lessons from in college, who were big into yoga, had their watercolors up for sale at a local coffee shop, and always looked as though they’d stopped crying about two seconds before I walked through the door.
It turned out that I was in need of a subject at the precise moment when Amanda was in need of an acolyte. She had just returned from Germany after abandoning a language fellowship and was looking for someone to chronicle her anticipated rise from obscurity to stardom. She wanted to be photographed, so I brought my cameras and tripod to Massachusetts when I returned home for Thanksgiving. But when Amanda greeted me at the door of her apartment in Somerville—a cheerless den of bare mattresses, dirty clothes, and candlewax—I felt a twang of doubt. With the lessons of my art school education still fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but notice that she would not make an ideal subject. Unless I cut her in half and suspended her in formaldehyde, there would be no openings at White Cube. Her large-format portrait would never find its way onto the walls of a Tribeca loft or a renovated bomb shelter in Berlin. There was no chance, even, for a sidebar in Art News .
I knew this because I had spent much of my time in art school focused not so much on creating an original body of work as trying to puzzle out the underlying algorithm for art world success, which, as far as I could see, didn’t have much to do with either talent or aesthetics. I remember one year, the winner of the highly competitive school art show was a small square of ordinary cardboard with the number 69 scrawled on it in black paint. Two other pieces popular in the student galleries at the time were a color photograph of a vulva, blown up to the size of a screen door, and a dead rat in a ziplock bag. The rat, in particular, had a way of following one around the school. I would round the corner to the darkroom only to confront it hovering at face level stapled to the wall, or turn, one hand on the door to the girl’s bathroom, to feel its cloudy eyes fixed on me from some limp perch in the corner. Now, I was no Fra Angelico, but I truly believed the 69, the vulva, and the dead rat were all within safe pitching distance of even my modest talents. And yet, somehow, I knew I could never achieve the success of these innovators. There was some intrinsic quality I lacked that doomed me to my status as art school backbencher. Guts? Imagination? Self-importance? I wanted to know: What was that intangible quality that separated me from them? My portrait of Babushka cooking an egg from their dead rat?
In the photography department, this is how it went. We would gather together silently at crit to consider the glossy C print taped to the wall: a photograph of a bald man, completely naked save for a pair of bunny ears, attached to his head with duct tape, and a pair of aviator glasses. He is leaning across a credenza while a hand belonging to someone outside the frame jams what appears to be a candlestick, gently, up his ass. Light from a neon Budweiser sign on the wall gives the man’s face an almost religious cast and illuminates the casual mess on the bedroom floor.
“Now what is it that makes us want to look at this photograph?” a professor would ask, her voice giving nothing away as her eyes made an even sweep of the room. Damn you, cipher! we would think to ourselves. It was a Zen koan, not a question.
“What raises this above your everyday abject scene is that Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum wrapper stuck to the subject’s left foot,” someone would say after a respectful pause. “It’s a textbook example of what Barthes would call the ‘punctum’ of the scene.”
“The artist is, like, totally destabilizing the referent by doubling the signifiers through his interrogation of epistemologies of queerness,” another of us would offer, in a well-trained voice that betrayed no doubt in whatever had just been said.
“Ultimately,” a third voice would
It turned out that I was in need of a subject at the precise moment when Amanda was in need of an acolyte. She had just returned from Germany after abandoning a language fellowship and was looking for someone to chronicle her anticipated rise from obscurity to stardom. She wanted to be photographed, so I brought my cameras and tripod to Massachusetts when I returned home for Thanksgiving. But when Amanda greeted me at the door of her apartment in Somerville—a cheerless den of bare mattresses, dirty clothes, and candlewax—I felt a twang of doubt. With the lessons of my art school education still fresh in my mind, I couldn’t help but notice that she would not make an ideal subject. Unless I cut her in half and suspended her in formaldehyde, there would be no openings at White Cube. Her large-format portrait would never find its way onto the walls of a Tribeca loft or a renovated bomb shelter in Berlin. There was no chance, even, for a sidebar in Art News .
I knew this because I had spent much of my time in art school focused not so much on creating an original body of work as trying to puzzle out the underlying algorithm for art world success, which, as far as I could see, didn’t have much to do with either talent or aesthetics. I remember one year, the winner of the highly competitive school art show was a small square of ordinary cardboard with the number 69 scrawled on it in black paint. Two other pieces popular in the student galleries at the time were a color photograph of a vulva, blown up to the size of a screen door, and a dead rat in a ziplock bag. The rat, in particular, had a way of following one around the school. I would round the corner to the darkroom only to confront it hovering at face level stapled to the wall, or turn, one hand on the door to the girl’s bathroom, to feel its cloudy eyes fixed on me from some limp perch in the corner. Now, I was no Fra Angelico, but I truly believed the 69, the vulva, and the dead rat were all within safe pitching distance of even my modest talents. And yet, somehow, I knew I could never achieve the success of these innovators. There was some intrinsic quality I lacked that doomed me to my status as art school backbencher. Guts? Imagination? Self-importance? I wanted to know: What was that intangible quality that separated me from them? My portrait of Babushka cooking an egg from their dead rat?
In the photography department, this is how it went. We would gather together silently at crit to consider the glossy C print taped to the wall: a photograph of a bald man, completely naked save for a pair of bunny ears, attached to his head with duct tape, and a pair of aviator glasses. He is leaning across a credenza while a hand belonging to someone outside the frame jams what appears to be a candlestick, gently, up his ass. Light from a neon Budweiser sign on the wall gives the man’s face an almost religious cast and illuminates the casual mess on the bedroom floor.
“Now what is it that makes us want to look at this photograph?” a professor would ask, her voice giving nothing away as her eyes made an even sweep of the room. Damn you, cipher! we would think to ourselves. It was a Zen koan, not a question.
“What raises this above your everyday abject scene is that Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum wrapper stuck to the subject’s left foot,” someone would say after a respectful pause. “It’s a textbook example of what Barthes would call the ‘punctum’ of the scene.”
“The artist is, like, totally destabilizing the referent by doubling the signifiers through his interrogation of epistemologies of queerness,” another of us would offer, in a well-trained voice that betrayed no doubt in whatever had just been said.
“Ultimately,” a third voice would
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