Meet the School of Art's New Head
School of Art
written by
Phillip Crook
“Art is essential to life,” says Meg Bisineer, the new head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. “I really believe that art school is the place that holds the basis of those values. It's important not to be separate, but to be connected to the city and to what's going on politically, socially. It's exciting to think about how we do that at CMU.”
An Indian-born, internationally recognized artist, curator and educator, Bisineer joined CMU this August following a decade at the California College of the Arts, where she served as chair of Animation and Game Arts & Design. Her path to Pittsburgh also includes 12 years in London, where she earned her master of fine arts from the Royal College of Art.
Now, Bisineer is embarking on her next chapter with a deep commitment to engaging with the people and places that make Pittsburgh distinct. In the conversation below, she shares more about her studio practice, the power of unlearning and the meaning of home.
To start, tell us how you describe your artistic practice.
I think about my interdisciplinary art practice as a conversation that expands the possibilities of what animation can be. I started in quite traditional animation, and since then it has really expanded into a way of thinking, sensing and engaging with the world — a practice that can inhabit space, ritual, performance, material processes, community and lived experience.
I see it as a practice of connecting with place, people and the idea of home — which, for me, as a queer migrant moving between cultures, comes with this idea of foreignness. I am interested in the body and place as sites of multiple becoming, a site of resistance, one that holds ancient histories, personal memory and speculative futures, centered around locating a changing self in a precarious world.
I’m influenced by both meditation practice and the traditions I inherited growing up in South India, so I think deeply about the act of paying attention. In many ways, attention and time have become materials within my work, through repetition, observation, duration and embodied engagement. In recent years, ritual has become increasingly central, such as through food and collective gatherings.
The various dimensions of my work are all deeply interconnected. I believe that the field grows through community, dialogue, mentorship, and the creation of spaces where artists can gather, exchange ideas and take risks.
Is there a moment you can point to when your practice shifted?
Coming from quite a traditional storytelling background, and then deconstructing animation as an art form, it was really about finding out what that means to me and the forms that it could take. For example, when I graduated from the RCA, I needed somewhere to keep drawing on a big scale, but I couldn’t mess up the walls of my rental flat, so I started drawing on this massive window and recording it frame by frame. Of course, the window is not just a surface; there’s a world outside, so it was about all those things that happen in between the inside and outside, and the self.
After that, I was invited to do an artist residency at the Royal Festival Hall, which is this big glass building. They built a platform on which I could access these massive windows, and that’s when I made the film Light Water Glass, which was to celebrate the Festival of Britain. I was listening to recordings of Eliot’s poem "The Waste Land" in his own voice that were in the library, and then I was drawing onto the cityscape with everything happening outside.
Glass does all these things, because you’re not just looking out. At some point, when the light changes, you’re reflected in it. For an animator, it's really difficult to see yourself. On the one hand, animators love control, but on the other, we are very uncomfortable with putting ourselves in the frame. So it plays with all these boundaries, that comfort zone that you hold and navigate.
Stills from Light Water Glass, 3:55 mins, Single channel video with sound, 2011
What’s your relationship to place? Are you someone who wants to stay in one place, or do you like to keep traveling?
My relationship with place is deep, expansive and personal. I like to be reflective and respectful and think of what’s going on in that place and time, but I’m also very aware of always being kind of on the outside. Once you’re a foreigner, once you leave your place of birth, I think it’s a different way of being in the world, even when one goes back home. I’m not someone who’s like, “I have to keep traveling every three months.” I do feel the need to keep going back to, now, both my homes, which are the U.K. and India.
Thinking about where you are now, what possibilities do you see in CMU’s unique intersection of art, technology and research?
It is that place of coming together and intersection that I am excited about. I like that it’s not just one thing. It is about these conversations and collaborations and what can happen inside an institution — but also the institution being totally porous to the outside world is really important. I need to learn a lot. I need to see what work is already being done and listen, learn and find out about the culture that I’m coming into, and pay attention to the community’s desires, hopes, and frustrations. I’m not the expert; everyone here is.
What are you most looking forward to experiencing during your first Pittsburgh autumn?
The autumn colors, and the cold plunge into my first snowy winter here, which I’ve been forewarned of. I’m tropical, so this might not be easy! But I look forward to the seasons and the shifts they bring. I’m looking forward to exploring the landscape and the natural beauty of the place: the ancient old-growth forests, waterfalls, rivers and trails. And most importantly, the people and community.
Stills from Dust, 5:30 mins, Single channel video with sound, made in Bangalore, India, 2020
What’s a piece of advice you received as a student that has stuck with you?
I showed one of my professors at the RCA one of the shots I was animating for a film about my relationship with my grandmother called Journey Across Grandmother. I couldn’t tell if he liked it or hated it, but he said, “It’s just too perfect.” I had learned the craft of animation, had really perfected it, but it really lacked the soul. I scrapped the whole film — thousands of drawings — and completely changed the way I was working. It was hard, because it was about unlearning the way that I thought a perfect animator would work. It was really about coming back and finding my own voice and how I would do things. Finding our voice, staying true and vulnerable, staying with the trouble — these are hard and important lessons.
What is the last book you read that's really stayed with you?
Actually, two books: The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh, where he makes the argument of the “resource curse” and powerful storytelling about colonialism, resources and environmental emergency. And also Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. It’s dark and funny, and I loved the main character. Tokarczuk explores the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? Who is worthy of a voice?
Finally, let's think about your personality as defined by the five schools of the College of Fine Arts. What, specifically, would you be if you were each of the following: an artwork, a structure, a design object, a sound and a play?
Art: TV Cello is Nam June Paik’s playful interpretation of technology’s place in society, an elegant summary of his fascination and exploration of sound, performance and visual art. It’s also a collaboration with Charlotte Moorman, a nod to the Fluxus movement and John Cage, and his interest in Lévi-Strauss’s summation of “culture as a communication network.”
Architecture: I would be a tropical cave that is flooded with natural light and the sound of a stream. It’s warm, symbiotic with flora and fauna, and part of something larger than itself.
Design: I once converted my London studio into a pinhole camera and inhabited it for weeks, capturing the images with long exposures on my digital camera. Once the eye gets used to the darkness, it starts to see the ever-transient projections of the outside world, which fill the space inside the camera. We are made of this world, and carry it within us. How much we are able to see lies with being absolutely present, and seeing through the dark.
Music: The harmonic background drone of a tanpura, a traditional Indian instrument that is not used to play melodies but instead forms a rich background drone that supports and sustains the performance. It anchors the voice of the singers within which they can freely improvise.
Drama: This is completely aspirational. I would be a play co-written by Anne Carson and Arundhati Roy, and directed by Mira Nair — which is a collaboration between three incredible women I have long admired!