LG Williams Awarded Honorary Doctorate Degree
This press release stages the awarding of a Docteur Honoris Caustica as both institutional parody and genuine artistic credo. The comic apparatus of honorary degrees, boards, overseers, commencement secrecy, and academic prestige frames an acceptance address that is unexpectedly serious about freedom, invention, and the necessity of questioning convention. Williams rejects art as problem-solving, distrusts academic imitation, and insists that original work begins in self-inquiry, contradiction, repetition, hunger, anger, and the willingness to invent tools one does not yet understand. The piece is radical because it hijacks ceremonial authority in order to attack the very educational systems that mistake training for invention. Beneath the absurd doctorate lies a fierce pedagogical manifesto: art begins when the artist stops asking permission from inherited procedures.
- DATE:
- February 26, 2005
- DOCUMENT TYPE:
- Press Release
- NAMED ARTISTS / FIGURES:
- LG Williams; Haleh Niazmand
- INSTITUTIONS / VENUES:
- Institute for Subversive Art and Analysis; Gallery Subversive; Cedar Rapids; Rat Bastard Protective Agency Hawaii; University of Hawaii
- KEYWORDS:
- Docteur Honoris Caustica; art begins when permission stops; self-inquiry over imitation; contradiction and hunger as method; training vs invention; honorary degree as subverted ceremony; inventing tools not yet understood; pedagogy attacked through ceremony