Salon des Refuses

Today I had my BFA portfolio review. I did not get accepted.

There were some valid points made by members of my committee. My work could probably stand to have more “me” injected into it (I've done work that I suppose you could say has that quality … I didn't show it because it's only a secondary interest for me. Ideally, I want my work to inspire people, not preach at them.)

Partly it was also my fault because I let the choice of committee (at least one member was rumored to be particularly harsh on condidates) and the general stress of facing the firing squad get to me, leaving me unable to clearly express more or less anything. Maybe ten minutes into the half-hour inquisition, my mouth was completely dry. It didn't help that our Art Studio Building is a converted tobacco warehouse, and has the complete lack of moderate temperatures to prove it, and which is probably responsible for a significant fraction of my continual respiratory issues. (Also, I'm never at my best before around 11 am; the only thing I'm passionate about at 9:30 is going the hell back to sleep. Especially when anxiety and respiratory distress conspired to keep me from getting more than a half-hour of sleep at a time all night.)

However, I flat out disagree with the process and with the committee on several points:

• I believe the committee should consist of one member chosen by the student (as it is now), one chosen by the department (as it is now, opaque though the process may be to the students) and the third chosen by the department from among those faculty who actually work in the same medium.

• Any given work of art in the real world will never achieve unanimous acceptance. Why, then, should we expect students to achieve it, to say nothing of doing so with a much more constrained, and therefore statistically meaningless audience? Acceptance into the program, at the very least, should be by majority vote, not unanimous decision. Ideally, awarding the degree at the end of the program of study should be as well.

• It is not the committee's function to validate or invalidate certain types of art. I had photographers telling me that a certain thing was not art (game design work, specifically). I am given to wonder if they realized the irony of that judgement, given that photography itself hasn't entirely shrugged off the stigma of that particular question. In all issues of whether something is art or not, I attempt to give the benefit of the doubt. There are exceptions, but they usually involve (literal) human excrement. (Whether I think something is good or interesting art is a completely separate question … probably two.)

• Also, whether or not my committee sees “no value” in a particular form of creativity is of absolutely no interest to me. I see no great value in Abstract Expressionism for me, but I don't bust the chops of other artists just because I don't like the style (I primarily grumble about it when I'm expected to actually do it myself).

• When I say that I am interested in uniting traditional and digital painting, don't turn around and tell me that I should be trying to find some way that digital painting gives me something I can't accomplish with pigment. To ask that question is to fly in the face of what I'm doing. I don't WANT digital art to look consciously digital. Digital is just another way for me to get at what's inside, one that I'm slightly more fluent in, just as in certain ways I'm more fluent in painting than in drawing, and far, far more so than in (say) printmaking (which I've not studied at all) and sculpture (which I find far too tedious).

Ultimately, I don't actually believe there is a meaningful difference in results between most pairs of two-dimensional media. They all put value and color on a surface, and the eye simply will not care whether a particular image is generated with paint, inkjet ink, photographic emulsion, or tiny tiny grains of sand. A sufficiently skilled painter can concievably make a painting that is so photorealistic that it IS essentially a photograph … the only difference being the materials. One could concievably make a masterpiece with a set of Crayola Crayons, or even drawings made by scratching a sharp rock on a sidewalk, and maybe in a few decades there'll be tools around so that we could build a sculpture molecule by molecule … but honestly, I don't see the problem with doing something a bit easier and therefore more likely to be successful. Convenience is as much a virtue as it is a sin, often more.

Suffering can make good content, but suffering in order to render the content in a tangible form just makes for an incomplete piece and an artist who is too blocked by the medium to actually create anything. It's the creative equivalent of a speech impediment.

There are differences in how light interacts with material (in sculpting, for example, marble is translucent, granite is not … painting media have similar concerns. There are also issues of permanence and durability of various media. These are the only major differences that affect the final image on some level other than “how easy is it to accomplish what I want” that I can think of (at least the only ones that I really care about). I think none of them are actually problems that can't be worked around, and in any case they aren't primary concerns for me at this stage.

• I find nothing so offensive as the arrogant disdain that some Art Professors hold for anything that even vaguely resembles commercial art. It's nothing more than intellectual snobbery, cultural incest, and ego wanking. It'd be nice if we could all be tenured instructors (or otherwise assured of a reasonably steady income to allow us to do what we are driven to do) but one great painting in two years doesn't pay the damned payments on the $30k student loan that is buying that piece of paper, buddy.

Neither will two hundred bad ones, but I like to think that there's some happy middle ground that is being ignored here. Consider that before you tell me that I shouldn't worry about deadlines and such. And I say all of that as a person who isn't exactly enthusiastic about financial matters.

I'm not terribly surprised that I bumped up against the Fine Art/Commercial Art dichotomy somewhere in my academic career. It was bound to happen, given that I think that the distinction is about as important and useful as …

… actually, I can't think of anything that I find less useful or important right now. Not even sloughed-off skin cells, household pests, or my appendix.

One of my classmates also was rejected. If anyone seemed likely to get accepted on the basis of having a consistent style and promise, I would have said it was her (actually, I did). She has work that I'd judge much more consistent and distinctive than mine, and I've actively considered buying a painting from her. Then again, I think she also bumped up against the “this is not art” issue.

She was pretty torn up about it, too.

What's worse is that (some part of) her committee seems to be actively trying to force her to change her work … if she goes up again, she apparently has to face the same group so they can “make sure she goes in the right direction” (I doubt all of them felt that that was entirely necessary). I think the usual practice is that your committee assignment is more or less a crapshoot each time … if you get the short straw and wind up with one that is unsympathetic to your direction, then you can always hope for a better one next time.

Bah.

Addendum:

Just to be clear, I'm not overly distressed at not getting in. I can always try again next semester, and if I never make the cut, I still plan on taking precisely the same classes and graduating at the same time, so the ultimate result will be that my degree has one less letter. I came to school to learn the fundamentals of art and provide myself an environment in which I would be able to explore them. I didn't come for a piece of paper, and I most certainly did not come for approval or validation from the instructors or the larger academic art world. Frankly, the acceptance of the academic art world means less to me than it would to your average blue collar worker.

No, I'm simply annoyed at not getting in because of (in part) what I consider stupid reasons.

Posted by Dyne on October 31, 2003 03:52 PM