1. Titles are important.

Well, they are to me. This one is an optimistic title, because it assumes I’ve learned something—anything at all—and at art school of all places, where I am quite sure I went to learn nothing—and got close—when I think back to art school and what it means the videotape starts to scrunch in the machine and I open the player and have to carefully unravel the Mylar – that’s the name of the plastic that videotapes are composed of. Then I’m back in the edit suite, late at night, accompanied only by the hiss and swirl of warm coke and I’m sure of only one thing.

2. You can put the end at the beginning, the beginning in the middle and the middle at the end.

That’s an actual piece of bonafide art criticism dispensed—sincerely—I might add—by my tutor, Julie, a time based artist, in the Intermedia Department at Elam School of Fine Arts circa 1995.

I have stumbled right at the beginning because I don’t know what to put next. Other than a non sequitur. 

My tutor was talking about video art and film, mediums that utilise duration, but you can withhold a beginning, skip to next chapter and refuse to deliver on the end.

On that note, I walked to the door of the edit suite and peered out the glass window. The science department corridor funneled into darkness.

I took a deep breath, opened the door. The linoleum amplified my lone footsteps. Step. Step. Step. I walked past a row of closed wooden doors, towards the drone of the lit machine. The hairs on my neck weren’t standing up but they weren’t horizontal either. An exit sign glowed spookily above the door to the outside world that I would have to run through screaming if…

Splunk. I fed a coin into the snack machine. That hollow sound as it fell to the bottom, a can pushed forward and dropped. I opened the black flap, extracted the coke then sprinted back to the edit suite, shut the door and locked it. My breath fogged the glass window.

Outside stood the twins from The Shining in their matching blue pinafores.

“Come and play with us forever and ever and ever,” one said.

The other said, “Can I have some of your coke.”

I yanked the ring pull and the can hissed. It was the beginning of the end.

3. Every sentence I write is earning interest…

On my student loan. I started university in 1992, the same year that the student loan scheme was introduced. I was seventeen. My student loan and I have grown up together. We’re both a lot more interesting than we used to be. If I could rewind I would dial the interest back to zero and start again. Uninteresting but happy and free.

I my first year I studied Philosophy, Anthropology and Religious Studies. In my second year I switched to English Literature and Art History. In my third year I got into art school. I hit the jackpot. Those first mistakes earn 4.0% per annum.

I took out a student loan to cover my fees and my living expenses. It was the start of a bad habit: the accrual of early cynicism. I was not eligible for the full student allowance because I was means tested on my parents combined incomes even though 1. They split up when I was three. 2.  Neither of them paid money to me, nor could they afford it. 3. I worked part-time throughout university and everything I did earned interest. Yes, it’s been hard to be so fucking interesting, especially from such a young age.

The student loan system has changed over time and so have I. We’re both more self-aware and I like to think we both understand our limitations better too. It’s a shame I couldn’t bring that awareness to the start of our relationship, it’s a shame I can’t put beginning at the end. It’s a shame that exemption from interest while studying wasn’t introduced by the student loan scheme until 2001. It’s a shame I left New Zealand in 2001 and went overseas for ten years with nothing but a degree from art school to protect me from neo-liberal capitalism. It’s an even bigger shame that I was still overseas in 2006 when interest right-offs were introduced for student loan borrowers living in New Zealand. What I wouldn’t do for some interest-free right offs!

Hindsight is such a bitch: interesting though at 4% per annum.

What’s this got to do with art school? The student loan scheme is available to students across every discipline of tertiary study. But my argument is that art doesn’t need to accrue any additional interest. Art is interesting enough as it is. The truest sentence I ever heard in the nineties came from a curator who said, “I wouldn’t loan $50,000 to a video artist.” Then he laughed.

Snap… if you play a tape too fast it gets tangled and munched in the machine.

4. Don’t say it’s about your boyfriend.

Easy. My art wasn’t about my boyfriend because I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t have a portfolio to get into art school either. So I took a weekend workshop run by a female painter. I produced a large graphic painting of an elongated office chair, the kind I’d never sit on. The chair became my muse. In the barren concrete studio I produced multiple paintings of the chair, working quickly, inspired, my fists full of oil sticks. The chair took on a new lease of life. The female tutor approved, but she gave me some cautionary advice for my upcoming art school interview, “Don’t say it’s about your boyfriend.” That painting of a chair earned me a place at art school where I learned that it was not a good idea to make work about your boyfriend.

Yet the one thing I longed for at art school?

A chair? Don’t be silly.

A boyfriend is much more interesting to sit on than a chair.

But art school was not about ‘feelings’ ergo boyfriends. What was art school about? Criticality. Take a seat.

5. In the nineties the idea loomed large and theory chased after it, like a bright red balloon.

When I arrived at art school it was the era of the Young British Artists like Damien Hirst and his stuffed shark titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living. See what I mean about titles? Without that title one would be inclined to look upon the dead tiger shark in formaldehyde as a specimen destined for a natural science museum. Instead the title plunged Damien’s shark into the deep end. Hirst was an uber project manager reeling in marketing hooks. The work was its specifications: tiger shark, glass, steel, 5% formaldehyde solution, 213 × 518 × 213 cm.

