Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  Whole Foods Market is an emporium of fresh smells and vanguard taste tests. As I load up with guacamole and black beans at the create-your-own-burrito bar, I think about how difficult it is to be an art student looking into the abyss of graduation. Two or three of the lucky ones will find dealer or curator support at their degree shows, but the vast majority will find no immediate ratification. For months many of them will be out of a job. Mary Kelly used to think it was depressing that so few students could sustain themselves as full-time artists, but then she realized “it is not sad at all. I believe in education for its own sake, because it is deeply humanizing. It is about being a fulfilled human being.”

  Faculty members may understand that the value of art education goes beyond the creation of “successful” artists, but students are uncertain. Although CalArts students distance themselves from UCLA students, who they say “have dollar signs in their eyes,” they don’t want to languish in obscurity. Hirsch Perlman is a sculptor-photographer who has known market highs as well as many difficult years of enduring the relative poverty of part-time teaching. Now a full-time professor at UCLA, he still talks like an outsider. As he sees it, “The art market simmers underneath all of these schools. Every student thinks that he can jumpstart his career by being in one of these programs. But nine out of ten times the student is in for a big surprise, and nobody wants to talk about it. Whenever I open up the conversation to that aspect of the art world, you can see how hungry the students are. They are dying to know.”

  Most art schools turn a blind eye to the art market, but CalArts seems to turn its back. Some faculty members are pragmatic; they think students need to develop artistic projects that are independent of the fickle swings of the marketplace. Others occupy a left-wing position that believes the neo-avant-garde should subvert the commerce of art. Steven Lavine has been the president of CalArts since 1988. A bespectacled diplomat who talks about the school like a proud parent, Lavine says that “everybody talks a pretty good left game,” but he doesn’t know how far left CalArts really is. “We’ve all made our compromises with the world, so center-left is all we can compliment ourselves with.” President Lavine embodies the distinctly high-minded and down-to-earth attitude that typifies CalArts. “We’re idealistic. We don’t prepare students to do jobs that already exist. Our mission is to help every student develop a voice of his or her own,” he explains. “There is a soul to every great institution, and you go wrong if you betray that. At CalArts, people want to make work that has a relationship to what is under discussion rather than what is hot for sale at the moment.”

  Back on campus, Hobbs and I walk over to the second-year grad studios—two rows of small industrial units facing a sidewalk that student graffiti has transformed into a “Walk of Fame.” Gold stars inscribed with the names of current postgraduates refer to the famous strip on Hollywood Boulevard and to the otherwise unmentionable problem: artists need to make a name for themselves. Hovering over the stars like halo afterthoughts are black spray-painted Mickey Mouse ears that deflate the self-aggrandizement and pay mock homage to CalArts’ unlikely founder, Walt Disney.

  Hollywood affects the horizons of the L.A. art world in subtle ways. After graduation, artists who don’t support themselves through sales or teaching can work in the ancillary industries of costumes, set design, and animation. Sometimes the communities of artists and actors overlap. Ed Ruscha, who admits that “art is show business,” used to date the model Lauren Hutton. Actors like Dennis Hopper, who is also a photographer and collector, or artists like CalArts graduate Jeremy Blake, who made abstract digital works for Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Punch-Drunk Love, move between the worlds. Here on campus, however, one feels that most artists are openly hostile to commercial spectacles, as if CalArts were set up as the conscience or doppelgänger of the entertainment industry.

  Hobbs unlocks her studio. All the doors have been customized with oversized names, cartoon numbers, collages, and even bas-relief sculptures. “Every grad has a space of their own that they are allowed to use twenty-four hours a day. I live in mine. You’re not supposed to, but a lot of us do,” she says as she points to a fridge, a hotplate, and a couch that turns into a bed. “There’s a shower down by the workshop,” she adds. The cube is twelve by twelve feet, with dirty white walls and a cement floor, but it has twelve-foot-high ceilings and north-facing skylights, which give the workspace some dignity.

