This Monday, Dr. Jorge Lucero, Anthony J. Petullo professor of Art Education and senior associate dean for faculty affairs at the University of Illinois, presented his lecture on conceptual art, “No Wasted Moves: On the Pliability of Teaching as a Creative Practice.” The talk featured a presentation of Lucero’s own artistic practice and philosophy of turning everyday life into art, before moving to a Q&A with the audience, a mixed group of faculty and students who almost filled the entire classroom.
Lucero was invited to Oberlin by Assistant Professor of Sculpture Zé Kielwagen, who said he came across Lucero’s website while browsing online a year and a half ago. Kielwagen thought Lucero’s work was impressive and unique, and that he wanted to borrow Permissions for Documentation, a traveling exhibition book that Lucero loans out as part of an ongoing artistic endeavor.
Kielwagen routinely brings in visiting artists to talk to sculpture students about their work. He explained why he decided to bring in Lucero.
“I thought this would be great for students here because [of] his surprising, very creative … idea of testing the pliability of things,” Kielwagen said. “Usually in art schools, students are trained in a specific medium, and every medium is pliable. … Sculptors try to push the limits of whatever material they’re working with.”
Lucero spent three hours with Kielwagen’s students, discussing their next projects with them, before his lecture that night. At 7:06 p.m. — after giving stragglers ample time to arrive — Kielwagen stood to jovially introduce Lucero and begin the lecture.
Lucero began a little self-deprecatingly, noting that even after years of lectures to audiences as large as 150–200 people he still gets a little anxious speaking, and that the americano he had just had probably wouldn’t help. These comments, humorous as they were, were undercut immediately, because if he had any anxiety over the next 40 minutes, he certainly didn’t show it. Lucero made his way through an extensive slideshow on the pliability of life and work as art expertly, broadly gesturing with full arm and open palm at the slideshow and audience. His passion for the topic was clear, as was his depth of knowledge and experience.
Mindful of the time, he moved through the slideshow with a fast but never rushed pace, skipping a few sections. This sacrificed nothing of his broader point: that life and educational work can be used to create art. Pictures of different arrangements of textbooks, reorganized announcement boards, and an office space turned into an hour long study space/library persistently reinforced Lucero’s point that it is indeed possible to work and create art at the same time. Moreover, Lucero emphasized, it is possible for work and art to be one and the same.
“There’s a kind of administrative component to being an artist,” Lucero said. “There’s an administrative component to being a teacher, as well as there being a pedagogical component to being an artist and a pedagogical component to being an administrator.”
The audience was thoroughly attentive. After Lucero finished, a lively Q&A period commenced. For around 15 minutes, the students asked specific, sometimes probing questions, the mark of any successful lecture. In his answers, Lucero described his training in art school and reassured a student of the feasibility of continuing to create art while teaching.
The audience response to the lecture was enthusiastic. Audie Wilson, fourth-year Studio Art major, said Lucero assuaged her fears surrounding teaching.
“He just told me to keep going,” Wilson said. “And stick with what I was interested in and pour the love and appreciation into what I care about, whether it be teaching or making things.”
Lucero expressed his hopes for what students would take away from the talk.
“I hope that they come away recognizing that even when something presents itself as unpliable, that’s a false interpretation,” Lucero said. “Most things that appear unpliable, immovable, if you come at them from a different perspective, you can move them. … In the worst case scenario, if you can’t change the thing, you can change yourself in your engagement with the thing.”
