Keynote Address by Anne Ayres
Otis College of Art and Design
Commencement 2003

Members of the Otis Boards, Otis Faculty and Staff, Families and Friends of the Graduates, and, most important, the Fine Artists and Artist/Designers for whom this day of graduation represents a rite of passage.

This day must have seemed long in coming and long overdue. Here you are no longer customers and consumers of an art education-if, indeed, you ever were that-and I don't for a moment think you actually were. Rather, you were (and will forever remain) learners and seekers and active participants in a complex process of looking and thinking-of skill building and experimentation and innovation and provocation. You were teachers of yourselves first of all, and also of your classmates and of your remarkable faculty-together situated in a community dedicated to shared values-dedicated, at the very least, to the shared values of useful difference, close argumentation, and coming fully to grips not only with the "how" but also with the "why"-the meaning and consequence of what you make and send into the world.

Artists and designers are by temperament rebellious, and by training they are taught more than the necessary hand/eye skills. You have learned to be critical, demanding, non-institutional, anti-bureaucratic, questioning of all authority, alert to the afflictions and joys of commerce, keen to analyze "who gains, who loses" in the inevitable plays of power, alive to the meanings of visual sign systems, deconstructively acute in the face of the mass media overload-a media whose content is increasingly a faithful echo-chamber of the powers-that-be.

And now you are fully credentialed creators-imaginative makers and thinkers-who are ready and eager to take your talents into the world and build and conserve and remake and rethink that world into a better, more human, more beautiful, more intelligently organized place.

Well, you see my problem here. To say what I think is important to say on this celebratory day without falling headlong into an abyss of cliches. To try to be a little bit true to myself-and thus true to you-without jettisoning a useful habit of irony and skepticism (and even a certain cynicism)-while yet whole-heartedly and sincerely declaring the value and fascination and importance and pleasure of an art education in general and the excellent one that you have received from your teachers at Otis.

In the face of necessary institutional imperatives (administrative, legal, fiscal), I have learned to cherish-as you have- the equally legitimate cry "but it's an art school"-a mantra of resistance and an indispensable reminder of the messy, scrappy, often puzzling, sometimes trouble-making, and always passionate activities that are essential to artistic thinking and production-essential, that is, to the very purpose of our collage. It seems to me that an art school-a good and functioning art school like Otis College of Art and Design-is always a constantly contested arena, a hard won paradox-perhaps indeed an outright miracle.

Art's primarily function, I believe, is to "liberate us from a ponderous and pedestrian mind." [1] A ponderous mind is labored and dull. A pedestrian mind lacks interest or imagination. None of you I am sure are either ponderous or pedestrian. Art is a powerful antidote to what might be called the fundamentalist mind-a rigid and exhausted mind, one that shuns the complex and the difficult solution in favor of easy, familiar, might-makes-right responses to the dilemmas of our increasingly more dangerous world.

"Keep it Simple, Stupid" is a good reminder that focus is necessary and effective-but a useful slogan is not an adequate guide to the serious problems of an endangered democracy, a perilous politics, and a fragile planet that-yet again in my lifetime-faces the very real threat of extinction. This world and its people deserve citizens eager to ask hard questions and engage complex thoughts and commit to goals that may not even be achieved in your lifetime.

Yes, an artistic practice is a deeply personal endeavor. It calls for clarity, focus, a deep seeing, a deep listening, a deep touching. It calls for the "proper use of one's own solitude" [2] --a solitude that almost always entails an existential meeting with one's mortality.

An artistic practice is also a deeply social endeavor. It asks that we make authentic contact with human beings not human resources; that we bring harmony to situations of forbidding differences; that our laugher and cordiality and accommodation be a recognition of and compassion for our shared humanity. Patriotism, I like to think, is the unaffected love of one's own country and, in the case of the United States, the vigilant defense of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights-a Patriotism expanded to love and support of the land and waters that make life possible-a Patriotism further conceived as loving care of our planet and the maintenance of its survival.

This solitude and this community-this Being Alone and this Being-with-Others-is the crux of being Human. You can't have one without the other. It is served by both contemplation and creative action. So honor both compromise in the social realm-which calls for rapprochement, give-and-take, a dialectic synthesis, a rubbing together of differences out of which something new arises-and obstinacy in your private studios, an obstinate, relentless, clearly understood reluctance to "accept anything short of absolute attainment of your artistic goals." [3]

I have come to know that the only world I know is my world of experience. It arises when I am born and ceases when I die. So-travel far and wide or stay close to home; have a hugely successful career in enjoyable worldly terms or cultivate the pleasure of anonymous satisfaction (most of our lives settle into various points of these continua). Be courageous and open and free and loving with your fellows-and your experiences (at least most of them) will be productive and useful, expansive and bountiful, generous and, if you want, blissfully intoxicating.

Well, enough of this happy rhetoric. We've all seen-or soon will-the remarkable year-end exhibitions beautifully and professionally installed throughout the Ahmanson Building, the Galef Fine Arts Center, and in the Ben Maltz Gallery. Clearly you have the talent, the ambition, and the fine education to make your way in your chosen careers-just do your best, show up, stay present, and you are more than halfway home. Good luck and On with the Show!