dayton is not in ohio

I put together a proposal this April for a sculpture to be installed at MidAmerica Nazarene University. It was gonna be a great summer job, taking about a month and a half to fabricate and paying almost ten grand, minus materials and other expenses.

I didn’t get it.

I know that this may come as a shock to those of you who have me in your Fantasy Artist League and were riding the wave of my three-for-three streak of proposals. It probably wasn’t a good pick for me, and I expect that they selected something more ‘Christian.’ My proposal was well conceived, but it was pretty abstract, and I eventually got the idea that they wanted something pretty direct and easy to read (and presumably boring). That’s not fair to say. I’m a competitive person and it’s easy to want to think these things to take the sting out of it. So much for the grand slam…

I haven’t had to get a summer job in nearly a decade, so the prospect of getting one this year made me nervous. I also haven’t held a regular 9 - 5 job in five years, so the prospect of that has been a little nerve-wracking. I almost got to be an artist. DANG!

So, for these two weeks until my job starts I’m working for some friends down the street putting up drywall and painting before the arrival of their second kid. It’s nice to have instant work that’s pretty flexible and pays cash. I don’t mind the busyness either, because I have no idea what I’m doing in my art right now, and wouldn’t know what to do with myself in the studio.

My ‘real’ job starts in a week, where I’ll be a summer teaching assistant in the Sullivan Fabrication Studio at the Art Institute. The pros of this job are that this is one amazing shop, with incredible tools that go way beyond your standard shop tools, including CNC routers (carves digitally programmed objects out of solid blocks of material), rapid prototyping machines (like an ink jet printer that ‘prints’ things out in three dimensions using plastic), and all sorts of other tools that I have yet to learn how to use. Another pro is that I’ll be able to do a bit of working with students and helping folks realize ideas, which I enjoy.

The cons are that it pays $11.80 an hour (12 years ago I may have been excited about that…), and that the hours are 10 - 4. Subtracting a lunch break, that works out to 5 hours a day, and totals 25 hours a week. This basically makes it a part-time job, BUT, by making the hours 10 - 4, it eats up a day just like a full time job. I’d really rather that the hours were 7 - noon, or noon - 6, because I don’t work well in small bookend chunks, and that’s all I’ll have if I do want to get into the studio.

Here are a few pictures of Anna and I at the Art Institute on Friday, and one at Lowes to do a project on Saturday morning. The first two are from the 17th floor of the school’s Michigan Avenue building - the first looking out the lake, and the second down on the museum. Most folks don’t realize that the the Art Institute owns three or four buildings downtown, in addition to the museum building where my studio is located.

From Anna this morning: “I put my sippy-cup on the counter to warm up. Otherwise, it be too cold.”

She still mixes up her tenses a little, but I don’t think I used the word ‘otherwise’ in everyday conversation until I was at least 25…

Picture of a storefront church about a mile from our house. Not sure the denomination… maybe Jay-Z is the pastor?

…the freedom to buy 50-cent soft-serve from the Swedish, I guess.

The crit was on April 30 which seems like a lifetime ago… I had a major breakdown of some sort leading up to it, causing me to irrationally decide that everything I’d made this year was worthless. I was worn out and can be highly critical of my work anyway, so it created the perfect storm of an art crisis. It had something to do with wanting to do something cathartic and emotional and ‘authentic’… It’s interesting how “personal expression” is so often spoken of by bad artists and non-artists. I once had a friend say during a lecture to some Christian students “No one cares how you feel.” What he meant was that you can’t presume that anyone cares how you feel, and make art like you’re the center of the universe. Can’t tell you why I got in this mood… but my idea was to take everything I’d made this year (a lot of stuff), assemble it into a large pile, like a pyre in the middle of the gallery, then run my paper shredder over the top like a symbolic bonfire.

I told a number of fellow MFA students about my idea and they all liked it (of course), and those I mentioned it to in my family didn’t object (wouldn’t know what to say, probably, though I expect they thought it was dumb), but I have a host of artist friends in Philly that would have all listened to me and then told me not to be an idiot and just show my work. That’s what the one I told said, thankfully. My work can be a bit calculating and cerebral, and I do need an emotional outlet, but trying to deconstruct my entire year in some kind of melodramatic conflagration is just plain stupid.

The work I showed was: Infinite Bridge (circular bridge), Chopstick Junction (the chopstick bridge), Internals (SillyPutty photographs), Rapunzel, Rapunzel (paper shredder), 23f (airplane crash video), and Bread Bird. I didn’t get any photos of the entire gallery, but it ended up looking really good in the space. The hardest part of this was getting the 16.5 foot chopstick bridge out of the studio, but I did it in two pieces and reassembled it in the gallery and it worked just fine. I had planned on building a wall so that the piece could be properly installed spanning the gallery, but my crit time got all messed up and instead of having until Thursday, I had to do it on a Monday, fouling that all up.

My panel was pretty benevolent, but not uselessly so. The most interesting thing was when we began to talk about “risk-taking” and what that constitutes for an artist that is up to most technical problems. One of the harshest critiques that I have gotten is that all I’ve done in school is what I was already able to do when I arrived. That’s only true if you don’t take into account the fact that I’d never done anything like what I did when I arrived at school. Just because I did some things well the first time doesn’t make them invalid. The most interesting thing that I took away from the crit was an encouragement to try to flesh out some of my ideas on a grander scale. That’s easier said than done, but the point was that perhaps that’s what constitutes risk for me.

That’s where my thoughts were left in preparation for next year, and leaving me to consider doing at least one really large or ambitious project for my thesis show. I’ll be writing to all of my rich friends for funding.

The last month has been a whirlwind of making art, final critiques, writing papers, and a canoe trip to Mississippi. I just haven’t had much time to blog. Now I’m faced with finding a job for this summer, but I still want to do a few posts to catch up… so stay tuned, I’m still here…

I, like the person that sent this to me, really want to believe that this was delivered tongue-in-cheek. Sadly, I’m not so sure. However it doesn’t seem too far removed from some of the actual ‘research’ conducted around this highly politicized, pseudo-scientific debate.