Licensed to Practice Art: 4/20/08

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Selecting Classes

Even though school doesn't start until August 28th, I have to pick classes this Monday. I spent a long time being hugely confused by the catalog but then becoming engrossed by the catalog, as I actually thought about taking classes on these topics from these teachers. I've been out of any kind of school for 18 years or so. Reading the catalog was kind of like watching a little fire taking hold from smouldering embers buried in the back of my mind. I had vague flashbacks to planning undergraduate schedules and worrying about getting enough hours while leaving big blocks of time so I could work enough to stay in school.

A couple of courses are prescribed. I have to have two sessions with advisors, and they don't have to be in photography at all. I also am required to take an art history class on modern art and post-modernism. Required to take a photography seminar. That's four classes (12 hours) prescribed. It leaves room for one class of any kind at all. I'm thinking of a seminar in sculpture, since it's closest to the installation art that I'm interested in now.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Prematurely Named Blog

Welcome. This is a first for me, which is à propos, given that I'm about to embark on an adventure. My first day towards a Master of Fine Arts - Studio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will be August 28th. At the conclusion of two years time, I will be [drumroll] Licensed to Practice Art!

The trip to this point has been quite eventful, but the transition between now and August 28 will be complicated too. And the course between then and two years hence is almost impossible to imagine. I'll chronicle some of it here.

For background, it helps to know that I grew up in a town in South Texas, moved to Houston to attend Rice University, then went to the University of Houston for a law degree and I practice law. There. That about covers the first 45 years.

Now, a little about why I chose SAIC and what I want to work on next.

I was rejected by every school with any good sense, but still had to choose between the MFA programs at SAIC and the School of Visual Arts in New York. I conducted a poll of pretty much everyone I know who is involved in art and visited both schools. When I visited SVA, despite the overwhelming students, faculty, graduates, and what not, I came away with the impression that it would be too much like attending law school all over again: very smart people in a very competitive program, hoping to make it big and reap the rewards. I'm confident that SVA would make me a better photographer, and maybe even a very good one. But SAIC feels more like Rice, or at least what I recall Rice feeling like. In my mind, it was an intellectual, academic environment and I will never forget Dennis Huston chasing me down across campus one day, demanding an explanation of why I hadn't showed up for his Shakespeare class. Rice was more about teaching how to learn than teaching the thing itself, and that has proved much more valuable. I think SAIC is going to be the same way. I hope SAIC will make me more of an artist than a photographer. Which is important since I've been studing art history and non-photographic arts for the last year or so.

My friend Kristy and I have been collaborating on installations, and they have become completely non-photographic. Our first installation was at a local community college (involving the printing of photographs on rocks and helium filled ballons). It was called Salted Away, and it was all about epistemology, and curatorial practices. We think. Here's an installation shot.

After it was done, the school asked us to create a permanent installation with the rocks and we installed a spiral jetty, after Robert Smithson. There were no photographs in it at all. That piece is called After Smithson (Limestone Jetty). There's a photo of it too.

We've also proposed three other installations and are waiting word on whether they will be accepted. They all have something to do with art history, epistemology and curatorial practices. We think.

I like referencing non-photographic art and I like using photography for the things that require photography. But I want more tools than photography alone, though I can't imagine abandoning photography. SAIC seems like the kind of place I can do installation, performance, painting, video, sculpture, and photography as long as it makes sense. Sounds good to me.

So what do I do next, photographically? I'm thinking about a purely documentary project for grad school. I visited the Rio Grande Valley (where I was raised) last weekend and liked several of the photographs I made. The day before, I had taken Keith Carter's workshop at the Houston Center for Photography (HCP), and he described his decision to approach East Texas as a tourist in an exotic locale, and how thinking about the place as if he had never been there, didn't know anyone, didn't know the customs or language, etc., really made a difference in his work. The perspective allowed him to make photos that were personal, of his time, and were the first successes he had. It reminded me of advice I got from Peter Brown, another gifted teacher, to photograph the Valley.

So I began thinking of working on a personal documentary of the area, particularly the rural area my family lives in. There is much more there than I could ever photograph: the plants, the people, the racial tension, the stark economics, the crooked judges and sherrifs, the citrus groves, the onion fields, the beaches, the loners who went as far south as they could go, the drug dealers' mansions at the end of dirt roads, the remote Polish farmers in little hamlets who only listen to polkas and have 24 hour weddings, the brutally hot weather, the river, the stunning growth, the diseases that don't exist anywhere else in the country -- I don't know of a place quite like it. There are stories that people swear are true, like encountering Chupacabres (goat suckers) and the night the devil danced at Boccacio 2000, a disco in McAllen, before spinning so fast he melted into a pool of blood on the dance floor, leaving only a black cape behind. I have met people who swear they've seen the Chupacabre and others who swear they were at Boccacio 2000 that night. Anyway, there's no shortage of material there.

All I got this trip, though, was a few shots of the family and my sister's house. Here are some of those.