Talent. Supposedly art’s crucial ingredient. That was how I thought about art in the 1960s, when I confused lack of talent with failure of application and quit. But I was thinking differently now, after decades as a historian proving the value of education and hard work. Very quickly hard work turned out to be right as a way to start anew. I worked hard. My drawing recovered, and my painting improved. Keeping at it is a good thing, but it also helps to see appropriately, which early on I could not manage.
The culprit? My lying, twentieth-century eyes. I started out ignorant—so wrong, so utterly, completely misguided as to my sense of what art was. I dumbly prided myself on working as a painter while my fellow students, hunkered over canvases in their little corners of the big painting studio, copied other people’s photographs and drew cartoons and action figures. Hell, they didn’t even look like they wanted to be taken seriously. One pulled his hoodie down around his ears so that his face looked shriveled. Another wore fey little dresses, bragged out loud of being shit-faced, and painted shit-facedness. In my early days at Mason Gross, I reckoned their derivative work surely could not be art, while my bad paintings, as original images, surely were.
False and foolish pride, mine, beguiled by my lying twentieth-century eyes. It turns out that The Art World god Andy Warhol began his fine art career making cartoons, and appropriation of photographers’ and anyone else’s images is artists’ standard practice today. Thinking like a historian misled me as an artist.
Coming out of history, I saw what visual artists call appropriation as akin to copying or plagiarism. I was used to scrupulously citing my sources, something artists hardly ever do. This conflict between the two fields’ use of other people’s work hobbled me in art school. I knew Mark Twain said, “Good writers borrow; great writers steal.” Even so, until the 1980s, originality was the hallmark of artistic genius. My eyes were still back there, before copying and reproduction emerged as widely respected ways of making postmodernist art in the “Pictures” generation. I didn’t know that.
I’ve mentioned Andy Warhol. Jeff Koons, the biggest living star in The Art World’s firmament, has made his career appropriating existing objects and remaking, or, rather, having them remade on a very large scale. Sherrie Levine, photographing other photographers’ photographs. Without changing the images, she made them her own art. Unless you read the captions, you could not tell the difference between a Sherrie Levine photograph of a Walker Evans photograph and Walker Evans’s original photograph. Michael Ray Charles inserted stereotypical black figures from postcards—pickaninnies with big red lips, grinning watermelon eaters, natives with bones in their noses—the kind of image normally excoriated as ugly, into his universally acclaimed paintings. Now artists can take an image from advertising or off the web and use it without citation. They can take anything off the street and say it’s art—and sell it should it find a buyer. I do that, too, now. But surveilled by my inner historian, I still change the original enough to make the image my own.
Marcel Duchamp, the godfather of contemporary art, made everyday objects—a urinal, a bicycle wheel—into art by presenting them in art venues as ready-mades. Feeling my way into portraiture, I inserted a Duchampian bicycle wheel into my Alternator self-portrait. I had first encountered Duchamp many years before on a childhood visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with my Bucks County cousins. I remember coming up a stair and confronting Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, a 1912 painting that scandalized Americans at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. They hated it then. My twentieth-century eyes fell in love with it immediately. I still love it, even if it now seems to me to belong to another era.
IT TOOK ME years in art school to recognize my twentieth-century eyes as my major handicap as an artist, the real way I was old in art school. My eyes hindered me perhaps more than my sex and race. I say perhaps, because I can’t disentangle old eyes from woman and black, and because I don’t want to dwell on my disadvantages. I did come to know that art is fundamentally about taste, and tastes vary; tastes change. My lying twentieth-century eyes favored craft, clarity, skill, narrative, and meaning. My twenty-first-century classmates and teachers preferred everyday subject matter, the do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic, appropriation, and the visible marks of facture: drips, smudges, and what in the twentieth century would have been considered mistakes needing to be cleaned up. What I thought of as private intimacy is out in the open, as graphically as possible. Penises and vaginas are commonplace motifs, and nowadays even I contemplate making penis art.
