Continuing lessons in the land of neoliberal academia
Adjusting to Southern California, working with Joanna Macy (in person) and the pervasiveness of all things nuclear
Before I continue deconstructing my decades within academia, I want to offer an abbreviated history of neoliberalism courtesy of Doug Paterson, an Alliance for Cultural Democracy peer from decades ago. He shared the following on Facebook after seeing the link to my most recent substack post. While I added this quote in updated version of my last post, I wanted to make sure that those of you just reading here took in his words in as well.
Doug said,
“The term, neoliberal comes from post-civil war corporate assaults on "public" government that created an economy that would not only stop regulating the Corporate State (the real US government) but would instead help it to make profits. They called this "liberalism" in c. 1880 - 1890, and it lasted until 1929 when "liberals" like FDR gave the public government renewed power over the Corporate State. This lasted until perhaps 1980 and Reagan, though "neo" liberalism (of the 1980's variety) was already rising on steroids. Telling this story is a teeny tiny subversion maybe, and it can be fun, even a prep on the real enemy.”
For those of you not familiar with the damage done by Reagan and his cronies (because they rarely teach this history in schools), it’s important to be aware that his decisions and those of his henchmen ruptured unions and other parts of the social safety net, created new media monopolies to reinforce rightwing propaganda, shaped the current real estate crisis, invested in the prison-industrial complex, and generally damaged anything that offered benefits to the public via FDR’s New Deal. The cascade of societal ills that have resulted from this devastating shift towards favoring more corporate control of society are still unfolding, as we see more folks without shelter, without adequate nutrition, ubiquitous corruption, crises in mental health, epidemic violence, and a widening divide between the rich and the poor.
How did this shift in politics impact higher education? Well, simply put, the profit motive became much more crucial in making decisions about what to fund and where to get funding. This focus on financial gain and growth hampered the development of innovative programs that were not in the world of STEM, and it definitely shifted priorities away from the humanities towards subjects that would allow entry into positions in the tech world. Our society will pay the price for this for many years to come.
With the rising costs of education causing decades of students to take out loans, we lost many members of previous generations who might have become organizers, creatives, activists, and innovators to the exhaustion and stress of paying off endless debt. Not to mention all those who were prevented from getting an education because it was just inaccessible financially. Many of us believe that this was a deliberate strategy by those in power, especially after the student activism of the ‘60s and ‘70s…a punishment still being inflicted on subsequent generations. On top of this tragedy, most of our current educational system is not set up to help young people learn who they are, develop their gifts, or learn how the various systems of oppression and structures work or how to dismantle them. So there’s lots to undo and repair here, and that’s what led me to teach.
Some of us may have an idealized vision of an academic life, especially if you were in college in the late 1960s-1970s, seeing the upheavals happening on so many campuses. Often faculty were crucial allies and catalysts for the surge in student activism, so some of us saw ourselves having a less compromised future working in those places. I have to admit being a bit delusional about the ethics of these institutions. I was incredibly naïve about the politics I would encounter. Somehow I had imagined that the people I respected as a student were the dominant culture among faculty, and that they didn’t have pressures, enemies, the priorities of full-time enrollment (FTE), and profit-making weighing down on them.
Yesterday, I decided to research who were the new faculty in the art department at Cal State Long Beach. I had not been keeping track of that place for many reasons, so I have to admit being a bit startled to see that only one of my former colleagues is still there after my departure 28 years ago. Ah, the passage of time… When you’ve had as nomadic a life as I’ve had, it is not surprising that chapters get left behind; it’s not just time passing and doors closing on past chapters, but the myopia that can occur when you live inside multiple crises for long periods – the latter, in particular, can exacerbate this feeling of being out of sync. I will probably write more about this feeling as I continue this memoir.
