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| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Jill Giegerich | . | |||||||||
No, it's insane. It's completely insane. No artist should be sent into the world with debts like that. It's ridiculous. And it seems like the least you could do if you're in an institution charging that much money, there is a specially designed course that would teach them how to make money doing something. You know? And you can't graduate until you've passed this course and learned how to do this other thing.
M. Yeah, I think that there's any number of things. But I think it's considered taboo.
Well of course, because then you'd have to admit that what you're teaching them has no monetary basis.
M. I think that it's beyond that. I think that the absence of monetary sustainability is considered a virtue. In fact, I've heard as much. That to do otherwise would be an incomprehensible compromise, an ethical taint, etc.
Yeah, but you don't have to teach them to make art that makes money. You teach them to repair cars. (laughs) It will never happen.
M. It won't happen.
Well, it does seem like a crime. I can't believe the debts that artists are going out of these institutions with. It's unbelievable. Wouldn't that be an interesting subversive act if all the artists that we knew dedicated themselves to becoming mentors to three young, striving artists.
M. That's kind of my hidden agenda, actually. Basically, I'll get on my soapbox, I think that... You know, I thought I was a pretty decent teacher, but the thing that struck me later, when some of those people actually worked for me, it occurred to me that now they're getting what they should have gotten then. Then I was just bullshitting them. (Both laugh)... Yeah, well what's wrong with the apprentice system. It was just really clear to me that very little that I had to say [as a teacher] was as reality-based as what they saw. And also, in terms of supply and demand, which is the situation, it's more real than this institution that's propped up with government-insured bank loans to private banks. Private banks hand out the funds and rake in the interest payments and the forbearance payments, and all the other terms...
And the average citizen gets screwed once again.
M. You can't default on a loan anymore. Actually that would be my first pointer on graduation, go get your passport today before you default. (Both laugh)
Good advice. I didn't even know that that's what happens.
M. If you don't have a passport, they won't give you one. And if you do have a passport, they won't renew it.
Screwed again.
M. I think that there's an age issue too. I have inevitably found that the older the students are, the better off they are in the end. They come in there more real and leave more real, too. It's more of a guiltless relationship. It's like maybe I'm a fucked-up teacher but I can't hurt you that much because you're a better student. (Both laugh)
That's true. Going to school right out of high school is a frightening and vulnerable position.
M. It's so easy to be influential. It's not even a fair fight intellectually.
No, it's not.
M. You said, "These are the ones I teach" and I was surprised that you would reveal those [tricks], even to a paying customer. (Laughs) I don't really see a lot of that going on.
Well, artists unfortunately aren't talking very much about art anymore. You know? I do because that is what I was taught. Someone taught them to me and I may as well pass the information on. That's what my teachers did for me. That's what some of my teachers did for me. Some tried to annihilate my soul. That's another story. Actually, I must say I was very blessed with teachers. I had great teachers, enough so that the few destructors didn't do too much damage. But when you think about it, it is terrifying what one terrible teacher can do and what one great teacher can do. It's very frightening. It's a scary responsibility.
M. As the programs become more and more institutionalized, they become more and more like schools and they have less and less to do with art. And frankly the faculty seems less and less composed of artists. But the degree, more and more becomes this isolated thing, an 'art degree', evermore separate and useless. The real activity that it's founded on, or if you want, the brain wave patterns, as you said, that's become... you can't even talk about it. It's like it doesn't exist. But what do you expect? I guess they can't talk about it if it hasn't happened to them.
Yeah, it depends on who you're talking about, who's doing the teaching. But that's what I teach. I mean I teach ways to figure out what's... ways to proceed, so that you can figure out what you are feeling so urgent about. I don't think that you have to feel urgent to be an artist. I use that because I have a particular urgency that runs through my character. But I do recognize that not everyone feels that way. (laughs) But these things I do, I think that they are going to reveal whatever they are going to reveal about your own interests, whatever those may be.