At PS1’s “Into Me, Out of Me” show, the aesthetic was completely post-Happenings, where the artist became the artwork. Artists menstruated; artists peed; artists shat; artists copulated; artists cut and tortured themselves and their friends. One sculpture of three drunken young men vomited in the snow. Owwww! My poor twentieth-century eyes! Truth be told, my fellow students’ cartoons were better paintings than my earnest efforts toward art. Popular culture, cartoons, pornography, imaginary fantasy worlds work now, with faux naive gestures and drips. Mine was the wrong way of seeing; mine were the wrong techniques.
At least I didn’t indulge a familiar claim of people my age, that current tastes—in art and in scholarship—can be dismissed as ephemeral fads. This comforting belief remains widespread, whether facing DIY aesthetics or the French theories of Derrida and Foucault as a means of understanding society. I’m remembering a sunny autumn lunch with dear friends in Abiquiú, New Mexico, across the road from Georgia O’Keeffe’s studio. I was talking about what I was learning to like in process-centered art, the drips, the DIY, and the shapelessness. One friend waved it away as mere faddishness. It was bound to pass on, she said, presumably leaving real art as we had known it a quarter century ago, as though painters would go back to painting like Georgia O’Keeffe or, as in the New York Studio School, like Paul Cézanne. No such luck. Art keeps on changing. I had to figure out how to see it and make it, as art is made now. I tried to explain to my friends what had changed, even as I cited older artists’ work that contradicted my generalizations.
I was struggling to define differences between twentieth-century painting and twenty-first-century painting. I was saying that twentieth-century painting favored opaque mediums like oil and gouache. Yet as I said it, I could see the thinned-down oil paint, drips, and splatters of Arshile Gorky’s Water of the Flowery Mill (1944). In his brief life, Gorky was an Abstract Expressionist stalwart, twentieth-centuryism incarnate. Drips and splatters, even footprints, the essence of twenty-first-century painting, are right there to be seen in famous Jackson Pollocks. So much for simple generalizations. But let these mere facts not obstruct my perusing of categories.
Painters’ processes seem more visible to me in twenty-first-century art, almost like the erasure of the divide between public and private and the slender difference separating art and life in reality TV and webcams streaming people’s every moments of what used to be private life. Now artwork that looks like real life—uncomposed, unedited—is art. Accidents are to be courted, not cleaned up. In performance and installation art, life, unaltered, pokes through. And digital art, performance art, 3-D art, animation, these many new genres, reinforce the impression that painting is dead. That’s an old line by now, but one I heard from my classmates as well as a teacher, even, amazingly, in painting class.
THE PREFERENCE FOR spontaneity sometimes carried over into instruction, with significant exceptions I appreciated deeply. I had to adapt to art-school teaching, less about instilling a curriculum of material-based skills and more about fostering students’ creativity. After my three decades of university teaching, this adjustment took more time than I would have expected, had I known to expect the adjustment in the first place. I wasn’t exactly gracious in my accommodation.
In art school, you get a teaching gig as an artist by having New York gallery representation and being reviewed in the New York Times and Artforum, not by imparting the nuts and bolts of image making, patronized as
the work of vocational school. For some, teaching can be little more than a badly paid day job. I found little consensus—little discussion, even—about what skills are essential for contemporary art, though everyone agreed that experienced artists make better art than inexperienced ones, that the work of professional artists is more satisfying than the work of amateurs, that viewers can spend much more time with the work of professionals. These are my views, too, and reasons for me to attend art school, not just the occasional art class by a teacher who had certified herself on her own that she was good enough for the job. Though I couldn’t express the difference at first, perhaps still cannot do so convincingly, I could see it.
Maybe I couldn’t say why I preferred the work of professional artists to that of amateurs because to do so would question my ambition to be a serious artist. If experience and skill measure the worth of what you do, then at my age, I was wasting my time in a new field. As a painter, I feared I could never measure up to myself as a historian because I’d never have enough time to learn to manipulate images as well as I had learned to answer the questions on my mind through research and writing. Is this a reason to stay in a place where you do what you do better than what you can do anew? Does this mean I could never change fields? Well, no. There was no reason on earth why Nell Painter, painter, had to equal Nell Irvin Painter, historian and author. I didn’t always know that.
