Introduction To Ceramics.
Art School ceramics students primarily learn the craftsmanship of the ancient art of pottery. They will work primarily in the teacup and bowl genre. Ceramics exhibits are usually very minimalist and the artists present these teacups as art, rather than what they really are: vessels that are sometimes fancy. For many, clay tiles are about as abstract as it gets.
Sometimes a renegade ceramics student will shock everyone by taking the medium outside of the realm of utility. They might do one of the following:
- combine porcelain slip with photographic elements
- performance art
- make strange organic forms that serve no function
This is against the rules! Form over function is too…sculptural…for them to feel comfortable. Ceramics professors prefer to keep ceramics and sculpture mutually exclusive. Occasionally they will belittle the sculpture department for its frivolity, and bring everyone back to basics: you’re there to make interesting teapots.
Unlike painting, the artist statement for the ceramics student does not focus on lofty, pretentious name dropping. Instead, ceramists write folksy anecdotes about “drinking tea with their grandmothers” or “choosing a glaze that reminds them of New Mexico sunsets.”
Don’t be fooled by this. Ceramics may appear to be the philosophical antithesis of painting; but upon closer inspection, you will realize that in both fields, the professors’ collective mindsets are identically narrow.
When in doubt, you can always cast your ass in something to make a statement!
SCULPTORS:
The good news is, if someone gets injured while viewing or handling your piece, you can get some free attention from newspapers, magazines, TV news, and defense lawyers!
Start smoking. It doesn’t matter if it’s tobacco or hash, but just stick something in your mouth and inhale. Fun drugs like Quaaludes went the way of the dinosaurs, but there’s still a lot to smoke up and ingest in art school!
Learn how to nonchalantly discuss your drug problems. You probably only sparked a couple of doobies at your friends’ parties, but you really score artist brownie points if you can credibly make people believe you’ve done hits of acid, glimmer, angel dust, ice, crack shrooms, or smack. If you want to liven things up, tell people you’re on PCP and sit in the middle of the street hitting it with a hammer. Get loaded on space paste and go wander around a golf course looking for Japan. Get your Russian roommate to bring you a bottle of absinthe from the old country and spark that shit up in a spoon. (It tastes like Nyquil.)
Most people are afraid to take the hard shit, so it doesn’t matter if YOU have, just as long as you can make people believe you’re more hardcore than they are.
CHALLENGE: Write convincing artist statements for each of these items.
The following descriptions will be what sane people think upon seeing these pieces of art. Find a way to convince everyone that you are in a very important process of discovery.
- An abstract representation of Charlie Chaplin, rendered in plastic garbage bags
- A sculpture made from assorted garbage and taped on a checkerboard
- Fucking COOTIE CATCHERS strung together with wire!!!???!!!
- Jesus on some fur.
- WTF?!?!?!
BONUS POINTS: Guess which one is mine.
DOUBLE BONUS POINTS: Guess which one was selected for the juried BFA exhibit.
A FIELD GUIDE TO ART STUDENTS: MR. BUTTERWORTH.
Art is all about sucking up. By buttering the professor’s ego, they will be more sympathetic to Mr. Butterworth’s work and possibly even choose him to be their (unpaid) TA next semester. (Mr. Butterworth is always male, though he is frequently spotted with a fanatic female devotee.)
Mr. Butterworth can be identified when he does the following:
- name drops
- sells himself
- mentions his hobnobbing with professors
- carries art theory books to appear intellectual
- wears cardigan sweaters
- keeps secret flashcards of famous artists
- hands out business cards with quotes from Susan Sontag
- names his SmugMug account after an obsolete film processing technique
This establishes instant hierarchy: he regards himself as important because he has ambition – the ambition to collect status.
Mr. Butterworth’s actual art is fair to middling, and usually relies on trickery to appear deep and meaningful. He has remarkable skill in getting an entire semester’s worth of critiques over three classes for one mediocre photo shoot.
Mr. Butterworth is usually a photographer, but he can be found in the painting and sculpture departments as well.
Sucking up will reward him with the following:
- invitation to the professor’s parties
- wine and hummus
- smug feelings of self-importance in the name of art
- a great vocabulary
Identifying line: “My art comes before my grades.”
