At least, we’d like to think that if the art world were an Illuminati card, it would be Liberal and Weird.  (If you’re not familiar with the game, just translate that as, “We’d like to think the art world is liberal and weird.”)  But that presumes a certain homogeneity that just isn’t there, as in fact did my own presumption that we (me, and you who are reading this) both want the art world to be the same, certain thing.  That is by no means a sure thing.  If for sake of discussion we can continue to refer to the art world as a single entity, then along with “community,” it also praises “diversity.”   That value is tested when one learns that diversity means hanging out with a bunch of people with whom one doesn’t agree, and whom one might not even like.

So what, then, does the concept of community really mean within the context of the art world?  The answers that spring to mind come in the form of analogies:  the art world as ecosystem, the art world as family, the art world as neighborhood.  Any of these metaphors can provide insight into the nature and structure of a subculture, but they can also be misleading, as well as potentially offensive and therefore divisive:  the vulture is an invaluable part of the ecosystems it inhabits, but few would want to be called the vultures of the art world.  (“He only collects work by dead artists.  Also, he’s bald, and when it’s hot out, he shits on his legs.”)

So it’s like Hannibal Lecter says in Silence of the Lambs:  “First principles.  Read Marcus Aurelius:  ‘Of each particular thing ask:  What is it in itself? What is its nature?’ What does he do, this man you seek?”  And as we try to piece together exactly what it is that we do, in this so-called art world of ours, to answer the question, I cringe, expecting any answer I give to be followed by Anthony Hopkins shouting, “No!  That is incidental!”

But nevertheless, the immediate answer, the “He kills women” answer that Lecter would have rejected as superficial, reveals part of the problem.   Mostly I paint, and draw, and I also teach, and write, and sometimes I curate, and perform, and basically do a whole bunch of different stuff.  All of this is part of what it means to be a member of the “Artist” subset of the art world.  There are also critics and curators and collectors and dealers, and while there is a lot of overlap, those who excel in one field tend to be specialists, if only in that the expenditure of time is a zero-sum game.

While each individual participant may bring something else to the equation, our individual efforts add up to a collaborative result, and that conglomerate of artwork and text and ephemera is the collective production of the art world.  And to what end?  I’d like to think, I think we’d all like to think, that our goal is to make the world a better place.  Like the fictional Weyland-Yutani Corporation from Aliens, perhaps our motto is, “Building Better Worlds.”  But isn’t that a bit vague?  After all, isn’t that how everybody, in any field, likes to see what they do?  Doctors save lives , lawyers fight for justice, invading armies are delivering freedom, and timber harvesting companies are creating jobs.  Any human activity can be rationalized in terms of making the world better in one way or another, and that includes a lot of things that are antithetical to the individual ethics to which many artists subscribe.  How can we be sure that we’re really making the world a better place, rather than merely producing luxury commodities ultimately no different from a BMW or a yacht?

One metric, and I’m not saying it’s a perfect one, might be that, rather than ends justifying the means we use to reach them, the means we use to reach our ends might give an indication of the worthiness of those ends.  In short:  If you have to do shitty things to reach your goal, maybe it’s a shitty goal.  Sometime around 1999 or 2000, Google informally adopted the corporate motto or slogan, “Don’t be evil,” and while opinions are varied on how well they are living up to this, the principle is a good enough starting point.  If it has a limitation it’s that “evil” as a word carries connotations of such unmistakable atrocity that it may be hard to see how it applies in morally ambiguous situations:  if we use the word “evil” to refer to something on the level of genocide, its hard to apply the same term to something like failing to credit the inspiration for an artwork.  In its place, we might simply say, “Don’t be a dick,” or in polite company, “Be cool.”

The question of the ethics and etiquette of the art world has been on my mind a lot lately, for a few reasons.  Last August I bought and reviewed “I like your work:  art and etiquette” by Paper Monument; actually my “review” consisted of answering the same questions that they asked of those they interviewed for the book.  More recently, though, I’ve been thinking about the idea of ethics and etiquette in the art world, and about art communities, and ultimately about what we’re all doing and why, because I’ve got some smart, awesome friends who are putting in serious work to make Chicago’s art scene a better place.  Claire Molek, formerly of This Is Not The Studio, is behind those ads you’ve seen on the Brown Line for the “Brave New Art World.”  The BNAW manifesto describes it as “an arts unification movement dedicated to the service of consciousness,” dedicated to the belief that “there is infinite, inherent value in the practice, product and distribution of art as a vehicle for consciousness.” What makes BNAW different is that, unlike a lot of the other (and also very worthwhile) alternative art organizations, it doesn’t seek to colonize an up-and-coming neighborhood with for-now cheap rent and no history of art exhibitions (or collectors).

The Brave New Art World kicked off this past Thursday in River North, a neighborhood with a long history of art exhibitions, high rents, and a reputation (deserved or not) for conservatism and an aging base of collectors and patrons.  It’s the neighborhood the cool kids love to hate, characterizing it as a bastion of old money and boring art.  By launching in this context, BNAW eschews the romantic appeal of the anti-establishment revolutionary ideology, and seeks instead to work within existing structures to renew and reform, rather than to destroy and replace.  It’s a smart move for everybody involved, if this mutualism proves sustainable, because it brings a new generation of innovative and experimental artists into contact with long-established galleries and collectors.  The galleries need new artists to remain relevant in an evolving art market, collectors (we’d hope) are eager to see things they haven’t seen before, and artists benefit by showing their work in established spaces where people actually buy art.  Some River North galleries have a strong history of showing emerging artists, and several have dedicated space or programming to this end:  David Weinberg has dedicated a portion of his space to The Coat Check, Catherine Edelman has a long history of supporting emerging photographers through The Chicago Project, and Jennifer Norback recently added The Project Room to her gallery.  The Brave New Art World has the potential to build upon and expand these programs and others like them, to breath new life into this long-established gallery district.

The launch of a new endeavor raises again the question of ethics and ideology, of what means shall be used to achieve these ends.  Another of my smart and awesome friends, Jake Myers, recently wrote a sort of opinion piece (published on the Brave New Art World site) on some of the dirty aspects of the art world, and opportunities to better, from an ethical perspective.  Some of what he wrote is prone to misinterpretation, and one passage in particular bears closer examination:

Instead of backstabbing, manipulating or using people for short-term gain, some people like to maintain healthy, friendly, long-term working relationships. Reward people who support you and bring other thoughtful, like-minded people into your cohesive crew. This is how communities and art movements begin.

