 hours together, listening to Millions Now Living Will Never Die at least once a week, grades, etc. We could ask, together, what conditions does this create for learning art making? More importantly, where do these conditions appear a little artificial? Why, for example, are we learning observational drawing when Duchamp can hang a shovel on the wall? Hickey addresses this, briefly, in his essay talking about Pollock dripping paint as first new and exciting, only to become prescriptive later. Because contemporary art is so often working to define its own rules, this becomes a tricky consideration.

‍Now, my class is digital. We have Adobe and its satanic subscription model to attend to. We have a confounding learning management system (LMS) to wrestle with. Each student has one to five digital technologies on them at all times, as do I. And, because I don’t want to be a cop, I’ve been trying to figure out how to navigate this. Thank god for C. Thi Nguyen.

If you don’t know Nguyen’s work, he is a philosopher who has written two books dealing with games. This past year, when I would catch my students gaming in class, I gave them his article, “Games and the Agency of Art” and have them read it before they could game again in class. After they read it, we talk about it a little bit and I usually ask at least two questions: First, how do they understand ‘agency’? Second, where do they experience agency in their education? When I saw one of these students gaming later in the semester, they told me, “Teach, I’m working on some striving play at the moment for a break.” Using philosophy against the professor? You can’t really argue with that.

I read Nguyen’s new book earlier this Spring with some interest. It’s called The Score: How To Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Friends of the blog, this book rules. I dream of assigning it to a senior seminar as a complement to all the traditional ‘professional practices’ stuff the students usually get. While Nguyen never references Hickey’s earlier article, I think of it, at least in part, a lovely development from it. And for my students (and honestly myself), thinking about how we measure our lives and the external pressures that shape our desires is essential.

The whole book is really worth reading, but I want to focus for a few paragraphs on Nguyen’s Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy: Scale, Rules, Parts, and Control. I want to argue that studio art classes, particularly first-year ‘foundations’ courses in arts and design, offer an ideal space within which to explore these ideas when the space is properly calibrated, allowing for a kind of homeostasis in the classroom learners that is rooted in how much a teacher-student wants to play with the circumstances at hand.

In The Score, Nguyen offers The Four Horsemen of Bureaucracy to conceptualize our contemporary life as a way to think through the complicated scoring systems and metrics we wrestle with (or not) in our lives. I think we all have ways we assign value to particular activities and ways of living. We work to rationalize how we spend our time and validate our worth to ourselves and others (Nguyen is very good at highlighting many practical examples of this in the book). When I think back to Hickey’s basketball example, this seems a little easier to conceptualize. The rules of basketball, and the scoring system, are givens, dictated from outside. The allow for both the viewer and the player of the sport to understand how to play. Subtle tweaks to the rules have occurred over time, but, in general, this is a knowable space where some folks can truly excel (shout out to the Knicks at the moment of my writing). Hickey hints at how this idea can be transferable to other fields when he talks about Pollack’s paintings. However, in my opinion, this is too pat. Contemporary art and design education has to wrestle with painting, performance, animation, installation, user experience design, film, sound, and on and on. Each of these fields could be said to have their own rules and some of their own ways of scoring. While some may overlap in people’s minds–how can I get make money in this field–there are too many differences to count. In short, shit is really complicated. Because things are complicated, many teachers return to something like the elements and principles of art and design as a set of rules, projecting simplicity onto a field that is not simple.

To wrestle with this complexity instead of offloading it to the Bauhaus (which I hope to address at some point because I think a lot of people have taken some incorrect lessons from Walter Gropius and Vorkurs courses), let’s consider Nguyen’s Four Horsemen. First up is Scale:

The Horseman of Scale gives us a powerful gift: He makes things comprehensible across vast territories, across vastly different people[…]This is useful for all sorts of things: government bureaucracies trying to manage its citizens, corporations seeking profit, scientists researching for a greater good. But Scale asks for a sacrifice. To gain his power, we can no longer make nuanced judgments and use our sensitive understanding that arises from our particular background (110).

Second is Rules:

[Rules] gives us clear procedures that everybody can follow in the same way…He offers accessibility and consistency, which are the bedrock for coordinating across vast scale…But Rules asks for a heavy price. Rules confines us to operating in the terrain where everybody can repeat a procedure consistently. When the terrain is more obvious, that’s fine. But when it’s more subtle, Rules will want to change what we target and count, to somethings that everyone can repeat with the same result…We can’t make exceptions based on our judgement, or shift around how we apply the rule, or we lose out on much of that power (146-7).

Third is Parts:

The Horsemen of Parts wants pieces that are interchangeable, replacable…Parts wants to be able to fix the machine. If we lose a screw, Parts wants to be able to buy a new identical screw…[W]e can make workers functionally identical by giving them roles, rules, and procedures. That is why Parts loves Rules. Rules turn people into parts…[By removing variety], you have made standardized procedures work better…Parts promises us interchangeability. The sacrifice is specifity (169-70).

Finally, Nguyen offers Control:

The Horseman of Control wants to make decisions in an organized way, from a central location. Control wants to coordinate actions across a vast institution, across many contexts…Control is not necessarily authoritarian or malicious. He simply wants to make sense of the world, and then make decisions in a rational and informed way–and enact those decisions upon the world in a coordinated way…What he asks us to sacrifice is autonomy (238).

In offering the reader these myths, Nguyen creates what we might call a ‘both/and’ out of something, rather than an ‘either/or.’ For art and design students, we try to use Scale to standardize multiple sections of a class and multiple institutions. A first-year drawing class in New York is generally similar to one in Ohio and in a Western University in Sharjah. Rules allow a teacher to evaluate if, in the words of the immortal Homer Simpson, things look like the things they look like. Parts ensures the materials a student uses are the same for everyone in the class. Control enables administrators to look at the results of a drawing class and quickly see if the students have learned linear perspective and baseline observational drawing. And, as a result of all of this, we iron out idiosyncrasies of culture, background, and perception. Foundation drawing is just one of these classes; there are others. Professors and institutions in this field often use these classes to make something governable that is, by our contemporary understanding, ungovernable.

In Lawrence Weshcler’s book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, on Robert Irwin, Irwin speaks about his approach to teaching art:

[W]hat you’re trying to do is develop their sensitivities and not your own. I have strong philosophical reservations about what it is we are talking about when we use the word morality, but as that word is most commonly used, I think the most immoral thing one can do is have ambitions for someone else’s mind (112).

There is a real truth to this. And, it is because people believe in the power of the institution in the first place that allows a professor to work with a student in this way. To put it another way, every semester I will have a student who comes to my institution because we have alumni working at someplace like Pixar and my first semester classes have to start wrestling with why this student might want to work at Pixar. We have to begin to put a little space for thought between an expected outcome and commencing a journey.

Where does this leave our three-hour studio class that meets twice a week? Well, it’s a little murky. We can see Scale, Rules, Parts, and Control in the construction of these spaces. It brings a group of us together to have an experience and it gives us a distinct border for the eccentricities of everyone in the class. At the same time, with Nguyen’s work now in mind, it also reminds us this border is permeable and constructed. In their work “A Very Long Line”, the collaborative art group Postcommodity asks the viewers to consider when does a border function as a tool to keep someone out and when does it function as a tool that imprisons people. It’s both, obviously, but figuring out when we want and need a border is something I will negotiate with, god-willing, for the foreseeable future. Amen.