Art School As Religion.
Although most art students traditionally identify themselves as “Buddhist,” “agnostic” or “atheist,” most fail to observe the similarities between art school and places of worship. In reality, the religious “world” and the art “world” are quite similar. As Roman Catholics have CCD class and Jewish scholars study the Torah and Islamic pupils pour over the Koran, art students devote their lives toward a perfection that may not exist except in the work of their chosen “idol.” Usually it’s someone in the Saatchi collection.
Art students live similar lives to those of monks and nuns: ritual fasting, public declarations of devotion, the creation of icons, pouring over books about the disciplines that capture their hearts and minds, eschewing the cheapening of their belief systems by ‘selling out’ (Jesus in the Temples; Andy Warhol?)
Art students aspire to live the cliché perfected centuries ago by the Cistercian order of monks: the endurance of constant suffering to remind them of their devotion, which in turn rewards them with a place in heaven/article in ArtNews. For both, this will involve fasts, clothing made out of hair (both to wear in suffering and to display in a gallery), and self-inflicted bodily mutilation.
In art school, the equivalent to religious sects are your chosen discipline:
Painting/Drawing = Roman Catholicism
Ceramics = Buddhist
Photography = Judaism
Graphic Design = Mormon
Printmaking = Quaker
Metalworker = Hindu
Sculpture = People’s Temple of Jonestown
What To Expect From Beginning Classes.
Think of your core classes an art school boot camp, in which you are handed a series of tasks with the expectation that you competently complete them, but with no real purpose. You will slave over these meaningless assignments for weeks, wondering why you are wasting your time, worrying that failure to reach the goal of the assignment will lead you to another major.
This is the weeding-out process of separating the “serious” art students from the “poseurs.” Most of the fake emo kids and ersatz punks fail or leave the program at this point, due to their lack of discipline. (It’s okay; it gives them something to bitch about in their DeviantART blogs.)
THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM.
Throughout art school, you will take classes where the professor makes you use a material which you are entirely unqualified to use…and hate. This could be as simple as using
pastels when you’re more comfortable using pen and ink, or it could be as dangerous as you operating welding equipment with little training beyond seventh-grade shop class.
Irrelevant assignments are notoriously maddening and complicated for no reason, other than sadism on the professor’s part.
You are expected to appear to be “thinking outside the box,” but in reality you have to complete these tasks within the elusive guidelines on the syllabus handout.
HOW WILL YOU FAIL?
For instance, you will learn about color theory in your beginning Two Dimensions class. After being given a handout with lots of science-y sounding words, you will be
expected to create, by hand, your own color theory chart; as if there aren’t already enough in the world. You will paint stripes of reds, blues, and yellows. You will mix the colors, and paint new stripes. You will repeat this a third time. You will take an x-acto knife and cut out little rectangles from these primary, secondary, and tertiary stripes, arrange them in a circle on posterboard, and affix them with rubber cement.
You will have no idea in hell why you are even doing this or what it means, and when you are rapidly finishing this assignment at the last minute, you will slice off your fingertip and land in the emergency room to have it re-attached. You will not have done the chart correctly (is there an answer? Isn’t it a “theory?”), and your professor will make you re-do it when your finger heals.
EGO CRUSHING 101.
Your Three Dimensions class will involve you having to make a chair. That’s all. A chair. You don’t have any idea how to execute the chair, so you go to the library and look up pictures of famous chairs (there are some) and try to figure out how to make one. You will decide to do the easiest-looking one, go to the store, and buy some balsa wood. You will have a hard time getting the chair to stick together with glue, so you half-destroy the thing with carpet tacks and the cloudy veil of incompetence. You will try to hide the piece’s engineering shortcomings with Xeroxes of a comic strip you like, and suddenly decide to explain the whole thing off as a “reflection of your childhood,” as if pulling THAT out of your ass will suffice in masking your failure. You’ll paint the rest of the thing yellow because that’s the only paint you have left in your tackle box that isn’t dried out.
You will come to class with your shitty-looking chair and you will be shamed because The Critic made gorgeous, intricate, museum-quality work. Yours looks like it should be in a dumpster.
In fact, when you get your C, that’s precisely where it ends up.
