Individualized Major Program: Retrospective Statement

Between 2000-2004, I pursued a self-designed major in Indiana University’s Individualized Major Program called “Horizontal Integration in the Arts.” The following is my retrospective statement, the paper I had to turn in summarizing my program of study in order to finally graduate. I post it here because it answers, in depth, that oft-asked question: “What kind of major is that?”

In short, “Horizontal Integration in the Arts” is an integrated study of film, music, art, design, and writing. Most people immediately ask for an explanation upon hearing the strange title of my major. A crude example will clarify: in the same way that the appeal of an entertainer like Miley Cyrus or Will Smith works through TV, movies, music, and video games, so can an artist’s ideas translate throughout disciplines. The title of my major initially referred to realizing aesthetic ideas and making connections throughout disciplines, finding the most appropriate mediums through which to express those ideas, and conceptualizing artistic movements from idiosyncratic angles. Naturally, it has ended up being much more than that.

The admission statement into this program began with a quote from Voltaire: “All the arts are friends, since they are divine. Whoever would separate them is far from knowing them.” My major was largely an extended investigation of whether or not this was true. Unsurprisingly, I have found it to be very much so. Though the ways I regard each artistic discipline have evolved significantly since my freshman year, my relative partiality towards one or another has not. When talking about art for art’s sake, I still see the various disciplines as tools for conveying something greater, not cloistered practices that naturally exist separately from one another. Some of the most salient inspirations of my major–Goethe, da Vinci, Robert Rauschenberg, Brian Eno, Wim Wenders, Buckminster Fuller, and even Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin–ostensibly shared the same sentiment and worked beyond disciplines.

Creating this program of study was a necessary, practical, simplifying response to the way I think. It imposes order on a mind interested in just about everything. The creation of this major began with an honest appraisal of how I work best, and will help me move forward in a culture inclined towards specialization and categorization. I hope to see myself not as a photographer, or writer, or musician, but, more simply, an artist in the broadest sense of the word: one who creates. My major allowed me to hit the ground running in our rapidly evolving creative culture, and prepared me to thrive in it.

In a practical sense, interdisciplinary awareness is the bread and butter of any artist. While the primary task of an novelist is to write good novels, to actually be read and get noticed, the writer needs a dynamic website and a well-designed book cover. Filmmakers interpret novels and plays, design sets, and work in teams of individuals from disparate disciplines and specialties. Designers work for a wildly disparate clientele, from businesspeople to musicians to other artists, and require the ability to empathize with varied clients. Visual artists, of course, regularly collaborate with other artists in other disciplines, if only in conversation.

In our “internet age,” effortlessly transitioning between multimedia is a matter of course. My interdisciplinary bent was fostered by being raised on computers, the internet, hyperlinks, and cracked copies of multimedia software. Within a handful of programs, one essentially has a music studio, design workshop, photography studio, and publishing house on a single computer. Twenty five years ago, it was simply not possible to work in these disparate arenas; they were cloistered and cost-prohibitive. Now, what was once impossible is commonplace: today one may work in all of these environments simultaneously. Self-publishing and self-promotion—themselves examples of a trend towards an individualist-minded brand of vertical integration—are overtaking 20th century models of distribution. There is a widespread democratization of artistic production happening in the world today, and my major was designed partly in response.

Much of the real, nitty-gritty work toward my major was self-guided, independent, and un-credited. My studies were geared toward absorbing a lot of texts—at one point I had 262 books on loan from IU’s libraries—comparing and contrasting books, music, films, and visual art works, and using the resultant analogies to streamline further investigations of the varied disciplines. My course work within the major was extensive and in a range of departments, but most of it was within specific disciplines: twelve hours of film, eighteen hours of writing, nineteen of art, fourteen of music, and nine of explicitly interdisciplinary courses. The relatively few hours of this last group may sound curious, but most of the real “integrating” went on through taking classes in disparate disciplines with a focus on synthesizing what I was learning in each.

To finally gain acceptance into the program, I had to do a lot of cutting. I wanted to study everything: entrepreneurship, history, languages, anthropology, psychology, religion, biology, botany, ecology. It was after meeting and befriending composer, author, and interdisciplinary arts scholar Prof. David Ward-Steinman that my interests were brought into tighter focus. During my junior year, I received a grant from the Honors College to be his teaching assistant for the class “Connections: Music, Art, Poetry,” in which I had been a student the previous semester. This interdisciplinary class, more than the others, embodied the kind of comparative work I was interested in doing. His clear, concrete deconstruction of aesthetic forms and art movements throughout the disciplines created an immediate leap in my perception. At the end of the course, I was able to teach a class. I compared similar aesthetic impulses in films, music, and literature, equated the instrumental hip hop of J Dilla with the collage work of Robert Rauschenberg, and broke down the production of music and photographs into fundamentally analogous processes.