M. Did you teach at Cal Arts at all?
I did a... you know, the fresh blood thing. It's a visiting artist thing. They call it 'fresh blood', which I thought was real amusing. (Laughs) Oh, you didn't know about this. I did it last year. And you come for two weeks and you see a bunch of people. It's like independent study. First you present your work and then you see a bunch of people. And I must say it was one of the most difficult teaching experiences I have ever had. The students were as brilliant as ever but they were so frightened, so frightened. And at first it really knocked me off my bearings. It was deeply disturbing, as a matter of fact, because the first day when I showed my work to this class which was composed of the people I was then going to see... I showed slides... and I'd done that a million times. I had the whole rap down. I was sick of doing them. I was sick of looking at that work, but I got all the stories and I talked about them.
There was dead silence. Dead silence. No one asked a question. No one had a comment. I think one person finally, after it became unbearably uncomfortable... and I didn't know what it meant. I thought, "Oh. Oh, I'm over the hill." That's what this is about. This work has no ability to communicate whatsoever. And then when I started seeing people, and people were alone and not with their peers, I realized, and they told me, that they were terrified and they could not speak in front of their peers because the terror of using the wrong word or seeming to be stupid was so intense that they couldn't speak. And for everyone, the issue, the entire discussion of fifteen people that I saw, was about fear. And how to overcome this paralyzing fear that they felt in order to make their work.
M. (Laughs)
So, I don't know. I can't necessarily blame that on Cal Arts.
M. (More laughter)
It could be that these people are already in a state of fear and Cal Arts enhances that, but these are already eccentric people. These are already brilliant, eccentric people so they are already shell-shocked by the society that they've moved into and now find themselves in this place in which they're trying to gain another kind of footing and... It was pretty amazing.
M. Yeah. I find it... it traumatized me, for sure. Both times, differently. But the first time just from general distance, like return to the primal scene.
Yeah, there was that too. But to be fair, I've taught in a lot of places and I find that same sense of paranoia and fear in all of the institutions where the stakes are high, that have the kind of reputation that Cal Arts has. There is that same paralyzing fear.
M. What are high stakes?
Well I think the high stakes are they are getting out of this place, like the stuff you just said, they are getting out of this place thousands and thousands of dollars in debt. The pie is this big. There is some sort of cream of the crop sensibility that is making everyone know that they are with the people that are definitely going to be competing for that little piece of the pie. And they don't know what the game is. (Both laugh)
M. And the game is... "Figure out the rules!" – Go! ...Time's Up!
Right, and whatever the game is it certainly isn't the game when they were four-years-old and they were doing those drawings in their room.
M. One more thing, before you kick me out. Way back at the beginning you said something about not having the need, having outgrown the need to work all the time. And that was just sort of a mandate of capitalism.
I think that has a lot to do with it, maybe not only capitalism. Puritan work ethic. Yeah, Puritan work ethic.
M. So you mean something that's internalized.
Yeah. I think I internalize that one in a big way. And also, there's a Puritan work ethic, there's the capitalist mandate, and there's also the myth of the artist. And at that time, I didn't have a lot of role models to go by. The big modernists... high modernists were held up as role models, and the late modernists. We are told they just worked all the time, all the time, all the time. And it kind of never occurred to me that they could do that because a lot of them had art wives, and I was never going to have an art wife. And I just kind of forgot about that. You know? And also I was laboring under the mandate of the feminist movement at that time, which for all the wonderful things that it did, the other thing that it did was told women that they could have everything. So not only was I struggling to be this artist of great output, but I also had a child and I had a mate. Let me be clear. My mate is very supportive, but I never got the art wife thing.You know? (Laughs) It took me a long time to realize that I had in my head these historical figures whose lives had nothing to do with my own. That I had these pressures and struggles that were completely different. And also after a while, after years and years and years of rising to the occasion - I was rising to the occasion of no matter how many shows I was offered, I had to do all of them - I realized that I felt like I was strip mining. You know? That I didn't have that many ideas. I just didn't. That I was doing something dangerous to myself.
Well I think that we start out with a set of assumptions and as you go along you learn that maybe those assumptions don't match your particular temperament. And maybe they just change, maybe your temperament changes. And somewhere along the way you become your own boss. Hopefully, you do.
The end.