I got my MFA from a school begun in the Arts & Crafts movement at the turn of the (last) century.  It has since dropped the "& Crafts" off its name, and perhaps off its mission, but when I attended it was still very much a HiLo establishment.  I was in the "Hi" end of things, no real surprise there, but the existence of the "Lo" was crucial in ways I believed theoretically, but was to come to know practically.

FuseliSo there we were first semester, at the Hi top of the school already by being in the Painting department, and we were supposed to find our Authentic Gesture.  Kind of like Carlos Castaneda and his power spots, you'd know it when you found it, and it would be unique to you. In art your Gesture is your identity, your reality, the expression of your inner core -- Pollock had his Authentic Gesture, and de Kooning, and Frankenthaler, and Sol Lewitt, and on and on and on.  You could apply it in retrospect to Michelangelo, Goya, Manet, even Bouguereau.  But I was all set, I knew I'd only need to refine my Gesture and proceed along the usual road of Talent.  All set that is, until my advisor advised me on Day 2 to "do whatever I want, just stop doing that."

I became somewhat adrift.  By the end of the first semester everyone else had a Gesture, and was busy refining it.  I had no Gesture. Instead, I was painting my way through Art History, copying things, to keep busy, and to see if anything spoke to me.  Everything was spoken for.  Nothing spoke.

Well, to leaven the anxiety caused by having no Gesture I would go over to the computer lab and start playing around with programs and buddying up to the Local Nerd.  This was the Craft part of me.  I started messing around with Photoshop.  Immediately I got the idea, since I was reenacting art history in the studio, that it would be funny to put my face into famous paintings of women: since I was "trying on Gestures" anyway, why not just try on the entire image?  This was Photoshop 3, and no RAM and signing up for time by the hour and dot-matrix printers and all sorts of nonsense, but it was fun and kind of practical-machine-like thinking and there was no question of a Gesture plaguing me at all.  And I would bring the printouts back to the studio and tape them up and then it would be time for the beer run and everything would be fine until the next day.

And my advisors would walk by and say, "why are those things in here?" and I would laugh and they would roll their eyes and indulge me and move on.  And the printouts were funny but the art was Serious and I had no Gesture and things were not converging at all.

One day my most painterly painting advisor stopped by.  For him painting was personal and art was Serious and he was California and he was a sensualist and he thought theory was 'after the fact.'  And I was an emotionally reserved overly intellectual east coaster with an irreverent sense of humor and no Gesture after 4 months and an entire lifetime in fact and he waltzed into my studio one day and we unaccountably, immediately, and irrevocably, hit it off. It was not to understand, it just was.  Anyway on the day in question he came by and I started baiting him about the printouts, because they were silly and because I knew it was the kind of thing that drove him crazy, art-wise, and he let me get away with it for awhile, and when I finally paused he said, pointing first to the printout and then to some half-finished pseudo art-historical attempt on the wall, "why don't you put that (printout), in there (the painting)?"

And that was it, my "water" moment.  I did not have a Gesture.  I would never have a Gesture.  I would never be Authentic.  I was a Collage Artist, whose art was only and forever to costume myself in others' mufti.  But not just one Other!  I mixed it up.  Because just as I had no Gesture, there was nothing special about any Other in particular.  What did it matter to me if this one or that one was such a genius. They were all now equal now, they were all Material.

And my identity?  Well, it collapsed of course. There was nothing there, no Gesture on which to hang a set of attitudes and propositions.  Which felt awful and empty and nothing for a time.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald describes here so well.  And after finding myself in the abyss, and after falling and after being terrified of falling and after getting used to falling and after getting bored with falling and after stopping falling, and then, much later, after taking a few steps around . . .  I realized that it was -- funny.  I could paste anything on top of anything.  I could redeem that 5th grade collage that got me an elementary-school detention, the one where I put Nixon's face on a naked bathtub model smoking a broken cigarette. I could reenact things that had never existed.  I could inhabit characters, and write up random explanatory index cards from cereal boxes and subway warnings.  I realized that with Surrealism and Dada and readymades and Fluxus and Pop and Conceptual there was not just one world waiting to welcome me in, but many.  All you had to do was cross the Styx of the real and leave your Self at the dock with Cerberus, a collage himself of course.  And somewhere in the middle of the neo-Boschian phantasmagoria I found myself in the middle of constructing and inhabiting, sometime far enough down the road that I couldn't have retraced my steps even if there was still an "I" that wanted to, I realized, as will you if you've followed me this far -- that I was free.