The Artist Traversing Perilous Waters

I have hopes that I will get to see the time when to be an artist becomes a respectable lifestyle again, the way it used to be in pre-capitalist times. My hope doesn’t come from nowhere since the tendency of post-industrial capitalism is to leave people with more free time available as manufacturing jobs go away to areas of the world where cheaper labor is available.
To be an artist today still carries upon the stigma of being a social parasite. The artist is seen as some sort of perennial bohemian who does not contribute anything relevant to the commonwealth. The artist is compared to someone pulling our hair and playing some sort of make believe, an ideas butcher trying to make you buy --and sometimes achieving it-- a cat, thinking it was a rabbit.
It still amaze me that despite the rejection society exerts on them, the alienation they suffer and the psychological flagellation they undergo, there are so many young people, year after year, semester after semester, registering in art classes and yearning to be an artist.
It used to be that the formation of an academic trained artist lasted about four years. The first and second years the art student will spend the time copying Greek sculptures and still lives using pencil and charcoal. By the third year he would start using color in a limited way, sanguine or gouache in monochromatic harmonies. By the time he reached the fourth year he would finally be allowed to use oil paint and apply full color.
If the artist was formed in one of the artisan guilds that existed in Europe since around the 15th C. he would have to start at an early age, maybe seven or nine and by the time he was eighteen or nineteen years old he would be a fully formed artisan ready to start a career on his own. The art student would have to go through a series of steps, the first one consisting of painting clouds, then after a few years he would rise in the apprentice ladder and start painting animals. Finally and after about a decade, he would be asked to take on the responsibility of painting faces and hands, achieving the mastery that would bring recognition to his skills and talents and those of the guild he represented.
The industrial revolution and the advent of photography ended all this. It didn’t make sense anymore to spend four or nine years learning how to reproduce the facial features of a person when the daguerreotype and later the Kodak machine where capable of doing this in a matter of minutes. Consequently art schools, if they wanted to keep art programs going, needed to cut the time spent by a student and change the curriculum accordingly.
Today few art schools in the world have the luxury of providing undergrad students with full four years curriculum. M.F.A.s have three to four full years and much of it would be spent doing theoretical research on visual art and other disciplines related to the work of the graduate student. Almost nobody have the leisure to spend four years in an art school, it would cost too much money that most probably is not going to be recouped. Exactly the opposite would happen if money invested were going to law or medicine school, where you can pay back loans and investment after few years practicing your profession as a doctor or a lawyer. Therefore is natural that painting and drawing classes had to be reduced to a semester in college or, if taken seriously, by the ones who wanted to develop in the profession, a couple of more semesters before entering a B.F.A or an M.F.A. program.
It is impossible to form a visual artist in one year, don’t even think in four months. Art professors have struggled to create methods from which the student, although not fully formed as an artist, at least would have some tools to use to make a respectable portrait, a landscape or a still-life. In one of the art classes I took at an American college I painted twelve big 72 x 72 inches canvases in a semester, very much in accordance with American grass-roots philosophy of hard work. That class was the closer experience of American pragmatism I ever had. Forget about European rationalistic-too much complication method of having to learn every facial bone and muscle in order to do a good portrait. You needed only to make a grid and translate your snapshot picture into an unusual large-scale canvas. The result was that you would recognize your face in the painting after you finished in one week, and not only that, you would see yourself capable of creating a portray of such a huge dimension. You would feel proud of being able to manage such a big scale in such a short period of time. The author has spent four years in an art school in Havana and many years making a career as a visual artist and can testify that dominating big canvases is a psychological tour the force that take years to solve. What I couldn't do during four years -dominating big spaces and canvases taller than yourself- was easily achieved using this method.


I passed by my old college today as I took a quick detour from my Central Park strolling and watched the students involved in the process of making their portrays, landscapes and abstractions. Today was not a typical day at the studios and my eye and my ears were caught. They were playing music in the studio. That was something that was not allowed while I was an art student at Hunter and I asked them about the unusual event while congratulating them about it. A skinny girl called Barret, which I know since my years as an student told me that they agreed to play music to make the experience more relaxing. I answered that the whole thing reminded me of times past in my studio in Havana, always full with loud music, alcohol and cool conversation with friends that came to visit. I also remembered my students at Altos de Chavon school of design, in Dominican Republic, were I spent some time as an invited professor. The students over there enjoyed loud music night after night while doing their homework. They would take turns playing their favorite musicians and they would never fight over certain type of music or certain author. Music was for them part of the experience of painting, as it was for me, something inseparable from art learning and art making.
While at Hunter I always wondered why music was banned from the studios while you could still listen to it using earplugs. They said is because fights between students have broke over the choice and volume of the music played. I used to think the real reason had to do with puritanical culture, with an attitude of austerity, a kind of Kantian morality towards art making, a sense of solitude in the universe and left alone with only the company of the art work you were creating. I believed that what was truly at stake by making art in silence was a tale of the lonely creator giving birth to life from the void, an interpretation of the religious American puritanical narrative and an embrace of American culture at large. The artist as the existential next frontier conqueror fighting alone against the threatening forces of nature that came to challenge him from the emptiness of the canvas.
I witnessed today several creators in the process of giving birth to their creatures, some of the many that are going to populate our spiritual universe in the years to come. As I said at the beginning of this paper I hope post-industrial society gets to appreciate what they are doing. Since post-industrial society gives way to so much free time and un-employment, the un-employed and free-timers probably will. Maybe the artist would not be anymore such a stigmatized creature mostly rendered as a producer of things with no value.



In capitalist society the figure of the artist goes in opposite directions, from excoriated to idolized. Those artists who make it and achieve international recognition and tons of money along the way are ridiculously worshiped by the media and by the social mind. Since art is such an unnecessary activity and the artist such an unnecessary figure only the ones who get to prove that they are really one of a kind get to be appreciated. Only the ones who show their willingness to cut an ear or throw themselves into the waters of overdose get some measure of credibility. Only the ones that fly into the eye of the storm get to be respected and counted as valuable. When is too late and when is not worth it. I will never understand why would anyone commit suicide leaving his legacy to someone who is going to enjoy it while he is six feet underground.
When an artist gets recognition society sees herself vis-a-vis the encumbered artist on his pedestal. If post-industrial society gets a grip on reason it would not worship artists and their blockbuster masterpieces as emissaries of some sort of Hegelian realization of the absolute. Post-industrial society may be start doing some good by learning to elucidate and separate the superficial art from the substantial, the serious artist from the specialist on the tricks of the trade. If this becomes a fact, both the un-employed proletariat and the solitary artist could start getting to respect and appreciate each other more. After all we are navigating the unpredictable and dangerous waters of post-capitalism –not post-apocalypse that is— in the same ship. And nobody would like to see a fight broke in a boat traversing perilous waters in the middle of a storm. Neither to say, nobody wants it either.