In any case, when I looked at the photos and bios of the more recent art faculty at CSULB, my feelings were mixed. I thought about all the search committees, interviews, and meetings that were invested in each person who was listed, and read their impressive bios wondering what the hiring committees were projecting onto each new hire. By the standards of the mainstream art world, the spread of talent indicated by these teaching artists is formidable - NY galleries, Whitney Biennial, and international exhibitions. This new era of faculty provides the conventional forms of prestige that so many programs desire.
When I arrived on campus in 1986, I learned that lots of expectations were being projected onto me. The art department was hoping for a stronger connection to the NY art scene and that my presence and offerings to their program would help their program appear more contemporary and experimental. CSULB’s art department was one the cheapest options for an art education in the area, given that it was a state school, but they were still competing for students with the much more experimental, “avant garde” schools like CalARTS and Pasadena’s Art Center. CSULB’s art department, as mentioned in my last post, was stuck in late modernism and the craft of academic painting from the late 19th century. As I recall, the university had been started post-WWII to provide education and degrees to the masses of returning veterans. The art department was more focused on training skills and aesthetic taste. In some ways, it felt vocational, rather than offering critical views of what art could do beyond decoration and spectacle. Bringing in artists who were representative of NYC’s avant-garde art world signaled a shift into something glamorous (rather than socially engaged) that they hoped would improve the department’s self image and prestige.
Hearing from my female colleague that they had brought me there with those expectations was a bit strange, given that their projections had little to do with my aspirations. I had left the NYC art world, and my contacts within the alternative margins of the high art world would not offer my new colleagues access to gallery dealers or a spot in the Whitney Biennial. They had chosen the wrong “target” for their opportunism. They also had not recognized how my orientation towards social change would impact my teaching and my subsequent art projects. This goal would sadly cause a few colleagues to feel threatened by my presence (despite the fact that they had never even talked to me, one on one). Fortunately during my tenure at CSULB, there were two art department chairs who found my passions in alignment with theirs, and most of the students adored my classes, but the support from those arenas did not prevent some nasty attacks (more on those later).
When I arrived in Long Beach, California in the summer of 1986, I rented a vine-covered craftsman bungalow in a neighborhood on the edge of the “crack” epidemic. The romance of this new home’s appearance captivated me, but augured so much of what would continue to beguile me - being seduced by the beauty, and then seeing the ugly underside. Sometimes, it could work the other way around: despite the poverty, violence, and drug culture fraying the edges of my new community, I had some lovely elder women neighbors who had moved to Long Beach from somewhere in the midwest to retire. Greeting and sharing stories with them was comforting.
As someone who was most identified with NYC and Northeast culture, there was so much that was foreign to me in southern California: the flora, fauna, the endless sun, beach life, the car dependent culture, and the amount of skin that was exposed year-round. One of the things that really irked me the first year were the constant smiles from strangers and associates, as well as the stereotypical invitations of “let’s do lunch” that never manifested. I also learned that my sarcastic sense of humor was not always appreciated. That first year was one of adjusting and adapting.
I found the CSULB students refreshingly diverse. Many were first generation college students, coming from working class families. After my previous two years working with a much more comfortably middle class student population, I was excited by the varied stories and ambitions that my new students had, and the multiple cultures they emerged from; there were so many histories that I had never learned in school. Through the work my students did in my classes, I was finally getting an inkling about the devastation of the relocation camps on my Japanese American students and their families, the trauma of the Cultural Revolution on my Chinese students who had recently emigrated, and the complex navigation that my Chicano and Black students had to do to avoid gangs and prison. One of the primary reasons that I had chosen to teach was coming to life; I was getting a much more nuanced and complex education through my students.
My own creative process was not flowing easily that first year, due to an increasingly problematic long-distance relationship, along with the difficulties of transitioning to a very different culture. But, despite these challenges, I was journaling and making small drawings in my living room. Some of those drawings became part of my limited edition 1987 calendar, to process my culture shock.
July’s image may be recognizable to those of you who are familiar with the San Onofre Nuclear Plant.