In 1998 Tracey Emin exhibited her bed, titled My Bed. It was a great title because it was true. Its genius was its simplicity. The bed was unmade too. Good on her. In fact it looked suspiciously like it might be in some way a work about feelings and even boyfriends. Multiple condoms came with the bed proving that Tracey’s career was more advanced than mine, even though her mind as she slept in the bed was in an alleged state of dissarray following two abortions. My big takeaway: women can make work about their boyfriends but only if they are having an emotional meltdown. Sex always leads the female artist to the brink of psychological disintegration.

The American artist Jeff Koons constructed a giant topiary Puppy out of flowers and alleged that it was about happiness. Koons’ career was inescapable; no student I knew in the 90s respected him but noone could deny his magnitude either. Koons was like the BFG of contemporary art stalking around inside the American dream creating fanciful sculptures like Balloon Dog. He was also big for Ushering in Banality, a sculpture that replicated a twee ornament of some cherubs pushing a pig. Koons claimed he wasn’t cynical and I believe him. What’s gross can still be instructive. I never expected to be an artist in the manner of Jeff Koons, I understood full well my status as a DIY Alice holding a papier mache pig, but Koons nett worth still makes some compelling price points: you need a big budget, a team of assistants and a good idea or a bad idea or an idea that’s so bad its good because its of its time, or so bad its just bad like that porcelain and gold sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, first made in 1988. Who’s bad?

N.B. I have only seen these works in reproduction.

6. Things I learned in no particular order:

Your gaze hits the side of my face is a work by Barbara Kruger

The male gaze is bad (as above)

There will be an assignment based on Plato’s Cave (featuring much rumination about the shadows on the wall)

Semiotics 101 e.g. a signifier is the form a sign takes; the signified is the concept it represents

The revolution will be televised e.g. at some point you will watch William Burroughs The Naked Lunch

The Death of the Author is a book by Roland Barthes. I’ve still never read it, but I think I’ve got the gist

Post-modernism

Post-Post-modernism

People’s annoyance with the word Post parked in front of Modernism as though the present wasn’t as important as the past and at art school it wasn’t

Post-modernism is wrong and you’re it

Something about Walter Benjamin, something something about Susan Sontag, like the Jackie O of the intellect, she’s a book cover you just can’t push past. “I’m not Susan Sontag for fucks sake” becomes your catchphrase

 “Go and look it up in the Elam library. Now,” said the male tutor in a hurry, except today you can’t look it up in the Library because it is closed.

Deconstruction

 7. Things I didn’t learn in no particular order:

Construction. e.g. How to turn a chair into a man. 

Technique: how to usher it in.

In fact if you wanted to know how to make anything at art school you had to ask one of the technicians. In this way we learnt that the brain was separate from the body especially when chasing a balloon dog. 

8. Beauty has a first name

 And it is David. Michelangelo cracked on to that first when he carved David from a block of marble. Think male beauty and at some point you’ll think David. For me I think it right away, but my David isn’t made of marble.

He could be. David had envisaged himself as a work of art. I saw him before I met him, walking along Ponsonby Road, that gentrified straight street once known as cappuccino mile back when the word cappuccino wasn’t completely naff.

David had a walk to remember, back straight, elegant, be brought poise to that long gaited walk – he was in no hurry either. David wasn’t impatient and it showed in the way he walked along Ponsonby Road, his neck long, not like a swan’s but still…you get where I’m going with this. He’d been given more grace that most men or women will ever muster. He was also barefoot. His toes, long and grubby, I didn’t see them from the other side of Ponsonby Road, I know his toes from later when we became best friends.

A pair of old men’s trousers once ever so chic, rippled around the bottom of David’s feet, and over those trousers he wore a tulle prom dress, that resembled a tutu –, David took ballet classes from early childhood up until he turned sixteen, he was told he was good enough to try out for the Royal New Zealand Ballet but decided not to because his teacher annoyed him.

His head was shaven, eyebrows shaven and then drawn back in. Two sharp arches. From a distance his skull seemed to glisten with pearls. The pearls were attached to a gauzy little hairnet he’d picked up in an op shop. He also wore a cockroach that he’d found on KRd as a brooch.

I looked at the spectacle of David and he was a spectacle and distinctly remember what I thought next: people at art school often look more interesting than they really are.

I took his fashion combo for attention seeking (it was) but I failed to give him credit for lampooning the stereotype of masculinity or was he actually lampooning the stereotype of femininity? He did it all with such panache and so little cash. The chance encounter of a young man and a prom dress on Ponsonby Road in the direct heat of summer was a remarkable sight.

Everyone at art school knew who David was. And if you’d mentioned David to anyone they would have thought straight away of my David, Michelangelo’s second or maybe even last.

David has looks no one else had. He wore a Foodtown plastic bag as a crop top. He cut a hole in the bottom of the bag then threaded his arms through the straps and his head out the top. It was snug. Even I had to concede this was genius. I’d never seen a plastic bag as anything other than what it was. Now David had boldly rebranded Foodtown. It’s a shame they couldn’t have discovered him and launched a sensational advertising campaign. The F for Foodtown on David’s crop top demonstrated distaste for capitalism and for an art school student that really is de rigeur. Did I even understand what capitalism was? No, but my Student Loan did. Plus: I’ve always hated supermarket shopping.

