I'm the asshole.
Google search "ray nagin" "delicious drink" now occurs 322 times.
That's probably not due to me; I'm just saying.
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"Crit" in class today was absolute hell. First off I got there at 8.45 and sat in one of the those wicked evil chairs, the discomfort of which is not even rivaled by anything I have ever sat upon in any high school science lab or transportation hub, for 25 minutes until the instructor sidles up to me with this really polite "what the hell are you doing" look about her, so I ask what time the crit starts. ELEVEN! Damn thing doesn't start for two hours. "But I'm all done," I say. "Well, now you can start working on something else!" teacher-lady says. As if I just have a junkyard and a hardware store in the back of my car and can whip something up. And she has this Thing about us using Lab Time to do work In Class, because we're not allowed to be unproductive, even if staying in class means being less productive than whatever I would be doing at home, which for me it always does. We're not allowed to just sit there or read, either. For some reason she feels that if we do those things, we're not taking advantage of the intellectual stimulation offered by our peers and the oh-so-academic setting. Of course, my peers offer me about as much intellectual stimulation as a Broadway musical and every minute I spend in their grating presence is just as melodically pleasing. And well-written. So I looked at a book that was in the classroom for half an hour, nodded politely and smiled tightly while teacher-lady tried to make conversation with me about it (I think the book was "Selling My Life" or something, about that guy who sold almost everything he owned; which would have been really impressive except that he was just a big fat packrat with a bunch of useless crap that he didn't need by anybody's standards anyway--a kidney-shaped ashtray is charming, I have to admit, but even I know better than to take it home from the swap meet in the first place) and then I pretended to leave to get something from the snack kiosk and escaped to my car to read Tolstoy in peace for the next hour. I had to leave my backpack and everything behind! That is how desperate I was to escape.
Part Two: the crit itself. Oh, it was painful. I don't usually like very many people's work, no matter what setting I'm in, but the satisfying thing about critiques (or at least crits at UCSC) is that there's always at least one asshole in every class who is more than willing to point out the inadequacies of the piece that the artist has tried hardest to hide. Except in community college art classes, people apparently don't put enough thought into their work to feel inadequacy (much less feel the shame for said inadequacy or have the cunning to attempt to conceal it); and in community college art classes, I have become the asshole. Except that I'm a shy asshole and don't feel like it's okay for me to be the one that brings this stuff up. And when I say I'm a shy asshole, I mostly mean that I don't care enough about the person who made the inane work to give him or her any feedback. I don't feel that I should be forced to come up with comments when the artist hasn't given me a goddamn thing to work with. It's the same sense of frustration I felt in high school English when we had to peer edit essays and I always got stuck with people who couldn't form proper sentences.
Most of the "discussion" quickly devolved into typical Santa Cruz I-love-it fests and "where did you get that?!" gushing sessions (big hint: everyone gets everything at either the swap meet, or "flea market" as the coastal people coloquially and euphemistically call it, or the Bargain Barn, or the "Bargain Bin" as many classmates who have clearly never been there refer to it as), occasionally sprinkled with technical advice from the audience which was quickly fended off with cascades of excuses and retro-justification*. The major problem with the format of crits that I've had in classes at Cabrillo is that we have to present our projects before we get feedback on them, as if it's show-and-tell or we're reading an essay about panda bears. Now at the time I was in it, I thought the UCSC art department was entirely too fluffy, but at least I learned how to present and do a crit properly. During my last year and a half of classes, when we showed our work, the person who made each piece wasn't allowed to talk until after all the comments had been made. At first this led to a lot of defensive presentations by the artist, but the idea is that eventually people learn that you have to put all the information in the piece. If it needs to have a title, you need to put a title. If it needs to have a statement tacked up next to it, you have to put it there. Making a piece of visual art and then presenting it yourself before you get feedback is entirely pointless (in that you won't get an honest idea of a viewer's reaction) but it's also totally cheating (like turning in a final draft of a paper with post-it notes all over it explaining what you meant).
I tried to incite an actual helpful (I was going to say "smart" but then I'd sound like a jerk) conversation by forcing the rest of the class to give me comments before I said anything, but they just sat there. So I told them to say if they got any, you know, feelings from the piece. Still sitting there. Finally this one especially annoying girl says, "I don't feel like I've been given enough information to know what this is about." Pause. [I've shown this piece, in slightly different presentations, to two other classes. I've been working on it for seven months. They all got it, at least to a certain extent. You don't. I sincerely doubt that I'm the one who has screwed up.] "So does anyone, you know, not know what it's, uh...about, but get any...senses? That you...feel?" Nothing. Poop. Fuck this, I'm never teaching community college. It's not like there aren't enough idiots in state universities. I'm specifically remembering a conversation on a bus at UCSC between two guys discussing the merits of various Mexican medical schools. Higher AP test scores and more money doesn't neccessarily mean a better product. But for fuck's sake...
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Conversation with Michelle, 8.02 pm:
EM: i hated the ucsc art department
but now i appreciate it so much
ML: yeah. it was pretty awesome
lots of hot boys
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*The act of coming across a concept (which may or may not work within your thesis) unintentionally in a visual art piece, which is not realized until someone else points it out and is then explained extemporaneously (usually in a classroom setting) to make it seem intentional, relevant, or at least not incongruous.
| | Em Dashing (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small} codydan) wrote, |
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