  A few doors down and across the walk, the class is viewing the installation in Fiona’s studio called Painting Room II, which will be the subject of this afternoon’s discussion. Paint flies beyond the edges of four canvases onto the wall and floor. Pale scribbles evoke the work of Cy Twombly, while the paint on the floor recalls Jackson Pollock’s drip method. The writing desk in the corner and the hard-to-pinpoint femininity of the space suggest Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Ironically, given the name of the crit class (Post-Studio Art), the installation is a forceful reassertion of the importance—even the romance—of the studio. It feels as if a restrained outburst or cool tantrum has taken place here. It’s not grandiose or heroic but private and insistent. You can feel Fiona’s diminutive height and the lonely hours. And on one of the canvases, you can almost make out the word learning.

  Back in subterranean F200, the students sit in a different configuration from this morning. It’s 3:15 P.M. and Fiona, with a hibiscus flower still tucked behind her ear, has chosen to sit behind a table. One of the knitters has abandoned her needles and lies on her stomach, chin in hands, looking at her intently, while a guy lies on his back with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. Fiona is setting out the parameters of the discussion. “I have a schizophrenic practice. I do dry sociopolitical work, but I always have, and always will, paint. I like the process. All the decisions that I made while making the Painting Room were formal. I didn’t want to work ‘critically,’” she says, sweetly but defiantly, as she pulls in her chair and straightens her skirt. “There is a real masculine aggression to iconic 1950s abstract expressionism. I wanted to revisit abstraction and explore the poetics of space with my own hand.”

  Shortly after Fiona’s introduction, a woman who is sitting on the floor and wearing her flip-flops on her hands says, “I find it interesting the length to which you conceptualize your work. A painting room requires a lot of justification in this class.” Her comment lingers until Asher says, “You see institutional limits? It would be good to be specific.” The woman, not a talker, fumbles for the right words, eventually spitting out something about the “ideological biases of CalArts.”

  A few days ago, a handful of students were loitering in the makeshift living room of the art department, a wide point in the hallway outside the dean’s office where a couch and a coffee table lend the feeling of an outpatients’ waiting room. There I took the opportunity to probe the jargon I’d heard on campus. Criticality was at the top of my list. “It shouldn’t be confused with being harsh or hostile, because you can be unthinkingly negative,” said a young photographer slumped on the couch. “It’s a deep inquiry so as to expose a dialectic,” explained an MFA student keen on doing a PhD. “If you’re on autopilot, you’re not critical,” said a performance artist, with a nod from her boyfriend. During our conversation, an African-American man of about sixty emerged from one of the offices. He turned out to be the conceptual artist Charles Gaines. The students flagged him over to pose the question on my behalf. “Criticality is a strategy for the production of knowledge,” he said plainly. “Our view is that art should interrogate the social and cultural ideas of its time. Other places might want a work to produce pleasure or feelings.” Of course! Conceptualism arose in the 1960s in part as a reaction to abstract expressionism. Criticality is the code word for a model of art-making that foregrounds research and analysis rather than instincts and intuition.

  After Gaines took his leave, I explored another word: creativity. The students wrinkled their noses in disgust. “Creative is definitely a dirty wor
d,” sneered one of them. “You would not want to say it in Post-Studio. People would gag! It’s almost as embarrassing as beautiful or sublime or masterpiece.” For these students, creativity was a “lovey-dovey cliché used by people who are not professionally involved with art.” It was an “essentialist” notion related to that false hero called a genius.

  Perhaps creativity is not on the agenda at art school because being creative is tacitly considered the unteachable core of being an artist? Asher believes that the “decisions that go into making a work are often social,” but he’s in a minority. Most artist-teachers believe that creativity is a very personal process that cannot be taught. As a result, students are expected to have it when they arrive, so creativity is an issue only when it comes to admissions. President Lavine says, “We hunt for students who have some spark of originality. It might seem like eccentricity or cussedness, but we want students who are in some way on edge with their world.” Paradoxically, many art educators see artists as auto didacts, and high academic achievement can be a contra-indicator. As Thomas Lawson, dean of the School of Art here for over a decade, told me, “We are looking for the kind of kids who didn’t quite fit in at high school.”

