| Four years of pent-up artsnobbery |
[May. 9th, 2008|01:14 pm] |
I had an epiphany about my education at Bennington the other day. Things have been excellent for me post-graduation: I have a full-time job with a great salary with benefits and vacation days and everything, working as a web developer: doing what I love. Better than I ever hoped for, right out of school.
Well, I was talking to a coworker about technical skill versus "creativity" or "art", and all of a sudden, it hit me. I came to Bennington wanting to learn technique: HOW do I paint? HOW do I draw? HOW do I program? I was a very HOW kind of guy, academically. It was a sticking point for all of my art classes, and my professors were forever palming their foreheads and massaging their temples as I steadfastly refused to answer the question, "WHY? What is it ABOUT?" It would've made a great sitcom. (For liberal arts students!)
I remember poignant moments from every class: During a private review with Cadence Giersbacht, she said, "Tell me what this painting is about." I threw up my hands and said, "It's not ABOUT anything! I just PAINTED it!" For the life of me, I couldn't understand why that wasn't good enough, and for the sake of my D final grade, she couldn't explain it to me, either!
And poor Robert Ransick, who tried so hard to coax art out of me. "Ask yourself 'WHY' you're doing something," he admonished. "It's not enough just to do something cool. You have to understand why." I refused, up and down. I was so enamored with the technology of Digital Arts and Physical Computing that I never got around to the part where I actually SAID anything. I couldn't see why it was important! I thought, "Bennington just doesn't understand my needs. I'm here to design my own education, not conform to their standards!"
For my final project in Digital Arts, I wanted to make a game. It was a great idea, but I was too caught up in making it cool, and Robert was too caught up in making it art. We never found a balanced middle-ground: Everything Robert suggested felt heavy-handed, and everything I wanted was shallow. He picked the worst possible examples to sway my opinion: Hastily cobbled-together "games" that were more concept than execution. "Where is the excellence? Where is the pride in this work?" I said. There was no real answer.
So, what was my epiphany? What hit me? I can't completely verbalize it, but the gist of it is this: We were all wrong! I thought that pursuing technical excellence and pursuing artistic meaning were mutually exclusive, and my professors were so distracted by my insistence on technique that no one ever thought to sit down with me and say, "You can do both." No one ever built the bridge for me, because they already knew how to swim from side to side. I realize now: for a self-described anti-artist like myself, "WHY" can be rephrased as "HOW" without losing any meaning: HOW can I create something that challenges me as an artisan, AND challenges my audience as culturally informed observers? HOW can I create tension in my work?
I think my time at Bennington would have been profoundly different if someone had "caught" me in my first or second year, sat down, and said, "Listen, Max, it's great that you're interested in pursuing technical excellence, because you're going to learn that here. But another thing you have to learn is how to say something. You have to learn how to use your technical expertise to ask questions and suggest answers. You have to learn what your inner vocabulary is.
"It's not about politics or philosophy in a macroscopic sense; it's about how you see the world. I know you're afraid of being a heavy-handed 'artiste', and that you don't want to associate yourself with the pretentiousness commonly associated with what it means to 'SAY SOMETHING', but it's a risk, and nothing worth doing happens without some risk. You just want to draw right now, but you're going to go deeper than that. Why? That 'why not' bullshit doesn't cut it anymore: WHAT IS REALLY WORTH SAYING? What do we take for granted? What do we assume?
"You won't learn the answer to that question in the next four years; you might never learn the answer at all, but we're going to teach you how to explore the syntax and landscape of these questions."
This epiphany was connected to the analogous realization that it takes a long time to become an artist. People seem to think that anyone can pick up a pencil, draw someone who looks nonspecifically angsty, and they're an artist. Poof! It's not like that, though, and for years, I was content to chortle and merrily excuse myself from the pursuit of "fine art" because I just "didn't have anything to say".
BULLSHIT!
That's taking the EASY way out! That's TV dinner art. It's OK to be a TV dinner artists, but if you EVER have the opportunity to learn more about what's going on in your own head, for God's sake, TAKE IT! On the other hand, just because you have a wrench and you're tinkering with a car doesn't make you a mechanic. Cutting someone with a scalpel doesn't make you a surgeon--you have to spend over a decade learning about the SYMBOLS that are meaningful to medicine, the CONTEXT and TECHNIQUE of the practice. Otherwise you're just stabbing people, which is fun, but not very rewarding!
It's the same thing with becoming an artist. Every stroke of lead or paint you make is another question you're trying to answer, whether you realize it or not, and you can't just blindly rage ahead, trying to become a better representationalist. You have to step back and ask yourself why you did things a certain way, and what it means to you. It's difficult. It's scary. It's uncomfortable at first, but I feel like college is really a time for people to get comfortable in their own heads and hearts. And also to demand more popcorn chicken from the Dining Hall. |
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