ART POWER!

I was known in elementary school as the guy who could draw good. Shortly after I moved to the United States for the first time I met another kid with a similar legacy (Nick) and we became friends. I sorta thought he was better, and he sorta thought I was better. It was an interesting dynamic, between elementary school kids. I'm still in touch with him, once every couple of years or whatever. I went off to the Corcoran School of Art in DC for a summer program, and that was a big influence – at age 13 or 14 I had the college freshman art experience: drawing from life, including live (although clothed) models, gesture drawing, contour drawing, and etc. Of course the thing I remember most are two attractive city girls, my age, but who talked about having 18 year old boyfriends. One, named Lily I think, had really big boobs. Then, I got my Mac and did a lot of computer drawing. Then, in high school, I was introduced to acrylic painting, pastels, and other 2D media. I've always been lazy and other-directed, and tend not to do anything. I have to wait for some teacher or boss or someone to force rich experiences on me, because I won't seek out rich experiences on my own.

I was not an art major when I first went off to college at age 18, I think because I didn't see it as a career path. Perhaps I had already been subsumed by cultural capitalism, or, I was just being practical. Anyway it's moot because I took a bunch of nonsense classes to find out what I wanted to do, as they recommend, and then dropped out a month later with a suicide attempt and angry letter from the provost. My life feels like a lot of striving – a lot of attempted self improvement projects. I wish it had been different.

It's funny: people love the expression "art major," and will jokingly call me an "art major," even though I have an MFA. Of course I am not so egotistically reactive as to correct them – I remain an art major in spite of having earned a terminal, professional degree, the highest thing, in art. I was first an art major in community college, just before going to jail. I think I was pointed toward illustration. Anyway I only completed a month or two of one set of classes. After my brain injury, I tried art again at that same community college, and this time did well at it. This is something I keep repeating: the secret to success in school is just one or two classes at a time, or, a ton of really easy classes can also work. Although I did well at art this go-around, I fell out of it and back into something like general studies, in preparation for "real" four year college, which ended up as industrial psychology (human resources management school, basically) until I didn't do well and switched back to art. I spent about 10 years at Montgomery College, all told, and it was way more meaningful and contributory with higher quality teaching than any other single institution. This has hipster points I cannot ignore – having a better experience in community college than four year university or graduate school. I have a bumper sticker from that community college, and I even had a shirt before I outfatted it.

After I had failed out of psychology at UMBC, I applied for secondary admission to the art program, and was accepted. From then on I had a good experience in baccalaureate-bound college. I've told people that art was easy, and that's why I did well at it, and they sometimes correct me with "art was easy for you." I admit that material talent makes success in academic art more pleasant and less like drudgery, but I think those people are missing something that I touched on already but will say again: art is different, because there's less of a discernible standard against which your art is judged. This is not to say that it cannot ever be appraised poorly and marked down, but it's not like an anatomy test where you get right and wrong answers. Poor performance has more to do with lack of invested time, lack of quality, lack of spirit, rather than missing the mark (drawing a duck when the assignment was to draw a chicken).

Grad school wasn't as good an experience as undergrad in some ways. When I say "undergrad" I mean my time at UMBC, excluding my years at community college – only my last two years starting in on a psychology degree, almost dropping out, and saving myself with enrollment in the art program, which as it now turns out is the only thing I can do, academically. Well that's not true – I did well in some hard classes like music theory, calculus, deductive systems, biology, and anatomy. But, if I had tried to major in any one of these subjects it would have been all over quick. Art was pretty easy. I put a lot of time into it but with art you can do mostly whatever you want and don't have to follow a recipe, which I'm bad at; meeting standards is hard. I turned down a couple of women of course, and was just on my own, doing my work.

In graduate school, teachers and their assistants graded student projects on a strong implicit curve – the average had to be kept down to fight grade inflation and keep the program competitive. This was not popular with undergraduates in career fields needing creative electives, whose GPAs were averaged down for the sake of those aforementioned ideologies. Anyway, what we did was lay the drawings (for example) out on the floor next to each other, and attach number grades to them, from something like 50 at the low end to around 85 at the high end, such that the average came out to be around 65. This is Ontario grading, so it's not as ferocious as it might seem; 80 is an "A," and 50 might be barely passing (don't quote me). I don't know why Ontario does it this way. Students came into the grad studios – "my office" – to complain about their grades, and I confessed to being subject to this mechanized grading scheme, which I agreed sucked, and that I could change their grade if they wanted. In one case the student didn't want it changed, but only wanted to complain...to have an ear. I was impressed by that.

