OBSESSED

I went to the Mills MFA opening last night with George and Welly and totally had my socks blown off by all of the amazing amazing art there and the beautiful woodsy campus. I saw Glen Helfand (my old advisor) there and he told me that Mills grad students have an acclivity to obsessive art production, perhaps fueled by it having a history of being an all-female college. When I was telling someone about this later they asked me if it was its obsession that I was falling in love with and not necessarily its quality. As if obsession, true obsession, is a reproducible gimmick. I thought about it and decided that all projects have got to have some sort of obsession about them in order to be good, if not through rigour or intentionality then at least through some sort of commitment to not being rigorous or intentional. Two of the artists made these pretty technically amazing papercuts and another had crocheted these form fitting gloves for branches, seeds and logs, all out of this intensely golden yellow string. It helped me figure out some strategies for my own art production-- it's hard to believe that this time next year I'll be wrapping up this whole grad school experience. It'll probably be years before I figure out what this all means-- only since having re-enrolled into academia have I really started reflecting about my experience as a student at Wesleyan.