Dennis Hollingsworth

Post Script

Quinton Bemiller brought a group of artists for a studio visit last Saturday. It was the second such studio visit that I've had this spring, and I have another speaking engagement as a guest artist lecturer for Monique van Genderen's advanced painting class at UCLA next week.

Public speaking both thrills and scares me. I immediately think of skydiving, the stomach wrenching feeling is the same. And yes, I have had the skydiver experience once in my college days. Once, that is. I wanted the thrill of the experience but skydiving is the kind of sport where only complete devotion might insure you from horrific and sudden death. This is the key where the odds of survival diminish with each successive jump. Public speaking is different, the odds of success are reversed in fact. For me, public speaking is similar to skydiving in terms of gut sensation.

Now that I think of it, actors do die onstage at times.

One would think that my previous experience as an adjunct professor (architecture, Woodbury University, Burbank, 1992-2000) would have armored me in this respect. Not in my case. An audience which consists of a class of 15 or so students was intimidating at first. I soon discovered two solutions. After a brief introduction of myself and the class content, I would ask each student to introduce themselves, thus allowing me to delve into each character and assess the class potential overall. Secondly, I realized that by announcing an assignment, any anxiety (mine, that is) would be instantly transferred to the students (in the best sense) and the task of transmitting curricula content would be grappled forthwith.

Neither of these two solutions works for a studio visit, however. Generally, I remember that a good start in public speaking involves a protocol of gratitude. Thanks for the invitation, thanks for the audience. Such expressions I usually find easy to come by, too easy that is. Effusion is a weakness of mine, I try to govern it. The icebreaker-of-humor technique is another tool that I repeatedly leave abandoned in the toolbox. The icebreaker joke or humorous story conveys a tone of geniality, it is a window into what the audience are about to hear. I am not a natural joke teller, unfortunately. How does one go about learning such a thing?

I feel that this blog is an instrument that is as yet underutilized by me. There is much that falls through the editorial cracks. Maybe it is because constantly discerning private from public information is difficult in the art world. It is certainly because the perfect ideal of blogging would be a minute to minute account of one's impressions and ruminations. This is a blogger's utopia that approaches disease. I perform far short of this ideal, but in general, I suppose that I should be more energetic all the same. This blog as a record of my curiosities, as a testament of the life in my studio both mental and physical in terms of the connections of one to the other, and this places no small stress to the efficacy of my project overall. Therefore I promise myself and you, dear reader, to do better in the future. But a blog is good for post scripting life, too.

Here is what I would have liked to have said at the outset of Quentin's class visit:

Quentin, thanks for bringing an audience to me. (This, I did say. But I could have modeled my gratitude much more vividly.) There is an overarching importance of the audience in art, one that deserves much more recognition. Maybe it is because what most artists do is intrinsically new or out of the general discourse that we are accustomed to smaller audiences... and perhaps we artists unconsciously tend to jump to the assumption that the cognoscenti are the natural, best audience and are therefore naturally limited in number. "So what if few appreciate my work, soon many and all might." This is too easy a formulation. Let us say that for the sake of argument, that perhaps an artist's task is to reduce and perhaps eliminate doubt. Wouldn't it be best to seek out as much of an audience as possible and appeal to all their senses for the sake of our work? Thanks therfore to Quentin for bringing these people to my studio, and thanks to his students who have troubled themselves to insert me into their schedule to see the work and listen to what I might say about it.

There is something to be praised about the uniqueness of Quenton's project: his entrepreneurialism, the manifestation of the extra-academic, and public service.

Quentin evolved his roving art tours from the creation of a painting class in the public realm. As he tells the story, he started to assign galleries for his students to visit and report on what they saw in the subsequent class. All too often, life would run interference and the field work would come lacking, so he just took them out to see the art he felt they needed exposure to. Our art world is a big place and soon the field trips took on a life of their own, spawning a second line of work for him. Business, in other words. Entrepreneurialism in other words. It is sometimes strange to me that so much of Marx infuses the theory and philosophy of life in our art world, especially since the literal reality of an artist's life is that of a self starting small business. Marcel Duchamp worked in the secondary market to finance his shenanigans. Both aspects of his life are essentially entrepreneurial. Damian Hirst and all of his ilk (I call them CEO artists because they are arch conceptualists who specialize in the art of the deal) spin off lisencees, restaurants, bars and discos... But I am starting to digress. No matter, this is another topic and a huge one at that, destined for future blog post. Suffice it to say that what Quentin is doing is in the best sense of the term, entrepreneurial, and should be applauded by artists of all stripes.

Quentin created a painting class, folks. I know that this has been done before, but what he is doing is on or near the level of a graduate painting class one could find in any of our university fine art departments across the country. Think of it: might there exist a market in a similar class in... sculpture? Art history? Theory? Performance? Film and video? Wouldn't it be great if art school as we know it found a life outside of the campus and in the world at large? Art School Gone Wild?

As such, what Quentin is doing is a public service as much as he pays his bills. He brought together a bouquet of like minded people and presented them to me with much grace. Let us take to his example and may a thousand flowers bloom.