Life, the Universe and Everything

I did something naughty today. Bear with me, it takes a while to get to, but there's a point at the end of all this.

It has to do with that elective.

A little background. My tentative forays into the creative arts have been a mixed bag at best. My very first stage performance at the age of 4 saw me playing the triangle, and at one point I think I was a bunny. (Which beat the hell out of my younger sister, whose stage experience so far has consisted of playing a slice of watermelon - complete with stuffed headpiece shaped like a slice of watermelon with a worm coming out of it and padded bodysuit with stripes - and a strange shiny alien life form which wore far more wire hooping, lycra and sequins than any non-transvestite should ever have to wear)

Then I went into the usual melodramatic tortured teenage stint and wrote some very broody clichéd plays revolving around death (how terribly original, I know, but at the time I was convinced I was some melancholic gothic genius. Thank god the hormones kicked in in time, although not before I had inflicted a self-written play - and put in a cameo appearance - on the public). Along the way here was the ButterKnife Boy incident, which left me a lifelong distrust of people who thought of themselves as thespians in italics. I dabbled in sculpture (satisfyingly messy(, painting (and learned that if you mix every color in your paintbox, you don't get a rainbow, you get black), drawing (I gave lessons at the age of 6 and continued to muck around with my trusty Little White Sheep metal pencil box filed with Faber Castells in enchantingly exotic grades of graphite goodness).

I made history in uni. While my fellow colleagues studiously took practical courses for our precious third-year electives, I threw myself merrily headlong into the equivalent of Drama 101, which was surprisingly interesting, although there was one unfortunate lesson which had this aspiring lawyer pretending to be a tree. Then I dabbled in stage performances again, thus ending up in some spangly boob tube and belting out "Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend" with Miss J (and in what may have been an unrelated incident, playing 'I Never' with the only company I've ever played with where they've ended up more drunk than me).

All in all, it's been a spotty record at best, but the creative arts has always had some sort of strange allure to me, like a morgue to a necrophiliac. I just can't stay away.

Which was why I chose the elective I did when I was faced with the option of giving in and taking some elective which I was technically exempted from and insisting on my rights and getting deported. Faced with the other options like Physics 101 or Chemistry 101, I took this.

Now, I know that sometimes the people in the creative arts lie on a different plane of reality, and you have to work around that. But after the first lecture I knew we were in trouble. Why? Because the person teaching the course is flakier than a bowlful of oats. She Googles her source material in lecture (because she hasn't prepared?), and there as once an entire lecture where some woman I've never heard of told us how she wrote her book (which perhaps 3 people read, which may or may not have been her family). When lesson after lesson revolves around the central the of "What is Art?" (capital letter please), I knew this was going to be trying, because that was something that ButterKnife Boy would have mumbled.

It is impossible to take this class seriously.

Seven weeks in, I haven't taken a single note in the lectures I've bothered to attend (those where I haven't fallen asleep, anyway) and have been given grief by someone who thinks that someone pissing on a painting of Christ is Art. I've grown deeply and profoundly irritated with this notion, persistently voiced by said tutor that goddamned everything is Art.

The logic goes that not only beautiful sights, pleasing performances, are art. If it is shocking or disgusting or distasteful, that is also Art, because it challenges you to think about the intention behind the art.

Fine.

But you need the draw the line somewhere. And the issue I have with the harebrained course is that it would seem that just about anything and everything is considered bloody Art. Therefore, Dennis Rodman was Art, Orlan is Art, putting a toilet bowl on display is Art, putting a price tag on a tramp is Art (and will win you heaps of money to boot). It all seems like the Socratic method of teaching is being used to mask either confusion or indecision on the part of the tutor, with the easiest course being adopted, that of not taking a position and letting the students duke it out. And disguising the lack of focus and preparation as "What is Art?" It's deeply exasperating, and I'm rather miffed that any part of the massive amounts of fees I pay goes towards the continued funding of a rubbish course which will try and have me believe that drawing a ring around a tree is Art.

I brought up the notion of artistic integrity, not in any highfalutin' sense of the word, merely that there is an intention to create something as Art. To me, it seems preposterous that an idiot with a ceramic saw could take a toilet bowl out of its normal surroundings, plonk it on a platform and call it Art. Or perhaps to scoop up dogshit and put it into a glass casing and call it Art. Or to beam live video feeds of plastic surgery and call it Art. Because all these things are seen on a normal everyday basis anyway and we don't go running around exclaiming at the originality of it and imbuing it with pretentious implications it never meant to convey. Would an episode of Nip/Tuck , with its realistic recreation of plastic surgeries be Art? Would my dog taking a dump be Art just because I shoved a piece of paper under her arse and got her to sign it with a muddy paw print? It's ridiculous. Hence the notion of some sort of creation of art.

"Oh, you're talking about artistic integrity?" said the tutor with a look like she'd bitten into a lemon. It seemed to be the height of bad taste to bring up the subject of artistic integrity when talking about Art, I seemed. On par with wanking off to porn in a pew in the middle of Sunday sermon.

Art, it is of course claimed in this course, is anything that would provoke a reaction. You can't just say that that it's disgusting or it's icky and therefore it's not Art.

When I told this to The Boy, he displayed his usual knack of putting things in contact. "So if I fart and you react, that's Art, isn't it? Like, how does that make you feeelll?"

The entire argument seems rather too all-inclusive and self-serving and I cannot help but suspect that it may simply because she doesn't have any answers or doesn't know how to justify a posiiton and thus cops out and says everything is art.

I feel a little like that kid in the Emperor's New Clothes. ("But it's just an unmade bed, my bedroom looks like that all the time, it's NOT ART!") I don't have patience for pretentious rubbish like that. This is why for my mid-semester assignment, a critique of a certain play, I got fed up and decided to put in a little Art of my own.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, at one point Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent get captured by the Vogons and one of them dishes out the ultimate punishment by reading Vogon poetry to them. They are then asked for their critical opinion of the poem, failing which they get thrown out of the airlock to suffocate in space. Ford and Arthur immediately babble the most pretentious critical review they can think of, and are immediately shot into space.

"Hmmm," [the Vogon] said, "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor.." He considered this for a moment, and then closed the book with a grim smile,

"Death's too good for them," he said.

I quoted Ford and Arthur Dent in my essay, my little written third finger for your Art. Here's my pop culture, shove it up your overpaid bum.

Art. Bah.