The Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program
The Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program, one of the most successful programs within the Gallatin School, representing approximately a quarter of the overall student body, offers a collaborative educational venture between students and faculty. In accord with the overall structure of the Gallatin School, students design their own programs of study adapted to their unique backgrounds, interests and goals, under the direction of faculty advisers. These individualized programs combine courses throughout New York University along with Gallatin's internships, independent studies, private lessons, course equivalency and core curriculum of discussion-based interdisciplinary seminars. Founded in the early seventies by Professor Laurin Raiken as an experiment in arts learning and training, the Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program (GIAP) has grown over the past twenty years to include several paths of study and clusters of courses through which students can develop individualized, interdisciplinary programs in both academic and studio areas in the arts. These areas of concentration include sociology and anthropology of the arts; arts management; cultural policy; gender and performance; political economy of the arts; performance history; and drama and aesthetics, as well as more studio-oriented workshops in dance, acting, music, visual arts, performance art, and creative writing. Professors Laurin Raiken and Julie Malnig direct the program; they and a core of Gallatin fulltime and adjunct arts faculty work closely with students to help them shape an arts curriculum tailored to their individual needs within the collaborative art world.
The GIAP is distinguished from other arts programs at New York University, and indeed from other arts training programs around the country, in its philosophical and practical emphasis on what we have termed the artist-scholar/scholar-artist approach to arts education. While variations of the artist-scholar, or academic-practitioner, model may be found elsewhere at Gallatin, the GIAP is engaged in the process of actively incorporating the two approaches to enrich our overall arts curriculum. The cornerstone of this program is its unique combination of intellectual and experiential components along with vehicles for creative expression. All too often in contemporary approaches to arts training, intellectual concerns are pitted against artistic and aesthetic ones; the professional artist is either fearful of or antagonistic to the life of the mind, and the intellectual suspicious and unappreciative of the work of the studio and the stage. In keeping with Gallatin's mission to integrate knowledge previously fragmented into disciplinary categories, the Directors of the Program seek to re-synthesize analytical and intuitive approaches to art and overcome this artificial division. Our work, thus, serves as a laboratory to test the advantages of a joint experiential-academic program.
The concept of the artist-scholar, designated by the Directors, actually has a long and distinguished tradition. Students of art history know that many visual artists have also been distinguished scholars, writers or critics. One of the earliest and best known examples is the poet Charles Baudelaire, who is often credited as the first modern art critic. Contemporary examples of such artist-scholars include Charles Rosen, the distinguished pianist as well as musicologist and music biographer; Mary Catherine Bateson, noted anthropologist, writer and artist; Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller who has conjoined her role as psychoanalyst with work as a painter; and Dr. Theodore Conant, a foremost artist-scientist who pioneered one of the first significant experiments between art and technology at Bell Labs. Using these and other artist-scholars as models and sources of inspiration, the aim of the Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program is to create an environment in which students may discover how intellectual pursuits can enrich their studio work, and how, in turn, their own artistic efforts and creative experiences can serve as the springboard for intellectual questions and challenges.
The collaboration between Professor Raiken and Professor Julie Malnig (who joined the Gallatin faculty in 1994), marked an evolution in the development of the Gallatin Interdisciplinary Arts Program. Through the process of exchanging ideas from each of their individual areas of specialty (interdisciplinary studies and cultural policy and performance studies, respectively), and as a result of sharing their experiences working with Gallatin arts students, both Raiken and Malnig arrived at a similar analysis of the Arts Program. They realized that a process of learning which had hitherto been implicit in the Gallatin arts curriculum, needed to be made explicit and expanded; the time was necessary to fully articulate the aims and goals of this method of arts training and harness all the existing elements- into a coherent, recognizable curricula model, to be used now and as the basis for the Gallatin arts curriculum for years to come.