What made all the difference in this new chapter was being welcomed by the feminist artists of Los Angeles; there were many of them animating and activating the cultural milieu, thanks to efforts of the Woman’s Building. The latter institution had seeded the liveliest and most inclusive feminist art scene that I’d ever experienced, and over the 9 years that I lived in southern California, I was always amazed by how generous this community was. Even though I was a recent arrival, my peers invited me to participate in shows, panels, discussions, and events, not fearing me as a competitor. They wanted to share in whatever abundance was available. This behavior, I have learned over the years, was exceptional to the southern California women artists community. I have not experienced this kind of welcome elsewhere, and I sorely miss it to this day.
My dear friend, Jacki Apple, who became an ancestor in 2022, was a NYC transplant whom I had worked with at the Franklin Furnace, invited me to many art events and introduced me to many performance & activist artists. Jacki had created a vital niche for herself in the community, curating a sound art program on the local Pacifica radio station and many exhibitions. She taught art theory and contemporary cultural history at the Art Center, wrote for a variety of journals, and was constantly birthing a wide variety of cultural projects. Through some connection of Jacki’s, I was invited to do a slide/tape piece for Beyond Baroque, a cultural center in Venice, CA. That piece, Don’t Look at This, was a response to the cognitive dissonance that I was experiencing in southern California.
Sometime during my first year at CSULB, the art writer, Suzi Gablik, called me and suggested that we both go to the Ojai Foundation to do a workshop with Joanna Macy, saying “you MUST meet your teacher in person.” Suzi, after writing about THIS IS NOT A TEST and spending time with me in NYC, had known about Joanna’s influence on my work. Suzi had just been invited to be a visiting scholar at UC Santa Barbara that year and had done a pilgrimage previously with the then director of the Ojai Foundation, Joan Halifax (Now Roshi Joan, founder of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe). Suzi had great stories about their adventures searching for the Black Madonna and shared some of the fascinating history of this retreat center.
Through this workshop with Joanna and subsequent retreats in Ojai, the trajectory of my life began to change in profound ways, although the shifts were slow and almost undetectable at first. When I learned that Ojai Valley was one of the locations for the film, Lost Horizon (based on the imaginary world of Shangri-La), I was not surprised. The landscape became a cacophony of sensations - it was speaking to me through its perfumes and vistas; the orchards, vineyards, and gardens spoke of an earthly abundance that was tantalizing. When Suzi told me that Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher, along with folks from his Theosophy crowd, had purchased the land in the 1920s where the Ojai Foundation sits, I was amazed. I had heard Krishnamurti speak at NYC’s town hall when I was only 17. Having grown up without any spiritual education, I had found the content of his talk intriguing, so being led to this land felt like something fated. When I returned to do retreats there, my whole nervous system recalibrated into something close to a HUM…a foreshadowing of “gravity humming;” part of my very tentative dance into the land of woo-woo that I will write about soon. Despite my East Coast skepticism and ease with sarcastic comments about the spiritual inclinations of others, some frequency was beginning to find more portals, somatic and otherwise, into my consciousness.
The sensory input of that retreat center still lives inside me: eucalyptus-fragrant paths, time that was scored by the rhythm and melodies of bells, chimes, and roosters crowing, the hard-packed and dusty earth, the rugged and seemingly forbidden mountains not far in the distance, and the chilly solemnity of morning meditations, with echoes of each other’s breath in the yurt. There were no smart phones then, no pings to interrupt the depth of what we were doing together. In fact the only phone accessible to participants required coins, and was located in a booth at the top of the hill. We were in a space out of time, where we could name our pain for the earth and feel it on a cellular level. Sitting with this collective of kindred souls created a kind of care that I had not expected.