David’s first thought when he met me at the Elam Library: who is that angry young woman?

9. Something about Feminism but what?

I had a thing about Patricia Arquette in True Romance and had dyed my hair blonde (but a redhead can never truly change her spots). I wore a leopard print top – dubious, as leopard print can have a Coronation Street dimension, it can age you, you have to be beautiful before you put leopard print on, that was Patricia Arquette’s advantage. Over top, I wore a brown vinyl waistcoat. Red wine just wiped off.

The nineties was a time when young women rediscovered our grannies negligees and lace hemmed slips and decided to wear them once again, but not as underwear, no as is. The same rules that apply to leopard print apply to ‘outer wear.’ I wore my black slip over a pair of black thick tights. That was my wisdom showing through. My infamous wisdom only showed in flashes. I also found a pink child’s lunchbox from the 80s that I carried around as a handbag. Don’t ask what I put in it. Not a mobile phone. It was pre-connectivity and I thank God every day that there was no social media when I was in my twenties.

Semiotics 101: A young guy who had a thing about Patricia Arquette had a thing about me. Signs are powerful. I didn’t have a thing about him though. The pink lunchbox came pre-packed.

Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, never read it, think I’ve got the gist though.

Kate Moss became famous for Heroin chic. “What was the question again?” Kate asked.

“I’m not sure about that waistcoat.” David confessed.

I updated my look. I had my own catchphrase prepared, “Beauty is the female genius,” I said. And I wore it like a vinyl waistcoat. 

10. India Song is a slow burn

We sat side by side in the auditorium. The seats curved in a semi circle around the floor. On the big screen: a red sun slowly disappeared from view into the smudgy charcoal sky. 

I nudged David.

He nudged me back.

The sun was taking its time. A foreign voice sang a twangy song, then the sound of laughing. Disorientating.

I rolled my eyes. David rolled his.

Our tutor—Julie—sat down the front to the side of the screen. Her hair agitated like her thoughts. She watched intently. Every inch of the title credits was captivating.  Once the credits were over she stood up.

“What do you think?” Her voice scratchy, abrasive, she was ready to go at the subject hammer and tongs. 

The students sat in silence. We blinked. We were ready to go to sleep. What did she want us to say?

I could sense the patience in David as he held his body in the seat next to mine. I could also sense the patience in Julie as she waited for an answer that would live up to her question…it was running out.

I squirmed, shuffled my bum, trying to get more comfortable.

She tried again. “See how Duras uses sound?”

I yawned. It had been a long night in the edit suite.

Julie looked up. Our eyes met but not our point of view. I covered my mouth as though the yawn was a sun that had popped up.

By the way this isn’t a paragraph about Marguerite Duras’ film India Song as much as it is a portrait of my tutor as a woman who was interested in watching it. That might sound glib but I’ve read Marguerite Duras now and I’m more interested in her point of view. Who was Julie beyond that tutor we didn’t listen to? India Song obviously moved her deeply, matched the tenor of her soul which was serious, and the architecture of her thoughts which were serious too and I have no doubt that serious things had happened in her past that she could never undo, stuff about her mother and stuff about Marguerite and when she first saw India Song and what it meant to her because when art goes in that deep it becomes part of you and that is how it travels as object as experience as emotion as thought and it matters it matters it matters

Memories are also fluid because recently I asked David what he remembered and he remembered watching The Lorry by Marguerite Duras.

Wikipedia says: A female writer reads to a comedian the script of her next film. It is about a hitchhiking woman who climbs in a truck. During the whole trip, she keeps talking while the driver listens to her, saying nothing. The film does not show the actor and the actress, just numerous scenes of a big truck going through the countryside.

11. Untitled is also a fine choice for a title.

In fact Untitled contains a decorum that a titled work often lacks. An Untitled artwork is composed of pure confidence in its bare facts. The title is the gateway to meaning, but meaning can be withheld. Sometimes it means more if it is. You could also add parentheses; parentheses frame a title in a loving embrace. Or you could use a number in lieu of a title, thus emphasising process.

e.g. Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist) by Jackson Pollock.

Pollock’s first action painting was titled by the art critic Clement Greenburg and it has no lavender in it. But if you stand back you can get the gist.

12. Untitled (Time was luxurious and we were pissed)

The Intermedia department had a weekly meeting at nine o’clock. No one could make it on time. So the department shifted the time to ten o’clock. But it turned out that we couldn’t make it then either. One day at eleven o’clock David stalked into the Intermedia studio in a pair of tight black leather paints and a Tiger print singlet.

“Why aren’t you on time?” Julie asked.

David sat down at the back of the studio. He was always scrupulously polite. His septum piercing shone in the half-light. 

“Why aren’t you on time? She demanded again, hands in air, agitated.

“I’m sorry, I thought that was a rhetorical question,” David said.

The Intermedia department no longer exists.