The world of the Rhode Island School of Design and the world of my former academic life rarely overlapped. But some RISD people, like my printmaking Teacher Randa, inhabited both realms and didn’t pretend my book didn’t exist. Chatting with her in Benson Hall one day after our printmaking class, I seized a rare opportunity in art school to brag about my writing, to wit, my Sunday’s morning wonder of wonders, my book reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.
The New York Times Book Review.
Front-page review.
Oh la la la la!
Randa recognized this as every writer’s dream, a Once In A Lifetime, a True-to-Life Coup. She ran me downstairs to share my miracle with her teacher colleague Sharon. Passing the printmaking office on our way to Sharon, we ran into Teacher Henry standing outside the doorway of his faculty office, a distraction from wonder, the reminder of a beef.
Teacher Henry had given me an A-minus (bad graduate school grade) and called me “dogged” (a put-down, not an appreciation of persistence). Recognizing an insult, I had called him out over “dogged.”
Henry’s malevolent magnetic field pulled me off course. Instead of rejoicing over my amazing good fortune with Sharon and Randa, I resumed my fight with Henry. This was stupid of me, now I know, even though I was right, and he was wrong. Henry did not back down. He doubled down. He insisted he had to say what he believed, what he “knew,” to be true:
You may show your work.
You may have a gallery.
You may sell your work.
You may have collectors.
But you will never be an artist.
Why not? Because I lacked an essential component, some ineffable inner quality necessary to truly be An Artist. I recognized Henry’s logic of “being” as complete, unalloyed bullshit. I said,
Henry, that’s bullshit.
I knew it was totally unprofessional of him, a teacher, to say that to me, a student. I knew that from a career of teaching, from a lifetime of knowing teacher-student relations. I knew. I knew. As surely as I was right and he was wrong, I knew. What I felt was something as different as heart from brain.
What I felt was Henry’s arrow of condemnation piercing my student’s psyche. He hurled an arrow, a dagger, a sharp-pointed weapon into my bull’s-eye of a heart, where it lodged among a thousand insinuations, of doubts that in fact, I was not good enough. That arrow-target, the assault and the wound. The target of my self-doubt shape-shifted into an Escher loop of insecurity and self-pity.
Never be An Artist, not good enough, never be An Artist, not good enough, never be An Artist, not good enough
You may recognize this circuit of torture.
Henry cut me so deeply because part of me—while I was in graduate school, the larger part of me—wanted to be An Artist in just that indescribable way. An An Artist artist finds her identity in art, does nothing but make art, and does it all the time, making work of unimaginable creativity. An An Artist artist makes art 100 percent of the time.
I would have loved to devote all my time to art, to pursue each inspiration to its fabulous ends. But I also didn’t want to leave book promotion or writing tasks or my dear husband in New Jersey. I wished I didn’t always have to cringe when the phone portended parental emergency from the West Coast. But my parents were a part of me I could not even imagine letting down. I could not abandon the rest of me, even when the rest of me overwhelmed my art.
I wanted to be a better artist and make more exciting work with never-before-seen drawings and hitherto unimaginable compositions and color from the ends of the earth. Part of me wanted to be An Artist, without any asterisks. All of me wanted to be An Artist—and yet at the same time to keep my past as thinker and writer. But how could I be An Artist, when “academic” was so poisonous a concept in art and while I had always been academic? The very worst thing in the world you could call someone’s art was “academic,” meaning sterile, humorless, obscure, unattractive, and old-fashioned. Old.
An Artist’s art is ambiguous and ironic, possessing what Teacher Roger called “right nowness.” I was doing my darnedest for ambiguity and irony, with mixed results, but right nowness? I was too old for right nowness.
Teacher Donna faulted me for not being “hungry” enough to be An Artist. I asked myself what on earth is “hungry” if not moving to another state, paying a fortune in tuition, rent, and supplies, working endless hours, and being humiliated on a daily basis? What an art-world fun house of jumbled, upside-down values.
Donna’s condemnation stung because Henry’s resonated, and I was vulnerable to both. Meanwhile, my upbringing, long life’s experience, and scholarship had armored me against thinking of identity—racial or gender identity—as something you are, or as academics would say, as something ontological. Knowing identity as something people performed in various ways, I was armored against racial and gender “essentialism,” as academics would say of something simple and unitary. Yet here I was, falling for essentialism about artists.
Henry’s definition of An Artist was ontological (as in “to be”) rather than epistemological (as in “to learn”) or pedagogical (as in “to teach”) or performative (as in “to act”), or even commercial (as in to have a gallery): he was saying that since anything can find its way into a gallery, and tastes vary so widely that just about anything can find a buyer, an inexpressible something, some inward quality of being, hard to pin down and beyond the market, must, therefore, exist on the exciting side of the line separating An Artist artists from inferior beings, i.e., from me.
To be An Artist was to be a certain kind of person that you could not become through education or practice. It was a toggle switch between either you were or you weren’t. If I was never going to be An Artist, my last few years were a terrible mistake, a waste of time and a great deal of money. If I lacked the essential quality of being An Artist, I was condemned to failure.
My defect was my seriousness, my persistence, my discipline, my goddam hard work. In other realms, these are the foundations of resilience, a positive quality in life, essential for survival. Survival, however, does not figure among the qualities of An Artist. How much more attractive to go down in flames at a young age, like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Arshile Gorky. I remembered skinny white Matt, my skateboarder classmate at Mason Gross, who made awesomely huge, extraordinary imaginative pieces by staying up the night before the piece was due. Totally amazing work, but hardly a routine for the decades. All the better to die young.
Too late for me.