As it turns out this space is a monthly for me, I don't move at the pace of the internet, and really I'm not a blogger, I simply have a blog that I tell some of you about. I've sat on this post since January it was intended to be a response to
Sharron Buttler's post on her blog
Two Coats of Paint about an MFA final crit she sat in on. I've been thinking about the relative value of an MFA since 2006 when I was sent my first bill from Brooklyn College for that particular degree and I sent Sharon some comments about what I thought about the experience. This is a version of the same things I sent her with pics I thought would be helpful.
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| Boats, c. 2003, approximately 10 x 12 inches |
In 2003 I moved to New York with the
specific intention of attending a fairly cheap graduate school in
pursuit of an MFA degree. As it turns out I got into my second choice
school, Brooklyn College (Hunter was first on my list). I thought I
was a pretty hot shit, if modest, painter and I spent my first year
at Brooklyn making competent modernist figurative paintings. My
heroes at the time were New York School second generation painters
like Louisa Mathiasdottir, Leland Bell and Paul Georges. In turn
their heroes were also my heroes, the first generation ab-ex painters
DeKooning and Hoffman but also figurative painters like Balthus,
Derain, Matisse, Bonnard. I was making paintings just like they did,
and I was at grad school trying to figure out how to make paintings
like that matter to the world, it was a stance I took against the
last 50 years of art history, but I was fine with that, I was a
“rebel” in the sense that I was rejecting contemporary mores.
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| Untitled, 2004, 24 x 19 inches |
I found some support for my beliefs at BC,
Archie Rand and Patricia Cronin were hugely supportive. I liked
Archie especially, he really understood what I understood about how
important these artists really were. He was respectful, even
reverent, in my studio. At the same time I was studying with
Elizabeth Murray and William T. Williams. I'd met occasional
resistance from both of them in personal studio crits but nothing I
couldn't handle, I knew how to argue for an ideal beauty, I knew how
to argue against how stupid and wrong minimalism and conceptual art
were, I had moral high ground to stand on.
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| Bed, 2005, 24 x 36 inches |
At the end of my first year I was
confused but confident I was right, and it was with that confidence
that I walked into my first year critique. Armed with some fairly
large new paintings and tons upon tons of studies and small
watercolors I was there to prove my worth as a painter, if not by
quality at least by sheer volume. I was prolific, like Picasso, ya
know? I made a lot of stuff, just look at my stream of semen, look at
how well I paint! Look, will you? And if you don't see how great this
particular bowl of apples is please look again, you have no IDEA how
hard I worked on that pile of fruit, and it's grand, isn't it?
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| Untitled (after Caravaggio's Flagellation), 2004, 24 x 19 inches |
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The
critique was vaguely praising, nice this, good touch here, lovely
color, nice palette knife work there, etc.
And then, the last person
to speak finally spoke. Elizabeth Murray, who I'd grown to respect
for an abundant amount of reasons and who had recently suffered
through an unimaginably grueling session of chemo therapy on what
turned out to be one of her last days with us on this planet but who
also somehow felt well enough that day to crit me and my classmates,
said:
“Your work is inane”.
Which was a pretty easy thing to brush
off, I mean the whole rest of the room pretty much told me I was the
genius I knew I was so fuck her. Right?
And then it was suddenly summer and I
had what seemed like eons of time off from the pressures of grad
school. I had one more crit with a visiting artist that summer, Kara
Walker, who couldn't figure out why I liked dead white guys any more
than I could explain what it was about art that I was so in love
with.
I felt awful, and worse, out of touch. That moment of that day killed something in me that needed to be killed. I went home and cried.
[ed. you can't feel bad for me here, I was an incredibly naive person, unaware of my own naivete, thinking it was some kind of secret knowledge.]
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| Untitled, 2005, 19 x 24 inches |
I spent that summer making lots of
paintings, reams upon reams of paintings on paper. And I thought
all of that work was shit; horrible, awful, terrible things, an
amazing amount of paintings, a whole new portfolio. Paintings I spat on, paintings I pissed on, paintings made from
soap bubbles and ink, cartoon paintings, stuff I'd never made before. It was an awful summer of awkward growth.
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| Untitled, 2005, 19 x 24 inches |
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| Untitled, 2005, 19 x 24 inches |
I spent my second year at BC making
what are probably the worst, ugliest paintings I've ever made, but I
was making them as a free person, I discovered I was really good at
making bad paintings, I was good at having bad ideas and I was really
good at ugly. I had never let myself do that, I'd never really let
go, I'd never let myself into my work in the way I did that semester,
and the results were horrifying.
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| Quadripples, 2006, 18 x 24 inches |
So I just made ugly art for a few
years. I remember my second year crit was nearly silent. Quite a few
of the undergrad faculty who sit in on the crits couldn't figure out
what had happened, or why. I had murdered something precious, my own
“taste” I guess, whatever it was that was preventing me from
speaking from my own experience. Fear was part of that thing I'd just
killed, fear of making a bad painting, fear of saying the wrong
thing, etc. The thing was I didn't even recognize my defense
mechanism as fear, I was proud of that mechanism, or at least I had been.
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| Untitled, 2006, 48 x 56 inches |
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| Dancing in the Show Tonight, 2006, 48 x 48 inches |
I spent a lot of time in my second
semester reading artforum from the 70's, I figured I'd go to at least
one of the sources of the rhetoric I was hearing. I read Don Judd's
reviews in Arts magazine, the ones he wrote about the scene around
him. I discovered young Jerry Salz's paintings were heavily
influenced by Jasper Johns. I realized why he had quit making art and began writing. I began actually liking a lot of stuff
I'd rejected before, not just liking it but thinking critically about
why it was made and why it might be important.
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| Dickheads, 2006, 48 x 48 inches |
Best of all, for my own work, I did get
comfortable with making ugly things, and those ugly things became
less ugly to me, because I'd made them and I had discovered a way of owning the things I'd been afraid to make. Making work became a way of
working through having my ass handed to me by
Elizabeth Murray. I never want another person to tell me that my work
doesn't need to exist, and I'll likely never have the opportunity to
have someone tell me that again in my life. But that's what grad
school is for.
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| Untitled, 2006, 48 x 48 inches |
I remember saying one thing in that
final crit, when the notion that the new paintings were less than
pretty came about I remember answering “yes, and I should have been
making paintings like this years ago”.
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| 70 paintings titled individually, the work as a whole has no title, 2011 - 2012, 10 x 10 inches each (excepting the one that's 10 x 12 inches) photo by Sharon Butler. |
