On Becoming an Artist
By Becket Flannery, RPS Class of 2003
Very few are really born into the art world,
particularly if we consider the specific one called
contemporary art. So, for most artists, there is a process
of one kind or another to figuring out what an artist is,
though the distance to be crossed varies from person to
person.
At a certain age that I can’t remember, I read a book
called The Bat Poet, by Randall Jarrell. In the book, an
insomniac (diurnal) bat spends his days failing to imitate
birdsong. Unable to carry a tune, his chirping becomes
poetry, and he begins to “sing” about the strange things
he sees during the day. An attempt to recite some of his
recent work to his bat friends leaves them politely confused. Never mind that it is about a non-human
poet; embedded in this story are many ideas of what an artist is: somehow gifted, but traditionally
untalented; tolerated but misunderstood; unable to sleep. I’ve always made art (whatever that was to
me at the time), so I’ve always had some notion of being an artist, but most artists I’ve met exchange
these vaguely received notions from childhood for more explicit ones around the time they go to art
school.
I didn’t go to art school, but I’ve been kind of fascinated by it ever since. It seems to me that art
school is often where a certain shared idea of art is made and contested, and the gaps in knowledge
and awareness between students, born into disparate social and cultural circumstances, are bridged
enough to be involved in the same conversation. This is something acquired as much through fellow
students as lectures -- as such, it requires a critical mass of peers. Confident that I aspired to the
professoriate as a Latin scholar, I didn’t apply to art school, and instead went to a liberal arts college
and studied political theory. The experience was not unrelated to what I do now when making art
– the best way I can describe it is that when studying politics, I would consider a problem for long
enough that its contradictions became apparent, laying bare its incompatibility with our received
political ideas. This is probably where the similarity ends, if I have not already overshot it, but I tend
to make art to somehow figure out a contradiction or question that seems evident in the world.
After I graduated, I moved to Chicago, where I mostly just lived and observed (at great distance)
how others lived. I produced very little tangible artwork, but a lot of my feelings about the world, for
better or worse, were formed in this time. Around then I began to study painting more seriously. I
attended and subsequently worked for a summer painting program in France, allowing me to travel
around Europe for about a month each year before returning to Chicago.
Most of what I learned about being an artist at this time is that, at least if one is making paintings,
a large portion of one’s time is spent alone. What to do with that becomes a way of considering a lot
of other questions –whether it’s not better to simply fall asleep than to make a painting, whether it
isn’t better to think about one’s life than to make sketches, etc. Time is such a tangible thing when you
have given yourself a certain amount of it to make art. Who you are, and how you feel and act toward
yourself become very apparent when the isolation of a studio pulls you back on yourself. At least this
is true for me.
After a couple years I moved to Philadelphia, where I had many more friends and family than
I had in Chicago. The only thing I can say about this time is that I rented my first real studio, and
began making my first work. I still dealt with the issues of time and studio practice I had struggled
with in Chicago, but I had more control over them, was more comfortable, less discouraged, and more
present. I also started working in the offices at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University
of Pennsylvania. I met a lot of artists and curators, and became interested in some of the questions
they were interested in. After a year in Philadelphia, nearly four years after I graduated from college,
graduate school did not feel like a horrible idea.
A Masters of Fine Art is kind of a normal thing from a certain perspective, but pretty strange
from another. My thoughts on it, incidentally, are recently published in the incomparably wonderful
magazine The Enemy (http://theenemyreader.org/masters-and-servant/), so I won’t write too much
about it here. It did bring me to Los Angeles, which I now consider my home, in the company of an
amazing community of artists.
I will end here, I think, having literally come up to the present (I received my MFA this summer),
and yet short of what I have done as an artist per se. A career in art is something that I think even
those who have had long and prestigious ones would find difficult to define. I have participated in a
few exhibitions, and these have almost all been great experiences, but to describe them individually
would be to miss the broader rhythm of making work, not making it, showing it, etc. Being out of
school, I think a lot about my time in Philadelphia; I think the majority of my studio time is spent in
a state of mind, working in empty time, sorting things out, finding resources internally to resonate
externally. This is both largely why I have chosen to become an artist, and what most of my time as
one is spent doing.