Trouble & Attitude 1/Trouble and Attitude - Issue 01.iso/pc/pctext/bizsc.txt

Text File | 1995-06-02 | 10.8 KB | 232 lines

MARY SCHMIDT-CAMPBELL
Dean, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU
with Jennifer Williams

Public funding of the arts is such a vital issue to
Mary Schmidt-Campbell, that the Dean of Tisch recently
gave it blanket coverage in New York Newsday. Campbell
has spent numerous years laboring on behalf of
theatre, broadcasting and film and, as the Arts
School's current head, oversees all phases of Tisch's
ten professional training programs, as well as its
preeminant academic programs.
Campbell's profile extends to scholar, author, film
producer and previous New York City Cultural Affairs
Commissioner under Koch. The former director of the
Studio Museum in Harlem, Campbell has continued to
promote education about African and African American
culture, most notably in her organization of the 1994
international academic conference, Black Cinema: A
Celebration of Pan-African Film. She began by focusing
upon this aspect of her multi-faceted career...

Early in your career you taught English to refugees
from the southern region of Africa. What did you learn
from that experience?
MC: A real understanding of what cultural difference
meant. I thought I was going back to my roots in
Africa, but I really understood more profoundly that I
was American and Western and African American.

You became Executive Director of the Studio Museum in
Harlem in 1977; I understand that while you were
there, the museum was moved to a space on 125th Street
that was six times the size of the original space?
MC: At that time, the museum was a loft over a liquor
store and Kentucky Fried Chicken, so you could always
get the aromas as you walked into the galleries!
But the trustees had made the decision, actually, even
before I had arrived: they wanted a museum that had a
collection, and a permanent home, and that was of
status that matched the content, which was African and
African American culture. A bank gave us a building--
the roof was leaking, the windows were cracked, the
basement was made of dirt. And we said "Great! We love
it!" Over the years we converted it into a real museum
space, and it's about to celebrate it's 30th
anniversary now. It's thriving.

That must have been gratifying.
MC: It was very gratifying. For one thing, it was the
kind of museum that had to be connected to the
community. Harlem is a very pro-active community. I
remember when we were about to move from this little
loft into the big space, I was walking down the
street, and somebody said to me, "So you're moving
your museum." I said "Yeah, we're going to have a real
museum with a permanent collection and galleries,"
etc.
He said, "If you don't get it right, we're going to
come after you with the hook", referring to the Apollo
Theater, where, when someone bombs, they get dragged
off the stage. Though Harlem is a poor
community╤economically poor╤the sense of aesthetic
standards is extremely high. Whether it's music or
art╤anything cultural--the people have very, very high
expectations. And so, that always drove the museum.
There was always a very close connection between the
museum and the people who lived and worked there.

Do you have a strong personal connection to Harlem?
MC: Yes, I do. My second son went to Harlem School of
the Arts, which is another cultural institution up
there; and he was really nurtured there. He became an
actor, and the school carefully guided his
development. There are other places╤Dance Theater of
Harlem, Boy's Choir of Harlem╤and I have this very
strong feeling that places like Harlem have their own
strength and resilience. Very often, when the media
talks about them, they talk only about the
difficulties and the problems╤corruption in the 30th
Precinct, drugs, crime╤but there's an underlying
strength that's quite remarkable, despite the
difficulties.

And that was the first Black, fine arts museum to be
accredited by the American Association of Museums?
MC: Yes, that was important to us because we felt that
in order for us to do justice to the cultural
artifacts, we should be meeting certain standards of
excellence. And by seeking accreditation, we were
making those standards very public. We were saying,
very publicly, that we were buying into the notion of
excellence and quality, and that we thought the
culture itself merited our behaving that way.

You became the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs in New
York, in charge of 32 major cultural institutions
including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn
Museum and Carnegie Hall. You must have loved your
job...
MC: Yes, going to work meant going to the
ballet, going to museums. I would say to myself, for
example, 'For the next two months I am going to see
only dance', and I would just immerse myself in New
York's dance community. I'd see small companies, large
companies, contemporary dance, ballet...
You could do that for each discipline and still not
see everything available in New York. It is a most
astonishing place: the smallest and most out of the
way location, could yield something that was
absolutely sterling. There really is no other place in
the world like New York City.
What we try to do at Cultural Affairs is try to keep
the city a fertile environment for all of that kind of
activity. New York City is a complicated city, with
layers and layers of complexity. So we would always
try to troubleshoot and help groups negotiate space,
or leases, or develop relationships with various city
agencies. Try to make their lives easier. I would
always tell my staff that we are doing the business of
cutting through the red tape for them, so they can do
the business of making art.