Being a TA was a big part of my grad school experience. In spite of my criticisms my favorite task was grading essays and drawings, while my least favorite was walking around the room looking at and commenting on students' projects while they worked on them. My first year assistantship wasn't bad, but my second year assignment was terrible. I got paired up with a gung ho "art guy" – intellectually aggressive, performative, and eager to decry stuff as being "not art" and generally give the skinny on what's what. He was like a young executive on the partner track at a big accounting firm. He would also make things up. He insisted there was a Marx brother named "Uwo," and that the term "artsy" comes from "art fart," which was a pejorative for homosexuals, and so "artsy" was never to be used (I had used it). I found no evidence on the web for either of these claims; I wonder where he got them. So he and I hated each other, and years later I sent him an email asking if he was still a complete piece of shit or if he'd improved marginally, to which he did not reply. But I liked my first supervisor; he treated me as a colleague and wasn't full of himself, and we stayed in touch on Facebook for a while. The students hated him though because they found him capricious and weird, and were excited the day we did teacher evaluations.

I perved out on my students a bit, who were almost all girls or in fact all girls, in the second year. I once told my advisor that this phenomenon – all girls in art – was something everyone noticed but the less said about it the better, ha ha, and he chuckled and agreed, but I'm not sure he had the same idea I did. My idea was that young women are more likely to major in art because they don't go for practical careers as much. Maybe that's not controversial, unless you add something about relying on their future husbands to be providers ("are you sure you're hot enough to study art?") or suggest that girls can't do math. I made a chart in Excel which rated the students on tits, ass, face, body fat, overall shape, intelligence, and niceness, then ranked them from first to last. These "kids" are 18-22 – the same age as the porn stars we all jerk off to. It's not reasonable to ask a teaching assistant to not think of them sexually (there was a hush-hush relationship between a student and a TA while I was there, or one year after but I was still in the loop), especially in art, where you're supposed to be running close to your emotions and base instincts and be impulsive and so on. Basically they encourage mental illness, which worked well for me. That first supervisor with whom I got along well reported something I had said – some mass murder threat – to my advisor, who called me on the carpet and made sure I was "just kidding." There's a thing in Canada that works to some people's advantage, and has the same source as the aforementioned passive aggressive desire to avoid blunt and raw and honest confrontation: it amounts to just sort of smoothing things over and grinning and bearing it, and hoping it'll go away on its own, so no one will have to be embarrassed. Maybe overall this method is better than American shouting matches.

My first experience at grad school was talking to the facilities engineer – I told him I was American, and he replied "Well, just leave your guns at home." Haha. Other than that, the most trouble I had with being a big fat American was with a little Indian guy who had his students call him "Buddha," and who made snide comment after snide comment in his affected, pitched-up "gentle" voice, until I grabbed him by the throat one day. This is my instinctive flip-out move; I have executed it at least three times, uncontrollably, in something like anger or feeling like I could not control the situation to my liking. One time I head butted someone who said something I didn't like. Later when I visited some of these two-faced Canadians in Toronto, this little Indian was there and called me a psycho.

I made art and it was fine. I think no one was super happy with my projects, though, and I wasn't either, although this model is encouraged in MFA programs: work is supposed to be experimental and developmental, and nothing is "good" or "finished." Students understand this and make shoddy weird stuff to fit into the grad school rubric. To be honest all the art in me had gone somewhere around 2002, and really I was there, in grad school, because 1) I was qualified on paper to do it, and 2) my mom was about to sell the house out from under me. My best friend in grad school, Robert, told me it seemed like I was just completing assignments, rather than being an artist, which was right on the money. But what I was really good at was writing; I was sort of known in the program for it. I basically blogged my thesis, referencing my assertions later with Google Books.

I mentioned this in the very beginning of this doc, or a few pages in maybe: when my mom got married, the plan was to sell the house. Or wait no – that was sort of my decision. I think it was communicated to me that nothing had to change and I could just keep living there if I wanted, but I thought that was silly and decided to go off to grad school instead of being a burden right from the get-go. So I put that all together, with recommendations and portfolio, and applied. I was admitted to two out of maybe five places, and was reassured by one of my recommending profs that this was a bad time to apply for school (2008-9, right after "the" housing crisis) – many people were getting rejected, so I should be pleased that I was admitted anywhere.

