Fast
Forward: Our early story really begins to take off and move forward at UNR, the University of
Nevada, Reno. It was my first year as an artist and everything was going
gangbusters for a very young artist in a small town. I had just moved out of my parent's house, well more like I was
thrown out of my parent's trailer and after a summer spent on several couches,
I had finally moved in with my first, real girlfriend and her chain-smoking
grandmother--who I loved as though she was my actually grandmother--moreso, actually.
I was taking art classes in the University of Nevada, Reno art department, which we referred to as the "Church of Fine Arts," due to a misreading of a placard at the old front entrance, which had been dedicated to James Edward Church, who was a professor of Latin, German, classical art and history, there from 1892-1959.
It was at UNR, in front of the Getchell Library, that I had met Laura Akers, who I would eventually marry and later
divorce in a breakup that would leave me completely broken for exactly one
year, not one day more.
Back
then, though, everything was exciting and new and I was even a bit of a local
Chicano art star. I had just been asked to be part of a three-person "Day
of the Dudes" Show with two of my professors, Ed Martinez and Michael
Sarich--something which was a huge deal for a student, any student--as it was
apparently the first time that anyone had been asked to join any of their
professors in an art exhibition.
A
couple of months earlier, Professor Sarich had bought one of my artworks, a
sculpture of a found Virgin Mary, which I had wired to a plank of wood painted
with the colors of the Italian flag because I had gotten the Mexican flag
wrong. That same year, I won a materials
grant for my work and for showing great promise, but something was missing—even
though I must have been in twenty "Day of the Dead" shows that year!
There
were no particularly discernible dinosaurs hanging around on campus on that
certain blisteringly hot Nevada semester day and all the Neanderthals on the
planet had long-since lost their sloping foreheads and could move about
undetected—except under detailed genetic analysis and at UNR, at least, these
particular "cavemen" preferred to couch their more primitive
inclinations into more artistic activities and endless discussions of the finer
points of deconstruction, rhetoric and irony, after all, things were always bit
more rugged, a bit more seminal, a bit more artistic, and ultimately a bit more
cowboy here at UNR!
UNR
had never lost that primal edge--more than once I was almost shot--by one of my
professors, but I'm sure I am not the only one who took classes there that can
say that! Those were different times—and UNR had created its own rugged,
insulated art culture—yet, at the same time never losing a sense of hope and
the idea that we would all become extremely important artists and that
everything we made was instilled with a kind of magic. Years later, when I was
accepted to UC Davis for grad school, one of the professors there confided in
me that they had a great respect for the teachers and students at "good
ole" UNR.
During
this seemingly never-ending summer of my extended adolescence—four professors—especially,
were very important to me—sculpture professor Robert Morrison, painting
Professor Michael Sarich, performance artist and mistress feminist Joanna Frueh
and photographer Peter Goin. They were the egos, superegos and ids to my
artistic infancy.
For
a very glorious period of my undergraduate experience, in fact, every Friday we
would head to one of the local bars with a few of these professors and we would
get very drunk, smoke ourselves sore, and talk and talk and talk about
philosophy, share our artistic ideas, dreams and autobiographies, and all the
while we would be thinking about how our art would change the world—just as it
was changing our very souls and opening our imaginations in ways that even now
I do not fully understand.
It
was during this period, too, that I was first introduced to the ideas of Michel
Foucault, Jacques Derrida and the mixed media work of Matthew Barney—who was
still climbing walls and restraining himself for all to see, and it was also
then that I fell in love with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns and came to
worship Marcel Duchamp. It was then, too, that I first understood the power of
noise with John Cage and danced with Merce Cunningham, ate my first helping of
Naked Lunch, ran from Gargantua and Pantagruel, had Akira completely blow my
mind, met (in the flesh) Allen Ginsberg, Graham Chapman, Terry Allen, Rachael
Rosenthal, Alan Wilder, Paul Humphries and missed Andy Warhol by mere minutes—all
the while having the time of my life and filling my head with the dreamy dreams
of an aspiring artist.
But
back to the amazing bacchanals that we were having—and those old-world
"secret society" meetings. Here mystery women and mystery men told
stories of New York gangsters and opium dens, of Montana artists in cowboy hats
and chaps--crooning songs and setting up artistic boxing rings. We heard tales
of professors who in their past lives broke people's fingers for money—and
mangled hands in meat-grinders due to non-payment. I heard stories of a young
Bruce Nauman and his performances on the Davis campus, tales of the "Hairy
Who" and Robert Smithson, of Jackson Pollock and the invention of
conceptual art and so much more.
In
time, word would come down from "the regents" or "whomever"
that professors could not fraternize with their students like this, they
couldn’t engage in a real artworld where everyone was treated as an adult—I
didn’t realize it at the time, but this moment was a harbinger of how the
entire world was heading—but for one long moment there was magic in the air and
everything seemed possible.
It
was during this period that Dave Hickey was asked to judge our annual student
art show—I don't remember who it was that won that year--it wasn't me, though I
think I got an honorable mention or something—I don't remember and it doesn’t
matter. I do remember getting really drunk later that night at a bar with
our professors and I remember Bob accidentally lighting a cigarette butt
backward and after several hours of listening to Mr. Hickey pontificate about
art—I finally got the nerve to step up and began to ask him about art
criticism.
At
the time, I had been doing reviews and criticism for the UNR newspaper—the
Sagebrush—and I was thoroughly loving it.
Eventually, I would end up writing criticism on and off throughout my
university experience and I really, desperately wanted to understand why he
also did it-to understand what drove him, and to some very real extent to maybe
understand better why I did it. After about an hour of back-and-forth, however,
I remember getting drunker and feeling like he was absolutely unwilling to give
me the magical answer that I was so desperately demanding.
To
me it seemed like he must be in the catbird's seat—spending all of his time
imagining and re-imagining the state and form of the art-world—finding,
refining and defining the state of play in each of the words that he so
carefully set out before us. The Buddha that was presented before me
however was flawed and imperfect and so very unhappy—it seemed to me—with the
heart of a poet and a very tragic clown. What I found before me was
something very different than the battling hero that a young artist-cum-art
writer wanted to find—what I found was someone who was not actually in love
with what he was discovering to be the truth of the matter of contemporary art.
He
told me and I must assume that that means that he was telling everybody—that he
was even thinking of retiring and that was way back in the 1990's.
Naively—I
asked him—why don't you just change it? Why don't you just change the art
world?" He looked at me with a mix of emotions that I still don't
think I understand, can't replicate but also cannot forget and said, "I
can't. It doesn't work that way."
I
looked back up at him and answered, "bullshit." I said,
"Just bullshit."
He
looked at me with another look—one that I could see clearly read, "you
just called me bullshit--if I was in a different mood I would punch you--or
worse—if I had a gun—I’d shoot you."
I
had seen that look from Michael Sarich before and after a minute which felt
like far too long and in which I steeled myself and made myself ready for
anything—he cleared his throat. Then he held me transfixed in his crooked
eyes for another eternity.
"What
are you having?" he asked.
I
relaxed.
Safe with the knowledge that I wasn't going to get punched—at least not that evening. Not by Dave Hickey, anyway.
Luckily, Robert Morrison—my ever-present, guide through all things artistic—came to our rescue and shifted the conversation and more and more drinks and cigarettes were consumed, but nothing else was said that night about the perceived darkness that was infiltrating the art-world and I was spared my own delicate naivety. Though, if I remember correctly Hickey never paid for a single drink, so this particular darkness was also an ever-present friend.
End of Chapter One.
