Category: Uncategorized

At least five times out of ten when I tell people I am an art history major, I would get the confused face from them and the recurring question:” So do you draw?” The confusion between art history and fine art is a plausible one because there seems to exist an assumption that art lovers are passionate about both the practice of making art and the theories/concepts in the history of art, and there are, indeed, many student who are more talented than me and can pursue a dual-degree in art&design and art history. However, for me, the studio art class, instead of the three-hour seminars and honor thesis class, appears to be the most intimidating class I need to take in order to fulfill the concentration requirements in art history, and that’s why I was too reluctant to worry about it and have been avoiding taking it until the last year before graduation.

It is not that I do not enjoy fine art practices at all. Actually, I always love making art. Fine art classes have been my all-time favorite among all the classes at school. I remember in elementary school, my art teacher would reward students who got five on all art assignments with a drawing of Digimon or Cardcaptor Sakura by her, which seemed to be in huge scale for me back then (actually about the size of a poster). This reward successfully motivated me to get fully engaged in every class and put huge efforts at all my drawing assignments. In middle school, I was fascinated by Japanese anime and manga. I watched so many anime and subscribed to multiple monthly MAG (manga, anime and games) magazines, and the idea of drawing my own comic naturally raised in my mind. I copied anime characters from anime posters and created my own cartoon characters. My dream to be a cartoonist evaporated with the increasing academic pressure as I entered high school. No more spare time to watch anime or read comics or magazines, but I soon realized another interest, graphic design, when I was making the class magazine. I spent hours on photoshop and pagemaker to design the magazine cover and to edit graphic illustrations in the magazine.

I have been wondering about how these passions gradually disappeared as I entered college and how I ended up keeping myself a respectful distance from the world of fine art. Being an art history major and being exposed to masterpieces over the centuries in classes seemed to have raised my standard for art makers in terms of their level of profession, and my hypercritical attitude, in return, also makes me more fastidious about myself when considering me making art. How can I, who is not in the art and design school and has got no artistic training before, be professional enough to make some satisfactory artworks? This logic seems convincing until I realized that the ultimate audience of artworks is actually the artist him/herself. Art historians may judge the aesthetic value of artworks, but the pleasure the artist get from the process of art-making could not be measurable by certain theoretical standards. In retrospective, the time I spent on polishing a drawing assignment, copying my favorite anime protagonist, and designing a magazine cover was really enjoyable and memorable. With this in mind, I finally get the confidence to reenter the world of art making and to start sketching another amateur drawing.  

This weekend was a big deal for all of the seniors in the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design, marking the sporadic openings of a citywide exhibition titled Launch, which showcases the thesis work they’ve been creating all year. Displayed in a variety of locations (the galleries of A&D aka 2000 Bonisteel Blvd., Work Gallery on State St., 325 Braun Ct. between Out Bar and The Bar, and The Yellow Barn/416 W. Huron), the results were across the board: there are eight-foot prints of caves hung from the ceiling, plants potted in concrete geometry, books bound like the Kells, books describing how to teach kids business through screen printing, books with illustrations drawn by hand, life size figure sketches that may as well be sculptures, chairs that change the way you sit, woodcut body contours, prints of fish guts, Minecrafted paintings, paintings of revolutionary leaders, shapes in a sand box, performance, poetry, installation – the variation was nothing short of overwhelming, in the best way. There’s enough to spend days simply looking, touching, listening, smelling, thinking; the most impressive part is that it was all made by students. Sometimes confused, stressed, and scared students, but dedicated students, talented students. Students I should be graduating with.

I switched into A&D from LSA after my freshman year; putting me behind in studio credits and flushing any hopes I had of a four-year undergraduate degree down the drain. Still, I’m friends with large amount of the class of 2014, and consider myself more closely related to them in the art school family tree than the ‘15ers. I was asked a hundred times about my “missing” work that didn’t exist yet. It was strange having spent all year listening to them talk about their ideas, materials, processes, ups and downs, heroic failures and happy accidents, to see it all come together in real concrete space. No more words, hand gestures, quick sketches – real stuff, each project a mirror image of its creator in some way, pieces of my friends hanging on walls or mounted to board, splashed on canvas, lying on the floor – proof of how seriously each artist took their work, a measure of their individual obsessions, priorities, an estimation of how much sleep they’d given up over the past few months. At first, it was really tough to separate the work from the person who made it. I realized this is how I’ll remember, or forget, every one of them. All of the memories, little strings tying together the people I’ve spent the past three years with, now anchored to these objects, images, gestures, staked down to the lattices of my mind.