Here's a letter to Robert.

Dear Robert,

I remember something I said to Patrick shortly before graduation – something like "the task of any artist is to see through the lie of postmodernism." Patrick then got all serious and admonished me that I shouldn't say that out loud...hehe. I don't know that he totally knew what I was talking about, but maybe; he seems to have, somewhat.

What I meant was this: it's no secret that academic art and postmodern culture studies are close bedfellows – shit, we even read guys like Adorno and Gramsci and Lukacs and so on; the sources are the same. Looking at work by Jason, and then the ideology of that angry New Zealander guy whose name I've forgotten who did digital stuff and had a tremendously fat girlfriend, my impression was that there was a dislike of work that looked too polished, and maybe even too capitalistic – too much like a manufactured good. The other Patrick (who did that project where he wrote lovingly to Fidel Castro) had a lot of contempt for Gilbert and George and Andy Warhol and even I think Jeff Koons, whom he all saw as being in ideological conflict with an ethos of "left wing art." What I mean by that is, leftist art can't be too "good." It can't be too exclusive, or expensive to make, or be reminiscent of civilization or capitalism or anything like that.

Have you heard of "Harrison Bergeron"? It's basically a story of a hyperbolic endgame of leftism: anyone with exceptional ability is brought down to match the herd. For example, a man who is too smart is forced to wear noise-makers in his ears so that he will be brought down to the level of some bulk average of human ability. I think this ties in to the concept of "privilege," which seems to me like it could have come out of a page of "Harrison Bergeron": not only should the under-advantaged be lifted up, but the overly-advantaged must be brought down, to achieve equality-of-outcome for everyone. The dangers of leftism in a nutshell.

The problem is that artists are basically stuff-makers who like to make stuff, and not critical theorists or committed leftists (in most cases). So, they like art that is actually good: that is well executed and precise and controlled and made of high quality materials, fastened together in careful and effective ways. So it's like they teach you one thing with the theory (don't make art that's too good because it runs afoul of leftism), but then they want to see work that is, in fact, good, according to the aforementioned criteria.

So that was what I was saying to Patrick: you have to pay lip service to all the equalist BS, but then actually ignore it and make art that a person unbrainwashed by leftist ideals would be attracted to.

But I don't think the only source of this central issue – of everything having to be ugly and broken and shitty and cobbled together out of woodshop garbage lest it speak to ideals of wealth and Nietzschean greatness – has only Marxism, and its "new left" Marcuse-derived sequelae, to blame. I think Judeochristianity might actually be a bigger contributor. Nietzche talked about this in terms of his "inverted pyramid" ideas: that the uplifting of the weak/sick/degenerate/etc in Christianity (which is really just a kind of radicalized Judaism, ethically) obviously leads to the disintegration of any civilization that takes this ideology seriously, inasmuch as rewards are no longer given to those who naturally "win" them, so every material thing (bridges, crops, etc) falls apart since it's not being done correctly.

As this relates to art, we need to look at the second (or third, depending on the source) commandment:

4 "You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing steadfast love to thousands[b] of those who love me and keep my commandments.

This relates to "inverted pyramid" leftism in that any beautiful, compelling man-made thing diminishes the glory of God. Islam takes this to an extreme in basically disallowing art of any kind. Except in cultural leftism, "God" has been replaced with "man." This is not an original idea (the notion of a contemporary religion of secular humanistic liberal leftism, in which the experience of the individual self takes precedence over everything). So, in this later case, your object can't exceed in quality that of the average quality of all the objects of mankind.

Basically my central point is that art is a material practice necessarily concerned with greatness and specialness and beauty and glory – with a thing rising above all the other things, and that this is completely antithetical to leftism. But I don't think anyone likes to talk about this. It seemed glaring to me when I was at Western. Like...an "emperor has no clothes"-type situation. How can you sit there and make art that's supposed to be good, and at the same time assert that all human endeavors have to come out even? The theory does not match the praxis, and in fact seems to be the complete opposite. Artmaking does not fit with critical theory, and in fact critical theory is out to destroy art.