  Lawson’s office is one of the few rooms on this floor that is graced with a shaft of natural light. A marked contrast to Asher, Lawson is a Scottish painter with a firm belief in the visual. He’s an eloquent speaker and a prolific writer who contributes to Artforum and coedits a journal called Afterall. Lawson is a tall, self-effacing man with thoughtful hazel eyes. When asked the reckless question, What is an artist? he said, with seasoned patience in his lilting accent, “It’s not necessarily someone who sells a bunch of objects through a fancy gallery. An artist thinks about culture through visual means. Sometimes it’s thinking about culture through any means possible, but it’s rooted in the visual. When I was here in the late eighties as a visiting artist, there was an alarming tendency to graduate MFAs with great praise when they were doing no visible work. As they say in the movie industry, ideas are a dime a dozen. You’ve got to put it into some sort of form. So when I came here as dean, part of my mission was to reinvest the visual.”

  Nowadays at CalArts there are painters on staff but no “painting staff” per se, and the school has developed a reputation for being inhospitable to practitioners of the medium. Lawson admits, “The beef against us is that we are not an emotional painterly type of school. That’s true. But we have a system that is open and intelligent, and as a group we value intelligence. So you can do anything you want, if you can defend it.” However, when pressed about the fate of the taciturn painter, Lawson confessed, “I’m a painter and I know that painting is not about talking. The issues of skill and mistake are very close. You can do things that to some eyes look horrible and to others look brilliant. It’s very curious—and difficult to defend.” Ironically, some of CalArts’ highest-profile graduates are painters: Eric Fischl, David Salle, Ross Bleckner, and, more recently, Laura Owens, Ingrid Calame, and Monique Prieto. Their success is likely to be the result of the market’s rapacious appetite for the two-dimensional, easily domesticated medium.

  6:20 P.M. The conversation isn’t going in circles as much as spiraling amorphously. Five guys are milling about restlessly at the back. Two of them shift their weight from foot to foot with their arms crossed, while the other three actually pace back and forth with slow, silent steps. One man is seated with his back to Fiona, while another is conspicuously reading the LA Weekly. In most crit classes, the prohibition against passing explicit value judgments is absolute, yet people’s reactions can be read from their bodies.

  A good artist and a good student are by no means the same thing. Art students have a reputation for acting out. Recruited for their rebelliousness, for their portfolios that are off the wall, they can be tricky for the institution to handle.

  Occasionally the relationship between teacher–role model and student-artist becomes dangerously twisted. In a UCLA crit class, a student wearing a dark suit and red tie stood up in front of the class, pulled a gun out of his pocket, loaded a silver bullet, spun the chamber, pointed the gun at his own head, cocked it, and pulled the trigger. The gun just clicked. The student fled from the room, and several gunshots were heard outside. When he returned to the classroom without the gun, his classmates were surprised to see him alive, and the crit staggered on with a tearful group discussion.

  The incident was a misguided homage to—or parody of—a historic artwork by a professor in the department. Back in 1971, artist Chris Burden carried out one of the most notorious performances in L.A. art history. In a piece called Shoot, he had himself shot in the upper arm by a friend with a rifle in front of an invited audience at a private gallery in Orange County. The work was one of seventy-six performances that explored the limits of physical endurance and stretched people’s conception of art.

  Although Burden was not running that particular crit, the perverse copycat quality of the student’s performance was apparent to everyone at UCLA. When Burden heard about the incident, he thought, “Uh-oh. This is not good.” His position was simple: “The kid should have been expelled on the spot. The student violated about five rules in the university code of conduct. But the dean of student affairs was confused and did nothing. She thought that it was all theater.”