MASON GROSS GAVE us students an exhilarating freedom, for there were practically no rules to discourage us. We could paint madly, at least when it came to the formal qualities of our work. On the up side, this was very good at fostering productivity in eager students like me.
On the down side, I had to teach myself a lot, to consult the web to find out, say, how to make a twelve-hue color wheel. Then I had the wrong shade of magenta and had to buy more supplies. Not that I minded spending on materials. Art supplies—paper, ink, paint, charcoal, brushes—are so inviting, so sensuous, like walking into a vagina. The aisles of Jerry’s Artarama in West Orange and Pearl Paint in Woodbridge were my vagina-candy store, with so many mediums and colors and the promise of visual, tactile sweetness. Oils, acrylics, dry pigments, and even pastels that I don’t use—the possibilities seemed limitless in these voluptuous houses of treasure.
When I compare art supply stores to vaginas and candy stores, I’m not just speaking visually, for there’s more to the parallel than brilliant color and the promise of pleasure. You can’t eat art supplies, but you can practically taste their scrumptiousness.
In Woodbridge and West Orange, I’d see amateurs and professionals of every level, and parents with children with a natural talent in art. How many parents have gushed to me over their child’s ability to draw portraits that look just like the subject, taken as the surest sign of a lucrative career as a professional artist.
At Christmastime, especially, parents from all of New Jersey’s many races and ethnicities fill Jerry’s narrow aisles, as bedazzled by color as their ten- and twelve-year-old prodigies. Cunning with knowledge of their markets, art-supply companies make pastel and watercolor and colored marker sets with twenty-four, forty-eight, sixty-four, and more colors arranged to display subtle differences. And they package them in arty-looking boxes so you want to buy one for your Picasso-kid at Christmas to encourage his or her natural talent. No one really needs so many different colors, but the display is drop-dead gorgeous, and you’re tempted to measure your attachment to your young artist according to how many colors you buy. I admit it; my debit card has sprinted to Jerry’s cash register to pay out for this kind of thing, which I don’t use but find too seductive to pass up.
At Jerry’s, the narrow aisles toward the front overflow with inviting pigments and tools stacked close to you at eye level in beguiling array. Farther back in the store against a wall are less sexy items essential to serious painting, workaday bottles of gesso and solvents and mediums called turpenoid, alkyd, dammar varnish, and a million polymer mediums. No one artist could use them all, at least not at the same time. But these bottles look you in the eye with reproach for not making more art and for not trying more different kinds of materials. It’s a good kind of winking reproach, more invitation than reprimand.
Art supplies could make art all by themselves, or so it seems in the stores. Every year new tools come out, making new marks on new kinds of supports, from papers to canvases to boards made of wood and plastic with gesso and clay finishes. Every year brings new ways of putting down line and color, not just spray paint—an old medium—but spray paints of varied levels of opacity and glossiness. Brushes, animal and mineral: rounds, flats, brights, filberts to lay down pigment thick and thin. Oils and acrylics. Paint sticks and masking fluids, heavy-bodied paints and runny, transparent inks. Every time I entered their realm, art supplies reached out to me, slipping their grasp around my readily accommodating debit card. If only there were money enough to buy them all or even just half, or even just the supplies I hadn’t known about before. If only there were time enough to use them.
Pearl Paint in Woodbridge, where fellow student Joseph worked and answered my questions, always thrilled me with its abundance—so many art tools there I hadn’t even heard of and didn’t know how to use. Joseph knew them all. For one assignment, our painting teacher set up two models, a seated woman and a man reclining at her feet. The pale-faced woman sat upright in a closed pose. The suntanned man lay on the floor at an angle. How to fit the whole composition on one canvas? Behind the models was a tall backdrop of bright, translucent drapes of two colors impossible to mix with our limited palette. Just try to make Naples yellow from cadmium yellow without its turning brown.
