There are times when I commune with pictures of Chicago and my time in school where it feels so certain that I could go back to that time, not out of desire alone, but toxic nostalgia. A longing to correct inebriation, stay true to discipline, have good nature toward lovers and friends, focus on a single craft, or hold on to that ready-made dream of being someone known for something.
10 years later and it still has a profound hold on me. It was just school. Art school—something to laugh at having spent money on.
The lasting impact was made possible by my expectations going in. I never thought I’d make it out of my hometown, a farm-hugging suburb. I never thought I’d be associated with anything prestigious. But I always wanted to be so exceptional, recognized, and affecting, that I never believed I’d be stuck.
When I got to Chicago, I clutched SAIC as a time-sensitive vantage point with which to leap toward dreams of being a celebrity artist. It was like a race to the cornucopia, and I assumed everyone else felt the same way. After all, we were pouring out work, seniors went to NYC for their last semester, Yale scouted Advanced Painters, some of us got shows before graduating, kids took up as much space as they could in critique to show how avant grade they were, and teachers doomed us, “Most people stop making work after they graduate,” which put in our heads, “Are you a Real artist?”
To this day, I don’t know if a single person was as megalomaniacally driven by such narcissistically-deluded visions of grandeur as myself. When my mother and I put ourselves in debt over tuition, we had bought a lottery ticket on credit. The ticket was merit-based, so urgency flooded my mind to prove myself, and my inferiority complex was unable to transition gracefully. At once, it was obvious, of course, that I was accepted by a rich art school. That was validation. But it was undermined by many things. Not least was the 70% acceptance rate, for-profit model, money laundering, tax-write offs via art donations and learning about auction buyers not viewing a piece but its flippability before purchase.
When the disillusionment with art institutions hit me, I didn’t know how to process if the whole dream was fake, if I was giving up on a legitimate dream, or if SAIC was even that good of a place to realize dreams. Either way, there was a death in me when I stopped painting. It felt like when I went to go play with my toys one day as a ten-year-old and saw it as no longer fun and creative but silly and childish. The thoughtless play ended with a seed of doubt.
And I think that’s what I mourn when I reflect on that time. I morn the version of myself that could have continued thinking Advanced Painting placement was the anointment of the gods, who could have actually gone to NYC their last semester to be scouted by galleries. That version of myself had such blind faith in the reciprocity of the sanctity of Art within institutions that all stages, all rungs and ladders, all awards and accolades fabricated in its name had to be holy. It was truly my religion for five years straight.
That religion and that version of myself are dead for many reasons. There’s just no way I would have not read The Million Dollar Stuffed Shark. And there’s no way I could have tolerated another critique with people who have nothing to say but allotted an hour and a half to say it. There’s no way I would have continued spending an extra two grand a semester for my materials while tuition bought the film department’s RED cameras. Had I not quit and stayed the course, failure would have burned me twice by reminding me how I never tried anything else but what I came for. Painting wasn’t god’s work. It was a scam.
But that dead, boy’s dream is still in my head, like a persona trying to win over my body again. The boy’s dream was built by seeing write-ups of Jules de Balincourt in some art magazine, this handsome guy, sitting on a stool by his work in a light-drenched studio, smoking, wearing paint-covered pants. I wanted people to come to my studio to buy my work, meet cool people, and make cool things in inspiring cities. That dream whispers that there’s unfinished business. That the life we both wanted is still there and I’ve landed in a weird, derailed fog for the past eight years. “What about the controversy we wanted to brew? The people we wanted to meet? The neat lifestyle we used to want?” It’s unbelievable how deeply you can be indoctrinated by school, by yourself, by media, to want a particular life so badly. That’s why those four years haunt me, why the pictures haunt me. That dream was so desperate, so ego-fueled, so full of imposter syndrome that it became too traumatic to carry, and having aborted it in Chicago makes me feel like I’ve got a fucked-up child wandering alone out there.
I don’t know if looking at the pictures from that time will ever get softer. I wanted something bad and discovered what I wanted wasn’t real. Art isn’t sacred in this country. Moneymakers have just set up shop on an inexorable human tendency at every artery and are sucking artists dry while assuring us we’re special and precious. I always assumed being validated by the art world with recognition would change my life forever because there would be no doubt possible in the accolade. If you don’t love art then you don’t buy it, right? You wouldn’t look at it, you wouldn’t talk about it, you wouldn’t make it. But that’s a lie. The fine art world is a racket seeking to pigeonhole you into a one-trick pony as fast as possible. Beyond Impressionism in museums, the public doesn’t give a fuck about art either. Contemporary art is a joke to most people. Ideas are jokes. If it ain’t pretty, it’s trash. Art’s most personal, real-world purpose is to be decorations for wealth criminals. Or it’s supposed to spawn a KAWS empire for other leeches to get fat off of. In which case, prolificacy is malignancy. Filling the world with brightly colored collectible bullshit is rewarding the worst of our tendencies.
I wanted art to be a merging of science and philosophy within the context of fine art—a space where things are inherently looked at with unique attention. The same power of context that allows a doctor to grab your genitals; a gallery or museum should grab the audience with ideas. But I felt completely ostracized in that pursuit. Completely insane. In so many words, critiques devolved into claiming I was gaslighting them with trying to be conceptual in order to be controversial. That, in conjunction with learning about how the fine art world clanks, strangled the dream. Like someone in a hoe phase realizing sex appeal and beauty are not cups deep enough to overflow validation to their other cups—I abstained from trying to be validated.
I was a whore. Not an artist.