Preceded by the heading “Friends who curate friends, “ and followed by a reference to a certain collaborative team, it would be easy to read this paragraph as a guilty plea to a charge of cliquish nepotism, but I read it differently.

We once bought a pair of feeder mice for our beloved ball python, Snake, but she was about to shed so she wouldn’t eat.  We kept the mice for a couple days in a small cage, fed them granola and made sure they had water, so they would be comfortable while they awaited their fate.  One morning I awoke to find that one of the mice had killed the other and eaten its face (here we are back to Hannibal Lecter again).  Apparently, I’ve since learned, mice kept in too close proximity will suffer stress, which can result in them killing each other and eating each other’s faces.  If you compare the number of graduates from art schools and MFA programs (to say nothing of the self-taught), and compare that to the number of available galleries, collectors, teaching positions, and other opportunities, we shouldn’t be so surprised to see an unfortunate number of young and not-so-young, struggling and not-so-struggling artists kill each other and eat one another’s faces, metaphorically speaking.

What I think Jake, and Claire, and a lot of other smart, awesome people, many of whom I am privileged to call friends, are saying right now, although maybe not in these terms, is that we need to stop being a bunch of mice, which are bitchy, murderous, face-eating piss and shit factories.  (I know, I know, they’re cute.  But they’re also really gross, and eat each other’s faces.)  Instead, we need to be more like vampire bats.  Now, if you’re familiar with Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, and with the discussion of biological altruism, you may have an idea of where I’m going with this, and may in fact already be mouthing the words to you rebuttal.  But bear with me.  Dawkins gave a good summary of the Vampire Bat model of Reciprocal Altruism on a radio interview with Tom Morton:

Well, vampire bats have a kind of blood donor scheme; vampire bats, as you know, eat blood, and it happens to be a case of reciprocal altruism that’s been well worked out. These bats roost by day and then at night they go out and look for an animal to suck blood from, and then they come back and roost for the next day. Well if a bat is lucky, and manages to find an animal to suck blood from, it usually engorges itself and becomes very, very full, has much more blood than it actually needs. But that is quite a lot of luck that goes into that, and there are other nights when a bat will come home hungry, having not found any blood. And that can be fatal. These little animals need constant topping up in order not to die. So the situation is tailor-made for reciprocal altruism. When these bats come back into their cave after their night’s work, so to speak, some of them will be almost overflowing with blood, and others will be near death from starvation, and so there’s a lot to be gained from the ones who’ve got a lot of blood giving some to the ones who haven’t got much, and they do it by regurgitating it, by sicking it up, and the others eat it. And they can expect to get paid back by those very same individuals on another night, when the luck has been reversed. And that actually happens, that’s been demonstrated and it’s a very good example of reciprocal altruism in nature.

The game theorists point out that because these bats know they’re going to see each other again, it’s not true altruism, but rather an investment in a community.  This may be an argument for the evolution of true altruism, but it’s an argument for, rather than against, its use as a model for behavior within a community.  Be cool to your friends, because they might be cool to you in the future.  Don’t try go game it, to only hook up your friends whom you expect to be able to do you a favor in the future.  Just do everything you can, to help anybody you can, because in the long term, it is in your self-interest to do so, as long as we’re all doing it.  So, let’s all help each other out, whenever and however we can, and everybody profits.

In other words, you barf blood into my mouth, and I’ll barf blood into yours.  That’s community.

Some applicants are accepted only into a single program, at which point the decision pretty much makes itself, especially if that program was one of the applicant’s top choices.  In other cases, if accepted by a “safety,” the choice is between accepting admission into a program that wasn’t one’s first, second, or even third choice, or licking one’s wounds, getting back to work, and applying again the next year, in hopes of getting into a more competitive program.

I actually found myself in this situation ten years ago, in 2003, just after graduating from my undergraduate program at Humboldt State University (my degree was conferred in December 2002).  I had applied, rather casually, to a few graduate schools, not really taking the process particularly seriously.  Mass Art, Pratt, RISD, and Tulane University all wisely concluded that I wasn’t quite ready, while SAIC informed me that yes, their application deadline was a firm one, and that I’d have to apply again next year.

After receiving all this bad news, I finally received an offer of admission from the University of New Orleans.  I had applied to UNO, along with Tulane, primarily out of an interest in its role in the Gothic subculture; even as late as 2003, I was thinking it’d be a good place to meet girls in black lipstick.  I had visited New Orleans on a road trip with a friend in summer 2001, and it seemed like an interesting place:  I found a porcelain doll’s arm and some fragments of what I’m pretty sure were human bone in the topsoil of a cemetery, and at the New Orleans Art Museum I saw Odd Nerdrum’s “Five Persons Around A Waterhole,” which let me tell you, when I was 21, seemed to me to be the paragon of contemporary art.  I know, I know.

So I had applied out of a sort of schoolboy’s crush on the city, and I’d been accepted.  By that time, though, the end of March, I’d had a sort of awakening, and had realized that despite having just received my degree, I still had a lot to learn about the actual techniques of painting.  My interest was in figurative representation, but I had been pushed away from it by my instructors and classmates, probably in large part because I wasn’t very good at it.  Instead, I had been making paintings that were a sort of workaround, essentially drawings on toned canvas, and these were pretty well received.  My classmates and faculty were supportive, I showed some in local coffee shops and restaurants, even sold a few (albeit at undergrad-in-a-small-town-coffee-shop prices).  But ultimately I knew the work was shit.  Or, at least, I thought I did; in hindsight, it might have actually been an interesting direction to go in, but it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing.  At any rate, by the time the schools I’d heard were good had all rejected me, and UNO had accepted me, I had decided that the work I’d applied with was terrible, and concluded that I “wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have someone like me as a member.”

The point of all this masturbatory, navel-gazing, canker sore-licking reminiscence is that whatever choice you make, you’ll have the rest of your life to second-guess it.  And, if you’re anything like me, you will.  If I’d accepted that offer of admission, I would have moved to New Orleans in summer of 2003, having just started a series of large self-portraits dressed up as other people (friends, famous artists, and artist stereotypes), which was kind of clever and funny in an undergrad sort of way.  A military saying is “No plan survives contact with the enemy,” and how this body of work would have gone over at UNO’s grad program will remain forever unknown.  Would I have been pushed in a more interesting direction with it?  Encouraged?  Sidetracked?  Challenged?  Coddled?  There’s no way to know, but thus relocated, my influences and peers all rearranged, it’s impossible to imagine that I would have gone on to make the same work as I ended up making after deciding to decline their offer and spend another year working on my portfolio to reapply.