The composition, the colors, and the drapery befuddled me. Painting Teacher Irma surely set this up to drive us crazy. How to compose the painting with figures going off in separate directions? How to render the drapes’ two colors, one on top of the other, without a muddied mixture? How to convey transparency without fading out the hues? Joseph said use an alkyd medium like Liquin or Galkyd to solve my drapery problem, at least. Though we used oil paints in class, Joseph preferred Golden acrylics and recommended Golden’s website for technical advice. Very handy to know when you have to find answers yourself. Painting flesh, however, continued to vex me. For years.
All was not self-teaching. Teacher Hanneline taught drawing in a considered way, strengthening the link between eye and hand, between charcoal and paper. She started us drawing bones, for bones contain a multitude of curves, surfaces, and textures. Then she moved us on to human models, first just one, then two in challenging compositions. Trained in Norway, she had a method. For Teacher Hanneline I would draw for days, covering my studio’s walls with explorations of composition and color. Not just could draw for days; I did draw for days, just drew and drew and drew.
At the other end of the teaching spectrum was contemporary art criticism Teacher May,* to me (coming from Princeton, a teaching institution) a total wreck. She didn’t give the copy center our course packets. She never arrived at class in time to sort out her slides. She showed her slides out of order, out of focus, badly placed, and uncaptioned. She attracted a coterie of arty young male smokers who smelled like garbage. The crucial matter, which I grasped only gradually, went much deeper than this one teacher. And it spread way out past Mason Gross.
Teacher May wasn’t a total mess. No, she was a total mess, but that wasn’t the point. The issue was meta, not individual; she came from New York, from NEW YORK!
No matter that she came only once a week and kept no office hours in New Jersey. They all came from New York. (Okay, Brooklyn.) Teacher May was just an extreme case of the tyranny of New York over art school and over New Jersey. (Don’t get me started.) She wasn’t really a total mess after all; she was just a regular NEW YORKer coming down to Jersey to dispense NEW YORKness. I never have gotten over it, but I moved on from this matter that was, is, far bigger than one particular teacher and one particular course. Mason Gross was giving me a real art educatio
n.
RUTGERS WAS TEACHING me so much I was loving to learn. My commute made me part of the community of my state and gave me a view of New Jersey I loved watching from the train. All this was very good, but, by November, all that was theoretical. In body and therefore in mind, I was spent beyond exhaustion. One morning I became convinced I’d made a series of wrong decisions. I was WRONG to go back to school before I had really and truly finished my book The History of White People, which was taking longer than expected to complete. I’d NEVER finish it as it needed to be written; as an artist, I’d NEVER be able to do what HAS to be done to succeed (whatever that means); and further, my art history class was wasting my time. State-university-Rutgers was going down the tubes, taking me down with it.
At Mason Gross we were twenty in each studio class, exceeding the limits of our spaces. Why the increase in class size? To raise more money for cash-strapped Mason Gross, after the state had repeatedly cut its money (I saw it as Mason Gross’s money) in order to throw cartloads of money into New Brunswick football. Football! Harrumph.
Football, they said, made Rutgers more attractive to parents and prospective students. In theory, alumni would give more if the football team won. Alumni were reputed not to care that at Mason Gross there wasn’t enough space in 2-D design class to keep one student’s supplies from being mixed up with another’s and that one student’s wet paint smeared onto another student’s art, art made of hours of work and many dollars’ worth of art supplies.
If you came late, you couldn’t get space at a table. In the painting studio, we bumped into each other, and we couldn’t see the models around other students’ easels. We painters kept running out of turpentine for cleaning our brushes, and the photocopying machine (this was then) was always out of toner or paper. We were hundreds in art history lectures, and more than thirty in my “discussion” section in contemporary art. Why was I running up and down New Jersey to this dumpy state institution?!
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