The problem is that I like Jason's cobbled together woodshop garbage, and I was not (I don't think) brainwashed by leftism. So where does that leave us?

This letter sounds political, but I assure you that that was just the mood of the setting: I was in Canada for humanities grad school and was being reactive (but not reactionary). I'm not some kind of fascist or even a conservative...the only thing I conserve is fat stores. I'm kind of an anti-leadership type – maybe something like an anarchist. Basically I think that the impulses that drive a person to seek leadership roles indicate or even guarantee that they are going to behave corruptly and aggressively. And I saw firsthand what the cult of leadership can do to the susceptible, vis-a-vis Trump and election fraud claims. So I'm basically anti-hierarchy – anti-boss, or "anti-tyranny," to borrow from Noam Chomsky, although I'm really more focused on mean bosses than big oppressive abstract societal forces. This is a leftist sort of position, although in a sense both big American political factions make a claim on being 'left wing'– fighting "the man" for the sake of "the little guy"; it just varies who these parties are taken to be (fighting Big Business for the sake of The People by the left, as opposed to fighting Big Government for the same of The People by the right). As I said, I think robots/computers could do a better job at basically everything, especially when I see bungling like the vaccine roll-out and my bank changing names and screwing everything up for everyone. People are incompetent and should not be in charge of anything. I'm a posthumanist anarchist. Hip enough for ya?

I really did like Jason's cobbled together woodshop garbage. The political noises in my letter to Robert came out because I don't like being told what to do, or people, communities, countries, etc, in general, because I'm so fuckin' special. But I think I had a legitimate grievance in expecting a lot from art, or the idea of art: art is supposed to be transcendentally free, and allow for pure, perfect creative expression. You can do anything you want. So then when I encounter a subculture and political conformity and people generally behaving in the same ways, with their Macintosh computers and fancy soft monotone speech, I wonder what's going on. As I mentioned in my letter, a colleague made an homage to Castro, and was smiled at. If someone had made an homage to Pinochet they would have been kicked out of the program, probably. I had fantasies of a performance where I'd put everyone in an auditorium and post armed guards at the exits, then dress up in a black suit with slicked back hair and explain Harrison Bergeron and the killing of quality and how art is the opposite of leftism and how everyone is stupid.

Anyhoo, grad school was a good experience overall, in spite of some minor freak-outs like grabbing Buddha by the throat, and feeling like I couldn't swing it (grad school, itself...not beating up my colleagues, although it was decided that an athletic painter named John from New Brunswick could have given me a run for my money). At one pivotal moment in a library cubbyhole, I decided once and for all not to drop out, and to give it a go (I was having trouble with a paper), which turned out to be a "deciding I can" moment I later recounted for a therapist. I went out to eat with Robert and Danny a lot and talked at great length and depth about art and culture with educated people. I guess it all had a "finishing school" quality to it, inasmuch as it didn't lead to a career. But I think it had some permanent effects: grad school taught me to regard and consider the look of human constructs, and how that look explains what's going on in their heads, and in their collective heads; "visual culture," basically, although that had amounted to a buzzphrase to be avoided, back in 2011 – that's what a Phd student said to me, anyway...he once gave me a scarf, out of the blue; I still have it. Plus I'm more inclined to feel confident in my interior decorating now, which sounds like a joke but it's not. My thesis was called "The Look of Math," and was an exercise in vanity, with the secondary purpose of intimidating humanities intellectuals so they wouldn't jury me too hard. Basically the abstract is Saussurean: "math has a graphic representation that is distinct from 'actual' math," and then I talk around that for about 80 double spaced Microsoft Word pages and put in scans of my own drawings. But I did find math to be meaningful, and maybe even spiritual, at one point, and I was good at and enjoyed community college calculus (both differential and integral), shortly after my motor-pedestrian brain injury. I was even going to be a math major, before I finally realized that I can't do many hard classes at once like a normal person. Math, music, and art were the subjects I got the most out of and was the best at. I've only taken one writing class, in high school, in which I wrote a short story called "Ted the Goat" about a goat who works at a fast food restaurant and is traumatized by the advances of a young human lady.

I'm glad I did the MFA program, because now I have an MFA – not only a masters degree, but a masters degree in a rarefied subject that not everyone can do. It makes me more special-seeming. I did drawing, sculpture, sound, and animation.