As it turned out, I didn’t accept the offer, instead electing to spend another year working on what I thought of at the time as my first real body of work, that dozen or so self portraits.  I felt pretty good about them at the time, thought I had a decent shot at getting into a more competitive graduate program the following year.  I busted my ass, pulled some crazy all-nighters.  I was an animal.  I was a machine.  All summer, I worked.  Some friends and I, all in the same boat, spent Thanksgiving break in the painting studio; we knew how to shimmy across a roof and in through a window so we could paint even when campus was closed.  On Thanksgiving, three of us had a little potluck dinner, using the model stand as a table.  And then we got back to work.  I bought Rock Star (or was in Monster?) at Costco by the case.  December came, and with it, the deadlines.  I applied to nineteen schools.  I was rejected from every single one.

If I’d accepted that offer from UNO, I would have been finishing up my first year, instead of collecting a massive stack of rejection letters.  As it was, I started a new body of work, better than the last (I actually still like a few of those paintings), and tried again, and that third year was accepted into three of my top choices:  Mass Art, Cranbrook, and MICA.  They were all basically good programs, and I had to choose between them.  None had offered me a full fellowship, the proverbial “free ride” that MFA students sometimes get, which would have made the choice easier.  (Some programs are free for anyone who’s accepted, but none of these three were.)  I had a friend at Cranbrook, which was tempting, but ultimately I decided that the Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA was the best fit for me, due to its director Grace Hartigan’s emphasis on figurative representation.  I started at MICA in August of 2005.  A month later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, leaving me to wonder what would have happened to me if I’d gone to UNO.  Would I have found a teaching position in the area and been hit by the hurricane, or would I have found work elsewhere and dodged the bullet?  If I’d been affected, how? Would I have stubbornly refused to evacuate?  Might I even have been killed?  More likely, I would have survived, and it’s almost impossible to conceive that I wouldn’t have made work about it, but would it have been any good?

Like Maximus said in Gladiator:  “The choices we make in life echo in eternity.”  The problem is that we can’t always know how our choices will echo.  Whether or not the wingbeat of a butterfly can really effect weather systems a continent away, unexpected outcomes are certainly the rule rather than the exception.  So maybe, as you’re mulling over your options for MFA programs, you should picture Jeff Goldbloom playing with droplets of water on the back of your hand, explaining that there is no way you can know what consequences your choice will have.

I never could have known that Hurricane Katrina was headed for the city I would have moved to if I’d accepted UNO’s offer, nor could I have known that by staying in Humboldt for another two years, I would meet the woman who would become my wife.  There’s a certain hippie, New Age kind of mindset that may be more prevalent on the West Coast than in Chicago, that the universe has some sort of plan, that everything happens for a reason, and looking in hindsight at some of these consequences leads some to say, “Well, see?  There you go!  It all worked out.”  But of course, if it hadn’t , something else would have worked out.  If I’d never met my wife, I would probably have met somebody else.  (Tim Minchin’s got a great song about this.)  If I can draw any lesson from my experience, it’s that the most important outcomes of any decision tend to be the ones you can’t predict, and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it anyway.

In the interests of concluding with something a little more actionable, I’ll share two pieces of advice I received while looking at graduate programs.  The first was “Follow the money,” that is, go to the school that will result in the least student loan debt.  This is great if you are offered a full scholarship to your top choice, or even one of your top choices.  But it’s difficult if you’re facing the choice between taking on a major debt load to attend a program that really feels right for you, versus getting a free ride at a school that feels slightly less right to you.  Add to this the fact that some programs (Northwestern, for example, and also UIUC I believe) are free for anyone accepted, and at others you can teach in exchange for a tuition waver and sometimes a stipend to live on.  It’s a tough choice, not one I ever had to face, but one that some of my friends are facing right now.  One mitigating factor in favor of getting to the school that’s best for you, debt be damned, is the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.  This says that, in effect, if you work full time for a non-profit public service institution for ten years, while making your scheduled student loan payments on time, at the end of that period they’ll forgive the rest of your loan debt.  Considering that a.) a primary reason a lot of people pursue an MFA degree is in order to teach, and b.) that most colleges count, and that c.) you can make fairly low student loan payments on the income-based repayment plan, this means that you can go to the fancy MFA program, teach for ten years (if you can find the work, and that’s a big “if”), make modest loan payments of as little as eighty bucks a month, and then you’re free and clear.  This takes some of the hurt and fear out of going to a more costly school that might offer the kind of program you’re looking for.

The other piece of advice I got, though, was that the most important aspect of graduate program was the city you’d be living in while attending.  It makes some sense; certainly we see players in Chicago’s art scene who represent students and alumni from not just SAIC but also Columbia, UIUC, UIC, and more; attending graduate school in Chicago can be an entry point into Chicago’s art scene regardless of which school one attends.  On the other hand, Yale’s MFA program pretty obviously has influence outside New Haven, Connecticut.  Cranbrook is located in an almost monastic retreat in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, not particularly close to Detroit or anywhere else, and yet its graduates show up, doing well, all over.

I only ended up in Chicago out of sheer, dumb luck.  I stuck around Humboldt for another year because I wanted to go to a school that was ranked highly by U.S. News and World Report, and then another because none of them would have me.  On a whim, I went to crash Freshman Orientation to pick up on freshman girls and scam free pizza.  Three years later, I married one of those girls, Stephanie Burke.  She’s quick to point out that she was a transfer student, not a freshman, and also there for the free pizza.  After she spent a year with me in Baltimore while I finished up at MICA, she applied to her own round of MFA programs.  It was her first year applying, and she got into three excellent programs:  Virginia Commonwealth, MICA, and SAIC.  SAIC had been her top choice, and Baltimore hadn’t really set any hooks into either of us compelling us to say, so we pulled up our stakes and headed for Chicago.  Five and a half years later, we’re rocking and rolling in an incredibly vibrant art scene, and while it’s hard for me to imagine doing so well anywhere else, the road that led here is one I couldn’t see at all from where it started.

Fortunately for my Chicago-based readers, the College Art Association conference is coming to Chicago in February 2014.  It’s a lot easier when you don’t have to travel to get there, and a lot cheaper too.  In fact, if you can, you should probably see if any of your fellow alums or old friends from school are coming into town and want to sleep on your couch to save on the cost of a hotel.  This can be a great way to turn a competitive frenemy into a collaborator and confidant, as they seek to avoid cognitive dissonance, preserving their positive self-image by attempting to repay the favor by, for example, telling you about an opportunity.  (If you’re reading this, and we know each other, even rather distantly, like you saw me naked at a party one time, call or email or hit me up on Facebook, and you’re welcome to the couch or at least some floor space.  Even if I kind of hate you.)

