The Department of History of Art inaugurated a new MA level programme last October; an MA in Fine Arts. The course is not only built on theoretical and historical artistic principles, but is also of practical orientation. The students have the responsibility to constantly intertwine theory and practice.
The Department wants to give birth to potential artists who, besides having a solid and strong practical basis, would also complement their work with a thorough knowledge of theory and art history.
The problem is that we believe that this approach is already being implemented in Malta. Unfortunately, no institute applies such a methodology. It is only taught in an elementary and superficial manner, which is worse than having no mention of it at all.
The lack of a theoretical and historical basis in art creates a wave or arrogance and pretentiousness, as the lack of professional and analytic teaching gives birth to the belief that something new has been discovered, the incorrect idea that such a methodology is without precedence.
Contrary to this is when a serious art student reads on the history and theory of art and his or her practice takes on new form, a more conscious form, a more profoundly studied and incisive knowledge on what this individual wants to say with their art.
The great masters, those who can teach us properly, were profound in their thought, in their historical knowledge and knowledge of the masters of their particular discipline. They were also multi-disciplinary, something which rampant bureaucracy has undermined and which the University is today fighting for in order to reintroduce this concept.
The MA in Fine Arts is an attempt to provoke this inter-disciplinary environment so that visual art students will absorb other forms parallel to those of art: it is extremely important for a painter-student to be conscious of what occurred and is occurring in the literary scene as well as that of music, dance, opera, film, theatre and others. The more exposed one is to different spheres of art, the more one would be capable of creating strong and logical work.
The aim would be for him or her to see how different spheres of art react and reveal the reality which surrounds us in different artistic forms. Such an expansion asserts a knowledge which the student may exploit in their own work. Inter-disciplinarity enriches the intuition of the individual. Intuition is not something abstract. Intuition is an internal strength which grows proportionally to one's acquisition of empirical information and continuous study. The more deeply one studies, the more will their intuition be enriched. They will sharpen their acuteness and thus be able to create good art.
This is one (ambitious) objective of the MA course.
It is a new approach, yet one taken from antiquity. The history of art, including the contemporary, clearly shows us that the central and determinant points in history are all monopolized by artists of great intellectual strength and impeccable technique. And we must study their works to confront the disaster which art is undergoing today.
The more we study, the more opportunities we have to be exposed to work of quality, the more we are exposed to that occurring around the globe, the more we go on foreign exchanges, the more dangerous will be our artistic sword, in the beautiful sense of the word.
In other words, our minds and eyes will become automatically ready to select good from bad; to sharpen our powers of selection.
Without all this we will not be able to establish an objective difference between the mediocrity of the Guido de Marco monument and the masterpieces by Antonio Sciortino and Josef Kalleya. For whoever is not informed, the bronze dumped on the Lija roundabout is the same as the bronzes by Sciortino or Apap.
And this gives birth to a larger problem: the total lack of dialectics in our country. We do not know how to discuss, how to debate, how to create a thesis, to listen to a counter-thesis so as to arrive at a more just and informed conclusion. We do not know how to listen. This stems from the fact that we have lost a strong basis in the education of thought. And thus all decisions (in the artistic field) are made negligently. First monuments, sculpture parks and exhibitions are produced, and then the experts are consulted afterwards.
This signifies a total collapse of cultural awareness which will have horrible repercussions in the future. Who came up with the idea that those grey pilasters which are soiling the Valletta bastions are the masterpiece of someone who is being defined by those in power as the Richard England of today?
Could we at least create a sane debate on these works and disallow politicians who understand nothing about art to themselves determine the definition of art? The same politicians inaugurated mediocre monuments, monuments which do no good, and the same politicians also inaugurated exemplary and beautiful works. How are we to know what those in power really think about art?
The presumptuousness of political power (whoever is in government) that believes itself to understand everything is an exceptional Maltese trait. This is the effect of a total lack of education on dialectics and rhetoric, something which should be thought throughout one's educational life.
I have long been saying this, and it seems as if it is all for nothing. But I have noticed that certain small and modest changes are happening, so maybe mine is not a lone voice in the wilderness. However, the fight for quality is like the struggle of Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods so that every time he manages to roll a boulder up a hill, this rolls back down and he is made to repeat this action forever. And what did Sisyphus do to receive such a cruel punishment from the gods? He brought wisdom to humanity. Just like Adam and Eve's punishment, they were penalized for coming to recognize the bad from the good.
The gods and all powers are scared of knowledge. That is why education is always attacked. Unfortunately, if we look at the history of all religions and ideologies, all renounce the importance of education except for that which propagates their own religion or ideology. We can see this happening today with Islamic extremism and with extremist Orthodox Jews. Observe the attacks made by the church on lay education in the 19th century, or those against equality for women, the list is endless.
Education is accepted by religions and ideologies when it becomes a tool to brainwash people, to stunt their intellectual growth and shape it according to the particular ideology or religion. And all universities and institutions should fight against this attitude if they really want to be centres of intellectual thought.
Society attacks education through different forms, even ones which are paradoxical. One example is to establish numerous educational institutions to drown them in phenomenal bureaucracy which not only corrodes research sources and free academism, but also researchers and scholars become themselves bureaucratic collaborators without noticing.
In other words, the strategy is to kill fire with fire: when a brutal fire erupts and destroys large forests at great speed, the only way to stop it is to set on fire the same passage in front of the already existing fire. Thus, one has to destroy part of the forest to discontinue any further threat.
The same is happening to university education in Europe and beyond. To destroy free thought, research, intellectual competition, thousands of university institutions were founded, all with phenomenal budgets and bureaucratic structures, so large that one is equally frightened of them as of totalitarian structures, which control the performance and direction of research and intellectuality.
Otherwise what would thousands of bureaucrats do, those whom Charles Dickens calls beavers without air? Like fire which kills fire, we create institutions for the supposed betterment of thought to kill thought itself. This is what planned contemporary bureaucracy does.
This may be fought against in many ways: however the most effective mode to avoid choking is to create programmes in which students are given the possibility to think, to think liberally, possibilities to create freely. The more thinking students are around, the less will beavers.
Here art plays a central and determinant role. In today's modern world, we are faced with so much which neutralizes our thought in collaboration with the bureaucrats who have taken over all European universities; reality shows, innocuous TV programmes which are marketed as important and vital, virtuality and lies are posited as truth, absolute control of the media by international powers.
Which sphere possesses the capacity to confront all of this? Only art can.
And the Left prefers to sit down and eat pastizzi.
Article edited and translated by Nikki Petroni
Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci is the artistic director of the Mdina Cathedral Contemporary Art Biennale which will be held between 13 November 2015 and 7 January 2016. APS is the main partner of the Mdina Biennale