Does this take away from any aspect of the exhibition? Of course not. The work stands on its own, and is simply augmented by the experiences and memories that have shaped my perception of each individual artist. I was lucky enough to witness the challenges, setbacks, inspirations, epiphanies, and everything in between, from a perspective that is simultaneously personal and detached. I feel as though I’ve taken a free prep course that’s allowed me to make an informed approach to my own project in the fall. I learned what’s possible to make in a year, what falls flat, how viewer interaction is the key to a visible response, how bigger is not always better (but most of the time it is), how to stick to my guns, how to stick it out. It felt strange to tell my peers I was proud of them, like my approval somehow validates their work, but I couldn’t help it. It felt awkward to thank them for making something they would have made anyway, but it had to be said. I’m proud and grateful to have made stuff beside these folks, to have known them and seen them grow into the artists and designers they are today. The majority of them don’t know where they’ll be in a few months, let alone a year from now, but I’m not worried. Each one has ventured into themselves and come out the other side unscathed; what better preparation for real life is there? One thing is for certain: they will be missed.

For me, the spring progression towards the end of school – this time of year –has always kind of felt like falling off a cliff. At the same time that you’re cramming desperately for exams, you suddenly start remembering that school is not necessarily the full length and breadth of life. A certain melancholy might set in, as you remember on emotional level that the boundaries between which you live, the standards of success and failure that create your day-to-day requirements, are not only made up, but made up by someone who isn’t you. So how do you keep your sense of autonomy within the structure of the academic world? And what do you do when that structure dematerializes in a day?

Last night, two of my friends sat in the Michigan House kitchen and talked about dropping out of college. Ana had stopped attending school a year ago, while Isaac was thinking about dropping out next fall. “The hardest part about it,” said Ana, “is dealing with other people. If you’re not terrified of dropping out, then you probably haven’t fully considered other people’s reactions.” Isaac thought about that while we broke into a pan of staling cinnamon buns. “But I have considered the consequences. And I’m generally fine with breaking social norms.” He twisted off the tops of two cinnamon buns, switched them, and smiled.

Earlier that day I had watched Isaac leaning against the gate in the Mich house backyard, as the sun slowly set and the tendrils of smoke from a struggling dinnertime bonfire drifted upwards towards the sky. He looked young, but also determined – like within his clothes he was setting up a mold for the man he would be, a person that would solidify inside the jean jacket, the long-johns, the earring, the eyebrows that tilted upwards with sudden joy at catching a strand of creative thought. Meanwhile, graduating seniors Katie and Kat were causing a ruckus: like most of Ann Arbor they had been somewhat demented by the early spring influx of sunlight, and were standing on benches, hitting crumpled PBR cans into the air with sticks. As drops of months-old crappy beer/backwash pelted my forehead, I stopped thinking and started to laugh.

A periodic shaking off of my own persistent thoughtfulness might be kind of good for me. To quote the late David Foster Wallace, “probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education –least in my own case – is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in the argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” Maybe I am ambivalent about academia, and maybe academia does structure my life, but I’m not ambivalent about life. I suffer no uncertainty about drinking coffee in the afternoon sunlight with good friends while listening to them improvise songs to the people across the street, no doubt about the bikeride with my sister before work, no hesitation about going to see that oddly named band at the weird venue with the new friend.

And abridging self-imposed routines can be as important as fighting back, with friends and coffee and music, against the suffocation of work and school. One of the first days of spring I was suffering through a run in the Arb with a sore Achilles tendon when I remembered something – despite the hurry I was in to get home, shower, and do my homework, despite the anxiety that if I didn’t get enough exercise I wouldn’t be able to sleep, despite the tiny numbers in the window of my ipod telling me that I had another forty minutes left in my workout, I did not have to keep running. I yanked my earbuds out of my ears, and as the tinny music stopped, abruptly my other senses returned. Half of the meadow had been charred in a controlled fire, and as the cool breeze lifted the remaining grass, the smell of burnt organic particulate drifted hazily in the sunlight. I wandered towards the swaying pine trees at the edge of the meadow, and laid down on a slightly damp patch of pine needles and clay soil – the ‘O horizon’ in the soil profile, I remembered dimly from an ecology class. As the leaves above me swayed and blued in the sunset, I sank through the soil horizons, trying to center myself somewhere within the bedrock. The sensation of falling off a cliff dimmed. By the time I stood up to walk home, I forgot about the numbers ticking away on my ipod.

David Foster Wallace couldn’t really tell me how to fight off springtime melancholy, and I couldn’t really tell you how. I think it has something to do with paying attention to the beautiful, organic strands of love (cinnamon roll, pbr, bike, bedrock) that weave their way through the seemingly impermeable boundaries of routine. I think it has something to do with understanding and remembering the relative impermanence of the academic thread, both in its greatness as an avenue to achievement and its dull everyday pressure. Maybe, between all the essay-writing, beer and coffee-drinking, running and studying, you should really just let yourself be demented by the sunshine, stop thinking, and laugh.