About the Mark
The Blued Trees Symphony 2019, Aviva Rahmani
"The young artist of today need no longer say ‘I am a painter’ or ‘a poet’ or ‘a dancer.’ He is simply an ‘artist.’ All of life will be open to him. He will discover out of the ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. He will not try to make them extraordinary. Only their real meaning will be stated. But out of nothing he will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well.” - Allan Kaprow 1958
Kaprow’s 1958 eulogy for Jackson Pollock described the trajectory of my career from the time I was a very young artist. The eulogy defined the parameters of serious discourse about what it means for an artist to make a mark in the world for many more right into the present, as discussed in an ARTnews article from 2018. I first met Allan Kaprow in 1971, at CalArts. From then on, he was my mentor, friend, and occasional intellectual sparring partner.
When I was completing my dissertation on “Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism,” in the Z-Node program in Zurich, Switzerland, almost ten years ago, I taught a class in drawing fundamentals at Stonybrook University. It was the most fun I have ever had teaching a class because I organized the formal instruction around breaking down what an artist mark is, a question that has fascinated me since childhood when I first encountered Japanese calligraphy. I would have happily continued teaching the class. It was so popular that students invited their friends to join us. When I later taught another class there in the Sustainability department, students complained that they were learning too much from me, whose employment was precarious in contrast to many tenured professors who were too lazy to actually teach.
Of the two classes I taught at Stonybrook the basic one about drawing as mark making was by far the most enjoyable. Formalism has always fascinated me. I think of drawing as the essence of spatial comprehension. In the classroom, we often had live nude models. I brought in a skeleton to teach basic anatomy and had them make maps based on a one-hour walk around the studio. Many of my students were science majors with no previous experience in art. They astonished themselves by the end of the semester with what they could accomplish by simply paying assiduous attention.
When budget cuts subsequently eliminated funds for adjuncts, it was almost a relief because I calculated that when I added my hours with the costs of my train tickets, I was earning -$1.00 an hour without even my own office, not unusual for adjuncting. I concluded that adjuncts, mostly women, were scotch-taping together the American academic university. Since then I haven’t been able to find another teaching job and have been told the tacit reason was ageism. I stopped applying but am considering teaching workshops from the Ghost Nets site in Maine.
As I prepare to move back to Maine full-time at the end of March, I am contemplating what my life will be like there, as we are enjoying a blizzard. Storms always thrill me. I adore snow. What is most awesome to me about snow is the erasure of all marks before the animal intrudes, whether bird or human. It is a brief reprieve from contemplating all the ways humans have marked the Earth with greed and cruelty. I plan to explore the snowy city early tomorrow morning. I imagine the coastal land will look spectacular on Vinalhaven Island by tomorrow afternoon.