Proof-of-Burn Reflections

In 2010, I dropped out of art school in the wake of the post-2008 student debt crisis, the movement of the squares and the iphone. This felt like the most economically rational approach to the predatory model of arts education, peaking at six figures in the US. But it was also the art historical conjuncture I'd inherited.

For whatever reason, I was able to work out my transgression at NYU in Haley Mellin's undergraduate senior thesis course. This was very off the books: Mellin would meet me before class started in order to let me in through the backdoor of the Steinhardt building. The course requirement was that everybody had to do a thesis, and find someone in the art world that they didn't know to come to class and talk about whatever the class wanted to talk about. So that was the art world I was introduced to: the one you could email, not the one that gave you a solo show your senior year.

When I erased my student ID it was after I'd spent six years at an inner city college. Weird to come from an art school that didn't advertise its course listings on coffee table books, I later learned. I didn't know who a lot of the famous people were. I just knew that you can't really have anything new because when you erase something it leaves marks.

I was recently reading a research paper that surveyed entrepreneurs and that tried to quantify the probability that a person would end up one. Not surprisingly, a number of bootstrappers come from non-traditional academic backgrounds that are difficult to represent in traditional contexts of industry.

The only place I'd ever gone to school was the inner city community college my parents made us go to instead of church, despite the church being the only institution that had enough power, in the Gulf of Mexico, to let you take your kids out of school. We had to perform like we believed in God, in virginity and in the Bush administration but they must have drawn the line at Creationist science, because that was when we were enrolled at the city colleges. When we had to dissect frogs.

Eighteen months apart and sent to two different, low-income junior colleges (hers traditionally Black; mine was where you went to go burn off Military credits), the differing orientations to Life my sister and I have today still fascinates me. We were raised as a single unit until forced to read different books. But we both got good educations: I went to the school that had an art department run by the air force, and she took contemporary dance from rappers.

There have been times in my life when I have been rewarded for such a radical act of refusal, and moments when I've felt like an idiot. Which, looking back, might have been the point of working as a low-key underground art model instead of getting paid to read Marx like everyone else at Columbia.

Fun fact: the technology of the working class does not work better when you are poor. But graduate housing does. I spent two years with mostly the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature at the peak of AirBnb, who rotated in and out between jaunts to Berlin. Ahhh. The low interest rates of the 2010s.

What's interesting to me is how, with the internet and the secularization of technical knowledges, the barriers to entry into art and adjacent cultural fields also get lower. Yet I've noticed that, simultaneously, work critical of, and integral to, those institutions whose barriers are to be lowered, is much more difficult to represent.

In software, the interface is defined as a contract between the system and the environment. I am interested in the messy problem of autonomous representation through the contractual protocol of presentation.