  “The name ‘performance art’ is a misnomer,” Burden told me. “It is the opposite of theater. In Europe they call it ‘action art.’ When a performance artist says that he or she is doing something, the predominant feeling is that he or she is actually going to do it.” After twenty-six years of teaching, the artist-professor resigned. He told the dean, “I do not want to be part of this insanity. Thank God that student didn’t blow his brains out, because if he had, you would be on the carpet big-time.” Burden distrusts institutions, because they lack accountability and hide behind bureaucratic ways of thinking. “To be a good artist in the long term, you need to trust your own intuition and instincts,” he said. “Whereas academia is based on rational group-think. There is a magic and an alchemy to art, but academics are always suspicious of the guy who stirs the big black pot.”

  Asher looks at his watch. It’s 7:01 P.M. I’ve sunk into Post-Studio’s parallel universe of daydreams. The crit is about “being here” and letting your mind flow. Class numbers are ebbing. Twenty students remain, from an earlier high of twenty-eight. People move slowly so as not to be disruptive. The only time people walk out quickly is when, phone vibrating, they leave the room to take a call. When they return, they tiptoe through the debris, the scattered chairs, the sprawled legs, the sleeping dogs.

  At 7:10 P.M., after a long silence, Asher stands up and waits. When no one says anything, he asks, “Do we need dinner tonight?” To which a student replies, “Are you cooking?”

  We take a break so that pizzas can be ordered. The women put their refuse in the trash as they exit from the room. The men, without exception, leave theirs. I walk through the hallways of the CalArts compound, down to the creepy graffiti-lined corridors of the basement, up the extra-wide stairwell, past the closed cafeteria, up to the exhibition areas. The sounds of a jazzy Latin-experimental ensemble waft though the building. I stroll out the front door into the pitch-black night, only to find Fiona drinking tequila and orange out of a bashed-up Calistoga Springs water bottle.

  What was that like for you? I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she says with bewilderment. “You go in and out of consciousness. When so many people open up your work, they say things that you never imagined, and you start to feel baffled.”

  The lawn sprinklers suddenly switch on. Through the spray, we can hear the hum of huge trucks hurtling along Interstate 5, the highway that extends the full length of the West Coast from Canada to Mexico.

  “To get the most out of your crit,” Fiona continues, “you have to have a mysterious blend of complete commitment to your decisions and total openness to reconsider everything. There is no point in being too brazen.”
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  Fiona and I deeply inhale the cold desert air. “I wanted to do something different,” she adds. “Students make work just because it stands up well in critiques, but outside the classroom it is often inconsequential.”

  We go back underground to attend the third part of the crit. Six boxes emblazoned with the words HOT DELICIOUS PIZZA have arrived, and there are only a few slices left. A guy comes over to Fiona and says, “I’ve never heard Michael speak so much.” This is meant as both the highest praise and an act of reassurance. The comment amuses me, because Asher had uttered relatively little.

  At 8:15 P.M., Asher looks toward Hobbs and asks, “Are you ready?”

  Three medium-sized color photographs are pinned to the wall behind her. One depicts a horse standing by a tree. Another shows a couple of cowboy figures facing off as if they are about to duel. The third portrays a stuntman falling back onto a mattress in the middle of a rugged desert. Hobbs puts three issues on the agenda: photography, the western genre, and the absurd. Only her flushed face reveals evidence of nerves. She discusses the camera as a “violent tool” in the context of “visual pleasure and narrative cinema.” Then she delivers the heartfelt confession, “Thomas Mann said that all women are misogynists. I can identify that conflict within myself. I get pleasure from stereotypes even when I know they are wrong.” Finally, she talks about the importance of humor in her work: “It’s corporeal and crass—that’s the language I trust most.”

  There are thirty-four people in the room—the highest number all day. Some boyfriends and girlfriends of enrolled students have come along for an evening out. The dog population has also increased and diversified to embrace a full range of colors from deep black through splotchy chocolate and golden brown to dirty white. All six are chomping on biscuits distributed by the patchwork-quilt knitter. The arrangement of bodies has again shifted. Several students are doing difficult balancing acts with feet up on multiple chairs. Many are sharing pillows and blankets.