There are some tricks to cut the cost and get smart about attending CAA, particularly if your primary motive for attending is as part of a job search.  Here’s the dirty little secret most people don’t know about the CAA conference before their first time attending:  You don’t need to register for the conference to attend the professional development stuff or go into the Interview Hall.  That just requires a current CAA membership, which you’ve probably already gotten, since the friend whose membership number you were using to look at the jobs on the website either got their job or gave up, and either way let their membership expire.

There are good reasons to register for the conference; the price of a badge is well worth it if you’re going to attend a bunch of the panel sessions.  These are a great way to keep current in your field, particularly if your field is something like “The Post-Gender Significance of Nipples on Ancient Sumerian Bronze Armor.”  It’s also probably a good idea to go if anyone you know is presenting.  Just try not to glare at them from the back row, resenting their success.  Plaster on a fake smile, fight your way to the front at the end of the presentation, and try to put a positive spin on whatever you’ve been up to for the last couple of years.  See if you can call your babysitting gig a performance piece.

I’m talking shit, but I actually really enjoy the panel sessions.  I’ve seen some great ones, on “The Opposite of Snake” (spoiler alert, it’s “bird”), and on Nazi curatorial practices at the Exhibition of Degenerate Art.  These sorts of art historical things are half professional research (I’m sure they’re good for my making, teaching, and writing, somehow, even if the connections are neither direct nor immediately clear) and half guilty pleasure.  For a contemporary artist, writer, or educator, a panel session on a given art historical topic may be neither more nor less relevant to their practice than watching a History Channel special on sea monsters.

The thing is, if you’re on the job hunt, there are far better uses of your time than showing up for the conference because a bunch of jobs you applied for said they’d be interviewing, then scowling your way through a bunch of panel sessions because nobody wanted to interview you.  You can prowl the Interview Hall; again, no conference registration required, you just need a current membership ID.  During the conference, there’s a career services subsection of the conference section of the website, where they tell you who’s interviewing (useless if you don’t have an interview lined up), but more importantly, who’s accepting drop-off packets.  In my experience, at a given conference, an average of 2-3 places have been hiring in my medium (studio art focusing on drawing, painting, or foundations), and accepting drop-off packets.

So rather than bringing 50 copies of your CV, bring 5 full packets, including a generic cover letter, CV, references, sample syllabi, a CD containing 20 images of your work and 20 images of student work (if need be, this can be student work from your graduate assistantship, if that’s all you’ve got), and image lists for those.  Copies of your transcripts (unofficial okay) and copies of your generic letters of recommendation aren’t usually necessary, but couldn’t hurt.  Obviously you’ll want to bring a USB drive with these documents on it, in both print-ready PDF format as well as editable docx and jpeg files.  That way if you discover a typo, you can rush to a computer to fix it (there are computers in the candidate center, or you can use your laptop).  You can also go see who’s accepting drop-off packets in your medium, then go bang out a custom cover letter real quick, print it off, sign it, and swap it out for the generic letter in your packet.

It’s also a good idea to bring your images in multiple formats:  at a mock interview I signed up for, the mock interviewer’s laptop was newly-issued to him, and he didn’t realize until our interview that it didn’t have a CD drive!  Fortunately, I had my images available on my website, as 8 ½” x 11” prints in an Itoya folder, and on my USB drive, so this wasn’t a major problem.  On a related note, one tip I received was that if you’re offered an interview, bring new copies of all the materials you submitted with you to the interview, because it’s entirely possible that the interviewers didn’t bring them, lost them, forgot them, or dropped them on the subway.  So bring new ones, just in case.  Some other helpful tips I received at the various professional development workshops I attended were:

1.  On your CV’s exhibition list, don’t separate solo shows from group shows until later in your career.  It’s confusing to the search committee to have to jump around.  Keep ‘em together, in reverse chronological order.

2.  Separate solo shows from group shows, to highlight them.  Your solo shows, particularly if they’re at a reputable gallery, are the heart of your exhibition record, so they should go at the top.

3.  Remove from your exhibition history any shows at coffee shops, bars, restaurants, banks, or other businesses.

4.  Omit nothing from your CV.  Include everything.  The definition of a CV is a complete record of ALL of your professional activity.

5.  Use printed CD labels.  Writing your information on the cd in marker looks unprofessional.

6.  Don’t use printed CD labels.  They can get stuck in the CD drive.  Write your information directly on the CD in marker.

Literally, I received all six of those tips at one time or another while at the conference this year.  Like Ned Flanders, I’ve tried to follow all of these commandments, “even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff.”  The annual CAA conference takes place in February, more the middle of the “search season” than the end, so even if, like me, you don’t score any interviews at CAA, it’s not too late to put these tips into practice.  Full time teaching positions for the Fall often have deadlines as late as the preceding March or April, so if you’re looking now, there are still a few postings open for Fall 2013 positions.  If none of them pan out, well, I’ll see you there, February 12–15, 2014, somewhere in Chicago (probably the Hyatt Regency on Wacker, where they held it in 2010).  May the odds be ever in your favor.

The issue of abstract painting surfaced for me recently at Co-Prosperity School, the artist-run discussion circle that I’ve been coordinating, along with Stephanie Burke, ever since the school’s founders, Aaron Delehanty and Ed Marszewski, each became busy with the joys of fatherhood. Each week, in addition to a visiting artist’s presentation, one of the participants presents his or her work for critique and discussion. A couple of weeks back, it was Chicago-based abstract painter Erin McGuire’s turn to present her work. Erin’s a vocal advocate of abstraint painting’s continued relevance today, and after her critique, I asked her to summarize her thoughts in a brief “manifesto.” Here’s what she sent me:

Why Abstract Art You Say!

1. Representational and abstract are both valid art subjects.

2. I like to draw, paint, combine forms, colors, and relationships without being constrained to one specific literal object.

3. Not being tied down to one specific object opens the piece up to everyone to understand, even if they haven’t learned art history.

4. You don’t have to “get” abstract to enjoy it.

5. It gives a lot of room for imagination.

6. Yes, there is shitty abstract art, just like there is shitty realistic art.

7. Silly, bizarre, casual, colorful, sexy, poetic abstract paintings exist that might make you cry, remind you of certain music, or a powerful little moment that no one else noticed.