The NEA's fight for survival must be highly disturbing
for you.
MC: It's terrible, and very, very disturbing. The city
should be the place, in the country, where the
leadership is speaking on behalf of art and culture:
the value of it, and the value of public funding of
it.
Public funding for the arts is very young; it was
really Richard Nixon who got the endowment up and
running. We don't have a lot of experience in this
country with that kind of public support, and it's a
tiny bit of money compared to the way other countries
support the arts. I think what has been disappointing
is that we, as a community, have not really found a
persuasive public argument for that kind of support.
Public support of schools, colleges and universities,
libraries, even parks seems to make sense; but we've
not quite articulated why we should be supporting a
museum, or a theater company, or a dance company.

While you served as commissioner, you spoke of serving
the whole range of New Yorkers. Are you concerned that
people of low economic class won't have access to high
art?
MC: I have an interesting philosophy about that,
actually, particularly about this country. We have
such a thriving popular culture, that, in fact, there
are moments when our popular culture and our high
culture are interchangeable. Shakespeare could have
been called popular culture at one point.
So, a filmmaker like Martin Scorcese is an artist in
my mind, the highest sort. Or a musician like Duke
Ellington, was a musician of the highest sort. I think
that if we think more deeply about American culture,
we'll realize that most people are touched by art and
culture almost every day of their lives. It's that
kind of awareness that I think we have to awaken in
people. The reason we want public funding of it, is so
that we can continue to train people to be literate,
to be able to deal with ideas, to be able to write, to
be able to play instruments, to keep popular culture
and high culture very much alive in this country.

In 1991, you became the dean of Tisch and in March of
last year, organized the week-long Black Cinema
conference, which involved both African and African
American artists/scholars participating╤╩Sembene
Ousmene, Wole Soyinka, Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier,
Harry Belafonte, Manthia Diawara and bell hooks, to
name a few. What was it like?
MC: People literally came from all over the world for
the conference; we had thousands of people who
congregated. The conference itself was a mecca. I'm
happy to report that after we finished the 300 pages
of transcription of all the panels, we also had
substantive text. We sent all the text out to all the
panelists, and they've returned it to us now.
People are still connected to that event. We will
probably develop a publication, and we have 20 hours
of broadcast-quality video, so we've been talking to
the Bravo channel about developing a television
program based on it as well. That conference was
valuable for the participants, but also for NYU,
because it allowed us to install a whole new subject
area here╤ the area of Black Cinema╤on a global scale.
We're going to now try to get a permanent faculty
member in that area. There has been much resonance as
a result of that conference.

What are your goals for NYU?
MC: We're at a quite extraordinary, historical moment
at Tisch. As a film school, that half is facing a
revolution. Almost all the tools of filmmaking are
shifting. Not only that, but the art object itself is
changing. We're seeing the development of CD-ROM. Who
knows what is going to come out of further mergers
between telephone companies and computers and
television?
I see my role as shepherding the school through that.
I see that in three separate areas. Certainly at the
film school, we need to re-tool, bring ourselves
up-to-date. Secondly, we have a program called
interactive communications, and our plan is to
probably expand that. The third area, is that I think
we ought to be doing some experimental things in a
cross-disciplinary way, having opportunities for our
students to work as collaborative teams.

What do you predict for film in an age where
television is taking over?
MC: I think these technologies don't replace each
other. It's interesting how talk radio has had a
resurgence recently. It has really resurrected itself
in a major way, and has had a major impact on American
policy and American politics. I think every medium has
its own strength and its own appeal, and that each
will find its place in an increasingly complicated
landscape.
One of the most fascinating books I've read recently
is The Gutenberg Elegies:The Art of Reading in the
Electronic Age. It asks the question "What becomes of
reading in all of this?" It's a good question. As the
landscape becomes more complicated, what happens to
the art of thinking deeply? What happens to
conversation? What happens to those things that are
our basic connections and intimacies? I think that's
actually the more fundamental question.