The contemplative and deep listening practices that I was introduced to during that retreat shaped a spirituality grounded in activism and community. In that particular moment, when I was carrying so much horror about what human actions were doing to the world, it felt right-sized for who I was and what I was swirling inside. My commitment to my work about nuclear nightmares was only heightened by what I was learning about the proliferation of weapons and nuclear waste, and the myopic greed and intense fear that was allowing this to happen. Joanna led us into meditations that took us into deep time. She shared her dream for the Nuclear Guardianship project that would create a strange sort of spiritual cult of devotees who would monitor radioactive waste containers, above ground, protecting hundreds of generations from contamination for thousands of years. I began making sketches of what I imagined for that sacred, but terrifying space.
After this retreat with Joanna, Suzi and I had many conversations about the book she had begun to write – what was to become The Reenchantment of Art. This book was the follow up to Has Modernism Failed? and offered examples of the socially engaged direction that she felt artists should be taking. She asked me to recommend artists who she should include in the book. I was happy to give her a list; it included folks doing work in communities who had been part of our ICA exhibition in London in 1980 that included Suzanne Lacy, Mierle Ukeles Laderman, and people from the Alliance for Cultural Democracy world. Reimagining what art could become outside of the rubrics of capitalism was definitely terrain that excited me. We had great conversations about how this paradigm for art as a strategy for healing the world was beginning to manifest.
Around the same time, the curator, Josine Ianco-Starells, invited me to install THIS IS NOT A TEST at the Long Beach Museum of Art. The interactive drawing series, Taking the Empire’s New Clothes to the Laundry was expanded to include new sites inspired by my new location. I was excited to debut my work in my new community, and offered a free and modified “Despair and Empowerment” workshop inspired by Joanna Macy’s work for the museum audience. Those who attended were receptive, but I recognized the process for raising consciousness about nuclear issues was going to be a slow process. In the dominant culture, the numbness was thick and I was aware that I had my own avoidance issues around the topic at times. How else would I navigate everyday life?
In the summer of 1987, I was finally able to travel again (after years of not having the resources and time to do that). I spent time visiting a college friend in Paris and another friend in Luzern, Switzerland. As I traveled via train from one place to another, throughout the French countryside I saw the cooling towers of nuclear plants in the midst of what should have bucolic landscapes of sunflowers and grazing animals. I found this a haunting reminder that there’s nowhere free of such ecological insults to our precious planet, and was inspired to create a series of postcard “corrections” or interventions - all postcards were purchased at the Louvre in Paris. I sent them off to cultural institutions, not knowing what impact seeing these images would have on the postal workers and the people who received them.
”While France is Sleeping & Dreaming” (after Van Gogh) 1987
Just before the fall semester began in 1987, I was invited to attend a CSU art faculty retreat. The then Chancellor of the CSU system, Ann Reynolds, threw some funds to make this retreat happen, and faculty who were artists, poets, musicians, dancers, filmmakers and theater folks came together at a ski resort near Lake Tahoe so we could inspire each other. We were fed gourmet food and the California wines were copious, in exchange for sharing our work with each other. Thankfully some of these CSU colleagues were inspired by my work, and offered me exhibitions at three university galleries. I made some new artist friends in Los Angeles and other parts of the state. All of the women faculty were feminists and were having different sorts of struggles in their departments. No matter how beloved we were by our students, inviting them into their creative power, we were seen as a threat on our campuses, and if we produced dynamic work that received recognition that would ultimately build our case for receiving tenure, that was seen as a provocation. It was not a healthy atmosphere.
I came back to Long Beach feeling uneasy for many reasons that I will soon detail, but some unexpected life blessings were just around the corner.
As the joint writer actor strike continues in an attempt to adjust to technology and the future of things such as AI it is interesting to remember who the president of SAG was the last time the two groups struck together in 1960. It was that leader of labor Ronald Reagan. This was his entry into politics and launched him into the governorship just in time for the 60's. On a seperate note I too was introduced to Krishnamurti in my youth at the same time as I was "saved" by Joseph Campbell. But it was only last December that I finally got to visit the Foundation property and Oji. I am now looking forward to going back and spend time there by volunteering to help build stone lined irrigation ditches in their olive orchards.