8. Give abstract a chance; don’t be intimidated by its history.

9. Just (fucking) enjoy the painting, whether it’s abstract or realistic – there’s nothing wrong with just liking something without having to explain yourself.

10. There’s room in your mind for abstract if you allow it.

You can read more of Erin’s thoughts, and see some images of her work, here:  http://erinmcguirestudio.com/home.html

One of our fellow participants, Kelsey Greene, took the time to write a response to Erin’s presentation. In it she uses McGuire’s work as an entry point to begin discussing abstract painting more generally.

The next leap is abstraction. But how does a person tell a good abstract from a drunken scribble? It has to do with intent, and artistic intent is very difficult to parse out without education or training. Without knowledge of proportion, composition, color systems etc., all the deliberate choices of the artist appear random or accidental. Education is essential because people want to know that their opinion has a valid basis. They don’t want to be the person with the wool pulled over their eyes, imagining that a child’s drawing is the next great masterpiece. They want to know they are not being fooled into discussing something as higher than it is. The only way to give that assurance is to discuss process and technique (artist’s choices) with the viewer…

A painting is “finished” when there is nothing left to do. There should be nothing “wrong” (out of place, unbalanced) with the painting, but it should still be interesting enough to keep the viewer (in this case, the artist herself is the viewer) visually engaged. This is perhaps one of the most important distinctions between [representational] painting and abstract paintings. A [representational] painting is done when it looks like what it is, and in sufficient detail. An abstract painting is done when the artist decides that it looks like itself. A representational painting is done when it can’t look any more like the thing, or when changes start to lessen the likeness of the painting to its subject, or when additional work doesn’t seem to be adding anything to the perception of the subject, but an abstract work doesn’t have an objective guide. The point of completion is entirely the artist’s prerogative, and is a very deliberate choice, perhaps more so than in a process when the work is being compared to an outside standard.

The full entry is available on Kelsey’s art blog: http://ixonia.livejournal.com/2131.html

All of this manifesto-grade discussion may feel as dated as abstract painting itself, but as with Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, painting, and specifically abstract painting, may be rendered a littler clearer with some choice words, particularly if it is going to continue to endure alongside performance, digital art, and all the newfangled whatzits that have become part of the contemporary definition of art.

The best theory or manifesto of painting I’ve read, seen, or heard in a while has been painter Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s 95 Theses on Painting, shown as part of her exhibition at the MCA Chicago and now available online: http://fromawhispertoascream.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-95-theses-on-paining.html The whole list is well worth reading, several times over, but this morning, grey and snowy outside, and stuffy and congested inside, this one feels just right:

73. The dream of abstract painting in the 20th century was a dream of whole people, whose senses weren’t fragmented, whose vision was complete, who made paintings with their hearts and minds and bodies in harmony.

Postscript: It was my great pleasure to perform my graduate work under the guidance of painter Grace Hartigan, who first became well known as a second generation abstract painter in New York, before returning to figurative painting later in life. It was through conversations with her that I learned to appreciate abstract painting, particularly the work of Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Krasner, as well as Grace herself. Although my own work is figurative, representational, and realist in a very traditional sense, I nevertheless drew much inspiration from these abstract painters, who incidentally happen to be women. So Georg Baselitz can suck it.

I don’t know what the straw was that broke Hickey’s back, but when it happened, I imagine it went exactly like this.

Hickey’s complaints, first reported in The Guardian and immediately quoted basically everywhere, carry an echo of a quotation (often misquoted) from Hunter S. Thompson’s Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ‘80s: “The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason…Which is more or less true. For the most part, they are dirty little animals with huge brains and no pulse.”

Last night over after-dinner drinks, a friend told me about Damien Hirst’s collaboration with the Olsen twins: the twins’ signature black patent leather Nile crocodile backpack (which, apparently, is a thing), released as 12 limited-edition designs embellished by Hirst. The Nile originally sold for $35,000; the Hirst edition goes for $55,000, with the proceeds going to Unicef. Nobody’s going to hate on Unicef, but Hirst’s spot paintings already had an air of an artist who’d become too big to fail just phoning it in to make a buck. Repeating the spot imagery on a luxury backpack starts to feel like the art world’s version of the Portlandia “Put A Bird On It” sketch.

The $55,000 Hirst/Olsen collaboration.

Big shots make big targets, and any museum-vetted multimillionaire artist is going to draw some flak. Jeff Koons has attracted criticism ever since his public relationship-as-performance with an Italian porn star-politician (a pretty special combination in itself) was widely written off as an obvious publicity stunt. Hirst has always attracted skepticism, mostly of the “but is it art?” variety, for his dead-thing-in-a-vitrine work, but they were at least monumental. His spot paintings look lazy by comparison, and stamping them on a bag reinforces the idea that he’s become not just a brand, but nothing but a brand. Warhol would approve, maybe, but a lot of us, I think, are tired of it.

What makes us uncomfortable, I think, is the implication that this collaboration may actually be between equals. We dread that there may be some hypocrisy in our criticism of the balls-out consumerism that allows a pair of twins who got famous getting their diapers changed on television to sell handbags for five figures. Are art world celebrities so different from the garden variety? More to the point, are art world celebrities any different from ourselves, and our friends, if we got the success we pretend to disdain but secretly covet? We want to see ourselves as the kid who points out that the emperor’s new clothes are nothing at all, and when one of our darlings pairs with one of theirs, we start to feel the tickle of the breeze on our own naked back.

Eat a mile of Nile backpacks, and you’ll find out, this is where they come from. From: http://www.fullhousereviewed.com/2010/03/13/season-1-episode-1-our-very-first-show/

The truth, I think, is that there is no difference. These art world titans fill our need to have something to worship, and to hate. Like soccer moms flipping through tabloids in the checkout line of the grocery store, we need these gods and demons, to love and to fear, to envy and mock. In the end, the fact that they happen to be artists is entirely incidental. Like everybody else, we’re drawn to epic personalities, and like everybody else, we’ve been eating a mile of their shit just to see where it comes from. That we happen to prefer the flavor of artist shit over actor shit, or musician shit, or athlete shit, is an incidental consequence of subculture, class, and education, and has no bearing whatsoever on the essential nature of cults of personality.

This at least would seem to explain Hickey’s “fuck this shit” decision to opt out of the whole thing. And Hickey is one for whom the system worked: I’m sure the man’s received his share of rejection letters, but I’m also pretty sure that it’s been a while. His criticism can hardly be called a case of sour grapes, but it must resonate with anyone who’s doing good work, not getting the recognition it deserves, and seeing what look like heaps of laurels being stacked on the heads of lazy hacks. The temptation to sweep the chessboard onto the floor and walk away is certainly understandable.