Perhaps the best example of extra-curricular “integrative work” involves the musical group I drummed and sang in throughout college. My major gave me the tools I needed to make sure the aesthetic message of the group was consistent throughout everything we produced. When we planned music videos and designed promotional posters, a website, and packaging for our music, the cohesiveness of supplementary materials with the music and lyrics was far greater than what could have been achieved by comparatively uninvolved third parties. Meanwhile, I was drawing on my design and film classes for inspiration in producing the videos and promotional materials themselves. Modern popular music is not self-contained. It is dispersed not only through an album alone, but also promotional materials, live shows, videos, and packaging; the proverbial “whole shebang.”

Only through hindsight do I realize how much unintentional emphasis on history this program provided. When I first applied, I wished to focus only on contemporary art, and said something to this effect in one of my proposals for admittance. My interest has since meandered back in time. Presently, I can say that my undergraduate years gave me a good understanding of the aesthetic zeitgeist in western society since the end of World War I, and in independent study I continue to dig farther back in time. I did not take history classes as an undergraduate–perhaps outdated textbooks from K-12 have left a bad taste in my mouth. But, from such varied reading, and especially as a result of a tutorial internship at the recording studio of a history-buff Vietnam veteran— a living, breathing link to the culture of the generation that preceded mine—my appreciation for being engaged with and by history has exploded. This is why I use the word “zeitgeist” so much—it has connotations of history, evolution, and what’s simultaneously shared by all disciplines.

The final credit of my undergraduate tenure was earned through a two-month trip to research Brasilian popular music on a Hutton International Experience grant. While my initial interest in Brasilian music was purely visceral, the parallels that between 1960s Brasilian and American music and culture are what I ultimately found so extraordinarily, irresistibly compelling. Throughout college I regarded study abroad as an essential component of a well-rounded education, and was ecstatic that it could occupy the pinnacle of mine. Through meeting a great number of musicians in my travels, and taking a course with Prof. Luiz Lopes, a Brasilian composer in our music school, I was able to delve into Brasilian music and culture about as deeply as a twenty-two year old non-native possibly can.

The final crux of my major was my BOMB internship. Though this is described in great detail in my separate internship statement, it is worth re-emphasizing how much of a paradise the magazine is for someone with my interests. Not only does it feature years of artists having cross-disciplinary conversations, but it tends to promote artists who operate between or through varied disciplines. My major and BOMB were intertwined from the start: BOMB was part of the initial inspiration to create my major, my major prepared and qualified me to work at BOMB, BOMB added depth and breadth to my awareness of the arts, and continued study in the IMP prepared me to converse with artists myself after completing both my studies and the internship itself.

The Individualized Major Program was truly a haven for me. It allowed me to follow my nose, respond to the rapid evolution of culture in an increasingly hyper-technical age, meaningfully integrate diverse learning experiences from outside of the classroom, and operate freely between related disciplines. The program is invaluable to students with the gumption to blaze their own trails, and I see nothing in its future but growth.

Freshman Major Courses:

The Critical Issue: Philosophy, Film, & Music
Creative Writing: Fiction
Fundamental Studio: Drawing
Intro to MIDI/Computer Music
Intro to Media
Fundamental Studio: 2D
Piano I
Honors Seminar: Making Meaning Through Stories
Honors Seminar: Reading & Writing Contemporary Poetry
Honors Seminar: Media & Society

Sophomore Major Courses:

Authorship in the Media: Alfred Hitchcock
Graphic Design I
Honors Seminar: History of Japanese Cinema
African Music & Movement
Connections: Music, Art, & Poetry

Junior Major Courses:

Creative Writing: Poetry
20th Century Art: 1945 – Present
Honors Interdepartmental Colloquium: Fact, Fiction, & Film
Independent Tutorial in Modern Fiction
Independent Tutorial: The American Road Trip (uncredited)

Senior Major Courses:

Latin American Popular Music
Connections: Music, Art, & Literature
Honors Seminar: Leonardo daVinci & Michelangelo
Independent Tutorial in Studio Recording
Independent Tutorial in Arts Writing
Black Religious Music
History of 20th Century Photography
Contemporary France: Film & Culture
Independent Tutorial: Study Abroad in Brazil