ART/Cathy Curtis : New Dean Has Bright Vision for Laguna Institute

Why would the acting vice president of a large, 81-year-old art school that boasts a long list of well-known artists among its alumni leave that job to be dean of a much younger, low-profile institution with just 100 students and a history of complacent catering to Sunday painters?

The lack of tradition is exactly the point, says Richard Carp, 39, newly arrived to take over as dean at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach after eight years at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland.

In Carp’s eyes, a small school without the burden of tradition “can move more quickly, can be much more creative, can be much more powerful. . . . It’s almost like guerrilla war. We’re light and fast, and we can go where the action is.”

Originally known as the Laguna Beach School of Art, the 26-year-old Art Institute changed its name in 1986 to reflect its new bachelor of fine arts degree-granting status and accreditation by the National Assn. of Schools of Art and Design. (The school is now the only accredited art institute in Orange County and one of four in Southern California.)

A boyish, red-haired man with the blue-chambray-shirt look of a reluctant ex-hippie, Carp radiates energy and a goofy sense of humor. At one point during a recent interview he jumped noisily onto a spot on the ground indicated by the photographer and mischievously offered to swing from the big metal hoop of the Todd Chapman sculpture in front of the school.

Right now, Carp thinks the school needs to move “toward multidisciplinary or interdisciplinary or non-disciplinary” treatment of art as well as participate in the “multicultural dialogue.”

“The artists I most admire do not define themselves by medium,” Carp says. “They define themselves by whatever their need is at the time they’re working on a work.”

Pressed for examples, Carp mentions Robert Irwin (who explores aspects of perception in various tangible and intangible media) and performance artist Suzanne Lacey. Lacey will be in residence at the Art Institute this fall as part of the school’s visiting-artists program, which will include performances and other activities that “offer some insight and contact for people in the community who would like it.”

Although Carp realizes that some students will “basically do nothing but paint,” the school’s “primary focus will be on people who want to develop a broader vision of themselves,” much as it is at the Oakland art school, where 60% of the students do not specialize in a particular art medium.

Carp won’t discuss specific curriculum changes that he has in mind to reflect a pan-ethnic outlook until the faculty has a chance to discuss his ideas. But part of this emphasis will involve a concerted effort to recruit students whose cultural backgrounds reflect the diversity of the “Pacific Rim.”

An instructor in the humanities and social sciences departments at the Oakland school, Carp earned his Ph.D. at the Graduate Theological Seminary in Berkeley and his BA in political theory at Stanford University. But his off-duty passion is acting, which flavors his speech with theatrical pauses and flourishes and gives him a handy metaphor for academic administration: “You write a script and you collect a group of creative people and you generate a show.”

One of his chief tasks as “scriptwriter” is to beef up liberal arts offerings for the bachelor of fine arts degree so that the program meets the standards of the Western Assn. of Schools and Colleges. (Accreditation requires 50% of each student’s work to be in the humanities--at the Laguna Art Institute that figure is now only 25%.)

Carp compares the potential of the Art Institute to such famous untraditional art schools as the Bauhaus (founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany) and Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the 1950s.

But surely those schools had extraordinary faculties and extraordinary students quite different from those at the Art Institute?

Carp replies that such judgments have to be left to history. “Check back with us in 20 years and tell us whether or not we were (noteworthy).”

He does believe that one key factor in excellence that is lacking at the school is senior faculty. “It’s not that the senior people haven’t achieved the stature senior people in (other schools) have achieved,” he says. “It’s that we don’t have any senior faculty. Our junior faculty (members) stack up perfectly well with anybody’s.”

By next year, the school will have hired “a couple” of senior faculty, Carp says. Asked what the financial and creative inducements will be for an artist of this stature, he replies, “There are other things in the world besides money, and the more substantial and the more passionate an artist is, the less that is the primary issue.”

At the same time, Carp insists that the pay scale at the Art Institute “isn’t so bad.” Junior faculty salaries are “in the 20s and 30s”--comparable, Carp says, to what junior faculty earn at other art schools.

But what about attracting the caliber of students likely to interest a first-rate senior faculty member?

“We’re in the process of development,” Carp replies. “You don’t walk into a studio and expect the pigment to be on the canvas. . . . This is really only the second class of students we’ve gone out and recruited for the bachelor of arts (program), and they are a bunch of serious young committed artists who are going to create the kind of pressure for excellence that we need.

“I am not dissatisfied with the caliber of students we have, and I expect to be developing that caliber in two ways. We will be instituting an honors program and developing an honors track . . . and we will control our growth so that we become more selective in our admissions process. . . . If we’re only going to have 30 or 40 maximum (students entering the program each year), we can really go out and say, ‘What 40 people do we want?’--and find them.”

But will they want to come to Laguna Beach, where the ranks of tourist-trash commercial galleries have long overshadowed the town’s serious reputation as an artists’ colony?

“I think Laguna has something to offer the college,” Carp says carefully. “And I think the college has something to offer Laguna.

“What Laguna has to offer is a tradition of real concern and commitment about the arts. I appreciate the fact that (work in) glass and ceramics and all of that could find a home here back in the bad old days when crafts were still having to fight for being recognized as valid (art) media. . . .

“Now we need to be looking at site works. We need to be looking at performance work. We need to be looking at art that doesn’t endure forever. We need to be looking at the social and political role of the arts. . . . That ferment and excitement is what you need our college for.”