Here’s the thing: gods you don’t believe in can’t touch you. It doesn’t matter what million-dollar deals are being done between people you’ll never meet. It may be interesting, and sure, we may wish for a slice of that action, but it can only suffocate you if you bury your face in it. Art is like Calvinball: if you don’t like the rules, you can change ‘em. I’m not going to second-guess how Hickey wants to live his life; it sounds like he’s got some book projects he’s into, which look interesting, and while they’re not directly about art, I was never entirely sure that Air Guitar was, either. But opting out isn’t the only option on the table for anyone else who feels that way.  Nothing the big shots are doing, however frustrating, however misguided, need stop you from making that work, writing that blog post, or running that apartment gallery.

Bumper stickers make for lousy arguments, but there’s one out there that slings a butchered quote spuriously attributed to Mahamta Ghandi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” The actual quotation isn’t quite as pat, but it’s a decent thought for anyone who’s frustrated with the way things are, whether in the art world or anywhere else:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”

P.S.  Fuck you, Olsen Twins:  This is how to use a crocodilian as a fashion accessory: The author’s wife Stephanie Burke with one of Jim Nesci’s reptiles, at Big Run Wolf Ranch.

There are those of us, though, who notice things in that scene, that most viewers miss:  For example, the completely anachronistic juxtaposition, on the armors flanking the door, of close helms and breastplates from the sixteenth century, with eleventh century kite shields decorated with swirling-armed crosses.  Five hundred years of history separate the former from the latter, no less than separates the latter from the present day.  A close helm would have been as out of place at the battle of Hastings as an Abrams tank at the court of Henry VIII.

Most people watching Batman, even artists and art viewers, wouldn’t know the difference, and couldn’t care less, and in fact would probably imagine the previous paragraph being read aloud in the voice of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons.  The appreciation of arms and armor is easily treated as an oddball, nerdy fringe of art history, and tainted by association with violence:  undergraduate art history survey courses rarely cover the difference between a bascinet and a burgonet.  Contrast this with the expectation that anyone with a degree in art, in any medium, should easily recognize the painting The Joker later defaces as Rembrandt’s late self-portrait, and the one he spares as one of Bacon’s popes.

Arms and armor may not be appreciated by as wide of an audience as is painting, but they have their fans, and I’m one of them.  As a kid, I remember going to visit my family in Philadelphia, and we must have gone to the art museum; I remember a seeing, just in passing, some maces in a display case and becoming totally enamored.  My dad bought me a book on arms and armor on that same trip, and I’ve still got it, much abused and well loved.  In my teens my mom bought me a book on the arms and armor of the medieval knight, and I’ve still got that one too.  The summer before I went away to college, I went to Europe with my girlfriend at the time, and each time we visited a new city I sought out its arms and armor museum:  Vienna and Dresden were both quite memorable, though that latter city sadly lost much of its collection in the firebombing it experienced in World War II.

In August of 2007, I was attending a residency at the Vermont Studio Center, before moving to Chicago to join my wife Stephanie Burke, who had just started school at SAIC.  She called me to tell me about the wonderful collection of arms and armor she’d seen at the Art Institute.  I arrived a month later, headed down to the Art Institute, and found the long, dimly-lit hall…completely empty, save for a single display case with a few swords lingering.

The hall was the Art Institute’s Gunsaulus Hall, which housed the Art Institute’s fantastic collection of arms and armor until late 2007.  Three years later, a small selection of the collection was put on display in the Art Institute’s Galleries 235 and 236, where it remains on view today.  The exhibition space is small and so the percentage of the collection that can be shown is necessarily quite limited (although its ceilings are high enough to display an armor for man and horse with the rider mounted, something never before possible at the Art Institute).  In that display, a sign indicates that this small display is temporary, pending the completion of a new, much larger exhibition space for the collection, at an undetermined future date.

The Art Institute’s collection of arms and armor comes from the estate of George F. Harding, Jr. (1868-1939), a Chicago businessman and politician who amassed an incredible collection of arms and armor as well as other art and artifacts from around the world.  In 1927, Harding expanded his Hyde Park home, adding upper stories emulating a castle.  He used this “castle” as a museum to display his collection of arms and armor.

The castle was torn down in 1964 as part of an urban renewal project, and the collection was moved to a building, closed to the public, at Randolph and Michigan.  The museum’s chairman, Herman Silverstein, along with his wife Bea, was the subject of a lawsuit by the Illinois attorney general’s office in 1976, accusing the Silversteins of “violating IRS regulations concerning charitable trust laws by mismanaging the museum assets and failing to allow public viewing of the relics.”  The Silversteins agreed in count in 1989 to resign, and to turn over to the Art Institute the last $4.1 million of the Harding Museum’s cash assets, to be used to conserve and display the collection.  The Harding collection itself had been turned over to the Art Institute in 1982, under pressure from the State.

The bulk of the Art Institute’s collection remains in storage, out of view, but even the small selection on display is well worth seeing.  There’s also a book, Arms and Armor at The Art Institute of Chicago, by Walter J. Karcheski Jr., out of print but available online very inexpensively.  For my dear fellow viewers who appreciate this odd branch of our culture’s visual history, we will have to content ourselves with these, until the Art Institute makes room for a larger exhibition space for this world-class collection.

Sales were “cautiously positive, if not glowing,” according to Julia Halperin’s article on Art Info (which includes some specific works sold, and prices, including at least three in the million-dollar range).   Susan Snodgrass, writing for Art in America, quoted most gallerists as generally describing sales at the fair as “slow,” while describing others’ attitudes as “wait-and-see.”  That’s the tone I felt at the fair as well:  not ecstatic, but not the depressed gloom that had settled over Art Chicago by its final year, either.  I asked a pair of friends who worked the fair as section coordinators if people were selling much at Expo.  As soon as one had said, “In my section they weren’t,” the other exclaimed “In mine they were!”  So it seems to have been something of a mixed bag.

Descriptions of Karman’s strategy make heavy use of the phrase “quality over quantity,” and Snodgrass agrees with the assessment, saying, “Overall quality was high.”  Certainly there were plenty of well-known names on the walls of the bigger, blue-chip galleries, and gathered together the best (or at least the best-known) could have made for a respectable, if modest, exhibition at a small contemporary art museum.

