/////// 10tonfunk

Yes, I have an art degree, a bachelors in fine arts in painting. Now I realize it may not seem like my education makes me a great candidate for a position at your company unless you have an illiterate client that needs diagrams drawn or the walls are looking awfully bare (or, conversely, need painting — I have not only studied painting, I have repainted the dorms of an art school, which is meta manual labor). But I did more in school than

- study color theory
- develop an admiration for people who locked themselves in galleries with wild animals, or carefully glued rabbit ears to cockroaches to create ‘cockabunnies’ which were later released into a gallery (read Mysoon Rizk’s excellent article on this in the Aug 09 issue of Antennae)
- compile a list of artist types who killed their wives but remained free and popular.

Your ad says you’re looking for someone with problem solving and troubleshooting abilities. I could make a rather inappropriate trouble shooting reference here to the way in which William Burroughs dispatched of his wife, but that would only prove the trivial nature of myself as a human being and cast a negative light on the importance of studying history (in this case, William Tell), so let’s talk about the problem part:

Besides dealing with plenty of problem children, and a plethora of faculty treasuring dreams of success and retirement in roughly equal measure, studying art teaches you all about problems. In essence, an artwork is a problem posed and a problem solved. The success of the artwork depends on the knowledge and ambition of the artist (in terms of the scope of their inquiry, not how much they want Shaq to put one of their works in a show — or have James Frey write the essay for it) when posing the question; their ability to answer this question in a way that isn’t boring (even if it’s not a particularly interesting question — Monet certainly wasn’t the person to paint water lilies), isn’t incomplete or evasive; and, to communicate this exploration in a highly codified syntax while adhering to all the rules of design and using them to the best of one’s advantage.

The best artworks are visual manifestation of a system of thought that are coherent enough to be understood but dynamic enough to be engaging and provoke further investigation. You do not want your work to be like the conversations parents so often have with their pre-teenage children:
“What did you do today?”
“Nothing.”
Making art teaches you to approach problems and questions from every possible angle both when asking and answering.

Interested in expressing your belief that centuries of art, including all the great works by the great masters, have failed to speak to and properly take advantage of the potential offered by visual art? Most people do not immediately seize upon painting a picture of pipe as the way to go about this and yet you probably recognize this painting. Thanks to my BFA, I know all about thinking outside the box and can actually do something much harder — I know about condensing the outside and inside of the box onto a two dimensional surface in a manner clear enough that you can understand at a glance but deep enought that you can ponder it’s intricacies for centuries. Put that in your imaginary pipe and take a puff.

Studying art teaches about you history: the way it swallows people and spits them out shiny and polished years later, and the ways in which other people play an often unrecorded part in the process. Van Gogh failed, rather spectacualrly, to make it in religion, art and into the arms of a local prostitute. Now, Starry Night will set you back a cool couple of dozen million dollars. Was it because he was a great painter? It was part that and part the fact that his brother Theo was a gallerist. Henry Darger is only acknowledged today as an artist because his landlord had a gallery, and when he opened his Darger’s apartment after his death and found his incredible body of work, knew what he had on his hands and what to do with it. So I’m a believer in hard work, vision and sidling up to the right people. I understand that the road to success is marked with scores of intertwining tracks and that you can’t count on anything except being prepared. Incidentally, I can also start a fire by grinding two thoughts together.

Looking for someone who can communicate clearly and honestly without raising ire? Snap, that would be me. In art school, your works, the things you’ve invested your heart soul and better part of your nights into, are crudely stuck on the wall and picked apart, by the teacher and all the other students, to your face. You’re expected not only to take it, but to learn from it. You learn that if you want people to really hear what you’re saying when you publicly dismantle their babies (obviously these are metaphoric babies) that you need to frame your input in a way that doesn’t create a defensive response. You also need to be able to talk and write about your work convincingly, even if you went into visual art to get away from the verbal end of things. If you’re paying attention, you also learn about what important people consider important: you learn that no matter how good your work is, if your slides suck and your artist statement looks more Y Tori kant’ reed than Walter Benjamin you’re going to be screwed when it comes to shows and grants.

Artists are also filled with that premium unleaded blend of cynicism and delusional optimisim that fuels so many successful entrepreneurs. You know that few artists ever ‘make it’ (and your definintion of what making it means changes drastically over time) and yet you continue to perservere, believing that you will be one of the 20 percent who still makes art five years after graduation. One of the fraction of fraction of a fraction of a percent who makes it into the canon. You know all about marrying reality to your fantasies through sacrifice — how much money can you spend on food and still have a studio? Can you afford to get your car fixed and still buy paint? Etc.

Communication, problem solving, high level decision making abilities — knowing when to go for it and what you’ll lose if you don’t pull it off — flirting with uncertainty and getting some, creativity, good time management, ability to meet deadlines with enough time that your painting doesnt smear itself across the inside of your car when you transport it, managing disappointment… It’s one thing to study history, it’s another to be determined to be the person who stars in its next chapter.

If that sounds like the kind of abilities you’d want someone on your ‘team’ to possess than shout me a holler. I don’t have a phone at the moment but if you come to my mom’s house and throw a pebble up at the third floor that should work as long as it’s not before 1130 am. I’m not going to be able to show you the actual degree either, I used it a collage a long time ago.

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This entry was posted by fred dintenfass on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 5:51 am. It is filed under Generale. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.