Art School is a process. It is one of those experiences in life that feels uncertain, tempting, and usually administered to those who wander, who are trying to fidn their footing in life, unashamed to be creative, yet unaware of what it will take to make a career in the arts feasible should they continue. There is a sense of experimentation and camaraderie in the halls where strange smells of hot glue and linseed oil mix and coagulate the nostrils, creating an ad hoc nostrum of familiarity and possibility. An occasional mature student gives advice, and a precocious youngster with parents who own a preposterous and expensive Thomas Houseago gleams from under sagging eyelids, not without talent, but locked in the trunk of their parents’ expectations, fraternizes with plaster of Paris, cocaine, and a deep-seated realization that they have a decade, if they stretch it, before they are recalled home to the family business.
The sounds include the soft hum of a kiln, to the screech of a saw on metal, cutting 90-degree angles, to be welded back shut. A teacher, whose career has involved making unfathomable yard sculptures/public art, plays the negative reinforcer, a slight trouser minnow erection dawning in his pants when he can make a student cry, giving ammunition to his next commission, a slight rub of that incongruent trouser on some unsuspecting student like a bad dentistry experience. Life continues this way, and before one knows it, they are cast out into the world of barristas if they are lower or middle class, and into real estate if they were lucky enough to be the sperm that won in a wealthy family. Lives will cross ever briefly, a congratulatory back pat for the most inconsequential of award trips through America with a Fulbright to boot. Eventually, the cloud of creativity dissipates with the pressures of the real world, and all but a few will continue onward as educators, festival organizers, and rarely, with a group show spot at a blue-chip gallery. That is part of the art school.
The other experience of art school is the proximity that one gains by being alive and allowed to understand the material world and one’s place in it through the experimentation of creation. Whereas I might have painted a dark view of the world above, one should understand that there is a reality to art practice and it is one of the greatest things one can do for themselves, but is also encumbered with maddening moments of trying to understand how to function in a world that does not value or appreciate art as a majority idea, but rather sees it not as a way of life and coping with the world, but as entertainment. Art is not entertainment for the artist, but rather an inexplicable feeling of highs and lows, of grounding one’s reality in an unrelinquishing world. It would not be remiss of me to say that it is essential, and for some of us, the only way we know how to make our way in the unrelenting world as we know it, using it to defy the expectations that have been placed on our imaginations, defying the normalization of standard work practice, and denying the outcomes of a society that rewards conformity over otherness. Without it, many of us would lose track of our essence, self-castigate our very beings for the sake of a birth-to-death lifespan in which nothing is gained, and freedoms are instead denied for the sake of the rapacious order of greed, of self-preservation, and of ugliness.
Alvaro Deprit’s book The Anatomy of Fear (Witty Books) looks at art school through its creations. It is a multi-generational story that uses the process of sculpture and half-made faces hidden and choking under layers of plastic as a metaphorical conversation about the anxiety of art schools and the interim timelines they represent to so many of those kids who grew up wanting to create, to be, and to be left with their thoughts, something that contemporary society does not reward, let alone encourage. This, of course, works itself out in the frenetic life of the student, with all those uncertainties I mentioned. As it is an abstraction to think through, using the busts hidden under plastic, to keep the clay from hardening, seems like an interesting enough metaphor to make the work hold ground. In fact, I was not aware that this was part of the project when receiving the book, and I found it an additional add-on that makes enough sense, but in reality, coming from such an environment and where I studied early on as a sculptor, I instead understand the impetus as one of process. I remember that smell of clay, or spraying it down after a day of work, before putting it under plastic to keep it from hardening at the edges, with a fondness. Granted, there was always something morbid about this process, especially after the bust began to take on a realism that gave one pause. Eye sockets and mouth cavities become sucked in, a strangulation victim looking for air, or a ghostly visit from a deceased relative that you thought you saw move from the corner of your eye before you, the last to leave, turned the lights off for the evening.
What Deprit’s work speaks to is anxiety, but also horror, within the uncanny sculptures’ underwraps. Their Munch-ian screams are silent, yet pleading for us to listen. An errant eyeball rolls down the corridor, and the calipers lie on dusty tables, suited for hanging one up by the ears as they are to measure anything. In essence, I think of this book less as a book about Gen Z and their problems with the world than as a strong horror novel. I see the work as emanating from the same haunted void as Medardo Rosso, and though I get that funding requirements might need a little metaphorical value, I specifically think it’s a great book on backroom sculpture and uncanny dopelgangers screaming back at us from the void of their creation, lockstep with our own contemporary horror of watching genocide and an onsalught of technological “progress” taking over our lives. It might be an anathema for people to consider getting right with clay, digging their hands into the dirt, and looking at the world through its material essence, not its digital imprint, but perhaps we might try. Again, I value this book for what I see directly and think it, as Alec Soth’s more recent Advice for Young Artists (cringe title) or Matthew Finn’s School of Art books will fit in the orbit of this. For those interested in the synthesis of sculpture and photography, and in the work of Brancusi, Rosso, or Rodin, I think this adds another layer to that tradition. Recommended.