This, though, is a narrow and safe definition of quality, and while it may sustain the sales necessary to carry Expo into another year, it runs the risk of trading artistic liberty to purchase a little financial safety.  There was relatively little unexpected at Expo; that which was surprising was mostly in the seventeen or so spaces in the Exposure project, dedicated to newer galleries such as Chicago’s Andrew Rafacz Gallery and The Mission Projects.  When these galleries sell work at a lower price point (compared to the sometimes seven figures the blue chip galleries list), and show artists with a less established sales record, it can be difficult to cover the costs of a regular art fair booth, and projects like Exposure may, if priced and juried right, attract an exciting energy to what could otherwise become an overly stodgy event.

It may be that calls for more experimental, risk-taking, emerging art are naïve, romantic notions rendered untenable by a harsh economic climate.  It may be that in addition to the smaller scale, and undeniably more attractive venue, of Expo in comparison to Art Chicago’s final days (the ceilings really are higher; the place looks like a Zeppelin hanger, which is awesome), some of the more experimental, challenging projects, and more exciting (though less established) galleries, will find themselves cut from the equation by the cold, hard logic of economics.

The argument could be made that this is the reality of holding an art fair in Chicago.  However, a counter-argument is being made in the form of the MDW (“Midway”) fair, which describes itself as “a showcase for independent art initiatives, spaces, galleries and artist groups, highlighting artist-run activities and experimental culture locally, nationally and internationally.” In many ways, it is everything that Expo isn’t (and Art Chicago wasn’t).  There won’t be any metallic silver spaceships (Weather balloons?  Inverted orange juicers?) hanging from colossal ceilings in a cyclopean amphitheatre, and glasses of wine aren’t likely to be delivered on sliver trays even at the Vernissage opening night event.  Booth prices are lower, sales tighter, and the whole economics of the thing scaled down.  There will be relatively few big-time European collectors, and no seven-figure sales, but instead there will be experimentation, unconventional spaces, and unexpected and surprising work.

MDW isn’t likely to rival Art Basel or Frieze in terms of dollar values moved, or the international reputation of the work seen.  (Note that I said nothing here about quality; there has been some exceptional work at both of the previous MDW fairs.)  MDW’s significant contribution to Chicago’s art scene is likely to remain “other than economic.”  Rather, it can provide a counterpoint to the commercial fairs, showing what can be done even in tough economic times.  It might even hope to lead the big boys by example, encouraging a more experimental and risk-taking attitude on the part of the big fair organizers, galleries, and collectors, to show and support the work of artists who are already performing the experiments and taking the risks.

The attitude, even among MDW’s organizers themselves, is that Chicago still needs a large, commercial art fair:  Ed Marszewski, one of MDW’s organizers, posted on Facebook, “Well, you know it.  Expo looks kind of fantastic.  We’ve got something to be proud of.”  Judging not only by the Facebook “likes” and comments, but also by the chatter in meatspace, the sentiment seemed to be shared pretty widely across a broad spectrum of Chicago’s art community, which had collectively exuded an aura of embarrassment over Art Chicago’s last few years.

Expo is almost certain to happen again next year, with some galleries already making plans to be there. (NewCity’s Robin Dluzen quotes Karman as saying, “There had better be a fair next year, or I don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life.”)  Beyond that is anyone’s guess, and will depend in large part on next year’s sales.  Ultimately, though, for an art fair to truly succeed, and avoid Art Chicago’s final demise, it must remain interesting, compelling, and relevant.  This means new work by living artists, both established and emerging.  When a fair plays it too safe, it courts disaster.  Expo’s dealers may already have learned this lesson; Dluzen observes that “it was the contemporary, primary market art, not the Modern, secondary market art, that was being moved.”  Hopefully, Karman will pay close heed to this lesson, and perhaps even follow, in part, the example being set by MDW.  If Expo is to be Chicago’s chance at a lasting, world-class art fair, it’s going to have to be both profitable and exciting.  That’s a delicate balance, and next year is going to be a demanding test of how well Expo strikes it.

Expo Chicago is scheduled for September 18-22, 2013, at Navy Pier.  MDW takes place this November 9^th to 11^th, 2012, at Mana Contemporary Art Center, just off Cermak Road in Pilsen.

Top Feature Image:  Scan of rapid prototype of my head, made by Tom Burtonwood while we were working together at the Bad at Sports booth at Expo Chicago.

Only time will tell, but in the mean time, it remains undeniable that firearms have a significant, and contentious, role in American society.  (Their role internationally varies nation-by-nation.)  Anything this charged is fertile ground for artists seeking high-tension subject matter, and indeed artists have worked with firearms and firearm imagery in a variety of ways.

For the now-famous performance Shoot, at F Space in Santa Ana, California, performance artist Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle.  Sculptor Tom LaDuke made a sort of homage in his “A Self-Inflicted Burden,” a self-portrait in which he holds a pistol in one hand and examines a gunshot wound on his other arm.  Reviewed in Artweek, Art In America, and The Los Angeles Times, LaDuke’s sculpture plays with Burden through its small scale, the self-inflicted nature of the wound (Burden’s wasn’t, at least not directly), and through the title’s pun.

New York-based, Louisiana-born artist Margaret Evangeline uses firearms as an art-making tool, shooting holes in sheets of mirror-polished stainless steel, powder-coated steel, and aluminum.  (She also works in painting, installation, and video.)

Tom Sachs worked with guns in a couple of ways.  His 1995 sculpture Tiffany Glock (Model 19), made of cardboard, hot glue, and ink, and his Hermes Hand Grenade are both non-functional, but Sachs and his assistants also made hand-made, fully-functional firearms.  Some of these are listed on his website as art objects, but others were part of a clever scheme (some might argue performance) in which he and his assistants easily made improvised “zip guns” out of common, hardware-store materials, and sold them to NYPD’s gun buyback program at up to $300 apiece.

Alfredo Martinez is another artist who worked with firearms, and also came up with a novel money-making scheme.  Martinez’ scheme didn’t have anything to do with making guns; he was making fake Basquiat paintings, for which he was arrested by the FBI.  But in his more honest career as a painter, his own work consisted of large-scale paintings of cross-section schematics of firearms.  This actually got him into trouble more recently, when he was traveling and working in China; a hotel maid found some of his drawings, which looked like blueprints, so she reported him to the police as a terrorist.

Other artists have of course worked with firearm imagery from time to time.  Andy Warhol’s screenprint “Gun” treats its subject with the same cool remove with which he treated all of his popular culture sources.  The Gao Brothers’ 2009 sculpture “The Execution of Christ” features a ring of Mao clones armed with SKS rifles executing Jesus.  The examples are almost countless.

