Mastery

A few weeks ago I visited the studios of a graduate program that shall remain nameless. The students – painters, sculptors, performance and video artists, what have you – exhibited work in their studios (which, I was reassured to see, were as much like veal fattening pens as they are at every institution) as visitors poked in, occasionally committing to cross the threshold and see what was inside.

What was inside was an astonishingly uniform arrangement of works. In each studio, the artist appeared to have gone to great lengths to remain casual about work. Evidence of production was apparent (cans of paint, tools) even when they had nothing to do with the objects that were present (ubiquitous videos). Each room suggested a kind of domesticated pathology, as if the student had received a message that he or she should be obsessed with a subject, but not so obsessed as to appear genuinely interested in it.

One student was the exception casting all the others into sharp relief. He had painted the walls with a fresh coat of blinding, gallery-white paint. He’d hung three large canvases that were thematically consistent (all representing fire in a way that called to mind the work of Philadelphia painter Sydney Goodman). These supplemented a group of several similar works hanging in a near by gallery. All were large, thoroughly accomplished (if slightly conventional) works that had been carried to a point that one could reasonably conclude was finished. Taken together, they constituted a body of work, a thesis about painting with a light source in the composition, or perhaps about the transformative violence of fire, or perhaps about something else.

Another student had taken a similar path, painting abstract landscapes that were too vaporous to coalesce into such a concrete thing as a thesis, though they had the consistency and coherence of a body of works. These two, more or less only these two, appeared to working in an engaged mode that allowed new work to be born out of earlier work, as if each piece suggested possibilities and challenges for the next piece – in short, as one might be able to work over the course of a career. The other twenty or twenty five student were more like bees who buzzed from flower to flower, making a video here, making a sculpture, adding a sound track. Their method may have been more organic, may have more accurately reflected the diversity of their interests, but it came across as a profound manifestation of attention deficit disorder.

Now this was an open studio - a very informal event (that just happened to coincide with the formal graduate thesis exhibit that was just too dull to mention) - but it is an occasion to think about how one want to behave at a critical point in one's career. Is it best to let it all hang out, or to try to bring (or force, in some cases) structure to your work by establishing parameters? What is the role of the studio in your practice - workspace? showroom? place to put old sofa and listen to tunes while waiting for the next exhibit opportunity?