A longstanding sophism holds that a work of art isn’t finished until the viewer completes it by looking at it.  This is more like a Zen koan than a debatable point, along the lines of “If a tree falls in the forest…” This notwithstanding, art’s relationship with its viewer plays a particularly interesting role when the art in question involves firearms, when art viewers are typically stereotyped as liberal and therefore (the stereotype holds) anti-gun.

A recent review on NPR of the film Expendables 2 pointed out this same kind of interaction between a gun-happy action movie and its hoplophobic Hollywood audience:

            The message, if the film has one at all – more guns, more fun. And in a throwback, old school kind of way, yeah. But in the heart of the carnage, it’s nearly impossible not to think of when big guns and cinema violence last met in the real world of Aurora, Colorado. Forget all the post-tragedy finger pointing between the gun lobby and the media coddlers, in “The Expendables 2″ both sides of the divide set aside their differences long enough to join forces and make a tag team grab at the box office.

            This odd and oddly at ease symbiosis was plainly evident at the film’s Hollywood premiere when Chuck Norris made his onscreen cameo, a real life, unabashed, gun-toting conservative, entering frame at a stroll, wading through all the dead baddies he’s just laid out to the hoots and hollers and enthusiastic applause of a theater filled with Hollywood’s so-called liberal elites.

It is this same sort of interaction between audience and subject that creates the essential tension in artworks with firearms as their subject.  Some people, upon seeing an image of a firearm, feel a frightened revulsion, others feel a giddy fascination, and of course there is a spectrum in between.  Regardless of its orientation, this response, whether positive, negative, or ambivalent, is what makes firearms such an enduring subject (and sometimes medium) in works of art.

[Post-script:  As part of our practice, Stephanie Burke and I take artists and other art-world participants to a shooting range and teach them to shoot firearms.  We call this project Shooting With Artists.  If you are a Chicago-area artist or other art professional, and would like to join us on a future shooting trip, shoot us an email at either my website, or Stephanie’s.]

Our campsite in Yosemite Valley, with Stephanie Burke.

Some challenge the openness of this definition, or rather this refusal to define, as too easy.  Objections to it from our students, families, and friends outside the art world are either dismissed as naïve, or lead a conversation down the same rabbit hole of irresolvable issues as Thanksgiving dinner politics or dorm-room theology.  It’s easy to forget that the question of what is, and what is not, art, is merely a matter of how we define a word.  (Birds didn’t wake up feeling different, the day we decided to call them dinosaurs.)  There is a sphere of human activity, encompassing everything from impractical object-making to practical experiments in philosophy, and since the activities in this sphere seem to share some traits, we’ve got to call it something, so we might as well call it art.

Stephanie, myself, a friend, and my sister, setting out on our overnight backpacking trip from Glacier Point, to Little Yosemite Valley, and down into Yosemite Valley.

The cause and consequence of this open-ended definition of art has been a dizzying range of activities falling within its scope.  Rirkrit Tiravanija prepares and serves Thai food.  Marina Abramović played the knife game thirteen years before the android Bishop made it famous in the movie Aliens.  Bas Jan Ader fell off of things, rode his bike into a canal, and ultimately tried to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat, after which he was never seen again.  Here in Chicago, Stan Shellabarger goes on 12-hour walks celebrating equinoxes and solstices, and Chicago-based artist Meg Onli walked the length of the underground railroad.

Canoeing in Missouri.

In the name of art, I’ve participated in a Japanese-style game show, played basketball and volleyball, and received a small black tattoo of a dot.  In each of these cases, I was a participant in a project created by someone else, but I’ve also done some weird stuff myself and called it art.  Stephanie Burke and I had coffee sitting in the chairs people left to reserve themselves a parking spot in the winter, and we’ve taken artists to Indiana and taught them to shoot guns.  These projects have been a lot of fun, and have given us the chance to explore avenues of expression other than my usual practice as a painter, and hers as a photographer.

Sitting by the Merced River in Yosemite, with my friends and family.

There is a risk, however, inherent to this open, anything-is-art kind of world, and that is that if anything can be art, it is tempting to turn everything into art.  If we accept ol’ Douchie’s claim that anything is art if an artist says it is, then an artist can, with a word, turn everything he or she makes or does into art.  This power is irresistable.  Like Ice-nine, it spreads throughout an artist’s life, turning everything it touches into art.  Or at least, it can, if we let it.  And it’s hard not to, especially for those of us who are constantly surrounded by and immersed in the art world.  If we earn our livings by teaching or working at a gallery, odds are that we have precious few contacts or activities that are entirely separate from our lives as artists.

At a self-defense workshop at Zombie Con. My partner is practicing the “brachial stun” on me.

I would suggest here that it is essential to maintain exactly this kind of separation in some aspect of our lives.  Picasso said, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”  It’s a lovely sentiment, and as good a justification as any for why we do what we do, as artists.  But when one’s workweek consists of making art, teaching art, and writing about out, and then the weekend rolls around and it’s a couple of nights of gallery openings, and maybe a barbecue or party with some art-world friends, art becomes the dust of everyday life.  Not art itself, of course, but the infrastructure surrounding it, the networking, the applications, the paperwork…all of the stuff that comes along with the special thing that happens in the studio.  And sometimes we need to get away from it all.

On top of Hughes Mountain, a remarkable and possibly unique structure composed of polygonally-jointed rhyolite.

One of the advantages of teaching is the relatively open summer schedule it affords one, and both Stephanie and I take advantage of this freedom as much as we’re able.  While we do some teaching at community art centers over the summer, we’re still able to get away quite a bit.  This past May, we flew out to California and did some camping and backpacking in Yosemite National Park.  Then we drove up to Humboldt, crashed an old friend’s party, and then drove across Oregon to Crater Lake, stopping on the way to play with some baby animals at a wild animal park.  We explored some caves in Lava Beds National Monument, and then spent a week in Stephanie’s home town of Grass Valley.  We wrapped up our trip in San Francisco, where we saw the metal band Rhapsody perform, and then got up the next morning to hike around Muir Woods.

Shooting my AR-15 at Little Indian Creek, a public shooting range in Missouri.

We returned to Chicago for a week, then headed down to Missouri for a few days of camping, canoeing, shooting guns, and watching shitty zombie movies on a jagged rock in the middle of nowhere.  We faced sunburn, ticks, and an adorable little scorpion, and ate a strange kind of pizza that is apparently a St. Louis specialty.  We came back sore, filthy, and exhausted, but also washed free of the shimmering but sometimes stifling layer of pixie dust that builds up on the soul of we who live this particularly extraordinary life, as artists.